The Bible underneath it

What We Can Know About Jesus

A preacher named Jesus lived and was crucified. The story that makes him the Christ rests on accounts that disagree with each other.

The point in one sentence

A Jewish preacher named Jesus lived and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, as nearly every historian of the period agrees, and that is as far as the historical record can carry: the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection, and the Latter-day Saint additions (Jesus visiting the Americas in 3 Nephi, Jesus appearing in the Sacred Grove) all rest on sources that cannot hold that weight.

What you were taught

If you grew up in the Church, you know Easter. You have sung “He Is Risen!” (Hymn 199, in the Easter section of the hymnbook). You have heard the women went to the tomb, found it empty, and were told he had risen. You probably also learned the next two chapters of the story, because the Church teaches them as part of the same one: after the resurrection Jesus visited the Americas and let the people there touch his wounds, and he appeared to a boy named Joseph Smith in a grove of trees.

Those are the Church’s own words, and every piece of that story stands on the one before it. The apostle Paul saw this too, and said so in the Bible itself.

What the Church says

The world it came from

The year is about AD 30. Judea is a province of the Roman Empire, and Pontius Pilate is the Roman governor. A preacher from Galilee, a rural region in the north, is arrested in Jerusalem and executed by crucifixion.

Here is a fact that surprises many Christians. A crucified Messiah was not what anyone was waiting for. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic who is one of the best-known Bible scholars alive, puts it this way: “prior to Christianity, there were no Jews at all, of any kind whatsoever, who thought that there would be a future crucified messiah.” (HuffPost.) The cross was a failure to the people who first watched it. The movement that began afterward had to explain why it was not. Believers read the same fact the other way: nobody would make up a crucified Messiah, so something must have happened. That is a fair point, and the rest of this page takes it seriously.

The Gospel dates and the question of who wrote them are covered on Who Wrote the Bible, and Who Chose It, so this page does not repeat them. What matters here is the order: the earliest source is the thinnest, and the details arrive later.

Did Jesus exist?

Two arguments are often heard, and both fail. One says we count our years from his birth, so he must have been real. The other says no one who saw him wrote anything down, so he probably never existed.

The calendar first. The year numbers we use were set in 525 by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who was building tables for the date of Easter (Wikipedia, Anno Domini). That is about five hundred years after the fact. A calendar shows what the people who made it believed, nothing more. Our own days are named for Thor (Thursday) and Saturn (Saturday), and no one takes that as proof those gods exist. The calendar is not even exact. Wikipedia reports that “Modern scholars believe that the actual date of the birth of Jesus was about 5 BC.”

Now the other side, at its strongest. No surviving text can be shown to come from anyone who met Jesus during his lifetime. The Gospels name no author and were written decades later. The outside writers who mention him, Josephus and Tacitus, were born after he died. All of that is true.

But look at what it proves. Almost nothing survives from ordinary rural Galileans of his day. If “no eyewitness account” meant “did not exist,” most of the ancient world would vanish with him. Socrates wrote nothing at all, and what we know of him comes from accounts by others. The difference is that Plato and Xenophon were his pupils. For Jesus the nearest we have is Paul, who never met him in life but spent fifteen days with Peter and met James, “the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:18–19). That is thinner than Socrates, and it is still enough for historians.

The exhibits

Here is what the sources actually say. Every quote is word for word, and each is linked so you can read it yourself.

Check it yourself: four accounts of one morning

This is the part you can verify with your own scriptures. The four Gospels each tell what happened at the tomb on Sunday morning. Open them side by side. Each cell below is quoted or closely paraphrased from the King James text, and each verse is linked.

Look down each column and across each row. All four agree that a woman or women went to the tomb early on a Sunday and found it open. They disagree about who the women were, how many angels there were, whether the stone was already rolled away or an angel rolls it back, whether the angel sits on it (Matthew) or a young man sits inside the tomb (Mark), whether the women told anyone, and whether he met the disciples in Galilee, in Jerusalem, or both. Matthew has the women holding his feet, while John has Mary told not to touch him. Mark, the earliest, has the women say nothing to anyone. Paul’s list begins with Cephas (Peter) and names no women at all.

Believers have answers for most of these differences. Matthew and Mark may mention only the angel who spoke, and Luke and John mention two. The women may have gone out in groups, and Mary Magdalene may have been in all of them. In Mark the women say nothing “to any man” on the road, and tell the disciples afterward. “Touch me not” (John 20:17) comes with a reason, “for I am not yet ascended to my Father,” and Jesus invites touch later that week (John 20:27). As for Galilee and Jerusalem, the usual reading is Jerusalem first, then Galilee (John 21 has both). Each answer is possible. What they add up to is a story that none of the Gospels tells.

