The resurrection narratives in the gospels are among the oddest stories ever written. At one level they are simple, brief and clear, at others complex and perplexing. Studying them carefully involves almost all the problems of studying the rest of the gospel narratives, with several extra complications added in for good measure.
I have waited until this point to introduce these stories—rather, one might think, like Beethoven making the choir wait for the first three movements of his ninth symphony before making their entrance—because the history of research shows that if one begins with them it is easy to get bogged down in a mass of detail and never emerge. More particularly, whatever we think of these stories, it is clear that they were told and retold, and finally written down, within the ongoing life of the early church, and it is therefore important that we come to them having already acquired as clear an understanding as possible of what that early church seems to have believed about resurrection in general and that of Jesus in particular. Hence the protracted study involved in Parts II and III above. In terms of our historical enquiry, we have now at last rolled away the heavy stone and can start to peer into the darkness of these most mysterious of all stories.
By the end of the previous Part we have arrived at a point where we can see that the life of early Christianity is inexplicable apart from the assumption that virtually all early Christians—except, of course, the small and late minority represented in the Nag Hammadi texts, in so far as some of them would want to be called Christian—did indeed believe that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised bodily from the dead, but with a transformed embodiment, not simply in a resuscitation to an identical body; and that this event was both the proleptic fulfilment of Israel’s great hope and something for which no one at the time had been prepared. This belief is the reason why early Christianity was, to its core, a ‘resurrection’ movement, with this hope standing at the centre, not the periphery, of its vision. This is the reason why it was a messianic movement, even though its ‘Messiah’ had died on a cross; why it remained a kingdom-of-god movement, even though the ‘kingdom’ had not arrived in any of the senses a second-Temple Jew might have hoped for. We have seen that this belief could involve telling, in a longer or shorter version, the basic story of Jesus and his death and resurrection, as in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 and, more briefly, in 1 Thessalonians 4:14. It would indeed be surprising if we did not have, in early Christian literature, other versions of the same tale.
So, indeed, we do; but the other versions we have—that is, the canonical gospel stories, and one further source (the Gospel of Peter) related to them—are themselves almost equally surprising. We have five accounts which, though they converge in some respects, also exhibit striking individual characteristics, not only in the ways the stories diverge in detail, but in the particular emphases they carry. This demands that we ask a string of questions about them: where did the stories come from? were they shaped by particular influences in the community? did the evangelists put their own particular stamp on them, making stories that already existed conform to their particular theology and interest, and if so to what extent and in what ways?
For many years now there has been a broad consensus of answers to these questions among many critical scholars from various backgrounds.1 There has always been plenty of disagreement, but the following account covers a good many influential writers.
What came first, according to this modern narrative, was a belief in Jesus’ exaltation. There then grew up ‘Easter legends’ about appearances and/or an empty tomb. Mark’s account, the first to be written, was short and mysterious, deliberately stopping with the women being so afraid that they said nothing to anyone. There are no actual appearances of the risen Jesus, and no announcement by the women, even to the disciples. All we have is an empty tomb (introduced into the tradition late in the day as an apologetic motif connected with these recently invented ‘Easter legends’) and an angel who says that Jesus will be seen in Galilee. Matthew’s account, written next, has Jesus appearing briefly to the women, and then, at only slightly more length, to the disciples in Galilee, where his closing words serve to round off several themes from earlier in Matthew’s gospel.
The modern consensus then continues with a hypothesis about further developments. As the first century winds towards its close, three problems begin to rear their heads. First, the problem which Ignatius addresses: was Jesus really human, or did he only ‘seem’ (dokeo, hence ‘docetism’) to be a true, flesh-and-blood being? This, it has been assumed, is the setting for Luke’s and John’s fuller, and more ‘bodily’, stories of the risen Jesus: breaking bread, expounding scripture, inviting Thomas to touch him, cooking breakfast by the shore. Second, the developed ‘Easter legends’, including stories of appearances and the empty tomb, create a problem: how does one relate these stories to the basic belief in Jesus’ exaltation? Thus there are invented, around the same time and in the same texts as the anti-docetic material, stories of an ‘ascension’ which affirms both the initial embodied resurrection and the exaltation, which is now seen as a second stage. Third, some versions of the broad consensus recognize a third problem in the early church: that of rival claims for apostolic authority, dealt with by telling stories which pit one apostle against another (the women against the men, Peter and John against one another, either or both of the latter against Thomas, and so on). Though there is wide disagreement about many details, the consensus that has emerged is that whatever may have happened a few days after Jesus’ death, the gospel accounts as we now have them, apart perhaps from Mark, do not take us very far towards a description of the first day of the week following the crucifixion, but rather put us in touch with the theology, exegesis and politics of the early church. Business as usual, in fact, for the modern, and now also the postmodern, critic.
One extra element which has emerged afresh in recent scholarship, and which must be taken into account, is the Gospel of Peter. Most scholars have considered it late, derivative and exhibiting quite a different view from the canonical texts; one scholar (J. D. Crossan) has argued, with considerable ingenuity, that it contains elements, including its ‘resurrection’ story, which go back very early and are in fact the major source for the canonical accounts. This question must now be addressed within a wider consideration of sources.
Where did the stories come from? Synoptic scholarship, notoriously, has found it difficult to reach any firm conclusions about the interrelationship of the texts at a literary level. It is of course virtually impossible for four sources to tell essentially the same story without using any of the same words. Look at four different accounts of the same football match, and ask yourself whether the word ‘goal’, common to all of them, indicates collusion among the journalists. But a glance at the Greek synopsis for even the start of the Easter story—Mark 16:1–8 and its parallels—shows that one could be forgiven for thinking that the evangelists had set out to see how different from one another they could possibly be.
I regard it as a more or less fixed point of synoptic criticism that Luke used Mark. But at this point he has told the story very much in his own way: a total of only sixteen words out of the 123 in Luke 24:1–9 correspond to equivalents in the 138 words of Mark 16:1–8.2 Nor are the parallels particularly significant: ‘on the first day of the week’; ‘to the tomb’, ‘when they arrived’, ‘you are seeking’, ‘he is not here, he is risen’.3 If Luke has ‘used’ Mark, we must conclude either that he has done so very freely or that he has had another source alongside, which he has almost exclusively preferred. Or maybe ‘using’ in this case means that he had the scroll of Mark on the table but was so accustomed to telling the story his own way that he glanced at it, decided he could do without it, pushed it to one side and got on without further reference to it.
The relationship between Mark and Matthew is a little closer. There are moments when it sounds as though we are listening to a version of the same text, though from this passage alone it would be impossible to say which of them has used the other. Even so, out of 136 words in the equivalent Matthew passage (28:1–8) there are only thirty-five which are matched in Mark.4 As for putting Matthew and Luke side by side, there are a bare ten or a dozen matching words, depending what we count as exact parallels.5 It is, though, worthy of note from this brief glance at the synopsis that there is solid agreement on the words of the angel to the women: he is not here, he is risen (literally, ‘he has been raised’, egerthe). From this point on, of course, Mark stops (we shall discuss the longer endings of Mark in due course), and Matthew and Luke go their separate ways.
