Vatican spokesman defends historicity of Resurrection accounts
April 17, 2025
» Continue to this story on Vatican News (Italian)
CWN Editor's Note: On the eve of the Sacred Paschal Triduum, a leading Vatican spokesman published an article defending the historicity of the accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels.
“The canonical Gospels were not thought up centuries later by the authors of a devotional fiction or by fanatical propagandists of a religious ideology, but are based on eyewitness accounts: they represent a bare account of facts, are far from miracles, and do not describe the moment of the Resurrection,” said Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication.
“The historicity of the story of the burial, as well as that of the story of the empty tomb, is no longer questioned by serious scholars,” he added. “There is a Big Bang at the origin of Christianity that cannot be explained with sociological categories. What could have transformed a small group of terrified and disappointed disciples into tireless heralds of the death and Resurrection of Christ, willing to testify to everyone what they had seen and to die as martyrs to tell about it?”
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