Most religious teaching arrives as ideas you’re asked to hold. The Christian gospel claims to be something else: a report of things that have happened.

There’s a clip from 1968 of J. R. R. Tolkien talking about how The Lord of the Rings came together. He’s dismissing the suggestion that it’s an allegory of the nuclear bomb.

Two pieces of evidence for the resurrection get overlooked almost entirely. One is a calendar. The other is the existence of Christianity itself.

Two features of the resurrection appearances carry more evidential weight than they’re usually given. One concerns who saw Jesus first. The other concerns what kind of encounters these were.

The empty tomb, taken alone, doesn’t conclusively demonstrate the resurrection.

All four Gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection begin the same way: the tomb was discovered empty.

Part of the importance of history is that the future is determined by things that have happened. Based on what took place in the past, it’s possible to know something about the future state of the world and of human life.

The resurrection of Christ could have no natural explanation or human cause. It is inexplicable without relation to God.

Christ’s resurrection is an essential matter of faith. Together with his death it sits at the very heart of biblical belief in God — and without it, Christian teaching loses its identity and meaning.

With Jesus raised, the nature of resurrection itself became clear — and the difference from every earlier case is decisive.

The resurrection of Jesus is not an abstract idea or theory. It is a real, bodily, historical, datable event — at the time widely witnessed, publicly visible, objectively verifiable (1 Cor 15:5-8).

Jesus explained that his suffering and entry into glory was clearly implied and ‘necessary’ in ‘Moses and all the prophets … and all the Scriptures’ (Luke 24:26-27).