TWO: RETHINKING RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD
Since I was in college I have read every book on Jesus I could get my hands on, whether scholarly, popular, or even fiction. Irresistibly, like so many who were raised in the Christian faith, I found myself skipping to the end of a book to see just how the author handled the events following Jesus’ crucifixion and death. No matter what else a writer might say about Jesus, the question of what happened “after the cross” was fascinating and critical in my mind. All four gospels report that Jesus’ dead body was hastily laid in a rock-hewn cave tomb and blocked with a stone late in the afternoon on the day he was crucified but that the tomb was found empty by his followers on the following Sunday morning. New Testament scholars, historians, and even novelists seem incapable of offering a rational explanation as to what most likely happened that first Easter weekend. This seems to be the mystery of the ages when it comes to understanding Christian origins. What happened to the body of Jesus? One recent historian wrote, after comprehensively surveying the historical and archaeological evidence: “The reality is that there is no historical explanation for the empty tomb, other than if we adopt a theological one, i.e., the resurrection. I leave it up to the reader to make up his own mind.”1 What I had failed to consider in all those years of analyzing our New Testament gospel accounts was that the answer to this insoluble problem was found in the letters of Paul. I am convinced that there is a rational historical explanation for the resurrection of Jesus and the “appearances” to the disciples that can stand up to proper historical scrutiny, but if one reads the gospels alone, without using Paul as a key, everything remains a mystery. If we begin with Paul, suddenly everything becomes clear and we can sort through the gospels in a way that makes real historical sense. It is easy to assume that the four New Testament gospels provided us with our earliest reports that Jesus’ tomb was found empty, and that he was raised from the dead, whereas in fact they are our latest witnesses, ranging in date from A.D. 80 to 120 or even later.2 Paul writes in the early 50s A.D., just twenty years after Jesus’ crucifixion. That is not to say the gospels are without historical value. The problem is that they report a garbled mix of contradictory stories that have to be critically analyzed and sorted out chronologically. It is Paul’s earlier testimony that provides us the insight to be able to do just that. Paul not only reports his own visionary experience but also passes along testimony he received from faceto-face contact with Peter, James, John, and the other apostles—interpreting for us what it meant to say Jesus was “seen” by this or that person following his burial. Paul is the essential missing piece for understanding historically this most important cornerstone of the Christian faith. Ironically, evangelical Christian scholars often use Paul to make the point that he is our earliest source mentioning Jesus’ resurrection, but then they promptly forget what Paul says when they turn to consider the subsequent gospel accounts. In order to understand the historical background and context of Paul’s language about Jesus’ resurrection, and resurrection of the dead more generally, we need to diverge a bit from Paul’s time and the Jewish culture of his day. It is essential that we first understand the views of afterlife among the Greeks, since Paul assumes that his readers, who were his contemporaries, shared a Greek cultural outlook. The Jews, on the other hand, represented to the Greeks a strange and naïve view of the matter of death and afterlife, one that the Greeks thought was patently absurd. In contrast the Jews had come to their view of resurrection from the dead from a completely different place. I always begin my college course on Paul by assigning an article I published some years ago called “What the Bible Really Says About Death, Afterlife, and the Future.”3 Until one knows a bit about how the idea of resurrection of the dead developed and what was at stake in its unique view of the afterlife, there is no way to really comprehend Paul’s “Gospel.” To put things succinctly: the notion of resurrection of the dead is a distinctly Jewish way of thinking about life after death. Even today people easily confuse the idea of resurrection with the notion of the immortality of the soul. They are two separate but related views of afterlife, both affirming what is commonly called eternal life, but there are important differences between them.4 I want to begin with the Greek side of things.
GREEK DUALISM
The Greek idea of immortality of the soul presupposed a dualistic understanding of the human person as consisting of two separate components. The physical body, mortal and perishable, was viewed as a kind of “house” for the true self, which was the inner spirit or soul of the person and would never die. Death was not the end of the individual, but a release of the soul from the restrictions of the body. Plato, for example, likened the mortal physical body to a prison, from which the pure soul achieved release and moved to a more blessed place to continue on its path of spiritual development. The body, with its passions and sensual limitations, was seen as an obstacle to the soul’s highest spiritual development. Detachment from the body was both the ideal and the goal of the higher spiritual life. According to Plato, “the soul of the philosopher greatly despises the body and avoids it and strives to be alone by itself.”5 Although one was not permitted to take one’s own life, unless by necessity, nonetheless death was infinitely better than the imprisonment of the body, and philosophy, in essence, was “a training for death.”6 In the classic Greek view the soul at death descended into Hades, the mythical realm of the dead, where it was judged, reborn to another human life in a cycle of reincarnation, and ideally, after eons of time, could ascend to the higher celestial realms wholly free from the restrictions, contaminations, and imperfections of the lower physical world. Ironically, given this perception of reality, death, which released the soul, was viewed as “life,” while birth, which imprisoned the soul, was like a kind of “death.” In the second most famous death in Western history, that of Socrates, Plato relates how his master courageously, even cheerfully, drank the bowl of hemlock, choosing death over exile, all the while admonishing his disciples to weep for themselves, not for him, since his release from the body was at hand and he was departing to a better place. He presents an extended philosophical argument on the nature of the body and the soul as he lies dying, concluding, “it is perfectly certain that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will exist in Hades.”7 Cicero’s Republic, a text much closer to the time of Jesus and Paul, provides a concise précis of this philosophical dualism that was so popular in the GrecoRoman world: Strive on indeed, and be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure that can be pointed out by the finger. (6:24)8 Platonic body/soul dualism became the standard belief in Greco-Roman antiquity, even among some Hellenized first-century Jews such as Philo and Josephus.9 The great early Christian theologians, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine, considered Plato a kind of honorary “pre-Christian” and reshaped their exposition of the Christian faith almost wholly in Platonic categories. As a result it is extremely difficult for people today, whether Christian, Jewish, or in any other Western spiritual tradition, to conceive of life after death other than in Platonic terms—the body perishes and the immortal soul passes on to an unseen realm of the spirit.
THE ANCIENT HEBREW VIEW OF DEATH
The Jewish concept of resurrection of the dead, adapted by the Christians and put at the center of their faith, insisted that the dead would live again at the “end of days,” rising up from their graves in newly created bodies. This view of afterlife, unique to Jews and Christians, developed out of a distinctively different understanding of the human person, the nature of death, and the importance of a body. God “formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). The phrase in Hebrew, “living being,” was translated in the King James Version and some older translations as “a living soul,” which is quite misleading since it might imply some parallel to the Greek notion of the immortal soul. The Hebrew word (nefesh) simply means a “breathing creature” and the same phrase is used for the various animals that also have what is called the “breath of life” (Genesis 1:24; 7:15). When a human or an animal dies, the breath of life departs and the body returns to the ground, thus Adam is told, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). So in Hebrew one can speak of a “dead” nefesh (Numbers 9:7). The book of Ecclesiastes, the most philosophical in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, provides the starkest summary: For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. (3:19–20) Apparently the author has heard other views here and there, perhaps from Greek influence, but he skeptically concludes, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?” (Ecclesiastes 3:21). Like the Greeks, the Hebrews had a concept of an underworld of the dead that they called Sheol, somewhat akin to Hades, but it was primarily a metaphor for the grave, and was often referred to as the “pit” (Psalm 30:3). Sheol is described as a land of silence and forgetfulness, a region gloomy, dark, and deep (Psalms 115:17; 6:5; 88:3-12; Isaiah 38:18). All the dead go down to Sheol, and there they make their bed together—whether good or evil, rich or poor, slave or free (Job 3:11–19). The dead in Sheol are mere shadows of their former embodied selves; lacking substance they are called “shades” (Psalm 88:10).10 There is one “séance” story in the Hebrew Bible in which the infamous medium of Endor conjures up the “shade” of the dead prophet Samuel at the insistence of King Saul, who wants to communicate with him. When Samuel appears, rising up out of the earth, he asks Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” (1 Samuel 28:8–15). But even Samuel must then return to Sheol. Death is a one-way street; it is the land of no return: But man dies, and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be aroused out of his sleep. (Job 14:10–12) It is surprising to most people to realize that this starkly realistic view of death is consistent throughout the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament. Whether Abraham, Moses, or David, one dies, is buried, and descends into Sheol. The body returns to the dust, the life-breath or spirit returns to God, who gave it, and the “soul” or shade of the former person rests in the underworld (Ecclesiastes 12:7). Nothing is ever said about any kind of a blessed or vital afterlife, much less the notion of an immortal soul leaving the body and joining God in heaven.11 The Hebrews understood the cosmos as tripartite: the heavens were the spiritual realm of God and the angels; the earth was the domain of humans and all living creatures; and below the earth was Sheol, the realm of the dead. For humans the good earth was the designated place to be. They were forever cut off and banished from the Tree of Life, in the middle of the Garden of Eden, that would have allowed them to be like gods and live forever (Genesis 3). Psalm 115 puts things succinctly: The heavens are Yahweh’s heavens, But the earth he has given to the sons of men. The dead do not praise Yahweh, nor do any that go down into silence. But we, the living, will bless Yahweh from this time forth and for evermore. (verses 16–18) The notion of resurrection of the dead has to do with a very obvious and simple question—will the dead, resting in Sheol, ever return to life? Death is death and life is life, but is it possible that one who has died and returned to dust might be raised up, escaping the grip of Sheol? And if so, in what sort of body would one come?
