THE RESURRECTION of Jesus is multiply testified in almost all of the documents we have of his life, the Epistles of Paul, the Gospels, other of the books collected in the New Testament. Paul clearly believed he had encountered Jesus risen, he said so, he knew people who had known Jesus before his death who also saw and encountered Jesus risen from death, he recommended that some of them could testify to their experience to those he was writing to if they doubted it, when he was writing those people were still alive.
But one of the things about Jesus risen from death is that some of those who knew him best didn't recognize him on first seeing him, Mary Magdalene didn't recognize him at first when she mistook him for the gardener who she asked if he could tell her where they had taken the body of Jesus away, she needed to hear him to know him. The disciples who encountered him while walking the road to Emmaus. a village a number of miles from Jerusalem. It took them even longer to know that the man they were befriending was their teacher, maybe their friend. It wasn't until they hospitably asked him to travel with them and eat with him that when Jesus broke the bread in the way he did in several of the events described in the Gospels that "they knew him in the breaking of the bread," and he disappeared.
The other descriptions of the risen Jesus make it clear that he had something like a human body, he ate with them, he wasn't a ghost (as is also made clear in the stories) his new form was capable of surpassing physical limits that our bodies certainly can't. So all of the scoffing that calls the risen Jesus a reanimated corpse, all of the arguments out of human and animal physiology and that old atheist chestnut, some kind of invocation of "the second law of thermodynamics" clearly doesn't match the description made by rather ordinary people, Luke, perhaps being something of an exception as it's assumed he may have had what went as medical training at the time - which can't be honestly considered as analogous to what we'd mean by the term today.
I think too many modern Bible scholars, textual experts, theologians are clearly embarrassed by what the only documents we have available to us say and they're always trying to find some argument against taking them seriously as a description of what the human beings who had those experiences said about them, either first hand, in the case of Paul or perhaps one level removed in the case of some of the telling of it, though it's possible some of those who gave those accounts were actually present to have seen Jesus in the flesh. I think they should consider more seriously that what is described in the documents might be a more accurate description of what wasn't like anything else any of them had encountered or perhaps had ever heard of than the post-enlightenment attempts trying to shove it into modern materialism and the pseudo-science of psychology can come up with.
No modern Bible scholar or textual expert or theologian saw Jesus break bread, they didn't see him after he had arisen from death never to die again. That's typical of all scholarship regarding historical figures whose existence is known to us solely on the basis of whatever textual evidence of their lives comes down to us, much of what is claimed uncontroversially is, actually, less well documented than most of what is claimed about Jesus. None of us have anything but the testimonies of those who left us the documents to start with, and it's clear that in the case of Jesus a lot of them are embarrassed that those don't fit into modern notions of what's possible not considering it might be the modern notions that are too narrowly drawn to encompass those things if the texts are at all accurate. I wouldn't claim they could be completely accurate, the Epistles of Paul, the Gospel accounts are conventionally called "the word of the Lord" during Christian religious worship but they are humanly written documents told out of human limitations. Even those who are making the claims are rather modest in claiming their completeness. It's plain that they were as mystified by them as anyone today would have been. If their claims are accurate they were witnessing something that had happened for the first time, certainly in their experience, the language they would have had, the analogies they could draw couldn't describe it. None of them describes their encounters with Jesus in any but the most practical terms, breaking bread, eating, seeing the wounds - the relationship of the body of Jesus after he rose and what had been done to his body before then is clearly indicated in the story of Thomas doubting them but not in the others.
We do have the unlikely phenomenon of the early Jesus movement being credible to ever growing numbers of people who were at least as unlikely to believe it as anyone today is. The fact that the numbers of believers grew even under severe persecution in the period before the most serious damage to the teachings of Jesus happened, it being taken up by worldly powers and the trappings of it used by them, something that is an ongoing feature and problem for someone who said in no uncertain terms that his kingdom was not of this world, no more than his risen body would be of the world, at least not in the way that mortal bodies are.
I choose to believe because of the breaking and distribution of the bread being a central teaching and act of Jesus and so many other of the down to earth acts that have the most transcendent significance in their denial of selfishness and the command that the greatest among us be the most humble. That is something I've had too little experience of directly or by witness. It certainly isn't the way of the world, the extent to which any Christian church or individual gets from it the farther away they are from what they are told to do. I choose to believe because I don't believe we are merely "particles and forces" or "lumbering robots" controlled by DNA intent on its replication or that our minds are the epiphenomena of molecules in our brains, I choose to believe the alternatives in no small part because I think the entire aparatus of modern materialism is a self-contradicting, self refuting ideology that can't account for the experience of life, it certainly doesn't have what is in it to produce anything but the kind of gloomy, pessimistic depravity that, in the time of Jesus, was embodied in classical paganism. If I'm a fool to believe it, I'd rather be a fool aspiring for more than risk being a fool falling for a depraved and degraded view of this very life which we are leading which is also an aspect of materialism. Anything higher in any materialist ideology is what that most honest of the depraved, Nietzsche called "the shadow of the Buddha," fading ever dimmer in modern materialist culture.
I think we have a highly imperfect, no doubt too human demonstration in the difference between neo-pagan materialism (fully joined in by an enormous number of false and nominal "christians") as represented by the Trump regime and an approximation of its opposite in the Biden administration, whose economic policy some have called "Catholic social doctrine in action". I would never have believed I wold write that sentence before this year but, there, I said it. I would never claim that Biden is the anointed agent of Christ in the world, I am sure he would never say that, himself, anyone who would is someone you should be suspicious of.
He would never deify himself as Trump was and is by his followers (including some Catholic bishops and many as-seen-on-TV Bible thumpers) and, lest anyone forget, by himself.
Biden's side are more likely to express their disapproval and opposition to some of what he's doing than they are to deify him. In that, I think, we can see the difference between a servant of The People and an earthly governing gangster, the very difference between egalitarian governance, legitimate democracy and what any "most Christian" monarch, so called or not, will be. It's the difference between insincere profession and remembering Jesus in the sharing of the substance of life for us. There is the most intimate linkage between our present mortal bodies and that of immortality that we can experience in life and it is through our bodies and through those to touching other souls through their bodies. If you think I understand that, well, I don't. But I believe it, by choice and by experience in life.
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