How Is Christianity Different From Other World Religions?

Yes, in a specific sense. The resurrection is reported as an event that happened to a real man, in a real place, in front of named people. That means the ordinary questions anyone asks of an ancient report can be asked of it. Investigation can tell you whether the claim is the kind evidence bears on and how the reports hold up. Whether the evidence carries you all the way to the conclusion is a separate question. This study treats that second question as open and asks you to work it out.

You can use this guide alone in one sitting or with a group over about an hour. Bring a Bible and a sheet of paper you can divide into columns. Leaders should not reveal any verdict before the group does the evidence work. The study is built so people reach their own conclusions and can say exactly why.

Begin with the proposition under scrutiny

An investigation starts by stating the claim precisely. Dr. Craig Hazen, the founder of the apologetics department at Biola University, did his doctoral work in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before that he trained in biology and worked in research. He says the lab left him with a simple habit: “you gotta test your theories.”

When he compared Christianity with the other great traditions, that habit shaped what he noticed. He concluded that “Christianity is set apart in rapid, dramatic fashion from the other great world religious traditions, in that it can be tested.” His shortest version: “It’s a testable religion.” He describes this as being able to “ask all the hard questions about the claims Christianity is making, and test them to see if they’re real.”

Notice what is being claimed here and what is not. Hazen’s first point concerns the kind of claim Christianity makes. It is not yet a verdict that the claim is true. Keep those two apart for the rest of the study. A claim can be testable and still fail the test.

First observation. Before reading further, each person writes one sentence stating what Christians claim happened at Easter. Make it specific enough that someone could disagree with it. Compare sentences. Did anyone write something about feelings, hope or meaning? If so, set it to one side. It may be true, but it is not the claim under investigation.

The questions any ancient report has to answer

Nobody can rerun the past in a lab. What anyone examining ancient history can do is question the reports that survive. The same questions apply whether the report is about a battle, a king or a man said to have risen from the dead:

• Who is reporting, and how close were they to the event? A firsthand witness differs from someone repeating a story generations later.
• Is this one voice or several? Several accounts carry more weight only if they are not simply copying one another.
• Could the details be checked by people at the time? Names, places and living witnesses expose a report to correction.
• What did the reporter stand to gain or lose? Motive does not settle truth, but it belongs in the evidence.
• What other explanations fit the same reports? An honest investigation has to try the alternatives, not only the preferred answer.

Hazen’s work on Mormonism gives a useful test case for these questions. He points out that its founding story includes concrete historical episodes: ancient gold plates, a translation, an account of peoples in the Western Hemisphere. Hearing the whole story, he says, “this is a historian’s delight.” Yet in his experience with missionaries, local leaders, university faculty and church apostles, hard questions produced a retreat. He says they “take a step back and start to talk about an inner experience that they’ve had.” His summary is that it “sounded like it was testable, but then it really wasn’t once you started to actually ask the hard testing questions.”

That is Hazen’s report of his own conversations, and Latter-day Saints would describe their faith differently. The methodological lesson still stands apart from it. Historical-sounding details are not enough. A claim is investigable only when the people who hold it let the evidence count, including evidence against them. So the real test for Christianity is whether its own founding documents accept that exposure.

Reading Paul’s report as a witness statement

The oldest Christian discussion of the resurrection that Hazen points to is 1 Corinthians 15. Paul is writing to a church where some were saying there is no resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:12). Before he argues with them, he restates what he had already taught them. Read 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 aloud, slowly:

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: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.

Look at what kind of text this is. It is a letter, not a poem or a vision report. Paul says he “delivered” what he had “received,” so by his own description he is passing on a report that came to him, then adding his own experience at the end. He names individuals. He mentions a large group and says most of them are still alive. In KJV English, “fallen asleep” means died. A writer who wanted his claim kept out of reach of checking would not usually point readers toward living witnesses.

Then read 1 Corinthians 15:14-15: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.” The KJV word vain means empty; other translations render it as futile or useless.

Verse 15 is easy to skim past, and it matters most for this study. Paul uses the language of testimony. He calls himself a witness and admits that if the event did not happen, he is a false one. Hazen’s paraphrase of the passage is blunt: if it did not happen, “our faith is bunk, you ought to go do something else.” Paul does not fall back on an inner confirmation. He places himself where a historian would put any witness, open to the charge of being mistaken or lying.

