Fr. Adrian Mascarenhas –
Q: Skeptics claim that the Resurrection of Christ was just a hoax, hallucination or superstition. How should Catholics respond?
Well, Catholics should respond with love, always! And a touch of humour as well!
Let us begin by assuming that the Gospel narratives are talking about real experiences that the disciples had. The question now arises as to whether they were hallucinating. Did the apostles merely dream about Jesus? Or, possibly, were they deceived by someone posing as Christ? The answer is that while it might be possible to have a hallucination of Christ, it does not seem plausible that several women and several apostles individually hallucinated an empty tomb, not just once but a number of times. Apart from which, the idea of a collective hallucination seems implausible, since large numbers of people are said to have witnessed the risen Christ together and as individuals (1 Cor 15:5-8).
Besides, why did the Resurrection appearances suddenly stop after the “forty days” mentioned in Acts 1:3? All these facts are incompatible with the idea that the Resurrection appearances were simple hallucinations. One possibility is that a spirit or ghost somehow disguised itself as Jesus and brought on these apparitions. While this would be difficult to disprove, the fact that the tomb was empty would seem to render this possibility highly unlikely. For the same reason, the appearance of the Risen Christ cannot be easily connected with superstitions such as belief in ghosts or witchcraft.
Now we consider another alternative, namely that the Gospel narratives are not talking about a real experience at all; namely, they themselves are fictitious accounts. Could this be plausible? Once again, there are several reasons to believe that while the Gospels might not reveal all the facts about the Resurrection, the central truth that they teach is absolutely clear – that Jesus is indeed risen.
While the four Gospels follow roughly the same pattern in relating the story of the Passion and Death of Jesus, they branch out into totally different directions while talking about his Resurrection. Here we have our first indication that the Gospels are not the product of a group of conspirators setting out to create a new religion through a false story of a risen Lord. Each of the Gospel writers is drawing from his own sources, and ultimately the sources are independent of each other.
That means that the Gospels present us with four independent testimonies to the Resurrection. That would count as evidence in their favour, but stronger still is the fact that they specifically rely on women as the first witnesses. It is unlikely that anyone in the first century would have invented a story of women as the first witnesses to the Resurrection.
Another circumstantial detail corroborates the Gospel story. The early Church, at some point during the lifetime of the apostles, decided to celebrate the Eucharist on Sundays, as opposed to the Jewish day of worship which was Saturday.
Obviously, some major event must have taken place on a Sunday, which led the Apostles to abandon one of the Ten Commandments, namely, the one about keeping the Sabbath Day Holy. Jesus himself observed the Sabbath during his lifetime, though he explained it differently from the Pharisees. So what could have been that major event that made the apostles change their day of worship? The history of the apostolic Church contains no other possible explanation, apart from the Resurrection of Jesus.
Lastly, if you or I had written a false story about someone who rose from the dead, would we then be ready to suffer and die for our faith in that false story? The martyrdom of the apostles shows their belief not just in the general fact of the Resurrection of the Dead (like the Jews in 2 Macc 7), but specifically in the Resurrection of the Messiah whom they preached, Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus had not risen from the dead, the Gospel would have merely been a story about a good teacher who died, like Plato’s stories of Socrates. And the Bible would probably have ended with Peter’s words, “I am going fishing” (Jn 21:3). The fact that we have a Church at all, and the fact that – through the sacrifices of the apostles – Christianity spread to many nations within a short period – is the fruit of the Resurrection of Jesus.