BUT DID IT HAPPEN?

At Easter, E.P. Sanders, one of the world's authorities

on the historical Jesus, seeks the answers to the Resurrection — though also the questions

TWO of the most common opinions about Jesus's resurrection are, I think, in error. The first is that the Jesus who appeared to some of his followers two days after his execution was physically the same as the Jesus who was crucified. His body came back to life. It was a corpse one day, and a living man the next. The second dubious view is that Christianity as a religion is absolutely based on this view of the resur- rection. Many people think that if the corpse of Jesus was not resuscitated and he did not get up and walk around for a few more days Christianity is completely false.

As is the case with other major reli- gions, most of the crucial claims of Chris- tianity can be neither proved nor disproved by modern science or Tesearch, and many of those that relate to historical events could not be verified even if we had a video recording. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth died 'for the sins of the whole world' — meaning that God decid- ed that this man's death would result in salvation for anyone who believes this. A team of modern scientists, had they been there and monitored every aspect of Jesus's death, could neither confirm nor deny its theological significance. According to the gospel attributed to Mark, when Jesus died a Roman centuri- on said, 'Truly this man was a son of God' (Mark xv 39), but other bystanders obvi- ously did not 'see' it. The majority of peo- ple who had flocked to him in Galilee or Jerusalem, listening to his words and hop- ing for healing, in the end did not believe in him in the full Christian sense — that is, they did not believe that he was God's ulti- mate messenger and that faith in him was necessary for eternal life. His words, how- ever great, and his deeds, however marvel- lous, did not constitute the sort of proof that convinced one and all, and they would not do so today even if we could examine them directly.

Is it different with regard to the resurrec- tion? Now, of course, the event cannot be tested except by studying the biblical pas- sages that describe it. But what if we had been there? What if we had scientific proof that Jesus was brain-dead one day and that he was in some sense alive the next? Would the entire world convert to Christianity? The reader's answer is as good as mine. Probably most of us will agree that this evi- dence would not actually convert very many people. Most people would think that there must be some explanation other than Jesus's special role in a divine plan. They would maintain, for example, that we can- not yet explain the change from death to life, but that some day science will have an answer. The grounds of faith for one per- son will prove to be inadequate for anoth- er. But what do the sources actually say? What should a historian think about the resurrection of Jesus?

The best evidence, in approximately the order in which it was written, is as follows. In I Corinthians xv, Paul discusses Jesus's resur- rection and attempts to describe the expect- ed resurrection of Christians. Paul wrote I Corinthians in about 55 AD, about 25 years after Jesus's death. The gospel of Mark, writ- ten in the 60s or 70s AD, refers to the resur- rection but does not describe it. The gospel of Matthew, written in the 70s or 80s AD, has a brief account of two resurrection appear- ances. The gospel of Luke, written in the 80s and 90s AD, has a longer and quite different description of appearances. The Acts of the Apostles, which was written shortly after the gospel of Luke, and by the same author, has an account of Jesus's appearances that dif- fers in some respects from the gospel of Luke. The gospel of John, also written in the 80s and 90s AD, agrees partially with the other gospels, but has a great deal of unique material.

The resurrection continued to generate stories and traditions long after the follow- ers of Jesus died and after the letters of Paul and the gospels were written and published. These later sources include the New Testament Apocrypha. 'Apocrypha' means 'things that are hidden', which is not an especially good term for this mate- rial, which has had at least a small public circulation for centuries. But we are stuck with the name.

Pious Christians wrote the Apocrypha, which shows that piety and fiction are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Thus it is quite possible that some Christian inven- tions also ended up in the New Testa- ment. The invention of harmless new stories about Jesus and the disciples has seldom been considered un-Christian.

Many of us today are rather narrow- minded about such matters, believing that invented stories are lies and that the authors are dishonest. A few highly sophisticated ancient people would have seen matters the same way, but most did not. The author of a good new story about Jesus in all probability merely wanted to give life and colour to an event in which he believed deeply.

American schoolchildren learn a few things about the 'father of the country', George Washington. Two of them are these: as a boy, he chopped down a cherry tree, but immediately confessed when questioned by his father; and at Valley Forge, where his troops spent a difficult winter, he devoutly prayed on his knees.

These stories are hagiographical: one illus- trates Washington's honesty, the other claims that he was also pious.