TWO IDEAS OF RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD
There are two related but separate concepts of resurrection of the dead in the Bible. The first involves the rare case where a prophet or holy man resuscitates the corpse of one who has recently died, so that the person has a reprieve on death, but eventually grows old and dies like anyone else. The other concept affirms that at the end of time those in Sheol, or Hades, will come forth, newly embodied in a transformed immortal form. Though both can be called “resurrection,” these two concepts have little in common. There are three such “resuscitation” stories in the Hebrew Bible. Elijah prays over the son of a widow who had fallen ill and stopped breathing and “the lifebreath came into him again and he lived” (1 Kings 17:17–22). Elisha, his successor, performs a similar miracle for the dead son of a wealthy woman. He lies upon the corpse, literally mouth to mouth, until it becomes warm, and the child opens his eyes and gets up (2 Kings 4:32–37). Finally, after Elisha has died and been buried, another corpse is put into his grave and as soon as it touches the bones of Elisha, the man “lived and stood up.” In the gospels Jesus performs three such miracles. He revives a twelve-year-old girl who had died, with the words “Little girl, I say to you arise.” The child immediately gets up, walks about, and takes something to eat (Mark 5:41–43). On another occasion he halts a funeral procession, touches the bier, and speaks to the corpse of a young man who had died, “Young man, I say to you arise.” The dead man sits up and begins to speak (Luke 7:11–17). Finally, when his friend Lazarus dies, and has already been buried for two days, Jesus goes to his tomb, asks that the stone be removed, prays, then shouts, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man comes out with his hands and feet still bound in the burial cloths (John 11:43–44). The book of Acts records two such miracles: one by Peter, and the other by Paul. When a widow named Dorcas falls sick and dies, Peter is called in. He prays, then turns to the body and commands it to rise. Dorcas opens her eyes and gets up. Paul revives a young boy named Eutychus who fell from a third-story window and was presumed dead (Acts 20:9–12). The descriptive language in each of these cases is noteworthy: “He lived,” “she got up,” “he sat up,” or “he came out.” These are verbal expressions of what took place, not conceptual terms about life after death more generally. In that sense the English term “resurrection from the dead” is misleading. In the Hebrew Bible there is no noun for “resurrection,” just verbs describing the dead being revived. Even in the New Testament the Greek word anastasis, translated “resurrection,” occurs forty-two times; it literally means “a standing up.” Most scholars agree that there is only one unambiguous reference to a general resurrection of the dead in the entire Hebrew Bible.12 It is found in the book of Daniel, an uncharacteristically apocalyptic book, considered by scholars to have been written much later than the other books of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Daniel receives a long visionary prophecy that purports to give him a glimpse into human history right up to the end of time. The revelation concludes with these words: And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And multitudes of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars for ever and ever. (Daniel 12:1–3) The metaphor of “sleeping in the dust of the earth” and then awakening captures precisely the core idea of resurrection of the dead in the context of the ancient Hebrew understanding of death. The dead come forth from Sheol and are judged at the end of time, receiving either everlasting life or shame and contempt. Their bodies have long ago decayed and turned to dust, so rather than a resuscitation of a corpse, their revival entails a transformed state of glorified immortal existence. Daniel writes at a time, in the mid-second century B.C., when Jews had chosen to die at the hands of their Greek conquerors rather than give up the practice of their religion (1 Maccabees 1:41–64). Coinciding with these gruesome tales of martyrdom there are declarations from the mouths of those dying that God will restore to life those who have perished: “You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws” (2 Maccabees 7:9). Here we see emerging a new Jewish understanding of both life and death. The older idea, found in much of the Hebrew Bible, that God justly rewards good and punishes evil in this life, was beginning to unravel. The book of Job struggled mightily with this issue, with Job insisting that his suffering was undeserved and that God was obligated to adjudicate his case, even if it required that he be vindicated by some future interlocutor, long after his death (Job 19:23–27).13 But if Daniel’s vision of the future were true, then any question about God’s justice would become moot, since the dead would be raised at the end of time and all would face final judgment. As appealing as the notion of resurrection of the dead might be, it was sharply debated in Jewish circles for at least three centuries (200 B.C. to A.D. 100). Those who opposed the idea argued that since it was found only in the book of Daniel, a book whose authenticity some disputed, but nowhere else in the Hebrew scriptures, it represented an intrusive and unjustified addition to the teachings of Moses and the Prophets. According to Josephus, the first-century A.D. Jewish historian, of the three major schools of Jewish thought, the Sadducees opposed the idea of resurrection of the dead while the Pharisees and the Essenes accepted it.14 Josephus says the views of the Pharisees were accepted by the general populace, whereas the Sadducees tended to represent the aristocratic classes with decidedly “this worldly” interests in wealth and political power. The Essenes are most often identified with the sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. Books like Daniel and Enoch, in which the idea of resurrection of the dead is pivotal, inspired their decidedly apocalyptic views. Both Jesus and Paul stood squarely with the Pharisees and the Essenes. The Sadducees challenged Jesus on this point and in response he declared: “You are wrong, for you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God,” explaining his understanding of resurrection: Those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. (Mark 12:24–25; Luke 20:34– 36) Whether Jesus himself spoke these precise words or they were an elaboration by the gospel writers, what they show is that within the Jesus movement the resurrection of the dead at the end of the age was understood as the release of the dead from Sheol, or Hades, clothed in a new spiritual body no longer subject to death or decay. Resurrection involved transformation to a higher order of life, no longer differentiated as male and female, and thus no birth or death. The idea of resuscitating corpses or reassembling decayed flesh and bones long perished or turned to dust did not even enter the picture. Metaphorically one could speak of “those in the graves” coming forth, but since the “grave” ultimately referred to the underworld of Hades or Sheol, even those “buried” at sea come forth: “And the sea gave up the dead in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done” (Revelation 20:13). The Jewish notion of resurrection of the dead never means disembodied bliss, or even “life after death,” but always a re-embodied life. This is quite different from the Greek idea of the immortal soul being freed from the mortal body and experiencing heavenly bliss. For Plato death is a friend, offering release from the prison of a mortal body, whereas for Jews and Christians death is an enemy that sends one to Sheol forever, until God intervenes and raises the dead in their new form.15
PAUL: FIRST AND BEST WITNESS
Paul was a Pharisee, one of the three major schools of thought among Jews of that time. He gives us our earliest and most extensive treatment of resurrection of the dead as understood, debated, and defended by his contemporaries (Philippians 3:5; cf. Acts 23:6). There are rabbinic traditions that discuss the Pharisaic view of resurrection of the dead, but they date much later, from the third to fifth centuries A.D. Josephus, our other first-century Jewish witness, offers little on this subject. Like Paul, he was a Pharisee, but he provides none of the expository detail that Paul provides, and he seems eager to cast the Pharisees and their views of afterlife in Greek dress: “Every soul, they maintain, is imperishable, but the soul of the good alone passes into another body, while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment.”16 It is possible that his reference to “passing into another body” could refer to resurrection of the dead, but it could just as easily fit Plato’s notion of reincarnation. Josephus was keen to slant things for his Roman audience, including the emperor Vespasian himself, who was his patron. In contrast to Josephus, Paul addressed Plato directly, skillfully making use of the language of Greek dualism while maintaining a clear distinction between the Greek view of the immortality of the soul and the Jewish understanding of resurrection of the dead. Paul exhorts his followers at Corinth not to lose heart over persecutions: Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day . . . because we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16, 18) One would be hard-pressed to find a more succinct expression of Platonic dualism. The body is obviously the outer perishing nature, which can be seen, while the unseen inner nature, which is eternal, is the soul. Paul is making use of standard Greek language but then he adds a most important twist. According to Paul, we humans are “clothed” in a physical body, which we shed at death, but our desire is not to end up naked or unclothed—that is, stripped of the body, as Plato would have it—but to be re-clothed with a new eternal house that God will create (2 Corinthians 5:1–4). Paul draws upon a mixed set of metaphors here, contrasting a tent with a permanent dwelling and old clothing with new clothing. His meaning is subtle but clear. To die is to be in a naked state, unclothed, without a proper dwelling, whereas to be resurrected from the dead is to be reclothed, or rehoused, with a new spiritual body. We can draw two very important conclusions. First, in contrast to Plato, Paul has no interest in the “naked” or disembodied soul. Second, the old clothing or the tent, that is, the physical body, perishes and is of no concern to him. This is Paul’s view of resurrection of the dead and it is consistent in all his letters. 1 Corinthians 15 is often called Paul’s “resurrection chapter.” There he clearly expresses his view of what resurrection of the dead involves, both for Jesus and those who have died and who he believes will be raised from the dead when Jesus returns. Apparently he had gotten a report that some in the Corinthian congregation were maintaining that “there is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:13). Presumably they had accepted Paul’s gospel message that Christ had been raised, but they saw no need for any future resurrection for those who had died. Their objection was likely based upon the influence of Greek thinking, in which the notion of the dead coming bodily out of their graves was absurd and unnecessary. If the dead were now free of their bodies, were they not closer to God than those yet imprisoned in the mortal body? This Greek objection to resurrection of the dead appears in the book of Acts when the Stoics and Epicureans in Athens mock Paul as soon as he mentions the idea of resurrection (Acts 17:32). Celsus, a second-century Greek philosopher who wrote a treatise against Christianity, charged that Christians “believe in the absurd theory that the corporeal body will be raised and reconstituted by God, and that somehow they will actually see God with their mortal eyes and hear him with their ears and be able to touch him with their hands.”17 This is not at all what Jews and Christians believed about resurrection, as we have seen, but their position was easy to caricature in this way. Why would God, who is pure Spirit, have any interest in rotting corpses or dried bones? But even more to the point, how could God possibly raise the dead with bodies turned to dust, burnt to ashes, or lost at sea? Paul’s Corinthian opponents challenged him directly with these very questions: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (1 Corinthians 15:35). They found the very idea absurd. Paul calls them fools who limit the capacities of God as Creator. If God created our physical world with all of its variety of “bodies,” or outward forms, for various plants and animals, surely he can provide spiritual bodies for those whom he raises from the dead in the new creation (1 Corinthians 15:36–38). Paul thinks of a body as a mode of being, whether in a physical creation or in the new spiritual creation that God would fashion in the future. Paul uses the resurrection of Christ as his illustrative example, viewing Jesus as the prototype of what will take place in the future for all the dead who will be raised at Jesus’ coming. Just as God created Adam “from the dust” with a physical body, Christ, through his resurrection from the dead, became a new heavenly Adam, with a spiritual body. Paul expresses this with five contrasting couplets and a conclusion: 1. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.18 2. The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam [Christ] became a life-giving spirit. 3. It is not the spiritual that is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. 4. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 5. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:45–49) Conclusion: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable (verse 50). As a Pharisee Paul must have had some general notion of resurrection of the dead as involving a reembodied spiritual self, but as a Christian he has developed his understanding much further. He is convinced that Jesus’ resurrection is actually the proof that this new cosmic process of transforming physical beings into a higher spiritual form is underway. He argues, “For as by a man [Adam] came death, by a man [Christ] has come also the resurrection of the dead.” This is not something Jews in general, or Pharisees and Essenes in particular, would say, since the hope that God would raise the dead would have no necessary connection to Jesus’ being raised. But for Paul the two are inseparable: Christ’s resurrection as a life-giving spirit inaugurates the process of the new creation. THE BODY IN QUESTION Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ resurrection allows us to approach with a new perspective the question of what happened to Jesus’ body after he was taken from the cross. Paul begins his “resurrection chapter” with a formula-like recitation of what he calls “the Gospel”: For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. (1 Corinthians 15:3–4) Paul is writing this around twenty-five years after Jesus’ crucifixion and since he was not a witness to the death, burial, and resurrection on the third day, he passes along something he has “received” to the Corinthians. Most scholars take this to mean he is passing on a formal early Christian creed that he got from the Jerusalem apostles, or perhaps from Christians at Antioch. Although this is possible, I don’t think it is at all certain, since Paul swears so adamantly that the gospel he “received” was not through men or from men, but by a direct revelation of Christ (Galatians 1:11–12). Earlier in 1 Corinthians he writes that he “received from the Lord” (same Greek verb, paradidomi), meaning from Jesus, his tradition about the Last Supper. Either way, whether by tradition or revelation, Paul offers his testimony of what he preaches. Paul then lists a series of “sightings” (Greek ophthe) of the risen Christ to various people, including Peter, James, and the twelve apostles, and finally his own experience of having “seen” Jesus.19 Two conclusions seem to follow from Paul’s formulaic testimony. First, since Paul emphatically makes the point in 1 Corinthians that the resurrected Christ dwells in a spiritual body as a life-giving Spirit, we can say with assurance that the Christ that Paul claimed to have “seen” was not Jesus’ physical corpse revivified. According to Paul, the “Lord,” that is Jesus, is the “Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17– 18). Second, since Paul equates his experience of “seeing” Christ with the experiences of the Jerusalem apostles who were before him, we can conclude that, at least in Paul’s view of the matter, their experiences were identical—they all saw the same risen Christ in his glorified spiritual body. Since Paul explicitly says that Christ died and was buried but was subsequently “raised from the dead,” he most likely believed that Jesus’ physical body returned to the dust, and like a change of old clothing, had nothing to do with the new spiritual body Jesus received. His reference to Jesus’ burial was to make the point that he was truly dead. Paul clearly believes in a bodily resurrection, or more properly, an embodied resurrection. It is one thing to say the dead will be raised bodily and it is quite another to insist that the same bodies, long ago turned to dust and ashes, or buried at sea, must somehow be reconstituted in order to experience resurrection. The latter was the absurdity that Greeks objected to in offering naïve objections to the Jewish idea of the resurrection of the dead. Resurrection is not the transformation of the physical into the spiritual, for given the corruption of the body there is nothing left to transform. Resurrection is rather the reclothing or “reincorporation” of the essential self with a new immortal body that frees it from the Hadean state of death. A good illustration of this point is the case of John the Baptizer. The gospel of Mark, as well as Josephus, records John’s brutal death at the hands of Herod Antipas, who had him beheaded.20 Mark says that John’s disciples, hearing of his death, were allowed to take his body and lay it in a tomb. Sometime later Herod received reports of the miraculous activities of Jesus. He was so impressed that he said “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead,” thinking that what was reported of Jesus could only be explained if John had somehow returned from the dead (Mark 6:14). Yet there is no indication that Herod had John’s tomb checked to see if it was empty. He was not thinking about a beheaded corpse being revived but he still considered the possibility that John might have returned to life. This account illustrates how the Jewish culture of the time could imagine someone being resurrected and reclothed in a new body, their former body left in the tomb. If we take Paul seriously as our earliest witness to Jesus’ resurrection, leaving aside for the moment the later reports in the gospels about an empty tomb, or stories of Jesus appearing after death as flesh and bones, we end up with an entirely different perspective on the resurrection. Paul’s position is clear. He concludes his lengthy exposition on resurrection with the emphatic declaration that “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50).
THE GABRIEL REVELATION
Recently an exciting new text was published that sheds significant light on this entire discussion.21 It was found around the year 2000 in Jordan, near the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. It is now in the hands of a private collector in Europe. This ancient Hebrew text contains eighty-seven lines written in ink on a stone tablet. Experts date it to the end of the first century B.C., so it is definitely preChristian. The text purports to be a revelation of the angel Gabriel about the final apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil. We have various texts from this period dealing with this theme, including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the second half of the text contains something entirely new. According to Israel Knohl of Hebrew University, the final section of the text focuses on the death and resurrection of a messianic leader, most likely Simon of Perea, who led a revolt in Judea in 4 B.C. following the death of Herod the Great.22 Josephus reports that Simon’s followers crowned him, a tall and handsome figure, as king of the Jews. He ravaged the countryside for a time, burning down the royal palace at Jericho. Gratus, Herod’s military commander, pursued Simon and caught up with him in Transjordan and beheaded him.23 What is fascinating and new about this text is that the slain leader, who has, according to the text, become “dung of the rocky crevices,” his body decayed in the desert heat, is nonetheless addressed by the angel Gabriel: “I command you, prince of princes in three days you shall live!” Since the text is pre-Christian, the parallels with Jesus are all the more amazing. Not only do we have reference here to a “slain” Messiah, an idea many have argued originated only with the unexpected crucifixion of Jesus, but also the reference to Simon being raised from the dead after three days. Since Paul is our earliest source for the tradition that Jesus was raised “on the third day,” one has to ask whether this tradition of a slain Messiah being raised after three days was one that he appropriated and applied to Jesus. What is all the more striking about this text is that it affirms Simon’s resurrection from the dead even though his mutilated body had turned to “dung” in the hot Jordanian desert. Clearly the person composing the text, who surely believed that Gabriel’s divine decree had been fulfilled, was not concerned with the decaying remains of Simon’s beheaded body. Whoever wrote this text, most likely a follower of Simon, believed that God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. Unfortunately, other than this text and Josephus’s account of Simon’s death, we have no way of knowing anything about the followers of Simon and what they might have done after his death. Simon apparently had no “Peter” or “Paul” to carry on his messianic mission, but nonetheless the faith his followers had in his death and resurrection after three days was written down in a text. It provides us with significant new evidence about how the concept of resurrection of the dead was understood among Jewish messianic groups precisely from Jesus’ time. It is our closest contemporary parallel to the resurrection faith. By taking our clues from Paul’s reports of “seeing” Jesus, and factoring in Paul’s understanding of resurrection of the dead as a contemporary Jew of that time, we are now in a position to understand and interpret the gospel accounts in their proper historical contexts. What emerges is a consistent and coherent story of how Christian faith in Jesus’ resurrection developed before it changed over time, allowing us to reconstruct what Jesus’ earliest followers likely believed versus the later understanding of the resurrection that came from Paul.
THREE READING THE GOSPELS IN THE LIGHT OF PAUL It makes perfect sense to read the New Testament in its current order. The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, introduce us to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The book of Acts gives us the early history of Christianity, ending with the career of Paul. The letters of Paul and the other apostles, Peter, John, James, and Jude, come next, and the mysterious book of Revelation provides a climactic finale to the whole. It all makes perfect sense—unless one is a historian. Historians read the New Testament backward. Over the last hundred and fifty years they have made a significant discovery. If the New Testament writings are ordered chronologically, according to the dates the various books were written, a wholly different picture emerges, with radical and far-reaching implications. Historians disassemble these various sources in an attempt to understand them in chronological order. They focus on a precise set of questions: Where do we find our oldest and most authentic materials? How and when were they passed along, edited, and embellished? Who was involved in this process and what theological motivations were operating? As it turns out, this seemingly destructive process of “disassembly” yields positive and fascinating results. I want to return to the question of what happened following the death of Jesus. Now that we have Paul as our master key, when we attempt to analyze the four New Testament gospels with their narratives of the empty tomb, an entirely different perspective opens up. Understanding Paul turns out to be fundamental to understanding what the earliest followers of Jesus most likely experienced, and the central affirmation of Paul’s message and apostleship—that he had “seen” Jesus raised from the dead—can be placed in its proper historical light. In looking at the gospels, chronology turns out to be a remarkably fruitful starting point. There is no absolute guarantee that what is early is more accurate than what came after, but unless we begin the process of disassembly and comparison we have no way of even approaching our questions. Evangelical Christian scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, believe that the only possible explanation for the empty tomb is that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead and that he emerged from the tomb fully and miraculously restored to health. They maintain that there is no other logical explanation for all the facts as reported and are quite keen to uphold Jesus’ resurrection as the solid, demonstrable bedrock of Christian faith.1 Their thinking runs something like the following. The disciples were in great despair over Jesus’ death, having lost all hope that he could be the Messiah. After all, a dead Messiah is a failed Messiah. None of them was expecting Jesus to die, much less rise from the dead, so how were they suddenly transformed from disappointed hopelessness to dynamic faith? Rather than wither away, the Jesus movement began to mushroom, gaining strength and numbers as the apostles proclaimed all over Jerusalem that they had seen Jesus alive and his tomb was empty. How can such a dramatic change, three days after Jesus’ death, be explained any other way? Why were the apostles willing to face persecution and even death if they were spreading a story they knew to be false? There are a limited number of nonsupernatural explanations to explain what might have happened. The oldest explanation, that the disciples stole the body to deliberately promote the fraudulent claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead, is mentioned in the gospel of Matthew as a rumor that was spread among the Jewish population (Matthew 28:13–15). A second explanation, that some unknown person with no connection to the disciples, usually said to be a gardener, removed the body, also shows up in some later Jewish texts. The earliest source for this story is Tertullian, a late-third-century Christian apologist. He writes that some Jews were claiming that a gardener, upset that crowds visiting Jesus’ tomb were trampling his vegetables, reburied the body elsewhere, never revealing the location.2 In more recent times, the so-called Swoon Theory, popularized by Hugh Schonfield’s 1965 bestseller, The Passover Plot, suggested that Jesus was not really dead but unconscious, either through a drug or from the trauma of crucifixion, and that he revived in the tomb.3 The most common explanation among biblical scholars is that Mark, our earliest gospel writer, invented the entire burial and empty tomb story to bolster faith in the resurrection of Jesus. It is Mark’s invention, lacking any historical basis.4 I find this last explanation highly unlikely since it is hard to imagine the early followers of Jesus relating his death on the cross, but then saying nothing about what happened to his body. It would essentially be a story with no ending. But perhaps more to the point, Paul, our earliest source, written decades before the gospels, knows the tradition that Jesus was at least buried. I think Mark does his share of inventive mythmaking—but not regarding the fact of Jesus’ burial, or even that his tomb was found empty on Sunday morning by his followers. That seems to me to be at the minimal core of what we can responsibly say about what happened after the cross. Geza Vermes, in a recent work, The Resurrection: History and Myth, surveys these various alternative explanations and concludes that none of them “stands up to stringent scrutiny,” despite our need for some rational, scientific