Allison, Dale C., Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Criticism, History

 Part I. Setting the Stage 1 

1. Overture 3 

2. Options 8 

Part II. Historical-Critical Studies 23 

3. Formulae and Confessions 25 

4. Appearances and Christophanies 46 

5. The Story of the Tomb: Friday 94 

6. The Story of the Tomb: Sunday 116 

7. Resurrected Holy Ones? 167 

8. Rudolf Pesch Redivivus? 183 

Part III. Thinking with Parallels 207 

9. Apparitions: Characteristics and Correlations 209 

10. Visions: Protests and Proposals 236 

11. Enduring Bonds 262 12. Rainbow Body 272 

13. Cessationism and Seeing Jesus 286 

14. Zeitoun and Seeing Mary 294 

Part IV. Analysis and Reflections 301 

15. Some Tenuous Arguments: Apologetical 303 

16. Some Tenuous Arguments: Skeptical 323 

17. Inferences and Competing Stories 336 

18. Overreach and Modest Results

FOREWORD 

My first book, a revision of my doctoral dissertation, contained an excursus on the resurrection of Jesus.1 There I briefly staked out a proposal that, twenty years later, I unfolded in a lengthy chapter in another book.2 That chapter is the Grundschrift for the present volume. I have rewritten much, made corrections, added sections, dropped sections,3 composed fresh chapters,4 enlarged old chapters,5 responded to criticism, honed earlier arguments, discarded earlier arguments, formulated new arguments, revised conclusions, and taken into account as much of the literature, from whatever time or place, as I could manage to read.6 The present treatment is, as a result, more than three times the length of its predecessor. I heartily thank those who have read and commented on portions of this manuscript, conversed with me about its topics, or otherwise helped me to bring it to completion: Kristine Allison, John Allison, Kathy Anderson, Clifton Black, Duncan Burns, Donagh Coleman, Tucker Ferda, Chuck Hughes, Ed Kelly, Chris Kettler, Mike Licona, Joel Marcus, Yee Jee Park, George Parsenios, Jeremiah Ravindranath, Heiner Schwenke, Michael Thate, and Stephen Wykstra (who saved me from one especially egregious gaffe). I am further grateful to reviewers of and commentators on my earlier work, above all to William Lane Craig, Stephen Davis, and Gary Habermas, who produced thoughtful responses for a meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.7 I am delighted to dedicate this book to Warren Farha, whom I have known now for forty-five years. We have shared the best of times and the worst of times. Even though he will judge that I have, in this book, gone astray on multiple critical issues, it should matter little. He will, like Jesus, freely forgive me for whatever mistakes he deems me to have made and for whatever heresies he thinks I have promulgated. Friendship covers a multitude of sins. Warren long ago counselled me, when I was fretting over the theological consequences of my earliest work, that I should follow the evidence wherever it leads and whatever the fallout. I have often recalled that sagacious counsel, not least of all in writing this book.

Part I: Setting the Stage

 

Chapter 1: Overture

Authors of books on Jesus’ resurrection often set for themselves one of two tasks. Either they seek to establish, with some assurance, or even beyond a reasonable doubt, that God raised Jesus from the dead, or they seek to establish, with some assurance, or beyond a reasonable doubt, that God did no such thing. The arguments of the former serve to defend deeply held religious convictions. The arguments of the latter aim to dismantle a faith the writers reject or perhaps even loathe. The present volume, which is an exercise in the limits of historical criticism, has a less assertive, more humble agenda. This is not because I am, in my religious sympathies, equidistant from the two entrenched camps—I believe that the disciples saw Jesus and that he saw them, and next Easter will find me in church—but because I am persuaded that neither side can do what it claims to have done. The following chapters offer nothing sensationalistic. They collect data, make observations, pose questions, develop arguments, and offer suggestions and speculations about this and that. I have no missionary spirit and so no inclination to advise readers as to what religious beliefs they should or should not hold. I am neither belligerent Bible smasher nor enthusiastic evangelist, neither fullfledged skeptic nor gung-ho defender of the faith. I am not assailing the Christian citadel from without, nor am I manning the apologetical barricades under the banner of resurrection. I am rather an embedded reporter, making observations on the unending battle and proffering some provisional judgments, hoping along the way to learn some things and to raise issues others might find worth pursuing. Probably most readers will close this book with the same beliefs they held when they opened it. It is truly hard to change one’s mind about emotionally charged subjects. We may profess to love the truth, but none of us doggedly wants the truth in the way that a drowning person desperately, unrelentingly struggles for air. What we really long for, if we are candid, is justification of what we already believe. Julian Baggini has observed: Chapter 1 Overture 4 THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS When…an atheist comes across a clever new version of an argument for the existence of God which she cannot refute, she does not say “Ah! So now I must believe in God!” Rather, she says, “That’s clever. There must be something wrong with it. Give me time and I’ll find out what that is.” Similarly, a theist will not lose her belief just because she cannot refute an argument for atheism. Rather, that argument will simply become a challenge to be met in due course.1 Because the point holds equally for believers and unbelievers in Jesus’ resurrection, I have, while writing this book, more than once recalled John Locke’s famous words: “It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.”2 Locke’s modest aim is my aspiration. Many, wanting more from a book on the resurrection than this, and craving some grand, integrating explanation of everything rather than a dispatch from a halfway house on an unfinished journey, will be disappointed. Still others may be frustrated, as were some who, after reading an earlier work of mine on this subject, contacted me in order to ask, But what do you really think? The question presupposes that I have a candid, crystal-clear answer. I do not. This is in part because my religious convictions, which continue to evolve with time, are idiosyncratic and elude the usual theological cartography. I am a Christian whose favorite spiritual writer is Aldous Huxley in his Neo-Vedanta stage. I am a Protestant whose favorite theologians—Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, Gregory Palamas—are not Protestant. And I am a Presbyterian, teaching at a Presbyterian Seminary, who feels more intellectual affinity with Pascal and William James than with John Calvin or any of his Reformed followers. I am, furthermore, not consistently “liberal” or “conservative” but sometimes the one, sometimes the other, and just as often neither. I am, more significantly, a multiple personality. One self is pious. He says his prayers, goes to church, and tries to think theologically. His conscience is the New Testament. He venerates the great mystics, is at home in the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, and writes books such as The Luminous Dusk and Night Comes. This character, however, lives alongside a critical, hard-hearted historian who knows how tough it is to apprehend the past, and how easy it is for one’s theological patriotism to get in the way. He knows that the fear of self-deception is the beginning of wisdom, and that “Abandon all certainty, ye who enter here” is the sign over the door to history. This character, an advocate of fallibilism, is not ashamed to confess ignorance more than now and then; and he can applaud when Gerd Lüdemann, a professed atheist, complains that religious prejudice has led this or that Christian historian astray. This subpersonality, who frets that this book is, at multiple points, not skeptical enough, frequently recalls the words of the wonderful Origen: “The endeavor to show, with regard to almost any history, however true, that it actually occurred… is one of the most difficult undertakings that can be attempted, and is in some instances an impossibility.”3 Another inner voice, near kin to the wary historian, belongs to the I Don’t Know Club. He is relentlessly skeptical about almost everything, including know-it-all skepticism. Solum certum nihil esse certi: The only thing certain is that nothing is certain. Insisting on epistemic humility, he loathes all species of dogmatism. He refuses to cash anyone’s ideological check. He scoffs at the notion that all problems are conveniently mind-sized. He knows that people are always more often in error than they are in doubt, and that he cannot be the exception. He idolizes the wise Socrates, who knew that he knew nothing. And he has never forgotten the haunting entry in Kierkegaard’s Journal: “My doubt is terrible.—Nothing can withstand it—it is a cursed hunger and I can swallow up every argument, every consolation and sedative—I rush at 50,000 miles a second through every obstacle.”4 Along with T. H. Huxley, this skeptical chap ranks the invention of doubt beside the invention of fire. He espouses not only an apophatic theology but an all-encompassing apophasis: everything—space, time, gravity, quarks, consciousness, memory, placebos, hypnosis, emergent properties, quantum entanglement, the laws of nature, the fine structure constant, sudden savant syndrome, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, whatever—is, in the last analysis, dark, enigmatic, mysterious. The cloud of unknowing hangs low over the whole world. Neti neti. Our prefrontal cortex may be oversized, and our scientific triumphs may be breath-taking, yet we remain mammals, which means that we own mammalian brains, and all such brains are severely bounded. This voice regularly recites to his alternates the words of William James: “We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”5 Yet another inner self is a Fortean. He has little faith in the suffocating citadels of normality. He is incredulous that anybody’s worldview should be the final arbiter of reality. Proselytizing rationalists, who have the explanation for everything in their all-purpose, reductionistic bag of tricks, impress him no more than the magician who pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Rejecting the prevalent materialistic epistocracy, this interior self believes that, to the informed and fair-minded, the parapsychologists made their basic case long ago,6 and further that, if we throw away the reducing goggles of this or that dogmatic ideology, human experience is teeming with puzzling anomalies and indeed fantastic absurdities.7 He holds that reality, full of magical surprises, does not obediently stay between the lines drawn by the self-appointed gurus of consensus reality. It rather transgresses them regularly, exhibiting, as Chesterton put it, “an exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions.”8 This countercultural fellow does not believe that the world is a reasonable place in which everything has a reasonable explanation. These four characters have been engaged in earnest yet affable debate for decades. Each remains, to the present day, unvanquished, and no single character has become superordinate. On many issues, then, I am not of one mind but several. That is why the present volume sincerely reflects not one mind but several. I let this book go with a sense of its prodigious inadequacy. Doing serious history is a laborious task ideally undertaken at leisure, with all else to the side. My many academic and personal responsibilities, however, have not permitted such plodding luxury. I have accordingly typed and retyped these pages far too quickly and far less often than prudence advised. I am, moreover, keenly aware of my multiple limitations in the face of the historically complex, philosophically dense, theologically momentous, and religiously sensitive issues that this book both directly and indirectly confronts. Jesus’ resurrection may be Christianity’s holy of holies, but it is also a maze of haunting conundrums, and I have not found Ariadne’s thread. The book ends with a “Coda” rather than a “Conclusion” because I cannot connect all the dots. I am unable to fit all the facts, likely facts, and possible facts into a single, historically compelling, winner-takes-all hypothesis. Because this was equally true when I wrote earlier on this subject, I have received, over the years, numerous emails asking for further clarification on this or that aspect of the debate. I have rarely been able to help much, for the writers, although posing questions I know to be large and complex, are seemingly looking for simple, email-sized answers. The naïve impatience unsettles. Part of the problem, of course, is the internet, which has accustomed so many to more than superficial treatments of countless topics. But shallow religion is also to blame. Too many live with the false promise that their faith will deliver them from doubt and conveniently supply all the answers to all their questions. In truth, however, religious beliefs—including belief in Jesus’ resurrection—are like everything else of consequence: complicated, difficult, confusing. And just as there are no shortcuts for the pilgrim’s progress, so there is no easy path to ascertaining and understanding exactly what happened in the days, weeks, and months after the crucifixion. Indeed, my sobering experience has been that the more I have learned, the less, I am sure, I know. This book is not, I should add, a theological treatise. Those looking for religious bread will find here only a historical-critical stone. It has, of course, been unfeasible to leave God and miracles altogether out of account. They put in appearances at several junctures. My goal, however, has been to adopt, before all else, the role of a historian, and to think, as far as possible, about a circumscribed subject within a limited frame of reference.9 I am, without apology, interested in what really happened. I adopt a historical-critical approach not because I have pledged my troth to pure immanence or care nothing for theology. I am, quite the contrary, vitally interested in theological matters, and I want to do much more than stumble around in the darkness of history. My historical orientation also does not stem from a conviction that theology and history are non-overlapping magisteria, that theology is theology while history is history and never the twain shall meet. There is no safe space where theology can go about its business while ignoring historical criticism.10 My self-imposed restraint rather has two sources. The first is the practical need to focus and thereby prevent a potentially protean subject from sprawling far and wide. This has entailed, in most chapters, a one-sided pursuit of history. I have, in other words, privileged a method, and in the words of David Bentley Hart, a method…is a systematic set of limitations and constraints voluntarily assumed by a researcher in order to concentrate his or her investigations upon a strictly defined aspect of or approach to a clearly delineated object. As such, it allows one to see further and more perspicuously in one particular instance and in one particular way, but only because one has first consented to confine oneself to a narrow portion of the visible spectrum, so to speak.11 Second, and to be personal, life is all-too-brief, and enough is enough. This book is overlong already, and I must draw the line somewhere, even if that is precisely where things get most interesting. The following pages are, in my mind, nothing but a collection of disparate preambles to a much larger work that I shall never write. In other words, I have not finished this book but abandoned it. The upshot is that herein I am chiefly a historian playing on the seashore while the great ocean of religious truth—which is also the ocean of religious untruth—comes into view only now and then. To what extent my personal beliefs and predilections, as just sketched, have helped or hindered me from open-mindedly heeding and fairly assessing the relevant historical evidence is inevitably for others to judge. I have, however, sought to do my best, hoping that my conclusions derive not from reflexive prejudices and rigged starting points but from the data, limited as they are. I dislike reading, and have tried not to write, a book whose conclusions have been predestined from the foundations of the inquiry. We should all aspire to be led to our conclusions, not led by them. Doing honest history is not a Rorschach test, and important beliefs are not just troves to be guarded but countries to be explored.

Chapter 2: Options

Before the eighteenth century, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christians regarded the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ resurrection as, down to their details, historically accurate. The Enlightenment brought something new. Disillusioned with the feuding branches of European Christendom, oriented to doubt by Cartesian philosophy, and enamored with the successes of materialistic science, rationalism began to aspire to supplant Christianity as the central ideology in the West, at least among the intellectual elite. The advocates of this promissory rationalism, emboldened by Protestant critiques of Roman Catholic miracles, had no place for divine intervention, understood as the violation of natural law. This included the greatest Christian miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus. That event, many came to think, must be an outworn fable, a myth, in the derogatory sense of the term; or, alternatively, and more positively, a fiction to be deciphered for its symbolic and existential meaning. It is one thing to doubt, another to explain and tell a story that accounts, without appealing to God, for the origin of belief in Jesus’ resurrection; and since doubt, like faith, needs to justify and console itself, there has been, since the Enlightenment, no dearth of attempts to euthanize such belief, to prove it to be a pious projection inadequate to the facts. There have also been, in response, myriad attempts, some quite sophisticated, to justify the conventional conviction. Everybody agrees that we need a good story. If we are to account for the birth of the church, we must, one way or the other, get Jesus raised from the dead, if only in the minds of his followers. Yet recovering exactly what happened two thousand years ago is not easy. History appears to have taken a peculiar turn here. Although Pilate must have assumed that crucifixion would do away with Jesus, it did not. What unforeseen series of events undid the governor’s expectation? C. D. Broad was right: “something very queer must have happened soon after the crucifixion, which led certain of the disciples and St. Paul to believe that Jesus had survived in some supernatural way.”1 But what? The question holds its proud place as the prize puzzle of New Testament research. 

“No trail of historical research,” according to E. C. Hoskyns and F. N. Davey, “has been more zealously trodden over than this, or with more disparate results.”2 Although the first half of this claim may be accurate, the second is not. The countless books and articles dedicated to Jesus’ resurrection, despite their manifold differences, have not issued in a surfeit of truly disparate hypotheses. Indeed, almost all the explanations of Easter faith fall into one of nine categories.3 

1. THE TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN VIEW 

There is first of all the conventional Christian account, which centuries of creedal recitation has hallowed: tertia die resurrexit a mortuis. Many within the churches continue to profess and believe this declaration because they see no compelling reason to disbelieve it. For them, orthodox opinion still commends itself. William Lane Craig, Gerald O’Collins, N. T. Wright, Richard Swinburne, Gary Habermas, and Michael Licona are prominent contemporary exemplars of this point of view.4 They, like the late Wolfhart Pannenberg before them,5 have stoutly defended both the historicity of the empty tomb and the objectivity of the appearances, and they are at one in urging that all naturalistic alternatives are third-rate rationalizations. As a matter of sober fact, Jesus did not rest in peace. Most pew-sitters around the world would presumably go along. A full tomb would, for them, entail an empty faith. 

2. AN EMPTY GRAVE WITHOUT A MIRACLE 

Others have thought that the Christian proclamation rests on some mundane circumstance attending Jesus’ burial or his tomb, a circumstance that Galilean peasants, more pious than thoughtful, more credulous than disinterested, misinterpreted. Is it not sensible to posit, if the alternative is a dead man becoming undead, some faulty observation, erroneous inference, or unconscious distortion of the facts? Jesus’ disciples, after all, “took no part whatever in the positive science of the time.”6 It does not take a supernatural agent to empty a tomb. Perhaps some pious detractor, hoping to prevent veneration of Jesus’ remains, quietly removed them.7 Or maybe a gardener moved the body, for reasons forever unknown.8 One can also envisage sorcerers, keen on a body or body parts for magical rituals, or a would-be supplier for sorcerers, stealing Jesus’ corpse.9 Then again, Joseph of Arimathea could have moved Jesus’ body from its temporary resting place to another spot, a circumstance that never came to public notice.10 A related proposal, with the same result, has it that the women went to the wrong tomb.11

Whatever the cause, when Jesus’ followers learned of his unfilled tomb, faith in his resurrection entered the world. Such belief in turn fostered subjective visions among people who were in mourning and not perfectly in their wits. A pining Mary or a distraught Peter hallucinated Jesus.12 Another reductive scenario involving an empty tomb is that, as Mt. 27:51 has it, the earth shook not long after Jesus was laid to rest. Although the commentaries are unacquainted with the fact, seismological data reveal that a significant earthquake occurred in Judea near the time of Jesus’ crucifixion.13 One might, then, imagine that, after his interment, an aftershock opened a crack in the floor of his sepulcher and his body fell in, after which the rocks slammed back together. Visitors, misled by an unoccupied tomb, came to believe as true a thing utterly false. Seismic activity would additionally explain why, as the gospels have it, the stone before his tomb rolled back without human assistance.14 

3. JESUS NEVER DIED 

Another skeptical conjecture is that Jesus, despite appearances to the contrary, survived crucifixion.15 No death, no resurrection. In Mk 15:44-45, Pilate wonders that Jesus is so soon expired. Maybe,  then, a few have guessed, he was yet alive, if barely.16 What Poe branded “premature burial” likely “occurred regularly” in earlier times.17 Even in the modern world, with its immeasurably improved medicine, patients declared dead sometimes return to life, whence the terms “autoresuscitation” and “the Lazarus Phenomenon.”18 Perhaps, then, Jesus revived in the cool air of the tomb to make his exit, after which his emptied sepulcher was discovered and faith was born. Or perchance he ran into olk who naively mistook him to be returned from the dead, although one wonders how a half-dead, scab-covered, listless victim of flagellation and crucifixion could impress others as triumphant over death.19 Despite this obvious difficulty, the hypothesis of a docetic death is an old one.20 Maybe Mk 15:44-45a was already designed to answer detractors who surmised that Jesus had never really perished.21 Origen in any case had to address the issue.22 

4. HALLUCINATIONS 

During the nineteenth century, when “medical materialism” (William James) and “retrospective medicine” (Emile Littré) began their crusade to reinterpret supernatural experiences as pathological symptoms,23 the theory that hallucinations begat the empty tomb eclipsed in popularity the theory that the empty tomb begat hallucinations. People sometimes see things that are not there, so why not the disciples? If Freud said that we cannot imagine our own deaths, maybe the disciples could not imagine their beloved teacher’s death. The Dositheans (about whom we know little) reportedly denied the death of their messianic leader, Dositheus,24 and the Islamic followers of Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya (d. ca. 700 CE) asserted the same of him.25 In our own time, followers of Elijah Muhammad declared that death did not hold him: “We believe that Elijah Muhammad is not dead physically. We believe he is alive. We believe that during that time in the hospital he went through what they call death, and we believe that he was made to appear as though dead. [But] I believe that he escaped.”26 Some, then, might give a psychological reading to Acts 2:24, which declares that it was impossible for death to hold Jesus in its power: the disciples could not imagine him being gone for good and so saw him alive again. As victims of wish fulfillment, they externalized their deep conviction that “he cannot be dead, therefore he is alive.”27 Whereas a guilty conscience punished Macbeth by conjuring the face of Banquo, maybe, on this view, a grieving, guilty Peter—he had denied his lord—conjured the face of Jesus; but instead of administering self-reproof, Peter projected what he needed for healing, namely, a forgiving Jesus, which the uncritical disciple sincerely thought real. Under a psychological necessity to restore his emotional equilibrium, Peter turned his subjective impression into a mythic objectification. Without knowing it, he became his own oracle and forgave himself. A sort of mass hysteria, a chain reaction, the product of emotional contagion, followed, with others, victims of their over-luxuriant imaginations, also claiming to see Jesus, although he was nothing but a figment of their optical delusion.28 One recalls Renan: the first weeks of the church “were like a period of intense fever, when the faithful, mutually inebriated, and imposing upon each other by their mutual conceits, passed their days in constant excitement, and were lifted up with the most exalted notions. The visions multiplied without ceasing.”29 Visionary claims, like speaking in tongues, can be imitated and learned,30 and we can imagine, if we like, that those who saw Jesus may thereby have coped with disillusionment and stress, gained attention, and enhanced their status.31 So Peter’s individual reality soon became, without the aid of Providence, the communal reality, a religious meme, the sacred canopy of Galilean peasants who had, as children, been brought up on the miracles of the Hebrew Bible and then, as adults, followed a reputed wonder-worker. “Did not their prepossessed imaginations make them see what did not exist?”32 The matter, on this skeptical view, might be likened to a Bigfoot scare: once there is one report, another may follow, and then another and another, although we may well doubt the veracity of what is related.33 Even the Roman Catholic Church has condemned many of the less sober reports of the Blessed Mother as arising from prodigal hysteria.34 Maybe it was the same, cynics have offered, with Jesus’ followers. Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, already envisioned this possibility.35 Its more recent defenders include David Friedrich Strauss and Gerd Lüdemann.36 They deem the story of the empty tomb to be a legend, a postulate of a faith fabricated by credulous visionaries, “a substitute for history addressed to the pious imagination.”37 One may note that today many Christians of a certain liberal bent have been able to domesticate this point of view. What was once polemic aimed at their faith no longer troubles them. Karl Martin Fischer declares that the nature of the visions of Peter and his companions is of interest only to historians and perhaps psychologists, not theologians. The issue has nothing to do with Christian faith, which is not grounded in what happened in the psyches of the first disciples.38 

5. DUPLICITY 

A fifth hypothesis involves not self-delusion but conscious deception. Thomas Woolston (1669– 1733) and H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768), both deistic antagonists of Christian orthodoxy who relished slashing their way through centuries of dogma, cynically concluded that some of Jesus’ followers, under cover of darkness, pirated his body.39 Having learned, while Jesus was with them, that religious leaders win attention and free meals, they did not want the crucifixion to terminate their agreeable vocation. They accordingly conspired to abscond with Jesus’ corpse. This allowed them to proclaim his resurrection and stay in business. Credulous dupes believed them. Already Mt. 28:11-15 has Jewish opponents of Christianity claim that the disciples came and pirated the body.40 The hypothesis of pious fraud, which William Paley effectively dispatched in the eighteenth century,41 has never had many publicists.42 Not only have most thought it unlikely that the anxious followers of Jesus would have braved an illegal act,43 but they have found it hard to doubt the sincerity of Peter, who ultimately became a martyr.44 The only version of this far-fetched hypothesis that one could take seriously would have it that a single disciple or admirer, or a tiny group of conspirators, wanting to restore Jesus’ good name, removed the body without knowledge of the deed coming to Peter and his crowd. Such is the view of Richard Carrier, who thinks that “from among what may have been over seventy people in Jesus’ entourage, it is not improbable that at least one of them would be willing to engage in such a pious deceit.”45 

6. VERIDICAL VISIONS 

Some have offered, as yet another account of things, that, while the story of the empty tomb is legendary, the visions were veridical: the disciples really did encounter a postmortem Jesus who communicated with them. C. J. Cadoux wrote that “the least difficult explanation of these appearances seems to me to regard them as real manifestations given to his followers by Jesus himself, not by means of the presence of his physical body resuscitated from the empty tomb, but by way of those strange processes sufficiently attested to us by psychical research, but as yet very imperfectly understood.”46 Hans Grass famously came to a similar conclusion, although he preferred the language of theology over the language of psychical research. According to Grass, the tomb was not emptied—that is a legend—but God granted the disciples visions of the victorious Jesus who, upon bodily death, had entered into the divine life.47 

7. AN ORIGIN IN PRE-EASTER BELIEFS OR EXPECTATIONS 

The rival accounts introduced so far focus on events following the crucifixion. A seventh approach begins instead with the pre-Easter period. Rudolf Pesch, following Klaus Berger,48 found traces of a tradition of a dying and rising prophet in Mk 6:14-16 (Jesus is John the Baptist risen from the dead); Rev. 11:7-12 (two prophets are slain and then rise after three and a half days); and a few later sources.49 Pesch argued that this tradition was known to the disciples, who regarded Jesus as God’s eschatological prophet. So when he suffered and died, his disciples forthwith postulated God’s vindication of him. Their faith, established before Good Friday, eventually produed the legends of Easter. Pesch further contended that the unelaborated ὤφθη (usually translated as “he appeared”) of 1 Cor. 15:3-8 need not refer to visionary experiences: it is rather part of a formula of legitimation.50 Resurrection faith commenced neither with visions—there need not have been any—nor with discovery of an empty tomb—that story came later51—but from the conviction that, if God’s eschatological prophet has died to salutary effect, he must also be exalted to heaven.52 Pesch is not alone in his basic orientation. Others concur that belief in the resurrection was more a continuation of pre-Easter faith in Jesus of Nazareth than the product of extraordinary events after the crucifixion.53 Stephen Patterson represents this point of view: “the presupposition for any claim about resurrection is not appearance stories, empty tombs, and the like. Resurrection, as vindication, presupposes only that a righteous person has been killed in faithfulness to a divine cause. In a dissident Jewish context, this is all one needs. The followers of Jesus could have said ‘God raised Jesus from the dead’ on the day he died, and probably did.”54

Although English-speaking scholarship seems mostly to have missed the debate,55 Pesch’s work fostered a noteworthy discussion in Germany.56 Pesch, admirably revealing a self-critical spirit, found his critics persuasive, and he later forwarded an alternative explanation, although once again it grounds resurrection faith first in the historical ministry of Jesus, not in post-Easter experiences.57 Jesus and his followers, according to Pesch, expected the eschatological scenario to unfold in the near future, when tribulation and death for many would augur, on their interpretation of Daniel 7, Jesus’ coming as the Son of man on the clouds of heaven. After the crucifixion, Peter and other disciples experienced the realization of the parousia in their own experience.58 That is, they saw Jesus enthroned in heaven, in fulfillment of his words about the Son of man. In this way they came to believe in his resurrection and, at some point, posited, without historical discovery, his empty tomb. One should note that Pesch was a Roman Catholic who contended that God can communicate in various and sundry ways, including via hallucinations.59 

8. A MYTHICAL ORIGIN 

Shortly before and after 1900, several writers, many of them inspired by James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, 60 essayed the task of proving that Jesus did not exist. He was rather, like Hercules, a pure myth of the imagination.61 These folk, who regarded David Friedrich Strauss as too conservative, urged that Jesus’ resurrection was modeled on pagan myths of dying and rising gods. In returning to life, the Christian god enacted the script of previous deities such as Inanna, Baal, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, Persephone, and Dionysos.62 Although some of the mythicists were learned, their reductionistic accounts were uniformly implausible, and their publications did not flow into the academic mainstream.63 This is why, when I taught courses on the historical Jesus in the 1980s and 90s, I gave scant time to these folk. I used to bring a few long-forgotten skeletons out of the closet and then quickly explain how they died. I do this no longer. A vociferous and truculent group of writers, with enthusiastic support from the blogosphere, has recently sought to resuscitate the mythical theory, often as part of their case for atheism. So an issue once dead and buried lives again in the present.64 I refrain here from entering the current debate, whose participants sometimes adopt an intemperate tone. I remark only the obvious: skepticism can be bottomless, and one can stack reasons to doubt anything.65 In this book I presuppose the sensible verdict that Jesus of Nazareth existed and that we can say informed things about him and his first followers.66 I further abstain from reviewing traditions about ostensibly dying and rising gods and from explaining why, even though some of them go back to pre-Christian times,67 those traditions likely have no direct bearing on initial belief in Jesus’ resurrection.68 To my mind, arguing that Jesus was a new edition of the Sumerian goddess Inanna is as injudicious as maintaining, let us say, that Jesus was a woman who, like the legendary Pope Joan, had to play the part of a man in order to accomplish, in her time and place, what she wanted. Not very likely. Although there may be any number of decent reasons for doubting that Jesus rose from the dead, his non-existence is not among them. Indeed, although I am temperamentally opposed to declaring anything to be, without qualification, “impossible”—I favor adjectives of the comparative degree, such as “likely” or “improbable”—here I am close to it. That Jesus did not exist is well-nigh incredible, so any explanation of belief in his resurrection that resides solely in mythology is well-nigh incredible. Although the gospels contain mythical elements, they are not on the whole mythological constructs.69 

9. ACCELERATED DISINTEGRATION 

I introduce the final option not because it is representative but because it is, on the contrary, novel and so may stand for the several idiosyncratic hypotheses that have failed to garner serious attention. According to John Michael Perry, Jesus’ soul triumphed over death, and he was able to communicate this to the disciples through veridical visions.70 His body, being unnecessary for life in the world to come, rotted in the tomb. In Jesus’ time and place, however, most mistakenly believed that survival required a body; so for the disciples to embrace the truth of Jesus’ victory over death, God had to arrange things so that the tomb would be void. The Almighty did this by hastening the natural processes of decay. The body remained where Joseph of Arimathea laid it, but its disintegration was so rapid that, when the tomb was entered shortly after Jesus’ interment, it appeared that its occupant had vanished.71 According to Perry, this magic did not constitute a violation of natural law. While I delight in Perry’s ingenuity, his thesis beggars belief. Would it not have been far simpler for the Supreme Being to have coaxed the women into going to the wrong tomb, or to have arranged an earthquake to engulf the corpse, or to have ordered an angel to stash the body where no one would find it?72 One might also ask why Providence failed to raise up Jewish prophets to promote the immortality of the soul à la Socrates rather than the resurrection of the body à la Daniel. What, however, is the point of discussing further a proposal that was dead on arrival?73

So much for the various options.74 The historian’s task is to determine, if possible, which solution is the right one, or at least which one best fits the evidence.

PART II: Historical-Critical Studies

Chapter 3: Formulae and Confessions

Historical investigation of Jesus’ resurrection must, among other chores, assess three sets of data: (i) primitive formulae and confessions, (ii) narratives featuring the postmortem Jesus, and (iii) stories about Jesus’ tomb. This chapter concerns itself with the first of these, confessions and formulae. 

“GOD RAISED JESUS FROM THE DEAD” 

Several early Christian1 texts enshrine variants of a simple sentence: 

θεός (ὁ) (“God [who]”) as the subject 

+ ἐγεῖρειν (“to raise”) as the verb (in both finite and participial forms) 

+ (τὸν) Ἰησοῦν (“Jesus”) or Χριστόν (“Christ”) or αὐτόν (“him”) as the object2 

+ ἐκ (τῶν) νεκρῶν (“from the dead”) as a prepositional qualifier.

Acts and the Pauline corpus3 as well as 1 Pet. 1:21 and Pol., Phil. 2.1 preserve this phrase or an iteration of it. Abbreviated versions, without the qualifier, “from the dead,” occur in both Paul and Acts.4 The appearance of θεός (ὁ) ἤγειρεν (τὸν) Ἰησοῦν/Χριστόν/αὐτόν ἐκ (τῶν) νεκρῶν in Paul’s earliest epistle, 1 Thessalonians, as well as its attestation outside his writings are consistent with the formulation being ancient.5 Indeed, it may well come, as Klaus Wengst argued, from the earliest Aramaic community.6 The affirmation—which is not an unembroidered statement of experience but a theological claim—is structurally similar to the Hebrew confession that prefixes the decalogue: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt.”7 The form of both is: God as subject + “who” + salvific act.8 The Christian declaration also resembles, no less importantly, the well-known line in the second benediction of the Shemoneh ‘Esreh: “Blessed are you, O Lord, who gives life to the dead.”9 Again we have the form, God as subject + (“who”) + salvific act, and here the divine action is resurrection, albeit in the future. If, as seems likely, the Christian claim echoes the liturgical line, this would be consistent with the properly eschatological nature of the earliest kerygma, with Jesus’ first followers conceptualizing his resurrection as belonging to or inaugurating the general resurrection of the latter days.10

“God raised Jesus from the dead” is an assertion without warrant. The formula speaks about God and Jesus (or Christ) without stating how anyone learned what transpired between them. Nothing, for instance, is said of appearances or an empty tomb. So the phrase has no epistemological prop and, in and of itself, serves no apologetical end. This fact, plus the sometime connection with the confessional verb, πιστεύω (“believe”),11 as well as the existence of Jewish liturgical parallels suggest an origin in Christian worship, or at least customary recitation there.12 If, however, this is the right inference, the appearance of the formula in four speeches in Acts (3:15; 4:10; 10:40; 13:30) is reason to suppose, in addition, that missionaries utilized the phrase in public proclamation.13 

RESURRECTION JUXTAPOSED WITH DEATH 

Also traditional, although more flexible, was a statement of contrast between Jesus’ death and his resurrection. First Thessalonians 4:14 and Rom. 8:34 avow that Jesus died and rose, Rom. 4:25 that he was put to death for believers’ trespasses and raised for their justification, and 1 Cor. 15:5 that he “died for our sins…and…was raised on the third day.”14 The sequential contrast appears additionally in Acts 3:15 (“you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead”),15 in Ign., Rom. 6.1 (“I seek him who died for our sake; I desire him who rose for us”), and in Pol., Phil. 9.2 (“who died on our behalf, and was raised by God for our sakes”). It is further embedded in the passion predictions in the synoptics16 as well as in the angelic proclamation in Mk 16:6 (“who was crucified. He has been raised”). Because of its far-flung attestation and appearance in Paul’s earliest letter, we doubtless have here, as with “God raised Jesus from the dead,” a very old way of speaking.17 Two of the pertinent passages mention Nazareth and use the verb, σταυρόω (= “crucify”).18 In fact, Mk 16:6 (“you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised”) and Acts 4:10 (“Jesus of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead”) are formally similar: both refer to “Jesus of Nazareth,” then to his crucifixion, then to his resurrection. Perhaps this is a coincidence. Or maybe Acts is here indebted to Mark. Yet given that the speeches in Acts are not devoid of old materials, Mk 16:6 and Acts 4:10 might echo a kerygmatic affirmation from a time and place where Jesus was still known as “Jesus of Nazareth.”19 

“I HAVE SEEN THE LORD” 

First Corinthians 9:1 resembles two verses in John: 

• 1 Cor. 9:1: “Have I not seen Jesus the Lord?” (τὸν κύριον ἡμῶν ἑόρακα;).20 

• Jn 20:18: “I have seen the Lord” (ἑώρακα τὸν κύριον). 

