Greg Daly
Pope Benedict XVI The bodily resurrection of Jesus was central to Christian faith from the very beginning, writes Greg Daly
“The resurrection of Jesus is fundamental to our Faith, but that does not mean it happened exactly as it is described in the various biblical accounts,” wrote Fr Tony Flannery on his blog almost exactly a year ago.
“What it does tell us is that, after the desolation of Jesus followers as a result of his death, they gradually began to realise that in a mysterious, but very real, way he was still with them,” he continued. “In other words, maybe their experience of the reality of Jesus in their lives wasn’t that different to how we can also experience him in our own lives, and in our communities when we gather to pray and celebrate.
“The detail of how this happened doesn’t really matter very much. What matters is that they knew Jesus was with them, and that changed everything. For me, that is all I need to know about the reality of the Resurrection.”
“The detail of how this happened may not have mattered much to Fr Flannery last Easter, but by Christmas Fr Flannery had returned to the subject on his website, writing of Jesus: “He was put to death, the standard method of that time being crucifixion on a wooden cross. When his small group of followers got over the initial shock of what had happened to him, they gradually began to realise that, while he had died and was buried, he had not gone away from them.”
Accounts
Again, he wrote, the detail of the Resurrection didn’t matter, but one detail seems clear from both accounts: however Jesus rose, for Fr Flannery, it was not bodily, as described in the New Testament narratives. In this his take on the Resurrection seems in the tradition of the Tipperary-born former priest John Dominic Crossan and others who have tried to place the Resurrection narratives as apparitions to or parables told among a traumatised community.
The obvious problem with this, from a simple historical point of view, is that as a thesis it has no basis in extant historical evidence, and seems to depend on a philosophical predisposition to disregard the miraculous, as though a transcending of the laws of nature is beyond the capacity of the God who wrote and sustains them.
Although the tide seems to be turning now, largely due to the magisterial work of such scholars as N.T. Wright, the erstwhile Anglican Archbishop of Durham, and Cambridge’s Richard Bauckham, there can still be a tendency among modern Biblical scholars to reject out of hand any possibility of a supernatural resurrection or other miracles, and to date the Gospels to the last three decades of the 1st Century.
The late dating of the Gospels – and datings of them to the 2nd Century seem, at least, to be increasingly a thing of the past – is in effect the product of a thesis that rests on three legs. The ancients, so this thesis goes, knew that the Gospel of John was written after the three synoptic Gospels; both Matthew and Luke can be shown through textual analysis to be heavily dependent on Mark; and the apparent reference at Mark 13 to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple can only have meant that the Mark wrote in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction in 70AD.
The assumption underpinning that last premise – the beermat propping up the short leg of this rather wobbly stool, if you like – is that Jesus could not possibly have predicted the destruction of the Temple, and so Mark must have made this prediction up after the fall of the Temple, placing this fictitious prediction onto Jesus’ lips. If Mark wrote after 70AD, then Matthew and Luke must have written after him, or so the thesis goes, with John writing a few years after them.
The whole thesis, of course, depends on the assumption that miracles are impossible – that is, it depends on the assumption that God did not become incarnate as one of us, that he did not miraculously heal or raise the dead or cast out demons or feed the multitudes or transform water into wine or calm storms or walk on the sea or rise himself from the dead and ascend into Heaven.
It depends, in short, on the assumption that the New Testament is nonsense, the assumption that Hamlet is important and worth our time even if the role of the prince is cut wholesale from the story.
Open-minded
If we approach the New Testament in a genuinely open-minded way, however, not presuming that miracles do happen or indeed that that the described miracles did happen, but not rejecting this possibility out of hand either, we start to reach some interesting conclusions very quickly.
Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are, it is clear, to all intents and purposes two halves of the same narrative, with the internal evidence of the latter, inclusively ending as it does with Paul under house arrest in Rome, strongly suggesting that it was written before 64AD.
It is difficult for devotees of a late authorial date, after all, to explain Luke’s otherwise remarkable failure even to mention the Jewish revolt of 66AD, with the great cataclysm for Judaism that was the Romans’ destruction of the Temple in 70AD. It is even more difficult, one might think, to explain away Luke’s otherwise staggering failure to mention the events that shook Rome’s Christian community in the mid-60s.
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Writing in the early 2nd Century, the imperial biographer Suetonius recorded that during the reign of Nero, “punishments were also inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief”, with the historian Tacitus, writing around the same time, being rather more forthcoming.
The Great Fire of Rome was the most terrible and destructive fire the city had ever experienced, Tacitus wrote. Starting by the city’s great racecourse, the Circus Maximus, it spread to devastate 10 of Rome’s 14 districts, and though many believed the fire had been accidental, others suspected a criminal act on the part of the Nero.
“To suppress this rumour, Nero fabricated scapegoats – and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called),” wrote Tacitus. “Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judaea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome.”
The historian described a spectacularly vicious campaign of persecution.
“First, Nero had self-acknowledged Christians arrested. Then, on their information, large numbers of others were condemned – not so much for incendiarism as for their anti-social tendencies,” he wrote. “Their deaths were made farcical. Dressed in wild animals’ skins, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight.”
The Neronian Persecution, in which Ss Peter and Paul are believed to have been killed, goes unmentioned in the New Testament, save, perhaps, in the form of the prophecy to Peter at the end of John’s Gospel. Small wonder, then, that the liberal theologian and Anglican prelate J.A.T. Robinson speculated in the 1970s that much of New Testament, or at the very least the Gospel narratives, was written before 64AD.
