By Victor Greto
There’s a lot more to the resurrection than the popular notion of Jesus emerging from a tomb three days after his death and appearing bodily to his disciples.
Just ask many of the scholars studying the history of early Christianity.
There also may be a lot less to it, if you’re picturing it as literally as a Renaissance painting, or are thinking of Cecil B. DeMille’s pioneering 1927 movie image of Christ emerging from the tomb in King of Kings.
In discussing an Easter that may seem alien to many lay Christians, scholars in the past couple of decades increasingly have used historical study to suggestively sculpt an Easter Sunday that symbolizes more than one day or literal event, while also asserting an enriched affirmation of faith in the seminal event of Christian faith.
The historical consensus at its most basic may be seen in the textbooks which “introduce” the New Testament to college students. These introductions delineate the generally accepted chronologies of when the letters and the four gospels that mostly make up the New Testament were written. These chronologies show that for at least the first two generations after Jesus’ death, most of the stories about him circulated orally, making historical judgments about the events in his life reported by the gospels historically tenuous.
The Easter or resurrection narratives are perhaps the most contentious. For example, the earliest manuscripts of the earliest Gospel, Mark, written about 40 years after Jesus’ death, has no resurrection narrative.
“I can say without any problem there is a historical consensus that there was not a historical emergence of Jesus from his tomb early on that Sunday morning,” says Tom Sheehan, the head of religious studies at Stanford.
So, if I was able to build a time machine, bring along a camcorder, and go back to the outskirts of Jerusalem during the early morning hours of April 9 of the year 30 (the date some scholars identify as the day), what could I record?
Maybe a tomb — if I could find one, let alone the right one.
Perhaps a few scruffy looking women wandering around with spices in their hands looking for Jesus’ body.
Perhaps even a body grotesquely dangling from a cross that no one is even allowed to bury.
The infusion of history into faith has helped to credibly imagine these fundamentally different scenarios.
“The first point to make,” says Veronica Koperski, a professor of theology at Barry University, “is that nowhere in the New Testament does anyone witness the event of the resurrection itself. There are experiences of the risen Jesus that are described in the Gospels and in [Paul’s] 1 Corinthians 15.”
“What the writers [of the Gospels] are trying to convey,” Koperski says, “is that they experienced Jesus alive, the same Jesus as they had known, but [who also] was somehow so different. They didn’t immediately recognize him, but after some time, were able to recognize him. I don’t think you can press the details more than the writers do.”
Pressing the details, however, is at least part of what history is all about.
For Erik Larson, an associate professor of religious studies at Florida International University, one of the fundamental problems of historically understanding what happened on Easter lies in the sources themselves.
Larson agrees with the consensus chronology, and a crucial contention that the original Gospel of Mark ended at verse 16:8, with the women astonished at the empty tomb, but before any resurrection appearances.
“The New Testament is unusual because it has four accounts of its founder,” he says. “On the one hand, it provides a rich amount of detail; on the other hand, [the Gospels] provide different information. The question is how you view that different information.”
According to those basic New Testament introductions, most scholars accept that at least seven of the letters attributed to Paul were the first written documents now contained within the New Testament, crafted perhaps in the late 40s and early 50s, about 20 years after Jesus’ death.
The Gospel of Mark is considered by many to have been the first written Gospel, completed by or soon after the year 70 (when the Romans completely destroyed Jerusalem after its citizens revolted), followed by Matthew and Luke about 15 years later; the last, John, may have been written during the 90s.
Many scholars also argue that Matthew and Luke depended on Mark for the basic structure of their narratives, expanding or adding as they saw fit, or depending on other unknown sources.
Though Luke’s resurrection stories include and even emphasize the physicality of the resurrection, if the consensus chronology is right, it was not committed to parchment until more than 50 years after the events it purports to describe.
Because of the distance in time between the sources — and the distance of the sources from what originally may have been an oral tradition — some self-described “liberal” scholars have stated that nothing historical can be claimed about the resurrection.
For example, the Jesus Seminar, an ongoing group of more than 200 mostly Christian historians and theologians formed in 1995, issued a book in 1998 that concluded:
- The resurrection of Jesus did not involve the resuscitation of a corpse.
- Belief in Jesus’ resurrection did not depend on what happened to his body.
- The body of Jesus decayed as do other corpses.
- The resurrection was not an event that happened on the first Easter Sunday; it was not an event that could have been recorded by a video camera.
- Since the earliest strata of the New Testament contain no appearance stories, it does not seem necessary for Christian faith to believe the literal veracity of any of the later narratives.