John, meanwhile, pursues his own path from the very start, with only the faintest echoes of parallels, after opening words which are more or less identical to a combination of Luke and Matthew (‘on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb …’).6 His Mary, like Luke’s, sees the stone rolled away, but instead of going in she runs off to tell Peter and the beloved disciple. From there on the only overlaps in the whole story are between the different references to Jesus standing ‘in the midst’ in the upper room, showing them his hands and side, and making them joyful.7
The choice we are faced with, at the level of sources, seems clear. If there is literary dependence, the most likely place to look is between Matthew and Mark. But even there, if one has depended on the other, there has been such substantial rewriting that we might never know. Since the overlaps are either at places where one could hardly avoid it (the name of Mary Magdalene, the mention of the tomb) or, as in the rest of the synoptic tradition, at short, key sentences (‘he is not here, he is risen’), it is just as likely that the appearance of literary dependence is an illusion caused by a natural overlap in the swirling, incalculable world of oral tradition. And if that is so, since the hypothesis of at least some literary relationship seems likely for the synoptic gospels as wholes, we must assume that each of the evangelists had access to ways of telling this story which went back via different, though ultimately related, oral and perhaps written traditions.
Might it be possible, then, to trace stages in a pre-literary oral tradition by which these stories arrived at their present shape? Some have attempted to do so, by means of isolating fragments of the stories and arranging them in a hypothetical order of chronological development.8 But this process, not surprisingly, has produced very little agreement, for the obvious reason that we lack the historical grid against which to plot them. We have no map that would tell us which kinds of moss grew where in early Christianity, so that we could tell which pieces would be picked up by the rolling stone of tradition (always assuming that this rolling stone would disobey the general rule about stones and moss). In particular, the argument of chapter 18 below will lead us to question whether it would have been possible, within early Christianity, for stories of an empty tomb and stories of appearances of Jesus to have circulated in complete independence from one another. Without anticipating that later discussion, we may simply say that historical considerations about the rise of Christianity suggest that such stories must always have at least implied the existence of the other. At the level of method, in the case of the resurrection narratives we cannot use theories about literary units existing before the gospels took their present form as a way of probing the unknown period between Jesus and the evangelists. If we are to peer into that dark tunnel, it will only be when we have borrowed light from either end. There is no light in the tunnel itself that would illuminate, independently, that which lies beyond it.
It is difficult, then, to say very much about either literary sources or oral traditions. The latter certainly existed; Paul tells us as much in 1 Corinthians 15:3, even if we had not guessed. Paul’s story, in fact, looks like a brief summary of the other stories, including the crucifixion and burial, omitting some elements (the women) and adding others (the appearance to James, and the ‘five hundred at once’). But tracing the relationship between hypothetical sources is like looking for a black cat in a dark room—or, indeed, for a body in a tomb when the stone is still rolled against the door.
But what if a source should arrive like an unheard-of cousin, make itself at home, and come to be regarded as one of the family? Stringent criteria apply at such a moment. Examples in other fields are rare; one can imagine the searching questions musicologists would ask if a manuscript turned up in a Vienna attic purporting to be the third and fourth movements of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony. Sometimes a work already known turns out to be the missing link in a chain: I remember the excitement I felt when, following a tip-off from scholars working on Thomas More, I was able to publish a work, previously known simply as an anonymous sixteenth-century tract on the eucharist, among the authentic works of the early English reformer John Frith.9 So when scholars have speculated, as they sometimes have, that behind the canonical narratives of the passion and resurrection there must have been some kind of written source, and when a document describing those events turns up, the question of its origin, and its relation to the documents we already have, must be taken seriously.
The one text that raises these questions is the surviving fragment of the Gospel of Peter. This work was mentioned by Origen, Eusebius and Theodoret, but remained otherwise unknown until what seems to be a fragment of it was discovered, along with part of the Book of Enoch in Greek and another fragment now thought to be a separate apocalypse, in a monastic grave at Akhmim in Upper Egypt in the winter of 1886/7. In 1972 two fragments from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri were identified as coming from the same work, providing (together with Eusebius’ mention of Serapion in connection with the work) a terminus ad quem of the late second century. It has been suggested, not altogether implausibly, that the work was also known by Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis, pushing the date further back to the middle of the second century at the latest.10
Two different opinions have been canvassed by scholars ever since this text began to be evaluated. Some have argued that the text is dependent upon the canonical gospels (Zahn, Swete and most others); others, that it is independent of them (Harnack, Gardner-Smith). The great majority of scholars continue to follow Zahn and Swete, with increasingly detailed arguments to back up the point. However, in recent years Helmut Koester has argued that this work, though in its present form showing clear signs of dependence on the canonical gospels, must be traced back to an older, less worked-over version, which in its original form was independent of the canonical texts. And J. Dominic Crossan, in a substantial monograph and subsequent works, claims to have identified which parts of the fragment are later additions and hence which parts go back to an original which he dates in the 40s of the first century. He claims, further, that this original work (which he calls ‘The Cross Gospel’) was the single source for the passion and resurrection stories in the gospels, the rest of the canonical material being explicable in terms of the theological and political interests of the different subsequent authors.11
So that we can see what we are talking about, we may quote the relevant texts at some length. There are two segments which offer narratives of Easter day. The first is the one with the famous ‘speaking cross’:
Early in the morning, when the Sabbath dawned, there came a crowd from Jerusalem and the country round about to see the sepulchre that had been sealed. Now in the night in which the Lord’s day dawned, when the soldiers, two by two in every watch, were keeping guard, there rang out a loud voice in heaven, and they saw the heavens opened and two men come down from there in a great brightness and draw nigh to the sepulchre. That stone which had been laid against the entrance to the sepulchre started of itself to roll and give way to the side, and the sepulchre was opened, and both the young men entered in. When now those soldiers saw this, they awakened the centurion and the elders—for they also were there to assist at the watch. And whilst they were relating what they had seen, they saw again three men come out from the sepulchre, and two of them sustaining the other, and a cross following them, and the heads of the two reaching to heaven, but that of him who was led of them by the hand overpassing the heavens. And they heard a voice out of the heavens crying, ‘Hast thou preached to them that sleep?’ and from the cross there was heard the answer, ‘Yea.’12
