to us a son is given;
But even more exalted images of the Messiah existed. Isaiah declared, For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government will be upon his shoulder,
and his name will be called
“Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom,
to establish it, and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and for evermore. (Isa. 9:6–7 rsv) Here the Davidic king is called “Mighty God,” and his reign is said to endure forever, motifs which are echoed in the Psalms of Solomon. Again, in the first-century Similitudes of Enoch we are presented with “the Lord of the Spirits and his Messiah,” who is also called “that Son of Man.” Of him we read, Even before the creation of the sun and the moon, before the creation of the stars, he was given a name in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits. He will become a 38. “Bar Koziba reigned two and a half years, and then said to the Rabbis, ‘I am the Messiah.’ They answered, ‘Of Messiah it is written that he smells and judges: let us see whether he [Bar Koziba] can do so.’
When they saw that he was unable to judge by the scent, they slew him” (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 93b).
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staff for the righteous ones in order that they may lean on him and not fall. He is the light of the gentiles and he will become the hope of those who are sick in their hearts. All those who dwell upon the earth shall fall and worship before him; they shall glorify, bless, and sing the name of the Lord of the Spirits. For this purpose he became the Chosen One; he was concealed in the presence of (the Lord of the Spirits) prior to the creation of the world, and for eternity. ( 1 En. 48.3–6) Here the Messiah is understood to be a preexistent, God-like figure. Thus, the messianic options available at the time of Jesus included not only prophet, priest, and king, but also a heavenly Messiah.39
In Jesus’ case the proclamation of John the Baptist, that after him would come one mightier than him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit, is seen as the fulfillment of Malachi 3:1 (rsv): “Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way for me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” and Isaiah 40:3 (esv): “A voice cries, ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’” Notice that, according to these prophecies, it is the Lord himself who is coming (cf. Isa. 40:5, 9–11). The relevant question to be posed here is not whom John expected,40 but, as the person coming in self-conscious fulfillment of John’s predictions, who Jesus took himself to be. It is intriguing that in the Q saying by Jesus on the person of John the Baptist (Matt.
11:10; Luke 7.27), Jesus himself identifies John as the messenger of Malachi 3:1.
In that same discourse Jesus goes on to speak of himself as the Son of Man who has come after John (Matt.11:19; Luke 7:34). Such a divine-human figure would sensibly fulfill the divine and human facets of John’s prediction.41
We might interpret prophetic descriptions of the Messiah in terms of divinity as religious hyperbole and therefore take Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah as startling but not super-human. But then again, if we find in Jesus’ other personal claims and activities indications of a divine self-understanding, then his taking himself to be Israel’s promised Messiah may also involve an implicit claim to divinity.
The Son of God
We’ve already seen that at his trial Caiaphas challenged Jesus as to his being the Son of God. This is a status to which Jesus often lays claim in the Gospels. Here we’ll examine three texts in which he does so.
First, consider Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants of the vineyard (Mark 12:1–9).
In this parable, the owner of the vineyard sends servants to the tenants of the 39. John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 102–94.
40. As thought by Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 369–71.
41. Paul’s letters also give early evidence of the Christ’s being taken to be God in human form (Phil.
2:5–8). Hengel comments, “The discrepancy between the shameful death of a Jewish state criminal and the confession that depicts this executed man as a pre-existent divine figure who becomes man and humbles himself to a slave’s death is . . . without analogy in the ancient world” (Hengel, Son of God, p. 1). Hengel goes on to show that this idea is pre-Pauline.
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vineyard to collect its fruit. The vineyard symbolizes Israel (cf. Isa. 5:1–7), the owner is God, the tenants are the Jewish religious leaders, and the servants are prophets sent by God. The tenants beat and reject the owner’s servants. Finally, the owner decides that he has one left to send: his only beloved son. “They will respect my son,” he says. But instead, the tenants kill the son because he is the heir to the vineyard.
Even skeptical scholars like those in the Jesus Seminar recognize the authenticity of this parable, since it is also found in one of their favorite sources, the Gospel of Thomas (65), and so is by their reckoning multiply attested.42 Moreover, as Evans has emphasized, the parable not only reflects the actual experience of absentee landowners in the ancient world but also employs stock images and themes found in rabbinic parables: Israel as a vineyard, God as the owner, unworthy rebellious tenants, the figure of a son, and so on, so that it coheres well with a Jewish milieu.43 There are, furthermore, aspects of the parable which render unlikely its later origin in the Christian church, for example, the concern over who should possess the vineyard after it is taken from the present tenants and the absence of the resurrection of the slain son. The parable also contains interpretative nuances rooted in the Aramaic targums (paraphrases) of Isaiah 5 which were in use in Jesus’ day. Evans concludes, “When understood properly and in full context, everything about the parable of the wicked vineyard tenants—including its context in the New Testament Gospels—argues that it originated with Jesus, not with the early church.”44
What, then, does this parable tell us about Jesus’ self-understanding? It tells us that he thought of himself as God’s only Son, distinct from all the prophets, God’s final messenger, and even the heir of Israel itself. Notice that one cannot delete the figure of the son from the parable as an inauthentic, later addition, for then the parable lacks any climax and point. Moreover, the uniqueness of the son is not only explicitly stated but inherently implied by the tenants’ stratagem of murdering the heir in order to claim possession of the vineyard. So this parable discloses to us that the historical Jesus believed and taught that he was the only Son of God.
Jesus’ self-concept as God’s Son comes to explicit expression in Matthew 11:27
(rsv cf. Luke 10:22): “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Again there is good reason to regard this as an authentic saying of the historical Jesus. It is a Q saying of Jesus and therefore very early. The saying has been shown to go back to an 42. On the derivative character of the Thomas version see Charles L. Quarles, “The Use of the Gospel of Thomas in the Research on Historical Jesus of John Dominic Crossan,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 69
(2007): 517–36.
43. Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2006), 132–35.
44. Ibid., 138.
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original Aramaic version, which counts in favor of its authenticity.45 Moreover, it is unlikely that the church invented this saying because it says that the Son is unknowable—“no one knows the Son except the Father”—which would exclude even Jesus’ followers from knowing him. But the conviction of the post-Easter church is that we can know the Son (see, e.g., Phil. 3:8–11). Notice, too, that according to the saying the content of Jesus’ revelation is the Father, whereas Jesus himself was the content of the church’s proclamation. The reference to the Son is almost informal, rather than emphasizing a title like “Son of God.” So this saying is unlikely to be the product of later church theology.
This saying has been characterized as a bolt out of the Johannine blue. For what does it tell us about Jesus’ self-concept? It tells us that he thought of himself as the exclusive Son of God and the only revelation of God the Father to mankind! It is said by those who deny the saying’s authenticity that the unrestricted authority and absoluteness and exclusivity of the postulated relation between the Father and the Son is unparalleled in the pre-Easter Synoptic tradition. But that assumes, implausibly, that passages like Mark 1:11, 27; 3:11; Matthew 7:21–23, and so forth, are not part of the pre-Easter tradition, for they certainly do contemplate Jesus as the absolute, authoritative Son of God and revealer of the Father. As Denaux has rightly emphasized, what we have here is a Johannine Christological affirmation in the earliest stratum of the Gospel traditions, an affirmation which forms a bridge to the high Christology of John’s Gospel and yet, in light of passages like Mark 4:10–12; 12:1–11; 13:32; and Matthew 16:17–19; 28:18, is also at home in the Synoptic tradition.46 On the basis of this saying, we may conclude that Jesus thought of himself as God’s Son in an absolute and unique sense and as having been invested with the exclusive authority to reveal his Father God to men.
Finally, another interesting indication of Jesus’ sense of being God’s Son is his saying concerning the date of the consummation: “But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32 rsv). It seems highly unlikely that this saying could be the manufacture of Christian theology, especially in light of traditions like Matthew 11:27 (cf. John 5:20; 16:15, 30; 21:17c), because it ascribes ignorance to the Son. The criterion of embarrassment requires the authenticity of the reference to the Son’s ignorance.
Just how embarrassing the saying was is evident in the fact that although Matthew reproduces it (Matt. 24:36), Luke omits it, and most copyists of Matthew’s Gospel also chose to drop the verse (though it is preserved in the best manuscripts).
That Mark preserves this saying, despite his emphasis on Jesus’ predictive power and foreknowledge (Mark 11:2; 13; 14:13–15, 18, 27–28, 30), is testimony to his 45. Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus, translated by John Burchard (London: SCM, 1967), 45–46.
46. Adelbert Denaux, “The Q-Logion Mt 11, 27/Lk 10, 22 and the Gospel of John,” in John and the Synoptics, ed. A. Denaux, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 101 (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1992).
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faithfulness to the tradition. As Markan commentator Vincent Taylor nicely puts it, “Its offence seals its genuineness.”47
Some critics have suggested that the early church may have inserted the phrase “nor the Son” into the saying, using an honorific title to compensate for the slight dealt to Jesus by this saying. Not only does this suggestion violate the structure of the saying—the oude . . . oude forming a pair so as to say “neither the angels nor the Son”—but it is precisely by the addition of such a phrase that the saying becomes offensive. Without the phrase the saying would contrast what is unknown to men and angels but known to the Father (and by implication to Jesus as the one who exclusively reveals the Father). It is futile to suggest that the early church may have substituted the honorific title “the Son” for some other self-designation on Jesus’ part, for it would have been easier and more natural just to omit any such self-reference, so that Jesus’ knowledge would not even come into the equation.
On the basis of these three sayings of the historical Jesus, we have good evidence that Jesus thought of himself as the unique Son of God. Once again, however, we are not yet arrived at an unequivocal claim to divinity. For although Hellenistic readers of the Gospels would be apt to interpret the expression “Son of God” in terms of the divine status of the claimant, in a Jewish milieu such a status was not the customary sense of the title. Jewish kings were referred to as God’s sons (2 Sam. 7:14; 1 Chron. 17:13; 22:10; Pss. 2:6–7; 89:26–27), and in Wisdom literature the righteous man could be characterized as God’s child, having God as his father (Wis. 2.13, 16, 18; 5.5; Sir. 4.10; 51.10). Such generic usage is, however, irrelevant to Jesus’ claim to divine Sonship, given the uniqueness and exclusivity of his claim. We have seen that Jesus thought of himself as God’s Son in a singular sense that set him apart even from the prophets who had gone before. But what was that sense?
The answer may be, once more, that Jesus thought of himself as God’s unique Son in the sense that he was the promised Messiah. Four Ezra 7.28–29 speaks of Messiah as God’s son but nonetheless as mortal: “My son the Messiah shall be revealed . . . and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred years. And after these years my son the Messiah shall die, and all who have human breath.” The Dead Sea Scrolls also show that the Messiah was thought to be God’s son. 4Q174
interprets the promise to Solomon in 2 Samuel 7:14 that God will be his father to apply to the Messiah, as we have seen. 4Q246 speaks of a false prince who “will be called the Son of God, and they will call him the son of the Most High” (cf.
Luke 1:35). 1QSa 2.11–12 anticipates the time “when [God] has begotten the Messiah,” which evinces a messianic interpretation of Psalm 2:7, which concerns the Lord’s anointed one (Ps. 2.2). This is the psalm alluded to at Jesus’ baptism in the words of the heavenly voice, “You are my beloved son” (Mark 1:11; cf. Acts 47. Vincent Taylor, The Gospel according to St. Mark, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1966), 522.
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13:33). The uniqueness of Jesus’ Sonship could be a function of the uniqueness of the Messiah.
