Abstract

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

Jesus is risen

Willi Marxsen, a professor of New Testament at Munster university says faith in the resurrection is faith in the church, or as S Paul put it:

If Christ has not been raised, then our “kerygma” is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

1 Corinthians 15:14

Faith depends on the resurrection, so the resurrection really is not something to gloss over. History is important in this because the resurrection purports to be an historical event, but talk of resurrection does not appear for the first time in Christianity. “It occurs much earlier.” So these older traditions should be investigated too.

Just what do Christians mean by “Jesus is risen”, a statement that every Christian would accept? Even Christians who would willingly kill each other agree on this. The question is not that Christians say it—they all do—but what do they mean when they do say it? Words do not have unambiguous meanings. Even single words can be understood differently, and so even short combinations of words, like this one, can have multiple interpretations. One short sentence, apparently accepted by different parties, can actually hide disagreement.

In the sentence “Jesus is risen”. What does “Jesus” mean? Does it mean Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ or the Son of God? Does “Jesus” mean a man, a demigod or a god? On the face of it Jesus was a man, a Jewish leader. A man rising from the dead is more than remarkable, it is miraculous, but not a god. A remarkable man, however, is believable, but a god appearing as a man is hard to believe, especially today. What then is meant by “risen”. Can it be expressed more clearly by adding the word “bodily” to it so that we have “bodily risen”? As a minimum of interpretations, if a Christian is asked what they mean by “Jesus is risen”, one will say, “I mean Jesus has risen bodily from the tomb”, while another will say, “Jesus has risen spiritually”. Does it signify the rising of a spiritual body? Or does it mean the body “risen” was a normal human one? That this latter is the right meaning might be implied by the tomb it was laid in being empty. If, though, the rising was a “spiritual” one, what does that mean? Is it simply a way of saying that Jesus was set in the hearts of his disciples, or in the proclamation of the church?

What seemed banal and self evident is far from it, though many Christians will never have considered it a problem. Yet it is a problem that is at the heart of Christian unity. The Christian who means that Jesus rose bodily when he says “Jesus is risen” might take a dogmatic view about it, and tell others they are wrong to think it means spiritual resurrection. Or the reverse. Who is right? Faced with this dilemma, the Christian turns to the New Testament, but finds no resolution there because both views are supported in it. It could be considered from the viewpoint of modern knowledge, but no Christian will do it. “God has spoken”, they say, and has never spoken since, they believe.

Viewpoints

The sentence “Jesus is risen” has to be examined even more closely, professor Marxsen says. What is meant by “is”? Many Christians believe that Jesus is, that is, when they say “Jesus is risen”, they mean he is! He is alive, still, at the present time, not just a figure from the past. The stress is on the present. Although it is an item of faith with no proof, Jesus lives. Others, though, less fundamentalist, perhaps, accept that the announcement, “Jesus is risen”, is a statement from the past. It is an announcement of a particular historical event of 2000 years ago that had in it a message from God. The confession of faith in the living Jesus depends on this historic event. Plainly the two interpretations are interwoven, but they are still different viewpoints. The fact that a Christian has faith in one view or the other does not help in distinguishing them because under both views the Christian believes in Jesus and has faith—accepting either view is Christian—but that has no bearing on the truth or otherwise of the statement. They have a view but still no idea whether it is based on what is true, false or inaccurate.

As a simpler example, belief in Jesus—having faith—does not confirm or deny that he was born of a virgin. Faith is not an instrument communicating information from the past. Faith in the proclamation, “Jesus is risen”, does not have anything to say about how the resurrection happened. It is simply faith that it did. To come to conclusions about the resurrection, other sources of information are needed, like experience. Experience says that dead men do not rise again. It is impossible, and so the tomb cannot have been empty. Christians reject this as irrelevant information.

Another source of information is other people, parents, preachers and peers. Such people often offer the information to persuade someone of their beliefs and thus persuade them to believe, or to strengthen their belief. It becomes part of faith, and when someone suggests some aspect of faith like this is wrong, the Christian gets scared of losing faith. That is why Christians do not like discussing the resurrection. They fear they might lose faith.

So, how do Christians get their information about the resurrection? A typical answer is that the Christian trusted the person who taught them to believe. That being so the Christian ought to recognize to themselves that they are accepting the word of someone else, and unless that person has confirmation of what they are teaching, it is only their opinion. What if they were wrong? It is not to suggest they were wrong, but simply that the Christian does not know the person who taught them was right. Who taught the teacher what they were teaching? If the process was the same one, there is no assurance the teacher had anything but an opinion taught to them, by whoever taught them. So, the Christian’s belief that “Jesus is risen” depends upon a chain of tradition back to the beginning of it.