According to the consensus chronology, the earliest historical strata within the New Testament do not contain appearance stories, but Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians reports appearances to Peter, “the Twelve,” and to as many as 500 others — not to mention to himself.
So, the compelling details recorded in the Gospels (including the women at the tomb, the story of Joseph of Arimathea, bodily appearances to disciples) are nowhere to be found before 70.
And that’s a problem for historians — let alone historically-minded Christians.
According to Sheehan, a participant in the Jesus seminar, the idea of a physical resurrection was historically just one of several different ways to imagine a belief that Jesus’ death was “not a failure and that his life and death have a meaning.”
Sheehan says that the word translated as resurrection from the original Greek, egersis, doesn’t even mean resurrection.
“Egersis means awakening,” he says, “not resurrection. `Jesus was awakened from the dead’ would be the literal translation.”
That “awakening,” Sheehan says, “is an apocalyptic symbol used by many Jews over a 200-year period [beginning at least with its mention in the Book of Daniel] to describe someone entering into the new life of God. That phrase is used by some early Christians in the first 20 years after the death of Jesus, knowing that it’s an apocalyptic expression. No one was going to check tombs.”
Paul may not have been interested in checking tombs, but he used both egersis, or awakening, interchangeably with anastasis, which unequivocally means bodily resurrection (literally “to stand up”), says Dan Goodman, an assistant professor of New Testament Studies at the evangelical Palm Beach Atlantic College.
But Paul had a very different understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.
“Modern Christianity sees the resurrection as proof or validation for certain claims about Jesus,” Goodman says. “That wasn’t Paul’s interpretation of it. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was the beginning of the resurrection of humanity. He calls Jesus the `first fruits,’ the first born of the new creation.”
Regardless, Sheehan says, egersis is used more often earlier, and either word is used metaphorically by the early Christians to express Jesus entering into the kingdom of God.
Even so, Goodman and other scholars, including Koperski, Larson and Tom Ryan, chair of the religious studies department at St. Thomas University in Miami, all who agree with the chronological consensus, have no problem making the episodic resurrection narratives more historical than not.
“The authors of the gospels didn’t have the sense that they were speaking metaphorically,” Ryan says, “but had the sense they were speaking of some event that actually happened.”
Goodman says, “If we look at resurrection and texts and scholars that seem to be chipping away at the historicity, I ask, `what are the intentions?’”
The trend to understand the historical context of the Gospels, as well as the desire to imagine or recreate “what actually happened,” Goodman says, is a reflection of two centuries’ worth of rationalism.
“My agenda is a little different,” Goodman says. “The [Gospels] are theological documents, and each Gospel has its own vision of presenting the story of Christ. I must have that in mind.”
Historically, he says, “I would see a resurrection. I think it’s the best explanation for the transformation of the Jesus movement,” that is, the reason why early Christianity spread widely and quickly.
Despite this, Goodman says, “If we are to believe in this event, we’ve left the bounds of history. [History] can only be so helpful to unpack and interpret `resurrection.’”
Besides, he says, “I think that every Christian I ever met who believes in the resurrection believes because he’s had a personal experience with Christ. They never convert because they’re convinced the resurrection was historical. It’s personally and experientially compelling first, then historically compelling.”
Which leads us to one of the more problematic preconceptions a historian may bring to the study of early Christianity, and especially to the resurrection.
“If you disbelieve in miracles, there’s no way these things can be accepted at face value,” Larson says. “They’re myth, or hallucination, or stories blown out of proportion.”
If you believe in miracles, however, the questions may be even more problematic: why accept these miracles, and not others reported in the ancient world, by either other religious traditions, or those claimed by Roman emperors?
For himself, Larson has no compunction in saying he believes in miracles, and says there are plenty of good reasons to conclude that at least there was an empty tomb.
If so, Larson says, the historian must ask himself, “What’s the theory that best accounts for it? The apostles stole the body? People went to the wrong tomb? Jesus actually rose?”
John Fitzgerald, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Miami, says history can mix with religion, but it can never prove or disprove anything spiritual.
“The problem is not simply that the evidence is scanty and partly contradictory,” he says, “but that the early Christians’ interpretation of the event goes totally beyond any kind of historical verification.”
Early Christians “did not claim that Jesus had simply been resuscitated and come back to life,” he says, “but rather that he had been transformed and exalted. These are all religious claims that lie far beyond the ability of the historian to prove. They may be true, but they are not historically demonstrable.”
The irrelevance of whether an “Easter event” actually took place, let alone could have been recorded, may even be some of the Gospel writers’ ultimate points, he says.
“In the New Testament itself,” Fitzgerald says, “neither the empty tomb nor an appearance by the risen Jesus is necessarily sufficient to produce faith.”