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What evidence exists for the resurrection of Jesus?
Post-death and pre-resurrection, what evidence exists Jesus' spirit visitation to the Spirit world where those who have died await the reuniting of their spirits to their bodies, i.e. their own resurrections?
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A Story that Grew in the Telling
The source evidence that exists that purports to show that Jesus "rose from the dead" actually indicates how this idea most likely developed and evolved over time. It indicates that the idea that Jesus was somehow "resurrected" was a way his followers dealt with his sudden and unexpected execution and that this idea developed from an abstract one into one of a more concrete, physical revivification. The contradictions in the various accounts, which date from the 50s AD through to the 90s-100 AD, show this process of development.
The Nature and Date of the Sources
Firstly, it should be noted that only one of the references to or accounts of the resurrection appearances is first hand. The earliest account, in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, says he saw the risen Jesus in a vision, which seems to be a reference to his vision of Jesus that he he also refers to in Galatians 1:11 and which is described by a later writer in more (though differing) detail in Acts 9, 22 and 26. All other references to or accounts of people seeing the risen Jesus are at least second hand: Paul talks about others seeing Jesus in 1Corinthians 15 (James, Peter, "the Twelve", "all the apostles" and "more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time"). Then there are the stories of appearances in the gospels of Mark (Mark 16), Matthew (Matt 28), Luke (Luke 24) and John (John 20).
Despite attempts by conservative scholars and fundamentalist apologists to argue otherwise, most scholars agree that none of the gospel accounts were written by anyone who actually knew and followed Jesus in his lifetime and that all were written a generation or more after his execution and at one or more removes from any eye-witnesses. gMark is generally dated to after 70 AD, gMatt and gLuke to the 80s AD and gJohn to sometime after 90 AD or as late as 120 AD. Jesus was executed in the early 30s AD and the idea that he had "risen" arose very soon afterwards.
So what we have here are five accounts of people seeing the "risen Jesus" after his death, the earliest written about 20 years later and the others written at a distance of 40-90 years after the supposed event. Only one is by an eye-witness and he makes it clear that what he saw was a vision, with later accounts of this vision talking about a heavenly light and a disembodied voice. The other accounts are very different to this and substantially different to each other, as we will see. They are also at least second hand in nature and at increasing distances in time from the supposed events.
Miracles and Apotheosis in the Ancient Mediterranean World
It should first be noted that miracle stories are not uncommon in the literature of this period. Ancient people believed in a world permeated by the supernatural and readily accepted stories of miracles and believed in stories of visions and visitors from the world of the divine all the time. Even very sober and sometimes sceptical historians like Tacitus will pass on accounts of miracles that he clearly accepts and expects his audience to believe as historical.
So when we read stories of how the emperor Augustus was miraculously conceived by the god Apollo, or how his birth was presaged by a new star in the heavens, or how Julius Caesar was seen ascending into the heaven after his death or how Vespasian healed lame and blind people who asked him for a miracle, we accept that these stories represent the kinds of things ancient people genuinely believed about great men. Or we accept that they are at least told to indicate that the man in question was great. What we don't do is accept that simply because people believed these stories they must mean that they really happened.
And this is even when the stories are presented to us by a very careful historian and given to us as verified fact. Take Tacitus' account of the miracles of the emperor Vespasian:
"In the months during which Vespasian was waiting at Alexandria for the periodical return of the summer gales and settled weather at sea, many wonders occurred which seemed to point him out as the object of the favour of heaven and of the partiality of the Gods. One of the common people of Alexandria, well known for his blindness, threw himself at the Emperor's knees, and implored him with groans to heal his infirmity. This he did by the advice of the God Serapis, whom this nation, devoted as it is to many superstitions, worships more than any other divinity. .... And so Vespasian, supposing that all things were possible to his good fortune, and that nothing was any longer past belief, with a joyful countenance, amid the intense expectation of the multitude of bystanders, accomplished what was required. The hand was instantly restored to its use, and the light of day again shone upon the blind. Persons actually present attest both facts, even now when nothing is to be gained by falsehood." (Histories, IV, 81)
Tacitus was closely connected to the court of Vespasian's sons and successors, Titus and Domitian, and so in a position to know the "persons actually present" and to consult them long after Vespasian's death "when nothing is to be gained by falsehood". He was also a very careful historian who scorned those who took rumour and stories as fact without checking them against sources and eye witnesses and who condemned those who "catch eagerly at wild and improbable rumours in preference to genuine history" (Annals, IV,11).
Despite this, I don't know anyone who would read the account above and conclude that the emperor really had magical healing powers and genuinely used his supernatural abilities to heal people. The fact that even a judicious and often sceptical analyst like Tacitus accepted this story shows us just how readily people in the ancient world accepted claims of the miraculous.
One form of miracle that was widely believed in was the idea of apotheosis, where a great man is physically taken up in to the heavens and raised to divine status. It was claimed that Romulus, the founder of Rome, underwent this process and later appeared to his friend Julius Proculus to declare his new celestial status. The same claim was made about Julius Caesar and Augustus, with supposed witnesses observing their ascent into the heavenly realm. Lucian's satire The Passing of Peregrinus includes his scorn for the claim that the philosopher was taken up into the celestial realm and was later seen walking around on earth after his death. The Chariton novel Callirhoe has its hero Chaereas visiting the tomb of his recently dead wife, saying he "arrived at the tomb at daybreak" where he "found the stones removed and the entrance open. At that he took fright." Others are afraid to enter the tomb, but Chaereas goes in and finds his wife's body missing and concludes she has been taken up by the gods.
An even closer parallel to the stories of Jesus' resurrection can be found in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana. The teacher and miracle worker Apollonius speaks in advance of his coming life after death and even tells his followers where he will meet them after he dies - the town of Dicaiarchia, near Naples. After meeting them there he continues to appear to them and teach them for forty days. At one point one of his followers, Demetrios, doubts that it is really Apollonius back from the dead speaking to them so the teacher encourages him to put out his hand and touch him to prove he is not a phantom. Apollonius later ascends into heaven, though he does later appear again in a dream vision to convince a doubter. The parallels between these stories and those of Jesus are obvious, though it is not certain if Philostratus may have been influenced by the Jesus stories, so it is hard to know how significant the parallels with Apollonius are. Details aside, what is clear is the idea of a great man being taken up into heaven and appearing after his death was commonplace in the ancient world.
Resurrection in the Jewish Tradition
In Jesus' time, the concept of people rising from the dead was clearly current and a hot theological topic. Many Jews of the time generally believed in some kind of coming redemptive intervention in history by God - what Jesus referred to as the "coming of the kingship/kingdom of God/Heaven". The idea was that Israel had been conquered and oppressed by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Syrians and Romans in rapid succession because God had withdrawn from the world and abandoned his "Chosen People" due to their sins. But the belief developed that this punishment would come to an end when enough of his people repented and God chose to reassert his authority, smite the unrighteous, save the righteous and (with his anointed Messiah) usher in a new, perfect age with a renewed earth.
