Alan Z.

My rewrite on the evidence for the resurrection

I’ve been promising for a while now to upload my rewrite on what I’ve been learning about the resurrection of Jesus. For better or worse it just keeps growing. I was going to wait until I covered all the topics on the page that is now up, but that might take a while to finish.

Instead I am going to blog what I’ve been writing one section at a time as I near a final draft of each section. This will give those of you who are interested a preview and a chance to comment on it before I replace the page I have up now. When I am finished it will be more than one page–I think there will be at least four of them.

I will be posting about Paul’s list of appearances of Jesus in 1 Corinthians in a couple days, but to start off here is the opening section for the whole topic. Comments are welcome, and if you spot any typos please let me know.

3. The resurrection of Jesus

In the first century C.E. (Common Era, often referred to as A.D.) some people in the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea were claiming publicly that a person named Jesus had died and was raised from the dead. These claims helped spread a growing movement which heralded Jesus not only as the Christ (the Greek term for the Jewish Messiah, or “anointed one”), but as the first of those to be resurrected at the end of this age of human history, and ultimately as equal to God.

The idea of a general resurrection of all people (or, alternatively, a select group of them) at the end of this age had spread among the Jewish people in the centuries preceding the Christian movement. Jewish author Jon Levenson (2006), in his study of the development of this idea, found it to be an outgrowth of early Jewish traditions such as the goodness of God’s creation, God’s intention to do justice to humanity, and God’s saving power. But as Christian Biblical scholar N.T. Wright (2003) points out, before the Christian movement there was no expectation that a single person would be resurrected before everyone else, nor that the Messiah would be such a person.

Trying to discern what actually happened to generate the claims about Jesus is one of the great puzzles of history. Even so, I think it is an apt place to begin in sorting out what happened at the outset of the Christian religion. We might question everything that’s been written about Jesus, but we know with certainty that his early followers talked about his resurrection from the dead. And because that belief had an influence on almost everything else they said about him, it needs to be taken into account in assessing our sources when they recount his life and teachings.

The earliest Christian sources we have present three types of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. First, the Christian missionary Paul wrote a letter recounting a tradition that Jesus appeared to several of his disciples after his death. Second, four “gospels” recounting events of Jesus’ life and death say that a few of his women followers discovered that the tomb he had been buried in was empty two days after his body had been laid there. And third, three of those gospels and one other early Christian scripture, the Acts of the Apostles, describe several of the appearances of the resurrected Jesus.

On the following pages I will examine and interpret this evidence from a historical perspective.

Changing my mind on the resurrection

Hi there. Honestly, I didn’t go into this study of the resurrection of Jesus with a desire to confirm either that it did or did not happen. I wanted to make the strongest case possible against it to see how well that case stood up. Depending on how strong it seemed, the resurrection would be either more or less defensible. My own viewpoint was that I had no idea what really happened, but it would be nice to have my mind more settled on the question.

Well, as a result of all of this reading and thinking my viewpoint is shifting. Not that I think there is proof, but that I think it is intellectually defensible to believe that Jesus really appeared to some of his disciples in some kind of bodily form after his death. Of course, that requires more than an analysis of the evidence to accept. It requires a worldview which won’t suffer too much violence to fit in such an event.

Here are a few of the things that made a difference.

N.T. Wright, in his (massive) book “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” asks the question: how can you explain the early Christians’ adoption of the idea of a two-stage resurrection–first Jesus, then everyone else–unless the disciples were absolutely convinced that they saw Jesus again after his death? Most first-century Jews seemed to believe in one resurrection, the one with everyone at the end of the age. How did the two-stage idea come to be?

His answer is that it could only have happened if they were absolutely convinced Jesus rose from the dead, even though the rest of the deceased were not yet showing up. And they would only be convinced by both the empty tomb and the multiple appearances of Jesus. One without the other would not be enough. An empty tomb would be a mystery. Appearances would be visions, like the frequently reported visions of a dead person that people do have. Only both meant a resurrection had happened.

I am not sure that argument holds up. I think an expectation that the general resurrection was imminent, plus the appearances of Jesus, would be sufficient for them to come up with a two-stage concept. But it did cause me to think about the oddity of the combination. Chronologically, it makes sense to me. First a belief that resurrection is about to happen, then the appearances, and you get a resurrected Jesus. But look at it in reverse. How likely is it not only that multiple appearances of the same dead person are reported (as in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians), but that a belief in an imminent resurrection happens to have been accepted by them beforehand?

