Jesus most certainly had a resurrection in the minds of his disciples. Unless the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are complete fantasies, they were absolutely convinced that he rose from the dead, despite the fact that he was changed, and seemed at times to be almost unrecognisable. And actually one would not want him to have had any other sort of resurrection. Religion is about belief; not cold intellectual scientific belief, but passionate belief in the mind and heart, passed on from one person to another.
So what is the significance of his resurrection for us? Not I hope that Jesus saved us from our fallen nature; because if Evolution has any truth in it, the birth of Man with language, tools and reflective thought was a triumphant success; and the doctrine of original sin is ripe for the waste paper basket. And if Atonement is necessary, perhaps it should be the Church’s atonement for having preached an incomplete or inadequate Gospel? Now the great proportion of educated people do believe in Evolution, in the sense that they accept that star-dust evolved into US somehow or another. There was no Fall: no golden age in the past from which we have been expelled. Death may at times be the wages of sin, but first and foremost it is an evolutionary necessity; there could have been no Evolution without death. So that lovely story of Adam and Eve can be regarded as an unscientific society’s attempt to explain the uncomfortable reality of death. But we know better now. And unless we want to bury our hearts and minds in the untenable myths of antiquity, we have to accept modern knowledge, and the world we live in so far as it reflects that knowledge. And the great fact of our experience is that Evolution has been a triumphant success, so far. It has produced man, civilised society without tyranny, and modest comfort for most in that society. The Church would be mad to turn its back on all this. But sadly the Church does regard an emotional attachment to Jesus as sufficient; and is content to leave the task of maintaining a decent just society to others. Apart from the hypocrisy of that attitude; it never made a bigger mistake.
One comment that two world wars of the 20th century invite is that there was nobody to condemn the exultation of naked power, because the Churches did not concern themselves with the God-World side of the Triangle, but only with the God-I side. Bismarck had modified Clausewitz’s dogma that “War is the continuation of political intercourse by other means”, as follows, “War can be used as an alternative to attempting political intercourse”. So perhaps one should modify Edmund Burke as follows: nothing more is necessary for ensuring the arrival of complete hell on earth, than that the Churches should fail to preach an adequate Gospel, and concern themselves with only part of life.
A better symbolism for Jesus’ coming than the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is, I think, Plato’s imagery of the man who had the courage to escape from the cave of shadows into the sunlight outside; and who returned into the cave to try to free his fellow-men from their delusion that shadows were reality. You could say that Jesus tried to lead men out of the created world, in which god or the gods were anthropomorphic, into the sunlight, where the spiritual world came alive in the human heart, and in which it might be possible to bring a corner of the kingdom of heaven down to earth.