Certainly, if Luke wrote in the early-to-mid-60s, as his own words and silences seem to imply, it seems certain that Mark must have written at least a few years earlier, with Matthew perhaps doing likewise, even if the earliest version of Matthew differed from the text we know – the 2nd-Century writer Papias seems to have believed that Matthew originally wrote a collection of Jesus’ sayings “in a Hebrew dialect”.
Bringing forward dates in this fashion should cause us to ponder all the more carefully the historicity of the Gospel accounts. Scholars differ on the date of the Crucifixion, but generally date it to between 30AD and 33AD. If, as seems likely, Mark was written in the mid-50s, it clearly cannot be dismissed as an unreliable account, written many decades after the events it described, the product of tales told and retold, embroidered and reimagined, in a community that had never laid eyes on the man it hailed as the Messiah.
On the contrary, it’s quite plausible that its traditional identification, dating back at the very latest to the early years of the 2nd Century – as a narrative based on the eyewitness experiences of St Peter – could be correct. Similarly, Matthew’s, Luke’s, and John’s Gospels could be also be products of oral history – not simply oral tradition.
This, crucially, is central to the thesis of Bauckham’s widely-lauded Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Rehabilitating the oft-overlooked Papias, Bauckham deploys the kinds of approaches that are normal in mainstream ancient studies and shows how early Christians placed immense value on the testimony of identifiable eyewitnesses, with specifically identified witnesses being carefully alluded to in Gospel accounts in a fashion that was typical in ancient historical writing.
If we think about it, it shouldn’t really surprise us that the Gospels could have been written late in the generation after the Crucifixion: the eyewitnesses to the life of Christ were getting old, after all, and the evangelists wanted to preserve their testimony.
There are, of course, differences between the Gospel accounts, even of the Passion, but that’s in the nature of oral history – and Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution on divine revelation, calls for readers of the Bible to be alert to, among other things, literary genres. The Biblical authors are true authors, after all, and truth is differently presented in different ways throughout the varied books of the Bible, with the sacred authors expressing the truth “granted the circumstances of their time and culture”.
Those of us who’ve noticed how eyewitness accounts of, say, Blessed Oscar Romero’s funeral or the events of the 1916 Rising could differ a generation on from the events recalled and retold will hardly blink, therefore, at how there are differences of timing, phrasing, and details in the different Passion narratives: the core structural facts of the story remain constant, however they are recalled, and whichever truths are emphasised.
It’s worth noting, after all, that in his Jesus of Nazareth – Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, the then Pope Benedict XVI said that he believed the evidence marshalled and weighed by John P. Meier in A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus was convincing, and that the chronology of the Passion outlined in John’s Gospel is more likely to be right than that of the Synoptic Gospels. The Last Supper, then, was not a Passover meal, but, he later clarifies, it had the character of one, such that it should hardly surprise us that the early Christians should have had a tradition that identified it as one.
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While there are differences between the New Testament accounts of the Resurrection, they indisputably make a point of stressing the concrete nature of the Resurrection. Luke’s Gospel describes Jesus showing his wounds to the apostles, and pointing out how spirits do not have flesh and bones such as he does; with the apostles still having difficulty believing he was truly among them, Luke records, Jesus asked for something to eat and then ate a piece of fish. John, for his part, relates in his Gospel how Jesus had a breakfast of bread and grilled fish with the apostles and also records the famous tale of ‘Doubting’ Thomas, where Jesus urges him to reach out and touch the wounds in his hands and side. It is clear from these passages that the Evangelists were trying to emphasise the physical reality of the Resurrection.
Even aside from pondering the credibility of the Gospel evidence, it’s worth remembering too – as popular critics of Christianity so often fail to – that however we date the Gospels, the earliest of the Pauline letters date to around 50AD. Written within 20 years of the Crucifixion, 1 Thessalonians is a startlingly clear testimony to Christian beliefs in the first Christian generation, with Paul reminding his audience of how they “became servants of the real, living God, and how you are now waiting for Jesus, his Son, whom he raised from the dead, to come from Heaven to save us from the retribution which is coming”.
A few years later, Paul wrote to the Christians of Corinth, emphasising the importance of accepting the historical reality of the Resurrection.
“Well then, in the first place I taught you what I had been taught myself, namely that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures; that he appeared first to Cephas (Peter) and secondly to the 12,” he wrote.
“Next he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died,” he continued, “then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles; and last of all he appeared to me too; it was as though I was born when no one expected it.”
Although written in the mid-50s, this passage clearly reflects a rather earlier tradition, with it almost being a truism among Biblical scholars that the first sentence of this, if not the second, is a creedal statement, that is, a statement of belief Paul himself received in the mid-30s when he became a Christian after a period in which he had persecuted them.
The clear lesson here is that if the early Church was inventing traditions, including a tradition of Jesus’ resurrection, it was doing so very quickly, almost immediately after the Crucifixion, and doing so against a background where devotion to Christ could mean persecution and even death.
What’s more, there was no suggestion in early Christianity that Jesus’ resurrection was anything other than a concrete, bodily phenomenon: quite the opposite, in fact, and this despite Christianity arising in a Jewish context where such a resurrection had never been imagined, and where Christians stood apart from their older brothers by upholding as utterly central an idea that hitherto had been merely peripheral.
That, in essence, is the heart of the Christian conundrum as a historical religion, and one that sets it apart from other faiths with origins lost in the mists of time or with historically-attested founders who claimed to have had private revelations that were for them and them alone.
Christianity was born in daylight, with Jesus’s ministry, miracles, death, and resurrection all attested to by witnesses, and with there being, if Paul is to be believed, no shortage of these witnesses. It’s no accident that the Greek word for witness is ‘martyr’. The first Christians believed something unprecedented, and they were willing to put their bodies on the line for their Faith. None of them died for a metaphor.
