You can trust the resurrection. That claim sounds bold until you sit with the evidence, as skeptics across three centuries have done, only to walk away convinced rather than vindicated. Two Oxford scholars, Gilbert West and George Lyttleton, set out to dismantle Christianity by disproving Paul’s conversion and the resurrection, but ended up writing two of history’s better-known defenses of the very faith they meant to destroy. A skeptical Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis, and later a legal journalist, Lee Strobel, followed the same path and arrived at the same place. Different centuries, same evidence, same verdict.
So, what happens when you actually look at the evidence? Not what you’ve heard secondhand or assumed, but the historical record itself. Start by asking whether you can trust the documents. Luke opens his gospel like a historian, not a myth-maker, telling us he investigated eyewitness accounts and earlier written sources so you could have certainty about what you’d been taught. Archaeology backs him up: dozens of obscure political titles and geographical details in Acts, the kind only someone close to the events would know, check out. The manuscript evidence is staggering, too. Over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament survive, some dating to within decades of the originals, compared with Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a text no historian doubts, preserved in roughly 10 manuscripts, the earliest copied nearly 1,000 years later. And when Paul tells the Corinthians that more than five hundred people saw the risen Jesus at once, most of them still alive as he wrote, he’s issuing an open invitation to go ask them yourself. You don’t extend that kind of challenge if you’re making up the story. The Bible can be trusted.
Once you trust the record, look at what it says Jesus claimed about Himself. He didn’t call himself merely a prophet or a wise teacher. He told the crowd, “Before Abraham was, I am,” echoing the divine name God gave Moses at the burning bush. Everyone listening understood exactly what He meant, and they picked up stones. He said He and the Father are one, and the response was the same charge: blasphemy, because you, a man, are making yourself God. He told a paralyzed man that his sins were forgiven, and the religious leaders rightly asked who but God alone can do that. C.S. Lewis put the choice plainly: given what Jesus claimed, “good moral teacher” isn’t on the table. Either He was lying, He was a lunatic, or He was telling the truth and is indeed Lord. We can trust Jesus’s claim to be God.
That leaves the resurrection itself, and the case rests on a handful of facts most scholars, skeptical or not, already accept. Jesus really died by crucifixion; Roman executioners didn’t let people walk away. The tomb was found empty, first discovered by women, whose testimony carried no legal weight in that culture, exactly the detail no one inventing a persuasive story would choose. Many people, in different settings, reported encountering Him alive, including His own brother James, who hadn’t believed in Him before and later died for that belief. And the disciples themselves, who had scattered in fear the night Jesus was arrested, were transformed into people willing to die rather than stop proclaiming what they’d seen. People die for what they believe is true far more readily than for what they know is a lie they made up themselves. The resurrection was real.
Put those pieces together, and you’re left with more than an interesting ancient claim. Paul told the Corinthians in chapter 15 that if Christ wasn’t raised, their faith was worthless and they were still in their sins. He didn’t hedge, and neither should you. The evidence is meant to lead somewhere: not just to a conclusion you file away, but to a decision about the risen Christ. You can examine the manuscripts, weigh the eyewitnesses, work through Lewis’s choice, and walk through the facts, and still have to decide what to do with what you find. The resurrection is true. Jesus is who He said He is. What will you do with that? I hope you will choose to receive Him as Savior and to follow Him as Lord. Soli Deo Gloria (Glory to God Alone)!