The title of this piece represents a crude question that may dissolve as we examine it. For the Paschal Mystery is something much wider than a single punctual event called the Resurrection. The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, in a sovereign gesture gave his body in sacrifice for the life of the world. The Passover begun there comes to its conclusion not on Easter morning but in what is called the Ascension into glory. Christ exalted, throned in the glory of heaven, and sending thence the Spirit through whom he lives amid his community, is the terminus of the Paschal Mystery. Yes, yes, one will say, but isn’t the linchpin of the whole great process the physical fact that a dead body was miraculously restored to life, his grave being found empty?
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The empty tomb story emphasizes the corporeal reality of the risen life, which we celebrate anew in every Eucharist. But need this mean what John Updike wants it to mean?:
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Seven Stanzas at Easter
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Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall. [...]
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The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
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Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
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The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
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And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
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It seems a tall order to dictate the chemical composition of the glorified body of Christ; and St Paul would be the first victim of Updike’s sweeping dismissal of analogy and parable. But the author of Roger’s Version may be writing ironically.
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Should we say that the Resurrection is an ontological, not a merely ontic event? Or does its ontological reality depend crucially on its ontic factuality? Emmanuel Falque draws very widely on biblical and Christian tradition to form an account of the Resurrection as an ontological reality (Métamorphose de la finitude : Essai philosophique sur la naissance et la résurrection, Cerf, 2004). In addition, his vision is nourished by a phenomenology of birth and by appropriations of ideas from Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Romano. The resurrection is not an inner-worldly event but determines the meaning of worldhood as such. It is a sublation of the lived world to a new level, allowing an enjoyment of the eternal in all the dimensions of time.
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These readings are in the wake of Bultmann, though they put more emphasis on such topics as joy (chara), taking the New Testament primarily as a message about new life rather than about the justification of the sinner or eschatological crisis. Joy is indeed the essential tonality of the resurrection experience and it floods the entire New Testament. It is within that dazzling ‘saturated’ horizon, or rather excess of any horizon, that the details of the resurrection narratives take on their meaning.
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I feel that Falque’s vision would gain from being anchored in a more differentiated critical reading of the biblical sources, even if this made the construction of a general phenomenology of resurrection more difficult. The language of the New Testament has been exploited speculatively throughout Christian history, and its phenomenological exploitation is a new chapter in this venture. But to link the resurrection faith firmly to the historical Jesus, a sober genealogy of its formation is needed that will bring out more clearly its basic contours.
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The Resurrection is primarily a human experience, indeed, it is exclusively a human experience; to speak of the ‘resurrection of God’ may be licensed by the communicatio idiomatum whereby the human attributes and actions of Jesus can be ascribed to the Word, in virtue of their hypostatic union. But note that this ascription is to the Word only, not to the Godhead as such. Falque makes a significant slip in defining the communication of idioms as ‘the transference of attributes of one person of the Trinity to another’ (p. 127); this opens the door to patripassianism, a danger which Falque, like Von Balthasar and Moltmann, scarcely avoids.
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Falque’s work shows that deep Catholic piety today offers an antidote to myopic fundamentalism, allowing a generous embrace of the widest spiritual, philosophical and theological horizons. While in his work on Bonaventure he has contributed to an overcoming of metaphysics within Christian tradition by finding in Bonaventure a phenomenological approach to God, within which the human relation to the divine prevails over the objectivizing approach of Thomism, Falque should pursue a further overcoming by drawing on the critical point of the philosophers he quotes rather than seeing them primarily as contributors to a positive edifying vision, and by securing the specific biblical roots of his resurrection-faith through a more ‘Protestant’ take on the rhetoric of tradition.
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Some will reject the question of ‘what really happened’ between the death of Christ and the preaching of the resurrection faith by the early Church not because of the danger of ontic fact occluding ontological reality, but because they will see it as pointless to check the credential of the Holy Spirit, who has already answered the question through the word of Scripture or the teaching of the Church. Even more than theological inquiry, which can be very cramped and inhibited in this area due to the threatening noises of the easily scandalized faithful, secular historical discussion of the Resurrection is exposed to charges of blasphemy. Yet, prima facie, ‘what really happened?’ is a perfectly respectable historical question, and though historical research may often be pointless it is a human practice that cannot be renounced. We have a thirst for the truth about the past, particularly if there is controversy about it. When new documentary or archeological evidence turns up, a thrill runs through the academic community and sometimes even through the general public at large. This curiosity nourishes the commercial exploitation of the newly-discovered Gnostic Gospel of Judas or alleged discoveries of the tomb of Jesus. Meanwhile the ‘third quest’ for the historical Jesus testifies that the Gospels are a rich source of fairly reliable historical knowledge, if we know how to read them discerningly, and even when it is inconclusive it has at least clarified the perspectives within which the question of the historical Jesus can be posed; this in itself is an advance in awareness of the human historicity of Jesus.
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Against the objection that burrowing into the resurrection traditions is pointless, the best riposte is that such historical questioning does justice to the fact that the Word became flesh, that is, the divine Wisdom took up its abode in the world of historical contingencies. So we have nothing to fear from handing Jesus over to secular historical research. Historical study of the development of the Jesus traditions helps the theological inquirer who may build on it to come closer to the reality of incarnation. Certainly, to make the findings of purely secular research the court of last appeal over against the effort at theological understanding of the gospel history would be wrong. Also unsound is theological fetishism about what Jesus himself actually did and said, especially when this is then played off against what is ‘merely’ later tradition or doctrinal elaboration.
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Of course since all our sources for the resurrection come to us deeply embedded in theological frameworks of thinking, the attainment of a neutral secularized historical approach to them is very difficult. What theological inquirers can attempt instead is to work from within their basic faith-understanding in an effort to bring the complex New Testament data into a satisfying perspective, one that neither claims strict historicity when this is implausible nor ignores what is historically convincing, and one that above all attends to the full theological resonances of the resurrection texts as they still speak to us of the early Church’s experience of Christ moving among them as a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor 15.45).
