How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (20 page)

Moreover, historians presuppose that it is possible for us to establish, with some degree of probability, what has happened in the past. We can decide whether it is probably the case, or not, that the Holocaust happened (yes it did), that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon (yes he did), and that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed (yes he did). Historians maintain that some of the things in the past (almost) certainly happened, other things very probably happened, others somewhat probably happened, others possibly happened, others probably did not happen, others almost certainly did not happen, and so on. It is (virtually) certain that the University of North Carolina basketball team, the Tar Heels, won the national championship in 2009. It is also (virtually) certain that they got knocked out of the NCAA tournament in 2013 by Kansas. (It is
absolutely
certain that this was an enormous tragedy, but that’s a value judgment, not a historical claim.)

Related to the presupposition that it is possible to establish with degrees of probability what has happened in the past (some things more probable than others) is the assumption that “evidence” for past events exists, so reconstructing the past is not a matter of pure guesswork. And historians presuppose that some evidence is better than other evidence. Eyewitness reports are, as a rule, superior to hearsay from years, decades, or centuries later. Extensive corroboration among multiple sources that show no evidence of collaborating with one another is far better than either collaboration or noncorroboration. A source who provides disinterested off-the-cuff comments about a person or event is better than a source who makes interested claims about a person or event in order to score an ideologically driven point. What historians want, in short, are lots of witnesses, close to the time of the events, who are not biased toward their subject matter and who corroborate one another’s points without showing signs of collaboration. Would that we had such sources for all significant historical events!

These then are among the kinds of presuppositions that historians tend to share. On the other hand, some presuppositions are decidedly not at all appropriate for historians who want to establish what happened in the past. It is not appropriate, for example, for a historian to presuppose her conclusions and to try to locate only the evidence that supports those presupposed conclusions. The investigation needs to be conducted without prejudice as to its outcome, simply to see what really happened. Similarly, it is not appropriate for a historian to treat evidence as irrelevant when it does not happen to be convenient to his personal views.

Moreover—and here is where the rubber meets the road—it is not appropriate for a historian to presuppose a perspective or worldview that is not generally held. “Historians” who try to explain the founding of the United States or the outcome of the First World War by invoking the visitation of Martians as a major factor of causality will not get a wide hearing from other historians—and will not, in fact, be considered to be engaging in serious historiography. Such a view presupposes notions that are not generally held—that there are advanced life-forms outside our experience, that some of them live on another planet within our solar system, that these other beings have sometimes visited the earth, and that their visitation is what determined the outcome of significant historical events. All these presuppositions may in fact be true—there is no way for historians to know one way or the other, using the historical approach to establishing what happened in the past. But since they are presuppositions that the vast majority of us do not share, historical reconstruction cannot be based on them. Anyone who has these presuppositions has to silence them, sit on them, or otherwise squelch them when engaging in their historical investigations.

This is also true of all religious and theological beliefs that a historian happens to have: these beliefs cannot determine the outcome of a historical investigation, because they are not generally shared. This means that a historian cannot establish that the angel Moroni made revelations to Joseph Smith, as in the Mormon tradition. Such views presuppose that angels exist, that Moroni is one of them, and that Joseph Smith was particularly chosen to receive a revelation from on high. These are theological beliefs; they are not based on historical evidence. Maybe there is an angel Moroni and maybe he did reveal secret truths to Joseph Smith, but there is no way for historians to establish any of that: to do so would require accepting certain theological views that are not held by the majority of other historians—for example, those who are Roman Catholics, Reformed Jews, Buddhists, and nonreligious hard-core atheists. Historical evidence has to be open to examination by everyone of every religious belief.

The belief that a Christian miracle—any Christian miracle—happened in the past is rooted in a particular set of theological beliefs (the same is true of Jewish miracles, Muslim miracles, Hindu miracles, and so on). Without such beliefs, miracles cannot be established as having happened. Since historians cannot assume these beliefs, they cannot demonstrate historically that such miracles happened.

