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2. The Tomb and the Meetings

The two things which must be regarded as historically secure when we talk about the first Easter are the emptiness of the tomb and the meetings with the risen Jesus. Once we locate the early Christians within the world of second-Temple Judaism, and grasp what they believed about their own future hope and about Jesus’ own resurrection, these two phenomena are firmly warranted. The argument can be set out in seven steps, which I shall state in summary form and then expound at somewhat more length.

1. To sum up where we have got to so far: the world of second-Temple Judaism supplied the concept of resurrection, but the striking and consistent Christian mutations within Jewish resurrection belief rule out any possibility that the belief could have generated spontaneously from within its Jewish context. When we ask the early Christians themselves what had occasioned this belief, their answers home in on two things: stories about Jesus’ tomb being empty, and stories about him appearing to people, alive again.

2. Neither the empty tomb by itself, however, nor the appearances by themselves, could have generated the early Christian belief. The empty tomb alone would be a puzzle and a tragedy. Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world.

3. However, an empty tomb and appearances of a living Jesus, taken together, would have presented a powerful reason for the emergence of the belief.

4. The meaning of resurrection within second-Temple Judaism makes it impossible to conceive of this reshaped resurrection belief emerging without it being known that a body had disappeared, and that the person had been discovered to be thoroughly alive again.

5. The other explanations sometimes offered for the emergence of the belief do not possess the same explanatory power.

6. It is therefore historically highly probable that Jesus’ tomb was indeed empty on the third day after his execution, and that the disciples did indeed encounter him giving every appearance of being well and truly alive.³

7. This leaves us with the last and most important question: what explanation can be given for these two phenomena? Is there an alternative to the explanation given by the early Christians themselves?

The kind of argument I am offering here may be located on the well-known map of theories of explanation, using the tools of necessary and sufficient conditions. Most detailed historical enquiry, like the detective work that hunts down criminals, makes at least implicit use of these tools, and I find that making them explicit can bring some clarity in an area where it is often lacking. It is a way of putting the matter under the microscope. There is a substantial literature on the different types, and sub-types, of conditions, and it is impossible and unnecessary to go into the details here.⁴ In any case, when dealing with history—not least the history of what people believed and how they came to believe it—we are unlikely to attain the watertight conclusiveness demanded in symbolic logic.

The broad difference between necessary and sufficient conditions is not difficult to grasp. A necessary condition is something that has to be the case for the conclusion to follow: it is a necessary condition of my computer working properly that the house be connected to an electricity supply. A sufficient condition is something that will certainly and without fail bring about the conclusion: it is a sufficient condition of my having a sleepless night that somebody should practise the bagpipes outside my bedroom window. The difference between the two appears if we consider the alternatives. Connecting the house to the electricity supply may be a necessary condition for my computer to function, but it is certainly not sufficient; any number of things might go wrong with the machine itself. Bagpipes at midnight are sufficient for my sleeplessness, but they are certainly not a necessary condition; a pot of strong coffee, or a pneumatic drill in the street, would have the same effect. The supply of electricity is thus a necessary but insufficient condition of the computer functioning; the bagpipes are a sufficient but unnecessary condition of my sleepless night.

My argument in the seven steps outlined a moment ago, more precisely in the crucial steps 2, 3, 4 and 5, can be plotted with the same conceptual tools. Steps 2 and 3 face the question of whether, and to what extent, the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus can be seen as sufficient conditions for the rise of early Christian belief; steps 4 and 5 raise the question as to whether they should be seen as necessary conditions.⁵ In both cases the answer needs fine-tuning, but my substantial proposal is that the combination of the empty tomb and the appearances constitute, with qualifications, a sufficient condition for the rise of the early Christian belief (2 and 3), and that, with more substantial qualifications, they also constitute a necessary condition (4 and 5). The qualifications are important, meaning that the argument falls short of anything approaching mathematical proof; but the proposal remains important, advancing well beyond historical possibility to high probability.

The seven steps may now be elaborated as follows.

Step 1 sets the context for the question we face, drawing together the threads of the previous chapters. The early Christian beliefs were conceived and formulated within the context of second-Temple Judaism, and make sense as a mutation from within one well-known position on the Jewish spectrum; but no other second-Temple Jews came up with anything remotely like them. When we ask the early Christians themselves why they held to these beliefs, the answers they give point to the strange stories at the end of the four canonical gospels. The tomb was empty, they say (being careful to let us know that it was certainly the tomb in which the dead Jesus of Nazareth had earlier been buried); and they saw him alive, talked with him, and ate and drank with him.

This brings us to step 2, and to my double argument that neither the empty tomb on the one hand, nor the appearances on the other, constitutes by itself a sufficient condition for the rise of the early Christian belief.⁶ Let us examine each in turn.

2a. An empty tomb without any meetings with Jesus would have been a distressing puzzle, but not a long-term problem.⁷ It would have proved nothing; it would have suggested nothing, except the fairly common practice of grave-robbery. It certainly would not have generated the phenomena we have studied in this book so far. Tombs were often robbed in the ancient world, adding to grief both insult and injury. Nobody in the pagan world would have interpreted an empty tomb as implying resurrection; everyone knew such a thing was out of the question. Nobody in the ancient Jewish world would have interpreted it like that either; ‘resurrection’ was not something anyone expected to happen to a single individual while the world went on as normal.⁸ Certainly—a point often ignored by critics—the disciples were not expecting any such thing to happen to Jesus. Had the tomb been empty, with no other unusual occurrences, no one would have said that Jesus was the Messiah or the lord of the world. No one would have imagined that the kingdom had been inaugurated. No one, in particular, would have developed so quickly and consistently a radical and reshaped version of the Jewish hope for the resurrection of the body.⁹ The empty tomb is by itself insufficient to account for the subsequent evidence.

An apparent and striking counter-example to this proposal is found in John 20:8. The beloved disciple goes into the empty tomb, sees what Peter had seen a moment before (the grave-clothes lying, separate from the head-cloth), and believes. Could it be that in his case, or at least in the mind of the evangelist writing this, the empty tomb by itself was sufficient for the rise of his faith? The answer suggested by the text is ‘No’. The grave-clothes seem to be understood as a sign of what had happened to Jesus, a sign which would be the functional equivalent of the actual appearances of Jesus (John 20:19–23). The beloved disciple came to his new belief, the text wants us to understand, not simply on the basis of the emptiness of the tomb (which had been explained by Mary in verse 2 in terms of the removal of the body to an unknown location), but on the basis of what he deduced both from the fact that the grave-clothes had been left behind and from the position in which they were lying. He, like Thomas at the end of the chapter, saw something which elicited faith. The fact that the grave-clothes were left behind showed that the body had not been carried off, whether by foes, friends or indeed a gardener (verse 15). Their positioning, carefully described in verse 7, suggests that they had not been unwrapped, but that the body had somehow passed through them, much as, later on, it would appear and disappear through locked doors (verse 19). The conclusion holds, then: an empty tomb, by itself, could not have functioned as a sufficient condition of early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection.

2b. ‘Meetings’ with Jesus, likewise, could by themselves have been interpreted in a variety of ways. Most people in the ancient world (though not so many, it seems, in the modem world) knew that visions and appearances of recently dead people occurred.¹⁰ No doubt there are all kinds of explanations for things like that. Various theories can be advanced about the psychological state of the person who experiences them, though the evidence seems to suggest that in some cases at least the phenomena are clearly related to actual events (for instance, the recent death, unexpected, otherwise unknown and so far unexplained, of an absent loved one) rather than simply the projection of feelings of guilt or grief.¹¹ But that such ‘seeings’, even such ‘meetings’, occur, and that people have known about them throughout recorded history, there should be no question.

