How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (18 page)

The second question is somewhat more intellectually challenging: “If other Jews in Jesus’s day taught this apocalyptic view, then . . . why Jesus? Why is it that Jesus started Christianity, the largest religion in the world, when other apocalyptic teachers are forgotten to history? Why did Jesus succeed where others failed?”

It’s a great question. Sometimes a person asking it thinks there is an obvious answer, namely, that Jesus must have been unique and completely
unlike
all the others who proclaimed this message. He was God, and they were humans, so of course he started a new religion and they didn’t. In this line of thinking, the only way to explain the enormous success of Christianity is to believe that God actually was behind it all.

The problem with this answer is that it ignores all the other great religions of the world. Do we want to say that all great and successful religions come from God himself and that their founders were “God”? Was Moses God? Mohammed? Buddha? Confucius? Moreover, the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the ancient Roman world is not necessarily an indication that God was on its side. Those who say so should think again about other religions of our world. Just as an example: the sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that during its first three hundred years, the Christian religion grew at a rate of 40 percent every decade. If Christianity started out as a relatively small group in the first century but had some three million followers by the early fourth century—that’s a 40 percent increase every ten years. What is striking to Stark is that this is the same growth rate of the Mormon church since it started in the nineteenth century. So these mainline Christians who think that God must have been behind Christianity or it would not have grown as quickly as it did—are they willing to say the same thing about the Mormon church (which they in fact tend not to support)?

And so we are left with our question: What is it that made Jesus so special? In fact, as we will see, it was not his message. That did not succeed much at all. Instead, it helped get him crucified—surely not a mark of spectacular success. No, what made Jesus different from all the others teaching a similar message was the claim that he had been raised from the dead. Belief in Jesus’s resurrection changed absolutely everything. Such a thing was not said of any of the other apocalyptic preachers of Jesus’s day, and the fact that it was said about Jesus made him unique. Without the belief in the resurrection, Jesus would have been a mere footnote in the annals of Jewish history. With the belief in the resurrection, we have the beginnings of the movement to promote Jesus to a superhuman plane. Belief in the resurrection is what eventually led his followers to claim that Jesus was God.

You will notice that I have worded the preceding sentences very carefully. I have not said that the
resurrection
is what made Jesus God. I have said that it was the
belief
in the resurrection that led some of his followers to
claim
he was God. This is because, as a historian, I do not think we can show—historically—that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. To be clear, I am not saying the opposite either—that historians can use the historical disciplines in order to demonstrate that Jesus was
not
raised from the dead. I argue that when it comes to miracles such as the resurrection, historical sciences simply are of no help in establishing exactly what happened.

Religious faith and historical knowledge are two different ways of “knowing.” When I was at Moody Bible Institute, we affirmed wholeheartedly the words of Handel’s
Messiah
(taken from the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible): “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” But we “knew” this not because of historical investigation, but because of our faith. Whether Jesus is still alive today, because of his resurrection, or indeed whether any such great miracles have happened in the past, cannot be “known” by means of historical study, but only on the basis of faith. This is not because historians are required to adopt “unbelieving presuppositions” or “secular assumptions hostile to religion.” It is purely the result of the nature of historical inquiry itself—whether undertaken by believers or unbelievers—as I will try to explain later in this chapter.

At the same time, historians are able to talk about events that are not miraculous and that do not require faith in order to know about them, including the fact that some of the followers of Jesus (most of them? all of them?) came to
believe
that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. That belief is a historical fact. But other aspects of the accounts of Jesus’s death are historically problematic. In this chapter and the next I discuss both the facts we can know and the claims we cannot know, historically. We begin with what we are
not
able to say, either at all or with relative certainty, about the early Christian belief in the resurrection.

I
HAVE STRESSED THAT
historians, in order to investigate the past, are necessarily restricted to doing so on the basis of surviving sources. There are sources that describe the events surrounding Jesus’s resurrection, and the first step to take in exploring the rise of the Christians’ early belief is to examine these sources. The most important ones are the Gospels of the New Testament, which are our earliest narratives of the discovery of Jesus’s empty tomb and of his appearances, after his crucifixion, to his disciples as the living Lord of life. Also critical to our exploration are the writings of Paul, who affirms with real fervor his belief that Jesus was actually, physically, raised from the dead.

We have already seen why the Gospels are so problematic for historians who want to know what really happened. This is especially true for the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s resurrection. Are these the
sorts
of sources that historians would look for when examining a past event? Even apart from the fact that they were written forty to sixty-five years after the facts, by people who were not there to see these things happen, who were living in different parts of the world, at different times, and speaking different languages—apart from all this, they are filled with discrepancies, some of which cannot be reconciled. In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

These narratives are found in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20–21. Read through the accounts and ask yourself some basic questions: Who was the first person to go to the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself (John)? or Mary along with another Mary (Matthew)? or Mary along with another Mary and Salome (Mark)? or Mary, Mary, Joanna, and a number of other women (Luke)? Was the stone already rolled away when they arrived at the tomb (Mark, Luke, and John), or explicitly not (Matthew)? Whom did they see there? An angel (Matthew), a man (Mark), or two men (Luke)? Did they immediately go and tell some of the disciples what they had seen (John), or not (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? What did the person or people at the tomb tell the women to do? To tell the disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee (Matthew and Mark)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them earlier when
he
had been in Galilee (Luke)? Did the women then go tell the disciples what they were told to tell them (Matthew and Luke), or not (Mark)? Did the disciples see Jesus (Matthew, Luke, and John), or not (Mark)?
¹
Where did they see him?—only in Galilee (Matthew), or only in Jerusalem (Luke)?

