First Glance

“If Christ has not been raised,” the apostle Paul declared, “then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Nearly 2,000 years later, Paul’s statement still reflects Christians’ vital interest in Jesus’ resurrection. This concern, as well as the desire to reconstruct what actually happened, continues to spur scholars to undertake new research and to produce a massive outpouring of textual analysis, as Malcolm L. Peel shows in “The Resurrection in Recent Scholarly Research.” In this survey of the field, Peel explains the principles that scholars use to evaluate ancient texts and systematically describes the most up-to-date scholarly conclusions—including disagreements and points of uncertainty—about each source and each type of resurrection tradition.