explanation.5 Like so many others he concludes that historical investigation, given our limited evidence, has reached a dead end, given the contradictory and mythological nature of our evidence—namely the texts of the New Testament. Is there a way through this impasse? Since the earliest surviving Christian texts are seven letters of Paul (1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon), dating to the early 50s A.D., twenty years after Jesus’ death, it makes sense to give them priority, particularly in our attempting to solve the mystery of what happened after the cross. Not only are these letters the earliest evidence we have, but they come to us firsthand, as first-person testimony from one who had direct dealings with Peter, James, and the other apostles. If gospels were written a generation or more later, when Paul, Peter, and James were dead, and the Romans had shattered the original Jerusalem church following the destruction of the city in A.D. 70, they should be considered as secondary evidence. It comes as a surprise to many people familiar with the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to learn that all four are anonymous productions, written in the generation after the apostles, and based on a complex mix of sources and theological editing. Scholars are agreed that none of the gospels is an eyewitness account and the names associated with them are assigned by tradition, not by any explicit claim by their authors. In other words, the names themselves are added as titles to each book but are not embedded in the texts of the works themselves. Each gospel writer had his own motives and purposes in telling the Jesus story in a way that supported his particular perspectives. None of them is writing history but all four can rightly be called theologians. From a distance their differences might seem minimal, but once carefully examined they are quite significant, revealing a process of mythmaking that went on within decades of Jesus’ death. Of the four gospels, Mark, not Matthew, comes first, written sometime around A.D. 80 or later. Mark gives no account of Jesus’ birth at all, miraculous or otherwise, and most strikingly, in his original version, as we will see, there are no post-resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples! This fact alone provides us with an important key to unraveling the mystery surrounding the empty tomb. The author of Mark preserves for us a stage of history when the Jesus story is being told with an entirely different ending. Matthew was written at least a decade or more later and the author uses Mark as his main source. He does not start from scratch and he obviously does not have his own independent account to offer. Matthew incorporates 90 percent of Mark but he edits Mark’s material rather freely, embellishing and expanding the story as fits his purposes. That is why most readers of the New Testament who begin with Matthew, and then come to Mark, have the strange sense that they have already read the story before. They actually have, but in Matthew’s edited version. The result is that Mark is almost always read as a cut-down version of the more complete story in Matthew. Matthew’s embellishments are many but most particularly he finds Mark’s beginning and ending wholly unsatisfactory. How could one possibly write a gospel of Jesus Christ with no birth story of Jesus and no appearances of Jesus to the disciples after the resurrection? What this means is that for several decades, when there were no other gospels but Mark in circulation, Christians were relating the Jesus story without the two elements that later came to be considered foundational for the Christian faith— Jesus’ virgin birth and his Easter morning appearances. Matthew’s gospel represents a watershed moment in Christian history. He composes the first account of the miraculous virgin birth of Jesus, and he creates a spectacular scene of resurrection: And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. (Matthew 28:2–4) Mark has none of this. In his account there is no angel but a young man sitting inside Jesus’ tomb and no miraculous intervention from heaven. Matthew ends his story with a dramatic scene of the resurrected Jesus meeting the apostles on a mountain and giving the so-called Great Commission, to preach the gospel to all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:18–20). Luke was written several decades after Matthew, perhaps at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, and the author expands and embellishes the core Mark story even further than Matthew had done. Luke adds multiple appearances of Jesus to various individuals as well as to all the apostles, and like Matthew, he also provides his own version of a birth story. Even with these later embellishments Luke and Matthew nonetheless provide us with an unexpected surprise, discovered by scholars over a hundred and fifty years ago. In addition to Mark, both writers had access to the Q source. This early collection of the sayings of Jesus, probably compiled around A.D. 50, was apparently not known to Mark. It can be extracted and reconstructed with some degree of certainty, but as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, we don’t have an independent copy of Q itself, only its reconstruction from Matthew and Luke. I mention it again here because one of its most important features is that in the Q source Jesus never speaks of his resurrection from the dead, whereas in Mark, who comes later, Jesus refers several times to being “raised on the third day.” This is one more example of how putting our sources in proper chronological order might enable us to reconstruct the ways in which faith in Jesus’ resurrection developed in the first few decades of the movement. Most scholars place the gospel of John as the latest of the four gospels and certainly it is the most theologically embellished in terms of its view of Jesus as the divine, preexistent Son of God. So far as the empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus are concerned, John, like Luke, recounts multiple appearances of Jesus to his disciples in Jerusalem, as well as an appended final chapter in which Jesus also appears to several of them on the Sea of Galilee (John 21). All of this disassembly, sorting, and sifting might suggest historians are just picking and choosing at random whatever suits them to support a preconceived theory, but there is definitely a method to this critical historical investigation. Historians of any period have a similar challenge in evaluating the reliability of multiple sources. What is required is that one be explicit and clear about one’s methods with careful arguments as to why this or that bit of evidence is given whatever weight. What is needed is a synthesis of our best evidence, incorporating the essential clues that Paul provides for probing a series of related questions: Why was Jesus’ tomb found empty? What happened to the body of Jesus? How did his earliest followers understand his resurrection? A RUSHED BURIAL AND AN EMPTY TOMB Jesus died in the year A.D. 30 in the late afternoon, just hours before the Jewish Passover meal was to begin in the evening.6 Mark says it was “the day of preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath” (Mark 15:42). The rush was to remove the bodies of Jesus and the two others crucified that day from their crosses before sundown, when these holy days would begin, since both Jewish law and custom forbade the corpses of executed criminals to be left hanging past sunset, much less through a holiday (Deuteronomy 21:22–23). Josephus, the contemporary Jewish historian, explicitly mentions this practice, asserting that the Jews “took down those who were condemned and crucified and buried them before the going down of the sun.”7 This rush to bury provides us with our first insight into why Jesus’ tomb was found empty. Mark tells us that Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the Sanhedrin, the governing council of the Jews, obtained permission directly from the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to remove Jesus’ body from the cross and take charge of his burial (Mark 15:42–46). Apparently Joseph had sympathies toward Jesus and his followers since he shows up suddenly in Mark’s story and voluntarily exercises his influence to facilitate Jesus’ burial. Given the impending festival that began at sunset, there was no time for full and proper Jewish rites of burial that would involve washing the body and anointing it with oil and spices. The women of Jesus’ family, who had followed him from Galilee, had plans to carry out these duties but had to defer them until after the Passover and the Sabbath (Mark 16:1). There is no indication that they were in communication with Joseph of Arimathea at the time he took Jesus’ body or through the Passover holiday. The followers of Jesus had mostly fled in fear and were in hiding (John 20:19). One gets the idea that the women watched from a distance, surely a bit frightened themselves, but wanting to know where the body was taken (Mark 15:47; Luke 23:55). The burial was in the hands of Joseph, but they hoped he would allow them, as Jewish custom prescribed, to carry out the traditional rites of burial and mourning. Mark says that Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Jesus in a linen shroud and laid him in a rock-hewn tomb, blocking the entrance with a sealing stone. There are hundreds of these hewn-out cave tombs of this type in the Jerusalem area, some of which have been excavated, so what Mark describes is quite familiar to us. They typically have a small squared entrance that can be blocked up with a stone cut to fit. They are of various sizes but are intended for family burials. Mark says nothing about where this tomb was or how or why it was chosen. It is the gospel of John that provides a key missing detail: Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, where no one had ever been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:41–42) People assume that the tomb into which Joseph of Arimathea placed the body of Jesus belonged to him but here we see that such was not the case.8 It was a newly hewn tomb with no one buried inside that just happened to be close by. Jesus’ body was laid inside, but only temporarily. He was not really buried there, since full and formal burial involved the preparation rites and mourning rituals carried out by the family over a seven-day period (Mark 16:1; John 20:1). That is why the women show up early Sunday morning at the tomb, expecting to initiate the burial process with Joseph’s cooperation. Jesus’ corpse would have been badly mutilated with bruises, wounds, and dried blood. Preparing it for proper burial would require quite a bit of time and effort. The body could not be left exposed over the holidays, and the empty unused tomb with its blocking stone would provide protection from predators. Joseph’s actions were practical temporary emergency measures. We have to assume, since Joseph had taken responsibility for Jesus’ proper burial, that his intention was to fulfill this obligation as soon as possible after the Passover. When the Sabbath was over, on Saturday night, he would have his first opportunity to properly bury the body and presumably returned to the temporary unused tomb to remove Jesus’ body for permanent burial—hence the empty tomb. As a man of means, and a member of the highest Jewish judicial body, the Sanhedrin, this makes perfect sense. Based on Jewish law, he would not have placed Jesus in his own family tomb, but would have provided a separate tomb for Jesus.9 What Mark knows is that very early Sunday morning, just as the sun was rising, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Salome, most likely Jesus’ sister, came to the tomb with the intent of washing the body and anointing it with oil and spices.10 When they arrived the large blocking stone had already been removed but the tomb was empty, the body gone. This was precisely what one might expect given the circumstances of Joseph’s intentions and activities. But it was a total surprise to the women. They arrived fully expecting to be involved in the rites of a proper and final burying. That is why they arrived so early, so as not to miss Joseph, who they expected would return at first light Sunday morning—but they arrived twelve hours too late! What they did not consider is that Joseph had returned to the tomb the instant the Passover Sabbath day was over at sundown. Mark says that when the women looked into the empty tomb they saw a young man sitting inside, who told them: Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you. (Mark 16:6–7) Here the line between history and theology is clearly drawn. That the tomb was empty fits what we know of the circumstances of Jesus’ temporary “burial” by Joseph of Arimathea, but that the women were told that Jesus would meet his disciples in Galilee is clearly a theological embellishment. It is Mark’s attempt to connect the empty tomb with subsequent appearances of Jesus. The link is quite weak, since Mark knows of no specifics of any appearances of the risen Jesus to the disciples in Galilee; otherwise he surely would have related them to round out the ending to his gospel. I think we have to assume that Mark tells us all he knows but what Mark knows he gets from Paul. Mark is following Paul here, since it is Paul who reports that Jesus first appears to Peter and the disciples, and in Mark’s account the young man sitting in the tomb specifies Peter by name (1 Corinthians 15:5). Mark relates next that the women fled the tomb in fear and amazement and that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). The oldest, most authentic copies of Mark end abruptly here, at verse 8. The additions found in most translations of the Bible, where Jesus appears to various people mentioned in Matthew, Luke, and John, were interpolations added to later manuscripts of Mark by editors who could not imagine a gospel ending without appearances of Jesus.11 Mark also knows an old tradition, not mentioned specifically by Paul, that the first time Peter and the disciples saw Jesus was in Galilee, in the north, not in Jerusalem the week of Passover. This is not a minor difference from Luke and John, as we will see. It is a blatant counter-story. If we put Mark and Paul together we get the earliest and most reliable tradition—faith in