At the heart of the message of Christianity lies the Resurrection of Jesus. The chief herald of this message, St Paul, bluntly proclaims: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.” How does his statement, reinforced by two millennia of theological cogitation, compare with what the Gospels tell us about the first Easter? Is it myth or does it contain a grain of history?

Resurrection was neither an old nor a widespread Jewish doctrine in the age of Jesus. The concept of afterlife, conceived either as spiritual survival or as rising from the dead, first gained prominence in the 2nd century BC.

The conservative Sadducees considered the idea of life after death a departure from biblical faith, where reward for virtue and punishment for sin were expected in this life. Beyond the grave everybody shared the same chilly and sleepy existence in the Hades of the Hebrews. The principal innovators were the Pharisees; they promoted the doctrine of resurrection among urban Jewry.

In the Gospels resurrection is not among the central tenets of the teaching of Jesus; he was more concerned with eternal life than with the revival of dry bones. One may also put a question mark to his repeated announcements of his death and resurrection. The fact that all his Disciples abandoned him when he was arrested and no one expected his rising suggests that these prophecies did not originate with Jesus, but were added later.

Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus consists in two combined sets of stories about an empty tomb and a series of apparitions. All four Gospels report that the body of Jesus was missing from the grave when one or several women visited it early on Easter Sunday. The idea of resurrection comes from one or two unknown men presumed to be angels who met the women in the tomb (according to Mark, Matthew and Luke).

By contrast, in John’s account, Mary Magdalene suspects that Jesus’ remains were removed by someone not connected with the Apostles. She asked the unknown man standing close by, later identified as Jesus, where he put the missing body.

The second type of “evidence”, the apparitions of the risen Jesus to his apostles, does not fare much better. The oldest account, Mark xvi: 1-8 contains no visions at all. According to Luke and John, Jesus was seen by the Apostles in Jerusalem on Easter Sunday and Luke mentions an encounter with two Disciples on the same day some miles away in Emmaus. Matthew places the only meeting of Jesus with 11 Apostles days later on a Galilean mountain, and John asserts that seven Apostles saw him by the Sea of Tiberias. To muddle the story further, Luke’s Jesus orders his Disciples not to leave Jerusalem at all until Pentecost. As for the identity of the appearing person, Mary Magdalene took him for the gardener, the Emmaus Disciples for an unknown passer-by, and the Jerusalem Apostles for a ghost.

There are four rational ways for explaining away the Resurrection conundrum. One: the body was not found by the women because the guardian of the cemetery used the first opportunity to move the body of Jesus out of the grave that had been prepared for someone else. Two: in the darkness the women lost their way and went to a wrong tomb. Three: the Apostles stole the corpse as was alleged by the priestly leaders. (But since nobody expected Jesus to rise again, why should anybody fake his resurrection?) Four: Jesus was buried alive and survived. This modern concoction, popularised by The Da Vinci Code, is unsupported by ancient evidence, though we know that recovery from crucifixion was possible. In this class of literature, Jesus usually marries Mary Magdalene and settles away from Judea, in the South of France or in Rome.

Neither positive nor negative reasoning leads anywhere because the Resurrection of Jesus cannot be compared with events belonging to history. There is one phenomenon that may lead us out of this maze: the transformation of the Apostles. It was not because of the apparitions of Jesus. What catapulted them into action was Pentecost, the metamorphosis achieved by the inward experience of the Spirit. Pusillanimous men became spiritual warriors. The charismatic potency imparted to them by Jesus and the recollection of His powerful teaching resulted in mighty words and deeds. They felt their master close to them: He rose in their hearts. This is the historical element in the Resurrection saga.

Geza Vermes is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford and author of The Resurrection (Penguin, 2008)