Today is Easter and, all over the world, men are waking-up and realizing that the Li’l Woman is going to drag he and the children to church today, and there is nothing he can do about it unless he is prepared to get a divorce. Once there, they will be subjected to the claim that “Jesus rose from the dead,” and “Jesus triumphed over death,” and so forth.
Aiming, perhaps, to help shape today’s sermons, Albert the Pious went so far just yesterday as to humiliate himself by publishing this egregiously false, but typical, claim:
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead separates Christianity from all mere religion — whatever its form. Christianity without the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is merely one religion among many. “And if Christ is not risen,” said the Apostle Paul, “then our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain.” Furthermore, “You are still in your sins!.” Paul could not have chosen stronger language. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.”
Yet, the resurrection of Jesus Christ has been under persistent attacks since the Apostolic age. Why? Because it is the central confirmation of Jesus’ identity as the incarnate Son of God, and the ultimate sign of Christ’s completed work of atonement, redemption, reconciliation, and salvation.
Sigh. The humdrum truth is that dying-and-rising gods were such a commonplace in the ancient world that Jesus would never have gained entrée to the god-club if he hadn’t died and come back, and mythologists have wondered whether such nonsensical stories ought to comprise a distinct category.
Undoubtedly, the resurrection narratives of Jesus — and there are a bunch — are fakelore, stories made-up to make him appear more like a genuine-article god to people steeped for millennia in tales of gods who died and returned from death.
The howling and bellowing pastor in the little white church down the street knows that perfectly well, too, if he has had a proper seminary education, for it is simply not true that Christianity popped-up out of nowhere one day, like a mushroom. The birth of Christianity is a point on the continuum of religious thought; it had antecedents in other, pre-existing religions, and it has spawned offshoots of its own. Indeed, many serious-minded scholars wonder whether Jesus ever even existed, because the entire Jesus narrative can be constructed from previous materials. (I incline toward the view that, Paul Bunyan-like, there probably was a human being around whom the tall-tales gathered, mainly because I have a difficult time imagining a strong Jesus-movement without a historical figure. There is no — NO — contemporaneous evidence that Jesus ever existed.)
All of which raises a troubling question: Why is the truth so often the exact opposite of the claims made by pastors? Why, if they are the keepers and guardians of the Eternal Truth, do they need to lie?