christianity – Jesus Reconstructed

Reviews of Nina Livesey’s book about “Paul’s” letters

I recently finished reading Nina Livesey’s 2024 book, The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context. Her central thesis is that the seven letters of Paul widely considered by Biblical scholars to be genuine 1st century writings are instead pseudonymous compositions of the mid 2nd century. That is, the authors of the letters are pretending to be “Paul” and writing nearly one hundred years after Paul was supposed to have lived. She further argues that the likely location of the letters’ composition is the school of alleged Christian heretic Marcion in Rome. A huge amount of historical research on early Christianity would be overturned if she is correct, thus of course one would expect a lot of resistance to it.

As I noted in my previous post on her book, when I first heard of her thesis I was skeptical but intrigued. After listening to her in a couple of YouTube videos I was impressed enough to rethink my assumptions about Paul and early Christianity. It struck me that her thesis helps make sense of a couple of problems that I was already aware of.

The first problem is a chronology in which the letters of Paul precede the composition of the Gospel According to Mark, thought to have been written in the 70s of the 1st century. Paul’s letters have a higher Christology and more developed theology that Mark seems to have. It makes more sense to me that a relatively low Christology and less developed theology came first, thus Mark should have preceded the composition of the letters.

The second problem is a larger one: a chronology in which the letters of Paul precede the composition of the Acts of the Apostles, which narrates Paul’s missionary activity. If Paul was known to have written theologically dense letters that were so cherished by their recipients that they preserved them and shared them with other Christian communities, why does the author of Acts say nothing about Paul’s letters and depict speeches by Paul in which his theological views don’t match his letters? Doesn’t it make more sense that Acts was written first and the pseudo-Paul writers of the letters placed their theological embellishments into settings and situations derived from Acts?

And so I read her book. I found it to be well-documented, thoroughly researched, carefully argued, and persuasive. Her arguments against the conventional dating of the letters are, in my opinion, very strong. Her arguments for the origin of the letters in Marcion’s school are not quite as convincing, although, as she says, her thesis is a better fit of the evidence than the conventional view.

To further test her ideas I read and watched a few takes on her book from those with more expertise than me. Here the ones I found most useful so far:

Paula Fredriksen’s review delivered to the Society of Biblical Literature in 2025.

“The Letters of Paul: A Review of Nina Livesey’s New Book,” on M. David Litwa’s YouTube channel.

“Did Paul the Apostle Exist?! | Dr. Nina Livesey Vs. Dr. Bruce Chilton,” on the History Valley YouTube channel.

I also asked ChatGPT if Bart Ehrman had reviewed her book and learned he had not, but that he has comments regarding it scattered about his blog. I then asked ChatGPT to summarize his comments and it did so.

What I would say at this point is that these confirmed my initial reaction to her book. None but Ehrman take issue with her contention that a 1st century dating of the letters is weakly supported. Ehrman’s argument relies on one of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch to show early knowledge of Paul’s letters. But Livesey addressed this in her book, showing how the letters of the apostolic fathers like Ignatius and Polycarp also share the characteristics of pseudonymous “letters in form only,” which was a common genre at that time. Based on ChatGTP’s account of Erhman’s comments, I doubt he has read her book.

What they do take issue with is her alternative dating and location of the composition of the letters, and Fredrikson and Litwa make some very specific arguments here. A couple of examples. Fredriksen points out that Livesey mistakenly dates the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which actually happened in 70, not during the Bar-Kokhba uprising of the 2nd century, and that neither event resulted in widespread Roman antipathy to the Jewish law as Livesey states. Litwa questions why there is no evidence that anyone writing around that time expressed suspicion at the letters’ supposedly sudden appearance.

My view now is that the letters are probably pseudonymous “letters in form only,” but that producing a plausible alternative dating will require examining the contents of each letter in light of developments in the post-70 period. I no longer have enough confidence in the letters to use them as I did in examining the resurrection of Jesus, a topic I have spent much of the last year researching and writing about! I was almost done with that section of this website but now I don’t think I will finish it. The foundation of my account feels too shaky. (I will keep those pages up for the time being.)

Instead I am going to once again make a new start. This time I will interrogate early Christian history by starting with the gospel of Mark and trying to figure out where Paul’s letters best fit as I go on from there. I may find I am on the wrong track, but I am very interested in seeing if an alternative history can be produced.

What do you think?

Are Paul’s letters the earliest source on Jesus?

Okay, here’s another instance where I come across something that causes me to rethink everything I thought I knew about early Christianity.

