Source Ledger

Paul · Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. · c. 53–55 CE

1 Corinthians 15:3–8, in Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed.

Reliability · The earliest surviving written reference to resurrection belief, by a named author who states he had met some of the people he names. Paul introduces the passage with handover language indicating he is quoting material already formulated before him, which is why it is treated as earlier than the letter that carries it. Paul is an interested party and says so.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.

Cornelius Tacitus · Loeb Classical Library · c. 116 CE

Tacitus, Annals 15.44.

Reliability · A senatorial Roman historian, hostile to Christianity, reporting the execution of "Christus" under Pilate during Tiberius' reign. Written some eighty years after the fact; whether Tacitus drew on official records or on what Christians of his own day reported is genuinely disputed, and that dispute bears directly on how independent this witness is.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.

Flavius Josephus · Loeb Classical Library · c. 93–94 CE

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.55–64, 18.85–89.

Reliability · A Jewish historian writing roughly sixty years after the events, with access to Judaean administrative memory. Josephus writes with evident apologetic aims and the manuscript tradition of one passage in this book (the Testimonium Flavianum, 18.63–64) is demonstrably interpolated by later Christian hands — so passages must be assessed individually rather than accepted wholesale.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.

Israel Museum, Jerusalem · c. 26–36 CE; discovered 1961

Limestone dedicatory inscription naming [Pon]tius Pilatus, [praef]ectus Iuda[ea]e, discovered by Antonio Frova at Caesarea Maritima, 1961. Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Reliability · Contemporary epigraphic evidence, and the strongest single item for Pilate: a public inscription produced during his own administration, independent of any literary tradition. The stone is damaged and partly reconstructed, but the prefectural title and the name are legible.

Partially verified — Bibliographic identifiers present; no live catalogue check has been run.

Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. · c. 65–75 CE

Mark 15:42–16:8, with the longer ending 16:9–20, in Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed.

Reliability · The earliest narrative account of the burial and empty tomb. Its ending is the most consequential textual problem in the New Testament: the earliest and best manuscripts stop at 16:8, and the longer ending is absent from them. Any claim resting on Mark 16:9–20 therefore carries a textual weakness that claims resting on 16:1–8 do not.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.

E. P. Sanders · Penguin · 1993

E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993).

Reliability · A standard critical account of what can be established about Jesus by ordinary historical method. Sanders is careful to separate the facts he regards as secure — including the crucifixion under Pilate and the disciples' subsequent conviction that they had seen him — from the explanation of those facts, which he declines to give.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.

N. T. Wright · Fortress Press · 2003

N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God vol. 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

Reliability · The fullest scholarly statement of the case that bodily resurrection is the best historical explanation of the rise of the early Christian movement. Rigorous on Second Temple and Greco-Roman views of the afterlife; its concluding inference to a metaphysical conclusion is where critics, including sympathetic ones, part company with it.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.

Dale C. Allison Jr. · T&T Clark · 2021

Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: T&T Clark, 2021).

Reliability · An unusually even-handed survey by a scholar who takes both the apologetic and the sceptical literature seriously and finds both overconfident. Valuable here precisely because it does not resolve the question: Allison is explicit that the historical evidence underdetermines the metaphysical conclusion in either direction.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.

Bart D. Ehrman · HarperOne · 2014

Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (New York: HarperOne, 2014).

Reliability · A trade book by a credentialed New Testament scholar, arguing that resurrection belief is best explained by visionary experiences and that the burial and empty tomb traditions are historically weaker than commonly assumed. Written for a general readership rather than peer-reviewed, which is why it is tiered as serious secondary interpretation rather than scholarly synthesis.

Internal corpus record — Internal corpus record. Not reconciled against an external catalogue.