Resurrection, Delegated Agency, and the Identification of an Ultimate Source

Suppose an investigator knows with certainty that Jesus died and that the same person returned to bodily life. What would warrant identifying the source of the return? This article compares principles for inferring proximate production, authorization, the provenance of a communication and doctrinal identity from a common concession. It assesses formal consequence separately from the warrant for decisive premises and from comparative evidential support. A worked case shows how a rule about control of the laws leaves room for a dependent producer with permission, even given a personal controller. A comparison of the return as a sign with collective experience at Sinai applies the same test for divine provenance to different kinds of evidence. The results locate which additional premises could settle a given attribution and which remain unestablished. The cosmological contrasts illustrate the limits of incremental support when the relevant physical information already belongs to the investigator's common background.