OPINIONS: RELIGION
Rationality and resurrection
We should reconsider the facts of the Easter story Jonathan Wolstenholme (Year 13)
E aster. chocolate, bunnies, eggs, cake, family. A smaller, springtime version of our sentimentalised – and commercialised – Christmas. the Bible-thumpers banging on about Jesus. But as the story centres not on a cute baby in a manger, but the unscientific absurdity of a man rising from the dead, we can more easily ignore the myth-mongers, and tuck into our next mini-egg. No one believes in the Easter We must still, of course, endure Easter is when Christians remember the resurrection, the fundamental fact of our faith. If Jesus did not rise, our evidence supporting his claim to be the son of God is thrown out. The apostle Paul spelt out the consequences of this in his first epistle to the fledgling Christian community at Corinth, later captured in the wonderful hymn of the London-based Anglican priest, GR Woodward: ‘Had Christ, that once was slain, ne’er burst his three day bunny. Surely no one actually believes in the resurrection? I do.
and death in order to spread a lie they didn’t believe? Yet these disciples of Jesus, poor Galilean fishermen with nothing to gain and everything to lose, proved willing to testify unto martyrdom to Christ’s resurrection. To me, that also seems pretty incredible. Alleynians: heed what your truly liberal education teaches. Consider the evidence, without predetermining the conclusion. Too many ignore inconvenient evidence because it might lead them to uncomfortable conclusions. Instead, they indulge in the fiction that Christianity – indeed, any faith other than our secular ‘norm’ – must be, by definition, fact-free. What evidence, then, can I offer? Can you take any of it seriously? Am I about to brandish my Bible? As it happens, I believe that a great deal of the accounts of the man Jesus given in the New Testament are reliable. So do most serious biblical scholars. But we needn’t dwell only on the dusty testimony of texts. History makes its case. ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’, argued Tertullian in his second-century treatise, Apologeticus . From their graves sprung a living community, a civilisation, millennia of art and culture. From
prison, / our faith had been in vain; but now hath Christ arisen’. For Paul, ‘if Christ be not risen’, man lay ‘yet in sin’; he might ‘eat and drink’ his fill of this world, ‘for tomorrow we die’, with no hope of eternal life. On Easter Sunday, Christians greet each other triumphantly, proclaiming: ‘Christ is risen’ – ‘he is risen indeed’. For me, Easter is about much more than eating our fill of chocolate; it concerns the events around which I try to base all my actions. But how can I have so much confidence in this resurrection? Unlike the credulous of 2,000 years ago, we know that people don’t come back from the dead – that we needn’t believe anything we hear – don’t we? It’s easy to sneer. But it’s totally unfair to assume that people extraordinary. Many contemporaries vehemently denied the resurrection, including the Jewish authorities who demanded Jesus’ crucifixion. It’s also strange to assume that those who radically changed their lives on the basis of an encounter with the risen Christ would have made those changes had they not experienced what they did. And who exactly would suffer torture 2,000 years ago just jumped at any opportunity to believe the
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