It's already well into the evening
of Easter Sunday, and time keeps running faster than I can throw events into it
on the way past… Likewise, I have even less time, lately, to fill in URLs,
correct some spelling and formatting errors, etc., over just the last week or
two here.
Today saw a good chunk of the family
meet up for Easter dinner at my sister's home across town (my other sister, and
her husband, live in Boston, with their first child on the way; Dad should have
lived to see this). My younger brother and one of his daughters are in Thailand
on Spring break (the other daughter is attending college in Australia, her
mom's home-country). My sister's two teen kids, and husband (plus a couple cats
and dog) were there, too, plus one of my daughters, and my harried mother.
My older brother joined us, too
(late as always); as with the past several months, he brought along his regular
companion, my sister-in-law-in-law… which isn't a typo; she's his late, Korean
wife's sister. (The three of us did a 10K together, Choggun Nu-Nim and I
walking most of it, last October.) First thought of the two of them is one of
shock… but with Lee dead now over two years, Brother needs to be happy, and
this is the closest he'll ever be to having that wonderful, strong woman still
in his life. And they're grown adults.
But enough of this raucous family;
given today's momentous events (minus almost 2,000 years) are deserving of more
space and meditation here… and my attention is already drawn away, given the
remaining things I want to nail down tonight before bedtime.
The historicity of Jesus is beyond
question; research into historical writers beyond reproach will show that such
a man lived, and died, around the time we acknowledge (~4 BC to ~30 AD); that
he had followers whose numbers, within a generation, had multiplied to
nuisance-level – at least from the viewpoint of the Roman overlords and the
subjugated Jewish leaders. (They may even have instigated the Jewish revolt of
70 AD, which was brutally and utterly crushed by the Romans, and resulted in
nearly nineteen centuries of heart-wrenching diaspora.)
There's evidence of Christians in
Pompeii (in or before 79 AD), and Christian burials in or near Jerusalem as
early as 41 AD. At some point later I'd like to give some references to these
details, although even casual research on the 'net will yield even more data –
e.g., one First-Century Roman writer mentions some hearsay about the followers
of a "Chrestus".
It's too easy for the world to judge
the founder of Christianity by the lousy, even cruel, deeds of His present-day
followers… and you can hardly blame them. (But bear in mind that for every
prostitute-patronizing evangelist, every altarboy-hungry priest, every David
Koresh… there are many more Mother Teresas, Albert Schweitzers, and so on.)
I don't know the correct quote –
need to research it – but I've heard that someone told Gandhi that, given the
beautiful, spiritual beliefs that drove him, he ought to be a Christian, Gandhi
responded with something like, "I agree, but I've never met one." The
meaning, of course, is that those folks bearing the name of
"Christian" whom he'd met… had not been living up to the commands and
ideals of their own faith. Amen!
But most of the Western world (at
least the first- and second-world countries, to use Mao's terminology) has it
very easy, with Christianity front-and-center and out of the catacombs and
Circus Maximus. Is there any doubt that in its first three centuries,
Christianity saw a sizable percentage of its practitioners cruelly tortured and
murdered?
A question too-rarely asked is… why
did the victims willingly undergo all this? When all that many of them needed
to do to save their skins (and some did indeed do it) was kowtow to the
Greco-Roman pantheon, why instead willingly allow yourself to be executed
cruelly by the state? There was something they valued even more than life, than
family; obviously.
I'm not the first to posit this, of
course, but let me lay out here that they accepted not only the earliest of
Christian teachings on morals and spirituality, but also had every reason to
believe that what they'd been told about resurrection was true. The last
witnesses to Jesus' death and Resurrection themselves died by the very earliest
second century. But they had taught many, who in turn taught many more, and so
on; much of this was written down (with and without the imprimatur of the
fledgling Church) and preserved from the very beginning. E.g., John the
Evangelist (wrote the Fourth Gospel, and the Book of Revelation) died IIRC
~100AD; he taught Polycarp, who taught Irenaeus… and that alone brings us to
~180 AD. In that time, the letters of Clement, and the Didache, were written:
these are some of the oldest-surviving writings about Christian beliefs by
Christians.
I'm wandering off into the obscure
here; sorry about that. But this is but a small sample of what attests to the
Christians in their first couple centuries; they were persecuted until well
into the Fourth Century; as I recall, just about all of the first couple-dozen
Popes were martyred, to cite another example.
They all believed in the physically
risen Jesus. One of the earliest writers, Paul, says that "If he did not
rise, then our faith is in vain, and we are the most miserable of men, and
still lost in our sins, and those who have fallen asleep (in death) are truly
dead indeed." The earliest Christians knew that they
believed in the unbelievable – and they clung to it so surely that even the
threat of being burned alive, torn limb from limb, crucified, shot full of
arrows, disemboweled, and so on… that even these threats were not enough to
pull most of them away from this belief.
I want to examine, soon, the
accounts of the first Easter morn in detail. The events, and the following
weeks, affected the participants and witnesses so profoundly that their vivid
recollections, handed down by writing and word of mouth over the next few
generations, were sufficient consolation and sustenance to see many of
Christianity's adherents through some of the worst human-on-human cruelties
history had seen.
They weren't all stupid farmers and
fishermen and household slaves. Many were intelligent, keen, decisive, educated
(this can be seen in the quality of their writings, for instance) – and firmly
swayed by the stories and recollections of one Yeshua, son of Miriam, of
Nazareth. I repeat: They all believed in the physically risen Jesus.
They were much closer in time, of
course, to those events, and they believed it to their very core. So I ask you:
what if it's really true?
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