Such things were not, perhaps, quite as frequent as some recent writers have tried to make out.¹² Visions of this sort, in addition, did not normally involve physical contact, let alone watching the recently departed person eating and drinking; indeed, accounts of visions of the dead sometimes made it clear that this is what did not happen. But such ‘meetings’, even if they did seem to involve seeing, touching, or even eating and drinking with the recently dead person, could, at a stretch, have been interpreted as ‘angelic’ visitations of the kind the disciples thought they were having from Peter in Acts 12. They might have provided a very special case, perhaps even a very encouraging and heart-warming case, of the generally known and widely recognized possibility of short-lived encounters with something that seemed to be the dead person. The response to reported visions of this kind might of course have been, in the ancient as in the modem world, to question the mental balance, or perhaps the recent diet, of the witnesses. As we have remarked more than once, the ancient world as well as the modern knew the difference between visions and things that happen in the ‘real’ world.¹³ But visions did occur.

However, precisely because such encounters were reasonably well known (the apparently strong point of those who have recently tried to insist that this is what ‘really happened’ at Easter) they could not possibly, by themselves, have given rise to the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. They are a thoroughly insufficient condition for the early Christian belief. The more ‘normal’ these ‘visions’ were, the less chance there is that anyone, no matter how cognitively dissonant they may have been feeling, would have said what nobody had ever said about such a dead person before, that they had been raised from the dead.¹⁴ Indeed, such visions meant precisely, as people in the ancient and modern worlds have discovered, that the person was dead, not that they were alive.¹⁵ Even if several such experiences had occurred, if the tomb was still occupied by the dead body they would have said to themselves, after the experiences had ceased, ‘We have seen exceedingly strange visions, but he is still dead and buried. Our experiences were, after all, no different from the ones we have heard about in the old stories and poems.’¹⁶

As with the empty tomb, we here face possible counter-arguments. Did not Paul himself come to his belief in Jesus’ resurrection on the basis simply of an appearance? Things are again not quite so straightforward. Unless we are to discount entirely the witness of Acts, we must conclude that the empty tomb of Jesus, and the repeated insistence that his body had not decomposed, were of central and foundational importance in the preaching and life of the Christians whom Paul had been persecuting. It is highly likely that he knew at least that the followers of Jesus claimed that his tomb was empty, and that this claim had not been falsified. His seeing of the risen Jesus, therefore, took place in a context where at least the report of an empty tomb may be assumed. In the same way, the story of Mary’s meeting with Jesus in John 20:11–18 includes the often puzzling ‘do not touch me’; if, as is often suggested, the proper interpretation of this is ‘do not cling on to me’, the story may be making the point that this was not simply the appearance of a phantom, a bodiless spirit such as Odysseus attempted to cling on to but could not. Though in the longer story Mary had of course seen the empty tomb for herself, someone telling this story in the ancient world would be aware that it contained within itself the sign that the body which was appearing was no mere ghost. The same point is made in Luke, John and Acts by the stories of Jesus eating with the disciples.¹⁷ There seems to be a constant sense that ‘appearances’ by themselves have to be backed up with evidence that what was seen was a substantial body such as must have left an empty tomb behind it. It is thus comparatively straightforward to show that, by themselves, neither an empty tomb nor visual ‘appearances’—however we categorize them—would be sufficient to generate the early Christian beliefs we have been studying. This bears importantly on a topic at which we have already glanced: it seems to me unlikely that stories only of an empty tomb or only of ‘appearances’, without at least some hint of the other, could have been generated, or indeed circulated, independently in early Christianity. The point of the empty tomb stories always was that Jesus was alive again; the point of the appearance stories always was that the Jesus who was appearing was in bodily continuity with the corpse that had occupied the tomb. Neither, without the other, makes the sense that the early Christians believed they made. They are like the two parts of a road sign, the arm which indicates the road and the vertical post which supports it. Without the post, the arm cannot be seen; without the arm, the post cannot say anything. Join them together and they point to the truth.

3. Putting two insufficient conditions together, of course, guarantees nothing. The fact that the house is connected to the main electricity supply, and that the computer is in working order, does not guarantee that the computer will now work. Someone may have taken away the power cable which connects the computer to the supply. Once more, it only takes a little ingenuity to dream up all kinds of twists and turns in such illustrations. But in some cases, two insufficient conditions, put together, will produce a sufficient one. The fact that the plane is in perfect mechanical order does not guarantee a safe landing. Having a well-trained, alert pilot in charge is likewise insufficient. A first-rate plane piloted by a novice, or a poor-quality plane flown by a first-rate pilot, may still crash. But put a first-rate pilot in charge of a first-rate plane, and—granted other things like weather conditions and the state of the runway—the combination produces a sufficient condition of a safe landing.

That is the kind of position we are in, I suggest, with the empty tomb and the appearances. We have seen that they are, by themselves, insufficient to generate early Christian belief. Bring them together, however, and they form, in combination, a sufficient condition.¹⁸ From everything we know both of the second-Temple context and of the beliefs of the disciples about Jesus and his mission, we can be confident that if they discovered on the one hand that his tomb was empty, and found on the other hand that, for a while, they kept meeting him in ways which gave every appearance that he was dead no longer, but actually alive, the belief we have studied throughout the first two centuries of Christianity would certainly emerge.¹⁹

Once again, a counter-example suggests itself. According to John in the story of Thomas, and to Matthew in the story of the disciples meeting Jesus on the mountain, not everyone did in fact believe, in the first case when reports of the empty tomb were supplemented with reports of appearances, and in the second when, after the discovery of the empty tomb, Jesus was actually appearing at the time.²⁰ Furthermore, of course, as the gospel message went out into the wider world a great many people refused to believe, even when confronted with enthusiastic eye-witness evidence of both the empty tomb and the appearances. Does this mean that, even in combination, the empty tomb and the appearances did not, after all, constitute a sufficient condition for the rise of the early Christian belief?

This time the counter-example suggests that we introduce a modification into the proposal. The combination of empty tomb and appearances of Jesus was clearly not sufficient for the rise of Christian belief in everyone who heard about it. But we can, I think, propose a nuanced and ultimately stronger case. Granted that those who found the empty tomb and saw the risen Jesus were second-Temple Jews, most of whom had followed Jesus and were hoping he would turn out to be Israel’s Messiah, the two pieces of evidence would be sufficient to make most of them conclude that he had been raised from the dead in the sense we have already studied. The doubts of some at the time, and the refusal of others later on to believe the witness of Christian preachers, do not substantially affect this point. (The fact that, because of poor weather or ground conditions, or indeed reckless or hostile action by other parties, not all first-rate planes flown by first-rate pilots make it safely to land does not affect the general point.) The empty tomb and the appearances were sufficient, not for every single person who heard about them to arrive at Christian belief, but for that belief to arise within a community which began with Jesus’ followers and spread outwards from there.

4. If the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus are, in this sense, a sufficient condition for the rise of the early Christian belief, we must now ask: are they also a necessary one? This is a harder task, since it involves proving a negative. To show that the electricity supply is a necessary condition for the computer to work is one thing. Not only can you experiment with other possibilities and show that nothing else will in fact do; you can examine the computer itself and discover that it is designed to work on electricity and only on electricity. But with history things are seldom that straightforward. Furthermore, when our primary datum is a widely held belief for which we are seeking the causes, matters are even more open-ended. People believe many strange things for many odd reasons. All that is required to demonstrate that the tomb-plus-appearances combination is not a necessary condition for the rise of early Christian belief is the possibility that some other circumstance, or combination of circumstances, was equally capable of generating this belief. If there are two or more quite different sets of possible circumstances, each of which is demonstrably a sufficient condition for the datum we are trying to explain, none of them can be deemed necessary.

This is the point at which we must declare that the matter lies beyond strict historical proof. It will always be possible for ingenious historians to propose yet more variations on the theme of how the early Christian belief could have arisen, and taken the shape it did, without either an empty tomb or appearances of Jesus. However, there are two strong points to be made on the other side as well. First (point 4), the meaning of ‘resurrection’ within the ancient world in general, and second-Temple Judaism in particular, rules out most of the alternatives. Second (point 5, at more length), the principal theories advanced as alternative explanations turn out, on examination, to be insufficient. Point 4 can be divided, as was point 3, into two, corresponding to the two key elements under discussion, the empty tomb and the appearances.

