The Christian faith was born in the Moment of Easter. Yet somewhat surprisingly that Moment is written about rather briefly in the Christian scriptures and then only in terms of the experience of the witnesses, never in terms of what Jesus experienced. One chapter out of Matthew, nine verses in Mark, one chapter in Luke, two chapters in John (one of which—chapter 21—is generally regarded as not being part of the original Johannine corpus), and a few verses in Paul represent the total content dedicated to a narration of this crucial Moment.
As brief as this is, however, the material is rich and pays dividends in insight to those who will explore it in depth. I am surprised and discouraged by how little this material is treated with seriousness in sermons from the pulpit of Christian churches. The liturgical churches observe the great forty days of Easter as a major season of the church year, but there are few churches in which the Resurrection is treated homiletically for that entire season. Even the sermon on Easter day to the largest congregation of the year is apt to be a bit truncated. On that day the service is a bit longer, the music a bit more special, the crowd in a festive mood so that the sermon can be both brief and shallow and no one will be critical—no one except those who do not come again until the following Easter.
Certainly such treatment of this great central affirmation is not appropriate to its power. I wonder what would happen in our churches if an Easter series of sermons on the Resurrection giving some evidence of a serious exploration by the clergy were announced in advance and well advertised in the community? I suspect there would be a surprising amount of interest and excitement, for there is not a person living who is unconcerned about the issue of life’s ultimate destiny. The ancient question framed by Job is still a haunting one today: “If a man (or woman) die, shall he (or she) live again?” (Job 14:14).
So now let us draw into focus the biblical record about the Easter Moment and try to push our sources back as far as we can.
Enormously enriching means of studying the Bible have been made available to scholars in the last 100 years. Form criticism, linguistic analysis, textual reconstruction and redaction, archaeological insights have all contributed to the explosion of biblical knowledge. Many from the days of William Jennings Bryan (especially in his attempts to defend the State of Tennessee against Clarence Darrow and Mr. Scopes) and many within organized religious institutions today have feared this scholarship. There has always been an element of Christianity that is anti-intellectual. Such an attitude is still present and will undoubtedly find expression in some of the reactions to this book. Most biblical scholars are never read by lay persons.
But this volume is not technical. It is written for lay people. It will attempt to popularize the commonplace insights of the scholars. It is written by a bishop who is fair game for criticism, for as one clergyman wrote me, “Bishops are supposed to defend the faith, not explore it; they are to be ritual performers, not scholars.”
I am convinced that the only authentic defense of the faith involves honest scholarship, not anti-intellectual hiding from truth. There is a sense in which our scholarship ought to be so deep, so honest, and so intense that the result will be either that what we believe will crumble before our eyes, incapable of being sustained; or that we will discover a power and a reality so true that our commitment will be total. If we do not risk the former, we will never discover the latter. Nothing less than this seems worthy of Christians.
We turn now to some biblical facts and biblical data that I find, surprisingly enough, are not part of the conscious memory of most Christians, including most clergy. The same thing has happened to the Easter narratives of the Bible that happened to the birth narratives. They have been blended in the minds of people, and in the blending process their irreconcilable conflicts are ignored. We act as if the biblical witness is one consistent witness. Most of us have an image of the Bible as a whole, smoothed out by ignorance or a faulty memory. Few of us embrace the details of its various parts. Thus, conflicts in the biblical record are seldom faced with honesty, or some incredible, nonsensical explanation is given. I remember hearing Professor Raymond Brown, the world-famous Roman Catholic New Testament scholar, discussing the irreconcilable conflicts between Matthew’s birth narrative and Luke’s birth narrative. This conflict, he said, had been smoothed over by the simplistic explanation that Matthew recorded Joseph’s version of the birth of Jesus and Luke recorded Mary’s version. That explanation has many problems, Dr. Brown suggested, not the least of which is that “it assumes that Joseph and Mary never talked to each other.”
