Hello out there. I’ve posted two freshly updated pages. The first is on the gospels as historical sources. The second is on what they say about the burial of Jesus’ body.
I am getting nearer to the end of my study of the resurrection. I will wrap it up with some conclusions that probably won’t satisfy anyone!
After that it is on to the life of Jesus, including addressing whether he was a real person or a myth. (Preview: I think the former.)
–Alan
I’ve added two newly revised pages to the Jesus Reconstructed website, one on Paul’s comments about what resurrected bodies are like and the second on practices he may have used to make himself receptive to mystical experiences.
The second one has undergone more revision than the first and has some new material. As always comments are welcome.
Hi everyone. I started updating the Jesus Reconstructed website to include the new research and thinking I’ve been doing. The Resurrection page is updated (and shortened) and I added a page on Paul’s list of appearances of the risen Jesus. The home page and the pages on the historicity of Jesus and 1st century Galilee and Judea have also been slightly revised.
More will be coming soon. Comments are welcome as always.
–Alan
Yesterday as I tried to finish writing and get the section about the burial of Jesus’ body posted, it took much longer than I anticipated. By the time I finished it was late in the day and I was tired. Later I realized I had neglected to write up a final, key paragraph. Here it is:
Final paragraph:
The earliest gospel, Mark, states without explanation that only two of the original group of women witnessing the crucifixion saw Jesus’ body being laid in the tomb. As the gospel was likely written decades after these events, during or after a devastating war in the Jewish homeland, the two witnesses could have been dead or refugees and unable to verify what Mark alleges about the burial. Matthew followed Mark in stating that only the two Marys witness the burial. Luke asserts that all the women saw the burial. John lists only four people witnessing the crucifixion (three Marys and the beloved disciple) and does not specify who saw the burial. However, only Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb later. The record of who actually saw Joseph bury Jesus’ body in the tomb is thus problematic and open to doubt
In this post I start my analysis of the gospel accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, focusing first on the burial of his body.
“He was buried”
Mark’s scene of the women “looking on from a distance” at Jesus’ execution is plausible. (Mk 15:40-41) Crucifixions were public events that Jesus’ disciples could have attended, but fear of arrest would have kept his male disciples away. Women however were expected to be present when someone close to them was dead or dying in order to carry out expected customs such as weeping and singing formal laments. (Corley, 2002: 114-115)
Three of these women are named, as though Mark expects they may be familiar names to some of his reader/hearers. Mary Magdalene makes her first appearance in this passage. Her name suggests she was from Magdala, a fishing village on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. Mark depicts Jesus’ early ministry as occurring in the area around the sea and describes his first disciples as fishermen, thus Magdalene’s name connects her to the early ministry. (Corley, 2002: 33) Mary the mother of “James the younger and of Joses” is not identified further, but earlier in the gospel Mark gives the same two names to brothers of Jesus and so this Mary may very well be Jesus’ mother. (Corley, 2002: 35) Possibly Mary’s son James is called “the younger” to distinguish him from Jesus’ early disciple James the son of Zebedee. One might question why Mark would not have said outright that this Mary was the mother of Jesus; it’s possible that this was another Mary who had sons with the same names. There is also the question of why he would list Mary Magdalene before her. Each of these details may have something to do with a need to highlight Mary Magdalene, even if it entailed downplaying the presence of Jesus’ mother, because Magdalene presumably played a central role in a tradition Mark was relying on. Mark says nothing to identify Salome; nearly half the women in the ancestral Jewish homeland were named Mary or Salome. (Corley, 2002: 32, 36) Likely Mark knew a woman named Salome was at the crucifixion but did not know anything about her. The abrupt introduction of these women, given Mark’s general lack of interest in women disciples of Jesus, suggests that their presence at the crucifixion may have been well known enough to early Christians that Mark wanted to use them as witnesses to the crucifixion and, more importantly, to the events that followed. (Corley, 2002: 28)
Less plausible is the passage about Joseph of Arimathea, who is otherwise unknown to history, and his interaction with the Roman prefect Pilate. (Mk 15:42-46) If “evening had come” there wouldn’t be enough time for Joseph to make his request to Pilate, the centurion to verify Jesus’ death, and the body removed from the cross and entombed before nightfall. These incidents would have to had occured earlier in the day. This could merely be clumsy writing on Mark’s part; I assume by placing the incident at evening he wanted to emphasize the body was removed before night came and the Sabbath began. Aside from that, I question the source for the story. Certainly Pilate did not talk to the early Christians about it. Joseph could possibly be the source, as Mark describes him as “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God,” which could hint at some sympathy with Jesus’ disciples that led to later contacts. But this possibility conflicts with Mark’s description of Joseph as a respected member of the Jewish council that unanimously condemned Jesus and delivered him to Pilate for execution. Could Joseph condemn Jesus to death at a nighttime council meeting and the next day be so sympathetic to the Christian movement that he would go “boldly” to Pilate to ask for the body? In addition, the fact that Mark feels the need to explain who Joseph is suggests he did not expect his audience to be familiar with him. In sum, there is little evidence in Mark’s description of Joseph to support the idea that he was the source for the scene with Pilate. Did Mark know Joseph played a role in removing the body because the women recognized him and passed this bit of information down in the Christian community until Mark received it and expanded it into the scene with Pilate? I think it unlikely the women would have recognized him, as Joseph is a depicted as a high status Jew living in Jerusalem and the women are from rural Galilee.
The various problems described above suggest to me that Mark created a short fictional scene with Joseph and Pilate to achieve a few literary goals. First, the scene explains why Jesus’ corpse was removed from the cross, which I regard as a likely event as will be explained below, and does so in a way that legitimizes belief in (and foreshadows) the coming “kingdom of God.” Second, the centurion checking on Jesus provides confirmation that Jesus’ death actually happened. Third, the women witnessing the body being laid in the tomb and the stone being rolled against the door sets the scene for the discovery of the empty tomb when they later return to the location.