Jesus’ resurrection began in Galilee with Peter and the apostles as the first to claim they had seen him. Matthew and Luke, using Mark as their source, follow closely his account of the women finding Jesus’ tomb empty, though Matthew adds all sorts of supernatural elements, as noted previously. Both flatly contradict Mark’s statement that the women said nothing to anyone; in Matthew and Luke they run to tell the disciples (Matthew 28:8; Luke 24:9). All seem to agree, however, that the discovery of the empty tomb by the women that Sunday morning did not inspire anyone to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead. The assumption of everyone was that someone had removed the body. The gospel of John offers an alternative empty tomb story that is not based on Mark, and although John is our latest gospel, this particular story seems to offer us a less theological account of the story, leading some historians to conclude it might represent a much earlier independent tradition:12 Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes. (John 20:1–10) John, of course, gives other stories following his account of the empty tomb in which Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and to the disciples as a group, including Thomas, the famous doubter. But this account of the empty tomb stands out. There is no young man or angelic interpreter in the tomb to proclaim the resurrection. Instead, Mary is quite sure the body has been taken elsewhere for burial: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2). One has to ask, who is the “they” Mary Magdalene has in mind? Based on the hasty burial of Jesus’ body in this temporary tomb, it seems obvious that she is referring to Joseph of Arimathea and his assistants. After all, just a few verses earlier it is John who tells us that the tomb was a temporary one (John 19:41). Peter and the other disciple race to the tomb to verify that it was empty. What they “believe” is not that Jesus has been raised from the dead, as John clarifies, but that the body of Jesus has been removed and reburied—presumably the night before. This fits precisely what we have reconstructed above, based on all our sources. I argued a version of this “reburial” scenario in my book The Jesus Dynasty,13 and one response in particular, from an esteemed academic colleague, seemed to sum up some possible objections to my thesis quite well: You say that the body of Jesus was removed from its temporary resting place to a permanent tomb. This is not at all impossible. Extreme improbability sets in only when you invite us to assume that this group, who knew perfectly well what had actually happened to the body of Jesus, permitted their co-religionists to proclaim, not that he was still alive (immortality of the soul, well attested in Judaism) but that he was risen from the dead. This, of course, is against the background of what “resurrection” meant for first-century Jews. In order for me to take your “evidence” seriously, you would have to explain why the family and/or disciples based their future lives on what they knew to be a falsehood, namely that the body had been raised, and finally to justify how the secret was preserved in one of the gabbiest societies in ancient history.14 In my judgment there are several incorrect assumptions embedded in this objection. I showed in the previous chapter that, according to Paul, the resurrection of Jesus, and resurrection more generally, was understood as the reembodiment of one who has died, not the resuscitation of a corpse. The gospels, written decades after Jesus’ death, begin to connect the empty tomb and the disappearance of Jesus’ body to subsequent and immediate appearances of Jesus to his followers, even the same day, in Jerusalem, proving that he had been raised from the dead. But as we will see, these are late expansions of earlier tradition. What Mark only implies (“you will see him in Galilee”) is lavishly embellished by Luke, and John, but is now set in Jerusalem, on the Sunday after the crucifixion. Jesus walks around, wounds and all, eating meals and claiming he is still flesh and bones—directly contradicting Paul’s emphatic assertion that Jesus has become a “life-giving spirit”—embodied, yes, but not physical or material. It is a mistake to allow these later texts to frame our objections and take priority over earlier materials. Whether the family and followers of Jesus knew immediately where Jesus had been reburied, or learned of the location later, they were not running around Jerusalem in that first week following Jesus’ death proclaiming he had been raised. In fact, a critical reading of our sources will show that there were no sightings of Jesus in Jerusalem at all, but only in Galilee, other than perhaps the single experience of Mary Magdalene (John 20:11–18; Matthew 28:9–10).15 The matter of a first appearance to Mary Magdalene is always possible but she is not included in the list of first witnesses that Paul relates—perhaps since appealing to the testimony of a woman was considered less than convincing, as we will see below.
SORTING THROUGH THE SIGHTINGS OF JESUS
Sometimes clues show up from the most unexpected quarters. In 1886 a fragmentary eighth-century A.D. copy of the lost Gospel of Peter was found buried in the grave of a monk in Egypt. Eusebius, a fourth-century church historian, had mentioned its existence but regarded it with disfavor.16 It is written in the first person, claiming to be by Peter, but scholars generally place it in the late second century A.D. It narrates Jesus’ death and resurrection and scholars have debated without resolution whether it is dependent on our New Testament gospels or represents an independent tradition. It has a highly legendary flavor to it, with quite a few fantastic embellishments, so whether it has much historical value is debatable. At the end of the text the author seems to retell his empty tomb story in a much more straightforward way, for a second time in the text, but this time almost identical to Mark. It is as if he is passing along two versions, one highly fantastic and legendary, and the other more sober and realistic. In this second version Mary Magdalene and the other women arrive at Jesus’ tomb, finding it empty, and as in Mark, they encounter a young man who tells them Jesus is risen, and they flee the tomb frightened. The critical final lines of the text, before it breaks off, read: Now it was the last day of unleavened bread and many went to their homes because the feast was at an end. But we, the twelve disciples of the Lord, wept and mourned and each one, grieving for what had happened, returned to his own home. But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew took our nets and went to the sea. And there was with us Levi, the son of Alphaeus, whom the Lord . . . 17 This text is a bombshell in its implications. The Passover festival lasts for eight days and according to this text, rather than running around Jerusalem celebrating various appearances of Jesus, Peter and the rest of the disciples spent that week in Jerusalem weeping and mourning. At the end of the eight-day feast they returned home, to Galilee, still grieving for what had happened. Each went to his home, and Peter, with his brother Andrew, returned to their fishing business. This evidence—that the followers of Jesus returned home to Galilee in despair and mourning, and even went back to their businesses, and only sometime later, in Galilee, began to have faith that Jesus had been raised from the dead—rings true with the rest of our evidence when put in proper chronological order. The body of Jesus, resting in a tomb in Jerusalem, was no threat to their faith that Jesus, though dead, had been vindicated by God and was indeed the Messiah they had hoped for. That we even have such a text, running so counter to the reports of appearances of Jesus in Jerusalem the week following his death, given the subsequent embellishments of the gospels with multiple appearances of Jesus, is quite remarkable. The text also fits in with Mark, who mentions no appearances of Jesus, but also relates the tradition that the disciples returned to Galilee. It is more than likely that the Gospel of Peter, after this abrupt break, goes on to narrate a “sighting” of Jesus by Peter, Andrew, and the others on the Sea of Galilee, after they had returned to their fishing and given up hope. Strangely, we have a version of this story tacked on to the end of the gospel of John—an extra chapter, 21, like an appendix, after the original text had clearly ended with chapter 20. It has been edited to read as if Jesus had already been appearing to the disciples in Jerusalem and now just showed up in Galilee. But it is clear that it reflects an entirely independent source, preserving a story very similar to the ending of the Gospel of Peter. Peter has returned to the Sea of Galilee with a few others and he has gone back to fishing. They are out in the boat when they think they see Jesus, distantly on the shore. The way the story is related, even though the author of John has elaborated and embellished it, shows that this tradition of a return to Galilee, and a resuming of the fishing business, was a persistent one. Matthew follows Mark with his emphasis on Galilee as the place where the disciples first saw Jesus. What he relates is quite telling: Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. (Matthew 28:16–17) Presumably Matthew is associating a specific mountain as a place of visionary experience, much like his account in chapter 17 where Jesus appears as a transfigured shining being with Moses and Elijah. Many scholars have suggested that the account of the transfiguration, related also in Mark 9, is a misplaced resurrection story.18 But whether that is the case or not, what we learn here is that Matthew only knows a single story of Jesus appearing to his disciples. It takes place in Galilee—a “misty mountain” visionary experience—and some doubted! If we put all our “sighting” evidence together in chronological order from all our sources, including the evidence we have surveyed from Paul, we get an interesting breakdown, and one can clearly see how the stories expand and develop. What follows is a basic summary. Paul had his revelation of Christ approximately seven years after Jesus’ crucifixion. He claimed that he saw Jesus in a glorious heavenly body. Twice in his letter 1 Corinthians he equates his own experience with that of those who had seen Jesus earlier, based on traditions he had received: namely, Peter (Cephas), the Twelve, a group of five hundred at once, James, and the rest of the apostles: Last of all, as to one untimely born, he was seen also by me. (15:8) Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (9:1) He does not say when or where these earlier “sightings” by the others took place but since he mentions “the Twelve,” he might be referring to a time when Judas Iscariot, who was dead, had been replaced, which would mean several weeks had passed since the crucifixion of Jesus.19 Mark has no accounts of anyone seeing Jesus but the young man who meets the women at the tomb and tells them explicitly to go tell the disciples they will see Jesus in Galilee. Matthew relates that the women who first went to the tomb are told by an angel to go tell the disciples they will see Jesus in Galilee. As they run to convey this message they meet Jesus, who repeats the message, even more explicitly, “Tell my brothers to go to Galilee and there they will see me” (Matthew 28:10). Matthew closes his gospel with the scene on a mountain in Galilee, clearly somewhat later, in which the eleven disciples see him, though he mentions that some of them doubted it was Jesus. Luke writes that later on that first Sunday two men who were walking on a road outside Jerusalem met Jesus and shared a meal with him, at first not recognizing him. Subsequently he says that Peter then saw Jesus, but no details are given, only the report. That evening Jesus appears in the room where the eleven disciples are gathered and eats with them, showing them his physical body of flesh and bones and convincing them he is not a ghost or spirit. John says that Jesus first appears to Mary Magdalene, outside the tomb on Sunday morning. Later that evening he appears to the rest of the disciples, showing them his wounds, but Thomas is not present. Eight days later he appears again, where they are staying, and Thomas is able to see and even touch his wounds, which convinces Thomas he is not seeing a ghost. The Appendix to John (chapter 21) relates a separate story, unconnected to the main narrative and taking place in Galilee, where Peter and the other disciples have returned to their fishing but see Jesus on the shore from a distance. They come to land and he is cooking fish on a charcoal fire and they eat together. The Gospel of Peter ends with the disciples leaving Jerusalem a week after the crucifixion and returning to Galilee. Even though Mary Magdalene and the women have found the tomb empty, the disciples have no faith that Jesus is alive. They are in despair, mourning the death of Jesus, and they return to their fishing business. Unfortunately the text breaks off at that point. Two important observations emerge from this breakdown of sources. 1. The earlier texts (Mark, Matthew) agree that the disciples encountered Jesus only in Galilee sometime after the empty tomb was discovered. They are actually told to go to Galilee, where they will see him. Since they would not have left Jerusalem until after the eight-day Passover festival ended, their experiences would have been several weeks after Jesus’ death. Matthew’s account indicates that whatever encounter they had, it was more visionary in nature, and subject to doubt. As a kind of addendum to the Galilee tradition, even though they come later chronologically, the Gospel of Peter and the Appendix to John indicate that Peter and the others returned to their homes in Galilee and that Peter and his brother Andrew resumed their fishing business. 