Both stories are fictional, having been invented by Mason Locke Weems, who published the first biography of Washing- ton in 1800. Weems exercised `hagiographi- cal licence': the liberty allowed to a biogra- pher whose intention is to extol the virtues and abilities of the subject. The category excludes modern academic history and biography, but it can include a lot of mod- ern popular writing. The authors of biogra- phies written for children often permit themselves such liberties. Did the authors of the best sources for the resurrection exercise hagiographical licence? At least some of them did. The resurrection stories in Luke and those in Matthew (one of which is implied also in Mark) directly contradict each other and at least one of the authors invented some stories. We shall begin our review of the best evi- dence with Mark, the earliest gospel, which probably served as a source for Matthew and Luke, and possibly also for John. According to Mark, just before his arrest Jesus predict- ed his resurrection: 'After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee' (xiv 28). The gospel, however, ends with the empty tomb. After Jesus's execution and burial, three women (Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome) return to his tomb. They discover that it is empty, except for a young man 'dressed in a white robe', who recalls Jesus's prediction. 'Go, tell his disci- ples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee, there you will see him, as he told you' (xvi 7). Matthew's story agrees very closely, and it may be seen as adding specific descrip- tions of the resurrection to Mark's frame- work. According to Matthew, when Mary Magdalene and 'the other Mary' (Matthew indicates that she was the mother of James and Joseph) went to Jesus's tomb, they were met by an angel who told them that Jesus had risen and that he would meet the disciples in Galilee. Jesus himself then appeared to the women and repeated the instruction to go to Galilee. The 11 surviv- ing disciples (the 12th, Judas, was by now dead) did as commanded, and Jesus appeared to them once, telling them to `make disciples of all nations'. We are not told what happened next. The story ends with Jesus and the 11 on the mountain in Galilee. The entire account of the resurrec- tion is 20 verses long. There are only two conflicts with Mark: the lists of women are not quite identical, and Matthew includes an appearance to the women that is not implied in Mark. Luke is quite different in some crucial respects. This is the outline of Luke's rela- tively long account, which requires 53 vers- es. Several women (Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and `the other women') went to the tomb. They were met by two men 'in dazzling apparel'. The men asked them to remember that Jesus predicted the resurrection 'while he was still in Galilee'. Mark, we recall, had written that Jesus predicted that he would rise and go before the disciples to Galilee. Luke revised the prediction: while they were in Galilee Jesus predicted that he would rise. Luke wished to limit the subsequent appear- ances to Jerusalem and environs. Beside this major change of locale, Luke's story is unique in other respects. On the same day as the resurrection, Jesus joined two followers going to Emmaus, a few miles from Jerusalem. Jesus spent some time on the road with them, but even though they had been his followers they did not recognise him until the evening meal, when they saw him break bread. Jesus van- ished, and the two followers walked back to Jerusalem, where they found the 11 disci- ples, who had already received another report: 'The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon.' While the two recently arrived followers were narrating their encounter with Jesus, he appeared before them all. They thought that he was a ghost (or spirit, Greek pneuma). He asked them to touch him, so that they would know that he was not a ghost, and then he ate a piece of fish. After a brief address, which con- cluded with the admonition to 'stay in the city', he led them to nearby Bethany, where he lifted his hands, blessed them and 'part- ed from them'. All this apparently took place on what is in our reckoning the same day, Sunday. The Jewish day begins at sun- set, which puts the first resurrection appearances on Sunday, the last one during the first hours of Monday and the ascen- sion just a few hours after that.

Luke's second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, contains a partially different account of the resurrection appearances. The opening verses of Acts remind the reader that Jesus had commanded the dis- ciples 'not to depart from Jerusalem'. But it adds, in a revision of the clear implica- tion of the gospel, that Jesus appeared to them during a period of 40 days. At the end of this period, they gathered some- where (Bethany is not specified) and dis- cussed whether or not Jesus would 'restore the kingdom to Israel at this time'. This, of course, picks up a major theme of the teaching of the historical Jesus: the king- dom of God was imminent.

Luke now takes account of the fact that decades had passed and it had not arrived. `It is not for you to know times or seasons,' he has Jesus explain. After Jesus charged the disciples to be his witnesses throughout the world, 'he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight'. The cloud is a new touch. Acts then expands the theme of the ultimate arrival of the kingdom. Two men in white robes told the disciples, while they were still looking up towards the ascending Jesus, that 'this Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven'.

In Acts, then, Luke revises the, story that he told in his gospel. The risen Jesus now remains in touch with the disciples, pre- sumably preparing them for their mission, for more than a month. Moreover, the new version addresses a major problem of early Christianity: Jesus expected the kingdom soon, apparently during the lifetime of his followers, but this expectation was not ful- filled. In the 50s AD, Paul still held the orig- inalview, which is clear in the earliest surviving Christian document, I Thessaloni- ans (see iv 17): 'Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds.' It also appears in the gospels, e.g., Mark ix 1: 'There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power', a passage that is paralleled in Matthew xvi 28 and Luke ix 27. The gospel of Luke downplays this idea, but does not eliminate it, and the author takes it into account in Acts I, while also providing room for delay.

