Category: Jesus

4 min read

Jesus

Defending the Resurrection

Carl E. Olson

April 6, 2021 1:52 pm April 6, 2021

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4 min read

How many accessible works of Catholic apologetics can you name that focus on the resurrection of Christ? Chances are your list is quite short. That’s one of the reasons I…

How many accessible works of Catholic apologetics can you name that focus on the resurrection of Christ?

Chances are your list is quite short. That’s one of the reasons I wrote my recent book “Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? Questions and Answers about the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ” (Ignatius Press–Augustine Institute, 2016). One of the main goals of the book was to provide nontechnical but substantive answers to a wide range of questions about and arguments against the Christian belief that Jesus Christ did, in fact, rise from the grave. Here are a few things I think are noteworthy about this topic.

There are very few recent books by Catholics defending the Resurrection. However, the fine Jesuit theologian Father Gerald O’Collins has written and edited several books on the topic, and I refer to his books many times. One great insight from Father O’Collins is that the Christian belief in the Resurrection is intimately connected to the Christian belief that God is Trinitarian and personal. He notes how often the apostle Paul “takes the Resurrection of Jesus (together with ours) as the specifically Christian way of presenting God.” He also notes that to “be wrong about the Resurrection is to ‘misrepresent’ God essentially, since Paul defines God as the God of resurrection (1 Cor 15:15).” This is a reminder of how the distinctively Christian beliefs in God as Trinity, the Incarnation and the Resurrection are intimately connected.

Many of the best books about the Resurrection in recent years have been written by evangelical or Anglican scholars, such as William Lane Craig, Michael Licona and N.T. Wright, or evangelicals, such as Craig Keener, Craig Evans and Ben Witherington III. Catholics need not, of course, agree with everything written by these authors to appreciate the rigor of their research and argumentation.

The internet is, in many ways, way behind the curve. While you can find plenty of sites run by atheists and skeptics claiming that Jesus didn’t exist or that there is no evidence for the Resurrection, there are few (if any) reputable historians who will deny that Jesus existed, or who will dismiss the many difficult questions posed by the textual and historical data. Bart Ehrman, who is both a prolific New Testament scholar and an agnostic, recently wrote a book, “Did Jesus Exist?”, that takes on “mythicists” — those who deny that Jesus was a real, historical figure. Ehrman compares such skeptics to Holocaust deniers. He notes that few of these mythicists have any training “in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field,” and he claims that no mythicists teach New Testament or early Christianity at “any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world.”

The importance of chronology cannot be overstated. Some skeptics tend to talk about the events following the death of Christ as if they happened in a sort of vague vacuum — as if we have no idea when certain things happened. That’s not really the case, even if exact dates aren’t possible. So, for instance, Peter and the other apostles began proclaiming the Resurrection within a few weeks of Jesus’ death. If Jesus had still been dead, why didn’t someone produce the body? And whatever would have inspired the previously frightened and hiding apostles to suddenly be bold and unwavering in their witness?

Details are always important, but we shouldn’t overlook the forest for the trees. Some skeptical scholars fixate — to the point of neurotic obsession — on supposedly conflicting details within the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. But there are three key facts that the early Christians all agreed upon, even in the face of opposition and persecution: the tomb that held Jesus was empty; Jesus appeared at various times to the apostles and other disciples; and the Church grew based primarily on its declaration that, as Peter stated: “God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses. Exalted at the right hand of God, he received the promise of the holy Spirit from the Father and poured it forth, as you [both] see and hear” (Acts 2:32-33). Those three facts are reiterated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (see Nos. 638-658). There is, in fact, plenty of compelling arguments for the Resurrection.

Carl E. Olson is the editor of Ignatius Insight (www.ignatiusinsight.com). He and his family live in Eugene, Ore.

