The New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15

First Corinthians chapter fifteen is Paul's own extended argument for the reality of Jesus's bodily resurrection and its consequence for believers, and it is cited here as the primary text itself, the earliest written account of resurrection belief in the New Testament corpus and a central proof text within Christian theology across nearly every tradition. As scripture rather than as scholarship, its authority for a reader depends entirely on the confessional or historical-critical framework applied to it: within Christian traditions it functions as a normative theological claim, while historical-critical scholarship reads it primarily as evidence for what the earliest Christian communities believed and taught within roughly two decades of the crucifixion, a distinct and more modest claim than the passage's own theological one. Both readings are legitimate uses of the same text for different purposes.