N. T. Wright On Resurrection

There are many other things to say about Jesus? resurrection. But, as far as I am concerned, the historian may and must say that all other explanations for why Christianity arose, and why it took the shape it did, are far less convincing as historical explanations than the one the early Christians themselves offer: that Jesus really did rise from the dead on Easter morning, leaving an empty tomb behind him. The origins of Christianity, the reason why this new movement came into being and took the unexpected form it did, and particularly the strange mutations it produced within the Jewish hope for resurrection and the Jewish hope for a Messiah, are best explained by saying that something happened, two or three days after Jesus? death, for which the accounts in the four gospels are the least inadequate expression we have.

Of course, there are several reasons why people may not want, and often refuse, to believe this. But the historian must weigh, as well, the alternative accounts they themselves offer. And, to date, none of them have anything like the explanatory power of the simple, but utterly challenging, Christian one. The historian?s task is not to force people to believe. It is to make it clear that the sort of reasoning historians characteristically employ – inference to the best explanation, tested rigorously in terms of the explanatory power of the hypothesis thus generated – points strongly towards the bodily resurrection of Jesus; and to make clear, too, that from that point on the historian alone cannot help. When you?re dealing with worldviews, every community and every person must make their choices in the dark, even if there is a persistent rumour of light around the next corner.