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The resurrection of Jesus is the belief that God raised Jesus from the dead. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday, two days after Good Friday, the day of his crucifixion. Easter's date corresponds roughly with Passover, the Jewish observance associated with the Exodus, that is fixed for the night of the Full moon near the time of the spring equinox.

The death of Jesus

 * Jesus went to his death deliberately and willingly, as the culmination of his role as the messianic Son and Man and Suffering Servant of Isaiah.
 * Jesus identified himself as the Suffering Servant of the Book of Isaiah who willingly accepts death in order to fulfill God's plan for atonement. He saw himself as a prophet in the line of Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, whose souls had been taken up into heaven and whose undecayed bodies awaited the resurrection of the dead.

The New Testament and the Resurrection
Jesus of Nazareth was crucified c. 30 CE. His resurrection on the third day thereafter is alluded to throughout the New Testament documents, the earliest accounts being the epistles of Paul and the most extensive the four Gospels.

Paul was a Jew and a pharisee and an early persecutor of the followers of Jesus, but became a follower himself c. 37 CE after witnessing the resurrected Jesus (the story is alluded to in his letters to various Christian communities, and by Luke the Evangelist in the Acts of the Apostles). He founded several Christian communities throughout the eastern portion of the Roman Empire, to whom he wrote letters in the decades of the 50s. In a section of one of these letters, 1 Corinthians, he passed on what he had heard from Saint Peter, James the brother of Jesus and the other disciples concerning the very first post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.

Cultural background: Jewish and pagan beliefs regarding resurrection
Jewish belief in resurrection began to develop towards the end of the Biblical period, first as a resurrection of the soul alone, later, with the sect of the Pharisees, of the body as well. Nevertheless, the idea of a resurrection of the flesh was a marginal one among the Jews; another sect, the Essenes, believed that while the soul was immortal, the body would return to dust. Daniel 12:3 speaks of the resurrected soul becoming a star, meaning an angel, for the stars were identified as heavenly beings in the court of God. This, according to the gospels, was the stance of Jesus, who defended it in an exchange with the Sadducees, a sect which did not believe in any form of resurrection: "Those who are accounted worthy ... to the resurrection from the dead ... are equal to the angels and are children of God..." (Mark 12:24-25, Luke 20:34-36). Paul's vision of the resurrected Christ falls within the general pattern of Jewish beliefs in a fleshless immortal soul. Another important Jewish understanding about resurrection was that it would be a communal event at the end of history: at the moment of Christ's resurrection, according to Matthew, "many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised ... they came out of the tombs and entered the Holy City and appeared to many" (Matthew 27:52-53): Matthew is saying that with the Resurrection of Jesus the end-time general resurrection predicted by Daniel, Hosea and other prophets had begun.

The Greeks had long held that a meritorious man could be resurrected as a god after his death (the process of apotheosis). The successors of Alexander the Great made this idea very well known throughout the Middle East, in particular through coins bearing his image – a privilege previously reserved for gods – and although originally foreign to the Romans, the doctrine was soon borrowed by the emperors for purposes of political propaganda. According to the theology of Imperial Roman apotheosis, the earthly body of the recently deceased emperor vanished, he received a new and divine one in its place, and was then seen by credible witnesses; thus, in a story similar to the Gospel appearances of the resurrected Jesus and the commissioning of the disciples, Romulus, the founder of Rome, descended from the sky to command a witness to bear a message to the Romans regarding the city's greatness ("Declare to the Romans the will of Heaven that my Rome shall be the capital of the world...") before being taken up on a cloud.

The "foundational creed" and Paul
The earliest evidence of belief in the resurrection of Jesus is a brief passage in Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, written around 52-55 CE. Fearing that the Corinthians are beginning to question the resurrection, he reminds them  of what he has received himself from the apostles, listing, apparently in chronological order, those who had witnessed the risen Christ: first Peter, then "the Twelve," then a crowd of 500, then James (presumably James the brother of Jesus), then "all the Apostles," and last Paul himself:

[W]hat I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas (Peter), and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Corinthians 15:3-7).

Peter and the Twelve are probably original to the list, but not all scholars believe the same of the 500, James, and "all the Apostles". It is difficult to correlate this with the appearances in the gospels, and Paul makes no mention of the empty tomb.