The author of Luke and Acts had a `Jerusalemocentric' view of early Christian- ity. All the important actions and decisions took place in Jerusalem. This probably explains the insistence that the disciples never left the Jerusalem area and that all the appearances took place there. The Mark/Matthew tradition of a resurrection appearance in Galilee is relatively more probable. Moreover, as we have seen, Luke wanted to work into the resurrection story a modification of the common Christian view that Jesus would soon return.

But there is also another striking change within Luke's two-volume work: appear- ances within one 24-hour period in Luke versus appearances during the course of 40 days in Acts. Luke was not stupid, nor is it useful to call him dishonest: the revision is naked, there for all to see. He simply var- ied the story, and it is possible that one of his motives was dislike of repeating the same story in the same words. In Acts, he gave three accounts of the appearance of Jesus to Paul, which differ appreciably. He was not trying to deceive; he was probably only adding interesting new thoughts as he had them. We should take this as useful information about the genre of all our sources. The authors were not striving for the strictest and most limited kind of accu- racy. They were, instead, telling stories that made valuable points.

The resurrection accounts in the gospel of John cover two chapters and present complex problems. Most New Testament scholars, including the present author, regard chapter xxi as an appendix, added to the original gospel at a relatively early date. We start with chapter xx. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb alone, early on Sunday morning. The stone had already been removed from the door. She then went to find Peter and 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', who is mentioned several times in the gospel, but never named. He is usually called 'the beloved disciple'. She told them that someone (`they') had taken Jesus away. Peter and the beloved disciple ran to the tomb. The latter arrived first and saw the linen grave-clothes, but did not enter. Peter entered and noticed that the head- covering was rolled up separately from the other clothes. The beloved disciple then entered, saw the clothing, and 'believed'. Then, quite strikingly, the two went back to their homes.

Next, Mary Magdalene arrived and stood outside the tomb weeping. When she looked in, she saw two angels in white, sit- ting where Jesus had lain. After a brief exchange on the whereabouts of the body, she turned around and saw Jesus, but did not recognise him. She thought he might be the gardener and asked him to tell her where Jesus's body was. Jesus addressed her by name, and she replied, `Rabboni', which, the author explains, means 'teacher'. Jesus forbade her to touch him and told her to tell the disciples that he was ascend- ing to God. Mary did so. That evening, Jesus appeared to the dis- ciples, who were hiding behind closed doors. He showed the wounds on his hands and his side. He declared that he was send- ing them as God had sent him, breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.' Thomas, in a famous scene, expressed his doubts and said that he would not believe unless he could see and touch the wounds. The scene ends.

Eight days later, the disciples were in the same house. The doors were again shut, but Jesus appeared. He told Thomas to look at him and touch his hands and put his hand in the wound in his side. Thomas exclaimed, 'My Lord and my God!' Jesus responded, 'Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.' This seems to end the original gospel, except for a con- cluding remark indicating that Jesus did much more than recorded here.

I shall enumerate the most interesting points of chapter xx: 1) Only one woman, Mary Magdalene, is mentioned. 2) Two disciples go to the tomb and enter it. In the other gospels only women go to the tomb and no one enters it. 3) The story of running and entering seems to reflect competition to be first and perhaps proposes a compromise: the beloved disciple got there first, but Peter entered first. 4) The two appearances eight days apart are unique. 5) The story of Thomas is unique. 6) The offer to Thomas to touch the wounds is reminiscent of Luke, where Jesus shows his wounds and eats a piece of fish to show that he is not a ghost. It is noteworthy that John does not say that Thomas actually touched the wounds, and Jesus's response refers only to seeing and believing, not touching. 7) In view of the conflict between Matthew/Mark and Luke over geography, John xx is espe- cially interesting. Because the first appear- ance to the disciples is on the day of the resurrection, we must suppose that the locale is in or near Jerusalem. This, of course, agrees with Luke. But John writes that Peter and the beloved disciple went to their homes, apparently near Jerusalem, about which we are otherwise ignorant. All four gospels regard the disciples as Galileans. This remains a curiosity.

The appendix in John xxi offers an extended description of an appearance to the disciples on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. I shall not describe this in detail, except for two points. Jesus and Peter have an exchange that includes a prediction about how Peter will die: 'You will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to die.' The author adds, so that no one will miss it: 'This he said to show by what death he was to glorify God.' Peter then turns and sees the beloved disciple. He asks, `What about him?' — that is, will he die too? Jesus answers, 'If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!' The author again explains his point: 'The saying spread abroad among the brethren that this disciple was not to die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die, but, "If it is my will". '

It seems reasonable to think that the author of the appendix wanted to include the view that Jesus appeared to the disci- ples in Galilee (as in Matthew and Mark), and also to take account of the fact that all the disciples died. In the first years after Jesus's death, we recall, the Christians expected Jesus to return in their lifetimes. Acts provides room for an extended delay. John xxi responds to the fact that all the disciples had died.

