Matthew goes his own way and poses his own problems. He has two stories, each of them in two parts, which mark him out from the other gospels: a pair of earthquakes, and a guard of soldiers who get bribed to tell tales. In the middle of all this, we have a story of the finding of the empty tomb, quite similar to Mark’s though with significant differences. His narrative then concludes with a final commissioning on a mountain in Galilee.
We had better deal with the problems first, since they frame, colour and contextualize the central story. This will open the way for a consideration of Matthew’s unique contribution to the early Christian understanding of Easter and its meaning.
2. Ruptured Earth and Rising Corpses
Matthew alone, in his account of Jesus’ crucifixion, includes the extraordinary tale of an earthquake and what seems to be a localized but quite large-scale rising from the dead. Immediately after Jesus has breathed his last,
Behold, the veil of the Temple was torn (eschisthe) in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were torn apart (eschisthesan), and the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the sleeping saints were raised, and going out of the tombs after his arising they went into the holy city and appeared to many.
When the centurion and those with him, guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and the things that happened, they were greatly afraid, and said, ‘Truly, this man was God’s son!’1
This account presents all kinds of puzzles, not least at the level of what Matthew actually thinks is going on, and what he thinks it all means.2 Is the earthquake intended to explain how the Temple veil was torn apart? Does he imply that the centurion and the others saw the tombs opening and corpses getting ready to emerge? Why does he say they only came out after Jesus’ resurrection, two days later? What were they doing in between? And what happened to them next? Matthew did not suppose, did he, that they remained alive and resumed some kind of normal life? Did he think, then, that having ‘appeared to many’, they returned to their tombs, like the ghosts in Ruddigore, and lay down again?3
I do not think we can find certain answers to any of these questions—which may of course mean that they are, as we say, the wrong questions to be asking. But the obvious starting-point for assessing Matthew’s meaning is to examine the biblical echoes which, like the sleepers themselves, are awoken in this account (though not, as we noted in chapter 13, in the Easter narrative itself).
The natural starting-point is Ezekiel 37:12–13, where YHWH declares to Israel in exile that he will ‘open your graves and lead you out of your graves’ (the wording in the LXX is close to Matthew 27:52–3), and bring Israel back to her own land. As we have seen, what started as metaphor for Ezekiel was already by the first century being understood as literal prediction, though still as part of the expectation of national restoration. Matthew (or his source; but Matthew’s use of the Bible elsewhere suggests that this may well be his own work) seems to be echoing this entire tradition.
The two other prominent biblical ‘resurrection’ passages are also echoed here. Isaiah 26:19 predicts that the dead will arise, ‘and those in the tombs shall be aroused’, with the LXX again finding an echo in the Greek of Matthew 27:52–3. Daniel 12:2 speaks of ‘many of those who sleep’ being awoken and raised up, and though Matthew uses a different word for ‘sleep’ from either the LXX or Theodotion, his description of ‘many bodies of the saints that slept’ is probably a deliberate allusion to the passage, which he may after all have known best in Hebrew.4
What do these allusions tell us about Matthew’s intention? There are basically four options.
1. He may know a tradition which speaks of these strange happenings, and is retelling it in such a way as to give a biblically alert reader a sense of their meaning: this is the real return from exile, the dawn of the new age, and perhaps even the harrowing of hell.
