1
The Significance of the Earliest Evidence
The Protestant theologian Bernhard W. Anderson1 writes:
"The earliest literary witness of the Resurrection is given to us by Paul, especially in 1 Corinthians 15. The historical value of this chapter is great, for though 1 Corinthians was written around A.D. 56-57, Paul claims to hark back to the time of his conversion, perhaps within ten years after the Crucifixion. Moreover, Paul insists that he passed on to the Corinthians the gospel he had received from early preachers and witnesses:
..... that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [that is, Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at the same time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me (verses 3-8)."
Alongside Anderson's statement we may put the words of the eminent Roman Catholic priest and commentator Raymond E. Brown2 apropos of the four-clause formula in Paul's "Corinthian correspondence", each clause beginning with "that" and the whole formula ending with the word "appeared":
"Not only is it the only N[ew] T[estament] testimony to the resurrection written by one who claims to have seen the risen Jesus, but also it is one of the most ancient NT references to the events that surround the resurrection. Although Paul wrote 1 Corinthians about the year A.D. 56, he tells the Corinthians (15:3) that what he transmitted to them (presumably when he
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first came to Corinth about 50) was information that he himself had received at an earlier period. The verbs 'transmit' and 'receive' are almost technical terms in the vocabulary of Judaism for the handing on of tradition so that we are dealing here, at least in part, with a primitive tradition from Paul's early days as a Christian (mid-30s)."
Anderson presents Paul as the first scriptural writer to attest the Resurrection of Jesus. Brown is a little ambiguous in language, but when he calls Paul's testimony in 1 Corinthians "one of the most ancient NT references" he is not hinting at anything outside Paul, since elsewhere he3 speaks of Paul as "our earliest written evidence" about "the appearances". He means the same thing as Anderson who picks out 1 Corinthians as a special witness among the earliest ones, all of which are given by Paul. Even without that phrase from another place in Brown's book, we can deduce his chronological outlook on Paul, for he is no subscriber to the view which long made the Roman Catholic Church accord primacy in time among the four Gospels to the one called Matthew's and which as late as 1966 the prestigious Catholic production, The Jerusalem Bible, was still loth to abandon.4
The view is that the Greek Matthew, our present text, is based on the Greek translation of a primitive version of it in Aramaic composed by Matthew the publican, one of the Apostles mentioned in our present version (9:9; 10:3) as chosen by Jesus. Our text is said to supplement the Aramaic Gospel with material drawn from other sources, some of them peculiarly its own, notably in the Infancy Narrative, and it is granted to have its own spirit and purpose, yet held to be fundamentally a development of the original. The original is taken to have been most probably composed between 40 and 50 and hence to antedate the Pauline Epistles, depriving them of the status of being the first Christian documents. Brown touches decisively on the controversy about Matthew.
On the chronology of the four Gospels he5 takes the stand: "I accept the common scholarly opinion that Mark was the first of our written Gospels" - and he provides us as well
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with a neat precis:6 "The majority scholarly opinion is that Mark was written in the late 60s; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; and John in the 90s - the approximations allowing a five-to-ten-year margin of error." Brown7 further writes: "The author of the Gospel that we call 'according to Matthew' was not the tax-collector and companion of Jesus, but an unknown Christian who used as his source Mark's Gospel (and other traditions)..." The "other traditions" are indicated by Brown8 when he speaks of "Matthew's dependence on Mark (and upon Q, a body of Jesus' sayings in Greek, known also to Luke)..." In pointing to Q (from Quelle, German for "Source"), as does the bulk of Protestant scholarship, Brown sets little store by old orthodox attitudes. He9 informs us: "Roman Catholics were among the last to give up defending officially the view that the Gospel was written by Matthew, one of the twelve - a change illustrated in 1955 when the secretary of the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission gave Catholics 'full liberty' in reference to earlier Biblical Commission decrees, including the one which stipulated that Greek Matthew was identical in substance with a Gospel written by the apostle in Aramaic or Hebrew. A group of Protestant scholars (mostly American, e.g., W. B. Farmer) who have argued that Matthew was not dependent on Mark do not interpret Matthean priority to mean that the evangelist was an eyewitness."
What the editors of The Jerusalem Bible rely on and elaborate is, as we can gather from the Catholic expositor of Scripture John J. Dougherty,10 a dictum of "Origen in the first half of the third century": "The Gospel according to Matthew, who was first a publican and later the Apostle of Jesus Christ, was the first to be written; it was written in the Hebrew [Aramaic] language for the believers from Judaism." But nothing in Matthew's Gospel as it stands shows the compiler depending on an eye-witness account. One with access to eye-witness memories would not - to quote Brown11 - "draw so totally upon 'secondhand' collections" such as Mark and Q.
Brown12 does not lend support even to a piece of information said to hail from a Bishop of Hierapolis who flourished
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about 130 A.D.: "Whether or not Papias of Hierapolis was factual when he reported that Matthew [the apostle] collected the sayings of the Lord in the Hebrew language (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III. xxxix. 16), no such collection was preserved for us; and there is no way of knowing whether canonical Matthew drew even indirectly (through translation) on such a collection." We may add that even if Papias, as quoted by Brown, were to be credited, what would be pre-Paul is only logia - to use the Hierapolitan Bishop's own Greek term: that is, words of teaching attributable to Jesus and not an account concerning his life, death, burial or resurrection.
It has been argued that at times the term can cover something like a Gospel. But it is wise to note in that monument of Roman Catholic exegesis, The Jerome Biblical Commentary,13 J. L. McKenzie on Papias's logia: "Papias... says that each one translated (or interpreted?) them as best he could." Obviously, "translated" (or "interpreted") does not lend itself to a Gospel-sense. Besides, McKenzie makes a point which has been obscured by Brown's use of the expression: "the sayings of the Lord." In the original of Papias the logia are not attributed to anybody. They stand unqualified. So McKenzie is able to continue:"... the logia may mean a collection of Old Testament texts, a handbook of texts for apologetic use." The type of book. McKenzie has in mind he14 indicates in connection with the source of the various OT quotations in the Synoptic Gospels: "Some are quoted according to the LXX, some according to the Masoretic Text, and some according to neither of the two. That Matthew (or the other authors) used either the MT or the LXX at random or always quoted from memory seems highly improbable. Several scholars have postulated a handbook of OT texts devised for the use of Jewish Christians from which it could be argued that Jesus is the Messiah of the OT (cf. J.-P. Audet, Revue biblique 70 [1963] 381-405). The existence of such a handbook would explain the lack of consistency in the texts that are quoted in one Gospel or in all the Gospels taken together." So Papias need not even relate to Jesus' sayings, leave aside to a proto-Gospel about him.
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All things considered, we cannot go further back than the Pauline Epistles and dispute their primacy in conveying to us Christianity's sense of "the risen Jesus". And what is to be most remembered here is the fact which Brown emphasises - that Paul testifies at first hand. But can Paul be regarded as testifying definitively to Jesus' Resurrection? Was it the resuscitated Jesus whom he saw? What he claims is that Jesus appeared to him no less than to several others. As the appearance was after Jesus' death, the implication is that it was the resurrected Jesus who was witnessed by Paul. However, the immediate actual testimony is only to the appearance.
Whether or not we shall understand the appearance to be of the very body of Jesus that had died and had now been resurrected, involving a real resuscitation, would depend on Paul's account of the nature of what had appeared to him. No doubt, listing Jesus' death, burial, rising and appearing as a sequence, he personally believed that what had appeared was in continuity with the crucified body. And indeed a number of later books of the NT - those of Luke and John in particular - depict the appearance in a most physical manner directing our minds to that body. If in any respect we find Paul the eyewitness using analogous terms for the appearance, we may conclude that the earliest attestation of it, being the sole direct one, is a proof of a bodily resurrection of Jesus.
We may arrive at such a conclusion all the more because of two momentous points: (1) all the other witnesses of the post-burial appearances cited by Paul were his own contemporaries whom the people addressed in his Epistle could meet and question; (2) three out of the six appearances were to more than a single person and one of these three appearances was to a huge collectivity (evidently at a general yet private convention of the faithful), most of whose members were expressly said to be alive as if Paul were challenging his congregation to go and substantiate for themselves the truth of his statement.
The outstanding feature emerging from the Pauline account is not only the implied verifiability of it but also the sheer objectivity of the event related; for, when more than one
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individual and most eminently when more than five hundred individuals could see the risen Jesus "at the same time", there could not be a purely subjective inner experience, however true in its own field. We have before us a phenomenon "out there" of a supernatural order but projected into our space-time world on a few special occasions.
Yes, were we able to trace any physicality in the miraculous objective appearance Paul records, physicality such as some of the Gospels impress on our minds, the bodily resurrection of the buried Jesus would be demonstrated with absolute finality. But, even were we to fail to trace it, the converse would not completely hold. Indeed, a very strong presumption would be created that the body which had been buried had not risen and that some mysterious event other than this body's resurrection had occurred. Yet to firmly establish its non-resurrection we would have to demonstrate the error of Paul's inference to the contrary, and also get over a few hurdles deriving from post-Pauline scripture..
2
The Reports of Appearances in the Gospels
Brown15 writes: "... the verses that conclude the Gospel of Mark in most Bibles (Mark 16:9-20, called the Marcan Appendix or the Longer Ending of Mark) were not the original ending of the Gospel but were added because of the abrupt termination in 16:8____Mark mentions no appearances of Jesus, although 16:7 indicates that Peter and his disciples will see him in Galilee." The Marcan Appendix does narrate some appearances16 but there is nothing to make us recognise distinct physicality in them.
Matthew pictures Jesus meeting Mary of Magdala and another woman-disciple after his death: "And there, corning to meet them, was Jesus. 'Greetings' he said. And the women came up to him and, falling down before him, clasped his feet" (28:9).17 Here the resurrected Jesus is physically tangible.
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Luke goes much further with the following scene in which the Apostles figure: "They were still talking... when he himself stood among them and said to them, 'Peace be with you!' In a state of alarm and fright they thought they were seeing a ghost. But he said, 'Why are you so agitated, and why are these doubts rising in your hearts? Look at my hands and feet; yes, it is I indeed. Touch me and see for yourselves; a ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have.' And as he said this he showed them his hands and feet. Their joy was so great that they still could not believe it, and they stood there dumbfounded; so he said to them, 'Have you anything to eat?' And they offered him a piece of grilled fish, which he took and ate before their eyes" (24:36-43).18
Similarly, in the Gospel of John (20:20) we have Jesus visiting his disciples after his death and showing them his hands where the nails at the time of the crucifixion had made holes and his side which had been pierced by a Roman soldier's lance to make sure he had died. To the apostle Thomas, who was not present on the first occasion and who doubted the story of the other disciples, a special appearance was granted. We are told that Jesus again came in and spoke to Thomas: "Put your finger here; look, here are my hands. Give me your hand; put it into my side. Doubt no longer but believe" (20:27).19
However, in both instances John notes that Jesus entered the room although "the doors were closed" (20:19, 26).20 Luke too reports the strange way of his appearance to the disciples: Jesus suddenly came up and as suddenly vanished (24:15, 31, 36) and finally "withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven" (24:51).21 This means that he was considered exempt from the usual laws of space. Luke also mentions that when Jesus first came up to two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus "something prevented them from recognising him" (24:13, 16).22 Obviously, there was a degree of change in Jesus' look. So, as Brown23 has remarked, while the Lucan and Johannine stories imply a rather physical understanding of what has occurred in the raising of Jesus' body, the same
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two Evangelists supply a counteractive to a crass physical understanding. Yes, to them the appearances are not crassly physical, but there is no denying that the body which had suffered death is for them the one which has appeared and acquired supernatural faculties. Simultaneous with these faculties it betrays an extreme-physicality.
3
How Far are the Gospels Credible?
Before we proceed further, let us ask what value exactly is to be attached to Gospel evidence. Except for one piece of observation from the Protestant quarter, we shall advert to Brown, a most open mind and yet a representative of an institution not easily prone to give up old habits of thought. Thus we shall have a balanced outlook, modern without exposure to the suspicion of being too rash or radical.
Brown24 draws our attention to the process of Gospel development from Jesus through the early traditions to the Evangelists: "This process... is spelled out for Catholics in Dei Ver-bum (v. 19) of Vatican II and in more detail in the 1964 Pontifical Biblical Commission Instruction 'On the Historical Truth of the Gospels' (conveniently available in a Paulist pamphlet with an important commentary by J. A. Fitzmyer). The instruction distinguished three stages: the work of the historical Jesus, the period of the apostolic preachers, and the period of the sacred writers [=authors of the Gospels]. It pointed out that there was already a tremendous development in the apostolic period because after the resurrection a perception of Jesus' divinity colored the memory of what he had said and done. And the sacred writers not only selected and synthesized the traditions that came down from the apostles - they also 'explicated' those traditions in light of the church situation. Thus it would be within the lines laid down by official Church teaching to interpret words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels as examples
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of explication by the evangelists, if our evidence warranted such a conclusion."
The above passage is a footnote evoked by the start of a paragraph in which we are told:25 "The Gospels... are not simply factual reporting of what happened in Jesus' ministry but are documents of faith written to show the significance of those events as seen with hindsight. As an example of what that might mean..., the fact that according to the Synoptic (first three) Gospels Jesus predicted his crucifixion and resurrection and in increasing detail (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34) does not necessarily mean that the historical Jesus had such exact foreknowledge of his future. Actually Jesus may have made more general statements expressing an assurance that God would not desert him but would make him victorious; and knowing the outcome of his life, Church preachers and evangelists may have reformulated these statements and supplied detail in light of actual occurrences of the passion."
After the word "victorious" we are pointed to a footnote:26 "For instance we may compare to the detailed predictions of Mark the three vague predictions in John about 'lifting up' of the Son of Man (3:14; 8:28; 12:32-34). For the reasons why scholars think that the details of the Marcan predictions were supplied by the Church rather than coming from Jesus, see J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology (New York: Scribners, 1971), pp. 277-86; and G. Strecker, 'The Passion and Resurrection Predictions in Mark's Gospel,' Interpretation 22 (1968), 421-42."
Next, Brown buckles down to meet a likely protest against the sceptical attitude he has outlined and which his Church would once have opposed tooth and nail. He27 writes: "An obvious objection is that even if the evangelists themselves were not eye-witnesses, the continued survival of eye-witnesses would have prevented much creative development of the Gospel tradition over such a short period of thirty to sixty years. This argument cannot be discounted as support for the general lines of Gospel historicity, but it will not hold for many details of the Gospel accounts. In our time, despite the much greater control exercised by exact written and oral records, we
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have seen a tremendous growth in the tradition about figures such as Pope John and John F. Kennedy within ten years after their death, so that one can speak of a difference between these men as they were in history and as they are in the popular evaluation."
According to Brown,28 "the recognition that the Bible can be fallible as regards details of historical accuracy is very important" for "discussions" like those in his book. He offers instances of how the new outlook would work. One of them is relevant to a vital point which will come up in our comparison between Paul and the Evangelists in relation to the "empty-tomb" topic: so we shall postpone its treatment by Brown to the right time. In the other instance he29 touches on Matthew and Luke: "... Matthew and Luke give very different accounts of Jesus' conception and birth. In times past we would have assumed that because these infancy stories were recounted by inspired writers, both were accurate and had to be harmonized. Today, if the evidence is strong enough, we would be free to consider either or both of the narratives as not historical. Obviously this is a conclusion that should not be reached quickly; but we cannot deny a priori the possibility that since there were no apostolic eye-witnesses for the events accompanying the birth of Jesus, traditions about that birth could have been produced by popular imagination."
Later, Brown30 reverts to the subject: "... our problems deepen when we compare the two infancy narratives one to the other; for despite ingenious attempts at harmonization, the basic stories are virtually irreconcilable (cf. Matt 2:14 and Luke 2:39). They agree in so few details that we may say with certainty that they cannot both be historical in toto. Even the lists of Jesus' ancestors that they give are very different, and neither one is plausible." The final adjective could be refused equally to both the accounts. As Brown's subsequent remarks31 make plain, there is no criterion for choosing between them for plausibility. Elements which we could dub "folkloric and imaginative" abound in Matthew; "literary artistry and organisation" in Luke with "a delicate
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balance" among elements which are only a little less folkloric make Brown say: "obviously this is not the atmosphere of purely historical reportage." The best one might aver is that some of the sources are non-historical while others may carry genuine tradition. Nevertheless, one must admit that "the general context of the infancy narrative", in which the supposedly genuine tradition may have been preserved, "does nothing to increase our confidence in historicity".
Not that Brown ultimately brands as unhistorical the virginal conception itself which is the common factor in the midst of the many contradictions between Matthew and Luke. The contradictions relate even to the circumstances directly bound up with the common factor. Thus in Matthew (1:18-21) the Lord's angel assures Joseph of Mary being with child by the Holy Spirit and prevents him from divorcing her, while Luke (1:26-33) has the angel announce to Mary that the Holy Spirit will overshadow her and there is no hint of Joseph worrying about any possible scandal. Besides, Matthew (2:1) shows Jesus conceived as well as born in Bethlehem, the birth occurring in Joseph's own house; Luke (2:4-7) makes Joseph and Mary travel from Nazareth, where Jesus has been conceived, to Bethlehem in order to attend a census under Augustus Caesar, which, in Brown's words,32 is "a Lucan device based on a confused memory" and "almost surely represents an inaccuracy", and it is there that the time comes for Jesus' birth: he is born in a manger because his parents find no room at the inn. Brown, though aware of all the contradictions, all the folkloric and fictitious elements, yet tilts to the positive rather than the negative side in the controversy, but his choice should be traced to considerations outside scripture in spite of his avouching that he is deciding "scripturally".33 For such a posture flies in the face of his own stance34 at the end of his scriptural investigation: "My judgement, in conclusion, is that the totality of the scientifically controllable evidence leaves an unresolved problem." A theological insight into Jesus' exceeding the significance of mere human birth seems to have been popularized in an imaginatively literal form just before
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the writing of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels and to have invested Mary with supernormal importance. The bar to an alternative view is that evidence for a virginal conception could stem only from Jesus' family and that, if there was any such family tradition, how should we explain "the failure" -as Brown35 puts it - "of that memory to have had any effect before its appearance in two Gospels in the last third of the first century"?
What Brown has in mind here is "the early Christian situation" as judged "from our earliest writings, the Pauline letters and Mark".36 Leave aside any "explicit reference", there are in them no "implicit references" either. "In Galatians 4:4-5 Paul says, 'When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem those who were under the Law.' Influenced perhaps by the (mis)use of the term 'virginal birth' some (Zahn,- Miguens) have immediately thought of a virginal conception here, since only the mother is mentioned. To be precise, however, Paul is speaking about the reality of Jesus' birth, not about the manner of his conception. The phrase 'born of a woman' is meant to stress what Jesus shared with those whom he redeemed, precisely because it is applicable to everyone who walks this earth..."37 "See Matthew 11:11 and Luke 7:28: Among those born (begotten) of women none is greater than John the Baptist."38 To the argument from Paul's use of the verb ginesthai, "born", rather than gennan, "begotten", Brown's answer is already in the sentence just quoted. And he adds that neither is "specific about the manner of conception": even "Matthew, who believes in the virginal conception", is shown to "use the verb gennan of Jesus, once, at least, clearly with the meaning 'begotten' (1:20...). Without further indication of Paul's mind, it would be abusive to read a knowledge of virginal conception into Paul's use of ginesthai."39
As for Mark, Brown40 refers not only to 6:4 "where Jesus compares himself to a prophet without honor in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house". He refers also to 3:21, 31-35: "Apparently, Mark includes Jesus'
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mother among the 'his own' who thought he was frenzied. Mark goes on to have Jesus distinguish his natural family, who are standing outside, from those inside listening to him, a family constituted by doing the will of God. Such an uncomplimentary view of Mary's relationship to Jesus is scarcely reconcilable with a knowledge of the virginal conception." We may top off Brown here with his observation:41 "Paul never mentions Mary by name and shows no interest in her, and the Marcan scene in which she features is scarcely favourable to her."
Sticking sheerly to scripture Brown42 finds "formidable difficulties" facing the only proposal worth discussing: namely, that the Matthean and Lucan information may have derived from Jesus' family. He43 even tells us: "The arguments against a family tradition have been strongly advanced by the Roman Catholic scholar A. Vogtle, 'Offene'." Indeed Joseph is for Brown quite out of the running since he is nowhere during the period of Jesus' ministry when he might have transmitted the vital news to Jesus' friends who later became his preachers. Mary is the sole candidate theoretically thinkable. Here the main difficulty, according to Brown,44 "about a preserved family (Marian) tradition of the virginal conception of Jesus is the failure of that memory to have had any effect before its appearance in two Gospels in the last third of the first century". Evidently, the original Christian proclamation went without the least word from Mary informing the Apostles, who knew Jesus personally, of any unusual circumstances attending his entry into the world. In no pronouncement attributed to Peter, the foremost of the Twelve Apostles, is the Virgin Birth hinted at: in fact, it is totally out of the picture in all the sermons put into Peter's mouth in Acts as well as in 1 Peter which Roman Catholics sometimes incline to regard as his document.
