Alive: 21 Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus ChristSample

Reason 18: There was no concept of individual resurrection prior to Jesus

The ancient Jews had a concept of all of God’s people rising together at the end of history, but no concept of one person rising alone in the middle of history as Jesus did (Daniel 12:2).

In the ancient world, Greek philosophy believed the physical body was bad, but the spiritual soul was good. The goal was to die, leave the body, and live in the soul. The Greeks had no desire for a resurrec- tion and in fact the exact opposite was true. Oxford Graduate and St. Andrews Professor N.T. Wright has published the most thorough academic of the concept of resurrection throughout history. He says, “Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believed that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed resurrection....”

N.T. Wright continues, “Nobody in the pagan world of Jesus’ day and thereafter actually claimed that somebody had been truly dead and had then come to be truly, and bodily, alive once more.”

Noted historian and professor Edwin Yamauchi who has immersed himself in twenty-two languages, ancient archeology, and history says that there is no possibility that the idea of a resurrection was borrowed by Christians from pagans because there is no definitive evidence for the teaching of a deity resurrection in any of the mystery religions prior to the second century. Apparently, the pagans stole the idea of resurrection from the Christians, and not vice-versa.

Did you know that many Christian and non-Christian scholars have studied the resurrection and come to the conclusion that it is factual?

N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 35.

N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 76.

Edwin Yamauchi, “Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History?” Christianity Today, March 15, 1974 and March 29, 1974, 4–7, 12–16.