Tag: empty-tomb

Jane Schaberg and the empty tomb

I recently finished re-reading The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene by the late Dr. Jane Schaberg. Jane was my Biblical Studies professor when I was an undergraduate majoring in Religious Studies back in the 1980s. Although she encouraged me to pursue graduate work in Biblical Studies, I went in a different direction. We became friends and had sporadic contact over the years.

She published The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene in 2002, and I first came across it about 2005, twenty years after receiving my bachelor’s degree. This was during a period when I was “deconstructing” my Roman Catholic religious beliefs for the second time. The first time was in my teenage years when I simply discarded it as of no interest. I returned to the faith in my mid-twenties, only to deconstruct more deliberately in my late forties.

At the time I had left my academic career in political science and belatedly began to pursue a Religious Studies degree at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley CA, with courses and teachers from a variety of religious orientations. I wanted to take a closer look at Christian and Buddhist religious traditions to determine what each of them meant to me at that turning point in my life.

I did a lot of reading on my own, utilizing the GTU library, and it was then that I read Jane’s two major books. It was fascinating to read her work for the first time and helpful in sorting through some of my thinking about religious texts and Catholic dogmas.

I reread her book this year, another twenty years later (!), because Mary Magdalene is a key figure in the gospel reports of the death and burial of Jesus and the discovery of his empty tomb. I felt like I was meeting Jane on an intellectual and personal level in a way I hadn’t before. It was like talking over a subject of mutual interest with an old friend.

Her unexpected gift to me was in understanding how much the figure of the “Son of Man” in Ch. 7 of the book of the prophet Daniel influenced the gospel attributed to Mark. I had to revise my page on the empty tomb once again to incorporate this insight. The empty tomb had the elements of an apocalyptic text similar to those in Daniel, with an emotionally troubled protagonist seeing something incredible, having it interpreted by an angelic figure, and then keeping quiet about it due to fear.

So I want to thank Jane for this insight, for her encouragement at different points of my life, and for her teaching me some of the basics of critical Bible study long ago. Although she died in 2012, I have encountered her again and learned from her. I don’t know whether her grave is empty or not, but I do know she is still with me on my journey.

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 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.

Why didn’t this occur to me?

In a post a few days ago I mentioned that both Luke and John tell the story of Peter returning to the empty tomb to see it for himself, and that it caused me to question whether John knew one at least one of the synoptic gospels, the gospel of Luke. I was working on the assumption that John did not know the synoptics, therefore he and Mark must have been drawing from an independent narrative known to both.

My thinking was this. If Mark did not know the story of Peter returning to the tomb, it couldn’t have been in the earlier narrative. Then how did John know it? He must have gotten it from Luke, therefore John at least knew the gospel of Luke. Right?

Wrong! It occurred to me today that there was a simpler explanation. An early copyist of the gospel of Luke added the one line telling the story of Peter to harmonize it with the story in John. I checked and sure enough, the line (Lk 24:12) is not found in all the early manuscripts. It doesn’t look like there is a consensus on whether it was in the original Luke, but it is certainly possible, and to me likely.

So I wasn’t on my toes when first thinking about this. The good thing is that it did send me looking into more recent research on the independence of John from the synoptics and finding that the experts’ views on this have been changing over the last decade or so. As a result I am being more careful about the idea that John and the synoptics represent independent attestation of an earlier narrative, an example of where my previous knowledge has become outdated.

I didn’t expect to be posting so often, so I hope you don’t mind. I am learning new things as I work on this website, and thought my subscribers would like to follow along and perhaps learn something new themselves.