Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 15, 2001

Belief in the Resurrection

The gospels were mainly written before the end of the first century AD, and agree that what convinced the disciples that Jesus had risen were the empty tomb and the appearances of the risen Jesus. Christian belief now depends mainly on Jesus’s appearances rather than the empty tomb which had been what impressed the original followers. Christians claim the appearances were not late inventions of the Church because the first appearances in the gospels of the risen Christ were not to the apostles but instead to women, and the evidence of women was not considered strong in Jewish legal practice. But that is good evidence surely that they were late inventions, because they were invented in a non-Jewish milieu, the gentile Roman provinces where the bishops were trying to recruit female godfearers, of which there were many.

The resurrection is central to Pauls teaching:

If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

1 Cor 15:17-19

Before the gospels were written, in the earliest Christian works we have, the apostle Paul never attempts to convince skeptics about the resurrection by quoting witnesses to the empty tomb. His statement has few of the elements of the later gospel accounts—no earthquake and empty tomb, no women, no angels. They were not mentioned because they were traditions that had not yet developed when Paul wrote. His evidence is the risen Jesus’s appearances, and he lists them.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

1 Cor 15:5-8

This is recognized by most biblical scholars, including evangelical apologists, to be the earliest known statement about the resurrection. So Pauls list of appearances is—Peter, the Twelve, five hundred disciples, James, all of the apostles, and Paul himself.

Paul is the only writer who makes the risen Jesus appear to five hundred people simultaneously. It might as well have been five million, and would carry no more credence. None of these 500 could be found to offer direct testimony, and nor could any of the soldiers on guard at the tomb. No witness to the resurrection had been found by the first Christian writers. Evidently this early story of an apparition to five hundred was thought wrong or incredible and was abandoned. None of the gospels know about appearances to the 500 and to James, and only Luke, in a probably added sentence, says he appeared to Peter.

Paul claims that most of the 500 disciples to whom Christ appeared were still alive when he wrote the letter, giving it spurious authority for Christians. Spurious because, even if it were true, none of the 500 could have been identified by Corinthians since they lived hundreds of miles away by sea in Palestine. Of course, it is typically of Paul to exaggerate more than anyone else, knowing that no one could contradict him.

Even though Paul declares Jesus was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, Luke (Acts 1:15) says soon after there were only one hundred and twenty brethren. Was membership so rapidly in decline? Of course, one could accept occasional discrepancies from ancient authors as minor in the normal run of things, but Christians tell us that these are God’s words—and the discrepancies are all too common! So why is God, or his Holy Ghost, so careless?

Paul mention no appearances to the women, including Mary Magdalene, nor the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The only consistent appearance seems to be to the remaining apostles as a group. This can simply be explained as a meeting between Jesus’s successor in the Essene hierarchy meeting his leading followers and telling them to return home!

Paul was not interested in the living Jesus but only in the resurrection and, as the first Christian writer, having possibly heard of a hysterical reaction to Jesus’s crucifixion and abduction, he could have invented appearances to confirm it. The remarkable appearance to a throng of 500 even the gospel writers found stretched credulity too far.

Paul argues that the resurrection happened. The earliest Christian documents, the epistles, show that, within a few decades of Jesus’s death, Paul believed in Jesus’s resurrection and appearances to various friends. If these letters are genuinely first century, and Paul is deemed credible, they have to be considered better evidence than the gospels.

The most secure evidence in the New Testament is the single statement of Luke that the Jewish authorities cast the body of Jesus into a grave. According to Acts, in a speech in the synagogue at Antioch, Paul says the Jewish authorities buried Jesus, in which case his body would have been put in the common grave for crucified criminals. Luke has Paul saying:

For they that dwell at Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they knew him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which were read every sabbath day, they have fulfilled them in condemning him. And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre.

Acts 13:27-29

The word “thapto” meant simply to bury, not necessarily entombment, and would be consistent with the known practice of taking the bodies of crucifixion victims and burying them in a common grave. Acts 2:29 reads:

Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried (thapto), and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.