The believing answer is that eyewitnesses to one event always differ on details, and that the Gospels agree on the main thing. That is a fair point about details. But these are not small details. They are the basic facts of the story: who, how many, where, and what came next. Paul, who wrote before any Gospel, could have settled these questions. He does not tell the story of the morning at the tomb at all.

The earliest Gospel stops at frightened women and an empty tomb. No appearance of Jesus follows in the oldest copies. Mark does announce that he is risen (“he is risen; he is not here”) and promises that he will be seen in Galilee (Mark 16:6–7), but it ends before anyone sees him.

Many scholars notice that the most physical accounts are the latest written. Luke has him eat broiled fish (24:42–43) and say “handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones,” and John has him invite Thomas to put a hand in his side. Mark, the earliest Gospel, has no appearance at all, and Paul writes of “a spiritual body.” Believers answer that Paul’s phrase can mean a body of a new kind, not a ghost, and that is a fair reading.

The Book of Mormon account in 3 Nephi 11 belongs at the far end of this line. In John, Thomas is invited to touch, and the text never says he did; Jesus says he believed because he had “seen” (John 20:27–29). In 3 Nephi 11:15 they do it: “the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails.” That is the most physical version of all, and it first appeared in print in 1830.

What is true on the other side

The case for the resurrection is stronger than people often assume, so here it is at full strength.

The best-known case for the resurrection is called the “minimal facts” argument. Two scholars, Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, begin only with facts they say almost every scholar accepts, believer or not (Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, Kregel, 2004). Jesus was crucified. His followers sincerely believed he appeared to them alive. Paul, who had been persecuting the church, became its greatest missionary after what he said was an appearance. Jesus’s brother James, who during his lifetime did not believe in him (“For neither did his brethren believe in him,” John 7:5), became a leader of the church. Many add the empty tomb. The argument then asks: what best explains all of this? Their answer is that Jesus rose.

Add the following. The disciples are not shown as heroes in the Gospels. When Jesus was arrested, “they all forsook him, and fled” (Mark 14:50). Soon afterward, according to the book of Acts, the same men were preaching in the city where he had been killed. Peter, “standing up with the eleven,” says: “Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death” (Acts 2:14, 24), and “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:32). Something changed them. And Paul’s turn is striking: a man who “beyond measure I persecuted the church of God” (Galatians 1:13) became a believer. Finally, the Gospels report that women were the first witnesses, which many scholars argue would have been an embarrassing detail for anyone to invent. These are real points. None of them is stupid.

Two more belong here, because believers lean on them. First, the Gospels admit the disciples did not expect it. When the women told them, “their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not” (Luke 24:11), and even at the last meeting, “when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17). Believers say this shows men who were hard to convince. It does. It shows they were convinced. It does not show what convinced them.

Second, many Latter-day Saints will say they do not hold the resurrection because of historians. They hold it because of a witness they believe came from the Holy Ghost: “if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things” (Moroni 10:4–5). A page about sources cannot say what that witness is, and this one does not claim to. What it can say is that people of other faiths describe a similar inner assurance about beliefs that contradict each other, so the feeling alone cannot tell which belief is true. That is why the sources matter.

Now the answer. Most of these points can be granted. The question is what they show, and what each leaves standing.

• The claim is about belief, and belief is granted. The disciples sincerely believed he appeared to them. This page agrees. But Ehrman, quoted above, in his reply to a reader, says it right: “The disciples really thought Jesus appeared to them, whether he did or not.” The gap between “they believed he appeared” and “he rose” is the whole question.
• Sincere appearances are reported in many movements. In a study of 293 widowed people in mid-Wales, 46.7 percent reported sensing the presence of their dead spouse, and 14 percent reported seeing them (Rees, 1971, as summarized on Wikipedia). Grief experiences like these are common and feel completely real. Believers answer that grief visits are private and happen one person at a time, and that Paul was not grieving: he was hunting down the movement. They add that Paul lists an appearance to “above five hundred brethren at once” and says most were still alive to be asked (1 Corinthians 15:6). Those are fair points, and they leave grief unable to explain Paul. But groups report appearances too. In Portugal in October 1917 a crowd that has been estimated at 30,000 to 100,000 gathered at Fátima, and many reported the sun spinning and changing color. The local bishop declared the apparitions “worthy of belief” in 1930. Not all witnesses saw the same thing (Wikipedia). Every church already weighs claims like this and decides which ones to accept.
• Paul’s own experience is described as a light and a voice. Paul lists his appearance in the same list as the others (“last of all he was seen of me also,” 1 Corinthians 15:8). He says God was pleased “to reveal his Son in me” (Galatians 1:16). Acts, which was written later, describes it as a light and a voice from heaven. It tells the story twice, and the tellings differ: his companions stood “speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man” (Acts 9:7), but also “saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice” (Acts 22:9). If Paul counted his own experience as the same kind as the others, then at least one item on the list is an experience Acts describes as a light and a voice from heaven.
• A change of heart is not a resurrection. People change dramatically after bereavement, conversion, and shared grief. A change in the disciples shows that they were convinced, not what convinced them.