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BEYOND FIDEISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM
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Any discussion of the resurrection will meet objections from believers who have been educated in a literal understanding of the resurrection narratives and who will, naturally, feel unsettled in their faith. Even scholars as much at the heart of Catholicism today as Raymond Brown and Edward Schillebeeckx have found themselves exposed to vituperation and hatred from those thrown into a panic by the questioning of the surface literal readings. Some adopt a fideist position, according to which we should simply submit our minds to the resurrection kerygma and abstain from curious questioning into its genealogy. Others go further, in a fundamentalist claim that every word of Scripture is literally true, so that to know ‘what really happened’ we need only consult the deliveries of the inspired, inerrant text.
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Fideism is an old temptation. The resurrection was a stumbling-block from the beginning. The basic rationalistic objections are expertly set forth by Celsus, and refuted with difficulty by Origen seventy years later in his Contra Celsum. Celsus had no understanding of the resurrection climate of the New Testament, no idea of what it could mean to discern Christ in our midst with the eyes of faith. Origen sometimes alerts his readers to this dimension, and that is the most convincing part of his reply. Perhaps new difficulties were set forth in the anti-Christian treatises of Porphyry and Julian, but the Constantinian Church had less patience with pagan objections; these writings were simply destroyed, to the chagrin of scholars ever since.
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Tertullian’s ‘credo quia absurdum’ echoes down through the ages as the charter of fideism. Theologians generally prefer the Augustinian dictum ‘credo ut intelligam’, ‘I believe so that I may understand’, for they want their resurrection-faith to be based on truth and to be intellectually tenable. They want to ‘get it right’. Theology consists in the task of faith seeking understanding, ‘fides quaerens intellectum’ – rather than merely reasserting uninterpreted statements – and in that task it must draw on the best thought of its time. The church has always firmly believed in the Resurrection, but it has also struggled to understand it. Clement of Alexandria invoked the phoenix as an analogy for life springing from death. Today Benedict XVI is among the many who invoke an evolutionary context: ‘Christ’s Resurrection is something more, something different [than mere resuscitation]. If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution, it is the greatest "mutation", absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history’. The Pope also stresses a collective dimension that undermines positivist accounts of the resurrection: ‘What forces were in operation? The crucial point is that this man Jesus was not alone, he was not an "I" closed in upon itself. He was one single reality with the living God, so closely united with him as to form one person with him. He found himself, so to speak, in an embrace with him who is life itself, an embrace not just on the emotional level, but one which included and permeated his being. His own life was not just his own, it was an existential communion with God, a "being taken up" into God... The Resurrection was like an explosion of light, an explosion of love which dissolved the hitherto indissoluble compenetration of "dying and becoming". It ushered in a new dimension of being, a new dimension of life in which, in a transformed way, matter too was integrated and through which a new world emerges’. (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20060415_veglia-pasquale_en.html).
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Such language fits the world of Eugen Drewermann and Teilhard de Chardin much better than it fits the world of inerrantist harmonizers. It is refreshing to have a Pope who is versed, and deeply versed, in German theology, that is, the most important theology of the last three centuries; even if his take on it is conservative, he at least gives an opening to discussion of the most telling modern proposals for a critique or rethinking of Christian tradition. Benedict plays down ‘simple indestructibility of the soul by itself’, though not going as far as Barth, who claims that following the Old Testament we must see man as intrinsically mortal. Benedict strongly stresses the empty tomb and that Christ’s body did not see corruption. Most Christians want to believe that this is literally true. But many theologians argue that even if it were not, the risen and glorious body of Christ would still be an explosive reality, one that all of us will participate in.
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There may be a residual touch of fideism in Benedict’s own stance. There may be a residual touch of fideism in Benedict’s own stance. If the German theologian he refers to is Drewermann (rather than Bultmann), this would be a false note in an Easter sermon, a throwback to Benedict’s activities as Prefect of the CDF and to the bitter controversy about Drewermann, whom many see as a prophet dishonored. Also surprising is the following statement in Benedict’s Urbi et orbi message: ‘the lifeless body was suffused with the living breath of God and, as the walls of the tomb were shattered, he rose in glory’ (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/urbi/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20060416_urbi-easter_en.html). There is no reference to shattered walls in the Gospels, but only to the stone rolled back from the mouth of the tomb (Mk 16.3-4; Mt 28.2; Lk 24.1; Jn 20.1). The women (and in John, the two disciples) enter the tomb and inspect it, with no suggestion that it was in poor repair. Is the Pope thinking of the earthquake in Mt 28.2 (a literary fiction like the other earthquake at Mt 27.54; there are no earthquakes in the other Gospels)?
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Clearly the empty tomb remains a neuralgic point, and those who stress it most often end up giving concrete accounts not covered by the biblical text and even contradicting its letter. One Barthian theologian told me that Jesus got up and pushed the tomb open, forgetting that the only account of who opened the tomb in the Gospels attributes the deed to ‘an angel of the Lord’, Mt 28.2.
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Fideism takes modern and sophisticated forms, as in Kierkegaard, but fundamentalism signs off from any engagement with modernity from the start. Faced with the historical implausibility of certain narratives – notably that of the guard at the tomb, shown by Reimarus to be an apologetical construct – and with the inconsistencies in the gospel record – notably the contradiction between Mark and Matthew who speak only of Galilee appearances and Luke and John 20 who speak only of Jerusalem appearances – the fundamentalist resorts to very elaborate and unnatural readings of the biblical text.
