Eric Chabot of Ratio Christi Ohio State University has a great post up about the post-mortem appearances of Jesus.
The post contains:
- a list of the post-mortem resurrection appearances
- quotations by skeptical historians about those appearances
- alternative naturalistic explanations of the appearances
- responses to those naturalistic explanations
Although there is a lot of research that went into the post, it’s not very long to read. The majority of scholars accept the appearances, because they appear in so many different sources and because some of those sources are very early, especially Paul’s statement of the early Christian creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, which is from about 1-3 years after Jesus was executed by the Romans. Eric’s post lists out some of the skeptical scholars who the appearances, and you can see how they allude to the historical criteria that they are using. (If you want to sort of double-check the details, I blogged about how historians investigate…