The best-known statement of this idea is by the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). He wrote that “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish” (Enquiry, section 10). In plain words: unless it would be even more surprising for the witnesses to be wrong, don’t believe a miracle report. It is the test any of us uses when the miracle belongs to someone else’s church. It is explained on The Case Against the God You Were Taught.

The common rebuttals

“The apostles died for what they saw. Nobody dies for a lie.”

Correct, and it rules out a conspiracy. Nobody is claiming the disciples were liars. It does not rule out a sincere mistake. People have died for beliefs in every religion, including ones Christians consider false. And there is less here than people assume: the New Testament records the death of one apostle, James the brother of John, killed “with the sword” (Acts 12:2). Wikipedia notes that scholars differ over how much of the martyrdom tradition is historical, and that some hold the claims rest “only on late legends.” Josephus also reports that James, the brother of Jesus, was stoned (Antiquities 20.9.1, above). The Gospel of John says that during Jesus’s life his brothers did not believe in him (John 7:5), so that is a real change. It shows James held his belief to the end. It still shows sincerity, not that what he believed is true.

“Paul was Jesus’s enemy. Why would he change unless he really saw him?”

Because he was convinced he had. Paul sincerely believed. What is in question is what he saw. Paul puts himself on the same list as the others (“last of all he was seen of me also,” and “have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?” 1 Corinthians 15:8, 9:1), and believers read that as a real meeting. But the only account of it, Acts, describes a light and a voice from heaven, tells it in two versions that differ about what his companions saw and heard (Acts 9:7, 22:9), and Paul himself writes that God was pleased “to reveal his Son in me” (Galatians 1:16). Whether that was Jesus returned from death or an experience inside Paul is exactly what the sources cannot settle.

“Women were the first to find the tomb. Nobody would make that up.”

This is a good argument, and it is granted. It suggests the tomb story was not invented from nothing, and that someone really did find an empty tomb, or believed so. It does not say what emptied it. And Paul’s list, the earliest we have, names no women and does not tell of the tomb being found empty. It says only that he was buried and rose the third day.

“More than five hundred people saw him at once.”

Paul says so (1 Corinthians 15:6), and says that most of them were still living when he wrote, which believers read as an invitation to check. But Paul names none of the five hundred, no Gospel records the event, and none of them wrote anything we have. Paul is passing on what he was told. If a missionary told you that five hundred people at once saw a vision in some other faith, you would want their names.

What this means

Here is what you just saw. A man named Jesus lived and was crucified, and mainstream historians, believing or not, agree. The earliest surviving list of appearances, written about twenty-five years after, lists the people who say they saw him, and tells of no tomb being found empty (it says only that he “was buried” and “rose again the third day”). The Gospels came later, and when you set them side by side they disagree on the women, the angels, the stone, and whether he met them in Galilee, in Jerusalem, or both. Mark, the earliest, ends in silence and fear. The most physical details come latest: fish in Luke, a wound offered to Thomas’s hand in John, and then in the Book of Mormon, a whole multitude who do touch him. The outside historians confirm the man and his death: Josephus names Jesus and his brother James, and Tacitus says Pilate had him executed. Neither mentions a resurrection.

A crucifixion is a fact the record can carry. A resurrection is a belief the record cannot, and every claim built on it, the Americas visit and the Sacred Grove included, has no firmer ground than that one.

That is not a reason to think the disciples lied. They almost certainly did not. People who loved him believed they saw him, as bereaved people in every age have, and they spread what they believed. All five sources agree that he rose; they disagree on the details. Believers find that agreement more important than the differences. The question is whether the differences are small enough to ignore. If sincere people can be wrong about this, and the sources disagree about what happened, what should that do to how sure we feel about the rest of the story built on it?