16. The Most Difficult, Most Necessary Step

In my slow conversion, the deadbolt that barred me from faith was always true belief in the resurrection, since the entirety of Christianity depends on it, as St. Paul himself wrote. Without it, the whole story falls apart, and none of the other miracles matter. The resurrection of a sinless human opens the door to the forgiveness of sins and new life for us all. If there is no resurrection, then Jesus is simply an insane charlatan that deserves no respect or worship. This situation of the resurrection puts everyone into a decision point about whether to believe or not, and this is exactly why Christianity is so challenging. The leap of faith all comes down to the resurrection.

To me the proper response if you do not believe in the resurrection is rejection of all of the Christian faith. Literally, none of it is worth the paper it is written on if he is lying, even the teachings and parables, because to claim divinity without it being true really would be a mental disorder. There is no other response but rejection if the resurrection did not happen, as the teachings of Jesus become moot if the miracle is false. There are lots of teachers in history we can use that didn’t claim something so outlandish. Especially today with all the meditation and self-help books, we can find maxims and aphorisms to live by that do not require belief in miracles.

On the other hand, if the resurrection happened, then you have no choice but to fully embrace Jesus as the savior. This is why belief is hard, because if the resurrection is true, everything is true. All of it, and yes, that includes the hard parts. The resurrection truly is an either/or selection that we have to make, and if the default is choosing doubt and ignoring the claim, the much more difficult choice is to examine and review whether or not to believe in the resurrection.

This dilemma presents a fork in the road on how to live your life, one that must be chosen. This is not like being asked to believe if Athena really sprung from Zeus’s head or to believe in the tree worship of ancient tribes in The Golden Bough, this decision puts the miraculous directly in front of us. And we must choose, as even choosing not to make a choice is itself a choice. Making no choice at all is choosing to deny the miracle. That is the default position, but still it is a choice. I love mythology and trees. Really, who doesn’t? Yes, I love Lord of the Rings and giant oak trees and Ovid’s Metamorphosis and cottonwoods. In fact, I like science too and stand in awe of the everyday miracles of surgery and treatments that save lives. But this dilemma about Jesus and the resurrection cannot be avoided because the reality is that our heart knows there is something more than this world, beyond the confines of science and what is known and knowable, that God is so far beyond our ability and understanding that something supernatural, that is beyond nature, can exist and touch our world. The author of the universe cannot be understood, but you can see the wonder in the world everywhere in art and nature. We are characters in the author’s book who cannot know what is outside of our story here, but we can feel the presence of something higher than just tall tales or the periodic table of elements.

He declared multiple times that he is the way to eternal life. That is a hard pill to swallow for modern rationalists who seek data and a cause for all things. “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live,” and “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I guess this is why Jesus says we have to enter through the narrow gate, because it is hard to find and perhaps harder to decide to walk through that gate. I think it is mainly hard to squeeze my mind and ego through it.

I’ve gone on in a prior post about how the scenario at the tomb on Easter Sunday sowed doubt in me. The story sounded too fantastic to be true, and lacking answers I let my doubt win rather than pursue the subject, since I didn’t get the impression that asking questions was encouraged. I’ve come to realize that Catholicism can handle any question thrown at it, especially ones surrounding the divinity of Jesus. Today I only wish I had sought a deeper understanding of faith sooner in life. I have come to realize that there is no stone left unturned in the writings of the church and the Catechism, as they have spent 2,000 years turning over stones.

Specifically, for the resurrection, there are many points that tipped the scales from doubt to faith, but not without probably cause and good reason. As Frank Morison noted in his book Who Moved the Stone? about his own conversion to the truth of the resurrection:

I have wrestled with that problem and found it tougher than ever I could have conceived possible. It is easy to say that you will believe nothing that will not fit into the mold of a rationalist conception of the universe. But suppose the facts won't fit into that mold? The utmost that an honest man can do is to undertake to examine the facts patiently and impartially, and to see where they lead him.

The main reasons are below, but each could be a lengthy post of its own.

-The fearful and defeated Apostles turns into fearless and unbreakable believers. No one dies for a lie. Not this way. People may be willing to die for a lie that gives them social standing or power or fame or honor, but the followers of Jesus got none of that. They received the opposite, becoming outcasts and rejects of society.

