Jesus Rises from the Dead

The resurrection of Christ may well be claimed a history’s most singular example of the uncanny. Although there were no witnesses to the actual moment of resurrection, belief in it was strong enough to galvanise Christ’s followers into evangelism, sometimes to the point of martyrdom. What facts are known of the event?

Jesus was crucified at about 9 am on a Friday and was dead by mid-afternoon, when a soldier thrust a spear into his body. He was laid in a rock tomb by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. The burial was watched by Mary Magdalene and other women, and a heavy stone was rolled across the tomb entrance before 6 pm, when the Sabbath began. Guards were sent to watch the tomb. By dawn on Sunday Jesus’ disciples had stolen the body while the soldiers dept. Gospel accounts vary considerably about what happened next. Was the empty tomb found by Mary Magdalene alone (according to the gospels of John and Mark) or in the company of other women (according to Matthew and Luke) when she came to anoint the body on Sunday? A young man, possibly an angel, told Mary or the women, ‘He is not here; for he has risen, as he said.’ Matthew described a powerful earthquake, an angel tolling the stone away, and the tomb guards falling unconscious. Mary or the women reported the new to Peter, and an unnamed disciple, possibly John, ran to the tomb and found only the grave clothes in a heap, with the head band rolled up separately. It is said that Jesus later appeared to Mary Magdalene and another Mary, then to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. These last two rushed to tell the other disciples and learnt that Jesus had also appeared to Peter. Amid their joy and Bewilderment Jesus materialized yet again, instructing them to remain together in Jerusalem until they received ‘power from on high’. Later he appeared to a crowd of 500 followers, then to his brother James. Unrecorded appearances might also have taken place before Jesus ascended into Heaven some days later. Critics of the resurrection story have argued that Jesus was alive when buried, and claim that he left the tomb, appeared to his disciples and died years later, perhaps even in India. Others claim that the women mistook the location of Christ’s grave, or that the body was removed – by thieves, the Romans, the Jews or the disciples. Some simply argue that the accounts are too inconsistent to be relied upon at all. Whatever did happen at the tomb of Jesus, it changed the would for ever.

The Heavenly Host

The Heavenly Host The angels were messengers who conveyed God’s will to his people They are somewhere between humans and God, but what do angels do and are they truly ‘angelic’? Both the Hebrew and Greek words for angel mean ‘messenger’, and angels often have this role in the Bible, but the biblical writers also use the term in other ways. Good or evil angels are envoys of God or Satan, clashing in the final battle in John’s Book of Revelation. Angels can also be ordinary people, prophets who inspire others to action, supernatural informants or instructors, and even impersonal forces, including winds or the pillars of cloud and fire that guided the Israelites in their desert exodus. Pestilence and plague are called evil angels, and Saint Paul referred to his own ailment as a ‘messenger of Satan’. God and the angels are sometimes referred to interchangeably. In the book of Judges, for example, Samson’s father, who had been talking to an angel, says to his wife, ‘We shall surely die, for we have seen God.’ Many other phenomena, such as inspiration, sudden impulses and the workings of providence, are also ascribed to, or called, ‘angels’.

Invisible and immortal According to church teachings, the angels are sexless, invisible essences, immortal from their creation. Angels are also multitudinous, as implied by the Old Testament description of God as the ‘Lord of hosts’. They form a hierarchy of ‘angels and archangels and all the company of heaven’. The early church visualized nine orders, or ‘choirs’, of angels – seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels. Angels mediate between God and his people. The Old testament says that no one could look directly upon God and live, so direct contact between the Almighty and humans is often portrayed as a meeting with and angel. It was an angel that prevented Abraham from sacrificing Isaac; Moses saw an angel in the burning bush, although he heard God’s voice; and the Israelites were led out of Egypt by an angel. Occasionally biblical angels behave as mortals until their true nature is revealed, like the angels who visited Abraham and Lot before the terrifying destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Nameless spirits The scriptures describe many other angels, such as the spirit whose flaming sword barred Adam’s return to Eden; the cherubim and seraphim (portrayed as thunderclouds and lightning flashes, recalling an early Hebrew belief in a storm god); and the agent who miraculously freed Peter from prison. Then there are the beings seen in Isaiah’s heavenly court vision – ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew’. Angelic hosts appear in the Bible a number of times, like the choir of angels that heralded Christ’s birth. The Allrchangel Michael commanded God’s great legions of angels against Satan’s spirits. Michael and Gabriel, who revealed the birth of Jesus to Mary, are the only angels actually named in the Old and New Testaments. Most refused to identify themselves when asked, perhaps reflecting the contemporary belief that to know a spirit’s name diminished its power.