4a. As we saw in the first Part of the book, the meaning of ‘resurrection’, both in the Jewish and the non-Jewish world of late antiquity, was never that the person concerned had simply ‘gone to heaven’, or been ‘exalted’ in some way which did not involve a new bodily life. Plenty of disembodied post-mortem states were postulated, and there was a rich variety of terminology for denoting them, which did not include ‘resurrection’. ‘Resurrection’ meant embodiment; that was equally so for the pagans, who denied it, as it was for the Jews, at least some of whom hoped for it. This is presumably why some leading non-Christian historians have come to the sober conclusion that, whatever else we say, the tomb must have been empty (in other words, that it is a necessary condition for the subsequent phenomena). Within that world, it is difficult to imagine a ‘resurrection’ of any other sort:

When every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathizer and the critical agnostic alike—and even perhaps of the disciples themselves—are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb.²¹

We may insist, in fact, that whatever else had happened, if the body of Jesus of Nazareth had remained in the tomb there would have been no early Christian belief of the sort we have discovered. It will not do to suggest, for instance, that because the disciples lived in a world where resurrection was expected, this will explain why they used that language of Jesus. Many other Jewish leaders, heroes and would-be Messiahs died within the same world, but in no case did anyone suggest that they had been raised from the dead. One might imagine other kinds of early faith which could have been generated by events which did not involve an empty tomb. But the specific faith of the earliest Christians could not have been generated by a set of circumstances in which an empty tomb did not play a part. I therefore regard the empty tomb as a necessary condition (though by itself, as we have seen, an insufficient one) for the rise of the very specific early Christian belief.

4b. But is the same true of the appearances? Are they, too, necessary conditions of the early Christian belief? I think so, though this is harder to demonstrate. They seem to me to be a kind of necessary supplement to the discovery of the empty tomb; they provide the extra element which turns the first insufficient condition (the empty tomb) into a sufficient one. Having a supply of electricity connected to the house is a necessary but insufficient condition for the working of the computer. This condition needs supplementing by other conditions, themselves also necessary but insufficient—a proper connecting cable, and the computer itself being in working order—before the combination of conditions becomes sufficient as well as necessary. So it is, I suggest, with the appearances of Jesus.

This is once more difficult to demonstrate. There is no limit to human ingenuity, and it is always possible that someone might dream up a theory in which some other event or phenomenon could supplement the discovery of the empty tomb and, in combination with it, produce a sufficient condition of the rise of early Christian belief. Dreams, in fact, are the obvious place to look for rival explanations. Perhaps, some might say, the disciples had powerful dreams of Jesus (after all, they had been with him day and night for a long time, and he had made a huge impact on their lives). Perhaps they had such vivid dreams about him that he seemed thoroughly alive, so that they began to speak of him as being alive, not dead at all, and then, bit by bit, to use the language of resurrection …

But this could not have generated the actual belief which we have studied. As we saw above, dreams of recently dead people are, and were in the first century, as common as grief itself. Such dreams might be taken to indicate that the dead person had passed into a post-mortem state, and was, in that sense, ‘alive’. But that was never, for either pagans or Jews, what the language of ‘resurrection’ denoted.

In addition, we must also explain one of the striking modifications which we noticed as the Christians picked up the Jewish language of resurrection. They spoke, in a variety of ways, not only of continuity but of transformation; and we have noted that the Easter stories in the gospels provide a model for this, in their strange portrait of a Jesus who is definitely embodied but whose body has unprecedented, indeed hitherto unimagined, properties. As we saw in chapter 13, it is impossible to explain these pictures as fictional projections from early Christian theology. We must search for an alternative explanation. The best one available is that it was the appearances of Jesus that precipitated this transformation in the understanding of resurrection. The language of ‘resurrection’, and the specific modifications within Jewish resurrection belief which we have seen in early Christianity, could only have occurred, I suggest, if the early Christians believed they had clear evidence, against all their own and everyone else’s expectations, both of continuity between the Jesus who died and the Jesus who was now alive and of a transformation in his mode of embodiment. Appearances of this living Jesus would have provided such evidence. Nothing else could have done.

We are left with the conclusion that the combination of empty tomb and appearances of the living Jesus forms a set of circumstances which is itself both necessary and sufficient for the rise of early Christian belief. Without these phenomena, we cannot explain why this belief came into existence, and took the shape it did. With them, we can explain it exactly and precisely.

5. To test this, we must enquire whether in fact anything else could have produced early Christian belief in the same way. Is the combination of tomb plus appearances simply one thing that might have caused early Christian belief to arise, or is it the only thing that could possibly have done so?

A good deal of study has been devoted to the task of proposing alternative explanations for the rise of early Christian belief. Any of these, if sustainable, could challenge the argument of the previous section, leaving the Easter stories to be explained as aetiological or apologetic attempts to flesh out a faith arrived at on other grounds. If, however, it can be shown that the most apparently powerful of these will not do the job, the case for the tomb-and-meetings combination being necessary becomes considerably stronger.

We have already dealt by implication with some of the main alternative proposals. I have shown at various points, for instance, that the early Christians could not have developed beliefs of the type and shape they did if they had simply been working back from first-century readings of the Jewish scriptures and attempting to construct stories about what ‘must have’ happened to fulfil them.²² But there are two other types of alternative explanation which need more attention. They warrant a section to themselves, after which we shall return to the sequence of our argument, specifically to steps 6 and 7.

(i) ‘Cognitive Dissonance’

The first type of alternative explanation is frequently encountered, though not perhaps quite so often now as a few decades ago. This is the theory that the disciples were suffering from ‘cognitive dissonance’: the hypothetical state, studied within social psychology, in which individuals or groups fail to come to terms with reality, but live instead in a fantasy which corresponds to their own deep longings. This theory became popular in the 1950s and thereafter through the work of Leon Festinger.²³ Its implicit force in the Easter discussion is obvious: the disciples wanted so badly to believe in Jesus that instead of facing the fact of his death they claimed he was alive.

Much of the material in Festinger’s systematic presentation of the theory relates to the dissonance between two different things a person might be said to ‘know’. When a smoker faces the medical evidence about health risks;²⁴ when supporters of two college football teams are asked to evaluate, after a particularly rough game, what had happened, and who started it;²⁵ or when someone who had chosen a present (from a range including an automatic toaster, a portable radio and an art book) was then presented with more information about the product which cast doubt on the wisdom of the choice;²⁶ in what sense do they ‘know’ the evidence which runs so strongly against their prejudices? What happens when, as popular psychology has taught us to say, they ‘screen it out’?

These, one may feel, are hardly relevant to the historical study of a group of first-century Jews, and Festinger and his colleagues did not, of course, suggest that they were. But the major study undertaken, with historical analogues such as the Millerite sect in the 1840s, was that of a small flying-saucer cult in mid-western America in the 1950s. In Festinger’s systematic analysis of the phenomenon of ‘cognitive dissonance’, this is placed as the final case study, along with the survey of rumour-mongering following the Indian earthquake of 1934 and the evidence of Japanese people who continued to believe that Japan had won the Second World War. It is clearly intended to be seen as load-bearing for the topic as a whole.²⁷

From Festinger’s summary in his systematic treatment, his main point becomes clear. The small group of flying-saucer devotees centred upon one woman who had convinced them that she was receiving messages from outer space, culminating in the prediction of a massive flood that would engulf America, from which the believers would be rescued in a flying saucer at a given date and time. In the days immediately prior to this date, despite considerable interest in the press, the group seemed anxious to avoid publicity and were not interested in attracting new potential ‘believers’. After the crucial hour had come and gone, however (the story is drawn out by various predictable postponements), those who had stayed together in the little group received a message to the effect that ‘God … had saved the world and stayed the flood because of this group and the light and strength they had spread throughout the world that night.’²⁸ Immediately the behaviour of the group changed; they avidly sought publicity and attempted to get others to join them in their belief. ‘If … more and more converts could be found … then the dissonance between their belief and the knowledge that the messages had not been correct could be reduced.’²⁹ The conclusion of Festinger’s summary of the study shows clearly what he has in mind as its implication (and what, certainly, many writers on early Christianity have seen as its implication):

With sufficient social support available so that they could manage to retain the belief to which they were so heavily committed, and with the clear and unequivocal knowledge that the prediction had been false, almost the only avenue for further dissonance reduction was to obtain more cognition consonant with the belief in the form of knowing that more and more people also accepted their beliefs and the messages as valid.³⁰

