Throughout salvation history, a key litmus test of a prophet’s authenticity was whether his ministry was divinely attested with the occurrence of supporting miracles. Neither the presence or absence of signs and wonders were considered definitive. But if someone claiming to be God’s representative received backup for his claims from Heaven, you knew he was someone worth taking seriously.
And the more astounding the miracle—i.e., the more authority over creation required to pull it off—the stronger the miracle’s evidentiary force. After all, parting the sea is harder to explain with appeals to nature than making a spring gush from a rock.
Related: A Eucharistic Miracle
This being the Easter season, it is fitting and just to turn our attention to Christianity’s defining miracle, the Resurrection of Jesus. Requiring as it did sovereign authority over life and death, and being documented in multiple Christian and secular sources, the Resurrection is not only the greatest miracle of all time, it’s the best-attested.
Catholic Answers head apologist Jimmy Akin does a theological and empirical deep dive into Christ’s rising from the grave. Along the way, he addresses several major Resurrection-debunking theories in generous detail and concludes whether or not they hold water.
Now, a core aspect of apologetics is meeting infidels where they are. And since most Western heathens are immersed in the Pop Cult, Jimmy does resort to some pretty cringe pop culture analogies. That said, his dissections of the leading arguments against the Resurrection are quite sound.
See for yourself:
A few Tl; dw highlights:
- The Romans put the same engineering mastery that built roads and aqueducts into perfecting crucifixion; in other words, they refined it to kill the condemned every time, so that’s what it did.
- If Jesus’ followers stole his body, the chief priests wouldn’t have needed to bribe the tomb guards to spread that story.
- Ancient pharmacology fell far short of today’s standards. Even if you managed to drug someone into a death-like state, reviving him at all would have been a gamble; without permanent debilitating complications, an even bigger gamble. And that’s with a healthy subject, never mind one who’d just been crucified.
Related: Pharmakeia
The long and the short of it is, the weight of the evidence indicates that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, and was buried. And He rose again and ascended into Heaven.
Which makes Christ’s Resurrection the best-attested miracle of all time.
At bare minimum, the fact of the Resurrection demands that Christianity’s claims be taken seriously. And as some philosophers make a compelling case for, not only Christianity, but God Himself, can be proven for a certainty starting from the datum of the Resurrection.
Christos anesti. Alleluia!
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