One could begin simply with the question of what Easter is, and that would be enough to make one realize that the question of “what happened” is a historical question, even if we mean “what happened to change the lives of the disciples?” and not “did Jesus enter the resurrection age?” When it comes to questions about the past, prior to the time of anyone alive today, historical study is the only approach open to us, and provides the only tools available for addressing such topics.
The claim to simply “believe the Bible”, when it comes to Easter, is not in fact simple at all. It is in the end dishonest, since the person who makes the claim either has not read the Bible carefully enough to realize the problems, or is willfully ignoring them or denying their existence.
A fundamentalist will pick and choose while denying they are doing so. The stories of Jesus eating fish will be chosen, ignoring the fact that the earliest stories lack such details. The fundamentalist will allow the honorable burial in John to completely obscure from view the dishonorable one in Mark. The fundamentalist apologist will take Matthew’s addition of guards at the tomb at face value, even though it forces him to change the goal of the women who go to the tomb, and to attribute to the Jewish leaders an understanding of Jesus’ claims that even the disciples are acknowledged not to have had. The fundamentalist apologist will never focus attention on those stories in which Jesus doesn’t look like Jesus, in which those who had the experience of seeing him doubted, or in which the focus is clearly symbolic and eucharistic as he is discerned to be present in the breaking of the bread. The fundamentalist will ignore the fact that the Gospels are evenly divided over whether Jesus was first seen in Jerusalem or Galilee (In Mark and Matthew they are told to go to Galilee; in Luke, they are told to stay in Jerusalem).
A historian must also pick and choose, but does so because of an honest assessment of the state of the evidence. One cannot simply believe what the Bible says on this subject, since the Bible says diverse things that do not come together into a coherent whole. A historian takes the oldest sources, the ones most likely to contain reliable data because they are closest in time to the events themselves, and gives them priority.
I am a Christian, and as such I value truth. And thus I must choose the honesty of history to the dishonesty of fundamentalism, no matter how painful or disconcerting the path it places me on may be.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In