In other words, here is a theory to explain, among other things, why Jesus’ followers, having been anxious and secretive before his death, became shortly thereafter enthusiastic and zealous missionaries for the truth of his message, eager to attract more converts in order to sustain their own faith which had been so grievously challenged by the failure of their hopes.³¹

The flaws in this argument are so enormous that it is puzzling to find serious scholars still referring to it in deferential terms—which is, indeed, the only reason for giving space to discussion of it here.³² The crucial study of the flying-saucer cult was itself riddled with problems. The sociologists who infiltrated it were obliged to convince the existing members that they, too, were true believers, sitting with them in a suburban house waiting first for more messages from the spacemen and then for the flying saucer itself, and becoming such trusted colleagues that they were not infrequently the ones delegated to answer the door, talk on the phone, or speak to the press. The group was so small that in some meetings the sociologists must have appeared as among the strongest members. If a solitary anthropologist can, by his or her very presence and questions, influence quite seriously both the behaviour and the self-perception of an entire tribe,³³ how much more can three sociologists, forming perhaps a quarter, on some occasions even a third, of a group of flying-saucer believers not only influence but virtually direct proceedings.³⁴

In addition, there is no sign that the group maintained its identity or zealous mission for longer than the one month during which the sociologists kept up their study (and, presumably, their apparent bona fide membership). Those who had left jobs and sold possessions had to rebuild their lives. The press lost interest; the sociologists withdrew to their typewriters and tenure applications; the flying-saucer prophecy, having failed, ceased altogether. But none of this, important though it is, gets to the heart of the problem with proposing even the loosest kind of parallel between the material studied by Festinger (including the Indian earthquake rumours and other phenomena) and the rise of early Christianity.

The real problem is something that any first-century historian should recognize: that whatever it was that the early Christians were expecting, wanting, hoping and praying for, this was not what they said, after Easter, had happened. This is why (to anticipate a counter-argument) the fact that all the earliest Christians were second-Temple Jews, which needs to be the case for the tomb-and-meetings combination to produce the effect it did, does not mean that these effects can be reduced to terms of ‘second-Temple Jews who believed strongly enough in a would-be Messiah were bound to say things like that after his death.’ True, their announcement that the kingdom had been fulfilled, and that Jesus really was the Messiah (though not in the sense they had expected) bears a superficial analogy to the drastic modifications of expectations introduced by the fresh ‘revelations’ vouchsafed after the failure of the spaceship to arrive on time. But the reason the early Christians gave for these modifications was not that they had received a fresh private message which had made them realize their mistake, but that something had happened, something which was not at all what they expected or hoped for, something around which they had to reconstruct their lives and in relation to which they had to redirect their energies. They were not refusing to come to terms with the fact that they had been wrong all along. On the contrary, they were indeed coming to terms with, and reordering their lives around, dramatic and irrefutable evidence that they had been wrong. They were not so much like confused Japanese citizens refusing to reconcile themselves to the events of 1945, and continuing to cling to their belief that they ‘must have’ won the war, and that all evidence to the contrary was cunning enemy propaganda. They were more like people who, discovering that they had been fighting for the wrong side, at once changed their allegiance and applied for citizenship in the victorious country. They were more like Herod the Great, who backed Mark Antony in the Roman civil war, and then, after Augustus had won, went at once and offered to back him with the same energy.³⁵ They were like someone who had been deeply asleep, and would have preferred to stay that way, but who, on hearing the alarm clock, sprang out of bed at once and got on with the business of the day.

Festinger’s theory is in any case seriously challenged by the behaviour of other Jewish groups in the second-Temple period. We saw in chapter 12 that many of the messianic movements between roughly 150 BC and AD 150 ended with the violent death of the founder. When this happened, there were two options open to any who escaped death: they could give up the movement, or they could find themselves another Messiah. The followers of a dead prophet could of course go on believing that he was a true prophet; that, indeed, is what happened with some at least of the followers of John the Baptist.³⁶ But with a would-be Messiah, who was supposed to be inaugurating the kingdom, it was impossible. Nobody, after all, believed that the Messiah would be raised from the dead; nobody was expecting any such thing.³⁷ Clinging to the belief that the recently executed person was after all the Messiah was simply not an option. We do not find evidence of much ‘cognitive dissonance’ in the pages of Josephus; first-century Jews seem to have been, in this respect, more hard-headed than twentieth-century flying-saucer devotees. Even if there were anything in Festinger’s theory, it is incapable of providing an alternative sufficient explanation for the rise of early Christian belief.

Similar theories continue to crop up from time to time, evidence (it would seem) of the desperation of the critic rather than of serious historical thought.³⁸ But I turn now to a very different kind of explanation that has been put forward as an alternative sufficient explanation for what the early Christians believed.

(ii) A New Experience of Grace

The Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx wrote one of the largest works on Jesus to appear in the 1970s, and devoted considerable space to the question of Easter. His work received wide notice and has exercised considerable influence.³⁹ He attempted to distance himself from what he saw as the reductionism of mainstream German Protestantism, as represented by Bultmann and Marxsen; what he means by the rise of Easter faith has nothing to do with the idea that Jesus has risen only ‘in the kerygma’ or ‘in our experience as believers’ while he himself lingers on ‘in the realm of the dead’.⁴⁰ However, this disclaimer seems to me a way of insisting simply that Schillebeeckx is a liberal Catholic rather than a liberal Protestant. His own theory, expounded at length, is essentially very similar to the standard Bultmannian model.

In outline, his view works like this. The first Christians, particularly Peter, had a wonderful experience of grace and forgiveness, of ‘seeing’ and ‘enlightenment’, which can be described as ‘conversion’.⁴¹ This was not originally anything to do either with an empty tomb or with reports of ‘seeing’ Jesus in an ‘objectivizing’ way.⁴² At a certain point, however, not least through the cultic practice of visiting Jesus’ tomb (see below), stories of an empty tomb began to be told, coupled with the motif ‘on the third day’, which originally had nothing to do with actual chronology and everything to do with evoking, in a strictly metaphorical sense, an awareness of divine presence and action.⁴³ Gradually this developing tradition came to include also stories about Jesus being seen; then (at this point Schillebeeckx inverts Bultmann’s normal method) sayings of the earthly Jesus were put into the mouth of the risen lord.⁴⁴ This was not, to begin with, anything to do with people supposing that Jesus had actually been physically seen, touched, and so on:

only we suffer from the crude and naïve realism of what ‘appearances of Jesus’ came to be in the later tradition, through unfamiliarity with the distinctive character of the Jewish-biblical way of speaking.⁴⁵

Schillebeeckx’s appeal to this ‘Jewish-biblical way of speaking’ needs to be challenged in the light of chapters 3 and 4 above, and we shall return to this presently. But his proposal is at least now clear. What happened, across the first generation of Christianity, was a movement from a basic, early faith and experience, the experience of being ‘converted’, to an expression of that faith in terms of stories which, through the influence of Jewish ideas, look, like naive, literalistic stories of a dead man coming back to life. Schillebeeckx is conscious that with this proposal he is inverting what the New Testament writers actually say.⁴⁶ He recognises that some Jews at least thought of resurrection from the dead in a physical sense; but in the full ‘eschatological’ sense (which Schillebeeckx defines as ‘meta-empirical and meta-historical’, allowing for plenty of epistemological and hermeneutical elbow room) he says that ‘resurrection’ has nothing to do with bodies.⁴⁷

