THE RESURRECTION—A HISTORICAL FACT!

Homily given by Fr. Dennis Koliński, SJC

St. Peter’s Church in Volo

23 March 2008

In about the year 57, St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. … If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”[1] St. Paul did not say that we had to have faith in the Resurrection but rather that the Resurrection is the evidence that confirms our faith. He didn’t tell the Corinthians that God revealed this truth to him, but instead gave the testimony of credible witnesses, including himself, who had seen the risen Lord. The Resurrection is the foundation and the very reason for our belief in all the other truths of our faith. For if it did in fact take place, then everything that Christ said is true. If it didn’t, then all that we believe means nothing.

The Resurrection is not a revealed article of faith. It is a historical fact, which those hostile to Christianity have been trying to cover up ever since the Jewish authorities paid off the Roman guards at the tomb to lie about what really happened that first Easter day. Present-day, so-called enlightened critics claim that early Christians made up the story of the Resurrection—in other words, it was a conspiracy to make Jesus look like God so that people would follow their new religion. But it’s ridiculous to think that simple people with very little education, such as were the Apostles, would be able to construct and maintain an elaborate cover-up of such enormous proportions, especially in the face of persecution. Watergate conspirator Charles Colson, a partner in probably the largest conspiracy in the history of our country, once stated that the Apostles had to be telling the truth about Jesus’ Resurrection because in the face of persecution, conspiracies are very hard to maintain and that we have no record of any of the first Christians denying the truth of the Resurrection. And if the Apostles had made it all up, why would they really have repeated painted themselves as dense, unbelieving and cowardly.

Ultimately, the credibility of the Resurrection as a historical fact rests on the written record. As with any text from antiquity, we can only rely on copies of original texts, which themselves no longer exist, and here the evidence in favor of the New Testament texts is overwhelming. There are presently over 24,000 manuscript copies of different portions of the New Testament in existence and none of them contradict each other. No other ancient texts even come close to this volume of material. The New Testament manuscripts are also far superior in terms of their dating. The earliest dated copies of non-Christian ancient texts were made no earlier than 750 years from the time when the original authors penned their works. Whereas, the earliest dated copies of New Testament texts that we possess were made only 20 to 40 years after the original authors produced their texts, that is, within the lifetime of the very people, who had experienced the events about which they wrote. If one refuses to believe such overwhelming evidence in favor of the Resurrection, then he in turn has no grounds to believe any other historical account of equal antiquity, be it Aristotle, Josephus or Herodotus.

But let’s put the Resurrection under even greater scrutiny. Would modern lawyers consider the existing evidence to be convincing? Lord Darling, a former Lord Chief Justice of England, declared that “In its favor as a living truth there exists such overwhelming evidence, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true.” Lord Caldecote, another Lord Chief Justice of England, stated that as often as he has tried to examine the case for the Resurrection based solely on the evidence, he has always come to the conclusion that it is a fact beyond dispute. Irwin Linton, a lawyer, who has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, stated that the Resurrection is “so established that the greatest lawyers have declared it to be the best proved fact of all history.”[2]

People have been trying to disprove the historical truth of the Resurrection for centuries and all they have left behind is hollow and weak theories. In the mid-nineteenth century Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the principle founders of the Harvard Law School, and author of what is “considered the greatest single authority on evidence in the entire literature on legal procedure,” set out to disprove it. In the end he concluded that according to the laws of legal evidence administered in courts of justice, “the Resurrection of Christ was one of the best supported events in history.”[3]

Yet in the face of such overwhelming evidence, skeptics of Christianity and in particular, of the Resurrection, still claim that our belief is based upon a blind leap of faith. They refuse to accept that the evidence is solidly on our side and that they are the ones making a blind leap of faith by believing in theories that have no evidence to support them. The Resurrection, which we celebrate today, is a historical event of far greater certainty than any other event of antiquity. We believe in it, not because it is a revealed truth, like the Incarnation or the Trinity, but because it is a historical fact, a fact for which the first Christians were set on fire to the point of giving up their lives. The Resurrection is one of the best-substantiated events in ancient history, and consequently, if one refuses to believe in it, then there is no basis for believing anything else from antiquity. The certainty of this knowledge should set our faith on fire like the early Christians, who proclaimed Christ risen wherever they went because this one remarkable fact proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christ is God. The Resurrection is the completion and confirmation of our salvation begun on Calvary. It is the hope of our own resurrection into eternal life. The Resurrection is the greatest historical event to ever take place and we know it with certainty, as all the first Christians, to be a fact beyond dispute. That is why in this time of spiritual crisis, as never before, we need to loudly and with full conviction proclaim to everyone—Surrexit Dominus vere—“The Lord is truly risen!”