This remarkable and dramatic presentation contains several features which seem to me and many others to mark it as a secondary production, dependent on the canonical sources and showing signs of later theological reflection. Despite the characteristic brilliance of his reconstruction, Crossan has won few supporters (an exception being P. A. Mirecki in the Anchor Bible Dictionary). Several scholars have rehearsed the arguments for resisting his proposal, both in general and in detail.13 There are many elements that seem to most readers conclusive evidence for the Gospel of Peter being later and more developed than the canonical parallels. I mention only eight. (1) Granted that all the resurrection accounts include exceedingly strange events, nothing in the canonical texts approaches the two enormous angels coming out of the tomb, supporting an even more enormous Jesus between them, and followed by a speaking cross. (2) As I shall argue below, it is far more likely that the almost total lack of explicit biblical reference in the canonical Easter stories, compared both with Paul and the rest of the New Testament on the one hand and with the Gospel of Peter on the other, is evidence of their being early rather than of them all having removed, in parallel but independent fashion, the signs of biblical exegesis which, for Crossan and others, ‘must have’ been there in the earliest accounts. (3) So, too, the strong anti-Jewish bias of the Gospel of Peter accords better with a later date. (4) The fact that a crowd of soldiers and Jewish leaders witness the resurrection is very unlikely to have been carefully omitted by all the canonical evangelists in order to make room instead for a few frightened women as the original witnesses. (5) Extra and historically impossible details have been added to the story; in this text, for instance, it is Herod rather than Pilate who sends Jesus to his death. (6) The text speaks of the resurrection happening on ‘the Lord’s Day’, a phrase which is only used in the canonical New Testament at Revelation 1:10.14 Had it stood in a pre-Markan text, would Mark have suppressed it? (7) If the canonical gospels have used the Gospel of Peter, they have all alike omitted several elements: the three men coming out of the tomb, two who had descended from heaven now supporting the third, is without parallel in the New Testament and seems to indicate a resuscitation, or perhaps the rescue of an almost-dead Jesus (if that is what is indicated by having him supported on either side), rather than anything like the resurrection narratives in the canonical gospels.15 And the speaking cross is of course without parallel elsewhere. (8) The meaning of the speaking cross is itself revealing. Crossan ingeniously declares the ‘cross’ to be a cruciform procession of the redeemed, the great multitude now ‘raised’ already by the action of Jesus in preaching to the sleepers.16 But it has to be said that the text itself shows no indication of this, nor is there anything in the other accounts of ‘preaching to the dead’ (1 Peter 3:19 and the tradition thereafter), or in later resurrection iconography, to suggest that the newly redeemed would form themselves up into a cruciform procession—even supposing such a thing to be thinkable, emerging from a first-century cave-tomb. The presence of this ‘harrowing of hell’ motif seems, in any case, to be a sign of a theological interpretation for which other early evidence is lacking.17
The second passage, in a section which Crossan thinks is later, and derived from the canonical gospels, describes Mary Magdalene and her friends going to the tomb to weep and bring spices. They wondered how they would remove the stone, but they came and found the tomb opened. Then, as they approached,
they stooped down and saw there a young man sitting in the middle of the sepulchre, handsome, and wearing a brightly shining robe. He said to them, ‘Why have you come? Who are you looking for? Surely not him that was crucified? He is risen and gone. But if you don’t believe, stoop this way and see the place where he lay, for he is not here. For he is risen and is gone to the place from which he was sent.’ Then the women fled in terror.18
The main difference between this and the canonical account is that the angels here tell the women that Jesus is not only risen but already ascended. The earlier part of the same passage contains various warnings against the Jews, who are said to be angry.19
There is nothing in the Gospel of Peter to suggest that it comes from a gnostic setting. It does not seem to belong with the Nag Hammadi documents in tone or content. And, though Serapion had heard that some parts of it were being used in support of a docetic Christology, it does not demand to be read this way. The text does not, then, show too many signs of what the later church came to regard as a heretical standpoint. The problem is more simple. It simply fails to carry conviction, on any theory of Christian origins that will hold water, as coming, in whole or in reconstructed part, from the period before the canonical gospels, let alone Paul.
It is impossible to tell with any precision what precisely the author of the Gospel of Peter believed about the nature of Jesus’ resurrection body. Was Jesus after all the figure being supported by the two angels? In what sense was he ‘risen’? Are the resurrection and ascension regarded as the same thing? There are too many other obvious agendas (not least polemic against ‘the Jews’, and the careful exoneration of Pilate) for any theory to find sufficient grounding. The Gospel of Peter remains an enigma, but an enigma which need not materially affect our assessment of the four major accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.
Form-criticism of the gospels has not been anything like as much in vogue in recent decades as it was between roughly 1920 and 1970. One of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that there is tacit recognition among New Testament scholars that the philosophical, hermeneutical and theological agendas of the early form-critics, notably Bultmann himself, were driving the project more than had originally been realized, and that it was time to step back and take a different look. I argued for this point in the first volume, and proposed, not the abolition of form-criticism, but a different way of doing it, working from the likely Jewish story-forms that the earliest followers of Jesus would naturally have adopted and towards the kind of forms that the stories might have taken when retold in an environment more attuned to, say, Cynic aphorisms.20 Here I presuppose that argument. It may indeed be possible to detect, from the form of a story, what kind of role it played in the early Christian community. But the way in which such attempts have been made in the past is probably not the best way forward now.
The resurrection stories are, in fact, very difficult to classify by the normal canons of form-criticism.21 They are dense and tight, and do not admit of easy hypotheses, on the basis of form alone, about their use within the community. The opening sequence in Matthew and Mark could conceivably be read as a pronouncement-story, with the punch-line being the word of Jesus (in Matthew) and the angel (in Mark) about going to Galilee.22 The Johannine story of Jesus’ encounter with Thomas reaches a similar climax with Jesus’ blessing on those who have not seen and yet have believed.23 But it would be bold to suggest (as used to be argued about some pronouncement-stories) that the narratives had developed simply as a showcase for these final words. Similarly, there is one miracle-story, the catch of fish in John 21:1–14; but it does not share all the features even of its closest parallel, the fishing story in Luke 5:1–11, and the way the fishing story (21:1–11) runs on smoothly to the breakfast scene (verses 12–14) makes us wonder whether it should be classified that way at all. The disciples’ amazement at the huge catch is not the final point of the story, as it would be in a normal miracle-tale. The main points are (1) the strange seeing of Jesus, knowing him yet still wanting to ask ‘Who are you?’ (verse 12), (2) John’s apparently deliberate echo of the much earlier story about Jesus distributing bread and fish, and perhaps (3) the significance John gives to the mention of this being the third resurrection appearance.24
The other story elsewhere in the gospels which is sometimes placed alongside the resurrection narratives is of course the transfiguration.25 Yet at the level of form, as well as of content—and here form and content are closely intertwined—there are significant differences. In the transfiguration story there is preparation for a vision, then the vision itself, and then some closing comments about what it might all mean. It is a reasonably typical vision-story, which the resurrection narratives are not. In particular, though they share some elements with the biblical accounts of visions (the appearance of an angel who tells people not to be afraid, a commission to the visionary to tell other people, and so on), the form is again different. Attempts to line up the resurrection narratives with other elements of the gospel tradition, the wider biblical tradition, or indeed the very different stories of empty tombs in the hellenistic novels, all fail.26 In fact, in terms of their form, these stories become, in themselves, a further element of early Christianity in need of historical explanation. Why did early Christianity not only get under way at all, but tell this kind of story, without antecedent or obvious parallel?
