The resurrection of Jesus (Biblical Greek: ἀνάστασις τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, romanized: anástasis toú Iēsoú) is the Christian belief that God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion, starting—or restoring—his exalted life as Christ and Lord. According to the New Testament writing, Jesus was firstborn from the dead, ushering in the Kingdom of God. He appeared to his disciples, calling the apostles to the Great Commission of forgiving sin and baptizing repenters, and then ascended to Heaven.
For the Christian tradition, the miraculous bodily resurrection was the restoration to life of a transformed body powered by spirit, as described by Paul and the gospel authors, that led to the establishment of Christianity. In Christian theology, the resurrection of Jesus is "the central mystery of the Christian faith." It provides the foundation for that faith, as commemorated by Easter, along with Jesus's life, death and sayings. For Christians, his resurrection is the guarantee that all the Christian dead will be resurrected at Christ's second coming (parousia). The resurrection is seen as a theological affirmation that intersects with history as a precondition for understanding the historical Jesus, his suffering, and vindication.
Secular and liberal Christian scholarship asserts that religious experiences, such as the visionary appearances of Jesus and an inspired reading of the biblical texts, gave the impetus to the belief in the exaltation of Jesus as a "fulfillment of the scriptures," and a resumption of the missionary activity of Jesus's followers.
Scholars differ on the historicity of Jesus' burial and the empty tomb. Scholars of Jesus as a historical figure tend to generally avoid the topic, since many see resurrection as a matter of faith, or lack thereof, and outside of the scope of historical study.
Easter is the main Christian festival celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, symbolizing God's redemption and rooted in Passover traditions. The resurrection is widely depicted in Christian art and connected to relics like the Shroud of Turin, which some believe bears a miraculous image of Jesus. Gnosticism holds that only the soul is resurrected. Islam generally teaches that Jesus was not crucified but directly ascended to God; however Ahmadiyya Islam believes that Jesus survived the crucifixion and carried on his mission elsewhere.
Biblical accounts
The conviction that Jesus was raised from the dead is found in the earliest evidence of Christian origins.
Paul and the first Christians
The moment of resurrection itself is not described in any of the canonical gospels, only the aftermath, but all four contain passages in which Jesus is portrayed as predicting his death and resurrection, or contain allusions that "the reader will understand". The New Testament writings do not contain any descriptions of the resurrection taking place but rather accounts of an empty tomb and purported appearances of Jesus to his followers.
One of the letters sent by Paul the Apostle to one of the early Greek churches, the First Epistle to the Corinthians, contains one of the earliest Christian creeds referring to post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and expressing the belief that he was raised from the dead, namely 1 Corinthians 15:3–8. It is widely accepted that this creed predates Paul and the writing of First Corinthians.
Scholars have contended that in his presentation of the resurrection, Paul refers to this as an earlier authoritative tradition, transmitted in a rabbinic style, that he received and has passed on to the church at Corinth. Geza Vermes writes that the creed is "a tradition he [Paul] has inherited from his seniors in the faith concerning the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus". The creed's ultimate origins are probably within the Jerusalem apostolic community, having been formalised and passed on within a few years of the resurrection. Hans Grass argues for an origin in Damascus, and according to Paul Barnett, this creedal formula, and others, were variants of the "one basic early tradition that Paul "received" in Damascus from Ananias in about 34 [AD]" after his conversion.
[3] For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, [4] and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, [5] and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. [7] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. [8] Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
In the Jerusalem ekklēsia (Church), from which Paul received this creed, the phrase "died for our sins" probably was an apologetic rationale for the death of Jesus as being part of God's plan and purpose, as evidenced in the scriptures. For Paul, it gained a deeper significance, providing "a basis for the salvation of sinful Gentiles apart from the Torah". The phrase "died for our sins" was derived from Isaiah, especially 53:4–11, and 4 Maccabees, especially 6:28–29. "Raised on the third day" is derived from Hosea 6:1–2:
Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.
Paul, writing to the members of the church at Corinth, said that Jesus appeared to him in the same fashion in which he appeared to the earlier witnesses. In 2 Corinthians 12 Paul described "a man in Christ [presumably Paul himself] who ... was caught up to the third heaven", and while the language is obscure, a plausible interpretation is that the man believed he saw Jesus enthroned at the right hand of God.
The many Pauline references affirming his belief in the resurrection include:
- Romans 1:3–4: "...concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord".
- 2 Timothy 2:8: "Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead... this is my gospel for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God's word is not chained..."
- 1 Corinthians 15:3–7: "...that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures..."
Gospels and Acts
Jesus is described as the "firstborn from the dead", prōtotokos, the first to be raised from the dead, thereby acquiring the "special status of the firstborn as the preeminent son and heir". His resurrection is also the guarantee that all the Christian dead will be resurrected at Christ's parousia.
After the resurrection, Jesus is portrayed as calling the apostles to the Great Commission, as described in Matthew 28:16–20, Mark 16:14–18, Luke 24:44–49, John 20:19–23, and Acts 1:4–8, in which the disciples receive the call "to let the world know the good news of a victorious Saviour and the very presence of God in the world by the spirit". According to these texts, Jesus says that they "will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you", that "repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in [the Messiah's] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem", and that "if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained".
