As with the story of the cross, the narrative of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead lies at the heart of the Christian gospel, offering a fundamental historical proof of Jesus’s claims. Many skeptics, however, who rule out the possibility of miracles as one of their baseline assumptions, are unwilling to consider the historicity of the resurrection accounts. The difficulty with that position, in Keller’s view, is that the resurrection is the clearest explanation for a set of historically verifiable and otherwise unlikely events surrounding the beginning of the Christian church. The burden of proof thus does not lie with the Christian alone, to demonstrate that the resurrection happened, but also with the skeptic, to show that the story of Christian origins is historically plausible if the resurrection did not happen.

Keller suggests that such an endeavor is far more difficult than most people realize: “[T]he resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact much more fully attested to than most other events of ancient history we take for granted. Every effort to account for the birth of the church apart from Jesus’s resurrection flies in the face of what we know about first-century history and culture” (219).