The problem with this idea was that this seemed fine for the generation who happened to be alive when God finally chose to intervene in history, but it did not seem fair the poor righteous Jews who had already suffered through the period in which Israel was being afflicted and died without seeing the dawning of the new age. So the idea developed that there was going to be a general "resurrection of the dead" when the kingdom of God began, where all the dead would rise to be judged by God and the Messiah, with the wicked being cast into Hell and the resurrected righteous living in redeemed glory in the new age.
Not everyone accepted this new teaching. The Sadducees thought it was heretical, which is why the gospels depict them trying to trap Jesus with a trick question regarding this supposed resurrection (see Mark 12:18-27) And Jesus' reply shows that he clearly accepted the idea of a general resurrection.
So Jesus' followers clearly believed in the coming general resurrection and the idea of resurrection was closely associated with the coming new age of God's renewal.
Christian apologists and conservative scholars have tried to argue that, while there was a belief in a coming general resurrection, the idea of a individual rising from the dead as a pre-figurement of this was unknown and would have been unthinkable to Jews in this period. Therefore the idea that the concept of Jesus' resurrection arose out of this expectation is invalid. The conservative scholar N.T. Wright argues:
By Jesus’s day many Jews had come to hope that some day in the future there would be a bodily resurrection of all the righteous, when God renewed the entire world and removed all suffering and death. The resurrection, however, was merely one part of the complete renewal of the whole world, according to Jewish teaching. The idea of an individual being resurrected, in the middle of history, while the rest of the world continued on burdened by sickness, decay, and death, was inconceivable.
This is a very strange thing for Wright to claim, since the gospel themselves depict several such resurrections - the raising of the daughter of Jarius (Mark 5:21-43), that of the young man from Nain (Luke 7:11-17) and that of Lazarus (John 11:1-44) - as pre-figuring the coming general resurrection when God reasserts his kingship.
Furthermore, the gospels also depict people believing that John the Baptist rose from the dead after his execution and even that Jesus was the risen John (see Mark 6:14 and Mark 8:27-28). This makes sense, since it is clear that John the Baptist's sect continued long after his death - in Acts 19:1-3 Paul meets people in Ephesus in Greece who had been baptised by followers of John. The idea that John had risen from the dead came from the belief in the coming general resurrection. Obviously the concept of a prophet rising from the dead as a pre-figurement of the coming kingdom of God was very much in the air when Jesus was executed.
So just as the idea of a great man dying and being taken up into the heavens and later appearing to his followers was current in the Greco-Roman world, the idea of resurrection was a hot topic in the Jewish world. As was the idea of a individual rising from the dead as a pre-figurement of the imminent coming general resurrection. With the stories of the resurrection of Jesus, we see all these ideas coming together.
The Evolution of the Resurrection Stories
The fact that the five accounts we have of Jesus' resurrection are written over a period from 50 to about 120 AD means that we have five separate snapshots of what the first Christians were saying about their belief that Jesus had risen from the dead. By examining the clear differences in these accounts, we can get some idea of how the story and therefore the idea of the resurrection of Jesus developed and grew.
Paul (c. 50 AD)
The earliest account is in Paul's first letter to the Jesus sect community he founded in Corinth, written some time in the 50s AD:
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1Cor 15:3-8)
The first thing worth noting here is that fact that Paul includes himself in his list of those to whom the risen Jesus "appeared". Both his references to his encountering the risen Jesus and the three (slightly different) description of this encounter in Acts all make it clear that this was a vision - a light from heaven and a disembodied voice - not an encounter with a physically-revived former corpse returned to life. The verb Paul uses for all these appearances he mentions is the same one - ὤφθη meaning "appeared, was seen" - in each case. He makes no distinction between the appearance of Jesus to him and the appearances to others.
Paul then goes on to scold some of the Corinthians for saying there was not going to be a general resurrection of the dead - as already noted above, this idea was not universally accepted by all Jews and it seems to have become disputed in the Corinthian community of the Jesus sect. Paul asks "if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" (v. 12) and goes on to call Jesus' resurrection "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep", ie the pre-figurement of the coming general resurrection. He goes on to address the question of whether this coming resurrection will involve the rising of physical bodies and says in response "How foolish!". Then he goes on to explain that the coming general resurrection will not be physical but involve "spiritual bodies".
If Jesus' resurrection is the pre-figurement of the coming general resurrection of the dead, therefore, it is clear that for Paul his rising did not involve a physical body. This is why Paul's references to and insistence on the fact of the rising of Jesus makes no mention of the evidence of a physical revivification of his dead body that features in some of the later accounts: the empty tomb, discarded grave cloths, people touching Jesus, Jesus eating and his physical form flying up into heaven. For Paul, at this early stage of the development of the story, the risen Jesus is a spiritual concept involving visions, not physical encounters.
Gospel of Mark (c. 70 AD)
Twenty or so years after Paul's accounts, the writer of gMark tells a different story. Mark 15 ends with Jesus' body being laid in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea and Mark 16 depicts three women - "Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome" (v. 1) - going to the tomb two days later to anoint the body. On the way there they ask each other “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark 16:3), which should strike most readers as a question they should have asked before they set out, if this story was historical.
On arriving though they find the stone already moved and inside they find "a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side" (Mark 16:5) who tells them Jesus had risen and that they should tell Peter and the other disciples that Jesus had gone on to meet them in Galilee. In this account the women are afraid and so say nothing to anyone.
This is where the gospel ends, though this abrupt ending without any appearance by the risen Jesus seems to have been unsatisfactory for many and so a longer ending was tacked on later (Mark 16:9-20). This contains elements found in the gMatt and gLuke versions of the story, including the appearance of Jesus on the road to Emmaus and his ascension into heaven. These added verses do not appear in the earliest manuscripts and are universally acknowledged to be a later addition.
Differences between the gMark version and the later accounts will be dealt with below, but the details of the tomb here are worth considering more closely. First of all, Mark 15 goes to some effort to emphasise that the tomb belonged to "Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council". If he was a member of the Sanhedrin he would have been a wealthy man and possibly an aristocrat. This may be a historical detail, but gMark's account of Jesus' death is a patchwork of deliberate references to the Old Testament, especially the "Suffering Servant" passages in Isaiah. And they included Isaiah 53:9:
"He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death"
This makes it possible that this element is just another one added to the story to make it fit the "prophecies" better.
Secondly, the use of the word ἀποκυλίω (to roll away) indicates that the stone closing the tomb in the gMark account is meant to be round. A survey of First Century Jewish rock cut and cave tombs by Amos Kloner found that 98% of them were closed by square stones prior to 70 AD, with only four of the surveyed sites closed by a rolling round stone. After 70 AD, however, round stones became far more common. So this detail seems to be indicating the kind of tomb in the later First Century, given that a tomb of this style was exceedingly rare in Jesus' time. This could just be the writer of gMark indicating the kind of tomb in the time he was writing or it could be that the tomb itself, an element conspicuous by its absence in Paul's version, was an addition to the story.