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9 min read

Jesus

Christ’s Self-Emptying

Father Brian Mullady

February 16, 2021 1:53 pm February 16, 2021

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9 min read

Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, / did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. / Rather, he emptied himself, / taking the form of…

Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, / did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. / Rather, he emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave, / coming in human likeness; / and found human in appearance, / he humbled himself, / becoming obedient to death, / even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6-8).

This Scripture passage from St. Paul summarizes the humility of Jesus Christ and his self-emptying, also called kenosis in Greek.

The question of Christ’s self-emptying is very urgent today as there are many who question the traditional doctrine taught by the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) concerning the nature of Christ. This applies even to professional teachers of theology, who sometimes teach that Jesus is just a good man who is engraced in the same way any other human being is and therefore is an adopted, not a natural, son of God. There are two basic clarifications which must guide any truly Catholic understanding of Christ. The first concerns what the union of God and man is in Christ. The second concerns how the first doctrine is reflected in certain actions of Christ — for instance, His cry, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” from the cross (see Mt 27:46).

God and Man

When God became man in the Christ, this was a true self-emptying in humility. But what was exactly given up? Did Jesus cease to be God? What did He assume? Where does the union of God and man take place?

The attempt to explain this belief puzzled the early Christians. They used terms taken from Greek philosophy to attempt to explain the mystery in which they believed. Not that they could exhaust this mystery. That is not possible as it is a part of the ineffable wisdom of God. But since this mystery is received in a human mind, the early Christians used philosophy as a tool to help clarify what they actually believed in. The principle terms they used were: person, nature and relation.

In Greek philosophy a nature is a principle of a kind of activity which sets one being off from another. The way a dog acts differs from a tree. This demonstrates that a dog has certain powers different than a tree and so is a different being, possessing a different nature. The individual who possesses a nature which is shared by all the individuals of its species is called a hypostasis. An individual who possesses a rational nature (a hypostasis with a rational nature) is a person.

Once the divinity of the Word was determined, the question arose as to how the Word was present in Jesus of Nazareth. Many attempted to explain this by saying that God and man were united in nature in Christ. This did not do justice to what Christians believed or the Christ to whom they prayed. If the union took place in nature, Jesus would have to be really God and only seem to be man, really man or seem to be God, or be a strange monstrous mixture of the two. The heresy which teaches that the union takes place in the natures is Monophysitism, which derives from the Greek words mono(one) and phusis (nature). This would mean that Christ would, in some sense, be just a good man somehow identified with God, or only seem to be man.

Instead, the Council of Chalcedon taught that the union takes place in the person. The divine person of the Word who shares the divine nature with the other two persons, at a certain point in time, took unto himself a new way of acting, a human nature, but not a human person. God was not changed by this action, but the world was. What had been called to union with God in nature by a quality of being called sanctifying grace became a new and unheard of relation, and the world was united to God in the person of the Word. The union in person is thus called “the hypostatic union,” which is a grace unique to Christ. Christ does not assume a human person, but only a human nature, a perfect and complete one nonetheless. He has a human soul, intellect, will, passions and body.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church recounts for us the definition from Chalcedon: “We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis” (No. 467).

This means that the emptying of Christ in being consisted in His will to join human nature to His actions as a divine person, to act through it and to only hide the glory of His divine nature so that He might suffer the passion: “What he was, he remained; what he was not, he assumed” (Catechism, No. 469).

The one divine person, Jesus, thus acts in two natures. In Scripture, He even demonstrates this because He speaks in both natures as one person often in the same verse. “Now glorify me [human nature], Father, with you, with the glory that I [divine nature] had with you before the world began” (Jn 17:5). This new relation between God and the world is a sheer grace, and it is also a miracle.

St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians continues the passage about the nature of the self-emptying: “God greatly exalted him” (2:9). Does this mean Christ was not exalted in being before the Passion? Often, things are said to occur in Scripture when they come to our knowledge. Before the Passion, Christ rarely demonstrated His divinity. But after the Passion, in the Resurrection and the Ascension, His divinity becomes clearly demonstrated to the apostles. They come to know it.

