The Minimal Facts

The five things about Jesus that essentially every historian, including sceptics, accepts.

There is a way of arguing for the resurrection that goes like this: The Bible says he rose. The Bible is the word of God. Therefore he rose. I do not want to argue that way here, and not because I don’t believe the Bible — I do. I want to argue another way, because the other way is, I think, more useful for the person I am trying to write to.

The approach is called the minimal facts argument, developed by Gary Habermas over thirty years of meticulous survey of the academic literature on the historical Jesus.¹ The idea is simple. You take only the facts about Jesus that are accepted by an overwhelming majority of historians who work on the period — including the sceptics, the agnostics, the Jewish scholars, the atheists. You set the Bible’s theological claims aside. You ask: given the historical data, what is the best explanation?

Here are the facts.

Fact 1: Jesus died by Roman crucifixion

This is accepted by essentially every historian of the period. The crucifixion is attested by four independent sources within the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, plus the letters of Paul), and by at least three non-Christian sources: the Roman historian Tacitus, the Jewish historian Josephus, and (in passing) the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata.²

The atheist scholar Gerd Lüdemann writes: “Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.”³

Fact 2: The disciples sincerely believed Jesus appeared to them

After the crucifixion, the disciples — who had scattered in fear during the arrest — became convinced that they had personally seen Jesus alive again. They reported group encounters, individual encounters, encounters in different locations over a period of about forty days.

This is accepted by virtually all historians of the period. The dispute is not over whether the disciples believed this; it is over what they actually saw. The atheist New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes: “Why, then, did some of the disciples claim to see Jesus alive after his crucifixion? I don’t doubt at all that some disciples claimed this.”⁴

The reason the consensus is so firm is the strength of the behavioral evidence. People who had scattered came back. People who had been ordinary fishermen and tax collectors started preaching publicly in the same city where their leader had been executed, six weeks after the execution. Most of them were eventually killed for the message they preached. Liars do not generally die for what they know to be a lie. Whatever else is going on, they believed it.

Fact 3: Paul, who had been a persecutor of the church, became a believer

Paul (originally Saul of Tarsus) was a Pharisee, trained in the strictest school of Jewish law, who had built a reputation by hunting down Christians and turning them over to the authorities. Sometime around AD 33–36, by his own account and by the account of the early church, he had a personal experience he described as the risen Jesus appearing to him on the road to Damascus, and from that moment on he became the most aggressive evangelist in the history of the movement.

Paul is the bridge between the events of the gospels and the written record. He is the earliest New Testament author, writing letters within twenty years of the crucifixion. His own conversion is attested in his own letters, in Acts, and in the testimony of the early church about him.

It is, in historical-evidence terms, a remarkable data point. The case Paul made for the resurrection is the case made by a hostile witness — someone with every reason to disbelieve, who switched sides at enormous personal cost.

Fact 4: James, the brother of Jesus, became a believer

The gospels are clear that Jesus’ own family — including his brother James — did not believe his claims during his lifetime. “Even his own brothers did not believe in him,” John writes plainly.⁵

After the resurrection, James not only became a believer; he became the leader of the church in Jerusalem, the church’s strictest center, the one most under pressure from the Jewish authorities. He held that role until he was executed for it in roughly AD 62 — a death recorded by Josephus, the Jewish historian.⁶

Family members do not, in general, conclude that their sibling is the Messiah and the Son of God. James did. Something changed his mind. He was prepared to die for what changed it, and he did.

Fact 5: The tomb was empty

This one is slightly more contested in the scholarly literature than the previous four, but the majority — roughly 75% by Habermas’s survey — still accepts it. The case rests on three observations.

First, the disciples preached the resurrection openly in Jerusalem, the same city where the tomb was located, six weeks after the crucifixion. If the tomb had still contained a body, the authorities would have had a trivial means of ending the movement before it started: produce the body. They did not. The most natural explanation is that they couldn’t, because the tomb was empty.

Second, the earliest accounts have women as the discoverers of the empty tomb. In the first-century Jewish legal context, the testimony of women was not admissible in court. Inventing a story to convince a sceptical audience and then putting women in the lead role is a move no first-century forger would make. The presence of the women, on the historical-criticism principle of embarrassment, is one of the strongest marks of authentic memory in the gospel accounts.

Third, no first-century source — Jewish, Roman, or otherwise — disputes the empty tomb. The polemics against the resurrection focus on the explanation of the empty tomb (the disciples stole the body, the gardener moved the body, etc.) rather than the fact. That is a significant absence: if the tomb hadn’t been empty, the polemic would have started there.

What’s the best explanation?

The historical question now becomes: given these five facts, which explanation accounts for them best?

The resurrection accounts for all five with a single hypothesis: the disciples and James and Paul saw a risen Jesus because there was a risen Jesus to see; the tomb was empty because the body had been raised; the movement spread despite enormous opposition because the event was real.

Every alternative — hallucination, conspiracy, swoon, legendary development — has to either ignore one or more of the facts, or combine several different mechanisms to cover what the resurrection covers with one.

A piece on the alternative explanations and why each of them strains under the weight of the data is in progress.

In the meantime, the creed Paul quotes takes a closer look at the earliest written witness — a fragment of liturgy that pushes the resurrection claim to within a few years of the event, before legends had time to grow.