Throughout salvation history, a key litmus test of a prophet’s authenticity was whether his ministry was divinely attested with the occurrence of supporting miracles. Neither the presence or absence of signs and wonders were considered definitive. But if someone claiming to be God’s representative received backup for his claims from Heaven, you knew he was someone worth taking seriously.
And the more astounding the miracle—i.e., the more authority over creation required to pull it off—the stronger the miracle’s evidentiary force. After all, parting the sea is harder to explain with appeals to nature than making a spring gush from a rock.
Related: A Eucharistic Miracle
This being the Easter season, it is fitting and just to turn our attention to Christianity’s defining miracle, the Resurrection of Jesus. Requiring as it did sovereign authority over life and death, and being documented in multiple Christian and secular sources, the Resurrection is not only the greatest miracle of all time, it’s the best-attested.
Catholic Answers head apologist Jimmy Akin does a theological and empirical deep dive into Christ’s rising from the grave. Along the way, he addresses several major Resurrection-debunking theories in generous detail and concludes whether or not they hold water.
Now, a core aspect of apologetics is meeting infidels where they are. And since most Western heathens are immersed in the Pop Cult, Jimmy does resort to some pretty cringe pop culture analogies. That said, his dissections of the leading arguments against the Resurrection are quite sound.
See for yourself:
A few Tl; dw highlights:
- The Romans put the same engineering mastery that built roads and aqueducts into perfecting crucifixion; in other words, they refined it to kill the condemned every time, so that’s what it did.
- If Jesus’ followers stole his body, the chief priests wouldn’t have needed to bribe the tomb guards to spread that story.
- Ancient pharmacology fell far short of today’s standards. Even if you managed to drug someone into a death-like state, reviving him at all would have been a gamble; without permanent debilitating complications, an even bigger gamble. And that’s with a healthy subject, never mind one who’d just been crucified.
Related: Pharmakeia
The long and the short of it is, the weight of the evidence indicates that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, and was buried. And He rose again and ascended into Heaven.
Which makes Christ’s Resurrection the best-attested miracle of all time.
At bare minimum, the fact of the Resurrection demands that Christianity’s claims be taken seriously. And as some philosophers make a compelling case for, not only Christianity, but God Himself, can be proven for a certainty starting from the datum of the Resurrection.
Christos anesti. Alleluia!
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Truly, He is Risen!
A reminder from a Substack article on how it was not an unheard of belief in that era that one of significant repute might rise from the dead. But, someone who was hung from a tree? Unheard of.
The exclamation of the centurion and the soldiers holds greater impact when you know this.
https://rontimus.substack.com/p/risen-from-death-or-risen-from-shame
That’s a valuable insight into the pagan perspective.
The Sadducees, on the other hand, denied resurrection altogether. And the Pharisees only held to the general resurrection on the Last Day. Even Jesus’ disciples weren’t expecting Him to rise from the dead. So much for theories that they conspired to fake His Resurrection.
It’s one of those events where more mental gymnastics are needed to explain it away rather than to simply believe it.
One thing I’ve noticed with atheists trying to debunk Christianity is that their main point of attack is always the supernatural elements of the Gospel, even though I’d argue many non-Christians would consider His teachings (focusing on the purely practical ones) to make a lot of sense.
Why? Simple: they don’t really have an issue with His teachings, they have an issue with confessing Him as Lord, because such a confession means they’ll need to submit to His teachings alone and live their lives according to them. You have this interesting detail that Jesus’ opponents in the Gospels (best example being Judas), at best, can only speak of Him as a teacher.
They can’t argue with His teachings (which they instinctively know to be true), so they can only mock the supernatural elements and/or dismiss His teachings as ‘good guidance’ and nothing else. There’s a substantial difference between merely agreeing with His Word and actually worshipping Him, which is an important distinction I still struggle with at times.
For a while I even indulged in the heresy of viewing the Gospels as mostly metaphorical, where I regarded Jesus as basically being a mythic personification of “the truth”, and even though I’d agree with His teachings, I read the Gospels in that context.
Simply put, the entire text (and I mean virtually every story element), including His teachings, still made complete logical sense.
Truly amazing.