Last week I wrote a post here on David Hume, miracles, and the resurrection of Jesus. Some of the commenters took issue with my claim that "all the alternatives to the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead are more incredible than the miracle." I'd like to elaborate on that here.

Christians claim that the historical human being Jesus of Nazareth was executed then physically rose from the dead and stayed alive. He was seen by many people and then was seen to vanish into the invisible realm. Here we have the most revolutionary and radical question of human history. Did it really happen?

There are only three plausible options: that Jesus rose from the dead as Christians contend; that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t really die; or that he died, but that somehow his body disappeared and his disciples came to believe that he rose from the dead. The first question therefore is, did Jesus really die?

Alternative #1: Jesus Didn't Die

 
After his trial, Jesus of Nazareth was tortured by flogging. The punishment was not only severe, it was public. The Romans flogged a criminal with whips that had pieces of glass, pottery, and metal tied into the cords. Not only was Jesus flogged to within an inch of his life, but his executioners were professionals whose jobs depended on them doing a thorough job. His flogging was public and so was his execution. He was taken through the city streets and crucified in a public place.

Furthermore, his enemies themselves were present to make sure the job was done. This is recorded in the gospels, but the basic facts match what we know of Roman customs of the time and there is no reason why they should be doubted.

Using David Hume’s idea that we must believe that option which is easiest to believe, saying that Jesus was killed is certainly easier to believe than saying he was not killed on that dark afternoon. If he was not killed, then the disciples made up the story of his execution, but why would devotees of a religious preacher make up the story that he was executed as a criminal, especially since it was a public event? Many people saw it take place. We must conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and died.

Nevertheless, some people, including many Muslims, theorize that it wasn’t really Jesus who died. It was perhaps his brother James who resembled him, or it was Judas, or a celebrity lookalike who stood in for Jesus. Again, it takes more faith to believe in these theories than the simple truth. The reason Judas kissed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was to confirm his identity. Also, Peter was certain who he was denying and the crowd before Pilate knew who they were accusing. The scribes and Pharisees were intent on Jesus' death and interrogated him personally. Are we to believe that an impostor fooled them all? Was the man killed a stand in? Surely when things became deadly the patsy would have denied that he was Jesus of Nazareth.

Other non-Christians theorize that it was Jesus on the cross, but he didn’t really die. Perhaps he was drugged with painkillers and simply passed out. The gospel says a soldier offered him a painkiller, but he refused it. If Jesus only passed out we must believe that the man was flogged so that the torture ripped great chunks of flesh from his body. After dragging the heavy cross through the city streets, he was nailed to it by professional executioners who, instead of breaking his legs to hasten his death, stabbed him with a spear through the heart. Water and blood came from the wound and modern medical experts testify that this only happens after death.

But we’re to believe that he only passed out or went into a coma? Again, this is more difficult to believe than the reported story. But if we go with this theory, as the story progresses it gets even more difficult to believe.

Let us just suppose that Jesus did somehow survive the flogging, the crucifixion, and the thrust of the spear. After he was taken down he was buried. Now we have to believe that he woke up in a freezing tomb on a chilly Spring morning. Having suffered a huge blood loss, horrific wounds, a spear in the side and terrible shock and trauma. Despite all this he stops to unwrap his own tightly wound shroud and head cloth and he takes care to fold them neatly at the foot of his bed. Then (from the inside) he rolls back a stone on the outside of the tomb that weighs a couple of tons.

He then stumbles out, totally naked, and limps up to the disciples on his bloody feet, with his back looking like a butcher shop. His head is covered with puncture wounds and contusions. His side has a gaping wound. He shows the disciples his hands, and gasps out a greeting. What would you have done? You would have shrieked in horror and realized that your friend had somehow survived a most terrible ordeal, then you would take him home, call the doctor and put him to bed.

Instead we are supposed to believe that the disciples said, “He is risen! Alleluia! Let’s start a new religion!”

Again, it takes more faith to believe such an outrageous theory than to accept the simple events as they were related. Hume was right. We must believe the option which is most probable.

Alternative #2: Jesus Died, But Didn't Rise Again

 
That brings us to the next category of resurrection deniers who say Jesus really did die, but something else happened to his body. Consequently his disciples came to believe that he had risen from the dead.