Apropos of the play of imagination in the Gospels we may, in passing, cite Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of York. Contrasting Mark and Matthew on the alleged miracle at the tomb, he45 writes: "The possibilities of embellishment in the tradition will be apparent at once to a reader who will examine
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in turn the accounts of the visit of the women to the tomb in Mark and Matthew. In Mark the miracle is implied but not described. The story is told in utter simplicity. The women arrive wondering who will move the stone so that they may enter. They see that the stone is no longer there. They enter. The tomb is empty. A young man in a white robe tells them that Jesus is not there, and bids them tell the disciples that He will go before them into Galilee. They flee in fear, and tell no one. The reticence of the story tells us of the great event which has come to pass. How great a contrast is seen in Matthew's narrative. In place of the quiet implication of a miracle there is an elaborate description. There was a great earthquake; an angel of the Lord descended and rolled away the stone; his appearance was like lightning, and the soldiers on guard trembled and became as dead men. Such is an editor's embroidery of his source; and if elaboration of the tradition took place in the written stage it is reasonable to think that it took place in the oral stage too."
On the Matthean passage concerned, Brown46 has a brief yet significant remark: "This is an instance of Matthean dramatic midrashic technique at work, elaborating earlier and vaguer traditions." The significance stares out on our realising what a midrash is. In the same volume that holds Brown's remark, another Roman Catholic scholar, Addison G. Wright,47 tells us: "Midrash can take the form of a verse-by-verse commentary, a homily, or a rewritten version of a biblical narrative." The last form is applicable here, and the epithet "dramatic" by Brown leads us to Wright's further elucidation of a midrash-character: "the biblical material is handled creatively. Details are altered to fit the purposes of the author and events are idealized and even embellished upon with legendary and imaginative material to make them more ample, vivid and edifying."
While we are about Matthew and his exaggerations, a short footnote from Brown may also be in place. It passes no judgment but exposes a "tendency" in the Gospels to give rein to all kinds of fanciful narration to serve what may be termed
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theological motives. Referring to the fact that "while there was an expectation among many Jews of the Resurrection of the dead in the last times, there was no expectation of the resurrection of a single man from the dead, separate from and preliminary to the general resurrection", Brown48 observes: "The tendency to unite Jesus' resurrection with the general resurrection is exemplified in Matt 27:53 where we are told that after Jesus' resurrection many of the saints came out of their tombs and went into the holy city of Jerusalem and appeared to many."
Ramsey's impatience and dissatisfaction with Matthew is quite understandable. It is no surprise to find him preferring Mark in the particular situation before him, the tomb-scene, but at the close where he contemplates the certainty of elaboration at the oral no less than at the written stage he leaves room for possible embroidery and embellishment everywhere, even in Mark. What Ramsey does not leave room for supposing is the possibility of tampering with Mark and others by later authorities. The point is not relevant to his context but is otherwise quite legitimate. We have already noted through Brown the Church's hand in altering Mark.
We may round off our brief digression with four more quotations - two on the Evangelist John, the third on a discrepancy of localisation in the four Evangelists and the last on the same subject in general with a glance at Paul. Brown49 tells us: "I assume here the common position of Johannine scholars, Catholic and Protestant, that the statements attributed to Jesus in John Often reflect the theology of the evangelist at the end of the century rather than an exact historical memory of the words of Jesus during his ministry." The second quotation exemplifies very impressively the free story-telling which Brown reads again and again in the Gospels as theologically motivated. He50 writes:"... only John reports that Thomas was absent when Jesus appeared to the Twelve and so John has Jesus appear to Thomas a week later. In my commentary on John [The Gospel According to John, XXII-XXI (New York: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 1031-33], I suggest that this second appearance may
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be the evangelist's dramatization in which Thomas serves to personify an attitude. The other Gospels mention fright or disbelief when Jesus appears, but John transformed this doubt to a separate episode and personified it in Thomas. Such free dramatization is characteristic of the Fourth Gospel."
The final quotation deals with the geography of Jesus' appearance in the Gospels. The Gospels do not agree as to where Jesus appeared. "Mark mentions no appearance of Jesus, although 16:7 indicates that Peter and his disciples will see him in Galilee. Matthew mentions an appearance to the women in Jerusalem (28:9-10) that seemingly contradicts the instruction to go to Galilee where Jesus will be seen (28:7). The main appearance for Matthew is in Galilee... (28:16-20). Luke narrates several appearances in the Jerusalem area... In John 20, as in Luke, there are appearances in the Jerusalem area... in John 21 [a later addition] there is an appearance... in Galilee at the Sea of Tiberias. Finally, in the Marcan Appendix [also a later addition] there is a set of appearances all seemingly in the Jerusalem area... "51 Looking at all these localisations, Brown52 observes: "Paul says nothing about where the appearances occurred. The fact that our earliest written evidence does not locate the appearances raises the possibility that the variant Gospel localisations (a variance that is a real problem...) may stem, in part at least, not from a historical tradition but from the evangelists' attempts to supply a setting."
When we assess Brown's several comments on the Gospels we cannot help being struck by the resort to dramatisation in them or by the Church's interpolations for doctrinal ends. Repeatedly in them we come across minds prone to fantastic exaggerations. In Matthew 17:24-27, for instance, we are told of Peter asking Jesus whether the customary tax to the Temple is to be paid and Jesus replying that Peter, when he goes fishing, will get what is needed: a shekel will be found in the mouth of the first fish caught. Brown53 observes: "It is a most difficult miracle story, for it is one of the few miracles of Jesus that closely resemble magical action, worthy of the most popular tales of the Hellenistic miracle-workers. Many scholars
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would regard it as a popular tale." Brown's turn of speech -"one of the few miracles" - implies some other similar items in the Gospels. Particularly the entry of such items into them but, generally speaking, the narration of many incidents intended to cause a sense of wonder bespeaks the propagandist attitude of the men who wrote these works - an attitude carrying on and even intensifying the credulous creativeness of the earlier unwritten preachment. A Gospel like Matthew's which, out of the four, has been the most favoured by the various churches and by their adherents throws into greater relief the undependable nature of the Evangelical traditions believed down the ages.* Here is a religious zeal desiring to make Jesus as superhuman as possible at any cost. Notable narrative power the Evangelists commanded, but merely a power of this kind exercised in the interests of a picture that came to be constructed in the popular imagination of Jesus-cultists in the midst of several other religious bodies in rivalry with them is no guarantee of fact.
One may even dare to ask: "Are the Gospels at all factual in the main?" We have seen Brown - despite his belief in the Bible's being God-inspired - willing to allow, with his own Church's consent, any exegete to regard time-hallowed episodes in the NT as fictitious if grounds could be provided for doubt. His introductory pronouncement54 in this connection is worth heeding: "Within the Bible are historical writings of varying degrees of accuracy, poems epic and lyrical, sermons, letters, parables, fiction, etc. As the Constitution on Divine Revelation of Vatican II insisted (Dei Verbum, iii.12), anyone who wishes to discover the intention of the biblical writers must pay attention to such 'literary forms.' Each style of literature must be judged for accuracy according to its own
* Vide A. Wikenhauser who points out that in and from the time of Irenaeus, towards the end of the 1st century A.D., both the early Church and Christian literature in general were more deeply influenced by Matthew's Gospel than by any other book (New Testament Introduction, London: Nelson; New York: Herder & Herder, 1958, p. 198).
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standards; and so, sweeping statements about the inerrancy of the Bible are inapplicable. Biblical fiction and parable (books like Judith, Esther, Jonah) remain fiction and parable even though the composition was inspired by God; inspiration does not turn fiction and parable into history." Then Brown explains that the truth wanted by God to be put in the books of Scripture, and not that truth's literary form, is now the Church's concern in respect of the "sacred writings" being "without error".
It seems not inconceivable from the psychology of the Evangelists and of their oral predecessors that all the four Gospels are grand novellas except for a few details of Jesus' life which are broadly attested by Paul who, after his conversion, was acquainted with Jesus' own surviving circle, such details as are not exposed in themselves - like the Resurrection - to sceptical scrutiny. Thus we know from Paul that Jesus was born like all men subject to the common retributive Law (Galatians 4:4), was descended from Abraham (Galatians 3:16) and David (Romans 1:3), had brothers (1 Corinthians 9:5), with one brother named James (Galatians 1:19; 1 Corinthians 15:7), had twelve Apostles (1 Corinthians 15:5), two of whom were Cephas - that is, Peter - (1 Corinthians 15:5; Galatians 1:18; 2:9) and John (Galatians 2:9), was meek and gentle (2 Corinthians 10:1), self-denying (Romans 15:3), most lowly (Philippians 2:5-7), yet could work miracles (Romans 15:17-18), left several sayings behind which served as guide-lines (1 Thessalonians 4:2, 15; 1 Corinthians 7:10; 9:14; 13:2; Romans 12:14; 13:9; 16:19), was betrayed and on the night of the betrayal instituted the Eucharist, a memorial meal of bread and wine (1 Corinthians 11:23-25), was crucified (Galatians 2:20; 3:1; Philemon 2:5; 1 Corinthians 2:2, 8), died and was buried (1 Corinthians 15:23-24) and, though nobody saw him rise from the dead, there were appearances of him after his death to a number of people (1 Corinthians 15:5-8). 1 Timothy, which is directly in the Pauline tradition, if not Paul's personal writing in toto, alludes to Jesus' testimony before Pilate (6.T3). The most important of the acceptable items is, of course, the death by
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Crucifixion. This event under Pilate is reported not only by the Gospels but also by the Roman historian Tacitus (Annals 15:44, 2) at a later date. Josephus, the Jewish historian (1st century A.D.), refers to "James... the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" (Antiquities XX.9,11) - James who is mentioned in two out of the four Gospels. Facts like these could make a general base for a proliferating structure of fascmating fantasy in the hands of post-Pauline writers. Apart from that base, one may well plead the novella-character of almost the whole Marcan, Matthean, Lucan and Johannine literature.
Anyway, in regard to the nature of Jesus' body in the appearances, the prima facie case against the Gospels' historical credibility - because none of the Evangelists was an eyewitness like Paul - is strengthened by the play of imagination in them whether drawn from oral sources and increased in the written form or else originating from the fervent theological minds of the Gospel-makers themselves. The extreme physicality which Luke and John assign to Jesus' post-burial appearance is highly suspect.
It would be acceptable only if Paul anticipated it. We should expect him to do so from the fact that he agrees with them that it is Jesus' dead body which has appeared. But does his record provide a descriptive justification for the continuity he posits in common with the Evangelists?
4
The Evidence of Paul
In 1 Corinthians 15 there is no straightforward description of Jesus' body in the six appearances Paul has listed. But by trenchant implication of some words of his we are led to know exactly its nature. For Paul, dilating upon the resurrection of the faithful Christians at the world's end, links it with that of Jesus and regards both as inter-reflective (15:12-17). He asserts that Jesus being "raised from the dead" is "the first-fruits of all who have fallen asleep" (15:20).55 Jesus' resurrection is
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the arch-example of every succeeding resurrection. Therefore, from what is said to happen to the bodies of "those who belong to him" at the Second Coming (15:23)56 we can know Paul's notion of what must have happened to Jesus himself on the third day of his death. Our inference is ratified by the open assertion in Philippians 3:20-21 about "our Lord Jesus Christ" whom "we are waiting for": "...he will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body."57 The source, in 1 Corinthians 15, of our mediated yet clear-cut knowledge reads in The Jerusalem Bible58 as follows: "Someone may ask, 'How are the dead raised, and what sort of body do they have when they come back?' They are stupid questions. Whatever you sow in the ground has to die before it is given new life and the thing that you sow is not what is going to come; you sow a bare gram, say of wheat or something like that, and then God gives it the sort of body that he has chosen: each sort of seed gets its own sort of body (35-38).
"...It is the same with the resurrection of the dead: the thing that is sown is perishable but what is raised is imperishable; the thing that is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious; the thing that is sown is weak but what is raised is powerful; when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit.
"If the soul has its own embodiment, so does the spirit have its own embodiment. The first man, Adam, as scripture says, became a living soul; but the last Adam [=Christ] has a life-giving spirit. That is, first, the one with the soul, not the spirit, and after that, the one with the spirit. The first man, being from the earth, is earthly by nature; the second man is from heaven. As the earthly man was, so we are on earth; and as the heavenly man is, so we are in heaven. And we, who have been modelled on the earthly man, will be modelled on the heavenly man.
"Or else, brothers, put it this way: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God: and the perishable cannot inherit what lasts for ever. I will tell you something that has been
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secret: that we are not all going to die but we shall all be changed. This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the trumpet sounds. It will sound, and the dead will be raised, imperishable, and we shall be changed as well, because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability and the mortal nature put on immortality" (42-53).
The Jerusalem Bible has some enlightening notes to these passages. As regards the phrase "when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit", the annotation59 explains that the body which is sown is called psychikon in the Greek original, while the body which is raised is called pneumatikon. Psychikon is said to connote "physical",* and pneumatikon "spiritual". We are further told of all the senses in which psyche is used in the New Testament. We shall attend only to the various Pauline meanings: "In Paul, as in the O.T., psyche (Hebrew nephesh cf. Genesis 2:7) is what gives life to animals, to the human body, 1 Corinthians 15:45; or it is the actual life of the body, Romans 16:4; Philippians 2:30; 1 Thessalonians 2:8, its 'living soul', 2 Corinthians 1:23. The term can also mean any human being, Romans 2:9; 13:1; 2 Corinthians 2:14. As it only gives natural life, 1 Corinthians 2:14, it is less important than pneuma by which a human life is divinised by a process that helps, begins through the gift of the Spirit, Romans 5:5+; cf. 1:19+, and is completed after death. Greek philosophers thought of the higher soul (the nous) escaping from 'the body', to survive immortally. Christians thought of immortality more in terms of the restoration of the whole person, involving a resurrection of the body effected by the Spirit or divine principle which God withdrew from human beings because of sins, Genesis 6:3, but restored to all who united with the risen Christ, Romans 1:4+; 8:11, who is the 'heavenly' man and the life-giving Spirit, 1 Corinthians 15:45-49. The
* Brown, while quoting Paul, notes: "The Revised Standard Version accepts the translation 'physical'; the New American Bible has 'natural'; the New English Bible has 'animal'" (The Virginal Conception..., p. 86, fn.147).
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body is no longer psychikon but pneumatikon, it is incorruptible, immortal, 1 Corinthians 15:43, glorious, 1 Corinthians 15:43; cf. Romans 8:18; 2 Corinthians 4:17; Philippians 3:21; Colossians 3:4... Psyche can be used in a wider sense as the opposite of the body to indicate what it is in a human being that behaves and feels, Philippians 1:27; Ephesians 6:6; Colossians 3:23..." We may add that when the wider sense does not fuse psyche with pneuma, for the Greek original of Philippians 1:27, unlike The Jerusalem Bible's free English rendering by means of the single word "unanimous",60 employs the two terms side by side - en eni pneumati, mia psuche - expressing Paul's hope to hear that his followers are standing fast in one spirit, with one soul.
To the phrase "became a living soul" from Genesis 2:7, we get The Jerusalem Bible's short note:61 "Something that is alive because it has a psyche giving it a merely natural life, subject to decay and corruption."
Finally, the phrase "we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed" receives the gloss:62 "I.e. those who will be alive at the time [of the Second Coming], among whom Paul could theoretically have been included, cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:1+."
One further annotation, though not from The Jerusalem Bible, of a particular turn of speech may be in place for the sake of clarity. To the "stupid questions" Paul begins his answer by saying "Whatever you sow in the ground has to die before it is given new life and the thing that you sow is not what is going to come..." Paul is making use, as David Edwards63 reminds us, of the ancient belief that a seed died in the earth before a plant emerged, and trying to show that what came after a seed's death was at the same time different in character from the seed and existed bodily in its own way.
Now to our immediate purpose. What we can gather about Jesus' resurrected body in Paul's thought is neatly summed up in Brown's comment64 on the Corinthian text: "Clearly Paul rejects a crassly material conception whereby the risen body would resume the qualities of life as we know it - a conception
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that was current in Paul's time, as we see in 2 Baruch 50:20: 'For the earth shall then assuredly restore the dead____It shall make no change in their form; but as it has received them, so it shall restore them.' Paul seems to posit a transformation and spiritualization of the earthly body." So, to Brown,65 Paul makes us "wonder whether he would be in agreement with Luke (who was not an eye-witness of the risen Jesus) about the properties of the risen body. Certainly, from Paul's description one would never suspect that a risen body could eat, as Luke reports. Moreover, Paul distinguishes between the risen body that can enter heaven and 'flesh and blood' that cannot enter heaven - a distinction that does not agree with the emphasis in Luke 24:39 on the 'flesh and bones' of the risen Jesus____Most scholars maintain that, by way of apologetics against those who would deny a bodily resurrection, some of the evangelists, especially Luke and John, have presented too physical a picture of the risen Jesus."
Here Brown66 is careful not to create the impression that Luke and John are "employing a falsified argument": he takes them to have received about the risen Jesus "an already existing picture... of whose detailed accuracy they did not have control" but he does admit: "Some of the objectification of the body of the risen Jesus is the proper work of the individual evangelist." This means that the tradition anterior to both Luke and John was already "crassly material" and they accepted it, only exercising their narrative artistry, their dramatic faculty. But their readiness to incorporate a tradition of crass materiality in order to oppose critics who made out the resurrected Jesus to be a phantom, a ghost, is apparent, as also their proclivity to imaginative reconstruction of the incorporated matter.
Before we go further we may do well to attain perfect precision about Paul's "flesh and blood". These words are to be found in Paul in two other places than 1 Corinthians. Galatians 1:16 has him saying that in regard to his mission he received a revelation to preach to the pagans and that he consulted no "flesh and blood" - that is, no human being.67 In
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Ephesians 6:12 he tells his followers: "our battle is not against flesh and blood" but against "principalities and powers" and "the rulers of this world".68 The distinction is between human beings and subtle occult agencies. The Corinthian reference, however, is not just a generality signifying man as a bodily entity. It is counterpoised to "the kingdom of God" consequent on the resurrection, a life of perfection at the end of the world, and yet, by that counterpoising, it does not become a mere metaphor for a human condition divided from that kingdom by the action of sin. As the assertions preceding it show, the expression means "the corruptible body of man" which, without being transformed from its natural state, cannot share in "the life of glory", "the kingdom of God".69 "Flesh and blood" designates specifically man's corporeality along with a suggestion of its frailty and transitoriness. Thus the words have a literal bodily bearing, a shade exceeding Pauline usage elsewhere and focusing on a particularity. This is the first basic point peculiar to the words in 1 Corinthians.
The second point emerges when we set them side by side with the same in John's Gospel. There (1:13) they figure in a passage where "John insists emphatically" that men's new birth as "children of God... has nothing to do with human generation [i.e., birth by physical means and from sexual activity], but is a special gift of God".70 The phrase denotes "mankind and human potentialities" outside the life of divine grace brought by adherence to Christ. That Grace is held to effect a central change taking us beyond "flesh and blood" while we are still not dead. "Implicitly, we are told here that this new birth is that of the Spirit, as in 3:6."71 The later Johannine text to which we are referred informs us of a process during our lives when we are born "from above" (3:3 and 7) and we learn that "unless man is born through water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (3:5).72 The term "water" is interpreted by The Jerusalem Bible73 as an allusion to "baptism and its necessity; cf. Romans 6:4+". Paul too in several places speaks of the life of the Spirit before death. We may recall The Jerusalem Bible's words about "pneuma by which a human life
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is divinised by a process that begins through a gift of the Spirit, Romans 5:5+; cf. 1:9+, and is completed after death"74 - in the future when the dead will be resurrected. But Paul's mention of "flesh and blood" in connection with the same theme as John's - entering or inheriting the kingdom of God - does not have in view, as does the Evangelist, a group excluding recipients of the Spirit. For, indeed Paul himself who is such a recipient is among those waiting for the Resurrection, and his "flesh and blood" as much as that of any other person is barred from inheriting or entering God's kingdom while alive. Besides, he is writing to fellow-Christians: they may err in some of their doctrines but they are fundamentally his converts. All human beings, even those who are baptised and share the Christian life, are subsumed under the rubric "flesh and blood". The rubric covers all circumstances and points to every man's physical reality, the concrete body of him which is made of living matter characterised by corruptibility. We have a sweeping universality standing starkly over against an opposite type of bodily existence which is realisable only at the Resurrection and which, unlike the present one, will participate in God's splendour and be incorruptible.
Paul's special sense in 1 Corinthians springs out distinct not only in comparison with John 1:13. All other non-Pauline occasions of the phrase in the Bible have also the same difference though in varying contexts. The Old Testament has only Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) 14:18 and 17:31. In the former "the lesson is resignation to the fact that men and creatures are ephemeral".75 In the latter we have "thoughts of flesh and blood". The comment is: "The text is uncertain; the CCD [ = Confraternity of Christian Doctrine translation of the Bible] indicates man's inability to understand God's design."76 Here The Jerusalem Bible77 translates: "Flesh and blood think of nothing but evil." The New Testament offers two occasions. Matthew 16:17 shows Peter as receiving his revelation about Jesus' Messiahship not from "flesh and blood" but from Jesus' "Father in heaven": man in general is meant, with an emphasis on "his material, limited nature as opposed to that of the spirit
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world."78 From the context of Hebrews 2:14, where "blood and flesh" instead of "flesh and blood" occurs, we gather that Jesus by his incarnation made himself one with the rest of his fellows in their common humanity as descended from Abraham and subject to the power of the devil.79 Everywhere man's weakness both inner and outer in his bodily existence is kept in mind, but again no special prominence is given to his corruptible body as such nor are two types of body set in absolute contrast.