• Jn 20:25: “We have seen the Lord” (ἑωράκαμεν τὸν κύριον).21 

Does the agreement between Paul and John preserve an old way of announcing the resurrection in the first person? One can even ask whether one or more of the original, first-hand reports of the resurrection took the form, “I/we have seen the Lord.” In this case, “the Lord” might have meant something closer to “the teacher” than the exalted judge of the world.22 Yet this possibility ill suits the fact that there may be influence from the HB/OT, in which a few prophets claim to have seen “the Lord,” by which they mean the Lord God: 

• Micaiah in LXX 1 Βασ 22:19 = 2 Chron. 18:18: “I saw the Lord” (εἶδον τὸν κύριον). 

• Isaiah in LXX Isa. 6:1: “I saw the Lord” (εἶδον τὸν κύριον). 

• Amos in LXX Amos 9:1: “I saw the Lord” (εἶδον τὸν κύριον). 

Regrettably, speculation on the matter is unprofitable. The sparse attestation of the formula, if indeed we should speak of a formula, leaves us with questions we cannot answer. As will become a refrain in this volume, the dearth of evidence frustrates. 

“ON THE THIRD DAY” 

The materials reviewed so far establish the antiquity of certain articulations regarding Jesus’ vindication. They do not, however, tell us when belief in his resurrection was born—whether it was days, weeks, or months after his departure. It may be different with another way of speaking. A number of texts assert that Jesus’ resurrection took place “on the third day” (τῇ τρίτῇ ἡμέρᾳ) or “after three days” (μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας).23 William Sanday exaggerated only a bit when he observed that “the ‘third day’ is hardly less firmly rooted in the tradition of the Church than the Resurrection itself.”24 What then generated this way of speaking, which the later creeds, emulating 1 Cor. 15:4, included?25 It might seem strange, to quote Sanday again, “that so slight a detail should have been preserved at all.”26 

One option is that the course of events gave rise to “after three days” or “on the third day.” Maybe the latter expression reflects the conviction that Jesus’ tomb was found empty on the third day after his death,27 or—although we never read that he “appeared to So-and-so on the third day”—that the first encounter with the risen Jesus took place then.28 Yet there are other possibilities. Some have proposed that “the third day” or “three days” alludes to Hos. 6:229 or another Scriptural passage,30 or to a tradition of divine deliverance on the third day,31 or to a book now lost,32 or to the tradition that Israel mourned for three days when Moses departed.33 A few hold that the note of time was apologetical, proof that Jesus had really died.34 Another possibility is that the chronological claim goes back to something Jesus said, something close enough to what seemingly happened as to be usefully recalled after Easter.35 

The issue is all the more confusing because, in the canonical gospels, Jesus dies on a Friday and rises by or before Sunday morning. While this sequence may perhaps match “on the third day,”36 it is not in sync with “after three days.”37 One would expect rather “after two days.”38 Perhaps, then, the specifications were not, at first, meant literally. Maybe their sense was rather “in a little while” or “without delay.”39

These are all levelheaded options.40 They are, moreover, not all mutually exclusive.41 Linguistic expressions, like historical events, can have multiple causes. One could, then, fuse several explanations by positing, for instance, that Jesus used “after three days” with reference to Hos. 6:2, understood as a prophecy about resurrection in the offing, and that the expression became “on the third day” after his tomb was found empty on Easter morning and/or after he appeared to Mary Magdalene shortly thereafter.42 One could also venture that “after three days” and “on the third day” were born in different contexts to serve different purposes. Maybe some first employed “after three days” to underscore that Jesus had really died but later came to use “on the third day” to forge a link with Hos. 6:2, or to stress that he rose on the traditional day of salvation. It is a matter for regret that, in such an important matter, we are stuck with little more than educated guesses. We can, however, reasonably infer that, very early on, some Christians found three-day language appropriate because, among other things, they believed that very little time elapsed between Jesus’ crucifixion and his resurrection.43 

ROMANS 1:1-6 

Paul’s salutation to the Romans opens with these theologically loaded words: 

(1) Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, (2) which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, (3) the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh (4) and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, (5) through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, (6) including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. 

Martin Hengel opined that, “in recent years”—he was writing in the 1970s—“more has been written about” the christological confession at the heart of Rom. 1:1-6 “than about any other New Testament text.”44 He was referring to a robust discussion in the German theological world. It concerned the extent to which the verses reproduce a pre-Pauline confession, the nature of that confessions’ christology, and the identity of the group sponsoring that christology.

 Despite continuing debate, the guild, as one might have anticipated, has reached general agreement about next to nothing, not even whether Rom. 1:3-4 contains a pre-Pauline confession.45 Nonetheless, certain conclusions appear to this writer to be more likely than not: 

(1) Paul’s salutation probably does quote or assimilate a traditional formulation. This follows from a confluence of observations. (a) Some words and phrases are unexpected for Paul.46 (b) Several ideas and conceptual links are unattested or uncommon in his authentic correspondence.47 (c) The comparable 2 Tim. 2:8 (“Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, descended from David, as preached in my gospel”) is introduced with the imperative, “remember” (μνημόνευε), which suggests citation of or allusion to a well-known sentence. (d) The parallelism and the use of asyndeton are consistent with the presence of pre-formed materials.48 (e) Paul, when writing Romans, had not yet been to Rome, so to commence by quoting words familiar to his audience would have been strategically apt, a way of establishing common ground from the outset. (f) One might expect a freely formulated summary of Paul’s own christology to refer to the cross. Romans 1:1-7 does not. 

(2) Critical study of Rom. 1:3-4 has yielded an array of tradition histories. Paul Jewett, for instance, has outlined a three-stage sequence.49 The earliest form, on his analysis, contained or consisted of: “who was of the seed of David [and] appointed Son of God by resurrection of the dead.”50 This line, Jewett thinks, originated in the “Aramaic-speaking early church.” Its Sitz im Leben was celebration of the eucharist. Its sponsors understood “Son of David” to be a royal messianic title, and they held an adoptionistic christology like that in Acts 2:36 and 13:33, a christology derived from an application of Ps. 2:7 (“You are my Son, today I have begotten you”) to Jesus’ resurrection. At a secondary stage, Hellenistic Christians shaped the confession by adding the dichotomy between flesh and spirit. This devalued Jesus’ Davidic origin and diminished the importance of the historical, bodily Jesus (cf. 1 Cor. 12:3; 15:44-46). Finally, Paul formulated the present opening (“concerning his Son”), inserted “in power,” qualified “spirit” by “holiness,” and composed the ending (“Jesus Christ our Lord”). Through these alterations, the apostle aimed to block adoptionistic ideas and to oppose a possible libertine reading of the dualistic, Hellenistic add-on. 

Whether or not Jewett’s detailed reconstruction is close to the truth,51 he does seem to be right about one thing: the tradition behind Rom. 1:2-4 conserves primitive tradition. The lengthy sentence might even, to quote Hengel, go “back to the earliest congregation in Jerusalem.”52 If the apostle could assume that Roman Christians, most of whom he had never met, would be familiar with the content of Rom. 1:3-4, that content must have been well known and so not of recent coinage. Beyond that, “spirit of holiness” (πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης) is Semitic yet not Septuagintal,53 and the association of the title, “Son of God,” with the resurrection, whether or not one wishes to dub it “adoptionistic,” suggests antiquity.54 Also consistent with great age are the Davidic Son of God christology55 and, as explained below, the meshing of Jesus’ vindication with “the (general) resurrection of the dead” (ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν). 

(3) Although there is a long tradition of understanding Rom. 1:3-4 against the background of Ps. 2:7, the chief (although not exclusive) intertext is probably Nathan’s oracle in 2 Samuel 7.56 The latter includes these lines: 

(12) When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up (LXX: ἀναστήσω) your offspring (LXX: σπέρμα) after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. (13) He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. (14) I will be his father, and he shall be my son (LXX: υἱόν)… (15) but I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. (16) And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established for ever. 

The Dead Sea scrolls establish that some pre-Christian Jews took this oracle to be messianic,57 and early followers of Jesus found its fulfillment in their Messiah. Hebrews 1:5 cites it; Lk. 1:32-33 and Acts 13:22-23 allude to it; and the episode of Peter’s confession in Mt. 16:13-20 and the trial scene in Mk 14:53-65 tacitly interact with it.58 Granted all this, the verbal links between Nathan’s prophecy and Rom. 1:3-4 must hold meaning:

Rom. 1:3: “concerning his son” (περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ) 

2 Sam. 7:14: “he shall be my son” (LXX: αὐτὸς ἔσται μοι εἰς υἱόν) 

Rom. 1:3: “of the seed of David” (ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυίδ) 

2 Sam. 7:12: “your [David’s] seed” (LXX: τὸ σπέρμα σου) 

Rom. 1:4: “resurrection” (ἀναστάσεως) 

2 Sam. 7:12: “I will raise up” (LXX: ἀναστήσω) 59 

The links are all the stronger because (a) Jewish expressions of messianic hope often reiterated the “I will raise up” of 2 Sam. 7:12,60 which entails that the words were well known, and (b) among the HB/OT passages that Jews read as messianic, Nathan’s oracle alone associates “seed” and “son.”61 

If indeed 2 Sam. 7:12-16 significantly informs Rom. 1:3-4, and if the latter is old material, then somebody, not long after the crucifixion, used scripture to bolster belief in Jesus’ resurrection. This, given what we know of the early church, scarcely surprises.62 The point for us, however, is this. Interpreting 2 Sam. 7:12 as a prophecy of someone’s resurrection is, from the historicalcritical point of view, eisegesis, and first-century Jews unpersuaded by the Christian mission would no doubt have thought the same. No pre-Christian interpreter known to us took “I will raise up” to signify a resurrection from the dead. Jesus’ followers, it seems, invented this interpretation. One surmises that they did so because they were seeking biblical warrant for a theological conviction already formed. Nothing suggests that it was the other way around, that scripture was germinative, that Christian Jews formed their conviction by ruminating on Nathan’s oracle. In this respect, 2 Sam. 7:12-16 stands for all the biblical passages that our sources attach, explicitly or implicitly, to Jesus’ resurrection. Those texts did not beget their belief. They rather interpreted and sustained it. (4) Romans 1:4, in the NRSV, has this: “declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead” (ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν). The RSV, the NRSV’s predecessor, offers a slightly different translation of ἐξ κτλ.: “by his resurrection from the dead.” The Greek, however, has no possessive pronoun: it lacks “his” (αὐτοῦ). The exegetical question, then, is this: Are Paul’s words an abbreviation for “by his resurrection from the dead,” or do they mean something else? 

The issue presses because, in early Christian sources, the phrase, ἀνάστασις νεκρῶν, often refers to the resurrection at the eschatological consummation.63 This has led some to infer that Rom. 1:4 envisages Jesus’ resurrection not as an isolated event but as part and parcel of the general resurrection of the latter days. As Ernst Käsemann put it: the verse “does not isolate Christ’s resurrection, but views it in its cosmic function as the beginning of the general resurrection.”64 One may compare Acts 4:2 (“they announced in Jesus the resurrection of the dead,” τὴν ἀνάστασιν τὴν ἐκ νεκρῶν) and 1 Cor. 15:21 (“for since death came through a man, also through a man has come the resurrection of the dead [ἀνάστασς νεκρῶν]”). Long before Käsemann, the commentator known as Ambrosiaster thought in these terms: “Paul did not say ‘by the resurrection of Jesus Christ’ (ex resurrectione Iesu Christi) but ‘by the resurrection of the dead’ (resurrectione ex mortuorum), for Christ’s resurrection led to the general resurrection (quia resurrection Christi generalem tribuit resurrectionem).”65 

One is inclined to agree with Ambrosiaster and Käsemann. If ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν interprets Jesus’ resurrection as the inauguration of the general resurrection, the phrase falls in line with much that we know about both the early church and Paul. The latter wrote, in 1 Cor. 15:20: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who died.” The metaphor reappears in 15:23: “But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.” These two verses construe Christ’s resurrection as the harbinger and guarantee of the general resurrection, an event Paul associated with the parousia. 66 As, furthermore, Paul never gave up hope that the parousia and the resurrection of the dead would occur during his lifetime,67 it made perfect sense for him to liken Jesus’ resurrection to something that augured more of the same, and that in the near future.68 

Whether Paul borrowed or invented the metaphor of the first fruits, its sense would not have been foreign to other Christians. We have every indication that, shortly after Jesus died, certain adherents of the new faith held what the Germans call a Naherwartung. 69 Jesus, they believed, would soon return, the dead would rise, and God would repair the world. Yet they also believed that the Messiah had already come, that prophecies had been and were being fulfilled, and that even now they enjoyed the eschatological gift of the Spirit.70 Such a concatenation of beliefs, which combined near expectation with elements of what C. H. Dodd called “realized eschatology,”71 would almost inevitably have yielded the idea that, with Jesus’ resurrection, the resurrection of the dead had commenced.72 

One recalls, in this connection, Mt. 27:51b-53: “the earth shook, and the rocks were rent; and the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were resurrected, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.” According to this peculiar passage, to which we shall return in Chapter 7, Jesus was not the only one who to rise. He was, rather, one of “many.” The intertextual relationship with both Ezekiel 37 and Zechariah 14 leave the eschatological meaning not in doubt: this is end-time resurrection.73 This means that Rom. 1:3-4, if we follow Ambrosiaster and Käsemann, enshrines a creedal conviction that, in Matthew’s Gospel, takes the form of a story.74 Origen, I note, already cited Mt. 27:51b-53 when interpreting Rom. 1:4. For him, Jesus was not alone in being “the firstborn or first from the dead.” Others shared this honor, including the saints who exited their tombs after Jesus died.75

 It is impossible to discern how old Matthew’s tale might be. Yet whatever its age, the canonical passion narratives contain additional eschatological motifs. These, taken together, reflect the widespread conviction that, in Jesus’ end, the end of the ages had come (1 Cor. 10:10).76 This too harmonizes with the eschatological reading of Rom. 1:3-4.77

1 CORINTHIANS 15:3-8 

Central to all deliberation about Jesus’ resurrection is the “gratifyingly exact, but disappointingly brief” Urcredo in 1 Cor. 15:3-8:78 

(3) For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, (4) and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, (5) and that he appeared79 to Cephas, then to the twelve.80 (6) After that he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. (7) After that he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. (8) Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 

(1) This compressed summary of foundational events, which has a close parallel in Acts 13:28-31,81 and which conflates the conventional “so-and-so died and was buried” with the christological “he died and rose,”82 incorporates a pre-Pauline formula.83 Not only does Paul plainly say so (v. 3),84 but the lines use words and formulations he otherwise employs rarely or not at all.85 Verses 3-8 also introduce themes—“Christ died for our sins” and “according to the scriptures” (bis)—that the rest  of the chapter fails to expound.86 What is more, Paul’s lines, like the Decalogue, the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and other formal traditions, exhibit much parallelism, as one can see at a glance:87 

ὅτι (that) 

καὶ ὅτι (and that) 

καὶ ὅτι (and that) 

καὶ ὅτι (and that) 

κατὰ τὰς γραφάς (according to the scriptures) 

κατὰ τὰς γραφάς (according to the scriptures) 

ὤφθη Κηφᾷ (he appeared to Cephas) 

εἶτα τοῖς δώδεκα (then to the twelve) 

ἔπειτα ὤφθη… πεντακοσιίοις ἀδελφοῖς (after that he appeared to…five hundred brothers) 

ἔπειτα ὤφθη Ἰακώβῳ (after that he appeared to James) 

εἶτα τοῖς ἀποστόλοις πᾶσιν (then to all the apostles) 

ὤφθη κἀμοι (he appeared also to me) 

(2) As with Rom. 1:2-4, scholars debate the extent of the tradition before Paul. Verses 6b (“most of whom are still alive, though some have died”) and 8 (“last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me”) are his additions. What else is secondary, or what if anything Paul subtracted, or what stages the complex passed through, we know not.88 My surmise, nonetheless, is that the pre-Pauline formula probably ended with v. 5, so that vv. 6-8 in their entirety are the apostle’s addenda.89 The reasons are these: (a) Verses 3-5 contain almost all the obviously non-Pauline elements.90 (b) The ὅτι clauses cease with v. 5, so vv. 6-8 are stylistically different. (c) Paul seemingly wishes, in 15:1-11, to pile up evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, so it would make sense for him to expand the number of witnesses. (d) As already noted, at least vv. 6b and 8 are his work.91 (e) The apostle uses ἔπειτα (vv. 6-7) again in vv. 23 and 46, and the adverb appears three times in close succession in Gal. 1:18–2:1, where Paul orders events from his past. (f) If “he appeared to all the apostles” refers, as I shall urge below, not to a single event but rather serves as an all-inclusive, summarizing statement, it differs fundamentally from the surrounding materials and could reflect Paul’s attempt to cast the apologetical net as wide as possible. (g) Although Luke–Acts seems to reflect awareness of the old confession,92 it betrays no knowledge of vv. 6-7.93 

We do not know whether the tradition, in its pre-Pauline form, stemmed from a Semitic original, as Joachim Jeremias argued, or whether Hans Conzelmann was right to deny this.94 Nor do we know its initial function (although my guess is that it served chiefly as apologetic for insiders, that is, as reinforcement for beliefs already held). Nor can we determine whether Paul learned the tradition from authorities in Jerusalem—such as Peter, James, or the so-called Hellenists—or from the church in Damascus or from the church in Antioch or from some other community. It is even conceivable that the apostle first heard the formula or some part of it before he became a follower of Jesus, while debating Christian Jews. He cannot have persecuted a group without knowing something about them. 

(3) If much is uncertain, we nonetheless know that the substance of 1 Cor. 15:3-7, which relates “the experiential base of the ‘good news,’”95 is early. (a) It is tradition for Paul. And even if, as urged above, vv. 6-7 are Paul’s addition, he will have supplemented them on the basis of what he had learned from others. (b) The basic concepts—resurrection, “the scriptures,” Christos—and the “third day” idiom are Jewish.96 (c) The twelve do not, as a group, seem to have been of much importance beyond the earliest days of the church in Jerusalem. (d) The formula uses the Aramaic “Cephas” rather than the Greek “Peter.”97 And (e) the latter was the central figure of the Jerusalem community in early times. 

We can also be confident, given that Paul knew Peter and James, that 1 Cor. 15:3-8 is not folklore; and “since Paul…visited Peter and the Christian community in Jerusalem about five to six years after the crucifixion of Jesus, the tradition which he reports…can, at least, not contradict what he heard then.”98 Indeed, given the centrality of Jesus’ resurrection for Paul’s self-understanding and theology, it is implausible that it never occurred to him, when spending two weeks with Peter (Gal. 1:18), to ask anything about the latter’s experiences. Here the apologists have a point.99 Whatever the tradition-history of the formula behind 1 Cor. 15:3-8 and whatever the precise place and time of its origin,100 the main components take us back to Christian beginnings. 

(4) The formal credo shows us that Paul and others before him were not content with a bare “he was raised.” They were interested in who saw Jesus and in the temporal order of their experiences (“then…then…then…then…last of all”).101 One more than doubts, additionally, that the terse 1 Cor. 15:3-8 contains the only details about which people knew or cared. It is altogether unlikely, against Ulrich Wilckens, that “Christ’s appearances to Peter, James and Paul, were reported in the whole of primitive Christianity only in this short form, in which only the bare fact is mentioned,” or that, before Paul, there were no “complete stories.”102 Wilckens’ inference from 1 Cor. 15:3-8, or rather argument from silence, does not ring true. He overlooks the difference in genre between the gospels and Paul’s letters. These last also fail to tell a single story about the pre-Easter Jesus, a fact which says nothing about when stories featuring Jesus began to circulate. Further, outside of 1 Cor. 15:3-8, Paul nowhere refers to resurrection appearances to any other than himself. If, then, the issue behind 1 Corinthians 15 had never surfaced, so that there had been no occasion for that chapter, the apostle’s knowledge about such appearances would not be apparent, and surely some would, against the historical truth, have read worlds of significance into his silence. 

It is, to my mind, wholly implausible that early Christians would have been content with bare assertions devoid of concrete illustration or vivid detail. Were there no story-tellers until Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John showed up? First Corinthians 15:3-8 is skeletal, a bare-bones outline. It begs for more. How did Christ die, and why? Who buried him, and why? And in what way exactly did Jesus “appear” to people? Did such questions not interest anybody? 

To hold that shorn assertions, such as “Jesus appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve,” would have satisfied hearers, eliciting no queries calling for stories, is no more credible than insisting that Christians at first said things such as “Jesus went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil” (Acts 10:38) and only later relished telling miracle stories about him.103 Or that while Paul and others preached Christ crucified, no particulars about Jesus’ martyrdom emerged until decades after the fact, when interest unaccountably set in. Or that anyone ever declared that “he appeared to Cephas” without making clear who Cephas was, if the audience knew him not.104 Martin Hengel wrote, concerning 1 Cor. 15:3-8: “A Jew or Gentile God-fearer, hearing this formal, extremely abbreviated report for the first time, would have difficulty understanding it; at the least a number of questions would certainly occur to him, which Paul could only answer through the narration and explanation of events. Without clarifying delineation, the whole thing would surely sound enigmatic to ancient ears, even absurd.”105 Is this not sensible? Unless something obvious stands in the way, we should posit, on the part of early Christians, simple human curiosity and a desire to communicate rather than obfuscate. 

(5) The confession in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 contains several assertions which, probably in line with Paul’s intention, apologists have often reckoned evidential.106 One such assertion is that there were multiple appearances, a minimum of six. Another is that two or three of the appearances were collective, a point Paul in one case emphasizes (ἐπάνω: “at one time”). It is also notable that the text has Jesus appearing to Paul, who was once hostile to the Christian movement. 

(6) The previous paragraphs assume that 1 Cor. 15:3-8 adverts to visual christophanies. Some, however, have tried to drain the creed’s ὤφθη (“he appeared”) of ocular connotations: as a formula of legitimation it need not have referred to visual experiences, real or imagined.107 This is less than likely.108 First Corinthians 15:3-8 probably cites prominent or authoritative individuals primarily because they were well-known, and it serves not to establish their authority but rather presumes it. One recalls that Catholic apologetical literature championing the miracle of the sun at Fatima sometimes highlights the credentials, ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical, of witnesses. The purpose is to add credibility to the miracle, not to confirm anyone’s authority. Had Jesus appeared to the obscure Chalcol and to the little-known Hormezd in addition to the famed Peter and the celebrated James, who would expect a pithy creed to name all four? In addition, ὤφθη cannot function in 1 Cor. 15:6 to certify the authority of the nameless five hundred, whoever they were. 

The verb, ὁράω, regularly refers, in Jewish and Christian texts, to visual encounters with supernal beings;109 and Paul, in 1 Cor. 9:1, says that he has “seen (ἑόρακα) Jesus our Lord.” This last fact should guide interpretation of 1 Cor. 15:3-8, where the apostle aligns his experience with the experiences of others. In accord with this, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all know stories in which people ostensibly see the risen Jesus.110 Even were one to judge all these stories to be late,111 it is easier to imagine that they represent not some unprecedented interpretation of the confessional ὤφθη but rather stand in continuity with it. In addition to all this, curtailing the important role of visions within early Christian circles would be imprudent.112 The earliest Christian writer, Paul, was a visionary.113 The first narrative of the early Christian movement, Acts, attributes multiple visions to Jesus’ followers and cites Joel 2:28 as programmatic: “your young men shall see visions.”114 The earliest gospel, Mark, in its story of the baptism, may present Jesus himself as a visionary (cf. 1:10).115 Luke 10:18 (“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”) almost certainly does.116 And the three synoptics, when they tell of Jesus being transfigured, turn three disciples into visionaries.117 Perhaps the temptation narratives in Matthew and Luke belong here, too. At least Origen took them to record a vision.118 Whether or not he was right, there is, given the religious enthusiasm of the early Jesus movement and the number of visionary experiences in the New Testament, no cause to balk at the meaning that commentators have almost unanimously lent to ὤφθη over the course of two thousand years. 

(7) One last observation about 1 Cor. 15:3-8. Although it differs in significant ways from Matthew 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; and John 20–21—there are no women in Paul, for example, and the gospels intimate nothing of an appearance to James—one should not overlook the similar sequence:

(pag 54)

                     Matthew                Mark        Luke        John            1 Cor. 

death             27:45-54            15:33-39    23:44-48     19:28-30    15:3 

burial            27:56-61            15:42-47     23:50-55    19:38-42    15:4a 

resurrection   28:1-8               16:1-8        24:1-8         20:1-10       15:4b 

(on 3rd day) 

appearance to 28:9-10            16:7         24:13-35       20:11-18     15:5a, 7a 

individual(s) 

appearance 28:16-20             16:7           24:36-51       20:19-22     15:5b, 7b 

to twelve/apostles

We seem to have, amid all the diversity, variations on a common pattern.119 Paul is not so far removed from the gospel traditions as many have supposed. If, furthermore, the appearances to the five hundred and to James were, as seems likely, post-Pentecostal and so beyond the purview of the gospel narratives, and if, as I will urge, “all the apostles” adverts not to a single event but is instead Paul’s blanket summary, and if, as many have sensibly surmised, Mt. 28:16-20; Ps.-Mark 16:5b-7b; Lk. 24:36-51; and Jn 20:19-22 descend from the same proto-commissioning, the agreements are all the greater.120 One might even hazard that they overshadow the differences. 

* * * 

Given that the preceding pages scrutinize half a dozen formulae and confessions, I refrain from offering a summary, which would necessarily be diffuse. I rather highlight two results that will be crucial for later chapters. 

(1) First, although the evidence is woefully imperfect, it nonetheless suffices to establish, with a high degree of probability, that some of Jesus’ followers came to believe in his resurrection quite soon after his death. It is not just that the traditions in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 and Rom. 1:2-4 are old and that “God raised Jesus from the dead” is broadly attested, but there are the recurrent references to “the third day” and “three days.” While the expressions are theologically loaded, they strongly insinuate that little time passed between Jesus’ execution and belief in his resurrection. Paul, moreover, took “he was raised on the third day” (1 Cor. 15:4) to cohere with whatever he learned from those who were among the first to believe that God had raised Jesus (Gal. 1:18-19; 2:9).121 

Confirmation comes from the narratives to be reviewed in the next chapter, for they concur that people believed in Jesus’ resurrection within days of his crucifixion. Mark has an angel, on Easter Sunday, declare, “He is risen” (16:6). It is no different in the Gospel of Peter (13:56) as well as in Matthew, where Jesus appears to two women on the same day (28:7, 8-10). In Luke, after angels proclaim Jesus’ resurrection on Sunday morning (24:5), Jesus appears to Peter, to Cleopas and an unnamed companion, and then to the twelve (24:13-49). John’s Gospel has it that the Beloved Disciple and Mary Magdalene believed from day one (20:8, 18), and that other disciples saw Jesus that evening (20:19-24). In the Gospel of the Hebrews, Jesus appears to James, who has eaten nothing since the Last Supper, so only a few days can have passed.122 Pseudo-Mark 16:9-11, like John’s Gospel, recounts that Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene on the first day of the week. It is the same in Ep. Apost. 9-10, except that Mary, who is the first to declare Jesus risen, is here with two others. These various stories concur on one thing: within a few days of Jesus’ death, some thought he had risen from the dead. The common conviction harmonizes with the synoptic passion predictions, which have Jesus rising on or after the third day. Since there is no trace of a competing story line, I infer that we have here not just a social memory but a likely historical fact. Within a week of the crucifixion, something—or some things—happened which Jesus’ friends took to signal his resurrection.123 

(2) As was almost inevitable for people who thought that the end was near, Jewish eschatology was the initial matrix for interpreting what transpired after Good Friday.124 That is, when Jesus’ followers spoke of him as having been “raised from the dead,” they were using the language of their end-time scenario. This is why “God raised Jesus from the dead” resembles the second benediction of the Shemoneh ‘Esreh: “Blessed are you, O Lord, who gives life to the dead.” The tie between the third day and the scriptures (1 Cor. 15:4) has the same explanation if, as appears likely, Hos. 6:2 is in the background, for rabbinic literature gives that verse eschatological sense. The same holds for the old tradition embedded in Rom. 1:2-4. Not only does it seemingly speak of “the (general) resurrection of the dead” (ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν), but it finds in Easter the fulfillment of a messianic oracle, 2 Sam. 7:12: “I will raise up your seed after you.” In sum, Jesus’ resurrection meant, in the language of 1 Cor. 10:11, that the end of the ages had come.

Chapter 4: Appearances and Christophanies

In addition to preserving the brief formulae reviewed in the previous chapter, early Christian sources contain stories in which people encounter the risen Jesus. The present chapter concerns itself with such stories, as well as with a few narratives that, while they currently have a pre-Easter setting, may originally have had a post-Easter setting.1 

THE APPEARANCE TO MARY MAGDALENE 

Matthew 28:1, 8-10; Ps.-Mk 16:9-11; and Jn 20:1, 11-18 relate an appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene.2 While Matthew’s version includes another Mary,3 John and Pseudo-Mark speak of the Magdalene alone. In all three sources, this is Jesus’ first appearance. The chief common elements are:4

pg 58

Critics debate the literary relationship of these three accounts.5 The problem is not Pseudo-Mark, which the canonical gospels have almost certainly influenced.6 The issue is Jn 20:1, 11-18, which a few take to depend exclusively on Matthew.7 If John does nothing but rewrite Mt. 28:8-10, then the latter would be our sole source for Mary’s christophany. Since, moreover, some assign those verses to Matthean creativity,8 one can imagine that the First Evangelist made up the tale and that John and Pseudo-Mark borrowed it from him.9 It is, however, far from evident that Jn 20:11-18 rests wholly or even in part on Mt. 28:8-10, with which it shares so few words.10 In addition, one hesitates to categorize Mt. 28:8-10 as a purely editorial creation.11 The First Evangelist, unlike Luke, shows no great interest in female characters.12 Furthermore, τρέχω (v. 8) and ὑπαντάω (v. 9) are nowhere else redactional, and it is hard to see that 28:8-10 advances any Matthean theme, major or minor.13 Jesus’ words in v. 10 (“go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me”) are in fact redundant. They do no more than repeat what the angel says in v. 7, and “the Evangelist can hardly have felt that the angel’s message needed the reinforcement of Jesus Himself, and it is difficult to think of any other reason why it should have been invented.”14 Even granted that we may have two independent sources—Matthew and John—for Mary Magdalene’s christophany, one might resist drawing historical inferences. In Mark 16, Mary (along with others) discovers the empty tomb and sees an angel. Perhaps, then, some tradent turned her vision of an angel into a vision of Jesus.15 Joachim Jeremias thought otherwise. He found the report of Jesus appearing to Mary “quite credible.” He backed up his judgment with these words: 

were it a fabrication, the first appearance would not have been said to be to a woman, as women were not qualified to give testimony. There is also a ring of truth about the note that the two experiences of Mary of Magdala, the appearances of the angels and of Christ, at first had no effect: no-one believed her (Luke 24.10f., 23; Ps.-Mark 16.10f.). This sounds credible because it does not put the disciples in a good light.16 

C. H. Dodd, appealing to his intuition, issued a similar verdict: “I confess that I cannot for long rid myself of the feeling (it can be no more than a feeling) that this pericopé has something indefinably first-hand about it.”17 

Although I neither share Dodd’s “feeling” nor possess Jeremias’ professed ability to hear “a ring of truth,”18 I believe that there are decent arguments for supposing that there was an old memory about a christophany to Mary.19 

(1) Peter’s name is first in the canonical lists that name the twelve.20 His importance, which was partly or largely grounded in his being the first to see Jesus, explains this. Similarly, Mary Magdalene is, with the exception of Jn 19:25, where familial proximity to Jesus dictates the order,21 invariably first in early lists of female followers of Jesus.22 Nothing known from the public ministry explains this. But the memory that she first saw Jesus would account for her conspicuous placement in list after list.23 A better reason does not suggest itself. 

(2) Mark’s angelophany and John 20’s christophany contain variants of the same saying. The utterances in both Mk 16:7 and Jn 20:17 address Mary. Both are spoken near the tomb on Easter morning. Both direct Mary to speak to the disciples. Both describe what Jesus is about to do. And both are structurally similar:  

Mk 16:7                                      

 ὑπάγετε (“Go”) 

εἴπατε τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ (“tell his disciples”) 

προάγει (“he goes ahead”) 

Jn 20:17

Πορεύου (“Go”) 

πρὸς τοὺς ἀδελφούς μου καὶ εἰπὲ αὐτοῖς (“to my brothers and say to them”) 

ἀναβαίνω (“I am ascending”)24 

This is some reason to suspect either that the angelophany is a version of the christophany25 or that the latter is an adaptation of the former.26 (3) Our sources consistently have Mary seeing an angel or the risen Jesus or both:

pag 61

Whether Mark—which in its present form fails to narrate any appearances—originally contained a christophany to Mary in addition to the angelophany is, for those unsure that the book originally concluded at 16:8, an open question.27 A patriarchal prejudice would explain not only why Mary’s experience, however described, is everywhere less important than Jesus’ appearance to the men, but also why parts of the tradition either downgraded her Christophany to an angelophany or subtracted it altogether. Some have appealed to just such a prejudice in accounting for Mary’s absence from 1 Cor. 15:3-8.28 In the words of Carolyn Osiek, Paul’s tradition passes over the empty tomb in silence because it “necessitates reliance on the credibility of women, whereas the abundant male experiences of appearances do not… Once the empty tomb is eliminated, it is not difficult to eliminate also the appearances to the women, which are tied to the tomb narratives and setting…”29 I am inclined to agree.30 It is noticeable that 1 Cor. 15:3-8 not only enshrines “a male chain of authority”31 but, with reference to the five hundred, speaks of “brothers” (ἀδελφοί), not “brothers and sisters” (ἀδελφοί καὶ ἀδελφαί),32 although women were surely among them. In line with this, the replacement for Judas has to be, in Acts 1:21, not only a witness to the resurrection but a man (τῶν συνελθόντων ἡμῖν ἀνδρῶν). Even Matthew, who does report the appearance to Mary, rushes over it in order to get to what for him really matters, namely, 28:16-20, the appearance to the eleven males. The androcentric bias of the tradition is evident. One recalls the comparable silence of Justin’s Dialogue. Despite his knowledge of synoptic materials, the apologist, when defending the resurrection, fails to mention Mary Magdalene or the other woman and their experiences.33 There is also the Gospel of Mary, wherein Peter rejects Mary’s Christophany with these words: “Did he [Jesus] really speak with a woman without our knowledge (and) not openly? Are we to turn about and all listen to her?” (17:18-21).34 This disparaging characterization of Mary as “a woman” has its parallel in Gos. Thom. 114 (“Simon Peter said…‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life’”).