On the other hand, it must be said in all honesty that these texts do not even approach the sort of absoluteness and exclusivity claimed by Jesus of Nazareth in the sayings we have examined. There is nothing in Dead Sea texts to suggest the filial uniqueness of the Messiah. Being the Messiah might set Jesus apart from all the prophets who had come before him and make him the heir of Israel, as claimed in the parable of the vineyard, but being Messiah would not give him exclusive knowledge of the Father and absolute revelatory significance, as claimed in Matthew 11:27. Moreover, the saying in Mark 13:32 not only discloses Jesus’ sense of unique sonship but also presents us with an ascending scale of status from men to angels to the Son to the Father. Thus, amazingly, Jesus’ sense of being God’s Son involved a sense of proximity to the Father which transcended that of any mortal man (such as a king or prophet) or any angelic being.
Such an exalted conception of God’s Son is not foreign to first-century Judaism.
The New Testament materials themselves bear witness to this fact (Col. 1:13–20; Heb. 1:1–12). In 4 Ezra 13, Ezra sees a vision of a man arising out of the sea who is identified by God as “my Son” (13.32, 37) and who proceeds to subdue all the nations. Ezra asks,
“O sovereign Lord, explain this to me: Why did I see the man coming up from the heart of the sea?”
He said to me, “Just as no one can explore or know what is in the depths of the sea, so no one on earth can see my Son or those who are with him, except in the time of his day.” ( 4 Ezra 13.51–52; cf. 13.26)
That there are other persons presently with the Son prior to his earthly appearance suggests that the Son is a preexistent, heavenly figure. This becomes quite clear in 14.9 when Ezra is told that his own life is about to end and that he is going to be with God’s Son until he is revealed at the end of time: “You shall be taken up from among men, and henceforth you shall live with my Son and those who are like you, until the times are ended.” It is intriguing that there is a differentiation made between the pre-existent Son and the righteous, human dead like Ezra who are with him. The Son is clearly set apart as a supernatural figure.
We have here the same ambiguity with “the Son of God” that we encountered in considering the title “Messiah.” These titles are multi-valent and therefore inherently ambiguous without a context. In order to understand more clearly the meaning that Jesus invested in such self-descriptions, we shall need to look at the Christological significance of Jesus’ teaching and actions. But before we do so, there is one more title, the most significant of all, which demands our attention.
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The Son of Man
It is highly likely that Jesus thought of himself as and claimed to be the Son of Man.48 This was Jesus’ favorite self-description and is the title found most frequently in the Gospels (over eighty times). Yet remarkably, this title is found only once outside the Gospels in the rest of the New Testament (Acts 7:56). That shows that the designation of Jesus as “the Son of Man” was not a title that arose in later Christian usage and was then written back into the Jesus traditions. Even in the Gospels, only Jesus uses this title; others may confess him as the Messiah or the Son of God, but never as the Son of Man. On the basis of the criterion of dissimilarity we can say with confidence that Jesus called himself “the Son of Man.”
Dunn concludes, “When we encounter a thoroughly consistent and distinctive feature—a tradition which depicts Jesus regularly using the phrase ‘son of man’ and virtually no other use of the phrase—it simply beggars scholarship to deny that this feature stemmed from a remembered speech usage of Jesus himself.”49
The key question then becomes the theological significance of the phrase. Some critics maintain that in calling himself “Son of Man” Jesus merely meant “a human person,” just as the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel referred to himself as “a son of man,” or even “I” or “one,” as in later rabbinic use of the Aramaic equivalent. But with Jesus there is a crucial difference. For Jesus did not refer to himself as “a son of man,” but as “the Son of Man.” The use of the phrase with the definite article, ho huios tou anthropou, is consistent throughout the Gospels, whereas the Hebrew equivalent ben hadam occurs only in 1QS 10.20 and the Aramaic bar enasha is unknown, in contrast to the frequent instances of the indefinite phrases ben ‘adam and bar enash. It is sometimes said that the existence of certain parallel passages in the Gospels where “the Son of Man” occurs in one passage and the first person pronoun “I” occurs in the other (Matt. 5:11/Luke 6:22; Matt. 10:32–33/Luke 12:8–9; Mark 8:27/Matt. 16:13) shows an awareness in the transmission of the tradition that the two expressions are synonymous and that Jesus used bar enasha as a personal indexical term like “I” and “me.” But such an inference confuses sense and reference. The tradition does, indeed, support Jesus’ use of the expression as a means of self-reference; but it does not follow that because the two expressions are co-referential they have the same meaning. This is an elementary semantic point; the king, for example, may refer to himself as “the King” or as “I,” but obviously “the King” does not mean “I.” The parallel passages show merely that the tradents of the tradition understood that the person designated in Jesus’ sayings by the expression bar enasha was Jesus. Thus, the inference that because Jesus used bar enasha to refer to himself he did not use the expression as a title is quite erroneous.50
48. See Ben Witherington, III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 233–62; see also Gundry, Mark, 118–19, 587, and the therein cited literature, as well as Seyoon Kim, The Son of Man as the Son of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985).
49. Dunn, “Can the Third Quest Hope to Succeed?” 47.
50. Cf. the Beloved Disciple’s use of a descriptive title to refer to himself, on the assumption that he is the author of John’s Gospel. That obviously does not make “the Beloved Disciple” a personal indexical
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Rather by use of the definite article Jesus was directing attention to the divine eschatological figure of Daniel 7:13–14 (esv). Daniel describes his vision in the following way:
I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.
That Jesus believed in the eschatological appearance of the figure described in Daniel’s vision is multiply attested in Markan and Q sayings (Mark 8:38; 13:26–27; Matt. 10:32–33/Luke 12:8–9; Matt. 24:27, 37, 39/Luke 17:24, 26, 30). In Daniel’s vision the figure looks like a human being, but he comes on the clouds of heaven, and to him is given a dominion and glory which is God-like. The Similitudes of Enoch present a similar vision of the preexistent Son of Man ( 1 En. 48.3–6 cited above; cf. 62.7) who “shall depose the kings from their thrones and kingdoms”
( 1 En. 46.5) and shall sit “upon the throne of his glory” ( 1 En. 69.29). We have also mentioned the Danielic vision of 4 Ezra 13, in which Ezra sees “something like the figure of a man come up out of the heart of the sea,” whom the Most High identifies as “my son” ( 4 Ezra 13.37) and who preexists with the Most High.
The point in mentioning these passages is not that people listening to Jesus would have recognized his allusions to such works or ideas—which they evidently did not—but rather that the construal of Daniel’s Son of Man as a divine-human figure would be neither anachronistic nor un-Jewish for Jesus. By using the oblique, self-referential expression “the Son of Man,” Jesus prevented a prematurely transparent revelation of his super-human and messianic dignity.51
Some scholars, recognizing Jesus’ belief in an eschatological figure called the Son of Man to whom judgment and dominion would be given, have nonetheless tried to avert a radical claim to divinity on Jesus’ part by maintaining that Jesus was talking about and expecting someone else! Such an exegesis is sheer fancy. It term. That the “Son of Man” can appear in the mouths of others ( John 12:34; Acts 7:56) proves that it is not a personal indexical.
51. Gundry, Mark, 119.
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would require us to say that all of the Son of Man sayings used by Jesus to refer either to himself or to an earthly, suffering figure are inauthentic; if even one such saying is authentic, the proposed exegesis is invalidated. For example, Matthew 8:20
(rsv), “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” is generally taken to be authentic but obviously does not refer to some eschatological, cosmic figure. Moreover, in general, this view cannot make sense of Jesus’ claim to ultimate authority. There is something of a scholarly consensus, as we shall see, that Jesus had a sense of unsurpassed authority. He put himself in God’s place by his words and actions. But then it makes no sense to suppose that he thought that someone else was coming who would judge the world, someone who would, in fact, judge Jesus himself, if Jesus were merely a human prophet or teacher. Jesus’ consciousness of unsurpassed authority is incompatible with the view that he thought someone else was the coming Son of Man.
All three of the titles we have examined thus far come together in a remarkable way at Jesus’ trial. Mark records,
And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?” But he was silent and made no answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And Jesus said, “I am; and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the high priest tore his mantle and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy.
What is your decision?” And they all condemned him as deserving death. (Mark 14:60–64 rsv)
Here in one fell swoop Jesus affirms that he is the Messiah, the Son of God, and the coming Son of Man. He compounds his crime by adding that he is to be seated at God’s right hand, a claim that is truly blasphemous in Jewish ears.52 The trial scene beautifully illustrates how in Jesus’ self-understanding all the diverse claims blend together, thereby taking on connotations that outstrip any single term taken out of context.
So are these words of Jesus, which served as the basis for his condemnation by the Sanhedrin and for his delivery to the Roman authorities on charges of treason, authentic? In his meticulous commentary on Mark’s Gospel, Robert Gundry argues that the words of the high priest “Son of the Blessed (One)” are likely authentic because this use of a circumlocution for “God,” though common among Jews, was not characteristic of Christians; moreover, it appears only here in the Gospel of Mark, who elsewhere prefers the title “Son of God” (1:1; 3:11; 5:7; 15:39). As for Jesus’ reply to the high priest’s question, Gundry provides several lines of evidence 52. See discussion in Darrell L. Bock, Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism and the Final Examination of Jesus, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 106 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1998); repr. ed.: Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism: The Charge against Jesus in Mark 14:53–65, Biblical Studies Library (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000).
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in support of its authenticity: (1) the combination of sitting at God’s right hand and coming with the clouds of heaven appears nowhere in New Testament material except on Jesus’ lips; (2) the Son of Man is nowhere else associated with the notion of sitting at God’s right hand; (3) the saying exhibits the same blend of oblique self-reference and personally high claims that characterizes other Son of Man sayings (Mark 2:10, 28; 8:38; 13:26); (4) even though Psalm 110:1 concerning sitting at the right hand of God is alluded to frequently in the New Testament, the substitution of “the Power” for “God,” though typical for Jewish reverential usage, occurs nowhere else in the New Testament; and (5) Mark is unlikely to have created a prediction to the Sanhedrin which they did not, in fact, see fulfilled.
In addition, Gundry notes the subtlety of the Markan account of the trial, which would escape a later Christian fabricator. Rules for dealing with capital blasphemy cases in the Mishnah ( Sanhedrin 7.5) concern cases in which a person is accused of having pronounced on some previous occasion the divine name “Yahweh” so as to dishonor God. During the trial the alleged blasphemy of the accused is not actually repeated, but some substitute for the divine name is used. Only at the trial’s close is the courtroom cleared, and in the presence of the judges, the lead witness is instructed, “Say expressly what you heard.” He then repeats the blasphemous words uttered by the accused, at which all the judges stand and rend their clothes.
In Jesus’ trial, the blasphemy occurs unexpectedly on the spot, so that only the high priest is standing and tears his garments. If Jesus actually uttered the divine name by saying, “You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Yahweh,” a report of what transpired in Jesus’ trial would not include the pronunciation of the divine name itself but some substitute for it, like “the Power.” Gundry concludes,
“The collocation of capital blasphemy and clothes-rending in m. Sanh. 7.5 as well as in Mark favors . . . that Mark’s account of Jesus’ trial rests on trustworthy information. . . . For though Christians might have fabricated an account so defamatory of the Sanhedrin, Christians are unlikely to have fabricated—or even have been able to fabricate—an account corresponding so subtly to a later idealization of Sanhedrin jurisprudence in cases of capital blasphemy.”53 How did Jesus dishonor God? Gundry answers, “We may best think that the high priest and the rest of the Sanhedrin judge Jesus to have verbally robbed God of incommensurateness and unity by escalating himself to a superhuman level, by portraying himself as destined to sit at God’s right hand and come with the clouds of heaven.”54
For Jesus, then, titles like “Messiah” and “Son of God,” which need carry no connotation of divinity, become infused with such a connotation in his self-understanding and usage, just as they do in I Enoch and 4 Ezra, by his conviction that he is the Danielic Son of Man who is to be seated at God’s right hand.