The next natural step to our realising this contrast is to recognise how apart Paul is in his vision of Jesus' resurrected body from the picture by Luke and John, with whom Matthew would not refuse to concur. Luke and John display that body as combining the qualities of the body Jesus had before his death with those of a new and rare kind which, along with altering somewhat its look, enable it to appear and disappear suddenly and get into closed rooms. Paul unmistakably distinguishes in toto the body before death from the one after death. Although he postulates that "our present perishable nature must put on imperishability and this mortal nature must put on immortality" and thus believes Jesus' dead body itself to have been raised and converted - "as first-fruits" of our future fate - into an utterly different form, this utter difference which excludes all affinity with "flesh and blood" leaves us free to negate resuscitation and continuity. Taken by itself, the only eye-witness account we have of the post-burial Jesus fails to prove his Resurrection. On its own merit, it can justify us in regarding Paul's belief as unnecessary, an error of inference.
Here a warning must be sounded to save us from slipping into acquiescence in some suggestions of Brown's in The Jerome Biblical Commentary.,80 After mentioning that the NT authors thought of a transformed rather than a simply revivified body and after noting that Paul "stresses heavily the characteristics of the transformation that takes place in resurrection", Brown goes on to say: "Nevertheless, if the NT stressed that what was seen was a radically transformed Jesus, it was Jesus who was seen____As far as the biblical
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evidence is concerned, on the one hand, every single shred of evidence about this unique event would indicate that the disciples were claiming to have seen the body of Jesus that had been crucified and had lain in the tomb....On the other hand, there is reiteration in the NT that the Risen Jesus was different ('in another form' - Mark 16:12) and somewhat unrecognizable (Luke 24:16; John 20:14; 21:4). Any solution to the problem must take into account the element of continuity and the element of change and spiritualization, if that solution is to be guided by the biblical evidence."
There is a somewhat indiscriminate mix-up by Brown of Paul and the Evangelists. The references to the post-Resurrection Jesus came from Mark, Luke and John who, along with Matthew, combine the changed Jesus and "the body... that had been crucified and had lain in the tomb". The claim to have seen this very Jesus in spite of the spiritualisation can be connected only with them. For they alone point to his physical limbs and deal in some detail with his burial. "Flesh and bones" and bodily actions of the Jesus known in life are Luke's contribution to the Resurrection-picture, John's is the body bearing the wounds of the crucifixion as well as behaving in a physical manner. Paul's resurrected Jesus, for all the conviction which he, like the Evangelists, has of the continuity of this Jesus with the crucified and entombed body, falls wholly outside Brown's "every single shred of evidence" purported to be culled from "the disciples". In fact, from Paul who, as Brown observes in The Jerome Biblical Commentary81 "draws a close analogy between the resurrection of Jesus and the future resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:12)", Jesus' disciples may validly conclude - contrary to what they did in Luke 24:36-43 - that "they were seeing a ghost".82
However, we have to attend to whatever reason Paul has implicitly or explicitly to offer for his conviction. All that we discover as dictating it are certain preconceptions.
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5
Paul's Preconceptions
The preconceptions are apparent from his statement: "I taught you what I had been taught myself, namely that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures;... and that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures..." (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). What guides Paul's belief is highly respected hearsay carrying the assumption that the scriptures - that is, the Old Testament - infallibly foretold the world-work of Jesus and every event concerning him.
Let us first weigh the value of this assumption. The topic of Old-Testament prophecy and New-Testament fulfilment has been in the forefront ever since the NT was written. From even earlier, OT prophecy as such loomed large in the Jewish mind. Brown83 correctly sums up the situation and its assessment in our time:
"Before the advent of the modern critical method it was generally accepted by religious Jews and Christians that the Hebrew prophets foresaw the distant future. In particular, Christians thought that the prophets had foreseen the life and circumstances of Jesus the Messiah____However, this conception of prophecy as prediction of the distant future has disappeared from most serious scholarship today, and it is widely recognized that the NT 'fulfilment' of the OT involved much that the OT writers did not foresee at all. The OT prophets were primarily concerned with addressing God's challenge to their own time. If they spoke about the future, it was in broad terms of what would happen if the challenge was accepted or rejected. While they sometimes preached a 'messianic' deliverance (i.e. deliverance through one anointed as God's representative, thus a reigning king or even a priest), there is no evidence that they foresaw with precision even a single detail in the life of Jesus of Nazareth."
Elsewhere Brown84 has touched on the same theme and said: "... whether they know or not, when the NT authors see
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prophecy fulfilled in Jesus, they are going beyond the vision of the OT authors. Let us take, for instance, Isaiah 7:14: 'A young woman shall be [or is] with child and shall bear a son and shall call him Immanuel [=God with us].' The prophet was referring to the birth of a child taking place some seven hundred years before Jesus' time, a child whose coming into the world was a sign of the continuance of the royal Davidic line. Because Matthew regarded Jesus as the completion of the royal Davidic line, and because he read the passage in a Greek translation of Isaiah which spoke of a 'virgin' (as distinct from the Hebrew which has only 'young woman'), Matthew saw the applicability of this text to the birth of Jesus from the Virgin Mary at Bethlehem. It was a proof for Matthew who had an insight as to how Jesus' birth fulfilled God's plan; so far as we can tell, Isaiah knew nothing or foresaw nothing about Jesus' birth. Similarly, Hosea 6:2, 'After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up,' in the prophet's mind had nothing to do with the resurrection of Jesus. The likeness to the NT theme of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day (1 Cor 15:4) may have arisen because the NT authors deliberately phrased.their remembrance of the resurrection in the language of Hosea."
How the Catholic Church, in its enlightened section, stands now on the prophecy-problem is briefly suggested by Brown:85 "The classic apologetic argument from prophecy has had to be reinterpreted in the light of modern biblical criticism. It is no longer primarily a question of the exact fulfilment of divinely guided foreknowledge; it is much more a question of the culmination of a divine plan that could only be detected through hindsight."
The significance of the whole issue in our context is that, if Paul who was a comparatively late-comer on the Jesus-scene felt sure of the Resurrection because of the Hosea prophecy or of any other OT passage, and affirmed to himself continuity between Jesus' appearance to him and the dead body of Jesus, he committed a mistake.
What about those who preceded him and were closer to
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Jesus' death? Their teaching constituted the hearsay Paul so highly respected. Could they have gone by OT prophecies in their belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead or did they have special reasons of their own to affirm continuity? Paul has listed not only himself but several others as possessing personal first-hand knowledge of the appearance. Their authority is on a par with his and we should attend to what they would have to say.
Here one fact stares us in the face. Anderson86 lets it emerge when he writes: "Paul attaches the greatest importance to the 'appearances' of the risen Christ to a number of individuals, beginning with Peter and ending with himself. At this point Paul's witness is somewhat astonishing. He maintains that his vision of the Risen Lord... was precisely the same type of experience, and therefore gave him the same apostolic authority, as that of the early apostles (1 Corinthians 9:1; Galatians l:llff.). Moreover, he goes on to argue in the remainder of the chapter that the resurrection body of the Christian is not a body of flesh... but a spiritual body, miraculously transformed into the likeness of Christ's 'glorious body' (see also Philippians 3:21)."
The words for us to focus on are: "precisely the same type of experience." There is involved in them the suggestion that another type has been indicated somewhere else. And this very theme no less than the identity stressed by Anderson comes out in Brown's observations:87 "It is worth noting that, in listing six persons or groups to whom the risen Jesus appeared, Paul makes no distinction about types of appearances. He regards the appearance to himself as on the same level as the appearance to the others, even if it is the last. This differs from Luke's evaluation of the experience granted to Paul; for in Acts Luke distinguishes sharply between Jesus' appearances 'to the apostles whom he had chosen' (1:2) during forty days before his ascension and the experience of Saul [=Paul by his Jewish name] on the road to Damascus which took place considerably later."
To resolve the issue we have brought up about Paul's pre-
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decessors, we should concentrate on the cue from Anderson and Brown and bring out its implication. Paul reports six contemporary occasions of Jesus' appearance and mentions in Galatians 1:18-19 that he himself "went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him for fifteen days" and also "saw James, the brother of the Lord".88 He thus had the opportunity to compare notes with them. He was in Jerusalem a second time too (Galatians 2:1). This visit even shows him adverting to the appearance he had known, for he tells "James, Cephas and John" (Galatians 2:9) of the revelation made to him: "...they recognised that I had been commissioned to preach the Good News to the uncircumcised just as Peter had been commissioned to preach it to the circumcised. The same Person whose action had made Peter the apostle of the circumcised had given me a similar mission to the pagans" (Galatians 2:7-8).89 In spite of his exchanges with the apostles he gives us to understand that the nature of Jesus' resurrected body, on which is patterned the future resurrected bodies of Christian believers, was of a single type. Cephas and James and all the rest of the people to whom appearances had been vouchsafed are undeniably implied to have thought like him that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead, but - as Brown90 remarks about Paul - "paradoxically" to have "rejected the idea that the risen body was natural or physical."
Therefore we have to conclude that all those who preceded Paul and were closer to Jesus and some of whom had even known Jesus in person fail, along with Paul, to supply us with any sign of continuity from Jesus' buried body to the body of the Resurrection. If they went by any OT prophecy they were as mistaken as he. Not only Paul but the entire company in which he puts himself as transmitting its teaching can be convicted of indulgence in an unacceptable paradox if they on any ground held Jesus' dead body to have resuscitated.
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6
The First Hurdle from Non-Pauline Scripture
Especially in connection with Cephas (Peter) this point is of extreme moment. For Peter figures under several aspects in a particular book of the NT which has a different status from the Gospels and to which an allusion by Brown has already been quoted above: Acts (more fully The Acts of the Apostles), usually ascribed to the Luke of the Gospel. All the Gospels, though treating of pre-Pauline days, the days of Jesus' life, come from a post-Pauline atmosphere of religious understanding of that life. We learn from Brown91 that in the pre-Gospel period as attested by Paul "the resurrection was the chief moment associated with the divine proclamation of the identity of Jesus". About Jesus, Brown translates from Paul's Epistle to the Romans the key-formula: "Born of the seed of David according to the flesh; designated Son of God in power according to the Holy Spirit [Spirit of Holiness] as of resurrection from the dead" (1:3-4). Brown quotes also from the Epistle to the Philippians: "[Jesus] became obedient unto death, even death on the cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name [i.e., 'Lord'] which is above every name" (2:8-9). As can be seen, with Brown, from such texts, "the resurrection was originally contrasted with a ministry of lowliness, so that through the resurrection Jesus became greater than he had been in the ministry". By the time the Gospels were written, "a more developed view was dominant whereby Jesus was seen already to have been the Messiah and Son of God during his ministry... Mark tells the reader that... at the baptism Jesus was the Son of God (1:11)". But "Mark partially preserved the older understanding. He insists that Jesus was already Son of God and Messiah during his lifetime, but this was not publicly known". "In the later Gospels... the mystery of Jesus' identity begins to become apparent to his disciples... during his lifetime. In Matthew there are confessions of Jesus as God's Son where Mark has
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none (cf. Matt 14:33 with Mark 6:51-52; and Matt 16:16 with Mark 8:29). In the Fourth Gospel Jesus speaks openly as a pre-existent divine figure (John 8:58; 10:30; 14:9; 17:5)." Moreover, "the question of Jesus' identity is pressed back beyond the baptism in different ways. The Johannine Prologue presses it back to pre-existence before creation, while Matthew and Luke press it back to Jesus' conception", which is said to be virginal by the overshadowing of Mary by God's Holy Spirit. (Paul too has his Christ pre-existent, especially in Philippians 2:6 -
His state was divine,
yet he did not cling
to his equality with God92 -
but the pre-existence does not lead to a proclamation, as it does in John's Gospel, of Christ's divine reality during his life since he lets go his privilege to be God's equal: only the after-death miracle wrought by God reveals that reality.)
Acts differs from the Gospels in two ways. First, it purports to picture the very age of Paul and Peter after Jesus' lifetime and to recount the state of the Christian Church before the Gospels were written. Secondly, it has reminiscences of the original "Christological moment" centred on the Resurrection. Brown cites three passages: "This Jesus God raised up... God made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified" (2:32, 36) - "God exalted him at His right hand as Leader and Saviour" (5:31) - "What God promised to the fathers, He has fulfilled for us their children by raising Jesus, as it is written in Psalm 2: 'You are my son; today I have begotten you'" (13:32-33). The first two of these passages are from speeches assigned to Peter, the third from a speech put into Paul's mouth. Claiming Acts to be a legitimate document for the days of Paul and his contemporary Peter, one may pick up a certain sermon of Peter's and present from it a grossly physical view of Jesus' appearance to this Apostle and to the other chosen witnesses. Peter is made to say: "...we have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the
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dead" (10:41).93 Here is a contradiction of Paul's suggestion of Peter's outlook. Does it not make Paul's evidence dubious?
We must ascertain how far the saying in Acts is reliable in balance against Paul's implication that Peter's view, like his own, was of an altogether non-physical appearance.
Brown94 tells us about Acts: "The generally accepted thesis today is that the Book of Acts was composed in the 80s or 90s, and that its references to Christian origins sometimes reflect the Lucan theology of the later first century rather than a historical memory of the situation in the 30s and 40s. Nevertheless in the sermons that Luke attributes to Peter and Paul (scarcely verbatim reports but examples of an early style of kerygmatk proclamation), he preserves ancient expressions from the Church's beginnings." To focus precisely how much the sermons that Acts reports are truly Pauline or Petrine we may cite Brown95 again: "I am not suggesting that in Acts Luke gives us an exact record of early Christian sermons delivered by Peter and Paul. Yet the Christology of the sermons is more primitive than Luke's own Christology and may echo or imitate early Christian kerygma." Brown96 has also declared: "There is every reason to believe that Luke himself composed many or all of the speeches he has placed on the lips of Peter and Paul in Acts. To be sure he may be reusing older material in these speeches, but Luke weaves it together in a dramatic setting." Finally, referring to the three texts from Acts and the two from Paul culled to show the original centring of the Christological moment on the Resurrection and the contrasting of the Resurrection with a lowly ministry, Brown97 warns us: "I speak of the original import of the texts; I do not mean that they continue to have that connotation in Acts." Thus older and later layers of tradition are said to be found in Acts and, on the whole, Brown notes a varied flux in this book and evidently wants us to take Luke's representation of Peter as well as of Paul with a degree of reservation.
So, even if we ignore how Paul's Peter looked at the appearances of Jesus, we may validly doubt the way Acts makes Peter look at them in 10:41. And indeed when we glance at the
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entire sermon we cannot fail to agree with Dougherty who, after giving its outline, observes: "It is interesting to find the same plan in the Gospel of St. Mark." The Christological moment itself is Marcan and not Pauline. Mark's Gospel begins with John the Baptist preaching and baptising all and sundry in the river Jordan and it informs us: "It was at this time that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptised in the Jordan by John. No sooner had he come up out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you'" (1:9-11)99 Now, Peter's sermon in Acts 10:36-41 which provides a grossly physical statement on Jesus' appearance reflects Mark and enforces its Christology with a citation from Isaiah 61:1, as The Jerusalem Bible100 notes in the margin when translating Acts: "You must have heard... about Jesus of Nazareth and how he began in Galilee, after John had been preaching baptism. God had anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power..." (10:37-38). Thus the very context under consideration betrays a post-Pauline atmosphere and cannot offer us the Peter of Paul's day. The-Pauline view of the appearances remains unchallenged as the sole earliest and authentic one with no hint of anything continuing of Jesus' dead body.
7
The Credibility of Paul as against Acts
To put Acts in its proper secondary place to the Pauline Epistles in spite of its claim to narrate the history of Paul's and Peter's apostleship, we may justifiably go into a number of minutiae and show this composition and the Epistles to be at loggerheads at numerous points. Brown brings a few to our sight.
He101 is aware that "the early Christians seemingly had a tradition concerning a certain period of time in which the risen Jesus appeared to men and after which the appearances
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ceased". Then Brown102 considers the data from Paul: "In Cor 15:8 Paul speaks of Jesus having appeared to him 'last of all' - a statement that implies that by A.D. 56 (when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians) he had not heard of any appearances having taken place since Jesus had appeared to him twenty years before (mid-30s). Since the conversion of Paul did not take place till three or six years after Easter, Paul's inclusion of himself in a list of witnesses implies a much longer period of post-resurrectional appearances than has normally been conceded. In Acts Luke marks off the period of appearances as forty days, seemingly with the purpose of drawing attention to the parallels between Christian origins and the origins of Israel with whom God made a covenant during their stay of forty years in the desert. This interpretation of Lucan thought is supported by the fact that motifs of the covenant, the exodus, and the desert life abound in Acts' description of the origins and life of the early Jerusalem community." What Brown has explicated shows that Luke's forty days are part of a deliberately constructed pattern to evoke in the Christian mind of the 80s or 90s a sense of divine continuity from the epoch of Moses. They have no historical value, whereas Paul is giving us concrete history.
Uneasiness over the forty days can be caused by a comparison of the very pair of books ascribed to the same author: Luke. Brown103 writes in relation to the closing scenes in Luke's Gospel: "Jesus appears to the Twelve on Easter Sunday night. At the end of the appearance (Luke 24:50) we are told that Jesus led them out of Jerusalem as far as Bethany and departed from them (vs 51), ascending into heaven..." Then, after a short interlude on the conflicting stories in different Gospels of appearances in Galilee and Jerusalem, Brown104 writes: "In fact, the information in Acts raises acutely questions about the historicity of the whole Lucan scheme. How are we to reconcile what is said at the end of the Gospel (departure/ ascension on Easter Sunday night) and what is said at the beginning of Acts (ascension forty days later)?"
Footnote 171 to this passage reads: "To solve the problem
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it has been suggested that Luke did not write Acts 1:1-5, but that it was the awkward composition of an unknown Christian scribe, necessitated when Luke-Acts, originally one book, was split into two. The scribe, supposedly, wrote an introduction for the second book by imitating the style of the introduction to the first (cf. Luke 1:3 and Acts 1:1). Another suggestion is that Luke the theologian wrote one way when terminating the Gospel-story of Jesus, while Luke the would-be historian wrote another way when beginning the Acts-story of the Church. By associating exaltation or ascension more closely with resurrection, the Gospel was truer to the original theological understanding of the resurrection, while Acts divided resurrection from ascension in order to make both a part of a continuous story."
Neither suggestion is persuasive. It is a mistake to speak of an originally one book being split into two. Brown, in The Jerome Biblical Commentary,105 has noted: "Luke and Acts were not preserved as a unit. Marcion [c. 150 A.D.] accepted only Luke..." Brown further underlines the fact that only after Marcion's "error" - that is, his opposition to various orthodox doctrines - "Acts really came into frequent use" and "we are uncertain when Acts... was put on a plane with the Gospels..." "There is every evidence that Acts was accepted as canonical from 200 on..." Had Luke and Acts been a single book, there would have been no possibility of treating them as two separate compositions as late as the middle of the second century and the claim of Acts to the canon having been in doubt until still later.
As to Luke the theologian working at odds with Luke the would-be historian, it would vitiate his own credentials in either capacity. But in The Jerome Biblical Commentary106 Brown takes cognisance of this alternative in some detail with apparent appreciation. He says: "P.Benoit (Revue biblique 56 [1949] 161-203; also Theology Digest 8 [1960] 105-10) has made a very important distinction in the concept of ascension which helps to solve the problem. If one is speaking of the terminus of Jesus' frequent appearances among men, then this took place
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some time (40 days) after the resurrection, perhaps in the symbolic form of a levitation as Acts describes. If one is speaking of ascension theologically, i.e., as a return to the Father or as a glorification in heaven at God's right hand, this exaltation was an integral part of the resurrection. Jesus rose from the dead to glory, and he appeared to men after the resurrection as one already glorified with supreme power (Matthew 28:18; Luke 24:26). The intimate and immediate connection between the resurrection and the ascension so understood is spelled out in John 20:17ff, and is implicit in many other NT texts (Acts 5:30-31; Ephesians 4:10; 1 Peter 3:21-22; Hebrews 4:14; 1 Timothy 3:16)."
Benoit does not go to the heart of the problem. True, there can be two senses to ascension. Jesus, when he appears to a couple of disciples on the road to Emmaus, is already ascended because he says that it has been ordained for him to suffer and so enter into his glory (Luke 24:26). He is also glorified into supreme power when he appears to eleven disciples with a claim to have all authority in heaven and on earth given him and with a command to them to baptise and teach all nations (Matthew 28:18). This means that ascension in the sense of glorification and exaltation has occurred before the appearances. But how does such an ascension resolve the stark discrepancy between the two versions of the ascension after the appearances? That ascension takes place not only at the end of 40 days, as Brown appreciating Benoit tells us, but also at night on the very Sunday whose morning witnessed the Resurrection. What Benoit has done is to distinguish such an ascension from the theological one which has an intimate and immediate connection with Jesus having been raised. What he has failed to do is to justify the two versions of the event at the terminus of the appearances among men. As Brown107 himself says before championing Benoit, "several difficulties" arise from the 40 days of Acts 1:3, 9: "40 is a symbolic number in the Bible, and not always to be taken literally; other passages imply an ascension on Easter Sunday (Luke 24:51; John 20:17; Mark 16:19)..."
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Brown writes as if for Benoit "Easter Sunday" represented the "theological" sense of the Ascension. Actually, it can only signify, as an earlier quotation by us from Brown states, a comparatively closer association of Ascension with Resurrection and thus a greater nearness to the theological truth. But Easter Sunday night on which Jesus is carried up to heaven marks the terminus of the appearances as much as does the levitation after 40 days, whereas the theological sense is, according to Brown's report of Benoit, that Jesus ascended prior to the appearances. Benoit's "distinction" which Brown recommends is beside the point as far as the crux of the matter is concerned: the crux is the irreconcilableness of Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:3, 9 about the length of the period during which there were appearances.
