The Uniqueness of Jesus' Resurrection in Ancient and Modern Worlds

Nothing like it existed on the planet at the time in any culture anywhere.

Two thousand years ago on planet earth, there were no civilizations, religions, or mythologies that had anything akin to an account of Jesus’s resurrection.

When atheists and skeptics argue it would have been easy to pull the wool over people’s eyes two thousand years ago, they take a narrow and bigoted view of culture at the time. They believe something for which there is ample evidence to the contrary.

N.T. Wright showed in The Resurrection of the Son of God, contrary to claims of today, literally no civilization had anything like what the early Christians claimed. It has all the hallmarks of recorded history — a recounted real event.

The Jews had only two beliefs in their entire culture. Either they did not believe in resurrection at all or they believed we all were resurrected on the last day of history. They had no story to even contemplate a single person’s resurrection in the middle of human history.

The Romans, Greeks, Indian subcontinent, East Asian, Norse, Egyptian, African, and Western Hemisphere cultures that existed lacked the language of the Christian resurrection. Overwhelmingly, the pagan religions globally rejected resurrection at all. The few stories that considered resurrection either did not exist or came in one of two very distinct forms.

First, a resurrection involved a human coming back to life as godlike with a shining appearance, in almost all cases too bright for humans to lay eyes on. More commonly, the human came back to life pale and cadaverous, looking like one who had withered in the tomb.

That is it. On planet earth two thousand years ago, that was all there was and almost to a culture regardless of its place on the planet, they rejected the idea of a physical, bodily resurrection back to human form.

Then Jesus came from the tomb. The early Christians, speaking into a Jewish community, told a tale so incredible that deviated so substantially from anything known, it is impossible to think anyone would have believed Jesus’s followers. Their story simply fit no story archetype known to exist on the entire planet regardless of continent.

The apostles told the tale of the man Jesus coming from the tomb. His burial cloth had been removed and folded. Then he, neither shining brightly nor withered and cadaverous, was unrecognizable until he was recognizable. As Tim Keller notes in his new book, Hope in Times of Fear, it was like seeing a friend from fifty years ago and realizing it was the same person. Only it was the third day after his death.

Likewise, Jesus had the wounds of the crucifixion and possessed the ability to enter locked rooms. He could disappear and reappear. He ate — a lot of eating. He appeared to multiple groups of people and to individuals. There were hundreds of witnesses still living by the time Paul wrote. But his form was neither of dazzling light nor pale and cadaverous.

The story would have been impossible in Jewish culture. It simply is suggested in none of the Biblical or Old Testament Biblical literature that Jesus could be dead for multiple days and then rise again in the middle of human history. The resurrections of people in the Old Testament at the hands of prophets were not multi-day old affairs of withered corpses. Even in the New Testament, Jesus’s multi-day old resurrection of Lazarus required human help to get Lazarus out of his burial clothes.

The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” (John 11:44)

With Jesus however,

Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. (John 20:6-7)

On Holy Tuesday, we focus on Jesus’s talking about the resurrection. It remains the only event in human history with the power to transform a person. But at the time, no language, religion, culture, creed, mythology, or race of mankind had any story, tradition, writings, or known statements that reflect how the first Christians described Jesus’s resurrection.

It was simply new and came into a culture that was dogmatic in the belief such a resurrection was impossible. But that belief not only exploded in the society, people who claimed to be the eye witnesses were willing to lose their lives professing the truth of that most extraordinary event.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: 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, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. (1 Cor. 15:3-7)

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Cor. 15:8-9)

Tim Keller, in his new books, notes of this passage in Corinthians:

One of the oldest theories is that the legends of Jesus’s resurrection developed only many decades after the actual events had faded from living memory. But the 1 Corinthians text is itself an important piece of evidence against that view. Verses 3–7 are now seen by most New Testament scholars as not an original Pauline composition but rather an early gospel summary used by the earliest church in its evangelism and instruction which Paul is citing. As he says in verse 3, these words were “received,” not created by him, and then “passed on” to others. Scholars also show that the vocabulary in these verses—“according to the Scriptures,” “on the third day,” “the Twelve” are not terms Paul uses elsewhere in his writings. So this was a gospel summary that was already in widespread use by Christians all around the Mediterranean world when Paul wrote. Since this letter to the Corinthians was written only fifteen or twenty years after Jesus’s death, the eminent biblical scholar James Dunn concludes that “we can be entirely confident” that this summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 “was formulated . . . within months of Jesus’s death.” Keller, Timothy. Hope in Times of Fear (p. 6). Penguin Publishing Group.

Paul claimed these words came from an earlier time. He did not write them. They were already circulating widely throughout the Mediterranean region.

Something happened that fell outside human understanding at the time. It was a real and powerful supernatural event that defied all archetypes in all cultures in all civilizations at the time. And it spread rapidly and remains foundational to the Christian faith today.

Believe in the event and believe in Christ that you might ask Him for a personal relationship with Him.