The first thing an honest and serious probe into the truth of the Resurrection must face is the conflict and serious inconsistency that appears in the Easter narratives. Samuel Butler, in his autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, tells us that it was precisely the discovery of these discrepancies that caused his hero, a clergyman’s son (in reality Butler himself), to lose his Christian faith and to become an agnostic. The late James A. Pike, the former Episcopal Bishop of California whose strange, creative, and contraversional career is still remembered by thousands, confessed in one of his last books, The Other Side, that this same discovery led to his abandonment of the orthodox Christian belief in Jesus’ Resurrection.
In the secularized society of our twentieth-century world, the scientific and philosophical objections to belief in the Resurrection loom large. When we add to this the publicly acknowledged fact of significant discrepancies in the Christian record of its own belief, the problem of believing with integrity becomes immense for the person who yearns to be both a part of the Christian faith and a part of his own century and world. Ignoring the data, pretending it’s not there, or failing to acknowledge it is not a help. So let me bring the biblical record into clear and stark focus and relief.
There are five accounts (Professor Raymond Brownsays seven, for he subdivides Mark and John) in the New Testament that purport to give us the specific content of the Easter event. Each of the Gospels has an account, and Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, gives us his version. We will examine them in what I believe to be their chronological order, but let the reader be warned that the world of New Testament scholarship is far from unanimous in agreement on the dating of the various books of the New Testament.
There is general agreement, however, that Paul is the earliest Christian author whose writings have been preserved. So 1 Corinthians 15 is presumably the first written version of the Easter event. 1 Corinthians is generally dated A.D. 55–56, earlier than any Gospel, though perhaps not earlier than portions of the various passion narratives that come finally to lodge in the corpus of the several Gospels.
Isolating Paul’s version from the Gospels, we discover the following facts: (a) there is in Paul’s account no reference to the women’s discovering the empty tomb; (b) there is a reference to an appearance to James alone and to “five hundred brethren at once,” two accounts that are mentioned nowhere in any of the Gospels; and (c) Paul asserts that his own conversion experience was a resurrection appearance.
Paul’s conversion is generally dated one to six years after the events of Good Friday and the first Easter. Yet Paul distinguishes his conversion experience in no way from the appearances in the other resurrection traditions except to say that his was last. “Last of all he appeared unto me.” This would appear to argue that Paul agrees with John, and Mark by implication, that it is the already ascended, glorified Lord of heaven who was experienced in the resurrection appearances. Italso places Paul squarely against Luke, who quite specifically states that the resurrection appearances were pre-ascension phenomena, which is one of the major unresolved conflicts in the New Testament data regarding the Easter Moment. That is the Pauline witness.
The Gospel of Mark is generally believed to be the earliest canonical Gospel and is dated by most scholars between A.D. 65 and 70. Mark’s resurrection narrative is only eight verses long, and recorded in it are no resurrection appearance stories at all. Mark says that very early on the first day of the week three women (Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome) came to the tomb bearing sweet spices with which they planned to anoint his body. As they walked, they wondered how they should remove the great stone that sealed the tomb’s entrance. But arriving, they saw the stone removed. Entering the sepulchre, they found a young man wearing a long white garment, and the women were afraid. The young man calmed their fears, announced the Resurrection of Jesus, and invited the women to tell Peter and the disciples that he was going before them to Galilee and he would meet them there. The women departed quickly, trembling and amazed. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The Markan narrative ends quite abruptly here.
There is a lively debate in New Testament circles as to whether Mark’s Gospel actually ended at this point or whether, perhaps, the original ending was torn off the scroll and lost. The weight of scholarship leans toward the conclusion that Mark intended this abrupt ending. Obviously it bothered early scribes, for they appended verses 9–21 to Mark’s sixteenth chapter inan obvious attempt to harmonize Mark with the other Gospels, especially Luke. The King James Bible includes these verses in its text, but no New Testament scholar I know today regards them as original to Mark.10 For our purposes we will regard only the first eight verses of chapter 16 as the original resurrection narrative of Mark.
Luke was aware of Mark. Indeed, in the final draft of Luke’s Gospel, great sections of Mark’s narrative are simply inserted into the Lukan text. There is no evidence that would suggest that Luke was aware of Matthew or that Matthew was aware of Luke. Both appeared at approximately the same time but in totally different parts of the empire. I would date both Luke and Matthew around A.D. 85–90.