Until a real reconciliation is offered or a satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy is found, the general impression we get from Luke and Acts on the Ascension-theme is of an imaginative element at work with extreme latitude for them to vary from each other. Moreover, Luke, when like Matthew he implies the appearing Jesus to be already glorified, is inconsistent with what he understands by Ascension. Jesus' Ascension does not just connote his withdrawing from his disciples. It is to be carried up to heaven and take a special position there. Peter's first sermon in Acts figures Jesus ascended to God's right hand (2:33-34),108 and Stephen before his martyrdom gazes into heaven and sees the glory of God and Jesus standing at God's right hand (7:55).109 Ascension after the appearances is not merely their termination: it means to be divinely glorified. But, if the glorification is present earlier as a result of the Resurrection, we have two glorifications. Only by moving away from Luke and Acts and their chronologies do we reach some coherence. Rather than the untrustworthy flux of post-Pauline traditions, the true chronology for the appearances must be Paul's: that is, appearances for three or six years as computed by Brown. And along with this chronology a firm outlook may be discerned as to the relation between Resurrection and Ascension.
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Holding that the appearances went on for several years, Paul could not have thought of the Ascension as delayed so long. The Ascension as accomplished is implied in the phrase: "The one who rose higher than all the heavens to fill all things"110 (Ephesians 4:10) - and it is made immediately consequent on the Resurrection in the sentences on God: "May he enlighten the eyes of your mind so that you can see... how infinitely great... is this power at work in Christ, when he used it to raise him from the dead and to make him sit at his right hand, in heaven, far above every Sovereignty, Authority, Power, or Domination..." (Ephesians 1:18-21).111 In reference to these verses The Jerome Biblical Commentary112 remarks: "Like many in the early Church, Paul saw the resurrection-ascension as a single phase of the glorious exaltation of the Kyrios [=Lord]." From the great poem in Philippians 2 we may see in a striking manner how the Resurrection and the Ascension are as though indistinguishable and make one act of glory; for straight after mentioning Jesus' "death on a cross" it says: "But God raised him high and gave him the name which is above all other names" (2:9).113 The Jerusalem Bible comments: "Lit. 'super-raised him': by the resurrection and ascension."114 Actually, only one movement is stated: the word "raised" which is usually employed for the Resurrection is here coupled with "high" as if to fuse it into the Ascension and not imply merely a succession, however close, of two events. Nevertheless, we have to attend to a certain subtlety in the transitions of the poem as well as see this verse in the context of the habitual Pauline vision.
The Jerome Biblical Commentary115 remarks that this verse, "in its immediate passage from the cross to exaltation" is "un-Pauline in its passing over the resurrection". Yes, but only if we do not probe the poem's transitions we get something that contradicts Paul everywhere else. To get rid of the contradiction we must consider the phrase just preceding the verse. It is not merely the Resurrection that has been passed over. Where is the burial that should follow "death on a cross"? Surely to Paul the "super-raising" did not take place straight from the
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cross where the death had occurred. The burial is skipped as if "death on a cross" would automatically involve it. Similarly, the Resurrection is omitted as if it were automatically involved in the "super-raising". The spectacular infamy of the death by crucifixion is sought to be contrasted with the spectacular glorification of being raised high to be given the supreme name. The two intermediate steps of being buried and being resurrected are dropped for a special poetic-spiritual effect -without the implication that they were not there or that the crucifixion was meant to be fused with the interment and the Resurrection with the Ascension.
Still, unlike the case with Luke and Acts, there is nothing in Paul to plead for an Ascension noticeably later than the Resurrection. They are a swift sequence, the Resurrection shading off into the Ascension. This connotes that to Paul the six occasions he reports of the appearance of Jesus' resurrected body are from heaven where immediately after the Resurrection he has ascended or been exalted and where he returns after each occasion. A Pauline sense of the heavenly origin of the appearance seems to have lingered in the accounts in Acts of Paul's conversion by a vision of Jesus which for the author of Acts is no part of the pre-Ascension manifestation of Jesus to his disciples. Two of the accounts read: "Suddenly, while he was travelling to Damascus and just before he reached the city, there came a light from heaven all around him..." (9:3)116 - "I saw a light brighter than the sun come down from heaven..." (26:13).117
We may sum up. Even the brief distance of time from Easter morning to Easter night is foreign to Paul's outlook, much more the span of forty years. Perhaps the best mode of summing up is to draw attention to 1 Corinthians 15:43,51-52, where the metaphor of the seed that dies and the plant that grows in consequence is applied to the mortal state and the state of resurrection: "the thing that is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious... we shall all be changed. This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye."118 There is a conjoined Resurrection-Ascension, a two-phased single fact.
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And in the wake of it the half-dozen occasions which Paul lists of the encounters of the "raised" Jesus with selected humans are all heaven-projected and strung out over three or else six years.
To continue: Acts often exemplifies a mixture of history and imaginative reconstruction. The mixture vitiates to a considerable extent the very narrative of the most crucial incident in Paul's life, to which we have just adverted. Readers of the NT, in their picture of Paul the one-time persecutor of Christianity becoming suddenly its most energetic preacher, go almost invariably by Acts' sensational tale of Jesus' appearance to him on the road to Damascus. While we have no reason to doubt the substance of the initial questions and answers that Acts narrates between Paul and the widely shining presence of Jesus, what environs and follows them is at utter variance with Paul's own writing. In Acts 9:6 Jesus orders the dazzled Paul, who has fallen to the ground: "Get up now and go into the city, and you will be told what you have to do."119 And in Acts 9:15 the Christian Ananias of Damascus, who had a vision of Saul's arrival but who protests to the Lord that Saul has harmed Christians, is told by the Lord: "You must go all the same, because this man is my chosen instrument to bring my name before pagans and pagan kings and before the people of Israel."120 Next we learn from Acts 9:20-21 and 26-28 that Paul started to preach in the synagogues of Damascus and then "got to Jerusalem... to join the disciples" and "started to go round with them in Jerusalem, preaching fearlessly.. ."121 Finally, in all the three accounts that Acts gives of Paul's conversion he is accompanied by others. The first has "men" travelling with them, who heard a voice but did not see any light and who, because he had got blinded with the light, "led him into Damascus by the hand" (9:7-8).122 In the second the "people" with him saw the light but did not hear the voice (22:9).123 In the third the light shone round Paul and his "fellow-travellers" and all fell to the ground (26:13)124. All this is in absolute contradiction of Paul's personal report:
"The fact is, brothers, and I want you to realise this, the
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Good News I preached is not a human message that I was given by men, it is something I learnt only through a revelation of Jesus Christ. You must have heard of my career as a practising Jew, how merciless I was in persecuting the Church of God.... Then God... called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach the Good News about him to the pagans. I did not stop to discuss this with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were already apostles before me, but I went off to Arabia at once and later went straight back from there to Damascus. Even when after three years I went to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him for fifteen days, I did not see any of the other apostles; I only saw James, the brother of the Lord, and I swear before God that what I have just written is the literal truth" (Galatians 1:11-13,15-20).125
Lastly, it is undeniable from Paul's list of appearances that, like the appearances to Cephas and to James, the one to him was to a single individual unlike those to groups: to the Twelve, to over five hundred of the brothers and to all the Apostles. There could have been no "men", "people" or "fellow-travellers" with him, either hearing the words or seeing the light: else they would have been deemed at least partially co-recipients of the appearance.
Acts has to be sifted with care for what is Pauline in it and what is not. It does bring up something of Paul's time on the whole, echoes a few incidents of Paul's life as known from his Epistles and fleshes out in several respects the skeleton the Epistles present of his journeys. Unfortunately, however, it imports a lot of shadows of non-Pauline times and repeatedly it proves inaccurate about Paul. In the matter of doctrine, its proclamation about Jesus has no trace of Paul's combination of the pre-existent Saviour with the self-emptying lowly ministry chosen by that "first-born of all creation in whom were created all things" (Colossians 1:15-16).126 This absence directs us to the period intermediate between Paul and John, while the presence of preachments about Jesus' divine doings renders Acts akin to the age of dramatisation covering John no less
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than Mark, Matthew and Luke.
As for the miracle-feature in general, we must not cut apart Acts from Paul. Although Paul, unlike Acts, does not relate any actual miracle, he refers to what Christ has done through him "by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15:19)127 and he declares: "Though I am a nobody, there is not a thing those arch-apostles have that I do not have as well. You have seen done among you all the things that mark the true apostle, unfailingly produced: the signs, the marvels, the miracles" (2 Corinthians 12:12).128 But one particular type of marvel is never to be understood as meant by Paul: what is termed "speaking in tongues". Not that there is no such speaking mentioned in the Epistles. The thing to note is the total difference in the connotation of it in them. And this difference is enough to show the alienness of the age of Acts to that of Paul.
In 1 Corinthians 14:2, 4, 5, 9,18,19 we have Paul writing: "Anybody with the gift of tongues speaks to God, but not to other people; because nobody understands him when he talks in the spirit about mysterious things— The one with the gift of tongues talks for his own benefit... unless of course [he] offers an interpretation so that the church may get some benefit... if your tongue does not produce intelligible speech how can anyone know what you are saying?... I thank God that I have a greater gift of tongues than all of you, but when I am in the presence of the community I would rather say five words that mean something than ten thousand words in a tongue."129 In Acts Paul is linked with speaking in tongues: "the moment Paul laid hands on them the Holy Spirit came down on them, they began to speak in tongues....There were about twelve of these men."130 But the strange phenomenon of the Epistles has no relation to what goes by the same name in Acts.
The happening at Pentecost in Acts is famous. We are told about the group mentioned in 1:13-14: "They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech. Now there were men
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living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven, and at this sound they all assembled, each one bewildered to hear these men speaking his own language. They were amazed and astonished. 'Surely' they said 'all these men speaking are Galileans?... we hear them preaching in our own language about the marvels of God.'" (2:4-7, ll).131 It is patent that the sense of the phenomenon has undergone a complete change in Acts. Paul means a kind of hyper-enthusiastic vocalisation quite unintelligible to the hearers. The author of Acts interprets the phenomenon as a sort of magical linguistic faculty in the speaker by which the hearers can understand him in their own native speech.*
When the shift in significance took place we do not know with accuracy. After Paul the next reference to "tongues" occurs in the "longer ending" of Mark. Among "the signs that will be associated with believers", Jesus includes "the gift of tongues" (16:17).132 "The date of the Marcan Appendix," says Brown,133 "is difficult to determine precisely, but it is later than that of the other Gospel accounts." This carries us past John, the latest Gospel, which is dated by Brown to the 90s, but the Appendix must be earlier than Tatian and Irenaeus in the second century, since it is known to them.134 So we would not be wrong to make it more or less contemporaneous with Acts, which Brown, with the rest of modern scholars, dates to the 80s or 90s. The contemporaneity becomes all the more probable when we realise that in listing "the gift of tongues" among the signs of the believers Jesus is made to give it importance just as Acts puts it in the forefront, quite unlike Paul who rates it as very secondary. Thus the mind of the 90s mixes glaringly with whatever is Pauline in Acts, along with -as we have already seen from Dougherty - something on the threshold of the Evangelist age as illustrated by the Gospel of Mark apart from its "longer ending".
* For an informative discussion of "tongues" see John Ruef, Paul's First Letter to Corinth (Harmondsworth: The Pelican New Testament Commentaries, 1971), Introduction, pp. xxvi-xxviii.
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Acts is very composite - much of its substance post-Pauline even when dealing with Paul and truly Pauline only when it supports special points in Paul or the general drift of his discourse. No objection from it to anything in Paul can stand.
8
The Second and Last Hurdle:
(a) Was an Empty Tomb Discovered?
From the Gospels the one and only serious objection to a sweeping acceptance of the totally non-physical appearance of Jesus d la Paul would stem from the story of the women and the empty tomb common to all the four Evangelists. It would be legitimate if we could concede an argument such as Michael Ramsey's:135
"There is the evidence that the women found the tomb empty upon the third day after the crucifixion and reported the news to the Apostles. This evidence is set forth in the Gospels. Mark describes the visit of the women; John follows a separate tradition of a visit by Mary Magdelene alone. According to John - and some MSS. of Luke - the Apostles came to the tomb to verify the news for themselves.
"There is no reference to this evidence in documents earlier than the Gospels, and the question arises: Did the empty tomb have a place in the primitive tradition? It seems that although the primitive tradition as we know it does not mention the evidence about the empty tomb, it none the less implies the belief in it. The words of the tradition, as Paul reproduces it, seem incomprehensible unless they mean that the body of Jesus was raised up.
'how that Christ died... and that he was buried... and raised again on the third day.'
Died - buried - raised: the words are used very strangely unless they mean that what was buried was raised up. What
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otherwise is the point of the reference to the burial? In default of the very strongest evidence that Paul meant something different and was using words in a most unnatural way, the sentence must refer to a raising up of the body. The most radical of critics, Schniedel, and the most scientific of critics, Lake, agreed that the belief in the empty tomb is implied in these words."
Ramsey is right in asserting that Paul believed in the empty tomb, but the Evangelists speak of finding the tomb empty. Although Ramsey is aware of the distinction, he136 is satisfied with Kirsopp Lake's defence of Paul's silence about the findings: "Was there any reason why S. Paul should have supplied these details had he known them? Surely not. He was not trying to convince the Corinthians that the Lord was risen: he was reminding them that he has already convinced them" (The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, p. 194). Actually, Lake has missed the whole thrust of 1 Corinthians 15:12-17. True, Paul preached to the Corinthians in the past his Gospel of Christ risen, but at the time the Epistle is being penned there is a problem posed to him, which he seeks to answer because his past preaching has somehow not sufficed: "Now, if Christ raised from the dead is what has been preached, how can some of you be saying that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ himself cannot have been raised, and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing is useless; indeed, we are shown up as witnesses who have committed perjury before God, because we swore in evidence before God that he had raised Christ to life. For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people. But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead, the first-fruit of all who have fallen asleep" (15:12-20).137 Here a complex controversy is set forth. Where in Lake or Ramsey do we have an insight into the intricate and
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somewhat involved and repetitious argument?
By attending to a few comments by The Jerusalem Bible we may move towards disentangling what exactly Paul's problem was. The central line of the argument is caught by The Jerusalem Bible's general note138 on the whole Chapter 15: "Christ's resurrection of which the apostles are witnesses... is the decisive proof, vv. 12-28, of the future resurrection of all.... This is why the resurrection of Christ is the foundation of faith, vv. 12-19. The risen Christ can be called the first-fruit, v. 20, not only heralding but causing the resurrection of all Christians, vv. 20-28..." In reference to "what has been preached" there is the explanation:139 "Paul is preaching to those who believe Christ rose from the dead. To believe this and to lead a Christian life necessarily imply belief in the resurrection of the dead." The gloss140 on the last line of our passage is: " 'This life' has become for Christians a state from which life in Christ, through the resurrection, will deliver them. If there is no resurrection, they have lost their deliverance. Note that the possibility of the soul's immortality without the resurrection of the body is not considered." As a gloss on this gloss we may hark back to some words141 in the long note we have quoted on the spiritual resurrection-body: "Greek philosophers thought of the higher soul (the nous) escaping from 'the body', to survive immortally. Christians thought of immortality more in terms of the restoration of the whole person, involving a resurrection of the body effected by the Spirit or divine principle which God withdrew from human beings because of sins, Genesis 6:3, but restored to all who are united to the risen Christ, Romans 1:4+; 8:11, who is the 'heavenly man' and life-giving Spirit, 1 Corinthians 15:45-49."
The Jerusalem Bible on some other texts in the New Testament may be consulted to throw light on Paul's problem. Annotating Acts 17:32, it142 writes: "In the Greek world, even among Christians, the doctrine of the resurrection met stubborn resistance from preconceived ideas, cf. Corinthians 15:12f." Again, we are told:143 "The body, though tyrannised by the 'flesh',... by sin,... by death,... is not however doomed to
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perish, as Greek philosophy would have it, but, in accordance with the biblical tradition,... destined to live,... through resurrection. The principle of this renewal is the Spirit... which takes the place of the psyche, 1 Corinthians 15:44..." Finally, a remark on 2 Timothy 2:18 begins:144 "The Greek mind found the resurrection particularly hard to accept, Acts 17:32; 1 Corinthians 15:12."* It continues with reference to the text's mention of "Hymenaeus and Philetus, the men who have gone right away from the truth and claim that the resurrection has already taken place."145 The continuation runs: "Hymenaeus and Philetus may well have given [the resurrection] a purely spiritual interpretation by analogy with the mystical resurrection that occurs in baptism, Romans 6:14+; Ephesians 2:5+."
We can gather clearly enough that it is the Greek mind of the dissenting Corinthians which, interacting with the Judaeo-Christian outlook, has worked contra Paul by falling foul of the doctrine of being raised from the dead. But then The Jerusalem Bible's assertion that "Paul is talking to those who believe Christ rose from the dead" fails to meet the exact situation. Paul realises that to deny resurrection of the dead implies that if Jesus died, as Paul believes he did, the Corinthians cannot consider him to have been resurrected in the Pauline sense. Paul is puzzled as to how, knowing this inevitable corollary and having heard him in the past preach Jesus' Resurrection, they could question the rising of the dead at the world's termination. Since this rising follows from that of Jesus, the two
* 1 and 2 Timothy as well as Titus (all termed "Pastoral Letters") are under dispute for authorship. The Jerusalem Bible (p. 264), in spite of their lacking in Paul's distinctive style and vocabulary, inclines nonetheless for several reasons to attribute them to Paul, only insisting that as in the case of Ephesians but to a greater degree he must have given someone who was both disciple and secretary an unprecedented amount of freedom. Most New-Testament scholars exclude them from the genuine Pauline collection and make a disciple responsible for them, but grant that they "probably contain Pauline fragments" (Encyclopaedia Britannica [1977], Macropaedia, Vol. 13, p. 1090, col. 1).
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have to be accepted or rejected together. We must understand-the Corinthian dissent as applying both to Jesus and to Jesus' adherents, and so it must either set aside wholly the Pauline idea of Resurrection or interpret Resurrection in a manner that does away with reviving from death.
As the typical cultured Greek could never regard the body as anything save a soul's earthly house which must perish permanently when death overtakes it, we have in the claim by Hymenaeus and Philetus that "the resurrection has already taken place" a clue to part of what some Corinthians put before Paul. They must have conceived of Resurrection for ordinary human beings as a spiritual inner conversion on the lines of what Paul writes in the two Epistles noticed by The Jerusalem Bible: Romans and Ephesians.
Romans 6:4-6 tells us about baptism "in Christ Jesus": "You have been taught that... when we were baptised we went into the tomb with him and joined him in death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father's.glory, we too might live a new life. If in union with Christ we have imitated his death, we shall also imitate him in his resurrection."146 The Jerusalem Bible147 clarifies the suggestion here with a few words on the baptismal ceremonial: "The sinner is immersed in water (the etymological meaning of 'baptism' is 'dip') and thus 'burial' with Christ, Colossians 2:12, with whom also he emerges in resurrection, Romans 8:11+, as a 'new creature', Corinthians 5:17+, a 'new man', Ephesians 2:15+..." Of course, as the annotation adds, "This resurrection will not be complete or final until the end of time", but the Greek mind is liable to ignore the reservation and be satisfied with what, as The Jerusalem Bible goes on to say, "is already taking place in the form of a new life lived 'in the Spirit'..."
From Ephesians 2:5-6 we learn: "when we were dead through our sins, [God] brought us to life with Christ - it is through grace that we have been saved - and raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven, in Christ Jesus."148 Here too the baptismal ceremonial is a symbol as of a resurrection while one is alive, but the symbolised state
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is couched in a strange mode suggesting the world-end to be already realised. The Jerusalem Bible149 notes: "Here as in Colossians 2:12; 3:1-4, the use of the past tense shows that the resurrection and triumph of Christians in heaven is considered as actually existing, whereas the future tense in Romans 6:3-11; 8:11,17f treats it as something that has still to take place." No doubt, though Paul, for all the mysticism glimmering in these words, would never deny the additional physical beatitude at the end of the world complementing the present psychological one, the Greek habit of thought with its conviction of the body's irreparable destruction at the time of death would lean towards a spiritual death of the Old Adam into a new self-awareness during one's lifetime.
Of course Paul puts on a bold face and, referring to a strange practice of vicarious baptism which "people" followed, asks: "If the dead are not ever going to be raised, why be baptised on their behalf?" (1 Corinthians 15:29).150 But he was bound to be somewhat uneasy on the question of a world-end Resurrection. Rightly does Brown151 reflect: "we should remember that while 1 Corinthians 15 implies a general analogy between the resurrection of the Christian and the resurrection of Jesus, Paul must face problems about the earthly bodies of Christians, that did not arise about the earthly body of Jesus - their bodies will have decomposed or have been lost by the time of the general resurrection of the just, whereas Jesus was raised 'on the third day.'"
So much for the Corinthian non-conformism about the ordinary partisan of Christ. The second and, for our purpose, more important item of disagreement between it and Paul must be related to a non-Pauline sense in which Jesus, the extraordinary centre of Christianity's worship, could be envisaged after the crucifixion. Two points are involved here. First, as with its worshipper, so with Jesus himself, the upsurge of the Greek mind in the Corinthians would repudiate - as The Jerusalem Bible repeatedly says - the raising of the body from the dead: for if death came the body would be doomed forever. Resurrection, as Paul understood it, would be unacceptable. In
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a different way Jesus has to be looked up to as "raised". Next, Paul has averred: "If Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins." This statement harks back to an earlier verse in 1 Corinthians 15: "Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures" (3).152 Obviously, the questioners from Corinth have another view than Paul's of Jesus' victory both over death and over human sinfulness.