(iv) Redaction and Composition?
The more the stories go on, particularly of course in the fuller accounts of Luke and John, the more they reflect the style, and the theological interest, of the particular evangelist. This will emerge over the next four chapters. But even in the early section of the narrative (Mark 16:1–8 and parallels) some unique features appear. Because we cannot tell what literary relationship, if any, there was between the resurrection narratives, it is impossible to say whether, and if so to what extent, any of the gospel writers have consciously modified their sources in the interests of their own theology or other agendas. There are, however, tell-tale signs of the evangelists’ particular interests. We shall explore these in more detail in the chapters that follow; but a brief indication here will show what is going on.
The most obvious example is Luke’s angel telling the women, as Jesus himself will tell the two on the road and the eleven in the upper room, that the son of man must suffer and be raised (24:7). Another is John’s highlighting, even in the opening story, of the role of the beloved disciple. So too, notoriously, Mark’s strange comment about the women remaining silent for fear seems to belong with the commands to silence throughout the gospel (though, ironically, this was the moment when silence was no longer appropriate).27 Each of these we must examine more fully later on. But a more general redaction-critical comment must be made at this point.
Those redaction-critics who have attempted to reconstruct the world, the agenda, and the aims of the different evangelists have increasingly realized that they were, by and large, careful to describe Jesus as they supposed he was in his own day, not simply as though he were a member of their own church.28 Of course, if this point is taken seriously, it tends to pull the rug out from under a certain amount of form-criticism: if the evangelists are telling the story as though Jesus is talking to someone in a different setting to that of their own church, how much value can we place on a theory which depends for its validity on the stories circulating, and perhaps being invented in the first place, in order to address, not a situation in the life of Jesus, but a situation the church was facing at another time or place? Perhaps for this reason, some critics have envisaged the evangelists, sensitive to historical distance between themselves and Jesus, performing a clever ‘historicization’ upon original material which had no sense of an earlier setting. But this is unwarranted in the present case at least. There is no sign that these stories had a prior life reflecting the situation of a church in, say, the 40s or 50s, but that they have now been faked, like a modern piece of furniture being doctored to look like an antique, to produce a falsely ‘historicized’ sense.
In these stories above all, in fact, we have a sense that the evangelists are not saying ‘this is how it is for our own day, our own church’. Nor is there any hint of earlier versions which did intend to say that. Matthew’s Jesus will be with his people always, but they do not expect to go to a mountain in Galilee in order to meet him. Mark certainly did not want or expect his readers to ‘say nothing to anyone, because they were afraid’. Luke did not suppose that his readers might themselves walk down the road to Emmaus, or anywhere else for that matter, and meet an unrecognized stranger who would expound the scriptures to them and then reveal himself (and then disappear) while breaking bread at the supper table. John writes explicitly for a time when the church will no longer be able to see and touch the risen Jesus, but must believe without having seen. The last great beatitude in the gospel (‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,’ 20:29) elevates the difference between the first disciples and the later church into a principle.29
It is of course possible for all these stories to be read as ‘relevant’ to later times and places. Luke has told the Emmaus Road story so that it contains key elements of early church life to which he will then return in, for instance, Acts 2:42. John tells the story of the failed fishing trip, followed by Jesus’ command and the miraculous catch, well aware no doubt that Christian readers would take it as a picture of their own failed attempts at working for the kingdom and the remarkable results that might happen if they would only listen more clearly for the Lord’s command. The stories can indeed function as allegories or parables of what happens in the church, and the evangelists were certainly aware of that potential. But here again the historian’s disciplined imagination must be brought into play. If we start by supposing that the stories are in some way or other based on actual reminiscence of actual events, it is easy to see how they could come to be used in this extended sense. After all, if Jesus’ resurrection really was the start of the new covenant, the new creation, the new world in which the early church believed itself to be living, this is the kind of thing one might expect. But if we imagine the movement being made in the other direction we will discover that it is impossible. If the evangelists had started off with a lesson, theological, moral or practical, which they wanted to teach, and had attempted to develop ‘historicized’ Jesus-stories to serve as allegories of such lessons, they would not have come up with the kind of stories we have here.30 It is, in other words, easy to see how strange stories about meetings with Jesus, meetings of a sort which everybody in the early church knew did not happen in their own day, could be used for wider purposes. It is impossible to imagine this process happening in the other direction, for four reasons, which we must now examine.
(i) The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Stories
The first surprise when we read the resurrection stories in the canonical gospels ought to be that they are told with virtually no embroidery from the biblical tradition.31 This is itself remarkable for two reasons.
First, the evangelists have told their stories up to this point not only with a steady crescendo of drama and narrative tension—Jesus’ public career, his arrival in Jerusalem, the action in the Temple, the solemn warnings delivered on the Mount of Olives, the final meal, the arrest, the night hearing, the trial before Pilate, the crucifixion itself—but also with a persistent build-up of scriptural quotation, allusion, reference and echo. A glance at the biblical references in the margins of Mark 11–15 will make the point.32 Even the burial narrative has strong biblical resonances. After this, the resurrection narratives convey the naked feeling of a solo flute piping a new melody after the orchestra has fallen silent. Granted that the evangelists felt so free, as our own scholarly traditions have insisted, to develop, expand, explain, theologize and above all biblicize their sources, why did they refuse to do so, here of all places?
The second reason why this lack of biblical embroidery is remarkable is that, as we saw in 1 Corinthians 15:4 and throughout the subsequent tradition from Paul to Tertullian, from the earliest days of that tradition the resurrection of Jesus was seen as having occurred precisely ‘according to the scriptures’. Not only was it seen that way; it mattered vitally to the church that it be seen that way, in its preaching (Acts 2 and 13 are obvious examples), its self-explanation (1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 4 and 5), its confrontation with critics from outside (the line from Athenagoras to Tertullian), and so on. How easy it would have been, if the stories had developed along the lines the consensus imagined, to have one of the angels at the tomb, or one of the disciples, or even one of the women, or perhaps Jesus himself, give voice to a biblical passage which would do for this story what was done for so many others throughout the gospels! How easy it would have been, for instance, to have the story told in the elevated and dignified language of the fulfilment of prophecy. If we think for a moment of the marvellous passage in 1 Maccabees 14:4–15, which extols the reign of Simon Maccabaeus in high-flown language drawn from various biblical sources, we see how it could be done:
They tilled their land in peace;
the ground gave its increase,
and the trees of the plains their fruit …
He established peace in the land
and Israel rejoiced with great joy.
All the people sat under their own vines and fig trees,
and there was none to make them afraid.
No one was left in the land to fight them,
and the kings were crushed in those days.
He gave help to all the humble among his people;
he sought out the law, and did away with renegades and outcasts.