That is what struck me. The widespread expectation of a general resurrection just happens to have developed among first century Jews before the disciples of Jesus start having visions of him? Strange historical happenstance. No other culture held such a view, expect maybe in Persia, although that is disputed.

Just last night I finished Dale Allison’s exhaustive review of the literature on the resurrection in his book, “Resurrecting Jesus.” He presents a lengthy discussion of visions of the dead in modern times, with an abundance of footnotes. People have experiences of dead people present again. The deceased seem very real to them. Groups of people can experience this at the same time. Occasionally they not only see a deceased person, they touch the person. All that makes even the gospel accounts of Jesus’ appearances more credible.

That was not news to me. But what Allison also had was a discussion of the arguments pro and con the finding of an empty tomb. Up to now (and still on my page about the resurrection on my website) I have regarded the empty tomb story as a literary fiction by the author of the gospel of Mark. Allison presented a couple arguments that provoked me to rethink this. Part has to do with burial practices for crucified criminals (it was not uncommon to bury them) and part has to do with the reality of Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdeline and their roles in the drama. I am still in the process of thinking through these arguments.

Finally, a few months back I read a book by a Jewish author, Jon D. Levenson, “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel.” Levenson wasn’t writing about Jesus. He was defending the belief in the general resurrection as compatible with Jewish beliefs before the period of the Second Temple. For example, belief that creation is good, that God intends justice to be done, and that human life matters. All of these are beliefs I share, so his presentation made me want to believe in a bodily resurrection. His book shifted me from seeing resurrection as irrelevant to how I live my life, to an important potential buttress to beliefs I already hold dear. I think that prepared the ground for me to be more open as I considered the question. It wasn’t only about belief in what really happened at the start of Christianity, it was about how that belief could fit in with a worldview I already hold.

So that is where I am at. I am about done with reading and about to start writing up my thoughts, which is going to take many more pages than I currently have up on this site. I will let you know as I get the new pages up.

Thanks for your interest.

–Alan

The gospels as a “popular-novelistic biography

I ran across this blog post today and had to share it. The author, Matt Ferguson, is obviously well educated on the topic. In the post he discusses the characteristics of a “novelistic bios” and why the gospels fit this genre.

I am currently trying to write up the notes I’ve taken and further thoughts I’ve had about the resurrection. I am adding so much material that I will have to break that page up into about five separate pages. It may take a few weeks, but I hope by that time I can move on to examining what we can learn about Jesus and the very early church from the letters of Paul

–Alan

News update on the resurrection(!)

NEWS FLASH: I keep learning more about events that happened two thousand years ago. Who’d have thought?

Over the last few days I made a number of revisions, corrections, and additions to my page on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. I’ve been working through a lot of books on the subject and have yet a few more to go before focusing on my draft of a new page about interpretations of the appearances of Jesus.

The two biggest changes to the current page are the following:

Dale Martin’s 1995 book, The Corinthian Body, provided a lot of new material that helped me better understand Paul’s discussion of resurrected bodies in his First Letter to the Corinthians.

A video interview of Dennis MacDonald on the MythVision podcast gave me some new ideas about Mark’s use of the “man” in a robe in the empty tomb, as well as how that man complements the young man who loses his garment while fleeing the arrest of Jesus. I’ll have to look into this further but found it persuasive enough to make use of it.

As always, I invite your comments.

–Alan

Jesus’ brother James the first ‘pope’?

I saw a video interview of Jame Tabor today on the Mythvision podcast which was very interesting to me. Apparently Tabor has been doing a lot of research on James “the Just,” the brother of Jesus mentioned by Paul as well as in other sources. He connects James with the Ebionites, an early Christian group that was more Jewish in orientation than the kind of Christianity that eventually prevailed.

The Ebionites were said to have regarded Jesus as a just man but not God. They may have been part of the early church in Jerusalem, where James was a leader. Tabor makes the case that James, not Peter, was the first recognized head of the church after the death of Jesus. All very intriguing. Tabor is hawking an online course and I may decide to take it.

