The wise of this present age find the notion of resurrection impossible to believe. They therefore explain the accounts of Christ's resurrection in the Gospels as an existential attempt by the community of the early Church to make sense of what they had experienced. That is, it was a myth generated by those committed to Jesus' ministry which was meant to symbolically, not literally, vindicate the validity of his preaching in the light of his shameful death.
But as Luke Timothy Johnson notes on page 390 of his commentary on Luke's Gospel, this account gets things precisely backward. The Gospels do not show us a cohesive community immediately after Jesus' death, but an assortment of discouraged followers on the brink of scattering to the four winds. Memories of Jesus' earthly ministry did not keep them together. Rather, they were brought together into the community which would become the Church by the coming of the resurrected Christ to them.
The Church did not invent Christ's resurrection; rather, Christ's resurrection created the Church.
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