He made the sanctuary glorious,
and he added to the vessels of the sanctuary.33
This is the kind of thing one might have expected to occur, and quite naturally; but it never does. Matthew, at least, ought to have been capable of outdoing 1 Maccabees, but he never even tries. Not once do we hear his familiar line, ‘All this took place so that it might be fulfilled what was spoken by the prophets …’. John tells us that the two who ran to the tomb ‘did not yet know the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead’,34 but not only does he not tell us which scriptures he has in mind, he does not even hint at them in the story, here or later. Despite the fact that the rest of his book is so full of biblical language and imagery that it takes several books fatter than the original to tease them all out, the last two chapters, containing 56 verses, offer so far as I can see only four biblical allusions, only one of which is of real significance: in 20:22, Jesus breathes on the disciples so that they may receive the Spirit, which looks like a clear echo of Genesis 2:7 and perhaps other passages also.35 Of course, Luke loses no opportunity to tell us that what has happened to Jesus is what ‘must’ happen; the angels say it to the women, Jesus himself insists on it while walking to Emmaus, and he repeats the point in the upper room.36 But these Lukan stories, though in themselves consummate works of art, are not in themselves works of midrash or exegesis.37
It is revealing that one critic who has turned the hermeneutic of suspicion into an art form, writing eloquently elsewhere of the way the evangelists and/or their sources have ‘historicized prophecy’, not least in the crucifixion narratives, cannot even begin to say the same about the resurrection narratives.38 This, perhaps, is why he falls back on a different kind of suspicion, claiming that the resurrection stories were told to legitimate different authorities within the early church.39 But even if that were plausible (we shall see later that, by and large, it is not), this has not begun to explain why stories of this sort, narrating incidents of this sort, would come to be told. From very early on, as we have seen at length, the early Christians developed a sophisticated network of biblical exegesis in order to demonstrate that Jesus’ resurrection was exactly what one should have expected, and that it provided both the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes and prophecies and the groundwork for their own mission. But, though Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all clearly believe this to be the case, they have not told Easter stories which bring it out. For some reason, the narratives have remained biblically unadorned, and thus distinctly different from a good many of the other stories throughout the gospels, not least the crucifixion narratives which immediately precede them. I think there is an explanation for this; but it must wait until we have examined the other three surprising features of these stories.
(ii) The Strange Absence of Personal Hope in the Stories
The second feature of the resurrection narratives which should cause us considerable surprise is also to do with something they lack. Were this a different sort of book, I would be eager at this point to rub the point into the consciousness of those who organize Easter services, not least those who preach and choose hymns; but that must wait for another occasion. Simply in terms of our attempt to assess, as historians, what these stories think they are about, and where they belong in the early Christian scheme of things, it is extremely strange, and extremely interesting, that at no stage do they mention the future hope of the Christian.
This is, of course, counter-intuitive to most western Christians, Catholic and Protestant, conservative and liberal. A thousand hymns and a million sermons, not to mention poems, icons, liturgies and aids to meditation, have so concentrated on ‘life after death’ as the central problem, the issue which drives everything else, and have so distorted the Easter stories to feed this concentration, that it has long been assumed that the real point of the Easter story is both to show that there is indeed a ‘life after death’ and that those who belong to Jesus will eventually share it. As we have seen in reviewing the future hope of the Christian writers of the first two centuries, this is itself far too vague: the hope was, again and again, for bodily resurrection after ‘life after death’. But the significant thing to notice here is this: neither ‘going to heaven when you die’, ‘life after death’, ‘eternal life’, nor even ‘the resurrection of all Christ’s people’, is so much as mentioned in the four canonical resurrection stories. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wanted to tell stories whose import was ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you will be too’, they have done a remarkably bad job of it.40
Instead, we find a sense of open-ended commission within the present world: ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you have work ahead of you.’ This is very clear in Matthew, Luke and John; even in Mark the women have an immediate task (though whether they do it or not we must discuss later), and the angel’s message through them to the disciples, especially Peter, implies that they are going to be given things to do as well. This mission coheres closely with the missionary imperative displayed in Paul and Acts.
It does not, however, include any mention of the future resurrection, or of being ‘with Jesus’ in a post-mortem existence.41 And the real surprise is that this marks out the resurrection narratives from virtually every mention of resurrection in Paul and the rest of the New Testament outside the gospels and Acts, and virtually every mention of it in the post-canonical literature. When Paul speaks of Jesus’ resurrection he connects it again and again with that of his people; his greatest passages on the subject, 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 4 and 5, are focused on that question, and the tight argument of passages like Romans 8:9–11 and 1 Thessalonians 4:14 tie the two beliefs, the resurrection of Jesus and that of his people, tightly together. The first letter of Peter reflects exactly the same sequence of thought: by God’s great mercy you have been born again to a living hope, an incorruptible inheritance, through the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah from the dead.42 Paul is capable of referring to Jesus’ resurrection without immediately making the link: as we saw, he declares in opening and closing the theological argument of Romans that the resurrection validates Jesus’ Messiahship, his status as ‘son of god’, and his consequent status as the world’s true lord and ruler.43 But even there the connection of Jesus’ resurrection with that of all his people is implicit. He is marked out as ‘son of god’ ‘on the basis of the resurrection of the dead ones’ (ex anastaseos nekron, 1:4), which means more or less the same as Colossians 1:18, that Jesus rises as ‘the beginning, the first-fruits’. And Romans 15:12 highlights not just the rule of the risen Messiah over the nations, but the fact that ‘the nations shall hope in him’.
There are, then, a few places in early Christian literature where the resurrection of Jesus is mentioned without drawing a definite connection to the future hope of the Christian; but the great majority of references make the link explicit. In the gospels, however, it is not just a matter of the balance being the other way round. There is no balance. If all we had was the stories of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, we would never know that anyone ever interpreted the resurrection narratives as providing a basis for a future hope beyond the grave. The stories are about something else altogether: the vindication of Jesus, the validation of his messianic claim, and the commissioning of his followers to act as his heralds, announcing to the world its new, surprising, but rightful lord. This, like the first surprising feature, must await an explanation until after we have examined the other two in our list.
(iii) The Strange Portrait of Jesus in the Stories
There is a third feature of the resurrection narratives which should surprise us, especially when we think back to chapter 4 and reflect on the second-Temple Jewish expectation of resurrection. If, as the consensus view has tended to say, these stories developed as the church pondered scripture and expressed and re-expressed its faith, we should have expected the resurrection stories to reflect the kind of things that the favourite ‘resurrection’ passages in the Old Testament had been saying.
But they do not. To begin with, Jesus is never depicted, in these stories, as a heavenly being, radiant and shining. The brilliant light of the transfiguration is significantly absent, which does rather upset the old theory that it is a misplaced resurrection tale. (So too is the fact that the disciples have no problem recognizing Jesus, despite the radiance.) The sightings of, and meetings with, Jesus are not at all like the heavenly visions, or visions of a figure in blinding light or dazzling radiance, or wreathed in clouds, that one might expect to find in the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, or in connection with Merkabah mysticism.44 Whatever we say about Paul’s conversion (chapter 8 above), these stories are not at all like that.45 Whatever account we give of the vision of Jesus in Revelation 1, there is nothing in the gospel narratives that corresponds to it. They are not, that is, the sort of thing one would expect if the evangelists or their sources had wanted to say that Jesus had been exalted to a position of either divinity or heavenly glory. Nor are they the kind of thing that would have been said if the tradition had begun by wanting to say that Israel’s god had approved Jesus’ project, that his death was a success not a failure, and that the Bible had now been fulfilled. Jesus appears in the narrative as, in this respect, a human being among human beings.
