The life-changing claims of the Resurrection and what it means

“Jesus is fake news” – boy, aged 10.

It wasn’t the type of Christmas surprise my grandfather friend had ever expected to receive. He rang shortly before the usually happy day to share a very unhappy conversation he’d just had with his Catholic grandchildren, a girl and a boy aged eight and ten. I’ve been mulling it over ever since.

He had invited the children to go to Christmas Eve Mass with him at his parish church and they’d stared at him in astonishment. “Christmas is a fairytale,” said the youngest. While the eldest announced with a contemporary twist: “Jesus is fake news.”  My granddad caller said: “I’ve never heard the like of it before from children. Fake news? Where do they get that from?” 

We probably don’t need to search too hard for an answer. All roads now seem to lead to Google where more than three million results pop up after entering “resurrection is fake news” in the search engine box. To be fair to the children though, there has long been claims of fake news aimed at undermining the good news of the Resurrection. One such deception scheme stretches back more than 2,000 years in fact.

According to the Gospel of Matthew a disinformation plot was unfolding within hours of the empty tomb being discovered as Mary Magdelene and her companion raced to tell the grieving disciples of their encounter with the risen Christ. (Matthew 28: 11-15). Under the heading, “The guards are silenced”, Matthew’s account also features the current hallmark of a conspiracy theory with a cash bribe thrown in.

In Matthew’s account we learn the Roman guards were paid-off with a “considerable sum” to say the disciples stole the body of Jesus as they slept. An untruth spread not only when the gospel was written perhaps only decades after his death (and probably orally before) but continuing right up to the present more than two millennia later. The dark arts of disinformation and its first cousin misinformation, have a long tail.

Among some modern experts the alleged tomb raid became known as the “stolen body hypothesis”, but such claims do not yet appear to have gained dominance in the Resurrection debate. In the USA, for example, a Lifeway Research study in 2022 reported two-thirds of American adults believed the biblical accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus are “completely accurate.”

A 2017 UK survey commissioned by the BBC into belief in the Resurrection showed 57 per cent of “active” Christians surveyed (those who attend a religious service at least once a month) believed the Bible version “word-for-word.” While a 2024 YouGov survey in Australia where I live, showed 54 per cent Christian-identifying Australians stated celebrating Jesus’ death and resurrection was the most important part of Easter to them, as did 47 per cent of Catholic Australians.

So arguably a majority of Christians do believe the resurrection of Christ took place. It’s not fake news for them. However, that’s not to say many of us don’t experience doubts at one time or another. Doubt can be a friend, or a foe and clearly, we are not alone when it comes to questioning our personal religious beliefs.

The gospels show the 11 Apostles suddenly doubted Jesus’s divinity as they fled in panic after he was arrested. Peter, as we know, “disowned” Jesus three times before that cock famously crowed. (Matthew 26: 69-75).

And according to a gospel account the Apostles’ deep doubts were still on full display just a few days later when they refused to believe the claimed sightings of the risen Jesus by Mary Magdalene or the testimony of the two unnamed disciples who had quickly returned from their encounter with Christ while walking to Emmaus. (Mark 16: 9-13). He was a living, breathing walk-about Saviour.

Despite all they had witnessed and been taught during the previous three years, the Apostles hadn’t grasped or believed the sacred promise Jesus had made to them – that he would rise from the dead on the Third Day. Understandably, the torture and agonising execution of Jesus would almost certainly have triggered an attack of PTSD among the traumatised disciples. Or as Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) compassionately observed: “They were so disturbed when they saw him hanging on the cross that they forgot his teaching, did not look for his resurrection, and failed to keep his promises in mind.”

The most “forgetful” Apostle of them all was Doubting Thomas who stubbornly refused to believe his ten fellow disciples when they told him Jesus had made his history-changing return as prophesied and promised. Thomas would only accept the truth of their claims if he saw and examined the wounds himself.

As we well know, he got his heart’s desire a few days later when he saw and touched the wounds himself, and perhaps healed his own in the process. Jesus then had the last word when he gazed down the centuries and said: “You believe because you can see me. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.” (John 20: 26-29).

Words that my grandfather friend took very much to heart when he wrote an 800-word Christmas Day letter as a “gift” of his own to the two grandchildren. He told them he himself had returned to the Church after a five-year absence and wrote: “I returned because I felt there was something missing in my life. I was wanting inner peace, sacred reflection, and renewed strength after receiving Holy Communion in my life again.

“But as an engineer by training, I was also hungry for answers to corroborate my belief there is a God and that the host given to Catholics in Communion truly is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. And I remembered that most of what I wanted was all there in the eye-witness accounts in the four gospels describing the life and death of Jesus, especially the Resurrection.”

So, yes, he is going to invite them to Mass again next Christmas Eve. But who knows, they may even offer to take him. That would be the best Christmas gift of all. (1013 words)

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Bob Cameron is the Sydney based author of 21 Days Back to God – After 40 Years of Running Away. (Coventry Press, Melbourne). A Tablet blog on his book, “How a tirade by the richest man in Australia helped bring me back to God,” was published on September 7, 2023. He is currently writing: Is that God in the attic banging on the floor? (Reflections of a Comeback Catholic).