The resurrection is the basis for Paul's entire faith: Jesus died and was raised from the dead, and his resurrection is the first sign of the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God in which he will reign. The bodies in which believers will be resurrected, he tells the Corinthians, will not be earthly bodies of flesh and blood (1 Corinthans 15:50) but heavenly bodies, made of the same substance as the sun, moon and stars (15:40-41,49) – Paul is drawing here on the ancient belief, common to both Greeks and Jews, that the stars are living but spiritual beings, made of a "fiery" substance. In Philippians he talks about the "glorious body" of Christ and how Christ will transform our earthly bodies into a similar glorious form; he insists that he does not even want to know Jesus "according to the flesh," but only the resurrected Christ.

Comparison of narratives in the Gospels and Acts
Mark, written c.AD 70, was the first of the gospels. Matthew, written c.AD 80, and Luke, written soon after Matthew, took Mark as their source for the empty tomb stories but added their own independent resurrection appearances, diverging at the point where their common source ended. John, written c.AD 90, is generally agreed to have drawn on independent but parallel traditions. The differences between them are so great as to make harmonisation difficult if not impossible.

Empty tomb
The discovery of the empty tomb is first mentioned by Mark: Paul is silent on the subject, although he would surely have heard of it, having spent two weeks as Peter's house-guest within a few years of the resurrection; the evidence therefore suggests that it was new in Mark's day. Mark wrote for a Gentile Christian community, and the empty tomb is in keeping with the Greco-Roman tradition in which the physical body was essential for divine immortalisation. The fear-induced silence of the women presumably served to explain to readers why it had remained unknown for so long.

Matthew and Luke expanded the story they found in Mark. Matthew adds a meeting between the women and the risen Jesus and describes Mark's promised meeting in Galilee, while Luke suppresses it, turning the angel's instruction into a remembrance of prophecies about the death and resurrection of the Son of Man. John's story shows signs of being woven together of several originally independent sources: Mary is supposedly alone when she discovers the tomb, but speaks of what "we" saw when she reports to the disciples, and the account of her return to the tomb with Peter and the second disciple is filled narrative inconsistencies.

Post-resurrection appearances
Matthew, Luke and John add the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, but these are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the list in 1 Corinthians 15 or with each other. Luke's stories seem designed to counter two separate sources of opposition, the first the Greco-Roman argument that resurrected heroes should be transported directly to heaven, the second the idea that Jesus had never been a body of flesh and blood (the Docetist heresy).

John, more than any of the other gospels, shows signs of having been edited into its present shape from numerous originally separate sources. Just what these sources were remains mysterious: John is not directly dependent on the previous gospels, but there are signs that that he may have known and used them as sources, and he certainly knew and used similar traditions. Chapter 20, containing the "empty tomb" story and two linked appearances in Jerusalem, marks the original conclusion of the gospel; chapter 21, Jesus' appearances in Galilee, was added by a separate hand not long after.

In all three gospels the risen Christ is physical: "Touch and feel me; a spirit does not have flesh and bones just as you can see that I have," Jesus says to the disciples in Luke 24:39, and he and drinks with them to prove that he is resurrected flesh and neither a ghost nor an angel. Nevertheless there are signs, such his sudden appearances and disappearances, that this body is not quite identical with his earthly body, but an intermediate stage before his Ascension and exaltation in heaven. The older model of non-physical visions continued in other New Testament works, as in Luke's stories of the appearances to Stephen and others (including three differing accounts of the visionary appearance to Paul on the Road to Damascus), and John of Patmos's vision of Christ in heaven presiding over the divine Book of Revelation.

Ascension of Jesus
In Luke 24, in the evening of the day on which he was raised from the dead, Jesus leads the eleven disciples to Bethany, a village on the Mount of Olives not far from Jerusalem, where he instructs them to remain in Jerusalem until the coming of the Holy Spirit and blesses them. "And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy." Acts 1 describes a meal on the Mount of Olives, at which Jesus commands the disciples to await the coming of the Holy Spirit: a cloud then takes him upward from sight, and two men in white appear to tell them (the disciples) that he will return "in the same way you have seen him go into heaven." Luke and Acts appear to be describing the same event, but present quite different chronologies, Luke placing it on the same day as the resurrection and Acts forty days afterwards; various proposals have been put forward to resolve the contradiction, but the question remains open.