It points to a third source of information—what was written concerning Christ in the New Testament. Some might say that this should have come before the teacher, but few can deny that, in coming to Christianity, someone acting as a teacher first brings the message. Still, having been taught something, the Christian can turn to the New Testament itself. But in doing so, again they should recognize that they are not coming to it with an open mind, but with the commitment already passed on by one or another teacher. The Christian does not open the gospels free of prejudice. They are already to some degree conditioned to accept what they read.

To be fair, Christians ought to acknowledge this, for as soon as they read, they do so with ready made interpretations in their heads, and might not therefore be receptive to alternatives, or even think of any—and the alternatives might be the right ones! Whatever tradition the Christian has been brought up in—been taught before they began to read the New Testament freely for themselves—will have biased their outlook. It is only by realizing it that they have any chance of getting rid of their preconceptions and coming freely to their faith. Only by doing it can the texts—God’s Word—speak directly to them without being filtered by an already prescribed tradition that might be wrong. What is right ought to be important to a Christian. False interpretation passed on through well meaning but mistaken tradition can only result in some people not being saved when they think they are.

Written Texts

So, the sentence, “Jesus is risen”, has been passed down the centuries as the central idea of credal faith, yet there are different understandings of what it means. Is it possible to get a better idea of it, and, if so, what is it? The main source of information is the written texts, but there is reason to doubt them too, though all affirmations of the credo stem from them. There is a consensus among Christians that the texts are valid, but that is arguing in circles. Belief comes from the texts, so cannot be used as an argument to affirm them. Maybe Christians have some other reason for believing the texts. Indeed, they do! The bible is the Word of God! It is uniquely inspired. No Christian will be persuaded that they could be wrong about this, but a problem still remains—they actually might be wrong!

They have been persuaded by believers, like themselves, that these texts are the word of God, and therefore infallible, but they could have been misled. The texts might not even have the true facts of the resurrection in them because, though the story might have been faithfully transmitted by honest believers who wrote the original texts, they themselves had no texts to rely on. There is a long historic gap between the event of the resurrection and it being written down by the gospel authors, the evangelists. So, while it is possible to believe that the evangelists writing the texts could have been inspired by God, what they were being told by fallible human beings might have been wrong, and so the gap in transmission has not been bridged. Nothing unequivocal can be pointed to that could persuade a doubter of their divine inspiration that might alleviate the problem. Nothing special in the character of the texts themselves affirms the authors were not themselves recording just what they already believed. They might still have been misled.

Christians themselves are certain the gospels are the direct evidence of ordinary people alive at the time. Inspiration by God could not have been the source of gospel infallibility. Ordinary people might be inspired to write, but they cannot be inspired to be infallible. Christians accept that the character of the gospels exclude an infallible source from on high. If the gospels were infallibly inspired, they ought to be internally consistent. God knew the precise truth about the resurrection, and so anyone somehow infallibly inspired by Him must have written what God Himself knew about it—exactly—unless God is a liar or fallible Himself. Yet Christians point to the inconsistencies in the gospels as proof that they are records of human, and therefore fallible, witnesses to the event, remembered and preserved with the distortions and lapses of memory that humans are prone to have.

Some Christians might still dispute that the bible is fallible even though it seems to conflict, so it needs a closer scrutiny still, but first there is another reason why the Christian turns to the texts—they are closer to the events than any extant oral tradition. They are historical sources, and without sources, we can know little about the past. Even so, caution about them is needed, because who the authors were or what their purpose was is not certainly clear. We might turn to the texts with a question in our heads, but the texts might not have been written to answer it. Was the New Testament written mainly to explain that “Jesus is risen” or how “Jesus is risen”, to affirm the resurrection, or to explain it—or for some other purpose? Affirmation of it might be the right answer and suffice for the Christian, but it means that the texts are not intended to be primarily a source of information. To affirm belief, something might be better suppressed, and something else presented unfairly favourably.

Moreover, to affirm faith, the evangelists must already have had a faith to affirm, and the Christian who wants to get to the root of faith ought not to overlook it—the evangelists had an axe to grind. They had already been persuaded, but the question remains, “Were they right?”. They had the same problems as these being considered here. What did they understand by “Jesus is risen”, and did they all understand it in the same way, and for the same reasons? The meaning of “Jesus is risen” is not a modern problem. It applied even then when the authors of the New Testament books wrote, much closer to the root of faith, so there should not be any shame in asking about it now. Thomas the apostle insisted on unequivocal evidence.

Faith

But even if the Christian thinks the evangelists meant to inform, what they recorded is what they believed happened. It might have been incorrect for quite innocent reasons. We are still not at the root of the statement “Jesus is risen”. We approach the texts certain that they can answer questions that they were never meant to answer. The author was stressing what was important to him, and it might not have been what is important to modern Christians. The danger is surely obvious. By forcing an answer to a question the text was not meant to answer, the modern believer is forcing into the text a meaning it does not and cannot have. God is being attributed with approving answers to modern worldly concerns that are not and could not have been His. That is how evil is done in God’s name. Giving the text a supernatural ability to answer every problem that ever can arise is making the text into God. It shows how important are the questions we are thinking about, and how foolish are those Christians who refuse to consider them out of faith, thereby falling into worse sins than they can imagine.