A sepulchre is nothing necessarily grand. The NIV replaces “sepulchre” with “tomb”, but the Greek simply means grave, of which tombs and sepulchres are variations. Thus, in Luke’s history, Paul denies all of the gospels.

The sabbath ended at sunset, and so too did the prohibition of work, so the women could have gone to the tomb on Saturday night after dusk. That makes the gospel stories fictional or they suggest that the Nazarenes were not mainstream Jews, but were Essenes, who counted days from dawn to dawn. The role of the women was most likely a fabrication of the early church which consisted mainly of women. According to the earliest versions, the apostles scattered when Jesus was arrested, and they returned to their work as fishermen in Galilee. Later they said that they had seen their Lord.

The earliest attested expression of the belief in Jesus’s resurrection is Pauls (1 Cor 15:35-53), written about 25 years after the conventional date of the crucifixion, where Paul compares the general resurrection to that of Jesus. Paul uses the following argument of Jesus:

But someone will say, How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain—perhaps wheat or some other grain.

1 Cor 15:35-37

Nothing can grow from a dead seed. Paul imagined the seed died, and only then sprang into a new growth. He said, “You do not sow that body that shall be”. This implies the arisen body was different from the original. The risen Jesus was not as he was, thus apparently contradicting the gospels. The risen Jesus, the last Adam, “was made a quickening spirit” (1 Cor 15:45), and 1 Peter 3:18 says the same:

Christ… being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit.

Some argue it means the arisen body is spiritual, but Paul will mean it is different in not being corruptible. He soon makes this clear. After declaring that there are different kinds of flesh, he argued that there are also different kinds of bodies:

There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars, for one star differs from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a “spiritual” body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

1 Cor 15:40-44

Paul believed that the body that is raised is different from the body that was buried. The context is that Christ had been raised, so Paul believed that the natural body of Christ was “sown” when he was buried but that an incorruptible spiritual body was resurrected. The spiritual body is not necessarily incorporeal, it is simply incorruptible. Commentators agree that Paul does not mean by “spiritual” something “made out of spirit”, any more than a spiritual man is non-corporeal, but something possessing spiritual, that is perfect, qualities. This seems to be just what the Essenes believed.

Romans 8:21-23 supports Paul’s view of a physical resurrection. Creation will be transformed, yet remain physical, and our bodies are part of creation, they will also be transformed, yet still be continuous with our old bodies and remain physical.

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.

1 Cor 15:50

This refutes any ideas that Christians have propounded that the kingdom of God consists of the Christian churches, but seems to refute the idea of bodily resurrection into God’s kingdom all together. The interpretations can only be either that Paul is pandering to the Greeks, or that the kingdom of God, being incorruptible, was subtly different from the material world we know. Bodies were still made of flesh and blood but it had to be different flesh and blood because it would no longer corrupt. In that sense, it was heavenly, or spiritual.

Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

1 Cor 51-53

Paul is addressing Christians, and assuring them that they would not have to die (sleep) to inherit God’s kingdom, but they would be changed, after the dead had been raised incorruptible. Those who were still alive suddenly had their ordinary flesh and blood made incorruptible and therefore immortal. Otherwise, they would look no different. They simply became as angels, appearing human but being really spiritual. Paul concludes:

So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Cor 15:54-57

Paul’s emphasis is on the incorruptibility of the changed flesh. Modern reasoning sees a duality between the material and the spiritual, but Paul, while accepting that flesh changes, otherwise sees the property of being spiritual as primarily, in this context, as being incorruptible. Paul used incorruptible as synonymous with spiritual.

The last few sentences refer to a victory, an underlying reference to “nasach”, another word related by punning to Nazarene. Jesus had in fact scored a victory, although it is hidden in the gospels as the curing of the Gadarene swine. Subsequent to that, his followers thought he had been resurrected as the “first fruit of the dead”, the first righteous man to be resurrected according to Hosea 6:2. So, despite the subsequent defeat and execution of Jesus, the surviving followers considered that ultimate victory was only a matter of time—forty years at the most. Paul here alludes to the “victory” and the understanding of the Nazarenes as the “Victors”, understood as a victory over death.