What Did He Give Up?

One of the difficulties with this position is how one can dogmatically explain the cry of Christ from the cross: “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” Many theologians today hold that Jesus was forsaken because He had no idea He would rise from the dead, that He threw himself into a kind of existential darkness characterized by faith and just accepted the meaninglessness of life. So, His experience of death would be the same as ours.

Agony in the Garden, altar painting in the Church of St. Vitale, Parma, Italy. Zvonimir Atletic/Shutterstock.com

This is impossible. In what sense can Christ be forsaken on the cross? He cannot cease being the Word of God within the Trinity. This is His personhood. He cannot cease being the Word made flesh. This union is permanent once embraced. He cannot sin as this would war against His mission, which is to atone for our sins by His perfect obedience on the cross.

The traditional teaching of the Church is that Christ enjoys the beatific vision from the moment of His conception in the womb of His mother in His human intellect. This is not formally defined de fide, but has always been considered proxima fide, meaning that to deny it entails so many problems for other doctrines that it must be affirmed. If Christ were not to have this and therefore have faith on the cross, this would mean that He would have to merit it for himself as man and, in principle, could sin. In fact, faith is never attributed to Christ in His earthly life, and the ability to sin would again compromise His mission.

The only way Christ can be abandoned by His Father on the cross, then, is by external protection. Many times Christ’s enemies sought to put Him to death, beginning with Herod, when Christ was a baby, and God protected Him. The dogmatic difficulty here is resolved if one considers that “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the opening verse of Psalm 22 (RSVCE). If one reads the whole psalm, it is very far from a cry of despair and existential angst. The psalmist does suffer intensely, but the psalm ends with a hymn of thanksgiving to God and confidence that God will vindicate his sufferings. This will, of course, happen in the resurrection of the dead. Moreover, Thomas Aquinas thought that no one could freely give himself to the kind of suffering Christ embraced on the cross unless he knew about the resurrection of the dead.

The self-emptying of Jesus then is only a self-emptying in being in the sense that God should choose to take to himself a human way of acting and suffering. Psychologically this emptying does not involve sin. It is not even done in faith.

Rather, in this suffering Christ experiences the greatest pain possible. This is the case physically because His body was more sensitive than a normal body as it was perfectly fashioned by the Holy Spirit. He therefore suffers more in the bruises, the scourging, the nails and the hunger and thirst.

He also suffers mentally because he personally experiences all the human sins which will be committed and have been committed in the history of the human race. He knows these through the beatific vision He has on the cross. He does not allow this vision, or His glory as God, to enter into His lower self precisely so He can suffer the Passion. He feels abandoned by God, but knows internally He is not. This is a cause of acute pain both physically and mentally. But the internal union of the hypostatic union is preserved.

So, in Jesus, we see how much God loves us. We should therefore be caught up in love of the God we cannot see (see Roman Missal, Christmas Preface).

Father Brian Mullady, O.P., S.T.D., earned his doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.

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6 min read

Jesus

Did Jesus Really Exist?

Carl Olson

October 5, 2020 7:15 am October 5, 2020

6 min read

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6 min read

Scouring in a used-book store a few years ago, I came upon an impressive volume of Catholic apologetics titled “God, Man, and the Universe,” originally published in 1950 in French,…

Scouring in a used-book store a few years ago, I came upon an impressive volume of Catholic apologetics titled “God, Man, and the Universe,” originally published in 1950 in French, then published in English in 1953 by P.J. Kenedy and Sons (apparently the first Catholic publishing house established in the United States). Subtitled “A Christian Answer to Modern Materialism,” the volume featured chapters by an impressive array of mostly French academics, including the great Jesuit scholar Henri de Lubac and the prolific Dominican theologian Yves M.J. Congar.