At the same time, in some cases in which a past miracle is narrated,
elements
of the episode may be subject to historical inquiry even if the overarching claim that God has done something miraculous cannot possibly be accepted on the basis of historical evidence (since historical evidence precludes any particular set of religious beliefs).

Let me illustrate. My grandmother firmly believed that the Pentecostal evangelist Oral Roberts could heal the sick, the diseased, and the disabled by praying over them and touching them. Now, in theory it would be possible for a historian to examine a case in which a person had symptoms of a disease before having an encounter with Oral Roberts and that they disappeared after the encounter. The historian could report that yes, apparently the person was sick before and was not sick afterward. But what the historian cannot report—if she is acting as a historian—is that Oral Roberts healed the person through the power of God. Other explanations are possible that are open to examination by scholars without any theological presuppositions required for the “divine solution”—for example, that it was a kind of psychosomatic healing (that is, the person believed so thoroughly that he would be healed that the mind healed the ailment); or that the person was only apparently healed (the next day he was again sick as a dog); or that he was not really sick in the first place; or that it was a hoax, or, well, lots of other explanations. These other “explanations” can explain the same data. The supernatural explanation, on the other hand, cannot be appealed to as a historical response because (1) historians have no access to the supernatural realm, and (2) it requires a set of theological beliefs that are not generally held by all historians doing this kind of investigation.

So too with the resurrection of Jesus. Historians can, in theory, examine aspects of the tradition. In theory, for example, a historian could look into the question of whether Jesus really was buried in a known tomb and whether three days later that same tomb was found to be empty, with no body in it. What the historian cannot conclude, as a historian, is that God therefore must have raised the body and taken it up to heaven. The historian has no access to information like that, and that conclusion requires a set of theological presuppositions that not all historians share. Moreover, it is possible to come up with perfectly sensible other solutions as to why a once-occupied tomb may have become empty: someone stole the body; someone innocently decided to move the body to another tomb; the whole story was in fact a legend, that is, the burial and discovery of an empty tomb were tales that later Christians invented to persuade others that the resurrection indeed happened.

So too the historian can look into the question of whether the disciples really had visions of Jesus after his death. People have visions all the time. Sometimes they see things that are there, and sometimes they see things that are not there. (I’ll discuss this more fully in the next chapter.) What historians cannot conclude, however, as historians, is that the disciples had visions of Jesus after he was really, actually dead and that it was because Jesus really, actually appeared to them alive after God had raised him from the dead. This conclusion would be rooted in theological presuppositions not generally held by all historians.

To press the point further, it is in theory possible even to say that Jesus was crucified, and buried, and then he was seen alive, bodily, afterward. A historian could, in theory, argue this point without appealing to divine causality—that is, without saying that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is because we do have (numerous) instances within our own world of near-death experiences, when someone apparently (or really?) dies and then wakes up again to tell the tale. Recognizing that people have such experiences does not require a belief in the supernatural. Of course, it would be a different matter if a person was dead for ninety-five years and then came back. But that never happens in near-death experiences. Instead, a person is dead, or apparently dead (however we define “dead”), for a brief time and then somehow comes back to life. Did Jesus have that kind of experience? I doubt it, but it is at least a plausible historical conclusion. What is not a plausible
historical
conclusion is that God raised Jesus into an immortal body and took him up to heaven where he sits on a throne at his right hand. That conclusion is rooted in all sorts of theological views that are not widely shared among historians, and so is a matter of faith, not historical knowledge.

