On the Third Day – The Evidence for the Resurrection That Contemporary Scholarship Ignores

On the Third Day – The Evidence for the Resurrection That Contemporary Scholarship Ignores

2026-04-04

Deconstructing the deconstructionists in their quest for the ‘literary’ Jesus

Robert Nogacki  |  Easter 2026

There are claims that history ought to have swallowed long ago. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is one of those that refuse to go down.

Two millennia have passed – time enough to wear the names off caesars and bury empires under sand. Yet this one claim – scandalously specific, stubbornly irreducible – returns every year on the same morning, carrying the same non-negotiable content: that the tomb was empty, and that it means something. It is not a claim that submits to metaphor or dissolves into symbol. It demands a yes or a no. And it is precisely this uncompromising concreteness that has given no rest, for twenty centuries, to philosophers, historians, and – most tellingly – to those who would simply prefer to forget the whole thing.

 

What the argument is actually about

The latest attempt to domesticate this claim comes from Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker. His essay “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus” reviews two recent books and, in the process, sketches a portrait of contemporary Jesus scholarship – a portrait that rewards closer inspection.

The first book is Miracles and Wonder, by Elaine Pagels, the Princeton professor emeritus who has spent decades excavating the buried strata of early Christianity. Pagels treats the Gospels as palimpsests – layers of legend, propaganda, and oral tradition beneath which a core of historical memory can still be detected. The virgin birth? A late addition, designed to quash persistent rumors about Jesus’ paternity – modeled on Hellenistic tales of gods impregnating mortal women. The miracles? Psychosomatic phenomena, common enough in the ancient world. The empty tomb? A narrative solution to the practical problem of what happened to the body of a condemned man. Pagels compares the belief in Jesus’ resurrection to the faith of Lubavitcher Hasidim in the eventual return of their Rebbe, who died in 1994.

The second book, Catherine Nixey’s  Heresy – Jesus Christ and Other Sons of God, pushes the argument further: early Christianity consciously borrowed from pagan myths about sons of god and then – having cornered the market on truth – invented religious intolerance and eliminated the competition.

Behind both books, Gopnik outlines a still more radical thesis that has been gaining traction in the academy: that the Gospels are not records of historical memory at all but Greek literature – a collection of literary conventions, narrative tropes, and rhetorical devices borrowed from the Hellenistic tradition of writing biographies of wonder-workers. The leading voice of this school is Robyn Faith Walsh, of the University of Miami, whose The Origins of Early Christian Literature (2021) argues that the Gospels were written by educated Greeks for educated Greeks, and that they used the figure of Jesus as raw material for a standard Hellenistic bios – a tale of a wandering holy man and miracle-worker.

Gopnik presents these arguments with amused sympathy and arrives at his conclusion: the spread of Christianity was “a lucky break” – a consequence of Emperor Constantine’s longevity – rather than evidence of any theological necessity. Christianity is fascinating as a cultural phenomenon, he suggests, but its resurrection claims belong in the same category as bereavement hallucinations after the death of Elvis.

So much for Gopnik. The question is whether this account – of Jesus as a literary fiction, of the resurrection as a narrative trope, of Christianity as history’s luckiest accident – survives contact with the evidence.

 

The unbridgeable chasm: why the apostles could not have borrowed from Greek mythology

The language barrier

The thesis that the Gospels are “Greek literature” rests on an assumption that is rarely stated plainly: that the people who founded Christianity – Galilean fishermen, artisans, tax collectors – were sufficiently immersed in Greek literary culture to draw on it, consciously or otherwise. Accepting this requires a suspension of sociolinguistic realism that borders on the fantastical.

First-century Palestine was bilingual, but asymmetrically so. Greek served in commerce and administration – roughly the way English serves software developers in Krakow today: transactionally, not literarily. The language of daily life remained Aramaic; Hebrew was reserved for liturgical purposes. The distance between being able to haggle in Greek and being conversant with the conventions of a Hellenistic bios is approximately the distance between writing e-mails in English and reading Shakespeare in the original.

Joseph Fitzmyer’s foundational work on the Aramaic substrate of the Gospels – collected in his classic A Wandering Aramean – makes the point with philological precision. Scattered through the Gospel texts are Aramaic expressions preserved intact: Talitha koum, Ephphatha, Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani – each glossed with a translation for the Greek-speaking audience. These are not exotic ornaments. They are the fossils of an Aramaic-speaking community’s memory, preserved in linguistic amber. Matthew Black’s analysis in An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts confirms the picture: Semitic parataxis, the passivum divinum, Semitic mnemonic patterns – these are not borrowings from Hellenistic convention but the unconscious structures of Semitic thought expressing itself through a Greek translation medium.

A caveat: scholars such as Stanley Porter have rightly challenged the extreme “Aramaic originals” hypothesis. The Gospels were composed in Greek. The argument here is not that they are translations – it is that their Semitic substrate reveals a Jewish cultural matrix worlds away from sophisticated Hellenistic mythography.

