Why Does The Media Always Use Easter To Criticize Christianity? | Bishop Barron

There was a stupid article in The New Yorker. Scholars debate whether the gospel stories preserve ancient memories or are just Greek literature in disguise.
Around Christmas and Easter, there's going to be the mainstream media going after Christianity. This seems to happen every year.
I am so pleased to welcome on the show, His Excellency, Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron, thank you for being here.
Michael, good to see you, as always. So, Your Excellency, there was a stupid article in The New Yorker.
Now, of course, I have to be a little bit more specific than that. There was an article that came out March 24th.
We're still not done with Jesus. That's good news.
However, the subtitle here is, Scholars debate whether the gospel stories preserve ancient memories or are just Greek literature in disguise. But there's a reason they won't stay dead and buried.
This is reacting, I think, to news of a resurgence in Christianity. There was a great story out of the UK some 500 years or so after Henry VIII.
Looks like we're finally getting back at the Anglicans. The Catholics have overtaken the Anglicans among, at least among young people.
So things are looking strong.

And no sooner do we get that news than the New Yorker tries to debunk Christianity right before Easter.

This seems to happen every year.

Yeah.

No, as I say, as the swallows come back to Capistrano, you can predict that around Christmas and Easter, there's going to be the mainstream media going after Christianity.

I remember picking up that article with Hope. Oh, there's an article about Jesus, and we can't be done with him, so it must be something kind of positive.
As I kept reading it, though, I thought, oh, it's a review of Elaine Pagels, of course, who's been sort of a neo-gnostic critic of Orthodox Christianity for decades. We read her in the seminary, I mean, a long time ago.
And then as I kept reading it, I realized, oh, and he's in favor of Elaine Fagels. So all the hope went out of the balloon.
And then it was such a rehearsal of these old, tired arguments that are presented as though there's some revelation. These are as old as the 18th and 19th century that long ago were debunked.
The most recent scholarship stands very much athwart this position. So anyway, I just found it tiresome and annoying.
But then, of course, it dawned on me, yes, it's Easter time. So let's bring out the critiques of Christianity.
It always happens. I mean, even just in the life of a lay person, one notices that during Lent, sometimes new challenges arise in a particular way.
and it, you know, one hopes binds you, you know, in even some very minor way to the suffering of Christ, but it does seem to come up every year, and these arguments come up every year, just in a couple of moments, because there are other things I want to get to talk to you about. The top observations, the top criticisms from the non-Christians about Easter, they say Easter is a pagan and it comes from Ishtar and those Catholics are just paganizing the true faith or whatever.
Your response? That's James Fraser, late 19th century and his colleagues. It was already debunked in the early 20th century.
One of the best one-liners is C.S. Lewis, who was a great student of mythological literature.
And he said, anyone that says Christianity is one more myth hasn't read many myths. So myths, by their nature, are generic.
They're talking about abstract, archetypal truth regarding nature or humanity, whatever. Therefore, they're not set in a particular historical period.
On purpose, they're in illo tempore, as you'd say, like in that time, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away. That's the way a myth begins.
It's very interesting, Michael, that every Sunday we Catholics will say he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. It's a peculiar thing, but it's in the creed to hold off this kind of mythic misunderstanding.
We're not talking about a myth of a dying and rising God. We're talking about this Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee, who was put to death on a Roman cross under the authority of the Roman governor of Judea, whose existence and reign can be independently verified.
His name was Pontius Pilatus. That's how specific we get, and we say that week after week after week.
It's saying, not a myth, not a myth, not a myth. It looked like in the Gospel of Luke, he bothers to say at the Nativity narrative, when Quirinius was governor of Syria and when Caesar Augustus was emperor.
Time and again, the gospel writers want to locate and specify this story. Remember that wonderful account in the Acts of the Apostles when Peter says, you know, remember what happened up in Galilee with the baptism that John preached and all about Jesus from Nazareth and then he was put put to death, remember? He's saying this is a particular story about this guy that you remember and that you saw.
Well, he rose from the dead and we ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. Well, look, no one ever asks, you know, who was the governor of Thrace when Hercules was wrong?

