The Empty Tomb
Even Jesus's enemies admitted the body was gone. They just argued about why.
Grounded in the research on the historicity of the empty tomb of Jesus
the claim
Sunday morning after the crucifixion, a group of women go to Jesus's grave and find it empty. The body's gone. Weeks later the whole Christian movement detonates out of Jerusalem preaching resurrection. The empty tomb is the physical fact at the center of that. Not proof of the resurrection by itself, but the hole every rival theory has to fill. William Lane Craig builds his whole resurrection case on it as fact one.
the creed is early
1 Corinthians 15:3-7 is the load-bearing source. Paul quotes a creed he says he 'received' and 'passed on' — buried, raised, appeared. Scholars like Gary Habermas date it to within three to five years of the crucifixion, way too early for legend to grow. 'Buried' then 'raised' implies the grave was vacated. This isn't a Gospel written decades later. It's a memorized formula from the eyewitness generation.