Resurrection of Jesus Christ |
According to the New Testament, God raised Jesus Christ from the dead on the third day after his
crucifixion. This event is referred to in Christian terminology as
the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and is commemorated and celebrated by most Christians each year at Easter.
Most Christians accept the New Testament story as an historical
account of an actual event central to their faith. According to them, hope in the
Resurrection distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian: the belief that Jesus Christ died for the sins of humanity and was
resurrected to live with God the Father is regarded by many as the cornerstone of Christianity. Saint Paul said that if the resurrection did not really happen, then Christians were to be pitied
above all men (1 Corinthians 15:19). Christians have lived and died the
death of martyrs in the hope both of Christ's resurrection in the past and of their own in the future.
However, there is significant dissent. Non-Christians generally view the New Testament account of the resurrection of Jesus as
fictional to varying degrees. Under the influence of modernity, many
self-described Christians consider the historicity of the resurrection to be irrelevant to its significance as a religious symbol
of hope, and accept it as a richly symbolic and spiritually nourishing myth. According to
them, the fundamental difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is a subjective one, centered upon how a person responds
to the myth: making the resurrection a matter not of history, but of religious attitude. This rejection of the essentially
historical nature of the resurrection of Jesus is one of the issues that have divided orthodox Pauline Christians on the one side
from Modernist Christianity, which denies that belief
in historical factuality is defensible, but accepts that belief in the resurrection is nevertheless essential to Christian faith.
Those who believe that the resurrection must be accepted as a fact of history, and in those terms essential to Christianity, often cannot regard as genuine Christians those who view the
resurrection as an unhistorical myth. It must be stressed that the orthodox view dominates among the adherents of Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Churches and mainline Protestant
denominations, with the possible exception of Anglicans.
In support of this view, the defenders of the historical view have all Church history on their side. It is for them, as it has been in all eras of the Church, the bridge between
the beginning and the end of human destiny as represented in the Fall and the Consummation: the very essence of faith. People reared in Christian culture (as well as non-Christians) may consider the
crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ to be powerful myths (for instance, Carl
Jung suggests in his essay "The Answer to Job" that the crucifixion-resurrection story was the forceful spiritual symbol of,
literally, God-as-Yahweh becoming God-as-Job). But these opinions rather represent personal approaches to spirituality, and are
at odds with an historical view of the Christian religion. Nevertheless, this allowance for a subjective understanding of the
importance of the resurrection has gained a vast representation among the mainline Protestant churches since the middle of the
20th century.
The Biblical account
The primary accounts of the resurrection are in the Gospels: the last chapter of
Matthew, of Mark, and of Luke, as well as the last two
chapters of John.
Some other New Testament references to this event are:
- Acts 4:10 Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye
crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.
- 1 Cor 6:14 And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power.
- Gal 1:1 Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from
the dead;)
- 1 Pet 1:21 Who by him do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead, and gave him glory; that your
faith and hope might be in God
Other Christian records
Some of the earliest records of the resurrection outside the New
Testament are found in the writings of Ignatius (50 -
115), Polycarp (69 - 155) Justin Martyr (100 - 165), and Tertullian (160 - 220).
The Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians -- 1:2 - 2:1, 12:2
The Letters of Ignatius...
- ... to the Ephesians -- 20:1
- ... to the Magnesians -- 11:1
- ... to the Trallians -- 9:1-2 (one of the more detailed mentions of the historical events)
- ... to the Romans -- 6:1
- ... to the Philadelphians -- 8:2 - 9:2
- ... to the Smyrnaeans -- 1:1 - 3:3 (another passage with slightly more historical details than the others)
The letter of the Romans to the Corinthians, probably written by Pope
Clement I, also speaks of the resurrection at length.
Non-Christian records
The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus is reputed to have written
in 93 that Jesus "appeared to [the disciples] alive again the third day; as the divine prophets
had foretold". However, this is a highly controversial passage: see Josephus on Jesus for more information.
The historicity of the resurrection
As with all historical events before the past few hundred years, the issue of historicity is an important aspect of any
person's belief in the actual occurrence of the resurrection. In contrast with scientific phenomena for which reproducibility and falsifiability
are essential, historical phenomena depend on different criteria, such as uniqueness of occurrence, plausibility of
circumstances, and testimony of witnesses.
Christians who defend the resurrection's historicity claim the following:
- Multiple eyewitness accounts - different people, different times, different situations, all seeing the resurrected Jesus,
eating with him, talking with him.
- Eyewitnesses who were willing to suffer and die for their testimonies, which ends any chance of false motives for their
testimonies.
