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00:01This is a National Geographic Channel special presentation.
00:06It is one of Christianity's greatest mysteries.
00:09Was Jesus resurrected from the dead?
00:11Fact of faith or miraculous fiction?
00:14The Apostles struggled with the same issue,
00:16and today we still find ourselves in search of Easter.
00:302,000 years ago, three words uttered in a backwater of the ancient world shook the Roman Empire.
00:56Three words ignited a global religious movement that changed the course of history.
01:02Three words defined a faith and continue to grip millions.
01:08He has risen.
01:11Jesus' triumph over death three days after his agonizing end on the cross is Christianity's defining belief.
01:30A mysterious and pivotal moment in time, now celebrated as the miracle of Easter.
01:38I believe that the resurrection of Jesus is going to remain one of the most impenetrable mysteries in human history.
01:49Not because those of us who accept that there was a resurrection don't believe that something happened,
01:56but it's because of our inability to be absolutely precise about what happened.
02:02We are dealing with an event that quite simply is outside of normal human comprehension.
02:14Did Jesus truly rise from the dead?
02:17What really happened 2,000 years ago?
02:21What series of events led to a worldwide belief in the resurrection and lit the flame of Christian faith?
02:29Scholars in search of answers look to the New Testament, our only source of the resurrection narrative.
02:36The story is chronicled in its first four books, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, known as the Gospels or Good News.
02:48For many, the search for the truth also leads here, to the site where they believe the imponderable miracle of Jesus' resurrection occurred.
02:59The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has stood in Jerusalem in one form or another since the fourth century.
03:05Inside is a smaller structure enshrining what remains of the reputed tomb of Jesus.
03:15No evidence exists that proves the site's validity, but visitors appreciate its symbolic, if not historic value.
03:24Since little remains of the original tomb, some find greater satisfaction at a second site in Jerusalem.
03:37The so-called garden tomb, though less steeped in tradition, more closely matches the image in the popular imagination.
03:45At both locations, visitors can embrace their belief in the risen Jesus.
03:59Their conviction is shared by millions.
04:02According to a recent Harris Poll, 80% of Americans, including non-Christians, believe in the resurrection.
04:14This is really quite an extraordinary number.
04:16But I don't think that the polls actually get at what the people do believe.
04:21Do they believe that Jesus survived the dead in spirit form?
04:26Do they believe that Jesus was physically lifted up in body form, as the Gospels would have it?
04:33Or do they take a more metaphorical view of the resurrection, that somehow Jesus' message lived on?
04:39So the very statement really doesn't tell us exactly what people believe.
04:44Since word of the Easter miracle first spread from the Holy Land, the resurrection has meant one thing to some Christians, and something else to others.
04:54I believe that the resurrection is a fact.
04:58It's a fact of faith, not a fact of history.
05:01It has nothing to do with an empty tomb or miraculous appearances afterwards.
05:06These are beautiful legends that express that Christians believe that Jesus is empowered by God and living in heaven, if you will.
05:16But those events never happened.
05:19If there were an event at the tomb to be seen, then cameras could have caught it.
05:23There would be no room for faith.
05:24We would have reduced faith to history.
05:27I have no doubt about the sincerity of people like Peter and James and Paul and Mary Magdalene.
05:34When they testified that they saw Jesus return to them, they recognized him.
05:40As historians, we can locate the sincerity of the person giving the testimony, but we cannot confirm the actual fact of what they did or did not see.
05:52We can be historically sure, as sure as anything can be in history, that early Christians had visions of the risen Lord and had it immediately after the execution.
06:07Visions of the risen Lord happened.
06:11Now, how you explain them, that's a separate issue, but that they happened, I think, is an historical fact.
06:17What actually happened two millennia ago?
06:23The answer is all the more elusive because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John offer differing accounts.
06:30While similar in scope, the stories vary in their details.
06:34They do not set out to write history in our sense of the term.
06:39Rather, they begin with a certain conviction or belief in who Jesus is.
06:46So the gospel stories are intended to interpret the meaning of a mystery rather than report a historical fact.
06:55Many people think the gospels are written as straight history, whereas they're written as religious poetry about history.
07:02And poetry can tell us a lot more than empirical historical fact, because it tells us the personal significance, the meaning of those facts.