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Here is an example:
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John’s account (20:12-13) makes it almost certain that Mary Magdalene’s first encounter with the angels occurs at this moment, when she is alone; for it is clear that she still, as yet, has no suspicion of the Lord’s resurrection – a fact which, as we know from the other Gospels, has already been announced by the angels to the other women. But it might seem from Matthew (28:1, 5-6) and Mark (16:1, 5-6) that Mary Magdalene was in fact with those other women when they saw the angel(s) and, that she heard together with her companions the stupendous news that the Lord had risen. But once again, we have here instances of impressions left by the biblical texts, which might indeed reflect what was in their human authors’ minds, but which are by no means affirmed or strictly implied by what they wrote. Let us keep in mind two points here: (a) Matthew nowhere affirms that Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary’ were the only women who went to the sepulchre early that morning; and (b) after mentioning those two in v. 1, and in referring to the angel’s appearance and words a few verses later, Matthew simply says that this angelic message was addressed to ‘the women’ (vs. 5). Now, we would certainly have a problem on our hands if he had said ‘the aforesaid women’, or ‘the women already named’, or ‘those two women’. For these expressions, or other possible ones to the same effect, would affirm or rigorously imply that Mary Magdalene was indeed one of those women who saw and heard the angel in that first moment. But in view of (a) and (b), it cannot be said that Matthew’s Gospel text – whatever may or may not have been in his own mind – teaches that Mary Magdalene was among ‘the women’ who saw the angel(s) immediately on their first arrival at the empty tomb. The inerrancy of Matthew’s affirmations about ‘the women’ remains intact provided that the other women who had by that time arrived at the tomb (i.e., at least ‘the other Mary’, Joanna and Salome) did in fact see and hear the angelic manifestation (v. 5), make a hasty exit from the tomb (v. 8), and then (a little later on in the morning), run to tell the Apostles what had happened (v. 9).
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Or again:
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By the time Mary Magdalene and the other women have reached Peter and the apostles with the news of the angelic appearances and the apparitions of the Risen Lord, Peter has already been to the tomb and seen for himself its emptiness (except for the linen cloths). However, Luke mentions Peter’s visit to the tomb in 24:12, after he has related the arrival of the women with their amazing – and as yet more or less incredible – report to the apostles (24:9-11). To solve this difficulty, we simply need to recall the principles we have already appealed to in explaining other problem passages in these resurrection accounts. It may or may not be the case that Luke thought or presumed that Peter’s visit took place only after he had heard the reports of miraculous events from the group of women who came to him and the other apostles. But what the Evangelist says in writing does not affirm nor strictly imply that sequence of events, even though, undeniably, it leaves the reader with an impression to that effect. Verse 12 does not include any unambiguous expressions placing Peter’s visit to the tomb within a time-sequence that would place it clearly either before or after he hears the report of the women. Luke simply says here, after telling us of the women’s report and the apostles’ incredulity at it, that ‘Peter, however, arising, ran to the sepulchre… etc.’ Note the absence here of any word indicating the time when Peter did so, relative to the events mentioned in previous verses. So the integral truth (or inerrancy) of Luke’s text (not necessarily of Luke’s private thoughts or assumptions) remains intact provided that Peter did indeed arise and run to inspect the sepulchre at some moment during the series of astonishing events that took place on the first Easter Sunday. And we know from John’s Gospel that Peter’s visit (together with that of the ‘Beloved Disciple’), in fact took place at an earlier hour, very soon after the group of women first arrived at the tomb around dawn. (http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt107.html)
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Fantastic harmonizations in this tortured style will always be possible, but the natural and sensible reading is to suppose that a lot of symbolic narration is involved. Probably, the resurrection testimonies, as we find them in Paul, were not very detailed and had to be filled out by the theological imagination that formed the later more pictorial traditions.
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Fundamentalism is not warranted by present church teaching, as expressed for example in the 1994 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, ‘The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church’ (http://www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/PBCINTER.HTM). The divine inspiration of Scripture (mediated through the election of the people of Israel, as Karl Rahner suggested) does not abolish the humanity of the writers, people of their time and culture, or the normal literary conventions they followed – not only in clearly fictional works (Tobit, Job, Jonah) but also in historical works which commonly integrated fictional elements at that time. Vatican II points out that the Gospels are kerygmas shaped with a view to the circumstances of the churches at the time of their composition. Biblical literalism, which identifies itself with ‘orthodoxy’ in a bullying rhetoric, is a feature above all of American Christians, including many new Catholic converts from evangelical Protestantism. It also seems a specialty of the political right, that is, of supporters of George Bush and his wars. Since 9/11 the world is aware of the threat posed by religious fundamentalism, but its Christian variant all too often escapes censure.
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Some scoff at the Jesus Seminar, saying that its rules for disqualifying historical evidence are more convoluted than U.S. tax laws. But exegesis is a very democratic practice, because any reasonable interpretation of the text that both teacher and student have in front of them will be discussed on its merits. Acceptance of literary genre and of how the Gospel writers reshape their message in view of current needs will relieve the reader of Scripture of the needless burden of defending every detail as historical and squaring the inconsistencies. Indeed it is the rubrics of literalism that become as tortured as a tax-code. If it is true that literalist readings which crumble under analysis have caused many people to lose their faith, then we have here a serious pastoral issue. Train people in immature literalism and you train them for unbelief in the end.
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BEYOND POSITIVISM
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The presence of the risen Christ to the disciples was a physical presence in the sense of a glorified body, such as we will all have at the resurrection of the dead, and such as Christ has in the Eucharist. Paul writes: ‘What is sown a physical body is raised a spiritual body’ (1 Cor 15.44). Later it becomes difficult to compare the resurrection of the Lord to our own resurrection on the last day, but Paul seems to do so in 1 Cor 15.12-17, 20-23. Christ’s resurrection is the firstfruits of ours.
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Does the body of the risen Christ exist in space and time? Is this a meaningful question? The risen Christ manifests himself from heaven to his disciples on earth; he does not walk around in the continuum of ordinary time after his death. Is heaven a place in space? Is heaven in time? The resurrection is certainly manifested in space and time, for the encounters on which the apostolic witness is based must have occurred at a given date and location. What form that encounter took cannot be discerned with entire clarity behind the multiplicity of the largely symbolic narrations, from the ‘ophthê’ of 1 Cor 15 onwards. The presence of the risen Christ to and in the Church, especially in the Eucharist, is also a spatio-temporal reality in a sense. But spiritual realities are never ‘in’ space and time. Even the human mind or a work of art are not ‘in’ space. The categories of space and even time apply best to merely physical objects such as tables and chairs. An essential feature of the resurrection encounter is joy, chara. The joy of the resurrection is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a saturated phenomenon, exceeding the grasp of our categorial apparatus (including such categories as ‘space’ and ‘time’), simply because its reality is too rich to be summarized in categories made for everyday phenomena.
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The resurrection is a temporal event in the sense that it comes after the death of Christ, as does the outpouring of the Spirit. Yet there is a curious elusiveness about its timing – after three days and three nights in some texts, on the third day in others, etc. The ‘third day’ is perhaps a kind of symbolic timing (though some sees the early adoption of Sunday as the day of worship as a proof that the resurrection happened precisely on that day; see Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, Oxford, 2003.