2. This may be Matthew’s vivid way of speaking of the crucifixion of Jesus as the apocalyptic act of Israel’s god. He may have invented this story with the intention, not that it would be taken as a set of events, but that it would be seen as a dramatic metaphor for what happened at the cross.5
3. Matthew may perhaps know the tradition we find in the Gospel of Peter, in which three men come out of the tomb, followed by the cross, which answers ‘Yes’ to the question, ‘Have you preached to those who sleep?’ His story may be a variation on this: this is the moment when ‘the resurrection’ happened, at least in principle.6
4. Matthew, or his tradition, may simply have invented a story designed to fit with, and ‘fulfil’, Ezekiel 37, Isaiah 26, Zechariah 14 and Daniel 12, or other subsequent Jewish texts.7
We may take these in reverse order. The fourth option is not particularly likely. There are obvious echoes, as we have seen. But it would be strange for a first-century Jew to imply, as these biblical resonances would, that the final national restoration of Israel had occurred, or that the general resurrection had itself happened, when clearly neither of them had. Although Daniel 12:2 speaks of ‘many’ of the sleepers awakening, allowing at least for the interpretation that this might be a limited number rather than all of the righteous, it would be straining credibility to think of Matthew, or his source, inventing a story about ‘many’—presumably a few dozen at most—rising from the dead as though this were to constitute a ‘fulfilment’ of Daniel or Ezekiel which would somehow supplement the fulfilment which the evangelist, in company with the whole early church, saw in the resurrection of Jesus himself. There is no reason elsewhere in second-Temple Judaism to suppose that anyone imagined that Ezekiel, Isaiah and Daniel would be fulfilled by this kind of event.8
The possibility that Matthew knew the Gospel of Peter is, in my opinion, remote. Apart from the strenuous advocacy of J. D. Crossan, only a handful of scholars have suggested such a thing.9 In particular, Crossan’s interpretation of the ‘cross’ that follows the three men out of the tomb as a cruciform procession of the redeemed seems to me to strain the reading of the text quite unbearably; his suggestion that it thus belongs in the same strand of tradition, or indeed theology, as Matthew’s multiple raising of dead saints is very far-fetched. It is much easier historically to envisage the Gospel of Peter as a later text, dependent on both Matthew and 1 Peter as well as other texts, than to see it as a source for them or any other of the canonical writings.10
The second option is not particularly likely. There was no reason within pre-Christian Judaism to understand the death of a would-be Messiah as precipitating the general resurrection, or even a small anticipation of it such as this seems to be.11 Even in a more developed Christian tradition, one might expect such a thing to happen, if at all, as a result of Easter itself, not the crucifixion—though of course Matthew does give us the awkward two-day time-lag between the bodies being aroused and their emerging for a walk around Jerusalem, and this may have been a way of bringing a strange tradition more into line with perceived theological sense.
But this is already pushing us towards the first option: that Matthew knows a story of strange goings-on around the time of the crucifixion, and is struggling to tell it so that (1) it includes the desired biblical allusions, (2) it makes at least some minimal historical sense (the earthquake explains the tearing of the Temple veil, the opening of tombs, and particularly the centurion’s comment), and (3) it at least points towards, even if it does not exactly express, the theological meaning Matthew is working towards: that with the combined events of Jesus’ death and resurrection the new age, for which Israel had been longing, has begun.12 There may even be an allusion, here and in 28:2, to the predictions of Jesus in 24:7; but that may just be coincidence.
Matthew knows perfectly well, of course, that the bodies he speaks about were not still walking around, and he makes no attempt to explain what happened to them. He knows equally well that the church is still awaiting the final, complete general resurrection when, again with a sideways glance towards Daniel 12, the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father (13:43). In other words, he is not saying that this really was the great general resurrection; it was a strange semi-anticipation of it.
Of one thing we may be sure. This story was not written in order to embody or express the theology of Paul or the other New Testament writers. Though Hebrews speaks of women ‘receiving their dead by resurrection’, and of others who accepted torture and death because they were ‘looking for a better resurrection’, neither that writer nor any others referred to such events in connection with Jesus’ own death. And Paul is quite clear: ‘those who belong to the Messiah’ will be raised, as a single event, at his parousia.13
Matthew is very unlikely to have wanted, by telling this story, to upstage his own account of Jesus’ resurrection, and of course the picture of the latter event in chapter 28 has several features which distinguish the risen Jesus dramatically from the awakened sleepers of chapter 27. But the accounts have this in common: that on the Sunday morning, as well as the Friday afternoon, there was a great earthquake, which resulted in the opening of a tomb. Actually, the way Matthew has told the latter story it looks as though the arrival of the angel, and the rolling away of the stone, was the cause of the second earthquake, rather than, as in 27:51–2, the result of it.14 Some, of course, have suggested that there was actually one earthquake, not two, but the way Matthew has told the story it looks as though he means the incidents to be separate.15
It is impossible, and for our purposes unnecessary, to adjudicate on the question of historicity. Things that we are told by one source only, when in other respects the sources are parallel, may be suspect, especially when events like earthquakes were (as 24:7 makes clear) part of the stock in trade of apocalyptic expectation. But it remains the case that the events Matthew describes in 27:51–3, as well as being without parallel in other early Christian sources, are without precedent in second-Temple expectation, and we may doubt whether stories such as this would have been invented simply to ‘fulfil’ prophecies that nobody had understood this way before. This is hardly a satisfactory conclusion, but it is better to remain puzzled than to settle for either a difficult argument for probable historicity or a cheap and cheerful rationalistic dismissal of the possibility. Some stories are so odd that they may just have happened. This may be one of them, but in historical terms there is no way of finding out.