This week I saw a couple of interviews with Dr. Nina Livesey, author of The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context. The most startling takeaway from these interviews was that the Apostle Paul may have been a purely fictional character and “his” letters actually produced by someone a century after Paul was supposed to have lived. You can watch the interviews on YouTube:

Luke Invented Paul the Apostle

The Apostle Paul and His Letters Were Fabricated?

Before watching the videos I thought I would be hearing a Jesus mythicist (who does not believe Jesus was a real person) moving into Paul mythicism. I was curious about her arguments as my research on the resurrection of Jesus has shown how central the letters of Paul are to this topic.

But she does not seem to have started from a position of mythicism at all, rather she as an expert on the letters of Paul who had some unanswered questions about them. As she laid out her thinking I found her arguments to be very strong, at least compared to the arguments that Paul’s letters were written by him only about twenty years after the death of Jesus. I already knew how tenuous those arguments were, as they depend on correlating the dating of the letters with the reliability of the history in the Acts of the Apostles.

My whole picture of the development of Christianity has now shifted radically, due to these interviews and some writing on Josephus I’ve been reading. The historicity of the Acts of the Apostles is called further into question, leaving the entire period between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospel of Mark in the dark. Paul can no longer be assumed to be a first-hand witness of the risen Jesus. Nor can we rely on his tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 about the other witnesses to the risen Jesus.

The conventional view on dating the early Christian sources and their relationships to each other has been this:
50s: letters of Paul
70s: Gospel of Mark
80s-90s: Gospels of Matthew & Luke (both using Mark) and Acts of the Apostles
90s-100: Gospel of John

My view is tentatively now like this:
70s: Gospel of Mark
80s: Gospel of Matthew (using Mark)
70s-90s: Josephus’ writings (perhaps using Matthew?)
Early 2nd century: Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles (using Mark, Josephus, and perhaps Matthew), Gospel of John (using Mark, Matthew & Luke)
Mid-2nd century: letters of Paul

As you might infer, this new timeline would require revising a lot of historical research on early Christianity. This would include the pages I’ve already written on the resurrection over the last year or so!

I intend to obtain a copy of Livesey’s book as soon as I can to take a look at her arguments up close, then to read some of reviews of the book. I will then have to decide if the new timeline holds up better than the old one, and revise this website accordingly.

Lot of work, but kind of exciting to find my picture of early Christianity changing almost week by week as I pursue this project. I will certainly keep you all posted.

The missing ending of the gospel of Mark

Hello friends. I haven’t posted much lately because I slowed down my writing to run ahead in my reading. My reading has moved on from the resurrection to the life of Jesus. But I have been slowly finishing up my last two pages about the resurrection, and I actually finished writing about the gospel of Mark’s lack of resurrection appearances quite a while ago. Today I decided to give you that piece as I continue to work on the rest of it. Here it is:

The gospel attributed to Mark, which appears to be the earliest narrative of Jesus’ life and death that we have, ends without depicting any appearances of the resurrected Jesus. Some early copies of Mark do contain material at the end of the gospel that read like condensed versions of the appearances found in the other gospels, but manuscript and stylistic evidence have established “to the satisfaction of virtually all scholars” that this material was not written by the author of Mark. (Croy, 2003: 14) Many scholars have concluded that the author intentionally ended his story with the women discovering Jesus’ empty tomb and hypothesize reasons why he would have done so. But this flies in the face of what Mark clearly leads the reader to expect: as the “young man” at the tomb tells the women (Mk 16:7), and Jesus earlier predicts (Mk 14:28), the risen Jesus was to appear to Peter and his other disciples in Galilee.

In his study of the problem, Croy (2003) examined the arguments about Mark’s abrupt ending and defended the thesis that the both the beginning and ending of Mark’s original gospel were accidentally lost, probably by the outer page of a codex coming loose like the cover of a modern magazine. He notes that Mark is particularly fond of showing prophecies fulfilled and depicts Jesus repeatedly prophesying his own resurrection. The idea that Mark would have deliberately subverted his readers’ expectations is anachronistic; other ancient writers show no sign of such a literary strategy. It might seem like early Christians would take care that a gospel was carefully preserved and the loss of parts of a manuscript would be rectified by consulting other, intact copies. But when Mark wrote his gospel it was not considered sacred scripture or even thought of as a “gospel,” it was very likely the first narrative of Jesus’ life and meant for reading to a popular audience, not to preserve for posterity’s sake. The damage to Mark’s gospel would have happened soon after its creation and before many copies had circulated, as both Matthew and Luke, who adapt Mark’s gospel for their own use, supplement their versions with differing birth narratives at the beginning and different resurrection appearances at the end of their gospels, neither of which are found in Mark. (The gospel of John is once again a case in itself.)