Information might have been provided primarily of an astounding event, a man rose from the dead bodily, and because of it the Christian can believe. Or faith was affirmed primarily and the proof is that a man rose from the dead in a miraculous way. If the second was the evangelists’ intention, then drawing out of it the detail of the first intention is erroneous, yet most scholars would say it is the second that is correct. In that case, it would be pushing the gospels too far to conclude that a man actually rose from the dead. On the other hand, accurate information was not so readily passed around in those days as it is today, so that even if the aim had been to give information, the Christian ought not to think it had to be precise by the time it was set down.

We cannot seriously deny that it is one thing to know about an event, and another to be convinced that it took place.

W Marxsen, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth

“Jesus is risen” is an expression of Christian faith, but what does this faith mean? Many modern Christians take the view that their faith is a sort of insurance policy guaranteeing them a life when they ought to be dead, but, if the resurrection affirms this insurance policy for those who believe it, then what is the point of the record in the gospels of Jesus’s ministry? Surely it is that anyone who has faith is expected to live and act the way God did when He lived on earth as a man. The idea that faith alone is sufficient for salvation is belied by many contrary passages in the New Testament besides Christ’s own example.

Acknowledging Christ as Lord is to be his slave. A Lord is a master. Slaves do not ignore their master, if they are wise, and the Christian gospels show what the master expects of them. To be involved with Jesus through faith must mean noting what he did in his ministry, and his ministry is worthless if it does not vividly show the Christian how to behave. Morally accepting faith in Jesus is risen is posturing unless it has some content. It is the public ministry of Christ that shows what the content of faith is. The point has to be made because, if the whole basis of faith can be found only in the last few chapters of the gospels in the passion narratives, the ministry is irrelevant, and could be omitted.

The Gospel Evidence

So, turn to the four gospels. Here are what seem to be four parallel texts, quadrupling the historic evidence. Four separate witnesses could hardly be all wrong. Yet, it is not so. No scholar nowadays, even Catholic ones, deny that the repetition almost word for word of passages in Matthew, Mark and Luke proves they are not independent. Few scholars demur from the view that Matthew and Luke have used Mark. Comparison of all three shows a lot of material, mainly sayings, common to Matthew and Luke but not Mark, suggesting another source no longer extant called “Q”. As Q is mainly sayings, and has nothing about the resurrection in it, it is not important for thinking about the sentence “Jesus is risen”, and indeed it is of little interest to Christians, most of whom know nothing at all about it.

What is important is that in Matthew, Mark, and Luke there is only a single account of the Easter events that gave the impetus to Christianity, but it is repeated three times. The importance of it is that Matthew and Luke can hardly have been eyewitnesses to the resurrection if they had to use Mark’s account rather than their own recollections. Not that they found Mark’s account entirely satisfactory because they added some detail to it, and they did not like the clumsy way Mark said things, and so improved the way he expressed himself, but they had no independent viewpoint, no slant of their own, as they must have had, if they really were eyewitnesses.

What then do the last chapters of the four gospels tell us about the resurrection? Consider them in turn.

Mark

In Mark, the earliest gospel, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome saw Jesus’s crucifixion from afar (Mk 15:40f). Then Joseph of Arimathea buried the dead Christ observed by Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses (Mk 15:47), on the day before the sabbath. On the day after the sabbath, early in the morning the three women brought spices to the tomb to anoint the body. It was the third day, counting inclusively as they did then—Friday, Saturday (the sabbath), Sunday. The tomb was sealed with a large stone. They had not thought earlier about how they would open the tomb, and wondered about it on the way, but it had already been moved when they arrived. Inside the tomb they were scared to find a young man in a long white garment. Calmly, the man said:

You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here. See the place where they laid him.

Note that the resurrection was announced before any attention was drawn to the tomb being empty of Jesus’s corpse. The women were told to inform Peter and the disciples that Jesus had gone before them to Galilee where they would see him there, as he had said (Mk 14:28). The women fled trembling and amazed, but did not do as they were told because they said nothing to anyone.

Here (Mk 16:8) Mark ends, but additional verses have been added later, and different ones in different versions. Many contain additional verses, Mark 16.9-20, a harmonization from the other gospels. Some have a shorter ending and some just end at Mark 16:8. Did Mark mean to finish at Mark 16:8? Or has an original end been erased? As it stands, it ends at Mark 16:8, and the rest is spurious.

The account says nothing about the resurrection. It has already happened and the young man draws their attention to the absence of the body as proof. Mark says nothing about appearances, and so nothing about the nature of the resurrected Christ. An announcement of a future meeting in Galilee (Mk 16:7) implies perhaps that Jesus will seem normal, but nothing certain is said. The conclusion is that Mark was sure the tomb was empty, and little else.