Practice: build an evidence ledger

1. Divide your paper into four columns: What the text reports, Kind of evidence, Could it be checked, and by whom?, and What is interpretation?
2. Go through 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 line by line. Enter each reported item in the first column: the death, the burial, each appearance.
3. In the second column, say what sort of claim it is. Is it a public event, a private experience, a group experience, or a statement of meaning such as “for our sins”?
4. In the third column, note who could have confirmed or contradicted it when Paul wrote.
5. In the fourth column, mark anything a historian cannot assess by historical method alone. “According to the scriptures” and “for our sins” belong here. They are claims of meaning, and Christians hold them, but they are not the same kind of claim as a burial.

Groups can split the verses among pairs and then compare ledgers. Facilitators should expect disagreement about which column an item belongs in. That disagreement is the work, so let people argue it out instead of resolving it for them.

Where the investigation gets hard

A fair inquiry has to face the strongest objections, and two deserve real time.

The first concerns the source. Paul was a committed believer by the time he wrote, and a single letter from a convinced witness is not neutral evidence. The investigator’s next move is to ask what other reports exist and whether they are independent. Luke’s Gospel, for example, opens by saying its account rests on those “which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2). That is Luke’s claim about his sources. Whether the various accounts confirm one another or depend on one another is exactly the kind of question this study cannot settle in an hour. Name it as unresolved and keep it on the table.

The second objection concerns the method itself. A skeptic can grant everything in your ledger and still argue that history can establish what people reported, but never that a dead man returned to life. On this view, any natural explanation, however strained, will always be more probable than a miracle. That objection is not really about the documents. It is about what a historian is permitted to conclude. Have the group state it in its strongest form before anyone responds.

Hazen takes the opposite position. He says, “I think the historical case can be made that Jesus was alive at point A, dead at point B,” and alive again afterward. He calls that “the decided result of the historical record,” and adds, “And you can actually investigate it and find out that that really happened.” Keep the categories straight. In this conversation, those are Hazen’s convictions. He states them, but he does not walk through the full historical case in the episode. Testability brings you to the right question. Answering it takes the full case, weighed on its evidence, including the alternatives.

Christians are not left without footing while that work continues. Jude 3 teaches that Jesus rose bodily from the dead in space and time, a historical event and not a symbol or a feeling, and that the resurrection is the hinge on which the entire Christian faith turns. This study helps explain why that conviction can be examined instead of only asserted.

Questions for discussion

1. Look at your evidence ledger. Which single item would you most want to investigate further, and what source would you go looking for?
2. Paul calls himself a potential false witness in 1 Corinthians 15:15. Does a writer’s willingness to be proven wrong make his report more credible, or only more honest? What is the difference?
3. Restate the skeptic’s objection about miracles and historical method so that someone who holds it would say you got it right. Then say where you think it is strongest.
4. Hazen describes a faith that retreats to inner experience under pressure. Where have you seen Christians make the same retreat, and what would it take to answer differently?
5. Lisa Fields observed that “people don’t necessarily want to know the truth, they want to know their truth.” How does a claim about a public event change a conversation shaped by that attitude?
6. What evidence, if it turned up, would count against the resurrection? If you cannot name any, what does that tell you about how you are holding the claim?

Saying it responsibly to a skeptic

Lisa Fields put the problem plainly. Thinking about faith grounded in feeling, she said, “if you base your belief on Christ based on a feeling, and you go and try to talk, engage a Mormon, you may have a little bit of trouble when they say, well, I feel something too.” A historical claim gives you something else to offer. Hazen describes the shift: “rather than just saying, that’s what my religion teaches, I’m saying, and I can know it to be true.” He believes the resurrection “cuts through the spiritual fog like nothing else” because it turns a comparison of experiences into one question about the past.

Responsible speech also means not claiming more than you have examined. Hazen’s advice for hostile questions helps here. Before answering, return the question, along the lines of his own example: “I’m curious, what do you think Christianity is?” His name for the habit is “Ask of them as they ask of you.” It lets you learn what the other person actually objects to before you build a case.

To finish, each person writes three sentences and keeps them. The first states the claim in public, checkable terms. The second names one piece of evidence from your ledger you could explain to a skeptic. The third names one question from this study you cannot yet answer, and where you will look first. If you can say all three out loud without overstating any of them, you have learned to talk about the resurrection the way an investigator would.