Schillebeeckx supports this construction with brief analyses of the gospels and Paul. Mark, he says, develops from the cultic legend associated with pilgrims visiting the holy sepulchre, ‘where a religious ceremony then took place and apropos of this visit, in the early morning, the pilgrims were reminded of the apostolic belief in the resurrection’. He follows various scholars who have proposed an early Easter liturgy which then generated empty-tomb stories. This ‘aetiological cult-legend’, he says, corresponds to something ‘deep in human nature’.⁴⁸ Matthew, misleadingly, introduces the (Jewish) idea that a body has to be involved.⁴⁹ Luke, in order to address Greeks, invokes a hellenistic ‘rapture’ model as part of a theios aner (‘divine man’) Christology, only then to drop it again when he writes some of the speeches in Acts.⁵⁰ Paul is first called to a mission to the Gentiles, and this grounds and legitimates his Damascus Road experience, his ‘seeing’ of Jesus as ‘the Christ’. Thus he too has a kind of resurrection experience, though this follows from the faith he already has, and does not involve him actually seeing Jesus. Thus

a Jesus appearance is not the object of neutral observation; it is a faith-motivated experience in response to an eschatological disclosure, expressed in a Christological affirmation of Jesus as the risen One, that is, disclosure of and faith in Jesus in his eschatological, Christological significance. This was again the sole essence of all other Christ manifestations, which have subsequently been filled out either with the theology of the communities represented by Matthew, Luke and John or with the concrete career of the apostle Paul himself.⁵¹

This view is ingenious and subtle, but demonstrably wrong on almost every count.⁵² Schillebeeckx’s grasp on the Jewish context is sketchy and misleading. Despite a foray into the history of Jewish views of death and what lies beyond, he never sees that, precisely because there is a spectrum of views, ‘resurrection’ denotes one point on that spectrum, namely the point to do with dead people stopping being bodily dead and becoming bodily alive again.⁵³ His invention of a supposed ‘Jewish-biblical way of speaking’, in comparison with which stories of the risen Jesus appear crude and naively realistic, stands the truth on its head. His picture of the cultic practice of visiting Jesus’ tomb, upon which he bases his reading of Mark, is without foundation. He is right to say that Matthew tells stories which assume that ‘resurrection’ means bodies, but wrong to imply that this is an odd innovation in the tradition. His analysis of a ‘rapture’ tradition is unwarranted, and does not in any case apply to Luke (when Jesus disappears in Emmaus this hardly constitutes a ‘rapture’, since he reappears in Jerusalem shortly afterwards).⁵⁴ His account of Paul is inaccurate in its reporting both of the Acts stories and of Paul’s own evidence.⁵⁵

This alone would be enough to rule out his theory as a historical explanation: he has not done justice to the evidence. But two further features stand out as well. First, he insists repeatedly that experiences of the risen Jesus only happened to people who were already believers. To make this point, as we have seen, he has to manipulate the stories of Paul rather severely; and he never discusses the two other obvious counter-examples. To start with, there is Thomas (who could, we may suppose, be dismissed with a wave of a redaction-critical hand as a figment of the Johannine community’s imagination); but there is also James the brother of Jesus, who belongs firmly in the earliest tradition we possess (1 Corinthians 15:7), and stays there, as much a stumbling-block to speculative scholarship as he was to the Jerusalem hierarchy. James may well not have been a follower of Jesus during the latter’s public career, but he became a central figure in the early church—the latter indisputable fact undergirding the former, because, if James had been a follower of Jesus, it is very unlikely that the church would make up stories to say, or at least imply, that he had not.⁵⁶

Second, Schillebeeckx admits in a couple of throwaway lines that he cannot in fact explain why the disciples came to faith in the first place. He has simply pushed the historical question one stage further back. The disciples, he says, underwent ‘a process of repentance and conversion which it is no longer possible to reconstruct on a historical basis’.⁵⁷ The New Testament, he declares, ‘nowhere explicitly states’ which concrete events it was in which the ‘grace and favour’, or the ‘renewed offer of salvation in Jesus’, was manifested. It only speaks, he says, ‘of the character of this event as one of amazing grace’. What the disciples experienced, Schillebeeckx proposes, was grace in the form of forgiveness, though this can also be described as ‘their concrete experience of forgiveness after Jesus’ death, encountered as grace and discussed among themselves’ as they mull over the events and sayings of Jesus’ life:

He renews for them the offer of salvation; this they experience in their own conversion; he must therefore be alive … A dead man does not proffer forgiveness. A present fellowship with Jesus is thus restored … It is the individual’s experience of new being that imparts to faith the assurance that Jesus is alive or is the coming judge of the world.⁵⁸

The entire argument of Parts II, III and IV of the present book tell heavily against all this. To deny that the resurrection accounts offer a prima facie account of ‘concrete events’ which manifested the divine grace and favour is bad enough (Schillebeeckx first sweeps all the evidence under the carpet, and then exclaims, ‘Look! No evidence!’). To affirm in their place, as a ‘concrete experience’, the disciples’ feeling of forgiveness, which the accounts never actually predicate of the Eleven (except by implication, ironically, in the case of Peter, whom Schillebeeckx is concerned to prioritize ⁵⁹)—this is to invent something to do a job which, even if it were there in the texts, it would be incapable of doing. It is like carefully constructing an axe out of plasticine and hoping it will cut down a giant oak. As we noted in chapter 12, if some followers of Bar-Giora or Bar-Kochba had suggested, after their leader’s death, that he really was the Messiah, on the grounds that some of them had begun to experience a new sense of forgiveness, the response would have been that Judaism had plenty of categories for talking about divine forgiveness, but that declaring one’s recently executed leader to be Messiah (still less ‘the Christ’ in the sense Schillebeeckx uses the word), or that he had in any sense been raised from the dead, was not one of them. Even granted that Jesus had spoken words of salvation and forgiveness during his public career, and that his followers remembered and cherished those words, and had a strong sense of the divine presence with them in the days that followed, that would not provide grounds for saying that he was ‘alive’ in a way in which the writers of many much-cherished Jewish texts were not. The Psalms spoke of forgiveness; so did Isaiah. Many Jews lived by those promises while knowing quite well that David and Isaiah were long since dead.

Schillebeeckx’s entire construct, in fact, is mistaken and misleading, not so much at the level of Christian theology (that is a whole other question) but at the level of plausible historical reconstruction. It is revealing that when he sums up what he really thinks happened, in perhaps less guarded mode than usual, his position threatens to collapse back into a variation of that of Albert Schweitzer: Jesus was a noble but disastrous failure, but his followers were challenged in a new way by the memory of what he did and said. God must have the last word, despite the ‘historical fiasco’ of Jesus, and ‘this the early Christians try to express with their credal affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection’—an affirmation whose wording ‘may be subjected to criticism’, by which Schillebeeckx seems to mean that it leads one towards a ‘crude and naive realism’, the unfortunate belief that something actually happened at Easter.⁶⁰ But, as we have seen, the historical study of early Christian practice and hope leaves us no choice but to conclude that this unfortunate belief was what all early Christians held. Indeed, they professed that it was the very centre of their life. They would have responded in much the same way as the writer John Updike, in the epigraph to this Part of the book. Metaphors are important; but they are not to be used for mocking God.

Schillebeeckx is not, of course, the only scholar who has proposed this kind of theory, and there may be other examples which are not subject to all the criticisms I have voiced.⁶¹ But he is one of the fullest exponents of this line of thought, and it is important to show that, in its basic structure as well as in variable details, it simply fails to account for what happened. Like the theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’, the theory that the early Christians had a profound religious experience which only slowly grew into the (misleading) language of bodily resurrection provides no kind of an explanation for the rise of the early Christian belief.⁶²

4. The Necessary Condition

This study of two widely used alternative explanations for the rise of the early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection leads me back to step 6 in the argument I outlined at the start of this chapter. The empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ with Jesus, when combined, present us with not only a sufficient condition for the rise of early Christian belief, but also, it seems, a necessary one. Nothing else historians have been able to come up with has the power to explain the phenomena before us.