At this stage it is important to stress a fundamental point. History, for historians, is not the same as “the past.” The past is everything that has happened before; history is what we can establish as having happened before, using historical forms of evidence. Historical evidence is not and cannot be based on religious and theological assumptions that some, but not all, of us share. There are lots and lots of things from the past that we cannot establish as having happened. Sometimes, this is because our sources are so paltry. (And so, for example, it is impossible to establish what my grandfather had for lunch on May 15, 1954.) Other times, it is because history, as established by historians, is based only on
shared
presuppositions. And among these shared presuppositions are not the sorts of religious and theological views that make it possible to conclude that Jesus was exalted to heaven after he died and allowed to sit at God’s right hand, never to die again. This is the traditional Christian belief, but people do not hold it on the basis of historical evidence but because they accept it by faith. For the same reason, historians cannot conclude that the thief crucified with Jesus was exalted and was the first human to enter heaven upon his death, as claimed by a Gospel known as the
Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea;
or that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to thousands of her followers, as numerous eyewitnesses attest; or that Apollonius of Tyana came to one of his followers after he ascended to heaven, as we have on the basis of eyewitness testimony reported later. All of these claims presuppose religious beliefs that cannot be part of the arsenal of historical presuppositions.

With all this in mind, what can we say—historically—about the traditions of Jesus’s resurrection? If we can’t know, historically, whether God actually raised him from the dead, what can we know? And what else can we not know? As we will see, one thing we can know with relative certainty is that the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead is the key to understanding why Christians eventually began to think of him as God. But first, what we cannot know.

I
N ADDITION TO THE
resurrection itself—the act of God by which he raised Jesus from the dead—a number of other traditions are subject to historical doubt. The two I mention here will come as a surprise to many readers. In my judgment, we cannot know that Jesus received a decent burial and that his tomb was later discovered to be empty.

These two traditions obviously stand hand-in-hand, in that the second makes no sense unless the first is historically true. No one could have discovered that Jesus was no longer in his tomb if he had never been buried in a tomb in the first place (although the reverse does not necessarily follow: in theory Jesus could have been decently buried, and the tomb was never discovered empty). And so in many respects the second claim depends on the first. Therefore, I devote more discussion to it, explaining why we cannot know on historical grounds whether Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, as the Gospels claim he did.

According to our earliest account, the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was buried by a previous unnamed and unknown figure, Joseph of Arimathea, “a respected member of the council” (Mark 15:43)—that is, a Jewish aristocrat who belonged to the Sanhedrin, which was the ruling body made up of “chief priests, elders, and scribes” (14:53). According to Mark 15:43, Joseph summoned up his courage and asked Pilate for Jesus’s body. Pilate granted Joseph his wish, and Joseph took the body from the cross, wrapped it in a linen shroud, “laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock,” and then rolled a stone in front of it (15:44–47). Mary Magdalene and another woman named Mary saw where this happened (15:48).

Let me stress that all of this—or something very much like it—needs to happen within Mark’s narrative in order for what happens next to make sense, namely, that on the day after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and two other women go to the tomb and find it empty. If there were no tomb for Jesus, or if no one knew where the tomb was, the bodily resurrection could not be proclaimed. You have to have a known tomb.

But was there one? Did Joseph of Arimathea really bury Jesus?

There are numerous reasons for doubting the tradition of Jesus’s burial by Joseph. For one thing, it is hard to make historical sense of this tradition just within the context of Mark’s narrative. Joseph’s identification as a respected member of the Sanhedrin should immediately raise questions. Mark himself said that at Jesus’s trial, which took place the previous evening, the “whole council” of the Sanhedrin (not just some or most of them—but
all
of them) tried to find evidence “against Jesus to put him to death” (14:55). At the end of this trial, because of Jesus’s statement that he was the Son of God (14:62), “they all condemned him as deserving death” (14:64). In other words, according to Mark, this unknown person, Joseph, was one of the people who had called for Jesus’s death just the night before he was crucified. Why, after Jesus is dead, is he suddenly risking himself (as implied by the fact that he had to gather up his courage) and seeking to do an act of mercy by arranging for a decent burial for Jesus’s corpse? Mark gives us no clue.
⁶
My hunch is that the trial narrative and the burial narrative come from different sets of traditions inherited by Mark. Or did Mark simply invent one of the two traditions himself and overlook the apparent discrepancy?