How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (23 page)

Moreover, one can imagine strictly literary reasons for “inventing” the women at the empty tomb. Let’s suppose that Mark invented the story. I personally don’t think he did; there is no way to know, of course, but my suspicion is that Mark inherited the story from his tradition. But suppose he did invent it. There would be plenty of reasons, just from his literary perspective, to do so. The more you know about Mark’s Gospel, the easier it is to think of reasons. I’ll give just one. Mark makes a special point throughout his narrative that the male disciples never understand who Jesus is. Despite all his miracles, despite all his teachings, despite everything they see him do and say, they never “get it.” And so at the end of the Gospel, who learns that Jesus has not stayed dead but has been raised? The women. Not the male disciples. And the women never tell, so the male disciples never do come to an understanding of Jesus. This is all consistent with Mark’s view and with what he is trying to do from a literary standpoint.

Again, I’m not saying that I think Mark invented the story. But if we can very easily imagine a reason for Mark to have invented it, it doesn’t take much of a leap to think that one or more of his predecessors may also have had reasons for doing so. In the end, we simply cannot say that there would be “no reason” for someone to invent the story of women discovering the empty tomb.

In short, there are lots of reasons for someone wanting to invent the story that Jesus was buried in a known tomb and that it was discovered empty (whoever would have discovered it). And the most important is that the discovery of the empty tomb is central to the claim that Jesus was resurrected. If there was no empty tomb, Jesus was not physically raised.

I want to stress that adjective. Without an empty tomb, there would be no ground for saying that Jesus was
physically
raised. As we will see more fully in the next chapter, some early Christians believed that Jesus was raised in spirit but that his body decomposed. Eventually, this view came to be prominent among different groups of Christian Gnostics. We can see evidence of its presence even in the communities of the authors who produced our canonical Gospels. The later the Gospel, the more the attempt to “prove” that Jesus was raised bodily, not simply spiritually. In our earliest Gospel, Mark, Jesus is clearly raised physically because the tomb is empty—the body is gone. Later, in Matthew, it is even more clear that Jesus is raised physically (not just in his spirit) because Jesus appears to his followers and some of them touch him (Matt. 28:9). In Luke it is even clearer because when Jesus appears to his disciples, he flat-out tells them that he has flesh and bones, unlike “a spirit,” and he tells them to handle him to see for themselves (Luke 24:39–40). Then he eats some food in front of them to convince them (24:41–43). Later still in John, Jesus not only cooks a meal for the disciples (John 21:9–14), but when one of them doubts, he invites him to place his finger in his wounds to know for sure that it is he and that he has been raised physically from the dead, wounds and all (20:24–29).

Some Christians doubted that the resurrection was a physical affair. The Gospels that made it into the New Testament—as opposed to a number that did not—stress that the resurrection was indeed the resurrection of Jesus’s physical body. These debates may have been raging in early Christian communities from the beginning. If so, then the empty tomb tradition not only worked to show unbelievers that Jesus was resurrected, it worked to show believers that the resurrection was not a matter just of the spirit but of the body as well.

I
RECEIVE A LOT OF
e-mails from people who are concerned that I lost my faith. Many of them tell me that I must never have had a personal relationship with Jesus; obviously my faith was all intellectual and I “reasoned” my way out of it. In their view, if I weren’t a scholar and such an egghead but realized that faith in Jesus is a matter of relating to a person as one’s Lord and Savior, I would still be within the believing community. I’m never quite sure why strangers are so concerned about me. And I wonder if the fact that I left the faith is somehow seen as threatening, at least among people who have a gnawing suspicion, which they never explicitly acknowledge to themselves, that their own faith may need to be reexamined. Whether that’s the case or not, it simply is not true that I never had a personal relationship with Jesus. Quite the contrary: Jesus and I were very close, and for many years. He was my daily companion, comforter, guide, and teacher, as well as my Lord and Savior.

At the same time, it is true that conservative evangelical Christianity—the kind I converted into—is not entirely about a personal relationship with the divine. It has a strong intellectual component as well. This is one of the great ironies of modern religion: more than almost any other religious group on the planet, conservative evangelicals, and most especially fundamentalist Christians, are children of the Enlightenment.

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment arose during an age when reason, not revelation, came to be valued as the ultimate source of true knowledge. The natural sciences were on the rise, technologies were developing, and philosophies of the mind were in vogue. The Enlightenment caused the demise of traditional religion for many educated people and others whose views were shaped by them. Among other things, the Enlightenment encouraged reasoned skepticism of every religious tradition that was based on the miraculous, the supernatural, and revelation. By stressing the power of human thought, the Enlightenment dispelled the myths of the dominant religious traditions. It emphasized the importance of a person seeking objective verification for what he or she thinks and believes.

When I say that conservative evangelical Christians and fundamentalists are children of the Enlightenment, I mean that more than almost anyone else, thinkers among these groups are committed to “objective truth”—which was precisely the commitment that led to the demise of Christianity in the modern world in the first place, especially in Europe. And so this evangelical commitment is ironic. Or maybe it’s a case of trying to fight fire with fire. But the reality is that modern Christian apologists stress the importance of objectivity and champion it more than anyone—much more than most other educated people in our world. University intellectuals almost never speak of “objectivity” any more, unless they happen to live on the margins of intellectual life.

But Christian apologists do, and when I was one of them, I did as well. That is why Christian apologists are so keen to “prove” that the resurrection happened. This is a standard weapon in the apologetic arsenal: you can look at all the evidence for the resurrection, objectively, and conclude, on the basis of overwhelming proof, that God really did raise Jesus from the dead. No other explanation can account for the objectively established historical data—for example, that Jesus’s tomb was empty and that his disciples claimed to see him afterward. And so apologists proceed by taking these two data as “facts” and showing that no other explanation is plausible (that the disciples stole the body, that they went to the wrong tomb, that they were hallucinating, and so on).

