The Creed Paul Quotes

A scrap of liturgy in 1 Corinthians 15 that nobody has been able to dismiss as a late legend.

In about AD 55, Paul wrote a letter to a church in Corinth that had become tangled up in disputes over the resurrection of the dead. In the middle of his argument, he stops, says for I received what I also passed on to you, and quotes a piece of text that scholars across the theological spectrum agree he is citing, not composing — a pre- existing creed he had been taught when he first joined the movement.

The text goes like this:

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, 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

This passage matters more than almost any other single text in the New Testament for the historical case for the resurrection. Here is why.

Why scholars agree it is a quotation

The Greek of the passage has a specific structure — short parallel clauses, each beginning with hoti (“that”), with a rhythm and a vocabulary distinct from Paul’s usual prose. Paul also signals explicitly that he is handing on what he had himself received — language used in the rabbinic tradition for the transmission of authoritative teaching.²

This is uncontested across the spectrum. The atheist scholar Gerd Lüdemann, the agnostic Bart Ehrman, the Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide, and the conservative Christian scholar N. T. Wright all agree: Paul is quoting a pre-existing creed.

Why the dating matters

The crucifixion took place in roughly AD 33. Paul converted in roughly AD 33–36 — within three years, possibly within months. Three years later, around AD 36, he visited Jerusalem and met with Peter and James, two of the people named in the creed itself.³

The creed was therefore in circulation before Paul’s visit to Jerusalem in AD 36 — meaning it is, at the latest, a tradition from within three years of the crucifixion. Most scholars push the date further back than that. Lüdemann, again no friend to traditional Christianity, dates the creed to “not later than three years after the crucifixion.”⁴ Other estimates put it within months.

Whatever the exact figure, this is vanishingly early for an ancient historical claim. The standard sources for the life of Alexander the Great were written four hundred years after his death. The earliest biographies of Muhammad date from at least a century after his death. The creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is at the upper bound a few years removed from the event it describes — and was already, by then, a piece of memorized liturgy passed from teacher to teacher.

What this rules out

The most popular sceptical explanation of the resurrection accounts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the legendary development hypothesis: that the stories of a risen Jesus grew up gradually, decades after the event, as oral tradition embellished a sad death into a triumphant return.

The 1 Corinthians 15 creed makes this hypothesis very difficult to sustain. The full resurrection claim — including the empty tomb (“buried… raised”), the appearances, the named witnesses — was already a fixed liturgical formula within a few years of the crucifixion. There was no decade-long incubation period during which the legend could grow. The claim was being made, by people who were there, immediately.

“Most of whom are still living”

I find one line in the creed especially striking, almost casual: “most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.”

Paul is writing in 55. The creed names a group of more than five hundred eyewitnesses who, twenty years later, were still mostly alive. He is, in effect, telling his Corinthian readers: if you don’t believe me, go and ask them.

This is not the language of someone who is making it up. People who make things up do not invite verification with names attached. They do not give count estimates. They do not concede that some of the witnesses have died and some are alive — that is the language of an ordinary contemporary report.

It is the language of a man who thought, correctly or not, that the events were checkable.

What this gets you

The creed by itself does not prove the resurrection. It proves something weaker, but still substantial: that the resurrection claim was not a legend that grew up over decades. It was the original claim, from the original witnesses, made in public, within years of the event, in the city where the event had taken place.

If you are going to deny the resurrection, you have to deny it as a lie or a hallucination, not as a gradual legendary development. That is a much harder case to make. The piece on alternative explanations — when I write it — will take the remaining options one at a time.

For now, the next piece is who wrote the gospels — what we can and cannot say about their authorship and dating, honestly.