The Resurrection of Christ: not as outlandish as we think
by: Natalie Glover
Issue Date: 3/24/08; The Kentucky Kernel
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the event upon which the whole of Christianity hinges; without it, we have no reason to believe in His divinity. This is a topic of which I can only scratch the surface in the space allotted, but my goal is to simply get you thinking beyond the visits home, colorful bunnies and eggs, and yearly church visits to examine the miracle of the empty tomb.
Wouldn’t believing in miracles in the first place mean accepting violations of the laws of nature? Not quite. If we insist on explaining whatever happens in terms of natural causes, we are not doing much more than begging the question (i.e., miracles go against the principle that miracles don’t happen). If miracles are performed by an omnipotent God who put the laws of nature in place, no violation has occurred anyhow. We have no cause to call miracles improbable unless we first assume that there is no God who works miracles, and I have yet to encounter anyone with a logical argument for this belief.
The Bible has been examined by and passed all the tests by which other historical works are measured. There is a plethora of historical, archeological and eyewitness evidence for its claims, and it doesn’t take much research to discover that this is true. The Gospels were all written within several decades of the events they accounted for, and this is not enough time for substantial legendary accretion – in which embellishments of a story remove it from historical fact – to happen.
Scholars of every persuasion agree that Jesus was crucified and buried in the sealed, private tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Though various accounts differ regarding secondary details, they all state that the tomb was visited by a group of women the following Sunday and found empty – no one argued that it wasn’t. The important question was of what happened to Jesus’ body.
In answering this question, we are faced with five options, the first being that Jesus never actually died. This is called swoon theory and has a number of refutations, one of which explains that blood and water poured from Jesus’s pierced heart, signifying collapsed lungs and death by asphyxiation. Anyone who knows much about the gory details of a crucifixion would never believe that he survived.
The second is conspiracy theory. To believe this, you must assert that 12 ordinary peasants changed the Roman world with a lie that led them all willingly to their deaths. But they were persecuted and executed, they had no motive for inventing such a story, and any tales would have easily been exposed by the disciples’ many powerful adversaries. Considering the low status of women in first-century Jewish society, it would have been embarrassing to admit that they were first to lay eyes on Jesus, but the accounts that this was so were unanimous.
Thirdly is a hallucination, which is private, individual and subjective. But Christ appeared to 500 people at once (1 Corinthians 15:3-8), most of whom were still alive for questioning when this fact was recorded. Plus, these people weren’t insane. Jesus was touched by several people, and he also talked and ate food. (Hallucinations don’t behave this way.) And keep in mind that no one ever produced the body.
A fourth objection is that this was simply a myth, one of the many parts of Scripture meant to be symbolic. Not only is this specifically refuted in the New Testament (2 Peter 1:16), but the style of the Gospels is starkly different from that of all the myths, containing more detail, eyewitness description and psychological depth than would be warranted by any legend.
Your fifth option is to believe that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. We hold documented evidence sufficient for most of what we believe, and this matter is not as different as we may think.
Again, I have only given you the tip of the iceberg, and a belief in Jesus concerns the heart as much as it does the head. I simply hope that I have cleared up some issues in the latter by shedding some light on the real meaning of Easter.
Natalie Glover is a psychology and philosophy senior. E-mail opinions@kykernel.com.