Because it was not an historical story. No one says, who was the pharaoh when Osiris? No, no, it's not a historical reference.
But we do indeed say boldly, oh yeah, Caesar Augustus, he was the emperor and Quirinius, governor when he was born. He was crucified under Pontius Pilatus in Jerusalem around the year 30.
The Gospels aren't myths, but it's a tired old argument that's revived regularly. You know, there's a tradition that I heard of from a friend of mine that when Pontius Pilate in the Gospels, when his wife comes up to him and says, hey, have nothing to do with this man.
I am being troubled in my sleep because of this man. Don't, have nothing to do with this innocent man.
And there's this question that comes up, what's she dreaming about? And a friend of mine pointed to a tradition, which is that the dream she's having is that all over the world, for all the rest of history, she's hearing Pontius Pilate's name chanted, Subponcio Pilate to passus at Sepulter's Est, in the creed, and it freaks her out so much. She says, hey, you do not want any part of this.
But all to your point, this is a real historical figure. That reminds me, remember in Jesus Christ Superstar, then I heard thousands of millions crying for this man, and then I heard them mentioning my name and leaving me the blame.
It's a good line in that. And right, that's Pilate.
And so again and again. But it grounds the story in historic reality, and it matters.
That things really happen is extremely important in a religion that calls itself good news. You know, I've said this before many times, but when you read the Gospels, it doesn't sound like someone musing in a detached way about transcendent spiritual truths.
It's someone that is grabbing you by the shoulders and telling you something happened, and you need to know, have you heard? Have you heard what happened? That's the Gospels, and it makes all the difference. It sets them apart from all the other literature of the world, religiously speaking.
And I think we need to resist—and it is an old Gnostic trick. It's from the second century.
It's from the 21st century. An old Gnostic trick is to turn that into generic mythic talk, which renders it, by the way, harmless.
And that's why, dare I say it, places like the New Yorker magazine and kind of Upper East Side intelligentsia love Gnostic readings of Christianity because it renders the gospel harmless. But when you say, no, no, no, no, no, Jesus really rose from the dead.
You killed him and God raised him. That's a permanent revolution.
That's an earthquake. That's what the world is still reeling from, that message.
But it's the mythologization of it that domesticates it. But in the Anodyne general mythic reading, you have, one, this claim that the word Easter is just pagan, and two, that the Easter bunny is more evidence that the celebration of Easter is really just a kind of pagan fertility cult where we impose an historical man on it.
Yeah, and that's what they want to do all the time. That's why I have nothing against the Easter bunny.
It's something the kids get a kick out of, but I don't like the Easter bunnyization of Easter. No, no, it's a revolution.
And I like someone like Tom Holland, the historian that said that you can measure it now the way you measure like an earthquake, the aftershocks and so on. You can measure because of what's happening now, something happened then.
Or like the Big Bang, we can measure things in the universe that indicate, look, that's where it all came from. The same is true of Christianity in all these manifestations, but they go back to this earthquake.
Jesus rose from the dead. And I don't want Easter to turn into Easter bonnets and Easter bunnies and vague pagan myths and dying and rising gods.
That is the best way to emasculate it. But that's what they want to do.
That's why the mainstream media always bring out these debunking moves. Right now, download the Halo app.
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What do you make from the other side of things? Not from people who are totally faithless, but from people who maybe have a zealous, if misdirected faith. I've heard people say that the celebration of Easter is pagan and we should get back to a more truly biblical understanding of the crucifixion and the resurrection because, well, here's just one example.