2. The later accounts (Luke and John) put Jesus’ appearances in Jerusalem as immediate, on the same day as the tomb is discovered empty. Jesus appears as a flesh-and-blood human being, shows his wounds, and eats meals to demonstrate that he is not a ghost or spirit. The strong impression one gets is that the empty tomb is directly tied to Jesus appearing and one is dealing here with the idea of resurrection as the literal resuscitation of a corpse. These dichotomies are quite striking: Where: Galilee or Jerusalem? When: immediately on the day the tomb was discovered or weeks thereafter? And what: visionary-like experiences or resuscitation of a physical corpse? The internal evidence is decidedly in favor of the Mark/Matthew tradition. To even imagine that the kinds of stories that Luke and John relate, set in Jerusalem, were circulating when Mark wrote his gospel is highly improbable. That Mark could publish the first gospel in Christian history and include no appearances of Jesus, with the focus on Galilee, not Jerusalem, pushes our evidence decidedly in favor of the Galilee option. It is also hard to imagine a text like the ending of the Gospel of Peter even existing unless it were related to a strong tradition of remembering the despair and sorrow of the disciples following Jesus’ death, as they returned to their vocations in Galilee, giving up hope. It is not an edifying story, but it is a realistic one, and it fits our earlier evidence. Some have argued that these differences in our gospel accounts are the expected result of reports from a variety of witnesses but all testify to the same essential fact—Jesus was raised from the dead. Sometimes the analogy of an automobile accident is suggested. When eyewitnesses report what they saw, each reflects a particular perspective, and there are always differences in details, but the essential facts related to the accident are usually the same. Such an analogy fails in the case of the gospels. First, there are no eyewitness accounts at all. Second, the reports we have don’t even agree on where the sightings of Jesus took place—Galilee or Jerusalem? What we have is a series of theologically motivated traditions written decades after the event, removed from both place and time, battling out competing stories of what happened after Jesus died. They cannot be harmonized. Luke even has Jesus telling the eleven apostles that they are not to leave Jerusalem, which closes the door on even the possibility of subsequent appearances of Jesus in Galilee as alluded to in Mark and recorded in Matthew (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:3–4). Paul is a decisive witness for this reason. He does claim to have seen something firsthand, and he equates his “sighting” experiences with those of Peter, James, and the rest of the apostles, based on his personal acquaintance with them. Given his view of resurrection of the dead, as being reclothed in a glorious heavenly body, he would have found the emphasis on flesh and bones meaningless. When Paul says Jesus was “buried” he is indicating that he knows the tradition of Jesus’ body being put in a tomb (1 Corinthians 15:4). His point is to emphasize that Jesus truly was dead and buried. What was then “raised on the third day,” just as in the Gabriel Revelation, was not the perishable mortal body but a new spiritual body, no longer “flesh and blood,” the old body having been shed like discarded clothing (1 Corinthians 15:42–50; 52–54). Jesus’ own teaching about resurrection, preserved in the Q source, as we have seen, emphasizes an angelic-like transformation in which even the sexual distinctions between male and female are obsolete (Luke 20:34–36). This parallels precisely Paul’s view of resurrection. So why does this shift from Galilee to Jerusalem come about in Luke and John? And why their insistence on connecting the empty tomb with the literal appearances of Jesus as revived from the dead in the resuscitated corpse that had been buried? I think we can assume that the reasons were largely apologetic. These texts come late in the first century and even in the early second century. Sophisticated Greek critics of Christianity such as Lucian, Trypho, and Celsus were on the horizon.20 Their common charge was that Christianity thrived only among the ignorant, simple-minded, and gullible classes of society, who were led astray by the foolish tales of deluded women and hallucinations passed off as “visions.”21 There were also similar, rival tales of other “divine men” circulating, such as Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean wonder worker, born about the same time as Jesus in Asia Minor, who traveled throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. According to his followers, Zeus fathered Apollonius, so he, like Jesus, was a “Son of God.” According to his biographies or “gospels,” he healed the sick, raised the dead, and ascended bodily into heaven.22 Various versions of Apollonius’s death were passed along, including one where he was arrested by persecutors, set himself free, and was taken up from the earth into heaven. According to another story he appeared mysteriously to a doubtful follower after his death and convinced him of the doctrine of immortality. A fascinating stone inscription containing the following epigram has turned up in Asia Minor not far from Tarsus, where Paul grew up: This man, named after Apollo and shining forth Tyana, Extinguished the fault of men. The tomb in Tyana (received) his body, But in truth heaven received him So he might drive out the pains from men.23 As with Jesus there were debates among his devotees as to whether his body remained in a tomb or whether he was assumed bodily into heaven. The earlythird-century Roman emperor Caracalla built a shrine to Apollonius, and Caracalla’s successor, the emperor Alexander Severus, is alleged to have had a private shrine in which the images of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ, and Apollonius were given divine honors.24 If Jesus’ followers came to believe in his resurrection only after a period of despair, and in Galilee, far removed from the empty tomb in Jerusalem, based on visionary experiences, they were surely open to the charge that the entire phenomenon was mass hallucination. That Matthew, who gives us our first and earliest account of such a group appearance, says it took place on a mountain but that some of the eleven disciples doubted, while others believed, was clearly quite problematic for Luke and for John, writing a generation later (Matthew 28:17). That is also why Luke, alone of our four gospels records a scene in which Jesus ascends bodily from the earth, taken away in a cloud from the Mount of Olives, just east of Jerusalem, as the eleven apostles stand gazing into the sky (Acts 1:9– 10). To leave him bodily on earth, eating and drinking, in his physical form, simply would not do, since one would presume that like others “raised from the dead” by Jesus, he would have eventually died again as he grew older. And John, although he has no ascension scene per se, records that Jesus said that he was “ascending to where he was before” (John 6:62). These New Testament gospels and the book of Acts take us decades beyond Paul, into a time and place that he never lived to see. It is deeply ironic that Paul is in some ways the shadow behind all four of our gospels, yet to understand Paul we need to put the gospels aside, which means, at least in terms of sources, to learn to read the New Testament backward. If we can resist making assumptions and pick up Paul’s letters with fresh eyes, we will capture an amazing moment in time, for which he is our only firsthand source. We will learn how Paul transformed the original Christianity into a new religion that claimed to abrogate and supersede the “old” by moving everything from earth to heaven.
FOUR: LAST BUT NOT LEAST
Paul believed that God had selected him before his birth for a singular and pivotal mission that would determine the future of the cosmos. Though Jesus had directly chosen the twelve apostles, and in that order of things Paul came after them, God’s choosing him before birth would actually make Paul the first apostle. Paul was further convinced that his specific role in God’s plan of salvation was predicted in various prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, just as was the role of Christ. Although Jesus had instructed the twelve apostles over a period of three years, Paul did not believe that he had disclosed to them the hidden mystery of God’s secret plan, nor revealed to them “the Announcement” that Paul referred to as “my Gospel.” That came later, when God chose to reveal his Son, the heavenly glorified Christ, to Paul and to Paul alone: But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia. (Galatians 1:15–17) Arabia, as Paul uses the term here, refers to the desert area south of the Land of Israel, where Mount Sinai was located (Galatians 4:25). This rather extraordinary decision of Paul, to go to Arabia, is not mentioned at all in the book of Acts, where Paul heads up to Jerusalem right after his Damascus road revelation and even meets the apostles—something Paul swears was absolutely not the case (Acts 9:26–28). Either the author of Acts knows nothing about the Arabian sojourn, or he is so keen to have Paul linked with the Jerusalem apostles that he purposely ignores it. So why did Paul go to Arabia? Mount Sinai, also known as Mount Horeb, is called the “mountain of God” in the Torah. It was the sacred place, the “holy ground” where God first spoke to Moses in a burning bush, giving him his critical mission to gather the people of Israel and bring them into the Promised Land. It was also on this mountain, over a forty-day period, that God delivered to Moses the revelation of the Torah (Exodus 3:1–6; 34:27–28). When Moses came down from the mountain the skin of his face was glowing, because he had been talking directly with God, exposed to God’s glory (Exodus 34:29). As a result of this revelation Moses made a covenant between God and the people of Israel. The covenant and the giving of the Torah became the foundational pillars of Judaism, as Paul points out (Romans 9:4). Mount Sinai was also the place to which the prophet Elijah retreated, and it was there, in a cave in the same mountain, that he had his own extraordinary encounter with God, speaking with him face-to-face and also witnessing God’s glory (1 Kings 19:1–18). It was neither accident nor arbitrary choice that drove Paul into the Arabian desert immediately after he received his initial vision of Christ. Paul traveled to that desolate area not to confer with any human being, but to hear directly from Jesus Christ: “For I would have you know brethren, that the Gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from a man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12). Paul doesn’t say how long he stayed in Arabia, but he does note that it was three years after his vision of Christ when he finally went up to Jerusalem to meet Peter and James (Galatians 1:18). That visit appears to have been a clandestine one, in that he swears he did not meet any of the other apostles, only these two leaders. One must assume he wanted to convey to them his own experience of seeing Christ and to gain, if possible, some measure of acceptance from them. It is certainly not far-fetched to imagine that Paul spent his time in Arabia in isolation, perhaps at one of the mountains that he identified as Sinai, praying, meditating, and trying to sort through his dramatic experiences. Like the Twelve he had his own “three years” with Jesus—but now as the glorified heavenly Christ! In 2 Corinthians 12 Paul mentions an ecstatic experience that he had “fourteen years ago” in which he was taken up into the heavenly realms, and even entered paradise, seeing and hearing things that were so extraordinary he was not permitted to reveal them. He uses the third person, for irony’s sake, but in the context he is obviously talking about himself: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2– 4) The idea of ascending to the third, or highest, level of heaven and gazing upon the glory of God was viewed within the mystical Jewish circles of Paul’s day as the highest and most extraordinary experience a human could have.1 Moses alone had been allowed to ascend Mount Sinai and communicate directly with God and Elijah had been taken up to heaven in a fiery heavenly chariot (Exodus 24:15–18; 2 Kings 2:11–12). In the two centuries before Paul’s time, texts like the Similitudes of Enoch, 2 (Slavonic) Enoch, and the Ascension of Isaiah, in which Enoch and Isaiah ascend to the highest heaven, gaze upon God’s throne, and experience a transformed glorification, were widely circulated. We don’t know the precise year Paul writes this report in this section of 2 Corinthians, but it falls into the general range of his time in Arabia.2 One should not imagine Paul’s “conversion” as necessarily a sudden one-time event on a single day, as reported in the book of Acts. What he calls his “revelation of Jesus Christ” was something he was “taught,” which implies a period of heavenly tutoring that would have involved multiple “visions and revelations of the Lord” (Galatians 1:12; 2 Corinthians 12:1). This particular ascent experience was one of many visions and revelations he had received, and his experiences were so extraordinary that there was some danger that he would fall victim to pride— knowing that he among all human beings had been allowed to see and hear such forbidden mysteries. Consequently, Christ allowed a messenger (Greek angelos) of Satan to harass Paul with some kind of physical affliction he describes: And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:8–9) Presumably Paul refers to some kind of physical disability, and speculations as to its nature read like the multiple entries in a medical encyclopedia—epilepsy, stuttering, extreme nearsightedness, migraine headaches, and colic, to name a few.3 Since Paul explicitly says the thorn in the flesh was an “angel” of Satan, it is more likely that he refers to a demonic attack of some type—perhaps causing him to be tempted in some way.4 This extraordinary experience of being taken to heaven and presumably seeing both the glory of God as well as Jesus Christ in his glorified state put Paul among a select privileged few in the history of ancient Israel and in his mind this experience superseded anything Peter, James, and the rest of the apostles had experienced with Jesus on earth. One could safely say that Paul would have seen this privileged experience as surpassing anything any human being had ever received. In effect, Paul had tasted in a proleptic way the glorification that would be revealed at the second coming of Jesus in the clouds of heaven.
