Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

Yes - and the strongest case doesn't even begin by asking you to trust the Gospels. It begins with a short list of facts that even skeptical scholars grant - the 'minimal facts' approach developed by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona. Whatever survives that filter is common ground.

Four items are widely conceded across the scholarly spectrum, believers and skeptics alike: Jesus died by crucifixion (John Dominic Crossan, a very skeptical scholar, calls this 'as sure as anything historical can ever be'); his disciples sincerely believed they saw him alive afterward; the persecutor Paul was converted by what he took to be an appearance; and the skeptic James, Jesus' own brother, was too. Crucially, the resurrection was being proclaimed almost immediately - the creed Paul 'received' and 'delivered' in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 is dated by critical scholars to within a few years of the crucifixion, far too early to be legend.

The argument is an inference to the best explanation. Each natural alternative covers a fact or two but breaks on the rest: hallucination doesn't explain a hostile outsider like Paul; a stolen body doesn't explain why the disciples would suffer and die for what they would then know was a fraud; legend doesn't fit the timeline. The resurrection accounts for the whole set at once.

Be honest about the limit. This doesn't force the conclusion on someone whose worldview rules out miracles in advance - as the scholar Dale Allison notes, 'probability is in the eye of the beholder.' What it does is remove the historical excuse for unbelief: if you are open to the possibility that God acts, the evidence makes the resurrection the most reasonable explanation of an otherwise baffling set of facts.