First, confusion

Nobody witnessed the resurrection. According to Mark 16:4-8, the women who went to the grave saw very little:

But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”
Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

This is where the oldest manuscripts of Mark end: with women who kept silent. There is not a single miracle to be seen, and even the angelos of God is not an angel with wings, but simply a young man with a message: “Follow him home into the Galilee and you will see him.” It is almost as if Mark invites his readers to return to his opening chapter, where Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God and asked his friends to become ‘fishers of men.’

Then stories

The other – later - gospels are very, very different. In Luke, we hear about proper angels with shining clothes. In Matthew, an angel descends from heaven to open the grave and Jesus himself appears to the women. In John it is Mary Magdalene who becomes the ‘apostle to the apostles.’ And then Jesus himself appears to his disciples. It seems only logical, therefore, that later manuscripts of Mark have a summary of what happened afterwards.
It is also understandable that some people today believe that the later Gospel authors expanded Mark’s story with their own understanding and artistic license, some forty or fifty years after the fact. Think about that: if these Gospels can be approached as works of literature and metaphor, why then should we believe Mark in a literal way? Was his young man in white not simply a metaphor for the process of interpretation of Jesus’s earliest followers?

The point is of course that all four Gospels are literature, ancient historical biographical narratives, and you really have to get to know each of them quite intimately to see how they employ the ‘traditional’ story of Jesus to create their own rendering and message. Mark, for example, is a fast paced narrative with abrupt transitions. The focus of this rather short Gospel is on Jesus’s death on the cross, where the Roman centurion concludes: “Surely this man was the Son of God!” The author often plays with the lack of understanding among Jesus’s followers, as if to invite people to reinterpret Jesus’s ministry and message from the perspective of the crucifixion. The readers of Mark have to return to Galilee and reread the Gospel of Mark with a different lens in order to meet the living Jesus. That at least is how we could understand this abrupt ending today. Readers today can no longer verify what historical reality lies beneath the gospel narratives: how much is history, how much is imagination and how much is symbolism? How can we know what the apostles truly believed if all we have is story?

Paul's opponents doubted the resurrection of their own flesh, but not the living Jesus

We get a glimpse of what all apostles believed from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, written two decades after Jesus’s death. Often, when you read a letter by Paul, you have to be aware that other apostles may have had very different opinions. In fact, if you read this particular letter, you should be aware that Paul was at a low point in his ministry. In chapters 1 and 9 you can read that only part of the community in Corinth accepted him as a true apostles. Many preferred the sophisticated Apollos or the sturdy Peter (still known under his Aramaic nickname Cephas, which also means ‘the Rock’) over Paul. From Paul’s letter to the Galatians, we know that Paul had had a public disagreement with envoys from Jerusalem, sent by Jesus’s brother James. They argued that Jews needed to follow the law of Moses and could not eat with followers other nations unless these too would convert to Judaism. Paul resisted, but Peter and Barnabas sided with the men of James and split the tables in Antioch between Jews and Gentiles. These envoys then continued to visit the communities in Galatia and it seems that Paul had lost a lot of his authority in many communities, including the one in Corinth.

If you read Paul’s letter, you can see how he reacts to specific events and questions that were related to him by visitors from Corinth. One of these questions concerned the resurrection of the dead in the future. Some people had a problem with the idea that body would be resurrected in some future event. It never happens: bodies rot away and cannot be put together again. Perhaps they preferred the idea of souls living within us and living on with God. Some of them said the resurrection had already taken place. Perhaps they understood it symbolically, describing the moment that the soul was ‘illuminated’ or ‘came to life’ through the love of Jesus and the love for God.

Paul disagrees. He and many other followers of Jesus sided with the Pharisees who taught a literal ‘resurrection of the flesh,’ something that we will think about more when we get to that phrase in the Apostles’ Creed. For now, however, the focus is on the argument that Paul uses to convince the community in Corinth: ‘How can you say a physical resurrection is impossible, when we all know that Jesus rose from the dead?’ You can see how the empty grave in Mark, the one thing that he describes, is written to support the idea of a bodily resurrection.

And then Paul recites a fascinating ‘traditional’ list of witness, most of whom are still alive then, giving us a glimpse into the time that oral transmission of the story and teachings of Jesus was still dominant. Paul claims them all as witnesses of the living Lord on numerous occasions. Given his own disputed position, and the fact that friends of Peter and envoys of James travelled around, he could not invent this claim without serious blowback. In other words, the apostles literally believed they had met the living Lord after his death and burial. From subsequent sources we learn that men like Peter, Paul and James all continued in this faith in the face of persecution and, ultimately, a violent death for each of them in the 60s CE. It is this firm belief in the resurrection of Jesus that drove the religious innovation that we witness in the New Testament. For them, the resurrection changed everything. It was a move from a human Messiah and a literal kingdom of Israel to a spiritual kingdom, and a move from a metaphorical son of God to his true Son. As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans (1:1-4):

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.

How can you not doubt?

Most New Testament scholars take it as a well attested historical fact that the early followers of Jesus truly believed that he had been seen alive after his death. That does not mean that all these scholars believe that Jesus had risen from the grave, for nobody can testify to that. All we can be reasonably sure of is that his followers believed that they had seen him. Some scholars would venture a psychological explanation, but that is not as easy as it may seem to some. You would need to explain both individual and group experiences, both by followers, by sceptics like Jesus’s brother James, and by an opponent like Paul.

Decades later, the later Gospel authors had to deal with doubt in the community. Luke describes the appearance of Jesus to the travellers on the road to Emmaus as a gradual process of increasing understanding. John presents the doubting Thomas as person to identify with: Jesus invites him to touch the holes in his hands and his side to make certain that he is not a ghost or a mental projection. Matthew (28:16-20) invites the doubting followers of Jesus to go out with the apostles and experience him in their daily lives: 

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, as you go forth, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

To date, I have not seen an explanation that adequately explains the acts and words of these people, other than what they claimed themselves: that Jesus rose from the dead. Unfortunately, that is also the one explanation that is biologically impossible and you may denounce me as a fool for taking it seriously. But that’s alright. I may never be certain about the fate of Jesus’ flesh and bones, but I have grown quite fond of the loving women at the grave, of passionate pioneers like Peter, Paul and James, and gifted storytellers like Mark and Matthew. I am happy to be a fool in their company. And even if some of us disciples have doubts, we can go with them on a road into the world, where together we can somehow experience the presence of Jesus every day.

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Rembrandt van Rijn, The Resurrection of Christ, ca. 1635-39. Note how all the action is centered on the angel, as in the Gospel of Matthew. Christ lies ‘asleep’ in the grave.