Our Lord is supposed to be dead for three days and three nights. But when you go from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, you don't get three days and three nights there.
So, it can't possibly be according to the calendar that we understand. Well, no, it touches upon those three days is the only thing that means there.
But you can't get more biblical than the Easter faith. That's where the entire Bible comes to as kind of climactic expression.
Now, I'm reading it as a Christian, obviously, but now we understand everything in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, everything in David, everything in the Psalms, everything in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and all the minor prophets. Now we get it fully what all those things were pointing to.
This is the culmination of all the biblical revelation, is the resurrection. It's the yes, Paul says, to all the promises made to Israel.
That's one of the great statements of Christian faith, I think, coming from this very devout Jew, Rabbi Shaul, who becomes the Apostle Paul, and says just that. He knew all the promises made to Israel.
He knew everything in the Old Testament. And now, in the resurrection, that's the yes.
That's the promised land. That's the fulfillment of Torah.
That's the true temple. That's the true prophecy.
So no, you can't get more biblical than the resurrection. It's what lights the Bible up and makes the whole thing intelligible.
Now, I don't know if you've noticed an increased interest in the Shroud of Turin, the purported burial cloth of Christ. When I was a kid, I was told the Shroud of Turin is a medieval forgery and forget about it.
And then it appears in recent years that debunking was itself debunked. And there are many people, even as a kid, I always thought it was just sort of a Catholic thing.
But I know many Protestants who are shroud-pilled, to use a modern phrase. And so what is your take on the significance of the shroud or alternately the Sudarium of Oviedo, the purported headcloth of Christ, or other relics and artifacts in the resurgence of faith? I've been studying the shroud since I was a kid because the first serious kind of work was published in the 1970s, the real scientific kind of work by NASA scientists and all that.
So I read all those books when I was a teenager, and I got sort of fascinated by it. I was, along with many others, chagrined with that, you know, carbon-14 test that said, oh no, it was from the, you know, 12th century or something.
But then, as I continued following the literature and the studies, as you suggest correctly, I think that debunking has been debunked for all kinds of reasons. We can't go into all the scientific detail, but I think to claim that it's a medieval forgery, it's a greater leap of faith.
That's a greater leap of faith, knowing what we know about the shroud, than saying it's the real barrel shroud of Jesus. I had the privilege of seeing it in 2010.
I was in Rome, and it was displayed for that year, or part of that year, up in Turin. And a group of us flew up from Rome and just spent a few hours in Turin.
And it was extraordinary. I got within about 10 feet of it.
They allowed you in a little kind of area in front of it for maybe five minutes, and then you got to move on. But I got up close to it.
And see, it speaks to what we've been talking about. The shroud, which clearly from the Middle East and clearly from that time, and it has all the marks of someone who'd been crucified by the Romans and all of that, it grounds the crucifixion.
It specifies it in a time and place. And you see this figure, and it makes Jesus very real, very concrete, and not an abstraction.
See, I'm against abstracting Christianity. That's an old academic move, and it's a Gnostic move, indeed.
St. Irenaeus fought these people in the second century, and we're fighting him now on the page of the New Yorker magazine, but it's the same thing.
And the Gnostics back then wanted the same move, to render abstract these claims. The Shroud is a way of saying, no, no, no, no, no, look, he was in this burial cloth.
And I would say it speaks to the fact that he rose from the dead, because it's very to explain what we have on the shroud. It's very hard to explain that photographic negative image, which is stunningly accurate and detailed and so on.
I think it speaks to both the death and the resurrection of the Lord. I was once speaking with a group of Christians and non-Christians, and they were saying,