What could be the alternative view? As for "our sins", it must be that for a supernormal being like Jesus to have undergone the abysmal humiliation and terrible torment of the crucifixion, short of death, was enough to pay for them. In regard to being "raised", something merely on the analogy of "the mystical resurrection that occurs in baptism" will not do. A far more radical newness of existence is required for the supernormal being that Jesus was. One mode of it would be as follows. In his very body he must rise superior to death without having to die in order to be raised. From' the life that is inevitably death-governed and may be called certain death parading as precarious life, he must be taken into a life that will never terminate in death. Was it open to some of the Corinthians to envisage such a possibility of a post-crucifixion state?
Yes, and Brown provides a pointer. We may quote from him153 the observations "...scholars suggest that two ways of describing Jesus' victory, once quite different, have been harmonised by NT authors, and that originally exaltation into heaven did not imply resurrection from the dead. It is very difficult to be certain of this claim, for 'exaltation' need have done no more than capture the eschatological aspect of the resurrection." A footnote154 refers to X. Leon Dufour's Resurrection de Jesus et message pascal (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 55-75, where it is argued that one cannot claim resurrection language to be "derivative from exaltation language" but also "that, although exaltation language appears in the Christian hymns of the NT, it is not necessarily later than resurrection language which appears in the primitive kerygma or proclamation". This implies that exaltation language too is not to be derived from
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the other and that both are equally old. Thus the suggestion which Brown does not deem compelling could still be entertained and the notion of an exaltation without resurrection yet synonymous with ascension and glorification might be present in a milieu which, for all its Greek character, was penetrated by Judaeo-Christian influences. Corinth was indeed such a milieu.
Lying on the great trade-route between Rome and the East, it had a very mixed commercial and cosmopolitan population and a variety of cults.155 There was also a powerful Jewish community settled there, which gave trouble to Paul during Gallio's proconsulship of Achaia (Acts 18:12), starting from 52 A.D. according to an inscription found at Delphi.156 At the time 1 Corinthians was written, a learned Jew from Alexandria (Acts 18:24), Apollos, who after Paul's departure from Corinth had become a leader there of the Christian community, was with Paul and was unwilling to return to Corinth just then (1 Corinthians 16:12) "in case his presence aggravated party feelings among his own supporters, 1:12; 3:4-6". Against all this background we have to assess the non-conformist Corinthians' version, as against Paul's, of Jesus' triumph over death.
John Ruef157 explains that, side by side with the idea of the dead rising at the world's end, the Jews harboured the idea of God placing his sign of approval upon a particular worthy individual by exalting him bodily to heaven: "Moses, Elijah, and Enoch are all thought in various strands of Jewish tradition to have been exalted to heaven." But exaltation really meant "translation": the person exalted was "assumed" into heaven without his dying. In Ruef's opinion, that is what the disagreeing Corinthians believed to have happened to Jesus after his crucifixion. "When, therefore, they said, 'Christ is risen', they understood this in the sense of an ascension or assumption to heaven whence Christ subsequently appeared or was revealed to those who were to be the nucleus of the infant church. It is only thus that the Corinthians could claim that, while Christ is risen, there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead. The key word... is 'dead'. In the thought
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of the Gentiles, the dead are beyond recall. In the mind of the Corinthians, resurrection meant that Jesus avoided death. In the thought of Paul, of course, resurrection meant that Jesus overcame death. Paul must, therefore, emphasize in his discussion of the resurrection... that Jesus really did die."
Here we may cite Brown158 who has tried to meet some scholars' criticism of Resurrection-language. These scholars suggest that "somehow a genuine faith in Jesus' victory over death emerged" and "was conceptualized as bodily resurrection ... simply because the Jewish mind had available no other concept for expressing a victory over death." Brown argues: "This contention is inaccurate, for we know of several other models of victory over death that were current in Judaism and might have been employed by Christians, models that did not involve the resurrection and/or appearances of the one raised from the dead. For instance, the Gospels draw parallels between Jesus and Elijah; and so it would not have been unusual for Christians to have preached that, like Elijah, Jesus was assumed into heaven and that he would return at the last judgment." We should add that "appearances" need not be confined to the Resurrection-concept and denied to the Elijah-model. The Gospels not only draw parallels between Jesus and Elijah: they also speak of Elijah "appearing" before the time of the last judgment. Mark, the Evangelist nearest the age of Paul, writes: "Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain where they could be alone by themselves. There in their presence he was transfigured: his clothes became dazzlingly white, whiter than any earthly bleacher could make them. Elijah appeared to them with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus" (9:2-4).159 Matthew 17:1-3 and Luke 9:28-31 tell the same story. Luke has even a phrase - "Moses and Elijah appearing in glory" (verses 30-31)160 - in accord with the general Pauline "what is raised is glorious" (1 Corinthians 15:43) and Paul's particular allusion to the resurrected Jesus' "glorious body" (Philippians 3:21).161 An alternative to the Elijah-model would be a pattern of thought which we may dub "proto-Gnosticism". An index to it
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is given by Ruef himself when he comments on 1 Corinthians 7, 8,10 and inclines us to hold that perhaps in these verses we have a suggestion of the outlook Paul is opposing in 15:12-20. The verses read in Ruef's rendering: "...who sees anything different in you? What have you that you did not receive? If then you have received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? Already you are filled! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And we would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you!... We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ."162 Ruef163 marks here "a highly ironic description of the attitude of the Corinthian Christians" - and adds: "It must refer to their attitude rather than their style of life, already described in other terms [cf. l:26ff]... Some see this as evidence of the Gnostic character of Paul's opponents in Corinth. The terms filled, rich, kings and rule, can be paralleled in later writings by avowed Gnostics.....If this is not full-blown Gnosticism, it is certainly the intellectual climate within which Gnosticism could spring up.....In the 'gnostic' view of things, the terms would mean that those who had gnosis, i.e. knowledge or wisdom, were full (of the Spirit) and were therefore rich - treating the spirit as a possession. They reigned as kings because knowledge afforded them power to overcome the heavenly beings hostile to them and desirous to prevent their return to their heavenly abode in the primal man."
Giinther Bornkamm164 discerns even more distinctly the play of an attitude banking on a special secret knowledge such as originally a non-Christian sect extolled but is here adapted to Christian concerns: "The 'enthusiasts' at Corinth had succumbed to the attractions of a different theology of the resurrection and believed that, possessing Christ's spirit, they were even now living in a new aeon beyond time and death. This is the reference of the ironic, angry words of 1 Corinthians 4:8."
The Jerome Biblical Commentary,165 discussing the question of the Pauline authorship of Colossians and informing us that despite several objections "the majority of scholars still accept
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Paul as the author", has the following apropos of one of the objections: "The 'Gnostic' nature of the heresy [countered by Paul in Colossians], since Gnosticism is, in its development, a 2nd-century phenomenon." Then the Commentary adds apropos of it: "However, most scholars agree that Colossians is directed against an incipient form of Gnosticism, or Proto-Gnosticism, which is at home in a lst-century setting." Assuming with many scholars Colossians to have been written during Paul's imprisonment in Rome, Joseph A. Grassi,166 the writer on it in the Commentary, takes the years A.D. 61-63 as "the most likely period" of its composition - that is, about half a dozen years after 1 Corinthians. This is just the right chronological relationship, since, in Grassi's words,167 "the advanced Christology in the letter would point to a time after the composition of 1-2 Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians", while, as Dougherty168 reminds us, "the expansion of Paul's theology" here has still a "continuity... with his earlier thought": "The roots of this Christology already appear in 1 Corinthians 8:6; 2 Corinthians 5:19; Galatians 4:4f; Romans 8:38ff."
The presence of Proto-Gnosticism through the whole of Paul's preaching career may be affirmed also from the early existence of parts of the Gnostic document, The Gospel of Thomas. Elaine Pagels169 cites Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University as suggesting in his Introduction to this collection of Jesus' sayings that, though compiled around 140 A.D., it may include some traditions even older than Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.
Brown, writing in The Jerome Biblical Commentary,170 is practically in accord with Koester. After describing The Gospel of Thomas as "one of the most important of the 44 works" dug up in 1945-46 "in upper Egypt near the village of Nag-Hammadi", he says: "The Gospel of Thomas is simply a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus (maxims, proverbs, parables); it has no narrative. (Scholars have long posited a pre-Gospel source named 'Q'... which consisted entirely of sayings; The Gospel of Thomas shows that such a literary form did exist in Christian antiquity.) Some sayings are identical with or
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parallel to canonical NT sayings; but the majority are different in whole or in part. As for the similar or parallel sayings, it is difficult to be certain whether The Gospel of Thomas has borrowed from the Synoptics or from a source similar to the sources behind those Gospels. As for the sayings that are different, some of them may be genuine, for several of them are cited elsewhere in early Christian literature____Yet there is a Gnostic or incipiently Gnostic flavor to many of them. Probably The Gospel of Thomas is a composite work, binding together genuine sayings of Jesus, canonical and non-canonical, with sayings invented in Gnostic circles."
Everything indicates a fore-gleam, in Paul's days, of later Gnostic ideas. There could very well have been an anticipation of those, for instance, in The Treatise on Resurrection171 by a follower of the Gnostic teacher and poet Valentinus (c. 140 A.D.) which defines Resurrection as the moment of enlightenment: "It is... the revealing of what truly exists... and a migration (metabole - change, transition) into newness." Whoever grasps this becomes spiritually alive. This means, the Valentinian author declares, that you can be "resurrected from the dead" right now: "Are you - the real you - mere corruption?... Why do you not examine your own self, and see that you have arisen?" Another text, The Gospel of Philip, Pagels172 tells us, "expresses the same view, ridiculing ignorant Christians who take the resurrection literally. 'Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error.' Instead they must 'receive the resurrection while they live.' The author says ironically that in one sense, then, of course 'it is necessary to rise "in this flesh" since everything exists in it!'" This recalls the claim of Hymenaeus and Philetus, which may be understood as Proto-Gnosticism in terms of the baptismal rite.
If an inner knowledge of the non-physical reality that is the Divine Jesus as well as one's own deepest self is the resurrection for the Proto-Gnostic Christian, what would be to him the Resurrection of the historic Jesus who had been nailed on the cross? As Pagels173 recounts, the writings of the later full-fledged Gnostics "tell countless stories about the risen
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Christ - the spiritual being whom Jesus represented - a figure who fascinated them far more than the merely human Jesus, the obscure rabbi from Nazareth". Pagels174 continues: "For this reason, gnostic writings often reverse the pattern of the New Testament gospels. Instead of telling the history of Jesus biographically, from birth to death, gnostic accounts begin where the others end - with stories of the spiritual Christ appearing to his disciples." Curiously enough, here is essentially Paul's outlook: "Even if we did once know Christ in flesh, that is not how we know him now. And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here" (2 Corinthians 5:16-17).175 As Romans 1:3-5 makes it explicit, "the Son of God who, according to the human nature he took, was a descendant of David" was, "in the order of the spirit, the spirit of holiness that was in him,... proclaimed Son of God in all his power through his resurrection from the dead".176 The Jerome Biblical Commentary says about Paul: "It is remarkable how little he knew of Jesus the Galilean rabbi or even of what is recorded in the Gospels about him... Paul is interested in the exalted Lord..." The difference, however, between the Valentinians and Paul is that the former took the historical Jesus to be just a vehicle for a Divine Being who entered him at his baptism by John and left him during the crucifixion, whereas to Paul Jesus was himself the pre-existent Son of God and Jesus himself was raised from the dead after the crucifixion and appeared to his disciples. Hence a Proto-Gnostic view of the after-death Jesus would not be acceptable to him.
The Valentinian notion was already present before the close of the first century. Thus verse 22 of 1 John, a letter attributed to the Evangelist John who wrote in the 90s, gets in The Jerusalem Bible177 the annotation: "Probably a reference to Cerinthus who taught that Jesus was an ordinary human being who was 'possessed' by the Messiah at his baptism in the Jordan; this Messiah ascended before the Passion of Jesus." So the possible Proto-Gnostic view hailing from Corinth may be stated along the following lines:
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"Something in every man survives the inevitable and irreversible dissolution of the body, as taught in Greek philosophy. But the surviving something within Jesus whom Paul designated Christ would be in correspondence to the status of the great truth-revealer who had come from the Highest to work through him. It would give all the signs of what Paul would term Ascension, Exaltation, Glorification carrying it to a heavenly seat at God's right hand. After the death of Jesus the real Christ in him would appear to a chosen number as a sheer divinity freed from the physical covering which, like any other, was bound to dissolve for good."
How would the real Christ appear after Jesus' death? It would seem that in the opinion of Christian Gnostics he would still identify himself by the name of the responsive vehicle he had adopted but he would shed all the physical traits of it. Pagels178 quotes from The Letter of Peter to Philip which relates that after Jesus' death the disciples were praying on the Mount of Olives when "a great light appeared, so that the mountain shone from the sight of him who had appeared. And a voice called out to them saying 'Listen... I am Jesus Christ, who is with you forever.'" The Wisdom of Jesus Christ tells a similar story: "then there appeared to them the Redeemer, not in his original form but in the invisible spirit. But his appearance was the appearance of a great angel of light."179 The Apocryphon of John speaks of John seeing "an image with multiple forms in the light".180
The Corinthians whom Paul argues with were evidently dissatisfied with a doctrine which took the human body not only to rise from death at the Parousia but also to continue with its physical characteristics unchanged. The Jerome Biblical Commentary181 introduces thus its treatment of Paul's dealing with the manner of the Resurrection: "The Jews engaged in much speculation about the resurrection of the dead. Some entertained hedonistic conceptions of the life of the resurrection similar to the Mohammedan teachings about Paradise (see J. Bonsirvan, Le Judaisme palestinien [Paris, 1934], I, 483-85). Such materialistic conceptions seem to have influenced some
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Corinthians to deny the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead." The Commentary182 touches on Paul's employment of "the Greek mode of argumentation called diatribe, imagining an objector whom he refutes with an epithet common to that literary form - 'foolish fellow!' [=The Jerusalem Bible's 'They are stupid questions']". The Commentary183 also sums up Paul's vision: "The resurrected body will be transformed into a perfect instrument for the new conditions of the life of glory..." All this, of course, pertains to the ordinary Christians' Parousiac future, his "spiritual body" to come. But, as the Commentary184 explicates Paul, "The model of this 'spiritual body' is the risen body of Christ, 'the heavenly man'." So, if some Corinthians have presented a Proto-Gnostic version of Jesus' Resurrection, what Paul says here would be meant to help them clarify their minds and assure them that he never conceived of Jesus' dead body resurrected in a materialistic condition, retaining the characteristics of its old mortal form.
However, Paul's Epistle betrays a lacuna in combating the Corinthians' Proto-Gnostic model of the risen Jesus no less than their Elijah-model. Unlike the latter, this alternative would involve the death of Jesus' body yet deny its resuscitation a la Paul. But in either case Paul would face the challenge of showing that there was not only death but also resuscitation. Both the models would be counteracted if he could supply details such as the women going to Jesus' tomb and finding it empty. Contrary to Kirsopp Lake's submission, Paul answering the unorthodox Corinthians had every reason to bring forth evidence that Jesus' body did not escape death like Elijah's as well as that the dead body of Jesus, instead of lying in its grave forever as Proto-Gnosticism contended, had left it to live again.
The required evidence would have been most appropriately in place after the sentence: "But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead, the first-fruit of all who have fallen asleep." Had such details as the visit of the women to Jesus' tomb and the discovery of its emptiness been to Paul's hand, he could easily have refuted the suggestion either that the
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crucified Jesus did not die but was directly exalted or that he died irrecoverably and what survived to make after-death appearances was a divine being who had emerged from the casing of the mortal body it had put on for a time. Paul's lack of knowledge of the incidents the four Gospels narrate stands out. All he had to his hand was the teaching inherited by him and the authority of the prophecies. It is as if there were no tomb of Jesus to contradict the Elijah-model or allow the issue whether it was filled or empty to occur. The very fact that some Corinthians could argue against his position signifies the absence of concrete proof at Paul's disposal that in a localisable way Jesus was buried as a preliminary to his possible rising and leaving the grave void.
In addition to the reference in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 to Jesus' burial in the phrase about the teaching "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures",185 there are two allusions to the same subject. One is Romans 6:3, which we have already quoted and in which the teaching is said to connote that the dip into the water of the baptismal ceremonial symbolises our going into "the tomb" with Jesus and joining him "in death" and that the emergence from the water as a believer in Jesus reflects with the living of a new life the raising of him from the dead by God's glory. The second text is: "You must be... held firm by the faith you have been taught____You have been buried with him, when you were baptised and by baptism, too, you have been raised up with him through your belief in the power of God who raised him from the dead" (Colossians 2:12).186 But it should be evident that terms like "tomb" and "buried" are everywhere merely part of a teaching and, though Paul fully credits the teaching, he cannot have had enough evidence to enable him to direct the Corinthian non-conformism to a known grave, an identifiable tomb. The reason for his inability should be easy to understand if we divest our minds of fixed ideas.
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(b) Was Joseph of Arimathaea Real?
In all the four (Gospels we have read of Joseph of Arimathaea who took charge of Jesus' body and removed it to an unused tomb which Mark (15:46), Matthew (27:60) and Luke (23:53) describe as one hewn in rock and John (19:41) simply as one near-by in a garden:187 in short, in a special separate identifiable location. Brown188 says about Joseph: "It is virtually certain that he was not a figment of Christian imagination, that he was remembered precisely because he had a prominent place in the burial of Jesus, and thus that there was someone who knew exactly where Jesus had been buried." But Brown189 himself tells us in a footnote to Mark's figuring of Joseph as "a respected member of the council who also looked for the kingdom of God": "If one compares the four Gospels, the character of Joseph grows with the telling. Not only has he become a disciple of Jesus in Matthew, but the tomb in which he buried Jesus was his own tomb (Matt 27:57, 60). Luke (23:50-51) stresses that he was a good and righteous man who had not consented to the action of the other members of the Sanhedrin in condemning Jesus (a contradiction of the 'all' in Mark 14:64). John (19:39-40) has Joseph join Nicodemus in preparing Jesus' body for a solemn burial." The element of "imagination" and "dramatisation" is clearly at work. Brown notes190 too, as we have seen him doing when we considered the limited extent to which the Gospels are credible, how Matthew who generally bases himself on Mark changes the story of the empty tomb according to his own "apologetic" ends without any concern for better history. There is, again, a note by Brown191 on the different reports in Mark and Luke about the spices prepared by the women to anoint Jesus' corpse: "This disconcerting lack of agreement already raises a question about historicity." Finally, looking back at the contradiction between Mark and Matthew, Brown192 observes: "A greater contradiction stands between Mark/Luke and John. Not only does John not mention the women's purpose in coming to the tomb; but logically he excludes the possibility
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that the purpose was to anoint Jesus' body, for immediately after the crucifixion John has Joseph and Nicodemus join in preparing Jesus' body for burial, using an enormous amount of myrrh and aloes (one hundred pounds! - John 19:39-40). Once again there is doubt about John's historical exactitude because the main purpose of his burial narrative is symbolic."
A footnote193 to the burial narrative playing a symbolic role says: "It illustrates the theme of John 12:32 that, once Jesus has been lifted up from the earth (in crucifixion), he begins to draw all men to himself. In John 19:38-39 two hitherto fearful men begin to confess publicly their adherence by preparing Jesus for burial. Moreover, the implausibly large outlay of spices may be meant to suggest that Jesus received a royal burial, thus continuing the theme of Jesus' kingship that is very strong in the Johannine Passion Narrative..."
Nor does Brown stop here. He194 continues: "However, if there is hesitation about the reliability of the two accounts that exclude anointing as the purpose of the women's visit to the tomb, there is no certitude that Mark and Luke are historical in advocating this purpose. Several illogicisms have been detected in the Marcan/Lucan story, e.g., the oddity of seeking to anoint a body that had already corrupted for two days. I doubt the validity of such an objection since the evangelists knew the customs of the time and would scarcely have passed on what was manifestly unlikely. Perhaps the safe conclusion is to say that we cannot be sure whether Jesus' body was anointed before burial or not. (If it was anointed, then the women were probably going to the tomb to mourn.) In any case, the reference to anointing with spices in Mark 16:1 and Luke 24:1 represents an editorial attempt to sew together more closely the story of the empty tomb and the main Passion Narrative." A footnote195 to the bracketed sentence informs us that a custom of mourning for several days is implied by John 11:31 and that the Jewish Midrash Rabba 100:7 on Genesis 50:10 reports mourning at its height on the third day.
The excuse offered for Luke is rather lame. It stands to reason that anointing a corpse two-day old would never be
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practised and John 19:40 makes the accepted ritual specifically clear: "They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, following the Jewish burial custom."196 Neither is it a fact that Luke was incapable of passing on what went against the customs of the time. Not only is he shown by Brown197 himself as indulging in "details... of dubious historicity" such as "a census of the Roman world that affected Galilee and occurred before the death of Herod the Great": he is also exposed as a misinterpreter of customs by none else than Brown198 when discussing 2:22-24 which gives us Luke's scene in the temple with the child Jesus and his parents: "Luke seems to think that both parents needed to be purified, since in 22... he modifies Lev[iticus] 12:6 to read 'when the time came for their purification.' He seems to think that the reason for going to the Temple was the consecration or presentation of Jesus (vs.27), when only the law concerning the purification of the mother mentions the custom of going to the sanctuary. (And it is dubious that a journey to the Temple was still practised to any great extent in the Judaism of NT times.) He mentions nothing of the price (five shekels) required for redeeming the first-born child from the service of the Lord; rather he connects with the event the sacrifice of the two doves or pigeons which was really related to the purification of the mother." Brown's explanation199 is: "... the confusion results from a combination of inaccurate knowledge of the exact customs and of the conflict between two motifs" - the two motifs being drawn respectively from Leviticus and from the story of Samuel. But to explain the cause of Luke's inaccuracy is not to deny that he was capable of transmitting "what was manifestly unlikely" in "the customs of the time".