Although many commentators have questioned whether Pilate would have consented to the removal of Jesus’ body from the cross, this part of the story is within the realm of plausibility. Jesus’ death is portrayed as taking place during the Passover festival and there is some evidence that Pilate granted such favors on these occasions. (Lüdemann, 2004: 61-62; Allison, 2005: 360-363) A passage in a book by the first-century historian Josephus indicates that prior to 68 C.E. it was common practice for the dead bodies of the crucified to be removed for burial before sunset. (Licona, 2010: 308-309) Rather than having sympathy for the Jesus movement, one or more of the Jewish leaders could have requested permission to remove the body from the cross in order to honor the Sabbath and/or obey the law in Jewish scripture:
When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you must bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you for possession. (Deuteronomy 21:22-23)
Their intention would be to avoid defilement of the land, not to give the deceased a decent burial. Pilate could have consented to have the body taken down in order to maintain cooperative relations with the Jewish leaders and to avoid civil unrest while Jerusalem was crowded with Jewish subjects during a religious festival, especially one that commemorated their ancestors’ release from slavery to a foreign nation. Possibly Joseph of Arimathea was a real person known as having been a member of the Jewish council and Mark appropriated his name for verisimilitude in his description of the removal and burial of Jesus’ body. In any event, the exact identity of the person or persons who removed the body from the cross is not as important as its likely removal.
Mark winds up this part of his story by saying that Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses (leaving out mention of her son James for no apparent reason), two of the group of women present, saw where the body was laid. (Mk 15:47) This brings up further questions. Did the other women leave before the body was buried? Were the two Marys the only ones who cared enough to stay to the end? Perhaps the group of women agreed it would be less obtrusive for just two of them to follow the body to the burial place. Yet the tomb seems very near at hand, as Joseph is depicted as taking down the body, wrapping it in a linen cloth, and placing it in the tomb as though this was a set of actions unbroken in time. If that were the case, why would someone have carved a tomb so near to the site of crucifixions? It would not seem to be an appropriate resting place for oneself or one’s family members. The short verse about the two Marys creates a number of problems, but note that it also conveniently reduces the number of witnesses for the body being laid in the tomb to only two (and of course Joseph).
Mark seems to imply that Jesus’ corpse was the only one in the tomb by the way the “young man” later expects the women to recognize “the place they laid him.” (Mk 16:5-6) I am skeptical that this was the case. Jesus was crucified as a rebel against Roman rule, and Pilate would not want to allow any chance for the burial site of such a man to become an inspirational symbol of resistance and thus undercut the warning crucifixion was meant to convey. (Corley, 2002: 113-114, 118) Lüdemann posits that Mark’s story of Joseph of Arimathea placing the body in a tomb was a way of covering up what may have been a cursory and dishonorable burial, such as being dumped in a pit with the corpses of other executed criminals. (Lüdemann, 2004: 59-62) Allison, however, states that “burial caves” were set aside for criminals, which may be the kind of “tomb” Mark is referring to. (Allison, 2005: 263) I expect that such caves were meant for the disposal of multiple corpses, not “hewn out of rock” for the disposal of a single criminal’s remains.
To sum up my analysis of Mark in this section, I do think an oral tradition was behind Mark’s narrative in these passages. The tradition probably came from the women witnessing Jesus’ body being removed from the cross and reporting this to other disciples. Mary Magdalene was prominent in the tradition for some reason, which I will discuss below. The women’s report would be an adequate explanation for the early formulaic tradition, evidenced in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, that Jesus’ body was buried. Burial could be inferred from the fact that the body was removed from the cross rather than being left to rot and be scavenged by animals as was the fate of most crucified criminals. (Licona, 2010: 307) The passages about Joseph of Arimathea, both his interaction with Pilate and his placing Jesus’s body in a tomb, I regard as mostly or entirely fictional. Mark’s literary purposes for adding these embellishments to the story would have been as I outlined above: to provide a reason for the removal of the body that legitimates the expectation of the coming kingdom, to certify that Jesus actually died, and to set up the discovery of an empty tomb.
Matthew, Luke and John, the putative authors of the other three canonical gospels, also present the story of the burial of Jesus’ body, but with variations in the details. A reworking of Mark’s story is in line with how authors of popular-novelistic bioi would handle earlier sources.
Matthew’s passage about the women witnessing the crucifixion is clearly a slightly rewritten version of Mark’s, except that in identifying the women Matthew substitutes “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” for Mark’s “Salome.” (Mt 27:55-56) Possibly Matthew had knowledge that Mark’s Salome was the mother of the Zebedee sons, or alternatively he is describing a different woman he knew to be one of those present. It is also possible Matthew had no idea who Salome was and so substituted someone he thought should be there, the mother of two of Jesus’ closest disciples. Matthew’s handling of Joseph of Arimthea is more cavalier. He changes Joseph from a respected member of the Jewish council anticipating the kingdom of God into rich man who was a disciple of Jesus. This move relieves Joseph from participation in condemning Jesus and heightens Mark’s hint of sympathy with the Christian movement into actual discipleship. In making these changes Matthew shows little concern that Joseph’s identity may have been known to his audience, as it probably would not have been if he were a fictional character invented by Mark. The scene with Joseph and Pilate is highly condensed with the centurion checking on Jesus removed entirely. Matthew also notes that the tomb was “new” and belonged to Joseph, both of which are unlikely. (Mt 27:57-61) Matthew probably intended the details of a rich man with his own tomb to make Jesus’ sole presence in the tomb more credible. But as mentioned above, I think it would be unlikely for someone to build a new family or personal tomb near the site used for crucifixions.