If Paul did not mean the Jewish idea of resurrection, the restoration of the body to life, this might be an example of Paul’s opportunistic way of preaching resurrection to an audience that simply would not accept resurrection of the flesh, but were familiar with spiritual resurrection. Whoever the author of 1 Peter was, he was addressing Greeks in Anatolia, and they would have been just as skeptical of bodily resurrection as the Corinthians.

Luke relates a morbid resurrection story of events behind closed doors meant to prove that Jesus was not a mere spirit but existed in the flesh (Lk 24:36-43). In Jerusalem, on the day of the resurrection, Jesus himself appears in the midst of the assembled disciples and demonstrates his wounds. Even the marks of the nails on his hands and feet left them skeptical:

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.

Lk 24:39

The only thing that convinced them was that he could eat fish and honey. It expresses the apparent opposite of Paul’s argument. Jesus is depicted as solid flesh! Yet if incorruptibility was the criterion of spirituality, then the flesh would seem normal. It simply could not decay.

Paul is fairly open about his contacts with Jesus being visions, and he himself admits (1 Cor 15:12) that some Christians did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.

The word “opethe”, “appear”, Paul and other New Testament writers used in a visionary as well as a physical sense. The gospel narratives presented the appearances in a composite manner. In some ways, they were physical in that he had a body that could be touched and examined, but in other ways, it was a spiritual body that could pass through closed doors. The gospel writers who did believe that Jesus appeared physically wrote:

There you will see (opethe) him.

Mt 28:7

The Lord is risen (egeiro) indeed, and hath appeared (opethe) to Simon.

Luke 24:34

They will look (opethe) on the one they have pierced.

John 19:37

If the last case meant Jesus on the cross, the body was physical, unless he was already mythologising with solar imagery. The other cases could have meant the sighting of a vision.

In Matthew 17:3, Moses and Elijah “appeared” at the time of the transfiguration, and the Greek word here is the same one that Paul used in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 in listing the appearances that Jesus made to Cephas, to the twelve, to the 500 brethren, to James, and finally to Paul himself. In Acts 16:9, a vision “appeared”—the same word as in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8—to Paul in the night in which a man from Macedonia stood praying for Paul to come there to help them. Since the same word for “appear” was used in 1 Corinthians 15:8, where Paul said, “And last of all, as to the child untimely born, he appeared to me also”, there is sufficient reason to assume that the other appearances were like the appearance to Paul.

The only appearance of Jesus to Paul show that he regarded it in the same sense as a vision, but that he had actually not even seen Jesus in it, but only heard a voice speaking from a bright light (Acts 9:3-8; 22:6-11; 26:12-18), and, according to one of the accounts, the men who were with him saw only the light but did not hear the voice. In Acts 26, he related to King Agrippa the story of Christ’s appearance to him, after which he said:

Therefore, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly “vision”.

Acts 26:19

Paul is said to have seen Jesus in a “heavenly vision”, a type of appearance that no one with Paul could see. That does not sound like a bodily appearance. So if this was the way that Paul “saw” Jesus, and since the same word for “see” or “appear”, depending on translation, was used for all of the appearances that Paul mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15, why should we believe that Paul considered these “appearances” any more than just the same kind of visionary appearance that he had experienced on the road to Damascus?

Modern Christians have changed their tune compared with those of the first few centuries of this era. The entire point of the resurrection then was that Jesus’s physical body actually was reconstituted in life as the first saint resurrected into the perfect kingdom of God on earth. Then, it was a heresy to think of the resurrected Christ as only a spirit and the gospels, conscious of this, make a point of disproving it. Yet today, many Christians say and believe that Jesus lives, as a spirit. One Christian writes:

The risen Jesus, as the first fruits of a New Creation, arose from the dead as a spiritual body or glorified body.