So must have been Mark, on whom he drew appreciably though a little less than Matthew, and whose story about the women at the tomb he repeated here. D. E. Nineham200 discusses Mark 7:2-4 which says of the Pharisees and the scribes watching Jesus' followers: "... they saw that some of the disciples ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their
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hands, observing the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they purify themselves)..." Nineham's commentary begins: "According to the Jewish experts in such matters, the evidence of the Talmud is that in the time of Jesus ritual washing of hands before meals was obligatory only on the priests. An occasional 'pietist' might try to live, so far as outward purity was concerned, as if he were a priest, but the ordinary layman -including the Pharisee and the scribe - was not concerned with such questions of religious defilement unless he was about to enter the temple and make a sacrifice. Accordingly, the story as it stands can hardly be historical." Then Nineham quotes the reply of Christian scholars. They point out the lateness of the Talmud (dating from c. A.D. 450), question the value of its evidence for the time of Jesus and argue: "It is agreed by everyone that about A.D. 100, or a little later, ritual washing did begin to become obligatory on all; such a change will not have been completely sudden, so may it not be that there was already a strong move in this direction in the time of Jesus? If so, it would certainly have found its chief supporters among scribes and Pharisees, and they might well have expected a religious leader such as Jesus to exact the highest standards from his followers." Nineham's verdict is: "If that suggestion can be accepted, it may preserve the historicity of the story itself, though it cannot save St. Mark's generalizing that the Pharisees, and all the Jews practised such ritual washing, for the Talmudic evidence makes clear that, as a group, they did not."
Nineham is certain that Mark could not be altogether right about the customs of Jesus' day and his "If" proves him unsure that the Christian reply on the strength of a move in a particular direction more than 70 years after the period concerned can decide against the Talmud.
All in all, every item of Mark/Luke is open to grave misgiving and Joseph of Arimathaea is set in the midst of them. What shall we say about his historicity? Brown makes the point that Joseph "appears in all four Gospels". But, honest and scrupulous scholar that he is, he201 appends a footnote:
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"This may be less impressive than it seems; for in the main narrative of the empty tomb, Matthew and Luke appear to be dependent on Mark, and only John (with whose tradition Luke agrees in part) seems to have an independent tradition. Thus we are dealing basically with only two traditions." Still, Joseph retains some impressiveness and Nineham202 even argues about him: "Apart from this incident, an entirely unknown figure; if he subsequently became Christian, he does not appear to have been a particularly well-known one, so there would have been no obvious reason for attributing the burial of Jesus to him unless he had in fact been responsible for it." But there are two details in Nineham203 later that give us pause.
First, the Greek adjective euschemon, "when used in such a context, would have meant properly 'of good social position' ... but it was popularly used to mean 'rich'. So St. Matthew (27:17) understood it here, probably rightly, and we should surely see some influence of Isaiah 53:9 on our passage". The Jerusalem Bible translates Isaiah: "They gave him a grave with the wicked, a tomb with the rich..." - and comments: "Early Christian preaching seems to have had this text in mind when recording the burial of Jesus in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea, 'a rich man', Mt. 27:57-60. It is possible to correct it to 'in his death he is with the evil-doers'..." As prophecy-fulfilment was a common motif among early Christians, a rich man may have been conjured up by oral tradition and accorded "a local habitation and a name" which passed into the written records of Mark and John with a further embellishment in the latter in the form of Nicodemus. We do not need to be compelled to grant historicity to just a name and its connection with a place, especially when both of them are accompanied by a number of features whose historicity can validly be called in question.
We have already noted from Brown how much misguidance could come from faith in prophecy-fulfilment. A few words from Nineham204 would be very appropriate here. He refers to the fact that early Christians "regarded Christ's activ-
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ity as the final saving act of God to which the Old Testament had pointed forward. Since the Old Testament was regarded as completely accurate down to the last detail, it followed that everything it predicted concerning this final event must have found fulfilment at some point in Christ's ministry. Hence the Old Testament could become a source of information about the events of Christ's earthly life; and to the early Christians, with their deep conviction of its inerrancy, it may well have seemed a safer guide than the fallible memories of human witnesses, however well informed. There are, as we shall see, passages in Mark where it is impossible to be certain whether a particular story rests on a tradition derived from witnesses or whether it represents a deduction from Old Testament prophecy about what 'must have' happened when the Messiah came. (For example, see the commentary on 15:24.)"
The germ of the Joseph-tale was pre-Marcan but Mark's mentality face-to-face with Jesus' earthly life was pre-Marcan as well as in the matter of prophecy-fulfilment. So the claim to historicity weakens still more.
The second detail from Nineham himself to counteract his feeling of the factuality of Joseph of Arimathaea peeps out from his comment apropos of the favour Joseph obtained from the Roman authorities: the possession of Jesus' body. Nineham205 informs us: "The normal Roman custom was to leave the bodies of the crucified on the cross until they decayed, but there is some evidence that from the time of Augustus they sometimes granted them to the relatives and friends, if they chose to apply for them." Mark, as rendered by Nineham, unequivocally shows that Joseph was neither a relative nor a friend of Jesus but simply a pious Jew: "a respected member of the council, who was himself looking for the kingdom of God..." (15:43).206 Joseph's intervention is quite out of the blue and wanting in plausible historical roots.
The absence of historical roots becomes even more conspicuous when we consider the period in which Jesus died and the circumstances of his trial with its tragic result. The Chronological Table in The Jerusalem Bible207 notes that Jesus
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was "condemned to death by Pontius Pilate under the Emperor Tiberius (Tacitus, Annals)". C. Northcote Parkinson208 brings out a very significant aspect of this event in Jesus' life: "In A.D. 30 or thereabouts the High Priest and Council tried him for blasphemy, condemned him to death, and asked the procurator to confirm the sentence. This he was reluctant to do, but the High Priest next informed him that Jesus claimed the kingship of the Jews. Mindful of Tiberius's severity in matters of treason, and realising that the Council could complain to Ceasar about his lenience, the procurator confirmed the sentence. Jesus was then executed." Evidently the situation in regard to Pilate was such that it was impossible for him to act afterwards with the lenience attributed to him by all the four Gospels when Joseph of Arimathaea approached him. We may representatively cite the earliest Gospel: "Joseph of Arimathaea... boldly went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Pilate, astonished that he should have died so soon, summoned the centurion and enquired if he was already dead. Having been assured of this by the centurion, he granted the corpse to Joseph..." (15:43-45).209 Fearing a complaint to Tiberius by the Jews who were intent upon punishing Jesus to the extreme, Pilate could never have entertained a request to hand over Jesus' corpse to anyone not in sympathy with the accusers.
Even without bringing in Parkinson's insight we should be able to realise Pilate's psychology vis-a-vis the anger of the Jews. When they were so infuriated with Jesus that they would rather free a man like Barabbas who was then in prison on a charge of rioting and murder, and when Pilate was so "anxious to placate the crowd" (Mark 15:15)210 as to waive his own conviction of the offender's innocence, it was most unlikely for him to add fuel to the fire by letting after-death ministrations be given to a fanatically hated culprit.
A step further in rendering Joseph apocryphal, leading to a decisive coup de grace to the claim of his existence, would lie in piercing to the real meaning of a scholarly consideration by Brown211 of a relevant scriptural verse from outside the
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Gospels. While building up a brief for Joseph he has also written: "Acts 13:29 informs us that the Jerusalem rulers took Jesus down from 'the tree' and laid him in a tomb. Some scholars maintain that this is a more authentic tradition than the Joseph of Arimathaea story." Acts evidently can serve to break the connection which the two traditions behind the four Gospels make between Joseph and the burial following the removal of Jesus from the cross. It is not as if scripturally Joseph alone held the centre of the scene: it is as though in the period before the Gospels another tradition were in vogue, a tradition implying the complete non-existence of any Joseph and contradicting the inevitability of him which one may plead from the Gospels. But Brown attempts some sort of getting round the implication and contradiction. Immediately after citing Acts, he says: "However, the Joseph story does make it clear that he was one of the Jews (a member of the Sanhedrin). Thus the information could be reconciled if the Gospel accounts did not also present Joseph as a disciple of Jesus. We may speculate that he became a disciple later, and the introduction of his discipleship into the burial story was anachronistic retrojection. At the time of Jesus's death Joseph was probably no more than what Mark 15:43 makes him: 'a respected member of the council who also looked for the kingdom of God,' in short, a God-fearing man who extended to Jesus the burial that the Law commanded." We may appreciate Brown's honesty here, for he balances pros and cons and the conclusion has a tone of tentativeness. But it is easy to indicate the essential fallacy of the argument.
The full text within which 13:29 occurs reads in The Jerusalem Bible:212 "What the people of Jerusalem and their rulers did, though they did not realise it, was in fact to fulfil the prophecies read on every sabbath. Though they found nothing to justify his death, they condemned him and asked Pilate to have him executed. When they had carried out everything that scripture foretells about him they took him down from the tree and buried him in a tomb" (13:27-29). The crucial words are: "the people of Jerusalem and their rulers" - in
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verse 27. All the "they"s in the subsequent verses stand for this double group. Brown errs by speaking of "the Jerusalem rulers" in verse 29 and then seeking to include Joseph among them. The Authorised Version also leaves us in no doubt that Acts mentions the common people over and above those in power. Its phrase is: "... they that dwell at Jerusalem, and their rulers." The taking down of Jesus from "the tree" and burying him in a tomb represented a collective will. Joseph has no prominence here and the collective will is the opposite of friendly to Jesus: not the slightest shade of Joseph's pro-Jesus feeling is felt in it. We must fade him out totally from the statement in Acts. The picture is of Jesus' enemies treating him after his death as the criminal they had branded him to be before it. So his burial in a tomb must signify the fate of the crucified malefactor: the accursed corpse was dumped into a common burial place in which it could not be marked apart by an identifiable sepulchre.
We have precisely the situation evoked by Galatians 3:13 echoing Deuteronomy 21:23. And most curiously, Acts 13:29 is within an oration put into Paul's mouth at the city of Antioch in the province of Pisidia. The scholars who prefer the tradition of this verse of Acts to that of the Joseph of Arimathaea story are on the right tack.
From their coign of vantage every item in the situation should acquire clarity. It is the lack of knowledge as to where Jesus' body could have been buried that would give a hold to some Corinthians' belief either in his having been exalted physically from the cross into heaven like Moses, Elijah and Enoch under other circumstances or else in the heavenly Christ who made Jesus his medium, ascending to his home after the latter's death. The same lack would incapacitate Paul from opposing definitely these Corinthians with his own creed that Jesus had undergone a real death from which he rose and that the Resurrection must not be understood in a sense inapplicable to the ordinary Christian at the end of time. Naturally he was handicapped; for, while the appearances proved Jesus still existing and having been in communication
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with some persons, his rising from the dead - as if there were continuity between his corpse and the witnessed living form - could be just an inference, unless the site of burial, the specific tomb, was not only identifiable but also discovered to be empty, as said in the Gospel account.
Before we move on, we may close the subject in hand by putting the names "Joseph" and "Arimathaea" against a background of their past history and realising how utterly symbolic they are. Information gleaned from J. Duncan and M. Derrett,213 whose general thesis has no affinity with ours, can show them to be deliberate inventions by a subtle mind popularising them in the immediate pre-Gospel period. "Joseph" appropriately recalls the Patriarch Joseph who "was extremely interested in burials (Genesis 50:14)" and whose "own burial was a known item on the agenda at the First Redemption, viz. from Egypt (Genesis 50:25-26), Exodus 13:19; Joshua 24:32; Sirach 49:15; Hebrews 11:22; Acts 7:15-16". "Arimathaea... a known village in Judaea, otherwise called Armatha, Ramatha" brings up "a point visible to Eusebius but forgotten since. The place which is repeatedly spelled Armathaim in the LXX (1 Samuel 1:1 etc.) is the home of Elkanah ('God has possessed'), father of the divinely-promised (and the pious populace would believe, divinely-begotten) prophet of the Kingdom, Samuel. Armathaim/Ramathaim was the birth-place, residence, and burial-place of Samuel, therefore the place of pilgrimage to Samuel's tomb. Eusebius says (Onom. 225, llff.), 'thence came Joseph said in the gospels to be from Aramath-aea'. It was highly proper that a man from thence should play kinsman to the prophet of the New Kingdom, the New Covenant, who also was born, as Luke made clear, by the promise of God (the Magnificat, Luke l:46ff., should be compared with 1 Samuel 1-2)." Of course, it is possible to hold God to have so arranged affairs that a personal name packed with burial-associations in the tale of the Old Covenant should come again at the right time and a place-name should recur aptly, evocative of a locality where was buried a God-promised prophet whose mother Hannah sang in connection
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with his birth a canticle strikingly comparable - as all Biblical scholars know - with the one sung by Mary before Jesus the giver of the New Covenant was born.214 But it is far more credible as well as natural to see in "Joseph of Arimathaea" an ingenious play of religious symbolism, a fitting fabrication in a garb of f actuality.
Indeed, the illusoriness of this figure and of all his actions is suggested most forcibly by what Paul has to say on the burial or the tomb of Jesus. To receive best the impact of his testimony we must clear our minds of the single rock-hewn tomb associated with Joseph's activity. The word "tomb" is not necessarily linked with rock. It primarily means: "Hole (made in earth or rock to receive dead (esp. human) body, grave."215 Only secondarily its meaning is: "subterranean or other vault for the dead; sepulchral monument."216 And we cannot help attending to the simple sense of "grave" or "hole (made) in earth" when we hear Paul: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by being cursed for our sake, since scripture says: Cursed be everyone who is hanged on a tree" (Galatians 3:11).217 Every exegete knows that the allusion is to Deuteronomy 21:23. The Jerusalem Bible too knows this but it tries to minimise the relevance by its annotation:218 "To free the human race from the curse of God laid on it for defying the law, Christ made himself answerable for the curse, cf. Rm 8:3+; 2 Co 5:21+; Col 2:14. The somewhat remote analogy between the crucified Christ and the criminal of Dt 21:23 is used merely to illustrate this doctrine." The Deuteronomy verses read: "If a man guilty of a capital offence is put to death and you hang him on a tree, his body must not remain on the tree overnight; you must bury him the same day, for one who has been hanged is accursed of God, and you must not defile the land that Yahweh your God gives you for an inheritance."219 The full significance of Paul's "analogy" emerges from two statements by Catholic exegetes.
Before mentioning that "all four evangelists relate that Pilate delivered the body [of Jesus] at the petition of Joseph of Arimathaea", J. L. McKenzie220 gives the information: "Jewish
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law and custom prescribed that the bodies of criminals should be thrown into a common pit." Brown,221 prior to his championship of the notion that Joseph of Arimathaea was a real person in the post-crucifixion annals of the Gospels, states: "Was Jesus buried in a recognizable tomb that could be visited by the women two days later? Many have pointed out that the normal procedure following the execution of an accursed criminal (Deut 21:23; Ga 3:13) would have been to dump the corpse into a common burial place reserved for malefactors. A few adventurous scholars have suggested that the very idea that the body of Jesus could not be found sprang from the impossibility of correctly identifying his body in such a common burial ground."
We have, in what Brown's highly unorthodox scholars think, the clue (1) to the limited extent to which Paul knows about Jesus' burial or entombment and (2) to his inability to drive home to the non-conformist Corinthians his own conviction about the rising of the buried Jesus and (3) to the growth of the whole later myth of the non-discovery of Jesus' body in the imagined single rock-hewn tomb used by the apocryphal Joseph of Arimathaea.
It is in the fitness of things that one who dies like "an accursed criminal" on taking up the responsibility for human sin and paying in full the price demanded by divine justice should undergo for that sin the full infamy consequent on its condemnation: an unrecognisable grave in which his body is lost among his dishonoured likes. Would it not be an anticlimax to the horror if he who acts the part of an accursed criminal gets a fine sepulchre and is anointed with spices which in one Gospel, as Brown222 notes, involve myrrh and aloes to the "enormous amount" of "one hundred pounds" (John 19:39-40)?
Paul's other allusions to Jesus' vicarious sacrifice than in Galatians 3:13 are also best understood in the light of the idea of an utter dishonour. There is 2 Corinthians 5:21: "For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God."223 The Jerusalem Bible224
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comments: "By a kind of legal fiction God identified Jesus with sin so that he might bear the curse incurred by sin, Ga 3:13; Rm 8:3." Surely a curse on whoever is hanged on a tree cannot spare its victim, sinless though he be in nature, any part of the disgrace due as penalty. Romans 8:13 says: "God dealt with sin by sending his own Son in a body as physical as any sinful body, and in that body God condemned sin."225 Will the condemnation be genuine if it comes short of its last infamous phase as with all other malefactors? The sacrifice attributed to Jesus would be mocked by our conjuring up an Arimathaean Joseph and making him give Jesus a most decent burial quite out of accord with the adopted role of a crucified villain.
This role in its entire implication of disrepute is driven home to us by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:22-23: "And so, while the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, here are we preaching a crucified Christ; to the Jews an obstacle that they cannot get over, to the pagans madness.. ."226 The reference is specifically to what both the Jews and the pagans (the non-Jews as a group, the Gentiles, the Graeco-Roman world in which Paul preached) would think of a proclaimed Saviour nailed to the cross. William Barclay227 reminds us of the Graeco-Roman world's view of crucifixion: "The most cruel and the vilest punishment, Cicero called it (Verrines 5.66); the ultimate penalty, Apullius called it (The Golden Ass 10); the penalty of slaves it was commonly called (Tacitus, Histories 4.11; Juvenal 6.218; Horace, Satires, 1.3.8). It was a punishment which could only be inflicted on slaves and non-citizens." The pagans would see nothing save "madness" in Paul's preaching about a God-man hung on a cross, knowing as they did the full gamut of disgrace which such a supposed being would go through, up to the end when he would be thrown into a nameless general grave for felons. To them Paul's message would want wholly in wisdom, in the philosophical sense, because crucifixion was an unmitigated horror visited on the lowest of the low. To the Jews, with their expectation of God's anointed one coming in power to save his compatriots, a Gospel about a liberating messenger
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from the Most High who would hang "on a tree" instead of performing miracles of conquest would never be acceptable: a Messiah of this kind would be an insuperable obstacle to their faith, a stumbling-block (skandalon in Paul's Greek original) that would be absolute. As Ruef228 points out, "the inability of the Jews to accept a crucified Messiah found substantiation in their scriptures" - namely, in "Deuteronomy 21:22f", as Ruef's footnote to "scriptures" indicates. Paul's statement on the Jewish reaction would miss its precise mark if there was any relieving of the accursedness, if the denouement of the punitive drama was robbed of its identity-effacing starkness by the gift of an honourable burial from a suddenly intervening Jew of some status in Jerusalem.
How impossible such a burial and how apocryphal such a Jew would be in Paul's thought is proved also by the phraseology of the opening half of the famous hymn in Philippians 2:6-11 whose first lines as well as the tenth-to-thirteenth we have already quoted:
"His state was divine,
to his equality with God
but emptied himself
to assume the condition of a slave,
and became as men are;
and being as all men are,
he was humbler yet,
even to accepting death,
death on a cross."229
Keeping before us the word "slave" and the phrase "death on a cross" we cannot help remembering that crucifixion was commonly called by Tacitus, Juvenal and Horace "the penalty of slaves". How could one who would assume the condition of a slave as the utter opposite of his equality with God be conceived by Paul as escaping a slave's fate after being crucified? All the less, when Jesus was described as not only becoming
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mere man but being more humble than any other human creature, would Paul intend to suggest any diminution of the sheer acme of a shameful end. The idea of so low a station voluntarily adopted in self-sacrifice would be contradicted and nullified by making room for any saving feature as the finale to the extreme humiliation, the unrelieved servile destiny affirmed.
A saving feature would fly in the face also of Paul's pointers to an imitatio Christi in his semi-mystical references to the Christian experience of baptism. In the two quotations we have made (Romans 6:3 and Colossians 2:12) Paul's disciples are said to symbolically share Jesus' self-sacrifice, his sounding of the depths of humiliation and of accursed punishment before participating in his victory of Resurrection. When they are submerged in water they inwardly enter into his death and burial and when they rise out of it they in the same psychological manner enter his new bodily life. Would it not be a jolt to the salvific vision of the ceremonial concerned if the inner resurrection ensued on a symbolic fall into a death ignominious to the limit with yet an honourable burial imaged, an entombment like any other as though the extinction of life were in the normal course of things? Surely the sense of an entombment tarred with the same brush of disgrace is urged upon the disciples in the ritual of baptism? The setting of the psychological exaltation would be vitiated by the suggestion of a peaceful or, as in John, a solemn burial out of keeping with the horrific self-abnegation of a crucified life. The entombment imitated is meant to be as much of a trauma as the representative dying. Every man dies and gets buried: that is not what Paul wants the Christian to undergo imaginatively in the baptismal act. The mental dying and the mental getting buried have both to be of the same abnormal kind. To make the one a terrible experience to be matched in a symbolic way and want the other to be inwardly recreated as what would happen to any reputable citizen: this is indeed far from Paul's intention when he inspires his followers to realise the semi-mystical character of baptism.
