Like the apostle Thomas, the British journalist overcame his skepticism about Jesus
John J. Miller examines Jesus, The Man Who Lives in Free Expressions in the Wall Street Journal .
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When the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples, the apostle Thomas missed the meetup. The Eastertide story of what happened next rattled one of the 20th century’s great Christian apologists.
The Gospel of John says that Thomas questioned the news of the Resurrection. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe,” he said.
A week later, “Doubting Thomas” finally saw Jesus. He responded with awe: “My Lord and my God!” Jesus delivered his famous reply: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Malcolm Muggeridge worried about how he would have reacted to the astonishing claims of Jesus and his followers. “Had I lived in the time of Jesus, I fear I should have been among the scoffers, and missed the glory of those who heard him and saw him and believed,” he wrote in “Jesus: The Man Who Lives,” a book that has just come out in a 50th-anniversary edition from Creed & Culture, a new publisher.
Muggeridge was one of the top journalists of his time. A British newspaperman who became an influential television broadcaster, he was a natural skeptic. This trait served him well in the Soviet Union, where the Manchester Guardian sent him in the fall of 1932. Like many young socialists, the 29-year-old Muggeridge was drawn to the supposed warmth of collectivism. In the cold of winter, however, he heard rumors of deprivation. During Lent in 1933, he defied a travel ban on journalists, sneaked aboard a train and searched for the truth in Ukraine.
As Easter loomed, Muggeridge observed the horror of the Holodomor, a famine imposed by Stalin through state-run farming and the seizure of harvests. He witnessed starving peasants, empty villages and “hard-faced” soldiers. Years later, in his autobiography, he called it “a nightmare memory.”
Then came the wonder. On a Sunday morning in Kyiv, acting on an impulse, Muggeridge entered a church. “It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar,” he wrote. The devotion of the people amazed him. “Never before or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of turning to God in great affliction was overpowering . . . I felt closer to God then than I ever had before, or am likely to again.”
Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal.
