THE RESURRECTION

The Resurrection Appearances

Character: physical or visionary events?

Location: Galilee or Jerusalem?

Appearance: Did it look like Jesus or someone else?

‘Some doubted’ – what happened to the rest of the ‘twelve’?

Appearance Stories or Features of an Unhistorical Character

Anti-docetic emphases: Jesus eating with them

The road to Emmaus: Jesus present in the breaking of bread

The Eschatological Character of Resurrection Belief

There is a strong argument confirming and supporting the remarkable character of early Christian resurrection experiences. According to N. T. Wright, had they simply seen visions of Jesus, whether in their presence or enthroned in heaven at God’s right hand, this would most naturally have led to a belief that Jesus had been vindicated by God beyond death, without ‘undoing his death’. This does not appear to be entirely correct. Certainly the rule as regards belief in an afterlife in the Judaism of this time expected that the dead remained in some sort of waiting place, awaiting the end of the world and the final judgment (see, for example, 4 Ezra 7:75-101). On the other hand, the examples we have in the apocalyptic literature of heavenly journeys by individuals are journeys by living individuals. This being the case, visions of Jesus enthroned at God’s right hand could have been sufficient grounds for the early Christians to conclude that Jesus had been vindicated beyond death. In Paul’s writings (our earliest source), there is no clear reference either to the empty tomb, or to an interim period wherein Jesus appeared physically as opposed to merely in visions. Paul places all the resurrection appearances in the same category as his own. And the metaphor that he uses (the mortal body as the seed that is planted, the resurrection body as the plant that sprouts from it) would work equally well if not better if it were assumed that the body remains in the tomb! Be that as it may, what is certainly clear from the evidence is that the early Christians did not believe that Jesus simply joined the other dead in Sheol, the ‘land of the dead’. He had been raised from the underworld to life with God, the sort of life that most Jews expected for those righteous people who had died, not during an interim waiting period, but after the final judgment.

Now there was no known prior concept within Judaism of an individual rising to eternal life prior to the final resurrection of all people at the end of time. Of course, there may have been some parallel in the case of Enoch, and perhaps also Moses. But in the case of Jesus, their conviction that Jesus’ resurrection had taken place caused them to rethink the eschatological schema that they inherited from Judaism. Within Judaism, there was a clear concept of two ages: the present evil age, and the age to come, the ‘messianic age’. These can be diagrammed as follows:

Present age Age to come

_____________________________|_______________________________

The early Christians, starting from the conviction that Jesus had risen and thus that the final resurrection had begun, reworked this schema as follows:

Present age ______ Age to come_____________________

_____________________________|__________________________|

The resurrection of Jesus is an eschatological event. It is the ‘firstfruits’ of the general ‘resurrection of the dead’. It is thus not a belief that they would have ‘made up’ based on the beliefs they already had. No – something caused them to rewrite their eschatological beliefs, namely the conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead. What caused them to believe this (the disappearance of the body, visions of angels, visions of Jesus himself, encounter with a living person they believed to be Jesus) is difficult if not impossible to say from a historian’s perspective. What a historian can, indeed must say is that Christians did not simply invent beliefs to suit their tastes or their presuppositions. They must have had experiences that convinced them of what must have seemed implausible based on beliefs that they already had: that a crucified man is the anointed one and Lord, that this one individual has been raised to eternal life as part of the final, eschatological resurrection, but nonetheless without the end and the rest of the general resurrection taking place. This does not require a ‘supernatural’ explanation necessarily, but it does mean that something other than deception or even creativity is required to explain the facts. And here it becomes important what and how much Jesus may have said about his death and/or his coming vindication by God prior to Easter, since this will affect whether it is plausible to explain subsequent Christian revisions of Jewish messianic and eschatological beliefs in terms of ‘cognitive dissonance’, that is, in terms of their rewriting some beliefs in order to preserve other core beliefs. But here too one must recognize that the post-Easter Christians must have had a sufficiently strong conviction that Jesus is the Messiah and has risen from the dead for them to rewrite other fundamental beliefs in order to preserve these other core convictions.

How Essential is the Resurrection to Christianity?

Could Christianity survive without the resurrection as traditionally understood? Not only is it possible to answer in the affirmative, but we appear to have an example in the New Testament canon itself! The Letter to the Hebrews presents Jesus as dying on the cross and then taking his sacrifice into the heavens, cleansing them and preparing the way for us to enter God’s presence. There are no references to Jesus’ resurrection using the standard Christian terminology found elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g. the verbs egeirein and anistēmi), and the logic of his understanding of the work of Christ seems to leave no room for Jesus’ return to a bodily existence. This reflects the author’s platonic tendencies, and the evidence of Hebrews does not indicate what most ancient Christians thought about resurrection, atonement, and other issues. Nevertheless, it still raises some interesting questions. Does this suggest that the stories of the empty tomb and bodily appearances of Jesus were not universally known? That they were not so old and authoritative that one could not disagree with them? Or could we imagine this author formulating a theology that runs roughshod over the basic tenets of what any of his intended readers would regard as the Christian faith?

Certainly the empty tomb is not crucial to the Christian faith, since it has nothing to do with what Christians have traditionally meant by resurrection. The Romans used to scatter the ashes of Christian martyrs in an attempt to prevent them from being resurrected. I presume no one today would suggest that, if there is to be a final resurrection of the dead, that this would require God reassembling all the original molecules that made up one’s body! This would be resuscitation rather than resurrection! And so the Christian belief that Jesus was not just brought back to life to die again, but was raised to eternal life, means that the fate of Jesus’ body is ultimately irrelevant. Christian believers sing, “You ask me how I know he lives – He lives within my heart!” The post-Easter Jesus is regarded by Christians as present to all believers everywhere, and is not felt to be limited spatially, unlike bodily existence as we now know it. So the focus of so much attention on the empty tomb is really something of a distraction, a side issue, as far as the resurrection of Jesus is concerned. As Marcus Borg points out, the real focus of the resurrection faith of Christians down the ages has not been a past event, but their experience of Jesus as a real, living presence in their lives.

It will always be possible to find other explanations for why Jesus’ body was not in the tomb that Sunday morning. The most ‘natural’ explanation is that ‘someone took the body’, which is precisely what John’s Gospel tells us the disciples thought, and Matthew’s Gospel tells us that the Jewish authorities thought. It is a logical line of thought in view of the circumstances, and one that comes to mind more quickly than the suggestion that the disappearance of the body indicates that the body was raised to eternal life, indicating that the kingdom of God has arrived. The testimony of the early Christians who testified to the resurrection seems to have been without exception ‘We have seen him’ rather than ‘We found the tomb empty.’ An ‘empty’ tomb can always be explained in various ways; it is only the experiences of the early Christians (and many others since) that indicates that something out of the ordinary may have happened.

But what did the disciples see? And where did they see it? Luke’s Gospel and Acts assumes that the disciples remained in Jerusalem and saw Jesus there. Mark’s Gospel promises that they will see Jesus in Galilee. Matthew has Jesus appear briefly in Jerusalem before the disciples head off to Galilee. And John’s Gospel (in its final form, at any rate) seems to be trying to harmonize the two: it has appearances on two Sundays in Jerusalem, but also a subsequent appearance in Galilee. The Gospel tradition on where Jesus appeared to the Twelve is thus confused, and this raises a number of difficult questions about the history of the tradition of resurrection appearances.

There is also confusion regarding who they saw, believe it or not. It is striking that Luke and John both indicate that the disciples saw an individual (on more than one occasion, it would seem) who they did not recognize to be Jesus, but who they became convinced was nevertheless Jesus having risen from the dead. In view of this perplexing element in the tradition, it is not surprising that some have suggested that either mistaken identity or even deception was involved. But as with any good conspiracy theory, these reconstructions are not so much interpretations of a wealth of available evidence, as attempts to fill in the enormous holes in our knowledge around a few very small pieces of ambiguous information. Certainly in the earliest sources there is no mention of such uncertainty about the identity of Jesus (Acts 9:5 could be taken in this way, if one assumes Paul would have seen Jesus prior to his crucifixion, but this is at best uncertain). And so the nature of the appearances recorded later in the tradition will always remain uncertain, and are of questionable historical value at any rate.

The emphasis on Jesus having been alive in a physical body clearly is an apologetic motif. The stories about Jesus having eaten with the disciples are late inventions, attempting to combat either docetism (the idea that Jesus only appeared to be human) or the idea of a purely spiritual resurrection. But of course, the earliest evidence leaves the door wide open to just such an understanding: Jesus appears in locked rooms, disappears again, appears to individuals on the open road in a blaze of light and/or sound (depending on whether one follows Acts 9:7 or Acts 22:9). The earliest appearances of the risen Christ did not clearly confirm anything about his physical nature.

THE RESURRECTION