I remember quite a while ago I reflected on the possibility that the Jerusalem church did not regard Jesus as divine before his resurrection and elevation to God’s “right hand,” and that the Ebionites preserved this tradition after the Jewish wars drove the Jerusalem Christian community into exile abroad.

Tabor’s thesis also has bearing on the debate whether Jesus was an actual historical person.

Yet another thread to follow and see where it leads!

–Alan

More on the resurrection

Hi. You may have wondered what I’ve been working on since my last post.

After I decided to delete my page on the execution of Jesus and start instead with the claims of Jesus’ resurrection, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a little revising of what I already wrote on the topic.

My page on the evidence for the resurrection was based mostly on a careful re-reading of the relevant passages in the Christian scriptures and a little initial reading in current research. I’ve done multiple revisions to that page, re-organizing the text and adding some new information at a few points as I’ve learned more.

In the meantime, I’ve located a number of books on the topic (or related to it) in my city’s library system, which has access to some local universities, and am having them shipped over to my local branch for me to check them out. I’ve already read a few that provided me with new information and altered my thinking somewhat.

And finally, I’ve started a draft of my next page, which will also be on the resurrection. Specifically, it will cover modern interpretations of the resurrection appearances and offer my assessment of the arguments about what really happened. I’ve gathered a lot of material and am about ready to get my thoughts down in writing. I hope you will find it interesting and informative!

Thanks for your interest in this project. Feedback is always welcome.

–Alan

Was There a Passion Narrative Before Mark’s?

I recently took down my page about the crucifixion of Jesus because I decided I should not take the historicity of Jesus for granted in my writings on this website. In these times that is something that needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed, and I am looking into how persuasive a case can be made.

But if you had read that page, you may remember that I thought it likely that “Mark,” the author of the earliest gospel (that we know of), drew upon an oral tradition or maybe a written account of the events from Jesus’ arrival in his final visit to Jerusalem through his crucifixion. Subsequent to examining the gospel accounts and writing up my findings, I obtained a book on the subject by the well-regarded Biblical scholar Raymond Brown. This provoked some new thoughts that I want to share with you now that I’ve finished reading it.

The book is thirty years old, and so does not incorporate more recent research, but it is highly detailed and well versed in the research up to that time. Brown had a sterling reputation as a rigorous scholar. He was also a Catholic priest, and although often criticized for questioning the historical basis of certain claims of the the church, he was not one to question the real existence of Jesus or the central dogmas of Christianity. For these reasons I found what he had to say in this book especially interesting.

Much of the book was a line by line comparison and commentary on latter parts of the passion accounts in four canonical gospels and the less-known Gospel of Peter. I confess I skimmed much of that material. But as the second of his two volumes it also included several appendixes with studies of particular aspects of the topic. It was a couple of these that I found revealing.

The first is Appendix VII, “The Old Testament Background of the Passion Narratives.” In this section Brown gives a thorough listing of every passage in the Jewish scriptures that the gospel passion narratives seem to refer to. There are dozens of them, which raises the question of whether Mark’s narrative was created from what he regarded as prophecies in the Jewish scriptures rather than any pre-existing oral or written account of the passion events. Brown rejected the theory that Mark based his narrative purely on an imaginative reflection on the Jewish scriptures. But he conceded that those scriptures “influenced heavily early Christian presentation of the passion” in order to expand “the preaching outline into dramatic narratives.” In other words, Mark probably knew a basic outline of what happened to Jesus at the end of his life but created much of what he wrote about it as an exegesis of those scriptural passages.

The second is Appendix IX, “The Question of a PreMarkan Passion Narrative.” This was written by Martin L. Soards and edited by Brown for this book. Soards goes thr0ugh a long list of scholars who examined the question of whether there was a pre-existing passion narrative that Mark drew on, examining their methods and findings. He concludes that there was such a narrative, but that discovering what was in it “may finally be an impossible” task. His reason for thinking there was one is based entirely on Mark’s mention of “Judas, one of the Twelve,” in his passion account. Soards asks why Mark would feel it necessary to identify Judas when he had already brought up Judas earlier in his gospel. His answer is that Mark must have relied on an earlier account in which this was the first mention of Judas. That sounds pretty tenuous to me.