07:11According to all four gospels, the events leading to the Easter miracle begin on a distant Friday as darkness falls on Jerusalem.
07:27A man of vision is dead. A community of believers devastated.
07:33All of the hopes that he had raised with his teachings, all of the hopes about the significance of love, the majesty of compassion, the ability of people to be together in a new way.
07:55All of those hopes seem dashed.
08:02All four of the gospel authors tell of an aristocrat named Joseph of Arimathea, who was entrusted with the remains of Jesus.
08:10And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock, and he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre and departed.
08:29Matthew's Gospel specifies how Jesus' enemies, Jerusalem's high priests, arranged for guards to be posted outside the tomb's entrance.
08:39They suspect the disciples have conspired to steal the body to fabricate his resurrection.
08:45Resurrection was a widely held belief among Jews of Jesus' day.
08:50Many people believed that God was going to reveal himself, and he was going to reveal his messianic kingdom as his triumph over the oppressive gentile empires that had ruled the Jews from the Babylonians down to the Romans.
09:12And the second expectation was that God was going to rescue those people, especially those who had been martyred by the gentile oppressors.
09:22God was going to awaken those martyrs who are asleep and awaken them into his messianic kingdom.
09:34Three days after the death of Jesus comes the breathless instant when God reveals he has awakened Jesus from the grave.
09:41But each Gospel has a slightly different version of this moment.
09:46John offers the briefest account.
09:48He writes that Mary Magdalene, the most prominent female disciple, discovers that the stone sealing the tomb of Jesus has been rolled away.
09:57She is shocked to find that his body is missing.
10:03In Mark's version, additional women join Mary, and they also encounter an angel.
10:09And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment, and they were affrighted.
10:18And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted.
10:22Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified.
10:26He is risen. He is not here.
10:29Behold the place where they laid him.
10:31Luke's Gospel adds another angel to proclaim the resurrection.
10:37While Matthew tells of an earthquake which has rolled the stone away,
10:41the sentries that only Matthew mentions have been rendered unconscious.
10:48One constant in each Gospel is that the body of Jesus is missing.
10:52What became of it?
10:55Did it miraculously dematerialize as Jesus rose from the dead?
11:00Or could the solution to the resurrection mystery have nothing to do with the supernatural?
11:10On a distant Sunday morning, say the Gospels, the tomb of Jesus lies empty.
11:15For believers, it is a sign of God's miraculous rescue of Jesus from death.
11:30But if the tomb was truly empty, what became of the corpse?
11:34Why didn't the enemies of the early Christians, particularly the Romans who killed him in the first place,
11:42simply quash this whole Christian business at the source,
11:46and simply say, look, here's the body, enough of this nonsense.
11:50The fact that they cannot do that, this obvious move,
11:54lends an even greater mystery to the events that we see as the resurrection of Jesus.
12:00If the body of Jesus was missing from the tomb,
12:05is it possible that it was never there in the first place?
12:10Probably no one knew where Jesus' body was located.
12:14Because he was executed as a common criminal,
12:16the chances are he was buried either in a common grave or left for animals to devour.
12:21The Roman execution, crucifixion, intended to leave the body there until there was nothing left to be buried.
12:28That's what crucifixion meant.
12:31It wasn't a question of making you suffer.
12:33It was a question of annihilating your identity,
12:36not even leaving enough to be buried.
12:38That is the awful possibility, that that's what the Romans did to the body of Jesus.
12:47History has to do with the exceptions rather than with the norm.
12:52That is, Jesus had followers, he had sympathizers, he had people who cared for him.
12:56It's far more plausible to me historically,
13:00that something like the version that Jesus was buried in a tomb by somebody who was sympathetic to him,
13:07is roughly reliable.
13:11Some scholars believe that the Gospel's emphasis,
13:15that it was women who were first on the scene, lends the story credibility.
13:19If you were to make up this story, and to make it more believable, you certainly wouldn't choose the witness of women.
13:30Because at the time of Jesus, women's social standing was very low indeed.
13:35Women would not have been trusted as the most reliable witnesses.
13:39And they returned from the tomb, and reported all these things to the eleven, and to all the rest.
13:48And these words appear to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them.
13:52According to John's Gospel, only Peter and an unnamed disciple are curious enough to investigate the empty tomb for themselves.
14:06Then cometh Simon Peter following him.