53. Gundry, Mark, 917–18.
54. Ibid., 917.
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IMPLICIT CHRISTOLOGY
So the skepticism of earlier generations concerning Jesus’ use of Christological titles has greatly receded as the Third Quest of the historical Jesus has gained insight into the religio-cultural milieu of first-century Palestinian Judaism. But we may gain additional insight into Jesus’ self-understanding by examining his teaching and behavior. Most scholars believe that in what he said and did Jesus made claims that imply the same thing as the titles. In other words, the titles serve only to express explicitly what Jesus in his teaching and behavior had already expressed about himself implicitly. Let’s therefore review some of the implicit personal claims of Jesus widely accepted in New Testament scholarship, wholly apart from the question of Christological titles.
Jesus’ Preaching of the Kingdom
One of the undisputed facts about Jesus of Nazareth is the centrality of the advent of the kingdom of God to his proclamation.55 Moreover, it is clear that Jesus thought of himself as central to the coming of God’s kingdom. The scholarly debate continues over whether God’s kingdom was thought by Jesus to be already here or not yet arrived (or, as most scholars think, both in a dynamic tension), but in either case it is Jesus who is the vanguard and representative of that kingdom. As we shall see, Jesus carried out a ministry of miraculous healings and exorcisms as signs to the people of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom. The question then arises as to Jesus’ role in that kingdom. Was he merely a herald of that kingdom or did he have a more significant role to play? Here we encounter the very interesting Q saying of Jesus concerning his twelve disciples’ roles in the coming kingdom:
“Truly, I say to you, in the new world . . . you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt. 19:28 esv; cf. Luke 22:28–30). The saying is likely to be authentic, not only because it seems to envision an earthly kingdom which did not immediately materialize, but also because of the awkwardness of envisioning a throne for Judas Iscariot, who was known to have apostatized. Jesus’ calling twelve disciples is thus seen to be no accident: the number twelve is significant as corresponding to the number of tribes of the full nation of Israel. This fact has interesting ramifications for Jesus’ view of Israel as a political entity; but our interest lies elsewhere. If the twelve disciples are to sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, who will be the king over all of Israel? The clear answer is, Jesus himself. He will certainly not be beneath the disciples or outside of Israel, but he will be over the disciples as the King of Israel.
In short, Jesus thought of himself as Israel’s royal Messiah. Thus Jesus’ messianic self-understanding is implicit in his proclamation of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom in his person and ministry, wholly apart from his explicit claims.
55. See extended discussion in Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracles, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 237–506.
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Jesus’ Authority
Jesus’ personal sense of acting and speaking with divine authority is evident in a number of ways.
First, his authority comes to expression in the content and style of his teaching. These two aspects of his teaching are especially evident in the Sermon on the Mount. The typical rabbinical style of teaching was to quote extensively from learned teachers, who provided the basis of authority for one’s own teaching. But Jesus did exactly the opposite. He began, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old . . .” and quoted the Mosaic Law; then he continued, “But I say to you
. . .” and gave his own teaching. Jesus thus equated his own authority with that of the divinely given Torah. It’s no wonder that Matthew comments, “When Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matt. 7:28–29 rsv).
But it’s not just that Jesus placed his personal authority on a par with that of the divine Law. More than that, he adjusted the Law on his own authority. Although Jewish scholars have attempted valiantly to assimilate Jesus’ ethical teachings to the tradition of Judaism, Jesus’ opposition of his own personal authority to the divine Torah given through Moses is the rock upon which all such attempts are finally broken. Take, for example, Jesus’ teaching on divorce in Matthew 5:31–32
(cf. Mark 10:2–12). Here Jesus explicitly quotes the teaching of the Law (Deut.
24:1–4) and opposes to it, on the basis of his own authority, his teaching on the matter. In the Markan passage, he declares that Moses does not represent the perfect will of God on this matter and presumes to correct the Law on his own authority as to what is really the will of God. But no human being, no prophet or teacher or charismatic, has that kind of authority. “Jesus,” observes Witherington,
“seems to assume an authority over Torah that no Pharisee or Old Testament prophet assumed—the authority to set it aside.”56
In his provocative dialogue A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, the eminent Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner explains that it is precisely on this basis why he, as a Jew, would not have followed Jesus had he lived in first-century Palestine. Explaining that for a Jew the Torah is God’s revelation to Moses, he asserts, Jews believe in the Torah of Moses . . . and that belief requires faithful Jews to enter a dissent at the teachings of Jesus, on the grounds that those teachings at important points contradict the Torah. . . . And therefore, because that specific teaching was so broadly out of phase with the Torah and covenant of Sinai, I could not then follow him and do not now either. That is not because I am stubborn or unbelieving. It is because I believe God has given a different Torah from the one that Jesus teaches; and that Torah, the one Moses got at Sinai, stands in judgment of the torah of Jesus, as it dictates true and false for all other torahs that people want to teach in God’s name.57
56. Witherington, Christology of Jesus, 65.
57. Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1993), xii, 5.
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Given the supremely authoritative status of the divinely revealed Torah, Jesus’
teaching can only appear presumptuous and even blasphemous. In effect, as Robert Hutchinson put it, “Neusner wants to ask Jesus, ‘Who do you think you are—
God?’”58 Neusner himself recognizes that “no one can encounter Matthew’s Jesus without concurring that before us in the evangelist’s mind is God incarnate.”59 But if Jesus’ opposition of his personal teaching to the Torah is an authentic facet of the historical Jesus—as even the skeptical scholars of the Jesus Seminar concede—then it seems that Jesus did arrogate to himself the authority of God. According to Robert Guelich, “one must not shy away from the startling antithesis between God has said to those of old / But I say to you since here lies not only the key to the antithesis but to Jesus’ ministry.”60
Second, Jesus’ use of amēn expresses his authority. The expression frequently attributed to Jesus, “Truly, truly I say to you,” is historically unique and is recognized on all hands to have been used by Jesus to preface his teaching. It served to mark off his authoritative word on some subject, usually a statement about the inbreaking kingdom of God or about Jesus’ own work. Ben Witherington in his acclaimed study of the Christology of Jesus explains the significance of Jesus’ use of the phrase “Amen, I say to you”:
It is insufficient to compare it to “thus says the Lord,” although that is the closest parallel. Jesus is not merely speaking for Yahweh, but for himself and on his own authority. . . . This strongly suggests that he considered himself to be a person of authority above and beyond what prophets claimed to be. He could attest to his own truthfulness and speak on his own behalf, and yet his words were to be taken as having the same or greater authority than the divine words of the prophets. Here was someone who thought he possessed not only divine inspiration . . . but also divine authority and the power of direct divine utterance. The use of amen followed by “I say unto you” must be given its full weight in light of its context—early Judaism.61
That Witherington’s analysis is correct is evident from the complaint of the orthodox Jewish writer Ahad ha’ Am: “Israel cannot accept with religious enthusiasm, as the Word of God, the utterances of a man who speaks in his own name—not ‘thus saith the Lord,’ but ‘ I say unto you.’ This ‘I’ is in itself sufficient to drive Judaism away from the Gentiles forever.”62
Third, Jesus’ authority is especially evident in his role as an exorcist. Embarrassing as it may be to many modern theologians, it is historically certain that 58. Robert J. Hutchinson, “What the Rabbi Taught Me about Jesus,” Christianity Today, September 13, 1993, 28.
59. Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, 14.
60. Robert Guelich, Sermon on the Mount (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1982), 185.
61. Witherington, Christology of Jesus, 188.
62. Ahad ha’ Am, “Judaism and the Gospels,” in Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic, ed. H. Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1962), 298.
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Jesus believed he had the power to cast out demons.63 This was a sign to people of his divine authority. He declared, “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20 esv).
This saying, which is recognized by New Testament scholarship as authentic, is remarkable for two reasons. First, it shows that Jesus claimed divine authority over the spiritual forces of evil. Second, it shows that Jesus believed that in himself the kingdom of God had come. According to Jewish thinking, the kingdom of God would come at the end of history when the Lord would reign over Israel and the nations. But Jesus was saying, “My ability to rule the spiritual forces of darkness shows that in me the kingdom of God is already present among you.” As Ben Meyer explains in his study of Jesus’ aims, “The exorcisms pointed beyond themselves to the dawning of God’s reign! In terms of the history of religions, this gives an entirely distinctive profile to the exorcisms of Jesus. They become . . . signs of the eschaton.”64 Jesus’ exorcisms signaled that a new era was dawning and that Satan was being decisively cast out. More than that, however; for the advent of God’s kingdom was inseparable from the advent of God himself, as Meyer explains: Dalman pointed out that in the targumic literature “the reign of God” appears as a reverential circumlocution for “God” (as ruler). Jeremias rightly finds this phenomenon in Jesus’ idiom, as well, so that the words “the reign of God is near!” virtually mean “God is near”—at the door or already here!65
In claiming that in himself the kingdom of God had already arrived, as visibly demonstrated by his exorcisms, Jesus was, in effect, saying that in himself God had drawn near, thus putting himself in God’s place.
Finally, Jesus’ sense of divine authority comes clearly to expression in his claim to forgive sins. Several of Jesus’ parables, which are acknowledged on all hands to have been uttered by the historical Jesus, show that he assumed the prerogative to forgive sins. In parables like the prodigal son, the lost sheep, and so forth, Jesus describes persons who have wandered away from God and are lost in sin.
In Jewish thought such a person was irretrievably lost and therefore given up as dead. But Jesus extended forgiveness to such persons and welcomed them back into the fold. The problem is that no one but God had the authority to make such a proclamation. No mere prophet could presume to speak for God on this matter.
As Royce Gruenler puts it, Jesus “is consciously speaking as the voice of God on matters that belong only to God. . . . The evidence clearly leads us to affirm that Jesus implicitly claims to do what only God can do, to forgive sins. . . . The religious 63. According to Witherington, that Jesus was an exorcist is “one of the most incontestable facts about his ministry,” being attested in nearly all layers of tradition and by allusions in sayings, narratives, and summaries (Witherington, Christology of Jesus, 201).
64. Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979), 155–56.
65. Ibid ., 136.
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authorities correctly understood his claim to divine authority to forgive sinners, but they interpreted his claims as blasphemous and sought his execution.”66
What Jesus taught in his parables, he acted out in real life. One of the most radical features of the historical Jesus was his practice of inviting prostitutes, toll collectors, and other outcasts into fellowship with him around the dinner table.67
This was a living illustration of God’s forgiveness of them and his invitation of them into fellowship in the kingdom of God. As John Meier explains, in the eyes of religious Jews
Jesus’ table fellowship with the ritually or morally unclean communicated uncleanness to Jesus himself. Jesus, of course, saw it the other way round: he was communicating salvation to religious outcasts. His meals with sinners . . . were celebrations of the lost being found, of God’s mercy reaching out and embracing the prodigal son returning home. His banquets with sinful Israelites were a preparation and foretaste of the coming banquet in the kingdom of God.68
Critics like Crossan who see Jesus’ table fellowship as merely a demonstration of Jesus’ egalitarianism have missed its most distinctive feature: the reconciliation of sinners and their integration into the kingdom of God. In table fellowship with the immoral and unclean Jesus is acting in the place of God to welcome them into God’s kingdom. It’s no wonder that the religious authorities saw this presumptuous activity as blasphemous and sought to have him crucified (cf. the reaction to Jesus’ claim in Mark 2:1–12 that as the Son of Man he has authority to forgive sins)!
Thus, most New Testament critics acknowledge that the historical Jesus acted and spoke with a self-consciousness of divine authority and that, furthermore, he saw in his own person the coming of the long-awaited kingdom of God and invited people into its fellowship.