Look again! If Jesus lives, he lives as flesh and blood. Jesus’s flesh and bones, after being subjected to biological decomposition for three days, were gathered together contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and life was breathed again into them. Neither science nor sense can accept it. This Christian wriggles on his hook explaining that the resurrected body was unique and singular, a statement which would have to be true but tells us nothing. The dubious appearances of Jesus, which do not appear unfortunately in the earliest gospel, are this mans evidence.

If the absent corpse is explained by his resurrection into a carnal body, then he cannot have ascended into heaven. If the risen Jesus was a spirit, there was no reason for his fleshly body to have disappeared. Science has not had many laboratory spirits to study, but the evidence that is well grounded in reality as opposed to speculation and wishful thinking is that personality depends on the healthy functioning of the human brain. When it ceases to function properly the personality disintegrates. When the brain dies, it is impossible for the personality to live on.

Christians seek to harmonize these contradictory accounts by conflating them, claiming that some of the gospel authors omitted parts that were not of interest to their church. So, when a passage fails to mention something mentioned elsewhere, they say it cannot be assumed that the writer is denying that the event happened. It is easy to sea why believers want to do this, but it introduces chronological problems and requires impossibilities to be fudged—Jesus cannot have said at the same time that the disciples should leave for Galilee and yet they should remain in Jerusalem.

Attempts have been made to explain the appearances rationally as being the result of hallucinations. David Strauss in his famous Life of Jesus (1835) suggested that the more emotional disciples had hallucinations of Jesus appearing to them. Hallucinations do play a major role in religious cultures, but they are induced either by drugs or by the extreme deprivation of food, drink and sleep. Though they might have been factors in the mystic experiences of Indian fakirs and Christian ascetics, they seem not to have been present in the various appearances of the risen Christ to his disciples.

The details of the varied epiphanies of Christ, which in several cases were to more than one individual and on that one occasion to more than 500, are not typical of hallucinations. A visual hallucination is a private event. The variety of conditions under which Christ appeared militate against hallucination. The appearances to Mary Magdalene, to Cleopas, to the disciples on the shore of Galilee, to Paul on the road to Damascus, all differ in their circumstances. C S Lewis in his Miracles says:

And any theory of hallucination breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention it is the oddest invention that ever entered the mind of man) that on three separate occasions this hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus.

Lk 24:13-31; Jn 20:15, 21:4

Unless, of course, they came to imagine that another man was Jesus! Hugh Schonfield in The Passover Plot (1966) agrees that:

Various disciples did see somebody, “a real living person”. Their experiences were not subjective.

Obviously someone appeared to the disciples and followers in the same role as Jesus, and probably with the same title. Whoever it was looked quite like Jesus, offering a basis for the confusion, and probably spoke and behaved like him. He was the successor of Jesus to the leadership of the Essenes. The new Nasi who being nazir, like Jesus, would have worn long hair, would have had a similar demeanour and would have spoken in the same way. Do not all Archbishops look similar, and Archbishops of Canterbury look the same? The successor of Jesus was probably also called Jesus because Joshua was the title of the High Priest of Zachariah and had been used as such by the Essenes.

Resurrection of the Gods

There are several common features to the deaths of saviours.

1. They lay in the tomb just three days.
2. The are resurrected from the dead.
3. Their resurrection is about the time of the vernal equinox.

The twenty-fifth of March is the date assigned by Christians for the resurrection of Christ, though some Christians disagree. They all agree, however, that Christ rose from the dead three days after the entombment. Bishop Theophilus of Ceasarea taught that, since the birth of Christ was celebrated on the twenty-fifth of December, his resurrection should be celebrated on the twenty-fifth of March, on whatever day of the week it may fall, the Lord having risen again on that day. Elsewhere we find that all the ancient Christians thought that Christ was crucified on the twenty-third of March and rose from the dead on the twenty-fifth. Christians of the time of Constantine accordingly celebrated the twenty-fifth of March as the date of the resurrection.