14:08And he went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
14:19John's Gospel goes on to report that the amazed Peter and his companion depart the tomb, leaving Mary Magdalene alone to behold the impossible.
14:29A man calls her, she turns and sees, she supposes him to be the gardener.
14:35And she says, please, sir, tell me where you've taken the body so that I can claim it.
14:40And when the man calls her by name, Miriam, she recognizes in fact that this is no gardener.
14:47This is her resurrected Lord appearing to her in the flesh.
14:51John's vivid account offers no physical description of Jesus.
14:54And no explanation as to why Mary fails at first to recognize him.
15:01The way John goes on to tell the story, Mary has what we would take to be a very natural reaction.
15:07She wants to grasp and hug Jesus.
15:09And Jesus tells Mary, no, not yet.
15:13I can't be touched yet.
15:15And it lends an interesting and mysterious air to the whole episode.
15:19Mary's encounter, according to the Gospels, is only the beginning.
15:28Luke describes another sighting that he says occurs later that day.
15:33Two of Jesus' followers, who have just witnessed the crucifixion, are traveling on the road to Emmaus, a village north of Jerusalem.
15:42They are unaware that their martyred teacher intends to continue their education.
15:49The two disciples are walking along disconsolate after the events that have taken place in Jerusalem.
15:57And they're discussing what had happened in the city.
16:00And as they're walking along, they're joined by a stranger whom they don't recognize,
16:06and who enters into conversation with them.
16:09They're surprised that the stranger had not heard about the death of Jesus.
16:15And as they continue to talk and to walk, they describe to this stranger what Jesus had done, what he stood for.
16:24And as day began to progress toward night, the stranger announced that he would leave.
16:29And the followers say, no, no, no. Why don't you come and have supper with us?
16:33And the stranger agrees.
16:34And as they're sitting at supper, the stranger began to explain to them the truth of the story of Jesus unpacked through the sacred scripture that all Jews held at the time, what Christians today would call the Old Testament.
16:50And the stranger gives them almost like a graduate course in the interpretation of scripture, showing them that if they understood their scriptures, they would not have been so surprised that even the Messiah would be executed.
17:05Then comes the crucial point of the story.
17:09Jesus takes the bread, breaks it, blesses it, and hands it out, the Eucharistic formula, and they recognize Jesus.
17:16And it's only as they begin to comprehend the significance of what this stranger has been saying, we have this moment of comprehension when they recognize their former teacher.
17:29I think that this is very important.
17:30I think that this is very important. There's a sense in which the Gospels are telling us, it's when we recognize the importance of what he taught us, that we suddenly recognize him.
17:42Luke's account then takes an abrupt twist. At the very moment the two disciples identify Jesus, he suddenly vanishes.
17:53The pair rush to Jerusalem to report their encounter to the other disciples.
18:06They find them gathered together, still shaken by Jesus' death on the cross.
18:13According to the Gospel of John, Jesus' followers were greatly afraid following his crucifixion.
18:18They feared that they themselves would be caught by Pilate's army, by Pilate's soldiers, and themselves crucified.
18:25They unite in a room, a locked room, in Jerusalem.
18:30They're meeting, probably to console one another.
18:33So it's a scene of quiet, of fear, of some discomfort with the events that have transpired.
18:41And without the door opening, the Gospel of John says, Jesus suddenly is amongst them.
18:49The Gospel accounts of this breathless encounter make clear that Jesus is instantly recognized.
18:56The story will attempt to answer a question as old as Christianity.
19:00What type of being was the resurrected Jesus?
19:03A locked room in Jerusalem, the grief-stricken disciples overwhelmed by the finality of the crucifixion,
19:17and the shocking appearance of the risen Jesus, ingredients of one of the Gospel's most mesmerizing narratives.
19:23The story may hold the key to one of Christianity's greatest mysteries.
19:30Was the resurrected Jesus human, spirit, or something else?
19:34They were terrified, and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen his spirit.
19:39And he said unto them,
19:41Why are ye troubled? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts?
19:45Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.
19:50Handle me and see, for his spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.
19:56Jesus appears in an altered fashion.
20:00So he's really there, it's really Jesus, and yet he's not there in precisely the same way that he was before.
20:10It is spirit and it is body.
20:12And as spirit, it is capable of entering into communication and intimacy with other bodies.