Was his body hurriedly abandoned and thrown on the dump to be devoured by dogs? We know from other evidence that the Jews were very careful about burying the bodies of their loved ones, and the details of the story are there in the gospels. His friends took the body to bury it. If the body had not been buried why did Jesus’ enemies ask Pilate for guards for the tomb?

Maybe the disciples stole the body. Shall we believe that the eleven men who fled in terror when their friend was arrested suddenly got back together and planned a heist worthy of a "Mission Impossible" film? Why would they do that? They were as surprised as everyone else by the resurrection. Would they really plan such a heist to perpetrate a hoax? Is this the sort of hoax anyone would believe? No. You only plan a hoax if the hoax is something people might just fall for. A hoax to make people believe someone had risen from the dead?

Did they perpetrate the hoax to start a new religion? Why would they do that? What was in it for them? There was no such thing as starting a religion to be a prosperity preacher back then. As history proved, the only thing they got out of it was the loss of all their worldly goods, persecution, imprisonment, torture, homelessness, and eventually slow torture and martyrdom. They welcomed all that for a hoax?

Perhaps, some propose, the disciples went to the wrong tomb. But if they had, would they have drawn the conclusion that Jesus had risen from the dead? No. They would have said, “Whoops, wrong tomb. Hey, we messed up again!” Had Jesus been in another tomb all his enemies would have produced the body and pointed out the disciples’ foolish mistake. Once again, to believe the alternative theory is more difficult than to believe the traditional account.

Then we have the modernist theologian’s answer. For the modernist Christian, the resurrection was not a “crudely physical” event, but a “spiritual reality”. In other words, in some sort of wonderful way the teachings and example of Jesus continued to live in the hearts and minds of his followers and this, if you like, is what resurrection is really all about.

The problem here is that the simple meaning of the word “resurrection” is that a body that was dead came back to life again. There are spiritual meanings to be derived from this fact to be sure, but if there were no physical fact, then the spiritual meanings would be meaningless. Saying that the resurrection was not physical but a “spiritual event” is like a woman on her wedding night denying her husband the consummation of their marriage by saying, “We needn’t be quite so crudely physical as to have sexual intercourse. Marriage is, after all, simply a beautiful spiritual idea!”

The modernist theologian’s reductionist explanation doesn’t account for the simple facts of the whole story. Shall we believe that the apostles went on to follow lives of hardship, suffering, and deprivation, finally being tortured and killed for what was merely a “spiritual meaning” or a “beautiful theological idea”? I don’t think so.

When faced with the slow torture of crucifixion or being flayed or boiled alive don’t you think they would have said, “Hold on! All that resurrection Son of God stuff? You misunderstood! It didn’t really happen! It was only a spiritual meaning! It was a metaphor! It was a theological construct!”

Finally, we have the Biblical scholars’ theory that St. Paul and the gospel writers made up all the resurrection stories to bolster their new religion. There are too many implausible details to go into at this point, but the main obstacle to this conspiracy theory is that St. Paul died only thirty years after the death of Jesus himself, and he reported that the stories he had about the resurrection were facts he himself had received from eyewitnesses. If St. Paul or the gospel writers had made it all up, there were still plenty of eyewitnesses alive who would have corrected them—not least the murderous enemies of the new religion.

The fact of the resurrection is a good starting point for the debates about God’s existence. Arguments between Catholics and atheists can move forward in an intriguing way because the arguments surrounding the resurrection are more concrete and literal than philosophical arguments. They bring the argument about God down to earth...which is what the Christian religion is all about in the first place.
 
 
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

In the Bible, Psalms 14 and 53 both open with the statement: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’” Whatever this may tell us about unbelief in ancient Hebrew society, today it is not only, or predominantly, fools who are saying this. And they do not restrict their utterances to their hearts alone.

Especially in the United States and Europe—the historic heart of “Christendom”—there are large (and growing) numbers of intelligent, educated, reasonable people who reject Christianity and the God it proclaims. Many of these find Christian belief to be literally incredible—not just false, but ridiculously and grotesquely so. Some of these are high-profile public figures: scientists, philosophers, journalists, novelists, politicians, bloggers, and stand-up comedians. But most of them are just normal folks. They are colleagues, friends, relatives, and even, at least sometimes, a little bit of ourselves. Crucially, we ought not to forget that, particularly in the United States, these non-fools have likely been (and will ever remain) sealed by baptism; the Catholics among them will have been catechized, confirmed, and given first Communion as “true witnesses of Christ,” as the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” describes them (LG, 11).