3. The Priests, the Guards and the Bribe
The other story which spills over in Matthew’s gospel from the crucifixion narrative to the Easter account involves the chief priests getting together with the Pharisees to go to Pilate and request a guard on Jesus’ tomb. This is of considerable interest, not so much for its own sake (though that is interesting too) but for the sake of what it tells us about the story-telling motives of the early church.
The tale begins on the sabbath itself. Jesus’ body has been buried on the Friday afternoon by Joseph of Arimathea, watched by Mary Magdalene ‘and the other Mary’ (27:61). Then, on the sabbath,
the chief priests and the Pharisees went together to Pilate and said, ‘Sir, we remember that that deceiver, while he was alive, said, “I will be raised after three days.” So give orders that the tomb be made safe until the third day, in case his disciples should come and steal him and say to the people, “He has been raised from the dead,” and the last deception will be worse than the first.’
‘You have a guard,’ replied Pilate. ‘Go and make it as safe as you know how.’
So off they went and secured the tomb, sealing the stone and posting a guard.16
Historically speaking, we raise our eyebrows a bit at the apparently easy collaboration of the Pharisees and chief priests, and of the two together with Pilate, but there is nothing intrinsically implausible about that side of the story. It is perhaps more surprising that all this would be done on a sabbath, but that too is not beyond possibility, especially in an emergency. What is interesting is the description of Jesus in 27:63: ‘that deceiver’ (ekeinos ho pianos). This ties in with a regular Jewish charge against Jesus, echoing various biblical warnings about false prophets and teachers who might ‘deceive the people’. It is just conceivable that an early Christian, making up this story, would put such a description of Jesus on the lips of the Jewish leaders, since it may well have been quite widely known that this charge was near the heart of the accusation against him. But it seems more likely that it goes back to some kind of well-rooted memory.17
The story of the guard continues between the appearance of Jesus to the women in Jerusalem and that to the Eleven in Galilee:
As the women were going away, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests everything that had happened. They got together with the elders and concocted a plan that they would give a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, ‘Say, “His disciples came by night and stole him while we were asleep”; and if this is overheard by the governor, we will explain things to him and keep you out of trouble.’ So they took the money and did as they had been told. And this story is circulated among the Jews to this day.18
There is nothing improbable in this narrative; indeed, it makes good sense all round. But when we put the two halves of the story together, the plan to set a guard in case the disciples steal the body, and the tale that, despite the guard, the disciples had managed to do so none the less, some interesting questions emerge about the telling of such an overall account within the early Christian community.
The story, obviously, is part of an apologia for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is an attempt to ward off any suggestion that the disciples had in fact stolen the body, which must have seemed the most natural explanation for the emptiness of the tomb. But, while the historian is always cautious about accepting obviously apologetic tales, there are further considerations which make it very unlikely that this one was actually invented from scratch within the Christian community.
For a start, it is implausible to suppose that the whole story would have been invented in the first place, let alone told and finally written down, unless there was already a rumour going around that the disciples had indeed stolen the body. If nobody had suggested such a thing, it is difficult to imagine the Christians putting the idea into people’s heads by making up tales that said they had.
Furthermore, a charge such as this would never have arisen unless it was already well known, or at the very least widely supposed, that there was an empty tomb, and/or a missing body, requiring an explanation. If the empty tomb were itself a late legend, it is unlikely that people would have spread stories about body-stealing, and hence that Christians would have employed the dangerous tactic of reporting such stories in order to refute them.