Gospel of Luke (c. 80 AD)
In gLuke we get a story similar to that of gMark (which was used by the writer of gLuke as his main source), but differing in some key details. In this version it is "Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them" (Luke 24:10) who go to the tomb - the "Salome" of gMark is not mentioned and here Joanna is added to the list. The gMark version gave no hint of any "others" and only indicated three women, though here we have an unspecified number with only three of them named.
In this version, the women enter the tomb, find it empty and then go "wandering about", without meeting anyone inside. Instead, they meet "two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning" (Luke 24:4), as opposed to gMark's single young man "in a white robe". They bow down before these two men and, as in the gMark account, they are told Jesus is risen and going ahead to Galilee.
In this version, instead of telling no-one as in gMark, they "told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others" (Luke 24:9) but aren't believed.
Luke 24:13-34 then tells the story of two unnamed disciples travelling to Emmaus and being joined by the risen Jesus, "but they were kept from recognizing him" (v. 16). Only after he explains the resurrection to them do they see that it was Jesus and "their eyes were opened" but Jesus suddenly disappears (Luke 24: 31).
Finally Jesus appears suddenly among all of the disciples in Jerusalem. They think he is a ghost, so he invites them to touch him and then eats some fish to show he is corporeal. He then goes out with them to Bethany and suddenly "he left them and was taken up into heaven" (Luke 24: 51).
Here we have a much more overtly dramatic and detailed story, with the young man in white becoming two men in lightning-bright robes who the women recognise as celestial. Apart from other details, there is a strong emphasis on Jesus being physically risen, though his appearing and disappearing and the fact that he is initially not recognised are odd elements. Finally we get his ascension into heaven, since if Jesus is physically risen there has to be some explanation as to where he went afterwards.
Gospel of Matthew (c. 80 AD)
Like the author of gLuke, the writer of gMatt also used gMark as his primary source. But the gMatt version differs markedly from both the others. The three women of gMark and the unspecified number in gLuke have now become simply "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary" (Matt 28:1). In the other two gospels, the women are specifically going to the tomb to anoint the body. This is strange, because the Jewish custom was to do this at burial - there is no evidence of people ever doing it afterwards. Given Jewish taboos about dead bodies, it is a very unlikely thing for them to do. The writer of gMatt seems to have been much more conversant with Jewish customs than the other two authors, so in his version no spices or anointing is mentioned and they are simply going to "look at the tomb".
The single young man in white and the two men in shining robes are replaced in this account, however, with a much more dramatic scene:
There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. (Matt 28:2-4)
Here the story has changed completely. The writer of gMatt prefaced this account with a story about the chief priests asking Pilate for permission to place a guard on the tomb to prevent Jesus' followers from stealing his body and pretending he rose from the dead. This is the guard mentioned here, even though there is no hint of any guard in any other account and despite the fact this would be a rather significant part of any account if it were historical.
Now, instead of finding the stone already rolled back and meeting men in white or in robes that shine like lightning, the women see an angel in white with an "appearance like lightning" descend from heaven. Added to these rather noticeable details is an earthquake - something else the other accounts neglect to mention.
Again, the angel delivers the message about the risen Jesus going ahead to Galilee. But in this version, as they leave, Jesus himself appears to them and they "clasped his feet and worshipped him" (Matt 28:9). Jesus repeats the angel's message.
Matt 28:11-15 describes the sequel of the guard story, where the guards tell the chief priests what they saw and the priests, rather remarkably, ignore this eye witness account and tell the guards to say they saw the disciples steal Jesus' body - "this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day". This rather implausible addition to the story seems to have been added purely as an apologetic counter to this Jewish allegation.
The gMatt account ends with Jesus appearing to the disciples in Galilee, though with the strange note that, despite seeing Jesus alive with their own eyes, "some doubted" (Matt 28:17). This version makes no reference to Jesus ascending into heaven and places far less emphasis on Jesus being physically risen.
As in gMark, the tomb in the gMatt account has a round stone that is rolled, in the style of late First Century tombs.
Gospel of John (c.90-120 AD)
The latest of the accounts, in gJohn, is by far the most detailed and differs markedly from the earlier synoptic gospels in most respects. Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb again in this version (she is one of the very few common elements in all of the gospel versions, though she is not mentioned by Paul). This time she tells Peter and the "disciple Jesus loved" (John 20:2). They run to the tomb and see it is empty and then leave. Mary stays in the garden, weeping, until she sees Jesus who she does not recognise and mistakes for the gardener. When she realises who he is he tells her not to touch him and that he is going to ascend into heaven (John 20:17). She goes and tells the others.
That evening Jesus appears among the disciples despite the door being locked. Thomas is not there and doubts when he is told Jesus has risen, but Jesus appears again and offers to let Thomas touch his wounds to prove it's him (John 20:24-29). This version ends there.
Analysis
If the various differing resurrection accounts are read in chronological order, we can see the story growing and evolving over time. Paul's account is of visions of a spiritual risen Jesus, whereas by the time the gospels are written, the story has become one of (in at least some sense) a corporeal resurrection with an empty tomb. But the gospel accounts differ widely on all other elements and include things not even hinted at in Paul's earliest account. This chart details the key elements, showing which are found in what account:
As can be seen, there is no element found in all five accounts. The closest we get is "Appears to the Twelve" (found in all except gMark) and "Sunday appearance" and "Magdalene" (both found in all except Paul).
Some of these differences are reasonably explainable. Paul's account focuses on who witnessed the risen Jesus, not where or when they did so. So it perhaps makes sense that he did not say whether they saw him in Jerusalem or in Galilee or that he did not specify that it was on the Sunday following his death, while the more narrative accounts in the gospels do specify these things. But there are still clear differences that are far more difficult to explain.
Christian apologists who attempt to reconcile and harmonise all these elements often argue that some gospels are simply emphasising certain appearances over others. Therefore, they argue, Jesus could have appeared in both Galilee and Jerusalem, with some gospels mentioning one but not the other. This is at least possible, but would involve at least one trip from Jerusalem to Galilee (not mentioned in several gospels) and then back to Jerusalem for the ascension from Bethany (also not mentioned in several gospels).
Less convincingly, apologists try to argue away the clear differences by appealing to "different perspectives". Just as separate witnesses to a car accident recall different details and emphasise different elements, they argue, doesn't mean they aren't describing the same event. So, they claim, one witness may say a car was green and another blue or one may mention something another ignores, but they essence of their accounts is the same.
