Before leaving the subject of human survival I must touch very briefly on the following point. Christians often allege that the resurrection of Jesus constitutes evidence for human survival; that, without this evidence, the doctrine would be a mere pious aspiration; but that, with it, human survival becomes an established fact. This is a favourite theme of Easter-day sermons. Now, if I may say so without offence, this seems to me to be one of the world's worst arguments. Let us grant, what is at best questionable, that the resurrection really happened as described. Even so, the case of Jesus would differ from that of any ordinary man in at least two quite fundamental respects. In the first place, if Christianity be true, though Jesus was human, he was also divine. No other human being resembles him in this respect. Secondly, the body of Jesus did not decay in the tomb, but was transformed; whilst the body of every ordinary man rots and disintegrates soon after his death. Therefore, if men do survive the death of their bodies, the process must be utterly unlike that which took place when Jesus survived His death on the cross. Thus the analogy breaks down in every relevant respect, and so an argument from the resurrection of Jesus to the survival of bodily death by ordinary men is utterly worthless.
(C. D. Broad, "The Present Relations of Science and Religion," Philosophy 14 [April 1939]: 131-54, at 147-8 [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 