In Matthew 27:52-53, it says that after Jesus' death, dead people were resurrected and were walking around Jerusalem. Empirically, how could this have happened, and why?

It is a strange passage, and it is strange on purpose — Matthew has just described darkness, a torn curtain, an earthquake, and split rocks. The question is whether strangeness is a mark against the report or a signal about what kind of report it is.

1. Read the paragraph before judging the sentence. Matthew 27:45-53 is saturated with apocalyptic imagery: darkness over the land, the temple curtain torn from top to bottom, the earth shaken, the rocks split. That is the register of the prophets, not of a coroner's report, and the opened tombs of Matthew 27:51-53 belong to that scene. Whatever else is happening, Matthew is declaring that the cross shook the cosmos.

2. The literal reading is defensible. The most natural reading is that God genuinely raised these people as a foretaste of resurrection life — the firstfruits of what Christ's resurrection would accomplish (1 Corinthians 15:20). If God can raise the dead, which is the central Christian claim, then an event like this is not beyond him. It is the same power in miniature.

3. A symbolic reading has serious defenders. Some scholars, noting the dense symbolic texture of the passage, read it as Matthew's theological interpretation of the cross rather than a report of a walk through the streets. Michael Licona has argued positions like this in print and taken criticism for it. It should not be waved away as a dodge, nor should it be treated as the only respectable option.

4. Matthew ties the sign to the resurrection. The dead are raised at Jesus' death, but they come out of the tombs “after his resurrection” and enter the city (Matthew 27:53). That detail is deliberate: Matthew is welding the sign to the hinge of the story. The point is not a random marvel but the claim that Jesus' resurrection is the crack through which resurrection enters the world.

5. Silence elsewhere is not contradiction. That the other Gospels omit the detail is not a contradiction. Ancient biographies routinely selected, compressed, and arranged material, and each evangelist has a different argument to make. Matthew alone records the dream of Pilate's wife and the guard at the tomb; Mark alone records the young man fleeing naked. Omission is not denial.

6. The detail cuts against Matthew's interest. This is not the sort of thing an author invents to make his case easier. It invites mockery, it is unverifiable at a distance, and it locates the event in Jerusalem, where the claim could be checked by people who had been there. Legendary accretions usually grow in the direction of glory, not toward an awkward detail that raises immediate objections.

7. The turn: “empirically” assumes the conclusion. The question “empirically, how could this have happened?” presupposes a closed universe in which the dead do not rise. But that is the very point in dispute, and it would also rule out the resurrection of Jesus, which is a separate claim the objection has not addressed. A unique event cannot be repeated in a lab; history works from testimony, and demanding replication of a singularity is a category error, not a standard of rigor.

8. Matthew is echoing Ezekiel. The prophet was shown a valley of dry bones and told, “Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people” (Ezekiel 37:12). Matthew's readers knew that text. The cross, he is saying, has opened the graves — the exile's deepest promise is beginning to come true.

9. What the passage is for. Even on the symbolic reading, the theology is unmistakable: at the death of Christ, death begins to lose its grip. That is the claim the whole New Testament makes, and Matthew is making it in the idiom available to him. The disagreement is about the idiom, not about the gospel.

The passage is strange, and honest interpreters read it two ways. But strangeness is not refutation — and the demand that a unique event be empirically repeatable is a demand that no historical claim, including the skeptic's own account of the texts, could survive.

Sources: Craig Keener, Miracles; Michael Licona, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?; D.A. Carson; R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!