Luke expands the witnesses of Jesus’ death to “all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee,” omitting the names of the women. (Lk 23:49) Earlier in the gospel he depicts women traveling with Jesus and the twelve in Galilee but denigrates their attachment to Jesus by saying they had been cured of “evil spirits” and diseases. He notes Mary Magdalene in particular, saying “seven demons” had been cast from her. (Luke 8:1-3) Apparently Luke had a problem seeing women as disciples on the same level as men, presenting them as susceptible to possession and becoming followers due to gratitude rather than in response to Jesus’ call for discipleship. As for Joseph of Arimathea, Luke explains that “though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action,” clarifying that he was not one of those who condemned Jesus. Like Matthew Luke is trying to fix Mark’s seeming contradiction of Joseph voting for Jesus’ death yet wanting to give his body a decent burial. Again like Matthew Luke condenses the interaction with Pilate and removes the part about the centurion. I regard the similarities to Matthew as due to their mutual recognition of problems with Mark’s account, not Luke’s dependence on Matthew as a source. Unlike both Mark and Matthew, Luke doesn’t mention the stone sealing the tomb. He also moves mention of the arrival of the evening Sabbath from before Joseph’s request until after the burial, a more realistic timeline. He notes the “women” who saw the tomb and where Jesus was laid but again omits any of their names. (Lk 23:50-54) He reveals their identity only later, after the resurrection, naming Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna. (Lk 24:10)
Luke was very likely also the author of the Acts of the Apostles, a canonical Christian scripture narrating the history of the early church after Jesus’ resurrection. A purported speech by Paul in Acts has him talk of Jewish leaders burying the body of Jesus, with no mention of Joseph of Arimathea:
“The people of Jerusalem and their rulers did not recognize Jesus, yet in condemning him they fulfilled the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath. Though they found no proper ground for a death sentence, they asked Pilate to have him executed. When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb.” (Acts 13:27-29)
This is possibly based on a source other than Mark, as those taking the body of Jesus are the leaders in Jerusalem who wanted him killed, not the more sympathetic Joseph. (Lüdemann, 2004: 59) It is another indication that Joseph may have been a fictional character. Luke does make sure to include the tomb in Paul’s preaching, although this detail is nowhere evident in Paul’s extant letters.
The gospel of John is not as clearly connected to Mark as those of Matthew and Luke are, and there are ongoing debates as to whether he knew the earlier gospels. I will go into that question on a future page, but here I will say that I see signs that John was familiar with at least Matthew and Luke’s gospels, albeit knowing other sources and exercising a lot of creative freedom. There are also signs that this gospel in its original form had been subject to further editing before it reached the version we now have.
John moves the scene of the witnesses to the crucifixion earlier in his narrative and places them “near the cross,” which is less likely than placing them at a distance but allows John to insert a new scene which we will see in a moment. He changes the order of the women, first noting Jesus’ mother explicitly, then a second Mary who is now her sister and “the wife of Clopas” rather then the obscure Salome. Mary Magdalene is listed last. John then mentions that the “disciple whom [Jesus] loved,” a recurring character in his gospel, was nearby and Jesus spoke to his mother and this unnamed disciple. (John 19:25-27) The scene of Jesus talking to them while dying on the cross is implausible, and none of the other gospels mention it. (Corley, 2002: 29) Various symbolic meanings have been hypothesized for this scene, but I am uncertain which if any were intended by John.
After Jesus dies, John describes how “the Jews”—most likely meaning the Jewish leaders—didn’t want bodies left on crosses during the Sabbath, so Pilate has soldiers break the legs of two crucified men to hasten their deaths. The soldiers discover Jesus is already dead and instead of breaking his legs one of them pierces his side with a spear, bringing a flow of blood and water. John insists that a witness gave testimony to this and vouches for his reliability. This reads like an alternative version of Mark’s centurion going to check if Jesus was dead, one in which John underwrites new details with Jewish scriptural passages. (Jn 19:31-37) As in Mark the point seems to be verifying to the reader/hearer that Jesus did die, as well as verifying that these events fulfilled what John regarded as scriptural prophecies.
Only then does John introduce Joseph of Arimathea, who he describes, as Matthew did, as a secret disciple of Jesus. Instead of Joseph removing the body from the cross, Joseph asks Pilate to let him take the body away and Pilate permits it. John’s account fits with my hypothesis that it was actually the Jewish leaders who wanted the body removed from the cross, and that the role of Joseph in the narrative has more to do with the burial of Jesus than the removal of his body from the cross. John then reintroduces the character of Nicodemus, who is mentioned twice earlier in his gospel. (Jn 19:38-39) In his first appearance Nicodemus was identified as a Pharisee and “leader of the Jews” who visits Jesus at night to profess that Jesus is a God-sent teacher. (Jn 3:1-21) Later he defends Jesus’ right to a hearing when the “chief priests and Pharisees” complain that Jesus had not been arrested. (Jn 7:45-52) Both Joseph and Nicodemus are thus members of the Jewish elite who are sympathetic to Jesus but hide it from others elite members, and like the disciples fail to stand by Jesus in the events leading to his death. They give the body an even more respectful treatment than in the other gospels, wrapping it with spices in the linen cloth. As in Mark and the other gospels, John wants to depict a respectful burial rather than a cursory and dishonorable one. They lay the body in a tomb in a garden because it is nearby. (Jn:19:40-42) This makes the scene of the nearby tomb even less plausible as they place the body in a tomb they did not own. John does not mention the women observing the placement of the body in the tomb, although the narrative goes on to make it clear Mary Magdalene knew the location.
My analysis of the burial of Jesus in Matthew, Luke and John reinforces points I raised in my discussion of Mark. To summarize:
Matthew, Luke, and John all follow Mark in naming women witnesses of the crucifixion without much further identification. This suggests that the names were expected to be familiar and associated with the women present at the crucifixion by the expected readers/hearers of their gospels.
Matthew, Luke, and John all follow Mark in listing Mary Magdalene as one of the witnesses. Matthew and Luke follow Mark in listing Mary, “the mother of James,” while John identifies Mary the mother of Jesus, probably the same woman. Each of the authors list other women witnesses by name or a brief description, such as “Salome” (Mark), “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” (Matthew), “Joanna” (Luke), and Jesus’ aunt, “Mary the wife of Clopas” (John), as though they had independent knowledge of a source or sources naming some of the women who were present.
There is some disagreement in the texts about who removed Jesus’ body from the cross. Although Luke follows Mark in stating that Joseph removed Jesus’ body, in Acts Luke has Paul say it was the Jewish leaders who did it. Matthew is ambiguous as to whether Joseph removed the body from the cross or took possession of it after it was removed by others. John clearly states the latter.