Matthew

Three women looked upon the crucifixion. They were the same as the three in Mark, except the mother of the sons of Zebedee replaced Salome (Mt 27:56). The laying of the body in the tomb was watched by Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. On the sabbath, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate because Jesus had prophesied he would rise from the dead after three days, and they wanted Pilate to prevent anyone from stealing the body to claim he had risen by putting a guard on the tomb. Pilate agreed to a guard, and they went to secure and seal the tomb with the stone. It was still the sabbath. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb to view it. While at the tomb, an earthquake occurred and an angel descended from heaven, rolled away the stone and sat on it. The terrified guards fell down as if dead. The angel told the two women not to be afraid. Jesus who was crucified was not there for he had risen as he had said, and they were invited to see the place where he lay. Then the angel told them to go quickly and tell the disciples that he has risen from the dead, and was going before them to Galilee, where they would see him. Only the invitation to look is mentioned, so we have to assume they did look in. The women then ran with fear and great joy to tell the disciples.

Both of these accounts can hardly be by eyewitnesses:

• Either the women wanted to anoint the body and bought spices, or they went simply to see the tomb and so had no spices
• Either they found the stone already rolled away, or it was rolled away while they were there by an earthquake or an angel
• Either they found the young man in the tomb, or an angel sat on the stone in front of the tomb.

The two stories cannot be harmonized and the differences cannot be brushed aside. Matthew has more details like the guards but he had used Mark, altering his copy in nearly every passage, as we know by comparing the texts. The question is can one explain the alterations.

1. In Palestine, to anoint a body on the third day would be potentially highly unpleasant because it would have started to decompose. That might be why Matthew omitted this detail. It also posed a question about the accuracy of Mark.
2. Matthew has a continuous narrative involving the guards he has introduced, but not Mark.

Then the women met Jesus (Mt 28:9-10), he greeted them, and they fell before him and took hold of his feet. Jesus repeated what the angel had already told them and what they were just about to do (Mt 28.8). Then the story of the guard was brought to an end (Mt 28.11-15). The men, having recovered from their faint, went into the city, not to Pilate but to the chief priest. The chief priests and elders bribed the guards to tell Pilate they had fallen asleep on duty, and the disciples had come and stolen the body. How they could know this while claiming they were asleep is not explained. Matthew says why he introduced the story of the guard, absent from the other gospels. It was because the theft of the body had been spread among the Jews “to this day” (Mt 28:15). Matthew had introduced the guard to defend against a criticism current when he was writing about 90 BC. This defense made it plain that Matthew relied on the empty tomb as proof of the resurrection. But whether the guard was an original invention of Matthew or a tradition already established cannot be decided. It does not really matter because it contradicts itself, and so cannot be true.

Next, the eleven disciples went to the mountain in Galilee Jesus had told them to go, though actually he had not told them to go to “a mountain” but only “into Galilee”. They fell before him, although some of them, it seems, were doubtful. Jesus proclaimed, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”. Did he mean this was given to him through the resurrection? It seems we must assume it, if he had not told the disciples he had that power earlier. The eleven were told to make disciples of all nations, by baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and by teaching them to keep all Jesus had commanded them. He ends with the promise, “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age”… meaning the end of this world.

To be disciples of the risen Jesus, Christians will observe, they did so through baptism and by keeping all that Jesus had commanded. The Christian must return to Christ’s ministry to know what he had commanded them, what he had preached.

The basis of Christianity, Matthew believed, is that Jesus rose from the grave and proved it by leaving his tomb empty, then appearing first to two women and after to his eleven disciples. Believing that, the Christian will then accept that the risen Jesus had personally explained that discipleship meant keeping his commands. The content of “faith in Jesus” is plainly stated by the risen Jesus himself. The discipleship of the earthly Jesus should be carried forward today by Christians. Faith alone just will not do!

Luke

Luke pretty surely did not know Matthew, but might have known traditions that Matthew also knew. Unnamed women were witnesses of the crucifixion (Lk 23:49), but so too were everyone Jesus knew. The women had followed Jesus from Galilee. Joseph of Arimathea looked after the burial (Lk 23:50-53), the women who had followed from Galilee (Lk 23:55) looking on. Luke deliberately linked Galilee with the crucifixion. They returned to the city to prepare spices and ointments, but the sabbath was dawning and so they were unable to proceed, and rested on the sabbath according to the law (Lk 23:56). In a while, the women were named as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others.

On the first day of the week the women came with their spices to the tomb and found the stone rolled away. They entered the tomb and were perplexed that it was empty. Two men clothed in shining garments approached them. The scared women bowed their faces to the ground, and the men said to them:

Why do you seek the living among the dead? (He is not here, but has risen.) Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise.