(4) It is additionally conceivable that Mary’s status suffered because she was known as one “from whom seven demons had gone out” (Lk. 8:2; Ps.-Mk 16:9). From olden times to new, critics of the Christianity have remarked on the dubious nature of a former demoniac’s testimony.35 Might this partly explain Luke’s omission of her encounter with the risen Jesus?36 

(5) Disregarding Mary’s christophany, or replacing Jesus with an angel,37 could have served to sustain Peter’s status as the first to see Jesus. Certainly the memory that Jesus appeared first to him helped cement his authority.38 A desire to safeguard the apostle’s standing might, then, have been enough to demote Mary’s role in the rise of Easter faith. 

One could, if so inclined, appeal in this connection to Ann Graham Brock’s work.39 She has argued that the rivalry between Peter and Mary Magdalene in Gos. Thom. 114;40 the Gospel of Mary; 41 Pistis Sophia 1–3,42 and other sources from the second century and later goes back to the first century.43 She then urges that Luke and the Gospel of Peter, both of which report Jesus appearing to Peter but not Mary, reinforce Peter’s authority and do nothing to enhance Mary’s reputation; and further that, although both books mention Mary’s angelophany (as opposed to her christophany), neither entrusts her with a mission to inform Peter or the male disciples.44 

Whether the opposition between Peter and Mary in second- and third-century sources tells us anything about first-century circumstances is unclear.45 Yet it is no stretch to suppose that, just as later Easter narratives replaced Mary Magdalene with Mary the mother of Jesus,46 so earlier narratives, in deference to Peter’s perceived importance, reduced Mary’s role, either by omitting her christophany or by converting it into an angelophany. 

The previous paragraphs lead me to the same conclusion as Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz: it is “more probable that an original tradition of a protophany to Mary Magdalene has been suppressed than that it first came into being at a later date.”47 Beyond this, I should like to make three further points regarding Mary. (1) She must have been grief-stricken when she saw the risen Jesus. She also, when she went to his tomb, must have been expecting to find it full, not empty. Beyond this, we know little. Conjectures about her psychological temperament are empty guesses. Even if she was a one-time demoniac, as Lk. 8:2 and Ps.-Mk 16:9 have it, this tells us nothing about her mental stability or sobriety of judgment at a later date. Nor does it intimate anything about her powers of observation or propensity, if any, for having visions. 

(2) If there is any history at all behind the texts in which her name appears, Mary must have recounted her experience to others.48 Had she kept the event to herself, there would be no story about it. The inference lines up with the task handed her in Mt. 28:10 (“tell my brothers”); Mk 16:7 (“tell his disciples and Peter”); Lk. 24:9 (“they told all this to the eleven”); and Jn 20:17 (“Go to my brothers and say to them”).49 

(3) If Mary was Jesus’ follower, then she presumably shared his eschatological expectations; and if she shared his eschatological expectations, then she hoped that the kingdom of God was about to appear immediately (cf. Lk. 19:11); and if she hoped that kingdom of God was about the appear immediately, then she hoped that the resurrection of the dead was not far off; and if she hoped that the resurrection was not far off, then she may well have been the first to offer that Jesus had risen from the dead. For if she saw the postmortem Jesus and (as urged in Chapter 6) found his tomb vacated, why would she not have put two and two together? The literary circumstance that, in the synoptics, she learns of Jesus’ resurrection prior to Peter and his fellows likely reflects the historical circumstance that she believed before they did.50 I note that, unlike the twelve, she is never associated with the motif of doubt. 

THE APPEARANCE TO PETER 

First Corinthians 15:5 speaks, with utmost brevity, of an appearance to Cephas (= Peter): ὤφθη Κηφῇ. 51 The initial placement of this event in the list of appearances in 1 Cor. 15:5-8 signifies its importance and so implies Peter’s high status. Comparable is his pride of place in the canonical lists of the twelve. Luke 24:34 refers to the same event as 1 Cor. 15:5, again without elaboration: “They [the twelve] were saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon’” (ὁ κύριος… ὤφθη Σίμωνι).52 Mark 16:7, which names Peter—“tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee”53—also probably reflects knowledge of a separate appearance to the apostle, although the gospel remains mum on the matter.54 Luke, in accord with Paul, puts the appearance to Peter before the appearance to the twelve, and Jesus’ prophecy in Lk. 22:32 implies the same sequence: “When once you [Peter] have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” 

No narrative account of this appearance exists. This has surprised many.55 Some, to be sure, have found it or remnants in Mt. 16:13-19 (Peter’s confession of Jesus and the establishment of the church)56 or in Lk. 5:1-11 (the miraculous catch of fish and calling of the first apostles)57 or in 24:13-27 (the appearance to Cleopas and an unnamed disciple whom later tradition names “Simon”)58 or in Jn 21:1-17 (the miraculous catch of fish and meal beside the sea).59 I shall argue below, although not with full conviction, that an account of the appearance to Peter lies behind Lk. 5:1-11 and Jn 21:1-17. If, however, I am wrong about this, and if none of the stories just cited had a post-Easter setting, we remain unenlightened as to why no account of that experience has survived.60 

Perhaps Mark’s Gospel originally extended beyond 16:8 and related Jesus’ appearance to Peter, and the story vanished when the last page accidently suffered mutilation.61 Another suggestion is that something about the episode, whether or not part of the original Mark, ill-suited someone’s theological program, so it was displaced or forgotten.62 Perhaps it exalted Peter’s foundational authority (cf. Mt. 16:16-18) in a way some found uncongenial.63 Would fervent supporters of James or the Paul of Galatians 2 have treasured an episode that established Peter’s pre-eminence? Or perhaps anti-docetists discarded a report that in their eyes displayed docetic tendencies.64 Then again, if the story was set beside the Sea of Galilee (cf. Lk. 5:1-11; Jn 21:1-17), those who, like Luke, thought of the appearances as confined to the south might have wished to expunge it, discreetly pass it by, or move it elsewhere.65 Yet another proposal comes from Hans-Werner Bartsch: the original christophany to Peter recounted the fulfillment of hope for the parousia, and later theology, having moved the parousia to the future, had no use for such a story.66 

This does not exhaust the options. There is the pious guess that Peter regarded his encounter “as too sacred to be divulged even to his most intimate friends.”67 Or maybe, less piously, Jesus appeared to Peter while others were present and he alone saw Jesus. Or perhaps Peter had a vision and that was it. In other words, perhaps Jesus appeared without saying or doing anything.68 Apparitions of the dead often do nothing other than show themselves for a few seconds.69 If such was the case with Peter, maybe there was nothing to report except “he appeared to Peter.” That is, there was no story to tell, which is why it was not told. Schmiedel long ago ventured that the appearance to Peter is nowhere related in any detail “because the narrative alongside of the others would be too devoid of colour.”70 

Yet another option is that the absence of a narrative about Jesus’ appearance to Peter is due exclusively to the varied agendas of the evangelists. The silence of John’s Gospel is not unexpected given the evangelist’s desire to exalt the Beloved Disciple over Peter.71 The author of Luke, as already noted, might have ignored or relocated the episode if it was inextricably linked with the Sea of Galilee, all the more if it suffered by comparison with the dramatic, drawn-out dialogue on the road to Emmaus.72 As for Mark, if the Gospel ended at 16:8, there were no post-Easter Christophanies of any kind, so the failure to recount what happened to Peter requires no special explanation. If the Gospel did not end at 16:8, we have no way of determining whether or not the Christophany to Peter followed. 

What then of Matthew? Were one to endorse Robert Gundry’s view that, in the First Gospel, Peter is an apostate, the answer would be to hand.73 A better explanation, however, is the evangelist’s desire to focus wholly on the grand denouement in 28:16-20, which is a compendium of his theology. Jesus’ appearance to the women (vv. 9-10), a story Matthew much reduced if he knew anything close to Jn 20:11-18, repeats the command to go to Galilee in v. 7 and so emphasizes the climax to come. A singular appearance to Peter would throw attention elsewhere and prove to be a distraction. 

However one accounts for the fact, there is a dearth of details surrounding Peter’s christophany. Lüdemann has nonetheless tried to fill in the blanks. He urges that Peter, whom Acts depicts as a visionary (10:9-16), was psychologically primed to project an apparition of Jesus.74 Those in mourning often think that they have come into contact with a dead friend or relative.75 The phenomenon is common enough that we may, so Lüdemann thinks, assume that it happened to Peter. The guilt-ridden disciple could not manage his grief in a normal way, so his unconscious mind conjured the resurrected Jesus to forgive him his sins. Daniel Defoe observed long ago: “Conscience makes ghosts walk, and departed Souls appear, when the Souls themselves know nothing of it.”76 To this one might add that, if Peter was in mourning, he may have been fasting,77 and fasting, as the Merkabah mystics knew, can incubate visions.78

 This is a levelheaded hypothesis, although it can no more be confirmed that it can be disconfirmed.79 People do often see the recently departed, a point to which later chapters will revert; and both stress and despair can, just like fasting, trigger visions.80 Even so, Lüdemann’s conjectures regarding Peter’s state of mind are just that, conjectures. Reconstructing the psycho-histories of the long dead is, obviously, fraught with peril. Concerning Peter in particular, his overall mental health and the extent and nature of his psychological trauma immediately after the crucifixion are unavailable for our inspection.81 We do not, moreover, know how he would have fared on a battery of tests to determine, say, his fantasy-proneness or transliminality.82 Nor do we know how many hours of decent sleep he managed between his denial of Jesus and his vision of him. This is pertinent because sleep deprivation can provoke visionary experiences.83 Nor do we know that he saw Jesus while wide awake in the full light of day as opposed to while nodding off or waking up. This might be relevant as visions often come in hypnagogic and hypnopompic states.84 The material for retrospective analysis is scanty indeed. 

Lüdemann depicts for us a lonely Peter who, after Jesus’ execution, was wrestling with great guilt. While this scenario is plausible—it harmonizes with the theme of forgiveness in Jn 21:15- 1985—one can also imagine Peter being, at least initially, thoroughly disillusioned with Jesus and angry at being led astray, and beyond that grateful for not being arrested and dispatched with his teacher.86 Maybe, one could speculate, the disciple’s major concern for a time was his own safety. It could, then, have been his ostensible encounter with Jesus that created guilt or intensified it rather than the other way around. How good would Peter have felt about himself as soon as he believed that God had vindicated the man he himself had abandoned and denied?

We should also keep in mind Lauri Honko’s generalization: “A person who has experienced a supernatural event by no means always makes the interpretation himself; the social group that surrounds him may also participate in the interpretation.”87 Maybe the implications of Peter’s experience were, at least initially, not perfectly vivid to him. Maybe he arrived at his interpretation only after conversation with others and joint reflection. Or perhaps Mary Magdalene’s interpretation of her experience helped Peter make sense of what had happened to him. Focus on the disciple’s postGolgotha state might miss important ingredients in the rise of his Easter faith. 

Even if, however, one accepts Lüdemann’s reconstruction, questions remain. One is why a vision led a first-century Jew to confess that Jesus had been “raised from the dead.”88 Half of the Jewish texts from 200 BCE–100 CE that speak of an afterlife do so without mentioning resurrection,89 and there was no single idea about life after death in our period but rather a variety.90 Immortality of the soul or something akin to it appears as often as not.91 It would have been easy enough for Peter, after seeing Jesus, to declare that God had vindicated his lord without using the concept of eschatological resurrection.92 If, as Lüdemann contends, the first community knew nothing about an opened tomb, why did Peter and his friends not affirm, in a manner reminiscent of Jub. 23:31, that while Jesus’ bones rested for now in the earth, his spirit had been exalted in heaven?93 Or why did they not speak about Jesus the way the Testament of Job, without using the language of resurrection, speaks about its hero: Job’s soul was taken to heaven immediately after his death while his body was prepared for burial?94 This is not, however, what our sources report.95 Why? Lüdemann, in his two books on Jesus’ resurrection, glides over the question far too quickly.96 It is central to the discussion. We shall return to it later, in Chapter 8. 

A second issue arising from Lüdemann’s thesis has to do with one’s worldview. For many in our time and place, visions are, almost by definition, pure projection. Nothing beyond the self ever informs them. Not all, however, share this reductionistic opinion. Some hold that, on occasion, visions grasp or incorporate veridical elements.97 Those so minded—I am among them—could posit that Peter’s grief, guilt, and trauma altered his perceptual apparatus in such a way as to permit him to behold an extra-subjective something he might not otherwise have beheld. In short, diagnosing Peter as wracked by mournful guilt and distress need not, in and of itself, determine the precise nature of his encounter with Jesus. One final point about the appearance to Peter. If one rejects the thesis that memory of his experience informs Mt. 16:13-19; Lk. 5:1-11; 24:13-27; and/or Jn 21:1-17, one is free to think almost anything, for there is no story to steer conjecture. 

One could, for instance, hypothesize that Peter encountered Jesus in a dream, a possibility that the anti-Christian Jewish source known to Celsus seemingly forwarded.98 Not only do people today often report seeing the dead, including Jesus, in their dreams99—often with the conviction that “it was more than a dream”100—but Jewish and Christian texts enshrine the conviction that God and angels sometimes encounter people in their sleep.101 This is, for instance, what happens to the patriarch Jacob in Genesis 31, and it is what happens to Joseph the father of Jesus in Matthew 1 and 2.102 Furthermore, 3 Βασ 3:5, in reporting that the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream, uses ὤφθη + dative, the construction used in 1 Cor. 15:3-8; and the biblical tradition can speak of dreams as “visions” while its accounts of dreams regularly refer to people “seeing” things.103 With regard to Peter in particular, it is worth remarking that, if there is memory behind Acts 10, his “vision” (ὅραμα) in that chapter may well be a dream,104 and Acts presents the experience as having far-reaching repercussions. One could, appealing to 1 Cor. 15:3-8, object that Peter’s experience must have been just like the experiences of others, because the same construction, ὤφθη + dative, designates them all. Scholars have frequently urged that, to go by Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 15:3-8, what had happened to him—he beheld Jesus in the heavens—is what must have happened to the others before him. This, however, claims too much.105 That Paul was bold enough to attach “he appeared also to me” to the tradition in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 entails only his belief that he, like others, had seen the risen Jesus, not that Jesus had appeared to everyone in exactly the same way. First Corinthians 15:3-8 is not a list of bare, objective facts but an interpretation of half a dozen experiences. The repeated ὤφθη (“he appeared”) is somebody’s attempt to give a uniform meaning to a series of events that can hardly have been alike in all particulars.106 Having observed all this, I neither contend nor believe that Peter saw Jesus in a dream. My point is only this: because our ignorance is so vast, the possibilities can be multiplied, and little can be excluded.107 

THE APPEARANCE TO THE TWELVE 

First Corinthians 15:5 refers, without amplification, to an appearance to the twelve: “he appeared to the twelve.”108 Mark 14:28 (“after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee”) and 16:7 (“But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee”) seemingly advert to the same event.109 So too Mt. 28:16-20, which recounts an appearance to the eleven in Galilee. PseudoMark 16:14-18 offers something similar, without supplying a geographical setting.110 Then there are appearances to “the eleven” in Lk. 24:36-49 and to “the disciples” in Jn 20:19-23 and 24-29, although the location in these cases is Jerusalem.111 Despite what Markus Bockmuehl has called the “narrative mayhem” of the resurrection stories,112 the accounts in Mt. 28:16-20; Ps.-Mk 16:14-18; Lk. 24:36-49; and Jn 20:19-23 exhibit the same basic structure:

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There is also some overlap in vocabulary, the most notable items being these: 

• ἕνδεκα (“eleven”): Mt. 28:16; Ps.-Mk 16:14; Lk. 24:33. 

• εἶδον (“see”): Mt. 28:17; Lk. 24:39; Jn 20:20, 25-29. 

• πιστεύω / ἀπιστεύω / ἀπιστία / ἄπιστος (“believe” / “disbelieve” / “unbelief” / “unbelieving”): Ps.-Mk 16:14-17; Lk. 24:41; Jn 20:25, 27, 29; cf. Mt. 28:19: “but some doubted.” 

• ὄνομα (“name”): Mt. 28:19; Ps.-Mk 16:17; Lk. 24:47. 

• πάντα τὰ ἔθνη (“all the nations”): Mt. 28:19; Lk. 24:47; cf. Ps.-Mk 16:16: τὸν κόσμον ἅπαντα (“all the world”). • πατήρ (“father”): Mt. 28:19; Lk. 24:49; Jn 20:21. 

• λαλέω (“speak”) with Jesus as subject: Mt. 28:18; Ps.-Mk 16:19; Lk. 24:44.113 

The four accounts are, given the parallels, likely developments of the same proto-commissioning.114 That Paul lists only one appearance to “the twelve” is consistent with the several accounts having a common, single ancestor. 

According to Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, “there is no doubt that” the appearance to the twelve “really happened.”115 I prefer a slightly more modest formulation: we need not doubt that it really happened. 

Can we retrieve any historical tidbits from the varied versions of the appearance(s) to the twelve? The motif of doubt is in all four gospels, and an ostensible encounter with the crucified might well have left some confused or uncertain.116 Such a meeting might also, in accord with Lk. 24:41, 52; and Jn 20:20, have brought consolation and joy (cf. Mt. 28:8). It is further sensible to imagine that an experience begetting belief in Jesus’ vindication would have issued in a rebirth of the missionary impulse of the pre-Easter period, and the stories of Jesus appearing to the twelve feature an imperative to missionize.117 In harmony with this is the link in Paul between apostleship and seeing the risen Jesus (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:7). 

It is, then, reasonable to infer, and I am inclined to believe, that these three motifs—doubt, consolation, mission—derive from the original experience. Yet one must acknowledge that mission, consolation, and doubt are standard fare in Hebrew Bible call narratives, and because those narratives have influenced the stories of Jesus’ appearances,118 one could maintain that the motifs referred to were secondary additions. Convincingly coaxing historical details out of the stories of Jesus appearing to twelve is no easy task.119 What is more, we cannot even be sure where the event occurred. Mark and Matthew direct us to Galilee, Luke and John to Jerusalem.120 

We are also uncertain as to how many disciples were involved. As Judas was not present, there could not have been more than eleven, and Thomas is absent from Jn 20:19-23, which is a variant of the original appearance to “the twelve.” Yet 1 Cor. 15:5 (unlike Mt. 28:16 and Ps.-Mk 16:14) refers to “the twelve.”121 Evidently “the twelve” was less a literal number than a theological symbol.122 If, then, Jesus had appeared to only eight, nine, or ten of the disciples, the tradition would likely still have spoken of his appearance to “the twelve.” 

The same holds if there were more than twelve. We know, from Mk 15:40-41 and Lk. 8:1-3, that several women were among Jesus’ loyal followers, and further that they were with him in both Galilee and Jerusalem. Yet the gospels leave them almost wholly in the shadows. Mark 15:40-41 is a retrospective note which, in effect, says that Mary Magdalene and other women were with Jesus all along even though the gospel has heretofore ignored them. If, then, we can infer that these women were present when Jesus taught the twelve (4:10; 9:35; 10:32) and when he went to Bethany with the twelve (11:11), do we not have to ask whether they were likewise present when the resurrected Jesus appeared to the twelve? If the women were with the men right before Easter, might they not have been with them right after? The textual silence is scarcely determinative given the women’s likely but unacknowledged presence on so many other occasions. I note that, right before Luke’s version of the appearance to the twelve in 24:36-49, we read that “the eleven and their companions (τοὺς σὺν αὐτοῖς) were gathered together” (24:33). Did Luke believe that, among those gathered with the eleven, were the women who related news of the empty tomb to Peter and others (cf. 24:13)? 

Aside from who was actually present, were this a modern case, we would desire affidavits independently procured.123 We do not, however, have a single such affidavit from anyone. A skeptic could, accordingly, appeal to social psychology and plausibly wonder whether all had the same experience. Did all hear Jesus speak the same words? Did all see the same thing? To ask such questions is to realize how little we know. Many treat the appearance to the twelve as though it were an appearance to an individual, as though a group shared a single mental event. Yet how can anyone know this? If, let us say, two or three of the disciples said that they had seen Jesus, maybe those who did not see him but thought they felt his presence would have gone along and been happy to be included in “he appeared to the twelve.”124 Certainly none were indifferent, impartial spectators cheering for the death of their cause. 

What, in addition, can one confidently say about the analytical acuity and perceptual powers of these people? Were Thaddeus and his compatriots sober-minded, “plain matter-of-fact men,” who carefully “compared notes” on their experiences?125 Or were they anxious to believe? Were some like the pious who cried out and fainted in response to sermons during the Great Awakening,126 or like the untamed Shakers during their so-called Era of Manifestations?127 

Whatever the answers, the twelve were gathered before Jesus appeared to them. This means that, despite the crucifixion, they were still together; and if Peter was among their number, his claim that Jesus had appeared to him, like Mary Magdalene’s similar claim, cannot have been without effect. They could not, furthermore, have been united in their conviction that “he appeared to the twelve,” if united they were, until they had spoken with one another about their experiences; and to imagine that none of them, in the process, influenced the recall or interpretation of others would be naive in the extreme. 

THE APPEARANCE TO THOMAS 

John’s second story of an appearance to the disciples, the unforgettable episode with doubting Thomas (20:24-29), does not follow the pattern of the other appearances to the twelve, and it is unparalleled elsewhere. In the eyes of many modern scholars, it does not look like an independent account but rather as though it has been “largely spun out of the preceding paragraph.”128 I share their judgment, as well as Dodd’s verdict: “John has chosen to split up the composite traditional picture of a group some of whom recognize the Lord while others doubt, and to give contrasting pictures of the believers and the doubter, in order to make a point which is essentially theological.”129 

Even were one to come to another decision, the lack of a parallel, the pericope’s strongly apologetical nature, and the possibility that it tacitly participates in debates about the status of Thomas in some circles130 might disincline one to seek a historical nucleus behind it.131 Converting a doubter in a story is a way to address doubt in one’s audience, and “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side” sounds defensive.132 Maybe the narrative sought to allay the suspicion that the disciples hallucinated or saw a ghost.133 Or, if one discerns an anti-docetic bent in the rest of the Johannine corpus, one could find such here, too.134 

THE APPEARANCE TO PETER AND OTHERS IN IGNATIUS 

Ignatius wrote to the Smyrnaeans: 

I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection; and when he came to Peter and those with him, he said to them, “Touch me and see, for I am not a bodiless demon” (δαιμόνιον ἀσώματον). And immediately they touched him and believed, being mingled both with his flesh and spirit. Therefore they despised even death, and were proved to be above death. And after his resurrection he ate and drank with them as a being of flesh, although he was united in spirit to the Father (3.1-3). 

Jerome, when introducing Ignatius’ letter, offered this commentary: Ignatius 

inserts a testimony about the person of Christ, from the Gospel which was lately translated by me [the Gospel of the Hebrews]. His words are: “But I both saw him in the flesh after the resurrection, and believe that he is in the flesh; and when he came to Peter and those who were with Peter, he said to them: ‘Behold, touch me and see that I am not a bodiless phantom.’ And immediately they touched him and believed.”135 

Jerome’s claim as to the source of this story is hard to credit. Eusebius, who knew the Gospel of the Hebrews, confessed, when citing Ignatius’ words, “I do not know from whence they come.”136 Adding to the confusion is Origen, who attributes “I am not a phantom without a body” to the “Teaching of Peter.”137 

At first glance, one might suppose, despite the patristic opinion to the contrary, that Ignatius draws on Luke 24.138 This last has the risen Jesus instructing his disciples with these words: “look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”139 Both Ignatius and Lk. 24:33-43 

• refer to Peter along with others; 

• share the phrase, “Touch me and see, because/that” (ψηλαφήσατέ με καὶ ἴδετε ὅτι); 

• follow this phrase with a negation (οὐκ); and 

• refer to Jesus eating—Lk. 24:43 with ἔφαγεν, Ignatius with συνέφαγεν. 140 

Despite these commonalities, we can hardly be assured that Ignatius’ passage is a redrafting of Lk. 24:33-43. (a) Ignatius otherwise betrays no clear knowledge of Luke. (b) Both Origen and Jerome believed that Ignatius was taking up an extra-canonical text, not Luke. (c) The most distinctive and arresting expression in Ignatius—“I am not a bodiless phantom”—is missing from Luke 24.141 

Regrettably, I am unsure what to think. Did Ignatius and Luke reproduce a common tradition, whether oral or written?142 François Bovon believed this. On his view, Ignatius, like the author of Luke and John but independently of them, knew an appearance story that recounted “how the Risen One demonstrated the reality of his return to bodily life by taking and sharing food.”143 There remain, however, other possibilities. Maybe Ignatius conflated Luke’s story with a closely related second source.144 Or perhaps Ignatius borrowed from a text or oral tradition indebted to Luke. If there was a second source, it was, like Lk. 24:36-43 and Jn 20:26-29, probably a version of Jesus’ appearance to the twelve, expanded for apologetical purposes. Beyond that, we are in the dark. Maybe, before Ignatius, it was aimed at Paulinists who urged that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15:50). Or perhaps the episode was designed to short circuit the objection that the appearances of the resurrected Jesus were merely hallucinations. Or, as with Ignatius, it could have aimed to combat docetic claims. One also wonders whether the reference to Jesus eating and drinking was partly inspired by efforts to find fulfilment for the prophecy in Mk 14:25 (“I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God”) and Lk. 22:16 (“I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God”). Exegetes have often related the prediction at the last supper to Lk. 24:41-43, where Jesus eats broiled fish, and to Jn 21:9-14, where he seemingly consumes fish and bread.145 

THE APPEARANCE TO CLEOPAS AND HIS COMPANION 

Luke 24:13-35, which Ps.-Mk 16:12-13 summarizes, relates the unforgettable story of two disciples on the way to Emmaus. This long and captivating narrative—“a little masterpiece of dramatic narrative”146—is reminiscent of old stories in which angels mysteriously come and go147 or the gods appear in disguise,148 as well as of modern urban legends about phantom hitchhikers who suddenly disappear, only after which their identities are learned.149 It is so full of Lukan features and dramatic embellishment and so close to Acts 8:26-40 that some reckon it to be a redactional creation.150 This would be consistent with its absence from 1 Cor. 15:3-8.151 The careful work of David Catchpole, however, has established the probable existence of a pre-Lukan story behind Lk. 24:13-35.152 Granted this, one might go a step further and urge that the specificity of the obscure “Emmaus”153 and the otherwise unknown “Cleopas”154 preserve historical memory.155 Yet legend can invent concrete details,156 and the fact that Lk. 24:13-35 belongs to a book which opens with detailed, rich narratives that are largely haggadic-like fiction (Luke 1–2) is very much to the point. Not only that, but even were one to find reminiscence in “Cleopas” and “Emmaus,” as does Lüdemann,157 it is hard to see how much more one could say. The edifying story, so illustrative of Lukan themes and so congenial to Christian reflection and apologetics, is not an obvious entrée into the days following the crucifixion. Although Bultmann took Lk. 24:13-25 to contain “the oldest of the Synoptic resurrection stories,”158 and while Lake urged that the “story of the two disciples who went to Emmaus really represents an experience of two members of the Jerusalem community,”159 one is at a loss how to confirm their judgments. While Theodor Greiener thought that Lk. 24:13-15 “carries in itself the witness of its historical credibility,”160 Theodore Keim, to the contrary, characterized the pericope as “self-condemned by its picturesque legendary style.”161 Sometimes, one must concede, the more elaborate the story, the less believable the details. Vincent Taylor regarded Lk. 24:13-35 as the product of “conscious art.”162 E. L. Allen opined: “the Emmaus story may well represent, not a particular incident on the first Easter, but the crystallization of many such experiences of meeting the Lord in the breaking of bread.”163 Is this perhaps the correct judgment? I do not know, and I have been unable to come to any decision about the age and origin of the story. 

THE APPEARANCE TO PETER AND SIX OTHER DISCIPLES 

John 21:1-17 belongs to a chapter that is either a secondary addition of the evangelist or, more likely, a postscript from someone else.164 That chapter opens with the story of an appearance of Jesus to “Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples” (v. 2). The episode is, in its current context, peculiar. Jesus has already appeared to the disciples, given them their commissioning, and erased all doubt (Jn 20:22-29). One would expect them to be doing something other than trawling the Sea of Galilee. This is one reason Eugen Ruckstuhl dubbed Jn 21:1-17 “perhaps the most mysterious narrative of the New Testament.”165 

Can one reconstruct a pre-Johannine tradition? Those who think of John’s Gospel as incorporating tradition from the eye-witness known as the Beloved Disciple (who is prominent in ch. 21) could conjecture that this story ultimately goes back to him.166 Others, more suspect of John’s link to an eye-witness and less trustful of the gospel’s fidelity to history, will observe the overriding theological interests in the chapter—the proof of Jesus’ physicality, the rivalry between Peter and the Beloved Disciple (cf. 13:23-24), the dispelling of cognitive dissonance stemming from the death of the latter—and feel scant confidence in anyone’s ability to recover ancient tradition behind John’s peculiar termination.167 

Before, however, coming to any conclusions about Jn 21:1-17, one must ponder the parallels with the call story in Lk. 5:1-11, which is Luke’s fusing of Mk 1:16-20 and a separate tradition.168 Luke 5:1-11 and Jn 21:1-17 share much in common: 

• Peter, the sons of Zebedee, and others are in a boat near land. 

• They have caught nothing after fishing all night. 

• Jesus is on the shore. 

• Jesus tells the fishermen to cast out their nets. 

• The disciples obey and take in an unexpectedly large catch. 

• In Luke, the nets begin to break or are about to break (διερρήσσετο δὲ τὰ δίκτυα αὐτῶν) whereas in John the net is not torn (οὐκ ἐσχίσθη τὸ δίκτυον). 

• Jesus converses with Peter alone. 

• Luke’s Peter says he is a sinner while John’s text alludes to Peter’s denial of Jesus. 

• Jesus commissions Peter to catch people (so Luke) or feed Jesus’ sheep (so John). 

• Peter, in both stories, calls Jesus “Lord.” 

• Peter, in Luke, follows (ἠκολούθησαν) Jesus whereas, in John, Jesus says to him, “Follow me” (ἀκολούθει). 

Luke 5:1-11 and Jn 21:1-17 must, given these substantial correlations, be variants of the same story.169 While Luke conflated that story with Mk 1:16-20, John or his tradition augmented it with an episode featuring a meal with the risen Jesus.170 

The account of the miraculous catch was, according to Pesch, originally set in the pre-Easter period, as it is now in Luke. It was the Fourth Gospel or one of its sources that post-dated it, perhaps because of its resemblance to the story with which it is now combined, that being a resurrection episode which named Peter and featured a meal by a lake.171 Yet what other report from the ministry became a resurrection appearance?172 It is more plausible that the story about the miraculous catch originally narrated an encounter with the risen Jesus and that the Third Evangelist transferred it to the pre-Easter period. As Luke confined the Easter stories to Jerusalem, he had no place for a resurrection narrative inescapably set in Galilee.173 He could retain the story of Jesus and Peter only by moving it to the public ministry. It is a decent bet that, at some stage, the tradition common to Luke 5 and John 21 purported to recount the famous first appearance to Peter.174 The reasons are several. (1) The story puts Peter front and center. Although others are present, they remain in the background.175 

(2) The tale is set in Galilee, and that is most likely where the appearance to Peter took place.176 Even if, as I shall argue in a later chapter, the disciples, including Peter, were in Jerusalem the Sunday morning after the crucifixion, the evidence inclines me to believe that, despite Luke and John, Peter’s initial experience took place in Galilee. The angelic imperative in Mk 16:7 = Mt. 28:7, 10, which is likely ex eventu and so informed by memory,177 entails that the disciples will not meet Jesus until they are in Galilee;178 and one naturally connects this with the similarly retrospective Mk 14:27-28 = Mt. 26:31-32: the sheep will be scattered, but Jesus will go ahead of them to Galilee.179 This assumes that the disciples, as in Gos. Pet. 14:58-60, returned to Galilee.180 In harmony with this is Jn 16:32: “The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home (εἰς τὰ ἴδια), and you will leave me alone.” “Each to his own home” likely means that the disciples will forsake Jesus and thereafter end up in Galilee, as in John 21 (but not John 20).181 

(3) The story of the miraculous catch of fish in John 21 depicts Peter and others doing what they did before meeting Jesus (cf. Lk. 5:1-11). This is unexpected if they already believe in Jesus’ resurrection.182 Such belief would, presumably, have brought ordinary life to a halt and effected resumption of their full-time religious mission. So the logic of the story seems to imply that it is the first appearance. In Brown’s words, “the whole atmosphere of 21, where Peter and the others have returned to their native region and have resumed their previous occupation suggests that the risen Jesus has not yet appeared to them and that they are still in the state of confusion caused by his death.”183 

(4) Gospel of Peter 14:58-60 relates that, after the angelophany to the women at the empty tomb, people returned home after the end of the feast. This included Jesus’ followers: “We, the twelve disciples of the Lord, wept and mourned; and each one, grieving because of what had happened, went away to this own home. But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew took our nets and went to the sea. And with us were Levi, the son of Alphaeus, whom the Lord…” Lamentably, the text breaks off there. Almost certainly, however, it is moving toward an appearance of Jesus to Peter in Galilee, very likely on the Sea of Galilee, as in Jn 21:1-14.184 This would be, for the Gospel of Peter, Jesus’ first appearance to any of his male disciples. Even if one thinks, as I do, that the Gospel of Peter, like Ps.-Mk 16:9-20, draws on the canonical gospels,185 it may nonetheless be early enough—it likely appeared in the second century—that it could at points follow old or independent oral tradition.186 

(5) John 21 recounts Peter’s restitution following his threefold denial of Jesus in ch. 18. His affirmation in response to the question, “Do you love me?” (Jn 21:15, 16, 17), asked three times, marks the repair of his relationship with Jesus. This suits the initial appearance to Peter better than a subsequent event.187 

(6) Elements of Lk. 5:1-11 seem more at home in a post- rather than a pre-Easter setting.188 While nothing in Luke 1–4 prepares for Peter’s declaration, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (5:8), the words would make sense following Peter’s denial.189 Also a bit odd is Jesus’ announcement that “from now on (ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν) you will be catching people” (5:10). Although Jesus sends forth the twelve for mission in 9:1-6, Luke reports nothing of their success. Peter does not catch people “from now on” in Luke’s Gospel. One must wait for Acts to see the fulfillment of 5:10. Finally, “Do not be afraid” (10:10) would be at home in an Easter christophany (cf. Mt. 28:10). 