The Gospel of John has three references to Jesus' ascension in his own words: "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the son of man" (John 3:13); "What if you (the disciples) were to see the son of man ascending where he was before?" (John 6:62); and to Mary Magdalene after his Resurrection, "Do not hold me, for I not yet ascended to my father..." (John20:17). The last of these has mystified commentators – why should Mary be prohibited from touching the risen but not yet ascended Christ, while Thomas is later invited to do so?

Theology
Matthew's account of the meeting with the risen Jesus underlines the authority of the church as the successor to the earthly Jesus, but just why he and Mark lay such stress on Galilee as the setting for for this encounter has mystified scholars, some taking it as a metaphor for the gentile mission, others as the location of the Second Coming.

John's Jerusalem appearances stress the theological theme of seeing and believing, this being the point of the Doubting Thomas story.

In the teachings of the apostolic Church, the resurrection was seen as heralding a new era. Forming a theology of the resurrection fell to the apostle Paul. It was not enough for Paul to simply repeat elementary teachings, but as states, "go beyond the initial teachings about Christ and advance to maturity". Fundamental to Pauline theology is the connection between Christ's Resurrection and redemption. Paul explained the importance of the resurrection of Jesus as the cause and basis of the hope of Christians to share a similar experience.

The teachings of the apostle Paul formed a key element of the Christian tradition and theology. If His death stands at the center of Paul's theology, so does the Resurrection: unless the one died the death of all, the all would have little to celebrate in the resurrection of the one. Paul taught that, just as Christians share in Jesus' death in baptism, so they will share in his resurrection for Jesus was designated the Son of God by his resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15:20–22 Paul states:

But Christ really has been raised from the dead. He is the first of all those who will rise. Death came because of what a man did. Rising from the dead also comes because of what a man did. Because of Adam, all people die. So because of Christ, all will be made alive.

The Apostolic Fathers, discussed the death and resurrection of Jesus, including Ignatius (50–115), Polycarp (69–155), and Justin Martyr (100–165). Following the conversion of Constantine and the liberating Edict of Milan in 313, the ecumenical councils of the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, that focused on Christology helped shape the Christian understanding of the redemptive nature of Resurrection, and influenced both the development of its iconography, and its use within Liturgy.

Belief in bodily resurrection was a constant note of the Christian church in antiquity. And nowhere was it argued for more strongly than in North Africa. Saint Augustine accepted it at the time of his conversion in 386. Augustine defended Resurrection, and argued that given that Christ has risen, there is Resurrection of the Dead. Moreover, he argued that the death and resurrection of Jesus was for the salvation of man, stating: "to achieve each resurrection of ours, the savior paid with his single life, and he pre-enacted and presented his one and only one by way of sacrament and by way of model."

The 5th century theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia provides an insight into the development of the Christian understanding of the redemptive nature of Resurrection. The crucial role of the sacraments in the mediation of salvation was well accepted at the time. In Theodore's representation of the Eucharist, the sacrificial and salvific elements are combined in the "One who saved us and delivered us by the sacrifice of Himself". Theodore's interpretation of the Eucharistic rite is directed towards the triumph over the power of death brought about by the Resurrection.

The emphasis on the salvific nature of the Resurrection continued in Christian theology in the next centuries, e.g., in the 8th century Saint John of Damascus wrote that: "... When he had freed those who were bound from the beginning of time, Christ returned again from among the dead, having opened for us the way to resurrection" and Christian iconography of the ensuing years represented that concept.

Historicity
Jesus, in his earthly ministry, carried on the apocalyptic program of John the Baptist: the Kingdom of God was at hand, God was separating the wheat from the chaff, and he would burn the chaff with his fire. This reflected beliefs already circulating in Jesus' day, as set out in certain of the Dead Sea Scrolls: God would soon send his Messiah to make his reign evident to the world, injustice and suffering would would end, and God would rule. So when Jesus sent his disciples to the people of Israel it was with this key message: "The kingdom of God (or of heaven) is near!" (Matthew 10:7 and Luke 9:2, 10:9 and 11). Jesus taught his disciples that it was part of God's plan that the Messiah suffer and give up his life. Basing himself in the scriptures (especially Daniel and Isaiah, but many other works), Jesus believed that his suffering and death would redeem Israel and bring about the kingdom.