What was striking was that Brown, who fully accepted the historicity of Jesus, indicated by publishing these two appendices that much (most?) of Mark’s account of the passion events was creative exegesis and that it was near impossible to recover the historical events behind it. This back in 1994, long before any mythicist arguments about the historical Jesus had become widely known. It reinforces my belief that I was correct in deleting several of my pages so that I can avoid assuming Jesus’ historicity before taking a more careful look at the problem.

Thanks for joining me on this journey! As always, I welcome your comments on this blog post.

I’ve made a new start

In my last post I mentioned that Richard Carrier’s new book convinced me not to start my exploration of the life and teachings of Jesus with an assumption that Jesus was a real historical person rather than an historicized myth. In line with that I’ve made a new start on this website, deleting several pages and revising one.

Originally I started with Jesus’ execution, thinking that his crucifixion was the most secure historical fact we have about him. Now I am uncertain how much of the account in the gospels has any historical basis. So I deleted that page.

Instead I begin with my examination of accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, which I have revised a bit from its original version. Certainly it is an historical fact that the early Christians claimed Jesus was resurrected, and that we have some early sources giving information about that!

After that I deleted the next two pages that I had put up, one on the concepts used to interpret the resurrected Jesus and another summing up my findings to that point. Instead, my next page will examine whether Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus came upon him unexpectedly while in a normal state of consciousness, or he somehow induced himself to have a vision. I think the result will also shed light on Peter’s experience of the risen Jesus. From there I will go on to examine Paul’s epistles and what he has to say about Jesus and his teachings.

I have saved the deleted pages in a file on my computer to draw from in future pages, so don’t worry if there was anything in them you want to be able to access again!

Thanks for following this blog, and I hope you are all well.

Alan

Richard Carrier’s new mythicist book about the historical Jesus

I finished reading Richard Carrier’s new book, “The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus,” a couple of days ago. It did change my mind about the relative merits of the theory Jesus was only seen in visions versus the theory that Jesus was a real person. The evidence I thought was the strongest for the latter theory, passages in the letters of Paul suggesting he thought of Jesus as historical, is more ambiguous than I believed. The passages were those indicating Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4), saying Jesus was of the Jewish race “according to the flesh” (Romans 9:5), and referencing “Jame, the brother of the Lord” (Galatians 1:18-19). Carrier’s arguments about those passages are very detailed and as far as I can tell sound.

I am not yet ready to lean definitely toward the mythicist position, but I do want to think this through more carefully. When I first looked into the work of Carrier and other mythicists about 15 years ago it left me doubtful that anything about an historical Jesus could be recovered. Subsequently I set aside my interest in the subject for a while. I have to admit that in the meantime my mind reverted back to the assumption Jesus was historical, probably less due to intellectual conviction than because that assumption had been part of my imagination for so many years.

My page on this site about the historicity of Jesus will have to be revised. My arguments there no longer seem sufficient to wave aside the mythicist position so easily. But I will keep my other pages mostly intact for now. What I intended with this website wasn’t really about whether Jesus was historical, although I am interested in the question. What I intended was to assess what the teaching of Jesus was. I want to do that both for its contribution to my own spiritual life, as the gospels have inspired me since I was a child, and as a means of discussing what look to me like erroneous versions of his teachings.

I will have to approach that question differently than I had planned though. Rather than trying to excavate a presumed teaching behind the various sources about Jesus, I’ll examine his teaching as presented by various authors, such as Paul and the authors of the four canonical gospels. Whatever points the sources have in common will be of interest, whether Jesus was historical, the product of visions, or a literary character of longstanding cultural influence.

So that is where I am at now. I’ll do a bit of rewriting of the current pages to clarify my intentions, and then resume my explorations into the endlessly fascinating topic of Jesus and the origins of Christianity.

New page summing up my findings thus far

I just added a new page to my website summing up my findings on Jesus’ death, the subsequent reports of resurrection appearances, and the use of concepts current at the time to make sense of his death and the appearances. From here I will move on to entangling a plausible outline of his life and teachings before his death.

I also want to let you know I just received a copy of Richard Carrier’s brand new book, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus. Carrier is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus is a purely mythological figure, and his new book is meant to give an update on the debates regarding the theory and his answer to some of the arguments against it. Judging by the table of contents, several of the arguments he addresses are ones I use on my page about Jesus as a real person.

It should be interesting to see what he has to say and if any of it persuades me. Stay tuned.

Alan