It’s easy to doubt the resurrection of Jesus because it seems like a strange claim (a man rising from the dead?! Come on!). But what if I told you that in a certain sense, we should have been expecting something like this all along. The universe has many markings of intention and care. Everything around us is perfectly set up for human life to be possible (i.e., the fine tuning)—whoever or whatever is behind all of this, appears to have a plan. If true, there must be a plan for all the brokenness and evil in the world as well. Can we expect some sort of remedy?

This is where Jesus comes in. He claimed to be the long-awaited remedy to the human condition—God’s rescue plan revealed. But how can we know if he was right? After Jesus’ death, his tomb was mysteriously found empty, and hundreds of people began reporting witnessing him alive.

Lest you think that this is mere Christian fiction, the empty tomb and resurrection appearances are so well attested that even the vast majority of non-Christian scholars (atheists even!) accept these events as historical fact.

The problem is that there is no naturalistic way to account for these things. Was it all a big conspiracy? Was everyone going to the wrong tomb? Were people hallucinating having seen Jesus? All these ideas have fatal flaws. The best explanation of the facts is the one that the eyewitnesses themselves came to: Jesus rose bodily from the dead. We can know from the historical evidence alone that Jesus is alive! What does this mean? Christianity is in fact true!