Introduction

A common argument for the resurrection goes like this: Jesus rose from the dead. We know this because his disciples willingly submitted to torture and martyrdom instead of recanting their belief in Jesus' resurrection. So they were just making up the story of the resurrection, we'd expect them to admit that once it looked like they were about to be killed. This is often summarized as, who would die for a lie? Or liars make poor martyrs? While this is a common summary of the argument, I don't think it's the strongest version of that argument. And so I'm going to examine a variety of objections to it. In the process, modify the argument to make it more