In Luke’s resurrection narrative some women went to the tomb. They were, however, not quite the same women as in Mark, or at least it was a larger group. Luke suggests that it was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna, a person mentioned only one other time in the New Testament (Lk. 8:3). But he also adds the note that other women were also with them. They too went at dawn and found the stone rolled away. No explanation is given as to how it was rolled away. Entering the tomb, they confronted two men, not one, and not necessarily young as in Mark, and the long white garment that Mark described is now dazzling apparel, suggesting at the very least that these were beings of supernatural origin. The women in awe responded as if they were in the presence of the holy, and they bowed their faces to the ground. The two men gave the resurrection message, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” The men reminded the women of Jesus’ Galilean prediction of arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection. The women remembered as did Luke’s original audience, who had only recently heard chapter 9 read. They returned to the disciples with the news of this encounter. The disciples, distrusting the reliability of the women’s report, did not believe them.
In Luke’s narrative there is no appearance of the risen Lord to the women. There is no reference to an appearance in Galilee. Contrary to Mark where we are told the women said nothing to anyone, in Luke they immediately reported to the disciples.
Luke then relates the story of an appearance by Jesus to two disciples, Cleopas and his friend, on a road to Emmaus, a village some six miles from Jerusalem. This story is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible.
The Emmaus participants returned to Jerusalem to share their news with the other disciples only to discover that Jesus had also appeared to Simon Peter, who along with the other disciples was still in Jerusalem. As the two groups talked, Jesus appeared suddenly in their midst. They ate together. Jesus commanded them to stay in Jerusalem until they received the gift of the Spirit. Then he departed. Galilee is never a setting for the Easter experience in Luke either in fact or by implication.
When we turn to Matthew, who also wrote his work in the eighties of the first century, we have other interesting and significant variations. In this narrative only two women went to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week. They were identified by Matthew as Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. The sense of the miraculous and the supernatural has clearly been heightened. There was an earthquake. An angel of the Lord descended and rolled back the stone from the entrance to the tomb. There was no doubt that this messengerwas from the heavenly realm. His face was like lightning, and his garments were white as snow. Once he had rolled the stone away, he sat upon it. His presence was so magnificent and so eerie that the guards trembled and then fainted, becoming, as Matthew suggests, “like dead men” (Mt 28:4).
The angel gave the resurrection message: “He has risen. Come see the place where he lay. Then go quickly. Tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead and he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him” (Mt 28:6ff). The women with both fear and great joy rushed to tell the disciples. But before they arrived, Jesus himself stood in their path and greeted them. The women came up, took hold of his feet, and in obeisance worshiped him. He repeated the angel’s message: “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”
Matthew alone adds the story of the guards’ reporting all that had happened to the chief priests who took counsel with the elders and bribed the guards to tell people that the disciples had stolen his body while they were asleep. Since sleeping on guard duty was a capital offense, the promise of sanctuary from persecution was also given. This story, Matthew asserts in a clearly apologetic vein, is still spread among the Jews “to this day” (Mt 28:11ff).
Then Matthew concludes his Gospel by telling of that promised Galilean rendezvous (Mt 28:16ff). It was on an unnamed Galilean mountaintop to which Jesus had directed them. When the disciples saw him, they worshiped him. He was clearly of another dimension. The implication is that this was the resurrected, ascended, glorified Lord who proclaimed, “All authority in heaven and on earth is given to me.” Jesus then commissioned the disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations,” baptizing them “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” the first and only time the trinitarian formula is used in the Gospels. Jesus, the timeless Christ, also promised to be with them even “to the close of the age.” On this note Matthew’s Gospel ends.
Finally, there is the testimony of John. I date John around A.D. 100, but about the dating of this profound piece of writing there is more controversy than about any other New Testament book. I am personally unconvinced by arguments supporting a much earlier date given recently by both John A. T. Robinson and Raymond Brown. I do not think, however, that this is critical for our purposes in this volume. Perhaps the point at which it might make some difference is that I am convinced that the author of the Fourth Gospel was aware of and had read Mark, Luke, and Matthew, but that is not universally agreed to in the world of New Testament scholarship. More scholars would agree that the author of John knew Mark than would agree that he knew Matthew and Luke. I believe he knew all three. At the very least he seems to be in touch with much of the content of Luke’s special source that scholars call “L.”
