What Did the Earliest Christians Actually Claim About the Resurrection?

Apologetics · Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? · Part 1

Key passages: 1 Corinthians 15:3–8; Galatians 1:18–19

One common explanation for the resurrection of Jesus is that it began as a simpler story and grew into something miraculous over time. Perhaps Jesus was an influential Jewish teacher who was executed, His followers continued His movement, and decades or generations later stories developed that He had risen physically from the dead.

Before asking whether the resurrection actually happened, we should ask whether history allows that explanation.

How early can we trace the claim that Jesus died, was buried, rose from the dead, and appeared to His followers?

The answer takes us remarkably close to the beginning of Christianity.

Related reading: Can We Trust the Text of the Bible? examines the manuscript and textual evidence behind the New Testament we have today. Here, we move to the next question: What were the earliest Christians actually claiming?

The Resurrection Claim Predates the Gospels

Our earliest surviving Christian writings are the letters of Paul.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul reminds Christians in Corinth of the message he had already taught them:

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day.”
1 Corinthians 15:3–4 NIV

Paul then names people and groups who were believed to have encountered the risen Jesus, including Peter, the Twelve, more than five hundred people, James, the apostles, and finally Paul himself.

What makes this especially important historically is Paul’s introduction:

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance.”
1 Corinthians 15:3 NIV

Paul is not presenting the resurrection message as something he recently developed. He is passing along a tradition that he says he had previously received.

New Testament scholars have long recognized that at least part of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 reflects an earlier Christian formulation that predates the letter itself. New Testament scholar James Ware, writing in the academic journal New Testament Studies, argues that the formula is pre-Pauline and belongs to the earliest period of the Christian movement.

Paul’s own chronology adds another important detail. In Galatians 1, he says that three years after his conversion he traveled to Jerusalem and spent time with Peter, also called Cephas, and met James, the brother of Jesus. These are two of the same people specifically named in the resurrection tradition of 1 Corinthians 15.

That does not prove the resurrection happened.

It does, however, create a serious problem for the idea that resurrection developed slowly as a legend generations after Jesus. The claim was already present near the beginning.

Related reading: The Messiah According to Jesus: How Does the Old Testament Point to Jesus as the Messiah? examines how Jesus’ suffering and resurrection fit within the scriptural identity and mission Christians were proclaiming about Him.

The Claim Continues Outside the New Testament

The evidence does not stop when we leave the biblical canon.

Late in the first century, the church in Rome sent a letter to Christians in Corinth. Today we call it 1 Clement. It was not included in the New Testament, but it is one of the earliest surviving Christian writings outside it.

The writer speaks directly of Jesus’ resurrection and, even more significantly for our question, connects the beginning of apostolic preaching to the apostles’ conviction that Jesus had risen. In 1 Clement 42, the apostles are described as going out to preach after becoming convinced through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This matters because we have moved outside the New Testament itself. By the late first century, a Christian document from Rome still presents the resurrection not as a later theological development, but as something connected with the original apostolic proclamation.

A short time later, Ignatius of Antioch, an early Christian bishop writing while being transported toward Rome, repeatedly insisted that Jesus had truly suffered, died, and risen.

In his letter to the Christians in Smyrna, Ignatius goes beyond a vague claim that Jesus somehow lived spiritually after death. He explicitly argues that Jesus remained bodily real after the resurrection and refers to the tradition that He ate and drank with His followers afterward.

Ignatius was writing from the eastern part of the Roman world. Clement wrote from Rome. Paul had written decades earlier to communities across the Mediterranean.

This was not a belief confined to one local church or one later generation. Resurrection belief was already established across widely separated Christian communities.

What Roman Writers Tell Us

Christian writers obviously believed Christianity. It is therefore useful to ask what people outside the movement tell us.

Around AD 116, the Roman senator and historian Tacitus described Emperor Nero’s persecution of Christians following the great fire of Rome in AD 64.

Tacitus was not sympathetic to Christianity. While explaining where the movement came from, however, he reports that Christus, from whom Christians took their name, had suffered the death penalty during the reign of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate. He then says the movement, temporarily suppressed, appeared again in Judea and reached Rome.

Tacitus does not tell us that Jesus rose from the dead.

That distinction matters.

What his account independently establishes is still significant. By the reign of Nero, roughly three decades after Jesus’ death, Christians were already a recognizable group in Rome centered on a man Tacitus identifies as having been executed under Pontius Pilate.

Christianity had traveled from Judea to the capital of the Roman Empire remarkably early.

Another Roman official gives us an unusually revealing picture several decades later.