Let us now consider the earliest surviving discussion of the resurrection, I Corinthi- ans xv. It is amazingly different from the gospels. Paul's letters respond to questions and problems. It appears from I Corinthi- ans xv that his converts in Corinth were troubled about the resurrection — not Jesus's resurrection, which they seem to have accepted, but their own future resur- rection. They probably had the view of most good Greeks: what is real is intangi- ble, since anything tangible is destructible. All humans have souls, which are immor- tal; their bodies decay. Jesus was an excep- tion, and his resurrection should not be taken as meaning that the bodies of believ- ers would be raised. Thus the Corinthians.

Paul wanted to maintain the Jewish and Christian hope for a bodily resurrection, but he went a long way towards agreeing with the Corinthians. He granted that 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable'. The Corinthians, I imagine, stood and cheered when they heard this. But Paul would not entirely yield. He insisted that their 'bodies' would be raised, but he met their concern by specifying that he meant not their natural bodies but new, `spiritual bodies'. They would be the same as the resurrected Jesus: 'Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus].'

Paul may have had several reasons for offering the formula 'spiritual bodies', which would not be of flesh and blood, but surely a main factor was his own view of Jesus's resurrection. In Acts, Luke depicted Paul as seeing a bright light as part of his conversion experience. It is less well known that Paul did not agree. He thought that he had seen the risen Lord. 'Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?' (I Cor. ix 1). God 'was pleased to reveal his Son to me' (Gal. i 16). 'Last of all, as to one untimely born, he [the risen Jesus] appeared also to me' (I Cor. xv 8). It is true that Paul had his reasons for not wanting to have received an inferior revelation; but nevertheless he claimed to have seen the Lord. He thought that at the end Chris- tians would be transformed to be like the Lord, and he thought that this meant hav- ing a spiritual body, not one of flesh and blood. The risen Jesus, then, was not physi- cal: he, too, had a 'spiritual body'.

Can the historian, then, believe in 'the resurrection'? The historian clearly cannot believe all the stories and all of the lists of appearances. This is true whether or not the historian is also a Christian. So can the historian qua historian give any sort of cre- dence to any of this? Several decades ago, German New Testament scholars focused attention on the 'resurrection experiences' as the bedrock of Christianity. This is a useful category. The early Christian leaders (Peter, James, Paul and others) spent their lives working on behalf of the Lord whom they had seen. It seems to me to be rash to suppose that they were all liars or that they all suffered from the same delusion. Lies would presumably have led to an agreed story. Why should Peter, John and James (the Jerusalem leaders mentioned by Paul in Galatians) have made up diverse stories and then passed them on? If they com- pletely invented the resurrection, why should they have been willing to suffer and die because of their work on behalf of the risen Jesus? Deliberate fraud seems to me not to be the answer.

I think that the Christian leaders really experienced the appearance of Jesus after his execution. More precisely, they experi- enced what they called 'the resurrection', but we cannot say what it was. In fact, nei- ther could they. It is this that seems best to account for the competing stories. They wanted to describe something that they could not define and describe precisely, and so various people tried their hands at various stories, making up details in the effort to say something concrete.

The historian cannot believe any of the stories as such. The tradition in Matthew, I suggested above, is relatively more proba- ble than that in Luke, since we can readily explain Luke's preference for Jerusalem on the basis of the rest of his work. The prob- lem with the short and simple version implied in Mark and present in Matthew is that it is contradicted by Paul, who knew of a longer list of appearances. We are unable to find a 'bedrock' description or a funda- mental list of appearances. If we are also unable, as I am, to think that early Chris- tianity was deliberately based on fraud, we must be content with the simplest, vaguest sort of conclusion: something happened to the followers of Jesus, but we do not know what it was. It is, however, clear that the early Christians wished to affirm a bodily resurrection, but not a renewal of Jesus's physical life. Moreover, I Corinthians seems to indicate that Christianity did not require any specific stories at all. It could quite happily live with contradictory sto- ries, and it included several in its canon of scripture. Paul may not have told stories at all. In converting Gentiles, he may have been content to express his conviction that Jesus had appeared to him and others. He felt no need to talk of such things as Jesus once walking along the road to Emmaus, or standing on a mountain-top in Galilee.

The author is Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke University, North Carolina, and formerly Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis of Holy Scripture at Oxford. His The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993) was recently issued in Penguin.