50 Fun Facts About Resurrection

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

The phrase comes from Hosea 6; in Semitic reckoning any part of a 24-hour period counted as a day and a night, which is how Friday to Sunday makes three.

Mark's original ending has the empty tomb found by the Magdalene, Salome and whom?

A young man in white tells them Jesus will meet the disciples in Galilee; the longer ending was added later.

In Mark's account, who announces to the women at the tomb that Jesus has risen?

Matthew makes it an angel and Luke two angelic beings; John has Mary meet Jesus himself.

The earliest written Christian creed about the resurrection appears in which New Testament letter?

Paul says he received it and passed it on; scholars think it was formalised in Jerusalem within a few years of the events.

According to that creed, after Cephas and the twelve, Jesus appeared at one time to how many people?

Paul adds that most of them were still alive, then lists James and all the apostles, and finally himself.

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

As the firstborn from the dead he takes the preeminent place of the heir, in Paul's language.

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

One of the pair is named Cleopas; the other is never named, and candidates from Simon to Luke himself have been proposed.

Which painter's 1648 recognition supper shows a disciple risen with hands clasped in prayer?

The meeting on the road and the meal afterwards have both been popular subjects in art for centuries.

The apostle who wanted to see and touch the wounds gave English the phrase 'doubting' what?

The scene is usually painted, as by Caravaggio, at the moment he puts his fingers into the wound in Jesus's side.

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

Titian, Fra Angelico and Correggio all painted the scene, and Picasso borrowed Correggio's version for La Vie.

Mary Magdalene's image as a repentant prostitute stems from a 591 sermon by which pope?

There is no biblical basis for it; the Church later stressed her role as first witness of the resurrection and Apostle to the Apostles.

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

The detail is repeated in Mark's longer ending, which is missing from the earliest manuscripts.

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

He told them to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit, which came at Pentecost.

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

The Chapel of the Ascension on the summit is the traditional site, and a Russian Orthodox convent stands nearby.

The command to make disciples of all nations, given by the risen Jesus, is traditionally called what?

It appears in various forms in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, Acts 1 and John 20.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was originally known by which Greek name, meaning Resurrection?

The same word names the Byzantine icon type showing Christ pulling Adam and Eve out of Hades.

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

Hadrian had filled in the cave two centuries earlier to build a temple to Jupiter or Venus; digging revealed a rock-cut tomb.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed in 1009 on the orders of which ruler?

His son let the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX rebuild it, and the Crusaders remodelled it again after 1099.

After retaking Jerusalem in 1187, Saladin entrusted the church's key to which family, who still keep it?

The iron key is 30 cm long; the Nusseibeh family serve as doorkeepers, and the arrangement is part of the 1757 Status Quo.

The 19th-century shrine enclosing the tomb inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is called what?

The Status Quo of 1757 means even minor changes to the building need consensus among the churches.

The Garden Tomb, favoured by many Protestants as the burial place of Jesus, was discovered in which year?

The archaeologist Gabriel Barkay dates it to the 8th or 7th century BC, far too early for a new tomb in the first century.

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

The site draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims a year, especially evangelicals.

Radiocarbon dating in 1988 placed the Shroud of Turin's linen in which period?

Three laboratories agreed; the shroud's documented history begins in 1354 at Lirey in France.

Which photographer discovered in 1898 that the Shroud of Turin's image is clearer as a negative?

He took the first photographs of the shroud; the negative image feeds devotion to the Holy Face.

The Shroud was damaged by fire in 1532 while kept in a chapel in which city?

The House of Savoy moved it to their new capital Turin in 1578, where it has stayed.

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

The stolen-body claim resurfaced in the fifth-century Toledot Yeshu and in Reimarus's writings in the 1700s.

The theory that Jesus merely fainted on the cross and revived in the tomb is known as what?

The rationalist Heinrich Paulus argued for a coma from 1802; David Strauss retorted that a half-dead man could not have inspired faith.

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

The Ahmadiyya movement independently teaches that Jesus swooned and later travelled east.

Which 1700s writer portrayed Jesus and his followers as revolutionaries and revived the stolen-body claim?

His fragments, published after his death by Lessing, launched the modern quest for the historical Jesus.

According to Bart Ehrman, most claimed parallels between Jesus and pagan dying-and-rising gods exist where?

He says there are no ancient accounts of others born to virgin mothers who died as an atonement for sin and rose again.

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

The Pharisees, of whom Paul was one, did believe in resurrection, though Josephus describes their view as souls passing into other bodies.

The concept of bodily resurrection through recreation of the flesh is found in which Jewish text?

Jews today ground the belief in Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, and Maimonides made it one of his Thirteen Articles of Faith.

The earliest recurring theme of resurrection in written records belongs to which cultures, with dying-and-rising gods such as Osiris and Baal?

The scholar Tryggve Mettinger extends the category to Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun and Dumuzi.

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

Jesus deliberately waited two extra days before setting out for Bethany; Bede called Lazarus the most helped of all the dead Jesus raised.

Lazarus was the brother of which two sisters?

Both tell Jesus that if he had been there their brother would not have died, and the narrator records that Jesus wept.

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

A rival Provencal tradition makes him the first bishop of Marseille instead.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter raises a woman named Tabitha, also known by which Greek name?

Paul later revived Eutychus, who had dozed off during a long sermon and fallen from a window.

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

The Apostles' Creed says he descended to the underworld; the story is first told fully in the Gospel of Nicodemus.

The First Council of Nicaea in 325 fixed the date of Easter by reference to what?

The ecclesiastical full moon sometimes differs from the astronomical one, which is why East and West still often disagree.

The Easter season, Eastertide, runs from Easter Sunday for how many days, ending at Pentecost?

The English name Easter may derive from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre; most other languages use a form of Pascha.

In the traditional Paschal greeting, what is the response to the announcement that Christ has arisen?

The greeting is likely shortened from the angel's words in Matthew 28; nobody knows where the reply came from.

In Orthodox tradition, what are the women who brought spices and found the tomb empty called?

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are counted among them too, and Mary Magdalene is called equal to the Apostles.

The earliest Christian art represented the resurrection with which symbol, encircled by a wreath?

Constantine put it on his standard after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312; the wreath signified victory over death.

In which Tuscan town is Piero della Francesca's Resurrection, called by Aldous Huxley the greatest picture in the world?

A British officer, Tony Clarke, halted the shelling of the town in 1944 because he remembered Huxley's essay; a street there now bears his name.

In Piero's fresco, who is the sleeping soldier in brown armour on Christ's right taken to be?

The identification rests on the woodcut portrait in Vasari's Lives of the Painters.

In Acts, which young man did Paul revive after he fell asleep and tumbled from a window to his death?

Matthew also reports that after Jesus' resurrection many of the dead left their tombs and appeared in Jerusalem.

In 1 Kings 17, which prophet raises a widow's son from the dead?

Elisha later revives the Shunammite woman's son, and a corpse even returns to life on touching Elisha's bones.

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

Elijah likewise vanishes in a whirlwind, and both heroes reappear centuries later walking with Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.

In Judaism, the idea of resurrection first emerges in the Book of Watchers and which 2nd-century BC book?

The Pharisees developed it into a belief in bodily resurrection, an idea completely alien to the Greeks.

According to Josephus, himself a Pharisee, what did the Pharisees hold was immortal?

The New Testament says the Pharisees believed in the resurrection but does not specify whether that meant the flesh.