The gospels provide two motives for the removal of Jesus’ body. Mark does not directly state Joseph’s motivations, but mentions both the arrival of the Sabbath and that Joseph was “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God.” These details hint at a religious reason as well as some possible sympathy for Jesus and his movement. Matthew does not state the reason Joseph sought Jesus’ body, but in describing him as a disciple he implies Joseph acted out of respect for Jesus. Luke does not provide Joseph’s reason either, but he agrees with Mark that Joseph was “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God” and states that he did not consent to Jesus’ condemnation. This again implies some sympathy with Jesus and his movement. However, in the Acts of the Apostles Luke has Paul say Jewish leaders had the body removed from the cross in obedience to the commandment in Deuteronomy. John states the leaders had the body removed due to the Sabbath, which Mark implied was a motivation for Joseph. Jewish leaders removing the body for religious reasons corresponds with what we know from historical sources about the handling of the corpses of crucified criminals. The credibility of the idea that Joseph removed the body out of sympathy or respect for Jesus depends on the credibility of Joseph as an actual person that the gospel authors had reliable information about.
The four gospel authors identify Joseph of Arimathea in somewhat different ways. Presumably they believed their readers/hearers were not familiar with Joseph and thus needed an explanation of who he was. The variations in their accounts show creative freedom in how they identify Joseph. These two observations reinforce my impression that Joseph was not featured in any oral traditions which would have constrained how the gospel authors describe who he was, but rather was a fictional or fictionalized character intended to serve the authors’ literary purposes.
The four gospel authors all present Joseph burying the corpse by itself in a tomb, but as noted above it is likely they were obscuring the leading role of Jewish leaders in these events. As also noted above, the authors definitely exercised creative freedom in their handling of Joseph; another example is how John uniquely presents Nicodemus as assisting Joseph in burying the body. This all leads me to suspect Joseph is a fictional or fictionalized character covering the truth about how Jesus’ body was likely buried.
Other historical sources indicate that when crucified criminals were not left on the cross to rot, they were buried in a mass grave such as a pit or a public burial cave meant for the disposal multiple dead bodies. The gospels do not provide convincing evidence that the fate of Jesus’ body was any different.
References
Allison, Dale C. (2005). “Resurrecting Jesus,” pp. 198-375 in Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters. T&T Clark.
Corley, Kathleen E. (2002). Women and the Historical Jesus: Feminist Myths of Christian Origins. Polebridge Press.
Licona, Michael R. (2010). The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographic Approach. IVP Academic.
Lüdemann, Gerd (2004). The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry. Prometheus Books.
It’s been a couple weeks since my last post so I want to update you. Having (pretty much) finished with Paul on the appearances of Jesus, I have turned to the empty tomb story. There is a LOT written on the gospels so I’ve been taking the time to select books, read and take notes before writing. The good news (not “gospel”) is that I am near to finishing my reading list–just a few more books to go, although a couple of them are big ones (600 or more pages).
I can share the start of what I am writing on the empty tomb, looking at the genre of the gospels and what to expect from them as historical sources. This piece is mostly a rewrite and updating of my earlier version, but the next part will have more that is new. Soon I plan to put all this new stuff up as webpages instead of leaving it on my posts.
Empty tomb, part 1:
As I discussed previously, Paul handed down an early Christian tradition which in part said:
Christ died…he was buried and…he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. (I Corinthians 15:3-4; translations from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition of the Christian Bible)
The tradition tells us Christ died, was buried, and was raised on “the third day” after his death. Nowhere in the letters we have from Paul does he tells us how, when or where Jesus was buried or how it was known that he rose on the third day.
For that information we have only the story of the empty tomb in the Christian gospel narratives. Here I will examine the genre of the four canonical gospels, analyze the empty tomb while comparing the four gospels, and present what I regard as the most plausible theory of the origin of the story.
Mark’s story of the empty tomb
The earliest reference to the empty tomb that we know of is found at the end of the anonymous gospel which is traditionally attributed to “Mark,” who was thought to have been an associate of Peter. The writing of Mark’s gospel (often referred to simply as “Mark”) is usually dated at around 67-70 C.E. or later, a decade or more after Paul’s letters were written and about four decades after Jesus’ execution is assumed to have taken place. If this estimate is correct, the first documentation of the empty tomb story was produced decades after it is depicted as taking place. (Later on this website I will have more to say about the gospel and the dating of documents and events.)
The following is how Mark’s gospel ends, picking up the story with a group of women disciples witnessing the crucifixion of Jesus:
There were also women looking on from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome, who followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him, and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.
When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead, and summoning the centurion he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. Then Joseph bought a linen cloth and, taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 15:40-16:8)
Where did Mark get this story? Some commentators argue that it came from an oral tradition originating with women followers of Jesus who did actually witness his empty tomb. N.T. Wright (2003) asserts that Jesus’ disciples’ belief that he was resurrected entails the reality of the discovery of his empty tomb; otherwise they would have interpreted his appearances after death as that of his disembodied soul, that is, a ghost or spirit, not a resurrection of his body. Others argue that Mark made the story up. Richard Carrier (2014) proposes that Christianity started with visions of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus taking place not here on earth, but in a low celestial realm, and that Jesus was not a real historical person at all. In his view the gospels are attempts to historicize a figure who is mythical, both in the sense that he never existed and that his story served to shape the worldview and behavior of a community of people. Here I will navigate between the positions that the story was based either entirely on a reliable oral tradition or it is entirely fictional. Instead I will follow the position most commonly accepted by Biblical scholars and historians, which is that the gospel narratives are built around reports of events that actually happened, but the narratives were also freely shaped to fulfill the authors’ literary purposes.
It is important to understand the kind of book Mark and the other gospel authors had written. Since the 1992 publication of Richard Burridge’s first edition of What Are the Gospels?, his thesis that the Christian gospels fit the genre of the ancient Greco-Roman bios has received wide support. (Burridge, 2004) A bios is a medium-length (in terms of the literature of the time) prose narrative focusing on the deeds and words of a particular person, usually someone famous. Overall they have a chronological structure, usually from either birth or entry into public life to death, but with a variety of anecdotes, stories, sayings and speeches from various sources sandwiched between and often organized in a more topical manner. Authors felt free “to select and edit sources to produce the desired picture of the subject” (Burridge, 2004: 198-199) and had a mixture of aims such as informing, instructing, preserving memories, defending the subject and attacking opponents, and holding the attention of the target audience for the book. The gospels were written in koiné Greek, not the high literary style of Attic Greek, and we can infer they were aimed at a popular audience, probably including illiterate listeners as written works were usually read aloud to groups of people. The gospel of Mark, which exhibits an unsophisticated writing style, can be read aloud in under two hours. Popular bioi were “quite common,” although less likely to be preserved than bioi aimed at an audience higher on the social scale. (Burridge, 2004: 235)
Matthew Ferguson, in a 2015 conference paper and a 2016 webpage based on his paper, expanded upon the distinction between bioi aimed at a more educated readership and those aimed at a popular audience. The former are “historiographical” bioi which identify their author and use sources critically. The latter “novelistic” bioi feature an anonymous author, an omniscient narrator, a description of direct speech, and the creative adaptation of both written sources and oral traditions; all of which are features of the gospels. Did authors of bioi ever just make things up? Michael Licona writes that it is “clear that ancient biographers varied in the liberties they took pertaining to their use of embellishment and invention” and “the commitment to accuracy and the liberties taken could vary greatly” (Licona, 2010: 204). I infer that the gospels, as novelistic bioi, lean more toward “embellishment and invention.”