On every front Paul renders incongruous and superfluous
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the four Gospels' Joseph of Arimathaea as well as the tomb they associate with him.
(c) Was Jesus' Tomb Known?
Perhaps some defender of Brown will say: "When the four Evangelists told us of an individual and distinct tomb they must have had their readers in mind and would not have referred to something the readers would be unable to verify. There must have been such a tomb in their own times or else they would at once be proved liars." To answer this challenge let us revert to what the Evangelists actually have to tell us. Mark, the earliest who wrote in the late 60s, speaks only of Joseph laying Jesus' body "in a tomb which had been hewn out of the rock" (15:46).230 Matthew, writing in the 80s, makes Joseph put the body "in his own new tomb which he had hewn out of the rock" (27-.60).231 In Luke, again in the 80s, we have the dead Jesus put by Joseph "in a tomb which was hewn in stone in which no one had yet been laid" (23:53).232 It should be clear from these accounts that, though the tomb shows out as individual and distinct, nothing is said about its location. .There is no hint that, as we might suppose, it was anywhere close to the place of the crucifixion. Indeed, if Matthew is to be believed and if it was a rock-tomb originally meant by a respectable citizen like Joseph of Arimathaea for himself, it could never have been in the proximity of a place where, as Barclay notes, "slaves and non-citizens" suffered the vilest kind of punishment. None of the three Evangelists affords his readers the slightest handle to help them verify his information - and the information itself in its Matthean most elaborate form is the most distracting of all.
Only when we come to John, a writer in the 90s, over 60 years after the crucifixion which The Jerusalem Bible233 dates to A.D. 30, do we get a bit of would-be precise indication of Jesus' last resting-ground: "At the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried. Since it was the Jewish
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Day of Preparation and the tomb was near at hand, they laid Jesus there" (19:41-42).234 But the questions immediately arise: "How did a ready-made fresh tomb happen to be so close, and by what right could Joseph utilise it for one who had been condemned as a criminal, and if the garden is not said to belong to him how could he enter it for his own purposes?" There seems to be some arbitrary yarn-spinning here, a convenient imaginative looseness.
Moreover, we must not forget Brown's warning235 to us to be wary about "John's historical exactitude" here "because the main purpose of his burial narrative is symbolic". Apropos of the hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39-40) brought by Joseph and Nicodemus to prepare Jesus' body for burial, Brown236 points out: "the implausibly large outlay of spices may be meant to suggest that Jesus received a royal burial, thus continuing the theme of Jesus' kingship that is very strong in the Johannine Passion Narrative..." This theme which leads to extreme exaggeration in regard to the matter of anointing which is common to all the Gospels is likely to add the garden to the common matter of the new unused tomb. Indeed an exaggerative touch is this, for the word "garden" links up with two suggestions. First, there is the Garden of Eden, the earthly Paradise. John Marsh237 has caught the connection: "Where the Lord dies, is buried and is to rise is the new Paradise, the true 'garden of Eden' [i.e. delight]." The sense of Paradise is implicit in the very word "garden": "Paradise," says G. B. Caird,238 "is a Persian word meaning park or garden, which was taken over, first into Greek, then into Hebrew." The second suggestion comes out with A. E. Harvey's remark:239 "Paradise was originally the sumptuous garden of a Persian monarch." Derrett,240 therefore, is right in observing: "Burial in a garden suggests the burial of a King..." John's garden situating a tomb seems a purely symbolic invention matching the gratuitous symbolism of the massive amount to which the myrrh and aloes are expanded. Historicity has little room in John's burial narrative.
Even apart from this consideration, a major bar to verifying
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the account of any of the four Evangelists and not only John's exists in archaeology and history. We may press into service the archaeologist-historian W.F.Albright:241
"After years of increasing restiveness [under Roman rule] on the part of the Jewish population of Palestine, marked by frequent riots and harsh repression, the First Revolt broke out in A.D. 66, and lasted for four years. During this time the Jews of Galilee and Jerusalem suffered most, since the two chief centres of rebellion were located there. Most of the Jewish population which escaped death was sold into slavery. The completeness of this catastrophe is illustrated by the fact that not a single synagogue of the early Roman period has yet been discovered in any part of Palestine— It has sometimes been supposed that the Jews returned to Jerusalem and continued to maintain some sort of communal life there. Archaeological evidence is wholly against this view....
"The Christians suffered even more than the rest of the Jewish population, since they were treated as Jews by their pagan neighbours and were hated as pacifists and defeatists, as well as heretics, by their own people. In one of the bitter outbreaks of anti-Christian feeling which flared up during the years immediately preceding the First Revolt, James, brother of Jesus and head of the Christian community in Jerusalem, was killed. It is highly probable that most of the Christians in Jerusalem and the larger towns of Galilee, where nationalist feeling ran highest, escaped from their homes before the beginning of the First Revolt. Later Christian tradition recalled that the Christian remnant had fled from Jerusalem to Pella before the last Roman invasion of Judaea."
Albright's picture signifies that even before Mark's time -the late 60s - there were hardly any Christians left in Jerusalem to test any account of Jesus' burial. It is most unlikely too that the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke penetrated a Jerusalem in ruins and practically desolate of Christianity after the First Revolt. The case for John's Gospel of the 90s falling into Christian hands in Jerusalem for verification is still more forlorn.
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As time went on, the Roman grip squeezing out both Judaism and Christianity grew ever tighter. Albright242 refers to excavations "at Bittir, the site of the last stand of Bar Kokhba, leader of the Second Jewish Revolt about A.D. 135". In the wake of this Revolt Emperor Hadrian (117-138 A.D.) took drastic steps. Albright continues: "The Roman emperor Hadrian determined to do away with political Judaism completely; one of his first steps was to rebuild Jerusalem as a Roman colony, under the name Aelia Capitolina. No Jews were allowed to settle in Aelia...." Albright adds: "On the site of the [long-destroyed Jewish] Temple was a temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, patron of the city; north-west of it was a temple of Venus, later replaced by the Basilica of the Anastasis (Holy Sepulchre). No trace of these two temples have been discovered; they must have been thoroughly destroyed by the Christians."
Mention of the Basilica of the Anastasis brings us to certain significant facts noted by the Encyclopaedia Britannica.243 It is the Church built by the first Christian Roman emperor, Con-stantine, in the northwest quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem in about A.D. 336. "The site has been continuously recognized since the 4th century as the place where Jesus died, was buried, and rose from the dead." As John 19:41-42 puts the tomb "close to the place of Crucifixion... the church was planned to enclose the site of both cross and tomb". "Whether it is the actual place has been hotly debated. It cannot be determined that Christians during the first three centuries could or did preserve an authentic tradition as to where these events occurred." The Encyclopaedia recalls the flight of Christians to Pella from Roman Jerusalem and, dating it before the First Revolt (A.D. 66-70), observes: "wars, destruction, and confusion during the following centuries possibly prevented preservation of exact information." This means that from the time of the First Revolt right up to the first quarter of the fourth century there was no claim to knowledge of the place where Jesus had been buried. Even those who fled to Pella transmitted nothing. Suddenly, when Constantine became Christian
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as well as emperor, Christians came to believe that the "Holy Sepulchre" lay beneath Hadrian's temple of Venus. They razed the temple and with Constantine's patronage erected a church. Before this church was conceived nobody knew how to substantiate the burial-story in the four Gospels.
No doubt, the Encyclopaedia,244 while reporting the hot debate over the traditional site, ends on a somewhat constructive note on its behalf: "Another question involves the course of the second north wall of ancient Jerusalem. Some archaeological remains on the east and south sides of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are widely interpreted to mark the course of the second wall. If so, the site of the church lay just outside the city wall in the time of Jesus, and this could be the actual place of his Crucifixion and burial. No rival site is supported by any real evidence." True, there is no rivalry worth attention and the sole dispute over the plausibility of the present site is due, as Albright245 records, to "the problem of the Second Wall of Herod, which protected the exposed northern side of the city", a problem "still unsettled". Although Albright246 acknowledges that the majority of scholars trace this line of wall in a way which leaves the Holy Sepulchre outside it, he considers it yet possible "that Herodian stones built into the Hadrian line of wall, now represented by the northern wall of Turkish Jerusalem, belong to a system of fortifications which ran along the latter line and thus represents the Second Wall, leaving the Holy Sepulchre inside the wall".
If the traditional site was inside the wall, its authenticity would be ruled out on scriptural grounds themselves, leave aside general considerations of civic arrangement in antiquity for a place of execution. John 19:20 relates that "the place where Jesus was crucified was not far from the city walls".247 Mark 15:21 says that the soldiers "led him out to crucify him"248 and Matthew 27:32 has: "On their way out.. ."249 Most Roman Catholic scholars seem to be convinced that the site of the Holy Sepulchre answers to this desideratum, but they do not pronounce finally on the significance of the fact. In The Jerome Biblical Commentary Edmund J. Mally250 asserts: "...it
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is now definitely known to have been outside the so-called N[orth] wall of Jerusalem and the gate of Ephraim in the 1st century." His colleague John L. McKenzie251 is only a little less confident: "It is sufficiently well established that the site... lay outside the 1st-century wall of Jerusalem..." However, Brown,252 writing in the same volume, is non-committal: "The dispute about the site of the Holy Sepulchre of Jesus (who died and was buried outside the city... ) depends on the location of the [N] wall in Jesus' time." This appears to imply simply that the very question of the site's claim to be authentic would arise if archaeology decided against its being inside the wall concerned: there is no suggestion of favouring the claim as such. Mally makes a comparative estimate by saying that the outside location of which he is certain gives the traditional site "the best claim" - that is, as against whatever competitors it may have. McKenzie strikes the most judicious note when he submits that such a location "of itself does not authenticate the site". Only the statement of Robert North253 in The Jerome Biblical Commentary is somewhat unclear: "The very ancient tradition of localizing Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has shown itself strong enough to rise above its own legendary accretions and a concerted attack in the last century in favor of a less congested spot." One should perhaps understand here the Tightness of locating the place of crucifixion close to the grave and the greater chance of the Holy Sepulchre being where it is traditionally situated than any other site proposed.
But some drawbacks may be pointed out even in "the best claim". As the Encyclopaedia tells us, Constantine's Church was built on the basis of John 19:41-42 to cover both the site of the crucifixion and that of the burial, places which that text had declared to have been close to each other. But we learn from an earlier edition (1929) of this Encyclopaedia254 that what was found by Constantine's men beneath Hadrian's temple of Aphrodite was a rock-hewn Jewish tomb, for we are told: "The rock around was cut away the tomb chamber was isolated and a circular building - the Anastasius - was erected around
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it." Where in John is there any pointer to a rock-hewn tomb? His "tomb" for Jesus is said to stand in a garden. We have no suggestion of a hillside in whose rock-face a tomb could be excavated. An entirely different environment is presented. After John's narrative of how Mary of Magdala discovered the empty tomb and then saw the resurrected Jesus standing near her though she did not recognise him, we read: "Jesus said, 'Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?' Supposing him to be the gardener, she said, 'Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him'" (20:15).255 The implication of a gardener in John proves that he intended a private place with no connection with any rock-face to be hewn.
A clear sidelight on this point is cast when Brown256 mentions the "earliest Jewish apologetics against the resurrection": "they explain that the body was taken by the disciples or someone else. For instance, Tertullian, De Spectaculis xxx (PI 1:662A) gives us the Jewish legend of the role of the gardener (see John 20:15): Jesus was buried in a vegetable garden, and the gardener removed the body because he did not want crowds coming to visit the tomb and trampling his cabbages."
Thus the Johannine foundation sought for the traditional site is not really available. And if this site is to be preferred to any other the search for Jesus' sepulchre appears to be futile.
Nor is the futility all we can underline. We must emphasise that the very idea of Jesus' sepulchre can be mooted on the assumption that Jesus did not go to the whole shameful length of an accursed malefactor's death, ternunating, as required by a genuine divine sacrifice, in being flung into an anonymous hole in a common burial ground. Such an assumption, which runs counter to all that Paul has to proclaim, can be supported solely if the readers of the four Evangelists could be in a position to test the accounts offered them. Under the historical as well as the literary circumstances we have found it impossible for them to carry out any test. Archaeologically too the test is. not feasible. So nothing renders likely in the least the alleged service of Joseph of Arimathaea.
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To impute to Paul any inkling of a discovered empty tomb is illogical on yet another ground than the ones we have already elucidated. For, the Gospel-story is connected inseparably not simply with a single or plural feminine presence but as well with the appearance of the dead Jesus to this presence. Matthew writes that after the Sabbath, and towards dawn on the first day of the week, "Mary of Magdala and the other Mary" went to visit the sepulchre and, in the wake of some sensational phenomena including the descent of "the angel of the Lord" from heaven, were told by the angel that Jesus had risen: then, as the women ran quickly away from the tomb to tell the news to the disciples, "there, coming to meet them was Jesus..." (28:1-9).0257 John recounts that Mary Magdalene came upon the empty tomb, ran back to announce the emptiness to two disciples, returned with them and, while remaining there after they had gone, met the resurrected Jesus (20:1-3,11-16).258 Thus Matthew and John, sharing with Mark and Luke the empty-tomb report, make either a pair of women or just one woman the first to witness the appearance. Paul not only has no hint of the finding of the empty tomb: he also grants us no glimpse of a feminine witness, leave aside giving it primacy instead of to Cephas (Peter).
Anderson259 notes: "The apostolic sermons preserved in Acts do not mention the testimony of the women at the sepulchre, and in this respect accord with Paul's summary of the 'received' tradition." He adds that though mention is made of Jesus' burial, there is no reference to any failure to find his corpse in the tomb. To Anderson the situation is thus because the Apostles in Acts placed their main stress upon having "seen" the risen Jesus and not upon any detailed circumstances before their seeing. Still, it looks significant that Acts, which aims at conjuring up the time of Paul and Peter, should omit just what Paul omits, and in one verse make a specific reference which, juxtaposed with a Gospel-item, would seem pointedly to contradict the latter. Acts 13:31 says: "... for many days he appeared to those who had accompanied him from Galilee to Jerusalem; and it is these same companions
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of his who are now his witnesses before our people." 260 The witnesses are the Apostles, but in the Gospels of Mark (15:40-41; 16:1), Matthew (27:55-56; 28:1) and Luke (23:55; 24:1) the women who find the tomb empty are said to have come with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, and Matthew (28:9) depicts two of them as the first witnesses of his appearance. Acts, equating with the Apostolic witnesses those who came with Jesus to Jerusalem from Galilee, explicitly excludes the possibility of these two women having been Jesus' "companions" and of subsequently testifying to his appearance. Acts seems to be on Paul's side with both particularity and emphasis. And again it is interesting to realise that the verse we have quoted is ascribed by Acts to the speech of Paul himself at Antioch in Pisidia.
Brown261 regards Paul's omission of Mary Magdalene and other women in his Corinthian list as not necessarily implying that the tradition of the first appearance to them "was not historical or was a late development, as some scholars would argue. The claim that the risen Jesus appeared first to Cephas means that among those who would testify publicly Peter was the first to see Jesus. It would not exclude an earlier appearance to Magdalene". This is an odd argument coming from Brown. Let us see why.
As we have stated, the appearance to Magdalene and other women is inseverably linked with the theme of the empty tomb. Paul could be said not necessarily to exclude this appearance provided we could trace in him that theme at least by implication. Ramsey, as we saw, reads this theme as implied. Brown is more cautious. At one place he262 notices that "since the empty tomb story became the setting and vehicle of the kerygmatic formula 'Jesus was raised' it is not unlikely that the Pauline dating 'on the third day' reflects the events surrounding the empty tomb". But Brown263 is not backward in informing us of "the standard objection to this proposal" - namely, that in the NT "the empty tomb story itself does not speak of the third day but of the first day of the week [Mark 16:2; Matthew 28:1; Luke 24:1; John 20:1]". Elsewhere
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he264 considers whether the early four-clause formula - dealing with Jesus' death, burial, resurrection, appearance - in Paul's writing may be taken as "the first recorded reference to the empty tomb in Jerusalem". His judgment is: "to read a hint of the empty tomb in the reference to Jesus' burial goes beyond the evidence, for the formula's sequence... is meant primarily to bring out an element of continuity. The Jesus who died and was buried is the same Jesus who was raised and appeared. This continuity... is an important element in the idea of bodily resurrection, but it tells us nothing about an empty tomb." Brown's footnote 142 on the same theme carefully poses various possibilities. All he can say on his own is: "I find ample evidence for Paul's believing that Jesus' body had been raised from the tomb so that he has become the firstborn of the dead (Romans 8:29; Corinthians 15:23)... but I think the evidence for an implicit Pauline reference to the finding of an empty tomb in Jerusalem is more speculative."
All this renders also highly speculative Brown's own disposition towards conceiving an appearance to Magdalene and other women before the one to Peter. The weight of the evidence from Paul goes against such an appearance. The plea that Peter is ranked first because he was one of those who would testify publicly, whereas Magdalene and other women had no public status in ancient Jewry or in the Christian congregation, is quite unconvincing. Paul was speaking historically and without special stress on apostolic position: surely the "more than five hundred brothers" could claim no apostleship: they were ordinary Christians and are listed simply in the interests of history, interests which could definitely make room for Magdalene and her like.
Although in general Paul put woman below man's level and imposed some socio-religious constraints on her, his attitude to her in detail is fairly balanced: "[Man] is the image of God and reflects God's glory; but woman is the reflection of man's glory. For man did not come from woman; no, woman came from man [Genesis 2:21-23]; and man was not created for the sake of woman, but woman was created for the sake
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of man.... However, though woman cannot do without man, neither can man do without woman, in the Lord; woman may come from man, but man is born of woman - both come from God" (1 Corinthians 11:7-9, 11-12).265 Such an attitude cannot render Paul anti-feminist in regard to bearing witness to Jesus' appearances.
What is more meaningful, Paul's personal relationships never showed any invidious distinctions. Three times he mentions Prisca, the wife of Aquila. In 1 Corinthians 16:19 he says: "Aquila and Prisca, with the church that meets at their house, send you their warmest wishes, in the Lord."266 Towards the end of Romans he writes: "My greetings to Prisca and Aquila, my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who risked death to save my life: I am not the only one to owe them a debt of gratitude, all the churches among the pagans do as well" (16:3-4).267 Once more, in 2 Timothy 4:19 we find: "Greetings to Prisca and Aquila.. ."268 It may be significant that in two out of the three references to husband and wife, the wife is twice put first as though she were receiving more respect as a Church-member than her husband. Romans, before the passage on the couple, brings in a high tribute to another woman: "\ commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deaconess of the church at Cenchreae. Give her, in union with the Lord, a welcome worthy of saints, and help her with anything she needs: she has looked after a great many people, myself included" (16-.1-2).269 The pair Evodia and Syntyche figure in Philippians (4:1) and about them Paul goes on to say: "These women were a help to me when I was fighting to defend the Good News - and so at the same time were Clement and the others who worked with me. Their names were written in the book of life" (4:3).270 For perhaps the most impressive mention of a woman we have to hark back to Romans. On the surface no woman seems involved. The Jerusalem Bible reads: "...those outstanding apostles Andronicus and Junias..."271 A note272 ascribing a "wide sense (Romans 1:1+2)" to the word "apostles" cites "Julias" as a variant of "Junias". However, The Jerome Biblical Commentary273 remarks: "Junias is a man's name, which
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makes the latter part of the verse easily understandable. But [the Greek] Iounion could also be translated Junia, a woman's name, which some ancient commentators took as the name of Andronicus's wife." Although we are told further that most modern commentators understand it as a man's name, the recent research of B. Brooten274 tends to confirm the opinion of Chrysostom and other "ancient commentators" that Paul is referring to the wife of Andronicus and a woman apostle.
Paul's appreciation of individual women is clear. In some verses of 1 Corinthians, while pointing out his own renunciation of common rights and practices in spite of his being as much an apostle as any other, he indicates a state of affairs recognised by him, which associates women with the very core, the apostolic missionary nucleus, of Christian activity. He adverts to "the right to take a Christian woman round with us, like all the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas (9:5)".275 Surely, Paul could never have hesitated to associate with witnesses of Jesus' appearances Magdalene and others of her sex who were close to Jesus and devoted to him. Finally, we may attend to some observations of John Marsh. Appreciating that in the Gospel of John a woman -Mary Magdalene - is made by Jesus the first to discover the empty tomb and be the recipient of an appearance, Marsh276 says that this was "entirely consistent with the lowliness and humility of the [Church's] Lord, and with the profound insight e.g. of Paul who observed that 'not many wise, not many powerful, not many of noble birth' were among those called by God into the Church". As actually Paul's writings have no trace of the two achievements granted to Magdalene, the quotation from him shows that he would have been the last ever to exclude them if they had been known to him as facts. Besides, the quotation is verses 1:27-28 of 1 Corinthians, the very Epistle in which he lists the witnesses. His omission of women from his list proves the story about them in the Gospels a foundationless legend.
