The Resurrection: Why It Matters to All of Us

Death, Fear, and the Question We All Carry

Almost everyone I know is afraid of death, or at least unsettled by it. Not in a morbid way, just in the quiet, nagging sense that if this life is all there is, then something feels terribly incomplete.

My grandmother turned eighty a few years ago, and on that birthday, she told my brothers and me something I’ve never forgotten. Before she became a Christian, she said, the fear of death haunted her every single day. Not occasionally: daily. She described life as a kind of prison sentence with no appeal: you live, you love people, you lose them, and eventually you’re lost too. The fear didn’t just frighten her about the end; it hollowed out the middle. It made the whole thing feel, in her words, meaningless.

That’s a feeling I think a lot of us recognise, even if we’d phrase it differently.

The Christian claim about the resurrection is, at its core, a direct answer to that feeling. It’s the claim that death is not the final word; that a man who genuinely died, in one of the most brutal and well-documented manners in ancient history, walked out of a sealed tomb three days later. And that if that is true, it changes everything.

Paul puts it bluntly in 1 Thessalonians 5:9–10: we are saved through Christ, through his death and resurrection. Without the resurrection, as Paul says elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 15, our faith is worthless, and death wins. With it, the most terrifying thing in human experience loses its power.

A friend of mine raised a different version of this question recently. We were talking about events in the news, the kind that make you clench your jaw, and he said, “How can God let people who do terrible things simply die and escape? They live well, they suffer nothing, and then it’s over. I can’t believe in a God who lets that stand.”

I found myself saying: Death is only an escape from justice if there is no God. If there is a God, a good, loving, and just one, then death is not an exit. Christianity offers justice that extends beyond the visible. One day, the Scriptures say, Christ will return to judge the living and the dead. That is not a threat; it is, if anything, a promise to everyone who has ever watched evil go unanswered.

History and the Human Need for Truth

This summer, I worked for a congressman in Washington DC while taking part in a programme focused on Jesus as a teacher and historical figure. It was thoughtful and stimulating, but it kept sidelining the resurrection, treating Jesus’s ethics as the real point and his death as an unfortunate ending. This kind of theology misses the point - it undermines the resurrection as a whole and conveys Jesus as an incredible teacher and an overall great bloke, but not the son of God who forgives us of all of our sins. Without the resurrection of Jesus, we miss the offer of a relationship with him that no other religion or God can provide. 

My family would tell you that as a child (and arguably still), I always had to be right. I think what was underneath that, and what I still feel, is something the Psalms name with precision: “Surely you desire truth in the inmost being” (Psalm 51:6). The desire for truth isn’t uniquely religious. It’s human. We’re built for it. Perhaps this is why so many people my age in Gen Z are exploring faith.

So when we look at the resurrection, one of the most extraordinary, disorienting, and consequential claims ever made in human history, the right response isn’t to wave it away. The right response is to look at the evidence.

And there is evidence.

The historical existence of Jesus is not a matter of serious academic debate. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic and critical historian with no interest in defending Christianity, has said plainly: “I don’t think there’s any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus. We have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period.”

His crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is equally well-attested by Roman and Jewish sources alike. That much is settled.

The next question, whether he actually died, is, I’ll be honest, one I find hard to take seriously. The Romans were extraordinarily efficient at killing people, and crucifixion was specifically designed to be slow, agonising, and certain. Before reaching the cross, Jesus had been flogged with a lead-tipped whip, a punishment that alone could kill a man, lacerating the back to the bone. He had been imprisoned in conditions that involved darkness, chains, and deliberate degradation. He wore a crown of thorns roughly two inches long. He carried a cross weighing over 130 kg. On the cross itself, nails through hands and feet meant that every breath required pushing up on those wounds to expand the lungs, until you could no longer do it, and you drowned in your own blood. The Romans broke the legs of those crucified alongside him to hasten death. Jesus was already dead. They confirmed it with a spear through his side. No one survives this.

One thing I find profound about this is what it means for who Jesus is. Every other major religion in the world has a god who remains remote from suffering, who watches from above. The Christian God entered it. He was beaten, humiliated, and killed. If you have ever suffered or felt that no one truly understands what you’ve been through, the Christian claim is that God does, not theoretically, but from the inside.

So did he rise?

C.S. Lewis wrote that “the gospel is incomplete without the witness of Christ having risen from the dead.” Here are three reasons I find the resurrection historically credible.

First: the disciples didn’t want to believe it.