What we therefore should expect from the gospels is creative story-telling meant to make a point, especially to explain and spread their interpretations of Jesus’ significance. Mark may have made use of whatever factual information was available to him, but he would have felt free to shape his story and perhaps invent incidents in line with his literary objectives. This freedom is apparent in the later gospels, who often copied Mark while making obvious changes to what he wrote, as we shall see.
Sources referred to:
Burridge, Richard A. (2004). What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2nd edition. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Carrier, Richard. (2014). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press.
Ferguson, Matthew. (2015). “The Certamen of Homer and Hesiod and the Gospels of the New Testament: A Comparison of Biographical Genre.” Presented at the Pacific Coast Society of Biblical Literature, March 2016.
Ferguson, Matthew. (2016). “Greek Popular Biography: Romance, Contest, Gospel.” ἱστορία φιλοσοφία σκέψις website.
Licona, Michael R. (2010). The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographic Approach. IVP Academic.
Wright, N.T. (2003). The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press.
Hi. Maybe you prefer audio-visual presentations to reading. If so, here is a video I posted this morning with some of what I am learning and thinking about Paul’s list of appearances of the risen Christ in 1 Corinthians 15 and Mark’s story of the empty tomb.
The third part of my study of what Paul says about the resurrection is a new one. It’s based on passages that give more context to Paul’s experience of the risen Christ and his commission to preach “good news” to the gentiles. I’ve also included my conclusions from all three parts of my study of Paul’s letters.
There are additional passages in the letters of Paul that shed a bit more light on Paul and the appearance of the risen Christ he experienced. (I will discuss the pivotal appearance to Peter on another page.) In his letter to the Christian community in Galatia Paul connected his vision of the risen Christ with his commission to preach to the gentiles. The letter starts off:
Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead… (Gal 1:1)
He then expands upon this further:
For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. But when the one who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the gentiles, I did not confer with any human, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterward I returned to Damascus. (Gal 1:11-17)
In writing that he was set apart before birth, Paul alludes to words of the prophets Isaiah (“the Lord…who formed me in the womb to be his servant”) and Jeremiah (“before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations”) in the Jewish scriptures. Like the prophets he claims a divine mandate for his mission, asserting that his commission as an apostle came directly from Jesus and God and not through the original apostles in Jerusalem. According to Paul his commission and the message he preached stemmed from a revelation of Jesus to (or “in”) him, presumably referencing the appearance of the risen Jesus he lists in his letter to the Corinthians. Either the risen Jesus commissioned Paul and delivered the message he was to preach during his appearance to Paul, or Paul in his subsequent reflections on the appearance interpreted it as a commission to preach “the gospel” he proclaimed to the gentiles (gospel is Greek for “good news).
As a former persecutor of the early church, he would already have known their basic message that Jesus was the Messiah (Christ) and that he had been raised from the dead. Indeed, it is likely this message was a source of Paul’s opposition to the movement. Thus that would not have been the “gospel” he says he did not receive from a human source. In my judgment I don’t think it is warranted to assume Paul is saying Jesus announced to him that he, Jesus, was the Christ and had risen from the dead. Rather, the “good news” Paul was given to proclaim was the same one that gave him his mission: that the gentiles were being welcomed into the salvation offered by Christ. The appearance of the risen Christ caused Paul to accept what the Christians had already been preaching, but the gospel he was given had to do with Jewish scriptures that pointed to the gentiles turning to God in the end times.
Paul goes on to write that three years later he met Cephas and James in Jerusalem for the first time, and:
Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up in response to a revelation. (Gal 2:1-2)
Note that it was seventeen years after his commissioning that he returned to Jerusalem. (His first visit was three years after the commissioning and his second visit another fourteen years later.) He returned there, he writes, “in response to a revelation.” He gives no indication as to whether this revelation came from another appearance of Jesus, from an auditory but not visual manifestation, via some kind of inner impulse he regarded as God-inspired, through a prophetic message from another Christian, or in some other fashion. It would not seem to have been another visual appearance, as in his letter to the Corinthians he characterized that appearance of the risen Jesus to him as the last appearance in a series: “Last of all… he appeared also to me.” However one interprets this later revelation, it shows that his communications from Jesus continued beyond his initial experience.
In his Second Letter to the Corinthians Paul reveals another type of spiritual experience:
I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Cor 12:2-4)
Commentators agree that Paul is writing indirectly about himself in this passage. (Segal, 2004: 408) It is not clear whether his journey to the “third heaven” and the one to “paradise” were the same experience or two different ones. The “fourteen years ago” would place this some time after Paul’s initial experience of the risen Jesus but before the revelation that sent him to Jerusalem for the second time. The passage confirms that he had a series of spiritual experiences, not just one, and thus suggests that he may have cultivated a receptivity to such experiences through some type of mystical practices, such as those of the later Jewish rabbis, the heirs of the Pharisaic tradition. (Segal, 2004: 409-410) I will have more to say about this below.
After a few intervening lines Paul continues:
Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:7-9)
It is unclear whether the message about grace being sufficient was a part of the ecstatic experience(s) or Paul is connecting two different events. But again this passage confirms that Paul believed he continued to receive messages from Jesus long after his initial experience of the risen Christ.
