Jesus’ resurrection has been debated for centuries, but a new mathematical analysis has reached a provocative conclusion about the testimony of his followers.
Nathan Rockwood, a philosopher at Brigham Young University in Utah, examined a key feature of early Christian accounts: followers of Jesus continued to say they had seen him alive for years after his crucifixion.
Rockwood reasoned that if several people had fabricated those encounters, repeatedly promoting the story would have created opportunities for someone to confess, contradict the account or inadvertently reveal the deception.
To test that possibility, he created a model in which each witness had a one percent chance every year of admitting that the story was fabricated. The calculation also allowed for witnesses to die over time.
Starting with 16 witnesses, the model produced a 95 percent chance that someone would expose the alleged fabrication within 28 years. With 23 witnesses, the same probability would be reached within 17 years.
Rockwood found no reliable surviving record of such a confession. He argues that the apparent sincerity of the witnesses, together with biblical descriptions of repeated conversations and physical contact with Jesus, supports the claim that he rose from the dead.
‘Given the abundance of empirical evidence of the resurrected Jesus provided to the witnesses, their testimony would not be the result of perceptual error,’ he wrote in the study.
‘This is an important step, though not the only step, in showing that the testimony of the disciples is true.’
Nathan Rockwood, a philosopher at Brigham Young University in Utah, examined the claim that Jesus’ followers continued reporting appearances of him for years after his crucifixion
Christian belief holds that Jesus returned bodily to life after being executed on a Roman cross.
In his study, Rockwood begins with a point accepted by many skeptical scholars: some followers claimed to have seen Jesus alive after his death, although there is considerable disagreement over how those claims should be explained.
Paul’s account is significant because he had contact with several prominent figures in the early Christian movement.
In First Corinthians, a letter addressed to an early Christian community, Paul names people who were said to have seen Jesus after his death.
Many scholars believe the passage preserves a tradition that was already circulating before Paul committed it to writing.
In Galatians, another letter, Paul says he met Peter and James three years after his conversion and later encountered John.
Rockwood’s lower estimate of 16 witnesses includes the 11 remaining apostles, Paul, James—the brother of Jesus—and three women linked to the discovery of the empty tomb, including Mary Magdalene.
He suggests that people inventing a story to make it persuasive would probably have favored male witnesses, whose testimony generally carried more authority in that historical setting.
His higher estimate replaces the three women with five, adds the two disciples said to have met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and includes Matthias and Joseph, the men considered as replacements for Judas among the apostles.
Stephen, who was reported to have seen a vision of Jesus before being stoned to death, brings the total to 23.
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These figures are reconstructed from Christian writings; they are not drawn from an independently verified list of eyewitnesses.
Rockwood also examines Paul’s reference to more than 500 witnesses, while acknowledging that the historical status of this episode remains disputed.
After establishing his estimated groups, he asks whether a fabricated account could have continued without any participant exposing it.
His approach adapts research by David Robert Grimes, who studied whether large conspiracies—including claims that the Moon landings were faked—could remain secret.
Grimes’ work examined how the likelihood of disclosure rises as more people become involved and as a deception continues for a longer period.
Rockwood applied the same general reasoning to smaller groups claiming to have witnessed miraculous events.
He illustrated the issue through philosopher David Hume’s hypothetical example of Queen Elizabeth I dying and returning to life a month later.
Hume argued that deception would remain more plausible than a miracle, even if a large number of people supported the account.
‘This analysis demonstrates that, contrary to Hume’s assertion, many witnesses who maintained their testimony for many years provide compelling evidence of the sincerity of their testimony,’ the study states.
Rockwood then calculated whether an invented story could realistically remain hidden. With 100 participants, each facing a one percent annual chance of disclosure, his model predicted a 95 percent chance that the deception would be exposed within three years.
If the annual risk for each person fell to 0.1 percent, the same threshold would be reached in 15 years for 200 participants, compared with 30 years for 100 participants.
For Jesus’ followers, Rockwood selected the one percent figure because they were said to have discussed their experiences publicly and repeatedly. It is an assumption, however, rather than a rate measured from historical confessions.
He used Robert McIver’s book Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels to estimate how the number of surviving witnesses would decline, drawing on ancient Roman population and life-expectancy data.
Those projections indicated that about three-quarters of the witnesses would still be alive after 10 years, while roughly one-third would remain after 30 years.
Rockwood argues that opponents of Christianity would likely have publicized an admission of deception by any prominent witness. However, the incomplete historical record cannot show that every damaging statement would have been preserved.
The 95 percent result represents the predicted chance of disclosure under the model’s assumptions. It is not a calculation of the probability that Jesus was resurrected.
Nor does the model independently demonstrate that the biblical encounters took place. Its conclusions depend on assumptions about the number of witnesses, the likelihood of disclosure and whether each person’s decision was independent.
Rockwood’s wider argument combines two lines of reasoning: prolonged testimony makes deliberate invention less likely, while the reported conversations, meals and physical contact are intended to make an honest mistake less likely.
‘So, their testimony is either deception or they were telling the truth,’ he wrote. ‘And it wasn’t deception.’