The resurrection: what's the evidence?

Christianity stands or falls on a single historical claim: that Jesus rose from the dead. This cannot be proven like a theorem, but the evidence around it is more interesting than skeptics often expect.

• The timing of the belief Belief in the resurrection appears within a few years of the event, among people positioned to know — too early to be comfortably explained as slow legend.
• The willingness to suffer Early witnesses endured persecution and death rather than recant. People may die for what they believe true; it's harder to explain dying for what you know you invented.
• The empty tomb and the witnesses The accounts name witnesses, including women whose testimony carried little legal weight at the time — an odd detail to invent if you were fabricating a persuasive story.

None of this is proof, and we mark it as a matter of evidence and faith, not settled fact. What the evidence does is raise the cost of easy dismissals. The legend theory struggles with the timing; the lie theory struggles with the suffering; the hallucination theory struggles with the number of witnesses. You're left weighing which explanation strains least — and that weighing is the honest place to land.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — and dead people don't rise."

That principle is reasonable, and a resurrection is by definition extraordinary. The question is whether 'this kind of thing doesn't happen' settles the matter in advance or simply tells us the prior should be very high. We think the evidence is worth examining rather than ruling out before looking. Where you set that bar is yours to decide.