LAURENCE GRAHAM,
Sir, - On the front page of the Weekend section of your edition of last Saturday, Patsy McGarry presented the case for believing in the Resurrection of Jesus, and the case against.
What strikes me about the various points which make up the case against is how untenable they are.
The stolen body theory, for instance: If the disciples stole Jesus's body, why would some of them later give up their lives for what they knew to be a lie? And the hallucination theory does not work because it is impossible to believe that over 500 people could hallucinate the same thing on several different occasions for a period of six weeks, and that the hallucination should then suddenly stop.
I suggest that the arguments are not so closely balanced as Mr McGarry suggests. I am reminded again of a man called Frank Morrison who could not believe that Christ had risen from the dead. So he set out to look at the evidence and to write a book disproving it.
As he studied the evidence his whole outlook changed and he ended up writing a book called Who Moved the Stone?, in which he set forth the evidence which had led him to conclude that in fact Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. - Yours, etc.,
LAURENCE GRAHAM,
Methodist Manse,
Longford.
Sir, - Patsy McGarry's article on the Resurrection might not score the highest marks in a theology school, but it surely expresses things as many people see them. It is some kind of tragedy that what the Bible actually says and the Church teaches about the resurrection is so little known. Whoever is to blame for this, it is not your Religious Affairs Correspondent.
Regarding the pros and cons of belief in the resurrection, nothing in the Bible says that the risen Christ was raised in the way Lazarus was. You could not go along to his house to take a look at him. The risen Christ appears only as he chooses and to whom he chooses. In other words, the risen Christ is as Paul puts it, "hidden in God". He appears infrequently but significantly, as God does. The resurrection is all about Christ's divinity.
Paul's omission of the appearances to the women is notable, but not in the way that admits of a "that's Paul for you" comment. Paul wrote long before the gospels: by the time they were composed, a retrieval of women's role in Christ's life had taken place. In Paul's time, all the emphasis in Church matters was on the apostles and their message.
By the time of the gospels some decades later, Mary's role in the birth of Christ and the other women's role as witnesses of the resurrection had come to the fore.
They convinced the apostles, or half-convinced them at any rate. Then Jesus appeared to them. Ultimately he appeared to Paul. But he did not appear to the historian Josephus, who is accordingly not a very reliable witness. - Yours, etc.,
MYLES REARDEN,
St Patrick's College,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.