John’s account of the Easter Moment contains unique similarities and differences (John 20). Like the other Gospels, he starts with the women at the tomb, but now it is only one woman, Mary Magdalene. She discovered the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. There were no messengers, human or divine. There were no supernatural events, no earthquakes, no guards in a dead sleep. Mary Magdalene ran and told Peter. Peter and another disciple rushed to the tomb toverify Mary’s report. Then they departed. Mary lingered. Again she looked in the tomb. This time she saw two supernatural figures that John calls angels sitting there one at the head and the other at the foot where the body had lain. Yet she was strangely unimpressed. Mary and the angels conversed, “Woman, why are you weeping?” “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” That is hardly a resurrection message.
Then the Fourth Gospel says Mary turned around and saw Jesus standing but did not recognize him. Jesus spoke to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?"— the identical words the angels had used. Mary, supposing him to be the gardener, said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus then spoke her name, “Mary.” “Rabboni—teacher,” she replied. Then a fascinating bit of dialogue is related. “Do not cling to me, Mary, for I have not yet ascended to the Father, but go tell my brethren that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Mary went, and to the disciples she said, “I have seen the Lord,” and she relayed his messages to them.
Later that day and still in Jerusalem, the now ascended (please note) Lord appeared to the disciples. Jesus breathed on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. Both ascension and pentecost for the Fourth Gospel are events of Easter day. The commission to go forth was also, according to John, given on Easter day in Jerusalem and included the power to forgive or retain sins. From this gathering, it is noted, Thomas was absent. The disciples related this experience to Thomas, but he did not believe it. Some time passed.
On the first day of the second week, another resurrection experience occurred, according to the Fourth Gospel. The disciples were still in Jerusalem. Once more they were assembled in the upper room. It was evening, the time of the evening meal. Thomas was present. The risen Lord appeared, confronted Thomas, offered the nail prints in his hands and the wound in his side to Thomas as evidence of his identity. Thomas responded, “My Lord and my God.” An editorial word is added about the virtue of believing without seeing and a closing paragraph stating that “Jesus did many other things in the presence of the disciples which this book does not include.” These are written, the author states, so that the reader “may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing may have life in his name.” Here the twentieth chapter ends.
It seems to many that this is where the author meant to end his work, but there is another chapter added that most scholars, including Raymond Brown, C. H. Dodd, and Rudolf Bultmann, assert is a later addendum by a different author. But who wrote it or when makes little difference for our purposes.
In chapter 21 the scene has moved from Jerusalem to Galilee. Obviously, some time had passed since the events of chapter 20. The disciples had resumed their life routines. Led by Peter, they had returned to their fishing trade, but not all of them—only Peter; the sons of Zebedee, James and John; Thomas; Nathanael; and two others who were not named. They worked through the night. As dawn broke, Jesus on the shore inquired about their catch. They did not recognize him. They responded, “We have caught no fish.” Jesus instructed them to cast the net on the right side of the boat. They did so, and the catch was enormous. Theycould not even haul it in. The disciple identified as “the one Jesus loved” said to Peter, “It is the Lord.” Peter put on his clothes and swam to the shore. The others stayed in the boat, dragging their catch the 150 yards to shore.
On land they saw a charcoal fire, fish cooking, and bread. They hauled in their net—153 fish in all. They ate breakfast. “No one,” the Fourth Gospel strangely says, “dared ask him, who are you? They knew it was the Lord.”
Following the sharing of this meal by the sea in Galilee, the risen Lord confronted Peter, inquiring as to his love and charging him to “feed my sheep.” Finally, there is a cryptic reference to the death of Peter and the death of the beloved disciple. This is the end of the biblical description of the Easter Moment.
