You might prefer to think that Christ rose in some “spiritual” sense, leaving His body to decay in Palestine. If you prefer to think that—or indeed to think that the whole Christ story is a fabrication—that's fine. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, said the movie star. But it is not an actual offence against rationality to believe that Christ rose bodily (as it would be, for instance, an offence against rationality to believe with sometime Canadian Alliance politician Stockwell Day that the cosmos was created six thousand years ago, or to believe with some recent American television audiences that NASA faked the moon landings). Why is it not an actual offence? Because none of the arguments against Christ’s bodily resurrection is conclusive, and because there are some respectable (I don’t say conclusive) arguments for His bodily resurrection.
One argument for the resurrection is the text of St Paul, composed only a couple of decades after the alleged event. (Possible date for first Easter: 33 A.D.; possible date for some of Paul’s stuff: 55 A.D. Paul is writing in the same century as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and perhaps John, but considerably earlier than they.) Paul says explicitly that what gets resurrected is a body. (He compares the relation of corpse to resurrected body with the relation of seed grain to fully formed, mature, grain plant.) Concerning Christ, he says that a large number of people have seen Him risen, “many of whom are still alive, although some have died.”
Admittedly, Paul could have a lot of things wrong. But we also have the fact that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in describing the empty Sunday tomb, are drawing on a common lost source, older than they themselves are. (The oldest of those Evangelists, Mark, was himself a follower of St Peter, and might, for all I know, have been quite a young follower when St Peter was quite old. St Peter was of course the good-hearted, impulsive disciple of Christ who followed Him to the place of His trial, denied Him three times, and then in later life became the leader of the young Catholic Church among the Jewish converts.) This whole issue has been analyzed by scholars of various denominations, for instance by Edward Lynn Bode in The First Easter Morning (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1970). I think the way the scholars go is this, that they discount the inconsistent, theology-serving reports of an angel at the tomb, they discount the possibility of knowing which particular women visited the tomb, they emphasize that the very concept of historical reportage was unknown to the Evangelists (Herodotus and Thucydides had that modern concept—but they wrote in sophisticated, intellectual, classical Greece, not in backwater first-century Palestine), and then they tend to assert as a hard historical core of fact that an empty tomb is the simplest explanation for the actual inconsistencies and consistencies in the actual Gospel texts.
Finally, we have the testimony of sources which the Church does not recognize as official. Foremost among these sources is the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud is a linen cloth with an image burned into it (not painted on), bearing quite a close resemblance to the Christ of traditional religious art. Tradition says the Shroud was the burial cloth found in the empty tomb. It is possible, though anything but certain, that the Shroud was venerated in the Byzantine Empire as the “Cloth of Edessa” or some such before it surfaced in Crusades-era Europe, and that the whole Western artistic tradition of Christ as a bearded figure comes from that Byzantine cloth. (The very early images of Christ, in the Roman catacombs prior to the Byzantine empire, portray a clean-shaven, boyish Christ, who looks like a typical Roman citizen or god-hero. That artistic tradition sort of died with the Western Roman Empire. —Ian Wilson is an authority on the issue of artistic tradition, as well as on other Shroud questions, including the scary question of radiocarbon dating which we are about to tackle in this FAQ.)