Why Didn’t Everybody Believe in the Resurrection?

Question: Why was something so amazing like the resurrection of Christ not enough to convert all the people of Jerusalem and beyond, including the Jewish and Roman leaders? Was it not widely talked about?

Answer: Political events over the past years have shown over again that obvious facts are not always enough to change people’s views. It is part of the human condition that often we are hesitant to change our point of view even in the face of clear evidence, especially when those who lead us deny such evidence.

That also applies in matters of faith. The Catechism emphasises that faith is a personal response to God’s revelation and that it involves an act of the will and intellect (142). While the resurrection was a profound event, the acceptance of this truth requires a personal and communal response. This means that even in the face of a miraculous event, individuals must choose to believe.

Political and civic leaders, meanwhile, will happily deny, lie, deceive, manipulate, threaten and even apply violence to maintain their power. We can observe this also playing out in post-resurrection accounts involving the high priests, whose role then was both religious and political.

The Jewish leaders had established religious structures as well as civic positions and responsibilities, which they were not prepared to abandon. The Roman authorities were concerned about maintaining order, which might be threatened by a man so powerful that he could rise from the dead.

Moreover, the resurrection took place within a context where there were various beliefs and interpretations about what the Messiah was supposed to be, such as a political liberator, and for many people, the reports of the resurrection of Jesus, already difficult to believe, failed to meet these expectations.

Bribery of the guards

Matthew writes that the Roman guards, who had reported to the chief priests “all that had happened”, were bribed with “a large sum of money” to claim that “his disciples came by night and stole him while we were asleep”. That, the priests said, would also placate Pontius Pilate (28:11-15).

Those who were inclined to reject the huge implication of the truth of the resurrection thus had plausible deniability, even if the “stolen body” argument never really caught on.

The problem with the idea that the disciples stole the body is two-fold. Firstly, Jesus’ followers were dejected and scared, as their absence at the Cross shows. It is unlikely that they would have risked taking on armed Roman soldiers to abduct Jesus’ body from the tomb.

And to what end would they have taken the corpse of their dead leader, which had been anointed and properly interred in the tomb? On the day after the Passover, the women were coming to the tomb to complete the burial rites. There was nothing wrong with the location of Jesus’ resting place.

Moreover, the Roman and Jewish leaders would have dealt with any talk of resurrection by producing the “stolen” corpse, and thus have made every effort to locate it.  They couldn’t produce the body, nor did the followers of Christ have any new spot of memorial for their dead leader.

500 witnesses, most alive

On the contrary: the disciples and then multitudes of people reported seeing and conversing with the risen Christ. Writing 25 years after the events — in our terms, that’s as recent as the year 2000 — St Paul referred to more than 500 witnesses who saw the risen Christ in the 40 days following the resurrection — most of them “are still living” (1 Corinthians 15:6) and therefore available to give testimony.

Something absolutely extraordinary must have happened that those who saw the risen Christ would be willing to die for propagating the resurrection, with all the threats and marginalisation from society and the scant material rewards that would bring.

St Stephen was the first follower to die for his belief in the resurrection. All but one of the Twelve would die as martyrs. Why would these people — who had been ready to resume their pre-Jesus lives — have risked exclusion and death for a pure fantasy, a fraud that would bring them no power and no material benefits?

Their witness is the strongest argument for the resurrection, a testimony that has retained its potency over almost 2000 years.

Answered by Günther Simmermacher 

Published in the April 2025 issue of The Southern Cross magazine