Although the case does not extinguish all reasonable doubt, I am persuaded that Luke 5 and John 21 likely descend from a story purporting to recount the first appearance to Peter. Sadly, it is impossible to say much more, for one fails to see how we can move from the tradition behind our two texts to what really happened. Just as the fact that Jesus was crucified does not, in and of itself, guarantee the historicity of any details in the passion narratives, so the circumstance that Peter saw Jesus in Galilee does not, in and of itself, establish the truth of any detail in Luke 5 or John 21. Reconstructing history is all the harder because, as the substantial differences between Lk. 5:1-11 and John 21 testify, tradents remade what they received. They added, subtracted, revised, and rearranged what came to them in such a far-reaching fashion that, in this case, the conscientious historian can say very little

THE APPEARANCE TO MORE THAN FIVE HUNDRED 

Regarding the appearance to more than five hundred in 1 Cor. 15:6, our knowledge is near nil. Who exactly were these people? Paul supplies neither names nor addresses. Were they all well-acquainted with Jesus of Nazareth?190 Did they know his face, his voice, his manner of speaking? Or were many or most of them only superficially familiar with him? If the latter, how much value would their testimony possess? Were they all men, or does “more than five hundred brothers” (ἐπάνω πεντακοσίοις ἀδελφοῖς) mean “more than five hundred brothers and sisters” (so the NSRV) or, perhaps, “more than five hundred men, not counting women and children” (cf. Mt. 15:21)? And who tallied the number, and how close is it—the rounded “five hundred” must be somebody’s guesstimate—to the literal truth?191 Is Paul’s appraisal that “most are still alive” any more accurate?192 And were any of the twelve among their number? If not, who gathered them? 

Even more importantly, how many of the five hundred believed in Jesus’ resurrection or were disposed to believe before the event? According to Peter Lampe, “the resurrection news reported by Peter and the twelve is the only reason conceivable for this gathering. Otherwise no motive existed for adherents of a criminal who had been crucified by the provincial administration to get involved in a mass gathering that was dangerous for them.”193 I concur and am strongly inclined to suppose that the episode took place at a gathering after Pentecost. This would explain both the large number and why the episode finds no place in the gospels, which report only what took place soon after the crucifixion.194 

If the event occurred weeks, months, or years after Pentecost, how many weeks, months, or years later escapes us. Also beyond knowing is whether any in the crowd had doubts during or after the event (cf. Mt. 28:17), or what some percentage fell away, as almost certainly happened if hundreds were involved.195 Nor can we say how many of them Paul knew personally, or with how many—one? two? three?—he had conversed about their experience, or to what extent retrospective bias colored their recollections. The apostle’s knowledge of the event was in any case second hand. He was not among the five hundred.196

We are additionally ignorant as to where the encounter occurred—the most we can surmise, given the large number, is that it was outdoors—or whether it happened at dawn or dusk or in the middle of the day. Nor, above all, do we know precisely what took place. Did Jesus speak or, as with most Marian apparitions, did he simply appear?197 How did everyone in a crowd of five hundred get close enough to the central event to assure themselves of what was happening?198 Or should we envisage—this is my guess—something in the heavens, like the cross of light Constantine purportedly saw above the sun199—or maybe, to imagine the fantastic, an oversized apparition akin to the gigantic figure in Gos. Pet. 10:39? Additionally, how could anyone possibly know that everyone or even most saw and/or heard exactly the same thing?200 One more than doubts that anyone went about conducting critical interviews. Finally, what would despisers of Jesus have seen had they happened upon the crowd? 

I ask these questions not out of cynical perversity but to highlight our ignorance. Too many write as though we know something about the appearance to the five hundred. We do not. 

Perhaps the Corinthians knew more. Commentators and apologists have often remarked that Paul, with his aside that most of the five hundred yet live, implies that they could be interrogated.201 Yet was this more than a rhetorical possibility? Whereas the apostle was writing to people in Greece, the appearance to the five hundred must have occurred in Israel, where surely the majority of surviving witnesses still lived. We have no evidence that they traveled abroad giving their testimonies, nor that any Corinthians braved the Mediterranean waves to learn more. If, further, the Corinthians had known any of them, Paul could easily have written: “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, including your friends Faustinus and Vitus, although some have died.” He did not so write. Maybe, then, the Corinthians were almost as much in the dark as are we, unable to name or quiz any of those involved.202 

Despite our oceanic ignorance, exegetes, abhorring a historical vacuum, have sought to fill in the blanks. Some have been confident that the appearance to the more than five hundred occurred in Galilee.203 Others, with no better reason, have thought of Jerusalem or its environs as the more  likely locale.204 Some have surmised that the event involving more than five hundred (πεντακόσιοι) should be identified with Pentecost (πεντηκοστή), even though Acts 2 says nothing about Jesus appearing on that occasion.205 Others, including myself, are unconvinced.206 Some have found the appearance to the more than five hundred in Matthew’s final paragraph, sometimes on the dubious ground that those who doubt in 28:17 cannot have been the eleven, so the latter must have had company.207 Others rightly deem this implausible.208 And there are additional options.209 

Despite all the exegetical ink, 1 Cor. 15:6 remains an enigma. It is little more than a tease, a tantalizing hint about something that, barring the discovery of a new source, will forever provoke questions without answers, or at least answers without robust support. It is important to emphasize this, because many Christians continue to appeal to the appearance to the five hundred as though it carries great apologetical weight. Yet we really know nothing about this ostensibly stupendous event. We have only a brief assertion, from someone who was not there, that it happened, and we cannot name a single individual who was involved. For all we know, someone warmed up the throng and raised its expectations, as did the old-time evangelists at revival meetings.210 Maybe they were as excitable as some of the crowds that have eagerly awaited an appearance of the Virgin Mary.211 If we knew more, perhaps we would find Pfleiderer’s words appropriate: 

religious enthusiasm can overpower entire assemblages with an elemental force. Many succumb to the suggestion of individuals to such an extent that they actually repeat the experience; others, less susceptible, imagine, at least, that they see and hear the thing suggested; dull or sober participants are so carried away by the enthusiasm of the mass that faith furnishes what their own vision fails to supply.212 

Also worth pondering are these sentences, on the psychology of religious crowds: 

In cases of emotional contagion that so often takes place in crowds moved by strong emotions, there will be always some who will not see the hallucination. It is uncommon for them to speak out and deny it. They usually keep quiet, doubtful perhaps of their worthiness to have been granted the vision for which so many of their fellow all around them are frequently giving thanks. Later on, influenced by the accounts of others, they may even begin to believe that they saw it too. The “reliable eyewitness,” who, as it turns out upon closer examination, did not see anything unusual at all, is an all-too-frequent experience of the investigator of phenomena seen by many.213 

For the critical historian, then, 1 Cor. 15:6 amounts to disappointingly little. Many who find it impressive would surely brush it aside were it a claim about Kali rather than Jesus, or were it found not in the Bible but in the Vedas. We know far more about the miracle of the sun at Fatima, when a throng of thousands purportedly saw a plunging sun zigzag to earth. But what really happened there remains unclear, at least to me. We also have decent documentation for an alleged appearance of Jesus to about two hundred people in a church in Oakland, California in 1959.214 Yet the evidence—which outshines Paul’s few words—leaves one guessing as to what actually transpired. It can be no different with the appearance to the five hundred. When the sources say little, we cannot say much.

THE APPEARANCE TO JAMES 

Paul reports, in 1 Cor. 15:7, an appearance to James: ὤφθη Ἰακώβῳ. As with “he appeared to Cephas,” the lack of a qualifying phrase, such as “Son of X,” bespeaks the person’s fame. This, then, is surely the brother of Jesus.215 

Beyond the two Greek words, Paul fails to elaborate, and no other first-century source relates or refers to this event. Some have proposed that dissatisfaction with James’ leadership in Jerusalem led to a convenient shelving of Jesus’ appearance to him.216 My inclination is to suppose that the event happened too long after Easter to win inclusion in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.217 If, however, we look beyond the canon, we do find a story. Jerome preserves the following: 

The Gospel entitled “According to the Hebrews,” which I recently translated into Greek and Latin, and which Origen often quotes, contains this after the resurrection: “Now the Lord, when he had given the cloth [cf. Mk 15:46 par.] to the servant of the priest,218 went to James and appeared to him. For James had taken an oath that he would not eat bread from that hour in which he had drunk the cup of the Lord until he saw him risen from among those who sleep. Again soon thereafter the Lord said, ‘Bring a table and bread,’” and immediately it adds: “He took bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to James the Just and said to him, ‘My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of man is risen from among those who sleep.’”219 

The legendary character of this episode, which seems to be set in or near Jerusalem, is patent.220 Not only does the risen Jesus show himself to a neutral or hostile outsider (“the servant of the priest”), but the tale implies, against 1 Cor. 5:3-8 and the canonical gospels, that Jesus appeared first to James.221 Jerome’s tale further makes the isolated resurrection of Jesus a firm expectation of the pre-Easter period, and it places James at the last supper,222 for which we otherwise have no evidence. The passage must be a relatively late invention, perhaps in its entirely. In accord with this, it seems to betray the influence of Luke’s story of two disciples on the Emmaus road: 

• According to Jerome’s gospel, the risen Jesus tulit panem et benedixit ac fregit et dedit Jacobo justo. “took the bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to James the Just.” 

• According to Lk. 24:30, the risen Jesus, after λαβὼν τὸν ἄρτον εὐλόγησεν καὶ κλάσας ἐπεδίδου αὐτοῖς. “taking the bread, said a blessing, and breaking it he gave it to them.” 

Perhaps someone formulated the account with the Quartodeciman controversy in mind.223 James ends his fast not on the fourteenth of Nisan but rather on the day of resurrection. This favors the non-Quartodeciman stance. Whatever the truth about that, the story is no guide as to what happened to the historical James. 

This leaves us with nothing save the bare-boned 1 Cor. 15:7: “then he appeared to James.” Apologists, nonetheless, have repeatedly made much of it. Given the plain statement of Jn 7:5 (“For not even his brothers believed in him”) as well as the tension between Jesus and his family in Mk 3:21, 31-34 (cf. Mt. 10:34-36 = Lk. 12:51-53), many are confident that the appearance to James was, like the appearance to Paul, a sort of conversion. Reginald Fuller wrote: “It might be said that if there were no record of an appearance to James the Lord’s brother in the New Testament we should have to invent one in order to account for his post-resurrection conversion and rapid advance.”224 Defenders of the resurrection are in the habit of emphasizing that it took an encounter with the postmortem Jesus to turn an outsider into an insider.225

 This is hardly assured. I am reminded of what von Campenhausen wrote in another connection: “in the absence of any evidence, the imagination has the field to itself, as wide as it is barren.”226 We do not know that the tension between Jesus and his family was the same at all times, or that things were not better toward the end than near the beginning.227 And what excludes the possibility that James joined the Christian community and only subsequently had a vision of Jesus? Acts 1:14 has Mary, immediately after the crucifixion, joining the disciples in Jerusalem, and I am unaware of anyone who has urged that her post-Easter devotion to Jesus, if we judge it to be historical,228 has as its only explanation a resurrection appearance. The same holds for James’ brothers, to whom 1 Cor. 9:5 refers. The plural (ἀδελφοί) implies the prominence of more than just James. Did all of them also see Jesus?229 

With regard to James, there are three possible sequences: 

1. James as Doubter—James as Follower—Easter Sunday—Appearance to James 

2. James as Doubter—Easter Sunday—Appearance to James—James as Follower 

3. James as Doubter—Easter Sunday—James as Follower—Appearance to James 

Scenario 1 appears in the Gospel of the Hebrews.230 The many modern writers who rather favor scenario 2 often do so, one suspects, for the apologetical payoff. This sequence turns James into Paul. In both cases a resurrection appearance makes a believer out of an unbeliever. What real evidence, however, requires the second option and excludes the third or even makes it less likely? Matters are even more complex because there are degrees of doubt and degrees of opposition. Maybe James was, before encountering Jesus, only half-heartedly opposed to his brother and his devoted followers. Or maybe he was of two minds, inclining this way one day, that way another. In such a case, “conversion” might be too strong a word for what happened to him. 

The sad truth is that we do not know the circumstances of the appearance to James. We know not where it occurred nor when it occurred.231 We cannot characterize James’ state of mind at the time232 nor determine whether he had already thrown in with the Christian cause. We can say, assuming Paul has his facts straight, that James saw Jesus after Peter did, and so almost certainly after James had learned of others seeing Jesus. We can further surmise that the experience was a factor in the man’s rise to ecclesiastical power. That, however, is about all we can, with good conscience, wring from ὤφθη Ἰακώβῳ. 233 

THE APPEARANCE TO “ALL THE APOSTLES” 

First Corinthians 15:7 speaks of Jesus appearing to “all the apostles” (τοῖς ἀποστόλοις πᾶσιν).234 A few have tied this to Lk. 24:36-49, the reason being that “a larger group than the Eleven” was “present on that occasion.”235 Yet the presence in that scene of the two individuals on the Emmaus Road is the product of redaction, the outcome of Luke employing one tradition (24:13-35) to introduce another (24:36-49). Loofs rather thought of Jn 20:24-29, where Thomas rejoins his companions for an encounter with Jesus, so that all the apostles were present.236 Others have offered that we should equate the appearance to all the apostles with Mt. 28:16-20.237 Much more  common, however, has been identification with the ascension story in either Lk. 24:50-53 or Acts 1:6-12.238 

A few, without specifying the occasion, have opined that “the seventy” of Lk. 10:1 must have been involved,239 or that we should think of individuals associated with James.240 One could further hazard that Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias must have been among their number, because Acts 1:22 includes those two among the witnesses to the resurrection; or that women were included, because the apostle Junia in Rom. 16:7 was a woman.241 All this is, however, unalloyed guesswork. We can say little more than “the apostles” must, given the meaning of ἀπόστολος, have been “leading missionaries.”242 

We cannot even be sure that 1 Cor. 15:7b adverts to a single event. I am indeed disposed to think that the line is no more than Paul’s way of saying that Jesus appeared to others also, or rather to everyone who bears the title, “apostle.”243 Paul does not claim that Jesus appeared to “all the apostles at one time.” This makes v. 7 different from v. 6 (“he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time”). What is more, the other two collective appearances carry numbers: “the twelve,” “more than five hundred.” Paul’s failure to associate a number with “he appeared to all the apostles” is consistent with his words being a broad generalization rather than a reference to single event. Perhaps we should reduce by one the number of so-called collective visions.244 

THE ASCENSION 

The three earliest narratives of the ascension are Ps.-Mk 16:19; Lk. 24:50-53; and Acts 1:6-11.245 The short variant in Pseudo-Mark, which likely depends on Luke-Acts,246 is not an autonomous story but the conclusion of the appearance to the eleven in 16:14-18.247 It is sufficiently bereft of detail as to have no value for this investigation. As for Lk. 24:50-53, although some have tried to find pre-Lukan material here,248 the task is futile. Jeremias judged that vv. 50-53 show no “traces of tradition,” and he concluded that this report of the ascension is Luke’s free composition.249

 This leaves us with Acts 1:6-11.250 The dialogue in vv. 6-8, which states the theme of Acts—“you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and until the ends of the earth”—is Lukan from beginning to end. It is a redactional product that creatively combines elements from Isa. 49:6; Mk 13:4, 32; Lk. 19:11; and 24:46-49.251 This leaves only vv. 9-11 unaccounted for. Some deem them to be likewise editorial,252 although C. K. Barrett is rather of the opinion that this is “the one place” in the prologue to Acts “where pre-Lucan tradition may reasonably be traced.”253 He does not further specify its scope. Neither does Lüdemann (whom Barrett quotes): underlying 1:9-11 “is a tradition the form of which can no longer be recognized.”254 Less tentative is Mikeal Parsons: “there was in Luke’s tradition a brief narrative describing Jesus’ ascension on a cloud from his disciples.” Parsons urges that the cloud may be from tradition while the mountain and angels come from Luke, who assimilated the narrative to Elijah’s assumption in 2 Kings and to imagery associated with the parousia. 255

 Parsons may be right, although I see no way to confirm this. Here, as all too often, “we find ourselves in the sphere of hypotheses and conjectures.”256 Yet whatever tradition may lie behind Acts 1:9-11, it is unlikely to be very old. Only Luke, Acts, and Pseudo-Mark have ascension narratives, and there is no earlier trace of their specific content. The first Christians probably did not imagine significant chronological space between Jesus’ resurrection, ascension, and enthronement in heaven.257 One recalls 2 Baruch 50–51, where the righteous, in close sequence, rise from the dead, live in the heights like angels, and shine with glorious splendor. Acts 1:6-11 is not a good entrée into the early post-Easter period. 

THE APPEARANCE TO STEPHEN 

In Acts 7, Stephen of Jerusalem delivers a long speech, gazes into heaven, and then cries out, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God” (v. 56). Upon hearing this, a crowd drags him out of the city and stones him (vv. 57-60). 

Although this is a vision of the postmortem Jesus, it finds no place in 1 Cor. 15:3-7.258 The reason is not likely to be that Stephen was an obscure figure. He is prominent in Acts. Should we surmise, then, that he is missing because 1 Cor. 15:3-7 catalogues events that took place only immediately after Easter? Yet Paul, whose encounter with Jesus occurred after the appearance to James (cf. 1 Cor. 15:7-8), felt free to add his own name to the list. Why, then, did he not also insert Stephen’s name, especially if, as Acts 7:58 and 22:20 have it, the apostle was there for the occasion?259 One doubts, moreover, that the appearance to the five hundred took place before Pentecost, and yet it makes Paul’s list. The same is true of the appearance to James, for Acts fails to refer to him by name before ch. 12, and he may not have received his commission in the first weeks or months after Good Friday.260 

Another way of explaining Stephen’s absence from 1 Cor. 15:3-8 is that the tradition was not originally a comprehensive catalogue of those who saw Jesus but rather a list of individuals whom the resurrected Jesus appointed for mission; and because Stephen’s christophany led not to ministry but to martyrdom, his name was left off. Yet if this were the truth, the claim (whether added by Paul or from his tradition) that Jesus “appeared to more than five hundred brothers” would be out of place, for not all these people can have become missionaries or church authorities. 

Maybe then we should entertain the possibility that those responsible for the tradition behind 1 Cor. 15:3-7 disregarded Stephen for ideological reasons. Many have discerned behind Acts 6:1 (“the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews”) the trace of a theological conflict between two early Christian groups.261 So one could hypothesize that 1 Cor. 15:3-7 originated among the “Hebrews,” who had no inclination to include a “Hellenist” on their list of important appearances. Yet even if this is the right guess,262 again we run into the hitch that Paul, if he was bent on compiling evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, and if he knew about Stephen, could easily have appended his name. The puzzle remains. 

Yet one more option is that 1 Cor. 15:3-8 fails to notice Stephen’s experience because neither Paul nor those who formulated and passed down the tradition knew anything about it. Perhaps, one might urge, it was a legend fashioned between 1 Corinthians and the composition of Acts, or even the invention of Luke himself, who wished to emphasize Jesus’ declaration in Lk. 22:69: “From now on the Son of man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” A scholar forwarding this thesis could underscore the obvious literary parallels between the end of Jesus in Luke and the end of Stephen in Acts.263 

While I personally disbelieve that Luke created Acts 7:55-56 ex nihilo, 264 the sad fact is that we have little to go on if we are seeking to make historical judgments about Stephen’s christophany. We know nothing of his psychological history or previous ecstatic experiences, if any. Even on the dubious assumption that Acts 7 is, from stem to stern, infallible memory, and that v. 56 preserves Stephen’s ipsissima vox, the man had no opportunity to retell or comment on his story: death directly followed his vision. Besides that, Luke represents the event as a personal, private event. In contrast to the accounts of Paul’s experience in Acts 9:7 and 22:9, we are not informed that anyone else saw or heard anything. Regarding almost every facet of Stephen’s vision, then, we unhappily remain in the dark.

THE APPEARANCE TO PAUL 

Paul refers to his foundational experience only in passing, in 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8-10; Gal. 1:12, 15-16; and perhaps 2 Cor. 4:6;265 and “what stands out about these texts is their almost stenographic brevity.”266 There are also three accounts in Acts 9:1-19 (told in the third person); 22:6-16 (told in the first person); and 26:12-18 (told in the first person and somewhat condensed). These are probably Lukan variations on a single pre-Lukan tradition.267

Each paragraph in Acts contains items that the others omit, and they are not altogether consistent in their details. Most famously, in 9:7 bystanders hear a voice but see nothing while, in 22:9, they see a light but hear no voice.268 All three accounts, however, share the following items: 

• Paul persecuted Christian Jews. 

• He was on the road to Damascus when he saw a light and fell to the ground. • He heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” 

• He responded, “Who are you, Lord?” 

• The voice answered, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” 

• The apostle rose from the ground. 

• The encounter turned Paul’s life around and led to his mission to the Gentiles. 

We can be confident that the author of Acts had access to a traditional call story that included most or all the elements just enumerated, a story that, even if enlarged with legendary elements and modified by Luke, goes back ultimately to Paul’s first-person narration.269 This follows from the correlations between Acts and Paul’s own epistles. Paul informs us that he was a persecutor of Christians until his calling (1 Cor. 15:9; Gal. 1:13). He states that he has seen the risen Jesus, the Son of God (1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8; Gal. 1:16; cf. Acts 9:17, 20). His claim to have been “called” (καλέσας, Gal. 1:15) implies a verbal element within that experience.270 He attributes his missionary work among the Gentiles to his christophany (Gal. 1:16).271 And he relates that, shortly after his calling, he “returned to Damascus,” which suggests that his new life began in that city’s environs (Gal. 1:17). If, moreover, 2 Cor. 4:6 (“God…has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”) adverts to Paul’s vision of Jesus—an uncertain issue272—this would line up with the accounts in Acts, where Paul sees a spectacular light.

There is yet one more correlation between Paul’s epistles and the accounts of his vision in Acts. The apostle, in Gal. 1:15-16, says that, “when God, who had set me apart from my mother’s womb (ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου) and called (καλέσας) me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles (ἔθνεσιν), immediately I did not confer with any human being.” These words are, as long observed, conceptually close to LXX Jer. 1:4-5, which belong to an account of Jeremiah’s call and commission: “Before I formed you in the womb (ἐν κοιλίᾳ) I knew you, and before you came from your mother (ἐκ μήτρος) I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the Gentiles” (ἔθνη).273 There are also strong correlations with the calling of God’s servant in LXX Isa. 49:1-6: 

• 49:1: the Lord “has called my name from my mother’s womb” (ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου ἐκάλεσεν τὸ ὄνομα μου). 

• 49:5: the Lord “formed me from the womb (ἐκ κοιλίας) to be his slave.” 

• 49:6: “I [the Lord] have made you…to be a light to the Gentiles (ἐθνῶν), that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth.” 

As Paul elsewhere links his apostleship with phrases from Deutero-Isaiah,274 it is plain enough that, in his mind, his calling was like the callings of Jeremiah and Isaiah’s servant.275 

All this matters because Paul’s prophetic self-conception is also on display in Acts 26, which draws precisely on Jeremiah 1 and language about Isaiah’s servant: 

Acts 26:17 ἐξαιρούμενός σε ἐκ τοῦ λαοῦ καὶ ἐκ τῶν ἐθνῶν εἰς οὓς ἐγὼ ἀποστέλλω σε. 

Delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles unto whom I send you. 

Jer. 1:7-8, 10 πρὸς πάντας, οὓς ἐὰν ἐξαποστείλω σε… μετὰ σοῦ ἐγώ εἰμι τοῦ ἐξαιρεῖσθαί σε… κατέστακά σε σήμερον ἐπὶ ἔθνη. 

To all whom I shall send you… I am with you to deliver you… I have set you today over Gentiles. 

Acts 26:18 ἀνοῖξαι ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτῶν, τοῦ ἐπιστρέψαι ἀπὸ σκότους εἰς φῶς. 

To open their eyes, to turn from darkness to ligh

Isa. 42:6-7 εἰς φῶς ἐθνῶν ἀνοῖξαι ὀφθαλμοὺς τυφλῶν… καθημένους ἐν σκότει. 

For a light to the Gentiles to open the eyes of the blind… sitting in darkness.

Since Acts preserves Paul’s interpretation of his own calling, Luke’s source for Paul’s story must stem ultimately from the apostle himself.276 

A few have nonetheless insisted that, on one key point at least, Acts contradicts Paul. According to John Knox, “the one thing—and the only thing—Paul says about the experience is that he saw the Lord. Not only do the Acts accounts not mention this fact, they all but exclude it.”277 Whereas in 1 Cor. 9:1 Paul says that he has “seen the Lord,” in Acts we read only about a bright light and Jesus’ voice. 

Knox is mistaken. The narrator, in Acts 9:1-19, reports that the men who were travelling with Paul “heard the voice but saw no one” (v. 7). This naturally implies that Paul did see someone. This is confirmed in 22:6-16, where Ananias declares that God chose Paul “to see the Righteous One” (v. 14). Furthermore, in 26:12-18, the risen Jesus addresses the apostle with the words, “I have appeared to you” (v. 16: ὤφθην σοι). 

So far from the accounts in Acts misleading us, they fit well with what Paul himself wrote. The apostle, in the words of Phil. 3:21, hoped that Jesus would change his “lowly body to be like his glorious body.” Clearly he thought of the risen Jesus as having a body of δόξα, of light. So while we have no direct access to what exactly the apostle thought he saw, we can reasonably posit that he beheld a preternatural light that he anthropomorphized because it spoke to him (cf. Acts) or, alternatively, that his experience was akin to that of the prophet Ezekiel, who beheld some sort of “human form” in the midst of fire and splendor (Ezek. 1:26-28).278 In either case, Paul identified what he saw with the risen Jesus. (As the apostle had probably not known the historical Jesus,279 he cannot have compared a memory of what Jesus once looked like with what he saw on the Damascus road.280) 

Attempts to explain Paul’s conversion within the limits of reason alone—undertaken usually on the assumption that psychological accounts and theological explanations are mutually exclusive— have been legion.281 Many have confidently thought that “of all the miracles of the New Testament,” this “is the one which admits of the easiest explanation from natural causes.”282 Some have suggested that the apostle suffered an epileptic seizure283 while others have observed that, to judge from 2 Cor. 12:2-7 and Acts, he had a disposition to visions.284 Lüdemann, stressing this last point, has argued that Paul’s persecution of Christian Jews shows that their message had a profound effect on him, and that the apostle’s aggressive response signals unresolved internal conflict: he attacked what attracted him. Lüdemann even speaks of Paul’s pre-Christian “Christ complex,” which finally resolved itself in a hallucination.285

 None of this is implausible. Indeed, it makes a great deal of sense.286 If Paul’s persecution of Christians signals “a subconsciously initiated psychological defense against his own heretical tendencies,”287 then his changeover may have been a subconsciously initiated psychological acceptance of those tendencies. I am put in mind of the conversion to Christianity of the twentieth-century Hindu, Sadhu Sundar Singh. He, like Paul, vigorously opposed the Christian message, stoning preachers and burning Bibles, until one day a dramatic vision of Jesus flipped his life.288 

Nonetheless, while Lüdemann’s story fits the facts, the facts hardly require it.289 We have, as others have cautioned repeatedly, no real entry into Paul’s pre-Christian state of mind. The extent of autobiography in Romans 7 is notoriously disputed.290 The only clear statement about the apostle’s pre-Christian life is the relatively brief, self-serving Phil. 3:4-11, which neither says nor implies anything about an internally conflicted individual.291 One can, most assuredly, observe that this text reflects only Paul’s conscious self, not his unconscious mind, and further that, as we have known since Edwin Diller Starbuck’s work, disturbed psychological states typically precede dramatic conversions.292 Still, long-distance diagnosis of Paul’s psychological state during a time for which we have only minute residues of evidence is more than tricky.293 Even were there more and better evidence, nobody’s subjective experience is directly available to scientific or historical methods. Lüdemann may think that we “must” seek to uncover “the feelings” and “the emotions” of the first Christians,294 but this a very tall order. I do not see how we can go beyond collecting some intriguing possibilities. 

No less importantly, visions come for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Interviews with modern individuals who have seen apparitions reveal that, as often than not, there was seemingly nothing distinctive about their emotional state at the time.295 An instructive illustration of this comes from Hugh Montefiore, New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop. He wrote these words about his conversion to Christianity from Judaism, a conversion occasioned by a vision of Jesus:

 I had no knowledge of Christianity whatsoever… It [the vision] was certainly not caused by stress: I was in good health, a happy schoolboy with good friends, leading an enthusiastic life and keen on sport as well as work. I do not recall any need to suppress erotic fantasies! I am equally sure that it had nothing to do with my memories, for I had no memories about Jesus. Again, I am sure it was not wish fulfilment, for I was (and still am) proud to be Jewish. I am at a loss to know how it could be psychogenic, although I accept that my brain was the channel through which the experience came about. My sensory input at the time was not at a low ebb. I think it unlikely that the collective unconscious, if it manifested itself in a hallucination, would have taken what for me would have been an alien form. I cannot believe that I was in contact with a ghost, for the figure I saw was alive and life giving. I cannot account for my vision of Jesus by any of the psychological or neurophysiological explanations on offer.296 

As I have no reason to think these less than honest words,297 they are a good reminder that human events can remain enigmatic. Simple explanations, such as, “Well, it must stem from a pathological condition,” are not always satisfying.

THE APPEARANCE TO JOHN OF PATMOS 

The New Testament’s last book opens with a first-person account of the risen Jesus appearing to a certain “John.” The identity of this individual is disputed.298 So too the extent to which Revelation reflects visionary experience. In my view, however, the apocalypse enshrines much more than someone’s literary imagination. Revelation is, like 4 Ezra, the work of a genuine seer. Although it takes up apocalyptic tropes and incorporates multiple sources, real visions also lie behind it. 

The opening Christophany, which begins in 1:9 and ends in 3:22, is long and complex: 

1:9-10a Narrative setting 

1:10b-11 Commanding voice 

1:12-16 Detailed description of the glorified Jesus 

1:17a Physical response of seer 

1:17b–3:22 Extended speech of Jesus; letters to seven churches 

These verses differ from other first-century accounts of resurrection appearances in several ways. Most obviously, they offer an intertextually dense and theologically loaded depiction of the risen Jesus. In addition, his speech goes on for more than two chapters. This feature makes Revelation the precursor of later texts wherein the resurrected Jesus delivers very long discourses.299 

Amidst these and other differences, however, are a number of substantial similarities with what one finds in the canonical gospels and Acts: 

• In Revelation and three of the canonical gospels, the risen Jesus both shows himself and speaks.300 

• In Matthew, Luke, and John, Jesus appears on the first day of the week; in Revelation, John sees him on “the Lord’s day” (1:9), which is almost certainly the first day of the week. 

• Just as Mary Magdalene, in Jn 20:14, “turns” back and sees Jesus (ἐστράφη εἰς τὰ ὀπίσω… θεωρεῖ; cf. v. 16: στραφεῖσα), so John the seer, in Rev. 1:12, after hearing a voice behind him (ὀπίσω), “turns” and sees Jesus (ἐπέστρεψα βλέπειν; ἐπιστρέψας εἶδον). In each case, “‘turning behind’ is a sort of signal of a change of state, a preliminary that introduces the vision report.”301 

• If, in Rev. 1:17, John falls at Jesus’ feet (τοὺς πόδας) and is told not to fear (μὴ φοβοῦ), in Mt. 28:9-10, women grab Jesus’ feet (τοὺς πόδας) and are told not to fear (μὴ φοβεῖσθε). 

• Whereas Paul in Acts sees a brilliant light when Jesus meets him (9:3; 22:6; 26:13), John’s description of the risen Jesus is full of luminous elements (1:12, 14-16, 20). 

• The Stephen of Acts 7:56 sees the heavenly Jesus as “the Son of man”; the Jesus of Mt. 28:18, when he declares that “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,” alludes to Dan. 7:13-15 and its vision of the one like a son of man receiving world-wide dominion;302 and the Jesus of Rev. 1:13 is characterized as “one like a son of man,” a phrase cut and pasted from Dan. 7:13. 

• In describing the risen Jesus and the response of the one who sees him, both Revelation 1 and the accounts of Paul’s conversion in Acts allude to Ezekiel’s inaugural vision of the anthropomorphic form of the Lord.303 

• The announcement of the angel in Mk 16:6, that the crucified Jesus has been raised (16:6; cf. Mt. 28:5-6; Lk. 24:7), reflects the basic kerygmatic claim that Jesus died and was raised (cf. 1 Cor. 15:5; etc.). It is the same with Rev. 1:18: “I was dead, and behold, I am alive forever and ever.” 

• In Jn 20:28, the disciple Thomas acknowledges the resurrected Jesus as “my Lord and my God.” In Rev. 1:14, Jesus’ hair is white as white wool, which makes him like the Ancient of Days (= God) in Dan. 7:13; and in Rev. 1:17, Jesus is “the first and the last,” a phrase Isaiah associates with the deity (41:4; 44:6; 48:12).304 

• While, in Revelation 1, the appearance of Jesus is dramatic, his departure goes unremarked. Matthew 28:8-10, 16-20; Jn 20:19-23, 24-29; and 21:15-23 likewise fail to narrate Jesus’ exit. 

Although Rev. 1:9–3:22 is not exactly a mashup of other Christophanies, the parallels imply what we might otherwise anticipate from a book completed in the last decade or two of the first century,305 namely, that John was familiar with stories like those in the canonical gospels and Acts. Those stories, moreover, seem to have influenced both what he witnessed and what he wrote. In other words, and as is obvious from the remainder of the book, the seer’s linguistic and religious traditions mediated his visionary experiences. 

For our larger purposes, Rev. 1:9–3:22 is important because, on the assumption that it is in part the record of a real experience, the passage underscores the crucial fact that dense intertextuality and heavy debt to tradition are not sure signs of fiction. We shall profitably keep this in mind when, in subsequent chapters, we run across arguments which seemingly presume that dependence on scripture implies creation without memory. 

Revelation 1–3 also serves, as does the account of Stephen’s vision in Acts 7, to remind us that 1 Cor. 15:3-7 and the stories in the gospels do not exhaust the first-century claims to have seen the risen Jesus. The fact poses questions. Would John the seer have felt just as free as Paul to add his name to the list of appearances in 1 Cor. 15:3-7, or would he have hesitated because he thought of his experience as somehow different? In holding that, after Pentecost, the risen Jesus appeared only in visions from heaven, was Luke in good company or alone? Did some draw a distinction between earlier and later experiences principally because they wanted to invest Peter and certain others with authority, or for some other reason? We shall return to these issues in Chapter 13.

* * * 

Although this lengthy chapter, like its predecessor, eludes convenient summary, I should like, before moving forward, to offer five generalizations that flow from it.306 

(1) For the most part, the results of this chapter disappoint, for if our goal is historical reconstruction, our critical tools routinely unearth less than we seek. Time and again we cannot identify the evidentiary traces that must linger in the extant sources; that is, we are unable to determine what particulars in this or that episode preserves historical memories. Our guesses are many, the critical results few. 

(2) The sources are consistently and frustratingly laconic. We know far more about John of Patmos’ experience than about Mary Magdalene’s christophany, Peter’s initial encounter, or the appearance to the five hundred. The reticence of our sources, their dearth of detail, is part of the rationale for my attempt, in Part III, to see if comparative materials might throw some light on our subject. 

