The Resurrection of the Son of God

Surprisingly good article on the Resurrection in Newsweek by Jon Meacham (via Get Religion):

Yet the journey from Golgotha to Constantine, the fourth-century emperor whose conversion secured the supremacy of Christianity in the West, was anything but simple; the rise of the faith was, as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.” From the Passion to the Resurrection to the nature of salvation, the basic tenets of Christianity were in flux from generation to generation as believers struggled to understand the meaning of Jesus’ mission.

Jesus is a name, Christ a title (in Hebrew, Messias, in Greek, Christos, meaning “anointed one”). Without the Resurrection, it is virtually impossible to imagine that the Jesus movement of the first decades of the first century would have long endured. A small band of devotees might have kept his name alive for a time, even insisting on his messianic identity by calling him Christ, but the group would have been just one of many sects in first-century Judaism, a world roiled and crushed by the cataclysmic war with Rome from 66 to 73, a conflict that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem.

Just a thought: would all the proponents of the “secularization” thesis during the 20th century (i.e. the idea that religion would inexorably die out and be eclipsed by secular ways of understanding the world) possibly have predicted that in 2005 a major newsweekly would carry a story strongly implying that the Resurrection is the most rational explanation of the rise of Christianity?