This may explain some differences, like the lack of an ascension story, or a few details, like which women were there or who they spoke to. But it is hard to see why all but one account mentioned significant elements like the earthquake, the guards and the descending angel.
Less conservative Christians admit that the differing versions represent a story developing in the telling. Some still maintain, despite this, that there was an empty tomb and that Jesus physically rose from the dead. Others acknowledge that Paul's early account seems to represent the original belief - in visions of a purely spiritual resurrection - and talk about "the resurrection event" as more of a mystical realisation that the later gospel accounts make more concrete.
Non-Christian scholars, of course, note that the story seems to grow more concrete and more detailed and/or dramatic over time. Paul's account of a series of visions in the 50s AD has evolved into gJohn's intimate portraits of personal, physical encounters or gMatt's dramatic earthquakes and angels stories. They conclude that, given the cultural context of the time in both the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds, these accounts are just stories, not history.
The Psychology of Resurrection Belief
Apologists trying to defend the varied accounts of the resurrection as historical like to challenge the idea that these are just stories by claiming that something must have happened to turn the despondent and demoralised disciples after Jesus' execution into confident evangelists. They argue that if there had been no resurrection then his followers would simply have drifted back to their old lives, whereas they seem to have, fairly rapidly, not only become enthusiastic proclaimers of this risen Jesus but prepared to die for this belief. This, they argue, shows that their belief in his resurrection had a dramatic historical basis.
While this sounds plausible from a common-sense perspective, it actually does not fit with sociological and psychological studies of what happens when prophetic or millennial expectations are suddenly dashed. These studies of groups with prophetic or apocalyptic expectations show that this kind of sudden and powerful turnaround is actually extremely common and explainable by group psychology.
The classic psychological study of this phenomenon is Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter's When Prophecy Fails, which analyses a case study of a UFO cult that expected the end of the world in December 1954. When the cataclysm and expected alien rescue for the believers did not eventuate, the core of the cult managed to reinterpret the failure into a victory by saying their faith had led God to spare the world. So total failure suddenly transformed into a great victory. We can see various other examples of this phenomenon - eg the Jehovah's Witnesses' repeated reinterpretations of their predictions of the end of the world when it failed to happen or the reaction of New Age believers when the recent "2012 Mayan Prophecy" turned out to be wrong.
So we can actually expect that when Jesus did not usher in some cosmic world-changing event in Jerusalem, as his followers seem to have expected, and instead got captured and horribly executed, his followers would have gone through a similar process of reinterpretation. The alternative would have been to hike back north to Galilee and sheepishly admit that the guy they had left their homes and families to follow was simply another failed Messianic claimant, and Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter's study shows that the more cult followers have invested in the truth of an expectation the greater the psychological incentive for them to find a way to reinterpret it when it fails to eventuate. The desire for the reinterpretation of the prophetic disappointment is proportionate to (i) the investment in the prophecy/expectation by the believer and (ii) the intensity of the disappointment. The higher both are the more the believer is likely to embrace the new interpretation with increased fervour. And in the case of the core of Jesus' followers, both would have been very high.
So the dilemma for Jesus' followers in the wake of his crucifixion was how to reconcile what seemed like comprehensive proof that he was not the Messiah into some kind of belief that he was. This was quite a challenge, given the expectation that the Messiah was going to overthrow the unrighteous and usher in God's glorious re-emergence and direct rule over the earth. Clearly that had not happened, so they turned to their scriptures to find a way to reconcile his death with their expectations.
The main book they turned to was Isaiah, or rather to the section of it referred to a "Deutero-Isaiah" (ie Chapters 40-66) which is seen by most scholars as an addition to the original work. These chapters contain what are referred to as "the Suffering Servant Songs" - four sections in Isaiah about a servant of God who sacrifices himself for the good of Israel. At the time, the "Servant" figure was interpreted as a personification of righteous Jews generally (and that is how he is still interpreted by Jews today), but the earliest Jesus sect came to see the "Servant" passages as a prophecy of Jesus and his death. They looked at passages like this and read them as prophetic references to Jesus as Messiah:
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)
It is important to note that these sections of Isaiah were not interpreted this way before and don't seem to have been seen as Messianic prophecies at all before the Jesus sect began to present them this way. This seems to be the origin of the idea of a dying Messiah - something not seen in Judaism before. The idea became that Jesus, as the "Suffering Servant" portrayed in Isaiah, had taken on the sins of Israel and died to purify the nation and prepare for the coming kingship of God. Already established ideas about the Messiah appearing at the right hand of God when the apocalypse came were now interpreted as Jesus returning in triumph when the epoch-changing event happened, which his followers still expected was "soon". All this salvaged their expectations about the coming apocalypse from the wreckage of the crucifixion and gave them a revived and renewed focus on their previous ideas. This is why the gospels actually depict Jesus explicitly explaining all this to them (eg Mark 10:32-34)
and the disciples (inexplicably) not understanding what he is saying.
The "Suffering Servant" passages seemed to fit the death of Jesus in some ways and the gospel writers also seem to have written their accounts to make them fit even better (thus the rich man's tomb element in gMark discussed above). Other parts of the Isaiah passages do not fit at all - such as the part where the "Servant" is said to live a long life and look on many of his children (Isaiah 53:10) - so these parts are left out of the reinterpretation of these passages.
As with the sects studied by Festinger et al, the earliest Jesus sect was able to use their reinterpretations of their scriptures to turn the disaster of Jesus' execution into a victory. They came to see Jesus' death as a redemptive sacrifice and to believe that he had gone on to heaven and would soon return as the celestial Messiah described in the Book of Daniel and Book of Enoch to usher in the final victory of the kingdom of God.
Conclusion
That people saw "the risen Christ" after his crucifixion is the only element that is clearly found in all five of the accounts analysed above. This fits with what we know about people who have experienced the sudden, traumatic death of a loved one - it is actually a very common experience for people in these circumstances. And the group psychology of prophetic/millennial expectation would provide the atmosphere where such visions would become part of the reinterpretation of the earlier expectations of the Jesus sect, following the trauma of his execution.
Paul's early account makes it clear that these were spiritual "appearances" - visions like his, not physical encounters. The later gospel accounts also clearly indicate a story that is accumulating details and narrative elements. The Jewish theological context of expectations of a coming general resurrection provided the religious background for the idea that Jesus had somehow "risen" and gone on to heaven. And the Greco-Roman context provided literary narrative tropes of the great man who is raised to heaven, the teacher who revisits his followers after death and the evidence of an empty tomb as proof of apotheosis that we find in the various gospel accounts.
These elements converged in the story of the "risen Jesus" and, in doing so, helped turn a small Jewish apocalyptic sect into a Greco-Roman mystery religion and then into a world faith. But the evidence, objectively analysed in its historical context, does not support the idea that Jesus actually rose from the dead. It is a story, and one that grew in the telling.
Written 2 Feb, 2013. 20,594 views.