The chapter titled “The Problem of Christ” (and subtitled “The Myth of Jesus”), written by Henri Fehner, opens with this: “Did Christ ever exist? is the question so many materialists ask; and their way of framing it is a virtual anticipation of the answer.” Fehner then quotes from a work of Soviet propaganda, which contains the humorous claim that many “western European scholars” have “long ago been convinced that the Christ of the Gospel never existed.” As Fehner dryly observes, the specific time frame of “long ago” dates to the “end of the eighteenth century! Before this, nowhere at any time had there ever been any doubt about the historical existence of Christ.”

This basic bit of data will likely surprise some readers. But the “mythicist” school — that is, those who claim that the story of Jesus is entirely mythical in nature, for he never existed — is not only young, it often exhibits all of the hasty brashness and sneering insolence of youth. All of these qualities were taken up recently by the agnostic New Testament scholar (and former fundamentalist Christian) Dr. Bart D. Ehrman in his book “Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth” (HarperOne, 2013), which begins exactly where the Catholic Fehner did many decades ago:

“The first author to deny the existence of Jesus appears to have been the eighteenth-century Frenchman Constanin Francois Volney, a member of the Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution. … Several years later [after 1791] a much more substantial and influential book was published by another Frenchman, Charles-Francois Dupuis, who secretary of the revolutionary National Convention.”

Dupuis’ book, titled “The Origin of All Religions” (1795), was over 2,000 pages long and argued — as did Volney’s earlier essay — that all religions are essentially the same, each being variations on a mythology of a “solar deity.” Thus, as Ehrman summarizes, “Jesus too was originally invented as another embodiment of the sun-god.” It wasn’t until the 1850s that a biblical scholar, the “idiosyncratic” German philosopher and historian Bruno Bauer (d. 1882), a student of philosopher Friedrich Hegel, wrote a series of books arguing that the Jesus as an invention of the Gospels writers, heavily indebted to Greek mythology and Roman Stoicism. Another German, Arthur Drews, built on the work of Bauer, and his 1909 book “The Christ Myth” was quite influential, being taken up and used by Vladimir Lenin in his particular variation of atheistic Marxism.

And, coming full circle, it was this Marxist belief that inspired Catholic books such as “God, Man, and the Universe.” But, of course, not all mythicists are Marxists. But mythicists today still rely on some basic arguments used throughout the relatively short history of mythicism; these include three key claims:

1. Everything we know about Jesus comes from the books of the New Testament — and they cannot be taken seriously as works of history as they were written many decades after the facts by authors who were not eyewitnesses.

2. Jesus is not mentioned outside of the New Testament in works by Jewish or pagan authors, further substantiating the first point.

3. The stories of Jesus are based upon pagan legends and myths about dying gods and their resurrections; they have little or nothing to do with first-century Judaism.

These claims are rooted in a combination of anti-Christian bias — especially anti-Catholic prejudice, as found in the writings of supporters of the French Revolution — and hyper-Enlightenment assumptions, which have little regard for ancient sources and place a tremendous amount of faith in supposedly “scientific” evidence. And such an approach, not surprisingly, is based on the premise that anything supernatural or miraculous is, by definition, contrary to reason, logic or evidence.

There is, then, a certain built-in circularity to the mythicist project. This can be seen in a Washington Post opinion piece, titled “Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up”, written by Raphael Lataster, a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Sydney, and first posted in December 2014 before being retweeted by the newspaper in December 2017. Lataster writes:

“The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity — which gives us reason to question them.”

The blithe sloppiness here is partially due to big assumptions and sweeping judgments — all without any evidence. So, for instance, how is it that four lengthy biographical works written between 25 and 50 years after the death of Jesus, all containing claims to being based on direct witness and firsthand testimony, does not fall under the category of “early sources”? Because, as Lataster states, he assumes the Jesus being described is the “Christ of Faith,” not the “Historical Jesus.” How so? Because, as his essay indicates, they describe supernatural (or “celestial”) characteristics. Lataster further doubles down by essentially saying that the Christian authors cannot be taken seriously because, well, they believe in Jesus Christ. As is so often the case, the elephant in the room is metaphysical assumptions, which throw up a smoke screen when it comes to the historical veracity of the Gospels and the other New Testament texts.