This remains, of course, unprovable in logical or mathematical terms. The historian is never in a position to do what Pythagoras did: not content with drawing more and more right-angled triangles and demonstrating that the square on the hypotenuse always does in fact equal the sum of the squares on the other two sides, he constructed a theorem to prove that this must always be the case. With history it is not like that. Almost nothing is ever ruled out absolutely; history, after all, is mostly the study of the unusual and unrepeatable. What we are after is high probability; and this is to be attained by examining all the possibilities, all the suggestions, and asking how well they explain the phenomena. It is always possible that in discussing the resurrection someone will come up with the sceptical critic’s dream: an explanation which provides a sufficient condition for the rise of early Christian faith but which, by fitting into post-Enlightenment epistemological and ontological categories, or even simply mainstream pagan ones, causes no fluttering in the critical dovecotes. It is worthy of note that, despite the somewhat desperate attempts of many scholars over the last two hundred years (not to mention critics since at least Celsus), no such explanation has been found. The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ or ‘sightings’ of the risen Jesus in order to explain a faith they already had. They developed that faith because of the occurrence, and convergence, of these two phenomena. Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion-experience would have generated such ideas; nobody would have invented it, no matter how guilty (or how forgiven) they felt, no matter how many hours they pored over the scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and to enter into a fantasy world of our own, a new cognitive dissonance in which the relentless modernist, desperately worried that the post-Enlightenment worldview seems in imminent danger of collapse, devises strategies for shoring it up nevertheless.⁶³ In terms of the kind of proof which historians normally accept, the case we have presented, that the tomb-plus-appearances combination is what generated early Christian belief, is as watertight as one is likely to find.

This conclusion provides a solid framework within which some other small but significant pieces of historical evidence must be fitted. These are often noted, and we have described them more fully in chapter 12 above. They do not in themselves compel any particular reading of the evidence; but they strongly support the tomb-plus-appearances hypothesis. First, the early Christians, remarkably soon, began to regard the first day of the week as their special day. Second, there is no evidence whatever that anyone ever venerated Jesus’ tomb. Both of these have already been discussed in chapter 12 above.

Third, and related to the point about Jesus’ tomb, there was never a question of anyone performing a secondary burial for Jesus. There should have been, of course, in the ordinary way; this is often ignored in historical study, but it is important. The burial so carefully described in the gospels was, as we would expect in first-century Palestinian Judaism, the initial stage of a two-stage burial.⁶⁴ The body was wrapped in grave-cloths along with a significant amount of spices, to offset the smell of putrefaction, on the usual assumption that other shelves in the cave would be required soon enough by the same family or group. There would be plenty of coming and going with further bodies; nobody who owned a burial cave would want to leave it with only one body in it. Even Joseph of Arimathea, who according to the story was rich and devoted to Jesus, would have expected to use the cave again. After a period of between about six months and two years, those coming and going with subsequent primary burials would note that the corpse in question had completely decomposed, leaving only the bare skeleton. They would then collect the bones, fold them reverently and carefully according to a traditional pattern, and place them in an ossuary, which they would store either in a niche within the same cave or in some other location near by. This is what Joseph would have expected to do with the bones of Jesus.

Disciplined historical imagination indicates what would have happened. If Jesus, having been buried in the ordinary way, had remained physically dead, decomposing inside the tomb, so that there never was an empty tomb, let alone ‘meetings’ between him and his disciples, we must suppose that someone from among his followers or family, or perhaps from the family of Joseph, would sooner or later have returned to perform this final act of respect. And (unless we declare, a priori, that every single scrap of our evidence about early Christianity is a late fiction) we must suppose that this would have happened at precisely the same time that the early church was busily proclaiming him as Messiah and lord on the grounds that he had been raised from the dead—specifically, according to Acts, that his body had not decomposed.⁶⁵ And we must suppose that this happened around the same time that the zealous Saul of Tarsus, persecuting the church, was confronted by one whom he took to be Jesus, and forthwith declared that he had been raised from the dead. It is because of the impossibility of putting together the story on this basis that scholars have been driven to the desperate expedient of denying everything about Joseph, discounting almost everything about Paul, and offering us instead a narrative of their own, without primary evidence.⁶⁶

A fascinating sidelight on the whole question is provided by an inscription found near Nazareth, probably from the reign of Claudius, forbidding tampering with tombs. Like many pieces of ancient evidence, it may have nothing to do with our question; or it conceivably might. If we suppose that word had got out about a new sect that was hailing a recently executed ‘king of the Jews’ as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true lord, and that rumours such as those in Matthew 28:11–15 had been circulated as an official explanation, it is quite feasible to imagine someone using the emperor’s authority to try to lock the door after the horse had bolted:

Ordinance of Caesar. It is my pleasure that graves and tombs remain undisturbed in perpetuity … If any man lay information that another has either demolished them, or has in any other way extracted the buried, or has maliciously transferred them to other places in order to wrong them, or has displaced the sealing or other stones, against such a one I order that a trial be instituted … Let it be absolutely forbidden for any one to disturb them. In case of contravention I desire that the offender be sentenced to capital punishment on charge of violation of sepulture.⁶⁷

Nothing can be built on this, of course. Like many archaeological finds, it raises questions rather than answering them. But it certainly supplies a bit of teasing embroidery around the edge of the argument.

For all these reasons I conclude that the historian, of whatever persuasion, has no option but to affirm both the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ with Jesus as ‘historical events’ in all the senses we sketched in chapter 1: they took place as real events; they were significant events; they are, in the normal sense required by historians, provable events; historians can and should write about them. We cannot account for early Christianity without them. The tomb-and-meetings scenario is warranted, indeed, by that double similarity and double dissimilarity (to Judaism on the one hand and the early church on the other) for which I argued earlier as a methodological control in the study of Jesus.⁶⁸ Stories like these, with the kind of explanation the early Christians offered, make the sense they make within first-century Judaism (similarity), but nobody within first-century Judaism was expecting anything like this (dissimilarity). Stories like these do indeed explain the rise of early Christianity (similarity), but they cannot be explained as the back-projection of early Christian faith, theology and exegesis (dissimilarity).⁶⁹

This conclusion rules out several of the alternative accounts that have been offered from time to time, mostly variations on the theme of mistakes made in the early morning (the women went to the wrong tomb, they mistook someone else for Jesus, and so on). These are in any case trivial when we remember the state of mind of Jesus’ followers after his crucifixion and the fact that they were not expecting anything remotely like this to occur. Reports based on misunderstandings would quickly have been sorted out. The hoary old theory that Jesus did not really die on the cross, but revived in the cool of the tomb, has likewise nothing to recommend it, and it is noticeable that even those historians who are passionately committed to denying the resurrection do not attempt to go by this route.⁷⁰ Roman soldiers, after all, were rather good at killing people, and when given a rebel leader to practise on they would have had several motives for making sure the job was done properly. A further, more recent suggestion can also be ruled out: that, after his crucifixion, Jesus’ body was not buried, but left instead for dogs and vultures to finish off.⁷¹ Had that happened, no matter how many ‘visions’ they had had, the disciples would not have concluded that he had been raised from the dead. We are left with the secure historical conclusion: the tomb was empty, and various ‘meetings’ took place not only between Jesus and his followers (including at least one initial sceptic) but also, in at least one case (that of Paul; possibly, too, that of James), between Jesus and people who had not been among his followers. I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

This brings us to step 7 of the argument I outlined at the start of the chapter. It is important to see that we have got this far by following the historical argument, not by invoking any external a priori beliefs. The widespread belief and practice of the early Christians is only explicable if we assume that they all believed that Jesus was bodily raised, in an Easter event something like the stories the gospels tell; the reason they believed that he was bodily raised is because the tomb was empty and, over a short period thereafter, they encountered Jesus himself, giving every appearance of being bodily alive once more. How then can we explain these two facts, the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’?

5. The Historical Challenge of Jesus’ Resurrection

The answer is blindingly obvious, as Saul of Tarsus might have said, whether or not he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus. The adverb is important: the obvious answer to the question seems such a bold affront to the principles of post-Enlightenment historical epistemology that it looks as though the only way to affirm it is by shutting both eyes and flailing around in the dark. To say, as the early Christians did, that the tomb was empty, and that the ‘meetings’ with Jesus took place, because he had indeed been bodily raised from the dead, seems to require the suspension of all our normal language about how we know things about the past.

