ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the significance of investigating the resurrection of Jesus, provides a brief overview of various theories concerning how belief in Jesus’ resurrection arose, introduces the relevant historical sources and issues concerning their interpretation and the assessment of their historicity, and defends a transdisciplinary approach involving historical-critical studies, psychology, comparative religion, analytic philosophy, and theology. I demonstrate that all the possible naturalistic alternatives to Jesus’ resurrection can be reduced to a few known ones. Historians do regularly assess whether people made certain claims in history, whether people witnessed someone, had a hallucination, or mistook another person, and whether people died. A historian can therefore in principle argue that (I) there were people who claimed to have seen Jesus shortly after his crucifixion, (II) they had some kind of experiences, (III) what they experienced was not caused intramentally but extramentally, (IV) the extramental entity was not another person but the same Jesus who died on the cross. What follows logically from (I) to (IV) is (V) ‘Therefore, Jesus resurrected.’ It is only then that we need to consider whether ‘Jesus resurrected’ has a natural or supernatural cause, at which point the philosopher and theologian may take over the task from the historian.
