Is Easter fake news?
It's not just that the Resurrection of Christ is possibly true, argues George Pitcher, it's impossible that it's not true
Big-tech behemoth Google this week said it is investing a near $30 million in the newly established European Media and Information Fund to combat the propagation of fake news. You don’t even have to be borderline cynical to think that this is like Donald Trump announcing that he’s to launch a new social-media platform to raise the quality of online debate (and hiring Sir Nick Clegg to ensure its political integrity).
But we might note that Google chose Holy Week to make its announcement and then remove the plank from our own eye before we point to the mote in Google’s (optician, heal thyself). Because as we enter the Triduum that leads us to Easter Day, those who are the scattered disciples of Jesus Christ are again required to ask themselves: Are we, the Church, the biggest propagators of fake news ever?
If the tomb was empty on this coming Sunday morning because his apologists spirited his body away, or if the Nazarene insurgent was gravely injured by his torture but not quite killed and enjoyed a quiet retirement by the coast, or if they just thought they’d make the whole thing up because he’d had a few good ideas and it makes a better story, then the Christian Churches have conspired in the greatest act of fake news of the past two millennia.
Truth is a notoriously tricky quantity. The local Roman apparatchik Pontius Pilate, on this morning of his long and far from good Friday, gets it about right when he asks the shabby prisoner standing before him “What is truth?”, before leaving the question hanging in the air as he goes outside again to try to placate the Temple authorities. It’s a question that could have been asked by politicians other than Trump – Blair and Johnson come to mind – when pragmatic experience of populist power shows them that truth is as moveable a feast as Easter itself.
We can’t know how Pilate said it. But as he didn’t wait for an answer we presume it’s rhetorical. For God’s sake (or for gods’ sakes), he seems to be saying, truth is anything you want it to be. There’s my truth and there’s your truth. Truth is relative, not absolute.
Circumstantial evidence
This is the territory on which any discourse with atheism over the “truth” of the Resurrection is going to prove unsatisfactory, precisely because it has to be conducted in relative rather than absolutist terms, which means only circumstantial evidence can be offered.
For the non-believer, it is unlikely to be true, because nothing of the sort has happened before or since, because human physiology can’t “survive” death, because there were political reasons for claiming it happened, or because so few witnessed it over a limited period.
For the believer, it is likely to be true, because a new liberationist revolutionary Jewish movement wouldn’t abandon the Jewish Sabbath for a new one a day later, because the narrative style is entirely new and closer to reportage than scriptural tradition, because there’s no other way such abject disaster and defeat could have been turned around so quickly, because the new faith spread like wildfire off the back of something that must have been infinitely miraculous, because hundreds of thousands were prepared to die for that new faith and because so many (500 or so) witnessed it.
But circumstantial evidence is the foundation of fake news (as it is of conspiracy theories). And in the absence of direct evidence (divine DNA, a surprise follow-up interview with Pilate across all networks), other lines of inquiry must be pursued. One of the most fruitful of these is to start with current, empirical evidence and work back to assess whether it is supported by original and/or alternative events.
That means asking whether the Resurrection was necessary: Is the world’s largest religious movement, responsible for the greatest influences on human history (admittedly both good and bad in human hands), contingent on the literal truth of this event?
That, in turn, leads to this question: “If not the Resurrection, then what?” Any speculative answer to that question leads feebly and unsatisfactorily back to a hypothetical scene in a secret upper chamber in Jerusalem, where perhaps a dozen frightened men and women hide from a baying mob that would stone, crucify or bury them alive, utterly let down and disillusioned, until one of their voices pipes up: “Hey, come on guys, we can carry on – let’s pretend he’s not dead.” If anything’s a fake proposition, that is.
The apostle Paul figured he had an answer to the “then what?” question, when he wrote to the nascent Church in Corinth: “...if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” For him, it’s not so much that the Resurrection makes no sense, it’s more – much more – that the whole enterprise makes no sense without it.