Jesus’ Miracles
Jesus believed himself to be not only an exorcist but a miracle worker. Recall his reply to the disciples of John the Baptist, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf 66. Royce Gordon Gruenler, New Approaches to Jesus and the Gospels (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1982), 46, 59, 49. This claim comes to explicit expression in Mark 2:1–12, whose authenticity is defended by Gundry, Mark, 110–22.
67. As Meyer explains, through table fellowship the Jewish ritual distinction of clean and unclean and the Jewish moral distinction of righteous and unrighteous, which shaped and permeated the self-understanding of Judaism, came to concrete expression. With respect to Jesus’ ignoring such distinctions, Meyer comments,
“Nothing . . . could have dramatized the gratuity and the present realization of God’s saving act more effectively than this unheard of initiative toward sinners” (Meyer, Aims, 161). Jesus’ iconoclasm in this regard lends credibility to Mark’s comment that Jesus consciously overturned Old Testament food laws (Mark 7:19), which underscores the point above concerning his authority to correct the Torah, as is pointed out by Gundry, Mark, 356, 367–71.
68. Meier, Marginal Jew, 2:303.
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hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them”
(Matt. 11:4–5 esv). Dunn comments: “Whatever the ‘facts’ were, Jesus evidently believed that he had cured cases of blindness, lameness, and deafness—indeed there is no reason to doubt that he believed lepers had been cured under his ministry and dead restored to life.”69
Moreover, the miracle stories are so widely represented in all strata of the Gospel traditions that it would be fatuous to regard them as not rooted in the life of Jesus.
Thus, the consensus of New Testament scholarship agrees that Jesus did perform
“miracles”—however one might want to interpret or explain these. At the end of his long and detailed study of Jesus’ miracles Meier concludes, The overall attestation of the figure of Jesus as healer of physical infirmities and illnesses is thus even stronger than the attestation of his activity as an exorcist. . . . In sum, the statement that Jesus acted as and was viewed as an exorcist and healer during his public ministry has as much historical corroboration as almost any other statement we can make about the Jesus of history.70
Therefore, it is clear that Jesus at least thought that he had the power to perform miracles; and in that the majority of New Testament critics agree.
The miracles of Jesus take on a Christological significance in light of the fact that they, like his exorcisms, were taken to be signs of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God.71 This is the sense of Jesus’ allusion to Isaiah 35:5–6; 61:1
above.72 As such, they functioned fundamentally differently from the wonders performed by Hellenistic magicians or Jewish holy men. Moreover, Jesus’ miracles differed from those of his compatriots Honi and Hanina in that Jesus never prays for a miracle to be done; he may first express thanks to the Father, but then he effects it himself. And he does so in his own name, not God’s. Moreover, neither Honi nor Hanina carried out a prophetic ministry, made messianic claims, or brought any new teaching in conjunction with their miracles. Thus, Jesus’ self-understanding cannot be reduced simply to that of another charismatic Jewish holy man.
This is remarkable enough in itself; but there is more. For Jesus’ claim to be able to heal miraculously all diseases and infirmities also contains an implicit claim to divinity. As Howard Kee, a New Testament scholar from Boston University who has specialized in the study of the Gospel miracles, explains, for Old Testament Judaism God is the one who heals all Israel’s diseases. In this light, Jesus’ claim to heal miraculously, without use of any medical means, takes on a new significance: 69. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (London: SCM, 1975), 60. On the authenticity of the passage, see Witherington, Christology of Jesus, 165.
70. Meier, Marginal Jew, 2:969–70.
71. As emphasized by Graham H. Twelftree, Jesus the Miracle Worker (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1999).
72. Witherington points out: “The emphasis here is on the present fulfillment of Old Testament hopes for the messianic or eschatological age” (Witherington, Christology of Jesus, 44; cf. 172).
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Jesus in effect takes God’s place as the healer of Israel.73 No doctors or medicine are necessary for him—he heals as God heals. Compare Jesus’ claim to have healed lepers with 2 Kings 5:7 (rsv): “When the king of Israel read the letter [from the king of Aram concerning Naaman’s leprosy], he rent his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy?’” Jesus assumes the place reserved for God in the Old Testament. So his claim to perform miracles is not only amazing in itself, but actually has a deeper significance in implying Jesus’ divinity.
Jesus’ Prayer Life
Jesus always prayed to God as “Father.” The German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias demonstrated that such practice is attested in every layer of the Gospel traditions (Mark 14:36; Matt. 11:25–26/Luke 10:21; Matt. 26:42; Luke 23:34, 46; John 12:27–28). Behind the Greek word pater for Father lies the Aramaic “abba” (Mark 14:36), a familial term. This contrasts with what D. R. Bauer calls “the obsolete and formalized Hebrew term ‘ abi,’ ” typically used in Jewish prayers.74 Jesus thus thought of himself as God’s son in an intimate sense. This same intimate form of address to God appears also in early Christian practice (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6–7), doubtlessly preserved in Greek-speaking churches in imitation of Jesus. Since prayer to God as abba was part of Christian practice, the mere use of abba cannot be said to indicate a filial relationship to God unique to Jesus. But Jesus’ practice is noteworthy in that this expression was original to him and was his consistent and only form of address to God. It is also noteworthy that although Jesus may have taught his disciples to pray to God as Abba, he never joined with them in praying “Our Father . . .” On the contrary, he always referred to God as “my Father.” This distinction leads to an odd circumlocution like John 20:17: “my Father and your Father . . . my God and your God.” Jesus’ prayer life thus hints that he thought of himself as God’s Son in a unique sense that set him apart from the rest of the disciples.
Jesus’ Status as Arbiter of People’s Eternal Destiny Jesus held that people’s attitudes toward himself would be the determining factor in God’s judgment on the judgment day. He proclaimed, “I tell you, every one who acknowledges me before men, the Son of man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but he who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8-9 rsv).75 I have no doubt that in this passage Jesus is referring to himself as the Son of Man, not referring to some third figure besides himself. But be that as it may, the point is that whoever the Son of Man may be, Jesus is claiming that people will be judged before 73. Comments made in discussion of Kee’s paper at the conference “Christianity Challenges the University,” Dallas, Tex., February 1985.
74. Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, s.v., “Son of God,” by D. R. Bauer, p. 772, col. 1.
75. A multiply attested Q-saying, the authenticity of 12:8 is defended by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, trans. L. L. Wilkins and D. A. Priebe (London: SCM, 1968), 58–60.
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him on the basis of their response to Jesus. Think of it: people’s eternal destiny is fixed on their response to Jesus. Make no mistake: if Jesus were not divine, then this claim could only be regarded as the most narrow and objectionable dogmatism. For Jesus is saying that people’s salvation depends on their confession to Jesus himself.
A discussion of Jesus’ implicit self-concept could go on and on. According to Witherington, any adequate theory of Jesus’ self-understanding must be able to explain the following thirteen established features of the historical Jesus: 1) his independent approach to the Law
2) his feeding of the 5,000
3) his interpretation of his miracles
4) his proclamation of the kingdom of God as present and in-breaking in his ministry
5) his choosing of twelve disciples
6) his use of the Son of Man
7) his use of amēn
8) his use of abba
9) his distinguishing himself from his contemporaries, including John the Baptist, the Pharisees, Jewish revolutionaries, and the disciples 10) his belief that one’s future standing with God hinged on how one reacted to his ministry
11) his understanding that his death was necessary to rectify matters between God and his people
12) his sense of mission to the whole of Israel, especially to sinners and outcasts, which led to table fellowship with such people
13) his raising messianic expectations in a repeated pattern of controversy with his contemporaries.76
Although we have not discussed all these matters, enough has been said, I think, to indicate the radical self-concept of Jesus. Here is a man who thought of himself as the promised Messiah, God’s only Son, the Danielic Son of Man to whom all dominion and authority would be given, who claimed to act and speak with divine authority, who held himself to be a worker of miracles, and who believed that people’s eternal destiny hinged on whether or not they believed in him. Gruenler sums it up: “It is a striking fact of modern New Testament research that the essential clues for correctly reading the implicit Christological self-understanding of Jesus are abundantly clear.” There is, he 76. Witherington, Christology of Jesus, 268.
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concludes, “absolutely convincing evidence” that Jesus did intend to stand in the very place of God himself.77
Horst Georg Pöhlmann in his Abriss der Dogmatik reports, “In summary, one could say that today there is virtually a consensus concerning that wherein the historical in Jesus is to be seen. It consists in the fact that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, namely with the authority of God, with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation.”78 This involves, says Pöhlmann, an implicit Christology. He concludes: This unheard of claim to authority, as it comes to expression in the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, is implicit Christology, since it presupposes a unity of Jesus with God that is deeper than that of all men, namely a unity of essence.
This . . . claim to authority is explicable only from the side of his deity. This authority only God himself can claim. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur.79
There is no third way.80
Conclusion
Explicit use of Christological titles like Messiah, the Son of God, and especially the Son of Man, combined with implicit Christological claims made through his teaching and behavior indicates a radical self-understanding on the part of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, so extraordinary was the person who Jesus thought himself to be that Dunn at the end of his study of the self-consciousness of Jesus feels compelled to remark, “One last question cannot be ignored: Was Jesus mad?”81
Dunn rejects the hypothesis that Jesus was insane because it cannot account for the full portrait of Jesus that we have in the Gospels. The balance and soundness of Jesus’ whole life and teachings make it evident that he was no lunatic. But notice that by means of these claims of Jesus, on the basis of sayings shown to be authentic, we are brought round again to the same dilemma posed by the traditional apologetic: if Jesus was not who he claimed to be, then he was either a charlatan or a madman, neither of which is plausible. Therefore, why not accept him as the divine Son of God, just as the earliest Christians did?
77. Gruenler, New Approaches to Jesus and the Gospels, 74.
78. Horst Georg Pöhlmann, Abriss der Dogmatik, 3rd rev. ed. (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1966), 230.
79. Ibid.
80. I’m grateful to Robert Bowman, Charles Quarles, and Craig Evans for their helpful suggestions on this section.
81. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 86.
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Practical Application
It is intellectually gratifying to see how contemporary New Testament criticism has actually served to support rather than undermine a high view of Christ. The refusal of radical critics to draw the obvious Christological implications of unquestionably authentic sayings of Jesus is due not to lack of historical evidence but to their personal anti-metaphysical and, quite frankly, anti-Chalcedonian prejudices. The evidence thus vindicates the approach of the traditional apologetic.
But here a word of caution would be in order. Often one hears people say, “I don’t understand all those philosophical arguments for God’s existence and so forth. I prefer historical apologetics.” I suspect that those who say this think that historical apologetics is easy and will enable them to avoid the hard thinking involved in the philosophical arguments. But this section ought to teach us clearly that this is not so. It is naïve and outdated simply to trot out the dilemma “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” and adduce several proof texts where Jesus claims to be the Son of God, the Messiah, and so forth. The publicity generated by the Jesus Seminar and The DaVinci Code has rendered that approach forever obsolete. Rather, if an apologetic based on the claims of Christ is to work, we must do the requisite spadework of sorting out those claims of Jesus that can be established as authentic, and then drawing out their implications. This will involve not only mastering Greek but also the methods of modern criticism and the criteria of authenticity. Far from being easy, historical apologetics, if done right, is every bit as difficult as philosophical apologetics. The only reason most people think historical apologetics to be easier is because they do it superficially. But, of course, one can do philosophical apologetics superficially, too! My point is that if we are to do a credible job in our apologetics, we need to do the hard thinking and the hard work required, or at least to rely on those who have.
Now in applying this material in evangelism, I think it is often more effective when used defensively than offensively. That is to say, if the unbeliever says Jesus was just a good man or religious teacher, then confront him with Christ’s claims.