Saviours from Osiris, through Prometheus to Attis also rose from the dead after three days burial, and their resurrection was often the twenty-fifth of March. At the annual celebration of the resurrection of the Persian saviour Mithras, the Mediator, the priests exclaimed in a solemn voice:

Be of good cheer, thou sorrowful! Your God has come again to life. His sorrows and his sufferings will save you.

The twenty-fifth of March was for the ancient Persians the start of a new year. On that day they celebrated the feast of the Neuroner. On the same day the Romans celebrated the festival of the Hilaria. The Father of the Church, Clement of Alexandria, explained that their foundation was the fictitious death and resurrection of the sun, the soul of the world, the principle of life and motion. The inauguration of spring, the twenty-fifth of March, and the summer solstice, the twenty-fifth of June, were both important times for the ancients.

The midsummer solstice was fixed on as the birthday of John the Baptist, when the sun begins to decline southward—decrease—because he said, “I shall decrease, but he shall increase”. This implies that John was seen as the winter sun that brought the rains, John always being associated with water. Jesus was the summer sun that ripened the crops. The twenty-fifth of March is the day of the conception and annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was previously the conception of the ancient Roman Virgin Asteria, and of the ever-chaste and holy virgin, Iris.

The Resurrection of a Bird after Three Days

Even a bird was resurrected after three days!

Modern religious beliefs are like the beliefs of the Romans in the Egyptian Phoenix, which returned to the Holy City of On so infrequently that the legend was impossible to disprove. Christianitys promotion of the supernatural, irrationality and disdain for Nature and this life has led to a people ready to believe in any Phoenix you care to invent.

The source of the legend was the Sothic year which arises because the true year is not exactly 365 days—it is 365¼ days.

The traditional year is 52 weeks of 7 days plus an extra day to make 365. The extra day is the source of the mythological and fairy tale formula, a “year and a day”. It is easy to think a “year and a day” meant 366 days but it did not. The fairy tale year is simply 52 weeks and so is not quite a year, the extra day being needed to complete it. Today we are all used to the idea of a year not being an integral number of weeks.

Anyway, even 365 is not the complete year and in former times the shortfall of ¼ day slowly made the seasons slip back a day every four years until eventually, after 1460 years (4 x 365) the seasons again matched the calendar year and the accumulated lost year could be intercalated to fully account for the passage of time.

To celebrate this joyous moment, the priests of On evidently burnt a bird to represent the sun which had again been reborn at the proper time. The Phoenix was thought to have been heron-like but its association with the sun tends to imply it was an eagle, which is the suns bird, and so it is often depicted. Its long flight to distant lands was to collect fragrant herbs with which it built a pyre and consumed itself in flames, as the suns creatures often do.

After three days, a tiny worm emerged from the ashes to grow back into the mature phoenix. The tiny worm, the ¼ day short in the years, slowly grew over 1460 years into the reborn sun, the birds funeral pyre. Three days is typical of all resurrection stories because it represents the time at the midwinter solstice when the sun has reached its nadir and seems not to ascend or descend at all before it begins to rise once more in the sky—resurrected. Since the Phoenix was a manifestation of the sun, it always came from the East—at On, from the direction of Arabia.

A Historical Hypothesis

To reject the traditional interpretation of the empty tomb as showing the resurrection of Jesus, requires an alternative explanation. Several have been offered.

Heinrich Paulus, in his Life of Jesus (1828), suggested that Jesus was not dead when he was taken from the cross. The coolness of the tomb revived him. After exchanging his grave wrappings for the gardener’s clothes, Jesus spoke to his disciples for forty days and then walked into a cloud on a mountain and went off somewhere to die. Could one who had just come from the grave half dead, crept about weak and ill and was in need of medical treatment to the extent that he finally succumbed to his injuries have given to the disciples the impression that he was a conqueror over death and the grave?

