It is Easter. The custom among Christians has ever been to observe this as the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord. Not quite all Christians: for I know several strict Calvinists of the Westminster Confession, who reject both Christmas and Easter as pagan celebrations. God bless them, they are fine people, and my brethren, even if separated from me by more schisms than I can count.
For that matter, as my ancient Roman Church teaches, all men are my brothers, and that includes all women and children, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, animists, atheists, etc. Even Richard Dawkins.
We must (as my Pope also mentions from time to time) categorically respect every sincere and peaceable manifestation of religious belief, no matter how seriously we may believe it is in error.
As he said at the University of Regensburg in 2006, in a lecture that was maliciously misconstrued, we must further insist that our differences be discussed without violence and intimidation, and by the light of a reason that should be accepted
as the common property of all mankind. In the conditions of the modern world, there is no alternative that does not lead to cataclysm.
Reason, and John Locke, have taught that we can afford to tolerate only the tolerable. We can accept no religious excuse from those who in fact counsel violence and intimidation. There can be no freedom that extends to murder. But it is for an impartial State to enforce reasonable laws, on the admirable principle enunciated in the Koran: “There shall be no compulsion in matters of faith.” (Surah 2:256.)
Conversely, it is not the business of police and courts to suppress reasonable argument and inquiry over the nature and validity of religious claims, only to offer remedies for coercion.
Why would I mention all of this on Easter Sunday? Because we live in a time when malice is openly directed at the faithful of all religions—and because the notion of religious liberty is still a new thing in much of the world, and still a tenuous thing where it has been long accepted.
I care about coercion because I care for freedom; and I care for freedom because I care about the truth. My own path, from atheism, to deism, to Christianity, and latterly reception into the Catholic Church, has depended at every stage on the Socratic principle of following the truth wherever it may lead. I could not have wished to make the whole journey under the threat of arrest. Had the threat come from the Catholic Church, I might never have arrived at her door, for I cannot abide tyranny.
In the last weeks of Lent, I have been reading the sort of book that is germane to the above. It could have helped me decades ago, but it was only published in 2003: The Resurrection of the Son of God, by N.T. Wright, an Anglican clergyman (now their Bishop of Durham) who is also a classical scholar, and a forensic thinker both diligent and ingenious.
The book—all 800 pages of it, and it is the third volume in a series—sets about answering the question, was Jesus bodily resurrected?
It is an assertion that cannot be tested directly, for we can’t go back in time. But it can be investigated in a quasi-legal way, by assembling all the evidence, and examining each witness in turn.
Fearing open inquiry in their hearts, I fear, many faithful Christians are inclined to make the argument, “Of course, if He is God, He can do anything,” and leave it at that. But this is precisely the sort of argument that Wright found unreasonable, since it can relax easily into the vague notion that the Resurrection is poetry, not fact.
The backbone of Wright’s argument will be recognized by any intelligent Christian: that there is plentiful historical evidence for the human existence of Jesus, and plentiful evidence for disciples who knew exactly what they were saying about the Resurrection, and stuck by the story even to martyrdom. Moreover, as Wright elaborately shows, their claim to have witnessed fact, not “poetry,” was well understood in the ancient world, where it was taken as skeptically as any such claim would be taken today.
The clincher is that these were the same disciples who (except John—the one who never suffered martyrdom, but died peacefully in old age) ran and hid at the Crucifixion.
Wright’s argument goes well beyond this, and requires serious attention as it zigzags through space and time, even though he is a consistently clear (and often delightful) writer.
Around that backbone he fleshes an account in which the actual bodily resurrection of Christ emerges as the only conclusion that is consistent with all of a formidably large body of evidence.
I leave my reader to pursue this, or not; and with a reminder of the stakes.
For if Christ is resurrected, we will all be resurrected; and if Christ was not, all Christianity is founded upon a lie.
One wants to be sure of one’s facts in such a case.
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