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.