Schonfield in The Passover Plot says Jesus plotted with Joseph of Arimathea, Lazarus, a Judaean priest, and an anonymous young man to arrange a feigned death on the cross by taking a drug. The mysterious young man was mistaken for the risen Jesus on the four occasions of the “appearances” without correcting the misapprehension of the disciples. The disciples were confused by the appearance of this young man into believing that Jesus had arisen.

Kirsopp Lake in The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus (1907) argued that the women saw an empty tomb but the wrong one. Christians say that this theory does not explain their amazement and fear, but quite why is obscure. If the women thought it was the correct tomb they would have been just as fearful as they would have been if it really had been the correct tomb but empty—the gospel thesis. Christians also claim that the women noted where he was buried (Mk 15:47) and that the tomb was in the private garden of Joseph of Arimathea. The verse in Mark shows that the very first argument put to the disciples was that the women had the wrong tomb. It is the sort of point that would not be normally needed but has been put in to forestall the obvious conclusion. Nowhere are we told that the garden was private, though it might have been owned by Essenes.

If the tomb where Jesus was laid was indeed empty, could his body have been stolen away by someone? The story of the guard posted at the sepulchre (Mt 28:65-66) looks like an attempt to refute the suggestion that Matthew admits was commonly believed at the time he wrote! Who would have stolen the body and why? The Romans had no reason to do so. They had surrendered the body to Joseph of Arimathea. Would the Pharisees have been willing to spoil their Passover by desecrating themselves with an executed man? The Sadducees would have been stupid to have stolen the body to give cause for belief in what they themselves rejected, according to the gospels.

Hermann Reimarus, whose works were published posthumously by Gotthold Lessing in the eighteenth century, suggested that the Nazarenes removed the body and hid it somewhere. Though it is more credible than a resurrection, it seems unlikely that the rather naïve followers of Jesus could have carried through a plot like this, especially accepting their child-like belief in Jesus. To accept it is also to have to face the justifiable criticism that these same men not only perpetrated a fraud but took peculiar risks for their deception. The graveclothes and napkin observed by Peter and John (Jn 20:7) are evidence against tomb robbery by ordinary thieves, as they would not have taken the time to tidy up the sepulchre.

What then is the answer? It is that the Essenes, the parent organization of the Nazarenes, stole the body unknown to Jesus’s followers. Jewish New Testament scholar, Pinchas Lapide (The Resurrection of Jesus—A Jewish Perspective), found that all schools of Jewish thought in the first century believed in bodily resurrection. The New Testament clearly excludes the Sadducees, but it does not seem excessive that it should have been a widespread Jewish belief. Pharisees and Essenes seemed to accept it, and so did Jesus. The rational explanation is:

1. Jesus spoke not of his personal resurrection but of the general resurrection of the Holy Ones into the kingdom of God.
2. But, as he was the leading Holy One and believed he had been appointed as God’s Messiah, he was included in it.
3. When the miracle Jesus and the Essenes expected did not happen on the Mount of Olives, he and his disciples thought he had failed and was a false prophet.
4. The surviving disciples were depressed and frightened, thinking the story had ended badly for them.
5. Naturally they did not expect any reprise, once Jesus was dead. The time for the general resurrection seemed to have passed.
6. The Essene saints who had remained peripheral to all this, saw Jesus as a dedicated leader who had given his life for his beliefs. They removed his body to give it a proper burial.
7. The women brought the news to the Nazarenes, not Essenes but repentant Jews attracted to the idea of the kingdom of God, that the body had disappeared. They were astonished and did not believe it.
8. They confirmed it, but remained astonished, understandably, since the deliverance of Israel still seemed to have failed.
9. They rationalized the failure of the immediate revolution with the belief that Jesus had actually done what God had desired as proof of the love of his people for him. God had started the general resurrection as a reward.
10. “Jesus” (Joshua) was an Essene title, and after the failure of the uprising, the new “Jesus” met the remaining disciples and told them to return home. This was the origin of the appearances.
11. Jesus had apparently thought he would conclude the prescribed forty years of cosmic battle with his rebellion, but the disciples had to infer that the resurrection of Jesus had only started the process. He had been resurrected into God’s kingdom on the third day, but other righteous and repentant Jews would have to wait forty years to have the same experience while the cosmic battle was fought to a conclusion.
12. About forty years later, the Jews were destroyed as a nation in the Jewish War and the people left believing in Jesus were mostly gentiles. In the next fifty years, the gospels were published to persuade them to remain faithful and to recruit new converts.
13. The gospels were not telling the truth but were giving distorted accounts of events that could not be honestly related about a rebel Jewish leader when a major war with the Jews was fresh in the mind. The truth was hidden in the supernatural, miracles and parables. They were written with hindsight—as not even Christians can deny destroying the acceptability of any claimed prophesies—and the knowledge that a majority of Christians converts were women.
14. The Nazarene converts who undertook to be bapized to signify their repentance from sin had been called, by the Essenes, the Simple of Ephraim. The church was now gentile and few, if any, apostles had played any role in its growth. They were regarded by gentile bishops as the “Simple”, and so were depicted as dolts.