Slap some Christians about
As someone who claimed that the reason he fell off his horse on his way to slap some Christians about in Damascus was that the risen Christ appeared to him, one is tempted to respond, well, he would say that wouldn’t he? So let’s come at the question of whether the Resurrection was necessary a different way. Let’s assume it wasn’t necessary.
This is what the late and revered theologian John Macquarrie does in his book Jesus Christ in Modern Thought. He offers an “Ending A (The Happy Ending)”, the conventional story with Resurrection and Ascension, alongside an “Ending B (The Austere Ending)”, in which we draw the bottom line of the story under the cross. He then poses the question whether the absence of the “joyful mysteries” of Easter would destroy the whole fabric of faith in Christ. And he answers his own question:
“I do not think so, for the two great distinctive Christian affirmations would remain untouched – God is love, and God is revealed in Jesus Christ. These two affirmations would stand even if there were no mysteries beyond Calvary.”
Before Macquarrie, the German Lutheran theologian reduces it more bluntly: “Faith in resurrection is really the same thing as faith in the saving efficacy of the cross.”
This direction of travel spawns two further thoughts: The first is whether Jesus of Nazareth knew what he was doing, in the sense of whether he believed in his own Resurrection. Really this is to ask whether he expected the story to begin or end with his death. And any answer to that has to be both/and rather than either/or – if his death was to seal his Father’s new covenant with the world, then the death and end of Jesus was the start of the risen Christ.
The second thought is the one developed by the philosophy of non-realism, whose most famous exponent is Don Cupitt of Sea of Faith fame (a BBC TV series in 1984 that caused quite a stir), in which God is a projection of human altruism, the life of love is lived for its own sake “and not for the sake of some post-mortem pay-off” and the Resurrection is to start “living a risen life” ourselves. To which one response might be to inquire where that kind of human consciousness comes from and whether what it witnesses is any less real for being projected – there are many other take-downs.
So far, so undermining of the Resurrection “myth”. But does any of this make it fake news? The two alternatives don’t offer that. On the one hand, we have a nail hole into which Thomas sticks his finger in order to realise he is in the presence of the risen Christ. On the other, we have an itinerant artisan preacher who wanders out of a provincial backwater, causes a nuisance to the Roman and Temple authorities and is put to death for sedition, as hundreds were every week – and apparently in doing so changes the world forever.
In both cases, human rationalism and experience are defied, which must be the basis of the truly miraculous. In neither case can it be said that “nothing happened”, so that the requirement of fake news is not met.
We can’t leave it there, because if nothing didn’t happen then we’re not just entitled but required to ask what the something that happened was. And, again, to have had the consequences that it did, it must have been something so enormous and so beyond comprehension and description that we don’t only struggle to understand it but still get nowhere near it, other than through metaphor (which still doesn’t make it fake news).
The Fermi Paradox
We might turn to mathematics for assistance, with an inversion of The Fermi Paradox. The Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi’s theorem demonstrated that given the billions of stars in the Milky Way, never mind the hundreds and maybe thousands of billions in the universe, incalculably many of which a far older than our own Sun, it’s not only possible or probable that there is intelligent life out there, but statistically impossible that there isn’t.
Given that the universe is silent, Fermi famously asked: “But where is everybody?” One plausible answer is that there is a “Great Filter”, a inevitably cataclysmic event that ends life without a residual trace, an event that we earthlings have yet to face.
Now turn that logical model around for the Resurrection. There is such an abundance of faithful experience, such a cloud of witnesses down the ages, so many billions who have known and continue to know the reality of a risen Christ in their lives, that it’s not only possible or probable that there was a Resurrection event, but impossible that there was not.
Fake news? At Easter, the Christian Church proclaims again gospel truth, the good news. It’s what Pilate struggled to grasp with his “What is truth?” And it’s what we struggle to grasp, as we wonder what the news that Mary Magdalene brings us from the tomb really looks like.
Like her and the first witnesses, we may only be able to use metaphor to describe it, but it’s a revelation nonetheless. As the one who sits on the throne in the hallucinogenic Book of Revelation, which makes a decent fist of revelatory metaphor, puts it: “See how I make all things new.” And see how he still makes the Resurrection news.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.