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Arsène Hodali
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What evidence exists for the resurrection of Jesus?
Post-death and pre-resurrection, what evidence exists Jesus' spirit visitation to the Spirit world where those who have died await the reuniting of their spirits to their bodies, i.e. their own resurrections?
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A Story that Grew in the Telling
The source evidence that exists that purports to show that Jesus "rose from the dead" actually indicates how this idea most likely developed and evolved over time. It indicates that the idea that Jesus was somehow "resurrected" was a way his followers dealt with his sudden and unexpected execution and that this idea developed from an abstract one into one of a more concrete, physical revivification. The contradictions in the various accounts, which date from the 50s AD through to the 90s-100 AD, show this process of development.
The Nature and Date of the Sources
Firstly, it should be noted that only one of the references to or accounts of the resurrection appearances is first hand. The earliest account, in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, says he saw the risen Jesus in a vision, which seems to be a reference to his vision of Jesus that he he also refers to in Galatians 1:11 and which is described by a later writer in more (though differing) detail in Acts 9, 22 and 26. All other references to or accounts of people seeing the risen Jesus are at least second hand: Paul talks about others seeing Jesus in 1Corinthians 15 (James, Peter, "the Twelve", "all the apostles" and "more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time"). Then there are the stories of appearances in the gospels of Mark (Mark 16), Matthew (Matt 28), Luke (Luke 24) and John (John 20).
Despite attempts by conservative scholars and fundamentalist apologists to argue otherwise, most scholars agree that none of the gospel accounts were written by anyone who actually knew and followed Jesus in his lifetime and that all were written a generation or more after his execution and at one or more removes from any eye-witnesses. gMark is generally dated to after 70 AD, gMatt and gLuke to the 80s AD and gJohn to sometime after 90 AD or as late as 120 AD. Jesus was executed in the early 30s AD and the idea that he had "risen" arose very soon afterwards.
So what we have here are five accounts of people seeing the "risen Jesus" after his death, the earliest written about 20 years later and the others written at a distance of 40-90 years after the supposed event. Only one is by an eye-witness and he makes it clear that what he saw was a vision, with later accounts of this vision talking about a heavenly light and a disembodied voice. The other accounts are very different to this and substantially different to each other, as we will see. They are also at least second hand in nature and at increasing distances in time from the supposed events.
Miracles and Apotheosis in the Ancient Mediterranean World
It should first be noted that miracle stories are not uncommon in the literature of this period. Ancient people believed in a world permeated by the supernatural and readily accepted stories of miracles and believed in stories of visions and visitors from the world of the divine all the time. Even very sober and sometimes sceptical historians like Tacitus will pass on accounts of miracles that he clearly accepts and expects his audience to believe as historical.
So when we read stories of how the emperor Augustus was miraculously conceived by the god Apollo, or how his birth was presaged by a new star in the heavens, or how Julius Caesar was seen ascending into the heaven after his death or how Vespasian healed lame and blind people who asked him for a miracle, we accept that these stories represent the kinds of things ancient people genuinely believed about great men. Or we accept that they are at least told to indicate that the man in question was great. What we don't do is accept that simply because people believed these stories they must mean that they really happened.
And this is even when the stories are presented to us by a very careful historian and given to us as verified fact. Take Tacitus' account of the miracles of the emperor Vespasian:
"In the months during which Vespasian was waiting at Alexandria for the periodical return of the summer gales and settled weather at sea, many wonders occurred which seemed to point him out as the object of the favour of heaven and of the partiality of the Gods. One of the common people of Alexandria, well known for his blindness, threw himself at the Emperor's knees, and implored him with groans to heal his infirmity. This he did by the advice of the God Serapis, whom this nation, devoted as it is to many superstitions, worships more than any other divinity. .... And so Vespasian, supposing that all things were possible to his good fortune, and that nothing was any longer past belief, with a joyful countenance, amid the intense expectation of the multitude of bystanders, accomplished what was required. The hand was instantly restored to its use, and the light of day again shone upon the blind. Persons actually present attest both facts, even now when nothing is to be gained by falsehood." (Histories, IV, 81)
Tacitus was closely connected to the court of Vespasian's sons and successors, Titus and Domitian, and so in a position to know the "persons actually present" and to consult them long after Vespasian's death "when nothing is to be gained by falsehood". He was also a very careful historian who scorned those who took rumour and stories as fact without checking them against sources and eye witnesses and who condemned those who "catch eagerly at wild and improbable rumours in preference to genuine history" (Annals, IV,11).
Despite this, I don't know anyone who would read the account above and conclude that the emperor really had magical healing powers and genuinely used his supernatural abilities to heal people. The fact that even a judicious and often sceptical analyst like Tacitus accepted this story shows us just how readily people in the ancient world accepted claims of the miraculous.
One form of miracle that was widely believed in was the idea of apotheosis, where a great man is physically taken up in to the heavens and raised to divine status. It was claimed that Romulus, the founder of Rome, underwent this process and later appeared to his friend Julius Proculus to declare his new celestial status. The same claim was made about Julius Caesar and Augustus, with supposed witnesses observing their ascent into the heavenly realm. Lucian's satire The Passing of Peregrinus includes his scorn for the claim that the philosopher was taken up into the celestial realm and was later seen walking around on earth after his death. The Chariton novel Callirhoe has its hero Chaereas visiting the tomb of his recently dead wife, saying he "arrived at the tomb at daybreak" where he "found the stones removed and the entrance open. At that he took fright." Others are afraid to enter the tomb, but Chaereas goes in and finds his wife's body missing and concludes she has been taken up by the gods.
An even closer parallel to the stories of Jesus' resurrection can be found in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana. The teacher and miracle worker Apollonius speaks in advance of his coming life after death and even tells his followers where he will meet them after he dies - the town of Dicaiarchia, near Naples. After meeting them there he continues to appear to them and teach them for forty days. At one point one of his followers, Demetrios, doubts that it is really Apollonius back from the dead speaking to them so the teacher encourages him to put out his hand and touch him to prove he is not a phantom. Apollonius later ascends into heaven, though he does later appear again in a dream vision to convince a doubter. The parallels between these stories and those of Jesus are obvious, though it is not certain if Philostratus may have been influenced by the Jesus stories, so it is hard to know how significant the parallels with Apollonius are. Details aside, what is clear is the idea of a great man being taken up into heaven and appearing after his death was commonplace in the ancient world.
Resurrection in the Jewish Tradition
In Jesus' time, the concept of people rising from the dead was clearly current and a hot theological topic. Many Jews of the time generally believed in some kind of coming redemptive intervention in history by God - what Jesus referred to as the "coming of the kingship/kingdom of God/Heaven". The idea was that Israel had been conquered and oppressed by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Syrians and Romans in rapid succession because God had withdrawn from the world and abandoned his "Chosen People" due to their sins. But the belief developed that this punishment would come to an end when enough of his people repented and God chose to reassert his authority, smite the unrighteous, save the righteous and (with his anointed Messiah) usher in a new, perfect age with a renewed earth.