Third, the story presupposes that for the chief priests, the Pharisees and presumably anyone else involved, the reported prediction that Jesus would ‘rise again after three days’ must refer to something that would happen to his corpse. If anybody had supposed that ‘rising again’ meant that Jesus’ soul had gone to heaven while his body remained in the tomb, or anything even vaguely like that, there would have been no need for a guard or a stone, or for stories and counter-stories to be circulated.19
Finally, the telling of the story indicates well enough that the early Christians knew that the charge of stealing the body was one they were always likely to face—and that it was preferable to tell the story of how the accusation had arisen, even at the risk of putting ideas into people’s heads, rather than leave the accusation unanswered.20
For our present purposes, the main thing is not to argue that the story, in both its parts, is historically true in all respects, though as we have seen it is unlikely to have been invented as a late legend. The point is that this sort of story could only have any point at all in a community where the empty tomb was an absolute and unquestioned datum. Had there been varieties of Christianity that knew nothing of such a thing—in other words, if Bultmann was right to say that the empty tomb was itself a late apologetic fiction—the rise both of stories of body-snatching and of counter-stories to explain why such accusations were untrue is simply incredible. In the Bultmannian scheme, by contrast, we are asked to accept a complex theory which makes Matthew’s story look extremely simple and obvious: (1) Christianity began without any belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection; (2) early Christians began (unwisely, it seems) to use ‘resurrection’ language to speak of Jesus’ spiritual or heavenly exaltation; (3) other early Christians, misunderstanding this to refer to bodily resurrection, began to tell back-up stories about the discovery of an empty tomb (with scatty women as the principal witnesses); (4) Jewish onlookers, anxious about the rise of Christianity, believed these (fictitious) accounts of the empty tomb and began to circulate the story about the disciples stealing the body; (5) yet other early Christians, discovering that such stories were circulating, made up a convenient tradition which traced them back to the priests, the guard and the bribe; (6) this tradition found its way into Matthew’s possession, and he separated it carefully into two fragments and wove it neatly into the closing scenes of his gospel. And all this would have to have happened within sixty years at the outside, dating Matthew around 90, which is as late as most scholars would go; less if the date is earlier, as it might well be.
Of course, we could collapse (4) and (5) into one by having no such Jewish stories existing except ones that early Christians made up in order that, by ‘refuting’ them, they might ward off a potential accusation. Or we could collapse (4), (5) and (6) into one if we said that Matthew himself was responsible both for the fiction about the Jewish stories and for the fiction about a ‘true’ version which explained them.
If any historian finds this sequence more probable than the one which Matthew offers, I can only admire their ability to believe such remarkable things. But I suspect that if even Rudolf Bultmann were to find himself as a member of a jury he would be more prepared to believe a story like the one Matthew tells than a story like the five- or six-stage development of tradition that must be told if we are to declare that Matthew’s is impossible.
Two final notes about the story of the guard. First, it is noticeable that Matthew’s priests have somehow got to know about Jesus’ predictions of rising after three days. These were always in private with the disciples (16:21; 17:23; 20:19); unless we are to suppose that Judas revealed this secret as part of his betrayal, the only other hint of such a thing would have to be the accusation that he had spoken of destroying the Temple and rebuilding it in three days (26:61). There is no particular reason for a late apologetic account to accredit the priests with this knowledge; all sides would assume, in any case, that after that period the corpse would begin to putrefy.21 It looks as though this, too, goes back to an early tradition.