We can test this out easily enough by thinking of the favourite ‘resurrection’ texts in second-Temple Judaism. Suppose for a minute that a Christian community, or an individual Christian writer, in the 40s, 50s or 60s of the first century, had been studying the scriptures, and now wanted to tell the story of Jesus’ death and of the divine approval of him in terms of a fictitious ‘resurrection’, and to do so in such a way as to reflect the biblical context. Which scriptural texts would they go to? The one which towers above the rest, in Judaism of both this period and later, is Daniel 12:2–3:
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.
As we saw earlier, this text was picked up by Jesus’ contemporary, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, when he predicted that the righteous would shine forth and run like sparks through the stubble.46 But the gospel narratives of Jesus’ resurrection are innocent of all this. Why do they not have Jesus shining like a star?
On the other hand, Jesus is almost routinely depicted in these stories as having a human body with properties that are, to say the least, unusual. The same Lukan text that tells us that Jesus ate broiled fish, and invited his followers to touch him and see he was real, also tells us that Jesus appeared and disappeared at will, that at one of these appearances two close friends and colleagues did not recognize him, and that in the end he was taken up into heaven.47 The same Johannine text that tells us that Jesus invited Thomas to touch him, indeed, to put his finger and hand into the marks of the nails and the spear, is the text that has Jesus twice entering through locked doors, speaking of a ‘going up to the father’ which he must yet accomplish, and being only half recognized even when in the familiar act of serving food.48 The same text that has Jesus meeting his followers on the mountain, and commissioning them for worldwide disciple-making, allows that ‘some doubted’.49 It is at this point, as C. S. Lewis once wrote, that awe and trembling should fall on us (not, I grant, a familiar phenomenon among historical critics).50 What are these stories trying to tell us?
The one thing they can not be trying to do, despite a long tradition of scholarship which I have already mentioned, is to disprove docetism.51 It seems to me totally incredible that stories like these, especially those in Luke and John, represent a late development of the tradition in which for the first time people thought it appropriate or necessary to speak of the risen Jesus being solidly embodied. The idea that traditions developed in the church from a more hellenistic early period (in this case, a more ‘non-bodily’ view of post-mortem existence) to a more Jewish later period (in this case, a more embodied ‘resurrection’) is in any case extremely peculiar and, though widely held in the twentieth century, ought now to be abandoned as historically unwarranted and simply against common sense. If there was likely to be development, the model we find in Josephus, for example, suggests that we might expect a hellenistic-style ‘spiritualizing’ of the tradition, not a re-Judaizing of it. It is far more likely that a very Jewish perception of how things were, in very early Christianity, gave way, under certain circumstances, to a more hellenistic one by the end of the century—though that itself would need careful investigation before we simply assumed it. In the cases before us, it makes no sense to think of Luke sitting down to compose an anti-docetic narrative about the genuine human body of Jesus and allowing himself so far to forget this important purpose as to have Jesus appear and disappear, not be recognized, and finally ascend into heaven. Similar things must be said of John.52
Nor, again, are the surprising features of the portrait to be explained as a reading back of theological points from Paul or the later tradition. Paul, too, holds, as we have seen, a view of Jesus in which he is both embodied and somehow different, as the ground of his view that the ultimate redeemed human nature will be both bodily and transformed. But whereas Paul’s notion of transformation highlights incorruptibility (the fact that neither the risen Jesus nor his risen and transformed people will ever again face death), nowhere do the pictures of the risen Jesus in the gospels make any mention of this striking fact. It is as though they are talking about ‘transphysicality’, in the sense I defined it at the end of chapter 10, but have not yet begun to come to terms with it or to figure out its implications.
We are still left with the historical puzzle of accounting for the surprising stories of the risen Jesus which we find in Matthew, Luke and John. There is one more surprise to be noted before we can propose a solution.
(iv) The Strange Presence of the Women in the Stories
One of the most obvious things in common between the four canonical narratives, over against the Gospel of Peter and the tradition in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 (perhaps the only thing those two texts have in common), is that they begin with women. This leads to possibly the most obvious of the four strange things about these stories, which can therefore be stated briefly.
All kinds of questions have been raised about what the women were doing at the tomb, from a historical point of view (were they really going to anoint the body? was this part of a standard lament-process? which women are we talking about, anyway?) and from a literary point of view (the role of the women in the different accounts).53 A great deal has been said about the role of Mary Magdalene in particular. But there the women are. Granted the very early tradition of 1 Corinthians 15, where did they come from?54
It is, frankly, impossible to imagine that they were inserted into the tradition after Paul’s day. This is not because of a supposed shift during the first generation from an early period in which women were accepted as full members to a later period when male dominance reasserted itself. We have no evidence to help us plot such a graph. Rather, the tradition which Paul is quoting, precisely for evangelistic and apologetic use, has carefully taken the women out of it so that it can serve that purpose within a suspicious and mocking world. But this only goes round the edge of the issue. The underlying point is more ruthlessly historical.
Even if we suppose that Mark made up most of his material, and did so some time in the late 60s at the earliest, it will not do to have him, or anyone else at that stage, making up a would-be apologetic legend about an empty tomb and having women be the ones who find it. The point has been repeated over and over in scholarship, but its full impact has not always been felt: women were simply not acceptable as legal witnesses.55 We may regret it, but this is how the Jewish world (and most others) worked. The debate between Origen and Celsus shows that critics of Christianity could seize on the story of the women in order to scoff at the whole tale; were the legend-writers really so ignorant of the likely reaction? If they could have invented stories of fine, upstanding, reliable male witnesses being first at the tomb, they would have done it.56 That they did not tells us either that everyone in the early church knew that the women, led by Mary Magdalene, were in fact the first on the scene, or that the early church was not so inventive as critics have routinely imagined, or both. Would the other evangelists have been so slavishly foolish as to copy the story unless they were convinced that, despite being an apologetic liability, it was historically trustworthy?57
The argument thus works in the same way as our previous ones. It is easy to imagine that, when a tradition was established for use in preaching to outsiders, stories of women running to the tomb in the half-light would quietly be dropped, and a list produced of solid witnesses who could be called upon to vouch for what they had seen.58 It is not easy at all—in fact, I suggest, it is virtually impossible—to imagine a solid and well-established tradition, such as that in 1 Corinthians 15, feeling itself in need of some extra stiffening in the first place, or, if such a need was felt (why?), coming up with a scatter of women on a dark spring morning. The stories may all have been written down late in the first century. We do not know (despite repeated scholarly assertions) exactly when the evangelists first put pen to paper. But we must affirm that the story they tell is one which goes back behind Paul, back to the very early period, before anyone had time to think, ‘It would be good to tell stories about Jesus rising from the dead; what will best serve our apologetic needs?’ It is far, far easier to assume that the women were there at the beginning, just as, three days earlier, they had been there at the end.59
There are only two options that will account for these stories being what they are; and I find the first frankly incredible.
