Paul's earliest surviving summary of the resurrection fits into two sentences: "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). The sentences are short. The difficulty is deciding what they mean. Paul could be describing an inner conviction, a vision, a way of saying that Jesus' cause lives on, or a body that left its grave. Each reading gives a different Christianity, and only one of them matches what Paul wrote.
The texts answer that question better than most debates about them. Read closely, 1 Corinthians 15 and the Gospel tomb narratives claim a bodily event, publicly witnessed, on which the whole faith stands or falls. They also say what that event means: God vindicated Jesus' claims about himself and began the resurrection his people will share. In a Jude 3 Project episode on this subject, Lisa Fields stated the stakes without hedging: "you can't not believe in the resurrection and be a Christian." If so, the first job is to read the claim accurately, before praising or rejecting it.
The work below moves through the texts in the order a careful reader needs them. It starts with Paul's received summary and its list of witnesses. It then reads the tomb stories as narratives, tests the word "raised" against Paul's dispute with the Corinthians, and weighs the main alternative readings. Only after that does it turn to what the claim asks of the person who accepts it. Dr. Michael Licona, Dr. Craig Keener, R.L. Solberg, Dr. Mikel Del Rosario and Dr. Esau McCaulley appear as witnesses to particular readings. The goal is to state the resurrection claim so fairly that a skeptic would recognize it, and to know what follows if it is true.