Second, Matthew’s description of the stone and the seal offers another biblical echo, once more from the book of Daniel. In Daniel 6:17 (6:18 LXX) King Darius has a stone laid over the mouth of the lions’ den, with Daniel inside it, and he seals it with his own seal and that of his nobles, leaving Daniel, overnight, to an apparently certain fate. In the morning, of course, the king returns and discovers Daniel safe and sound; there is no mention of taking away the stone, let alone of angels and earthquakes. But someone as alert as Matthew was for biblical echoes can surely not have missed the allusion. Jesus goes to his grave as one who, like Daniel, has been faithful to Israel’s god despite all the forces ranged against him; and, like Daniel, his god will vindicate him. He is, after all, the true ‘son of man’ who, as in the next chapter of the book of Daniel, is to be exalted after being apparently prevailed over by the monsters.22
4. Tomb, Angels, First Appearance (28:1–10)
Matthew’s account of the first Easter may well, as we have seen, be dependent on that of Mark.23 But it bears all the signs of his own retelling. One of his favourite little words, idou,24 occurs no fewer than six times in the story, four of which come in this first section (verses 2, 7, 7, 9; the remaining two are found in verses 11 and 20).25 He introduces the story with a formal time-notice, longer than anything in the other three accounts. The women go, not to bring spices but simply ‘to see the tomb’ (28:1); does he, perhaps, think that they are doing what some rabbinic texts recommend, coming to inspect the tomb after three days to see if the body is truly dead?26 They do not go into the tomb as they do in Mark; perhaps Matthew was mindful of purity rules according to which entering a tomb with a corpse inside would have rendered them impure.27 Matthew has the women confronted not simply by a ‘young man’ as in Mark, or ‘two men in dazzling clothes’ as in Luke, but by a palpable angel, looking like lightning, and with clothes white as snow.28 There is a second earthquake (verse 2, following that in 27:51), perhaps even caused by the angel (see above). We have a long angelic speech, parallel in many ways to those in Mark and Luke but fuller. The women go to tell the disciples, without any suggestion that they say nothing to anyone (Mark) or that their report seems like an idle tale (Luke)—though, to be fair, Matthew fails to mention their actual carrying out of the commission one way or another. On meeting Jesus, the women worship (verse 9, echoing another favourite Matthaean term).29 Though the angel instructs the women to tell the disciples that they will see Jesus in Galilee, the women themselves (like Mary Magdalene in John) see him then and there, in Jerusalem. Even in so short a story, at almost every point Matthew remains stubbornly independent. Whatever his sources, he has made them his own.
This makes it all the more remarkable that he has not done more. As we pointed out in chapter 13, he has not introduced what we might have expected in terms of biblical and theological allusions and implications. The echoes of the Old Testament continue to the very last verse of chapter 27, but in chapter 28 they are almost non-existent.30 Instead, we have, as in Mark, two Marys at the tomb; a strange heavenly messenger, explaining why the tomb is empty, and giving the women instructions; and the women going off in haste and fear. And we must ask, with Matthew as with the other accounts: granted that Matthew has felt free to make this his own, and apparently to embroider the angelic and apocalyptic elements, why has he not felt free to make the story more convincing, for instance by having at least one male witness meet Jesus (as in another branch of tradition)?31
We have in Matthew 28:1–10, in other words, a story which belongs firmly, in this mode of its telling, within Matthew’s gospel. It exhibits many traces of his style. But it is still emphatically the same story, the same unlikely story, indeed a story which is so unlikely and improbable that one is astonished yet again at its being told not only as very early tradition but as the climax of a long, complex and artful literary work. The best conclusion we can draw is that, though Matthew felt free to tell the story in his own way, he did not feel free to invent a new one. Precisely because we can see his hand at work in so much editing, we can also see where he was bound to restrain editorial licence. This was the story all the early Christians knew.32 Had they been free to make up their own they might have done a superficially better job. They were not, and did not.
5. On the Mountain in Galilee (28:16–20)
Mark’s angel reminds the women that Jesus had said the disciples were to go to Galilee (16:7, referring to 14:28). Matthew has a parallel to Mark 14:28 at 26:32, but his angel does not remind the women of this; instead, he simply tells them to instruct the disciples to go to Galilee to see Jesus there (28:7). (Neither he nor Jesus mention a meeting on a mountain, so the comment in verse 16 about Jesus having directed them to go to one remains another unexplained Matthaean puzzle.) This brings us to Matthew’s dense closing scene.
Like the earlier one, this paragraph has Matthew’s own fingerprints all over it.33 But the fact that this was also true of 28:1–10, while that passage at the same time told substantially the same story as Mark 16:1–8 and Luke 24:1–12, should make us pause before suggesting, as one might otherwise have done, that this is a free Matthaean composition with no roots in earlier tradition. Some have suggested that this is the time when the ‘five hundred at once’ of 1 Corinthians 15:6 saw Jesus all together, though it is noticeable that Matthew only mentions ‘the Eleven’ (28:16). If, then, this is a different event, this is the only mention of it, so we cannot gain historical binocular vision of it. However, as frequently in ancient history, a single source needs to be evaluated on its own merits, not (as often happens in gospel criticism) dismissed because it lacks corroborating parallels.
