Christians began to celebrate Easter. For the church this is the greatest feast. His traditional understanding is connected with the idea of Jesus as an incarnate God who came to the world to redeem people from the power of original sin and death.
This atonement, according to Christian tradition, occurred on the cross. In Christian mysticism, the death of Jesus means the end of the power of the nature of Adam, and the resurrection of Jesus will give humanity a new, qualitatively different life. The resurrection of Jesus in the church-Christian tradition implies not just the revival of a dead person. It implies a qualitative change, transformation or transformation of all mankind with Jesus. This is the traditional understanding of Christian Easter: Christ conquers not only his own death, but like the new Adam, conquers the death and sinfulness of all mankind.
It is clear that one can believe or not believe in such a doctrine. To prove that it is true is impossible, just as impossible to prove the fact of the resurrection of Jesus himself.
Was the resurrection of Jesus really? Or is Sunday the fruit of popular fantasy, as many skeptics have suggested for several centuries in a row? Perhaps the basis of the faith of Christians is simply hallucinations and group suggestion of Jesus' disciples, as others suggest? Or, as others allow, Jesus did not die at all, but was in a deep unconscious state, and then woke up? Or, as even the gospel describes it as some say, did the disciples steal the body of Jesus from the tomb?
I have no intention of answering these questions because of a very simple reason: we cannot know what happened many centuries ago, and which is surrounded by conflicting evidence, which from a scientific and historical point of view cannot be considered reliable. One can only believe in the traditional doctrine of the church, or else believe in other versions.
From the historical perspective, several decades passed between the events of life, the crucifixion of Jesus, the birth of the Christian community that believes in his resurrection, and between the written fixation of this in the New Testament books. All this time, gospel tales, or, in the church language, tradition, were transmitted orally: in communication between believers and through preaching.
For Orthodox Christians, such a temporary gap is not a problem, since they believe not only in the sacredness of the books of the Bible, but also in the sacredness of the tradition of the church. For skeptics, of course, such a time gap causes doubts about the authenticity of what is written in these books, especially since many supernatural miracles are mentioned there, and there is no complete agreement on the description of different books.
For example, Zenon Kosidovsky, draws attention to the inconsistency of the descriptions of the events of the resurrection of Jesus in different New Testament books. Kosidovsky draws attention to the fact that already the apostle Paul was forced to convince the skeptics of that time, who were inside the Christian community, that Jesus had risen from the dead. As a justification for believing in the resurrection, he says that he accepted this from eyewitnesses and passes on. This is what the church calls tradition. Paul thus calls for keeping the tradition of the church.
The Evangelist Matthew denies rumors that someone could steal the body of Jesus, claiming that the sepulcher was sealed. The women who came to the sepulcher saw an angel who rolled the stone from the already empty sepulcher and announced the resurrection of Jesus. But if at Mark women were afraid to talk about the resurrection, then at Matthew, on the contrary, they were delighted and hastened to announce it. On the way, women meet the risen Jesus.
The evangelist does not meet Luke Jesus with women, but with students going to Emmaus, who do not recognize him immediately, but only after a long conversation and breaking of bread. They can touch Jesus. However, in John, Jesus for some reason says: “Do not touch me.”
John has a completely different version: only one woman comes to the tomb, not several, she initially does not see any angels, but she immediately calls to look at the empty coffin of Peter and the second disciple. And only after they left the tomb, she sees the angels, then Jesus himself, whom she did not immediately recognize.
“We saw,” concludes Zenon Kosidovsky, “how the legend of the resurrection develops from the unsophisticated tale of the empty tomb until the very resurrection of Jesus. This process consists in adding more and more new details to the old ones, striving at all costs to protect the doctrine of the resurrection both from skeptics in their own camp and from pagan pamphletists ”
(Tales of the Evangelists — M, 1977, p. 220 -227).
Similar inconsistencies and nuances of differences in biblical narratives (not only about the resurrection, but also in other episodes) are the subject of biblical criticism. Nowadays, many Christian theologians relate to this without worry.
They do not believe that the inconsistency and differences of some texts prove that everything in the Bible is false. They believe that there is the main and secondary. All these details of discrepancies and discrepancies are secondary, no matter how exactly this happened, and most importantly, the theological meaning of what was said, they say.
But how to find this theological meaning? Different traditions of interpretations arise in this question. If the teaching of the church, the authority of the Pope and the cathedrals are important for Catholicism, only the cathedrals and, in part, the utterances of the Holy Fathers are important for the Orthodox, then for Protestants it is important to rely on personal experience.
These are some examples of how Christians have different attitudes toward the church faith about the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, these examples are not limited to this topic. The purpose of this presentation was the desire to show that in Christianity there is no one single idea, but a spectrum of opinions and different accents, and there are many of them even on such a seemingly obvious question as the resurrection of Jesus.