Happy Easter to all my readers!
The following text was taken from the religion textbook “Catholic Apologetics”, written by the American priest John Laux, pages 91-96. The book was first published in 1928 and subsequently republished in the 1990s and later. Special formatting from the book was removed.
1. Christ performed real miracles.—He performed actions which the powers of human nature cannot perform, actions which make an exception to all the laws of Creation. He performed such actions often; He performed them in the full light of day, in the streets, in the public places, in the presence of His friends, before immense crowds, under the scrutinizing gaze of His enemies. His contemporaries never called these miracles in question; His enemies attributed them to the influence of the evil spirits. They are so intimately connected with the other facts of His life, with His preaching, passion and death, that they cannot be eliminated without destroying the whole Gospel narrative.
2. The crown of all the miracles of Jesus is His own Resurrection.—As a witness to His Divinity it has a threefold value: it is not only a miracle, but also the fulfillment of a prophecy, and it was the preaching of the Gospel of the Resurrection that converted the world to the Religion of Christ.
3. The Resurrection is the fulfillment of a prophecy.—To His disciples Jesus said: “The Son of Man shall be betrayed to the chief priests and scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles to be mocked, and scourged, and crucified, and the third day He shall rise again” (Matt. 20,18-19). When His enemies demanded a proof of His Messianic mission, Jesus answered: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. But He spoke of the temple of His body” (John 2,19). After His crucifixion His enemies remembered His words and asked Pilate to guard His sepulcher until the third day, “lest perhaps His disciples come and steal Him away and say to the people: He is risen from the dead” (Matt. 27,63-64).
4. The Resurrection of Christ is an historical fact.—If the history of Christ ended with His death on the cross, we could call Him the wisest of men on account of the sublimity of His doctrine, and the most virtuous of mortals on account of His perfect holiness; the number of His miracles would proclaim Him the greatest of the Prophets, and His passion and death would crown Him as king of martyrs. Jesus would be all this, and more; but He would not be what He Himself claimed to be—He would not be the Messias foretold by the Prophets, the Founder of the Kingdom of God on earth, the Liberator from sin and death, the Mediator between God and men, the Redeemer of the world, the Son of God. “If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God, that He hath raised up Christ. If Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins” (1 Cor. 15,14[-15]).
But Christ is risen from the dead! This is the joyous testimony of the witnesses of His life on earth and of His death on the cross. They proclaim it with one voice, as one man; they proclaim it in spite of insult and mockery and persecution, of imprisonment and torture. Hunger and nakedness and the threat of the sword and the gibbet cannot silence them. They proclaim it to Jew and Gentile, to the learned and the unlearned, to the Scribes ‘and Pharisees in Jerusalem and the Philosophers in Athens, to the Roman governor and to the king of the Jews: “Christ, who died on the cross, whose side was pierced with a lance, whose body lay cold and bloodless in the tomb, is risen from the dead; what we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands, we declare; we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard; by a man came death into the world, and by a man the resurrection of the dead; in Adam all died, in Christ all shall be made alive. God raised up the crucified Nazarene, of this we all are witnesses. He died according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. He appeared to Peter, and to James, and to all the Apostles; then He was seen by more than five hundred brethren at once. He ate and drank and conversed with us, and before our eyes He was taken up into Heaven. Stephen saw Him standing at the right hand of God; in the splendor of celestial glory He appeared to Saul.”
This is the unwavering testimony of the Apostles to the resurrection and the glorified life of Jesus and to His never-ending influence on the fortunes of mankind. This faith is as strongly rooted in them as the consciousness of their own existence.
If their testimony is not true, what testimony is true? If we doubt the simple, definite, unanimous story of the Evangelists, the blood-sealed testimony of the Apostles, can we believe anything? Must we not despair of ever attaining truth on testimony? If these men were deceived, then all the impressions registered by our senses, by sight, touch, and hearing, are illusions. It is an illusion when a thousand sane men and women see the sun shine at midday, when ten thousand hear the roar of the storm wind that uproots the giants of the forest. If these men deceived, then we are not sure of our lives in the company of our dearest friends. If the Resurrection of Jesus is not a fact, a reality, then all is delusion and an idle dream.
5. The Gospel of the Resurrection converted the world. —The Death and Resurrection of Christ is the central theme of the Gospel preached by the Apostles. The world became Christian by believing in the Resurrection. Without the Resurrection Christianity would have been an event more miraculous than the Resurrection itself. For their faith in the Resurrection the martyrs went to torture and death. When the Romans asked them: “How can you adore as God a man who was crucified as a malefactor?” they replied: “He was crucified indeed, and was dead; but He rose from the tomb, and that proves His Divinity.”
“Only the Resurrection was mighty enough to induce the disciples to believe in the Church and the future of Christianity; as for us, we are certain that Christ rose from the dead, because we see the Church” (St. Augustine).