The shorter version of the Gospel of Mark ends with the discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene, Salome, and "Mary the mother of James". A young man in a white robe at the site of the tomb announced to them that Jesus has risen, and instructed them to "tell Peter and the disciples that he will meet them in Galilee, 'just as he told you'" (Mark 16).
In the Gospel of Matthew, an angel appeared to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, telling her that Jesus is not there because he has been raised from the dead, and instructing her to tell the other followers to go to Galilee, to meet Jesus. Jesus then appeared to Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" at the tomb; and next, based on Mark 16:7, Jesus appeared to all the disciples on a mountain in Galilee, where Jesus claimed authority over heaven and earth, and commissioned the disciples to preach the gospel to the whole world. In this message, the end times are delayed "to bring the world to discipleship".
In the Gospel of Luke, "the women who had come with him from Galilee" come to his tomb, which they find empty. Two angelic beings appeared to announce that Jesus is not there but has been raised. Jesus then appeared to two followers on their way to Emmaus, who notify the eleven remaining Apostles, who respond that Jesus has appeared to Peter. While they were describing this, Jesus appeared again, explaining that he is the messiah who was raised from the dead according to the scriptures "and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem". In Luke–Acts (two works from the same author) he then ascended into heaven, his rightful home.
In Acts of the Apostles, Jesus appeared to the apostles for forty days and commanded them to stay in Jerusalem, after which Jesus ascended to heaven, followed by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the missionary task of the early church.
Jewish-Hellenistic background
Jewish
In Judaism, the idea of resurrection first emerges in the 3rd century BC Book of Watchers and in the 2nd century BC Book of Daniel, the later possibly as a belief in the resurrection of the soul alone, which was then developed by the Pharisees as a belief in bodily resurrection, an idea completely alien to the Greeks. Josephus tells of the three main Jewish sects of the 1st century AD, that the Sadducees held that both soul and body perished at death; the Essenes that the soul was immortal but the flesh was not; and the Pharisees that the soul was immortal and that the body would be resurrected to house it. Of these three positions, Jesus and the early Christians appear to have been closest to that of the Pharisees. Steve Mason notes that for the Pharisees, "the new body is a special, holy body", which is different from the old body, "a view shared to some extent by the ex-Pharisee Paul (1. Cor. 15:35ff)".
The evidence from Jewish texts and from tomb inscriptions points to a more complex reality: for example, when the author of the Book of Daniel wrote that "many of those sleeping in the dust shall awaken", religion scholar Dag Øistein Endsjø believes he probably had in mind a rebirth as angelic beings (metaphorically described as stars in God's Heaven, stars having been identified with angels from early times); such a rebirth would rule out a bodily resurrection, as angels were believed to be fleshless. Other scholars hold that Daniel exposes a belief in a bodily resurrection. Other texts range from the traditional Old Testament view that the soul would spend eternity in the underworld, to a metaphorical belief in the raising of the spirit. Most avoided defining what resurrection might imply, but a resurrection of the flesh was a marginal belief. As Outi Lehtipuu states, "belief in resurrection was far from being an established doctrine" of Second Temple Judaism.
Greco-Roman
The Greeks traditionally held that a number of men and women gained physical immortality as they were translated to live forever in either Elysium, the Islands of the Blessed, heaven, the ocean, or literally right under the ground. As such, some scholars have attempted to trace resurrection beliefs in pagan traditions concerning death and bodily disappearances and setting the Jesus tradition within a more Greco-Roman context. Such scholars have argued that the empty tomb narrative and subsequent appearances of Jesus are best understood as literary motifs within the context of Greek literary works that exhibit similar narratives in Greek mythology.
However, there is no evidence that the portrayal of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels (the three earliest gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke) was directly influenced by pagan mythology in any significant way. Rather, it is widely agreed that the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels is deeply influenced by Jewish tradition. The earliest followers of Jesus were devout Jews who abhorred Paganism, and would have been unlikely to shape their accounts of their founder on pagan myths. According to Bart Ehrman, most of the alleged parallels between Jesus and pagan deities only exist in the modern imagination, and there are no "accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead". The attitudes towards resurrection were generally negative among pagans. For example, Asclepius was killed by Zeus for using herbs to resurrect the dead, but by his father Apollo's request, was subsequently immortalized as a star.
According to historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, modern scholars hold that "dying and rising gods" trope is incorrect since early sources on numerous gods show that gods who have died, do not resurrect or even go through rebirth. Furthermore, claims of dying and resurrected gods is based on dubious reconstructions of later sources since early indigenous sources never make such claims, and there is no clear instance of a dying and rising deity. Tryggve Mettinger, an advocate of the "dying and rising" category, writes that dying and rising gods were closely associated with seasonal cycles whereas the resurrection of Jesus was treated as a one-time historical event unrelated to seasons. Mettinger also says that there is no evidence of these gods dying a redemptive death like Jesus, concluding that there is no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus took inspiration from previous myths.