‘The son of man is to be given up into the power of men.’
A frightening statement such as this might well provoke an instinctive rebuke from Peter and explain the bewilderment and sorrow of the disciples.
A further point to take into consideration is that despite Luke and Paul, and the Creed, the resurrection of Jesus ‘according to the Scriptures’ cannot be seen as a logical necessity within the framework of Israel’s prophetic heritage because, as has been indicated, neither the suffering of the Messiah, nor his death and resurrection, appear to have been part of the faith of first-century Judaism.
Following these somewhat disconcerting preliminaries, what exactly do the Gospels yield by way of factual evidence? What light do they throw on how the earliest traditions developed?
The main Gospel narrative reports seven events subsequent to the death of Jesus.
(1) Joseph of Arimathea deposits the body of Jesus in a rock tomb, which he closes with a rolling stone.164
(2) On the third day, at dawn, two, three, or several women, find the stone rolled back.165
(3) They enter and see a young man (Mark), or two men (Luke), wearing white garments, or an angel (Matthew), sitting (Mark, Matthew), or standing (Luke), in the tomb.166
(4) According to Matthew and Luke, but not Mark, they are frightened.167
(5) The women are told that Jesus has been raised from the dead and they are shown where his body has rested.168
(6) They are further instructed to convey a message to the disciples that Jesus is on his way to Galilee where he will be seen as already arranged. According to Luke, the women are reminded of a prediction made by Jesus in Galilee concerning his passion and suddenly remember.169
(7) Their reactions are described differently in each Gospel. They return and report the news (Luke); they run with awe and joy to make their announcement (Matthew); they rush away from the tomb, beside themselves with terror, saying nothing to anybody (Mark).170
The oldest manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel end at this point, but Matthew and Luke go on to record several appearances made by Jesus to the women, to two disciples travelling to Emmaus, to Peter and the company in Jerusalem, and to the eleven apostles on a Galilean mountain.171 It is in these stories that modern New Testament scholars, relying on Matthew and Luke, and especially on the tradition handed down by Paul,172 find the primary source of faith in the resurrection of Jesus; in their opinion, the narrative concerning the empty tomb is ‘completely secondary’, an ‘apologetic legend’ intended to ‘prove the reality of the resurrection of Jesus’.173 This explanation is nevertheless open to serious criticism. Mark, which besides being the most ancient of the Synoptic Gospels is also doctrinally the least developed, alludes to no actual apparition, but is content to present as the somewhat embarrassing basis for belief in the resurrection the evidence of three women that they heard from a white-robed youth that the body was missing from the tomb because Jesus had been raised from the dead.
There is one point in this episode on which Mark and the other Synoptists insist, namely that the tomb found empty on that Sunday morning was the one in which the body of Jesus had been placed on the previous Friday. The women did not go to the wrong grave because having followed Joseph of Arimathea they knew the site of the burial place.
Mark and Matthew are categorical and Luke is even more emphatic:
Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of Joseph . . . saw where he was laid.174
Mary of Magdala was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the grave.175
The women . . . took note of the tomb and observed how his body was laid.176
A hostile version, namely that the disciples deliberately removed the body of Jesus, is recorded by Matthew. To neutralize this accusation, he introduces the story of the guards placed by the Sanhedrin near the tomb who fainted when the angel descended in the middle of the earthquake to remove the stone, but later spread the news – after a substantial bribe from the chief priests – that while they slept his followers had come by night and stolen the body.177
The Fourth Gospel preserves a tradition to the effect that the body was taken out of its original burial place and interred somewhere else by people unconnected with Jesus’ party. Mistaking Jesus for ‘the gardener’, Mary of Magdala is supposed to have asked:
‘If it is you, sir, who removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’178
From these various records two reasonably convincing points emerge, one positive and the other negative. First, the women belonging to the entourage of Jesus discovered an empty tomb and were definite that it was the tomb. Second, the rumour that the apostles stole that body is most improbable. From the psychological point of view, they would have been too depressed and shaken to be capable of such a dangerous undertaking. But above all, since neither they nor anyone else expected a resurrection, there would have been no purpose in faking one.
It is preferable not to speculate on the disappearance of the body of Jesus during the earthquake mentioned in Matthew for it may have been more imaginary than real, a literary cliché indicating the presence of the supernatural. It is equally pointless to conjecture what part an uninvolved or hostile outsider such as ‘the gardener’ might have played.
The corollary must be, curious though this may sound, that for the historian it is Mark’s evidence, the weakest of all, that possesses the best claim for authenticity, the story brought by two women which – to quote Luke – the apostles themselves thought such ‘nonsense’ that they would not believe it.179
Christian tradition has tried to improve the argument. Luke and John introduce two male witnesses to check the women’s report,180 but this is still not enough. The closest approach to first-hand evidence is the testimony of several trustworthy men who assert that Jesus appeared to them – to the Twelve, to all the apostles, and to over five hundred brethren, in addition to the leaders of the Church, Peter and James.181 It is their collective conviction of having seen their dead teacher alive, combined with the initial discovery of the empty tomb, that provides the substance for faith in Jesus’ rising from the dead.
A final comment, as it were in parenthesis. In addition to the usual concept of resurrection, another notion appears to have existed in Galilee in New Testament times. Already in the Bible, Elisha is said to have inherited a double share of the spirit of Elijah.182 In the Gospels, John the Baptist and Jesus are both described as Elijah redivivus, and Jesus is believed by some to be the risen John the Baptist, or the reincarnation of Jeremiah or one of the old prophets.183
It is conceivable that a belief of this sort prevailing among those who continued Jesus’ ministry, including healing and exorcism, had a retroactive effect on the formation of the resurrection preaching, and liberal historians have long since seen the ‘real Easter miracle’, not in a changed Jesus, but in metamorphosed disciples.184
But in the end, when every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathizer and the critical agnostic alike – and even perhaps of the disciples themselves – are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb.
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