20:19The form of Jesus' resurrected body remained an issue of debate within the early church.
20:24For some, Jesus is more like a spirit. He walks through walls. He appears and disappears miraculously.
20:33And yet for others, he is solid flesh and blood. The Greek here would be sarks, flesh with hair follicles and sweat glands.
20:41Flesh like you and I are flesh.
20:42To proclaim that Jesus is an incarnate and enfleshed Lord suggests that the human body is not some prison or something to be sloughed off.
20:53But rather the package that we inhabit, our bodies, are an intrinsic part of us.
21:00They cannot be separated from our spirit or from our soul.
21:03And why is this important? Because the resurrection of Jesus says the material and the physical is important.
21:14The physical and the material is central to the Christian message.
21:19This is not a disembodied movement that cares only for spiritual, ethereal things.
21:24It is, one could say, God's endorsement of the made and created world.
21:30If the locked room encounter actually occurred, what swirl of emotions flooded the hearts and minds of the disciples?
21:41The Gospels are fairly candid about the fact that not all believers are instantly convinced.
21:46Luke has a remarkable phrase that his disciples disbelieved because of their joy.
21:52It was like it was too good to be believed that Jesus should be among them.
21:55In other words, there's a moment where they're still not sure, they're happy with what they think, but they're still not sure.
22:03There's an interesting element of this, and that is that in the somberness of dealing with a subject as serious as the resurrection,
22:12we can miss occasionally that there is actually some humor involved in this event as well.
22:17Let's remember, Jesus was famous for many of his miracles of food, water to wine, multiplying loaves and fishes.
22:27Clearly, Jesus loved to eat, and the disciples probably loved to eat with him.
22:32There's a moment at the Gospel of Luke where he's describing Jesus' appearance to the disciples.
22:38And then Jesus says, let's eat, where's the fish?
22:44I suspect at that moment, some of the disciples of Jesus said, yep, that's him.
22:51According to John's Gospel, the issue of doubt reaches critical mass when Jesus appears eight days after the encounter in the locked room.
22:59Jesus' purpose is to address it head on. Once again, the apostles are gathered in Jerusalem. Among them is a vocal skeptic who was not present at Jesus' first appearance, the disciple Thomas.
23:15When the disciples recount to him that Jesus had appeared to them, Thomas, as we know from later legend, becomes doubting Thomas.
23:25He says, I'm not going to believe until I can actually touch the wounds, until not only can I see Jesus, but actually feel him.
23:33Thomas wants more proof. Thomas wants a physical experience of Jesus.
23:38So, in a sense, John puts Thomas as a stand-in for us. Thomas asks our questions. Thomas expresses our doubts.
23:48At which point, Jesus miraculously appears to Thomas, and indeed extends an invitation saying, touch here, feel where the spear went in, touch the holes in my hand, feel that I am flesh.
24:01Thomas actually is never described as touching Jesus. Rather, it's enough to have the invitation, at which point he announces, my Lord and my God. He now believes.
24:14And Jesus tells him that you have believed because you have seen, but blessed are those who believe even though they have not seen.
24:25It seems to me that John's Gospel is trying to get at the status of everybody else. That for all those after Jesus' ascension, if you will, the presence of Jesus is always mediated through somebody else.
24:43It's not directly. We can't touch Jesus.
24:45And that is the reality that we live with in the modern era because we are dependent on reading about the resurrection as well as our sense of God's presence with us in a way that, unfortunately, is not going to be like Thomas'.
25:08Thomas had an advantage over us.
25:10The Gospel of John tells us that after Jesus erases Thomas' doubt, he vanishes once again.
25:19Why does the resurrected Jesus continue to appear and then disappear?
25:24This odd appearing-disappearing of Jesus in the appearance accounts has a very important message.
25:33And that is that the resurrection is not resuscitation. Jesus doesn't open an office.
25:37He's not there permanently. He's not there in his former somatic limitedness.
25:43He's a surprising presence. He intrudes. He interrupts. He is not predictable. He is not controllable.
25:50And in that sense, he shares the life of the living God.
25:53The appearing and disappearing are kind of moving us towards the reality that we are going to live with for the rest of time.
26:03And that is that we don't have the physical presence of Jesus anymore with us.
26:07We have, as it were, the spiritual presence of Jesus with us.