- The Gospels state that the early witnesses to the Empty Tomb and the Risen Christ were women, whose testimony was not
regarded as credible in the patriarchal Judaism of that period. If the resurrection stories were invented, one would not expect this: a hoax or conspiracy
would have used men as these early witnesses. An honest account, on the other hand, would have described what was true, however
inconvenient it was.
- Who could find a whole group of people willing to concoct a wild lie, be tortured and killed for it, and not have one of them
tell the truth to escape death?
- The morality of Jesus and his disciples.
- The radical change of Saul of Tarsus to the Apostle Paul.
- The birth and rapid spread of the early church, all from people who were originally hiding in fear.
- The Bible openly declared that the resurrection had over 500 witnesses, many still alive at the time. This open declaration
was in the face of non-Christians who could respond to the charge.
- The Jewish Scriptures contain many statements that Christians have interpreted as saying that God would take a body, die for
sins and rise again
- The early dates for most of the New Testament.
- Jesus fulfilled many Jewish prophecies. The probability of the fulfilment of all of them by chance is extremely small and
best accounted for as a miracle. This ought to prompt us to take more seriously the possibility of a second miracle, the
resurrection.
- The experiences of millions of Christians worldwide today, who claim to have met Jesus personally.
Those who reject or question the resurrection make the following points, among others:
- The Gospels state that Christ was not recognized at first by those who allegedly met him after the resurrection, even though
the contact was sometimes prolonged and intimate. This makes it less clear that the resurrection was a literal rather than
psychological phenomenon or a piece of religious symbolism.
- Human beings have suffered and died throughout history for a huge variety of contradictory religious and non-religious
beliefs. Willingness to die for a belief is not direct evidence of the truth of a belief, merely of the strength of the
believer's faith in that belief, and human beings have an enormous capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking.
- The Gospel accounts of the resurrection are allegedly incoherent and inconsistent, and there appears to be evidence of a
progressive supernaturalization involving the appearance of
angels at the Empty tomb.
- There is evidence in Mark, generally recognized as the earliest
Gospel, that the resurrection account has been added by a later hand (see Markan priority and Mark
16).
- If the resurrection is so clearly prophesied in Jewish scripture and the contemporary historical evidence for its actual
occurrence so strong, we require another miracle to account for its rejection not only by the vast majority of Jews in the first
century A.D. but also by the vast majority of Jews ever since, despite the persistent efforts of Christians to persuade them of
the error of their ways. For many centuries Christians explained this rejection as evidence of a special Jewish stubbornness and
even wickedness (see Christianity and
anti-Semitism).
Some historians have questioned the historicity of the events related by the New Testament. One of the first to do so was
Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794), in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
arguing about the fact that no Roman Historian quotes any darkness of three hours at the time of Christ's death; other historians
have explained this darkness as not a true solar eclipse but as being
caused by very dark clouds, local to the Jerusalem area.
Comparisons with other Resurrection stories
While the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, accounts of other resurrections also appear in religion, myth, and fable. This leads some to suggest
that the founding Christians invented the story of Jesus' resurrection based on other pagan traditions. However since
resurrection stories in these "mystery religions" almost always center around agricultural cycles (i.e. seedtime and harvest) and
involve their god dying and being resurrected every year any resemblance to the resurrection of Jesus is strictly superficial. We
also do not have good records of what the "mystery religions" believed before c. AD 200, but given their propensity of borrowing
from one another and the growth of Christianity at that time Christians argue that it is highly likely they borrowed from
Christianity rather than the reverse.
Another observation is that while many believers in the various "mystery religions" in the first and second centuries of the
Roman Empire freely borrowed from each other, Christianity was not an offshoot of any of these, but of Judaism. Paul the Apostle,
who wrote much of the New Testament, was himself a Jew, a Pharisee, until his conversion on the road to Damascus, and had been
trained by Gamaliel, one of the leading Jewish theologians of the time. In each town that Paul visited, he preached in the Jewish
synagogues before preaching to the Gentiles or non-Jews. Therefore, Christians argue that it is unlikely that the resurrection
story would be invented or borrowed in order to appeal to Gentiles. Skeptics, however, point out that it was Gentiles, not Jews,
who embraced and eventually dominated Christianity, which suggests that Gentiles were much readier to believe in stories like the
resurrection.
Justin Martyr argued in the second century that Jesus' virgin birth, death and resurrection were prophesied by the Hebrew scriptures, and
that similar stories in other religions were loosely based on the same Hebrew prophecies.
See also
- "Did Jesus Rise From The Dead"
- The Resurrection debate between Gary Habermas and Anthony Flew, referred to above
- Mark 16 -- discussion of the resurrection appearances in the final chapter of the
Gospel of Mark.
- The empty tomb
- Shroud of Turin
- Easter
External links
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