How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (25 page)

I begin with our early records. The oldest tradition that we have of the resurrection faith is the pre-Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, which we examined in Chapter 4. This creed says nothing about an empty tomb and indicates that the reason the disciples came to believe in the resurrection was that Jesus appeared to them. The same thing is true of Paul himself: he believed because of a vision, not because he saw an empty tomb (Gal. 1:15–16; 1 Cor. 15:8).

Several of the Gospel accounts, which were written later, present the same view. Our first Gospel is Mark; it records the “fact” that the tomb was empty, but strikingly, no one is said to come to believe that Jesus was raised because of it. Even more striking, in Luke’s account the report that the tomb was discovered to be empty was dismissed as “an idle tale” and is explicitly said not to have led anyone to believe (24:11). Only when Jesus appears to the disciples do they come to faith (24:13–53). The same view is advanced in the Gospel of John. Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb and is confused, but she does not believe. She instead thinks someone has moved Jesus’s body to a different location (20:1–13). Not until Jesus appears to her does she comes to believe (20:14–18).

These stories show what should have come as a logical surmise even without them: if someone was buried in a tomb and later the body was not there, this fact alone would not make anyone suspect that God had raised the person from the dead. Suppose you place a corpse in a rock-hewn tomb. Later the body is missing. What is your immediate thought? It is definitely
not
“resurrection.” Instead, it is “grave robbers!” Or, “someone has moved the body.” Or, “hey, I must have come to the wrong tomb.” Or something else. You do
not
think, “Oh my! This person has been exalted to the right hand of God!”

I want to stress this point in contradistinction to the view set forth by Dale Allison in a book that is otherwise a fine discussion of the resurrection of Jesus.
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But on one point (well, several others too) I disagree with him. Allison wants to maintain that if the disciples of Jesus had visions of him after his death—both Allison and I agree that they did—this would not lead them to think that Jesus was
bodily
raised from the dead unless they could examine the empty tomb to see that it was so. On the surface this view seems reasonable enough, but the problem is that it overlooks exactly who these followers of Jesus were and what they believed before the events leading up to Jesus’s death and its aftermath.

Jesus, as we have seen (and Allison agrees with this), was a Jewish apocalypticist who, among other things, agreed with other Jewish apocalypticists that at the end of this current wicked age the dead would be judged and resurrected. In Jesus’s view, the dead would be raised bodily to face judgment, either to be rewarded if they had sided with God or to be punished if they had aligned themselves with the forces of evil. This afterlife in the kingdom would entail a
bodily
resurrection.

And who were the disciples? They were followers of Jesus who, of course, accepted his apocalyptic message and themselves adopted such apocalyptic views.
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If an apocalyptic Jew of this kind were to come to believe that the resurrection of the dead had begun—for example, with the raising of God’s specially favored one, his messiah—what would that resurrection involve? It would naturally and automatically involve precisely a
bodily
resurrection. That’s what “resurrection” meant to these people. It did not mean the ongoing life of the spirit without the body. It meant the reanimation and glorification of the body. If the disciples came to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, they would have on the spot understood that this meant his body was no longer dead but had been brought back to life. They wouldn’t need an empty tomb to prove it. Of course, for them, the tomb was empty. It goes without saying and without seeing. Jesus is alive again, which means his body has been raised.

The empty tomb narratives came later—after the creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 and after the writings of Paul. In other words, they were not part of the early tradition. And even when they did come to be told and discussed, Christians realized that the empty tomb itself would not generate faith—as Mark, Luke, and John inform us. Something else did. Some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him alive after he had been crucified.

Before we proceed, it is important to be clear about the terminology I am using. When I say that some of the disciples almost certainly had “visions” of Jesus after his death, what do I mean?

I am not using the term
vision
in any particularly technical sense. By “vision” I simply mean something that is “seen,” whether it is really there or not. In other words, I am not taking a stand on the question of whether there was some kind of external reality behind what the disciples saw. Scholars who study visions speak of those that are
veridical
—meaning that a person sees something that is really there—and of those that are
nonveridical
—meaning that what a person sees is not really there. Sometimes you see a shadowy figure in your bedroom at night because someone is really there; other times you’re “just seeing things.”

When it comes to the visions of Jesus that his disciples experienced, Christian believers would typically say that there was indeed an external reality behind them. That is, Jesus really appeared to these people. Anyone with that view would probably call such veridical visions “appearances” of Jesus. Non-Christians would say that the visions were nonveridical, that there was nothing there and that the visions were, possibly, psychologically or neurophysiologically induced. Such people would probably call these visions “hallucinations.” The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
of the American Psychiatric Association defines
hallucination
as “a sensory perception that has the compelling sense of reality of a true perception but that occurs without external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ.”
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It should be noted that “sensory perception” here is understood to refer to not only “seeing,” but also to any of the other senses: hearing, feeling, smelling, and even tasting.

I am not going to take a stand on this issue of whether Jesus really appeared to people or whether their visions were hallucinations, so my case does not rise or fall depending on whether the visions were veridical or not. As an agnostic, I personally do not believe Jesus was raised from the dead and so I do not believe he “appeared” to anyone. But what I have to say about the disciples’ visions are things I could have said just as easily back in the days when I was a firm believer.

