Did Jesus exist historically, and is the resurrection factual?

The historical existence of Jesus is corroborated not only by the Gospels but by Flavius Josephus (94 AD), a non-Christian Jewish historian, who described Jesus as "a wise man" who "drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles" before his execution under Pilate. The early Church Fathers treated both the existence and the resurrection of Christ as established facts requiring defense against specific objections. John Chrysostom addressed the empty-tomb question directly, noting that Pilate sealed the sepulcher and set a Roman guard, making the theft theory implausible: a fraud that thorough would have been exposed immediately by the authorities who had the most to gain from disproving it. Theodoret connected the resurrection to unified apostolic proclamation — "God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ" — treating it as eyewitness-derived testimony about the same historical figure who died under Roman execution. Augustine treated the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection as historical precedents modeling Christian endurance, not allegory, and defended Christianity's historical dominance and fulfilled predictions as evidence of its truth. Tertullian argued the necessity of the bodily incarnation: if Christ was not truly born, he was not truly crucified; if not truly crucified, the resurrection has no historical content. In the patristic view, the resurrection is not less historical for being miraculous — it is the divine validation of the man who was actually crucified under Pontius Pilate.