Luke 24:5-7

The sentence in parenthesis is not present in all ancient texts. The women now remembered Jesus’s words, left the tomb and explained in detail to the eleven disciples and the others what had happened. Here three of the women were named though there were more. The apostles thought it an idle tale.

The women first discovered the tomb empty, and were met with a reproach—evidently because Jesus had prophesied his resurrection in Galilee. By going to the tomb the women showed their lack of faith in not believing Jesus, or treating his words indifferently. The apostles were the same. They too did not believe. The empty tomb here did not produce faith! Luke also changed the Galilee appointment into merely a memory of his words, to let everything following be enacted in Jerusalem. Luke 24:12, about Peter running to the tomb, is disputed because many manuscripts omit it, and it is similar to the events recollected in John. It could be a scribe’s error, or it could be an harmonizing addition from John 20:3-10. Whether Peter was at the empty tomb or not, it did not make him believe.

On the same day, Sunday, two of the disciples, Cleopas and another, met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, two hours’ from Jerusalem, but they did not recognize him. They explained to the apparent stranger they had hoped Jesus would redeem Israel, but he had been crucified, and they explained the circumstances of the women’s finding of the empty tomb. The hidden Jesus taught the two that Christ had to suffer. At their destination the stranger stayed with them to eat, broke the bread, thereby assuming the leadership and revealing himself to them. He then vanished. They hurried back to Jerusalem to tell the others, but, on arrival, were greeted with:

The Lord is risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon.

Luke 24:34

Then the pair confirmed it from their own experience. Only Luke has this story.

The statement is a surprising interruption of what seemed intended as Luke’s version of the first revelation of Christ. It looks like an early creed and matches the story of 1 Corinthians 15:3, which was recorded much earlier. So, it could easily be an interpolation to make Luke match beliefs held elsewhere and based on Paul’s account in his letter. Nobody can be sure. What is sure is that the parable about the two disciples on the road to Emmaus emphasizes their lack of belief. As it stands, at the end of the story they all believed. The word of an angel was not enough, and the pair on the road to Emmaus had had no chance to tell their story. The eleven and the others with them only knew about the appearance to Peter and based their belief that Jesus was alive on that alone.

While they were talking, late in the evening of Sunday, and still in Jerusalem, Jesus appeared among them. They were startled and frightened at what they took to be a ghost, and Jesus asked why. He showed them his hands and his feet and told them to touch him, pointing out that a spirit had neither flesh nor bones. The disciples were overjoyed but still incredulous and astonished. This amazement does not suggest any genuine belief in their declaration of Luke 24:34. Jesus undertook a further demonstration by asking for food and eating some cooked fish before them. Finally, Jesus instructed them to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins in the name of Christ among all nations, beginning in Jerusalem. They were witnesses, and Jesus promised them the gift of power from on high.

The resurrected body of Christ is presented here as utterly material except that it can appear and disappear. The disciples are invited to touch the risen body, and it seems we are to assume they did, although it is not said that they did. Jesus also ate in front of them, eating being a function of a natural not a spiritual body. Little emphasis is placed on the empty tomb, but a lot on the direct contact of the disciples with the risen Christ. Luke had presented the resurrection as that of a material body.

It was still Sunday, presumably late in the night, and yet Jesus led the disciples out to Bethany (Lk 24:50-53) where he blessed them and then departed. Some manuscripts add that he “was carried up into heaven”. It looks like another interpolation because Luke’s continuation in Acts has the ascension forty days later. The sending of the Spirit followed.

John

The Fourth Gospel is universally accepted as the last, written at the beginning of the second century. In John 21:24, the author is announced as the disciple whom Jesus loved, who has to be assumed to be John, and is by convention, but this last chapter has been added. Scholars agree that the author was not aiming to give a clinical report of the events, because he has tailored them to make theological statements. His Christ is quite different from the one in the synoptic gospels. The author, whoever he was, was not concerned with historical accuracy. If John is historically accurate, the synoptics are not and vice versa because the they differ so considerably that they are incompatible. The fourth evangelist seems not to have had at hand any of the other three gospels, but knew some of the traditions in the others.

In John, Jesus’s mother, her sister, another Mary (the wife of Clopas) and Mary Magdalene, and the beloved disciple were beneath the cross (Jn 19:25f). So, the witnesses are again different, and here they are directly beside the cross, not afar. Jesus can even speak to them. After his death, Jesus’s side was pierced with a spear (Jn 19:34) and blood and water flowed out, something no other gospel mentions. John has nothing to say about women being at the burial, differing from the other gospels (Jn 19:38-42), but instead, Nicodemus helped Joseph of Arimathea. The body of Jesus was anointed before burial, unlike Mark which made an intention to anoint after the burial the reason why the women were at the tomb. The events of John 20 are on the Sunday, except the story about Thomas. Mary Magdalene went alone to the tomb (Jn 20:1). No motive is given. Mary Magdalene found the stone, mentioned here for the first time in John, rolled away from the tomb. No more is said. Mary ran off, found Simon Peter and the beloved disciple and said:

They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we (sic) do not know where they have laid him.