Used offensively to convince someone that Jesus was divine, this apologetic can be derouted on the popular level. Many people will say Jesus was a man from outer space, and the more you argue with them the more they become entrenched in this position. Of course, such a view is hopelessly kooky, so that, oddly enough, this apologetic is probably more effective on the scholarly level than on the popular.
I think that a more effective approach is to argue that Jesus’ claims provide the religio-historical context in which his resurrection becomes significant, as it vindicates those claims. Of course, the non-Christian might still say Jesus was from outer space and came back to life like E. T., in which case the most effective strategy is not to argue with him at all but just to point out that no scholar believes such a thing. If you argue with him, this gives the impression that his view is worth refuting and therefore has some credibility, which it does not. So simply brush it aside, and it is to be hoped that the unbeliever, not wishing to feel intellectually
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isolated, will not take it too seriously either. Taken in conjunction with evidence for the resurrection—and one might add, with the evidence for Jesus’ miracles and with fulfilled prophecy, which I have not discussed—the radical claims of Jesus become a powerful apologetic for the Christian faith.
Literature Cited or Recommended
Historical Background
Bartsch, Hans-Werner, ed. Kerygma and Myth. 2 vols. Translated by R. H. Fuller. London: SPCK, 1953.
Ben-Chorin, S. Jesus in Judenthum. Wuppetal: R. Brockhaus, 1970.
Bultmann, Rudolph. Jesus. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1951.
Evans, Craig A. “Authenticity Criteria in Life of Jesus Research,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19 (1989): 6–31.
———. “Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology.” Theological Studies 54
(1993): 3–36.
Funk, Robert W. and Roy W. Hoover, eds. The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say?
New York: Macmillan, 1993.
Hagner, Donald A. The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1984.
Hemer, Colin. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Edited by Conrad H. Gempf, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989.
Hooker, Morna. “On Using the Wrong Tool.” Theology 75 (1972): 570–81.
Kissinger, W. S. The Lives of Jesus: A History and Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1985.
Marshall, I. Howard. I Believe in the Historical Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1977.
Paulus, Heinrich Eberh. Gottlob. Das Leben Jesu, als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums. 2 vols. Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1828.
Robinson, James. A New Quest of the Historical Jesus. Studies in Biblical Theology 25.
London: SCM, 1959.
Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. 3rd ed. Translated by W. Montgomery.
London: Adam & Charles Black, 1954.
Sherwin-White, A. N. Roman Law and Roman Soceity in the New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963.
Stein, Robert H. “The Criteria for Authenticity.” In Gospel Perspectives I, edited by R. T.
France and David Wenham, 225–53. Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1980.
Strauss, David Friedrich. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Translated by G. Eliot. Edited with an introduction by P. C. Hodgson. Lives of Jesus Series. London: SCM, 1973.
Wrede, William. The Messianic Secret. Translated by J. O. G. Greig. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971.
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Assessment
Am, Ahad, ha’-. “Judaism and the Gospels.” In Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic, edited by H. Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1962.
Blackburn, Barry L. “Miracle Working in Hellenism and Hellenistic Judaism.” In Gospel Perspectives VI, edited by David Wenham and Craig Blomberg, 185–218. Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1986.
Bock, Darrell L. Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism and the Final Examination of Jesus.
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 106. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1998; repr. ed.: Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism: The Charge against Jesus in Mark 14:53–65. Biblical Studies Library. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000.
Bultmann, Rudolph. Jesus and the Word. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1934.
Collins, John J. The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature. Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant.
Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991.
Denaux, Adelbert. “The Q-Logion Mt 11,27/Lk 10,22 and the Gospel of John.” In John and the Synoptics, edited by A. Denaux. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 101. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1992.
Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Edited by Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1992. A compendium of scholarship on the historical Jesus which ought to be on every Christian apologist’s shelf.
Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. S.v. “Son of God,” by D. R. Bauer.
Dunn, James D.G. “Can the Third Quest Hope to Succeed?” In Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, 31–48. New Testament Tools and Studies 28/2. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999.
———. Christianity in the Making. Vol. 1: Jesus Remembered. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003.
———. Jesus and the Spirit. London: SCM, 1975.
Ellis, E. E. “Dating the New Testament.” New Testament Studies 26 (1980): 487–502.
Evans, Craig A. “Authenticating the Activities of Jesus.” In Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, 3–29. New Testament Tools and Studies 28/2. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999.
———. “Authenticity Criteria in Life of Jesus Research.” Christian Scholar’s Review 19
(1989): 6–31.
———. Fabricating Jesus. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2006.
———. Jesus and His Contemporaries: Comparative Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2001.
———. “Jesus and Zechariah’s Messianic Hope.” In Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, 373–88. New Testament Tools and Studies 28/2. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999.
———. “Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology.” Theological Studies 54
(1993): 3–36.
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———. “What Did Jesus Do?” In Jesus under Fire, edited by J. P.Moreland and Michael J. Wilkins, 101–11. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1995.
Funk, Robert W. “The Issue of Jesus.” Forum 1 (1985): 7–12.
Funk, Robert W. and Roy W. Hoover, eds. The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say?
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Green, Michael. “Jesus and Historical Skepticism.” In The Truth of God Incarnate, edited by M. Green, 107–39. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1977.
———. “Jesus in the New Testament.” In The Truth of God Incarnate, edited by M. Green, 17–57. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1977.
Gruenler, Royce Gordon. New Approaches to Jesus and the Gospels. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1982.
Guelich, Robert. Sermon on the Mount. Waco, Tex.: Word, 1982.
Gundry, Robert H. Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993.
Hagner, Donald A. The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1984.
Hemer, Colin. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Edited by Conrad H. Gempf. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989.
Hengel, Martin. “Jesus, the Messiah of Israel: The Debate about the ‘Messianic Mission’ of Jesus.” In Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, 323–49. New Testament Tools and Studies 28/2. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999.
———. The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion.
Translated by John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976.
Hick, John, ed. The Myth of God Incarnate. London: SCM, 1977.
Hooker, Morna. “On Using the Wrong Tool.” Theology 75 (1972): 570–81.
Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003.
Hutchinson, Robert J. “What the Rabbi Taught Me about Jesus.” Christianity Today, September 13, 1993, 27–29.
Jeremias, Joachim. The Central Message of the New Testament. London: SCM, 1965.
———. The Prayers of Jesus. Translated by John Burchard. London: SCM, 1967.
Kim, Seyoon. The Son of Man as the Son of God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985.
Marshall, I. Howard. The Origins of New Testament Christology. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1976.
Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew. 3 vols. Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday, 1991, 1994, 2001.
Meyer, Ben F. The Aims of Jesus. London: SCM, 1979.
Moreland, J. P. and Michael J. Wilkins, eds. Jesus under Fire. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1995.
Moule, C. F. D. The Origins of Christology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
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Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Jesus—God and Man. Translated by L. L. Wilkins and D. A. Priebe.
London: SCM, 1968.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Vol.
1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Pöhlmann, Horst Georg. Abriss der Dogmatik. 3rd rev. ed. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1980.
Quarles, Charles L. “The Use of the Gospel of Thomas in the Research on Historical Jesus of John Dominic Crossan.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 69 (2007): 517–36.
Riesner, Rainer. Jesus als Lehrer. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/7. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1984.
Sherwin-White, A.N. Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963.
Stein, Robert H. “The Criteria for Authenticity.” In Gospel Perspectives I, edited by R. T.
France and David Wenham, 225–63. Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1980.
Taylor, Vincent. The Gospel according to St. Mark. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1966.
Trilling, Wolfgang. Fragen zur Geschichtlichkeit Jesu. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1966.
Twelftree, Graham H. Jesus the Miracle Worker. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1999.
Witherington III, Ben. The Christology of Jesus. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.
Wright, N. T. Christian Origins and the Question of God. 3 vols. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, 1996, 2003.
Yamauchi, Edwin. “Magic or Miracle? Diseases, Demons, and Exorcisms.” In Gospel Perspectives VI, edited by David Wenham and Craig Blomberg, 89–183. Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1986.
Zager, Werner and Hans Rollmann. “Unveröffentlichte Briefe William Wredes zur Prob-lematisierung des messianischen Selbstverständnisses Jesu.” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 8 (2001): 274–322.
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The Resurrection of Jesus
God and immortality: those were the two conditions we saw to be necessary if man is to have a meaningful existence. I have argued that God exists, and now we have come at length to the second consideration, immortality. Against the dark background of modern man’s despair, the Christian proclamation of the resurrection is a bright light of hope. The earliest Christians saw Jesus’ resurrection as both the vindication of his personal claims and the harbinger of our own resurrection to eternal life. If Jesus rose from the dead, then his claims are vindicated and our Christian hope is sure; if Jesus did not rise, our faith is futile and we fall back into despair. How credible, then, is the New Testament witness to the resurrection of Jesus?
Historical Background
The historical apologetic for the resurrection played a central role in the case of the Christian apologists during the Deist controversy. A review of their arguments and of the reasons for the decline of this form of apologetics will be useful in preparing the way for a contemporary assessment of the resurrection. Too often Christians today employ an apologetic for the resurrection that was suitable for use against eighteenth-century opponents but is today ineffective in dealing with the objections raised by modern biblical criticism.
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The Case for the Resurrection in the Traditional Apologetic
The traditional apologetic may be summarized in three steps.
THE GOSPELS ARE AUTHENTIC
The point of this step in the argument was to defend the apostolic authorship of the Gospels. The reasoning was that if the Gospels were actually written by the disciples, then quite simply they were either true accounts or they were lies. Since the Deists granted the apostolic authorship of the Gospels, they were reduced to defending the implausible position that the Gospels were a tissue of deliberate falsehoods. In order to demonstrate the authenticity of the Gospels, Jacob Vernet (whom we met in chapter 4) appeals to both internal and external evidence.
Internal Evidence
Under internal evidence, Vernet notes that the style of writing in the Gospels is simple and alive, what we would expect from their traditionally accepted authors.
Moreover, since Luke was written before Acts, and since Acts was written prior to the death of Paul, Luke must have an early date, which speaks for its authenticity.
The Gospels also show an intimate knowledge of Jerusalem prior to its destruction in a.d. 70. Jesus’ prophecies of that event must have been written prior to Jerusalem’s fall, for otherwise the church would have separated out the apocalyptic element in the prophecies, which makes them appear to concern the end of the world. Since the end of the world did not come about when Jerusalem was destroyed, so-called prophecies of its destruction that were really written after the city was destroyed would not have made that event appear so closely connected with the end of the world. Hence, the Gospels must have been written prior to a.d. 70. Further, the Gospels are full of proper names, dates, cultural details, historical events, and customs and opinions of that time. The stories of Jesus’ human weaknesses and of the disciples’ faults also bespeak the Gospels’ accuracy. Furthermore, it would have been impossible for forgers to put together so consistent a narrative as that which we find in the Gospels. The Gospels do not try to suppress apparent discrepancies, which indicates their originality. There is no attempt at harmonization between the Gospels, such as we might expect from forgers. Finally, the style of each particular gospel is appropriate to what we know of the personalities of the traditional authors.
Gottfried Less adds to Vernet’s case the further point that the Gospels do not contain anachronisms; the authors appear to have been first-century Jews who were witnesses of the events. William Paley adds a final consideration: the Hebraic and Syriac idioms that mark the Gospels are appropriate to the traditional authors. He concludes that there is no more reason to doubt that the Gospels come from the traditional authors than there is to doubt that the works of Philo or Josephus are authentic, except that the Gospels contain supernatural events.