-If the Romans or people of Jerusalem could have produced the body of Jesus, they would have done so. No one ever did.

-No one disputes that the tomb was empty. This is a massive fact, even for those that accuse the Apostles of stealing the body. Clearly the tomb was empty. This is a problem for the Romans, Jews, and Apostles. Even Mary Magdalene first announces that the body has been taken. Had his body been moved to a different tomb or location, rumor and hearsay in the city would have created cause for a search, and even today pilgrimages to the “correct” tomb in Jerusalem would be occurring. This didn’t happen. The powers at the time try to convince people that the Apostles moved the body, but these men were all cowering in fear, scattered across the city or returned home. Someone in the city of Jerusalem would have known where this second burial location was at, but no one appears to even be searching for a kidnapped body.

-If the Apostles had moved the body or knew of someone moving the body, one of them would have cracked under the numerous beatings and torture and martyrdom that came to them over the next thirty years. They never waver in their story, not once. None of them. Human beings cannot keep a secret, so if they had a secret of such magnitude, it would have come out.

-If it was all made up, the writers of the Gospels and Acts and James would not have mentioned a 7 week gap between the death of Jesus and the beginning of the preaching the Good News. This gap only causes doubt or gives detractors an entry point to suggest that the Apostles spent these 7 weeks crafting a story. This is one of the elements of the timeline that actually creates doubt. If the early believers wanted to sell a contrived fable, they would have claimed their preaching began the moment Jesus had risen. But they don’t write that - they all agree that they were confused and fearful until 7 weeks after the death and Resurrection.

-Once they do begin to tell the story of the Resurrection, after Pentecost, the Apostles manage to win over people in the same city where the trial, death, and burial happened. They convince people who were there in the city when it happened. The Apostles didn’t sneak off elsewhere, far away, and start telling people who might be duped, they stood in the city where it happened, where everyone knew it had happened and had even witnessed Jesus’ ministry. The original band of evangelists were uneducated people with no social standing who suddenly begin to convince people that the Resurrection occurred.

-Over 500 people saw the risen Jesus. It’s not just a handful of people. The “hallucination” theory might work for one or two, but not 11, and certainly not 500.

-Women are recorded as the first witnesses at the tomb and this is important, as culturally they were not even allowed to be witnesses in court. This would not help make the case, so it’s clear that the women were the first to witness, or the Gospel writers would have left it out. They would not have wanted to mention this since it worked against their case, but they did mention it, so why would they make it up?

-Over and over in the Gospels and Acts details are included that allow for doubt, or questions about the miracles. The authors are clearly not crafting a tale because elements of the stories do not make sense unless they were true. If they were trying to build up the apostles, why tell about Peter’s denial of Jesus? Why admit Jesus wanted to escape his fate in the Garden by “passing this cup”? Why have Jesus utter the words, “My God, My God, why you have forsaken me,” on the cross? Why not make the stone at the tomb crumble like magic? Why admit that the Apostles fell asleep in the Garden? Why characterize the Apostles as bumbling rubes so frequently? These books read like no other literature ever written and the writers were not literary types or trained storytellers. These aren’t troubadours, they are fishermen and tax collectors. The reason for all of these curiosities in the Gospels is that the truth needs no rehearsal.

-Crucifixion was a brutal spectacle meant to shame. The fact that the savior of the world would be shamefully executed in this way – no one would make up a story like this. It was demoralizing and devastating to the Apostles, until the Resurrection and Pentecost turned them into lions. To have your savior of the world, your messiah, rushed through an urgent kangaroo court trial and brutally executed with two murderers does not fit with any other story ever told. And no, the myth of Horus is not the same, not even close. Great effort among doubters is made to disable the message, but most amazing is that however many angles the attack takes to steer people away from the Gospels, it never works. The truth of these four books cannot be squashed, despite the Herculean efforts of writers and governments. The story taps into what is written in our hearts and for those who come to believe, the idea that we are both sinners and saved is shocking. That we are corrupt and don’t deserve saving, coupled with Jesus’ coming to serve us and die for us as if we were the heroes of the story, could not be invented by these writers and agreed upon so readily unless they were writing the truth. There is no myth of god of any other religion where the hero dies for the unworthy and then immediately turns around and forgives his killers. If anything, all other myths have the god turn around and wreak vengeance upon his tormentors. For anyone that reads these books without a cynical eye, with a historical context and critical study guides like those of the Navarre Bible or Word on Fire Bible, the reader will begin to feel the power of these words, as there is no myth or history or genre that can compare to this story.