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An old chestnut is the question whether the discovery of Christ’s bones in Palestine would falsify the Resurrection. Swinburne notes and explains away references to resurrection from the dead which do not entail the disappearance of the dead person’s body from the tomb, but he misses what may be the most important of these, namely, the disciples’ statement to Jesus that some think he is John the Baptist (risen from the dead) in Mk 8.28; Mt 16.14; Lk 9.19.
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What did Paul and his generation understand by ‘resurrection of the dead’? Is it patently clear that it demanded a knowledge of the condition of Jesus’s mortal remains? For later Christians such knowledge may have seemed an essential component of belief in resurrection, and so they may have elaborated the empty tomb narration for that reason. That would not necessarily reduce the spiritual body of the risen One to a ghostly wraith. It may be that much research needs to be done on this whole field of representations, and it should be done not in the spirit of heated apologetic, but in the spirit of a calm desire to understand things more clearly. See Schillebeeckx, Jesus, New York, 1989, pp. 518-25.
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However, looking at Paul’s idea of our resurrection, he does seem to think in terms of empty graves: ‘the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed, for this corruptible must put on incorruption’ (1 Cor. 15.53; the ‘we’, here, are the Christians whom Paul expected to be still alive when Christ returned). 1 Thess 4.16-17 has ‘the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them’ etc. Whatever the nature of his experience of encounter with the risen Christ, and whether or not he knew of an empty tomb report, its is clear that the thinks of the risen Christ not merely as a spiritual presence and not merely the one exalted by God (Philippians 2.6-11) but as risen from the grave.
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Christ was raised to new life by God the Father, life not of his soul only but of his glorified body. All the resurrection stories bear this home on us in their different styles and lightings. This reality was manifested to the infant Church first of all in manifestations to privileged witnesses listed by Paul (he does not list any women, however), and secondly in the pentecostal and eucharistic experience of Christ moving among them as a life-giving spirit. That experience of the resurrection can be had by Christians today -- for which we grope for words, ‘peace, love, joy.’ The story of the empty tomb may serve as a powerful sign of the paschal mystery. But the reality of the resurrection is probably independently attested and makes itself present without it.
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The idea that the resurrection can be summed up adequately in a few simple words, as people sometimes demand, is untrue to the NT witness. Much as every part of the NT confidently proclaims the resurrection, there is also a sense that this proclamation is born of a struggle for words; it is an achievement of speech for what at first left them speechless. Many prefer to avoid the word ‘resurrection’ today and to speak instead of ‘the life, death, and ongoing life’ of Jesus Christ, in order to express the paschal dynamic without allowing it to be captured by speculation about reanimation of a dead body. We, too, are struggling for a speech about the presence of the risen One in our midst. I suggest that his is more likely to be nourished by meditation on the entire New Testament than by an obsessive focus on the four chapters in which an empty tomb is mentioned.
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What is the motivation of the resurrection narratives? I suspect that there are a variety of motivations for the different narratives, and that the ones where the motivation seems most obvious (as in Matthew’s story of the guard at the tomb) are the less important ones. The resurrection narratives in the Gospels should be connected with the entire work in which they are found, for they continue its themes, completing its theological portrait of Jesus. John 20, for example, makes full sense only against the elaborate design of the Fourth Gospel as a whole.
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The influential work of R. H. Fuller, who insisted that ‘the earliest church did not narrate resurrection appearances, but proclaimed the resurrection’ is the well-chosen target of philosopher William P Alston (in The Resurrection, ed Davis et al.), who denounces Fuller for a massive argumentum ex silentio. The point that supports Fuller most against Alston is the late dating of the detailed appearance narratives in Luke and John. Even Matthew does not contain real appearance narratives, as Fuller rather convincingly argues. The Galilee appearance in Matthew is an address from the glorified Christ to the Church. The appearance to the women at the tomb is a doublet of the angel’s appearance. So there does seem to be a development. Alston gets rather heated, as Gerald O’Collins and N. T. Wright also do, which might be taken as indicating a weakness in their arguments. Alston, though his disagreement with Fuller, is only a moderate one, ends up talking of Fuller’s ‘hidden agenda’ – the sort of polemical phrase that biblical scholars refrain from when addressing one another. Craig’s onslaught on Crossan (in Davis et al.) is also over-heated.
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Sarah Coakley, writing with her usual inimitable lightness of touch, agrees with Alston that ‘New Testament scholarship of this generation (Fuller being a good case in point, if now somewhat dated) is often unnecessarily coy – or downright repressive – about supernatural events in general and bodily resurrection in particular. This leads to a persistent intensifying of sceptical presumptions against credulity where the Gospel resurrection narratives are concerned’ (p. 184). She criticizes Alston’s unwillingness to see the element of ‘interpretive restructuring’ (p. 185) in Luke’s very physical portrait of the risen Jesus. She goes on to raise a fundamental issue, querying the possibility of ‘some position of objective historical truth prescinding from Christian evaluation and interpretation’ (p. 186). ‘Alston clings to the hope that there might be areas of human knowing – perceptual or (here) historical-critical – that somehow abstract from the interpretative or hermeneutical lens’ (p. 187). The nature of the risen One’s physical presence, she suggests, undermines ‘analytical philosophy of religion’s most cherished presumptions about the nature of the (individual) self’ (ib.).
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Paul’s language about God ‘revealing his Son in me’ (Gal. 1.16) does seem to erase frontiers between the self of the resurrection witness and a self of Jesus standing over against him. (However, it can be taken as ‘an emphasized equivalent to the simple dative môi, ‘to me’’ (J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, New York, 1997, p. 158). The ‘mystery and novelty’ (Coakley, p. 188) of this situation are what press the NT writers to use symbols and metaphors in their effort to articulate the unspeakable. ‘ The New Testament was written by people who were still trying to find a language that would catch up with a reality bigger than they had expected. The stories of the resurrection especially have all the characteristics of stories told by people who are struggling to find the right words for an unfamiliar experience – like the paradoxes and strained language of some of the mystics. The disciples really meet Jesus, as he always was, flesh and blood – yet at first they don’t recognise him, and he’s something more than just flesh and blood. At the moment of recognition, when bread is broken, when the wounds of crucifixion are displayed, he withdraws again, leaving us floundering for words.’ (Archbishop Rowan Williams, Easter Sermon, 2006).