Many discussions of the resurrection are focused on just this question of whether the visions were veridical or not. Most New Testament scholars are themselves Christian and they naturally tend to take the Christian view of the matter—that the visions were bona fide appearances of Jesus to his followers. You can find such views forcefully stated in any number of publications, including the recent, and very large, books by Christian apologist Mike Licona and by renowned New Testament scholar N. T. Wright.
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But some prominent New Testament scholars argue vociferously on the other side of the question as well. For example, the German scholar and skeptic Gerd Lüdemann argues that the visions of Jesus experienced by Peter, and then later by Paul, were psychologically induced. In his view, when Jesus died his body decomposed like any other body; thus, Lüdemann says, since Christianity is rooted in the physical resurrection but Jesus actually was not physically raised, “Christian faith is as dead as Jesus.”
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And then there is the late British New Testament scholar and intellectual gadfly Michael Goulder, who argued that there are numerous occasions when people once provided supernatural explanations for things that now we can explain through science. But once a natural explanation exists for a phenomenon, we no longer need a supernatural one. For example, Goulder points out that in the Middle Ages the effects of what we now would call hysteria—paralysis, tremors, anesthesia, etc.—were attributed to demon possession. No doctor today would think she was grappling with demons when treating hysteria. Now we have a natural explanation for what once required a supernatural one. Another of his examples comes from 1588, when the English fired upon the Spanish Armada and the cannon balls at first did not penetrate the distant ships. An English captain declared that this was because of “our sins.” But as the Spanish ships got within closer range, the balls did begin to penetrate. A natural explanation (relative proximity) thus superseded the religious one (“because of our sins”), making the religious one no longer required. In Goulder’s view, the same can be said of the visions of the disciples. If we can come up with natural explanations—for example, psychologically induced hallucinations—there is no need for supernatural ones.
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I find these debates between believers and unbelievers fascinating, but for my purposes they are beside the point. Whether one believes the visions of Jesus’s followers were veridical or nonveridical, the results I think will be the same. The visions led followers of Jesus to believe he had been raised from the dead. And so I incline toward the view of Dale Allison, who maintains the following:

The situation is such, I believe, that nothing would prohibit a conscientious historian from steering clear of both theological and anti-theological assumptions, or of both paranormal and anti-paranormal assumptions, and simply adopting a phenomenological approach to the data, which do not in and of themselves demand from historians any particular interpretation. Would it be an historical sin to content oneself with observing that the disciples’ experiences, whether hallucinatory or not, were genuine experiences that they at least took to originate outside their subjectivity?
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I do not think it would be a historical sin at all to leave the matter of external stimuli—were the visions veridical or not—undecided, so that believers and unbelievers can reach common ground on the
significance
of these experiences. That is my ultimate concern.

In considering the significance of the visions of Jesus, a key question immediately comes to the fore that in my judgment has not been given its full due by most scholars investigating the issue. Why do we have such a strong and pervasive tradition that some of the disciples doubted the resurrection, even though Jesus appeared to them? If Jesus came to them, alive, after his death, and talked with them—what was there to doubt?

The reason this question is so pressing is that, as we will see, modern research on visions has shown that visions are almost always believed by the people who experience them. When people have a vision—of a lost loved one, for example—they really and deeply believe the person has been there. So why were the visions of Jesus not always believed? Or rather, why were they so consistently doubted?

Jesus does not appear to anyone in Mark’s Gospel, but he does in Matthew, Luke, John, and the book of Acts. Most readers have never noticed this, but in every one of these accounts we have rather direct statements that the disciples doubted that Jesus was raised.

In Matthew 28:17 we are told that Jesus appeared to the eleven, but “some doubted.” Why would they doubt if Jesus was right there, in front of them? We have already seen that in Luke 24, when the women report that Jesus has been raised, the disciples consider it an “idle tale” and do not believe it (24:10–11). Then, even when Jesus appears to them, he has to “prove” that he is not a spirit by having them handle him. And even that is not enough: he needs to eat a piece of broiled fish in order finally to convince them (24:37–43). So too in John’s Gospel, at first Peter and the beloved disciple do not believe Mary Magdalene that the tomb is empty; they have to see for themselves (John 20:1–10). But what is more germane, the text clearly implies that even when the disciples see Jesus, they don’t believe it is he: that is why he has to show them his hands and the wound in his side, to convince them (20:20). So too with doubting Thomas—he sees Jesus, but his doubts are overcome only when he is told to inspect the wounds physically (20:24–28).

And then comes one of the most puzzling verses in all of the New Testament. In Acts 1:3 we are told that after his resurrection Jesus spent forty days with the disciples—forty days!—showing them that he was alive by “many proofs.” Many proofs? How many proofs were needed exactly? And it took forty days to convince them?

Closely related to these doubt traditions are the scenes in the Gospels in which Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection and they don’t recognize who he is. This is the leitmotif of the famous story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13–31. These two do not realize they are talking to the person they have just been talking about, and they do not recognize Jesus until he breaks bread with them. Similarly, in John 20:14–16, Mary Magdalene is the first to see Jesus raised, but she does not immediately recognize him. She thinks she is talking with the gardener. So too in John 21:4–8, the disciples are fishing after the resurrection and Jesus appears to them on the shore and speaks with them. But they don’t realize who it is until the beloved disciple does.

What is one to make of these stories? Some readers have suggested that if the disciples had merely had “visions,” it would make sense that there was considerable doubt about what they had seen. This is an interesting point, but as I have already said, and as we will see more fully later, people who have visions tend
not
to doubt what they have seen. The most impressive thing about people who report visionary experiences in numerous different contexts is that they consistently insist, sometimes with some vehemence, that the visions were real—not made up in their heads. This applies across the board—to people who have seen loved ones after they have died (and sometimes talk to them, and hold them), to people who see great religious figures such as the Blessed Virgin Mary (whose sightings are reported and documented to an astonishing extent), to people who claim that they have been abducted by UFOs.
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People who have visions really believe them. But a number of the disciples are reported not to have believed them, until they were given “proof.”