-The Gospels agree that Jesus had said multiple times that he would rise on the third day. This clearly stood out in the Apostles memory as it is recorded in multiple places. This “third day” repetition is hammered into them by Jesus as a reminder.

-The “swoon theory” of Jesus not dying on the cross is beyond ridiculous, as the witnesses of the risen Christ do not see a staggering, bloody, nearly dead man in the Upper Room. They see a fully restored man, but with the wounds to prove it is Him. A “swooned” man who had been tortured and whipped and crucified and lanced wouldn’t be restored in a mere 2 days after the event. He wouldn’t be able to walk or move. Those type of injuries would have had a man on a gurney, not eating fish and walking to Emmaus. Moreover, the “swoon theory” didn’t come about until modern times when some creative academics got together and invented it.

-There is more written about Jesus than any other historical figure of his time. Clearly he existed, and clearly the Romans crucified him. Matt Nelson of Word on Fire recently wrote an article on this. 

-Ancient people, I have come to realize, were probably less gullible than people are today (see the internet and Facebook for ample evidence). The idea that the “ancients” were morons is just modern prejudice, also known as chronological snobbery. The idea of someone rising bodily and passing through walls and ascending to heaven would have been every bit as incredulous to an ancient audience as us today with all of our gains in modern science.

-The message could not be stopped. In a short time, this idea spread like wildfire. Starting with Rome and ever since, empires have attempted to stop the message of the Resurrection and failed. There is something greater at work, something beyond this world, something stunning and world-changing. There have been plenty of false messiahs whose messages go nowhere. But this one cannot be stopped, and all of the witnesses agree and will die for it and did die for it.

This quote from Frank Morison sums up the challenge that is put before us:

If the sole evidence for this really extraordinary phenomenon lay in a single passage in the early chapters of Acts it would be possible to regard it as the rather exuberant record of a contemporary historian whose close connection with the movement had biased and colored his views. But this is precisely what no one can claim. There is a far earlier and more authoritative testimony in the letters of Paul, of Peter, and of James the Just, and in the admittedly historic network of Christian churches stretching from Jerusalem through Asia Minor to the catacombs at Rome. Only from an intensely heated center of burning zeal could this vast field of lava have been thrown out from a tiny country like Palestine to the limits of the Roman world…The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgments of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power.

Yet the original material from which we have to derive this dynamic force consists of a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others.

I do not want to minimize the character of the historic nucleus from which Christianity sprang, but, seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not, and the more we think of it disintegrating under the crisis, the less can we imagine it rewelding into that molten focus that achieved those results. Yet the clear evidence of history is that it did. Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them…

…The sequence of coincidences is too strong. When we remember the swinging around of the disciples from panic fear to absolute certitude, the singular matter of the seven weeks' gap, the extraordinarily rapid adhesion of converts in Jerusalem, the strange absence of administrative vigor on the part of the authorities, the steady growing of the church, both in authority and power, until the whole situation blew up into the frenzied attempts at suppression under Saul, we realize The Historic Crux of the Problem that we are in the presence of something far more tangible than the psychological repercussion of a fisherman's dream.

If the flip happens in your brain, from disbelief to belief, where resurrection becomes a capitalized “R” - Resurrection - you are in trouble, because there is no turning back. You will be stuck with the result of being happy and having a purpose in your life like you have never experienced before. You will no longer be sinking, you will have a hand reach out for you when you look away and start to fall. The fear of being adrift will disappear when you say, “God, help me,” and Jesus will reach out and grab your hand before it goes under. He will save you first, and then with a gentle rebuke he will say to you, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Notes:

Listen to Trent Horn on comparisons to other myths.

Read Matt Nelson’s article on the existence of Jesus and 4 reasons to believe in the crucifixion.

Book: Who Moved the Stone?