including even a Catholic, was saying that representations of Christ as being of all different races or all different appearances, that that's actually fine. And I sort of understood the universal point that he was trying to make, but I thought, no, I don't think that Christ looks like everything and everyone because he's a real person.

And so I think he's a real person.

And so I think he has real distinct features.

And in as much as the features look like one thing, they don't look like another thing.

And someone asked me, I said, well, what do you think he looked like?

Because we were also talking about how every five years or so it seems like the liberal media go out and they say, we've reconstructed what Christ really looked like. And they put up some picture of a baboon or something based on absolutely nothing.
And that's the usual move. It happens at Easter time, typically.
Right. Yeah, exactly.
And it just drives me crazy. And they said, what do you think he looked like? And I say, I think he looks like the guy on the Shroud of Turin.
You know, I actually think we have a picture of him, like a photographic negative on a shroud. But in any case, these guys, the New Yorker types who just seem so desperate, especially when faith is resurging, say, oh, they put on a straight face.
They say, well, how interesting that faith is resurging. Well, I mean, you know, we don't really take it seriously.
But, you know, what does it mean? What does the movement itself even kind of mean? they would do whatever they can to abstract it. I want to just get, before we go, to one really concrete point.
Catholics are about to fast, at least tomorrow, maybe Holy Saturday, if they're hardcore, and then they'll have a feast on Sunday. But this is the end of Lent when people undertake voluntary penances, they abstain from meat on Fridays and they do all of these things.
Why does that matter? There are some people, even Christians, who say, you don't need to put yourself through that. Christ died on the cross for us.
We don't need to do anything. We don't earn our salvation through any works of our own.
And so why do it? That kind of distinction, as a Catholic better formed than I once said, that in Catholicism, you have first the fast and then the feast. And in other religions, you have first the feast and then the hangover.
Why does it matter that we fast and abstain and have penances? Because our desires for food and drink and pleasure and sex are good. But they're a bit like children, that they want what they want when they want it.

They're unruly and undisciplined.

And if we allow them to dominate our lives,

they will indeed take over the house.

They're a bit like kids.

Kids are great, but a parent knows

if you let a little toddler just dictate terms

that he wants what he wants when he wants it,

he'll be running your life and the whole house.

You have to discipline the kids so as to allow greater goods to emerge. That's a way to think about it.
These desires of ours, they're good. We're not manichees.
We're not Puritans or dualists. These are good things.
But they can come to dominate in such a way that the deeper desires, the higher desires for the true, the good, the beautiful, for God himself, aren't awakened. And so we fast so as to allow the deeper hungers to emerge.
And that's a classic practice. It's not like uniquely Catholic by any means.
You find it all over the world in religious traditions. And we're such a self-indulgent society.
I think it, we should do more of it. Something I did this Lent, by the way, is I, and I stuck with it, is one day a week, I just put my phone away completely.
I just put it in a drawer. Because I thought, like so many others, I got too addicted to this stupid phone.
And I was, you know, scrolling through it and looking at, you know, nonsense on Facebook or something. So I did one day a week, I'll just put it in a drawer, put it away.
And it was good. It was really good.
It did indeed allow deeper and higher interest to emerge in my life. So no, I think fasting is a great thing.
Right. It's a wonderful way to think about it.
It's not that you're denying your desires. It's that you are disciplining your desire and will so that deeper desires can emerge.
What a beautiful way to put it. Yeah.
So, you know, in heaven or like prior to the fall, all this would be properly ordered. So, all our desires would be ordered by reason, but because of the fall, we're all off kilter and our reason doesn't have control over the passions.
I mean, Plato knew this. Look at the image of the reason trying to drive the chariot and the horses are kind of unruly.
As long as reason is driving the horses, then the chariot goes forward. What happens is reason gets kicked out and then the horses go crazy.
Well, that's—Plato knew it, and that's a basic psychological truth. So the church wants us to discipline these emotions and desires so they give energy to the soul, but under the right direction.
And so that you have a better feast on Easter Sunday and you don't end up with a hangover. Your Excellency, thank you so much for being here.
Of course, everyone should follow Word on Fire and all of Bishop Barron's wonderful work and writing and debunking of the nonsense that constantly approaches itself.

And maybe, who knows, maybe you'll be able to see him on Easter Sunday or next time you're in

Winona, Rochester. Your Excellency, thank you for coming on the show.

God bless you, Michael. Thanks.

And thank you to all of you. I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.

See you all tomorrow.