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A brilliant review by Robin Griffith-Jones of a sceptical book on the resurrection in the Times Literary Supplement for April 14, 2006 has this to say: ‘We study the Easter stories as if they purported to tell of events as straightforward as the sowing of a field of corn; and we assess them for a straightforward truth or falsehood. But their authors, it may be, were less naive than we are. They may have been addressing a need we no longer imagine we have: the need for the readers, due to be confronted with anything so strange as the resurrection, to be brought to a special understanding equipped to understand it’. (See also http://www.templechurch.com/pages/church/index.htm.) The whole of the New Testament is our initiation into this resurrection-world and we need literary as well as spiritual sensitivity to respond to its language.
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The resurrection event is not accessible independently of the kerygma in which it is conveyed. It is an interpretation of certain overwhelming experiences (also interpreted in a language of exaltation or glorification). Obsessing about the empty tomb cannot take us beyond this horizon. Even if its historicity could be established without doubt, it would remain a sign to be interpreted. It is the appearances that provide the interpretation. We do not have direct experience of them, but we have a whole set of traditions springing up from them (as well as Paul’s direct witness to his own encounter with the risen Christ). We also have the entire experience of the early church -- with its mystical (Joy), ethical (Love) and theological (the renewed vision of scripture) dimensions, all of which testifies to the new reality of the resurrection.
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Coakley points out that ‘the apprehension of the risen Christ (then and now) requires some responsive recognition ‘deeper’ than normal cognition or visual perception’ (ib.). People directly witnessing the presence of the risen Christ disbelieved in it (Mt 28.17). Nonetheless, those who open their hearts in faith to the resurrection and are filled with spiritual joy experience the encounter with the risen one in a way that overrides doubt. The epistemic status of this cannot be measured by Carnapian logical positivists, any more than the epistemic status of one’s perception of the beauty of the music of Mozart (to give a lowly example). Clutching at sure-fire epistemic proofs seems out of place here. It is also, as Coakley justly notes, a gender-biased approach, ‘showing a marked predilection for characteristics honoured culturally as ‘male’’ (p. 190).
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An example of such an outlook can be found in Stephen Davis’s view, in the same volume, that the risen Christ must be accessible to normal vision, that ‘all redactional attempts to argue that the physical motifs are late and unreliable and that they emerged through a long and quasi-evolutionary process from earlier ‘spiritual’ appearance traditions have failed’ (p. 139), and that the glorified body is ‘still a material object that can be seen’ (p. 140). The scoffers of Acts 17, Celsus, and all the doubting Thomases of history doubted because they had not access to the spiritual seeing, that apprehends Christ with the eye of faith and love. Speculations about the body and legalistic arguments back and forth are all a distraction from that deepest source of resurrection vision. Arguing that the risen Jesus was visible even to unbelievers, and giving Paul, Thomas, and James as examples, he attempts to scotch the idea that the seeing of the risen Christ is a vision of faith. ‘I feel no sense of embarrassment whatsoever in holding that a camera could have taken a snapshot of the raised Jesus, say, feeding the seven disciples beside the Sea of Tiberius [Tiberias] (John 21: 1-14)’ (p. 142).
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Davis does not countenance the idea that the development toward even more naturalistic pictorialization (culminating in the Gospel of Peter which he quotes in support, and continuing in the Fathers) is a falling short of the original impact of the self-manifestation of the risen Lord. Davis opposes ‘seen’ to ‘visualized’, but glosses over the third possibility of an objective encounter, borne in upon the recipient with undeniable force and reality, yet not belonging to the category of everyday seeing. His main anxiety is that anything other than seeing in the ordinary sense would lack probative force. ‘Analytic philosophy of religion… has the hugest difficulty in conceiving _corporate_ identity in Christ: the hold of a certain form of individualism on it is too tenacious. It wants ‘facts’ about ‘Jesus of Nazareth’s afterlife’ (and so it tends to be drawn to the ‘literal’ physicality of Luke’s account)’ (Coakley, p. 187).
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The resurrection narratives are like a gallery of great paintings. The light is different in each of them, the same situation is lit up each time from a new, revealing angle. The Emmaus story is the most beautiful of them. Cleopas and his friend do not recognize Jesus until he breaks bread with them. They recognize him with their ‘heart’, or with their spiritual senses as Coakley suggests; ‘their eyes were opened’ refers to the eye of the mind (Lk 24.31-2). Perhaps the message is that the most real encounters with Jesus are ones that happen without our being aware that we are meeting him – encounters with our neighbour, with suffering, with justice. The Emmaus story is a theological summary of the eucharistic and scriptural experience of the early Church – the discovery that Scripture itself lit up in a new way in light of Christ. ‘The symbolism is obvious, as is the metaphoric condensation of the first years of Christian thought and practice into one parabolic afternoon’ (Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, San Francisco, 1991, p. xii).
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GALILEE AND THE ORIGINAL KERYGMA
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I turn now to somewhat closer discussion of the historical development of the resurrection traditions. My ideas on this subject are no doubt rather old-fashioned, having been shaped chiefly by writers of the 1970s. Perhaps a more subtle and flexible approach to the texts has been developed since then. For the moment, I follow John E. Alsup’s thorough and influential study, The Post-Resurrection Appearance Stories of the Gospel-Tradition (Stuttgart, 1975), which identifies three originally independent strands in the resurrection traditions: the kerygmatic strand, attested in 1 Cor 15.3-7, is the earliest, and may well be our only access to the basic bedrock of the apostolic witness originating (presumably) in Galilee. Next come the empty tomb stories followed by the appearance narratives that close the Gospels. I shall comment on each of these. (Swinburne, p. 147, says that ‘there is just one formal credal-type statement of to whom Jesus appeared in the New Testament, which is contained in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8’. But Luke 24:34 is no doubt an echo of this kerygma: ‘The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon’).
