Gunning for God (35 page)

Another apparent discrepancy lies in the fact that Luke describes Jesus as appearing to “the eleven”;
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whereas John’s description of what appears to be the same event says that Thomas was not present on that occasion.
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Thus, in fact, only ten disciples were there. However, there is no necessary contradiction here, since the term “the eleven” can mean “the disciples as a group”, rather than implying that all of them were there without exception on every occasion. For instance, there are eleven players in an English cricket team. If a sports reporter said that he had gone to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London to interview the English Eleven, his statement would not necessarily be taken to imply that he had seen all eleven players, but perhaps only a representative group of them.

For further discussion of the detailed historical questions involved in the events surrounding the burial and resurrection of Christ, see Wenham’s
Easter Enigma
.
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Criterion 3. The possible bias of witnesses

It is often said that, because the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ comes predominantly from Christian sources, there is a danger of it being partisan, and therefore not carrying the weight of independent testimony. This objection sounds plausible at first, but it looks very different in the light of the following considerations. Those who were convinced by the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus became Christians.
But they were not necessarily Christians when they first heard of the resurrection.
The prime example is Saul of Tarsus. Far from being a Christian, he was a leading academic Pharisee who was fanatically opposed to the Christians — so much so that he was persecuting the Christians, and having them imprisoned and tortured. He wanted to destroy the resurrection story, and stamp out Christianity at its roots. When he heard that Christianity was beginning to spread beyond Jerusalem, he got permission from the High Priest’s Office to go to Damascus in Syria and arrest all Christians. But by the time he got to Damascus something utterly unexpected had happened — he had become a Christian!
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Paul’s conversion and subsequent writing have marked the history of Europe and of the world. In his lifetime he founded many churches, and even to the present day his writings (more than half of the New Testament) have influenced millions of people from every nation under the sun. The conversion of Saul has proved a turning point in history, and demands once more an explanation big enough to explain that effect. His own explanation was: “Last of all… he appeared also to me.”
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Paul’s witness is significant, then, for the reason that he was not a believer when he met the risen Christ. It was that meeting which was the cause of his conversion.

But there is another question that should be asked in this connection. Where is the evidence, on the part of those who did not believe the resurrection of Jesus, to prove that he did not rise? The religious authorities, having condemned and executed Jesus, could not afford to ignore, or dismiss, the Christian claim. They desperately wanted to stop a mass movement based on the resurrection. They had at their disposal all their own official resources, and the help of the Roman military machine if they wanted it. Yet strangely they seem to have produced no evidence, except for the patently silly story (for which they had to pay a great deal!) about the disciples stealing the body while the guards slept. So they resorted to crude scare tactics. They put the apostles in prison, and tried to intimidate them by threatening them with serious consequences if they continued preaching the resurrection.
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The complete absence of contemporary evidence against the resurrection, from the authorities or anyone else, tells its own eloquent story. There does not seem to have been any to publish!

Criterion 4. The attitude of the witnesses

Hume would have us consider here the manner in which the Christians put forward their views. Were they over-hesitant; or, just the opposite, too violent? Certainly they were not hesitant. In Acts, Luke gives us many examples of the courageous way in which the disciples gave their witness to the resurrection, often to very hostile audiences. But they were never violent. Indeed, one of the striking things about the early Christians is their non-violence, which they had learned from Christ himself. He had taught them not to use the sword to protect either him or his message.
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His kingdom is not the kind of kingdom where people fight.
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Think of the effect that his conversion had upon Paul. Before he was converted, he was a religious bigot and fanatic, who persecuted his own fellow Jews when they had become Christians. After his conversion, he did not persecute anyone, of any religion, ever again. On the contrary, for his belief in the resurrection of Christ he himself suffered grievous persecution, and eventually gave his life.

It would seem therefore that, in the case of the early disciples, Hume’s criteria for credible witnesses are well satisfied.

Women as witnesses

To anyone who knows anything about the ancient laws regarding legal testimony, it is very striking that the first reports mentioned in the Gospels of appearances of the risen Christ were made by women. In first-century Jewish culture, women were not normally considered to be competent witnesses. At that time, therefore, anyone who wanted to invent a resurrection story would never have thought of commencing it in this way. The only value of including such a story would be if it were both true and easy to verify, whatever people thought of the fact that it figured women as witnesses. Its very inclusion, therefore, is a clear mark of historical authenticity.

The psychological evidence

There is no mention in John’s account
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that John and Peter attempted to discuss with Mary the logical implications of the grave-cloths. Psychologically, it is most unlikely that they did; for she was weeping, evidently distraught at the thought of having irreparably lost the body of the one who had brought forgiveness, peace of heart, and honour back into her life. And if “resurrection” meant that she had permanently lost all contact with him, it would have been no comfort to her. After all, she had come to the tomb with the other women in order to complete the embalming of the body, and it is easy to see what was ultimately in their minds. Had the resurrection not happened, they would very quickly have made the tomb into a shrine, to which they could come, and pray, and show devotion to their dead spiritual hero. Yet the extraordinary thing is that there is no record of their ever doing any such thing. Nowhere in the New Testament do we find the apostles encouraging the faithful to make pilgrimages to the tomb of Christ for special blessing, or for healing. On the contrary, in the earliest Christian era there is no evidence of any real interest in the tomb of Christ.

