Resurrection - Myth or Reality?

"Did Jesus really walk out of his tomb alive after being dead for three days?"

This is the question that cannot be avoided by the church in this post-modern world, where the authority claims of yesterday are subject to doubt, erosion, and even ridicule.

"Well, it's in the Bible, so it has to be true."

	When It's Real, You'll Know By Frederica Mathewes-Green For many believers, the resurrection is true not because it can be proved by texts but because they feel the presence of Jesus in their lives. more...>

This is the traditional answer given by those who are unable to imagine that those same authority systems of yesterday have lost their effectiveness.

The dialogue between this question and this answer reveals the problem faced by those who work for a new reformation of Christianity. Church leaders, eager to protect their power, appear intent on employing pre-modern claims that convince fewer and fewer people--or else they spend their time answering questions that modern people no longer ask. They are also the victims of what can only be called historical amnesia.

These leaders seem not to recognize that, as modern history has unfolded, the Bible has proven to be wrong many times. People sometimes gasp when they hear that said out loud and in public. The notion of wrongness and the Bible are not normally linked in print, because the church has lived with the illusion of biblical inerrancy for so long.

Yet the Bible was wrong in 1215 when it was used to oppose the Magna Carta and to uphold the divine right of kings. The Bible was wrong in the 17th century when it was quoted to attack Galileo's vision of the earth turning on its axis as it moved around the sun. The Bible was wrong in the 19th century when it ridiculed Darwin in the name of the literal accuracy of the seven-day creation story found in Genesis. The Bible was wrong when it assumed that sickness was the punishment for sinfulness or that the weather patterns were the means of God's judgment. The Bible was wrong when its words were used to justify slavery, to undergird segregation and apartheid, and to keep women in second-class status. It is wrong today when it is quoted to oppress gay and lesbian people. A column could be written on each of these subjects if space permitted.

Before representatives of Christianity begin to answer modern questions about the resurrection with biblical assertions as the source of their authority, they should remember this history and face the possibility that the Bible might also be wrong about the literal details of Easter.

We need to remember first that the Easter experience occurred around 30 C.E., while the gospel stories about that experience were not written until sometime between the years 70 and 100 C.E. This means that the gospels were not eye-witness accounts. When the New Testament is read in the order it was written, it is also easy to see how those stories grew, and exactly when new miraculous details were added to the narratives. We traced that development in the first column in this series. When these data are engaged, the literal accuracy of the resurrection narratives becomes suspect, causing the foundations of Christianity itself to tremble.

Continued on page 2: Will Christianity fall apart without the resurrection? »