50 Fun Facts About Resurrection

According to Christian belief, God raised Jesus from the dead on which day after his crucifixion?

The third day counts both ends: the Gospels put the crucifixion on a Friday, the eve of the Sabbath, and the empty tomb at dawn on Sunday, and part of a day was reckoned as a whole one.

In the oldest manuscripts, Mark's Gospel ends abruptly with the women at the tomb doing what?

Fleeing and telling no one: the oldest copies stop at 'for they were afraid', with no appearance of the risen Jesus at all, and the twelve further verses printed in most Bibles are absent from them.

How does Mark's Gospel describe the empty tomb's messenger, whom it never calls an angel?

A young man in white, sitting on the right inside the tomb, is all Mark describes; Matthew has an angel descend and roll back the stone, while Luke has two men in dazzling clothes.

Which New Testament letter preserves one of the earliest creeds, listing those who saw the risen Jesus?

First Corinthians: Paul says he is handing on what he himself received, and scholars date the formula to within a few years of the crucifixion.

In the early creed Paul quotes, the risen Jesus appeared at one time to more than how many followers?

Five hundred: Paul adds that most of them were still alive when he wrote, a remark often read as an invitation to go and ask them, before closing the list with himself.

The Greek term prototokos, applied to the risen Jesus, means what?

Firstborn: the Greek joins 'first' to a root meaning to give birth, and Colossians calls Jesus 'firstborn from the dead' so that he might hold first place in everything.

In Luke, Jesus appears to two followers walking to which village, who recognise him at the breaking of bread?

Emmaus: the pair walk and talk with the stranger for miles without knowing him, and the instant he breaks the bread and they see who he is, he vanishes from their sight.

Which Dutch master painted the risen Jesus breaking bread with two disciples in a quiet 1648 panel now in the Louvre?

Rembrandt returned to this supper several times; the 1648 panel drops the theatre of his early work for a still room and a soft glow around Jesus at the moment the pair realise who he is.

Which apostle refused to believe Jesus had risen until he could see and touch the wounds?

Thomas had missed the first appearance and demanded to touch the wounds; when Jesus offered them a week later, John never says he did, only that he answered 'My Lord and my God'.

The Latin phrase Noli me tangere, said by Jesus to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17, means what?

Touch me not is the Latin Bible's wording; many modern translations read 'do not cling to me', and he gives his reason at once: he has not yet ascended to his Father.

Which pope, later called 'the Great', fixed Mary Magdalene's image as a repentant prostitute in a 591 sermon?

Gregory I merged her with the unnamed sinner who anoints Jesus's feet in Luke, though no Gospel calls her a prostitute, and the Eastern Church always kept the two women apart.

According to Luke, Jesus had cast how many demons out of Mary Magdalene?

Seven: Luke lists her among the healed women who then paid for the group's travels out of their own means, alongside Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward.

According to Acts, for how many days did the risen Jesus appear to the apostles before ascending?

Forty: that is why churches mark the Ascension on the fortieth day of Easter, which always lands on a Thursday.

Luke's Gospel places the Ascension at Bethany, a village on which hill?

The Mount of Olives: a small domed chapel on its summit, now inside a mosque compound, shows a slab of rock said to bear Jesus's last footprint.

The risen Jesus's instruction to make disciples of all nations is traditionally called what?

The Great Commission closes Matthew's Gospel: on a mountain in Galilee the eleven disciples bow before the risen Jesus, though the text admits that some doubted.

Greek Orthodox Christians call the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by which Greek name, meaning Resurrection?

Anastasis: the fourth-century builders gave the name to the rotunda raised over the tomb itself, and Greek Orthodox Christians still use it for the whole church.

Which Roman emperor ordered the pagan temple over the tomb site replaced by a church around 326?

Constantine had Hadrian's pagan temple torn down, and tradition credits his mother, Helena, with finding the True Cross on the same site.

Under a 1757 decree freezing the rival churches' rights, which object above the Holy Sepulchre's entrance may nobody move?

A wooden ladder: it already appears in an engraving dated 1728, and because it stood on the ledge when the rules were fixed, nobody may take it down.

For centuries, families of which faith have kept the key and opened the door of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

Muslim: the Joudeh family guards the old iron key and the Nuseibeh family unlocks the door each morning, a neutral arrangement that spares the rival churches a fight over it.

Which name, Latin for 'little house', is given to the shrine enclosing the tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

The Aedicule was restored in 2016, when the marble over the burial shelf was lifted and the tomb itself was opened for the first time in centuries.

Jerusalem's Garden Tomb, a rival to the Holy Sepulchre as Jesus's burial place, is favoured mainly by pilgrims of which tradition?

Protestant pilgrims prize its quiet garden, but archaeologists date the rock-cut tomb, found in 1867, to centuries before Jesus, far too old to be the Gospels' new tomb.

The Garden Tomb sits beside a rocky outcrop with what name, proposed in the 19th century as Golgotha?

Skull Hill's eroded cliff face looks like a skull, and General Charles Gordon championed it after an 1883 visit, so the spot was long known as Gordon's Calvary.

Which technique, applied by three laboratories in 1988, dated the Shroud of Turin's linen to the Middle Ages?

Radiocarbon dating put the linen between 1260 and 1390, a close match for the 1350s, when the shroud first turns up in the records at Lirey in France.

The first photograph of the Shroud of Turin, taken in 1898, caused a sensation because the image looked far clearer as what?

A negative: while developing his pictures, amateur photographer Secondo Pia saw a lifelike face emerge, because the light and dark on the cloth itself are reversed.

In 1532, what left the symmetrical marks that flank the Shroud of Turin's image?

A fire in its chapel at Chambery in France charred the folded cloth, which is why the burn marks repeat down both sides; the shroud only reached Turin in 1578.

