More on "Is it Reasonable to Believe in the Resurrection?" (Part 2)

Since I'm fascinated by this subject, I'm planning to post twice a week for a total of probably six posts. It's going to be my work for Lent!

The New Testament offers mixed information about the risen Jesus: He was unrecognizable, he walked through closed doors, yet he could eat food. Do these contradictory descriptions mean that nothing actually happened except for different forms of delusion? I don't think so. I believe that what happened was real and powerful, but hard to describe. Those who don't believe in miracles explain these contradictions stating that the apostles simply underwent a life changing spiritual experience and that the evangelists translated it into symbolic images. Those who believe in miracles think that everything that is said in the resurrection narratives is true and that the properties described are peculiar to the "glorified body" mentioned by St. Paul.

In my opinion, the less likely explanation for the Easter apparitions is that nothing happened except for a spiritual experience, I have noticed that the scholars who hold on to this theory (at least those I happened to read) mention only in passing Paul's Corinthians 1,15, or they don't report it in its entirety. Paul wrote that Jesus appeared to Peter and then to the twelve apostles. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of them, Paul says, still living. Later he appeared to James and finally to Paul himself. This claim is so vast and precise, one has only two choices: Either Paul was lying or he was describing what he experienced and what the apostles told him. Corinthian 1,15 is no subject for interpretation and it was written no more than twenty years after Jesus' death. Paul was a great mind, respected as a man of culture. He was persecuting Christians before his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and he died for his faith. I chose to believe him.

However, we don't know to how many Christian brothers Paul actually spoke. From his letters to the Galatians we learn that he met Kephas (Peter) and James (Jesus' brother) three years after his conversion, and then he went to Syria and came back to Jerusalem after fourteen years. In Jerusalem he might have met some of the people who saw the risen Jesus. Where they all gathered together when they saw him? To find an answer to this question was important to me because my son insisted that they had suffered from a phenomenon of mass hysteria, so I spoke to a priest at my parish. He told me that Jesus appeared to each disciple individually.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Theology teaches that it's a property of the glorified body to be in several places at the same time", he answered.
According with Hinduism, after we die we can be everywhere at once because infinity and eternity stretch in all directions. I strongly believe that Jesus' resurrection in a glorified body is not an oddity, if one looks at Christ as a being who has transcended time and space.

My son says I believe because I consciously made this choice, since there is no rational argument to sustain a belief in the divinity of Jesus. I can understand his point of view; I thought just the same only a few years ago. Then I started wondering if I wasn't rejecting religion because I was afraid to be tricked by my psychological needs. I needed strength, comfort, atonement and hope, but I refused to look for them where I felt I could find them. My son thinks that I'm forcing rationality where it doesn't belong. Or does it? In spite of his reasoning I feel that my faith in Jesus is based on logic. It is rooted in my belief that there is no better explanation for the birth of Christianity than his resurrection.
Here is how Garry Wills describes the apostle's sudden change that took place three days after his death:
"These Christians were not expecting the Resurrection. They did not believe it, even when the women first announced it to them. They had, remember, all scattered and hidden as Jesus was condemned and executed…Yet this band of cowards was suddenly changed into an energetic body of effective evangels, spreading their faith, firmly offering the claim that Jesus lives".

As the risen Son of God, Jesus confronted Caesar and the emperors that followed him until, more than 325 years later, Constantine surrendered to reality: Christianity had won.