“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:17-19).

For many, Easter is a myth. Jesus rising from the dead is a metaphor for the value of self sacrifice. An allegory which teaches us to persevere even in the most hopeless of circumstances. A nice story we tell ourselves as a reminder of renewal and rebirth. Many smart and thoughtful people seem to think that this is what religion is actually all about. If you’re fixated on whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead, you’re missing the point. To such people I say, that’s a nice story, and it might feel enlightened, but it’s not the Gospel. And I think there are two good reasons to think it’s not true.

The first reason is the evidence.  If you’re not familiar with the arguments supporting the historical truth of the resurrection, you may be surprised at just how strong the case is. The account of Jesus’ resurrection defies any attempt to explain away the story through natural causes. For example, if you want to say that the resurrection was a hoax, you have to weave a conspiracy theory every bit as bizarre and  improbable (not to mention unsupported by evidence) as the best of them. If you want to say that the resurrection story came from a mass hallucination, good luck finding any evidence for a psychological phenomenon that can adequately explain so many people having so many different hallucinations at so many different times and places. 

Others, perhaps sensing the dead end casual attempts to explain away the resurrection come to, claim that the Gospel accounts are dishonest, unreliable, or legendary. On the contrary, the Gospels are not only just as trustworthy as other comparable secular records—they surpass them in several ways. For example, others have pointed out that the earliest biography of Alexander the Great was written four hundred years after his death. By contrast the Gospels were written within the lifetime of the eye witnesses they draw from. Additionally, the Gospels report events that would have been embarrassing and inconvenient for the Christian community. If you were a Christian trying to concoct a legendary origin story, why would you depict the chief apostle as a cowardly buffoon who denied Christ in his greatest hour of need? What propaganda purpose would that serve? Perhaps most resoundingly, the Gospels have an absolutely unrivaled manuscript tradition. This tradition explodes the assumption that the Gospels were passed on and corrupted in a manner similar to the child’s game Telephone.

The second is that Christianity quite simply doesn’t work if you don’t think Jesus rose from the dead. If Christianity is merely an inspirational story, there’s nothing unique or special about it, certainly nothing worth dying for. Christianity draws its power from the fact that it shifts what you believe happens to us after death. It is not poetic, it’s practical. It’s not allegorical, it’s empirical. It’s not a nice story, it’s the most important story. If you think life ends at the grave, you are going to live your life one way. If you think you will live forever, either with God or separated eternally from him, you will live your life in another way.

There’s a saying: If you want to know what people believe, look at what they do, not what they say. This Easter, take some time to reflect on the way you live your life. What do your actions say about what you believe happens after you die? How might your priorities change if you came to a greater faith in the resurrection?

John Brundage is a seminarian with the Companions of the Cross. He also writes a Substack Newsletter called Integrated Prayer.