Today the Christian world is commemorating Easter Sunday.

At the center of the celebration is the resurrection of Jesus, three days following His death by crucifixion. After His resurrection, Jesus then bodily ascended to Heaven in the presence of His apostles according to biblical accounts.

The resurrection of Jesus is considered as the cornerstone of the Christian faith. No other leader of the faith since the beginning of man had risen from the dead.

Muhammad, the founder of Islam and considered by the Muslims as the prophet and last messenger of God, died on June 8, 632 following an illness. His body was buried in the City of Medina in Saudi Arabia. But he did not rise from the dead.

They say that Siddh?rtha Gautama, the spiritual teacher from ancient India and founder of Buddhism, fell ill and died at the age of 80. His body was cremated and the relics were placed in monuments.  But never did he resurrect.
 
The Bible says that Moses, the Hebrew religious leader to whom God supposedly gave the Ten Commandments in Mount Sinai and led the Israelites in the miraculous Passage of the Red Sea, was 120 years old when he died. But there was no account that Moses ever resurrected.

Consequently, those who doubt the divinity of Jesus focus on their arguments by debunking the story of Jesus’ resurrection.  

Some skeptics say that the cadaver of Jesus was stolen by His disciples from His tomb.  Others would say that His Body was moved by Jewish or Roman authorities at that time to another location. There is also this theory that the women who visited His remains, distraught and overcome by grief, missed their way in the dimness of the morning and went to the wrong tomb and thought that He resurrected.  Another hypothesis was Jesus was mistakenly reported to have died but in reality He just lost consciousness because of pain, fatigue and loss of blood and walked away from His tomb after regaining His consciousness and thereafter appeared before His disciples.

In his electronic article “Beyond Blind Faith” that was adapted from his book “Know Why You Believe”, author Paul E. Little said that given the biblical claims of Jesus there are only four possibilities, either He is a liar, a lunatic, a legend, or the Truth. Those who do not affirm that Jesus is the Truth automatically affirm that He could be one of the three other possibilities.

Little argued that even those who deny Jesus affirm that He was a great moral teacher. And it is illogical to assume that He is such a teacher if He is a deliberate liar. He further said that a person who thinks he is God is certainly lunatic but if one would closely examine the life of Christ, there is no sign imbalance and abnormalities befitting a deranged person; in fact, He displayed the greatest composure under pressure. Neither is the story of Jesus a mere legend as borne out by the many evidences found in discoveries of modern archaeology that supported His existence as a human being. And by the process of elimination, Jesus cannot be the other possibilities but the Truth.

As Jesus said after His resurrection: “Because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.”

Indubitably, the Resurrection, and eventual Ascension, of Jesus is the greatest foundation of Christianity. But more than being the cornerstone of faith, His Resurrection is also the ultimate manifestation that there is Supreme Being, even if no one among the living has seen The Master face to face.

And verily it is only by seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness that human beings would be truly blessed. All things corporeal are secondary.