As mentioned above, Paul’s reference to his heavenly journey(s) suggests that he may have engaged in deliberate practices that would make him receptive to spiritual experiences such as visions. The Greek word he uses for “revelation” in Galatians is apokalypsis, the same word used to identify a genre of ancient Jewish literature in which human beings ascend to heavenly places and return to reveal what they learned there. This literature includes the Biblical books of the Jewish prophets Ezekiel and Daniel and the Christian book of Revelation, as well as a host of other writings less well known today. (Segal, 2004: 405-416) Commentators often treat the kinds of unusual experiences recounted in these writings as a literary device to convey a message to select readers in coded language, but Paul’s heavenly journeys challenge this assumption. It may be that the authors, or at least some of them, actually engaged in methods meant to induce altered states of consciousness. These methods could include ascetic practices, intense concentration in prayer, the repetitive singing of hymns, and even psychotropic drugs. A resulting experience would then be interpreted through the influence of familiar religious texts, using similar symbologies and sometimes innovating with the introduction of new concepts, interpretations, or messages from God. (Segal, 2004: Ch. 8; Pilch, 2011: Chs. 2-4)
These additional passages in letters of Paul put his experience of the risen Christ into a larger perspective. As would be expected of a Pharisee zealous for his Jewish traditions, Paul was well-versed in the scriptures and skilled in arguing from them. As an enemy of the Christians he would have paid close attention to the scriptural references they used to prove that Jesus was the Messiah in order to refute them. He surely knew the scriptural passages about the gentiles turning to the true God in the end times. These issues would have preoccupied him, and he likely prayed for God’s guidance in wrestling with the Christian arguments. Psychologically he was prepared to receive an answer. He probably engaged in practices meant to increase his receptivity to visions and messages from God, as the appearance of Jesus was only one of several spiritual experiences he had, and possibly not the first one. But this one had two distinguishing features. First, he experienced an appearance of the Jesus the Christians said had been raised from the dead, a figure who had certainly been on his mind. And second, he believed this appearance had commissioned him to preach to the gentiles that they were being welcomed into the kingdom of God.
In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul transmitted a carefully preserved Christian tradition indicating that Peter was the first to claim to have seen the risen Christ, followed by an appearance to “the twelve.” The prominence of Peter in the early Christian community aligns with this tradition. Paul was aware of several other reports of appearances but these are not attested in any other source. He also experienced an appearance himself. The nature of a resurrected body was a controversial issue among the Corinthian Christians. In trying to explain what a resurrected body is like, Paul rejected the common idea that it would be our familiar flesh and blood body restored to life while at the same time maintaining the Pharisaic and Christian belief that there is continuity between the body that dies and the body that rises in its glorified form. Paul had other spiritual experiences, including continued messages he believed came from Jesus. He may have engaged in practices meant to make him receptive to visions and messages from God. As a persecutor of the Christian community he would have been asking God for guidance in using the Jewish scriptures to refute the Christians; this preoccupation was the context in which he experienced an appearance of the risen Christ. This appearance convinced him that he had been commissioned him to preach to the gentiles that the way to salvation had opened to them, mirroring passages in the scriptures that seemed to predict this happening in the end times.
Sources cited
Pilch, John J. (2011). Flights of the Soul: Visions, Heavenly Journeys, and Peak Experiences in the Biblical World. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Segal, Alan F. (2004). Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West. Doubleday.
Hello, it’s been a few weeks since my last post. I have continued to do research on the resurrection and editing multiple drafts of my write-ups on what I am learning and thinking about it. Here is the section which follows my last post. That one was about Paul’s list of the appearances of the risen Christ in his first letter to the Corinthians, and this one is about his discussion of the nature of the resurrected body in that same letter. This will be the second of three parts on what Paul has to say about the resurrected Christ. I am near finished with the third part, which is entirely new.
This section today starts with where the last post ended, that Paul knew of multiple reports of appearances of the risen Christ.
Nowhere does Paul describe what any of these appearances were like, including his own experience. The Greek verb translated “appeared to” or “was seen” (ōphthē) implies a visual experience. A Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures which was widely used by early Christians utilizes the same Greek verb for the visual manifestations of God or angels to figures such as Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah and Daniel. (Segal, 2004: 406) If Jesus was seen, was he here on earth or in a vision of the heavens? Did he look recognizably like the pre-death Jesus or different in some important way, such as with a luminous face? (See 2 Corinthians 4:4-6) Did they hear his voice along with a visual appearance? Did they touch him? Did he handle any objects? Where did he come from and where did he go? Paul says nothing to satisfy our curiosity.
We do have a slight clue as to Paul’s understanding of what the resurrected Jesus was like. Later in his letter to the Corinthians Paul attempts to answer a question: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” His answer is not very clear, except to emphasize that our “perishable,” dishonorable and weak ordinary body will be categorically different from our “imperishable,” glorious and powerful resurrected body. The Greek terms he uses for the bodies before and after resurrection are sōma psychikon and sōma pneumatikon, sometimes translated “physical body” and “spiritual body.” However, the words sōma, psyche, pneuma and their derivatives, along with a number of other words Paul uses to talk of the components of human beings, are not easily translatable into English. Not only are our concepts of the composition of a human being different from Paul’s, such words are usually not used with a high degree of precision either in ancient or modern times.
A half century ago Robert Gundry, challenging the famous Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann’s existentialist interpretation of the resurrection, analyzed uses of such words in first century literature in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing in particular on sōma. (Gundry, 1976) He demonstrated that sōma primarily means a physical body, although it can also stand for the entire human being–but always including one’s physical body. Thus both sōma psychikon and sōma pneumatikon imply a physical body. The modifier psychikon has the same root as psychology, referring to the inner life of a person; psyche is often translated as “soul.” The other modifier, pneumatikon, is based on the word pneuma, which can mean “breath” or “spirit.” According to Gundry, Paul is not contrasting a material human body to some kind of incorporeal “body.” He is contrasting two types of physical bodies. One type of physical body is animated by a person’s soul, an “ensouled body,” as Alan Segal puts it (Segal, 2004: 429), that is, a live human being as we ordinarily know them. The other type of body is still physical but transformed in some mysterious way excluding “flesh and blood” (1 Cor 15:50), something inconceivable based on our ordinary experiences of physical bodies.
