How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (27 page)

Do such miracles happen? Believers say yes, unbelievers say no. But it is striking and worth noting that typically believers in
one
religious tradition often insist on the “evidence” for the miracles that support their views and completely discount the “evidence” for miracles attested in some other religious tradition, even though, at the end of the day, it is the same kind of evidence (for example, eyewitness testimony) and may be of even greater abundance. Protestant apologists interested in “proving” that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary.

Jesus also appears to people today, and some of these sightings are documented by Phillip H. Wiebe in his book
Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today
(1997).
²⁰
Wiebe presents twenty-eight case studies, which he examines from psychological, neuropsychological, mentalist, and other perspectives. Included is a vision of Jesus experienced by Hugh Montefiore, a well-known New Testament scholar at Cambridge University and later bishop of the Church of England, who converted to Christianity from Judaism at age sixteen because he had a vision in which Jesus appeared to him and told him to “follow me”—words that, at the time, the young Montefiore did not know were drawn from the New Testament.

Of particular interest are instances in which Jesus is said to have appeared to entire groups of people, rather than just to an individual. No case is more intriguing than the last one Wiebe recounts, that of Kenneth Logie, a preacher in a Pentecostal Holiness Church in Oakland, California, in the 1950s. Two appearances are worth detailing. The first occurred in April 1954 when Logie was preaching at an evening service. In the middle of his sermon, around 9:15
P.M
., the door to the church opened, and Jesus walked in and came down the aisle smiling to people on the right and the left. He then walked
through
(not around) the pulpit and placed his hand on Logie’s shoulder. Logie, understandably, collapsed. Jesus spoke to him in an unknown foreign tongue, and Logie revived enough to reply to him in English, having understood what he said. Wiebe tells us that fifty people witnessed the event.

Strange things happen. But what happened five years later was even stranger. And two hundred people saw and confirmed they had seen it. And remarkably, it was captured on film. The reason it was filmed, Logie later said, was that very strange things had been happening in the church and they wanted to document them. Wiebe himself saw the film in 1965. A woman from the congregation was giving her testimony when suddenly she disappeared and was replaced by a male figure who was obviously Jesus. He was wearing sandals and a glistening white robe, and he had nail marks in his hand. His hands were dripping with oil. After several minutes, during which he apparently said nothing, he disappeared and the woman reappeared.

Unfortunately, by the time Wiebe had decided to write his book, some twenty-six years after first seeing the film of the event, the film had disappeared. Logie claimed it had been stolen. Still, Wiebe was able to find, and interview, five people who had been there and agreed that they had seen the event. Moreover, there still were surviving photographs of the other odd occurrences in the church back in 1959: images of hands, hearts, and crosses had started to appear on the church walls, with liquid like oil flowing from them and a fragrance being emitted from them. The walls were checked by a skeptic, who had no natural explanation for these appearances (no hidden windows or the like). Wiebe has seen the photographs.

Skeptics may point out that the time between when these events allegedly happened in the 1950s and Wiebe’s written account of them amounts to several decades, so one may be justified in suspecting the accuracy of the witnesses’ memories. But Wiebe points out that about the same amount of time fell between the life of Jesus and the accounts of the earliest Gospels.

Let us return to the visions that Jesus’s disciples apparently had. Christian apologists sometimes claim that the most sensible historical explanation for these visions is that Jesus really appeared to the disciples. Let me bracket for a second the question of whether a historian can conclude that a miracle probably happened in the past (the historian definitely cannot, as I’ve argued; but I’ll bracket the question for a moment). Often one hears from these apologists that the visions must be veridical because “mass hallucinations” cannot happen—so if Paul says “five hundred brothers” all saw Jesus at one time, it defies belief that this could have been imagined by all five hundred at once. There is a certain force to this argument, but it does need to be pointed out that Paul is the only one who mentions this event, and if it really happened—or even if it was widely believed to have happened—it is hard to explain why it never made its way into the Gospels, especially those later Gospels such as Luke and John that were so intent on “proving” that Jesus was physically raised from the dead.
²¹
Apart from that, most people at the end of the day believe that mass hallucinations are not only possible, but that they really can happen. Precisely those conservative evangelical scholars who claim that mass hallucinations don’t happen are the ones who deny that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to hundreds or thousands of people at once, even though we have modern, verified eyewitness testimony that she has.

Sometimes such apologists claim that a hallucination could not possibly produce the result that Jesus’s appearances did: causing a complete moral and personal transformation of the disciples. This view, too, cannot be sustained after more than a moment’s thought. In order for a vision to have its effect—to relieve guilt, to remove shame, to provide a sense of comfort, to make a person want to live again, or any other effect—it does not have to be veridical. It has to be
believed
. Some of the disciples wholeheartedly believed that they had seen Jesus after he had died. They concluded that he had been raised from the dead. That changed everything, as we will see. Whether Jesus was really there or not has no bearing on the fact that the disciples
believed
he was.

Finally, in a more scholarly vein, some people have argued that a vision of Jesus would not lead the disciples to believe that he had been raised from the dead because Judaism at the time did not have a sense that an individual would be resurrected before the “general resurrection” at the end of time, when all people would be brought back to life. This too is an interesting argument, but it also is not convincing to someone who knows something about ancient beliefs of life and the afterlife. The New Testament itself reports that Herod Antipas believed that Jesus was actually John the Baptist “raised from the dead”; therefore, some such belief was not implausible. Moreover, a belief was attested in non-Christian Jewish circles that the emperor Nero would return from the dead to wreak more havoc on the earth, as reported in a group of Jewish texts known as the
Sibylline Oracles
.
²²
It was not unthinkable that someone would come back from the dead (as, for example, Lazarus did). But anyone who was an apocalyptic Jew like Jesus’s closest follower Peter, or Jesus’s own brother James, or his later apostle Paul, who thought that Jesus had come back to life, would naturally interpret it in light of his particular apocalyptic worldview—a worldview that informed everything that he thought about God, humans, the world, the future, and the afterlife. In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom. That’s how the disciples interpreted Jesus’s resurrection. Moreover, that is why Jesus was understood to be the “first fruits” of those who had died (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:20): because he was the first to be raised, and all others were to be raised soon as well. In that sense his resurrection
was
the beginning of the general resurrection.