Even on purely technical grounds it is doubtful whether Brown's plea - that Mary Magdalene and other women are
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passed over by Paul because they could not testify publicly -can hold. John Wenham277 has some information worth pondering: "I am indebted to the Rev. R. T. Beckwith for the following note: 'Siphre Deuteronomy 190 is the oldest work which disqualifies women from acting as witnesses, and it does so on the rather curious grounds that witnesses are referred to in the Old Testament in the masculine. However, the rabbinical lists of persons disqualified to give testimony do not ' normally include women, and it is clear from three passages in the Mishnah (Yebamoth 16:7; Ketuboth 2:5; Eduyoth 3:6) that women were allowed to give evidence on matters within their knowledge if there was no male witness available. Applying this to the resurrection appearances, it would mean that Mary Magdalene was on rabbinical principles entitled to give witness to an appearance of Christ which was made only to her or to her and other women, but it is also intelligible that in listing numbers of resurrection appearances Paul should have concentrated on those made to men. This does not, of course, mean that he was himself unwilling to accept the witness of women in such cases, but that some of his readers might have been.' " The last part of the statement is quite fanciful -Beckwith's convenient supposition under the conviction that Mary and other women did find an empty tomb and that Paul was aware of their evidence as well as of Mary's experience. In the purely legal context invoked by Brown, Beckwith's well-supported judgment stands - that Magdalene and her companions, under the circumstances in which they figured, were not debarred from testifying publicly. All excuses for Paul's omission as if he knowingly made it are invalid and the story about the women remains a legend without a foundation.
When the legend took shape and got publicised, the Jews retorted that the alleged empty tomb was to be explained by supposing the disciples to have stolen the body. In order to counteract such an explanation, Matthew adopts rather devious tactics. Brown278 points them out: "It is noteworthy that Matthew who seemingly is dependent on Mark as regards
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the account of the empty tomb, changes drastically the stated purpose for the women's visit: they were going 'to see the sepulchre,' not to anoint the body [as in Mark]. However, it is dubious that Matthew has corrected Mark on the basis of historical information. Matthew was trying to make the story of the visit to the tomb fit plausibly with the information that he (and he alone) recounted at the end of the burial scene, namely, that Pilate permitted the Jewish authorities to seal the tomb and to mount a guard over it. Obviously it would have been inconsistent for Matthew to report that the women had set out with the hope of entering the tomb and having access to Jesus' corpse." Footnoting the mention of the "guard", Brown279 says: "Most scholars regard the story of the guard as a Christian apologetic response to the contention that the body had been stolen. Benoit [a Roman Catholic exegete], p. 226 [of The Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969)], lists three serious objections against its historicity."
In fact, not only Matthew but all the Evangelists are found exposed to the charge of being non-historical in their empty-tomb stories, beginning with Mark. Brown280 looks upon the "angel" in Mark, directing through the women a message to the disciples, as a "manufactured" article from a pre-Mark time in consonance with "the ancient Semitic mind", and adds:281 "If we pay attention to the freedom with which the evangelists handled the details of the angelic appearance at the empty tomb (especially as to the number and position of the angels) we recognize their awareness that here they were not dealing with controllable historical facts but with imaginative descriptions." In note 208, p. 123, to this observation, Brown quotes from Benoit's book: "[Mark] introduces an angel - a classical technique in the Bible - and puts the Easter Kerygma into his mouth" (p. 260) - "When an author wanted to express a message from God,... it was an accepted custom to put it in the mouth of an angel" (p. 261).
Brown's and Benoit's open-mindedness, in spite of their belonging to a Church which has had a reputation for narrow
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orthodoxy, is indicative of the wind of liberalism that has blown through the Vatican from the period of Pope Pius XII.
Before we close the empty-tomb topic we may dwell a little on the strange shifts connected with the story. Drawing upon Brown282 we begin with the fact: "the verses that conclude the Gospel of Mark in most bibles (Mark 16:9-20, called the Marcan Appendix or the Longer Ending of Mark) were not the original ending of the Gospel but were added because of the abrupt termination in 16:8. (Scholars are divided on whether Mark originally terminated with 16:8 or whether there was a further narrative that was lost -I favour the former opinion.)" However, about the text up to 16:8 Brown283 tells us: "Mark mentions no appearance of Jesus, although 16:7 indicates that Peter and his disciples will see him in Galilee." Later he284 reflects on how "the empty tomb story would ultimately become a bridge between the Passion Narrative and the narratives of the appearance of the risen Jesus" - and continues: "To facilitate the relationship with the appended appearance narratives, the words of the interpreting angel(s) were expanded to include predictions or directives about future appearances. Mark's Gospel (if, as I suspect, there was no 'lost ending') represents a stage in the development of the empty tomb story where, as yet, no appearance narratives have been appended, even though the reader is presumed to know of the appearances." Here Brown subscribes to what would have been a heresy to the Old-time Catholic exegetes. His note 209 to the above passage runs: "There is a growing consensus among scholars that Mark 16:7 (see also 14:28) was a redactional addition to the story of the empty tomb, intended to leave open the possibility of combining the tradition of the empty tomb with the tradition of appearances." Mark 16:7 says: "But you must go and tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going before you to Galilee; it is there you will see him just as he told you.' "285 Mark 14:28 is the text of the telling by Jesus: "... after my resurrection I shall go before you to Galilee."286 Brown's explicit drift, along with the growing scholarly consensus, is that Mark originally had no reference to resurrectional appear-
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ances but acquired it through editorial interference.
Apropos of the Gospels, Brown287 assures us: "There is nothing in the Roman Catholic notion of biblical inspiration that would forbid the suggestion that those responsible for the resurrection narratives employed the technique of dramatization." Earlier, Brown,288 touching on the subject of the different reports given by the Gospels "of what happened at the empty tomb of Jesus, especially in the details of the angelic appearances", remarks: "In the past Catholic scholars have spent much energy trying to harmonize these diverse accounts, often with the supposition that they must preserve the historical accuracy of each. Today, we would be free to say that one or all the accounts have been influenced and shaped by popular imagination during the stage of oral transmission and also by the editorial goals of the sacred writer who used earlier traditions." As for the old notion of the Bible's inerrancy, the Second Vatican Council has laid down that even if the Gospel stories, whether of the empty tomb or of Jesus' infancy or of any other theme, "prove to be imaginative in whole or in part", we must work with one criterion, as Brown289 puts it: "from the overall import of these narratives what did God want taught through them for the sake of our salvation? That would be inerrant."
To those who do not belong to the Catholic Church, even this comparatively broad line of interpretation may look over-restrictive. In our present context such a line would rule that Jesus' body did disappear from his tomb and rise from the dead in a transfigured yet still physical form. Brown's quotation290 from Pope Paul VI has this very drift, for it says: "Jesus rose again in the same body he had taken from the Blessed Virgin, but in new conditions, vivified by a new and immortal animation, which imposes on Christ's flesh the laws and energies of the Spirit...."
Brown's own position is more or less akin to that of Pope Paul VI. While stating it, he291 distinguishes it from those in general vogue in the Christian world: "Many Christians today see only two possibilities: either one affirms a corporeal
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resurrection so physical that the risen Jesus was just as tangible as he was during his lifetime; or one denies the corporeal resurrection and reduces the appearances to an internal awareness of Jesus' spiritual victory. However, there is a middle ground, namely, a corporeal resurrection in which the risen body is transformed to the eschatological sphere no longer bound by space and time - a body that no longer has all the natural or physical characteristics that marked its temporal existence." Brown's middle ground stresses the Pope's "new conditions" rather than his "same body" which allows many if not all of the old "natural or physical characteristics". In fact, Brown's version reflects Paul's vision along with Paul's own presupposition of the continuity of the new with the old. We are Pauline too, yet with a difference.
9
Our Pauline Conclusions
Our investigation has demonstrated:
(1) Paul's account of the appearance of Jesus' "raised" body is both the earliest and the sole first-hand testimony, and therefore one that is eminently to be credited.
(2) According to Paul this body is wholly non-physical, totally free of "flesh and blood" and, if we are to be logical, it can have no physical continuity with Jesus' body during his life-time.
(3) Evidence for its marked semi-physicality from the Gospels and even from Acts cannot avail against Paul's contrary attestation.
(4) Paul's own belief that the very body Jesus had during his life-time was risen or was raised is founded on the teaching passed on to him by his apostolic colleagues, the main support of which is a trust in Old-Testament statements which were taken as genuine predictions of Jesus' life but which modern scholarship, as Brown shows, takes as historically inapplicable to that life.
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(5) It is clear that in Paul's period no evidence at all existed for Jesus' special burial or identifiable entombment, as his body had been disposed of in the general ground of interment of crucified criminals and so the Gospel stories about a Joseph of Arimathaea's work and about the empty tomb discovered by one woman or several and about Jesus' appearing to any of them at the site are imaginative dramatisations, as indeed in the critical eyes of modern Biblical scholarship, both Protestant and Catholic, they could very well be.
(6) There could have been no Resurrection in the true sense involving resuscitation but only a series of appearances after Jesus' death to certain people, including Paul, of an entirely spiritual form, a form whose nature, together with the nature of the experience by those people, has to be explicated.
References
1. Bernhard W. Anderson, Rediscovering the Bible (New York: A Haddon House Book, Association Press, 1951), p. 219.
2. Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), p. 81.
3. Ibid., pp. 92-93.
4. The Jerusalem Bible (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), The New Testament: Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels, pp. 6-8.
5. The Virginal Conception..., p. 16.
6. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (New York: Image Books, 1979), p. 27, fn. 5.
7. The Virginal Conception..., p. 16.
8. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 45.
9. Ibid., pp. 45-46, fn. 2.
10. J. Dougherty, Searching the Scriptures: A Popular Introduction to the Bible (New York: Image Books, 1963), p. 118.
11. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 46.
12. Ibid., p. 46, fn. 2 continued from p. 45.
13. Edited by Raymond E. Brown, S. S., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S. J., Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm. (Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, St. Peter's Seminary, 1962, after the Original American Edition
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published by Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968), The New Testament, p. 65, col. 1.
14. Ibid., p. 64, col. 1.
15. 77k Virginal Conception..., pp. 97,99.
16. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 89.
17. Ibid., p. 63.
18. Ibid., p. 135.
19. Ibid.,p.90.
20. Ibid., pp. 189-90.
21. Ibid., p. 139.
22. Ibid., p. 134.
23. The Virginal Conception..., p. 89.
24. Ibid., p. 17, fn. 14.
25. Ibid., pp. 17-18.
26. Ibid., fn. 15.
27. Ibid., p. 19.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., pp. 19-20.
30. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
31. Ibid., pp. 54-55.
32. 77k Birth of the Messiah, pp. 413,515.
33. 77k Virginal Conception..., p. 132.
34. Ibid., p. 66.
35. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 526.
36. Ibid., p. 340.
37. Ibid., p. 519.
38. Ibid., in. 5a.
39. Ibid., p. 519.
40. Ibid., p. 520.
41. Ibid.,p.340.
42. Ibid., p. 526.
43. Ibid., fn. 25.
44. Ibid., p. 526.
45. Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: A Study of the Event and Its Meaning for the Christian Faith (London: Collins, Fontana Books, 1961), pp. 60-61.
46. "Aspects of New Testament Thought", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 794, col. 2.
47. "Wisdom", ibid., p. 563, col. 2.
48. The Virginal Conception..., p. 76, fn. 129.
49. Ibid., p. 80, fn. 135.
50. Ibid., p. 106, fn. 176.
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51. Ibid., pp. 99,101.
52. Ibid., pp. 92-93.
53. Raymond E. Brown, Jesus God and Man (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978), p. 48.
54. The Virginal Conception..., p. 19.
55. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 307.
56. Ibid., p. 308.
57. Ibid., p. 342.
58. Ibid., p. 308.
59. Ibid., p. 309, cols. 1 & 2, note 1.
60. Ibid., p. 339.
61. Ibid., p. 309.
62. Ibid., col. 2, note o.
63. David Edwards, Jesus for Modern Man: An Introduction to the Gospels in Today's English Version (Glasgow: Collins, Fontana Books, 1975), p. 139.
64. 77k Virginal Conception..., p. 86, fn. 147.
65. Ibid., pp. 87-88.
66. Ibid., pp. 88-89.
67. "The Letter to the Galatians", 77k Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 239, col. 1.
68. Ibid., p. 349, col. 2.
69. Ibid., p. 374, col. 1.
70. Ibid., p. 423, col. 1.
71. Ibid.
72. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 150.
73. Ibid., p. 151, col. 1, note c.
74. Ibid., p. 309, col. 1, note 1.
75. "Sirach", 77k Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 546, col. 1.
76. Ibid., p. 547, col. 1.
77. The Jerusalem Bible, The Old Testament, p. 1058.
78. Ibid., The New Testament, p. 41, col. 2, note e.
79. Ibid., p. 374.
80. "Aspects of New Testament Thought", 77k Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 792, cols. 1 & 2.
81. Ibid., col. 1.
82. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 135.
83. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 146.
84. The Virginal Conception..., pp. 15-16.
85. Ibid., fn. 12.
86. Rediscovering the Bible, p. 220.
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87. The Virginal Conception..., p. 90, fn. 153.
88. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 322.
89. Ibid., p. 323.
90. The Virginal Conception..., p. 85.
91. The Birth of the Messiah, pp. 29-31.
92. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 339.
93. Ibid., p. 218.
94. The Virginal Conception..., p. 77, fn. 131.
95. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 136, fn. 12.
96. Ibid., p. 239.
97. Ibid., p. 30, fn. 15.
98. Searching the Scriptures..., p. 116.
99. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 65.
100. Ibid., p. 218.
101. The Virginal Conception..., p. 103.
102. Ibid., pp. 103-04.
103. Ibid., p. 102.
104. Ibid., pp. 102-103.
105. "Canonicity", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 528, col. 2.
106. "Aspects of New Testament Thought", Ibid., p. 795, col. 2.
107. Ibid., cols. 1 & 2.
108. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 203.
109. Ibid., p. 212.
110. Ibid., p. 334.
111. Ibid., p. 331.
112. "Pauline Theology", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 813, col. 2.
113. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 340.
114. Ibid., p. 341, col. 1, note k.
115. "The Letter to the Philippians", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 251, col. 2.
116. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 214.
117. Ibid, p. 244.
118. Ibid., p. 308.
119. Ibid., p. 214.
120. Ibid., p. 215.
121. Ibid., pp. 215-216.
122. Ibid., pp. 214-215.
123. Ibid., p. 239.
124. Ibid., p. 244.
125. Ibid., pp. 322-23.
126. Ibid., p. 344.
127. Ibid., p. 289.
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128. Ibid., p. 320.
129. Ibid., pp. 305-06.
130. Ibid., p. 233.
131. Ibid., p. 202.
132. Ibid., p. 89.
133. The Virginal Conception..., p. 98.
134. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 89, note c, col. 2.
135. The Resurrection of Christ..., p. 44.
136. Ibid., pp. 44-45.
137. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 307.
138. Ibid., col. 1, note a.
139. Ibid., col. 2, note c.
140. Ibid., col. 2, note e.
141. Ibid., p. 309, cols. 1 & 2, note 1.
142. Ibid., p. 231, col. 2, note z.
143. Ibid., p. 279, col. 2, note m.
144. Ibid., p. 365, col. 2, note d.
145. Ibid., p. 365.
146. Ibid., p. 276.
147. Ibid., p. 277, col. 1, note b.
148. Ibid., p. 332.
149. Ibid., p. 333, col. 1, note e.
150. Ibid., p. 308.
151. The Virginal Conception..., p. 87, fn. 147 continued from p. 86.
152. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 307.
153. The Virginal Conception..., p. 74.
154. Ibid., fn. 127.
155. Ronald Brownrigg, Who's Who in the New Testament (Nashville: Pillar Books, Abingden Press, 1977), p. 101.
156. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 233, col. 1, note j.
157. Paul's First Letter to Corinth, pp. xxi-xxiv.
158. The Virginal Conception..., pp. 75-76.
159. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 76.
160. Ibid., p. 108.
161. Ibid., p. 342.
162. Paul's First Letter to Corinth, p. 31.
163. Ibid., pp. 32,33.
164. Gunther Bornkamm, Paul, translated by D. M. G. Stalker from the German (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972), p. 160.
165. The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 335, col. 2.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid.
Page 233
168. Ibid.
169. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (London: Weidenfeld and Nicol-son, 1979), p. xvii.
170. "Apochrypha", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 545, cols. 1 & 2.
171. The Gnostic Gospels, p. 12.
172. Ibid.
173. Ibid., p. 15.
174. Ibid.
175. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 314.
176. Ibid., p. 267.
177. Ibid., p. 804, col. 2.
178. The Gnostic Gospels, p. 16.
179. Ibid.
180. Ibid., pp. 15-16.
181. "The First Letter to the Corinthians", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 274, col. 1.
182. Ibid.
183. Ibid., p. 273, col. 1.
184. Ibid., p. 274, col. 1.
185. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 307.
186. Ibid., p. 346.
187. Ibid., pp. 102,88,134,188.
188. The Virginal Conception..., p. 113.
189. Ibid., p. 115, fn. 190.
190. Ibid., p. 115.
191. Ibid., fn. 191.
192. Ibid., p. 116.
193. Ibid., p. 116, fn. 193.
194. Ibid., pp. 116-117.
195. Ibid., p. 116, fn. 194.
196. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 188.
197. 77k Virginal Conception..., p. 54.
198. 77k Birth of the Messiah, p. 448.
199. Ibid., p. 450.
200. The Gospel of St. Mark (Harmondsworth: The Pelican New Testament Commentaries, Penguin Books, 1972), p. 187 for the text and p. 193 for the commentary.
201. 77k Virginal Conception..., p. 113,fn. 188.
202. The Gospel of St. Mark, p. 434.
203. Ibid.
204. Ibid., p. 21.
205. Ibid., p. 435.
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206. Ibid., p. 432.
207. The Jerusalem Bible, Chronological Table, p. 467, col. 1.
208. C. Northcote Parkinson, East and West (London: John Murray, 1963), p. 119.
209. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 88.
210. Ibid., p. 87.
211. The Virginal Conception..., p. 114.
212. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 222.
213. J. Duncan M. Derrett, 77k Anastasis: The Resurrection of Jesus as an Historical Event (Warwickshire: P. Drinkwater, 1982), pp. 53-54.
214. J. L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Bangalore: The Asian Trading Corporation, 1984, with permission of Geoffrey Chapman, London), pp. 337, col. 2 and 536, col. 1.
215. 77k? Concise Oxford Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 1364, col. 2.
216. Ibid.
217. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 88.
218. Ibid., p. 325, col. 2, note e.
219. Ibid., The Old Testament, p. 244.
220. Dictionary of the Bible, p. 678, col. 1.
221. The Virginal Conception..., p. 113.
222. Ibid., p. 116.
223. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 314.
224. Ibid., p. 315, col. 2, note h.
225. Ibid., p. 278.
226. Ibid., p. 293.
227. William Barclay, The Plain Man looks at the Apostles' Creed (Glasgow: Collins,Fount Paperbacks, 1979), p. 96.
228. Paul's First Letter to Corinth, p. 13 and fn. 105.
229. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, pp. 339-40.
230. Ibid., p. 102.
231. Ibid., p. 88.
232. Ibid., p. 134.
233. Ibid., Chronological Table, p. 467, col. 2.
234. Ibid., The New Testament, p. 188.
235. The Virginal Conception..., p. 116.
236. Ibid., fn. 193.
237. The Gospel of St. John (Harmondsworth: The Pelican New Testament Commentaries, Penguin Books, 1971), p. 623.
238. The Gospel of St. Luke (Harmondsworth: The Pelican New Testament Commentaries, Penguin Books, 1975), p. 252.
239. The New English Bible Companion to the Gospels (Oxford-Cambridge: 1972), p. 295.
Page 235
240. The Anastasis..., p. 55.
241. The Archaeology of Palestine (Harmondsworth: A Pelican Book, 1961), pp. 240-41.
242. Ibid., p. 166.
243. Enc. Brit., Macropaedia, Vol. V, p. 110, cols. 1 & 2 (1977 Ed.).
244. Ibid., col. 2.
245. The Archaeology of Palestine, p. 154.
246. Ibid., pp. 154-55.
247. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 187.
248. Ibid., p. 87.
249. Ibid., p. 62.
250. "The Gospel according to Mark", 77k? Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 58, col. 1.
251. "The Gospel according to Matthew", Ibid., p. 112, cols. 1 & 2.
252. "Biblical Geography", Ibid., p. 648, col. 1.
253. "Biblical Archaeology", Ibid., p. 669, col. 2.
254. Enc. Brit, Macropaedia, Vol. 20, p. 337, col. 1.
255. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 189.
256. The Virginal Conception..., p. 122, fn. 204.
257. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 63.
258. Ibid., pp. 188,189.
259. Rediscovering the Bible, p. 221.
260. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, pp. 222-23.
261. The Virginal Conception..., p. 101, fn. 170.
262. Ibid., p. 124.
263. Ibid.
264. Ibid., pp. 83-84.
265. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 302.
266. Ibid., p. 310.
267. Ibid., p. 290.
268. Ibid., p. 367.
269. Ibid., p. 290.
270. Ibid., p. 342.
271. Ibid., p. 290.
272. Ibid., p. 291, col. 1, e.
273. "The Letter to the Romans", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 330, col. 2.
274. "Junia... Outstanding Among the Apostles", in Women Priests, ed. L. and A. Swidler (New York: 1977), pp. 141-44.
275. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 300.
276. The Gospel of St. John, p. 632.
277. John Wenham, Easter Enigma: Do the Resurrection Stories contra-
Page 236
dict one another? (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1984), pp. 150-51, Note 26.
278. The Virginal Conception..., pp. 115-16.
279. Ibid., p. 115.
280. Ibid., p. 122.
281. Ibid., pp. 122-23.
282. Ibid., pp. 97-98.
283. Ibid., p. 99.
284. Ibid., p. 123.
285. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, pp. 88-89.
286. Ibid., p. 85.
287. The Virginal Conception..., p. 89, fn. 151.
288. Ibid., p. 19.
289. Ibid., p. 20.
290. Ibid., p. 125, fn. 213.
291. Ibid., p. 85, fn. 145.
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