We could say, as historically minded readers of these texts, that Matthew, Luke and John (Mark’s eight-verse ending does not, of course, bring the risen Jesus on stage) have acquired, from Paul and the other early Christians, a particular theology of resurrected humanity: of human bodies being neither abandoned to rot, nor yet resuscitated into the identical sort of condition they were in before, but somehow transformed, so that they are puzzlingly the same and yet different. This ‘transphysicality’ would represent a theological view of new humanity for which Jewish belief in resurrection had in some ways prepared the ground, but which goes beyond anything we find in non-Christian Jewish texts of the period. As it stands, it is without historical precedent.
We would then have to say, pursuing this line, that the three evangelists who mention Jesus’ appearance have turned this theology of transphysicality, the one we find in all the major writers from 1 Corinthians to Origen, into significantly different narratives about Jesus (Matthew’s Jesus standing on the mountain, Luke’s walking on the road to Emmaus, John’s cooking breakfast by the shore) which show no sign of mutual influence, but which all possess this same, strange, like-and-yet-not-quite-like characteristic. We would have to say, in addition, that the evangelists, producing these largely independent and very different stories, have all avoided mentioning the analysis of the like-and-yet-not-quite-like risen humanity which Paul and the others give (that the present body is corruptible, and the risen body will be incorruptible); and that, instead, they all focus on recognition and non-recognition, on the risen body of Jesus doing some things that ordinary bodies do and other things that ordinary bodies never do.
Furthermore, had they been attempting to speak of continuity and discontinuity between the present body and the risen one within the framework of biblical reflection common to mainstream first-century Judaism, they could have reached for an obvious solution, based on Daniel 12: while the present body remains non-luminous, they could have had the risen body shining like a star. Instead, this first option requires that the three evangelists have invented these three quite different stories of a Jesus who is both recognized and not recognized, who comes and goes through locked doors, who is solidly physical, with wounds still visible, and yet who seems to belong in two dimensions at once (‘heaven and earth’?—in other words, the human and divine dimensions of reality—though this is never spelled out), so that it appears, to them at least, natural for him, after a while, to leave the ordinary, human dimension of the cosmos (‘earth’) and to go, still embodied, into the other one (‘heaven’).60
We would have to go further again. We would have to say that Matthew, Luke and John, in writing these very different stories which all, remarkably enough, shared this characteristic, managed at the same time, presumably independently, to abstract from these stories the feature they would surely have had, if they had been invented on the basis of the theology we know from Paul and elsewhere, namely the all-pervasive biblical exegesis, allusion and echo. If, as a first-century Bible-reading writer, you started with Paul’s theology, or indeed that of Revelation or Ignatius, and tried to turn that theology of resurrection into an artful, just-as-if-it-happened-yesterday sort of narrative, it would be extremely difficult to avoid reference to scripture. If you try to imagine three such people doing it independently and coming up with three different stories which nevertheless all share this remarkable feature, in addition to the others we have noted, I think you will find it incredible. I certainly do.
The same is true in relation to the strange absence of any mention of the future post-mortem hope of Christians. Supposing a Christian group, or several individuals, who had pondered the developing resurrection-belief of the early church, not least as we see it in Paul, were to write a story about ‘what really happened’ as a way of turning into an aetiological myth the burgeoning belief that Jesus’ resurrection was the model and the means for the Christian future hope. By the 50s of the first century, Christians who thought of Jesus’ resurrection also thought (among many other things) of their own. The more Christians were persecuted, and the more they began to die in some numbers (the problem addressed directly in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, and brought in alongside in 1 Corinthians 15:18), the more this theme of hope beyond the grave, based firmly on Jesus’ own resurrection, would have been an inevitable part of any resurrection stories that might be invented. It would have been almost impossible to keep this element out of the new-spun narrative. It is completely unbelievable that four writers would have come up with very different Easter stories and that each one, by a kind of tacit agreement, would have omitted all mention of this increasingly important theme.
Finally, the same is true when we consider the place of the women in the narratives. The point is obvious and often made. Nobody inventing stories after twenty years, let alone thirty or forty, would have done it like that.
There are other similar points as well; indeed, once you begin to reflect on this set of questions all sorts of things come and make themselves at home in the picture. In particular, if it is true that stories of people meeting Jesus were invented in order to legitimate leaders in the early church, it is remarkable that we hear nothing, throughout the gospel stories, of James the brother of Jesus. The only time anyone mentions him as a witness of the resurrection is in 1 Corinthians 15:7. But on the frequently made assumption about the origins of the stories, he should have been here as well. Why does he, too, not run a race against Peter? Would that not have been a convenient fiction to clothe early ecclesial power struggles? The more we try to envisage the first option—the resurrection stories as late inventions—the harder it becomes.
But think of the other option. Try running the movie back to front. Supposing that by Paul’s day all early Christians believed that something extremely strange had happened to Jesus, the strangeness consisting not least in this, that though he was bodily alive again, his body was somehow different. Supposing Paul was providing a theoretical, theological and biblical framework for stories which were already well known—stories which, indeed, he is summarizing when he quotes an already official formula at the start of 1 Corinthians 15. Supposing the stories in Matthew, Luke and John—though almost certainly not written down until after Paul had dictated his last letter—were what they were, not because they were a late writing up, or wholesale invention, of what post-Pauline Christians thought ought to have happened, but precisely because they were not. What if they represented, with only light editing, the stories that had been told very early on, without offering theories about what sort of a thing this new, risen body might be, without attempting (except at the level of minor adjustments) to evoke wider theological themes, without adding the element of hope for one’s own resurrection, and in particular without the biblical quotations or allusions that might have done for these stories what was done for so many, so recently in the same books. Supposing the reason nobody evoked Daniel 12 in the Easter stories was that everybody knew that the risen body of Jesus had not shone like a star? Supposing, wider, that the reason nobody evoked the Old Testament in the gospel accounts of the resurrection was that there was no immediately apparent point of connection between Jesus’ resurrection and the narratives of Jewish tradition? Supposing, in other words, that these stories have the puzzled air of someone saying, ‘I didn’t understand it at the time, and I’m not sure I do now, but this is more or less how it was.’