How did Mary Magdalene know this? All she had seen was the stone rolled away. Are we to infer that she looked in? Now the disciples raced to the tomb (Jn 20:3-10), checked the details then departed leaving Mary weeping outside (Jn 20:11). Then she looked in and saw two angels in white, who spoke to her.

Did Mary run to the disciples then run back with them only to be left by herself? Scholars think the whole of John 20:2-10 is an insertion. Then John 20:11 originally followed directly on John 20:1. The original story was simply that Mary Magdalene saw the stone had been rolled away and began to cry. Then she summed up the courage to look in and saw the two angels. This ties in more closely with the tradition of the other gospels that women made the discover of the empty tomb and the men in white. The alteration seems to have been to puff Peter and the beloved disciple, who was meant to have written the gospel, according to the added last chapter.

The empty tomb is a basic tradition, and is in all the gospels, but the disciples’ race to the tomb is a different one. Why did John want to change the story? He could have told it like Matthew, but seemed to have a reason for withdrawing Mary while letting the male disciples make the discovery. The reason is the same in Luke and in John. The church had an interest in making Peter the first to witness the empty tomb. Having been told by Mary, Peter and the other disciple ran to the tomb, the other disciple arrived first, looked in and saw that the linen grave clothes were lying neatly rolled together (cf Luke 24:12) but he allowed Peter to enter first. Peter saw the grave clothes and a napkin lying somewhere else. Then the other disciple entered the tomb, “he saw and believed” (Jn 20:8). Then confusingly the account says:

For as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.

John 20.9

It seems to take an awful lot of telling to convince these disciples of anything, but the line could make sense if it applied to the weeping Mary, who did not know the prophesy.

Did sight of the empty tomb lead to belief, or not? For the other disciple, it did, but evidently he did not know why. Ignoring the line about scripture, the other disciple believed, having seen the tomb empty. We have to infer that Peter who saw the empty tomb first also believed. That is the point of the race to the tomb, and Peter entering first, but even this could have been added to an original insertion in which it was the other disciple who saw and believed first! However it was done, it looks transparently as if the story was edited, perhaps more than once, to stress the priority of Peter, to make him the first to believe having seen the empty tomb.

The original tradition seems to be of of women, judging by Mary’s inappropriate “we”, at the tomb not Peter. The evangelist wrote the scene with Mary Magdalene at the tomb, essentially the original tradition as in the other gospels. Then he, or the editor who added the last chapter, inserted a scene in which he raced to the tomb and was the first to see it empty and believe. Finally, Peter was added to the revised tradition, perhaps because he had become important as the founder bishop of Rome. A rivalry between this other disciple and Peter is mentioned twice in the added chapter.

When Mary was left alone weeping, she looked in and saw the two angels in white, one at the head end of the stone bench on which corpses were laid, and the other at its foot. They asked her why she wept, and she replied:

Because they have taken away my Lord, and I (not “we” this time) do not know where they have laid him.

The angels say nothing. They look to be added to harmonize with the synoptic gospels. Mary turns and sees Jesus but without recognizing him—like the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke. Jesus repeats the question asked by the angels, adding, “Whom do you seek?”. Thinking this is the gardener and he had removed the body, she wanted him to tell her where it was so that she could have it back. For a third time the suggestion is that the body had been deliberately removed, echoing Matthew’s excuse for the guard. The gardener then called Mary by name and she realized it was Jesus, and called him Rabboni, but Jesus refused to let her touch him, unlike his keenness to be touched in Luke.

Why was Mary not to touch Jesus? Did it imply, in this original tradition, he could not be touched because he was not material? In the following story of Thomas, Jesus invited the doubtful disciple to touch him indeed. Possibly here is a conflict between a tradition which denied the tangibility of the resurrected Christ’s body, and one which emphasized it, and the author has failed to reconcile the two. Anyway, she found the disciples and told them what had happened (Jn 20:18).

On the evening of Sunday, Jesus appeared to the disciples (Jn 20:19-23) assembled in a closed room in Jerusalem. Even so, Jesus came into the room. He showed the disciples his hands and his side, and they were glad—no doubt being expressed. He told them what they were to do, and breathed the Holy Spirit into them. Here in John, they did not have to wait until Pentecost (Whitsuntide) to get it as in Acts. The Spirit conferred on to them the power to remit and retain sins. The tradition of this appearance seems to be the same one as Luke.

