catholicsphere

Judge to Rule on Merit of Christ Case

Some highlights from the article:

• The priest’s atheist accuser, Luigi Cascioli, says the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people for 2,000 years with a fable that Christ existed, and that the Rev. Enrico Righi violated two Italian laws by reasserting the claim.
• Cascioli says the church has been gaining financially by “impersonating” as Christ someone by the name of John of Gamala, the son of Judas from Gamala.

A press release on Catholic Online points to a book by Dennis Marcellino, Why Are We Here?: The Scientific Answer to This Age-Old Question (That You Don’t Need to Be a Scientist to Understand), that makes a case for the existence of Jesus including:

• Roman historians Cornelius Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and Syrian Mara bar Serapion.
• Josephus Flavius, the leading Jewish historian of that day:
  (From Jewish Antiquities) “Now, there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works - a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principle men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and 10,000 other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”
• “Why would the apostles allow themselves to be martyred in such horrible ways for saying Jesus existed when they knew that was false? Instead they said they were eyewitnesses of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. And they all were martyred separate from each other. It could be said that one of them was crazy and suicidal…but it would be hard to make the case that ALL of them were (except John, who wasn’t martyred but was exiled to the island of Patmos instead).” (ed. It should be noted that attempts were made to kill St. John, by boiling him in oil, but he survived. The story goes that he emerged with skin bright and glowing, as in youthful. It was then that he was exiled.)
• Marcellino then quotes current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s humorous way of pointing out how absurd it is to conclude that the apostles didn’t really witness the resurrection like they said they did. He said: “We must pray for the courage to endure the scorn of ‘the sophisticated world’. The ‘wise’ do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. It is really quite absurd [to them]. The Ascension had to be made up by groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred .”