Thinking about the Resurrection 3

Page Tags: Resurrection, Jesus, Christ, Risen, Belief, Believe, Body, Christian, Christians, Dead, Disciple, Disciples, Empty Tomb, Faith, God, Gospels, Jesus, John, Luke, Mark, Mary, Matthew, Paul, Peter, Tradition, Women

© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: Monday, 12 February 2007

Abstract

Paul

When Paul sets out to refute the Corinthians skeptical about the resurrection, he told the tradition of the post-rising appearances of Jesus as he knew it (1 Cor 5:3). Jesus had appeared to Peter, then the twelve (sic), then to 500 brethren, then to James, then to all the apostles. Finally, Paul says he appeared to him. In a letter written long before the gospels, there are more appearances than all the gospels together mention. There are two important points to notice here.

1. Bar the last, these were all appearances reported by others, not the narrator, so none of them are direct evidence. In US legalism, they are all hearsay.
2. None of them are even hearsay evidence of the resurrection. They are sightings of Jesus, who was thought to be dead, but was apparently alive. The resurrection has to be an inference from the sightings. No one saw it!

Of the six sightings mentioned, the one of Paul himself is distinctive, and so too is that to 500 brethren all at once. Neither are in the gospels, though Paul’s is in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, no less than three times! Two pairs are left, to Peter and the twelve, and to James and all the apostles, the group in each case being apparently the same people, so far as the evangelists tell us, but whereas the gospels affirm the first pair, they say nothing about the second. Paul seems to imply here that there were more than twelve apostles. Paul also calls the chosen disciples the twelve even though Judas cannot have been still among them after his betrayal, the crucifixion and his own death—reported differently in Matthew and Acts. According to Luke, in Acts, the replacement for Judas was not picked until after the ascension. Evidently Paul was not aware of any tradition that one apostle had dropped out before the appearances.

Many scholars think Judas is an invention of the early church and so was not part of the original story. Judas means Jew. The Jewish people were personified in Judas as being perfidious and so it was that the church began antisemitism. No one can believe that a good God blessed with foresight and omnipotence would have tainted anyone, let alone his formerly Chosen People, with a mark that could have led to so much foreseen injustice and tragedy to them. God’s plan, if that is how we should view it, did not need any betrayal. Indeed, Jesus would, far more nobly, have stood forward voluntarily when the guard came to arrest him. So Judas is a superfluous addition, and we know that it would have been added when the Jews were unpopular among the Romans through the very period when the gospels were being written, until a few years later when Bar Kosiba revolted again in Palestine with much bloodshed, both there and elsewhere in the empire as mobs attacked Jews (133-135 AD). Christians wanted to loose the charge of being followers of a rebellious Jewish sect, so they purposely denigrated Jews along with everyone else.

Paul considers Jesus’s last appearance was to him, and the first was to Peter. Paul seems not to know of Jesus appearing to Mary or any woman. Luke seems to be writing an account of a first appearance of Jesus to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, but surprises us by getting to the end and having the twelve declare that he had already appeared to Peter. What is significant is the closeness of the words in Greek in Luke to the words used in Paul’s letter. Remember that Paul wrote first! The explanation seems plain. The story was altered to fit the tradition of Paul that Peter was the first to see Jesus. Luke was going to make it Clopas, and an unknown disciple. The same is true of the other gospel traditions of Peter being first to enter the tomb, even though he was not the first there! Again, it looks as if a simpler story—in which the first at the tomb first believed—has been changed as an afterthought to give Peter a priority that the original tale did not support. Pericopes that had been loved and believed by people in the churches of certain regions for decades needed to be handled carefully, and so Peter could not just be inserted as being the first to see Jesus. Instead, he was depicted as the first to see the tomb empty and believe that Jesus had risen. Of course, we cannot be certain that even the list in Paul has not been amended to suit the Roman church, for the priority of Peter identifies Rome as the favored church.

The next appearance in Paul’s list was to “the twelve”, which had to become the eleven in the gospels. Yet Paul never mentions the twelve again. It is a gospel expression everywhere except here. But John has “the twelve” three times only, and otherwise it seems to have been Mark’s usage which naturally found its way in parallel passages in Matthew and Luke. It hints that the mention of Peter and “the twelve” in Paul’s letter could have been retrospective. Anyway, the appearance to the twelve or eleven in the gospels is the occasion of the mission statement Jesus gave them.

Now it seems clear that Jesus had no mission in his lifetime other than to preach repentance to Jewish sinners because of the imminence of the coming kingdom of God, with all that entailed at the time that Judaea was occupied by a foreign invader. The appeal was to Jewish sinners and avowedly not for dogs—gentiles, because both were barred from the temple. So, the mission to preach to all nations, after the crucifixion, is assuredly the justification of those who had done it—those who constituted the early gentile church. Those wanting to understand the gospels must accept that they were written when the apostles and their converts had been missionizing for about half a century at least. Only the most naïve people will not accept that the evangelists had many decades of evangelic activity to justify, as well as to record whatever Jesus had actually said. The mission was to continue into all nations the work started by Jesus in his own ministry to the Jews of Galilee and Jerusalem. This is truly the sense in which Jesus lived on. It is the practical sense for Christians of the creed, “Jesus is risen”. Paul makes it doubly clear, even bragging that he had done more to make Jesus live on than any of his rival apostles:

I worked harder than any of them. Whether, then, it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believe.

1 Cor 15:10-11

It is the duplication of the teaching and preaching of Jesus that brings belief, and that is following Jesus’s mission ordinances. Once people believe, then “Jesus is risen”. The appearances seem to have been to convey the sense of mission, quite openly in the case of the twelve where the mission statement was made. What we are finding is that the resurrection is a metaphor for the continuity of the teaching of Jesus and the way of life he proclaimed.

The value of this discovery is that it is independent of whether any revivification of a dead body happened or not. The reason it is valuable is that the whole of the New Testament does not give any adequate reason for belief in a real material resurrection of a dead body, but the metaphorical sense of it really is unquestionable. Perhaps the one can follow from the other, but, if that is so, it is belief in the revivification that has to follow from the other, because there is no proof of the revivification itself.

The first to believe their mission was to continue the work of Jesus were the twelve original disciples, hand-picked by Jesus and trained by him. They were the first to accept it was their duty to continue the work of their master—the first to believe in him. With their missionary activity, their belief spread. Particular people picked out were Peter and James as being successors of Jesus in different senses, Peter as the leader of the disciples and James as the leader of the church in Jerusalem. Lastly, of course, Paul mentioned himself, claiming he was better than the rest, better because he worked harder at the tasks Jesus was said to have proclaimed! If he had more faith than the others, the proof of it was the work he did. So Paul was no believer himself in faith not works. He believed in faith and works in his own case, and that lack of works plainly showed lack of faith. The point for all of them, Paul and the evangelists, was that they kept Christ alive by continuing his work!

In each case in 1 Corinthians, when Paul writes “Jesus appeared to…” the meaning is that suddenly they got it—they understood what Jesus had been urging them to do—they believed, and accepted that their duty henceforth was to be like Christ. The heretics of the middle ages believed that the true believer actually became a Christ, something that might seem blasphemous to modern Christians, but which is an entirely logical extension of this original understanding of faith. After all, if someone behaves as Christ would, what is there to distinguish that person from Christ? Jesus rose, was resurrected and lived again through the apostolic life—what else ought to be Christian life?

When Jesus “appeared” to someone or some group of people, that person or those people had come to believe in his life and mission. “Seeing Jesus” is functionally the same as “having faith”. Paul’s own vision and conversion illustrate it. He did not see anything other than a bright light, and to “see the light” is still a saying that implies a revelation. From this the early church used the seeing of Jesus as a metaphor for belief, and it is easy to see how some came to understand it as a literal rising from death.

The word used of the appearances in Greek is “ophthe” which means to “appear” or “be seen”, which, even then, was already a metaphor for comprehending. Paul in describing his vision of Jesus did not link it to any resurrection, an omission which seems strange when he speaks in all his epistles about Christ rising—though not as often as one might imagine. 1 Corinthians 15 is the only exception, and there it is mediated by the descriptions of the other appearances.

Paul first described his conversion experience in Galatians 1:15-17, where his words were that God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me… that I might preach him among the heathen”. The immediate effect was that he spoke to no one else, but went straight into Arabia. Note that his experience, described as a “revelation”, he directly linked with his calling to the ministry of Jesus, and in Galatians 1:11, he speaks similarly of his gospel as a “revelation of Jesus Christ”. Faith was no empty calling for Paul, so there really is no reason why any modern Christian should ever think of “Faith alone” being sufficient for a Christian identity. Note too that here Paul does not write of “seeing” Jesus. A revelation is the emergence of something previously hidden—belief in Jesus! In 1 Corinthians 9:1f, Paul does write of seeing Jesus but not with the word “ophthe”. Again, though, he links it directly with his ministry. So having seen Jesus, the result was again activity, not merely faith. It was through Paul that the Corinthians came to Jesus—he was their apostle, if no one else’s—but he did not refer back to the resurrection. The final instance was 1 Corinthians 15:8, when he used “ophthe”. Since it was related to the previous instances which he listed, it seems he adapted what he had always thought of as revelations to the terminology of the tradition—he “saw” Jesus, just as the others had, or Jesus “appeared”:

As time went on, Paul was constrained, for apologetic reasons, to approximate his formulations to those of tradition.

Professor W Marxsen

He couched his revelation from God as a vision of Jesus. The experience he had was not related as the reason Paul became convinced of Jesus being risen. But Paul also uttered the sentence at the beginning of this essay, expressing preaching and faith as vain without Christ having risen (1 Cor 15:14). The trouble is that Paul assumes everyone know what he means by Christ being risen and so does not explain it. Nor do we know what Paul knew about the resurrection, if that is what he meant. In 1 Corinthians 15:20, he says that Christ has been raised from the dead, apparently answering part of the first question, but still the earlier doubts apply to it—what precisely does it mean?—and we still have no answer to the second question.

Worse is that Paul is not here making a general statement about the truth of Christ having been risen, but rather is taking the fact that they have accepted it and become Christians from the preaching of Paul’s kerygma, as evidence that it must have been true. In short, he is arguing from their belief to that Christ must have been raised! Paul concluded it showed he was not a false witness. Overall the argument is that Corinthian skeptics denied resurrection, yet they had originally converted from the preaching of Paul’s kerygma so it was effective and therefore true. Therefore, Christ must have risen. It is that Christ rose because they believed, not they believed because Christ rose! Paul is refuting a denial of resurrection, from the Corinthian skeptics’ own faith.

Unfortunately, the argument is invalid. The Corinthians might have had many reasons for being converted, including Paul’s persuasive power, but that could not prove “Jesus is risen”. Christians can believe but belief is not an argument because belief is purely personal, and belief that faith is sent by God remains belief for all that, and remains entirely personal. Belief that faith is outside ourselves is still belief and belief cannot make something external true. Faith is a feeling. It is internal. It is not a datum about something external. It is not information, so says nothing about the actuality of the resurrection. If Paul preached that “Jesus is risen”, the Corinthians might have been persuaded and believed, but the belief itself says nothing about the resurrection, which could still have really been metaphorical—Jesus lives through your belief in him. “Jesus is risen”—through your belief he is.

Witnesses

Paul offered no evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead and did not use his own vision of Christ to uphold it. His own arguments seem best suited to the notion of Jesus living again through the Christ-like lives of those who believe in him and his teaching.

So far every avenue has failed to turn up any clarification directly concerning a man rising from the dead. Some Christians will say it was a miracle and cannot be expected ever to be clear or explained, but that modesty about what we can possibly know about it never stops them from telling others, without a blush or hesitation, precisely what it was. Mysteriously, they are able to describe it in some detail, while simultaneously saying they know nothing definite about it because it was a miracle of God. We have to accept them at their word, when black magic might fit the bill rather better.

The message of the gospels is that Jesus “appeared” after his death. Christians speak of witnesses to the event, but one thing is certain from the New Testament—the primitive church could bring forward no one who had witnessed it. Anyone who had would have had a book or personal account somewhere in the canonical books, but the best they have is hearsay evidence, not of the resurrection, but of appearances afterwards—reports that Peter or Mary or the twelve, and so on, saw Jesus. Not one of these, even Peter who presumably had some resources as the first bishop of Rome, left any direct statement of their experience.

We read that Jesus has appeared to someone, therefore he has risen from the dead. Then Christians say to others that Jesus rose from the dead, therefore he appeared. They recast the inference as the premise without compunction. Yet the Christian gospels simply point to a tomb being devoid of a corpse that was in it, and the word of people who say that someone else had seen the dead person walking and talking. From this, an inference is that a dead man had been revivified, but that does not make it a fact, so it is not justified that the inference should thereafter be the premise.

It is certainly possible that the faith of Peter or Mary led them to hallucinate what they hoped to be true. In such a case, it is the faith that led to the vision or appearance of Jesus, not the other way around. If faith led to the vision of Jesus, his resurrection need not have been a real one. Then there must be a problem in asserting that the resurrection is proof of Christianity. What, though, of Paul? He was persecuting Christians when he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. He did not believe before this vision, so here perhaps is proof of the resurrection. But Paul, as we saw, does not make any inference himself about the resurrection from his vision which was not one exactly of an image of the living Jesus confronting him. Nor can we be sure that this and Peter’s case are not ones of similar psychology. Quite possibly, Paul already did believe, but had been refusing to do so consciously. He had been fighting his own subconscious, but his subconscious conviction emerged as a vision which he took to be one of Jesus. Psychologists are familiar with the phenomenon, which is characteristic of conversion.

It is as likely, if not more so, that belief generally precedes the appearance of Jesus to believers. Most modern Christians treat Jesus as their personal friend and constant companion. Surely that goes further than just an appearance, yet it depends on belief, as all Christians of this type will tell us. Jesus is with Christians because they believe, and the appearances of Jesus are the first accounts of the same phenomenon. It is belief in Christ that raised him. “Jesus is risen” is not a statement of an event, but a statement of faith.

Christians object to this that Christianity depends on Jesus truly rising up from being dead. It maintains that faith depends on an event in the past, an event that must be believed as factually true even though there is a lot of doubt whether it is, and indeed what “Jesus is risen” means. The reports we have in the Holy Word do not explain what “Jesus is risen” means in real terms, but it is clear that it means the same as “finding faith” for those who do. The miracle is not that “Jesus is risen”, it is that people found faith in a man who lived a short life of self-sacrifice for others, and, in which, he taught others the same remarkable self-sacrifice.

He certainly died, and he certainly lived again in the lives of his followers—those who believed. “Jesus is risen” expressed their belief, and expressed it whether Jesus actually rose from the dead or not. It is quite impossible from the evidence to say Jesus did rise from the dead, but it is indisputable that Jesus continued to live. The reality of “Jesus is risen” is belief. No one can gainsay it, but equally no one can extrapolate either from faith or the gospel evidence that Jesus actually came back to life in his physical body. To understand “Jesus is risen” is to realize that Jesus is alive in the believing Christian, and, if he is, then the Christian lives like Christ. If not, the belief is not sincere, and the one who professes belief is not a Christian.

The Christian who objects that, without a revification of a dead Jesus, they cannot believe, never did believe! It illustrates the whole fallacy of “faith alone”. Faith in the conjuring trick with bones as a former Bishop of Durham called it is only true faith if it is stronger than the conjuring trick. In short, if a challenge to the reality of the conjuring trick causes outrage as a challenge to faith in Jesus, the outraged person simply did not believe anyway. Surely it is evident that such a feeble faith cannot be Faith. Those Christians are outraged at having to confront their own lack of faith. If this is true of “Jesus is risen”, how much more true is it of all the other blasphemies that Christians are wont to complain about.

The same is true, of course, of any Moslem who takes offense at imagined slights against Allah, Mohammed or any other aspect of Islam.

All of these outraged people show by their outrage that their belief is paper thin. They are papering over the rips in the thin fabric of their own faith, they are not helping God. They cannot have had any faith in God because they had no confidence in Him. Instead, they absurdly think God wants them to behave badly to defend Him. All they are doing is trying to show off to others the faith they do not really have. A meretricious faith is no faith, as Jesus himself said to the Pharisees—something else modern Christians do not want to hear. At root is that they fear their lack of faith, but…

Real faith casts fear aside.

Professor W Marxsen

What can we Conclude?

I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.

John 11:25f

Christians felt sure that Jesus would come again during the lifetime of the first generation—that he would come, according to the concept held, as the risen or exalted Lord, or as the Son of Man. It would have been the End of the World. Only the Righteous would live on in the perfect wold to follow. The wicked would suffer the Second, and permanent, death. So, in the first generation, nobody bothered about any promise of life everlasting because they knew they had it, as long as they remained righteous until Jesus returned, and that would be soon!—before most had lived out their lives. Within their lifetime, Jesus would inaugurate God’s everlasting kingdom, and then they would live forever. Any who had chanced to die righteous in the meanwhile would be resurrected back into life. Jesus was thought to have been the first of them—the first fruit of the Righteous Dead.

If we can accept that each evangelist was using his sources as best he could to give an account of the events affirming the resurrection, we ought to be able to accept that he did not necessarily get all the right facts or all the facts right. They none of them knew what had happened, and so had to tell the story as they could best reconstruct it. Christians unnecessarily strain their belief by forcing “belief in an inerrant gospel” quite contrary to the simple evidence of the texts themselves. There would not be such strain on belief if they accepted the self-evident facts—evangelists were human beings doing the best they could in a confused situation long after the events, and were not semi-gods writing infallible truths. They were writing the truth as they could best reconstruct it, but they were not infallible in their efforts. Recollect that a person’s view of an event need not correspond with the actuality. And of course, it does not mean they are insincere or dishonest—simply human!

A trouble, even with Christians that understand this, is that they think it can be resolved by harmonizing the texts, by rearranging them all together to make them fit. Yet no such harmonization is possible because the problem is not simply one of arrangement of the passages. Contradictions cannot be rearranged out of existence, the texts have to be changed to make them fit, and anyone who sets out on this course must think they are God. To take the simplest example. After the resurrection and the appearance of the risen Christ, the disciples cannot have left immediately for Galilee and yet remained in Jerusalem. To decide, say, that the two events followed in sequence, is changing what the evangelists said—in fact, making them all wrong. As a textual analyst, one could decide that Luke has deliberately altered the tradition of the other evangelists to suit his own message of the gospel progressing evenly from Jerusalem, and for which a sidestep to Galilee was a distraction. That seems sensible, but needs a rational examination and interpretation of the texts, and if reason is necessary here, then why not throughout?

Luke might look to be culpable here, but there is no need to think he was being dishonest, even if he knew he was changing something he knew to be true, because he sincerely thought it was irrelevant to his main purpose which was to show the growth of Christianity from Jerusalem. It is not merely to defend Luke, but to show that these things need thought, and the average Christian refuses to think about them, often because they cannot face the fact that the gospels are humanly constructed even if they were inspired. The evangelists need not have been telling deliberate lies, but the possibility, as here in Luke, ought to be considered, and Christians will not consider it. Maybe, one or another evangelist was not even innocent in the stories he changed, and was not honest. You know, that ought to be considered too! Paul warned of ravening wolves coming among his followers, but from when? If it is true, it is impossible for the Christian to count out the possibility that it had begun to happen even before the gospels were written!

But even sincere accounts can be in error. The examination of the texts above shows that, even if the evangelists meant to report accurately the circumstances justifying the belief in “Jesus is risen”, then they did not succeed. They do not deserve branding as incompetent for their failure. They tried their best to do something but failed to do it. Each reconstructed the sequence of events from the sources they had and failed to come up with the same sequence. It would indeed have been a miracle if they had, but it means the texts cannot answer the question of what “Jesus is risen” means. When the evangelists put their gospels together, the facts of the case were already lost in confusion.

Scholars know that the traditions about Jesus were passed on as “pericopes”, separate stories, like building blocks or jigsaw puzzle pieces that came along at random and had to be assembled to restore the original sequence of events. We saw Matthew and Luke using Mark, but John did not, but seemed to have many of the same traditions at hand. Matthew and Luke, however, had no guidance from Mark about the appearances because Mark ended without reporting any, and nor did John, of course. So all three had to put together the pericopes they had in the best way they could. Each had their own personal background and upbringing to mold their views, and each wrote for the congregations of the churches in a particular region. Luke wanted to show the good news progressively spreading from Jerusalem into the Roman empire. So he suppressed the tradition of the instruction to return to Galilee, though it was probably right.

What are the main objectives of Christianity? Modern believers seem to think belief or faith is itself the point. What then is the point of faith? Christians answer it is that they are rewarded for their faith with life without end. Can that be true? Almighty God does not disperse his incentives to people who are good but to people who have faith—and that is it! This world is not a test of personal goodness as a criterion for entering God’s kingdom, but just a test of faith that they will end up there? And those with no such faith die an eternal death by burning? Worth is on a belief in the reward not on righteousness? It cannot seriously be held that a good God could offer His incentives thus. The motive for the reward is selfishness not consideration for others. What then was the point of Jesus’s life and teaching? Did it have none? The teaching of mutual love was just dressing on the pointless cake of faith? Love was incidental, people should believe and be rewarded for it with eternal life, and nothing more? Christians do not have to do anything in this world to get everlasting life, they just have to be faithful. In this doctrine, faith but no works is sufficient to meet God’s requirements, but it is crassly foolish and fatal to the welfare of the human soul, if that is what is at stake. The modern Christian must be making a dire mistake in reading too much into the resurrection, and ignoring what Jesus—God!—told them to do while he lived among them.

For professor Marxsen, the important unifying theme of all of the gospels is that the crucifixion did not end the work of Jesus as demonstrated in his earlier ministry. The tradition of “Jesus is risen” is what signifies it. Jesus’s work continues. The duty of a disciple of Christ was to continue the tradition that he initiated, and that is the point of the resurrection. The disciples were instructed to continue it, and as long as they did, Jesus would be directing them. The life of Jesus was his ministry, and this did not die when Jesus did, and nor would it as long as his followers, the Christians, lived their lives like him. So long as Jesus’s words and works were practised, Jesus lives! All four gospels are united in emphasizing the continuity of Jesus’s work. Jesus cannot die while Christian life is determined by what he said and did.

Of course, Christ could still die! If Christians fail to live their lives like Jesus, and do what he ordained, then Christianity dies and so Christ dies. Again Faith is shown as being utterly insufficient to keep Christ’s teaching alive. It highlights that many Christians today, out of ignorance and self-centredness, are trying to crucify Christ still. They read letters and not meanings. They fail to read and understand the purpose of Christ’s life, or reject it as irrelevant to faith, and so do not practise it. Yet that is the very point, and without understanding and proper belief, Christ dies. It happened in the Roman church in the Dark and Middle Ages, and it is happening again under the modern American evangelical movement that makes a god of the words of the bible rather than the meaning of them. How can mass murderers even pretend to love others?

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Jesus is a Myth | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History

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