At the end of the day, belief in Jesus’s resurrection “works” whether the visions were veridical or not. If they were veridical, it was because Jesus was raised from the dead.
²³
If they were not veridical, they are easily explained on other grounds. The disciples were bereaved and deeply grieving for their dearest loved one, who had experienced a sudden, unexpected, and particularly violent death. They may have felt guilt about how they had behaved toward him, especially in the tense hours immediately before his death. It is not at all unheard of for such people to have an “encounter” with the lost loved one afterward. In fact, such people are more inclined to have just such an encounter. My view is that historians can’t “prove” it either way.

E
VEN THOUGH HISTORIANS CANNOT
prove or disprove the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection, it is certain that some of the followers of Jesus came to
believe
in his resurrection. This is the turning point in Christology.
Christology
, as I have said, is a term that literally means
the understanding of Christ.
My point in this chapter—indeed, in this book—is that belief in the resurrection changed everything Christologically. Before the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection, they thought he was a great teacher, an apocalyptic preacher, and, probably, the one chosen to be king in the coming kingdom of God. Since they followed him wholeheartedly, they must have subscribed to his teaching wholeheartedly. Like him, they thought the age they were living in was controlled by the forces of evil, but that God would soon intervene to make right all that was wrong. In the very near future, God was going to send a cosmic judge over the earth, the Son of Man, to destroy the wicked powers that were making life so miserable in this world and to set up a good kingdom, a utopian place where good would prevail and God would rule through his messiah. The disciples would sit on thrones as rulers in the coming kingdom, and Jesus would be seated on the greatest throne of all, as the messiah of God.

But he was purely human. He was a great teacher, yes. A charismatic preacher, yes. And even the son of David who would rule in the future kingdom, yes. But he was a man. Born like other humans, raised like other humans, in nature no different from others, only wiser, more spiritual, more insightful, more righteous, more godly. But not God—certainly not God, in any of the ancient senses of the term.

That all changed with the belief in the resurrection. When the disciples came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, they did not think it was a resuscitation such as you can find elsewhere among the Jewish and Christian traditions. In the Hebrew Bible, Elijah was said to have brought a young man back from the dead (1 Kgs. 17:17–24). But that young man went on to live his life here on earth and then he died. Later there were stories about Jesus raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead (Mark 5:21–43). She did not ascend to heaven and become immortal: she grew up, grew old, and died. Jesus allegedly raised his friend Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1–44). He too eventually died. These were all instances of resuscitation, when the body came back from the dead in order to live and then die again. They were the ancient equivalents of near-death experiences.

But that is not what the disciples believed about Jesus. The reason is clear. They believed Jesus had come back from the dead—but he was not still living among them as one of them. He was nowhere to be found. He did not resume his teaching activities in the hills of Galilee. He did not return to Capernaum to continue his proclamation of the coming Son of Man. He did not come back to engage in yet more heated controversies with the Pharisees. Jesus in a very palpable and obvious sense was no longer here. But he had come back from the dead. So where was he?

This is the key. The disciples, knowing both that Jesus was raised and that he was no longer among them, concluded that he had been exalted to heaven. When Jesus came back to life, it was not merely that his body had been reanimated. God had taken Jesus up to himself in the heavenly realm, to be with him. God had exalted him to a position of virtually unheard-of status and authority. The expectation that Jesus would be the future king in the kingdom, a human messiah, was just a foretaste of what was really in store for him. God had done something far beyond what anyone could have thought or imagined. God had taken him into the heavenly sphere and bestowed divine favor upon him such as had never, in the disciples’ opinion, been bestowed on a human before. Jesus no longer belonged to this earthly realm. He was now with God in heaven.

This is why the disciples told the stories of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances the way they did. Jesus did not resume his earthly body. He had a heavenly body. When he appeared to his disciples, in the earliest traditions, he appeared from heaven. And his heavenly body could do things no earthly body could do. In Matthew’s Gospel, when the women arrived at the tomb on the third day, the stone was not yet rolled away. It rolled away as they arrived. But the tomb was empty. That meant that Jesus’s body had been taken through solid rock. Later, when he appeared to the disciples, he walked through locked doors. Jesus had a heavenly body, not just an earthly body.

Let me return to a comment I made earlier: that even in the Gospels Jesus appears to have a heavenly body during his earthly life—one that can walk on water, for example, or be transfigured into a radiating glow in the presence of some of his disciples. But it is important to remember: these Gospels were written by believers in Jesus decades later who already “knew” that Jesus had been exalted to heaven. As storytellers told the stories of Jesus’s earthly career, year after year and decade after decade, they did not separate who Jesus was after his death—the one who had been exalted to heaven—from who he was during his life. And so their belief in the exalted Jesus affected the ways they told their stories about him. They recounted miracles that he had done as a divine human—healing the sick, casting out demons, walking on water, multiplying the loaves, raising the dead. Why could Jesus do these things? They were attributed to him by his later followers who already “knew” that he wasn’t a mere mortal because God had exalted him to heaven. As a heavenly being, Jesus was in some sense divine. The storytellers told their tales fully believing that he was uniquely divine, with that belief affecting how they told their stories.