The problem with this idea was that this seemed fine for the generation who happened to be alive when God finally chose to intervene in history, but it did not seem fair the poor righteous Jews who had already suffered through the period in which Israel was being afflicted and died without seeing the dawning of the new age. So the idea developed that there was going to be a general "resurrection of the dead" when the kingdom of God began, where all the dead would rise to be judged by God and the Messiah, with the wicked being cast into Hell and the resurrected righteous living in redeemed glory in the new age.
Not everyone accepted this new teaching. The Sadducees thought it was heretical, which is why the gospels depict them trying to trap Jesus with a trick question regarding this supposed resurrection (see Mark 12:18-27) And Jesus' reply shows that he clearly accepted the idea of a general resurrection.
So Jesus' followers clearly believed in the coming general resurrection and the idea of resurrection was closely associated with the coming new age of God's renewal.
Christian apologists and conservative scholars have tried to argue that, while there was a belief in a coming general resurrection, the idea of a individual rising from the dead as a pre-figurement of this was unknown and would have been unthinkable to Jews in this period. Therefore the idea that the concept of Jesus' resurrection arose out of this expectation is invalid. The conservative scholar N.T. Wright argues:
By Jesus’s day many Jews had come to hope that some day in the future there would be a bodily resurrection of all the righteous, when God renewed the entire world and removed all suffering and death. The resurrection, however, was merely one part of the complete renewal of the whole world, according to Jewish teaching. The idea of an individual being resurrected, in the middle of history, while the rest of the world continued on burdened by sickness, decay, and death, was inconceivable.
This is a very strange thing for Wright to claim, since the gospel themselves depict several such resurrections - the raising of the daughter of Jarius (Mark 5:21-43), that of the young man from Nain (Luke 7:11-17) and that of Lazarus (John 11:1-44) - as pre-figuring the coming general resurrection when God reasserts his kingship.
Furthermore, the gospels also depict people believing that John the Baptist rose from the dead after his execution and even that Jesus was the risen John (see Mark 6:14 and Mark 8:27-28). This makes sense, since it is clear that John the Baptist's sect continued long after his death - in Acts 19:1-3 Paul meets people in Ephesus in Greece who had been baptised by followers of John. The idea that John had risen from the dead came from the belief in the coming general resurrection. Obviously the concept of a prophet rising from the dead as a pre-figurement of the coming kingdom of God was very much in the air when Jesus was executed.
So just as the idea of a great man dying and being taken up into the heavens and later appearing to his followers was current in the Greco-Roman world, the idea of resurrection was a hot topic in the Jewish world. As was the idea of a individual rising from the dead as a pre-figurement of the imminent coming general resurrection. With the stories of the resurrection of Jesus, we see all these ideas coming together.
The Evolution of the Resurrection Stories
The fact that the five accounts we have of Jesus' resurrection are written over a period from 50 to about 120 AD means that we have five separate snapshots of what the first Christians were saying about their belief that Jesus had risen from the dead. By examining the clear differences in these accounts, we can get some idea of how the story and therefore the idea of the resurrection of Jesus developed and grew.
Paul (c. 50 AD)
The earliest account is in Paul's first letter to the Jesus sect community he founded in Corinth, written some time in the 50s AD:
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1Cor 15:3-8)
The first thing worth noting here is that fact that Paul includes himself in his list of those to whom the risen Jesus "appeared". Both his references to his encountering the risen Jesus and the three (slightly different) description of this encounter in Acts all make it clear that this was a vision - a light from heaven and a disembodied voice - not an encounter with a physically-revived former corpse returned to life. The verb Paul uses for all these appearances he mentions is the same one - ὤφθη meaning "appeared, was seen" - in each case. He makes no distinction between the appearance of Jesus to him and the appearances to others.
Paul then goes on to scold some of the Corinthians for saying there was not going to be a general resurrection of the dead - as already noted above, this idea was not universally accepted by all Jews and it seems to have become disputed in the Corinthian community of the Jesus sect. Paul asks "if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" (v. 12) and goes on to call Jesus' resurrection "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep", ie the pre-figurement of the coming general resurrection. He goes on to address the question of whether this coming resurrection will involve the rising of physical bodies and says in response "How foolish!". Then he goes on to explain that the coming general resurrection will not be physical but involve "spiritual bodies".
If Jesus' resurrection is the pre-figurement of the coming general resurrection of the dead, therefore, it is clear that for Paul his rising did not involve a physical body. This is why Paul's references to and insistence on the fact of the rising of Jesus makes no mention of the evidence of a physical revivification of his dead body that features in some of the later accounts: the empty tomb, discarded grave cloths, people touching Jesus, Jesus eating and his physical form flying up into heaven. For Paul, at this early stage of the development of the story, the risen Jesus is a spiritual concept involving visions, not physical encounters.
Gospel of Mark (c. 70 AD)
Twenty or so years after Paul's accounts, the writer of gMark tells a different story. Mark 15 ends with Jesus' body being laid in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea and Mark 16 depicts three women - "Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome" (v. 1) - going to the tomb two days later to anoint the body. On the way there they ask each other “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark 16:3), which should strike most readers as a question they should have asked before they set out, if this story was historical.
On arriving though they find the stone already moved and inside they find "a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side" (Mark 16:5) who tells them Jesus had risen and that they should tell Peter and the other disciples that Jesus had gone on to meet them in Galilee. In this account the women are afraid and so say nothing to anyone.
This is where the gospel ends, though this abrupt ending without any appearance by the risen Jesus seems to have been unsatisfactory for many and so a longer ending was tacked on later (Mark 16:9-20). This contains elements found in the gMatt and gLuke versions of the story, including the appearance of Jesus on the road to Emmaus and his ascension into heaven. These added verses do not appear in the earliest manuscripts and are universally acknowledged to be a later addition.
Differences between the gMark version and the later accounts will be dealt with below, but the details of the tomb here are worth considering more closely. First of all, Mark 15 goes to some effort to emphasise that the tomb belonged to "Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council". If he was a member of the Sanhedrin he would have been a wealthy man and possibly an aristocrat. This may be a historical detail, but gMark's account of Jesus' death is a patchwork of deliberate references to the Old Testament, especially the "Suffering Servant" passages in Isaiah. And they included Isaiah 53:9:
"He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death"
This makes it possible that this element is just another one added to the story to make it fit the "prophecies" better.
