What happened after the crucifixion?

Writing to Corinth in the 50s, Paul passes on a formula he says he received rather than composed: that Christ died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and last to Paul himself.

Scholars on both sides of the long debate over it treat its opening lines as a formula fixed before Paul, which pushes the claim back earlier still. Paul adds that most of the five hundred are still alive, which is the sort of thing a writer says when he expects it to be checkable.

Paul’s letters put its leaders in Jerusalem, within walking distance of the execution, among a population that had every reason to be unimpressed: three years after he joined, he went up to visit Peter there, and saw James. He also says he persecuted the movement before he joined it, in his own words and against his own interest: “beyond measure I persecuted the assembly of God and ravaged it”. That tells you people who wanted it stopped existed and acted on it.

What that establishes is that the claim was public, early and locally made. It does not by itself establish the claim.

Around 112, Pliny the Younger, governing the province of Pontus and Bithynia, wrote to the emperor Trajan for instructions about Christians. Describing what he had found out about them, he says they were in the habit of meeting before dawn on a fixed day and singing a hymn to Christ "as to a god", and binding themselves by oath not to commit theft or robbery or adultery, not to break their word, and not to refuse to return a deposit.

Pliny is not sympathetic. He ordered the execution of those who kept confessing, had two enslaved women who were called deaconesses tortured to find out what they did, and reported that he found nothing but a depraved and excessive superstition. The value of the passage is exactly that: an outsider, unfriendly, describing a group that is worshipping a crucified man some eighty years after the execution.

In Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible written in the middle of the fourth century, Mark chapter 16 runs to verse 8 and stops. The women flee the tomb and say nothing to anyone, because they are afraid.

The verses that follow in printed Bibles such as the King James and the World English Bible, in which Jesus appears and commissions the disciples, are not there: Luke begins on the same page. The World English Bible prints them with a footnote: the critical text, it says, notes their omission by a few manuscripts, and its own translators regard them as reliable. It is a rare case where the textual history is visible to any reader who looks at a footnote.

Paul, the earliest witness, lists appearances and does not mention an empty tomb. The Gospels, written later, all describe the tomb and differ from each other about the morning. Historians read that relationship in opposite directions: as a later narrative growing around an earlier core, or as Paul taking for granted something his readers already knew.

One detail bears on the other side: in all four accounts women, or in John Mary Magdalene, are the first to find the tomb empty. The premise underneath it is real and can be read. Josephus, setting out the law on evidence, writes that “the testimony of women” is not to be admitted “on account of the levity and boldness of their sex”, and files servants under the same rule. What is disputed is what follows from it. The argument built on the detail, that nobody inventing a story would have chosen them, is an argument about plausibility rather than a piece of evidence, and how much it carries is disputed.

That the earliest followers said they had encountered Jesus alive is in a letter Paul wrote in the 50s, in a formula he says he received, more than a decade before any of the Gospels. Explanations of that claim are where agreement stops: bereavement experiences, visionary states of a kind attested across many cultures, later theological elaboration, or an event of the kind the texts describe.

Each explanation has to carry the same weight, which is that the belief appears very early, in named people, some of whom had known him well, and that it survived the deaths of the people who founded it.

Historical method, as many studies of the historical Jesus practise it, works by asking what probably happened given the evidence, and assumes that the past resembled the present: the theologian Ernst Troeltsch called this the principle of analogy. On that assumption a resurrection is the one kind of event excluded in advance.

So a historian examining this can say, with real confidence, that people claimed it very early, that some of them had known the man, and that the claim cost them. A historian cannot move from there to a verdict without borrowing a premise from somewhere else, and which premise you borrow is doing the work.

That is not a dodge, and it is not a hint. It is the actual shape of the limit, and pretending the limit is not there would misrepresent both the evidence and the claim.

The creeds of the councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 both confess it: "the third day he rose again". Paul, in the same letter that preserves the earliest list of appearances, says that if Christ has not been raised then the preaching is empty and so is the faith. For Paul, the whole thing is staked on a claim about an event.

That is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to describe religion as being about values or community and leave out the part that is a claim about what happened on a particular weekend.

Paul presents the resurrection as part of the good news his readers had "received", and in which they "stand". Some find the historical case strong, and some do not think the question turns on it.

People who do not believe it need not be unaware of the evidence above. They can read the same early claim and judge that early, sincere and costly testimony to an extraordinary event is still testimony to an extraordinary event.

Both of those are positions held by thoughtful people who have looked. This site can show you where the evidence stops. It has no standing to tell you what to do at the edge.