A church youth group ‘somewhere in England’ had taken over their parish church for a youth service one evening, and the sounds of a very noisy Christian rock group were blaring out through the medieval doors. An elderly passer-by was disgusted at what he thought was the unseemly irreverence of what was going on inside. “If Jesus could hear this,” he said, “he’d be turning in his grave.” Quick as a flash one of the teenage members of the youth group, who was welcoming people to the event, replied, “Ah, but he’s not in his grave, is he? He’s alive!”
One compelling piece of evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, is the way that it continues to make the news year after year, as people try to debunk it and find alternative explanations for what might have happened.
Last year it was the Da Vinci Code, turned into a movie and spawning a number of TV ‘documentaries’. The common theme of most of these was that the whole of Church history has been a kind of conspiracy to conceal the truth that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and their descendants are still alive somewhere. This myth often includes the idea that Jesus did not actually die on the cross at all (so obviously he could not have risen from the dead), but lived out a normal human life in retirement, and died a natural death some number of years later.
This year’s version of the story concerns the finding of what is alleged to be the tomb of Jesus and his family. A number of stone ossuaries from the first century were found in Jerusalem, bearing the names Mary, Matthew, Jesua (i.e. Jesus) son of Joseph, Mary, Jofa (Joseph, Jesus' brother), and Judah son of Jesua. In fact archaeologists discovered these years ago, in 1980, and most of them simply noted the fact that these were all common Jewish names of the period. But now film maker James Cameron has produced a TV documentary claiming that these are the bones of the family of Jesus. Again the occurrence of the name Mariamene, which obviously to Cameron (if not to everyone else) represents Mary Magdalene, is ‘proof’ that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a married couple with children.
I suppose few Christians will lose much sleep about these notions, though they will no doubt be lapped up by conspiracy theorists and anyone who needs to believe that the truth is anything other than the straightforward explanation of something. It’s easy and comfortable to believe theories that appear to disprove the central affirmation of the Christian faith, provided you don’t take the trouble to examine the hard evidence of the Gospels, the New Testament, and the whole of Christian history and experience. People who do make that effort, usually end up believing in the truth of the Resurrection. One such researcher was Frank Morison, a lawyer who set out in the 1920s to write a book disproving the Resurrection. He ended up writing quite a different book, entitled Who Moved The Stone? when his studies convinced him of the accuracy and reliability of the Gospel accounts. He came to see that, unlikely as it might seem, the most obvious explanation of the evidence is that Jesus did in fact die on the cross and rise again on the third day.
The tomb was empty, and if the body had simply been stolen, someone would have come forward to reveal it. The disciples, against all expectation, met with Jesus many times after his death. They were transformed from terrified fugitives into courageous advocates for their executed Teacher. The early Church was soon growing enormously, attracting converts not just from among the Jewish people but from all the nations of Gentiles too. All these are the kinds of evidence which just don’t make sense, unless God had really done what he said he would do, and Jesus really had been raised from the dead.
For Christians, though, the truth of the Resurrection does not depend on an empty tomb, or on not finding the bones of a dead hero, but on the experience of meeting and relating to a living person. The great Methodist preacher Lord Soper used to deal with hecklers at Hyde Park Corner, who claimed that God was dead, by saying, “That’s strange - I was talking with him just a minute ago, and he was very much alive.” Anyone can try this for themselves: if you start to pray, and to try to live by Jesus’ teachings, you will find a growing conviction that you’re not just talking to yourself, but he is real and our contemporary.
Jesus is certainly not turning in his grave at all these books and films putting forward weird and wonderful fables about him. Just like that Christian teenager said: He’s not in his grave, he’s alive!
Published in the Marston Times, April 2007