Pass it on
Mathematician David Robert Grimes calculated that a conspiracy involving more than a few hundred people collapses within years. The early Christian account involved hundreds of public witnesses, many of whom were tortured and executed. No one recanted.
Grimes, a physicist at Oxford, developed a mathematical model for conspiracy failure. His formula accounted for the number of conspirators, the time elapsed, and the probability of any individual conspirator revealing the secret; whether intentionally, accidentally, or under duress. The result: large conspiracies are mathematically doomed. The bigger the conspiracy, the faster it collapses. The maximum plausible lifespan for a conspiracy involving a thousand people is less than a decade.
Paul, writing in 1 Corinthians 15, records that the risen Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of writing. He is effectively challenging his readers to go ask them. If the resurrection was a hoax; a conspiracy fabricated by the disciples; it involved hundreds of co-conspirators who maintained the lie for decades under conditions of severe persecution. Many were executed. None recanted. The conspiracy theory requires more faith than the resurrection. It requires believing that a large group of people, facing torture and death, unanimously chose to die for a lie they knew was a lie; and that no one, not one, broke under pressure.
This does not prove the resurrection. But it eliminates one of the most popular alternative explanations. If the disciples made it up, the conspiracy should have collapsed within years. It did not. It grew. And the people who started it died for it; not for a philosophy they found meaningful, not for a community they loved, but for a specific, falsifiable claim: we saw Him alive. People die for beliefs they hold sincerely all the time. People do not die for beliefs they know are false. The disciples’ willingness to die is not proof their belief was true. It is proof their belief was sincere. And when you combine that sincerity with the other evidence, the simplest explanation is not that they were lying. It is that they were telling the truth.