Nineteen years after Gundry, Dale Martin did an extensive analysis of the First Letter to the Corinthians in the context of ideas about bodies and life after death which were contemporary with Paul. (Martin, 1995; especially Ch. 5) The material body/immaterial spirit duality which is now taken for granted was not a feature of that culture. The general view of the Greek and Roman philosophers was that living human bodies are composed of a hierarchy of various substances, all of them material, but some denser like the earth, while others are less so like the air. At the bottom of the bodily hierarchy was sarx, roughly meaning flesh. Higher on the hierarchy was the psyche, which could be denser or more refined, depending on whether an individual was more inclined to desires shared with animals or to the pursuit of philosophical contemplation. At death the psyche separated from the flesh into their individuated substances, the psyche, if highly refined, persisting in existence, while the flesh decomposed into the earth.
For Paul the hierarchy went from sarx, to psyche, to pneuma at the highest level. Pneuma was regarded as the very refined substance of divine beings such as angels. Paul writes that “the first man, Adam” came to be a psychē zōsa (“living soul”) while “the last Adam,” meaning Jesus, became a pneuma zōopoioun (“life-giving spirit”) (1 Cor 15:45). Paul, according to Martin, expected the resurrected body to shed both sarx and psyche and to be composed of the remaining substance pneuma. Paul’s interlocutors were likely the more educated members of the Corinthian church who would have been familiar with Greco-Roman philosophical ideas and opposed to the notion that a corpse, with its heavy, dense substance of flesh, could be raised to a higher life in heaven. The less educated commonly thought of resurrection as portrayed in myths and legends of people who died and then returned to life in the familiar form of bodies pretty much as we know them. Paul agreed with the educated that “flesh and blood” could not inherit the kingdom of God, but wanted to maintain the Jewish position of the Pharisees, a sect he once belonged to, that there is a continuity between the body that dies and the body that is resurrected. He was especially concerned to bring the two factions of the Corinthian Christians into harmony by urging the more educated to tolerate less sophisticated views.
It is easy to see why the nature of the resurrected body was controversial among the Corinthians. To this day commentators argue about what Paul was trying to describe with his language about bodies, souls, and spirits. (See, for example, Bryan, 2011: 217-220) But how would Paul know any of the things he says about resurrected bodies? Would seeing an appearance of the risen Jesus convey what kind of substance his body was composed of, or how refined that substance was? Or how it was related to the body that had died? Paul was pressing into service what language was available to him to try to fit the appearances of Jesus within the context of first century views of human bodies, death, and resurrection.
As a Pharisee he would have been committed to the idea of a general resurrection at the end times, during which God would raise human beings back to their ensouled bodies for the final judgment. Early Christians, like many Jewish people of that time, shared this view, and they would have understood the appearances of Jesus through that lens. Apparently Paul’s experience of the risen Christ, and what he knew about the appearances to others, was not compatible with the uneducated person’s expectation of corpses literally recomposing and resuming life in the body they had before. In his letter to the Corinthians he struggles to explain how the resurrected body could be the same person yet in a very different form from than that of the body before death. Trying to tie these two things together—Jewish ideas of the general resurrection and what people saw in the appearances of Jesus after his death—was a challenge, and, as we will later see, a continuing source of controversy among the early Christians.
Sources cited
Gundry, Robert H. (1976). Sōma in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Dale B. (1995). The Corinthian Body. Yale University Press.
Segal, Alan F. (2004). Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West. Doubleday.
Here is the first of two parts from my near final draft about Paul’s list of the appearances of the risen Christ in 1 Corinthians 15. There is additional material compared to the version now up on this website, but I reach the same conclusions. Comments and notice of typos are very much welcome.
3b. Paul’s list of Jesus’ appearances
The earliest Christian documents we have copies of are probably the letters of Paul to various Christian communities around the Mediterranean. Dating such documents is tricky, but the academic consensus is that he wrote most of them in the decade of the 50s C.E. That would be about twenty years after the presumed date of the death of Jesus and about fifteen years or more before the earliest gospel we know of, the one attributed to Mark. In other words, about mid-way in the approximately three or four decades between the reports of the resurrection and the first written narrative of Jesus’ life. Much of what we know about Christianity during those decades comes from the letters of Paul.
The Christian Bible contains thirteen letters attributed to Paul, but Biblical scholars regard only seven of them as genuinely written by Paul. His letters do not show much interest in Jesus’ life, focusing instead on the meaning of his death and resurrection and offering instructions to the communities he wrote to. Paul expected the end of the world as they knew it and the triumph of the “kingdom of God” to happen in the very near future, so his eyes were on the present and his mission of preaching to the non-Jewish Gentiles while waiting for the imminent return of Jesus as judge and ruler of all. (On another page of this website I will discuss Paul’s letters, the dates assigned to them by scholars, and why only some are regarded as genuine.)
Paul’s list of appearances of the risen Christ
In what is called his First Letter to the Corinthians Paul bequeaths us some information about the resurrection appearances of Jesus:
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 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Cor. 15: 3-8, all English translations from the Greek here are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition of the Christian Bible)
Paul’s language of handing on and receiving information of “first importance” implies carefully passing down a tradition with a set verbal formulation. That formulation starts with the kernel of Paul’s missionary message, that Christ died for our sins as predicted in the Jewish scriptures, that he was buried, and that God raised him from the dead, again as predicted in the scriptures. There are several shorter statements about Jesus being raised from the dead scattered throughout Paul’s letters, also likely of earlier origin. (Lüdemann, 2004: 32-33; Allison, 2005: 229-231) In this particular passage Paul goes on to include a list of appearances of the risen Jesus: to Cephas (which roughly means “man of stone” in Aramaic, as does “Peter” in Greek), “the twelve” (apostles), five hundred Christians at one time, a “James” with no further identification, “all” the apostles, and then finally Paul himself. Dale Allison (2005: 234) notes that the formula uses words and expressions that Paul does not use elsewhere in his letters, such as “sins” in the plural, “according to the scriptures,” “has been raised” in the perfect tense, “appeared to” (or “was seen by”), and “the twelve.” This is another sign that he is passing down an earlier tradition.
