The Christian claim from the beginning was that the question of Jesus’s resurrection was a question, not of the internal mental and spiritual states of his followers a few days after his crucifixion, but about something that had happened in the real, public world.<\/p>\n
This “something” left, not just an empty tomb, but a broken loaf at Emmaus and footprints in the sand by the lake among its physical mementoes. It also left his followers with a lot of explaining to do, but with a transformed worldview which is only explicable on the assumption that something really did happen, even though it stretched their existing worldviews to breaking point.<\/p>\n
What I want to do here is to examine this early Christian claim, to ask what can be said about it historically, and to enquire, more particularly, what sort of “believing” we are talking about when we ask whether we – whether “we” be scientists or historians or mathematicians or theologians – can “believe” that which “the resurrection” actually refers to.<\/p>\n