Did Jesus actually rise from the dead?

Paul stakes the whole religion on this one event. If Jesus didn't rise, Christians have wasted two thousand years and you should walk away from us. If he did, then the universe is a very different place than the one you woke up in this morning.

The earliest disciples didn't die for a story they made up. People die for things they sincerely believe; they don't die for things they know they invented. Something happened to those eleven men that made them — terrified ex-fishermen — willing to be beaten, jailed, and executed without recanting. Their answer was always: we saw him alive.

Gary Habermas and Michael Licona ('minimal facts' approach) document four facts accepted by the vast majority of historians, including skeptics: (1) Jesus was crucified and buried, (2) the disciples sincerely believed he had risen and appeared to them, (3) the church persecutor Paul converted after a resurrection experience, (4) the skeptic James (Jesus's brother) converted similarly.

N.T. Wright (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 800+ pages) argues that no first-century Jewish category — not visions, not metaphor, not myth — accounts for the disciples' specific claim of a bodily-raised Messiah. The simplest historical explanation for the rise of Christianity is the one the eyewitnesses gave.