The belief that a Christian miracle—any Christian miracle—happened in the past is rooted in a particular set of theological beliefs (the same is true of Jewish miracles, Muslim miracles, Hindu miracles, and so on). Without such beliefs, miracles cannot be established as having happened. Since historians cannot assume these beliefs, they cannot demonstrate historically that such miracles happened.
At the same time, in some cases in which a past miracle is narrated, elements of the episode may be subject to historical inquiry even if the overarching claim that God has done something miraculous cannot possibly be accepted on the basis of historical evidence (since historical evidence precludes any particular set of religious beliefs).
Let me illustrate. My grandmother firmly believed that the Pentecostal evangelist Oral Roberts could heal the sick, the diseased, and the disabled by praying over them and touching them. Now, in theory it would be possible for a historian to examine a case in which a person had symptoms of a disease before having an encounter with Oral Roberts and that they disappeared after the encounter. The historian could report that yes, apparently the person was sick before and was not sick afterward. But what the historian cannot report—if she is acting as a historian—is that Oral Roberts healed the person through the power of God. Other explanations are possible that are open to examination by scholars without any theological presuppositions required for the “divine solution”—for example, that it was a kind of psychosomatic healing (that is, the person believed so thoroughly that he would be healed that the mind healed the ailment); or that the person was only apparently healed (the next day he was again sick as a dog); or that he was not really sick in the first place; or that it was a hoax, or, well, lots of other explanations. These other “explanations” can explain the same data. The supernatural explanation, on the other hand, cannot be appealed to as a historical response because (1) historians have no access to the supernatural realm, and (2) it requires a set of theological beliefs that are not generally held by all historians doing this kind of investigation.
So too with the resurrection of Jesus. Historians can, in theory, examine aspects of the tradition. In theory, for example, a historian could look into the question of whether Jesus really was buried in a known tomb and whether three days later that same tomb was found to be empty, with no body in it. What the historian cannot conclude, as a historian, is that God therefore must have raised the body and taken it up to heaven. The historian has no access to information like that, and that conclusion requires a set of theological presuppositions that not all historians share. Moreover, it is possible to come up with perfectly sensible other solutions as to why a once-occupied tomb may have become empty: someone stole the body; someone innocently decided to move the body to another tomb; the whole story was in fact a legend, that is, the burial and discovery of an empty tomb were tales that later Christians invented to persuade others that the resurrection indeed happened.
So too the historian can look into the question of whether the disciples really had visions of Jesus after his death. People have visions all the time. Sometimes they see things that are there, and sometimes they see things that are not there. (I’ll discuss this more fully in the next chapter.) What historians cannot conclude, however, as historians, is that the disciples had visions of Jesus after he was really, actually dead and that it was because Jesus really, actually appeared to them alive after God had raised him from the dead. This conclusion would be rooted in theological presuppositions not generally held by all historians.
To press the point further, it is in theory possible even to say that Jesus was crucified, and buried, and then he was seen alive, bodily, afterward. A historian could, in theory, argue this point without appealing to divine causality—that is, without saying that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is because we do have (numerous) instances within our own world of near-death experiences, when someone apparently (or really?) dies and then wakes up again to tell the tale. Recognizing that people have such experiences does not require a belief in the supernatural. Of course, it would be a different matter if a person was dead for ninety-five years and then came back. But that never happens in near-death experiences. Instead, a person is dead, or apparently dead (however we define “dead”), for a brief time and then somehow comes back to life. Did Jesus have that kind of experience? I doubt it, but it is at least a plausible historical conclusion. What is not a plausible historical conclusion is that God raised Jesus into an immortal body and took him up to heaven where he sits on a throne at his right hand. That conclusion is rooted in all sorts of theological views that are not widely shared among historians, and so is a matter of faith, not historical knowledge.
At this stage it is important to stress a fundamental point. History, for historians, is not the same as “the past.” The past is everything that has happened before; history is what we can establish as having happened before, using historical forms of evidence. Historical evidence is not and cannot be based on religious and theological assumptions that some, but not all, of us share. There are lots and lots of things from the past that we cannot establish as having happened. Sometimes, this is because our sources are so paltry. (And so, for example, it is impossible to establish what my grandfather had for lunch on May 15, 1954.) Other times, it is because history, as established by historians, is based only on shared presuppositions. And among these shared presuppositions are not the sorts of religious and theological views that make it possible to conclude that Jesus was exalted to heaven after he died and allowed to sit at God’s right hand, never to die again. This is the traditional Christian belief, but people do not hold it on the basis of historical evidence but because they accept it by faith. For the same reason, historians cannot conclude that the thief crucified with Jesus was exalted and was the first human to enter heaven upon his death, as claimed by a Gospel known as the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea; or that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to thousands of her followers, as numerous eyewitnesses attest; or that Apollonius of Tyana came to one of his followers after he ascended to heaven, as we have on the basis of eyewitness testimony reported later. All of these claims presuppose religious beliefs that cannot be part of the arsenal of historical presuppositions.
With all this in mind, what can we say—historically—about the traditions of Jesus’s resurrection? If we can’t know, historically, whether God actually raised him from the dead, what can we know? And what else can we not know? As we will see, one thing we can know with relative certainty is that the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead is the key to understanding why Christians eventually began to think of him as God. But first, what we cannot know.
The Resurrection: What We Cannot Know
IN ADDITION TO THE resurrection itself—the act of God by which he raised Jesus from the dead—a number of other traditions are subject to historical doubt. The two I mention here will come as a surprise to many readers. In my judgment, we cannot know that Jesus received a decent burial and that his tomb was later discovered to be empty.
These two traditions obviously stand hand-in-hand, in that the second makes no sense unless the first is historically true. No one could have discovered that Jesus was no longer in his tomb if he had never been buried in a tomb in the first place (although the reverse does not necessarily follow: in theory Jesus could have been decently buried, and the tomb was never discovered empty). And so in many respects the second claim depends on the first. Therefore, I devote more discussion to it, explaining why we cannot know on historical grounds whether Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, as the Gospels claim he did.