(3) Some scholars operate with a sort of Pauline fundamentalism when they compare what the apostle says about Jesus’ resurrection with what the gospels have to say. They construct arguments from silence that privilege 1 Corinthians 15 and turn the gospels into later, second-class witnesses. The apostle, they hold, must be the clue to everything, the Archimedean point around which all else orbits. Paul writes that Jesus was buried but does not name Joseph of Arimathea, so the Markan story of the burial is probably a secondary development. The apostle makes no explicit claim for an empty tomb, so that too is likely later legend. He fails to name Mary Magdalene in 1 Cor. 15:3-8, so we may doubt that she had a vision of Jesus. And so on.

 The justification is always that Paul is the earlier witness. But this move—formally reminiscent of Luther effectively making Paul the canon by which to read everything else in the New Testament—leaves this writer more than uneasy. When it comes to the Jesus tradition, Paul is consistently the inferior witness. He says nothing about Jesus speaking in parables or preaching the kingdom of God. He makes no mention of Jesus exorcising demons or healing the sick. He relates nothing about a ministry in Galilee or conflicts with Jewish leaders. He fails to name Mary or Joseph, or Judas or Pilate, or Caiaphas or Mary Magdalene. In the entirety of his extant correspondence, the apostle merely refers to a few facts about Jesus, cites a few sayings, and alludes to some others. That is it.

 

Chapter 5. The Story of the Tomb: Friday

The historicity of the discovery of the empty tomb does not require the historicity of Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea. Yet to judge the latter to be fictitious is to up the odds of the former being fictitious. For most scholars, then, the two stand or fall together.1 So before investigating the events of Sunday, it will be expedient to discuss the events of Friday. 

DOUBTS 

“There is a strong probability,” according to John Shelby Spong, “that the story of Joseph of Arimathea was developed to cover the apostles’ pain at the memory of Jesus’ having had no one to claim his body and of his demise as a common criminal. His body was probably dumped unceremoniously into a common grave, the location of which has never been known…”2 Spong further urges that, although Mary Magdalene hunted for Jesus’ lifeless body, “she discovered not the empty tomb but the reality of his common grave. No one could identify the place.” In time, “when Peter reconstituted the disciples in Galilee and they returned to Jerusalem, Mary’s story of not being able to find where they had buried Jesus was…incorporated into the resurrection tradition.”3 

John Dominic Crossan, with more critical resources available to him than Spong, has likewise contended that Jesus’ followers did not know what became of him.4 The disciples initially inferred, from Deut. 21:22-23,5 that law-abiding, hostile Jews buried him (cf. Acts 13:29). Later on, Mark turned burial by enemies into burial by “a respected member of the council, who was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God” (15:43). As to what really happened, Crossan observes that the Romans often left the crucified hanging as food for scavengers.6 More generally, the executed were customarily denied honorable or familial burial.7 We can, then, safely guess that, since Pilate was “a monster…with no regard for Jewish sensitivities,” Jesus’ body was “left on the cross or in a shallow grave barely covered with dirt and stones.” In either case, “the dogs were waiting.”8 

David Aus also reckons Joseph of Arimathea to be unhistorical.9 The disciples, according to Aus, bolted to Galilee when their teacher was arrested. The women who had gone up to Jerusalem with them did the same. So none of Jesus’ followers knew his fate. We, however, can make a good guess. A servant of the Sanhedrin—not a member of it—would have interred Jesus in one of the spots that the Jewish court had set aside for criminals (m. Sanh. 6:5; t. Sanh. 9:8). 

How then do we account for the story about Joseph of Arimathea? An Aramaic-speaking, Palestinian Christian Jew, sophisticated in haggadic methods, created it. He did this by drawing on legends about Moses’ demise. Jesus’ tomb was rock-hewn because, in Jewish haggadah, the mobile well/rock that accompanied Israel in the wilderness (cf. 1 Cor. 10:4) had been dug by hand,10 and it disappeared at the spot where Moses was buried (cf. Tgs. Neof., Ps.-Jn. Num. 21:20). Joseph became a member of the Sanhedrin because of the legend that the Sanhedrin dug that well (so Frg. Tg. P V 21:18). “Waiting expectedly for the kingdom of God” (Mk 15:43) was inspired by a version of Num. 21:18 attested in the LXX: “The well, the leaders dug it. The kings of the nations hewed it out of rock in their kingdom.” And “Arimathea” entered the story because Pisgah, the place of Moses’ departure, was known as a “high place” (cf. LAB 19:16) or, in Aramaic, ה/רמתא,” ramatha,” “the heights” (cf. Tg. Neof. Deut. 34:1). 

Bart Ehrman is yet another who has misgivings about the historicity of Mk 15:42-47.11 He finds the absence of Joseph of Arimathea from 1 Cor. 15:3-5 more than suspicious: “if the author of that creed had known such a thing, he surely would have included it, since without naming the person who buried Jesus…he created an imbalance with the second portion of the creed where he does name the person to whom Jesus appeared.”12 Older than Mark’s story is the tradition in Acts 13:29: “And when they [those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers] had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb.” This makes no mention of Joseph of Arimathea, and the verse implies a hostile burial.13 Yet even Acts 13:29 marks a fictional advance over the facts. The Romans had “no interest in Jewish sensitivities,” and “what normally happened to a criminal’s body is that it was left to decompose and serve as food for scavenging animals.”14 Pontius Pilate, who was minimally concerned with Jewish sensitivities, would have acted accordingly. Ehrman infers: “it is highly unlikely that Jesus was decently buried on the day of his execution in a tomb that anyone could later identify.”15

GROUNDS FOR DOUBT 

Is this the right verdict? Should we, with Ehrman, Aus, Crossan, and Spong, doubt or deny the basic historicity of the story in Mark 15? Reasons for endorsing their point of view include the following: 

(1) Receiving a dishonorable burial or no burial at all would have put Jesus in disreputable company.16 One would understand, then, if his followers found in this unedifying fact motivation to invent a legend or haggadic tale purporting otherwise. Since, moreover, they knew that the Romans did not bury crucified criminals, and further that Jesus’ family and friends had scattered to the winds, it would have been natural to make the agent of burial either a group of Jewish authorities (Acts 13:28-29) or a particular Jewish leader (Mk 15:42-47).17

(2) The story about Joseph may lack multiple attestation. That the accounts in Matthew and Luke rest wholly on Mk 15:42-47 is a common verdict.18 The situation with John is unsettled. Many judge Jn 19:38-42 to be independent of the synoptics.19 Yet Crossan is not alone in his view to the contrary.20 Mark, for him, is our sole primary source for Joseph of Arimathea’s interment of Jesus.21 

(3) Joseph of Arimathea is otherwise unknown. Apart from Mark and his successors, history, as opposed to Christian legend, offers nothing. This coheres with the proposal that someone invented him as a deus ex machina, to get Jesus into his tomb so that God could get him out of it. Fictional names are a dime a dozen in the so-called apocryphal writings.22 So too fictional place names.23 And what was possible in later times was possible in earlier times. One might be all the more suspicious given that we cannot identify Arimathea with any confidence.24 

(4) The narratives of Jesus’ burial, set side by side, strongly suggest a proclivity towards the legendary. Mark says that Joseph of Arimathea was a respected member of the council who was waiting for the kingdom of God, and that Jesus’ tomb “had been hewn out of the rock” (Mk 15:43, 46). Luke adds that Joseph was “good and righteous,” that he demurred from the Sanhedrin’s verdict regarding Jesus, and—perhaps to counter the notion that there was a mix-up of corpses—that “no one had ever been laid” in the tomb (Lk. 23:50-51, 53). Matthew’s Gospel has it that Joseph was both rich and a disciple, and that he himself had hewn the tomb, which was new (27:57, 59).25 According to John, Joseph was a disciple (cf. Matthew), albeit in secret, and he had help from Nicodemus (cf. Jn 3:1-15), with whom he loaded Jesus’ body with “about a hundred pounds” of myrrh and aloes, an incredulity-inducing quantity.26 The Gospel of Peter adds that “the Garden of Joseph” was the name of the place (6:24) and that Joseph was a “friend of Pilate” (2:3). The growth of the legend did not, of course, stop there. Given enough time, Joseph became keeper of the Holy Grail, and I have met people who believe that he founded the Church of England.27 

One is reminded of patristic statements regarding the Gospel of Mark, which grow with time.28 The first testimony is from Papias, for whom Mark remembered what Peter said. A bit later, the Anti-Marcionite Prologue gives us the colorful detail that Mark, who wrote in Italy after Peter died, was known as “stump fingered, because he had rather small fingers in comparison with the stature of the rest of his body.” After this, Clement of Alexandria purports that those who heard Peter preach in Rome besought Mark to pen a gospel, an enterprise the apostle neither encouraged nor prevented. By the time we get to Jerome, Mark has become the first bishop of the Church of Alexandria. 

Early Christians could tell stories that snowballed, gathering apocryphal elements along the way, and we catch a glimpse of the process in the various accounts of Joseph burying Jesus. Why presume that the snowball began to roll only after Mark?29 

(5) In addition to Ehrman’s appeal to Acts 13:29, which has the residents of Jerusalem and their leaders taking Jesus down from the tree and laying him in a tomb, one might find in Mk 12:8 (“they threw him out of the vineyard”) and/or Jn 19:31 (“the Jews…asked Pilate…to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed”) added evidence of an early tradition independent of, and not in line with, the story about Joseph of Arimathea.30 

(6) According to Crossan, Gos. Pet. 6:21 supplies one more argument for the secondary character of Mark’s burial story: “And then they drew the nails from the hands of the Lord and laid him on the earth. And the whole earth shook and there was great fear.”31 This, for Crossan, “presumes that those who crucified Jesus are responsible, from Deut. 21:22-23 [cited in Gos. Pet. 2:5], for taking his body off the cross and burying it before sunset.”32 In other words, the story “takes it for granted that Jesus was crucified, removed from the cross, and buried by his enemies.”33 Since Crossan assigns Gos. Pet. 6:21 to a pre-Markan source he dubs “The Cross Gospel,” he discerns here a rival to Mark’s account. 

(7) Finally, regarding Aus’ theory that Mk 15:42-47 reworks legends about the death of Moses, the rabbinic idea that the last redeemer (Messiah) will be like the first redeemer (Moses) was current in the first century.34 This partly explains why Mosaic elements appear not infrequently in the canonical gospels.35 What is more, some early Christian stories about Jesus not only allude to the law-giver but seem to derive in large measure from Mosaic materials. Matthew’s infancy narrative is the most obvious illustration.36 The generalization includes, significantly, Matthew’s closing resurrection appearance (28:16-20).37 Beyond all this, other ancient texts model a hero’s departure on legends about Moses’ departure,38 so Aus’ theory fits with much that we otherwise know.

 THE OTHER SIDE 

Although the foregoing points are not without force, they leave me, for the following reasons, unpersuaded: 

(1) Aus’ learned and fascinating attempt to derive most of Mk 15:42-47 from Mosaic elements, while it has given me much to ponder, has failed, in the end, to persuade.39 One issue is his premise. According to Aus, both the male and female followers of Jesus promptly fled, upon his arrest, to Galilee. As I urged earlier, however, we have no good reason to posit that they were anywhere but in Jerusalem or its environs a day or two after Jesus’ death.40 Yet even if I am wrong about this, it is unclear why, upon later returning to the capital, Jesus’ disciples, if interested, could not have gathered something from someone about what had happened in their absence. Given this, as well as Aus’ suggestion as to what really happened, namely, that a servant of the Sanhedrin buried Jesus in the cemetery for criminals, one might expect some trace in our sources of Isa. 53:9: “they made his grave with the wicked.”41 There is none. 

More critical is the problem of assessing the intriguing correlations Aus discerns between Mk 15:42-47 and legends about Moses. How can we determine whether they are substantial or phantasmal? While contemplating this question, I asked myself if I could do what Aus has done, that is, create a haggadic genealogy for Mark’s story, yet with different materials. I decided that I could. Here is how my thoughts unfolded. 

Had I been an early Christian interested in creating from scratch an edifying story about Jesus’ burial, I might have turned first to the HB/OT’s most elaborate burial story, that being Gen. 49:29–50:14. This tells of the patriarch Joseph burying the patriarch Jacob, also known as Israel. As soon as I recalled this passage, it would surely have struck me that, just as Jesus had twelve disciples, so Jacob had twelve sons.42 This might have been enough to move me to ruminate further. I could then have noticed that (i) Joseph was a ruler, that (ii) he nonetheless had to get permission from Pharaoh to proceed with burying Israel, and that (iii) Joseph laid Israel in a tomb that had been “hewed out.” I could, then, have constructed a story with these parallels: 

• Name of individual in charge of burial: 

Genesis: the patriarch “Joseph” 

Mark: “Joseph” (of Arimathea) 

• His status as a ruler: 

Genesis: second in command under Pharaoh 

Mark: member of the Sanhedrin43 

• The person buried: 

Genesis: the patriarch Israel, father of twelve sons 

Mark: “the king of Israel,” leader of twelve disciples 

• Permission of the ruler required: 

Genesis: Joseph needs Pharaoh’s permission to bury Israel in the land 

Mark: Joseph needs Pilate’s permission to bury Jesus 

• Where buried: 

Genesis: in a tomb that had been hewn out 

Mark: in a tomb hewn out of rock44 

With these correlations in mind—with which I would be all the more enamored if, like the church fathers, I took Jacob = Israel to prefigure Christ in other respects45—I could have composed something close to Mk 15:42-47. I might even, were I to recall Gen. 29:2 and 10, where Jacob rolls a large stone away from the mouth of a well, have anticipated the resurrection by having Joseph roll a stone in front of the door of Jesus’ tomb. Of course I would have had to make allowance for the inevitable differences, such as that Jesus would need to be buried in Jerusalem, and that a Jewish “ruler” in Jesus’ time and place would have to be a Sanhedrist. 

To hypothesize further: What if, two thousand years later, a New Testament scholar came along and divined what I had done? That scholar could appeal to reception history, which sometimes associates Gen. 50:5 and Mt. 27:60 or compares the patriarch Joseph with his namesake from Arimathea.46 My imaginary academic could further make the case that the author of Mk 15:42-47 must have known not only Genesis but haggadic elaborations of it, and also that Matthew, Luke, and John perceived the parallels that I have assembled, because they aptly added to them: 

• Tg. Ps.-J. 50:1 notes that Israel was buried with spices, which has its counterpart in Mk 16:1; Lk. 24:1; and Jn 19:39-40. 

• Tg. Onq. 49:24 reports that Joseph kept the Torah “secretly” (cf. b. Sotׂ ah 10b), and Jn 19:38 says that Joseph of Arimathea was a disciple “in secret.” 

• Abraham, fabled as “rich” (πλούσιος, LXX Gen. 13:2), purchased the tomb in which Israel was buried, and the owner of Jesus’ tomb is, in Mt. 27:57, “rich” (πλούσιος). 

At this point I shall stop. Perhaps someone with more resources than I can elucidate how traditions linked to Genesis 49–50 might supply “of Arimathea.” But the lesson is clear. Striking parallels between a text and a complex of traditions need not entail dependence of the former on the later. Coincidences crop up between texts as well as within history.47 And in the case of Aus’ argument about Mk 14:42-47 and legends linked to Moses’ death, I am unswayed because I cannot see that my alternative proposal, which I know to be bogus, suffers much by comparison. 

A final point about Aus. Even were one to decide that the story of Jesus’ burial draws on Mosaic traditions, this would not establish its genesis as unalloyed haggadah. Legend can be parasitic on memory. Myths about the assassination of John F. Kennedy abound. Nonetheless, somebody in fact shot the President. Early Christians could have elaborated their recall of Jesus’ burial with the aid of religious language and legends. Indeed, the synoptics confront us with this phenomenon again and again: intertextuality is, for them, the attire of memory. Aus himself, despite finding Mosaic motifs in the story of Gethsemane, doubts not that Jesus was arrested on the Mount of Olives.48 Why could it not be similar with Mk 15:42-47? That is, might not a known fact, that a member of the Sanhedrin buried Jesus, have been written up with Moses in mind?49 

(2) What of Crossan’s analysis of the Gospel of Peter? It does not fare well under cross examination. Even if the Gospel of Peter preserves a few traditions not derived from the canonical gospels, Crossan’s reconstruction of “The Cross Gospel” has persuaded few.50 Much more importantly, there is an exegetical issue. Gospel of Peter 6:21 says nothing about Jesus’ burial.51 Τhat comes only two verses later: “(21) And then they drew the nails from the hands of the Lord and laid him on (ἐπί) the earth. And the whole earth shook and there was great fear. (22) Then the sun shone and it was found to be the ninth hour. (23) And the Jews rejoiced and gave his body to Joseph that he might bury it since he had seen all the good deeds that he (Jesus) had done.” The unspecified “they” of v. 21—who could be either Roman soldiers or “the Jews” (cf. Mk 15:46)—place Jesus’ body on the ground. This refers not to burial but to removal from the cross and a temporary lull in the proceedings. What then happens to the body? In the gospel as it stands, Joseph of Arimathea receives it (v. 23). Crossan thinks this circumstance is due to later editorial interference under the influence of Mark: Gos. Pet. 6:23-24 interrupts the original sequence, 6:22 + 7:25 + 8:28ff. Only such surgery allows Crossan to find a non-Markan, pre-Markan view of the burial. Yet not only does one fail to see any persuasive justification for the operation, but the outcome is peculiar. If one heeds Crossan and accepts 6:22 + 7:25 + 8:28ff. as the pristine sequence, then we pass, if we are following Jesus’ body, from “they drew the nails from the hands of the Lord and laid him on the earth” (6:21) to the Jewish elders asking Pilate, “Give us soldiers that we may watch his sepulcher for three days, lest his disciples come and steal him away…” (8:30). In other words, the body has somehow moved from the foot of the cross to a sepulcher heretofore unintroduced. Not only does this fail to commend itself as a coherent sequence, but the interment, if Gos. Pet. 6:23-24 is a secondary insertion, is simply bypassed.52 How does this qualify as a tradition competing with Mark? 

(3) Acts 13:29 offers meager support for the apocryphal character of Mark’s account. The sentence appears in a source later than Mark, a source whose author missed the proposed contradiction with Joseph’s burial of Jesus. Acts 13:29 could even, moreover, be redactional.53 Be that as it may, it is far from self-evident that we have here a distinct, different tradition of the burial. Perhaps we should allow Luke some laxity of expression.54 No one finds old, non-Markan tradition in Acts 2:23, 36; and 4:10, which have the Jews in Jerusalem crucifying Jesus (cf. 1 Thess. 2:14-15), or in Lactantius, Inst. 4.19.6-7 (ed. Heck and Wlosok, pp. 393–4), where “the Jews” take Jesus down from the cross and put him in a tomb. 

Even were one to attribute Acts 13:29 to pre-Lukan tradition, it remains that the verse depicts not Romans but Jews laying Jesus to rest. This agrees with Mark. Further, the plurals in Acts (“they took him down…and they laid him in a tomb”) line up with the plural of Mk 16:6 (“the place where they laid him”; cf. also Jn 19:31). Assuming, then, that the Second Gospel presents Joseph as more or less a sympathetic character, the hypothesized rival tradition in Acts would differ only on the issue of motive, and that is scarcely enough to negate the historical core of Mk 15:42-46.55 (4) Do we have good reason to posit that imagination rather than memory begot the name, “Joseph of Arimathea”? Mark’s passion narrative has thirteen named actors: Simon the leper (14:3), Jesus (14:10 and passim), Judas Iscariot (14:10, 43), Simon Peter (14:29, 33, 37, 54, 66, 70, 72), James (14:33), John (14:33), Pilate (15:1-15, 43-44), Barabbas (15:7, 11), Simon of Cyrene (15:21), Mary Magdalene (15:40, 47), Mary the mother of James and of Joses (15:40, 47), Salome (15:40), and Joseph of Arimathea (15:43, 46). From secular sources we know that Pilate was a historical figure, and except for those who speciously deem Jesus to be a myth, no one doubts that Simon Peter, James, John, and Mary Magdalene were real people. If one additionally has the good sense to think the same of Judas Iscariot, over half of the named people in Mark 14–15 are not fictitious. 

What of the rest? The qualification of Simon as “the father of Alexander and Rufus” (15:21) is odd on the theory of invention, for it was customary to introduce men by reference to their parents (“son of”), not their children (“father of”). One presumes that Alexander and Rufus show up because someone knew them. It is even possible that we have the ossuary of Alexander, son of Simon of Cyrene.56 As for Simon the leper, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome, I do not see how to mount a vigorous case for their historicity.57 Equally, however, I fail to see how to press a case to the contrary. Few have. 

The one name in Mark 14–15, aside from Joseph of Arimathea, that has aroused considerable suspicion is Barabbas.58 I need not enter the debate here. I only register my judgment that the issue remains unsettled and add that critical doubt has stemmed in part from the name itself, Barabbas (= אבא בר” ;Abba” is a well-attested name for Jesus’ time and place). It means, “son of the father.” Early Christians did not miss the ironic significance of this: one son of the father goes free while another son of the father goes to execution. This explains Mt. 27:16, which turns “Barabbas” into “Jesus Barabbas.” “Joseph of Arimathea” is different. If the name serves a theological end, the prompts are subtle indeed. Ingo Broer indeed dubs “Joseph of Arimathea” an “erratischen Block.”59 Nor does “of Arimathea” appear to be spun out of scripture.60 Given this, the safer bet is that, like most or all the other characters in Mark’s passion narrative, he belongs to history.61 

The historicity of a name does not, to be sure, guarantee the historicity of a narrative built around it.62 One need only recall Matthew’s haggadic infancy narrative, starring Herod the king and Joseph the father of Jesus. The names are historical, the narrative mostly unhistorical. Even so, Joseph appears in Matthew 1–2 because he was indeed the husband of Mary and Jesus’ father, and Herod is there because Jesus was born during his reign. Why is Joseph of Arimathea at Jesus’ interment in Mark? One sensible explanation is that he was there in fact.63

(5) Herod, in Gos. Pet. 2:5, says to Pilate, “Even if no one had asked for him, we should bury (ἐθάπτομεν) him since the Sabbath is dawning. For it is written in the law: the sun should not set on one who has been put to death.” This assumes that pious Jews, heeding Deut. 21:22-23, did not want bodies left overnight on crosses or tossed onto the ground but rather desired that the executed receive some sort of burial, and further that the Roman authorities might acquiesce to this desire.

 Ehrman, like Crossan, finds this dubious, and he may be correct in holding that “people who were crucified were usually left on their crosses as food for scavengers”64 (although we cannot back up his “usually” with hard numbers). The relevant issues, however, are whether Rome ever granted petitions for burial—this is the situation in Mark—and whether, during times of peace in pre-70 Palestine, such a request was apt to be granted. 

Rome sometimes, we know, permitted the burial of state-executed criminals. The Digesta has this: 

The bodies of those who are condemned to death should not be refused their relatives; and the Divine Augustus, in the Tenth Book on his life, said that this rule had been observed. At present, the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted; and sometimes it is not permitted, especially where persons have been convicted of high treason… The bodies of persons who have been punished should be given to whoever requests them for the purpose of burial (48:1, 3).65 

These words line up with Philo, Flacc. 83: “I have known cases when, on the eve of a holiday of this kind [a celebration for the emperor], people who have been crucified have been taken down and their bodies delivered to their kinsfolk, because it was thought well to give them burial and allow them the ordinary rites.”66 

Philo, however, lived in Alexandria. What of Palestine? Here the key testimony is Josephus, Bell. 4.317: “the Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset.” Josephus here refers to Roman crucifixion in his day, and his words match what we find in the New Testament. 

Josephus’ generalization reflects the influence of Deut. 21:22-23, which for Jews would have been the law of the land: “his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is accursed by God; you shall not defile your land.”67 The commandment not to defile the land required the burial of criminals,68 and that on the day of execution. This would presumably have been enough for a law-observant Jew, acting either on his own or on behalf of the Sanhedrin, to have concerned himself, if possible, with Jesus’ lifeless body. 

We should not, to be sure, read Josephus’ words unimaginatively. They reflect aspiration—Jews buried bodies whenever they could—rather than every occasion in real life. Rome obviously did not, during war, release the bodies of slain enemies; and the Digesta lists “high treason”—which it does not here define—as vetoing interment. There were probably other occasions on which, for one reason or another, burial was disallowed. This is likely the background for Mk 15:43, which speaks of Joseph “daring” (τολμήσας) to ask for Jesus’ body. This seems to presuppose that the governor only sometimes granted requests for burial,69 and that uncertainty surrounded what Pilate would do in the case of Jesus.70 

Semahׂot 2:9 seems to envisage the same situation: the days of mourning were counted “from the time that [the relatives of a victim executed by the government] despaired in their appeal [to obtain the body from the authorities for burial] but not [given up hope] of stealing it.” This ruling, whose content could come from the early Roman period,71 implies that the relatives of executed criminals were accustomed to ask for the remains of a loved one; and, although the text envisions refusal, it implies that sometimes the authorities complied, otherwise there would have been no custom of appealing. 

The skeletal remains of the crucified man fortuitously discovered at Giv’at ha-Mivtar and buried in a family tomb supports the inference that the Romans sometimes allowed Jews to bury victims of crucifixion.72 Crossan judges the matter differently: “With all those thousands of people crucified around Jerusalem in the first century alone, we have so far found only a single crucified skeleton, and that, of course, preserved in an ossuary. Was burial, then, the exception rather than the rule, the extraordinary rather than the ordinary?”73 

Yet, as others have observed, the remains of victims who were tied up rather than nailed would show no signs of having been crucified.74 Additionally, the nails used in crucifixion—which some prized as amulets75—were pulled out at the site of execution (cf. Gos. Pet. 6:21), presumably for reuse, and so not entombed with the bodies.76 The only reason we know that the man in the ossuary from Giv’at ha-Mivtar was crucified is that a nail in his right heel bone could not be removed from the wood: it remained stuck in a knot. In the words of Byron McCane, 

If there had not been a knot strategically located in the wood of Yehohanan’s cross, the soldiers would have easily pulled the nail out of the cross. It never would have been buried with Yehohanan, and we would never have known that he had been crucified. It is not surprising, in other words, that we have found the remains of only one crucifixion victim: it is surprising that we have identified even one.77

 Crossan’s claim faces another hurdle. According to archaeologist Jodi Magness, “pit graves and trench graves are poor in finds” and were “more susceptible to destruction than rock-cut tombs,” so archaeologists have uncovered far fewer of the former than the latter.78 Yet there must have been many more trench and pit graves, which belonged to the lower class, than rock-hewn tombs, which belonged to the upper class. So what we have to hand is not representative of the first-century reality. Our finds are disproportionately from the segment of the population that benefitted most from the status quo, which means the segment least likely, before the Jewish revolt, to have run afoul of Rome and suffered crucifixion.79 

Returning to the case of Jesus, Eric Meyers judged that the Romans would likely have allowed his burial simply because many loved him.80 With the messianic pretender executed, there was no reason to compound upset by keeping his body up on its cross and so offending those anxious about obeying Deut. 21:22-23—especially during a holiday, when pious pilgrims overflowed Jerusalem. Lüdemann sensibly opined: “the release of Jesus’ body and its removal from the cross might…have suited Pilate, because this would a priori avoid unrest among the large number of visitors for the festival.”81 

(6) The proposal that Christian story-tellers moved Jesus from a criminal’s pile to a tomb in order to spare him dishonor collides with a blindingly obvious fact. Early Christian writings not only acknowledge that Jesus suffered the hideous, dishonorable fate of crucifixion but find profound meaning in the circumstance. In their own way, their authors even glory in the cross. Surely people capable of such an extraordinary, unprecedented theological move could equally have redeemed burial in a trench or bones drying in the sun had circumstances presented them such a challenge.82 This is all the more so as their hero was remembered as saying something that could have been construed, had the need arisen, as indifference to burial: “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Mt. 8:22; Lk. 9:60). 

(7) Regarding Ehrman’s reasoning about 1 Cor. 15:3-5, it seems ill-considered to me. He urges that Joseph of Arimathea is not in the creed because those who formulated it knew nothing of him. Had they known, they would have turned “he was buried” into “he was buried by Joseph” so as to form a nifty parallel with “he appeared to Cephas.” Yet it is unclear how this could have been done. “He appeared to Cephas” is, in Greek, two words: a verb (ὤφθη: “he appeared”) plus a simple dative (Κηφᾷ: “to Cephas”). One cannot, however, say “he was buried by Joseph” in Greek with ἐτάφη and a simple dative. One would instead need to use the active (“Joseph buried him”)83 or employ the preposition, “by” (ὑπό).84 In either case, the parallelism would be imperfect. In order, moreover, to mirror the singular “Cephas,” one would need the singular “Joseph.” Yet that might suggest the father of Jesus. Were one, then, to anticipate that misunderstanding, one would need the full-blown “Joseph of Arimathea,” which again would diminish the parallelism, for the creed has “Cephas,” not “Cephas of Capernaum.” Beyond all this, the formula in v. 5 is not “appeared to Cephas” but “appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” One fails to see how to fashion a linguistic twin for that with nothing but the singular, “Joseph of Arimathea.” 

In addition to such formal considerations, I have already observed, in another connection, that 1 Cor. 15:3-8 is full of holes.85 It fails not only to name Joseph of Arimathea but also Pilate. It likewise neglects to locate any event in Jerusalem or in Galilee. It even affirms that Jesus “died” rather than that he was “crucified.” Much then is missing, and why Joseph’s absence is more unexpected than the nonappearance of other particulars escapes me. This is all the more so as Peter and the twelve were eminent religious leaders for Jesus’ first followers whereas Joseph of Arimathea was not.86 The latter might, like Caiaphas, find his way into a narrative of Jesus’ demise, but that he did not make it into Paul’s credo does not puzzle. He also failed to enter the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, even though those who formulated those statements indubitably knew his story. 

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS 

Given that the case against the historicity of Mk 15:42-46, when critically examined, founders, it does not surprise that one can muster respectable arguments for a more conservative conclusion, namely, that Mk 15:42-47 is, in its gist, historical.87     

(1) According to the old confession in 1 Cor. 15:4, Jesus “died” and “was buried” (ἐτάφη).88 The first meaning of the verb, θάπτω, is “honor with funeral rites, especially by burial” (LSJ, s.v.). Nowhere in Jewish sources, furthermore, does the formula, “died…and was buried,” refer to anything other than interment in the ground, a cave, or a tomb. So the language of the pre-Pauline formula cannot have been used of a body left to rot on a cross. Nor would the unceremonious dumping of a cadaver onto a pile for scavengers have suggested ἐτάφη. Such a fate would not have been burial but its denial. The retort that Paul wrote “was buried,” not “buried in a tomb,” is specious. Just as “was cremated” implies, for us, “was cremated into ashes,” so “was buried” entailed, in Paul’s world, interment of some sort.89

 Whether or not 1 Cor. 5:4 summarizes an early form of the story about Joseph, “it would be strange,” as Barnabas Lindars observed, “to include this detail in the statement if the burial of Jesus was in fact unknown.”90 More than that, so far from being unknown, it may have been well known. Romans 6:4 affirms: “we have been buried with him (συνετάφημεν αὐτῷ) in baptism.”91 This assumes that Jesus was buried, and Paul prefaces his words with, “Do you not know?” The rhetorical question suggests that the recipients in Rome, a place the apostle had not yet visited, are familiar with the idea of being buried with Christ, which in turn suggests their belief that someone buried Jesus. Beyond Paul’s early witness, the four canonical gospels tell a story about Jesus’ burial, and each includes additional materials—not all purely redactional—which presuppose that Jesus was not thrown onto a pile for criminals but rather buried.92 Jesus’ committal in a tomb is, then, decently attested.93 

(2) Crucifixions were public events. Intended as deterrents, they were designed to call attention to themselves and to be remembered.94 Had Jesus been crucified in a corner, the potential “to deter resistance or revolt”95 would have been greatly diminished. When one adds that Jesus was sufficiently in the public eye so as to gain the governor’s notice,96 that his fate would likely have been of interest to the curious, and that his wretched ordeal would, given dismal human nature, have held entertainment value for some—one recalls the one-time crowds for public executions in Europe and America97—it is hard to imagine that there was no cloud of witnesses. Surely Origen was right: Jesus’ death on a cross must have been conspicuous (ἐπισήμως).98 That the gospels say there were passers-by is no reason to think that there were not.99 It is inherently probable that at least a few people, some friendly, some hostile, some indifferent, witnessed Jesus’ final hours, and that his crucifixion and burial promptly became the stuff of street gossip, so that anyone who wanted to learn what happened, or at least what people were saying had happened, could just have asked around.100 Jerusalem was, one should remember, a very small place by our standards. The Herodian walls enclosed less than one square mile, and at Passover the place was thronged, dense with crowds.101 Crossan says that those who knew did not care and that those who cared did not know.102 It is more likely, to the contrary, that most everyone knew whether they cared or not.103 

(3) If Pilate ignored Jewish scruples about Deut. 21:22-23, we have every reason to presume that Jesus and his crucified companions would have lived on for more than a few hours. The Romans were not in a hurry to extinguish the suffering of enemies and criminals, which is why crucifixions could last for days. Our sources, however, contain no trace of prolonged torture. Why not? If the Christian faithful were inventing haggadic fictions, they could just as well have had Jesus die on Sunday or Monday, or heroically last even longer. Would this not have allowed them to put more words into his mouth? Yet their stories tell of a speedy end: crucified during the day, dead by sunset.104 Why invent this? What theological end did it serve? If, however, there is memory in the gospels, Pilate did not orchestrate a drawn-out affair, presumably because of the oncoming Sabbath; and if that is so, then he likely acceded to the Jewish desire to have the executed taken down before dusk and buried. 

(4) To ascribe the story of Joseph of Arimathea to Mark or an immediate predecessor seemingly implies that, for quite some time, no concrete tradition about the burial of Jesus’ body was in circulation. Is this credible? Goulder thinks so. His proposition is that “at first the splendour of the  Resurrection fact might suffice for the celebration of Easter.” Only “in time” did questions “press themselves—what became of his body? who buried him? etc.”105 

Do the words, “in time,” which stand for the passing of three decades or so, reflect the likely course of events? Why did thirty or more years pass before anyone became interested in Jesus’ burial, which was after all part of the early kerygma? Why did the tradition behind 1 Cor. 15:3-7, with its assertion that Jesus “was buried,” not arouse interest and so prompt the telling or invention of a story? Goulder’s laconic and vague explanation—that “the first Splendour of the resurrection” stood in the way—clarifies nothing: it is an empty assertion. Were Jesus’ early followers, whose scriptures were not bereft of details about the burials of religious heroes,106 so incurious regarding his burial that they had to wait for Mark, in the 60s or 70s, to tell them a story? 

 (5) It would be contrary to Mark’s habit to depict a member of the Sanhedrin doing a kindness to Jesus. If, then, Mk 15:43, like Lk. 23:50-51, depicts Joseph of Arimathea as a member of that body—a probable yet uncertain reading of Mark107—this is surprising and so a sign of pre-Markan tradition.108 Neither Matthew (who was likely unhappy with or perplexed by Mark’s “member of the council”) nor John identifies Joseph as a counselor of any kind; and the several canonical attempts to explain Joseph’s act—he was discipled to Jesus or looking for the kingdom of God or disagreed with the Sanhedrin’s verdict or secretly believed109—reflect how irregular the evangelists found it. 