26:15There's a sense in which we're getting used to the fact now that the physical presence of Jesus is no longer going to be accessible to us.
26:23Could yet another possibility exist that explains Jesus' sporadic appearances?
26:31Is it possible he did not limit his visits to ancient Israel?
26:36This is the intriguing scenario described in the Book of Mormon.
26:39The Book which emerged in 19th century America is revered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as God's Holy Word.
26:51The Book of Mormon is an account of a civilization that lived in the Americas between about 600 years before Jesus was born till about 400 years after he died.
27:03The centerpiece of this story is Jesus' appearance to them.
27:10After he died and was resurrected, he comes to the Americas with business in mind.
27:17Jesus will say to these people in the Americas,
27:21Now I said to the Jews in Palestine,
27:24Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.
27:26And they misunderstood me.
27:28They thought I meant the Gentiles.
27:30But no, I meant you.
27:31I meant you.
27:32I meant you're the other sheep.
27:35I must come visit you.
27:36I must manifest myself unto you so that you can bear witness to the world about the nature of God
27:43and how to receive a forgiveness of sin, or more to the point,
27:48how you can overcome the circumstances of the world and be made one with God.
27:52According to the Book of Mormon, the risen Jesus remains with America's ancient tribes for three or four days.
28:03He then vanishes and makes sporadic appearances for an unspecified period of time.
28:07Meanwhile, according to the New Testament, Jesus continues to embrace his disciples in ancient Israel.
28:19But perhaps the most puzzling story of all is also the most epic.
28:23Did the resurrected Jesus really appear before a gathering of 500 spellbound witnesses?
28:36One episode in the New Testament's Easter narrative cries out as perhaps its greatest paradox.
28:41Why would Jesus' appearance before the greatest number of people be described in the fewest number of words?
28:50In 1 Corinthians 15, when Paul gives a recitation of those who had experienced an appearance of Jesus,
28:59he includes a puzzling reference to 500 at one time,
29:03some of whom are still around and able to bear testimony to this fact.
29:07The most puzzling thing about this is that there's no story about it in the Gospels as such.
29:13We would think that if there were such an event,
29:16it certainly would be included among the resurrection stories of Jesus or the appearance of God.
29:21Now for Paul, he just sort of mentions this in passing.
29:24Now of course, when we moderns read that, we want to say,
29:28stop, wait, back up!
29:30What do you mean 500 people?
29:32Who were they?
29:33What were they?
29:34Where were they?
29:35When did this happen?
29:36And we're terribly frustrated about the fact that Paul just sort of mentions it in passing.
29:40Clearly, his concerns were elsewhere.
29:43He was already arriving at the issue of what does all this mean,
29:47not, did it actually happen?
29:49Is the resurrection as told in the Gospels, history?
29:55Or is it meant to convey the internal experience of those living long ago?
30:00Often you hear bantered about this idea of a kind of mass hallucination,
30:05a sort of group perception of what they wanted to see because they were so overcome with grief.
30:10Well, there are a number of problems with this explanation.
30:12Psychiatrists tell us that individuals have hallucinations, not groups.
30:18For a group to be involved, they had to have seen something.
30:22Now they may have misunderstood what they saw, but they saw something.
30:26Those people didn't have to have a visual experience of Jesus in the room.
30:30In a prayer experience, for example, in an ecstatic experience,
30:33they could have said Jesus has been awakened by God.
30:37That's what constitutes an appearance of Jesus.
30:40Could that have taken place in a dream?
30:42Could it have taken place in a communal prayer moment?
30:45Certainly it could have.
30:47When Paul in Galatians 1.6 says that Jesus was shown to me as risen,
30:52he says he was shown within me.
30:56That is to say within his inner consciousness even.
30:58Whether visions of the risen Jesus were spiritual revelations or literal sightings,
31:08the Gospels differ over where they took place.
31:11Luke places all of the appearances in or around Jerusalem.
31:17Matthew sets all his episodes in the northern region of Galilee.
31:22According to John's Gospel, it is here that the risen Jesus achieves the most crucial task of his time on earth.
31:31The appointment of a new leader of the emerging Christian faith.
31:40According to John, the story of Jesus' final appearance begins as the disciples go fishing on the Sea of Galilee.
31:47Among them is Simon Peter, still tortured by his guilt for having denied Jesus three times before his crucifixion.