There are other discrepancies, but this is enough to get the point across. I should stress that some of these differences can scarcely be reconciled unless you do a lot of interpretive gymnastics when reading the texts. For example, what does one do with the fact that the women apparently meet different people at the tomb? In Mark, they meet one man; in Luke, two men; and in Matthew, one angel. The way this discrepancy is sometimes reconciled, by readers who can’t accept that there could be a genuine discrepancy in the text, is by saying that the women actually met two angels at the tomb. Matthew mentions only one of them but never denies there was a second one; moreover, the angels were in human guise, so Luke claims they were two men; Mark also mistakes the angels as men but mentions only one, not two, without denying there were two. And so the problem is easily solved! But it is solved in a very curious way indeed, for this solution is saying, in effect, that what really happened is what is not narrated by
any
of these Gospels: for none of them mentions two angels! This way of interpreting the texts does so by imagining a new text that is unlike any of the others, so as to reconcile the four to one another. Anyone is certainly free to construct their own Gospel if they want to, but that’s probably not the best way to interpret the Gospels that we already have.

Or take a second example—one that is even more glaring. Matthew is explicit when he says that the disciples are told to go to Galilee since that is where they will meet Jesus (28:7). They do so (28:16), and that is where Jesus meets them and gives them his final commands (28:17–20). This is both clear-cut and completely at odds with what happens in Luke. There, the disciples are not told to go to Galilee. The women are informed at the empty tomb, by the two men, that when Jesus had earlier
been
in Galilee, he had announced that he would be raised. Since the disciples are not told to go to Galilee, they do not do so. They stay in Jerusalem, in the land of Judea. And it is there that Jesus meets them “that very day” (24:13). Jesus speaks with them and emphatically instructs them
not
to leave the city until they receive the power of the Spirit, which happens more than forty days later, according to Acts 1–2 (that is, they are
not
to go to Galilee; 24:49). He leads them right outside Jerusalem, to nearby Bethany, and gives them his last instructions and departs from them (24:50–51). And we learn they did as he commanded: they stayed in the city, worshiping in the temple (24:53). In the book of Acts, written by the same author as the book of Luke, we find out that they stayed in Jerusalem for more than a month, until the day of Pentecost (Acts 1–2).

There is clearly a discrepancy here. In one Gospel the disciples immediately go to Galilee, and in the other they never go there. As New Testament scholar Raymond Brown—himself a Roman Catholic priest—has emphasized: “Thus we must reject the thesis that the Gospels can be harmonized through a rearrangement whereby Jesus appears several times to the Twelve, first in Jerusalem, then in Galilee. . . . The different Gospel accounts are narrativing, so far as substance is concerned, the
same
basic appearance to the Twelve, whether they locate it in Jerusalem or in Galilee.”
²

Later we will explore further how this discrepancy matters for reconstructing the actual course of events. For now it is enough to note that the earliest Gospels say that when Jesus was arrested, his disciples fled the scene (Mark 14; Matt. 24:46). And the earliest accounts also suggest that it was in Galilee that they had visions of Jesus alive after the crucifixion (intimated in Mark 14:28; stated in Matthew 24). The most plausible explanation is that when the disciples fled the scene for fear of arrest, they left Jerusalem and went home, to Galilee. And it was there that they—or at least one or more of them—claimed to see Jesus alive again.

Some people have argued that if Jesus really was raised from the dead, it would have been such a spectacular event that of course in their excitement the eyewitnesses would have gotten a few details muddled. But my points in the discussion so far are rather simple. First, we are not dealing with eyewitnesses. We are dealing with authors living decades later in different lands speaking different languages and basing their tales on stories that had been in oral circulation during all the intervening years. Second, these accounts do not simply have minor discrepancies in a couple of details; they are clearly at odds with one another on point after point. They are not the kinds of sources that historians would hope for in determining what actually happened in the past. What about the witness of Paul?

Paul speaks of the resurrection of Jesus constantly throughout the seven letters that scholars agree he actually wrote.
³
No passage states Paul’s views more clearly or forcefully than 1 Corinthians 15, the so-called resurrection chapter. In this chapter Paul is not intent on “proving” that Jesus was raised from the dead, as it is sometimes misread. Instead, he is assuming, with his readers, that Jesus really was raised; and he is using that assumption to make his bigger point, which is this: since Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, it is clear that his followers—despite what Paul’s Christian opponents are saying—have not yet experienced the future resurrection. The resurrection for Paul is not a spiritual matter unrelated to the body, as it was for some of his opponents. It is precisely the body that will be raised immortal on the last day, when Jesus returns in triumph from heaven. The Christians in Corinth therefore are not experiencing, in the here and now, the glories of the resurrected life. That is yet to come, when their bodies will be raised.

Paul begins his discussion of the resurrection of Jesus, and the future resurrection of believers, by citing a standard Christian confession, or creed (i.e., a statement of faith), that was already known to his readers (as he himself indicates):

³
For I handed over to you among the most important things what I also had received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,
⁴
and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures;
⁵
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve;
⁶
then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, many of whom survive until now, though some have fallen asleep.
⁷
Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles;
⁸
and last of all he appeared even to me, as to one untimely born. (1 Cor. 15:3–8)