From the beginning of the Christian movement Christians believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven as Christ and Son of God. The authority for this belief was the series of appearances which Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11: Peter, the disciples and apostles, James and the 500. These appearances were visionary in nature, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of divine revelation through waking visions, trances and dreams. Paul describes such a visionary revelation in 2 Corinthians 12:1-2: "I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord... I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven, whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know — God knows..." This, said Paul, was how Christ had appeared to him, and he had appeared to Peter and James in just the same way.

Attempts to determine the historicity of the Gospels and of Acts are severely hampered by the decades that separate them from the events and by the uncertainty of determining the backgrounds and intentions of their authors. Scholars are agreed that the similarity of the gospel stories to each other, in content and order of events, is due to literary dependence (i.e., they authors were copying each other).

Conversely, Helmut Koester writes that the stories of the resurrection were originally epiphanies in which the disciples are called to a ministry by the risen Jesus and were interpreted as physical proof of the event at a secondary stage. He contends that the more detailed accounts of the resurrection are also secondary and do not come from historically trustworthy sources, but instead belong to the genre of the narrative types.

N. T. Wright argues that the account of the empty tomb and the visionary experiences point towards the historical reality of the resurrection. He suggests that multiple lines of evidence from the New Testament and the early Christian beliefs it reflects shows that it would be highly unlikely that belief in the empty tomb would simply appear without a clear basis in the memory of early Christians. In tandem with the historically certain visionary experiences of the early disciples and apostles, Jesus' resurrection as a historical reality becomes far more plausible. Wright treats the resurrection as a historical and accessible event, rather than as a 'supernatural' or 'metaphysical' event.

Summarizing its traditional analysis, the Catholic Church stated in its Catechism: "Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles' encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history."

Doubts of historicity and other interpretations
Peter Kirby, the founder of EarlyChristianWritings.com, states that, "Many scholars doubt the historicity of the empty tomb." According to Robert M. Price, Christian "apologists love to make the claims ... that the resurrection of Jesus is the best attested event in history", but "probabilistic arguments" show that "the resurrection is anything but an open-and-shut case". Robert Greg Cavin, a professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Cypress College, states that, "our only sources of potential evidence, the New Testament Easter traditions, fall far short of providing the kind of information necessary for establishing the resurrection hypothesis."

Biblical scholar Géza Vermes analyzes this subject in his book, The Resurrection. He concludes that there are eight possible theories to explain the "resurrection of Jesus". Vermes outlines his boundaries as follows, "I have discounted the two extremes that are not susceptible to rational judgment, the blind faith of the fundamentalist believer and the out-of-hand rejection of the inveterate skeptic. The fundamentalists accept the story, not as written down in the New Testament texts, but as reshaped, transmitted, and interpreted by Church tradition. They smooth down the rough edges and abstain from asking tiresome questions. The unbelievers, in turn, treat the whole Resurrection story as the figment of early Christian imagination. Most inquirers with a smattering of knowledge of the history of religions will find themselves between these two poles."

From his analysis, Vermes presents the remaining six possibilities to explain the resurrection of Jesus account, (1) "The body was removed by someone unconnected with Jesus", (2) "The body of Jesus was stolen by his disciples", (3) "The empty tomb was not the tomb of Jesus", (4) Buried alive, Jesus later left the tomb", (5) Jesus recovered from a coma and departed Judea, and (6) the possibility that there was a "spiritual, not bodily, resurrection". Vermes states that none of these six possibilities are likely to be historical.

According to N. T. Wright in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, "There can be no question: Paul is a firm believer in bodily resurrection. He stands with his fellow Jews against the massed ranks of pagans; with his fellow Pharisees against other Jews." And according to Gary Habermas, "Many other scholars have spoken in support of a bodily notion of Jesus’ resurrection."

Habermas also points out three facts in support of Paul's belief in a physical resurrection body. (1) Paul is a Pharisee and therefore (unlike the Sadducees) believes in a physical resurrection. (2) In Philippians 3:11 Paul says "That I may attain to the ek anastasis (out-resurrection)" from the dead, which according to Habermas means that "What goes down is what comes up". And (3) In Philippians 3:20–21 "We look from heaven for Jesus who will change our vile soma (body) to be like unto his soma (body)". According to Habermas, if Paul meant that we would change into a spiritual body then Paul would have used the Greek pneuma instead of soma.