Like the commissioning scenes in Luke and John, Matthew’s final scene concentrates on the instructions the risen Jesus gives to the disciples for their new worldwide mission, which has been in view all along even though the gospel strategy demanded that work be restricted during Jesus’ lifetime to ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’.34 There is, however, no mention of the forgiveness of sins, as in Luke and John, unless it is seen by implication in the command to baptize. Rather, the Eleven are to be teachers, disciple-makers.
But the main emphasis of this closing paragraph is upon who Jesus is now revealed to be, a point which belongs closely with the argument of chapter 12 above. Jesus has been granted ‘all authority in heaven and on earth’—virtually identical in phraseology to the kingdom-clause in the Matthaean version of the Lord’s Prayer.35 This, it seems, is how the prayer is being answered; this, in other words, is how the kingdom is coming, how the will of the ‘Father’ is being done. The significance of the resurrection, as far as Matthew is concerned, is that Jesus now holds the role that had been marked out for the Messiah in Psalms 2, 72 and 89, which became concentrated in such imagery-laden figures as the ‘son of man’ in Daniel 7 and the texts which developed that line of thought. This scene, in other words, is not an ‘exaltation’ scene which only becomes a ‘resurrection’ scene because of its place in the narrative.36 The worldwide commission Jesus gives the disciples depends directly upon his possessing all authority in heaven and on earth, within the kingdom that is now well and truly inaugurated. The only explanation for this messianic authority on the one hand, and this kingdom-fulfilment on the other, is that Jesus has been raised from the dead.37
The strongest mark of authenticity in this paragraph is the jarring note: ‘but some doubted’ (verse 17). Matthew only has the Eleven there; how many is ‘some’? Two or three? Which ones? Were their doubts resolved? What form did their doubts take? We want to know, and again Matthew leaves us in the dark. We can be sure, however, that this strange comment would not have occurred to someone telling the story as a pure fiction, to reinforce faith and mission, some time towards the end of the century. If even some of Jesus’ closest disciples had doubts, what hope, a reader might think, would there be for anyone else? Nor will it do to suggest that Matthew is hinting at divisions between different groups of disciples, or different leaders who emerged from the Eleven. If that had been so, we might have expected some names. How else could the story serve to highlight them, and perhaps warn against them? We are given none. This forces us to look for another explanation. One obvious one is that here, as in the other canonical resurrection narratives, the risen Jesus both was and was not ‘the same’ as he had been before. There was something different about him, something which his closest friends and followers could not put their finger on at the time, something which seemed to enable him to do different things. Matthew’s Jesus does not allay their doubts and fears, as do John’s Jesus and, still more obviously, Luke’s. He allows the tension to remain in the air. This was Jesus all right, but there was a mystery about him which even those who knew him best were now unable to penetrate.
Among the surprises of this paragraph is the trinitarian naming of Israel’s god in verse 19. This is by no means the earliest such formula in the New Testament, of course (one thinks of passages like 2 Corinthians 13:13 and Galatians 4:4–7), so it would be illegitimate to argue for a late date on this basis alone.38 The trinitarian formula has become so entrenched in church tradition and particularly liturgy, largely because of this passage, that the phrase can acquire a ‘developed’ feel, as though it had taken a large step towards, or had even been generated within, the christological and trinitarian dogmas of the fourth and fifth centuries, a judgment which the parallels in Paul and elsewhere would prove spurious. Once again, as with our discussion in chapter 12, we glimpse in early Christian theology the further dimension of the revelation, through the resurrection, of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah: precisely as Messiah, he is the world’s true lord, sharing the authority which Israel’s god has said he will not share with another. And the mode through which that authority is now to be exercised is the Spirit.
The command to baptize, together with the mention of the Spirit, takes us back to John’s baptism, where it was promised that the coming one would baptize with the Spirit. This implies that we are to see the movement initiated with the command of the risen Jesus as the worldwide extension of the movement of covenant renewal that began with John, and is now continuing under the authority of the risen Jesus and in the power of the Spirit—as, in fact, in Acts.39 In Acts, baptism is normally ‘in’ or ‘into’ the name of Jesus;40 in Paul, it is ‘into the Messiah’ (eis Christon).41 Just as these are not mutually exclusive, but highlight different features of the same complex event, so we should not suppose that Matthew’s trinitarian naming of the true god, and the command to baptize in that name, would be understood by him or other early Christians as being opposed to the practice which Acts describes and Paul reflects. The point is that the risen Jesus is now at the heart of the early Christian picture of the living god. Baptism, with all its exodus-symbolism dating back to John’s baptism, is the mode of entry into the family of this god, the family of the renewed covenant. And, as more explicitly in Paul (Romans 6, Colossians 2), baptism is linked in particular to what the living god has accomplished in Jesus’ resurrection.