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There is a mysterious phrase that occurs five times in Mark and Matthew: The angel’s words in Mk 16.7 ‘he goes before you into Galilee, there you shall see him, as he said to you’ are taken up in Mt 28.7 with a slight change – ‘lo, I have said it to you’ – and again in Mt 28.10, where Jesus says to the women, ‘tell my brothers to go to Galilee, there they will see me’. This appearance to the women is Matthean composition, though the appearance of Jesus to Mary of Magdala in John 20 suggest that it may have some traditional background. Matthew need not have dropped the phrase ‘as he said to you’ because he retains the promise of Mk 14.28, ‘after my resurrection I will go before you to Galilee’ at Mt 26.32. Xavier Léon-Dufour states that all critical exegetes (l’ensemble des critiques) see the angel’s statement as a later addition to the empty tomb tradition, and that Mk 14.28 is itself an addition to the surrounding text (Résurrection de Jésus et message pascal, Paris, 1971, p. 151). Luke changes the angel`s statement as follows: ‘Remember how he spoke to you when he was in Galilee’ (Lk 24.6).
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Now what does ‘going before you into Galilee’ mean? I suppose that it refers to the flight of the disciples back to Galilee after the arrest of Jesus, and their subsequent meeting with the risen Christ there. (William L. Craig’s claim that the flight into Galilee is universally dismissed as ‘a fiction of the critics’ is queried by Paul Rhodes Eddy; in Davis et al., 262, 273). Willi Marxsen (The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Philadelphia, 1970) held that the Lord appeared only to Simon Peter in Galilee and that the other resurrection experiences mean simply that the rest of the apostles were convinced by Peter’s witness. This leads to a minimalist understanding of resurrection, whereby the resurrection means the power of the kerygma (itself an event of eschatological liberation according to Bultmann), or that ‘the cause of Jesus continues’. Others reduce the resurrection faith to an awareness that Jesus is living and active in the believers transformed by the apostles’ kerygma. In this perspective, the encounter with the risen Lord in Galilee might have more to do with eschatology than with resurrection (in line with the idea that early communities such as the group associated with Q lived in expectation of an imminent parousia, with no interest in passion-resurrection traditions. The Lord, in some mysterious way, stands before the apostles as the eschatological Lord of history, as having attained his final glory.
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The five hundred disciples mentioned in 1 Cor 15.6, would be a church assembly, and would be the chief referent of the angel’s ‘there you shall see him’, according to Swinburne. This mixing of Paul and Mark is in the genre of artificial harmonization. Paul in any case invokes the witness of the five hundred in such a way as to suggest that Christ’s appearing to them was more than a matter of their receiving Peter’s witness. Paul’s own Damascus experience is listed along with the others, suggesting that all of them were numinous experiences of that kind, rather than the detailed concrete encounters of the later gospel narratives. Paul’s words in Gal. 1.15-16, ‘it pleased [God] to reveal his Son in me’ are perhaps the nearest we come to grasping the nature of a resurrection appearance. Perhaps the experience of the five hundred was a similar interior illumination, of which the Pentecost story in Acts 2 may be an echo.
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THE APPEARANCE STORIES
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Alsup finds the oldest core of the appearance-narrative in the following: ‘1. He comes (and speaks) to them; 2. The disciples’ reaction is recorded: partially acceptance, partially scepticism; 3. The risen One is recognized as Jesus the Lord by the disciples’. Apparently this original core did not specify the location of the appearances. Matthew has the Eleven see Jesus, evidently for the first time, on a mountain in Galilee (‘And when they saw him they worshipped him, though some doubted’) – as the angel (and Jesus) promised the women, and as Jesus earlier promised the disciples. Luke has him see them in Jerusalem; there is nothing about anyone going to Galilee. John also has him appear to them in Jerusalem, on Easter Sunday and the following Sunday; the added 21st chapter has a Galilee appearance listed as the third.
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Swinburne, who ascribes the variety of the resurrection accounts to divergences arising in oral tradition in the course of time, asks ‘is it any more divergent than accounts of much else in the life and Passion of Jesus’? (p. 148). In fact, Alsup calls the appearance-narratives ‘a gospel complex, which compared to other gospel narratives has no parallel – outside perhaps of the birth narratives – in terms of its fluid character and wide-ranging variety’ (p. 162). Swinburne sees the appearances as taking place in this order: Easter Sunday: Mary Magdalene, the Emmaus disciples, Peter, the Eleven (or only some of them, in Swinburne’s view) – in Jerusalem. Squaring the Jerusalem and Galilee traditions, Swinburne opines that the appearance to Thomas could have happened in Galilee (though Jn 20.26 strongly suggests that the apostles are in the same room as a week before). In reality, the Thomas story is a characteristic Johannine theological composition; no critical NT scholar takes it as historical. Then back to Jerusalem for a last appearance to all the apostles and the Ascension. The problem with this is that it shows no interest in the literary character of the texts and just puts the events together as if they were all straightforward literal happenings. The adjustments he has to make are very strained and again bespeak little interest in the literary integrity of the gospel authors.
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As R. H. Fuller points out (The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, New York, 1971), the risen Jesus cannot have given a commission to the apostles to preach to all nations, since if he had there would have been no problem about the Gentile mission. Fuller would probably say that the resurrection appearances did not involve any verbal message of Jesus to the apostles. It must be noted that such messages as are attributed to the risen Jesus are all recyclings of what he said during his earthly ministry (and in the style used by the respective evangelists in describing that ministry -- e.g. what Jesus says to the disciples at Emmaus is very Lukan).
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Beyond explicit accounts of resurrection appearances, we must study the understanding of resurrection pervading the entire New Testament, notably the Gospel of John, which refers to the resurrection several times as well as to the glorification or the Hour of Jesus. The Book of Revelation also offers interesting sidelights on the resurrection appearances and the dynamics of the resurrection/exaltation of Jesus. Perhaps Gnostic or other extra-canonical texts could have value as well by showing how not to think of the resurrection (and also as indicating tendencies that Matthew, Luke and John might be seen as countering in their apologetical-sounding passages). As St Paul points out, Christianity stands or falls on the reality of the resurrection. But not, happily, on literalistic or materialistic conceptions of the resurrection.