31:56As they go about their work, they suddenly notice Jesus standing on the shore.
32:02When Jesus appears, Peter jumps out of the boat.
32:05The first time I actually read this account, I thought that Peter would be swimming in the opposite direction to get away from Jesus,
32:11Peter having denied him three times.
32:13But what ultimately happens is that the followers join Jesus on the shore and they have breakfast together.
32:21And Jesus commissions them, indeed commissions Peter in particular, asking Peter three times,
32:27Do you love me? And then commanding Peter, Feed my sheep.
32:30Feed my sheep.
32:32The scene is the way that the Gospel has of explaining that the message of Jesus must continue.
32:39That people who had doubted, that people who had denied, can still be redeemed, can still be welcomed, indeed be leaders in that community.
32:47But the responsibility of the leader is not to be a sort of taught-down CEO, but to be a kind shepherd who will attend to the needs of his flock and will do so in love.
33:00Like John, Matthew tells how the risen Jesus calls on his disciples to care for each other and to spread word of his teachings.
33:10The encounter he describes occurs not by the sea, but on an unspecified summit in Galilee.
33:16And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all the things whatsoever I have commanded you.
33:34And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.
33:39In religious phenomenology, mountains are typically places of revelation, places of power, places that represent intimacy with the divine.
33:53It is a satisfying conclusion to Matthew's Gospel.
33:58It forms a bookend, I am with you always, to the announcement in Matthew's birth narrative that Jesus' name, Emmanuel, means God with us.
34:10Matthew writes that even here, the disciples still have doubts that they are in the presence of the risen Jesus.
34:17I think these expressions of doubt are very significant.
34:21This was an unusual, a difficult event.
34:25Some of them clearly still couldn't make sense of it.
34:29I think that it lends a powerful sense of realism to these accounts,
34:33that for many it was very difficult to accept, and for others it never was able to be something that they could entirely and completely understand and swallow.
34:45By having the courage to record this doubt, the Gospel writers allow their own followers to know that doubt is okay, that one can doubt and in fact believe at the same time.
34:59After Jesus' proclamation at the summit, Matthew abruptly ends his Gospel.
35:06He never specifies how the risen Christ departs the earth.
35:10Luke carries the story forward, describing how Jesus finally ascends into heaven.
35:16The emotional parting happens on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem.
35:25We're told that the disciples looked up into heaven to watch, as if waiting for him to return immediately.
35:31And they're told by divine messengers, men of Galilee, why are you staring up into heaven?
35:38Jesus will come back the same way he left you.
35:41The importance seen here is not so much that Jesus has disappeared, but what the disciples do following.
35:49The idea is, one is not supposed to stare up into heaven waiting for divinity to come down and help us out.
35:55Our job is to do the work that Jesus started.
35:57It isn't long from the time of the ascension of the disappearing of the resurrected Jesus to the event of the coming of the Holy Spirit and of that eternal presence.
36:10Luke very much wants to connect those two events.
36:13And so it seems highly symbolic in his mind that we understand where one kind of presence is now gone, another kind of presence is now with us.
36:27Another mystery remains.
36:28Is the New Testament's epic telling of the resurrection the true spark that lit the flame of Christian faith?
36:36Or did an entirely different scenario give birth to the idea?
36:41Could the truth of the Gospel resurrection story be traced to the mind of one grief-stricken fisherman?
36:47Every Easter Sunday, Christians relive the Easter narrative in sermon and in song.
37:00Whether they accept the New Testament's version of events literally or symbolically, their belief in the risen Christ remains the cornerstone of their faith.
37:11But those who see the Gospel telling of the resurrection as mere fantasy face a mystery of their own.
37:22What series of events 2,000 years ago could have been powerful enough to convince ancient Christians that Jesus had risen from the grave?
37:30Some scholars believe that early Christianity began not in a tomb in Jerusalem but in the northern region of Galilee.
37:46In the tortured mind of an inconsolable Simon Peter as he returned to his home and struggled to cope with his unspeakable loss.
38:00After the death of Jesus, we may expect that his follower Simon had a revelation.
38:10In a moment of revelatory experience, it could have taken place in a dream, it could have taken place in prayer.
38:17It was revealed to Simon that Jesus' cause was not a failure.
38:22That God had rescued him and awakened the dead Jesus into the coming kingdom of God.
