The Resurrection
The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the Catholic faith. “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). This section examines the historical evidence, the eyewitness testimony, and the theological significance of the event that changed the world.
The Discovery of the Empty Tomb
On the Sunday morning after the crucifixion, a group of women went to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with spices — a standard Jewish burial practice that had been impossible on the Sabbath. What they found was not a dead body but an empty tomb, and an announcement that shattered every expectation: “He is not here; he has risen” (Matt 28:6).
The Four Gospel Accounts
All four Gospels independently record the discovery of the empty tomb on the first day of the week:
- •Mark 16:1–8 — Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome find the stone rolled away and a young man in white who announces the resurrection.
- •Matthew 28:1–10 — An earthquake and angel roll back the stone. The angel tells the women Jesus has risen and they meet the risen Jesus on their way to tell the disciples.
- •Luke 24:1–12 — The women find the stone rolled away and two men in dazzling clothes. Peter runs to the tomb and finds only the linen cloths.
- •John 20:1–10 — Mary Magdalene finds the stone removed and alerts Peter and the Beloved Disciple, who race to the tomb and see the burial wrappings lying neatly in place.
The variations in detail between the four accounts are precisely what we would expect from independent eyewitness testimony — the core facts agree (empty tomb, Sunday morning, women as first witnesses, angelic announcement) while the peripheral details reflect different vantage points and emphases. Fabricated accounts would be suspiciously uniform.(a)
Notes
(a) As the legal scholar Simon Greenleaf (Harvard Law School) argued in his Testimony of the Evangelists (1846): the discrepancies in circumstantial detail are “the natural character of honest witnesses” and would strengthen rather than weaken the testimony in any courtroom.
Women as First Witnesses
One of the most powerful arguments for the historicity of the empty tomb is the fact that all four Gospels name women — above all Mary Magdalene — as the first witnesses. This is a detail that no one in the first century would have invented.
The Criterion of Embarrassment
In first-century Jewish and Roman culture, the testimony of women was considered unreliable and was generally inadmissible in court.(a) Josephus writes: “The testimony of women is not accepted because of the levity and temerity of their sex” (Antiquities, 4.8.15). Celsus, the 2nd-century pagan critic of Christianity, specifically mocked the reliance on female testimony.
If the early Christians were inventing the resurrection story to persuade a sceptical audience, they would have named male witnesses — Peter, John, or the other apostles — as the first to discover the empty tomb. The fact that they consistently named women as first witnesses, despite the cultural embarrassment, is powerful evidence that they were recording what actually happened.
Notes
(a) N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003), p. 607: “If they could have invented stories of fine, upstanding, reliable male witnesses being first at the tomb, they would have done so.”
The Grave Cloths (John 20:5–7)
“He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’s head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.”
— John 20:5–7
John’s detail about the grave cloths is remarkably specific. The burial wrappings were not torn off or scattered — they were lying in place, with the head cloth folded separately. This detail is inconsistent with grave robbery (a thief would not unwrap and neatly fold burial linens) and points to something entirely different: the body had simply passed through the wrappings, leaving them undisturbed.(a)
The reaction of the Beloved Disciple is telling: “He saw and believed” (John 20:8). The arrangement of the cloths was itself evidence that something other than theft had occurred.
Notes
(a) The specificity of this detail suggests eyewitness memory. See Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 385–393, on the Beloved Disciple as an eyewitness source for the Fourth Gospel.
Sources & Further Reading
- N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003)
- William Lane Craig, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (Edwin Mellen Press, 1989; rev. 2002)
- Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006)
- Simon Greenleaf, The Testimony of the Evangelists (1846; reprinted Kregel, 1995)