You Should Be Skeptical About Easter’s Claims

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

How often do you meet someone who was born of a virgin? Or someone who died and came back to life three days later? These are some extraordinary claims. The question is, why do you believe them of Jesus? Are you scared to look into them, frightened you may discover the evidence doesn’t support the claim?

Worship leaders are often the most visible representatives of faith in a local church, and the people you lead are watching not just what you sing but what you believe. If your faith is built entirely on emotion and experience with zero knowledge on the historical and evidential foundations of Christianity, it becomes fragile. Doubt has a way of finding everyone eventually. When it comes, feelings alone won’t hold.

But beyond your own stability, there’s a pastoral dimension to this: the people in your congregation are living in a world that increasingly treats the Resurrection as mythology. They need leaders who can model what it looks like to hold conviction that has been tested and examined. You don’t need a seminary degree to engage with the evidence, but you do need to have honestly wrestled with the question of whether any of this is actually true. That wrestling, and the conviction that comes out of it, changes how you lead. There is a difference between a worship leader who hopes the Resurrection happened and one who has looked at the evidence and truly believes it did.

The Claim Worth Examining

At the center of everything Christians believe is this: Jesus was crucified, died, and on the third day was raised from the dead. He was seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses, ascended into heaven, and is coming back.

This is the claim that skeptics attack, and rightfully so. It’s the sort of claim that embodies the colloquialism “You don’t see that every day.” But just because it is an extraordinary claim doesn’t mean it isn’t true. In fact, if Christ wasn’t extraordinary then there would be nothing to talk about. The question is, is there extraordinary evidence to support it?

The Empty Tomb

The empty tomb is one of the most historically secure facts surrounding the resurrection. Even the Jewish religious leaders and Roman authorities never disputed that the tomb was empty! These are the two very groups that had the most to gain from disproving Christianity. They wanted to disprove it so badly that they actually killed people for spreading its message (including a certain man named Saul).

They couldn’t deny the tomb was empty, so instead they claimed the disciples had stolen the body (a real claim made by the Toledot Yeshu, a collection of Jewish anti-Christian writings on Jesus). That reveals a significant concession: you don’t invent a theft story unless the tomb is actually empty. The burial site was also well-known and easily verifiable; Jerusalem was a small city, and the crucifixion and burial had happened publicly just days before. If the body had still been there, the authorities could have produced it and ended the Christian movement before it started. They didn’t. Because they couldn’t.

Historians across a wide spectrum, including many who are not Christians, generally accept the empty tomb as a historical datum precisely because it is attested by multiple independent sources (Mark, John, Paul, and the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15) and because the alternative explanations fail to account for all the evidence.

The Conversion of Paul

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.

These words were written by a man who used to hunt Christians for sport: Saul of Tarsus.

Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus) was an educated, zealous Pharisee who actively persecuted the early church, overseeing the execution of Christians and hunting them down across multiple cities! He had every social, religious, and professional reason to suppress Christianity, and absolutely no self-serving reason to join it. But he did join it. In fact, he became history’s most influential spreader of it! It’s one thing to have a change of heart and feel guilty for killing Christians, another thing entirely to join them. Paul’s change would have required an extraordinary event. We can speculate, or we could get the answer directly from the source. Paul claims it was an encounter with the risen Christ.

The Disciples’ Willingness to Die for Their Belief

The disciples’ willingness to die for their belief in the Resurrection is one of the most psychologically compelling arguments for its truth. After Jesus was crucified, the disciples scattered. They didn’t scheme on what to do next; they were terrified and defeated. Imagine how you’d feel if the person you dedicated your life and beliefs to was just tortured and killed. They did what we’d all likely do: run away and hide behind locked doors.

But something dramatic happened to transform that group of demoralized followers into people who boldly proclaimed the Resurrection in the very city where Jesus had been killed. They even held strong to that testimony under torture and execution! Peter was crucified upside down. Paul was beheaded. James was thrown from the temple and beaten to death. Nearly every apostle died a martyr’s death. People may die for something they believe to be true but turns out to be false, but people do not willingly die for something they know is a lie. They saw Jesus die. They were shattered by it. But then every single one of them started saying the same thing: He’s alive! 

If the disciples had stolen the body or fabricated the story, at least one of them would have recanted upon facing torture and death. How many did? Not. A. Single. One. A testimony like that is a historical anomaly and demands a serious explanation. An extraordinary explanation, one might say.

And Many More

This article would be longer than an encyclopedia if every piece of evidence was presented and delved into. If you want to look into the mountains of evidence on your own, try these:

1. Post-Resurrection Appearances
2. The Conversion of James and Jude (Jesus’s skeptical brothers)
3. The Early Creed of 1 Corinthians 15
4. The Testimony of 500 Eyewitnesses
5. The Rapid Growth of the Early Church
6. Jewish Enemies Never Produced the Body
7. The Criterion of Embarrassment (women as the first witnesses)
8. The Disciples’ Dramatic Transformation
9. The Silence of Contemporary Refutations
10. The Hostile Witness Testimony (Roman and Jewish sources)
11. The Early Dating of Resurrection Claims
12. The Shroud of Turin (when you’re ready for a truly mind-blowing probability)

And if you want books on the topic, J. Warner Wallace’s books Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels and Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible are a terrific place to start.

God bless you in your research and ministry!