 

The cultural chasm

Behind the language barrier lies a deeper gulf. The apostles’ Jewish worldview was fundamentally incompatible with Greek mythology. A linear, teleological conception of history – guided by divine providence toward a messianic fulfillment – stood in structural opposition to the cyclical cosmology of Greek thought. The prohibition against anthropomorphizing God placed the Jewish worldview in irreconcilable tension with Homer’s all-too-human pantheon. For observant Jews – which the disciples were – the very idea of gods battling one another would have been blasphemous.

As James Dunn’s work on the “New Perspective on Paul,” building on E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, has shown, Jewish identity markers – circumcision, the Sabbath, dietary laws – were so fundamental to first-century self-understanding that the apostolic community defended them fiercely long after the Jesus movement had crossed ethnic boundaries (Acts 10–11; Galatians 2). And the memory of the Maccabean crisis – when Antiochus IV desecrated the Temple and outlawed Jewish practice on pain of death – had sharpened this cultural immune response to a point where conscious borrowing from Greek mythology was not merely implausible but ideologically repugnant.

An intellectual concession: scholars such as Dale Martin and Luke Timothy Johnson have noted that structural narrative parallels can arise without conscious appropriation. This is fair – but it shifts the burden rather than removing it. One still has to explain how the Christian kerygma retained its Jewish apocalyptic scaffolding while absorbing none of the Greek mythological content. Structural similarity without substantive overlap is precisely what one would expect from independent traditions grappling with the same questions – death, transcendence, hope.

 

The elements no one would have invented

If someone were inventing a divine hero, they would not have invented Jesus. As Martin Hengel demonstrated in Crucifixion, this mode of execution was reserved for slaves and criminals – shameful, obscene, unmentionable in polite company. Greek hero narratives offer noble deaths: Achilles’ last stand, Socrates’ hemlock. Not criminal executions on a Roman torture device. The crucifixion is, from a purely literary standpoint, the worst possible ending for a candidate deity.

The criterion of embarrassment – a standard tool of mainstream historical-Jesus scholarship, employed by scholars as diverse as John Meier and E. P. Sanders – identifies as probably authentic precisely those details that no propagandist would have fabricated: the disciples’ repeated incomprehension, their flight at the moment of arrest, Peter’s triple denial, Jesus’ cry of abandonment from the cross.

Then there is the matter of the women. Josephus wrote in the Antiquities (4.219) that the testimony of women should not be admitted “on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.” The precise legal status of female testimony in various proceedings remains debated among historians, but the cultural prejudice is well documented. If you were fabricating a resurrection story to persuade a first-century audience, you would not cast women as your primary witnesses. That the Gospels do so anyway is a powerful indicator that historical fidelity overrode apologetic convenience.

 

The timeline: too early for legend

Here we arrive at what may be the single strongest fact in the entire debate. Paul’s letters, written some twenty years after Jesus’ death, already contain fixed creedal formulations. The pre-Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 – which Paul explicitly describes as “received” (parelabon), not invented – is dated by Hengel, Dunn, and Fee to within two to five years of the crucifixion itself.

Let that sink in. Within a handful of years of the events described, a fixed creedal formula was already circulating that named specific witnesses – Peter, the Twelve, five hundred brethren, James – many of whom were still alive when Paul wrote. This is not the murky accretion of legend over centuries. This is testimony crystallized while witnesses could still be questioned, challenged, and contradicted.

(A. N. Sherwin-White, the Roman historian, observed in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament that at least two generations were typically needed for legendary material to displace historical fact. Scholars of oral tradition, notably Bart Ehrman, argue that legendary development can proceed faster. Even granting that – two to five years is not “faster.” It is immediately.)

 

The “dying-and-rising gods” – a myth about myths

What about the alleged parallels? Osiris, Attis, Adonis – isn’t Jesus simply one more “dying-and-rising god”? Jonathan Z. Smith – no Christian apologist but one of the most rigorous historians of religion of the twentieth century – demolished this thesis in Drudgery Divine (1990). Osiris persists in the underworld; he does not return bodily. Attis and Adonis undergo seasonal disappearance and return tied to agricultural cycles – not unique historical events of cosmic significance.

The concept of bodily resurrection was distinctively Jewish, rooted in apocalyptic traditions that expected God to raise the dead at the end of history. What the earliest Christians proclaimed was not a mythological metaphor but a specific claim: that this end-time expectation had been inaugurated in the case of one individual, ahead of schedule. And the resurrection narratives themselves are stripped of mythological apparatus: no battles with death deities, no weeping goddesses, no fertility symbolism – just an empty tomb and bewildered disciples. The very austerity of the accounts argues for historical reminiscence rather than literary construction.

