What are some of the Common Arguments Against the Resurrection?
Five arguments against the Resurrection refuted.
There are five common arguments used to explain or refute the resurrection event. The answers to these arguments, however, further only help to demonstrate the authenticity and credibility of the resurrection.
ARGUMENT 1
“Jesus’ enemies would have taken / stolen His body.”
This scenario would be highly improbable because Jesus' enemies would have certainly displayed His body if they could have, to humiliate His disciples, control any rumors of His resurrection, and cut short any new religious movement that would threaten their Mosaic traditions.
ARGUMENT 2
“Jesus’ followers might have taken His body.”
It is unlikely that Jesus’ followers would have taken His body because, following His crucifixion, they were profoundly disappointed and discouraged.
They also hid away and did not believe that He would resurrect as He had promised. It is absurd to think that, given their emotional state, they would have invented a scheme wherein they would steal the body to fabricate a story that they did not fully believe in and to be killed for.
Additionally, there is a problem with this theory because the Roman soldiers that guarded the tomb were trained military personnel. If the soldiers were found asleep during duty, they faced execution. The soldiers had every motive to stay awake. Thus, it was unlikely that the disciples could steal the body of Christ while they were asleep.
ARGUMENT 3
“No one had actually seen Jesus risen, and people who claimed to were just hallucinating with grief.”
Hallucinations are an individual phenomenon, not a group event. An individual can hallucinate; but group hallucinations over the same experience do not happen. After the resurrection, Jesus appeared to over five hundred brethren at once (1 Corinthians 15:6) — and Paul writes this while many of them were still alive. In fact, Paul was not even in a state of grief when Christ appeared to him; he was actively persecuting Christians on the road to Damascus (Acts 9) when he had the encounter with Christ.
ARGUMENT 4
“The Conversion of Paul could have happened by him just exploring other faiths as it occurs in today’s world.”
Paul wasn't someone who was exploring the Christian faith; he was on a mission to destroy the followers of Christ. He was dragging believers from their homes and travelling to arrest more of them in Damascus when Jesus stopped him (Acts 8:3; Acts 9:1–9).
Paul ended up losing everything for his faith in Christ. He had been a rising Pharisee, student of Gamaliel, with status, career, and a future. After Damascus, he was beaten with rods, given thirty-nine lashes five times, stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and eventually executed (2 Corinthians 11:23–27). He even called his former credentials “rubbish” compared to knowing Christ (Philippians 3:7–8).
The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatian church further confirms the fact that he received the gospel directly from Jesus:
Galatians 1:11-12 (NKJV)
But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.
He even tells us he avoided the other apostles after his conversion. He went into Arabia, returned to Damascus, and only met Peter three years later — and even then, only for fifteen days (Galatians 1:16–18). That is the opposite of someone slowly absorbing the teaching of a community. His convictions came from one source: a personal encounter with the risen Christ. He was willing to die for it — and eventually did.
ARGUMENT 5
“Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. He passed out, revived in the cool of the tomb, and escaped.”
First, Jesus was certainly dead. Before the cross He was scourged — a Roman flogging severe enough that it sometimes killed men on its own. Then He was crucified, a method of execution designed to end in death. When the soldiers came to break the prisoners' legs to hasten the end, they found Jesus already dead and didn't bother (John 19:33). To make sure, one of them drove a spear into His side, and “blood and water” came out (John 19:34) — a separation that physicians recognise as a sign that death had already taken place. These were professional executioners; ending lives was their trade. Pilate himself was surprised Jesus had died so quickly and summoned the centurion to verify it before releasing the body (Mark 15:44–45).
Second, it is impossible to think that a survivor could have escaped. Suppose Jesus had only fainted; He was then wrapped in linen with about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39–40), laid in a tomb sealed by a stone far too heavy for one man to move, with a Roman guard posted outside for security (Matthew 27:65–66). A man barely clinging to life does not unwrap himself, roll back the stone from the inside, overpower trained soldiers, and walk away.
Third, even if He had escaped, it would prove nothing. A man who had just survived scourging and crucifixion would have emerged broken, bleeding, and desperate for care. He would have stirred pity, not worship. He could never have persuaded His disciples that He was the risen Lord who had defeated death — yet that is precisely what they believed, preached, and died for. As the sceptic David Strauss conceded nearly two centuries ago, a half-dead man crawling from a tomb could never have produced the conviction that swept the early church.
The resurrection is not a claim that survives by force of argument. It is a claim that has survived because the evidence is what it is. Every alternative explanation requires more faith than the resurrection itself.