On Feb. 12, Matthew Brown published an editorial letter that contains some false or misleading claims about the stance of modern biblical scholarship on the resurrection of Jesus.

In particular, Brown stated: “Regardless of one’s view of the infallibility of the Bible, historians whom are Christian, Jewish, agnostic and atheist all agree that Jesus was crucified, that his tomb was later found empty by his female followers and that his disciples had experiences in which they believed they saw Jesus raised from the dead.”

However, it is not true that scholars who are “Christian, Jewish, agnostic and atheist all agree” that Jesus was crucified, or that his tomb was found empty.

A number of Christian scholars (e.g., John Dominic Crossan, “Who Killed Jesus?”, pp. 187-88) do not believe Jesus was necessarily buried in a tomb. There are other agnostic and atheist scholars who don’t believe Jesus was a real person at all, but rather a mythical figure or a fictional, literary character. Examples include Robert Price, author of “The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems,” (2011) and Thomas L. Brodie, author of “Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery,” (2012).

In an appended comment, Brown refers to “evidence” for his statement, but he is simply repeating the questionable claims of Christian apologists such as Gary Habermas.

Evidence from 1 Corinthians 15 is not really compelling because we cannot historically verify the author’s claims in that chapter are true. The fact that Aramaic expressions were used means very little because we have similar Aramaic expressions used in non-biblical sources that most Christians today regard as fictional.

We also have evidence that other self-described early Christians did not believe in a literal resurrection or in a flesh-and-blood Jesus (e.g., 1 John 4:1-3, and in some so-called “Gnostic” gospels).

For other atheist/agnostic views on the historicity of Jesus and the resurrection, see the chapter on “The Unhistorical Jesus” in my own book, “The End of Biblical Studies,” (2007), and Bart Ehrman’s “Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth,” (2012).