These hard facts, especially when combined with rising levels of those “non-affiliated” with religion (most of whom are not, or at least not yet, actual atheists), present the Church with even harder questions. For the most part, despite the Second Vatican Council’s prescient observation in the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”—“atheism may be numbered among the most serious matters of our time and merits more careful attention”—they are questions we have scarcely begun to formulate, let alone answer. Doing so is one of the most urgent tasks that Catholics face today.

Of course, there are myriad reasons (philosophical, psychological, social, cultural, moral) why a person might become skeptical toward the truth-claims of Christianity. Here I'll focus on just one. Somewhat perversely, this is a fundamental feature of the Christian message, yet one that atheists often grasp more intuitively than we do. Basically, the non-fools have realized something essential that we Catholics have been trying to forget.
 

Monstrous Claims

 
Let’s face it: The God of Christianity is an extraordinarily odd kind of being (if one can call God a kind of “being” at all). And the followers of this God subscribe to—or say they do—a list of seemingly ludicrous claims.

It is one thing to affirm a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, who created and sustains “all things visible and invisible.” That is in itself a fairly striking and radical claim—in its time, one that was revolutionary in human history and that the infant Christianity imbibed at the breast of Judaism. Yet it is quite another thing to claim that this God—or worse, one of three persons of this one God—took flesh, resulting in someone both fully God and fully human.

Consider, for example, Christianity’s most instantly recognizable (and thereby most easily ignorable) symbols: the baby Jesus and the crucifix. The first symbol proclaims that this God-man spent a significant amount of time doing things like suffering from colic and cradle cap, screaming in the night for no discernible reason, and weeing incontinently over his sleep-deprived (human) parents. Tears, tantrums and teething are thus the works of the one true God, just as surely as are “the heaven and the earth, the sea, and everything in them” (Acts 4:24).

The second symbol affirms that the God-man was tortured and murdered, subjected not even to some grandiosely superlative mode of suffering and death, as might befit a king, but to the tawdrily mundane form of execution to which the Roman Empire treated countless slaves, pirates and enemies of the state (a fact that in itself raises an interesting question about the kind of God we are dealing with).

It is perhaps fair to say that most believers do not quite realize the outrageous character of these most basic and taken-for-granted hallmarks of Christianity. (Is there not something at least a little strange about hanging around one’s neck a miniature corpse nailed to a tiny cross?) Irrespective of whether they are true or not, these are surely among the wildest and most monstrous claims ever proposed in human history. And if they are true, then they are, or ought to be, the most profound and world-inverting facts about life and the universe. Yet somehow, in the course of nearly 2,000 years, these claims have become so familiar, so tamed and domesticated, as to seem hardly worthy of comment, let alone wonder or puzzlement, among the great majority of those who profess them.
 

Foolishness to the Gentiles

 
Such was not, however, the case for those to whom the good news of Jesus Christ was first proposed. As Paul famously put it: “We proclaim Christ and him crucified, a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). For the Jews, of course, the claim that the Messiah had come but had been crucified was blasphemously scandalous (skandalon being the Greek word for “stumbling-block”). And they were, it should be said, impeccably non-foolish in thinking so: No one was expecting a crucified-and-raised Messiah (hence, for example, Peter’s “satanic” rebuke to Jesus in Matthew 16:22 and the disappointment of those trudging along the road to Emmaus concerning him whom they “had hoped...would be the one to redeem Israel” in Luke 24).

For the gentiles, meanwhile—the non-Jews—the entire proclamation was manifest folly. The very idea that the king of the Jews—indeed, of the whole world—would hail not merely from a backwater of the Empire (Judea), but from a backwater of that backwater (Galilee), would arrive on donkeyback leading a motley assemblage of peasants and fishermen, and would be arrested and crucified as a common criminal before miraculously coming back to life a few days later as the savior of the universe—surely these were the ravings, as the pagan philosopher Celsus put it, of “women, slaves, and little children.”

But for those who have been brought up with this narrative and with the idea of a God who was truly a human being—however imperfectly or infrequently expressed or reflected upon—it is very hard indeed to be genuinely confronted with the Christian proclamation in all of its (apparently) scandalous foolishness. Whether one believes it all or not, it is very easy to nod along half-heartedly (a diaper-clad creator? Fine; a god who gets murdered? Sure; a carpenter who saves the universe? Whatever) as though these are the most boringly obvious facts one has ever heard. And it has to be said that all too often Christian preaching and apologetics simply reinforce this view.