Flavius Josephus (c. 37–c. 100), a Jew and Roman citizen who worked under the patronage of the Flavians, wrote the Antiquities of the Jews c. 93 which contains a passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum. This passage mentions John the Baptist and Jesus as two holy men among the Jews. Most modern scholars believe the original text of the work has been changed by Christian editors. The text mentions the death and resurrection of Jesus: "When Pilate, upon the accusation of the first men amongst us, condemned [Jesus] to be crucified, those who had formerly loved him did not cease [to follow him], for he appeared to them on the third day, living again, as the divine prophets foretold, along with a myriad of other marvellous things concerning him."

There are various other arguments against the historicity of the resurrection story. For example, the number of other historical figures and gods with similar death and resurrection accounts has been pointed out. However the majority consensus among biblical scholars is that the genre of the Gospels is a kind of ancient biography and not myth. Robert M. Price claims that if the resurrection could, in fact, be proven through science or historical evidence, the event would lose its miraculous qualities. In a more focused argument, Carrier asserts that, "The surviving evidence legal and historical, suggests that Jesus was not formally buried Friday night," but that "it had to have been placed Saturday night in a special public graveyard reserved for convicts. On this theory, the women who visited the tomb Sunday morning mistook its vacancy."

New Testament historian Bart D. Ehrman recognizes that "Some scholars have argued that it's more plausible that in fact Jesus was placed in a common burial plot, which sometimes happened, or was, as many other crucified people, simply left to be eaten by scavenging animals." He further elaborates by saying: "[T]he accounts are fairly unanimous in saying (the earliest accounts we have are unanimous in saying) that Jesus was in fact buried by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and so it's relatively reliable that that's what happened."

Easter
Easter, the preeminent feast that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, is clearly the earliest Christian festival. Since the earliest Christian times, it has focused on the redemptive act of God in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Easter is linked to the Passover and Exodus from Egypt recorded in the Old Testament through the Last Supper and crucifixion that preceded the resurrection. According to the New Testament, Jesus gave the Passover meal a new meaning, as he prepared himself and his disciples for his death in the upper room during the Last Supper. He identified the loaf of bread and cup of wine as his body soon to be sacrificed and his blood soon to be shed. states, "Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed"; this refers to the Passover requirement to have no yeast in the house and to the allegory of Jesus as the Paschal lamb.

In Christian art
In the Catacombs of Rome, artists just hinted at the Resurrection by using images from the Old Testament such as the fiery furnace and Daniel in the Lion's den. Depictions prior to the 7th century generally showed secondary events such as the Myrrhbearers at the tomb of Jesus to convey the concept of the Resurrection. An early symbol of the resurrection was the wreathed Chi Rho, whose origin traces to the victory of emperor Constantine I at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, which he attributed to the use of a cross on the shields of his soldiers. Constantine used the Chi Rho on his standard and his coins showed a labarum with the Chi Rho killing a serpent.

The use of a wreath around the Chi Rho symbolizes the victory of the Resurrection over death, and is an early visual representations of the connection between the Crucifixion of Jesus and his triumphal resurrection, as seen in the 4th century sarcophagus of Domitilla. in Rome. Here, in the wreathed Chi Rho the death and resurrection of Christ are shown as inseparable, and the Resurrection is not merely a happy ending tucked at the end of the life of Christ on earth. Given the use of similar symbols on the Roman standard, this depiction also conveyed another victory, namely that of the Christian faith: the Roman soldiers who had once arrested Jesus and marched him to Calvary now walked under the banner of a resurrected Christ.

The cosmic significance of the Resurrection in Western theology goes back to Saint Ambrose who in the 4th century said that "The universe rose again in Him, the heaven rose again in Him, the earth rose again in Him, for there shall be a new heaven and a new earth". This theme developed gradually in the West, and later than in the East, where the Resurrection was early linked to redemption and the renewal and rebirth of the whole world. In art this was symbolized by combining the depictions of the Resurrection with the Harrowing of Hell in icons and paintings. A good example is from the Chora Church in Istanbul, where John the Baptist, Solomon and other figures are also present, depicting that Christ was not alone in the resurrection. The depiction sequence at the 10th century Hosios Loukas shows Christ as he pulls Adam, followed by Eve from his tomb, signifying the salvation of humanity after the resurrection.

Gallery of art

 * For a larger gallery, please see: Resurrection gallery