It is unsatisfactory to counter that, because everyone knew that neither the dispersed disciples nor the pitiless Romans could have entombed Jesus, Mark or his tradition felt compelled to hand the job over to a member of the Sanhedrin. Why was it easier to sin against the fact that Jesus had no tomb than to sin against the fact that the disciples were dispersed?110 If Mark could have Peter in the courtyard of the high priest after “they all fled” (14:50, 54), why could he not have the twelve at the tomb on Sunday morning after “they all fled”? Or why did the evangelist not nominate, as Jesus’ burier, the husband of the woman who anointed him for burial (Mk 14:3-9), or “the owner of the house” where Jesus ate the last supper (Mk 14:14), or Simon of Cyrene (Mk 15:21), or James, Jesus’ brother (Mk 6:3)? There is nothing about these individuals running away. What required, if we are truly in the realm of untrammeled legend and unconstrained memory, that the agent of Jesus’ burial be a member of the Sanhedrin? The answer cannot be similitude, because the skeptical argument has as its premise the implausibility of a member of Sanhedrin burying Jesus. Again, why not have a sympathetic Roman soldier, perhaps the centurion in charge of the execution, surreptitiously perform the task? That would be no more outrageous to the retroactive imagination than having the centurion declare Jesus to be God’s son (Mk 15:39). Mark’s “a respected member of the council” remains unexpected. 

(6) Mark’s laconic account contains neither fantastic elements nor explicit Christian motifs. Günther Bornkamm judged it to be “concise, unemotional and without any bias.”111 Ludgar Schenke agreed: “the story is matter-of-fact and without obvious theological ‘tendency.’”112 More than this, if we set aside Aus’ suggestions, it does not appear to be an example of what Crossan has called “prophecy historicized.” The only element in Mark’s adaptation that we might plausibly trace to scripture is burial before sundown.113 This could, one might urge, come straight out of Deut. 21:22-23 (cf. Josh. 8:29; 10:17-18). Yet because Jews in reality tried to fulfill the Mosaic prescription, we can just as easily suppose that the historical actors obediently followed the pentateuchal text. For the rest, and as already observed, it is perhaps surprising, given early Christian interest in Isaiah 53, that Mark’s story of Joseph fails to accommodate 53:9: “they made his grave with the wicked.”114 

(7) The assertion that Jesus might have been left on the cross or denied genuine burial is, to my knowledge, found nowhere in the ancient sources, with one exception. That exception is the Apocryphon of James from Nag Hammadi. At one point, the risen Jesus, addressing James and Peter, says to them, “Or do you not know that you have yet to be abused and to be accused unjustly; and have yet to be shut up in prison, and condemned unlawfully, and crucified without reason, and buried in the sand (àNn oyéoy), as I was myself, by the evil one?” (5:9-21). One more than hesitates to make much of this, however.115 Not only is the reading of the text uncertain,116 but “the date for the original composition is usually put at [the] third century.”117 The text presupposes James’ martyrdom, and it seems to know the canonical gospels, so it is hardly a safe place to mine for antique tradition.118 

The interpretation is also unclear. If the illustrations of abuse and unjust accusation—being shut up in prison, condemned unlawfully, crucified without reason, buried in the sand—not only prophesy the futures of James and Peter but are also supposed to come from the life of Jesus, then we have here the notion that Jesus was shut up in prison, for which we otherwise have no evidence. It seems much more likely that the concluding qualification, “as I was myself,” covers not the details of the sentence but its general import, that is, it communicates only that Jesus was abused and unjustly accused, not that his enemies shut him up in prison and buried him in the sand. 

(8) Even if Joseph of Arimathea did attend to Jesus’ corpse, why did Christians bother to recall his name? Would they have done so had he merely thrown Jesus into a burial plot for criminals, or if he had treated Jesus in a way other criminals were treated? The gospels are full of nameless characters. Matti Kankaanniemi has a point when he infers that “something unexpected in Joseph’s act inspired Jesus’ followers to mention his name.” Kankaanniemi then observes: “private burial by a Sanhedrinist matches well with this ‘unexpected.’”119 

(9) Mark relates that Jesus’ tomb was hewn in the rock. Rock-hewn tombs were common around Jerusalem in the second temple period. Mark tell us that a stone was rolled in front of Jesus’ grave. The archaeological record features such stones.120 Mark purports that Jesus was buried by a “respected member of the council.” Only people of means owned rock-hewn tombs.121 So Mk 15:42-47 lines up with much of what we know. Magness can state: “the Gospel accounts accurately reflect the manner in which the Jews of ancient Jerusalem buried their dead in the first century.”122 (10) The existence of a pre-Markan passion narrative, once taken for granted, is taken for granted no longer. Nonetheless, the hypothesis, as I have argued at length elsewhere, still commends itself.123 Those who concur can assign Mk 15:42-48 to Mark’s source as opposed to his redaction. To my mind, it is hard to envisage the story of Jesus’ burial as an independent piece, circulating without an account either of the crucifixion or the resurrection.124 

* * * 

The preceding paragraphs disclose why I find it likely that a man named Joseph, probably a Sanhedrist, from the obscure Arimathea, sought and obtained permission from the Roman authorities to make arrangements for Jesus’ hurried burial. I grant that the evidence is imperfect and, unlike John A. T. Robinson, I do not claim that the burial “must be accepted as one of the most firmly grounded facts of Jesus’ life.”125 It remains possible that someone made up the story. Yet there are no real signs of this but rather several indications to the contrary. Further, nothing we know about Jewish burial practices or Roman law and custom or from archaeology contradicts Mk 15:42-47 at any point. 

My observations and inferences about Mk 15:42-47 do not, I grant, unfold in isolation from everything else I believe about our earliest sources for Jesus. On the whole, I tend to be more positive about their historical value than Strauss, Bultmann, and Crossan. So my major conclusion, that there is a historical nucleus behind Mark’s story, suits my larger view of the tradition. Were my general orientation more skeptical, the points I have made would no doubt appear less cogent, or even fall short of persuasion. There are no stand-alone arguments. With all that said, I regard my main conclusion as important, because in David Catchpole’s words, 

It is extremely difficult to believe that the recollection of his [Joseph’s] name would persist in connection with something he had done, while at the same time the location where he had done it remained unknown. It is easier to associate a known agent of burial with a known place of burial, and therefore to be open to the possibility that there was indeed a specific tomb available for visiting shortly after Jesus’ death.126 

OPEN QUESTIONS 

Before quitting this chapter, I should stress that, notwithstanding my main conclusion, questions remain. 

(1) If Mark’s story approximates reality, why did the crucified, lower-class Jesus end up in an upper-class tomb?127 Why was he not instead interred in a graveyard for criminals or in a simple trench grave or in a place reserved for the committal of foreigners, as Mt. 27:7 reports of Judas?128 “There is no evidence that the Sanhedrin or the Roman authorities paid for and maintained rock-cut tombs for executed criminals from impoverished families.”129

For Matthew and John, the explanation for Jesus’ unexpected upgrade lies in Joseph’s personal devotion: he was a disciple. This is likely a late guess without historical merit.130 It is far more plausible that Torah dictated Joseph’s decision. Deuteronomy 21:22-23 requires burial before nightfall, and if, as appears, Jesus died late on Friday, there may have been, after Joseph received the body, not enough time to dig a shaft or trench grave or even a simple shallow field grave, whether in a spot for criminals or somewhere else.131 Perhaps, then, Joseph, moved by a lack of alternatives and pressed for time, obeyed Deut. 21:22-23 by moving Jesus’ corpse to his family tomb.132 If so, he presumably would have regarded the resting spot as temporary.133 Perhaps he planned to come back and remove the body in a day or two, or maybe he assumed that the bones would be extricated in a year, possibly to a place reserved for Jews who were not residents of Jerusalem.134 

The other way to explain Jesus’ burial in a rock-hewn tomb is to suppose that Joseph, although no disciple, was not hostile, or even a bit sympathetic.135 Mark’s insistence that the whole Sanhedrin, in a full-scale trial, condemned Jesus likely inflates the facts. The much less elaborate Jn 18:19-24 is more plausible.136 Maybe, then, Joseph was uninvolved or less than happy with the outcome (cf. Lk. 23:50-51). Mark’s characterization of him as “looking for the kingdom of God” (15:43) might reflect this circumstance.137

(2) The canonical gospels purport that Jesus was not crucified alone.138 If that is history, what happened to those beside him? The truth has fallen between history’s cracks. Yet the motive for burying Jesus quickly, in deference to Deut. 21:22-23, would have demanded their burial, too.139 Maybe the executed had family in Jerusalem and the bodies were handed over to them.140 Or perhaps Jewish authorities felt responsible for Jesus alone because they played a role in his demise whereas they were wholly uninvolved with what befall the others.141 It is also possible that a burial detail, having dug a couple of graves, ran out of time to dig a third, which led to Joseph’s hurried handling of Jesus. Or did Joseph, despite the silence of our sources, bury Jesus’ body alongside the others, each on a shelf or in its own loculus? Yet in that case the tradents should happily have welcomed the fact, which they would have seen as the fulfillment of Isa. 53:9: “they made his grave with the wicked.” But then again, acknowledging that Jesus had been laid beside others would have opened the possibility of imagining that the body that went missing belonged to another. Alas, ignorance encircles what we know, or rather what we take to be probable. 

(3) Even if, as the synoptics have it, Jesus was buried in a rock-hewn tomb, they offer few details. They say nothing about the number of rooms or niches in the walls, or whether the tomb had a standing pit because the ceiling was low, or how many shallow depressions for corpses were on the floor, or whether Jesus’ body was laid on a shelf or on the floor or in a kokh. 142 A few details, however, tempt the imagination. 

The synoptics saying nothing about the women going from chamber to chamber. Further, Lk. 24:12 has Peter seeing the burial garments while still in the entrance, and Jn 20:5 has the Beloved Disciple doing the same. Now I do not contend for the historicity of these items. If, however, one were to receive them as facts, they would suggest a small, one-room tomb without an antechamber. Such an inference coheres with Matthew’s claim that Joseph owned the tomb. Since this man was known as “Joseph of Arimathea,” he was not born in Jerusalem but arrived there later, so if he had a tomb in the capital, it was not filled with his ancestors. On the contrary, it was presumably on land that he had purchased after moving to Jerusalem, in which case there was likely neither need nor time to carve out a large complex to receive multiple bodies. So while I am disposed to regard the canonical insistence that Jesus’ tomb was new (Mt. 27:60; Jn 19:41) and unused (Lk. 23:53) as pure theology or apologetics,143 I could be wrong. Maybe the conventional expression, “the empty tomb,” which implies a tomb without a single body, corresponds to the facts.144 

Chapter 6. The Story of the Tomb: Sunday

It is a characteristic of popular consciousness to accumulate legendary and mythical details around a central figure, which has made a profound impression, and it would be strange if the figure of Jesus had been the only exception. —Reginald W. Macan 

A story may be false in many of its circumstances as related, but true in its foundations. —Augustin Calmet 

The story of Jesus’ vacated tomb is a riddle, a problem Providence has presented to the ingenuity of the historians. What we should think is not self-evident. Nonetheless, in studying the pertinent secondary literature, one is recurrently struck by the assurance with which many commend their conclusions on the matter. Some are whole-heartedly convinced that, to dispassionate observers, the report of women coming on a vacant tomb must be sober history. To demur is to suffer from an ideological prejudice. Others, with raised eyebrows, remain unmoved, and they can hold, with equal confidence, that the story, with its Graeco-Roman parallels, is apocryphal. To contend otherwise, they may imply, is to betray captivity to religious dogma. 

Such confidence on either side is incommensurate with the evidence we possess. It is patent that deeply held convictions, pro and con, are affecting if not controlling many of the disputants. What else explains why it is so rare to run across someone who concludes, “Well, maybe”?1 What counts in this chapter, however, is not anyone’s theological inclination or philosophical predisposition but the arguments people have mustered for what is, in the end, a historical question. It is these arguments I should now like to review.2 I begin with reasons often given for holding that the story of the empty tomb is not history but legend.3 

MARK AS THE ONLY PRIMARY WITNESS 

Informed opinion splits over how many sources we have for the story of an empty tomb. The accounts in Matthew and Luke are commonly reckoned to rest, in whole or in part, on Mark.4 As for John 20, its relationship to the synoptics remains contested.5 Some infer that John as well as Matthew and Luke knew and used Mark, and that our only primary source for the vacant tomb is the latter alone.6 A few, moreover, judge Mk 16:1-8 to be an editorial invention.7 They can, then, trace everything back to Markan innovation.8 

On such a view, maybe Mark fashioned a story in order to reinforce the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.9 Or perhaps his motive was different. Adela Yarbro Collins, calling attention to ancient sources in which heroes are translated to heaven, has suggested that “the focus on the tomb in Mark may have been inspired by the importance of the graves of the heroes in the Greco-Roman world. Even if the location of the tomb of Jesus was unknown to the author of Mark, and even if there were no cultic observance at the site of the tomb, it would still be important as a literary motif in characterizing Jesus as hero-like.”10

The reduction of the empty tomb to Markan creativity, whatever the redactional motive postulated, does not, to my mind, compel. Not only is the independence or partial independence of Lk. 24:1-12 and/or John 20 a live option,11 but the case for the redactional origin of Mk 16:1-8 is unimpressive. This is why so many scholars, despite disagreement over the details, find tradition here.12 For Mark to compose an entire story without some pre-Markan basis would be, in the view of many of us, exceptional; and no one has yet explained why, on the theory of Markan origination, the list of women in 16:1 differs from the list in 15:47. The several hapax legomena are, furthermore, consistent with positing pre-Markan tradition.13 Finally, “Mark 16:7, which is probably redactional…interrupts the story in which it occurs, since it begins with a disjunction alla (‘but’) and disrupts the natural progression from the women’s sight of the empty tomb and reception of the announcement of Jesus’ resurrection (16:5-6) to their reaction of fear and flight (16:8).”14 Again we have indication of a pre-Markan story. The previous chapter, which has made the case that Mark did not invent the story of Joseph of Arimathea burying Jesus, offers further warrant. It is implausible that there circulated, among people who believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead, a story about the burial yet no narrative about what happened thereafter. Even if, to speak hypothetically, nobody knew anything, surely somebody would have come up with something soon enough. Otherwise the first Christians would be remarkably incurious and surprisingly unimaginative. It stretches credulity that people who related stories about Jesus’ ministry and burial were, despite their belief in his resurrection, emptyhanded when it came to what occurred after he was laid to rest. 

Another sign that Mk 16:1-8 is pre-Markan is its imperfect fit with the passion predictions.15 In 8:31; 9:31; and 10:34, Jesus prophesies that he will rise “after (μετά) three days.” This has always vexed commentators because Jesus is buried late on Friday and gone by Sunday morning.16 “After a day” or “after two days” would work, but “after three days”—which literally means “on the fourth day or later”—does not, and all the more as Jesus has made his exit before sunrise (16:2). That Matthew and Luke turned “after three days” into “on the third day” is no surprise.17 One can, to be sure, reasonably urge that Mark must have understood “after three days” to mean “in a short time.” It nonetheless remains striking that, while his passion predictions line up literally in every other respect with his narrative, this is not true of 16:1-8. Why not have the women come and anoint Jesus on Sunday morning, while the body is still there, and then return to lament the next morning, only to find him gone then? Why the tension with the passion predictions? The inconcinnity may, then, stem from Mark’s reliance on tradition, from his inheriting the phrase, “after three days,” yet also receiving a story in which everything happens within three days. 

One final observation on the issue of a pre-Markan story. Glen Bowersock has argued that the proliferation of fictional writings in the Roman world, which began during the reign of Nero (CE 54–68), was in part a response to Christian stories. More particularly, he has urged that the recurrent, conspicuous theme of an empty tomb and resurrection in multiple novels is a “reflection” of the Christian story. He thinks this so already in Chariton, who wrote in the middle of the first century, probably before 62 CE.18 If he is right—I am unable to judge the matter—and if the Second Gospel appeared ca. 70, Mk 16:1-8 cannot account for what Bowersock envisages. His thesis requires that something like Mark’s story was known abroad before Mark.19 

A SCRIPTURALLY INSPIRED LEGEND? 

The following story appears in Josh. 10:16-27: 

These five kings fled, and hid themselves in the cave at Makkedah. And it was told Joshua, “The five kings have been found, hidden in the cave at Makkedah.”

And Joshua said, “Roll great stones against the mouth of the cave, and set men by it to guard them; but do not stay there yourselves, pursue your enemies…” Then Joshua said, “Open the mouth of the cave, and bring those five kings out to me from the cave.” And they did so… Joshua summoned all the men of Israel, and said to the chiefs of the men of war who had gone with him, “Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings.” Then they came near, and put their feet on their necks. And Joshua said to them, “Do not be afraid or dismayed; be strong and of good courage; for thus the Lord will do to all your enemies against whom you fight.” And afterward Joshua smote them and put them to death, and he hung them on five trees. And they hung upon the trees until evening; but at the time of the going down of the sun, Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees, and threw them into the cave where they had hidden themselves, and they set great stones against the mouth of the cave, which remain to this very day

According to Michael Goulder, Mark’s church read this passage on Easter, and its recurrent appearance in the lectionary supplied the raw materials for the story of Jesus’ burial and resurrection.20 Christians would, so Goulder affirmed, have regarded a book known as “Joshua,” Jesus’ namesake, as prophetic. And ch. 10, in which people are hung on trees and then cast into a cave that is closed with a stone, must have captured their attention: “Surely here was a prophecy of the manner of his [Jesus’] burial and resurrection. The kings had been buried in a cave, with great stones over its mouth, and they had come out alive from the same cave earlier. Jesus must have been buried in a cave with great stones over its mouth, and come out alive on Easter morning.”21 

Scripture also, according to Goulder, accounts for the several women Mark names near the end of his gospel: 

• 5:40: “There were also women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Jacob the younger and of Joses, and Salome.” 

• 15:47: “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.” 

• 16:1: “And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Jacob, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.” 

How did Mark or his tradition invent all this? Part of the answer lies in the psalms of suffering, where Christians espied prophecies of Jesus. Psalm 38:11 has this: “My friends and companions stand aloof from affliction, and my neighbors stand far off.” On Goulder’s reconstruction, since Jesus’ male followers had fled when he was arrested and so were not around for his execution, the friends and companions of Ps. 38:11 must have been women. Given, moreover, that the crossing of the Red Sea, after the first Passover, was a type of Jesus’ resurrection at a later Passover, Mark or a predecessor inferred that, just as Mariam and other women sang of God triumphing gloriously, so it must have been a Mariam, along with other women, who witnessed Jesus’ passion and resurrection, and all the more as it was a Mariam who “stood at a distance” from Moses when he was put into a papyrus ark (Exod. 2:4). 

But how then did anyone come up with “Mary Magdalene”? Before crossing the Red Sea, Israel camped “between Migdol and the sea” (Exod. 14:1), so “Mary will have come from Migdol, the Tower, Magdala-by-the-sea in Galilee.”22 As for “Mary of Jacob,” Gen. 29:1-10 tells the tale of Jacob rolling away a great stone so that Rachel, who later becomes his wife, can water her sheep; and Goulder observes that Mk 16:4 (“for the stone was exceedingly large”; ὁ λίθος ἦν γὰρ μέγας σφόδρα) is close to Gen. 29:2 (“for the stone was large”; LXX: λίθος δὲ ἦν γὰρ μέγας).23 So the name, “Joseph,” was to hand. 

What then of “Joses” (Mk 15:40, 47)? Taking the name to be a variant of “Joseph,”24 Goulder appeals to Genesis 50, where Joseph calls for Israel to be embalmed, and he suggests that Mark took this to imply that another Mary “must have been Mary the daughter (wife) of Joseph.”25 

Regarding “Salome” (Mk 15:40), it too comes from the Bible. Solomon, who had an abundance of spices (1 Kgs 10:25), said of his beloved: “your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out” (Cant. 1:3). So would it not have been natural, Goulder opines, for another woman to bear a feminine variant of Solomon’s name, “Salome”? 

The same imaginative method supplied the name of the man who buried Jesus. In view of Genesis 50, where the patriarch Joseph buries Israel, the man who buried Jesus must likewise have been a Joseph. As to his place of origin, Samuel anointed both Saul and David, and Samuel was from Ramathaim, which the New Testament knows as Arimathea. 

Matthew reflects further developments. Given the clear prophecy of resurrection in Dan. 12:2-3, it was natural, according to Goulder, for the First Evangelist to utilize Daniel as an aid in enlarging what he found in Mark. Matthew’s angel has a face like lightning, and his garment is white as snow (28:3), descriptions the evangelist borrowed from Dan. 10:6 and 7:9 respectively. When the angel in Matthew appears to those guarding the tomb, they tremble and become afraid (28:4), just as, in Dan. 10:11-12, the prophet trembles and becomes afraid when an angel appears to him. In Mt. 28:16-20, Jesus declares that he has been given all authority in heaven and earth, a likely allusion to Dan. 7:14. And earlier, in Mt. 27:66, when Jesus is buried, the authorities seal the stone (σφραγίσαντες τὸν λίθον) before his tomb, just as King Darius has a stone rolled over the mouth of the den into which Daniel has been thrown to the lions, thus sealing it (6:17 LXX: λίθος…ἐσφραγίσατο). 

What should we make of Goulder’s genealogy for story of Jesus’ burial and resurrection? While many might immediately dismiss it as overly ingenious, or even the half-baked product of freeroaming imagination, it is not wholly without merit. Goulder is probably right about the origin of some of the phrases unique to Matthew. Daniel 7:14 is indeed the likely inspiration for the phrase, “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me” (Mt. 28:18), and others have thought that “his face was like lightning” (Mt. 28:3) comes directly from Dan 10:6. Furthermore, a few readers of Matthew have ransacked Canticles to illumine the story of the women at Jesus’ tomb or to find a proof text for it.26 Even more have associated Dan. 6:17 (“a stone was…laid on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet”) with Mt. 27:66 (“they…made the tomb secure by sealing the stone”).27

Beyond all this, Goulder’s exegetical ingenuity has its counterpart in the haggadic creativity of olden times. Somebody turned Eve’s declaration in Gen. 4:1 (“I have gotten a man with the Lord”) into the fiction that Cain was literally the devil’s son.28 Someone else creatively linked Num. 20:2-13 (the story of Moses striking a rock with his rod so that abundant water comes forth) with other pentateuchal texts to generate the myth of an itinerant rock.29 And some haggadist fabricated from Ps. 137:2-3 (“on the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth”) the legend that the Chaldeans crucified Jewish exiles.30 Pious people really did rummage the scriptures for tiny hints that they imaginatively inflated into tall tales.31 

Yet having granted this much, I find Goulder on the whole much more clever than credible. His ideas about the early Christian liturgical calendar remain speculative. He certainly has not established that Mark’s church read Joshua 10 on Easter.32 Even aside from that sizable stumbling block, one should not credit the key role that he ascribes to Joshua 10. Not only do our earliest Christian sources otherwise fail to cite or allude to that chapter,33 but exegetes ancient, medieval, and modern have habitually failed to recall it when commenting on the stories of Jesus’ resurrection. In view of the conspicuous differences, this is unsurprising. Joshua 10 concerns five pagan kings who hide in a cave. They are God’s enemies (v. 25). Initially, large stones are rolled against the mouth of the cave while they are still alive. Later they are brought forth to be slain, only after which are they hung up. And Joshua/Jesus is not executed. He is, rather, the executioner. None of this would have spurred Christians to move from Joshua 10 to Jesus’ crucifixion or vice versa. 

How then do we account for and evaluate the parallels that Goulder notices? The truth is that it is often not hard to find resemblances between two unrelated texts,34 so the existence of such parallels does not, without further ado, establish anything substantial. Consider the correlations laid out below. On the left are some of the things that happen to Jesus and his disciples in Mark’s version of Gethsemane. On the right are some of the things that happen to a certain Abimelech in ch. 5 of 4 Baruch, a Jewish pseudepigraphon written between 70 and 133 CE:

What explains these parallels? The answer is purely personal. As I was writing these pages on Goulder, I was simultaneously reading the page proofs of my commentary on 4 Baruch, and when I ran across one of my sentences that cites Mk 14:32 (καθίσατε ὧδε ἕως) in connection with 4 Bar. 5:16 (καθέζομαι ὧδε ἕως), I decided to hunt for additional agreements between Mk 14:32-42 and 4 Baruch 5. There is nothing more to it than that. Seek and you will find. The parallels prove nothing except how simple it is, because of the far reach of coincidence, to compile parallels. 

One might counter that my links are immaterial because huge differences overshadow them. 4 Baruch 5, for instance, is full of humor whereas Mk 14:32-42 is dead serious, and while Jesus’ disciples do not sleep for long, Abimelech slumbers for sixty-six years. As already observed, however, huge differences equally eclipse Goulder’s parallels. His case, to my mind, holds no more force than—if I may invent a new hypothesis for the occasion—the claim that the New Testament’s Simon Peter is largely a fictional character spun out of the story of Simon Maccabee in 1 Maccabees. Would this not explain why Simon Peter is a religious leader, why among his close companions are a John and a Judas, why Simon Peter spends time in Galilee, and why he carries a sword and deploys it to defend Jesus? That, however, would be piffle. 

One element in Goulder’s reconstruction, however, does merit reflection. He reasonably supposes, as have others, that the sealing of Jesus’ tomb in Mt. 27:66 (σφραγίσαντες τὸν λίθον) draws on Dan. 6:17 (LXX: λίθος…ἐσφραγίσατο).35 If so, the evangelist may well have seen some sort of analogy between what happened to Daniel and what happened to Jesus. Perhaps his thoughts were not dissimilar to those of N. T. Wright: “Jesus goes to his grave as one who, like Daniel, has been faithful to Israel’s god despite all the forces ranged against him; and, like Daniel, his god will vindicate him. He is, after all, the true ‘son of man’ who, as in the next chapter of the book of Daniel, is to be exalted after being apparently prevailed over by his enemies.”36 One can find comparable sentiments in the church fathers.37 

Did anyone before Matthew contemplate an analogy between Daniel and Jesus and use it to manufacture the tale of Jesus’ empty tomb? Randel Helms has urged precisely this, that Mark’s story of Jesus’ burial and resurrection is a late fiction inspired, not by the story of Joshua and the five kings, but by the story of Daniel and the lions.38 The correlations may be set forth this way: 

• The law demands the death of God’s chosen. Mk 15:1-5 Dan. 6:10 

• The ruler, although reluctant, enforces the law. Mk 15:6-15 Dan. 6:14-16 

• Late in the day a sympathetic leader puts the Mk 15:42-46 Dan. 6:17-18 chosen one in a pit or cave and covers it with a stone. 

• Early in the morning those who care for God’s Mk 16:2 Dan. 6:19 chosen one approach the pit or cave. 

• There is angelic intervention. Mk 16:5-7 Dan. 6:2 

• The hero is not dead but lives. Mk 16:1-8 Dan. 6:19-23 

To the extent that one finds these parallels significant, so that the latter portion of Mark 15–16 is regarded as a rewriting of Daniel 6, to that extent might one be inclined to brand Mk 16:1-8 as haggadic fiction. 

Helms’ case is suboptimal. We have some handy if rough criteria for determining when one text is using another,39 and they are not well met in this particular instance. For example, Daniel 6 otherwise plays no role in Mark’s Gospel, most commentators have missed and continue to miss the series of parallels Helms espies,40 and the shared vocabulary is minimal. We should probably shelve Helms’ thesis and judge the correlations between Daniel 6 and Mark 16 to be the upshot of happenstance, akin to those between Mark 14 and 4 Baruch 5. 41 

Even if, however, I am wrong about this and one were to conclude that Mark 15–16 makes substantial use of Daniel 6, it is unclear what would follow. To biblicize is not necessarily to invent.42 

Paul, when writing to the Galatians and recapping his initial encounter with Jesus, borrowed language from Jeremiah 1 and Isaiah.43 This does not mean that we are here in the land of fiction. Eusebius, when recounting Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, cast the latter in the role of Pharaoh, the former in the role of Moses. This is not evidence that no such battle took place.44 John Bunyan, when narrating his own conversion, drew heavily on the New Testament accounts of Paul becoming a Christian. This scarcely entails that Bunyan’s recollections are free of facts.45 That a story is scripturally indebted does not, in and of itself, tell us whether it is anchored in history. One can recount a memory in many languages. This includes the language of scripture. 

“THEY SAID NOTHING TO ANYONE” 

Mark ends the story of the empty tomb and indeed his entire gospel with this editorial comment: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). Many have taken these words as a clue that the whole episode was invented at a late date. Someone wanted to say: “You know what women are like, brethren: they were seized with panic and hysteria, and kept the whole thing quiet. That is why people have not heard all this before.”46 

This claim wobbles. If 16:7 were explanation for why people had not previously heard about the empty tomb, the angel presumably would “have made the young man command the women to say that Jesus had been raised, that he was not in the tomb (cf. v. 6). Instead, the young man commanded them to say that Jesus was going ahead to Galilee, where the disciples would see him just as he had said.”47 In other words, “they said nothing to anyone”—which follows καί (“and”) rather than an adversative δέ or ἀλλά (“but”)48—immediately trails not a command to declare the tomb vacated but the angel’s imperative to tell the disciples about Jesus going before them to Galilee. The women’s silence is more closely connected to the latter than to the former.49

Beyond this oft-missed fact, the implications of “they said nothing to anyone” (οὐδενὶ οὐδὲν εἴπεν)—which some have taken to be part and parcel of Mark’s messianic secret50 and/or an expression of the mysterium tremendum of divine revelation51 and/or an apologetical move that makes the appearances independent of the discovery of the empty tomb52—are less than obvious.53 Readers may readily assume, because of the prophecy in 14:28 (“after I am raised I will go before you into Galilee”), that Jesus did in fact meet the disciples in Galilee. Near to hand, then, would be the inference that the angel must, after all, and so via the women, have gotten his message through to the disciples.54 K. L. Anderson has written: “we should hold as suspect an interpretation of Mk 16:8 that views the women as not only disobeying the young man’s command, but also thwarting the prediction and promise of Jesus. In Mark, Jesus’ predictions—for example, the ‘must’ (dei) of the passion predictions (Mk 8:31; 9:31; 10:33) and the prediction of Peter’s denial (Mk 14:30)—never fail.”55 

One should not neglect, in this connection, that Mark places women not only at Jesus’ tomb but also at his crucifixion and burial (15:40, 47; 16:1). They evidently serve as witnesses. As Marcus puts it, “the same women witness Jesus’ death, his burial, and his empty tomb, so that the reports of all three events become mutually authenticating.”56 Yet if Mark implicitly appeals to Mary and her friends as eyewitnesses, would it not be odd for him to conclude by establishing their disobedience? Would that not be a blot on their collective character and so set the evangelist at cross-purposes with his own narrative?57 

Mark 16:8 is probably to some degree analogous to Mk 1:44. Here Jesus tells a healed leper to “say nothing to anyone” (μηδενὶ μηδὲν εἴπῃς), and yet Jesus adds this: “Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.” Clearly, and despite the imperative, “say nothing to anyone,” the man, having regained his health, will have to explain himself to the temple establishment. Bauckham, who cites this as a parallel to 16:7-8, wonders whether “the women take the words of the young man to be an apocalyptic secret that they are to communicate to Jesus’ disciples but that is strictly not to be revealed to anyone else.”58 This is not unreasonable.59 Just as 1:44 means “say nothing to anyone (except the priest),” so 16:8 may well mean “said nothing to anyone (except his disciples).”60 It accords with this that Matthew and Luke clearly read Mark so that the message entrusted to the women gets to the men without noticeable delay.61 

Mark’s observation that the women “said nothing to anyone” does not stand alone. An explanation immediately follows: “for they were afraid.” It was, then, precisely because of their fear that the women, according to Mark, said nothing. The implication, on the view that Mark here explains the silence of three or four decades, is curious. If the women kept quiet for decades, and if the reason was fear, then they must have been afraid for decades. One could paraphrase: they said nothing to anyone for years because for years they were afraid. The thought is close to absurd. If Mark’s purpose had been to characterize 16:1-8 as a decades-long secret, he would have concocted something more credible than “they were afraid.” He could instead have written, “and they said nothing to anyone until many years later,” or “until after Peter died,” or some such. As the text stands, however, readers instinctively think of a short-lived fear begetting a short-lived silence, akin to 1 Sam. 3:15-18: Samuel “was afraid to tell the vision to Eli… And Eli said, ‘What was it that he told you? Do not hide it from me. May God do so to you and more also, if you hide anything from me of all that he told you.’ So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him.” It is understandable that the old commentaries uniformly take Mk 16:8 to say, in effect: they said nothing to anybody until they spoke with the disciples.62 While this interpretation is partly the result of harmonization with Mt. 28:8 and Lk. 24:9, it is also a natural reading of Mark. I agree, then, with R. H. Fuller: 

the silence of the women can hardly be explained as the Evangelist’s device to account for the recent origin of the story [of the empty tomb]; that is altogether too modern and rationalistic an explanation, and assumes that the early Jesus movement was concerned, like the modern historical critics, with conflicting historical evidence. The early church expounded its traditions anew in new situations: it did not investigate them historically in order to discover their origins and Sitz im Leben.63

THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT 

Although those who deny the historicity of the empty tomb do not always say this, surely one common contributor to their doubt is the problem of the miraculous. The story, in its various canonical forms, is fantastic. It features not only an angel or angels but a dead man coming back to life.

