What is the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead?

The evidence is an empty tomb that no one can explain away, a set of grave linens left in a condition no thief or enemy would leave them in, and named eyewitnesses who saw the risen Christ with their physical eyes and were still alive to be cross-examined when Paul published the list. The earliest published witness list we have is 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. Paul says Christ was seen by Cephas, then by the eleven, then by more than five hundred brethren at one time, then by James, then by all the apostles, and last of all by Paul himself. The Greek word Paul uses for "was seen" is ophthe, the aorist passive of horao, and that verb refers to seeing with the physical eye the way you see any person or object standing in front of you. It is not the word you would use for a vision, a dream, or a state of mind. Paul is deliberately shutting the door on the hallucination theory before anyone thought to propose it, and Luke 24:39-43 and John 20:27 do the same thing from the other direction. Notice also what Paul adds about the five hundred: most of them "remain until now," though some have fallen asleep. That is not a devotional flourish. That is a man inviting his readers to go find the witnesses and ask them. The most likely occasion is the gathering in Galilee where our Lord gave the Great Commission, which may well have been most of the town. The tomb itself. John 20:1 says Mary Magdalen saw the stone "taken away from the tomb," and the Greek, ermenon ek tou mnemeiou, is explicit: the stone was not merely rolled back in its track, it was lifted out of the track and laid flat. That matches Matthew 28:2, where an angel removes the stone and then sits on it. But mark the order of events. Our Lord had already risen and already vacated the tomb before the stone was moved, just as he later entered the upper room through locked doors (Luke 24:36, John 20:19). No human being witnessed the resurrection itself. The angel moved the stone for one reason only, so that it could be seen that the body was gone. The linens are the detail I would press hardest with a skeptic. John says the cloths were lying there, ta othonia keimena, and the word choice implies they had not been handled at all, unlike the grave cloths of Lazarus, which had to be unwrapped (John 11:44). If enemies had seized the body, there would be tattered linen and blood on the floor, and in any case grave robbers carry off the body with the wrappings still on it. Instead the head cloth was found entetyligmenon, folded, and set apart by itself in its own place. Someone deliberately folded it and conspicuously placed it where it would be seen. That is a silent testimony left behind on purpose. Add to that the character of the first witnesses. Mary Magdalen's first reaction was not faith but the accusation of grave robbery: "They have taken away the Lord, and we know not where they have laid him." The women feared the body had been mutilated. And Thomas, told repeatedly by the other apostles, answered with ou me pisteuso, the strongest form of denial the Greek language has, closer to "I refuse to consider it" than to polite doubt. These are not credulous men inventing a story. They are men who had to be dragged to the conclusion, one of them by putting his hand into the wounds. Our Lord then supplied physical proof on purpose. "Handle and see: for a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see me to have" (Luke 24:39). He ate broiled fish in front of them (Luke 24:42-43). Matthew 27:52-54 records that many bodies of the saints were raised and appeared to many in the holy city, and the Fathers understood this as given precisely to prove that Christ had risen. Keep in mind what is at stake, because Paul says it himself: if Christ is not risen, our preaching is vain and your faith is vain, and we are found false witnesses of God (1 Corinthians 15:14-15). He also uses the perfect passive egegertai, "he has been raised," meaning Christ did not shed that body afterward. He keeps his risen body in heaven now and will return in it. One last point for the modern skeptic. Two centuries of liberal scholarship set out to strip the miracles from the Gospels and keep the history. They failed. The supernatural and the history are so interwoven that when you subtract the one you erase the other. That is why the quest for the "historical Jesus" collapsed in its own words: scholarship found it impossible to write a life of Jesus at all.