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There is no account of Jesus being ‘sighted’ passively from the outside. He always takes the initiative in manifesting himself. The whole language of the stories presents the resurrection appearances in this key, and also as summoning and requiring a perception of faith from the recipients. Jesus did not get out of the grave and walk around for forty days. The ‘forty days’ refers to a span of time in which Christ sometimes manifested himself in his glorious body to the apostles (to Paul later, as to one born out of time – out of that time).
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Paul’s belief that he had seen the risen Lord was justified true belief. But was it the kind of knowledge I have when I see an ordinary empirical object – the book on the table in front of me right now? There are many kinds of knowledge. Positivists try to reduce all knowledge to irrefutable logic or undeniable empirical observation, but that is too narrow. To insist that one could have actually seen Jesus physically emerge from the tomb if one were there at the time is misleading. The NT never says that Jesus walked out of the tomb. The closest it comes to that is telling us that the tomb is empty. Some hypothesize that what one would have seen were one inside the tomb is the sudden disappearance of the crucified body. On the other hand when the bodies of the just are raised on the last day, this does not necessarily mean that their bones physically disappear wherever they happen to be at the time (the material components of our bodies are changing all the time even during our lifetimes in any case).
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The raising of Christ from the dead is not itself a miracle in the sense that the raising of Lazarus (if historical) would be. It is much more than that – a new creation. To reduce it to a local miracle misses the point. That it may have been attended by supernatural miracles, such as the miraculous emptying of a tomb, is another question; but these, like the Virgin Birth, would merely be signs of a mystery far exceeding them.
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THE EMPTY TOMB
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‘The Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset’ (Joseph, The Jewish War, 4.317). In accordance with Jewish custom, the body of Jesus was probably buried before sundown, and probably in disgrace in a criminals’ tomb (see the essays by R. E. Brown and Byron R. McCane in Craig A. Evans, ed. The Historical Jesus, Routledge, 2004, III). We must be cautious here, since the earliest burial account is in Mark and we do not know what he had derived from previous tradition (see Eddy, in Davis et al., p. 276). The idealization of Joseph of Arimathea and his tomb, continued in later Gospels, may have already begun. An earlier allusion to the burial is Paul’s ‘etaphe’ (1 Cor 15.4).
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All four Gospels speak of women coming on the third day and finding the tomb empty. To uphold the historicity of the empty tomb is not a fundamentalist position, for this tradition has respectable claims to historicity. It is no doubt pre-Markan. However to insist on its historicity with excessive emphasis is to override historical investigation with dogma. Today, since we cannot automatically take everything in Scripture as a matter of plain historical fact, for reasons which have imposed themselves on the Church, kicking and screaming all the way, over three centuries of scholarship (reasons based more on the study of Scripture than on Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment scepticism toward the supernatural), it is difficult to avoid a certain agnosticism here and unfair to brand those who have this agnosticism as heretics.
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Of course the empty tomb fits our concepts of the resurrection perfectly, but that is the very reason why people doubt it – it is too redolent of apologetical fiction. The argument of scholars such as N. T. Wright that it is no would be more persuasive if accompanied by a franker recognized that there is a lot of apologetical fiction in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Matthew’s story of the guard at the tomb, whose unhistoricity, at least in the form Matthew gives it, was shown in the 18th century (see Reimarus, Fragments, London, 1971, pp. 153-73), and which is developed some time later in the Gospel of Peter, where Jesus himself is taken out of the tomb by two angels, is clearly part of this trajectory toward apologetical elaboration, as is the story of Jesus eating to show he is not a ghost. The empty tomb is, of course, much better attested than these. But when people argue that every detail of the resurrection narratives is literally historical, even when they conflict, they undermine belief rather than build it up.
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A poor argument for the empty tomb narratives is that since their theological content is so slight they cannot be theological narrativizations but must be historical reports. In reality the theological content of Mark 16.1-8 is quite high, and of course in a late development of the empty tomb tradition such as we find it in John 20 the theological content is massive. Craig claims that Mark’s tomb story is ‘unadorned and non-apologetic in nature’ (Davis et al., pp. 257-8), but this is only relative to later texts.
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The empty tomb may be historical, but the angels are another matter; the four gospels give quite different accounts: Mark has a young man that the women find sitting in the tomb; in Matthew an ‘angel of the Lord’ spectacularly opens the tomb in the sight of the women and soldiers; Luke has two men in dazzling garments who suddenly appear by the women’s side; in John there is no angel at the tomb, Mary finds the tomb empty, then Peter and John inspect it, only later does Mary see and talk with two angels in white. The freedom with which the angelic element is varied suggests that the authors do not take it very seriously as a historical event, whereas they clearly do believe that the empty tomb was a historical reality.
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It is sometimes argued that the tomb traditions were created after the resurrection faith had arisen, on the basis of the appearances (those recorded by Paul). But people’s ideas of ‘resurrection of the dead’ might have been such that the appearances alone sufficed to galvanize that schema and to set going the language of resurrection (in tandem with the language of exaltation). The idea of the exaltation of Jesus is pictorialized in the Ascension narrative of Luke 24 and Acts 1, and something similar may have happened with the resurrection idea. There is a well-known theory that the angel’s words ‘see the place where he lay’ (Mk 16.6; Mt 28.6) originate in a commemoration ceremony held at the site (or supposed site) of Christ’s grave. Matthew reports a Jewish ‘stolen body’ riposte to the empty grave, but this is half a century after the events and decades after the empty grave tradition would first have arisen. It is of rather academic interest whether the empty tomb was a necessary condition of the resurrection faith or not. Also, with Pheme Perkins (in Evans, ed. The Historical Jesus, III) I do not think one can insist that it is a necessary component of the resurrection faith today. The ferocity with which defenders of orthodoxy attack those who doubt the historicity of the empty tomb is counter-productive.