Around AD 111–113, Pliny the Younger, serving as governor of Bithynia-Pontus in what is now Turkey, wrote to Emperor Trajan because he was uncertain how Christians should be prosecuted.

Pliny had interrogated people accused of Christianity. He reports that Christians gathered regularly before dawn and sang hymns to Christ in a manner of worship. He also notes that some people claimed to have abandoned Christianity many years earlier, showing that the movement had already been established in the region before Pliny encountered it.

He describes the movement as spreading through cities, villages, and the countryside.

Again, Pliny does not confirm the resurrection.

He gives us something different: hostile, non-Christian evidence that devotion to Christ had spread deeply into another Roman province by the early second century, and that Christians were treating the crucified Jesus with extraordinary religious devotion.

Related reading: Jesus the Messiah: The Unexpected Shape of Israel’s Hope provides the first-century biblical and Jewish framework for why a crucified and risen Messiah was such a surprising claim and why Jesus did not fit ordinary expectations of messianic victory.

What About Josephus?

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing near the end of the first century, also mentions Jesus.

One passage in Antiquities 18, often called the Testimonium Flavianum, contains statements about Jesus whose exact original wording remains debated because the surviving text appears to have passed through Christian transmission.

There is no reason to build our argument on disputed wording when stronger material is available.

In Antiquities 20, Josephus describes the execution of James and identifies him as “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” The authenticity of this reference has been widely accepted in scholarship, although questions surrounding Josephus’ references to Jesus continue to be studied.

Josephus does not tell us that Jesus rose.

But his testimony independently places Jesus and His brother James within identifiable first-century Jewish history. This becomes particularly interesting because James is one of the individuals Paul specifically names among those who were believed to have encountered the risen Jesus.

We will return to James later in this series.

What These Sources Can and Cannot Tell Us

It is important not to ask historical sources to prove more than they actually establish.

Tacitus does not prove the resurrection.

Pliny does not prove the resurrection.

Josephus does not prove the resurrection.

Clement and Ignatius were Christians and therefore cannot simply be treated as neutral confirmation that a miracle occurred.

But together these sources help answer a different historical question.

Was the resurrection a late legend added to Christianity long after Jesus?

The surviving evidence makes that explanation difficult.

Paul is transmitting an already established resurrection tradition within the first Christian generation. He personally knew Peter and James. Clement connects the apostles’ original preaching with their conviction concerning Jesus’ resurrection. Ignatius treats Jesus’ physical death and resurrection as established Christian belief. Tacitus confirms that the movement centered on the executed Christ had reached Rome by Nero’s reign. Pliny finds Christian communities spread through another Roman province and worshiping Christ by the early second century. Josephus independently identifies Jesus and James within first-century Judean history.

None of those facts requires us to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead.

But they do establish something important.

The resurrection was not an ornament added to Christianity after the movement became established. It was part of the message around which the movement formed.

That leaves the harder question.

Jesus was executed by Rome. His followers soon began proclaiming that God had raised Him from the dead.

So what actually happened?

That is where the historical investigation goes next.

Sources & Further Study

Primary ancient sources

• Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 and Galatians 1:18–19. The earliest surviving Christian testimony considered in this article.
• 1 Clement 24 and 42. A late first-century Christian document from the church at Rome that explicitly discusses Jesus’ resurrection and connects it with apostolic proclamation.
• Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 1–3. An early second-century Christian text strongly affirming Jesus’ physical death and bodily resurrection.
• Tacitus, Annals 15.44. Roman testimony concerning Christus, His execution under Pontius Pilate, the origins of Christianity in Judea, and Christians in Rome under Nero.
• Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96–97. Correspondence between the Roman governor Pliny and Emperor Trajan concerning established Christian communities in Bithynia-Pontus.
• Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200. Josephus’ reference to James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.

Modern scholarship

• James P. Ware, “The Resurrection of Jesus in the Pre-Pauline Formula of 1 Cor 15.3–5,” New Testament Studies 60 (2014): 475–498. A technical examination of the early tradition preserved in 1 Corinthians 15.
• Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History. A detailed historical treatment that takes both Christian arguments and skeptical alternatives seriously.
• N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God. A major historical study of Jewish and Greco-Roman resurrection beliefs and the emergence of the early Christian resurrection claim.
• T. C. Schmidt, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford University Press, 2025. A recent scholarly study of Josephus’ references to Jesus and their textual history.

The ancient sources above are included because they are historically relevant, not because each author supports the Christian claim. Several are explicitly non-Christian or hostile witnesses.