 Even in the first century, a time generally marked, in retrospect, by superstition and a deep longing for miracles, the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection created doubts, as we know from the Christians sources themselves.64 Skepticism is even more at home in our own time and place, where modern science rules and critical scholars have, ever since the Renaissance, and especially since the deists, continually and persuasively converted miracle story after miracle story into groundless legend. Under the scrutiny of serious historians, the number of purportedly miraculous events has, depending on one’s point of view, either shrunk dramatically or melted away altogether. This matters so much because “the more isolated a phenomenon” the resurrection of Jesus “is understood to be, the more difficult the process of establishing its truth becomes.”65 

Yet all this begs the question we are about in this chapter, even for those who altogether disallow the possibility of miracles, for there are several non-miraculous explanations for the empty tomb. One need not, as the New Testament recognizes, call on divine intervention in order to lose Jesus’ body or get the stone rolled away. In Mt. 28:13, some claim that the disciples stole the body. In Jn 20:15, Mary Magdalene wonders if a gardener has moved it. Moreover, one can, if so inclined, judge Mark’s young man or angel and his kerygmatic announcement to be legendary embellishment serving theological edification. As the rest of the Jesus tradition reveals, historical memories can be pressed down and shaken together with legendary, haggadic, and mythological ingredients. Those of us—to illustrate—who regard the voice and dove in Mk 1:10-11 as theological overlay are not driven to conclude that John the Baptist did not baptize Jesus. In like fashion, to regard Mk 16:1-8 as something other than straightforward history scarcely annuls the option that it is a Christian interpretation and write-up of the memory that some women found Jesus’ tomb open and empty, whatever the explanation.66

PAUL’S SILENCE 

While 1 Cor. 15:4 speaks of Jesus’ burial, it fails to mention Joseph of Arimathea or Jesus’ empty tomb. The same holds for the entirety of the Pauline corpus.67 The apostle, then, did not know about an empty grave, or so a popular argument would have it. In the words of Kümmel: “That Paul would not have omitted mentioning the discovery of the empty tomb if he had known of it, we must assume since in 1 Cor. 15:1-11 he means to adduce everything that supports belief in Christ’s resurrection.”68 If, furthermore, Paul knew nothing of an empty tomb, then the story that terminates Mark is likely late and so legendary.69 

This inference from 1 Cor. 15:3-8 and Paul’s disregard of the empty tomb does not persuade me. It is an argument from silence regarding a very compressed statement, one mostly bereft of details.70 Pilate, Jerusalem, and the crucifixion—all historical—also go unmentioned. One could equally construct the following very different argument from silence. Had those Corinthians whom Paul sought to correct known or imagined Jesus’ corpse to be yet in his grave, then surely, given their rejection of a physical resurrection, they would have brought this forward as a point in their favor, and Paul would have felt compelled to answer them in some way. He did not do so.71 

The apostle, in any event, often surprises us by what he fails to refer to, even when it would serve his purpose;72 and certainly we do not, as a general rule, accept as historical only those parts of the Jesus tradition that Paul attests. If it were otherwise, we would have to scratch almost all of it as secondary.73 One should, in addition, keep in mind that no character in Acts narrates the discovery of the empty tomb even though, as Luke 24 reveals, its author knew and valued that story.74 The same silence typifies the later creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, which has this: “he suffered, and he rose on the third day, and he ascended into the heavens.” Yet the bishops behind the creed were fully acquainted with the story of the empty tomb. James Ware appears to be on target: 

for all ancient Christians for whom we have evidence, reference to the empty tomb was confined to full narratives of the resurrection event (such as we see in the canonical gospels), and was not considered appropriate or expected within confessional formulae regarding that event (such as we see in 1 Cor 15.3-5). The claim that the empty tomb is conspicuous by its absence in 1 Cor 15.3-5 is thus based on a misapprehension regarding the form and limits of such summaries… No formula, creedal fragment or creed known to us from the ancient church contains any reference to the empty tomb.75

 Early Christian literature regularly exhibits unexpected holes, and it is often wise not to make much of them. 

Perhaps, however, this hole is not so unexpected. Competing explanations for the empty tomb have always been to hand, which means that it has never been robust evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.76 This would have been all the more true in Paul’s patriarchal world if the account of a vacated tomb was remembered as deriving from the testimony of women.77 

That, however, is not the end of the argument. First Corinthians 15:50 declares that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” and many have understood these words, within their broader context, to teach that Christians should look forward, not to the radical transformation of their buried remains, but to the reception of new, “spiritual” bodies. This interpretation, whose hermeneutical lineage includes Origen, Didymus of Alexandria, and John Locke,78 has encouraged some in their belief that Paul’s failure to mention the empty tomb is significant. According Wedderburn, “so great is the stress upon the newness and the difference of the resurrection existence” for Paul that he may have assumed that Jesus’ “body remained sown in the ground.”79 Unfortunately, the issues here are as exegetically complex as anything in early Christian literature. Nonetheless, if—against what I shall soon argue—Paul understood resurrection to be acquisition of a new body discontinuous to one’s old body, his view may have been peculiar to him and so, in some ways, not in line with pre-Pauline tradition.80 In other words, his Christian predecessors might not have shared his sophisticated idea that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,”81 in which case they could have known and valued the story of an empty tomb whereas he, although knowing that story, left it to the side because he did not find it serviceable.82 His silence would be, in this scenario, the upshot of his theology, not evidence for the post-Pauline origin of something like Mk 16:1-8. 

I am, however, of another mind. I consider it far more likely that, while the emphasis in 1 Corinthians 15 is on discontinuity, Paul thought of resurrection as involving, not the exchange of one body for another, but rather the transformation of a perishable, mortal body of flesh and blood into an imperishable, immortal body not made of flesh and blood.83 This follows from a confluence of observations. 

(1) Paul’s religious tradition knew not only of people being taken up bodily into heaven,84 but it often, when prophesying the resurrection of the dead, spoke of bones and graves, dust and earth, corpses and flesh:85 

• Isa. 26:19: “your dead shall live, their corpses (נבלתי ;LXX: οἱ ἐν τοῖς μνημείοις: those in the tombs) will rise.”86 

• Ezek. 37:5-6, 13: “Thus says the Lord God to these bones…‘I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come on you, and cover you with skin… I will open your graves and bring you up from them.’”87 

• LXX Dan. 12:2: “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will arise.”88 

• 1 En. 51:1: “the earth will give back what was entrusted to it.” 

• 2 Macc. 7:10-11: “he quickly put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, saying nobly, ‘I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.’”89 

• 2 Macc. 14:45-46: “Still alive and aflame with anger, he rose, and though his blood gushed forth and his wounds were severe he ran through the crowd; and standing on a steep rock, with his blood now completely drained from him, he tore out his entrails, took them with both hands and hurled them at the crowd, calling on the Lord of life and spirit to give them back to him again.” 

• Sib. Or. 2:221-24: “The heavenly one will give souls and breath and voice to the dead and bones fastened with all kinds of joinings…flesh and sinews and veins and skin about the flesh, and the former hairs.” 

• Sib. Or. 4:181-82: “God himself will again fashion the bones and ashes of people and he will raise up mortals again as they were before.” 

• LAB 3:10: “I will bring the dead to life and raise up those who are sleeping in the earth.” 

• Gk. LAE 13:3: “Then all flesh from Adam up to that great day shall be raised (ἀναστήσεται).”90 

• Ps.-Phoc. 103-104: “And speedily we hope the remains (λείψανα) of the departed will come out of the earth to the light.”91 

• LAB 3:10: “I will bring the dead to life and raise from the earth those who sleep.” 

• 4 Ezra 7:32: “the earth will give up those who are asleep in it.” 

• 2 Bar. 42:8: “dust will be called and told, ‘Give back that which does not belong to you and raise up all that you have kept until its own time.’” 

• 2 Bar. 50:2: “the earth will surely give back the dead at that time; it receives them now in order to keep them, not changing anything in their form.” 

• 4 Bar. 6:5-7: “Pay close attention to this basket of figs. For behold, they are sixty-six years old, and they have neither shriveled up nor begun to smell bad, but they are (still) dripping with sap. Thus will it be with you, my flesh, if you keep the things commanded by the righteous angel. The one preserving the basket of figs, he will also preserve you by his power.”92 

Whatever their differences, these sources unite in moving thought in the same direction.93 With regard to resurrection, moreover, there are few dissenting Jewish voices.94 The same holds for the early, non-Pauline Christian literature.95 The Jesus of Mt. 10:28, for instance, enjoins: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” These words come from the Sayings Source Q (for those of us who accept its existence), and probably in the version just quoted.96 Implied is a universal resurrection in which the wicked, body and soul, participate. The text is akin to the Apocryphon of Ezekiel, in which God, at the resurrection, unites a wicked soul with its earthly body so that the two may be judged as one.97 

What follows from the extra-Pauline evidence? While the apostle, in his attempt to answer those who said there is no resurrection of the dead, distanced himself from an unimaginative literalism, he nonetheless, as might be expected of a one-time Pharisee, marshalled his skills to defend the concept of resurrection. That is, he took himself to be defending ἀνάστασις against its Corinthian despisers. It is hard to explain how this could be if his thought was wholly out of line with the passages just quoted, some of which were authoritative for him: Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel.98 Unless, then, the evidence to the contrary is unequivocal, we should assume that his thought had something to with corpses and graves, and that his ideas were not dissimilar from what we find in 2 Bar. 50:2–51:16, where a literal resurrection from the earth issues in a glorious, radical transformation.99 

(2) Paul wrote, in 1 Thess. 4:16-17: “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. 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; and so we shall always be with the Lord.” These words do not envisage souls exiting their bodies in order to ascend. They rather foresee living, embodied saints being caught up in the clouds (cf. perhaps Mt. 24:40-41; Lk. 17:34-35); and as Paul sets them in parallel to “the dead in Christ,” who share the same future, it is natural, as the commentators from day one disclose, to envisage the dead rising as embodied persons, which implies resurrection from their graves. At least in Paul’s first extant letter, then, he seems to have a literal idea of resurrection.100 

(3) Writing a few years after dictating 1 Corinthians, Paul anticipated that “the Lord Jesus Christ…will change (μετασχηματίσει) our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). The sense seems clear: “believers who are conformed to Christ’s death in this life…will have their bodies transformed to be conformed to his supremely glorious angelic body in the next.”101 Once more Paul has in view change, not exchange.102 This presumably holds likewise for Rom. 8:11 (“he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies”) and 23 (“we wait for… the redemption of our bodies”). 

(4) In 1 Cor. 15:36-49, the subject of the main verbs of contrast—the mortal body—remains the same: “Paul does not describe resurrection as an event in which x (the present body) is sown, but y (a body distinct from the present body) is raised, but in which a single x (the present body) is sown a perishable x, but raised an imperishable x.”103 It is no different in vv. 53-54. There will be transformation—albeit radical transformation—not destruction and replacement.104 

(5) Some have taken the contrast between ψυχικόν (“natural”) and πνευματικόν (“spiritual”) in 1 Cor. 15:44 to be about the material and immaterial respectively, as though Paul were saying: the material body is sown, an immaterial or ethereal body is raised.105 As Licona has shown, however, there is no linguistic precedent for formulating such a dichotomy with these terms.106 

(6) Philo’s description of the death of Moses is relevant. When leaving this mortal life for immortality, the lawgiver was, we read in Mos. 2.288, summoned “from earth to heaven…by the Father who resolved his twofold nature of soul and body into a single unity, transforming (μεθαρμοζόμενος) his whole being into mind, pure as the sunlight.” Although Philo here uses the language of immortality (ἀπαθανατίζεσθαι) rather than resurrection, the biological platform, or some part of it, is nonetheless not sloughed off. It is instead, along with the soul, transformed and made fit for the supernal life.107 This, despite the differences, supplies a rough if partial parallel to what Paul seems to be arguing in 1 Corinthians 15. More distant but still relevant are those Jewish texts in which living human beings undergo truly radical change. The idea of transformation was at home in Paul’s world.108 

The upshot of the foregoing paragraphs is that Paul did not think of the resurrection body as created ex nihilo but rather as something “sown” from “this perishable body.” He believed in a radical metamorphosis, a sort of “transubstantiation” of flesh and blood into an imperishable, immortal σῶμα. 109 The body would not be destroyed but “changed into something supremely better, re-created in a qualitatively different form.”110 Whether or not he expected physical remains to be “used up in the resurrection,”111 he expected them to be used. It follows that, whether or not he knew a story about Jesus’ tomb, such a story would not have been foreign to his theology. 

MARK’S ORIGINAL ENDING WAS NOT ABOUT AN EMPTY TOMB 

Albert Edmunds maintained, a century ago, that the oldest account of the first Easter did not narrate the resurrection of Jesus’ physical body.112 “The most historic of all the Evangelists [Mark] never told a story about a corpse that got up and walked off, but simply of some women who came to a tomb and saw a strange young man.”113 Edmunds built his case on two textual variants. He insisted that, at Mk 16:5, we should read ἐλθοῦσαι (“came”) instead of εἰσελθοῦσαι (“entered”), and that, at 16:8, we should read ἀκούσασαι (“heard”) instead of ἐξελθοῦσαι (“went out”). The upshot is that, according to the original text, the women never entered Jesus’ tomb. Rather, they arrived outside his tomb, met a young man, heard his words—which were about Jesus being spiritually resurrected—and then departed. 

Edmund’s eccentric theory suffers from three fatal defects. First, recent critical editions, such as the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (28th ed.) and the Huck-Greeven Synopse, judge εἰσελθοῦσαι and ἐξελθοῦσαι to be original. Second, Mark’s Gospel otherwise speaks of “rising (from the dead),”114 and without clear indication to the contrary, the language is naturally construed, as we have seen, as having to do with bodies and graves. Third, those who find independent traditions about Jesus’ emptied tomb in some of the non-Markan materials in Matthew, Luke, and John will be unable to attribute the idea of Jesus’ physical resurrection exclusively to later, antagonistic corrections of Mark 16. We may, then, take leave of Edmund’s conjecture without further ado. It merits the lack of attention it has received. 

THE EMPTY TOMB AS AN INFERENCE 

If some Christians had, through visionary encounters with a postmortem Jesus, come to believe in his resurrection and exaltation, and if they had a physicalist view of resurrection, could they not have inferred at some point that his body was in heaven and so his tomb empty?115 H. J. Rose thought so and reconstructed their ratiocination as follows: “He was not dead, therefore he was not in the grave in which his body had been put; therefore the grave was empty, therefore someone must have found it empty, and also there had been a miracle, therefore a supernatural agency at work; and to people who had, ex hypothesi, no subordinate gods to postulate, the only possible mechanism was the presence of angels.”116 

Christians might, one could suppose, have been able to reason like this without fear of contradiction if the location of his burial or disposal were unknown, or if too much time had passed since Jesus’ death. Furthermore, the fiction-creating capacities of early Christians on clear display not only outside the canon, as in the Gospel of Peter, but also within the canon, as in Mt. 27:51-53, with its tall tale about the tombs being opened and the bodies of saints exiting to promenade around Jerusalem.117 Alfred Loisy proposed that 

the soldiers removed the body from the cross before dark and threw it in some common grave, where they cast the bodies of the criminals… The conditions of the burial were such that at the end of a few days it would have been impossible to recognize the mortal remains of the saviour, had anyone been looking for them… Nobody would contest that Jesus had died on the cross. Nobody could prove that he had not been resurrected.118 

Unlike the first five arguments, this one will, especially for those who deny that the historicity of Mark’s story of the burial, carry force. Human beings have created religious fictions in face of the facts, and early Christian literature does not stand outside the generalization. 

UNHISTORICAL PARALLELS 

One can compile a host of legendary stories about empty tombs and/or disappearing bodies.119 Jewish and Christian sources recount Enoch’s rapture (Gen. 5:24; Eccl. 44:16; Heb. 11:5), Moses’ mysterious disappearance and ascent (Philo, QG 1.86; Josephus, Ant. 4.326),120 Elijah’s ride to heaven (2 Kgs 2:11-12, 15-18; Eccl. 48:9), the vain search for the remains of Job’s children (T. Job 39:1–40:6), the assumptions of Ezra and Baruch (4 Ezra 14:48 v.l.; 2 Bar. 13:3; 76:1-5), the resurrection of the two witnesses in Revelation 11, the failure to find the body of John the Baptist’s father (Prot. Jas. 24:3), the disappearance of the corpse of the thief who asked Jesus to remember him in his kingdom (Narratio Jos. 4:1), Paul’s “rising” after death and his appearances to Caesar and to others (Acts Paul 11:4-7),121 the missing remains of John the Beloved (Acts John 115 v.l. ed. Bonnet, p. 215),122 the bodily ascension of Mary the mother of Jesus,123 the coming forth from their graves of the dead apostles so that they might journey on clouds to Jerusalem to witness Mary’s departure,124 the empty grave of Symeon of Salos (Leontius Neapolitanus, V. Sym. 11:62 PG 93:1745A-B), the resurrection of Saint George,125 and the light-filled but otherwise vacant burial cave of Sabbatai Sׂ evi and his occultation.126 

Greco-Roman analogies—as Justin Martyr already recognized127—also exist: the missing bones of Heracles (Diodorus Siculus 4.38.4-5),128 the rapture of Ganymede, lord of the Trojans (Homer, Il. 20.234-35; Herodian 1.11.2), the failure to find Aeneas’ body (Dionysius Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 1.64), the disappearance of Romulus (Ovid, Met. 14.805-851; Plutarch, Rom. 27.7–28.3),129 the miraculous exit of Empedocles (Diogenes Laertius 8.67-69), the departure of Aristeas of Proconnesus (Herodotus 4.14-15), the translation of Cleomedes of Astypalaea (Pausanias 6.9.6-9), and the various rumors about Apollonius (Philostratus, Vit. Ap. 8.30; cf. 8.31: no one can say where Apollonius is buried).130 Novels, such as Chariton’s Callirhoe, also featured such fables,131 and Plutarch said their number was “many” (Rom. 28.6). Given all this, the question of Celsus’ Jew has force: “Do you think that the stories of these others are indeed legends, as they seem to be, and yet that the ending of your tragedy is to be regarded as noble and convincing?”132 

One might counter such a list by observing that some of these legends (e.g. those about the good thief and Mary’s ascension) are modeled on Jesus’ resurrection while a few (e.g. those about Job’s children, John the Beloved, and Aristeas) are dissimilar to the New Testament accounts in that they probably originated not decades but centuries after the supposed facts recorded. Still others concern those who never died and so had no grave—Enoch, Elijah, Ganymede, Cleomedes, Empedocles, Aristeas, Apollonius—or are about old mythological or legendary figures such as Heracles, Romulus, and Aeneas. 

There is, however, at least one old story about a missing corpse that I have happened upon that is not based on the story of Jesus and which is not about someone from the distant past. Gregory the Great (540–604) tells the following tale: 

There is another incident which took place here in Rome to which the dyers of the city will bear me witness. The most outstanding craftsman among them died, and his wife had him buried in the Church of St. Januarius the Martyr, near the gate of St. Lawrence. The next night the sacristan heard his spirit shouting from the burial place, “I burn! I burn!” When the shouting continued, the sacristan informed the dead man’s wife, who immediately sent fellow craftsmen to examine the grave and find out the reason for the shouting. On opening it, they found all his clothes there untouched (and they have been kept in the church ever since as a witness to this event), but there was no trace of his body. Seeing that not even his body was allowed to rest in church, we can judge to what punishment his soul was condemned.133 

This account is so relevant because Gregory, a man of some education, presents this tale as worthy of belief.134 He knows people who will corroborate his testimony. He is absolutely concrete about the location of the events. And he indicates that there are relics from the event: anyone with sufficient curiosity can go and view the evidence. So if, despite Gregory’s evident sincerity, we disbelieve his story,135 we will infer that it is possible to concoct a tale about someone not long dead disappearing from his grave.136 

SUMMARY OF THE CASE AGAINST AN EMPTY TOMB 

Of the seven arguments just introduced, the first five are, like Jesus’ tomb in the gospels, empty. The sixth, however, cannot be blithely dismissed. Early Christians had the imaginative ability to fabricate fictions on the basis of theological convictions, and on more than one occasion they did so. This includes stories about resurrection. One of them made up the story in Mt. 27:51b-53. We can also be fairly confident that the narrative about the guard in Mt. 27:62-66, which has no parallel in Mark, Luke, or John, is sheer fiction.137 

The seventh argument impresses me as even more formidable. It will give skeptics some assurance. Some will indeed find it all by itself enough to brand Mark 16 and its parallels as probable fiction. Not only have people constructed fables about missing bodies, but the Greek and Roman legends, added together, establish that, before and after the turn of the era, a missing body was a not uncommon topos for gods and heroes in the Mediterranean world. Some of those myths, moreover, appear in the historiographical literature, where they are presented as worthy of belief.138 This undeniable fact merits much pondering.139 

* * * 

This, however, is not the end of the matter. To show that there is nothing far-fetched about Jesus’ followers conjuring up the idea, against the facts, that his tomb was empty, is not the same as showing that this in truth happened; and there are certain considerations that, according to many, show us that Mk 16:1-8 and its parallels are not, after all, unadulterated legend. These considerations now fall to be considered. I shall review them in their evidential pecking order, starting with the weakest and ending with the strongest. 

THE ALLEGATION THAT THE DISCIPLES STOLE THE BODY 

According to Mt. 28:11-15, the Jewish authorities put out the rumor that the disciples robbed the tomb.140 From this we learn, or so many avow, that anti-Christian propaganda concurred that the tomb was empty. The disagreement concerned only who or what emptied it.141 

The chief problem with this oft-repeated proof is that we do not know the age of the refutation in Mt. 28:11-15. Some have, to be sure, surmised that the verses, which may rely on pre-Matthean tradition,142 bear “the mark of fairly protracted controversy.”143 Yet this is hardly self-evident,144 and the passage, which cannot be history as it stands, is a lone witness. Nowhere else in the early sources do we hear of hostile opponents accusing Jesus’ disciples of stealing his body. So we do not know when this polemic was first formulated, or where it was first formulated—it need not have been Jerusalem—or who first formulated it, or how serious or informed its originators were.145 How can one safely move from Mt. 28:11-15 to the first days in Jerusalem? Who can say what Caiaphas thought about Jesus’ empty tomb, if he ever thought about it at all? Maybe the view combated in Mt. 28:11-15 did indeed arise in the days, weeks, months, or first few years after the crucifixion.146 But maybe it appeared for the first time between the composition of Mark and Matthew.147 I can see no easy way to adjudicate between these and any additional possibilities that might be offered as a means of explanation.148 

FAILURE TO VENERATE THE TOMB 

According to Murray J. Harris, “in the light of Jewish veneration for the burial-places of prophets and other holy persons such as righteous martyrs (Mt. 23.29), it is remarkable that the early Christians gave no particular attention to the tomb of Jesus. Remarkable, that is, unless his tomb were empty.”149 Several difficulties beset this assertion, which others have forwarded from time to time.150 While no one has established that Christians from an early period conducted religious services involving Jesus’ grave, no one has established that they did not, and a few scholars have found hints that they did.151 While their conclusions remain speculative,152 another possibility, equally at odds with Harris’ contention, has more support within the academy: there is a fair chance that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher marks the site of Jesus’ burial.153 If so, the fact implies a continuous social memory, which makes one wonder about Harris’ assertion that “no particular attention” was paid to it. Beyond that, if all concurred that Jesus’ tomb was empty, as Harris holds, why would that circumstance not have encouraged visits and veneration as opposed to indifference? The uncanny always attracts crowds. Believers in Jesus’ resurrection have for ages eagerly crowded into the empty aedicule in Jerusalem. Harris does not explain why their motivations were altogether alien to their first-century counterparts. 

It is striking that Lüdemann, starting from the same alleged fact as Harris, namely, the failure to venerate Jesus’ tomb, comes to the opposite conclusion: “Given the significance of the tombs of saints at the time of Jesus it can be presupposed that had Jesus’ tomb been known, the early Christians would have venerated it and traditions about it would have been preserved.”154 One understands the logic. I cannot, however, given my conclusions about the burial in the previous chapter, accept that Jesus’ tomb was unknown.155 So where does that leave us? 

Harris’ argument from the absence of veneration has this structure: 

a. The sources say nothing about the tomb being venerated. 

b. It follows that it was not venerated.

c. But it would have been venerated were Jesus’ remains there. 

d. Therefore the tomb must have been empty. 

Lüdemann concurs with (a) and (b) but then goes another way: 

a. The sources say nothing about the tomb being venerated. 

b. It follows that it was not venerated. 

e. But it would have been venerated were its location known. 

f. No one knew where the tomb was. 

There is nothing outrageous in the move, which both Harris and Lüdemann make, from (a) to (b). Still, it is an uncertain historical judgment because it is an argument from textual silence. What does it mean that our sources also fail to tell us that the followers of the Baptist or Hillel venerated their teacher’s remains? As for (c), it is not a self-evident truth or empirical fact. Indeed, why would people have venerated Jesus’ remains if they filled a tomb? Might not an unresurrected Jesus have been, à la Lk. 24:21, a failed prophet? 

The chief problem for both Harris and Lüdemann is that we know next to nothing about Jesus’ tomb in the first century. To be sure, on my reading of the evidence, some must have known where it was, so I cannot endorse Lüdemann. This does not, however, vindicate Harris. He imagines, as do so many others, that Jesus’ followers would have inspected the tomb to certify that the body was gone. Yet surely, if the blocking stone was, on Easter morning, off to the side, it would have been rolled back soon enough, so what could anyone have learned? Many unthinkingly envisage Jesus’ tomb after Easter Sunday as it is in the gospels and Christian art, with the stone to the side. But surely that could have been only a short-lived circumstance. 

For all we know, moreover, Joseph of Arimathea, in accord with widespread ancient Near Eastern and Jewish custom, had marked his tomb with a curse on those who would unlawfully open it.156 If so, should we simply assume that early Christians, beside themselves with anxious curiosity, cared nothing for curses or personal property and so moved ahead with their trespassing? The question hangs in the air without an answer. Certainly our sources divulge nothing about anyone, friend or foe, visiting the tomb after Easter morn. Yet if interested persons visited to check the facts, and if those facts bolstered Christian faith, why is there no story about this? Without more data, I cannot see that the argument from a lack of veneration much helps us.157 

PAUL AND THE TRADITION IN 1 CORINTHIANS 15:3-4 

Paul’s language in 1 Cor. 15:3-4, many have urged, assumes or implies an emptied tomb.158 The sequence is burial followed by resurrection: ἐτάφη καὶ…ἐγήγερται. If this creates any image in the mind’s eye, surely it is of a tomb being filled and then being emptied. It is indeed difficult to know what else one might envision.159 Resurrection immediately follows the burial, so it naturally includes the body, and all the more because, as argued earlier, Paul believed in “some sort of continuity between the present physical body and the totally transformed resurrection body—in spite of all discontinuity.”160 Why did Paul say that Jesus was raised if he did not mean that he had been raised? Why not just: “he was buried, and then he appeared to Cephas”?161 If, by ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω, “the Apostle meant something quite other than what was always understood” by these common verbs, “why did he throw dust in our eyes by using the familiar language?”162 

Robert Gundry has written: 

Resurrection means “standing up” (anastasis) in consequence of being “raised” (egeirō in the passive). Normally, dead bodies are buried in a supine position; so in conjunction with the mention of Jesus’ burial the further mention of his having been raised must refer to the raising of a formerly supine corpse to the standing posture of a live body… There was no need for Paul or the tradition he cites to mention the emptiness of Jesus’ tomb. They were not narrating a story; they were listing events. It was enough to mention dying, being buried, being raised and being seen.163 

These sentences harmonize with James Ware’s contention that “in no instance within Greek literature does ἐγείρω”—which appears eighteen times in 1 Corinthians 15—“denote the concept of ascension, elevation or assumption. Rather, it denotes the action whereby one who is prone, sitting, prostrate or lying down is restored to a standing position.”164 The investigation of John Granger Cook has reinforced this argument. Cook’s examination of resurrection narratives in antiquity shows that ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω would have implied, for Paul and his readers, an empty tomb.165 In sum, then, Paul’s belief that Jesus “was raised” implies that he “was raised (from a grave),” just as surely as Paul’s remark that Jesus “was born” (Phil. 2:7) implies that he “was born (of a woman).”166 

Yet exactly what follows from this for our purposes is not evident. Paul could, in theory, have believed in an emptied tomb without knowing a narrative about its discovery.167 The fact remains that the apostle, even if his words likely assume that Jesus’ tomb was empty, fails to say so. So what, if anything, he knew about Jesus’ tomb remains forever beyond recovery. He may have known something like Mk 16:1-8 as part of a pre-Markan passion narrative. I myself suspect that he did.168 Paul could even, when in Jerusalem, have visited a tomb thought to be that of Jesus. Nonetheless, “may have,” “suspect,” and “could” carry scant force. Nothing in 1 Cor. 15:4, considered alone, excludes the possibility that “was buried” originally alluded to entombment in a cemetery for criminals as opposed to interment in the rock-hewn tomb of a Sanhedrist. 

If, then, we are looking for good arguments for the empty tomb, we will need to look elsewhere. While Paul is no witness against the story of an empty tomb as found in the gospels, he equally cannot be called on to support any of the specifics of that tradition or even, with any confidence, its pre-Markan existence as a narrative. While, moreover, the historical fact that Jesus’ tomb was found empty will explain 1 Cor. 15:3-4, so too would a legend that Paul and others mistakenly believed to be true. 

As a footnote, I should observe that the immediately preceding paragraphs assume, for the sake of argument, what so many modern scholars take for granted, namely, that those whose names are now attached to the canonical gospels did not write them. If, however, as some still hold, the John Mark known from Acts (12:12, 25; 13:5, 13; 15:37-40), who is named as a coworker of Paul in Col. 4:10; 2 Tim. 4:11; and Phlm 24, wrote the Second Gospel, and/or if the Luke mentioned in Col. 4:14; 2 Tim. 4:11; and Phlm 24 composed Luke–Acts, everything changes.169 If Paul’s close associates included the author of Mk 16:1-8 or of Lk. 24:1-12 or both men, the odds that the apostle was unacquainted with a story about an empty tomb approach zero. 

THE INSUFFICIENCY OF APPEARANCES WITHOUT AN EMPTY TOMB 

N. T. Wright has written: “Neither the empty tomb by itself…nor the appearances by themselves, could have generated the early Christian belief. The empty tomb alone would be a puzzle and a tragedy. Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world.”170 

There are two problems here.171 The first is that “sightings of an apparently alive Jesus” were, even without the empty tomb, never “by themselves.” Rather did they come to people whose religious convictions had been thoroughly molded by Jesus over the course of his public ministry, and that means molded by very concrete eschatological expectations. Jesus himself had spoken of the new age, with its prefatory resurrection, as near, and how could this fact not have contributed to, or even been decisive for, the interpretation of encounters with a postmortem Jesus?172 

Why is it a stretch to envision followers of Jesus, under the spell of his eschatological expectations, coming to belief in his resurrection, even if they, returned to Galilee, were ignorant of the fate of his body?173 If, as Lk. 19:11 has it, they were expecting, before Jesus’ death, the eschatological consummation, and if, after that death, they saw him alive again, might they not have jumped to belief in his resurrection? 

The second problem has to do with the phenomenology of the appearances. Jesus did not, according to Wright, appear to his disciples as a transparent shade. On the contrary, Wright defends the essential historicity of Lk. 24:36-43 and Jn 20:19-29, where Jesus is a solid if “transphysical” presence. Given his conviction on this matter, how can he doubt that the disciples, confronted by such a Jesus, would not have entertained the thought of resurrection? They would not have thought they were meeting a “soul” or “ghost.” 

The same question arises even for those of us who doubt the historical veracity of Lk. 24:36-43 and Jn 20:19-29. This is because, as we shall see in Chapters 9–10, many apparitions are not vaporous or ethereal but realistic, convincingly lifelike, indistinguishable from ordinary physical objects. So when Wright urges that “sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world,” he seemingly neglects not only his own estimation of the appearances but also the phenomenology of many visionary experiences. 

I wish to be perfectly clear here. At the end of the day, I am not far from Wright on this matter. I will argue, in Chapter 8, that belief in Jesus’ resurrection was the upshot of three stimuli: pre-Easter eschatological expectations, encounters with the postmortem Jesus, and the empty tomb. That is, I do not believe that the appearances by themselves did the trick. Nonetheless, if we are entertaining counterfactual theories in order to make a case for the empty tomb, I do not believe that Wright’s argument, in the form he offers it, should carry the day. 

PROCLAMATION IN JERUSALEM 

Many have insisted that the earliest followers of Jesus could not have proclaimed his resurrection unless all parties concerned knew his grave to be empty.174 Would not believers have felt impelled to check the tomb for themselves? And would opponents have let the annoying sectarians get away with their outrageous claim if they could readily have falsified it?175 Surely foes of the new faith would have displayed the body if they could have done so.176 This is what later Jewish polemic has them do in the Toledot Jesu.177 Paul Althaus insisted that the resurrection was proclaimed 

soon after Jesus’ death in Jerusalem, in the place where he was executed and buried… This proclamation signified for all, for those who preached and for all heard, that the grave was empty. This could not have been maintained in Jerusalem for a single day, for a single hour, if the emptiness of the tomb had not been established as a fact for all concerned… In Jerusalem, one could not think of the grave as empty without being certain, without there being testimony, that it had been found empty.178

 To this one might retort that people just did not know where the body was because it had been thrown onto a pile as food for carrion. This possibility requires that the burial by Joseph of Arimathea is legendary. It is, however, likely enough, as we saw in the previous chapter, that a Sanhedrist buried Jesus and that the location was not a well-guarded secret. 

Another way around the inference from the proclamation of the resurrection in Jerusalem is to posit that the earliest Christians did not believe in a physical resurrection of Jesus’ body, that they held a more spiritual view of resurrection, akin to what Paul allegedly develops in 1 Corinthians 15. On such a view, if the location of Jesus’ tomb were known, it was irrelevant to all.179 The problem with this is that we have no good evidence for belief in a nonphysical resurrection in Paul, much less in the primitive Jerusalem community. As urged earlier, even Paul, when defending the notion of a “spiritual body” in 1 Corinthians 15, seemingly teaches, like 2 Bar. 51:10, the transformation of human remains. Nowhere does he imply their natural dissipation. 