It is important to stress the word ‘obvious’, though, as well as ‘blinding’. If we were faced with some other historical problem which had brought us to a secure and interrelated pair of conclusions, and if we were looking for a fact or event to explain them both; and if we discovered something which explained them as thoroughly and satisfyingly as the bodily resurrection of Jesus explains the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’; then we would accept it without a moment’s hesitation. An archaeologist discovers two pillars of an ancient arch. Her colleague, poking about in the long grass nearby, discovers carved stones that complete the top of the same arch. Everyone goes home satisfied; the original has been reconstructed. If I think I see an elephant walking past the Houses of Parliament, I assume either that it is a clever pantomime-like hoax (part of another animal-rights protest, perhaps) or that I must have consumed rather more alcohol last night than I had realized. If I then hear on the news that an elephant has gone missing from a circus in Hyde Park, it will not take me many minutes to come up with a hypothesis to cover both eventualities. If the friend who a short while ago was on the opposite bank of a deep and fast-flowing river is now on the near bank, and I know both that there is no bridge for miles in either direction and that she cannot swim, I assume that she has used some kind of a boat. We make this sort of inference all the time. A good many legal cases depend on it. The murder weapon had the accused’s fingerprints all over it; the accused had blood of the right type all over his clothes; however blameless and gentle his previous character, the jury will put two and two together.

Those are all examples of the kind of obvious and satisfying historical explanation which the bodily resurrection of Jesus offers for the data before us. If Jesus was raised, with (as the early Christians in their different ways affirmed) a ‘transphysical’ body, both the same and yet in some mysterious way transformed, the two key pieces of evidence, the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’, are explained. The arch fits the pillars exactly.⁷²

The problem, of course, is that we know that ancient arches often lie in ruins. We know that elephants exist, and that, given a chance, they might well wander off in search of fresh entertainment. We know that boats will enable people to cross rivers. We know that unlikely people sometimes commit murders. What we do not know—not because we inhabit a modern scientific worldview, but because at this point all human history tells the same story—is that someone who is well and truly dead can become well and truly alive again.

The Christian story about Jesus does not try to suggest otherwise. This point needs to be stressed. The early Christian understanding of Easter was not that this sort of thing was always likely to happen sooner or later, and finally it did. It was not that a particular human being happened to possess even more unusual powers than anyone had imagined before.⁷³ Nor did they suppose it was a random freak, like a monkey sitting at a typewriter and finally producing All’s Well that Ends Well (after, we must suppose, several near-misses). When they said that Jesus had been raised from the dead the early Christians were not saying, as many critics have supposed, that the god in whom they believed had simply decided to perform a rather more spectacular miracle, an even greater display of ‘supernatural’ power, than they had expected. This was not a special favour performed for Jesus because his god liked him more than anyone else.⁷⁴ The fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Christian belief, not an objection to it. The early Christians insisted that what had happened to Jesus was precisely something new; was, indeed, the start of a whole new mode of existence, a new creation. The fact that Jesus’ resurrection was, and remains, without analogy is not an objection to the early Christian claim. It is part of the claim itself.⁷⁵

The challenge for any historian, when faced with the question of the rise of Christianity, is much more sharply focused than is often supposed. It is not simply a matter of whether one believes in ‘miracles’, or in the supernatural, in general, in which case (it is supposed) the resurrection will be no problem. If anyone ever reaches the stage where the resurrection is in that sense no problem, we can be sure that they have made a mistake somewhere, that they have constructed a world in which this most explosive and subversive of events—supposing it to have occurred—can be domesticated and put on show, like a circus elephant or clever typing monkey, as a key exhibit in the church’s collection of supernatural trophies. The resurrection of Jesus then becomes either ‘a trip to a garden and a lovely surprise’, a happy ending to a fairy story, or a way of legitimating different types of Christianity or different leaders within it.⁷⁶ No: the challenge comes down to a much narrower point, not simply to do with worldviews in general, or with ‘the supernatural’ in particular, but with the direct question of death and life, of the world of space, time and matter and its relation to whatever being there may be for whom the word ‘god’, or even ‘God’, might be appropriate. Here there is, of course, no neutrality. Any who pretend to it are merely showing that they have not understood the question.⁷⁷

In particular, any who insist on being post-Enlightenment historians must look in the mirror and ask some hard methodological questions.⁷⁸ The underlying rationale of the Enlightenment was, after all, that the grandiose dogmatic claims of the church (and a good deal else besides, but the church was always a key target) needed to be challenged by the fearless, unfettered examination of historical evidence. It will not do, after two hundred years of this, for historians in that tradition to turn round and rule out, a priori, certain types of answer to questions that remain naggingly insistent. The larger dreams of the Enlightenment have, in recent years, been challenged on all kinds of levels. In some cases (colonialism, the global triumph of western capitalism, and so on) they have been shown to be politically, economically and culturally self-serving on a massive scale. What if the moratorium on speaking of Jesus’ bodily resurrection, which has been kept in place until recently more by the critics’ tone of voice than by sustained historical argument (‘surely,’ they imply on the edge of every discussion of the subject, ‘you cannot be so impossibly naive as to think that something actually happened?’), should itself turn out to be part of that intellectual and cultural hegemony against which much of the world is now doing its best to react?⁷⁹ What if the resurrection, instead of (as is often imagined) legitimating a cosy, comfortable, socially and culturally conservative form of Christianity, should turn out to be, in the twenty-first century as in the first, the most socially, culturally and politically explosive force imaginable, blasting its way through the sealed tombs and locked doors of modernist epistemology and the (now) deeply conservative social and political culture which it sustains? When I said that there was no neutral ground at this point, I was not only referring to patterns of thought and belief. Indeed, the holding apart of the mental and spiritual on the one hand from the social, cultural and political on the other, one of the most important planks in the Enlightenment platform, is itself challenged by the question of Jesus’ resurrection. To address the final historical question is to face, within the worldview model, not only questions of belief but also of praxis, story and symbol.⁸⁰

This is of course what people mean when they say that resurrection faith is ‘self-involving’. There are various levels of self-involving statements. If, walking down the street, I say ‘I think that was the Number 10 bus’, the statement is only minimally self-involving; I do not want to go where the Number 10 bus goes, and anyway I prefer to walk. But if, arriving breathless at the bus-stop on the way to a vital appointment, I look despairingly up the street and say ‘I think that was the Number 10 bus’, knowing that the next one is not due for another two hours and that there is no other means of arriving on time, the statement not only involves me, it plunges me into gloom. The point is that one cannot say ‘Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead’ with the minimal involvement of the first of those statements. If it happened, it matters. The world is a different place from what it would be if it did not happen. The person who makes the statement is committed to living in this different world, this newly envisioned universe of discourse, imagination and action.

In the same way—this is not so often noticed, but it is just as important—for someone to say ‘Jesus of Nazareth was not bodily raised from the dead’ is equally self-involving. Of course, if the speaker has heard almost nothing about Jesus and has no idea of the central Christian claims, the self-involvement appears minimal. But the more closely the speaker has looked at the question, the deeper the self-involvement becomes. Such a statement then belongs within, and reinforces, the universal ancient pagan worldview, the ‘modernist’ post-Enlightenment worldview, and (no doubt) many other variations on, or anticipations of, both of them.⁸¹ That is why, ironically, such a denial is usually felt to be unimportant (it merely reinforces a widely held worldview), except when warding off the challenge of mainstream orthodox Christianity. Believing that Jesus did not rise from the dead is not necessarily the central plank of anyone’s worldview, as belief in the resurrection is to an orthodox Christian worldview. It is usually a mere corollary, often simply assumed.

How then can we proceed? If there is no neutral ‘historiography’ that can serve as a tribunal before which one can present such a question and ask for a decision—the point, I take it, which certain theologians have insisted on, anxious lest blind historiography be elevated to a place that belongs only to God, if there be a god—are we condemned to remain for ever in mutually exclusive closed epistemological circles? Is the world to consist only of believers affirming their belief within a context where it makes sense, and unbelievers affirming their unbelief within a context where it makes sense, without either ever having the chance to talk to the other? At this point all kinds of theological, metaphysical, philosophical and cultural issues are raised, and I am well enough aware of them to know that there is no space at the end of a book like this to develop them in any detail.⁸² I want, instead, to explore a line of thought which seems to me to offer a way forward.⁸³

Take, as a model, the scene involving Thomas in John 20. Thomas comes to the question with one particular epistemology uppermost in mind: he wants to touch as well as to see. Indeed, he insists that the data must be caught within his proposed epistemological net or he will not acknowledge it as real data at all. However, when Thomas is confronted by the risen Jesus, and even invited to touch, John does not say (despite, once more, a long and distinguised artistic tradition) that Thomas went ahead and did so.⁸⁴ Seeing was enough; and he blurts out the confession which rounds off the theological structure of John’s entire gospel. But this, too, evokes a gentle rebuke: blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.

