What is the resurrection?
Short answer
Resurrection, in Christianity, is the claim that Jesus was killed, buried and came back to life on the third day — not as a spirit and not as a memory, but bodily. It is the core of the Christian announcement from the start: Paul writes that without it, preaching and faith are useless.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
The word gets used loosely in everyday speech, and the imprecision erases exactly what it means. Resurrection is not the immortality of the soul, is not reincarnation, and is not someone returning to the same life as before. In the New Testament accounts, Lazarus is given back his life and will die again; what is claimed of Jesus is different — a passage into a form of life that death no longer reaches.
The texts also insist on the body, and they insist in an almost awkward way. The appearances described are not luminous visions: Jesus shows hands and feet, invites them to touch, eats in front of the disciples. At the same time, the same accounts say he was not always recognised straight away. The authors seem to be trying to describe something for which they had no ready category, and they do not smooth over how strange that is.
The oldest written record of the resurrection is not in a Gospel. It is in a letter of Paul, earlier than the Gospels, and he says himself that he is handing on a formula he received, with a list of witnesses — including the note that most of them were still alive when he wrote. That is an implicit invitation to check, not a claim placed out of reach.
Paul then does something rare in religious writing: he puts his own faith at risk. He says in plain words that if Christ has not risen, the preaching is useless and the faith is good for nothing. There is no escape here into treating the subject as an edifying symbol. And the consequence he draws is the one both major Christian traditions confess in the same Creed — the resurrection of Jesus as the first case, not the only one.
What the passages say
3For I handed on to you, first of all, what I also received: that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures;
4and that he was buried; and that he rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures;
5and that he was seen by Cephas, and after that by the eleven.
6Next he was seen by more than five hundred brothers at one time, many of whom remain, even to the present time, although some have fallen asleep.
7Next, he was seen by James, then by all the Apostles.
8And last of all, he was seen also by me, as if I were someone born at the wrong time.
The oldest text about the resurrection that has reached us, and Paul says he received it ready-made — that is, it predates this letter. Notice the list of witnesses and the detail that most were still living: the reader is invited to check.
6And he said to them, “Do not become frightened. You are seeking Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified One. He has risen. He is not here. Behold, the place where they laid him.
The announcement at the empty tomb, dry and without an adjective. No description of what happened inside: the Gospels do not narrate the resurrection itself, only the before and the after. That restraint is one of the marks that the accounts were not embroidered.
39See my hands and feet, that it is I myself. Look and touch. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.”
The answer to the first guess made by the disciples themselves, who thought they were seeing a spirit. The argument offered is physical — flesh and bones, hands and feet — which rules out reading the resurrection as a ghostly apparition.
14And if Christ has not risen, then our preaching is useless, and your faith is also useless.
The sentence that blocks turning the resurrection into a comfortable metaphor. Paul accepts the risk of saying what follows if it is false, and what he says is that everything falls together, starting with the message he preaches himself.
20But now Christ has risen again from the dead, as the first-fruits of those who sleep.
The word first-fruits comes from the harvest: the first fruit to appear, showing the rest is on its way. It is the image that ties the resurrection of Jesus to Christian hope about the dead, rather than to an isolated episode in his biography.
4For through baptism we have been buried with him into death, so that, in the manner that Christ rose from the dead, by the glory of the Father, so may we also walk in the newness of life.
Where the doctrine touches the life of the believer. Paul reads baptism as participation in that passage, with an effect in the present — newness of life is language about now, not only about after death.