The Resurrection: Hysterical Belief or Historical Reality?

By Dr. Alan Fimister
Assistant Professor at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary

At the Last Supper, Our Lord told his disciples, “Amen, amen I say to you, he that believeth in me, the works that I do, he also shall do; and greater than these shall he do,”¹ and this prophecy has been vindicated in the many marvels that have filled the lives of the saints throughout the history of his Church from that day to this. In one respect, however, no member of his mystical body has equaled the works of the Savior. Christ alone, from beyond the grave, raised himself from the dead. No human soul has the power to resume its own body. If it did, it would not relinquish it in the first place.  

No one stood outside the tomb of Christ and implored God to raise Jesus from the dead. Jesus himself, in union with the Father and the Holy Spirit, raised himself from the dead. “I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.”² Thereby, beyond all of his other miracles, he showed forth his divinity.

Denials of Historical Reality

Two types of people seek to deny the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The first are those who deny the reality of miracles, usually Deists or Atheists. We ought not detain ourselves too long with this sort of objection. As St. Paul teaches, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made so they are without excuse.”³  In other words, St. Paul is saying that at some level, the Atheist or the Deist (a pagan monotheist) does not just err, he lies. They are “men who by their wickedness suppress the truth … they are without excuse.”  

A man might assert that he has visited Italy and we might (rudely) doubt his claim and he might demonstrate it to us; but if we deny that Italy exists altogether, our problem is more fundamental and requires a remedy of an altogether different sort. Jesus did not rise again to prove that God exists. The mere fact of changeable, frail, mortal, imperfect and transitory creatures is enough to demonstrate the existence of the Almighty and Eternal God. Jesus rose from the dead to show us that he is God and that his word is life: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.”⁴ 

The second group of deniers are those who accept the existence of God and the possibility of the miraculous but deny specifically the accounts of the Resurrection in the New Testament. In this regard, the first thing to remember is that the New Testament is the most well attested document from the entire ancient world. There are more manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament books than of any other document from the classical Roman Empire or earlier. To be sure, this is because the monks who preserved the ancient texts cared more about the New Testament than any other text, but this does not change the fact. Taken as accurate, the facts and teachings recorded in the New Testament obviously make it more important than any other text on earth. 

Add to this the fact that none of the disciples gained anything earthly from preaching the Resurrection. All were tortured, all but one died of it. A conspiracy to fake the Resurrection would be implausibly elaborate and prolonged and lack all motive. 

Eyewitness Accounts

The intellectually honest inquirer must therefore face up to the accounts of the Resurrection in the New Testament. However, the accounts of the Resurrection in the New Testament, in the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians are all strikingly different. There is a great deal of overlap between the other parts of the Gospels from Our Lord’s baptism in the Jordan until the Passion, but when we come to the Resurrection there is much more divergence – even the initial appearance of confusion. According to the traditional attribution, Matthew and John are eyewitnesses. Mark was perhaps present in Jerusalem at the time of the Passion. Mark lived in Jerusalem with his mother in the early years of the Church and he is often identified as the youth who ran naked from the Garden of Gethsemane,⁵ an incident which only he records. Mark, too, is therefore a partial eyewitness of the events of Holy Week.  

The diversity of the Resurrection accounts is in fact a telling feature of authentic eyewitness testimony. In the face of an event of such magnitude as the Resurrection, it is natural that each person’s experience and first realization of what had occurred would be very precious indeed. The apostolic witnesses would also have a strong sense of the obligation to bear witness to the Resurrection exactly as they had experienced it. Although Our Lord appeared as risen to 500 disciples at one time in Galilee⁶ and walked with the 11 through the outskirts of Jerusalem on one occasion (Luke 24:50), his resurrection appearances were precious and calculated. Two of them, his appearances to Peter and James, we only know of but not about.⁷ Yet they were considered very important to identify and record, as St. Paul makes clear. We know of 10 appearances in total, five on Easter Sunday and five in the remaining 40 days before the ascension. This may not be an exhaustive list.⁸

Vatican II tells us of the Sacred Scriptures that “God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.” The sacred texts are thus free of all error and yet show the marks of being written by human authors who were in normal circumstances fallible and limited. Mark tells us a group of women including Mary Magdalene came to the tomb that morning and saw the Angel guarding it. Matthew concurs but gives us much more dramatic detail about the manner in which the tomb was opened. One might be tempted to consider these details as embellishments until one realizes that Matthew has exclusive access to other information which only could have come from the soldiers guarding the tomb. 

Further Appearances

In his Gospel, Luke seems to assume, but never asserts or implies, that the Ascension occurred rather soon after the Resurrection. By the time he wrote Acts, he knew better and is careful to emphasize that Jesus “presented himself alive after His passion by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days.”⁹ Similarly, John describes Mary Magdalene’s journey to the empty tomb but without averting to any other witnesses or the encounter with the angel, presumably because she herself, in the excitement of the moment, did not explain any details. But he gives away the fuller account in his report of her words, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”¹⁰  

Luke makes no mention of the command to go to Galilee¹¹ and yet it is clear that this was important and eventually obeyed.¹² Indeed, the Resurrection appearance with which Matthew’s Gospel ends is the only event that seems to fit St. Paul’s reference to an occasion when “He appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.”¹³ Presumably, Luke knew of these words but lacked any accounts of the appearances in Galilee and so omitted them, lest they seem inexplicable to the reader. Given that the appearance of the Lord on the mountain in Galilee was the moment when the Great Commission to baptize all nations was proclaimed, presumably information about it circulated less freely because of the disciplina arcani,¹⁴ the practice of reserving teaching on the sacraments to those who had been initiated.  

One might imagine that the apparent inconsistencies in the Resurrection accounts were a problem for the skeptical inquirer. They are not. In fact, they profoundly confirm the reliability of these accounts. They are all resolvable and in resolving them, a much more rounded picture emerges of the events described in which the apparent inconsistencies end up reinforcing each account in ways which, significantly, the writers themselves could not have foreseen. As any historian or criminal investigator will confirm, a series of identical narratives is a sign of collusion and possible falsification. Seemingly confused reports which, upon closer inspection, produce a clear and three-dimensional picture is the sure note of historical reality. 

1.  John 14:12
2.  John 10:17-18
3.  Romans 1:18-20
4.  John 20:30-31
5.  Mark 14:51-52
6.  Matthew 28:16-20 & 1 Corinthians 15:6
7.  Luke 24:34, 1 Corinthians 15:5 & 7
8.  Acts 1:3
9.  Acts 1:3
10.  John 20:2
11.  Mark 16:7 & Matthew 28:7
12.  John 21:1
13.  1 Corinthians 15:6
14.  Matthew 7:6, Revelation 2:17
15.  Luke 23:56-24:1
16.  John 19:38-42
17.  Matthew 27:61, Mark 15:47
18.  John 12:7