I find Croy’s case definitive; Mark originally contained an account of one or more appearances of the risen Jesus, but we know next to nothing about them because of the lost pages. Likely neither did the authors of the other gospels, who had come up with their own endings without Mark to guide them. What Mark leads us to expect is that the disciples scattered after Jesus’ death (Mk 14:27), but Peter and other disciples later saw the risen Jesus in Galilee (Mk 16:7). Beyond that is pure speculation.

Reference:

Croy, N. Clayton. (2003). The Mutilation of Mark’s Gospel. Abingdon Press.

Historical evidence in favor of Christian claims

I read ahead on what I am writing about on my Jesus Reconstructed website, so the interesting things I come across have not all reached my pages yet. In this post I want to share three pieces of evidence that strike me as favoring some of the claims of Christianity.

1. Jesus as a real human being. T.S. Schmidt’s new book Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (click for a free copy) makes a very strong case for the authenticity of the famous Testimonium Flavianum passage in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. In Schmidt’s translation the passage is more ambivalent about Jesus than in other translations, and Josephus’ references to Jesus’ “mighty” words and deeds, the resurrection, and the identification of him as the Christ could have been derived from Christian sources. But as Josephus knew some of the chief priests alive in the early 1st century, or knew their immediate descendants, he would have been in a position to know if the crucifixion actually happened. Schmidt’s case, plus references to James the brother of Jesus by both Josephus and Paul, have persuaded me that the historical evidence favors the reality of Jesus as an actual human being and not, as the mythicists argue, a figure known only through visions.

2. Jesus’ self-conception. Many scholars argue that high claims for the role of Jesus in history were developed sometime after the resurrection reports, and that Jesus in his lifetime did not see himself as more than a prophet and rabbi (a teacher of the correct interpretation of the Jewish laws). Yet in Paul’s account of the last supper, Jesus said he was instituting a “new covenant.” I have not been able to find evidence of manuscript variations in his use of this phrase. This is a pretty high claim, as the last covenant God made was through Moses on Mount Sinai. Jesus is claiming that the Passover meal was now, for his disciples, a remembrance of a new covenant made by the sacrifice of his body and blood, not a remembrance of the old covenant given through Moses. This quote is evidence that Jesus himself saw his death as instituting a new phase in God’s plan for humanity.

3. The resurrection. Although I find the gospel accounts of appearances of the risen Jesus unconvincing as historical evidence, the appearances referred to in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians carry weight as reports derived from witnesses. Lately commentators have favored explanations comparing these reports to other types of visions of deceased people, such as grief visions by survivors (Peter/Cephas and James would be candidates for this), or visions induced by mystical practices (Paul is the candidate here). These comparisons are meant to show that the visions of the risen Jesus were not unique. It is true that there are contemporary reports of realistic appearances by deceased people, including appearances to multiple people at the same time and appearances to both those who knew and did not know the departed in their lifetime. However, to my knowledge there are no other examples of appearances of the same dead person to multiple individuals and groups (especially a group as large as 500 people) at different times. This aspect seems unique. It is also far from clear if all of the contemporary incidents can be explained as purely psychological rather than actual communications from a dead person. In some reports the deceased communicates information that otherwise could not have been know to the recipient. (I experienced this myself in a dream of a former colleague who informed me he had died.) From a historical standpoint, the events behind the appearance reports in Paul’s passage remain an unsolved mystery.

As I consider all this, I find myself leaning toward the position that the historical evidence shows at least these three things: Jesus was a real person, he saw his death as instituting a new covenant with God, and the reports of his appearances after his death remain an unsolved mystery. I am surprised at this, not because I had a firm opinion about traditional Christian claims one way or the other, but because I expected the historical evidence to be inconclusive about these particular topics. Of course the Christian claims are not proven by any of this, but it does provide a historical basis for some apologetic arguments.

I don’t mind moving closer to traditional Christianity (I still have a ways to go on some issues), but I am left with a further dilemma. Which church would I join? So far I see them all as problematic. We’ll see where all this takes me.

Empty tomb, part 1: the gospel genre

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 1 5:40-16:8)

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, 2^nd 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.

Paul on the risen Christ, part 3: Paul’s vision in context

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.

Paul’s spiritual experiences

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.

Conclusions

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.

Paul on the risen Christ, part 2: What is the resurrected body like?

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.

What are resurrected bodies like?

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.

Paul’s list of the appearances of the risen Christ, part 1

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.

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