If one wants to play the objectivity game (it is a game; there is nothing objectively that makes objectivity objectively true), it is relatively easy to poke holes in this apologetic ploy—a ploy that I myself used for years when I was a Christian trying to convert people to believe in the resurrection. For one thing, as I’ve already argued, there are very serious reasons to doubt that Jesus was buried decently and that his tomb was discovered to be empty. Moreover, as I’ve argued, any other scenario—no matter how unlikely—is more likely than the one in which a great miracle occurred, since the miracle defies
all
probability (or else we wouldn’t call it a miracle).

But apart from whether it makes sense to wrangle over the “objectively” best explanation for the data, there is the bigger problem—namely, that faith in a miracle is a matter of faith, not of objectively established knowledge. That is why some historians believe that Jesus was raised and other equally good historians do not believe he was. Both sets of historians have the same historical data available to them, but it is not the historical data that make a person a believer. Faith is not historical knowledge, and historical knowledge is not faith.

At the same time, the historian can talk about certain aspects of the resurrection tradition without presupposing either belief or unbelief. This is not a matter of requiring historians to have anti-supernaturalist biases. It is a matter of suspending one’s biases—whether they are supernaturalist or anti-supernaturalist—in order to do what historians do: reconstruct to the best of their ability what probably happened in the past on the basis of the surviving evidence, and admitting that there are lots of things that we not only do not know, but also cannot know, historically.

In the previous chapter I argued that there are some things, given our current evidence, that we cannot know about the resurrection traditions (in addition to the big issue itself—whether God raised Jesus from the dead): we cannot know whether Jesus was given a decent burial, and we cannot know, therefore, whether his tomb was discovered empty. But what can we know? We can know three very important things: (1) some of Jesus’s followers believed that he had been raised from the dead; (2) they believed this because some of them had visions of him after his crucifixion; and (3) this belief led them to reevaluate who Jesus was, so that the Jewish apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee came to be considered, in some sense, God.

T
HERE CAN BE NO
doubt, historically, that some of Jesus’s followers came to believe he was raised from the dead—no doubt whatsoever. This is how Christianity started. If no one had thought Jesus had been raised, he would have been lost in the mists of Jewish antiquity and would be known today only as another failed Jewish prophet. But Jesus’s followers—or at least some of them—came to believe that God had done a great miracle and restored Jesus to life. This was not a mere resuscitation, a kind of near-death experience. For Jesus’s disciples, Jesus was raised into an immortal body and exalted to heaven where he currently lives and reigns with God Almighty.

I say “some” of his followers because it is not altogether certain that all of the disciples came to believe this, for reasons I explain below. Our records are simply not good enough to allow us to know exactly which among Jesus’s closest followers came to accept this great miracle. Some obviously did, but our accounts were written many years after the fact, and we hear almost nothing about “the Twelve.”

The other matter of uncertainty is
when
belief in Jesus’s resurrection and exaltation began. The tradition, of course, states that it began on the third day after he died. But as I argued in the analysis of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, the idea that Jesus rose on the “third day” was originally a theological construct, not a historical piece of information. Moreover, if it is true that the disciples fled from Jerusalem to Galilee when Jesus was arrested, and that it was there that some of them “saw” him, they could not have seen him on the first Sunday morning after his death. If they fled on Friday, they would not have been able to travel on Saturday, the Sabbath; and since it was about 120 miles from Jerusalem to Capernaum, their former home base, it would have taken a week at least for them to get there on foot.
¹
Maybe some of them, or one of them, had a vision of Jesus in Galilee soon after he was crucified—possibly that following week? The week after that? The next month? We simply don’t have sources of information that make this kind of judgment possible.
²

It is striking, and frequently overlooked by casual observers of the early Christian tradition, that even though it was a universal belief among the first Christians that Jesus had been raised from the dead, there was not a uniformity of belief concerning what, exactly, “raised from the dead” meant. In particular, early Christians had long and heated debates about the nature of the resurrection—specifically, the nature of the resurrected body. Here I explore three options for what that resurrected body of Jesus actually was, as evidenced in writings from the early church.

I start with our earliest recorded source, the writings of Paul, and once again with his “resurrection chapter” (1 Cor. 15), so named because it is devoted to the question of Jesus’s resurrection and the future resurrection of believers. Here Paul stresses that Jesus rose from the dead in a
spiritual body
. Both terms are important for understanding Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus: Jesus was raised in the body; but it was a body that was spiritual.

Many readers of 1 Corinthians undervalue and misinterpret the first point. But Paul is emphatic: Jesus was
bodily
raised from the dead. Paul states this view vigorously in 1 Corinthians 15, and in some sense the entire chapter is written to make the point—precisely because Paul’s opponents in Corinth had a different view. In their opposing view, Jesus was raised in the spirit, not in the body, such that Christians who enjoy the resurrection with him in their own lives are also spiritually raised—not in their bodies but in their inner beings. These opponents believed that they were already experiencing the full benefits of salvation in the present. Paul mocks this view in his letter by sarcastically reflecting their own views back to them: “Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings!” (1 Cor. 4:8). That he is not stating this as fact, but sarcastically, is clear from the context: in the next breath he tells them that he wishes it were true. But alas, it is not. This current evil age is an age of weakness and powerlessness. It is only in the age to come, when Christ returns from heaven, that his followers will enjoy the full benefits of salvation when they are raised from these poor, lowly, weak, inferior, mortal bodies to be given amazing, spiritual, immortal bodies such as Jesus himself had at his resurrection.