'Compelling evidence' shows testimony of Jesus rising from the dead is 'true', study finds

Jesus' resurrection remains fiercely debated, but a new study has used mathematics to reach a striking conclusion.Nathan Rockwood, a philosopher at Brigham Young University in Utah, focused on a crucial detail in early Christian accounts: Jesus’ followers maintained their claims of seeing him alive for years after his crucifixion.He reasoned that, if several people had invented those encounters, years of publicly repeating their story would create opportunities for someone to admit the deception or accidentally expose it.To examine that possibility, he developed a model assuming each person had a one percent annual chance of revealing a fabrication, while accounting for witnesses dying over time.For a group starting with 16 witnesses, his model predicted a 95 percent chance of someone exposing a fabrication within 28 years. With 23 witnesses, that point would be reached within 17 years.Finding no reliable surviving record of such a confession, Rockwood argues that the witnesses’ sincerity, combined with biblical accounts of repeated conversations and physical contact with Jesus, strengthens the case that he rose from the dead.‘Given the abundance of empirical evidence of the resurrected Jesus provided to the witnesses, their testimony would not be the result of perceptual error,' he wrote in the study. 'This is an important step, though not the only step, in showing that the testimony of the disciples is true.' Nathan Rockwood, a philosopher at Brigham Young University in Utah, focused on a crucial detail in early Christian accounts: Jesus’ followers maintained their claims of seeing him alive for years after his crucifixion Christians believe Jesus returned bodily to life after being executed on a Roman cross.In the study, Rockwood starts from a point accepted even by many skeptical scholars: some followers claimed to have seen Jesus alive after his death, although scholars disagree about what explains those claims.Paul’s testimony matters because he knew other leading figures in the early Christian movement.In First Corinthians, a letter to an early Christian community, Paul lists people said to have seen Jesus after his death.Scholars widely understand this passage to preserve an account that circulated before Paul wrote it.In another letter, Galatians, Paul describes meeting Peter and James three years after his conversion, and later meeting John.Rockwood’s lower estimate of 16 includes the 11 remaining apostles; Paul; James, Jesus’ brother; and three women associated with discovering the empty tomb, including Mary Magdalene.He argues that inventors seeking credibility would have been more likely to choose male witnesses, whose testimony generally carried greater authority in that setting.For the larger estimate, he counts five women rather than three, adds the two disciples who encountered Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and includes Matthias and Joseph, the candidates to replace Judas as an apostle. The model looked at probability of a fabricated account of Jesus rising from the dead after the crucifixion being exposed Stephen, who reported seeing a vision of Jesus before being stoned to death, completes the group of 23.These totals are reconstructed from Christian texts, rather than a register of independently verified eyewitnesses.Rockwood separately considers Paul’s report of more than 500 witnesses, acknowledging that accepting this episode as historical is disputed.Having identified his groups, he asks whether a fabricated account could have survived without someone exposing it.He builds on David Robert Grimes’ research into whether large conspiracies, including claims that the Moon landings were faked, could remain secret.Grimes examined how the risk of disclosure increases with the number of people involved and the time a deception continues.Rockwood adapted that reasoning to smaller groups claiming to have witnessed miracles.He illustrated it using philosopher David Hume’s fictional scenario of Queen Elizabeth I dying and returning to life a month later.Hume argued that deception remained more believable than a miracle, even if many people supported the account.'This analysis demonstrates that, contrary to Hume’s assertion, many witnesses who maintained their testimony for many years provide compelling evidence of the sincerity of their testimony,' the study reads. Rockwood examined whether an invented account could realistically remain secret: with 100 participants, each having a one percent annual chance of disclosure, his model predicted a 95 percent chance of exposure within three years.At an individual risk of 0.1 percent annually, that threshold would be reached in 15 years for 200 participants, compared with 30 years for 100.For Jesus’ followers, he chose one percent because they repeatedly discussed their experiences publicly; it is an assumption, rather than a measured confession rate.He used Robert McIver’s book Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels to estimate declining witness numbers from ancient Roman population and lifespan data.Those projections left roughly three-quarters alive after 10 years and one-third after 30.Rockwood argues that Christianity’s opponents would have publicized a prominent witness’s admission of deception, although the incomplete historical record cannot establish that every damaging statement would have survived.The 95 percent figure predicts disclosure under specified assumptions; it does not give the probability that Jesus rose from the dead.However, the model does not independently establish that those biblical encounters occurred, and its results depend on assumptions about witness numbers, disclosure and independence.Rockwood’s broader conclusion combines two arguments: sustained testimony makes deliberate invention unlikely, while reported conversations, meals and physical contact make an honest mistake unlikely.‘So, their testimony is either deception or they were telling the truth,’ he wrote. ‘And it wasn’t deception.’