Christians ask why the following “legendary developments” about the burial, empty tomb, and appearances should have taken place:

1. The use of women to discover the tomb. The testimony of women was not considered credible in first century Judaism. So if the resurrection is simply a legendary evolution, why did the early Christians not have the disciples discover the tomb instead?

   The women discovering the empty tomb were inventions of the early gentile churches, not the Jerusalem Church. Women were most of the members and were given an apparently important but practically unimportant role. Here they are given the role of the lamenting women of Tammuz and Attis worship, highly popular religions among women at the time.

2. Why was Joseph of Arimathea used in the burial story? The members of the Sanhedrin were too well known for someone to place a fictional member on it or to spread a false story about one of its members burying Jesus.

   Apologists all think that the writing was done in Judaea contemporary with the events. They were written hundreds of miles away and forty or more years later, so Joseph could easily have been fictional. We discover from surveys that young people no longer know who Dwight Eisenhower was, or Winston Churchill, and these were national heroes. Besides that, Christians assume Joseph is a member of the Sanhedrin because he is described as an “honourable counsellor”. Joseph was unlikely to have been a member of the Sanhedrin but was a counsellor of the Essene Assembly, a council that was forgotten about for 2000 years until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found and read.

3. Why were the contradictions in the resurrection appearances not harmonized, if it was all a legend?

   Who says it was all legend? The trouble is that no one is sure what is and what is not. The question also assumes that Christianity grew according to some well planned scheme. It grew haphazardly at first, especially in the wider empire. The gentile Christians had to invent explanations for tales that their new god was a Jewish rebel coming from Judaea, especially at the time of the Jewish War. The gentile churches were not centrally organized and could not harmonize their initial inventions, especially when the gospels had started to be widely circulated.

The teaching and ministry of Jesus was not the gospel—the resurrection was. The first Christians convinced themselves of the truth of the resurrection as assuring them of the promised general resurrection. Thus is everything explained, to the satisfaction of history, if not Christian believers.

One of the most important elements in ancient myth was that of the dying and rising god, seen in its earliest form in the Tammuz myth, and popular in the Greco-Roman world in the first century AD. Some scholars think the gospel narratives of the passion and resurrection of Jesus have been modelled on Babylonian ritual myth, and that the ritual humiliation of the king in the Babylonian New Year Festival ritual, for instance, furnishes the pattern for the gospel story of the mock kingship and humiliation of Jesus. This point of view was presented many years ago by the French scholar, M Couchoud, in an article in the Hibbert Journal. The historical Jesus almost from the first was dressed up in the regalia of the dying and rising gods.

Further Reading

• More on Jesus crucified
• More on the Jewish idea of resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and some more, and more on Jesus is Risen, and belief in the resurrection
• More on secular Christianity
• More on Sun Gods, and on Dying and Rising Gods

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | 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