In Search of Atlantis

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the fate of this lost civilization has intrigued scholars, romantics and occultists. Atlantis was said to be a vast island, bigger than Asia Minor and Libya combined, lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar). Home to a great maritime nation, Atlantis was a place of fabulous wealth. It was well endowed with natural resources, including precious metals and stones, as well as abundant food. Nine thousand years before the time of the Greek law giver Solon, Atlantis had dominated the Mediterranean. But from an ideal state with an advanced civilization, it degenerated into a military aggressor and the gods, decided to punish it by sinking it under the sea.
So wrote the Greek philosopher Plato in his Timaeus and Critias around 350 BC. He said he had heard the story from his cousin, who heard it from his grandfather, who heard it from his father, who heard it from Solon, who heard it from the priests of Sais in Egypt in 590 BC. Plato was presenting a moral fable of what happens when the gods are displeased. But is the story true?

No known writer before Plato mentions a vast island that had sunk without trace under the Atlantic. But a similar tale was known in Egypt at the time of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 BC). The story might be a basic myth shared by several ancient peoples, or it could be a legend based of fact.
The factual basis may well be found in the ancient volcanic island of Thera (modern Santorini) – a prosperous commercial centre related to the powerful Minoan civilization on Crete to the south. In about 1500 BC, Thera’s volcano exploded in a violent eruption heard, it has been estimated, as far away as Scandinavia. Volcanic ash buried many parts of the island, in some places 30 meters deep, but luckily the people had already fled. About 40 years later, the volcano’s cone collapsed, plunging the island’s centre deep under the sea and creating tidal waves and a rain of ash that may have destroyed Cretan civilization virtually overnight. Crete’s trade and diplomatic contacts with Egypt were abruptly broken off, and perhaps the story Solon heard from the priests of sais was all their predecessors had learnt about the sudden disappearance of the Minoans as a world power. Could the priests’ vague information be the truth behind the Atlantis legend?
In the late nineteenth century Ignatius Donnelly, an American writer, asserted that Atlantis was in the Sargasso Sea, a part of the Atlantic between the Azores and the West Indies. Its mass of weed, he claimed, made the area identical to the unnavigable shoals said by Plato to mark the site. Russian born mystic Madame Blavatsky maintained that Atlantis lay in the North Atlantic and was peopled by the highly civilized descendants of the Lemurians, themselves inhabitants of another lost continent. In the early 1900s famed American psychic Edgar Cayce, who claimed that he had been an Atlantean in a previous incarnation, described the lost race as a sophisticated technological civilization whose power source was crystals. The abuse of this power, said Cayce, led to three nuclear disasters, the last in 10 000 BC.

Cayce predicted that Atlantis would reappear in 1968 or 1969. Curiously, in 1968 pilots photographed from the air structures that looked like buildings under the sea off Bimini in the Bahamas. Later, undersea explorers claimed they had seen ancient roads, walls, pyramids and stone circles on the seabed. Nothing has been confirmed by expert archaeologists, so possibly the Bimini Roads are natural features.
Colonel Fawcett’s quest Several people have devoted their careers and fortunes to the search for Atlantis, but few have paid the ultimate price for their passion. Trailblazing the vast Amazon River basin between 1906 and 1913, English surveyor and explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett became intrigued by a largely unexplored stretch of dense scrub known as the Mato Grosso. Fawcett subscribed whole heartedly to the legend of Atlantis and his hopes soared when he found a report in the Brazilian State Archives about an ancient hidden city, with quartz buildings and statues, but no inhabitants, which had been discovered in 1753. He became convinced that this deserted city was an Atlantean outpost. Unable to return to South America until after the First World War, he mounted his first expedition to find the lost city in 1920. It ended at a remote encampment on the Kuluene River, which he named Dead Horse Camp. Five years later he returned, this time supported by an American newspaper group. Fawcett resumed the search at the edge of the Mato Grosso, accompanied by his son Jack and Jack’s young friend Raleigh Rimell. For four days local Indians saw smoke rising from the group’s campfires, but after that nothing . When Commander G. M. Dyott searched for the party in 1928, he found the route they had taken, and discovered some of their possessions, but no trace of the men themselves. It was widely assumed that the mean had been murdered by Indians, but their remains were never found. The fates of Colonel Fawcett, his companions and the mysterious lost city they sought remain unknown to this day.