The final promise, that Jesus will be with his people ‘until the close of the age’ (heos tes synteleias tou aionos), belongs closely within the ‘two-age’ structure of chronology which we have seen to be characteristic of mainstream Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism, and also of early Christianity, particularly Paul.42 The point here is that the ‘age to come’ has now been launched with Jesus’ resurrection, and that the risen Jesus represents and embodies this new age, and hence becomes the human bridge between it and the present one. His promise to be ‘with you always’ is thus at the same time the fulfilment of the Emmanuel promise, and with it of YHWH’s promise to be with even a small group of worshippers as though they were actually in the Temple itself.43 It is also the sign that in him the eschaton has come to birth, so that his people are guaranteed safe passage through the present age and into the long-awaited age to come.
6. Matthew and the Resurrection: Conclusion
Matthew’s rich exposition of what he conceives to be the direct outworking of the fact of Jesus’ resurrection thus has many points of contact with the various early Christian traditions we studied in Part III. It would be surprising if it were not so. And yet he comes across as his own man. His language and imagery belong with the rest of his gospel. He has not obviously imbibed the resurrection theology of Paul or Revelation. He has not invented resurrection stories from scratch; the arguments mounted in chapter 13 rule that out. He has retold them, shaping and highlighting them so that they belong at the close of the narrative and theological logic of his gospel; but it is impossible that they were simply manufactured out of whole cloth some time in the late first century. Through these retold stories, Matthew gets us to see Jesus fulfilling at last the promises to Abraham and David, the promise of return from exile, the fulfilment of all that Moses had been and said.44 All of this is present, not as though it were derived from Paul or anyone else, but as though Matthew himself had mulled over the early stories for a long time and retold them in this form while allowing them to remain, essentially, early stories.
Matthew has written, through and through, a book of Jewish history and theology. His whole thesis is that Israel’s god has been at work in Jesus, climactically and decisively. As I argued in the first volume, there is no way that we can think of this divine activity, within such a Jewish framework, except in relation to historical events.45 Matthew believed, every bit as much as did Paul, that Jesus really did rise from the dead, leaving an empty tomb behind him. The stories he tells in chapter 28, though every bit as strange as those told by his fellow gospel-writers, cannot have been intended either by him or his sources to be taken in the sense of ‘this is a metaphorical way of speaking of the victory of the cross,’ or ‘read these tales and you will sense the spiritual presence of Jesus.’ These narratives, though heavy with significance at many levels, are not simply built up from that significance to look like history. They are not all icing and no cake. Unless Matthew had believed that there was a real cake, there would have been no significance, nothing to decorate in the first place.
Equally, Matthew, like the others, describes a Jesus who comes and goes, appears and disappears, and is doubted at the very end by some of his close and obedient associates. Matthew never describes a parting moment, but clearly there has been one; as we noted in chapter 13, Matthew’s Jesus will be ‘with you always’, but Matthew does not now expect his readers to meet Jesus on a mountain in Galilee as the Eleven had done. His risen Jesus was sufficiently ‘bodily’ not only to leave an empty tomb behind him but to generate a complex controversy, between Christians and their opponents, about how such a thing could have come about, which would be inexplicable unless both sides knew that the claim concerned bodily resurrection. (Verses 11–15 are, in other words, incomprehensible except as a reflection of some kind of actual debate; but such a debate is itself incomprehensible except as the result of a claim, not about a disembodied ‘life after death’, however glorious, but about bodily resurrection.) But Matthew’s Jesus is at the same time sufficiently different (words fail us as they did the early Christians; once again we fall back on the word ‘transphysical’, not to solve the mystery but at least to give it a name) to appear and disappear in unpredictable ways, and to be doubted. As in John, indeed, the fact of doubt becomes in itself a powerful reinforcement of faith.
We shall come to John presently, where we shall find both more explanation and more mystery. But first we turn to Luke, completing the synoptic resurrection accounts with the longest and most artistic of them all.