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External Evidence
Turning next to the external evidence for the Gospels’ authenticity, Vernet argues that the disciples must have left some writings, engaged as they were in giving lessons to and counseling believers who were geographically distant. And what could these writings be if not the Gospels and Epistles themselves? Similarly, Paley reasons that eventually the apostles would have needed to publish accurate narratives of Jesus’ history, so that any spurious attempts would be discredited and the genuine Gospels preserved. Moreover, Vernet continues, there were many eyewitnesses who were still alive when the books were written who could testify whether they came from their purported authors or not. Most importantly, the extra-biblical testimony unanimously attributes the Gospels to their traditional authors.
No finer presentation of this point can be found than Paley’s extensive eleven-point argument. First, the Gospels and Acts are cited by a series of authors, beginning with those contemporary with the apostles and continuing in regular and close succession. This is the strongest form of historical testimony, regularly employed to establish authorship of secular works; and when this test is applied to the Gospels, their authenticity is unquestionably established. Paley traces this chain of testimony from the Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle of Clement, and the Shepherd of Hermas all the way up to Eusebius in a.d. 315. Less presents similar evidence, and concludes that there is better testimony for the authenticity of the New Testament books than for any classical work of antiquity.
Second, the Scriptures were quoted as authoritative and as one-of-a-kind. As proof Paley cites Theophilus, the writer against Artemon, Hippolitus, Origen, and many others.
Third, the Scriptures were collected very early into a distinct volume. Ignatius refers to collections known as the Gospel and the Apostles, what we today call the Gospels and the Epistles. According to Eusebius, about sixty years after the appearance of the Gospels Quadratus distributed them to converts during his travels. Irenaeus and Melito refer to the collection of writings we call the New Testament.
Fourth, these writings were given titles of respect. Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Dionysius, Irenaeus, and others refer to them as Scriptures, divine writings, and so forth.
Fifth, these writings were publicly read and expounded. Citations from Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian go to prove the point.
Sixth, copies, commentaries, and harmonies were written on these books.
Noteworthy in this connection is Tatian’s Diatessaron, a harmony of the four Gospels, from about a.d. 170. With the single exception of Clement’s commentary on the Revelation of Peter, Paley emphasizes, no commentary was ever written during the first three hundred years after Christ on any book outside the New Testament.
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Seventh, the Scriptures were accepted by all heretical groups as well as by orthodox Christians. Examples include the Valentinians, the Carpocratians, and many others.
Eighth, the Gospels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, 1 John, and 1 Peter were received without doubt as authentic even by those who doubted the authenticity of other books now in the canon. Caius about a.d. 200 reckoned up about thirteen of Paul’s letters but insisted that Hebrews was not written by Paul. About twenty years later Origen cites Hebrews to prove a particular point, but noting that some might dispute the authority of Hebrews, he states that his point may be proved from the undisputed books of Scripture and quotes Matthew and Acts. Though he expresses doubt about some books, Origen reports that the four Gospels alone were received without dispute by the whole church of God under heaven.
Ninth, the early opponents of Christianity regarded the Gospels as containing the accounts upon which the religion was founded. Celsus admitted that the Gospels were written by the disciples. Porphyry attacked Christianity as found in the Gospels. The Emperor Julian followed the same procedure.
Tenth, catalogues of authentic Scriptures were published, which always contained the Gospels and Acts. Paley supports the point with quotations from Origen, Athanasius, Cyril, and others.
Eleventh, the so-called apocryphal books of the New Testament were never so treated. It is a simple fact, asserts Paley, that with a single exception, no apocryphal gospel is ever even quoted by any known author during the first three hundred years after Christ. In fact, there is no evidence that any inauthentic gospel whatever existed in the first century, in which all four Gospels and Acts were written. The apocryphal gospels were never quoted, were not read in Christian assemblies, were not collected into a volume, were not listed in the catalogues, were not noticed by Christianity’s adversaries, were not appealed to by heretics, and were not the subject of commentaries or collations, but were nearly universally rejected by Christian writers of succeeding ages.
Therefore, Paley concludes, the external evidence strongly confirms the authenticity of the Gospels. Even if it should be the case that the names of the authors traditionally ascribed to the Gospels are mistaken, it still could not be denied that the Gospels do contain the story that the original apostles proclaimed and for which they labored and suffered.
Taken together, then, the internal and external evidence adduced by the Christian apologists served to establish the first step of their case, that the gospels are authentic.
THE TEXT OF THE GOSPELS IS PURE
The second step often taken by the Christian thinkers was to argue that the text of the Gospels is pure. This step was important to ensure that the Gospels we have today are the same Gospels as originally written.
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Vernet, in support of the textual purity of the Gospels, points out that because of the need for instruction and personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many times, which increases the chances of preserving the original text. In fact, no other ancient work is available in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various versions agree in content. The text has also remained unmarred by heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies. The differences that do exist are quite minor and are the result of unintentional mistakes. The text of the New Testament is every bit as good as the text of the classical works of antiquity.
To these considerations, Less adds that the quotations of the New Testament books in the early church fathers coincide. Moreover, the Gospels could not have been corrupted without a great outcry on the part of orthodox Christians. Against the idea that there could have been a deliberate falsifying of the text, Abbé Houtteville argues that no one could have corrupted all the manuscripts. Moreover, there is no precise time when the falsification could have occurred, since, as we have seen, the New Testament books are cited by the church fathers in regular and close succession. The text could not have been falsified before all external testimony, since then the apostles were still alive and could repudiate any such tampering with the Gospels. In conclusion, Vernet charges that to repudiate the textual purity of the Gospels would be to reverse all the rules of criticism and to reject all the works of antiquity, since the text of those works is less certain than that of the Gospels.
THE GOSPELS ARE RELIABLE
Having demonstrated that the Gospels are authentic and that the text of the Gospels is pure, the Christian thinkers were now in a position to argue that the Gospels are historically reliable. Their argument basically boiled down to a dilemma: if the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection are false, then the apostles were either deceivers or deceived. Since both of these alternatives are implausible, it follows that the Gospel accounts must be true.
Apostles Neither Deceivers Nor Deceived
Let’s turn first to the arguments presented against the second horn of the dilemma: that the apostles were deceived. This alternative embraces any hypothesis holding that Jesus did not rise from the dead, but that the disciples sincerely believed he had.
Humphrey Ditton in his Discourse Concerning the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1712) argues that the apostles could not have been mistaken about the resurrection. In the first place, the witnesses to the appearances were well qualified. There were a great many witnesses, and they had personal knowledge of the facts over an extended period of forty days. It is unreasonable, therefore, to ascribe their experience to imagination or dreaming. Moreover, the disciples were not religious
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enthusiasts, as is evident from their cool and balanced behavior even in extreme situations. Thomas Sherlock responds to the charge that the evidence for the resurrection consists of the testimony of silly women by pointing out that they, too, had eyes and ears to report accurately what they experienced; and far from being gullible, they were actually disbelieving. He observes also that the women were never in fact used as witnesses to the resurrection in the apostolic preaching.
Finally, he adds, the testimony of the men is none the worse off for having the testimony of the women as well. (This exchange obviously took place before the days of feminist consciousness!)
Paley answers the allegation that the resurrection appearances were the result of
“religious enthusiasm” (that is, were hallucinations) by arguing that the theory fails on several counts. First, not just one person but many saw Christ appear. Second, they saw him not individually but together. Third, they saw him appear not just once, but several times. Fourth, they not only saw him, but touched him, conversed with him, and ate with him. Fifth and decisively, the religious enthusiasm hypothesis fails to explain the non-production of the body. It would have been impossible for Jesus’ disciples to have believed in their master’s resurrection if his corpse still lay in the tomb. But it is equally incredible to suppose that the disciples could have stolen the body and perpetrated a hoax. Furthermore, it would have been impossible for Christianity to come into being in Jerusalem if Jesus’ body were still in the grave. The Jewish authorities would certainly have produced it as the shortest and completest answer to the whole affair. But all they could do was claim that the disciples had stolen the body. Thus, the hypothesis of religious enthusiasm, in failing to explain the absence of Jesus’ corpse, ultimately collapses back into the hypothesis of conspiracy and deceit, which, Paley remarks, has pretty much been given up in view of the evident sincerity of the apostles, as well as their character and the dangers they underwent in proclaiming the truth of Jesus’ resurrection.
With Paley’s last remark, we return to the first horn of the dilemma: that the disciples were deceivers. This alternative encompasses any hypothesis holding that the disciples knew that the miracles and resurrection of Jesus did not take place, but that they nevertheless claimed that they did.
One of the most popular arguments against this theory is the obvious sincerity of the disciples as attested by their suffering and death. No more eloquent statement of the argument can be found than Paley’s: he seeks to show that the original witnesses of the miraculous events of the Gospels passed their lives in labors, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undertaken in attestation to and as a consequence of the accounts which they delivered.
Paley argues first from the general nature of the case. We know that the Christian religion exists. Either it was founded by Jesus and the apostles or by others, the first being silent. The second alternative is quite incredible. If the disciples had not zealously followed up what Jesus had started, Christianity would have died at its birth. If this is so, then a life of missionary sacrifice must have been necessary
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for those first apostles. Such a life is not without its own enjoyments, but they are only such as spring from sincerity. With a consciousness at bottom of hollowness and falsehood, the fatigue and strain would have become unbearable.
There was probably difficulty and danger involved in the propagation of a new religion. With regard to the Jews, the notion of Jesus’ being the Messiah was contrary to Jewish hopes and expectations; Christianity lowered the esteem of Jewish law; and the disciples would have had to reproach the Jewish leaders as guilty of an execution that could only be represented as an unjust and cruel murder. As to the Romans, they could have understood the kingdom of God only in terms of an earthly kingdom—thus, a rival. And concerning the heathen, Christianity admitted no other god or worship. Although the philosophers allowed and even enjoined worship of state deities, Christianity could countenance no such accommodation.
Thus, even in the absence of a general program of persecution, there were probably random outbursts of violence against Christians. The heathen religions were old and established and not easily overthrown. Those religions were generally regarded by the common people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful. From none of these sides could the Christians expect protection. Finally, the nature of the case requires that these early apostles must have experienced a great change in their lives, now involved as they were in preaching, prayer, religious meetings, and so forth.
What the nature of the case would seem to require is in fact confirmed by history. Writing seventy years after Jesus’ death, Tacitus narrates Nero’s persecution about thirty years after Christ, how the Christians were clothed in the skins of wild beasts and thrown to dogs, how others were smeared with pitch and used as human torches to illuminate the night while Nero rode about in the dress of a charioteer, viewing the spectacle. The testimonies of Suetonius and Juvenal confirm the fact that within thirty-one years after Jesus’ death, Christians were dying for their faith. From the writings of Pliny the Younger, Martial, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, it is clear that believers were voluntarily submitting to torture and death rather than renounce their religion. This suffering is abundantly attested in Christian writings as well. Christ had been killed for what he said; the apostles could expect the same treatment. Jesus’ predictions in the Gospels of sufferings for his followers were either real predictions come true or were put into his mouth because persecution had in fact come about. In Acts, the sufferings of Christians are soberly reported without extravagance. The epistles abound with references to persecutions and exhortations to steadfastness. In the early writings of Clement, Hermas, Polycarp, and Ignatius, we find the sufferings of the early believers historically confirmed.
It is equally clear that it was for a miraculous story that these Christians were suffering. After all, the only thing that could convince these early Christians that Jesus was the Messiah was that they thought there was something supernatural about him. The Gospels are a miraculous story, and we have no other story handed
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down to us than that contained in the Gospels. Josephus’s much disputed testimony can only confirm, not contradict, the Gospel accounts. The letters of Barnabas and Clement refer to Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. Polycarp mentions the resurrection of Christ, and Irenaeus relates that he had heard Polycarp tell of Jesus’ miracles.
Ignatius speaks of the resurrection. Quadratus reports that persons were still living who had been healed by Jesus. Justin Martyr mentions the miracles of Christ. No relic of a non-miraculous story exists. That the original story should be lost and replaced by another goes beyond any known example of corruption of even oral tradition, not to speak of the experience of written transmissions.