That is one reason (but hardly the only one) that the vast majority of scholars of the New Testament, ancient history, and theology don’t take the mythicists seriously. Yet that scholarly disinterest is a problem, precisely because the mythicists’ audience is not scholarly, even if some mythicists want to be taken seriously by scholars. In my next column, I’ll show how the agnostic Ehrman, the Catholic scholar Brant Pitre, and the evangelical scholar Larry W. Hurtado each offer substantial responses to the basic premises of mythicism.

Carl E. Olson is the editor of Ignatius Insight (www.ignatiusinsight.com).

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2 min read

Jesus

Jesus’ Words To The Good Thief

Father Ray Ryland

April 1, 2019 11:35 am April 1, 2019

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2 min read

Attempting to interpret the verse “And he [Jesus] said to him [the penitent thief], ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’” (Lk 23:43, RSV)…

Attempting to interpret the verse “And he [Jesus] said to him [the penitent thief], ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’” (Lk 23:43, RSV) raises several issues. The first centers on the word “today.” The Greek word used for today is quite distinct. It means “this day,” “now,” “the present day.” As presently punctuated, the verse states Jesus’ promise to be carried out that very day.

But that day Jesus did not go to “Paradise” (more about this term later). He went into the tomb where he was buried for three days. Moreover, according to John 20:17, after His resurrection Jesus said to Mary, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (Jn 20:17). So, three days after His death, He had not yet ascended into heaven.

Furthermore, St. Paul lists a number of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7.

If Jesus did promise to take that thief to paradise that day, He did not keep His promise.

The Greek version of this verse has no punctuation. The commas in Luke 23:43 are the result of guesswork on the part of translators. I agree with some modern commentators who contend the comma before “today” should come after. Thus: “I say to you today, you will be with me in Paradise.” This would reflect a common Hebrew idiom used for emphasis: “I declare to you this day, that you shall perish” (Dt 30:18, RSV); “‘I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you” (Acts 20:26, RSV).

Now, “Paradise.” There are varying opinions about the meaning of the term. I find persuasive what the New Oxford Annotated Bible offers. In a footnote to Luke 23:43, this version notes, “Paradise (like ‘Abraham’s bosom’ in 16:22) was a contemporary Jewish term for the lodging place of the righteous dead prior to resurrection.”

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1 min read

Jesus

Christ’s Head On the Cross

Father Reginald Martin

February 25, 2019 12:59 pm February 25, 2019

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Artists appear to have agreed to place the soldier’s wound on Christ’s right side (the viewer’s left), but an early carving shows the wound on the Savior’s left. Lucas Cranach…

Artists appear to have agreed to place the soldier’s wound on Christ’s right side (the viewer’s left), but an early carving shows the wound on the Savior’s left. Lucas Cranach (d. 1553) painted a crucified Christ without a wound and said he would add the detail if its position were revealed to him. As late as the 19^th century, Eduard Manet represented Christ supported by angels, with a wounded left side.

Only St. John mentions Jesus’ head in his Gospel account, “bowing his head, he gave up his spirit” (Jn 19:30). Because we cannot determine the actual position of Jesus’ head when he died, artists have exercised some freedom when representing this aspect of the Crucified Christ.

That artists represent Christ’s head leaning to the right may reflect no more than a sensibility that the right is the more noble side. Or the artist may simply wish Christ’s head to echo the position of his wound. To show the wound on one side and Christ’s head leaning toward the other might prove distracting. We shall never know who established these conventions, but the expression on the Crucified Christ’s face reveals his love; that is what counts.

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