Yet another retort takes this form: granted that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, it is conceivable that, by the time interested individuals got around to caring and so investigating the spot, it was too late. A corpse would have undergone significant decomposition between Passover and Pentecost, or whenever Christians first began publicly proclaiming the resurrection.180 If, then, Peter and like-minded believers, as Luke has it, did not actively missionize until several weeks after the crucifixion, maybe empirical inquiry would by then have been unprofitable. According to y. Yeb. 15d (16:3), “evidence [of the identity of a corpse] may be given only during the first three days [after death].” This must be because after that decay will have altered the features beyond indubitable identification.181 Lake opined: “the emptiness of the grave only became a matter of controversy at a period when investigation could not have been decisive.”182

This riposte gives one pause, although its force is hard to calibrate. If Jesus was, as the gospels have it, buried alone, then perhaps all that would have mattered was the place. One could, in theory at least, have checked the cave for its single body no matter what the condition. If, however, Jesus was buried with others, m. Sanh. 6:5-6 is evidence that his corpse might still have been identifiable. The rabbinic text presupposes that, even in the case of a criminal buried dishonorably, relatives could claim the skeleton after some time had passed: “When the flesh had wasted away they gathered together the bones and buried them in their own place.” If relatives could collect the bones of an executed criminal after the flesh had fallen off, then those bones were not in a jumbled pile but must have been deposited in such a way as to allow for later identification; and because burial customs tend to be conserved over long stretches of time, it may be that, already in Jesus’ day, corpses receiving a Jewish burial were somehow identifiable. Even were it sometimes otherwise, in the case of Jesus probably “all that would have been necessary would have been for Joseph [of Arimathea] or his assistant to say, ‘We put the body there, and a body is still there.’”183 

There remain, however, other possible defeaters of the inference to an empty tomb from the preaching of the resurrection in Jerusalem. Maybe, at least regarding Jesus’ followers, they were so self-assured of their peculiar beliefs that none ever bothered to visit the gravesite. Many modern historians have the disciples, without knowledge of the empty tomb, coming to faith in Jesus’ resurrection because of experiences in Galilee; and if they had come to believe without such knowledge, why did they need it once they returned to Jerusalem? Perhaps, contrary to the impression that Lk. 24:12 and Jn 20:3-9 leave, their religious enthusiasm was greater than their investigative impulses or their native curiosity.184 Maybe their assumption that Jesus was gone to heaven cancelled the common human sentiment to visit a loved-one’s grave, or perhaps they did visit and, as suggested above, the stone was still in place and they saw no compelling reason to move it.185 

Stranger things have happened, and what we imagine people in general would do as a matter of course is no sure guide as to what pious, first-century Galileans actually did do. Guignebert remarked that “the very idea of verifying presupposes doubt, and there is no ordinary connexion between the exaltation of the vision and the uninspired business of verification.”186 The Vatican was never in a hurry to carbon date the Shroud of Turin nor, despite the criticisms of the first test in 1988, does it appear to be in a hurry to do so again. Worth pondering are these remarkable words from a modern rabbi, a follower of Rabbi Schneerson: 

Anyone who opens their eyes can see that the Rebbe, the King Messiah, is alive and well. It is now that we can ask whether the Rebbe has real followers, not when you can see him, and everyone is shouting, “Rebbe, we’re with you.” For people who think like animals, what they can’t see doesn’t exist. But even those who follow their eyes and say “We saw the burial” eventually come here [Chabad’s headquarters in Brooklyn]. The Rebbe’s sermons provide us with ammunition against what our eyes can see. Quite simply, don’t believe what you see. It’s the toughest test of all, but the fact that we were given it means we can pass it, this concealment, and if we see with our eyes large numbers of people arriving with more arriving every year, then the Rebbe’s disappearance simply cannot be.187 

Of course, maybe Jesus’ followers were altogether different and played detective by checking out the tomb in order to make sure that they were not deluded. Yet most early Christian converts accepted the proclamation of the resurrection, like the reports of Jesus’ miracles, without seeking out and interviewing the principle witnesses or becoming sleuths looking for clues. Certainly Acts nowhere tells us that people who heard the gospel did the smart thing and decided to check out the facts by marching to the family tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. How then do we know that the very first disciples were of a wholly different character?188 Perhaps they were like the Lubavitcher who said: “I do not visit the Ohel [the tomb of the Rebbe]. I know the Rebbe is not there. He is still alive… I can feel his presence… Some messianists visit the grave… [But] the Rebbe is not dead.”189 

Here I recall what Strauss wrote about Paul: after the apostle saw Jesus, 

he was so sure of his case, so satisfied in his own behalf, and so sufficiently instructed, that he let three years go by before he started from Damascus, in the neighbourhood of which he had had the vision, to go for the first time to Jerusalem, and to get more accurate information about Jesus in general, and in particular about those appearances of him after his death which others also professed to have had… After his conversion, he felt no impulse leading him to…investigation; on the contrary, he could satisfy himself for three whole years with what he thought he had himself seen and heard. Now this proves sufficiently the pure subjectivity of the whole turn his mind had taken, how little adapted he was, generally, to undertake the historical investigation of an objective fact.190

 Is there not some truth in these words? 

What then of Christian opponents or Jewish authorities? Would they not have fetched the bones and paraded them through the streets if they could have done so?191 Perhaps. As already indicated, they do so in later Jewish polemic. Yet would it not have been impious and against Jewish custom to disinter and display a corpse? Maybe, moreover, the powers that be were content with less than halfmeasures because they initially did not take the business seriously, regarding it as nothing more than a minor, transient nuisance.192 They knew Jesus was dead, and nothing intimated that they were looking at a future world religion. Christian opponents may, at the very beginning, have contented themselves with a condescending, “That’s ridiculous!” Investigation requires an open mind, and their minds were closed. Or just maybe some were, like Gamaliel in Acts, calmly philosophical: “Keep away from these men and leave them alone. Because if this plan or undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them” (5:38-39). In any case, it was surely some time after Pentecost that anyone “wanted at all costs to stamp out the growing Christian movement.”193 One recalls that the well-informed Josephus, in telling the story of firstcentury Judaism, paid scant attention to the church. 

How many readers of this book would, were tomorrow’s news to report a case of resurrection, pay it solemn heed, even if several witnesses were insisting on its veracity? Who would do anything other than blithely shelve the tale on the grounds that it has next to no chance of being true? We are all Hume on some occasions. 

To carry my argument further, early Christian tradition nowhere records that Jewish opponents marched to the tomb and found it empty. Why not? The apologetical argument from early Christian preaching—it is an argument from silence—implies that at some point they sallied forth to investigate and returned empty-handed.194 Yet there is no story to this effect, and if Christians had known one, would they not have proclaimed it from the rooftops? What does the silence imply? Maybe there was no such event because the Jewish authorities had other things on their minds. Indeed, if they were, as so many apologists insist, really so desperately anxious to squash the early Christian movement, and if the law or religious scruples did not stand in the way, why did they not bring out some bones, anybody’s bones, and pass them off as those of Jesus? There is no record of that either. 

To complete the thought: maybe, despite no hint of the event, a body was produced. If so— this is purely hypothetical—we can guess that Jesus’ followers would not have broken down and conceded: “Ok, you’ve got us. Our faith was folly.” That is not how people devoted to a cause operate. The strategy of Peter and his companions, we can be fairly confident, would have been denial. Nobody back then could run dental records or check DNA. Christians, firmly persuaded by their personal encounters with the risen Jesus, would surely have retorted, “That body you’ve put on display belongs to someone else.”195 And then they might have gladly forgotten the whole affair. When Haile Selassie, the Rastafarian Messiah, disappeared in 1975, those who believed in him taught that he had gone into hiding, and they maintained this even into the 1990s, after his bones had been identified.196 Within their ideological context, the empirical mattered not. 

In the end, my judgment is that, even though it is likely that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, it does not unequivocally follow from this and from the early proclamation of the resurrection in Jerusalem that Jesus’ body was certainly known by everyone to be gone rather than presumed by his followers to be gone. Here is a case in which the arguments yea are fairly well met by the arguments nay. 

A DEARTH OF EXPECTED FEATURES 

Leslie Houlden has written that “we can analyse the [resurrection] narratives in the Gospels, pointing to theological features and literary connections, and the more they strike us, the less assurance we are likely to have that they represent history directly.”197 This makes sense. What then should we make of Wolfgang Nauck’s observation that Mk 16:1-8 betrays little if any scriptural intertextuality, a fact all the more striking considering how heavily the preceding passion narrative alludes to the Bible?198 And what should we say about the other ways in which Mark 16 is surprisingly quiescent? The chapter fails to note that Jesus’ resurrection was the dawn of a new age or that it inaugurated the general resurrection. It neglects to forge an etiological link between the date of Easter and the Christian celebration of the Lord’s Day.199 It says nothing about Jesus’ descent to the underworld or his ascent to heaven.200 It fails to describe the resurrection itself or inform us about the nature of Jesus’ risen body. And it lacks Christological titles. Jesus is not here Lord, Messiah, Son of man, or Son of God. The sole Christological motif is that the crucified is risen.201 

Although it “reasonable to expect that in a freely composed mythical narrative the church would maximize the theological depth structure of the tradition,”202 Mk 16:1-8 is not so maximized. To the contrary, “the discovery of the empty grave remains practically without effect.”203 Bultmann called Mk 16:1-8 “extremely reserved,”204 and Jacob Kremer remarked that “every theological reflection concerning the meaning of the resurrection fails.”205 The text also, remarkably, does little to nothing to defend itself. Apart from the insistence, in 15:47, that the women knew the location of the tomb, apologetical interests—so prominent elsewhere in the gospels—are hard to espy.206 That is, Mk 16:1-8 does not supply much ammunition for defenders of the faith. As we shall see in the next section, the accounts in Matthew, Luke, John, and the Gospel of Peter are quite different on that score. They have indeed been a boon to apologists. 

Mark is, most assuredly, a puzzling gospel in other respects, and maybe we should be content to observe that it “is a book about God’s shattering of human expectations,” a book that undoes “everything its readers thought they understood—even the conventions of how a Gospel should end.”207 Perhaps the unexpected theological reticence is part of a redactional strategy, part of the author’s attempt to disorient his audience. I suspect, however, that this is a distinctly modern take, and so I remain tempted to invert Houlden. The unexpected paucity of theological and apologetical features in Mark’s enigmatic conclusion, its failure to supply “many proofs” (Acts 1:3), is a sign—not compelling evidence but a sign—that some history lies in the background, that the narrative was not a purely imaginative construction but was rather rooted in memory of an initially confusing circumstance. 

APOLOGETICAL GLOSSES AND EXPANSIONS 

The state of affairs in Mark is not the state of affairs in the other gospels. The latter, in their narratives about the tomb, contain revisions and additions that reflect apologetical concerns: 

Matthew 

• 28:1: If—this is uncertain—the women come at the end of the Sabbath evening, the circumstance dramatically reduces the time during which anybody could have furtively removed the body.208 

• 28:2: An earthquake moves the stone, which eliminates human culprits. 

• 28:2-6: Jesus rises before the stone is moved, which excludes thieves. 

• 28:4: A guard seals the tomb, so again theft makes no sense (cf. 27:62-66). 

• 28:4: The guards witness miraculous events. 

• 28:9: The women at the tomb are able to touch Jesus, so he is not a ghost.209 

• 28:13: The allegation that the disciples stole Jesus’ body is a lie Jewish opponents invented. 

Luke 

• 24:6: Jesus foresaw all that happened. 

• 24:10: A large company of women was involved.210 

• 24:11: The disciples initially disbelieved and were persuaded only by evidence.211

• 24:12, 24: Men confirmed the women’s testimony to the empty tomb.212 

• 24:12: The burial clothes were still in the tomb, showing that the body was not stolen.213 

John 

• 19:32-35: The spear in Jesus’ side proves that he truly died. 

• 20:1-10: Peter and the Beloved Disciple confirm Mary’s discovery 

• 20:5-7: The burial wrappings remain in the tomb, which makes theft unlikely.214 

• 20:7: The cloth on Jesus’ head is rolled up by itself, demonstrating the same thing. 

• 20:9: Scripture foresees that the Messiah would rise. 

The Gospel of Peter 

• 8:30-33; 9:34: A guard and crowd were at the tomb, so the disciples could not have stolen the body. 

• 8:33: Seven seals sealed the tomb. 

• 9:35–10:42; 11:44-45: The guards heard and saw miraculous events. 

What should we infer from these apologetical extensions? They reflect the sense that a single sentence from an angel (Mk 16:6-7) was not enough, that the relatively plain story in Mk 16:1-8 was inadequate, that it left too many disagreeable possibilities unaddressed. In the words of Daniel Smith, the “narrative adjustments to the empty tomb story all show that the story itself was something of a problem, something that needed further explanation and elaboration and defense.”215 

We have here a phenomenon found elsewhere in the Jesus tradition, in places where a memory invited embellishment because a fact seemed problematic. That Judas, one of the twelve, betrayed Jesus was a source of potential embarrassment and so begged for elucidation. We accordingly find texts emphasizing that Jesus was not surprised, that the devil must have possessed Judas, that everything happened in accord with scripture, and that the betrayer came to a miserable end.216 

Matters are similar with Jesus’ baptism. That Jesus submitted to a ritual of repentance and forgiveness (Mk 1:4) under the Baptist’s supervision raised uncomfortable questions. The tradition rose to the challenge. In Mark, John the Baptizer refers to one greater than himself (1:7-8), and a heavenly voice establishes who should be the center of attention (1:11). In Matthew, John confesses that Jesus should baptize him while Jesus clarifies that he must “fulfil all righteousness” (3:13-15). In Luke, the Baptist implicitly rejects the idea that he might be the Messiah (3:15-16), and what looks like a private vision in Mark now appears to be a public event (3:21-22). In John’s Gospel, the Baptist denies that he is the Messiah and testifies that Jesus is God’s Son and the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The Baptist also makes it crystal clear that Jesus must increase while he must decrease (1:20, 29, 32-34, 36; 3:28-30). In the Gospel of the Ebionites, a great light illumines the scene, John calls Jesus “Lord,” and the divine voice speaks not once but twice.217 

What we find with Jesus’ baptism and Judas’ betrayal is what we find with Mark’s story of the empty tomb. Everywhere we discern attempts to head off potential objections and answer difficult questions. It is natural to suppose that, in all three cases, we have to do with a historical memory that invited apologetical massaging.218

THE WOMEN 

In the canonical gospels, women discover Jesus’ tomb to be open and empty.219 This circumstance, many avow, is not “the kind of detail anyone would have thought or wished to invent”; “that it should be these devoted but humble and relatively insignificant followers who are given the credit for the discovery in every gospel is historically impressive.”220 This is the most popular argument for the historicity of the empty tomb in recent decades.221 There are several issues here. (1) The first concerns the women in Mk 16:1: Why are precisely these three—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome—named? One is fairly confident that they were real people, like Simon of Cyrene and most if not all of Mark’s named characters.222 Why, however, is a story built around them in particular? Setting aside later legend, we know very little about any of these women. One might contend, then, that memory has here played its part. The obvious rejoinder is that historical names can enter unhistorical narratives. Christian imagination concocted countless legends about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, who were real human beings. So even if Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome are not fictional characters, their names do not, by themselves, establish the historical genesis of the story in which they appear.  

This retort will suffice for those inclined to believe that Mk 16:1-8 is redactional or otherwise late. Those of us who infer, on the contrary, that the pericope comes from a pre-Markan passion narrative that may have originated in Jerusalem will not be so quickly dismissive. For the most part, the greater the distance, the easier the fiction.223 

(2) A second issue regarding the women is the question of their perceived credibility in a maledominated world. Celsus derided the testimony to the empty tomb on the ground that it derives from “a half-frantic woman.”224 Even in the New Testament, Lk. 24:22-23 has male disciples reluctant to believe faithful women: “some women of our group astounded us…when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.”225 We meet the same prejudice in Gos. Mary 9:4, where, after Mary Magdalene divulges what the risen Jesus has taught her, Peter responds: “Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us?” Then there is Ep. Apost. 10, where the male apostles disbelieve Martha (Mary) when she, at Jesus’ command, declares that he has risen. They ask, “What do you want with us, O woman? Can one who is dead and buried be alive?” After she reports back, Jesus sends another female. She is greeted by the same dismissive response. Along the same lines, it is, in Luke, Peter, not a woman (contrast Mt. 28:9-10; Jn 20:11-18), who first sees Jesus (Lk. 24:34), and the women’s witness to the empty tomb does not stand alone but is confirmed by the apostle’s investigation (24:12).226 The Fourth Gospel likewise brings Peter onto the scene early. He and the Beloved Disciple inspect Jesus’ tomb. The Gospel of Peter goes a step further: the women are not the first to arrive at the tomb and learn what has happened. This role goes to male soldiers and elders.227

Whether or not a patriarchal prejudice explains the women’s absence from the old formula in 1 Cor. 15:3-8,228 the text comes from a world in which, to the embarrassment of so many today, someone writing in Paul’s name could contemptuously speak of “old wives’ tales” (1 Tim. 4:7) as well as of “silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:6-7).229 Another Christian author could make Peter avow that “women are not worthy of life” and have Jesus respond: “every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Gos. Thom. 114). 

Given the many pertinent texts, Christians would not, so the popular argument runs, have invented a story that relies on the testimony of women. Is it not significant that not a single speech in Acts refers to the women finding Jesus’ tomb empty? 

Lüdemann rejects this argument. He asserts that “there is no universal ancient view that women are incompetent witnesses. (That women were not allowed to give testimony was the case only in ancient Judaism.)”230 This misses the mark, in part because the story of the empty tomb arose in Jewish circles.231 Mark 16:1-8 speaks of the Sabbath and alludes to the decalogue’s injunction against doing business then (vv. 1-2). It refers to the sort of stone commonly used to close tombs around Jerusalem (vv. 3-4). It reflects the Jewish tradition of imagining angels to be young (v. 5; see p. 165 n. 288). It features Jewish names—“Mary,” “Salome,” “Jesus.” It designates Jesus as “the Nazarene” and Mary as “Magdalene,” thereby calling to mind two settlements unknown beyond Palestine. It shows an interest in Galilee (v. 7). And it deploys the concept of resurrection (v. 6: “he is risen”).232 Given all this, it would seem to be specifically the status of a woman’s word within Judaism that is relevant. What then do we know about that?

According to 1QSa 1:9-11, a young sectarian “shall not approach a woman to know her carnally before he is twenty years old, when he knows good and evil. And she shall be received to give evidence against him.” These words clearly sanction the evidence of women.233 The ruling, however, is specifically sectarian, and it concerns a personal matter of which a woman alone would have unique knowledge.234 More significant, then, is Josephus, Ant. 4.219: “From women let no evidence be accepted, because of the levity and temerity of their sex.” Josephus attributes this ruling (without justification) to Moses, and he implies that it is the law of the land. This harmonizes with Sifre Deut. 190 and the bulk of the Mishnah.235 

Even more importantly, while Josephus’ comment is about the court room, the implications of his remark are broader. His justification for the ruling—women are victims of levity and temerity236— expresses an attitude many males held near the turn of the era. This is the crucial matter,237 because Josephus was far from alone in his view that woman “is in every respect of less worth than a man.”238 Jesus ben Sirach was a “relentless misogynist.”239 Philo characterized masculine thoughts as “wise, sound, just, prudent, pious, filled with freedom and boldness, and akin to wisdom,” and he spoke of the female sex as “irrational” and full of “bestial passions, fear, sorrow, pleasure and desire… incurable weaknesses and indescribable diseases.”240 He also averred that women are “endowed by nature with little sense.”241 The Sentences of Syriac Menander advise one not to believe “a talkative and verbose woman” when “she complains to you of her husband; for he did not sin against her, but she did irritate him every day with her wicked tongue.” 

One must, to be sure, take great care not to oversimplify here.242 Certain sources, while far from egalitarian in the modern sense, reflect a more favorable view of women. Judith, Jubilees, the Testament of Job, and Joseph and Aseneth come to mind.243 These writings, nonetheless, do not annul the fact that what Josephus says about female testimony lines up with much in rabbinic sources, or that he can offer his disparaging stereotypes about women without apology, as though they are obvious. It is, furthermore, easy to collect similar disparaging remarks from Greek and Roman literature in general.244 Male society in the New Testament period strongly tended to view “women as inferior to men,” and “prejudice against women was widespread, and no record remains of any sustained protest against it.”245 The generalization includes Jewish and Christian circles. 

Richard Bauckham has observed that Lk. 24:22-23 has parallels in the first-century LAB 9:10 (“When Miriam reported her dream, her parents did not believe her”) and 42:5 (“Manoah did not believe his wife”). A woman’s witness to divine revelation is, in both instances, doubted.246 One might also recall Acts 12:12-17. When Peter appears to Rhoda, a female servant, no one believes her. They believe the disciple is still in prison and that Rhoda has perhaps, not knowing the difference, seen “his angel.” 

Jesus’ followers were probably not abetting their public cause with a hard-to-credit story in which women—none of whom appear to have been elites or otherwise eminent—are the featured eyewitnesses. Even though Jesus had female disciples (cf. Lk. 8:1-3), and even though women such as Phoebe, Prisca, and Junia held positions of leadership within the churches (cf. Rom. 15:1-7), public perception—which mattered to a movement driven by missionary zeal—was another matter. It is understandable that Christian storytellers soon enough got around to constructing narratives that feature male disciples. In Wilckens’ words, 

Later tradition shows a clear tendency to have the disciples at least confirm the women’s discovery afterwards (Luke 24:12, 24; John 20:2f.), and later tradition also has the disciples present on Easter Day in Jerusalem (Luke and John as compared with Matthew and John 21). Accordingly, it must be accepted that the core of the narrative is indeed that the women found Jesus’s tomb empty in the early morning of the first day of the week.247 

This is not a bad argument.248 

(3) A third issue involving the women in Mark is that their appearance coincides with the disappearance of the male disciples, who are otherwise major actors in the drama of Jesus. Why is it not Peter and his male companions who are at the tomb first thing Easter morning?249 It is rather women who have hitherto failed to put in an appearance.250 

The unexpected presence of women does not, for many, tell in favor of a historical genesis because “the flight of the male disciples was an established fact.”251 In other words, the tradition reported that the disciples had fled when Jesus was arrested, so they had not witnessed the crucifixion and burial. When, then, the time came to make up the story of the empty tomb, the only characters to hand were the women. 

This response limps. It is the hallmark of legends—as those who argue against the historicity of the empty tomb insist—to disregard facts. Why should Mk 16:1-8 be more conscientious? Why was it easier to sin against the fact that there was no empty tomb than to sin against the fact that the disciples had fled?252 Why not bring Peter and the others on to the stage despite what really happened, or what happens in Mark 14?253 Luke reveals that it was possible to omit the flight of the disciples and have them participate in the discovery of the empty tomb.254 Indeed, Lk. 23:49 (“all his acquaintances…stood at a distance”)255 places disciples at the crucifixion (cf. Jn 19:26-27). Even if pre-Markan tradition believed that the disciples were not around on Easter morn, one fails to see why Christian legend would have created a story with Mary Magdalene. She is not the star of any other Markan episode. Why not a story in which the disciples, if gone to Galilee, immediately return, perhaps right after the appearance to Peter, to find an empty tomb? Or a story in which Joseph of Arimathea or important Jewish officials go to the tomb and so learn the truth?256 Or something akin to Matthew 28, with guards testifying to the empty tomb? Or a statement like Lk. 8:2-3, which names four women and then refers to “many others.”257 The more the better, one would think. 

Aside from all this, the idea that the male disciples fled to Galilee before Easter Sunday and were in the north “between Good Friday and the beginning of their activity in Jerusalem,”258 although commonly asserted, is a feeble construct, a postulate without real evidence.259 In Mark, after “all” the disciples flee (14:50), Peter is still in Jerusalem (14:66-72), and there is no subsequent notice of him leaving. According to Luke and John, as well as the Gospel of Peter, the disciples are still in the capital after the crucifixion while Mk 16:7 (“tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee”) and its parallels in Mt. 28:7 and 10 presume the same circumstance, as does 28:13: Jesus’ companions have yet to leave the neighborhood and go north. Otherwise the women, who are in Jerusalem, could not communicate with them—unless we imagine them to be world-class sprinters able to catch up with the disciples before the latter make it home.260 In other words, all five gospels have the disciples in or near Jerusalem on Sunday.261 What is more, Gardner-Smith observed that the gospels say only

 that the disciples deserted Jesus and scattered among the crowds in Jerusalem. On the day before the feast the most conspicuous thing they could have done would have been to leave Jerusalem, and journey in a direction opposite to the stream of traffic. Probably travelling sixty miles during the feast would have been a difficult if not an impossible undertaking. Why should they try it? A man who wishes to hide himself generally chooses a crowded city, and it must have been easy for a dozen Galileans to escape notice among the enormous population of Jerusalem at the Passover season.262

 While we have decent reason to believe that the first appearances to Peter and his companions occurred in Galilee, we have little cause to suppose that, after Jesus’ arrest, and before even learning of his death, they sped home directly or traveled on a Sabbath, or that they abandoned the women who went up with them to Jerusalem.263 Those who imagine otherwise will need to ask how Jesus’ followers, fled to the north, came to learn that his arrest had led to crucifixion.264 And they will have to posit that the disciples were insufficiently interested in or worried about Jesus to hang around long enough to learn his fate. But the story of Peter’s denial, which is unlikely to be wholly fictitious, requires that at least one of them did. 

The absence of the disciples from Mk 16:1-8, then, remains a fair argument for memory here, especially when one keeps in mind that “the resurrection narrative is the only place in the whole Bible where women are sent by the angels of Yahweh to pronounce his message to men.”265 

(4) Ehrman is unpersuaded. “Who would invent women as witnesses to the empty tomb? Well, for openers, maybe women… There is nothing implausible in thinking that women who found their newfound Christian communities personally liberating told stories about Jesus in light of their own situations, so that women were portrayed as playing a greater part in the life and death of Jesus than they actually did.” Not to see this is to suffer from “a poverty of imagination.”266 

At the risk of exhibiting such poverty, my estimate of the situation is different. The gospels themselves agree that women, not men, first told the story. The issue then is, Why did a story told by and about women become crucial for those who passed on the Jesus tradition, in which women are, for large stretches, mostly in the background? We can hardly suppose that females invented the tale and then passed it on for years within their own circles until it was so firmly established that men had to adopt it.267 Women, as far as the evidence runs, did not form their own subgroups within the early churches. They rather belonged, both before and after Easter, to circles in which men and women conducted their religious activities side by side. Despite, moreover, the idealism of Gal. 3:28 (“there is no longer male and female”) and such prominent females as Prisca and Junia (Rom. 16:7), those with the most authority appear to have been males: Peter, John, the twelve, James the brother of Jesus, Stephen, Paul, Barnabas. It accords with this that men seem to have composed all the Christian literature extant from the first century. This implies that, for the story about women to have become community tradition, men must, in effect, have authorized it. What circumstances encouraged them to do that, especially as the sources show, as we have seen, how much tradents strove to buttress the women’s testimony? One good answer is that they told the story because it belonged to everyone’s memory.268 What of Ehrman’s suggestion that women invented stories that gave them “a greater part in the life and death of Jesus than they actually did”? In Mark and Matthew, Jesus’ female followers are not so much as mentioned until the crucifixion and, until Easter morning, they do nothing save observe from afar. So the first two gospels, if we leave aside the conclusions of their passion narratives, do nothing to encourage the thought that women concocted fictions that put the female followers of Jesus into the narrative picture. Perhaps one can, if so inclined, find some evidence of this in Luke; but if we are contemplating the earliest gospel, Mark, there is nothing. 

Feminists have of course taught us to be suspicious of our texts. Women were undoubtedly much more prominent and significant in the early Jesus movement than the extant sources, with their androcentric bias, reveal. Yet it is precisely this bias that makes it surprising that Mark leans so heavily, in the climax of his narrative, on female witnesses.

Indeed, Mk 16:1-8 is a bit out of sync with general synoptic tendencies on the whole.269 The miracle stories featuring men outnumber those featuring women by more than three to one. Furthermore, the episodes with women at their center are on average briefer, and Jesus tends to say less to women and they to him than is the case with men. In some stories, females say nothing at all (Mk 1:29-31, for instance), and their actions provide the opportunity for exclusively male conversation (as in Mk 12:41-44 and 14:3-9). These and related facts reveal that the synoptics appear “to have seriously minimized and distorted the roles of women around Jesus.”270 It is unexpected, then, when the most astounding and most important miracle in Mark features only female witnesses, and that they both speak and are spoken to (vv. 3, 6-7). 

(5) Mark 16:1-8 should not be considered in isolation. It belongs with 15:40-41, where Mary Magdalene, another Mary, and Salome witness the crucifixion, and with 15:47, where the two Marys see where Jesus is buried. Each notice almost entails the others. If the women went to Jesus’ tomb on Sunday morning, they must have known where he had been buried; and if they were present for the burial, they were almost certainly at the cross. They cannot have just happened upon Joseph putting away the body after all was over. 

The logic also works the other way. If the women chose to watch the crucifixion, it is hard to imagine that, instead of mourning over the body, they were apathetic about it. It follows that they would, if possible, have sought to be around for any burial. And if they knew where the body was buried, human nature and Jewish custom would have drawn them back later to mourn further. 

The upshot is that Mark’s narrative, from one point of view, commends itself. If Jesus had female followers, as everyone admits he did; and if some of them went up with him to Jerusalem, as we have no reason to doubt; and if a few of them witnessed the crucifixion, which is wholly probable given that crucifixions were designed to be public events, then a visit not long after entombment is nothing but expected.271 

SUMMARY EVALUATION 

Looking back over the debate regarding the empty tomb, there is no irrefutable, ironclad logic on either side. Neither case exorcizes all our doubts. I am nonetheless not moved to declare a hopeless stalemate, for pro and con are not here equal. Rather, of our two options—that a tomb was in fact unoccupied or that belief in the resurrection imagined it unoccupied—the former is, as I read the evidence, the stronger possibility, the latter the weaker. The two best arguments against the tradition—the ability of early Christians to create fictions, including fictions involving resurrection, and the existence of numerous legends about missing bodies—while powerful, remain hypothetical and suggestive, whereas the two best arguments for the tradition are concrete and evidential: (a) the short, enigmatic story in Mk 16:1-8, which invited so much revision and expansion, looks like a memory Christians sought to upgrade, and (b) the involvement of Mary Magdalene and other women commends itself as nonfiction. I agree, then, with Jacques Schlosser: “Indications are not lacking which permit the historian to conclude that the tradition of the discovery of the open and empty tomb is historically likely, but one will do so with great hesitation.”272 “Indications are not lacking” and “with great hesitation” seem to me to be just right. A judgment in favor of the empty tomb, which will forever be haunted by legendary stories of disappearing and raised bodies, must remain, if accepted, tentative. 

Even so, and although Mk 16:1-8 is undoubtedly stylized drama in the service of Christian theology, the drama can go back to a real event. “Narratives of faith [can] contain historical elements.”273 John baptized Jesus although that event, as it appears in the synoptics, has a divine voice speaking from heaven; and the Romans crucified Jesus, even if piety has embroidered the passion narratives. In like manner, Jesus was probably laid in a tomb which some women later found empty, and Christian imagination turned their report into a dramatic story that grew in the telling.

 The details may remain foggy, but my conjectures come to this. While death in all societies summons certain fixed, ritualistic responses involving corpses and graves, the dedicated followers of Jesus still in Jerusalem after his crucifixion would have been unable to engage in their tradition’s ritualistic responses on either Friday or on the Sabbath. Furthermore, public acts of mourning for a convicted criminal may have been forbidden.274 Personal, private lamentation, however, was inevitable.275 And it would have been wholly natural for Jesus’ followers to indulge their grief and undertake whatever acts of mourning were possible close to the corpse—near which the soul was thought to remain for a few days276—as soon as there was opportunity. That means late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.277 It is human nature not to let go of the dead.278 

Given then that certain women went up to Jerusalem with Jesus, and given further, to quote Kathleen Corley, “the tenacity of women’s lament traditions, as well as the overall interest in family retrieval of executed family members, we can at the least assume that the women, and perhaps even some of the men, would have tried to watch the crucifixion proceedings, and would have tried to find Jesus’ body after he died in spite of the risks that would entail.”279 Corley goes on to judge that those who sought Jesus’ grave did not find it.280 Another possibility is that they found an unused tomb near Golgotha which they guessed but did not know was his.281 I am rather inclined to think, given the preceding pages, that the evidence moves us to a more traditional conclusion.282 

MULTIPLE EXPLANATIONS 

The judgment that some women found a vacated tomb does not, it hardly needs be said, tell us why this happened. The empty tomb, considered alone, does not explain itself. This is why, in Mark, an angel interprets: “he is risen.” 

Many, of course, beg to differ with the angel. They offer alternative explanations. Perhaps someone, for reasons unknown, removed the body, as Mary Magdalene first supposes in Jn 20:13- 15. Or maybe Jewish authorities filched it to prevent veneration of Jesus’ remains and things soon got out of hand. Having dumped the body unceremoniously, they were unable or unmotivated to recover it later. One can also imagine, as have a few, that Mary went to the wrong tomb and the rumors started, or that necromancers wanted the potent corpse of an executed holy man, or that Joseph of Arimathea placed Jesus in his family tomb and, after the Sabbath, moved the corpse somewhere else. Having done this, perhaps he kept quiet for reasons we can never guess; or perhaps, after Pentecost, he spoke out, Christians disbelieved him, and the faithful chose to forget his protest. 

No one can confirm any of these conjectures, much less nudge them into the realm of the likely.283 This cheers apologists, who avow that no naturalistic scenario for emptying Jesus’ tomb is high on the scale of probability.284 Confident polemicists, however, will retort that a resurrection of one truly dead is even less likely, so they are “prepared to admit almost any conceivable concurrence of natural improbabilities rather than resort to the hypothesis of supernatural interference.”285

Given their worldview, this is not irrational. It is also not lame for skeptics to take refuge in ignorance. Shelley wrote: “all that we have a right to infer from our ignorance of the cause of any event is that we do not know it.”286 C. D. Broad agreed: 

the failure of alternative explanations does not just leave the miraculous explanation standing alone; it leaves it with an indefinite number of other explanations which our lack of all detailed knowledge of the events immediately following the Crucifixion prevents us from formulating. We know that our state of ignorance is such that it is compatible with the existence of some quite simple explanation, and with the fact that no one will ever hit on this explanation.287 

THE ANGEL(S) 

Before passing on to the next chapter, I should like to make one more observation about the empty tomb, or rather the story about it. There is an angel in Mk 16:5 and Mt. 28:2.288 Luke 24:4 and Jn 20:12 feature two angels. Modern scholars typically affirm that these angels are merely literary constructs. This is Raymond Brown: 

Christian readers of the Bible have understood too literally much of biblical angelology… Most angelic interpreters were no more than mouthpieces for revelation, without any personality. If we pay attention to the freedom with which the evangelists handled the details of the angelic appearance at the empty tomb (especially as to the number and position of the angels), we recognize their awareness that here they were not dealing with controllable historical facts but with imaginative descriptions.289

 My bet is that Brown is right. The angel’s words unmistakably mirror the primitive Christian kerygma:290

In addition, Jn 20:1-10 might reflect a tradition about the tomb that lacked an angelic interpreter. Yet I confess to having a qualm. 

The immediate appeal of Brown’s words is that so many of us in the today’s academy do not believe overmuch in angels. Yet first-hand reports of visions of otherworldly beings, often luminous or dressed in white, are a dime a dozen throughout world religious literature and indeed are commonly reported in our own modern world.291 Whatever one makes of this fact, a fact it is. People have sincerely reported seeing such beings, and in Jewish and Christian tradition they have called them angels. So although I reject the historicity of the content of the angel’s message because it “reflects the kerygmatic preaching of resurrection and thus requires an understanding of the significance of the empty tomb gained from the appearance tradition,”292 it escapes me why the report of a vision of angels should be doubted, as it is by some, for no other reason than that it is the report of a vision of angels. Certainly it makes no sense, for example, to assert bluntly: “if angels do not exist, then the Markan story of the angelic appearance at the tomb cannot be historical.”293 Even were the premise sound, the conclusion does not follow. People can and do see things that do not exist. One might as well vainly urge that, as Mary the mother of Jesus died long ago, accounts claiming that many have seen her since must be wholly fictitious. That would be preposterous. Whatever the explanation, many have experiences that they interpret as encounters with Mary. In like manner, many have experiences that they interpret as encounters with angels. 

As Brown’s reading is not found in the commentaries written before modern times, one wonders about the sophistication, if that is the right word, he attributes to the gospel writers. Perhaps we are dealing here with a modern prejudice, rooted in our reluctance to acknowledge the phenomenology of human religious experience when we find it foreign. Which is not to insist that Mary saw an angel near Jesus’ tomb. I am simply unable to share the self-assurance with which so many commentators, without real argument, assert she did not. Why do so many find it easier to believe that some had visionary experiences which they construed as appearances of the risen Jesus than that some had a visionary experience which they construed as an angelic revelation?

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