MOSES AND ELIJAH AT MOUNT SINAI
What makes it all the more likely that Paul’s choice of going away into Arabia had to do with Moses and Elijah is that he discusses the Mount Sinai revelations of both of them in his letters (2 Corinthians 3:4–11; Romans 11:2–5). These are not passing references that merely indicate Paul’s familiarity with biblical narratives. He draws specific parallels between the message and mission that he received by revelation from Christ and the roles of Moses and Elijah in their own times. Pairing these two particular figures is not accidental. They were considered the two greatest prophets of Israel’s past, and the work of each was to be repeated in some fashion in the Last Days. There are prophecies in the Hebrew Bible about a “Prophet like Moses” appearing once again, as well as a second “Elijah,” who would restore the people of Israel just before the final Day of Judgment (Deuteronomy 18:15–18; Malachi 4:5–6). Various Jewish apocalyptic groups in the time of Jesus expected both Moses-and Elijah-like figures to manifest themselves in the Last Days.5 The gospel of Mark reports an extraordinary experience in the life of Jesus when he and three of his disciples, Peter, James, and John, are “on a high mountain.” They see Jesus “transfigured” before their eyes, so that his body and clothing are gleaming white, and standing beside him are Moses and Elijah— indicating that the Last Days had indeed arrived (Mark 9:2–8). By tracing the journeys of Moses and Elijah to the Arabian area of the Sinai desert, quite literally, Paul was paralleling his own extraordinary revelations with those of the two greatest Hebrew prophets. He is quite specific about this point. Moses saw the extraordinary glory of God at Mount Sinai, he received the revelation of the Torah, and he inaugurated the covenant between God and the nation of Israel. Paul likewise believed that he saw the glory of God—in the face of Christ, that he received the Torah of Christ, and that he became the administrator of God’s new covenant with a new spiritual Israel. In view of the new, all that was old was now fading and passing away. Paul refers to the covenant that Moses brought as the “dispensation of death,” contrasting it to the new covenant that he calls the “dispensation of the Spirit”: “Now if the dispensation of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such splendor that the Israelites could not look at Moses’s face because of its brightness, fading as this was, will not the dispensation of the Spirit be attended with greater splendor?” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). Indeed, this “greater splendor” of the new covenant is so much more brilliant that “once it comes, what once had splendor has come to have no splendor at all, because of the splendor that surpasses it” (2 Corinthians 3:10). Paul then makes the startling assertion that God has hardened the minds of the Jewish people so that when they “hear Moses read,” the reading of the Torah actually becomes a veil to keep them from seeing the splendor of Christ! (2 Corinthians 3:14–15). One has to appreciate how utterly alien this idea is within Judaism. The reading and study of the Torah was considered the central duty and occupation of every faithful Jew: Rabbi Hillel said: Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and bringing them close to the Torah. (Pirke Avot 1:12) Rabbi Shammai said: Make your study of the Torah a fixed habit. Say little and do much, and receive all men with a cheerful face. (Pirke Avot 1:15)6 According to the New Testament, Josephus, Philo, and other contemporary sources, the Torah was read regularly in synagogues throughout the Roman world and both Jesus and his Jerusalem apostles participated in these activities in the homeland, as did the apostles in the Diaspora—the term for Jews who were living outside the Land of Israel.7 According to Paul, this listening to Moses is the very problem at the root of Jewish unbelief in Jesus. If one lays aside the Torah and turns to Christ, the veil is suddenly removed and those who were blinded by the Torah of Moses can see the true glory of God in the face of Christ: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Paul links the Spirit of Christ, the glory of Christ made in the image of God, and the ongoing transformation of those who are in Christ from one degree of glory to another. This cluster of ideas is consistent in all Paul’s letters, as we have seen. Paul’s Gospel is the revelation of the hidden mystery that God is creating a family of glorified Spirit-beings. That message necessitates a new covenant or Torah of Christ and a newly formed people of Israel—now defined by the Spirit and no longer by the “flesh.” Elijah’s Sinai revelation came much later than Moses’s. The nation as a whole had turned to idolatry during the reign of the infamous and wicked king Ahab and his wife, Jezebel. Elijah was deeply discouraged and had reached the point of thinking that he alone was left as a devoted worshipper of God. His journey to Sinai was not a casual one, but a panicked flight to escape arrest and execution by the king. His intention was to encounter God at the mountain, as Moses had once done, and lay before him his desperate plight (1 Kings 19). Paul quotes Elijah’s complaint as well as God’s revelations to him and draws a startling parallel to his own Gospel message and mission: Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” But what is God’s reply to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. (Romans 11:2–4) Paul makes use of this Elijah story to address one of the most obvious questions arising from his contention that his new covenant Gospel has superseded the Sinai revelation given to Moses. What about God’s promises to the nation of Israel? What about the great majority of the Jewish people who had not “turned to Christ” but were living their lives based on the Torah revelation of Moses at Sinai? Since God had chosen them, given them the Torah, and made a covenant with them, had he suddenly changed course and rejected his own people? At issue was the faithfulness of God. Paul states unequivocally that God has not rejected the Jewish people. He insists that the promises made to them are irrevocable (Romans 11:1, 29). But then he adds, based on the Elijah story, that the great majority of Jews, whom he calls “Israel according to the flesh,” have been broken off like unfruitful branches of an olive tree because of their “unbelief,” just as in the days of Elijah, leaving only a tiny “remnant” that God has “chosen by grace.” The catch here is the word “unbelief.” Paul does not mean that those “broken off” had rejected God and disregarded the Torah, as had those idolatrous Israelites in the days of Elijah. Their “transgression,” as Paul calls it, was that they did not believe in Christ! God had purposely hardened their hearts in order that their failure could open the way for the salvation to come to the Gentiles (Romans 11:7–12). Paul compares these Gentiles to “wild olive branches” who had no connection to the tree of Israel but could be grafted in through their faith in Christ (Romans 11:17). This new covenant nation of Israel is constituted wholly of those who are united with Christ through his Spirit, having nothing to do with physical pedigree. Once again, Paul’s view is utterly alien to contemporary Jewish interpretations of Israel’s future. The only reference to a “new covenant” in the entire Hebrew Bible is from the prophet Jeremiah. The term is perhaps more properly translated as a “re-newed” covenant, as it certainly does not imply any repudiation of the Torah of Moses or of the Jewish people, but quite the opposite. What Jeremiah envisions is a renewal of the Torah of Moses with the reconstituted nation of Israel when all twelve tribes return to the Land of Israel in the messianic age (Jeremiah 31:31–37). This is the idea we see reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as in the teachings of Jesus preserved in the Q source, where he appoints the twelve apostles to sit on thrones, one over each of the tribes of a regathered people of Israel.8 There is a place for Gentiles in this prophetic view of the age of the Messiah, not as replacements for the Jewish people, but as God-fearers who stand in partnership with Israel. The vision is that God’s house will be a “house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:6–7). We have no sure way of knowing what Paul experienced in his sojourn in Arabia, but the connections with Moses and Elijah seem too direct to ignore. There is a sense in which Paul, fortified with the extraordinary revelations he says he received from Christ, thinks of himself as fulfilling the roles of a new Moses and a new Elijah. Like a Moses figure, he became the mediator of a new covenant, drawing together a new nation of Israel defined by faith in Christ and under the Torah of Christ. Like an Elijah figure, Paul believed that his proclamation of his gospel would draw together the remnant group that God was choosing in the Last Days. Paul’s Moses-and Elijah-like experiences in Arabia were foundational as he began his work as an apostle, but he came to believe, based on his continued experiences and his further revelations, that he had been chosen from birth for something far greater. Much like a “second Christ,” he had been appointed by God to fill the key role that would usher in the return of Christ. Unless and until Paul fulfilled his special role as an apostle, those Israelites who had rejected Christ would remain in unbelief, and the end of the age would not arrive.
