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Who Lies Sleeping?

Thinking about the Resurrection 2

Luke
John
Assessing the Evidence

Abstract

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! 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 shown as the first to see the tomb empty and believe that Jesus had risen. We cannot be certain that Paul has not been amended to suit the Roman church, for the priority of Peter identifies Rome as the favored church. Following Professor Marxsen, this essay examines the meaning of the Christian credal statement, Jesus is risen

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.

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Last uploaded: 24 April, 2008.