By presenting “Christ and him crucified” as something platitudinous and uncontroversial—something to which all right-minded, non-obtuse people should naturally and non-problematically assent—we risk conditioning not just others, but ourselves, against ever taking this outlandish proposition truly seriously. It is an unusual person who would turn his or her life around for the sake of something platitudinous or commonsensical. And yet it is precisely such a turnaround (metanoia), or repentance, that Jesus thinks is required in order to “believe in the good news” (Mk 1:15).

In The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann remarks that the true import of Good Friday:
 

“is often better recognized by non-Christians and atheists than by religious Christians, because it astonishes and offends them. They see the profane horror and godlessness of the Cross because they do not believe the religious interpretations which have given a meaning to the senselessness of this death.”

 
In this light, consider these remarks taken from two of the New Atheists, that no doubt reflect the views of a wider group of non-fools. Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion:
 

“I have described the atonement...as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity.”

 
And Sam Harris, in Letter to a Christian Nation, writes:
 

“Christianity amounts to the claim that we must love and be loved by a God who approves of the scapegoating, torture, and murder of one man—his son, incidentally—in compensation for the misbehavior and thought-crimes of all others.”

 
Now, as fair descriptions of the theology of the cross, these statements leave much to be desired. But as impressionist reflections on the kind of thing that the crucifixion is—a monstrous affront to, and interruption of, the normal workings of the world (“God’s foolishness,” as Paul puts it)—they are arguably onto something vital to which Christians have inured themselves. While wonderment and incredulity are not quite the same thing, an unbeliever may yet hear strains overlooked by those with ears grown “dull of hearing” (Mt 13:15).
 

Re-encountering the Gospel

 
Dawkins is correct that the problem lies with “ubiquitous familiarity”—not because it undermines our objectivity but rather because it limits our capacity to be shocked and astonished, and thus excited and challenged. It is one thing to believe that Christianity is true. It is quite another to feel amazement that it not only is true, but even could be so, and to (re)build one’s life around it. Many Catholics seem to focus on convincing people only of the former. Perhaps that is one reason why so many Catholics, having been raised and educated in the faith, are so easily able to drift away from it (often without really noticing they are doing so).

But for the growing number of people brought up outside of Christianity, or who have already drifted sufficiently far from it, the possibilities of encountering the Gospel in all its mind-bending splendor are more promising. A context in which the Christian Gospel can be received as scandalous foolery is, as the early church amply demonstrates, equally one in which it can be greeted with surprise as “all that is good and right and true” (Eph 5:9). Viewed in this light, Scripture’s cryptic preference for being hot or cold, as opposed to lukewarm, makes much more sense (Rv 3:15-16).

Naturally, in emphasizing the radical, paradoxical nature of the Christian proclamation, there is a danger of retreating into fideistic obscurity. This, too, is gravely to be avoided: Augustine and Aquinas both caution against (unnecessarily) giving rise to irrisio infidelium, or “the mockery of unbelievers.” My point is not that Christianity is actually foolish, or false or ridiculous—on the contrary! But rather that like so many profoundly true things, it should probably strike us as such on a first and cursory hearing. Compare, for example, the wonders of the universe revealed to us by modern physics: that everything in the universe was once packed into an infinitesimally small space; that the vast majority of a solid object is actually empty space; that there are perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each with maybe a hundred billion solar systems and so forth. Popular science writers are adept at carefully explaining how and why all these things are true and the solid reasons we have for believing them. But they also revel in the scandalously foolish appearance of these claims, knowing full well that this is what excites and enthralls their readers.

The earliest Christians were no strangers to such strategies. The second-century apologist St. Melito of Sardis speaks of Christ as “treading upon the earth, yet filling heaven...standing before Pilate, and at the same time sitting with his Father; he was nailed upon the tree, and yet was the Lord of all things.” And as Augustine famously wrote in one of his Christmas homilies: “The maker of man was made man, that the ruler of the stars might suck at the breast; the fountain, thirst...strength, be made weak; health, be wounded; life, die.”

“A stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles” this may be, but better that than a platitude to the “non-affiliated” and boredom to the baptized.
 
 
Originally published in America. It is taken from Stephen's forthcoming book titled Faith and Unbelief (Canterbury Press, 2013; Paulist Press, 2014).
(Image credit: Tutt Art)