I find this second option enormously more probable at the level of sheer history.61 I can understand, as a historian, how stories like this (and perhaps other similar ones which we do not have) would create a puzzle which the best brains of the next generations would wrestle with, using all their biblical and theological resources. I cannot understand, however, either why anyone would develop that theology and exegesis unless there were stories like this to generate the puzzle, or how that theology and exegesis, formed thus (one would have to suppose) by a kind of intellectual parthenogenesis, would then generate three independent stories from which, in each case, all those developed elements had been carefully removed. The very strong historical probability is that, when Matthew, Luke and John describe the risen Jesus, they are writing down very early oral tradition, representing three different ways in which the original astonished participants told the stories. These traditions have received only minimal development, and most of that probably at the final editorial stage, for the very good reason that stories as earth-shattering as this, stories as community-forming as this, once told, are not easily modified. Too much depends on them.62
This is not an argument for the historical accuracy of the gospel accounts. I have not yet reached the point where we can even contemplate what that might look like. It is an argument for the accounts being chronologically as well as logically prior to the developed discussions of the resurrection which we find in Paul and many subsequent writers. They describe more or less exactly that for which Paul and the others provide a theological and biblical framework and from which they draw further eschatological conclusions: an event involving neither the resuscitation nor the abandonment of a physical body, but its change into a new mode of transformed physicality, what I have called ‘transphysicality’; that is, an event for which there was no precedent, for which indeed in very precise terms there was no prophecy as such, and of which there remained in their day, and remains still in our own day, no subsequent example. The gospel stories are not dependent on Paul. Nor does he refer to them directly, except in so far as the tradition he quotes in 1 Corinthians 15 is a summary of them, or of others like them. But irrespective of when the gospels reached their final form, the strong probability is that the Easter stories they contain go back to genuinely early oral tradition.
This extremely important conclusion can be supported by a better known argument which, though frequently discounted, should still be allowed some force. We have been pondering the stories of the risen Jesus presented by Matthew, Luke and John. These stories barely overlap at all (Luke and John both have Jesus in the upper room on the first evening; in both, he speaks of the coming of the Spirit to equip the disciples for mission; but the accounts are otherwise completely different). But where the gospels do overlap, as we saw earlier in looking for possible literary relationships between them, they tell the same story in extremely different ways. The surface inconsistencies between Mark 16:1–8 and its parallels, of which so much is made by those eager to see the accounts as careless fiction,63 is in fact a strong point in favour of their early character. The later we imagine them being written up, let alone edited, the more likely it would be that inconsistencies would be ironed out. The stories exhibit, as has been said repeatedly over the last hundred years or more, exactly that surface tension which we associate, not with tales artfully told by people eager to sustain a fiction and therefore anxious to make everything look right, but with the hurried, puzzled accounts of those who have seen with their own eyes something which took them horribly by surprise and with which they have not yet fully come to terms. This, again, does not prove either that the stories were in fact originally told by eye-witnesses or that everything they say represents a photographic record of what took place. But it strongly supports the idea that they were early, that they were not assimilated either to each other or to developed New Testament theology, and that the inconsistencies between them should not be allowed to stand in the way of taking them seriously as historical sources.
In fact, the accounts all tell a story which, in general terms, can be summarized without doing violence to any of them. All four agree that the key events took place early in the morning on the first day of the week on the third day after Jesus’ execution. All four agree that Mary Magdalene was at the tomb; Matthew, Mark and Luke agree that another woman was there too, and Mark and Luke add others. All agree that the stone presented an apparent problem, but that the problem was solved without the women having to do anything. All agree that an unusual stranger, an angel or near equivalent, met and spoke to the women. Matthew and John agree that Mary Magdalene then met Jesus (Matthew, of course, has the other Mary there too). All except Mark agree that Mary (and the other women, if they are mentioned) go off to tell the male disciples; Luke and John agree that Peter and another disciple then go to the tomb to see for themselves.
This, by the way, is an interesting point at which a wrong conclusion could easily be drawn. Luke 24:12 has Peter getting up, running to the tomb, stooping down and looking in, seeing the grave-clothes and going away again. This sounds as though only he is involved. But when the two on the road to Emmaus tell the anonymous stranger what had happened that morning, they say (24:24) that ‘some of our number’ went to the tomb and found it as the women had said. Luke is quite capable of highlighting one person when he knows, and tells us later, that more than one was involved. We might compare Luke’s own three different accounts of Paul’s conversion; or Josephus’ different accounts of events in which he himself was involved, as between the War and the Life. If Luke can say that there was one person, and then later that there was more than one, the numerical differences between the different accounts of the women and the angels cannot be regarded as serious historical problems.64
From that point, of course, the stories diverge more sharply. Mark’s angel tells the women that they and the male disciples will see Jesus in Galilee; Matthew’s Jesus does indeed appear there (though actually he appears briefly in Jerusalem as well, in 28:9). Luke’s Jesus only appears in and near Jerusalem, and never speaks of going to Galilee, but rather of the need for the disciples to stay in Jerusalem itself. John’s Jesus appears first in Jerusalem, and then later in Galilee. If John had not existed, and some bright harmonizer were to declare that the solution to the Mark/Luke divide on this point was that Jesus appeared in both places, such a person would be howled down. The fact that John does it, and that, however fleetingly, Matthew does so too, may, of course, mean that they attract the howls instead, but it might also cause us to pause before making hasty judgments.65
I suggest, in fact, that the stories must be regarded as early, certainly well before Paul; and that, when placed side by side, they tell a tale which, despite the multiple surface inconsistencies, succeeds in hanging together. To put it crudely, the fact that they cannot agree over how many women, or angels, were at the tomb, or even on the location of the appearances, does not mean that nothing happened. We should not try to domesticate the stories, either by forcing every last detail into an over-simple harmony,66 or by forcing them (at least as much violence is required, if not more) into an over-simple hermeneutic of suspicion where they can be explained as the back-projection of later theology or as coded messages in support of the ‘political’ or ‘leadership’ claims of the different disciples involved.67 We should treat them as the key pieces of evidence for answering the question which has built up throughout Parts II and III of this book: why did early Christianity begin in the first place, and why did it take this shape—particularly in relation to its beliefs about resurrection, and also in relation to its beliefs about Jesus? If we had asked that question without knowing of the existence of Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24 and John 20 and 21 (this is the fiction we have tried to maintain until this chapter), and had then come upon these chapters for the first time, we would have known that our question had found its answer.
These stories too, of course, provide evidence not directly for what happened but for what several different people thought had happened. (I do not wish to retreat from the critical realist position advanced in Part II of The New Testament and the People of God; I am simply concerned to be absolutely sure, here of all places, that I do not appear to smuggle into my historical argument anything more than it will bear.) The stories are, at this moment in our enquiry, answers to the question: why did early Christianity begin, and why did it take this shape? The answer is: because the early Christians believed that something had happened to Jesus after his death, something to which the stories in the four canonical gospels are as close as we are likely to get. I propose, in short, that the four canonical resurrection accounts, granted the presence in all of them of editorial features which we shall examine presently, almost certainly go back to oral traditions which provide the answer to the question of the origin and shaping of Christianity. The question which this then poses is, of course, the crucial one: what caused the earliest Christians to believe that something like this happened, and to tell this sort of story?
That is the question we must address in the final Part of the book. For the remainder of this Part, to fill in details and to make sure we are on firm ground, we must examine each of the four accounts in its own right.