In Matthew's Gospel, whom did the chief priests bribe to say the body had been stolen?

The tomb guards were paid to say the disciples came by night while they slept, and Matthew adds that the story was still going round in his own day.

The Ahmadiyya movement teaches that Jesus survived the cross and ended his days in which land?

India: the movement's founder taught that Jesus went east after the crucifixion to preach to the lost tribes of Israel and died an old man in Kashmir.

Which 1965 Hugh Schonfield book argued Jesus choreographed his own crucifixion to survive it?

The Passover Plot has Jesus staging his own crucifixion to fulfil the prophecies, drugged to seem dead, until a soldier's spear thrust wrecked the plan.

Which US president took a razor to the Gospels, making a private Bible that leaves out the miracles and the resurrection?

Jefferson kept the book private, but from 1904 Congress had it printed and gave copies to new lawmakers, a custom that lasted into the 1950s.

Which Scottish philosopher argued in 1748 that no testimony can establish a miracle such as a dead man's return to life?

David Hume's test was to ask which is likelier: that a dead man really rose, or that the witnesses deceive or are deceived.

Which Jewish sect, per Josephus and the New Testament, did not believe in an afterlife or resurrection?

The Sadducees tried to trap Jesus with a riddle about a woman widowed by one brother after another, asking whose wife she would be when the dead rise.

Which Jewish text, in Catholic Bibles but not the Hebrew one, has brothers die under torture sure God will raise them?

In 2 Maccabees a mother watches her sons tortured to death for refusing to eat pork, and one tells the king that God will raise them up to live again for ever.

Which Egyptian god, murdered and pieced back together by his wife Isis, did James Frazer class among the 'dying and rising gods'?

Osiris never returned to the living: once revived he ruled the underworld as lord of the dead, which is why some scholars deny that he 'rose' at all.

According to John's Gospel, Lazarus had been in his tomb how long when Jesus raised him?

Four days: his sister warned of the smell when Jesus asked for the stone to be moved, and Orthodox Christians still honour him as Lazarus the Four Days Dead.

Lazarus was the brother of which two sisters?

Mary and Martha each tell Jesus their brother would not have died had he been there, and the narrator records simply that Jesus wept.

Later tradition makes Lazarus the first bishop of Kition, now Larnaca, on which Mediterranean island?

Cyprus: a tomb unearthed at Larnaca was taken for his second grave and the Church of Saint Lazarus stands over it, though Provence claims him as Marseille's first bishop instead.

In Acts, which apostle raises Tabitha, a seamstress of Joppa whose mourners show him the clothes she made?

Peter sent the weeping widows out, knelt, prayed and told her to get up; they had been showing him the coats that Tabitha, called Dorcas in Greek, had sewn.

On which day is the Harrowing of Hell, Christ's descent to the dead, commemorated?

Holy Saturday marks the day Jesus lay dead; the Apostles' Creed says he descended to the dead, and the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus tells the story at length.

In the Western churches, Easter is the first Sunday after which event on or after 21 March?

A full moon, though one read from church tables rather than the sky; Orthodox churches still reckon it by the Julian calendar, so their Easter usually falls later.

Eastertide runs for fifty days from Easter Sunday and ends at which feast?

Pentecost ends the season because Acts sets the Spirit's descent on the disciples at the Jewish harvest festival held fifty days after Passover.

Among Russians, the Easter greeting 'Christ is risen!' and its reply are traditionally followed by which gesture?

A kiss, traditionally three on alternating cheeks: the greeting and its reply, 'Truly he is risen!', replace hello among Orthodox Russians through the Easter season.

In Orthodox tradition, what are the women who went to anoint Jesus's body and found the tomb empty called?

The Myrrhbearers brought myrrh to the tomb at first light, and their feast honours men as well, among them Nicodemus, who brought myrrh and aloes to the burial.

Early Christian tomb carvings showed the resurrection as a wreath around which monogram of Christ's name?

The Chi Rho joins the first two Greek letters of 'Christ', and the wreath around it stood for the resurrection's victory over death.

In 1944 a British officer halted the shelling of Sansepolcro because he remembered an essay praising which treasure there?

A Renaissance fresco: by his own account Tony Clarke recalled Aldous Huxley calling Piero della Francesca's Resurrection the greatest picture in the world, and ordered his guns to stop.

Piero della Francesca painted his Resurrection not for a church but for which building in his native Sansepolcro?

The town hall suited it: the town is named after relics of Christ's tomb that two pilgrims are said to have brought home, and the fresco is still in the building, now the Civic Museum.

In Acts, what was the young man Eutychus doing when he fell from a third-floor window and had to be revived?

He was dozing through a sermon: Paul, due to leave next morning, had talked past midnight, and after reviving him he went back upstairs and talked on until daybreak.

In 1 Kings 17, which prophet raises a widow's son, a feat his own successor later repeats?

Elijah stretched himself over the boy three times at Zarephath and prayed; his successor Elisha later repeats the feat for a Shunammite woman's son.

Which great-grandfather of Noah 'walked with God' and was simply taken, the Bible's first such case?

Genesis gives Enoch 365 years, short by the standards of his family, and says only that God took him; the Letter to the Hebrews reads that as being spared death altogether.

Which Hebrew Bible book, set among Jewish exiles at Babylon's court, promises that many who sleep in the dust will awake?

Daniel 12 has the sleepers wake, some to everlasting life and some to shame; scholars date those visions to the 160s BC, when Antiochus IV was persecuting Jews for their faith.

Which member of the Jewish council asked Pilate for Jesus's body and laid it in a rock-cut tomb?

Joseph of Arimathea went boldly to Pilate, Mark says; medieval legend later made him first keeper of the Holy Grail and brought him to Glastonbury.