Over coffee, a friend who is a Harvard medical student told me, “I like Jesus’s teachings, but I’m a modern, scientific person. I could never believe in a resurrection.” Modernity leaves no room for the miraculous, especially not for a miracle as outrageous as a dead rabbi coming back to life. But what if history tells a different story?

Today’s scholars seriously discuss the resurrection’s historicity. They recognize that the ancient sources tell a coherent narrative about the days following Jesus’s death. The mainstream view among historians today is that it’s more probable than not that Jesus’s tomb was empty and that people genuinely believed they saw the resurrected Jesus.