Enlightenment historiography has often placed itself in the position from which the doubting disciple began. Like Thomas, it protests that it has not shared the deep Christian experience of those who now believe, who look as though they are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. It insists on ‘hard evidence’, on ‘scientific proof’. It maintains a dignified if perhaps brittle scepticism.

Equally, certain branches of theology have stressed the gentle rebuke of Jesus. If you need proof, if you even want proof, that seems to show that you have not yet discovered true faith. One should not reply to the Enlightenment in anything like its own terms. As the book of Proverbs warns, answering fools according to their folly is itself a foolish thing to do.⁸⁵ And yet the very next verse declares that one must answer fools in their own terms, lest they be wise in their own eyes—in other words, lest they imagine they have won their case by default. Far be it from me, of course, to agree with the totally negative view of the Enlightenment implied by that use of Proverbs 26, which is here simply argumenti causa. There was much wisdom, as well as much folly, in the eighteenth-century appeal to history against dogma and hierarchy, even if now, with the Enlightenment’s own dogma and hierarchy firmly in power, it is time to turn the historical argument against post-Enlightenment scepticism itself.

To return to Thomas: in the story, Jesus welcomes him and invites him to do what he wants, even though there is still a gentle rebuke in store. Neither circle, it seems, is closed. There is enough evidence to lure sceptics forward, even if they still have lessons to learn about how we know things as well as about what there is to be known. And the faith which, in its most mature form, might be happy to go forwards without either touch or sight, is after all a belief and trust not simply in otherworldly realities, but (for John of all people!) in the Word made flesh, which can be heard, seen and handled.⁸⁶ The idea that faith must never have anything to do with history, so popular in certain circles for many years, is long overdue a decent burial.⁸⁷

A challenge must be issued, in any case, not only to misleading ideas of ‘faith’, but to other assumptions as well. There are plenty of unhelpful ideas still current about what counts as genuine ‘scientific’ explanation. Not only history, but the physical sciences themselves, often proceed not simply by deduction from hard data, and certainly not always by induction from the particular to the general (particulars are after all the stuff of history), but by inference to the best explanation, which is one variety of ‘abduction’.⁸⁸ In my earlier examples, the best explanation of the old stone columns is that there really was an arch; if we discover one that fits, we should be inclined to conclude the argument. The best explanation of the elephant outside Parliament is something nobody saw: the beast sneaking away from the circus and strolling round the corner. The best explanation of the presence of the friend on this bank of the river is that she has used a boat, even though there is no boat in sight. The best explanation for the fingerprints and the blood-stains (leaving aside the extra circumstances novelists love to invent) is that the accused really did commit the murder, even though there is no other evidence and the character references are impeccable.

In the case of history, these are all inferences to things which are in principle unrepeatable. In the case of the physical sciences, similar inferences are made with the supposition that they would have to be made again on the basis of analogous data.⁸⁹ In a recent treatment of ‘inference’, an example is given which bears some analogy to many debates about the resurrection:

Do you know that you are looking at a … book right now rather than, say, having your brain intricately stimulated by a mad scientist? The sceptic carefully describes this alternative so that no experiment can refute it. The conclusion that you really are looking at a book, however, explains the aggregate of your experiences better than the mad scientist hypothesis or any other competing view. A sceptic who disagrees with this, instead of telling still more stories in which we cannot distinguish radically different situations, needs to address fresh issues about explanation.⁹⁰

The equivalent of the ‘mad scientist’ hypothesis in the resurrection debate would be the intricately designed hypotheses according to which anything and everything that pointed towards the resurrection (the gospel accounts, of course, in particular) is to be explained as the work of the early church expounding, legitimating and defending theological, exegetical and church-governmental conclusions reached on quite other grounds. The question which must be faced is whether the explanation of the data which the early Christians themselves gave, that Jesus really was risen from the dead, ‘explains the aggregate’ of the evidence better than these sophisticated scepticisms. My claim is that it does.

The claim can be stated once more in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. The actual bodily resurrection of Jesus (not a mere resuscitation, but a transforming revivification) clearly provides a sufficient condition of the tomb being empty and the ‘meetings’ taking place. Nobody is likely to doubt that. Once grant that Jesus really was raised, and all the pieces of the historical jigsaw puzzle of early Christianity fall into place. My claim is stronger: that the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides a necessary condition for these things; in other words, that no other explanation could or would do. All the efforts to find alternative explanations fail, and they were bound to do so.

Many will challenge this conclusion, for many different reasons. I do not claim that it constitutes a ‘proof’ of the resurrection in terms of some neutral standpoint. It is, rather, a historical challenge to other explanations, other worldviews. Precisely because at this point we are faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island in the middle of the epistemological ocean, as yet uncolonized by any of the warring continents. We cannot simply arrive at a topic and make grand declarations, as in Francis Drake’s celebrated annexation of California, and suppose that all the local inhabitants will take them as binding. Saying that ‘Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead’ is not only a self-involving statement; it is a self-committing statement, going beyond a reordering of one’s private world into various levels of commitment to work out the implications. We cannot simply leave a flag stuck on a hill somewhere and sail back home to safety.

As I said in the Preface, this book is in many ways a ground-clearing exercise, hauling away boulders and digging out weeds that have prevented anything useful growing in this patch of soil. But the historical enquiry which we have undertaken, working back from the evidence of early Christianity to the question about its root belief, and back from the stories which encapsulate that root belief to the question of why they came into existence in the first place, ought to raise in the minds of the Thomas-like questioner fresh doubt, doubt about doubt itself, doubt which might pause to consider the difference between inference to the best explanation (that Jesus was indeed raised from the dead) on the one hand and the alternative theories on the other. It is, of course, perfectly possible to say that one cannot decide. But for those who prefer not to live on such a knife-edge for ever, but who do not want to solve the jigsaw puzzle by putting Jesus’ bodily resurrection in the middle of it, the challenge is: what alternative account can be offered which will explain the data just as well, which can provide an alternative sufficient explanation for all the evidence and so challenge the right of the bodily resurrection to be regarded as the necessary one?

The standard alternative theories have been ruled out, explicitly or implicitly, as we have made our way through this book.⁹¹ The common idea that, when the early Christians said ‘Jesus was raised from the dead’, they meant something like ‘He is alive in a spiritual, non-bodily sense, and we give him our allegiance as our lord’ is historically impossible.⁹² Not only, as we saw in Part I, did the words simply not mean that; one might as well say that ‘Jesus was crucified by the Romans’ meant neither more nor less than ‘As I think of Jesus, I experience a sense of the crushing power of pagan empire.’ If the early Christians had meant that, a belief of that kind could not explain, either within the second-Temple Jewish world or that of first-century paganism, why they hailed Jesus as Messiah and lord, or, in particular, why their belief about their own future resurrection took the very precise shape it did (Part III). The suggestion that Paul’s view of the resurrection (of Christians, and of Jesus) had nothing to do with what we think of as a ‘body’ has been shown in Part II to be exegetically unfounded. The idea that there were two parallel streams of ‘resurrection’ belief in early Christianity, one going from Paul to Rheginos and the other going from Luke and John to Tertullian, is ruled out by the evidence surveyed in Parts II and particularly III. The widespread belief that the resurrection accounts in the gospels are back-projections of Christian belief from the middle or late first century simply will not work, as I have argued in Part IV and again, in relation to Schillebeeckx in particular, in the present chapter. These are the major counter-proposals, the main ways in which, over the last century or so, the inference to the best explanation has been avoided. Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which scepticisms of various sorts have been hiding. The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity.

There remains one final question, which is closely intertwined with the directly historical one. The early Christians declared that because Jesus had been raised from the dead he was ‘son of god’. What did they mean by this? What light does this shed both on the historical question and on its meaning and results today?