Per Christum Catholic Blog

Time magazine has re-opened the controversy of the “Jesus tomb.” I guess the anti-Christian news was at a standstill and Time decided to revisit an old chestnut. Evidently the new information is that the widow of the man who discovered the tomb tells us that her husband actually believed it was the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth, but he feared speaking out because he feared a backlash of anti-Semitism. Baloney. Academics of all stripes have been promoting similar ideas for years. He should’ve had the guts to back his convictions instead of hiding behind vague fears of anti-Semitism. Still, I find this whole story lacking in credibility and it will fade. The fact that Time has to remind us of it again demonstrates my point. I’m not going to argue against the “Jesus tomb” here except to bring up one point: why would Jesus of Nazareth have a family tomb in Jerusalem? What bothered me the most about the article was the Methodist minister/academic who declared that if this were Jesus’ tomb, it would help many Christians because it would prove Jesus did exist; sure it would end belief in the bodily resurrection, but it’s ok, because there’s the spiritual resurrection! That would be a dream for liberal Christians: proof of their historical Jesus and an end to superstitious religious dogmas.

But, I hate to break it to our Methodist minister and his academic friends, but the bodily resurrection is vital to the Christian faith. In fact, it is essential. God’s plan of creation and redemption has always included the physical world. God created humanity body and soul and we sinned in the body and soul. Our salvation came through the Incarnation where God redeemed our body and soul. And, this divine man was raised from the dead in his body and soul so that our souls may be restored to our bodies at the last judgment. The cycle is clear: original bliss in the body, sin in the body, redemption in the body, resurrection in the body. You take any of these out of the equation, particularly from Jesus who pioneered the way for our salvation, and the whole system loses its consistency and parts of our humanity remain unsaved. Perhaps this explains why the Church, in spite of its emphasis on asceticism and virginity, at times extreme, has always vigorously fought Docetism, the belief that Jesus only appeared to be human, in all its forms.

Today, Docetism, or at least practical Docetism, is present in many Christian denominations, and even among liberal Catholics. Although few Christians would deny that Jesus had a body on earth, they minimize the Incarnation through iconoclasm, rejection of the bodily resurrection and the real presence (which makes no sense without a bodily resurrection), and promotion of such abstractions as the Jesus of history vs. the Christ of Faith. As Protestants moved beyond the earthy Luther to the cerebral Zwingli and Calvin, the emphasis shifted to spiritual salvation with little concern for the body or the physical. I’m not surprised to see a Methodist, one living in the inconoclastic tradition of Calvin and Zwingli and their English promoters, reject the bodily resurrection.

For more of my thoughts on the resurrection, visit On the Resurrection of Jesus: A Catholic View