The Gospels are remarkably candid about this. When the women returned from the tomb with news that Jesus was alive, the disciples dismissed it as “nonsense” (Luke 24:11). When others reported seeing him, “they did not believe them” (Mark 16:13). Thomas, probably the most famous doubter in history, said flatly: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, I will never believe” (John 20:25). Even Matthew’s account of the final resurrection appearance adds the remarkable detail that “some doubted” (Matthew 28:17), written during the very scene that precedes the Great Commission itself.

This matters. If someone were inventing a story, they wouldn’t write the primary witnesses as disbelieving, confused, and frightened. The very fact that all four Gospels record the disciples’ doubt is a mark of honesty, not invention. And these were people who knew Jesus, not strangers who might misidentify someone, but close friends who had spent years with him.

Second: the empty tomb has never been explained away.

The historian N.T. Wright, one of the foremost New Testament scholars in the world, has noted that after two thousand years of attempts, no one has successfully disproved the empty tomb. What is particularly telling is that even Jesus’ opponents didn’t try to deny it. Matthew records that the chief priests and elders held an emergency council after the tomb was found empty and paid the guards a large sum of money, a bribe, to spread the story that the disciples had stolen the body while they slept (Matthew 28:12–15). Matthew notes this story was still circulating in his day.

Think about what that concedes. They didn’t say the tomb wasn’t empty. They fabricated an explanation for why it was. The only debate was over the explanation, not the fact. 

And for those who like practical details: the stone sealing the tomb is estimated to have weighed between one and two tonnes. The women approaching the tomb that morning asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away for us?” (Mark 16:3), because they knew they couldn’t. The idea that a group of frightened, grieving disciples silently moved a two-tonne stone past a Roman guard in the dead of night is, to put it gently, not a compelling theory.

Third: the witnesses are too diverse and too unlikely to be a conspiracy.

The first people to see the risen Jesus were women, which in the first-century world was a significant problem for credibility. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote that women’s testimony should be rejected due to, in his words, the “boldness of their sex.” Roman legal culture agreed. If you were fabricating a resurrection story in AD 30 and wanted people to believe it, you would not have women as your lead witnesses. You would have chosen respected men. The fact that all four Gospels independently agree on the women being first is one of the strongest indicators that the tradition is rooted in memory rather than invention.

Then there is Paul. He was not a follower of Jesus; he was actively hunting down and imprisoning Christians. Then, on the road to Damascus, he encountered the risen Christ and was temporarily blinded by the encounter (Acts 9). He dedicated the rest of his life to spreading the resurrection message and was eventually executed for it. His transformation is one of the most historically puzzling in the ancient world.

Finally, consider what the disciples were willing to endure. These were men who were stoned, executed by sword, and crucified upside down. That in itself is not unusual; people have died for false beliefs throughout history. What distinguishes the disciples is what they were dying for: not a secondhand belief, not a tradition they had inherited, but a specific claim that they had personally, with their own eyes, seen Jesus alive after his death. People die for things they believe. Very few people die for things they know to be a lie they fabricated themselves.

The Fulfilment of Something Ancient

The Jewish world into which Jesus was born had, for over a thousand years, built its worship around sacrifice: daily offerings, the annual Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), and the Passover lamb. These weren’t arbitrary rituals. They were a system built on a serious idea: that sin has weight, and weight requires payment. Leviticus 17:11 puts it directly: “the life of a creature is in its blood, which God designated for atonement… blood represents life and acts as a payment for sin.”

Animal sacrifice was always understood as temporary, a holding pattern, repeated year after year. The Christian reading of the Old Testament is that all of it was pointing forward, like a shadow anticipating a substance. Jesus, as both high priest and sacrifice, offers what the system always implied but could never achieve: a once-and-for-all resolution.

Paul in Galatians 3:10 notes that the law placed everyone under a curse, because none of us can keep it perfectly. Jesus takes that curse on himself at the crucifixion. Deuteronomy 21:23 states: “cursed is anyone hung on a tree.” The cross, in other words, was not incidental. It was the point.

Those books of the law, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, catch a lot of strays and are often deemed as obscure and irrelevant. But read in this light, they look like a long and careful preparation for a single event, and convey the love of God for us in a completely different manner. 

Jesus’s last words on the cross were “It is finished.” Not “I am finished”, but it is finished. The work is done. The choice now is ours.

Whatever you believe about any of this, I hope you’ll keep asking the questions. The resurrection is, by any measure, an extraordinary claim. But extraordinary claims deserve a serious look, and this one, I think, holds up.

If you got this far, Happy Easter, and drop into a local church to sing ‘Thine Be the Glory’ on Sunday if any of this remotely resonated with you. 

Elijah Orr-Ewing is a second-year undergraduate student at St Andrews studying New Testament and Modern History. He researches Koine Greek and the post-Reformation reception of the New Testament.