In John, the doubt motif is introduced in the story of Thomas. Thomas, one of the twelve, was not present in Jerusalem on the evening of the first day of the week. He was told the news, but would not believe unless he could test it himself. A week later Jesus again came through closed doors and allowed Thomas to test him just as he wanted. The story did not say he did any tests, but simply that he acknowledged Jesus as, “My Lord and my God”. The point of the story is Jesus’s reply:

Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

John 20:29

So, the Christian is blessed to believe on merely hearing the message, but Jesus does not suggest here that doubt had any other consequences. Jesus did not condemn Thomas for a lack of faith. This with its short concluding summary, was the original end of the gospel.

The added chapter, John 21 is an independent tradition. The scene changes from Jerusalem to the Sea of Galilee. Simon Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel, the sons of Zebedee and two other disciples were fishing. They caught nothing all night. They showed no signs of doing what Jesus had told them to do, or that they had already seen the risen Jesus in Jerusalem, but they act just as they did before they were called. It suggests that here is an earlier story from the ministry of Jesus tacked on, suitably altered, to the end of this gospel. The whole scene has the effect of an utterly surprising first appearance.

In the morning, the disciples brought their empty boat to shore. There stood Jesus, but they did not recognize him. Jesus asked if they had any fish and they said they had none. So, Jesus told them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, and they caught too many fish to haul in. The beloved disciple then said to Peter, “It is the Lord”. Peter pulled on his coat and jumped into the water, but nothing more is said. The other disciples landed the boat and saw a charcoal fire, with fish and bread on it. Food had been prepared. Jesus told them to bring some of the fish. Peter hauled the net ashore with one hundred and fifty-three fish in it, but the net did not break. Jesus then invited them to come and eat with him. No one dared to ask who he was, but they knew that it was the Lord.

The beloved disciple first recognized Jesus. Peter jumped out of the boat to greet him. Again Peter is being added to a tradition already well established. Plainly a tradition of reverence of the beloved disciple existed in some places, and Peter could not replace him in those places, so he was introduced as being in a sense first each time, yet leaving the older tradition intact. It is a syncretism at work. Different traditions were being cleverly melded together.

Jesus instructed Peter to feed his lambs, adding what seems to be an image of his being a slave now to his calling, but then the narrator explained it meant his martyrdom (Jn 21.19). Jesus told Peter to follow him, and Peter enquired about the beloved disciple, to which Jesus said cryptically:

If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!

John 21:22

The narrator acknowledged that it was a widespread saying among the brethren meaning the beloved disciple would not die before Jesus returned, but evidently he had, and the author had to point out that the saying did not say the disciple would not die. Though he did not say what it does mean.

Jesus’s unexpected appearance to Peter while he is fishing in Galilee, and the command to him no longer to work in his own name but in the name of another are an old tradition not elsewhere mentioned, and probably inserted here anachronistically. More broadly in John 21, Peter and the other disciple are bracketed together, suggesting the whole gospel was written somewhere where the other disciple, whoever he was, was revered as the inheritor of Jesus’s teachings, but that Peter, revered elsewhere has been spliced in, after the church unified under the authority of Rome.

Assessing the Evidence

Having carefully surveyed what the gospels have to say about the sentence “Jesus is risen”, the conclusion is that the resurrection does not actually feature in any of the accounts. Nobody witnessed it, and nobody describes it or gives a hearsay account even. What we have is the empty tomb, and the appearances. You might say that the empty tomb and the appearances imply the resurrection, and so they might. The gospels invite us to consider what must have happened to explain the events. They do not tell us, and what actually happened remains a mystery.

The evidence offered seems to show that Jesus was resurrected into the same material body that was crucified. The tomb was empty because the corpse in it had revivified and walked away. Then Jesus appeared inviting people to touch him, except for Mary Magdalene, and eating fish. Yet there are difficult problems. Why was Jesus so hard to recognize, if he occupied the same body he always had? On three separate occasions, intimate friends did not know him, though he stood by them, spoke to them directly, and even dined with them. And when he demonstrated his reality to them, it was by his bodily normality, and the severe wounds they knew he had suffered to his body. These are visual and tactile signs in particular yet made no impression on these three other occasions when he seemed like a stranger. Belief is never automatic, even though automatic, unquestioning belief is praised, the disciples did not believe unquestioningly. They are shown as doubting, and having to be persuaded.

Jesus has a material body but it can enter closed rooms. Such a serious discrepancy, if it is credited, tells against all the proof that the risen body of Christ was tangible. More likely is the fact that the doors were closed in the sense that no one unknown to the occupants was admitted. The disciples were hiding in them. They were safe houses for them in the aftermath of the rebellion in Jerusalem which had led to Jesus’s arrest. The stories of Jesus not being recognized might be metaphors for people coming to believe. They were in a sense blind before. They could not see the risen Jesus because they did not believe he had risen. These gospel stories are therefore not true history. They are metaphors of belief, not proof of it.

