Phantasmagoria One

Then there is that business about the ostensible evidence for the Resurrection.  It is perhaps worthy of note that none of the canonical gospels describes anyone actually seeing the Resurrection itself--an unfortunate omission for any apologist who has ever set out to rebut the Swoon Theory.  The reader--on that score--is left free to imagine disciples (presumably able and not-recently-tortured disciples) heaving the stone aside and helping Jesus to his feet.  "But, no!" says the apologist, "The testimony of the Gospels makes it plain that the injuries done to Jesus must have been nothing less than fatal."

And so the Son of God, fully divine, through whom everything was made, calmer of seas, driver-out of devils, raiser of the dead--even this Jesus could not survive a surprisingly brief crucifixion?  This same Jesus who cannot survive a surprisingly brief crucifixion is, however, apparently capable of effecting his own resurrection.  Yet would not the same desired outcomes (a Jesus shown to possess divine power and a Jesus alive after having been determinedly executed) be arrived at in either scenario?

Obviously, the emphasis in (the surviving versions of) the gospels, and in the centuries that followed, has never really been about the historicity of Jesus or the historicity of his overcoming the grave.  It would be as nothing for someone to dig up a dead Jesus' body or an empty Jesus' tomb--considering how common was Jesus' name and how typical has been the case that tombs of that age have been plundered.

No, the matter at hand has always been the propagation of the gospel stories (parsed out into their physically unprovable particulars) and nothing has degraded those stories--or laid them more open to ridicule--than trying to prove them.  One might be reminded of Schliemann, scratching about where any competent ethnographer would have expected to find an ancient settlement of some description, and then choosing to describe his discovery as "Troy."  As someone has pointed out, the Troy for which Schliemann was searching was in ancient books and nowhere else, regardless of what he dug out of the sand.

Similarly, the story of the Resurrection--even to the most sober observer--is a phantasmagoria.  It is, as we will see, meant to be a phantasmagoria, and it is all the more profitably viewed as it is viewed by the most sober of observers.