Christ is risen. A summary of the state of scholarly play

This seems to be a pretty useful summary of where things are up to. Not as sure as some Christians would like, but far more positive towards Christian claims than the likes of Richard Dawkins would have us believe.

Despite the arguments of some Christian apologists, most mainstream scholars do not treat the resurrection as belonging to their field of inquiry. It is similar to Jesus' healings. Historians would not say that Jesus actually performed miracles - that would be to turn from history to philosophy and theology. They can only say that he did things which those around him interpreted as miraculous. So, too, with the resurrection. No historian wearing his or her historical cap would say that God raised Jesus from the dead. That is a theological interpretation of the evidence. What most scholars do affirm is more modest, though not without significance: Jesus' tomb was empty shortly after his crucifixion and significant numbers of men and women experienced what they believed to be appearances of the risen Jesus. These are the historical facts of Easter Sunday: an empty tomb and resurrection experiences. They are accepted not only by serious Christian scholars but also by leading Jewish historians such as Vermes and self-confessed agnostics such as Professor Ed Sanders of Duke University, who once wrote: "That Jesus' followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know." This is typical of the responsible historian's approach to Easter: whatever the explanation, something extraordinary happened.