So what was powerful enough to break the strong, natural desire, particularly on the part of those early Christian women, to venerate the tomb? Mary is perhaps the best person to tell us, for she felt very strongly that desire to remain close to the tomb on the day she found it empty. Since she had come to complete the task of embalming the body, she needed to find that body. As she stood there weeping, through her tears she was conscious of someone else nearby, whom she thought was the gardener. Perhaps he had taken the body? So she spoke to him: “Tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Together with the other women, she would have taken him away and reburied him with honour, in a place to be venerated forever.
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But she didn’t. Something so powerful happened in the garden that day, that Mary and the others never showed any interest in the tomb again. John tells us that the one whom she had taken to be the gardener was actually the risen Christ. “Mary,” he said, and as she instantly recognized his voice, she knew that her quest was over. If Jesus was risen, what interest could there possibly be in holding on to his tomb? None whatsoever! No one makes a shrine to a person who is alive.

But there is another issue. Granted that the tomb was abandoned because the disciples were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead, there then arises the important question of what was to be the relationship between the disciples and the risen Christ. Having found that he was alive, Mary wanted, very naturally, to cling on to him. But Christ had something to say to her — indeed a message for all his followers: “Do not cling to me [that is, in Greek, do not keep holding on to me, or stop holding on to me], for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
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Mary knew he was real and that he was really there: she had heard his voice and touched him; but he was telling her that he was not going to remain with her in that way. She would keep him, but not in the same sense as before. Now, from the other side of death, he was assuring her, and through her all of his followers, that he had created a new and permanent relationship between them and him and his Father, that death itself could not destroy. It was this living relationship with the living Christ that satisfied her heart, and the hearts of millions since. The bare fact of knowing that he had risen from the dead would not have been enough to do that.

SOME FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The nature of the resurrection body

That evening, Christ appeared to the main group of disciples.
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They were meeting somewhere in Jerusalem in a room with the doors locked, because they were frightened of the Jewish authorities. He showed them his hands and side with the marks of the nails and spear. Now at last John knew what resurrection meant! The body that had come through the grave-cloths, had come through closed doors — but it was real, tangible, and, above all, alive.

Now some readers will wish at once to raise the question: in this advanced scientific age, how can one possibly believe that a physical body came through grave-cloths, and through locked doors into a room? But perhaps this advanced scientific age has made such a thing more conceivable, rather than less so. We know what the disciples did not know: matter consists largely of empty space; elementary particles can penetrate matter; some — like neutrinos — to immense depth.

In addition to that, there is the question of dimensionality. We are familiar with the four dimensions of space-time; but God is not limited to those four dimensions. Maybe nature itself involves more dimensions than we thought — string theory would suggest there may be more. An analogy can help us here. In 1880 a delightful book called
Flatland
was written by a mathematician, Edwin Abbott, as a satire on class structure.
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Abbott asks us to imagine a two-dimensional world called Flatland, whose inhabitants are two dimensional figures, straight lines, triangles, squares, pentagons, etc., all the way up to circles. We are introduced to a Sphere from Spaceland (three-dimensions), who tries to explain to one of the creatures in Flatland what it means to be a sphere. The sphere passes through the plane of Flatland, appearing first as a point, then a circle that gets larger, then smaller until it disappears. This, of course, seems impossible to the Flatlanders, simply because they cannot conceive any dimension higher than two. The sphere mystifies them even further by saying that, by moving around above the plane of Flatland, it can see into their houses and can appear in them at will, without the doors having to be open. The sphere even takes one incredulous Flatlander out into space to give him a view of his world from outside. However, on his return, he cannot get his new knowledge accepted by the Flatlanders, who know nothing other than their two-dimensional world. Is it possible that our world is something like Flatland — but with four dimensions rather than two? If so, a reality of higher dimensionality could interact with our world, as the sphere does in the Flatland world.

The physics of matter, and such analogies as that of Flatland, can help us at least to see that it might be very short-sighted and premature to dismiss out of hand the New Testament account of the properties of Christ’s resurrection body. If there is a God who transcends space and time, it is not surprising if the resurrection of his Son reveals aspects of reality that also transcend space and time.

Some will take issue, however, with the idea that the resurrection body of Christ is physical, by pointing out that the New Testament itself speaks of the resurrection body as a “spiritual body”.
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The objection, then, asserts that “spiritual” means “non-physical”. But a moment’s reflection shows that there are other possibilities. When we speak of a “petrol engine”, we do not mean an “engine made of petrol”. No, we mean an engine powered by petrol. Thus the term “spiritual body” could well be referring to the power behind that body’s life, rather than a description of what it is
made
of.

To decide between these possibilities we need only to refer to the text of the New Testament; for there we find that Christ says to his disciples: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself! Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
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That is, he was explicitly pointing out that his resurrection body was not “made of spirit”. It had flesh and bone: it was tangible. And to prove the point even further, Christ asked them if they had anything to eat. He was offered a fish, and he ate it in front of them.
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The eating of that fish proved beyond all doubt that his resurrection body was a physical reality. They must have spent a long time staring at the empty plate on the table after he had gone. Whatever the nature of the world to which he now belonged, he had taken a fish into it. It certainly therefore had a physical dimension.