Secondly, the use of the word ἀποκυλίω (to roll away) indicates that the stone closing the tomb in the gMark account is meant to be round. A survey of First Century Jewish rock cut and cave tombs by Amos Kloner found that 98% of them were closed by square stones prior to 70 AD, with only four of the surveyed sites closed by a rolling round stone. After 70 AD, however, round stones became far more common. So this detail seems to be indicating the kind of tomb in the later First Century, given that a tomb of this style was exceedingly rare in Jesus' time. This could just be the writer of gMark indicating the kind of tomb in the time he was writing or it could be that the tomb itself, an element conspicuous by its absence in Paul's version, was an addition to the story.
Gospel of Luke (c. 80 AD)
In gLuke we get a story similar to that of gMark (which was used by the writer of gLuke as his main source), but differing in some key details. In this version it is "Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them" (Luke 24:10) who go to the tomb - the "Salome" of gMark is not mentioned and here Joanna is added to the list. The gMark version gave no hint of any "others" and only indicated three women, though here we have an unspecified number with only three of them named.
In this version, the women enter the tomb, find it empty and then go "wandering about", without meeting anyone inside. Instead, they meet "two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning" (Luke 24:4), as opposed to gMark's single young man "in a white robe". They bow down before these two men and, as in the gMark account, they are told Jesus is risen and going ahead to Galilee.
In this version, instead of telling no-one as in gMark, they "told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others" (Luke 24:9) but aren't believed.
Luke 24:13-34 then tells the story of two unnamed disciples travelling to Emmaus and being joined by the risen Jesus, "but they were kept from recognizing him" (v. 16). Only after he explains the resurrection to them do they see that it was Jesus and "their eyes were opened" but Jesus suddenly disappears (Luke 24: 31).
Finally Jesus appears suddenly among all of the disciples in Jerusalem. They think he is a ghost, so he invites them to touch him and then eats some fish to show he is corporeal. He then goes out with them to Bethany and suddenly "he left them and was taken up into heaven" (Luke 24: 51).
Here we have a much more overtly dramatic and detailed story, with the young man in white becoming two men in lightning-bright robes who the women recognise as celestial. Apart from other details, there is a strong emphasis on Jesus being physically risen, though his appearing and disappearing and the fact that he is initially not recognised are odd elements. Finally we get his ascension into heaven, since if Jesus is physically risen there has to be some explanation as to where he went afterwards.
Gospel of Matthew (c. 80 AD)
Like the author of gLuke, the writer of gMatt also used gMark as his primary source. But the gMatt version differs markedly from both the others. The three women of gMark and the unspecified number in gLuke have now become simply "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary" (Matt 28:1). In the other two gospels, the women are specifically going to the tomb to anoint the body. This is strange, because the Jewish custom was to do this at burial - there is no evidence of people ever doing it afterwards. Given Jewish taboos about dead bodies, it is a very unlikely thing for them to do. The writer of gMatt seems to have been much more conversant with Jewish customs than the other two authors, so in his version no spices or anointing is mentioned and they are simply going to "look at the tomb".
The single young man in white and the two men in shining robes are replaced in this account, however, with a much more dramatic scene:
There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. (Matt 28:2-4)
Here the story has changed completely. The writer of gMatt prefaced this account with a story about the chief priests asking Pilate for permission to place a guard on the tomb to prevent Jesus' followers from stealing his body and pretending he rose from the dead. This is the guard mentioned here, even though there is no hint of any guard in any other account and despite the fact this would be a rather significant part of any account if it were historical.
Now, instead of finding the stone already rolled back and meeting men in white or in robes that shine like lightning, the women see an angel in white with an "appearance like lightning" descend from heaven. Added to these rather noticeable details is an earthquake - something else the other accounts neglect to mention.
Again, the angel delivers the message about the risen Jesus going ahead to Galilee. But in this version, as they leave, Jesus himself appears to them and they "clasped his feet and worshipped him" (Matt 28:9). Jesus repeats the angel's message.
Matt 28:11-15 describes the sequel of the guard story, where the guards tell the chief priests what they saw and the priests, rather remarkably, ignore this eye witness account and tell the guards to say they saw the disciples steal Jesus' body - "this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day". This rather implausible addition to the story seems to have been added purely as an apologetic counter to this Jewish allegation.
The gMatt account ends with Jesus appearing to the disciples in Galilee, though with the strange note that, despite seeing Jesus alive with their own eyes, "some doubted" (Matt 28:17). This version makes no reference to Jesus ascending into heaven and places far less emphasis on Jesus being physically risen.
As in gMark, the tomb in the gMatt account has a round stone that is rolled, in the style of late First Century tombs.
Gospel of John (c.90-120 AD)
The latest of the accounts, in gJohn, is by far the most detailed and differs markedly from the earlier synoptic gospels in most respects. Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb again in this version (she is one of the very few common elements in all of the gospel versions, though she is not mentioned by Paul). This time she tells Peter and the "disciple Jesus loved" (John 20:2). They run to the tomb and see it is empty and then leave. Mary stays in the garden, weeping, until she sees Jesus who she does not recognise and mistakes for the gardener. When she realises who he is he tells her not to touch him and that he is going to ascend into heaven (John 20:17). She goes and tells the others.
That evening Jesus appears among the disciples despite the door being locked. Thomas is not there and doubts when he is told Jesus has risen, but Jesus appears again and offers to let Thomas touch his wounds to prove it's him (John 20:24-29). This version ends there.
Analysis
If the various differing resurrection accounts are read in chronological order, we can see the story growing and evolving over time. Paul's account is of visions of a spiritual risen Jesus, whereas by the time the gospels are written, the story has become one of (in at least some sense) a corporeal resurrection with an empty tomb. But the gospel accounts differ widely on all other elements and include things not even hinted at in Paul's earliest account. This chart details the key elements, showing which are found in what account:
As can be seen, there is no element found in all five accounts. The closest we get is "Appears to the Twelve" (found in all except gMark) and "Sunday appearance" and "Magdalene" (both found in all except Paul).
Some of these differences are reasonably explainable. Paul's account focuses on who witnessed the risen Jesus, not where or when they did so. So it perhaps makes sense that he did not say whether they saw him in Jerusalem or in Galilee or that he did not specify that it was on the Sunday following his death, while the more narrative accounts in the gospels do specify these things. But there are still clear differences that are far more difficult to explain.
Christian apologists who attempt to reconcile and harmonise all these elements often argue that some gospels are simply emphasising certain appearances over others. Therefore, they argue, Jesus could have appeared in both Galilee and Jerusalem, with some gospels mentioning one but not the other. This is at least possible, but would involve at least one trip from Jerusalem to Galilee (not mentioned in several gospels) and then back to Jerusalem for the ascension from Bethany (also not mentioned in several gospels).
Less convincingly, apologists try to argue away the clear differences by appealing to "different perspectives". Just as separate witnesses to a car accident recall different details and emphasise different elements, they argue, doesn't mean they aren't describing the same event. So, they claim, one witness may say a car was green and another blue or one may mention something another ignores, but they essence of their accounts is the same.