But is the traditional formula exactly as Paul has conveyed it? The comment regarding the five hundred, “most of whom are still alive, though some have died,” would be Paul’s, as a tradition composed to be carefully handed down would not indicate whether witnesses were still alive at a particular time. And consider that Paul includes himself at the end of the list. Elsewhere he confirms that he is a first-hand witness to an appearance of Jesus (1 Cor 9:1-2), but would an earlier tradition been have passed down to him saying that Paul himself was “last of all, as to one untimely born”? (The phrase “one untimely born” compares his experience to the abortion or miscarriage of a pregnancy, apparently meaning something that occurs before one is ready for it. See Wright, 2003: 327-329) Why would the originators of the tradition think he was last and why would they bother to describe his experience as untimely? I don’t think it’s likely they did; it is more likely Paul added himself to the end of the traditional list to defend his claim to be an apostle, despite not having been one of those originally recognized as apostles.
This raises the question of where the traditional list ends and Paul’s addition(s) begin: just before Paul is listed or at some point before that? It is important to note that Greek was written without punctuation at that time, so translators to modern English have to guess where sentences begin and end. The problem of where exactly the original tradition ended was in discussion as early as 1978 (Allison, 2005: 234), with most commentators holding that it ended either with “Cephas” or with “Cephas, then the twelve.” (Barclay, 1996: 16) Bart Ehrman (2014: 139-142) is among those who argue that it ends after the mention of Cephas. That would leave a formulation with a parallel structure easy to remember and convey to others:
Christ died/for our sins/in accordance with the scriptures/and he was buried.
Christ was raised/on the third day/in accordance with the scriptures/and he appeared to Cephas.
The first section in each line is a parallel statement about Christ (he died/he was raised). The second section ties the statement to a prophecy derived from the Jewish scriptures (for our sins/on the third day). The third section is exactly the same in each line (in accordance with the scriptures), following up the previous section. And the final section is a brief conclusion (he was buried/he appeared to Cephas). It is a tightly constructed set of parallel statements, which would be asymmetrical if much more was added after the mention of Cephas. That would suggest that the rest of the list was added by Paul from some source(s) other than the tradition as it had been handed down to him.
If this argument is correct, the tradition would be the earliest source concerning who was the first to claim to have seen Jesus after his death: Cephas/Peter. Peter as a key witness to the risen Christ fits other evidence that Peter was a central figure in the early Christian community, such as Paul’s reference to him as a “pillar” of the Christian community in Jerusalem in another letter (Galatians 2:9), his prominent role in the gospels (four Christian scriptures narrating the life, death and resurrection of Jesus) and the Acts of the Apostles (a history of the early Christian community), and letters to early Christian communities that were purported to have been written by Peter. In the gospel of Luke there is also an indication that Peter was the first to take heart after the death of Jesus, as predicted by Jesus (Simon was Peter’s original name before he was renamed Cephas/Peter):
“Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail, and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” (Lk 22: 31-32)
I am not arguing that all of these stories about Peter were true, but rather that he was important enough to have such stories told about him. Based on the evidence, I think Peter was the first to experience what he took to be a resurrected Jesus, and that his claim was carefully preserved and handed down in the larger Christian community. I don’t think we will ever know exactly what Peter saw, but apparently it was convincing enough to bolster his confidence and become a turning point for him, for the other early disciples, and for the rest of Western history.
The subsequent mention of an appearance to “the twelve” also may have been a part of the original tradition. Its inclusion would not disrupt the balance of the parallel structure of the original list very significantly. Gert Lüdemann (2004: 40-43) takes the position that the “twelve” was part of the original list. He notes that the conjunction between “Cephas, then (eita) to the twelve” differs from the conjunction that precedes the sentence about the five hundred and the one about Jame and all the apostles. That word in Greek is epeita, which Lüdemann translates as “thereafter.” As I recount on another page, three of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles all describe scenes of Peter with other apostles seeing the risen Jesus. These likely trace back to knowledge of the tradition Paul recounts.
The other appearances on the list, aside from Paul’s own experience, would then be appearances that Paul learned of after receiving the original tradition. You would think five hundred people seeing the resurrected Jesus at the same time would be dramatic enough that reports of it would reach those undertaking to write about Jesus, but there is no mention of it in any other source. A suggested reference to the appearance is in the Acts of the Apostles. (Lüdemann, 2004: 73-81; Allison, 2005: n. 140 on 235) The Acts is a narrative of the early Christian community which is universally attributed to the author of the gospel of Luke. In Acts Chapter 2:1-42 the disciples are gathered together on the feast of Pentecost, celebrated fifty days after the Jewish holiday of Passover, which the gospels depict as the time of Jesus’ death. They are “filled with the Holy Spirit” and begin speaking in other languages, which Jewish people from around the eastern Mediterranean who are present in Jerusalem hear and recognize. After Peter preaches to them, “about three thousand” are baptized and join the Christian community. But other than a miracle and the huge size of the crowd in Paul’s list and in the story, there is little resemblance between the two. In one the miracle is an appearance of the risen Jesus, in the other it is speaking in various languages under the influence of the Holy Spirit. (Wright, 2003: 324-325) And three thousand is a lot more people than five hundred.
Nor is there any other mention of an appearance to James in the early sources, unless this was James the apostle and he saw Jesus as one of several unnamed apostles present at one of the appearances to disciples depicted in the gospels. The lack of identification in the formula suggest he was a known figure in the Christian community. Most commentators take James to be “James, the Lord’s brother” that Paul refers to in Galations 1:18-19 and is presumably also the James who Paul calls a “pillar of the church” along with Cephas and John in Galations 2:9. James’ status suggests he had claimed to see the risen Jesus, but this is not made explicit in any early source. Who “all the apostles” were and what they claimed is also unknown.
In my judgment, Peter is the only person on Paul’s list whose experience, whatever it was, is convincingly attested as widely known and carefully handed down by the early Christians. His experience was the foundation for the belief in the resurrection of Jesus and the catalyst for other reports of appearances. Once the idea of the resurrection took hold, additional reports would have a ready audience among those who believed, no matter the substance of the reports or their lack of it. Paul may not have heard about these other reports until years later, nearer the time he added them to the end of the traditional list when he wrote to the Corinthians. The reports could have been second-hand or even more remote from the alleged events.
Jesus Reconstructed 