If Not Resurrection, Then What?

I do not pretend that any of the foregoing is a definitively conclusive argument that will bring a skeptic to admit that Jesus must have been raised from the dead.  It is always open to anyone to say, “I can’t think of a better explanation, but I know there must be one, because I intend to hold to my presupposition that dead people don’t rise.”  In fact, the Gospels tell us that thinking Jesus was a vision was the first conclusion of witnesses. They had to be convinced otherwise by Jesus’ behavior.  

And for us today? Well, as hard as it may be to accept that resurrection is possible, all other explanations for why Christianity arose, spread so rapidly, and why it took the shape it did, are far less reasonable as historical explanations.  Logic resides with the Christian explanation. 

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 significant happened.  Furthermore, the accounts in the four gospels provide the most plausible explanation.  There is no historical evidence for any other event that would explain all of these remarkable outcomes.

There are various motives why people may not want, and often refuse, to believe this.  But the honest examiner should weigh the alternative accounts against the testimony of the Gospels.   And, to date, none of them have anything like the explanatory power of the simple, though utterly challenging, Christian one.   Sound reasoning (i.e. critical rationality) points to Jesus rising from the dead.