 

Binitarian worship: what syncretism cannot explain

Larry Hurtado’s magisterial Lord Jesus Christ reveals another difficulty for the borrowing hypothesis. The worship of Jesus emerged within a strictly monotheistic Jewish framework. The binitarian pattern – Jesus incorporated into the divine identity while Jewish monotheism was maintained – has no parallel in Greek religious thought and is already visible in Paul’s earliest letters from the early fifties, two decades after the crucifixion. This was not syncretistic absorption from without but a unique mutation within Jewish theological parameters.

 

Scholarly fashion, or how every generation discovers “its own” Jesus

The arguments above do not arise in a vacuum. They belong to a long tradition of research into the so-called “historical Jesus” – a tradition with its own fascinating history of projection and self-deception.

Albert Schweitzer famously diagnosed this syndrome in The Quest of the Historical Jesus: each era’s scholars gaze into the well of history and see their own reflection staring back. It was a devastating critique – and Schweitzer immediately proved its accuracy by succumbing to the very disease he had identified. Having demolished the romanticized Liberal Jesus of the nineteenth century, he replaced it with his own construction: Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, consumed by eschatological urgency – a Jesus who embodied precisely the existential seriousness that Schweitzer himself prized above all. As John Dominic Crossan later observed, Jesus scholars tend to “do autobiography and call it biography.” That even the diagnostician could not escape the condition is perhaps the strongest evidence of its virulence.

The infamous Jesus Seminar (founded in 1985 by Robert Funk and Crossan) took this logic to its extreme: colored beads, theatrical balloting, truth determined by majority vote. Methodological naturalism – ruling out supernatural claims a priori – was presented as scholarly rigor when it was, in fact, a philosophical presupposition wearing a lab coat. The criterion of dissimilarity produced a Jesus with no Jewish roots and no influence on his own followers. As N. T. Wright argued, the resulting “Cynic sage” was an anachronistic projection of the late-twentieth-century academy.

Walsh and Gopnik represent the latest iteration of this same pattern – with the difference that they do not reduce Jesus to a sage but dissolve him into literature. The postmodern assumption that there is no layer of fact beneath the layer of text – that beneath the literary veils there is only more dancing – is intellectually elegant. The trouble is that it loses the evidence along the way: the Aramaic substrate, the chronology of the pre-Pauline creed, the archaeology that continues to confirm the Gospels’ local details.

 

The stubborn materiality of the evidence

Conspicuously absent from Gopnik’s literary tour is archaeology. The Pilate inscription at Caesarea Maritima (discovered 1961), the Caiaphas ossuary (1990), the topography of the Gospels confirmed by excavation – these stubborn material facts remind us that we are dealing with history set in a specific place and time, not with a Hellenistic novella. As Colin Hemer demonstrated in his painstaking analysis of Acts, the text exhibits detailed familiarity with local geography and officialdom that could not have been reconstructed in an age before Google Maps.

Gopnik attributes Christianity’s spread to “a lucky break” with Constantine. This would be more persuasive if Christianity hadn’t already permeated the Empire before Constantine’s conversion, surviving three centuries of intermittent persecution. Rodney Stark estimated in The Rise of Christianity that the Christian population grew from roughly a thousand in 40 C.E. to approximately six million by 300 – entirely without imperial patronage. Constantine’s conversion was a consequence of Christianity’s social penetration, not its cause.

As for Nixey’s claim that Christianity invented religious intolerance – Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who desecrated the Temple and outlawed Jewish practice on pain of death two centuries before Christ, might have objections.

 

What these arguments establish – and what they do not

Let us be precise. The historical arguments assembled here establish something important but limited: that the Gospel narratives are early, rooted in eyewitness testimony, and not derived from pagan mythology. They establish the historicity of the traditions. They do not, by themselves, establish the truth of the resurrection as a metaphysical event. That final step requires a judgment that transcends historical methodology – just as the a priori exclusion of the miraculous involves a metaphysical judgment that many scholars mistake for neutral method.

The honest position is this: the evidence is compatible with the resurrection. It does not compel belief – no historical evidence compels metaphysical conclusions – but it removes the lazy objection that the resurrection narratives are late, legendary, or borrowed. They are none of these things. What one does with early, independent, eyewitness-based testimony to an extraordinary event is, in the final analysis, a question each person must answer alone.

 

On the third day

As G. K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man, “The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.”

By trying so desperately to make Jesus more explicable, these scholars only make him more extraordinary. A Galilean peasant who inspired literary creations sophisticated enough to transform Western civilization is, if anything, an even greater miracle than the one described in the Gospels themselves.

In the end, the most compelling evidence for the Gospels’ reliability may be the simplest: no one would have invented a Messiah who dies on a Roman cross, or apostles who flee in terror, or women as the first witnesses in a patriarchal society, or a message so offensive to both Jewish and Greco-Roman sensibilities that it could spread only through the scandalous conviction that it was true.

The most rigorous historical analysis need not exclude the possibility of the transcendent. It need only follow the evidence wherever it leads – even if it leads, as it did for the first disciples, to an empty tomb and the unsettling conclusion that death itself has been overruled.