These facts show that the story in the Gospels was in substance the same story that Christians had at the beginning. That means, for example, that the resurrection of Jesus was always a part of this story. Were we to stop here, remarks Paley, we have a circumstance unparalleled in history: that in the reign of Tiberius Caesar a certain number of persons set about establishing a new religion, in the propagation of which they voluntarily submitted to great dangers, sufferings, and labors, all for a miraculous story which they proclaimed wherever they went, and that the resurrection of a dead man, whom they had accompanied during his lifetime, was an integral part of this story.
Since it has been already abundantly proved that the accounts of the Gospels do stem from their apostolic authors, Paley concludes, then the story must be true.
For the apostles could not be deceivers. He asks:
Would men in such circumstances pretend to have seen what they never saw; assert facts which they had not knowledge of, go about lying to teach virtue; and, though not only convinced of Christ’s being an imposter, but having seen the success of his imposture in his crucifixion, yet persist in carrying on; and so persist, as to bring upon themselves, for nothing, and with full knowledge of the consequence, enmity and hatred, danger and death?1
The question is merely rhetorical, for the absurdity of the hypothesis of deceit is all too clear.
A second popular argument against the disciples’ being deceivers was that their character precludes their being liars. Humphrey Ditton observes that the apostles were simple, common men, not cunning deceivers. They were men of unquestioned moral integrity and their proclamation of the resurrection was solemn and devout.
They had absolutely nothing to gain in worldly terms in preaching this doctrine.
Moreover, they had been raised in a religion that was vastly different from the one they preached. Especially foreign to them was the idea of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah. This militates against their concocting this idea.
The Jewish laws against deceit and false testimony were very severe, which fact would act as a deterrent to fraud. Finally, they were evidently sincere in what they 1. William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, 2 vols., 5th ed. (London: R. Faulder, 1796; repr. ed.: Westmead, England: Gregg, 1970), 1:327–28.
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proclaimed. In light of their character so described, asks Ditton bluntly, why not believe the testimony of these men?
A third argument pressed by the apologists was that the notion of a conspiracy is ridiculous. Vernet thinks it inconceivable that one of the disciples should suggest to the others that they say Jesus was risen when both he and they knew the precise opposite to be true. How could he possibly rally his bewildered colleagues into so detestable a project? And are we then to believe that these men would stand before judges declaring the truth of this product of their imaginations? Houtteville asserts that a conspiracy to fake the resurrection would have had to have been of such unmanageable proportions that the disciples could never have carried it off.
Ditton points out that had there been a conspiracy, it would certainly have been unearthed by the disciples’ adversaries, who had both the interest and the power to expose any fraud. Common experience shows that such intrigues are inevitably exposed even in cases where the chances of discovery are much less than in the case of the resurrection.
Yet a fourth argument, urged by Less, was that the Gospels were written in such temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate events. Anyone who cared to could have checked out the accuracy of what they reported. The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the resurrection under such circumstances had it not occurred.
Fifth, the theft of the body from the tomb by the disciples would have been impossible. Ditton argues that the story of the guard at the tomb is plausible, since the Jews had the ability and motivation to guard the tomb. But in this case, the disciples could not have stolen the body on account of the armed guard. The allegation that the guards had fallen asleep is ridiculous, because in that case they could not have known that it was the disciples who had taken the corpse. Besides, adds Houtteville, no one could have broken into the tomb without waking the guard.
Sixth, even the enemies of Christianity acknowledged Jesus’ resurrection. The Jews did not publicly deny the disciples’ charge that the authorities had bribed the guard to keep silent. Had the charge been false, they would have openly denounced it. Thus, the enemies of Christianity themselves bore witness to the resurrection.
Seventh and finally, the dramatic change in the disciples shows that they were absolutely convinced Jesus had risen from the dead. They went from the depths of despair and doubt to a joyful certainty of such height that they preached the resurrection openly and boldly and suffered bravely for it.
Thus, the hypothesis of deceit is just as implausible as the hypothesis that the apostles had been deceived. But since neither of these alternatives is reasonable, the conclusion can only be that they were telling the truth and that Jesus rose from the dead.
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The Origin of Christianity Proves the Resurrection
In addition to this fundamental dilemma, the Christian apologists also refurbished the old argument from the origin of the church. Suppose, Vernet suggests, that no resurrection or miracles occurred: how then could a dozen men, poor, coarse, and apprehensive, turn the world upside down? If Jesus did not rise from the dead, declares Ditton, then either we must believe that a small, unlearned band of deceivers overcame the powers of the world and preached an incredible doctrine over the face of the whole earth, which in turn received this fiction as the sacred truth of God; or else, if they were not deceivers, but enthusiasts, we must believe that these extremists, carried along by the impetus of extravagant fancy, managed to spread a falsity that not only common folk, but statesmen and philosophers as well, embraced as the sober truth. Because such a scenario is simply unbelievable, the message of the apostles, which gave birth to Christianity, must be true.
The Decline of Historical Apologetics
Paley’s View of the Evidences (1794) constituted the high-water mark of the historical apologetic for the resurrection. During the nineteenth century this approach dramatically receded. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a significant and influential thinker defending the Christian faith on the basis of the evidence for the resurrection. It seems to me that there were two factors that served to undermine the traditional apologetic.
THE ADVANCE OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM
The first of those was the advance of biblical criticism. In England the Deist controversy subsided, in France it was cut short by the Revolution, but in Germany it was taken up into a higher plane. There is a direct link between Deism and the advance in biblical criticism that began in Germany in the late eighteenth century.
The flood of Deist thought and literature that poured into eighteenth-century Germany from England and France wrought a crisis in German orthodox theology.
That theology had been characterized by an extremely rigid doctrine of biblical inspiration and infallibility and by a devotional pietism. The critique of the Deists undermined the faith of many in the inerrancy of Scripture, but their piety would not allow them to join themselves to the Deist camp and reject Christianity. This group of scholars, generally called Rationalists, therefore sought to resolve the crisis by forging a new way between orthodoxy and Deism; namely, they loosed the religious meaning of a text from the historicity of the events described therein.
The historical events were only the form, the husk, in which some spiritual, trans-historical truth was embodied. What was of importance was the substance, the kernel, not the mere external trappings. In this way, the Rationalists could accept the Deist critique of miracles but at the same time retain the spiritual truth expressed in these stories. With regard to the resurrection we have seen that many Rationalists adopted some form of the apparent death theory to explain away the resurrection; but for most it still retained its spiritual significance and truth.
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The Rationalists thus sought a middle ground between the Deists and the supernaturalists. The Deists and supernaturalists agreed that if the events of the Gospels did not in fact occur, then Christianity was false. But the Rationalists, while holding with the Deists that the events never occurred, nevertheless held with the supernaturalists that Christianity was true. Let’s take a look at two of the principal figures in this radical new direction.
Herrmann Samuel Reimarus, a professor of oriental languages at Hamburg, struggled privately with gnawing doubts about the truth of the biblical revelation.
From 1730 to 1768 he wrote them down, and his writing evolved into an enormous 4,000-page critique of the Bible. He was troubled by the many contradictions he found in the Bible and could not accept the stories of the flood, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the resurrection of Jesus. He denied miracles and came to accept a Deistic natural religion. Nevertheless, he never published his opinions but only showed his manuscript to a few close friends and two of his children. After his death, Reimarus’s daughter gave the manuscript to Gottfried Lessing, who became librarian in Wolfenbüttel. In 1774 Lessing began to publish excerpts from the manuscript, passing them off as anonymous fragments found in the library’s archives. In 1777 he published Reimarus’s attack on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, which set German orthodoxy in an uproar.
According to Reimarus, Jesus claimed to have been only an earthly Messiah, and having tried to establish his reign and failed, he was executed. But the disciples stole Jesus’ corpse and spread the story of Jesus’ resurrection, touting him as a spiritual Messiah so that they could continue the easy life of preaching that they had enjoyed with Jesus while he was alive. Reimarus realized that to maintain this position he must refute the evidence for the historicity of the resurrection.
In his mind, this consisted of the witness of the guard at the tomb, the witness of the apostles, and the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Against the testimony of the guard, Reimarus employed the arguments of the English Deists. He argued that the story is improbable in itself and is full of contradictions.
He held it to be an invention of Matthew that the other evangelists rejected. In order to undermine the testimony of the apostles, Reimarus capitalized on the inconsistencies and contradictions in the resurrection narratives. If these were not enough, there is the overriding problem of the privacy of Jesus’ appearances.
The apostles’ testimony is suspect because they are the only ones who supposedly saw Christ. Finally, Reimarus made short shrift of the proof from prophecy. The interpretations of the Old Testament passages in question are so strained as to be unconvincing. Besides, the whole procedure begs the question anyway, since it assumes that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead and the prophecies thus apply to him! In conclusion, Reimarus summarized his case:
(l) the guard story is very doubtful and unconfirmed, and it is very probable the disciples came by night, stole the corpse, and said afterward Jesus had arisen; (2) the
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disciples’ testimony is both inconsistent and contradictory; and (3) the prophecies appealed to are irrelevant, falsely interpreted, and question-begging.2
Thus, Christianity is quite simply a fraud.
Among the many who undertook to refute Reimarus was Johann Salomo Semler, a conservative Rationalist. In his earlier Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon (1771) Semler had broken the ground for the new Rationalist approach to the Scriptures. Semler had been the assistant at the University of Halle to S. J.
Baumgarten, who chronicled the course of Deism in his Nachrichten von einer Hallischen Bibliothek (1748–1751), reviewing almost every English Deist and apologetic work. Semler actually assisted Baumgarten in the reading and translation of Deist literature, and thus became open to Deist influences.
At the same time, Semler had a background in Pietism and had no desire to undermine Christianity. Therefore, he made a distinction between the timeless, spiritual truths in Scripture and the merely local truths. It was his conviction that only the spiritual truths may properly be called the Word of God. He thus introduced into theology the decisive distinction between the Scriptures and the Word of God. Since only the spiritual truths are the Word of God, it is no longer possible to regard the Scriptures as a whole as divinely inspired. Rather, the Word of God is clothed in fallible, human forms, which have only local importance. These fallible forms represent God’s and Jesus’ accommodation to human weakness. Included among these accommodations is the miraculous element in Scripture. No Christian can be obligated to believe that such events literally happened, for they are not part of the Word of God. Thus, we are free to examine the historical narratives as we would any other ordinary narrative, since inspiration concerns only the timeless truths they embody. Should the narrative be shown to be unhistorical, that is of little consequence, for that cannot have any effect on the Word of God. The proof that certain events are unhistorical is irrelevant to divine truths.
Given his views of Scripture, it seems somewhat surprising to find Semler writing a refutation of Reimarus in his Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten (1779). Reimarus’s bitter attack seems to have forced him back to the orthodox end of the spectrum. But in the way he defends the resurrection, we can see the beginning of the end for the historical apologetic for the resurrection. He emphatically subordinates the resurrection to the teachings of Jesus and removes from it any apologetic significance. According to Semler, Christianity consists of the spiritual doctrines taught by Christ. Reimarus mistakenly thinks that in refuting the three purported grounds for belief in the resurrection, he has thereby struck down the essential truths of Christianity. But this is far from the case, asserts Semler. In the first place, one may be a Christian without believing in the resurrection of Jesus. In the second place, the true ground for belief in the resurrection is the self-evident 2. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Fragments, trans. R. S. Fraser, ed. C. H. Talbert, Lives of Jesus Series (London: SCM, 1971), 104.