A SECOND “CHRIST”
Paul calls himself “an apostle of the Gentiles” and this unique role was one that he believed gave him a special and essential place in the plan of God (Romans 11:13). It was the reason he was born and it was for this mission that he had been chosen by God: But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood. (Galatians 1:15–16) Paul says that he was “called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God” in order to “bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the Gentiles” (Romans 1:1–5). He defines his gospel as the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now being made known to the Gentiles to bring about the obedience of faith (Romans 16:25–26). When Paul finally did have his official public audience before James, Peter, and the Jerusalem apostles fourteen years after he had already begun his work as an apostle, he was keen to get their agreement that he alone would be entrusted with the mission to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:7–8). This was no mere practical division of labor, at least in Paul’s mind. He was convinced that his role was foretold in the Hebrew Prophets, and like the role of Christ, was essential to God’s plan of salvation for humankind. Paul understood the mission of Christ, and by extension that of James and the twelve apostles, in a very particular way, intimately paired with that of his own calling as an apostle to the Gentiles. God, in sending his Son to the world, had inaugurated a two-stage plan. Stage one was fulfilled by Jesus, but stage two had been laid at the feet of Paul. Jesus had been “born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem those who were under the Law”—Paul’s terms for the Jews or Israelites (Galatians 4:4–5). Jesus was an Israelite of the tribe of Judah of the lineage of David and he was sent to the Jewish people: “For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy” (Romans 15:8–9). This is a surprising declaration. Paul says here that Jesus was sent to the Jews to fulfill God’s promises about sending the Messiah, but that God’s ultimate plan was that the Gentiles would come to glorify God. That second stage Christ would also fulfill, but only through the apostle Paul as his chosen “instrument.” Paul follows this statement with a string of quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures that foresee the role of the Messiah as reaching the Gentiles and causing them to turn in praise to the One God of Israel. He includes a verse from Isaiah 11 that is particularly straightforward: “The root of Jesse shall come, he who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope” (Romans 15:12). The “root of Jesse” is a reference to the Messiah of the line of King David, whose father’s name was Jesse. Notice, this Messiah actually rises to rule the Gentiles, who come to hope in him—their resurrected Lord! This is what Paul regularly refers to as “the obedience of faith” among the nations (Romans 16:26). But Jesus never went to the Gentiles, having been sent as a “servant to the circumcised.” Even though Jesus did on occasion deal with non-Jews who showed extraordinary faith, we have no record of Jesus leading any movement to reach Gentiles. In fact, there are several strands of gospel tradition in which he explicitly avoids such a mission (Mark 7:27; Matthew 10:5; 15:24). Jesus’ twelve apostles were commissioned to extend Jesus’ work to reach those Israelites scattered throughout the world. The letter we have in the New Testament from James is addressed “to the Twelve tribes of the Diaspora” (James 1:1). Peter’s first letter is likewise addressed to “the exiles of the Diaspora.” It is here that Paul finds his unique and pivotal role. Paul understands his mission as extending and advancing the work that Jesus inaugurated in his lifetime, but never completed. If the Messiah’s ultimate purpose is to rule over the Gentiles, what Paul calls the “reconciliation of the world,” causing them to turn to God, how can this goal ever be accomplished? Peter and the Twelve had already agreed with Paul that they would go “to the circumcision”—so what about the rest of the world? As Paul fulfills this messianic mission he understands himself to be performing the work of Christ. In that sense Paul is an extension of Christ, finishing up the main task of the Messiah as a kind of “second Christ.” He explains this complicated dynamic in the following way: “[God gave me grace] to be a servant of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the of ering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:16). Here Paul is acting in behalf of Christ and his mission is to function like a priest who brings an offering to God—in this case the offering is the “obedience of the Gentiles,” which fulfills the messianic mission of Jesus. Paul says he will not boast of anything in this regard “except what Christ has worked through me, to win obedience from the Gentiles” (Romans 15:18). In Paul’s mind his work is really Christ’s work and whatever he does is as an extension of Christ, now acting in the world through him. In the same way he can tell the Corinthians to expel the man living with his stepmother in a gathering at which his Spirit would be present—everything that Paul did he attributed to Christ working through him, and his commands were thus the “commands of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 14:37). Paul believed that his calling and his mission to the Gentiles were witnessed in the Hebrew Prophets, long before his birth (Romans 15:9–12). His was a destined role, backed up by the scriptures and his own visionary experiences. There are various passages in the Hebrew Bible that indicate a time when the Gentiles will turn to the God of Israel (Isaiah 11:10). Notice these lines in particular from one of Isaiah’s passages about a “Servant” of Yahweh who will serve as an agent to bring light to the Gentiles: Listen to me you coastlands, and hearken you Gentiles After a long time it will happen. From my mother’s womb he has called my name. He has made my mouth a sharp sword, and he has hidden me under the shadow of his hand; He has made me a chosen shaft . . . Behold I have given you for the covenant of a race, for a light to the Gentiles, That you should be for salvation to the end of the earth. (Isaiah 49:1–6) The personal way in which this passage addresses one who would specifically be designated from his mother’s womb to preach a message that would bring light to the Gentiles and result in the salvation of the earth likely drew Paul’s attention. He quotes the passage directly in 2 Corinthians 6:2 (Isaiah 49:1–2, 6) in justifying his special “ministry.” Apparently some at Corinth had questioned his authority, suggesting that he needed “letters of recommendation,” presumably from James or the Jerusalem apostles, to vouch for his claims (2 Corinthians 3:1–3). His response was that their Spirit-led lives are his “letters” and his sufferings and hardships are his commendation, including beatings, imprisonments, poverty, and hunger (2 Corinthians 6:4–9). This also fits well with Isaiah 49, where this servant who goes to the Gentiles is “deeply despised, abhorred by the Gentiles,” but nonetheless becomes a “covenant to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:7–8).9 What Paul expected was that his priestly service of turning thousands of Gentiles to the God of Israel would cause some of those Israelites who rejected Christ to be jealous: Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? (Romans 11:13–15) According to Paul, God had purposely “hardened” the majority of the Jewish people so that they would temporarily reject Christ, so that he, Paul, could then take his gospel message to the Gentile world—thus reconciling the world to God and completing the work of Christ. According to Paul, this was God’s secret plan: “Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25). This was Paul’s way of accounting for the fact that the Jewish people as a whole had not accepted Jesus as Messiah but were continuing to practice the Torah of Moses. He had come to believe that everything depended on him and thus he set his travel itinerary to travel west, to Rome and finally even to Spain—so that he could literally say that he had reached to the ends of the earth, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy (Romans 15:23–29). Paul saw his suffering in the world as an extension of the redemptive suffering of Christ, who was God’s Suffering Servant to the Israelites. At one point, when pressed hard by some of his opponents in Galatia, he declares: “Henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear on my body the wounds [stigmata] of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). He saw his own beatings, lashings, and stoning as equivalent to the wounds Jesus suffered, and as ample testimony to his special apostolic role (2 Corinthians 11:23–25). When Paul first began to work in the provinces of Asia Minor and Greece in the early 50s A.D., he fully expected to live to see the return of Christ and the end of the age. In his earlier letters he writes in the first person of how “we who are alive” at that time will be lifted up into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17). By the 60s A.D., when he had been imprisoned in Rome, he began to anticipate that his own life, like that of Christ, “would be poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith” (Philippians 2:17). The language here is difficult to translate, but Paul seems to be saying that as a priest he will bring the “faith” of his Gentile followers as an offering to God with the pouring of his own blood over it. He goes on to say, in the same letter to the Philippians, that he anticipates dying and being resurrected just as Christ had done: For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things . . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain being raised up out from [among] the dead. (Philippians 3:8b, 10) Even though this imitative language has generally been taken as generic, that is, as applicable to the suffering of any follower of Christ, in this context Paul has been contemplating his own immediate death, which he describes as “departing to be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23). He also uses a rare compound verb, meaning “to be raised up out of,” found nowhere else in Jewish or Christian writings. In the same way he had written to the Corinthians that as an apostle he was “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus” and “being given up to death for Jesus’ sake,” so that life would come to them (2 Corinthians 4:10–12). He is comparing his own state of suffering, for the sake of his followers, with that of Jesus. It is in this context that he speaks of being “absent from the body” but “present with the Lord,” again speaking of his suffering and death (2 Corinthians 5:6–9). The two passages are closely parallel and they seem to refer to Paul alone. Paul refers to those who die “in Christ” before the return of Jesus as the “dead in Christ,” or those who have “fallen asleep.” This is in keeping with the Hebrew view that the dead “sleep in the dust” (1 Thessalonians 4:13; 1 Corinthians 15:20; Daniel 12:2). They do not “depart” to be with Christ when they die but they rise up to meet him, literally, “in the air,” at his coming, raised from the dead in their newly glorified bodies: “And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16b–17).10 I am convinced, as Albert Schweitzer suggested, that Paul had come to believe in the latter years of his life that he would likely not live to see the return of Christ but that he was to receive a special reward immediately upon his death.11 Unlike others who “sleep in Christ,” awaiting the resurrection at Christ’s coming, Paul seems to believe that he will be raised up immediately out of Hades and taken to join Christ in heaven—being glorified together with him, as he has suffered and died with him. It is possible that he based this assurance of “departing to be with Christ” upon the special revelation he had when he was taken up into the third heaven and entered paradise. He indicates that he saw and heard things in that experience that he was not permitted to reveal (2 Corinthians 12:4). We have no record of Paul’s last years, assuming he was executed during the reign of Nero, perhaps in A.D. 64 during the great persecution at Rome. Our last authentic letters are Philippians and Philemon, written most likely when he was being held under guard in Rome, perhaps between A.D. 60 and 62. He seems to contemplate his death, but also anticipates some possibility of his release.12 Given Paul’s extraordinary understanding of his special calling as an apostle, destined for a mission to the Gentiles ordained by God even before his birth, let’s examine the unique message that he preached. Paul offered a new and different message—a “revelation of Jesus Christ” that had now been revealed only to him as the Thirteenth Apostle—last but not least. Paul transformed the message of Jesus from earth to heaven. In the following chapters we will see to what extent he redefined the role of the Messiah, the kingdom of God, the people of Israel, and the revelation of Torah to launch his brand of Christianity on a collision course with Judaism and pave the way for a new and separate Christian faith
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