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Even if historical, the empty tomb is a sign rather than a proof of the resurrection, to be interpreted by faith. The sign is best interpreted in negative terms: ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead; he is not here’ (Lk 24.5-6). Leon-Dufour comments that the tomb traditions are ‘marginal in relation to the central tradition of the appearances’ (p. 167). This dedramatizes the quarrel about the empty tomb somewhat. Leon-Dufour adds that the tomb traditions ‘did not wish to report that the empty tomb was seen and that the resurrection was then believed in; they show that faith in the Resurrection was not born from the discovery of the empty tomb, but from the heavenly message; their aim is not properly biographical, but theological. In the tomb which symbolizes Death, God, through his angel, announces to the community that he has resurrected Jesus from among the dead; and, through the same mouth of the angel, the community celebrates the act of God triumphing over Death’ (p. 168). Later the tomb was connected with an appearance of Jesus (Mt, Jn) or even became itself a proof of resurrection (‘saw and believed’, Jn 20.8). The NT contains no ‘argument from the empty tomb’ as a ‘proof’ of the resurrection; it is rather a sign to be interpreted. If Paul knew of the empty tomb, ‘this memory did not seem to him indispensable nor even useful to assure the fact of the resurrection of Jesus’ (p. 170). ‘On its own, the event of the empty tomb is valueless. The Christian believes not in the empty tomb, but in the risen Christ’ (p. 171).
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The historicity of the empty tomb is argued from the unlikelihood of the witness of the women having been invented (in a patriarchal culture). Their role in Mark is to behold the empty tomb, not the Risen One. They become witnesses of an appearance of the risen One only at a late stage (Matthew and John) when the resurrection witness is already long established. So I don’t see what weight can really be given to the claim that Christianity based its resurrection witness on a most unlikely source -- an ex-possessed peasant woman. The Magdalene appearance story is for intra-Christian consumption.
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If the women are cited as the primary witnesses for the empty tomb (treating as later elaborations the Johannine account of Peter and John’s race to the tomb, its echo in the interpolated verse in Lk, 24:12, and the reference in Lk 24.24) this hardly lends tremendous credibility to the story. The primary kerygma is warranted by a list of male witnesses in Paul. The empty tomb tradition was perhaps not put forward as a primary evidence or argument for the resurrection – this may be more a modern apologetic use of it. If the early tomb were something that was thought to need witnesses, perhaps the evangelists would have supplied male witnesses (as in John), but its context might have been more devotional than apostolic, in continuity with the role of the women by the Cross.
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Actually, Matthew does supply male witnesses to the empty tomb, namely the soldiers keeping guard. Apologetic warrants begin to surround the story with Matthew and Luke, no doubt a sign of chronological distance from the apostolic generation. One might speak of a Johannine apologetic as well, but it is rooted in contemplation as in the rest of the gospel. When Luke’s risen Jesus eats or shows his wounds it is apologetic demonstration, but this note is absent in John 20 or Inconsistencies in this narrative center on the angels and the appearance of Jesus, both of which can be considered non-historical. If Mark had meant to deny an appearance to Mary Magdalene, Matthew or John would not have added it, since both had a strong motive for attributing the first appearance to Peter, argues Swinburne (p. 154). But it is not clear that they would have had this motive. John’s Gospel revels in privileged communications to women – the Samaritan, Martha – and outcasts – the paralytic, the blind man.
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Peter F. Carnley treats all three strands I have been examining as incapable of providing certitude. ‘I note that even a reasonably conservative New Testament scholar such as James D. G, Dunn acknowledges that the ‘subjective vision hypothesis’ could be one explanation of the origin of the Easter appearances tradition, given the nature of the evidence we have… We quite simply do not have the evidence to decide the mater historically’ (Davis et al., p. 35). As to the empty tomb, ‘the very diversity of viewpoint among contemporary theologians on this point is a clear indication of the fact that nobody really knows with any certainty whether the empty tomb is historically factual or legendary’ (p. 37). He proposes that the basis of resurrection faith lies at a deeper level than the issues of empty tomb and appearances. ‘St Paul speaks about, and indeed continually celebrates, the continuing _presence_ of the raised Christ as Spirit, for ‘the last Adam has become a life-giving Spirit’ (I Cor. 15: 45)… This provides us with an additional datum in the cognitive nucleus of faith, an additional empirical anchor for faith, for which we urgently need an epistemology so as to explain how it is possible to identify and know the Spirit, not just as the Spirit of God in some very general sense, but s the living Spirit of the remembered Jesus, the crucified one’ (p. 39). Church teaching might be invoked to make certain what history on its own leave uncertain, as in the case of the virginal conception of Jesus. But it could be argued that the Church’s kerygma of the Resurrection and the belief in it urged by Jesus to Thomas in John 20.27 does not concern primarily the empty tomb or the nature of the appearances; belief that the crucified one is active among us as a life-giving Spirit, in his glorified body present in a special way in the Eucharist and in his mystical body the Church contains the essence of orthodox resurrection faith; the exact status of the empty tomb and even of the appearances remains secondary to this. Carnley writes in the same peaceful, non-truculent style as Coakley. Significantly, both are Anglican clergy; Carnley was Archbishop of Perth from 1981 to 2005. Perhaps the Anglicans are the ones with the most to teach us about how to discuss these difficult topics with a spirit of mutual charity, quiet faith and responsible open-minded inquiry.
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The same spirit was found in the Dutch Church, which came to grief on bitter polarization, a danger threatening Anglicanism today. I conclude these somewhat inconclusive ruminations with the summary of resurrection-faith offered by the foremost theological voice of that Church in 1974: ‘The New Testament hermeneusis of Jesus’ resurrection -- under the stimulus of what had taken place with Jesus and, after his death, had befallen the disciples -- shattered the apocalyptic view of resurrection [the idea that one is raised merely as a condition for facing the final judgment]. Although history goes on much as before, God’s definitive saving action has been accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified-and-risen One. Jesus, who had announced the imminent rule of God, had not, despite the contradiction of his rejection and death, been wrong. With him, who during his life had identified himself with God’s cause, the coming rule of God, God has now identified himself by raising him from the dead; Jesus Christ is himself that rule of God. Unintentionally, therefore, though Jesus preached not himself but the rule and lordship of God, it was ‘himself’ that he had proclaimed: the Proclaimer is the one proclaimed. This has ushered in the ‘eschatological times’, whose characteristic mark is experience of the eschatological gift: God’s Spirit, referred to as the Spirit of Jesus’’ (Schillebeeckx, p. 543).