Something so very basic to the Christian proclamation as the Resurrection is thus the subject of great confusion and contradiction even in the writings of the Gospels, the primary written Christian witnesses. Let me summarize the points of conflict.
Who went to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week? Paul says nothing about anyone’s going. Mark says that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went. Luke says that Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Joanna, and some other women went. Matthew says that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary only went. John says that Mary Magdalene alone went.
What did the women find at the tomb? Since Paul has no reference to the tomb visit, his voice is silent on all the remaining details. But Mark says they found a young man in a white garment who gave the resurrection message. Luke says it was two men in dazzling apparel. Matthew says nothing less than “an angel of the Lord” who descended in an earthquake, put the armed guard to sleep, rolled back the stone, and gave the resurrection message. John begins with no messenger at all, but on Mary Magdalene’s second visit, she confronted two angels, and finally confronted Jesus himself whom she mistook for the gardener until he spoke her name.
Did the women see the risen Lord in the garden at dawn on the first day of the week? No, says Mark. No, says Luke. Yes, says Matthew. Yes, but it was a little bit later, says John.
Where did the risen Christ appear to the disciples? Paul gives no hint of location in his list of appearances. Mark records no appearance stories, but he hints that there would be a meeting in Galilee. Luke says that resurrection appearances occurred only in the Jerusalem area, in the upper room, and at the village of Emmaus just six miles away. Further, Luke has the risen Lord, in clear contradistinction to Mark and Matthew, command the disciples not to leave Jerusalem until they have received the power of the Spirit. Matthew is very specific. The risen Lord appeared to the disciples only in Galilee and on top of a mountain, John says appearances of the risen Lord occurred first in Jerusalem in the upper room on two occasions separated by a week. The twenty-first chapter of John says that much later appearances did take place in Galilee, not on a mountain as Matthew states, but by a lake.
When did the risen Christ appear to the disciples? Paul says it was on the first day of the week for the first Easter experience, but he then stretches the time of resurrection appearances to include his own conversion perhaps as late as six years after the crucifixion. Mark hints that it will be at some indefinite time in the future. Luke says on the first day of the week after the crucifixion and for a period of forty days thereafter. Matthew says some days or weeks after the episode of the empty tomb when they all gathered in Galilee. John says it was on the first day of the week at evening and one week later at the same time of the day and then much later in Galilee.
Was it the resurrected but not yet ascended and glorified Lord who appeared, or was it the resurrected, ascended Lord of heaven that they experienced alive? Paul clearly implies the latter. Mark says nothing but hints that it will be the ascended, glorified Lord they will meet in Galilee. Luke argues that all resurrection appearances ceased with the ascension. As the author of Acts, he places Paul’s conversion in a different category. That was a vision from heaven, not a resurrection experience as Paul claims. For Luke, it was the risen Lord who, after appearing to his disciples, ascended into heaven; and it was the ascended Lord now united with the Father who poured the Holy Spirit out on the gathered church at the day of Pentecost. Matthew implies that it was the resurrected but not yet ascended Lord who confronted the women in the garden, but that it was the ascended, glorified Lord who possesses all authority and power who met them and commissioned them on the Galilean mountaintop. John says that the resurrected Lord appeared only to Mary Magdalene (“Touch me not for I have not yet ascended.”). But it was the resurrected, ascended, glorified Lord who appeared to the disciples and breathed on them, imparting the Holy Spirit, and inviting Thomas to examine his body and touch his wounds. This is true of both the Jerusalem accounts of chapter 20 and the Galilean accounts of chapter 21.
Disagreements on basic details of the Easter narratives abound in the records of the New Testament itself. Luke11 says that resurrection, ascension, and pentecost are separate events covering a time span of some fifty days. John says that all three were events of Easter day. And even such vital details as the place where the disciples first experienced the risen Lord and the time when this all-important moment occurred are not agreed upon by the canon of Holy Scripture. Mark and Matthew say that it took place in Galilee sometime later. Luke and John say that it took place in Jerusalem on Easter day.
This is the biblical record in stark, factual detail. It presents serious interpretive and apologetic problems with which we will attempt to deal as our exploration into the heart of Easter unfolds.
We must go deeper yet.