He is Risen: How an Atheist Came to Believe in the Resurrection

When I was very young, my mother used to read to me from the Bible and tell me stories about Jesus; and as a kid I loved hearing those stories. My eyes used to go wide with amazement when she would tell me how He calmed storms, walked on water, gave sight to the blind, made the lame walk and how He rose from the dead. I believed those stories without question; I loved this Jesus very much and I prayed to Him every night before going to bed. I felt that He was really there, really listening, and I felt that He was always with me.

But as I grew older I became convinced that they were just stories. After all, my parents had also told me that Santa Claus was real and I’d believed that too, until late one Christmas Eve I went  downstairs to get a glass of water and I caught my mom wrapping my Christmas presents. That was a very good Christmas. It was the year I got Grimlock the Dinobot; but it was also the year my belief in Old Saint Nick was shattered forever. I didn’t care at all, mind you. I still got Grimlock; it didn’t matter where he came from. But it did make me wonder; why tell the story at all if it isn’t true? What’s the point?

By the time I was a teenager I had become a philosophical atheist, and in my early twenties the great mythologist Joseph Campbell provided a sound, if only partial explanation to that question. Myths, he argued, are the essence of what makes us human. They reflect a profound inner reality rather than an outward or divine reality. Myths are true, not in a literal sense, but because they are part and parcel of the human psyche; for what is man if he cannot dream? I saw the Christian story, therefore, as just another version of the ancient Roman, Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Babylonian myths; stories that tell us not about God, but the human condition. The countless stories of dying and resurrected gods that have dominated our mythological landscape were to be seen only as our own reflection in the mirror. They represented our longing to transcend this material reality and to conquer and defeat death.

I never questioned the fact that a man named Jesus had actually existed. I just couldn’t accept any of the supernatural nonsense. To quote a famous line from the movie the Crow, I thought “there ain’t no coming back!!” Jesus had lived, He had been a great moral teacher, but He was put to death and that was the end of it. His followers crafted a myth around Him and it was that myth that became known as Christianity.

Then in the year 2,000 I had my own personal encounter with God and amidst a lot of grumbling and torrents of doubt, I became a reluctant believer. You see, even after I’d had what I believed to be my own supernatural experience; accepting the supernatural as a reality was very difficult for me. It seemed to fly in the face of all logic. I doubted everything, questioned everything. The first Christians and pastors I came into contact with must have thought I was crazy because here I was confessing to be a Christian, and yet I was challenging them and debating them on just about every point. I was especially skeptical about the resurrection. In the back of my mind, I kept hearing that guy from the Crow saying “there ain’t no coming back”. And then someone told me to read C.S. Lewis.

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”

I had simply come to the wrong philosophical conclusion about the power of myth; I had assumed that it was only a symbol. But what if that symbol could become reality? C.S. Lewis argued that all of mankind’s previous myths were expressions of our deepest yearning; that the transcendent and unknowable God would come into intimate contact with mankind and thus be made known. Christianity, Lewis said, was not merely one myth alongside countless others; rather it was the fulfillment of all previous mythological religions. What we once longed for in our myths became true in Jesus Christ, when God Himself entered into space and time.

And when it came to the resurrection story, I had ignored all the internal evidence for its reality. As I investigated the claims, the idea of the whole thing being a fabrication or a fiction just seemed more and more unlikely to me. There are a number of things I could talk about here, but instead I want to focus on just a few things that really stood out to me. First, we have the matter of the empty tomb. When something is purely invented, especially in ancient literature, the general idea was to show a thing in the best light possible. The Gospels tell us how women were the first witnesses to the empty tomb, and this just isn’t the best way to start a myth. Women were little more than second class citizens in ancient times, and this alone would have discredited the whole story for most people right out of the gates! If they were trying to start a myth, why in the world would they use women who couldn’t even testify in court? Then we have the problem of the body itself. Where is it? If the women had simply gone to the wrong tomb, or the Roman authorities had moved the body, why didn’t anyone produce it? They could have stamped out the whole hoax in a minute just by producing the body! The silence here is deafening, and it was but one smoking gun that led this former atheist to think that maybe, just maybe this myth had indeed become fact.

Then we have to look at the reaction of Christ’s followers. The Gospels didn’t gloss over the bumbling of, and at times, even the stupidity of the Apostles. When it came to the resurrection, not one of them readily accepted that it was true. They were all filled with doubt and fear, and I happen to find this fact encouraging. The way I see it, if I had been there, I would have reacted in exactly the same way as Thomas and the others did. If someone told me that a man was raised from the dead I would have thought they had gone mad! Thus, the skepticism on the part of the Apostles as depicted in the Gospels is to me evidence of its plausibility. They didn't just accept that He had risen from the dead. They demanded proof. The Gospels depict a very rational and human reaction to the supposed resurrection event. It is how most of us would have responded. They believed as you or I would; that “there ain’t no coming back.”

But then a change happens in them, literally overnight. They go from cowards and skeptics hiding in the shadows to boldly proclaiming the Good News that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. They did this under constant persecution and the threat of death. How is this possible if it were all just a myth; unless that myth had become fact?!

You see, this change occurred because when myth became fact in the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ, they now had hope. Death itself had been defeated on that first Easter Sunday. What all of humanity had been yearning for since the dawn of time became reality in the moment that Jesus first stood and the stone was rolled away. Saint Paul wrote of this, saying: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” (1 Thes 4:13-18)

So as we move through this Holy Week up to Easter, I want you to remember that we have hope. As an atheist, this was one thing I lacked; hope. I would think of all those I have loved and lost, I would think of my own mortality and I would be filled with an overwhelming sense of despair and futility. And if you have ever felt this way yourself, I would challenge you to ask a simple question; “what if it were true?” What if myth had indeed become fact on that first Easter Sunday?