Moreover, where was Jesus? If we accept his body was real, the one that had been crucified revivified, material and needing food, where was it in between these appearances to the followers? To believe Jesus lived anew inside his former body, he must have had somewhere to lodge that the disciples were unaware of. It would suggest that Jesus was part of a bigger movement quite outside the knowledge of his converts, or that they knew about but did not care to mention. It might have been these same people that had left the donkey for the ride into Jerusalem, provided the upper room for the Last Supper, and stolen the body to give it a proper burial, leaving the tomb empty, but unknown to the simple followers of Jesus. This movement typically dressed entirely in white robes, to judge from the young men or messengers—“angels” in Greek—at the tombs.

Perhaps Luke has the answer in saying that Jesus lived in heaven in between the appearances, or might imply it by describing Jesus ascending into heaven (Lk 24:51). If so, only he knew of it, assuming that each gospel writer was doing his best to say what he knew about the events after the resurrection. No one but Luke mentions it. In John, Jesus returned a week later to persuade doubting Thomas. Did he return from heaven for the purpose? This is not to be irreverent, but the very point here is to examine, something that Christians do not do, having been taught to try to harmonize difficulties away, rather than face up to them. And these are serious difficulties. The evangelists did not write harmonious accounts despite the ingenuity of modern priests and pastors in explaining away the problems.

Nor is it how the early Christians received them. Then, different churches had different gospels, and so nothing in them can be explained away by claiming that some other had the answer. Until, the churches united under Rome, and the four gospels were selected as canonical, no Christian except perhaps some bishops would have had access to any gospel other than their own—the one used by their church. Indeed, some of the odd features in the gospels seem to have arisen precisely by attempts to harmonize the different gospels when the churches were coming together. Matthew could not have expected his readers to know what he omitted from Luke—say, the ascension into heaven. The churches which used Matthew would not have used Luke, and vice versa. Only Luke included it, suggesting it was something his readers expected of a demigod or god. Other evangelists did not need to meet any such expectation.

But these others, at least, ought to have wondered where the materially bodied Jesus spent his time between his meetings with them. An answer, perhaps that Christians could not consider, is that these evangelists did not believe their own propaganda. They never believed Jesus lived again in his own material body after he rose, but they wrote to please their audience who did. In short, they were writing for Jews not gentiles, and they believed in the general resurrection, and were happy to accept that Jesus was the first fruits of it. Like many Christians today, it was something they had been brought up with, and did not need to explain. It was a mystery of God. The risen body was exactly like a normal body, but was free of sin and corruption if the person had been sinless in life.

So, it was not a normal body, and the freedom from corruption proved it, but it operated like one in every respect. Of course, a body could only be free of corruption in a world free of corruption, a sinless world, and that is what the Christians were expecting then, and still are. Jesus was simply the first one to be raised into it, but plainly he could not hang about here while the world was still sinful. Fortunately for Christians, his resurrection meant the sinless world had started and would soon be completed by Jesus returning on a cloud. They were happy just to wait for the event, rather than wondering about its metaphysical detail. The odd thing is that they are still waiting.

The gentiles of the classical world in the Roman empire were skeptical of the Semitic belief. Paul, who wrote before any of the evangelists, explains, in 1 Corinthians 15, about the body in which the dead are to be raised, and as Jesus was the first fruit of the risen dead, it should answer the problem discussed here. Paul calls it a “spiritual body”. In 1 Corinthians 35-55, Paul is answering skeptics in Corinth who cannot accept that a body already decayed in the grave could be materially resurrected. So here, even before the gospels were written, was the problem of the difference between the risen body and solid, tangible flesh.

Paul says the earthly body, the material one is different from the risen body, the spiritual body, which coincides with the personality. The earthly body dies but the spiritual body or personality lives on. His analogy was a seed which drops to the earth and dies, but then rises as the new plant. Of course, we know now that the seed did not die. If it had, then there could have been no new plant from it, but Christians are not interested in modern knowledge. They ought, though, to be interested that Paul had refuted the evangelists who wrote the four gospels even before they had been written! The empty tomb could have meant nothing in terms of resurrection if Paul was right and the risen body was not the earthly one. The body laid in the tomb was the dead seed, and the risen Jesus was the new spiritual plant, in Paul’s analogy. The risen Jesus could have looked upon his own dead body on the slab, and the gospel stories of a body being touched and eating fish is quite incompatible with Paul’s explanation.

The evangelists had two audiences, some who were happy with a solid, tangible but incorruptible Jesus, and others who happily accepted the risen Christ was a spirit. Having turned to the texts to answer the questions posed by “Jesus is risen” no clear answers are emerging. Even the ancient Christians much closer to the events could not agree on it. The texts are contradictory, confusing and self-refuting, and Christians today ought to be concerned about them. Plainly, there is nothing self-evident about the statement, “Jesus is risen”. It might be dangerously naïve to think so when the consequences are as potentially grave as Christians believe.

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?

Further Reading

• More on Jesus crucified
• More on the Jewish idea of resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
• More on secular Christianity

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