Tag: gospel

Appearances of the risen Jesus in Matthew’s gospel

In my previous post I explained why the gospel of Mark does not depict any appearances of the risen Jesus. In this post I move on to Matthew’s account of the resurrection appearances.

The gospel of Matthew presents two brief accounts of appearances of the risen Jesus. Both can be directly tied to particular interests of the author, indicating that they are his creation, although it is possible he knew something about Mark’s ending and adapted it to fit his own purposes. The possibility is more likely for his account of the second appearance, in which Jesus appears to his disciples in Galilee as the angels in both Mark and Matthew say he will.

In the first appearance, described in just a few verses, Jesus appears to the women on their way from the empty tomb to convey the angel’s message to the other disciples. (Mt 28:7-10) As I argued earlier on my page about the empty tomb, Matthew’s main purpose in creating the women’s encounter with Jesus is to slip in an appearance near the site of the tomb to establish that his body was resurrected and not stolen by the disciples, an accusation explicitly expressed in his gospel. He may have known that there were reports of multiple appearances of Jesus, as Paul recounts in his letter to the Corinthians (“he appeared to more than five hundred”), and so did not think an appearance to two women followers would be out of bounds for his story.

After he describes the chief priests bribing the guards to lie that Jesus’ disciples had stolen his body, Matthew abruptly jumps to Galilee with “the eleven disciples”—presumably the twelve apostles appointed by Jesus earlier in the gospel minus his betrayer Judas. This is the second, and final, appearance of the risen Jesus in Matthew’s gospel:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Mt 28:16-20)

Jesus appears at a mountain, a traditional site of divine self-revelations such as to Moses on Mount Sinai; a favorite Matthean theme is that Jesus offers a new covenant for all people that goes beyond the covenant God established with the Israelites through Moses. Jesus’ instruction to his disciples to teach what he commanded echoes Moses delivering God’s commandments to the Israelites. (Deuteronomy 31:11-12; see also Mt 5:1, 21-48, from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.”) The disciples worship Jesus, as the women had, emphasizing Matthew’s belief that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status, which is why Jesus can claim “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” The part of the verse in which witnesses doubt what they see is grammatically unclear and probably best interpreted as “some worshiped him, but some doubted,” perhaps a commentary on the responses of Matthew’s contemporaries the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection. It has also been suggested that it expresses wavering belief, as when Peter tries to walk on water and begins to sink (Mt 14:29-31). (Licona, 2010: 360-361) Matthew is the only author in the Christian scriptural canon to use the Greek word “distazo” for doubt, which he uses in both passages. (Catchpole, 2000: 42)

The risen Jesus commissions the eleven to “make disciples of all nations” (literally “all peoples”). Another Matthean theme is his endorsement of the Christian mission to the gentiles. This activity was controversial among Christians at the time of Paul decades earlier, but by Matthew’s time he is comfortable indicating Jesus’ approval for the mission by reworking several passages from Mark’s gospel. (Catchpole, 2000: 43-52) Jesus’ command to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” uses a Trinitarian formula that suggests theological development in the understanding of the relationship between God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and thus may be an early alteration of Matthew’s gospel by a copyist. Note though that the relation and relative status of the three is not spelled out in any explicit sense; rather the three are all brought together in endorsing baptism into the community of faith. Jesus then promises to be with his disciples “always,” until “the end of the age,” which ties back to a prophecy at the beginning of his gospel referring to Jesus as Emmanuel, or “God is with us.” (Mt 1:22-23) Matthew’s gospel ends at this point. He does not mention Jesus giving the disciples the power to forgive sins, as Jesus does in Luke and John (Lk 24:45-48; Jn 20:22-23), although Jesus himself is shown exercising this power during his life. (Matt 9:2-8) I wouldn’t make much of this difference, as Matthew probably understands the power to forgive sins as implicitly given to the disciples in Jesus’ commission.

Unlike the early appearance tradition recounted by Paul, Matthew does not mention an initial appearance of the risen Jesus to Peter. Instead he appears to those who came next in Paul’s chronology, “the Twelve” (minus Judas). I doubt Matthew knew much about the details of the appearances of Jesus reported by Paul. Instead he composed a brief collective experience focusing on Jesus’ commission to the apostles to announce God’s new covenant to “all peoples,” as the focus of the Christian mission had shifted decisively outside of Judea due to the war with Rome in 66-73 C.E.

References

Catchpole, David. (2000). Resurrection People: Studies in the Resurrection Narratives of the Gospels. Darton, Longman, & Todd.

Licona, Michael R. (2010). The Resurrection of Jesus. InterVarsity Press.

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.

The independence of the gospel of John

Well, here I am posting again much sooner than I thought I would.

I changed my mind about something important while researching the gospel accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb. That led me to do some revision of my already published page on the execution of Jesus, so I wanted to let you know about that change and why I made it.

In writing the page on Jesus’ execution I relied on my memory that the majority opinion of Biblical scholars was that the author of the gospel of John did not know the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke), although there was still a lot of dissenters from that opinion. Looking into this the last day or so, it seems a consensus is emerging that John DID know of the synoptics. The upshot is that I should not treat John as an independent source for the events of Jesus’ life and death.

And life after death! The thing that caught me while comparing the gospel accounts of the empty tomb was that Luke and John say Peter inspected the tomb but Mark and Matthew do not say this. I could not think of a reason why Mark would neglect that story if he knew of it, or why both Luke and John would insert it–unless John knew the gospel of Luke.

Thus a hurried search of current academic opinion on John’s independence, and my realization that I had relied too heavily on my assumption that there were two sources for the story of his execution. I revised that page but found that this new insight did not change my main conclusions.

By the way, I am about two-thirds of the way through a draft of my soon-to-be published page on the resurrection. It’s taking longer than I thought because I keep noticing and discovering new things, so I guess that is a positive.

Onward!

Alan