P1. Jesus was a first-century Jew who was executed by Roman crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and was believed by his followers to have died. P2. Jewish burial practice treated the dead with considerable religious seriousness. Contact with a corpse produced ritual impurity (Numbers 19:11–16), while Jewish sources also demonstrate concern for prompt and respectful burial (Deuteronomy 21:22–23; Josephus, War 4.317). Therefore, secretly disposing of Jesus’ corpse would not have been a religiously neutral act for Jewish disciples. P3. The Gospel traditions consistently identify women, especially Mary Magdalene, as the first discoverers of the empty tomb. This is noteworthy because female testimony could be disadvantaged in ancient Jewish legal/testimonial contexts; Josephus explicitly rejects women’s testimony in his description of Jewish law (Antiquities 4.219). The inference is not “Jews never believed women,” but that inventing women as the foundational discoverers provides no obvious apologetic advantage. P4. The earliest surviving Christian explanation of the Jewish response to the empty-tomb claim is not that Jesus remained buried, but that his disciples removed the corpse (Matthew 28:11–15). Later Christian sources also attest circulation of the body-theft accusation. This establishes an early reported controversy over how the body disappeared, although it does not independently prove that Jewish authorities conceded an empty tomb. P5. If the disciples themselves stole or deliberately disposed of Jesus’ corpse, they necessarily knew that the missing body was not evidence that Jesus had physically risen. Therefore, body theft cannot simultaneously explain both the empty tomb and the disciples’ sincere belief that they encountered the risen Jesus without adding another explanation. P6. Resurrection was not simply the expected Jewish response to a murdered Messiah. First-century Judaism contained resurrection expectations, but these concerned an eschatological resurrection of the dead; proclaiming that one individual had already been bodily raised in advance required an additional explanation. P7. Very early Christian testimony claims appearances not merely to Jesus’ existing followers but also to James and Paul (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). Paul independently identifies himself as a former persecutor of the Church (Galatians 1:13–23), making his conversion particularly difficult to explain through loyalty to Jesus before the crucifixion. P8. The earliest Christians publicly maintained resurrection belief despite serious social and eventually physical costs. This does not establish that their belief was true, but it weighs against the hypothesis that the principal proclaimers were knowingly perpetuating a fraud for obvious personal advantage. P9. Consequently, a naturalistic explanation must account simultaneously for at least: (a) the origin of the empty-tomb tradition, (b) claimed postmortem experiences among Jesus’ followers, (c) the extraordinarily early resurrection proclamation, (d) Paul’s claimed experience and reversal, and (e) James’s emergence as a believer and leader. P10. The bodily-resurrection hypothesis explains these phenomena with one central event: Jesus actually died and subsequently appeared alive because God raised him from the dead. C. Therefore, provided that divine action is not ruled out before the historical evidence is considered, the bodily resurrection of Jesus has substantial explanatory power as a unified explanation of the evidence and should be compared directly against the strongest competing naturalistic explanation.