38:28The resurrection was not an event that took place in time, three days after Jesus' death.
38:34If you want to call God's rescue of Jesus an event, we'll call it God's deed, and it would have taken place at the crucifixion of Jesus, one would say.
38:41The awareness of that supernatural deed, that supernatural event within quotation marks, would be Simon's revelation, his awakening to the fact that Jesus now was at the right hand of the Father.
38:57When Simon got the story, when he had the revelation, that's when the Jesus movement was really born.
39:02It's an interesting theory, but I see no grounding for it. Indeed, it strikes me as highly unlikely.
39:09Were Peter to have announced to his fellow villagers, Jesus has risen, I suspect they would have said to him, Peter, you're nuts.
39:16The notion has a certain psychological appeal to us because we're uncomfortable with rather more spectacular religious experiences.
39:27The difficulty with this is, A, it's not found in the sources. B, it's terribly individualistic.
39:33The witness to the resurrection has to do with the birth, the perseverance, and the transformation of communities, rather than simply of individuals.
39:46If this kind of power was not at work, it seems to me, what happened inside Peter's head would not have had any impact at all.
39:54I really do think, in this case, we have to look more for something like a Big Bang kind of experience.
40:03Something that genuinely had a communal and experiential dimension.
40:09Not simply Peter showing up and said, here's something I thought of this morning.
40:13The Gospels and Acts and Paul give the sense that the mission, the Christian church, did not begin in the Galilee itself, but rather certainly took root in Jerusalem.
40:29So it doesn't track from the testimony of the New Testament itself that it would have been Peter in the Galilee to begin the message of the resurrected Christ.
40:39To the contrary, it was women and they were in Jerusalem that began that message.
40:46Whatever its origin, the message of the risen Christ possessed a power transcendent enough to jumpstart a world religion.
40:55The Apostle Paul defined the resurrection as the measure of Christian belief.
41:00If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain. Your faith also is vain.
41:05He is absolutely correct. I do not think you can be a Christian without believing in the resurrection.
41:12But that does not tell me what the resurrection means.
41:17And it does not tell me when in the resurrection story you are talking literally and when you are talking metaphorically.
41:25When you are talking history and when you are talking parable.
41:28For example, I believe absolutely in the resurrection. But it does not mean for me what it may mean for some other Christians.
41:38For some Christians the proclamation of the resurrection is the personal assurance that that individual Christian too can inherit eternal life.
41:53For others the proclamation of the resurrection is a sign of God's victory.
41:57God's redeeming Jesus, God's sanctifying Jesus, a man willing to give up his life despite political pressure to the contrary.
42:08For others the resurrection is simply a nice story that provides a happy ending to the death of a martyr.
42:14To believe in the resurrection means to believe that God vindicated the life and the death of Jesus.
42:22That what Jesus lived for and died for is not in vain.
42:26Jesus died as a martyr for what he had preached and he did not preach himself.
42:31He preached God's justice and mercy for all people.
42:35To say that one believes in the resurrection is to say that it is worth living and dying for that kind of justice and mercy for all.
42:41Is this what the 80% of Americans who profess belief in the resurrection actually believe?
42:50Do they practice what is preached?
42:54I would say one of the greatest mysteries about the resurrection is over the centuries you have so many Christians who say that they affirm the resurrection of this teacher,
43:03but continue to live their lives by some other teaching.
43:06They continue to live their lives as if he's molding in his grave somewhere.
43:12How can we hold to the miracle and reject the teaching?
43:17Most people think of the resurrection not as Jesus entering into God's life, present now, placing a demand on our lives now.
43:28They think of it as something that happened in the past.
43:32One of the worst things that happened to the resurrection was that it became Easter.
43:36And that is that it was fixed as a specific time within the year.
43:41So that the resurrection now becomes an event to be preached on in the past rather than an event of the present which must be responded to.
43:50I find it regrettable because at some level it has enabled us to forget the radical edge of what is really being proclaimed by the resurrection.
44:04Which is not about celebration of the past but about transformation in the present.
44:10To claim and to live by resurrection faith means that you accept that, that justice and not violence rules the world.
44:23The absolute hope of resurrection is that if enough of us decide to live like Jesus, we will establish the kingdom of God upon this earth.
44:36To claim and to live like Jesus, we will establish the kingdom of God upon this earth.
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