This may explain some differences, like the lack of an ascension story, or a few details, like which women were there or who they spoke to. But it is hard to see why all but one account mentioned significant elements like the earthquake, the guards and the descending angel.
Less conservative Christians admit that the differing versions represent a story developing in the telling. Some still maintain, despite this, that there was an empty tomb and that Jesus physically rose from the dead. Others acknowledge that Paul's early account seems to represent the original belief - in visions of a purely spiritual resurrection - and talk about "the resurrection event" as more of a mystical realisation that the later gospel accounts make more concrete.
Non-Christian scholars, of course, note that the story seems to grow more concrete and more detailed and/or dramatic over time. Paul's account of a series of visions in the 50s AD has evolved into gJohn's intimate portraits of personal, physical encounters or gMatt's dramatic earthquakes and angels stories. They conclude that, given the cultural context of the time in both the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds, these accounts are just stories, not history.
The Psychology of Resurrection Belief
Apologists trying to defend the varied accounts of the resurrection as historical like to challenge the idea that these are just stories by claiming that something must have happened to turn the despondent and demoralised disciples after Jesus' execution into confident evangelists. They argue that if there had been no resurrection then his followers would simply have drifted back to their old lives, whereas they seem to have, fairly rapidly, not only become enthusiastic proclaimers of this risen Jesus but prepared to die for this belief. This, they argue, shows that their belief in his resurrection had a dramatic historical basis.
While this sounds plausible from a common-sense perspective, it actually does not fit with sociological and psychological studies of what happens when prophetic or millennial expectations are suddenly dashed. These studies of groups with prophetic or apocalyptic expectations show that this kind of sudden and powerful turnaround is actually extremely common and explainable by group psychology.
The classic psychological study of this phenomenon is Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter's When Prophecy Fails, which analyses a case study of a UFO cult that expected the end of the world in December 1954. When the cataclysm and expected alien rescue for the believers did not eventuate, the core of the cult managed to reinterpret the failure into a victory by saying their faith had led God to spare the world. So total failure suddenly transformed into a great victory. We can see various other examples of this phenomenon - eg the Jehovah's Witnesses' repeated reinterpretations of their predictions of the end of the world when it failed to happen or the reaction of New Age believers when the recent "2012 Mayan Prophecy" turned out to be wrong.
So we can actually expect that when Jesus did not usher in some cosmic world-changing event in Jerusalem, as his followers seem to have expected, and instead got captured and horribly executed, his followers would have gone through a similar process of reinterpretation. The alternative would have been to hike back north to Galilee and sheepishly admit that the guy they had left their homes and families to follow was simply another failed Messianic claimant, and Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter's study shows that the more cult followers have invested in the truth of an expectation the greater the psychological incentive for them to find a way to reinterpret it when it fails to eventuate. The desire for the reinterpretation of the prophetic disappointment is proportionate to (i) the investment in the prophecy/expectation by the believer and (ii) the intensity of the disappointment. The higher both are the more the believer is likely to embrace the new interpretation with increased fervour. And in the case of the core of Jesus' followers, both would have been very high.
So the dilemma for Jesus' followers in the wake of his crucifixion was how to reconcile what seemed like comprehensive proof that he was not the Messiah into some kind of belief that he was. This was quite a challenge, given the expectation that the Messiah was going to overthrow the unrighteous and usher in God's glorious re-emergence and direct rule over the earth. Clearly that had not happened, so they turned to their scriptures to find a way to reconcile his death with their expectations.
The main book they turned to was Isaiah, or rather to the section of it referred to a "Deutero-Isaiah" (ie Chapters 40-66) which is seen by most scholars as an addition to the original work. These chapters contain what are referred to as "the Suffering Servant Songs" - four sections in Isaiah about a servant of God who sacrifices himself for the good of Israel. At the time, the "Servant" figure was interpreted as a personification of righteous Jews generally (and that is how he is still interpreted by Jews today), but the earliest Jesus sect came to see the "Servant" passages as a prophecy of Jesus and his death. They looked at passages like this and read them as prophetic references to Jesus as Messiah:
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)
It is important to note that these sections of Isaiah were not interpreted this way before and don't seem to have been seen as Messianic prophecies at all before the Jesus sect began to present them this way. This seems to be the origin of the idea of a dying Messiah - something not seen in Judaism before. The idea became that Jesus, as the "Suffering Servant" portrayed in Isaiah, had taken on the sins of Israel and died to purify the nation and prepare for the coming kingship of God. Already established ideas about the Messiah appearing at the right hand of God when the apocalypse came were now interpreted as Jesus returning in triumph when the epoch-changing event happened, which his followers still expected was "soon". All this salvaged their expectations about the coming apocalypse from the wreckage of the crucifixion and gave them a revived and renewed focus on their previous ideas. This is why the gospels actually depict Jesus explicitly explaining all this to them (eg Mark 10:32-34)
and the disciples (inexplicably) not understanding what he is saying.
The "Suffering Servant" passages seemed to fit the death of Jesus in some ways and the gospel writers also seem to have written their accounts to make them fit even better (thus the rich man's tomb element in gMark discussed above). Other parts of the Isaiah passages do not fit at all - such as the part where the "Servant" is said to live a long life and look on many of his children (Isaiah 53:10) - so these parts are left out of the reinterpretation of these passages.
As with the sects studied by Festinger et al, the earliest Jesus sect was able to use their reinterpretations of their scriptures to turn the disaster of Jesus' execution into a victory. They came to see Jesus' death as a redemptive sacrifice and to believe that he had gone on to heaven and would soon return as the celestial Messiah described in the Book of Daniel and Book of Enoch to usher in the final victory of the kingdom of God.
Conclusion
That people saw "the risen Christ" after his crucifixion is the only element that is clearly found in all five of the accounts analysed above. This fits with what we know about people who have experienced the sudden, traumatic death of a loved one - it is actually a very common experience for people in these circumstances. And the group psychology of prophetic/millennial expectation would provide the atmosphere where such visions would become part of the reinterpretation of the earlier expectations of the Jesus sect, following the trauma of his execution.
Paul's early account makes it clear that these were spiritual "appearances" - visions like his, not physical encounters. The later gospel accounts also clearly indicate a story that is accumulating details and narrative elements. The Jewish theological context of expectations of a coming general resurrection provided the religious background for the idea that Jesus had somehow "risen" and gone on to heaven. And the Greco-Roman context provided literary narrative tropes of the great man who is raised to heaven, the teacher who revisits his followers after death and the evidence of an empty tomb as proof of apotheosis that we find in the various gospel accounts.
These elements converged in the story of the "risen Jesus" and, in doing so, helped turn a small Jewish apocalyptic sect into a Greco-Roman mystery religion and then into a world faith. But the evidence, objectively analysed in its historical context, does not support the idea that Jesus actually rose from the dead. It is a story, and one that grew in the telling.
Written 2 Feb, 2013. 20,594 views.
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