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truth of Christ’s teachings. For Semler, belief in Christ’s teaching entails belief in Christ’s resurrection: “The resurrection of Jesus hangs together with Jesus’ life and goal; whoever has experienced his teachings will also believe that God has raised him from the dead.”3 The proof of the resurrection is not the three points mentioned by Reimarus; the proof is the spiritual teachings of Christ. In specific response to Reimarus’s refutation of the three purported grounds, Semler grants all three to Reimarus—but for Semler they are simply irrelevant and present no problem once one has abandoned the doctrine of verbal inspiration.
Thus, Semler undercut the traditional apologetic in various ways: while affirming the truth of the resurrection, he nonetheless admitted that belief in the resurrection was not essential to being a Christian; he provided no historical reason to accept the reliability of the gospel accounts with regard to this event; he denied that the resurrection has any power to confirm Christ’s teaching; and he instead subordinated the resurrection to the teachings of Christ, the self-evident Word of God, making the latter the proof of the former.
By loosing the Word of God from the Scriptures and making its truth self-attesting, Semler enabled Rational theology to adhere to the doctrines of Christianity while denying their historical basis. During the time between Semler and Strauss, the natural explanation school predominated. The old conspiracy theory of Reimarus was rejected as an explanation for the resurrection of Jesus, and instead the apparent death theory enjoyed popularity among Rationalists. Even F. D. E.
Schleiermacher, known as the father of modern theology, accepted this explanation.
But the roof really caved in on the traditional apologetic with the advent of David Friedrich Strauss and his hermeneutic of mythological explanation.
Strauss’s Leben Jesu (1835) marks a watershed in the history of biblical criticism, to which modern form and redaction criticism may be traced. The year 1835 marks a turning point in the history of the Christian faith.
Strauss’s approach to the Gospels, and to the resurrection in particular, may be seen as an attempt to forge a third way between the horns of the dilemma posed by the traditional apologetic, which says that if the miracles and resurrection of Jesus are not historical facts, then the apostles were either deceivers or deceived, neither of which is plausible. Reimarus had chosen to defend the first horn, arguing that the disciples had hoaxed the resurrection. Paulus had chosen to defend the second horn, arguing that the disciples had been mistaken about Jesus’ return from the dead. What Strauss saw clearly was that neither of these alternatives was plausible, and so he sought a third alternative in the mythological explanation.
According to this view, the miraculous events of the gospels never happened, and the gospel accounts of them are the result of a long process of legend and religious imagination:
3. Johann Salomo Semler, Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungennanten insbesondere vom Zweck Jesu and seiner Jünger, 2nd ed. (Halle: Verlag des Erziehungsinstitut, 1780), 266.
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In the view of the church, Jesus was miraculously revived; according to the deistic view of Reimarus, his corpse was stolen by the disciples; in the rationalistic view, he only appeared to be dead and revived; according to our view the imagination of his followers aroused in their deepest spirit, presented their Master revived, for they could not possibly think of him as dead. What for a long time was valid as an external fact, first miraculous, then deceptive, finally simply natural, is hereby reduced completely to the state of mind and made into an inner event.4
Strauss thus denied that there was any external fact to be explained. The gospel accounts of the resurrection were unreliable legends colored by myth. Hence, the dilemma of “deceivers or deceived” did not arise. The fact that the resurrection was unhistorical did not rob it of its religious significance (here we see the change wrought by Semler), for a spiritual truth may be revealed within the husk of a delusion.
Strauss believed that the chief problem in applying the mythical interpretation to the New Testament is that the first century was no longer an age of myths. But although it was a time of writing, if there was a long period of oral transmission during which no written record existed, then marvelous elements could begin to creep in and grow into historical myths. Strauss recognized as well that adherence to this theory necessitated denying the contemporary authorship of the Gospels and the influence of eyewitnesses. Hence, Strauss regarded it as “the sole object”
of his book to examine the internal evidence in order to test the probability of the authors’ being eyewitnesses or competently informed writers.5
Strauss gave short shrift to the external testimony to the Gospels: he believed Mark to be compiled from Matthew and Luke and hence not based on Peter’s preaching; the Matthew mentioned by Papias is not our Matthew; Acts so contradicts Paul that its author could not be his companion; the earliest reference to John is in a.d. 172, and the Gospel’s authenticity was disputed by the Alogoi. Nor could living eyewitnesses prevent the accrual of legend: first, the legends could have originated in areas where Jesus was not well known; second, the apostles could not be everywhere at once to correct or suppress unhistorical stories; and third, eyewitnesses themselves would be tempted to fill up the gaps in their own knowledge with stories. Strauss argued that the Jews lagged behind the Romans and Greeks in their historical consciousness; even Josephus’s work is filled with marvelous tales. Myths about the Messiah had already arisen between the exile and Christ’s day. All that was wanting was the application of these myths with some modification to Jesus by the Christian community.
With regard to the resurrection accounts, Strauss used arguments similar to Reimarus’s to demonstrate their unreliability. For example, if the body was em-4. David Friedrich Strauss, “Herrmann Samuel Reimarus and His ‘Apology,’ ” in Fragments, 280–81.
5. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. G. Eliot, ed. with an introduction, P.C. Hodgson, Lives of Jesus Series (London: SCM, 1973), 70.
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balmed and wrapped, why do the women return for this purpose? Was the body placed in the tomb because it was Joseph’s or because it was near? The story of the guard is improbable, and the inconsistencies in the empty tomb narrative are irreconcilable. As for the appearances, why should Jesus command the disciples to go to Galilee when he was going to appear to them in Jerusalem? And why did he command them to stay in Jerusalem when he was going to Galilee? For such reasons, no credence can be given to the gospel stories of the empty tomb or resurrection appearances.
Despite this, Strauss admitted that Paul’s challenge in 1 Corinthians 15 concerning living witnesses to an appearance of Jesus before five hundred brethren makes it certain that people were alive at that time who believed they had seen the risen Christ. How is that to be explained? Certainly not by supernatural intervention, for that is unenlightened. “Hence, the cultivated intellect of the present day has very decidedly stated the following dilemma: either Jesus was not really dead, or he did not really rise again.”6 But that Jesus did not die on the cross is the defunct theory of Rationalism; therefore, Jesus did not rise. The correct explanation of the appearances is to be found in the appearance to Paul. His experience makes clear that the appearances were not external to the mind. What happened is that the disciples, convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, began to search the Scriptures after his death. There they found the dying and glorified Messiah of Isaiah 53. So Jesus must be alive! Soon they would see him, especially the women.
Having hallucinated appearances of Christ, they would naturally infer that his grave was empty, and by the time they returned from Galilee to Jerusalem, which was certainly not as soon as Pentecost, there was no closed tomb to refute them.
In this way belief in Jesus’ resurrection originated, and eventually the legendary gospel accounts arose.
Strauss’s work completely altered the tone and course of German theology.
Gone forever was the central dilemma of the eighteenth-century apologetic for the resurrection. Now the evangelists were neither deceivers nor deceived, but stood at the end of a long process in which the original events were completely reshaped through mythological and legendary influences. The dissolution of the apologists’ dilemma did not itself entail that the supernaturalist view was false. But for Strauss the supernaturalist view was not only disproved by the inconsistencies and contradictions noted by Reimarus, but was a priori ruled out of court because of the presupposition of the impossibility of miracles. Any event that stood outside the inviolable chain of finite causes was by definition mythological. Therefore, the resurrection could not possibly be a miraculous and historical event.
This is the challenge that Strauss has left to Christian apologetics. The position of Bultmann in the twentieth century with regard to the resurrection is virtually the same as Strauss’s. It is no longer effective to argue for the resurrection today simply by refuting theories as to who stole the body or that Jesus did not really 6. Ibid. , 736.
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die. They are no longer the issue. The issue is whether the gospel narratives are historically credible accounts or unhistorical legends.
THE TIDE OF SUBJECTIVISM
The other reason, it seems to me, for the decline in historical apologetics during the nineteenth century was the tide of subjectivism that swept away an objective approach to matters of religious belief. I do not have space to develop this here, but let me say in passing that during the nineteenth century there came a back-lash to the Age of Reason, and Romanticism swept Europe. This was spurred on in England by the Great Awakening, which emphasized the subjective, personal experience of faith. In France, the very emotive, subjective side of thinkers such as Rousseau emerged as a widespread reaction to the prior age of the philosophes, which ended in Revolution and the Reign of Terror. In Germany the effect of the philosophy of Kant and surging German Romanticism combined to color religious faith with a strong subjectivism. The net result of this tide of subjectivism was that apologetics moved from objective evidences for faith to emphasizing the moral grounds for faith or the beauties of faith itself. This subjective turn also enabled one to live with the destruction that was increasingly being wrought on the biblical narrative by the hammers of biblical criticism.
Twentieth-Century Developments
Liberal theology, with its cheery view of human perfectibility and progress, could not survive World War I; but its demise brought no renewed interest in the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. For the two most influential schools of theological thought that succeeded it were united in their devaluation of the historical with regard to Jesus. Thus, dialectical theology, exemplified by Karl Barth, championed the doctrine of the resurrection, but would have nothing to do with the resurrection as an event of history. In his commentary on the book of Romans (1919), the early Barth declared, “The resurrection touches history as a tangent touches a circle—that is, without really touching it.” Existential theology, exemplified by Rudolf Bultmann, was even more antithetical to the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection.
Though Bultmann acknowledged that the earliest disciples believed in the literal resurrection of Jesus and that Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 even attempts to prove the resurrection, he nevertheless pronounces such a procedure “fatal.” It reduces Christ’s resurrection to a nature miracle akin to the resurrection of a corpse, and modern man cannot be reasonably asked to believe in nature miracles before becoming a Christian. Therefore, the miraculous elements of the gospel must be demythologized to reveal the true Christian message: the call to authentic existence in the face of death, symbolized by the cross. The resurrection is merely a symbolic restatement of the message of the cross and essentially adds nothing to it. To appeal to the resurrection as historical evidence, as did Paul, is doubly wrongheaded, for it is the very nature of existential faith that it is a leap without evidence. Thus, to argue historically for the resurrection is contrary to faith. Clearly then, the antipathy
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of liberal theology to the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection remained unrelieved by either dialectical or existential theology.
But a remarkable change came about during the second half of the twentieth century. The first glimmerings of change began to appear in 1953. In that year, as we have said, Ernst Käsemann, a pupil of Bultmann, argued at a colloquy at the University of Marburg that Bultmann’s historical skepticism toward Jesus was unwarranted and counterproductive and suggested reopening the question of where the historical about Jesus was to be found. A new quest of the historical Jesus had begun. Three years later in 1956 the Marburg theologian Hans Grass in his influential Ostergeschehen und Osterberichte subjected the resurrection itself to historical inquiry and concluded that the resurrection appearances cannot be dismissed as mere subjective visions on the part of the disciples, but were objective visionary events.
Meanwhile the church historian Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen in an equally epochal essay defended the historical credibility of Jesus’ empty tomb. During the ensuing years a stream of works on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection flowed forth from German, French, and English presses. By 1968 the old skepticism was a spent force and began dramatically to recede. So complete has been the turn-about during the second half of the century concerning the resurrection of Jesus that I think that it is no exaggeration to speak of a reversal of scholarship on this issue, such that those who deny the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection now seem to be the ones on the defensive. Perhaps one of the most significant theological developments in this connection is the theological system of Wolfhart Pannenberg, who bases his entire Christology on the historical evidence for Jesus’ ministry and resurrection. This is a development undreamed of in German theology prior to 1950. Equally startling is the declaration of one of the world’s leading Jewish theologians, Pinchas Lapide, that he is convinced on the basis of the evidence that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. Also noteworthy is that fact that Christian philosophers, such as Stephen T. Davis and Richard Swinburne, whose own field has undergone a similar renaissance over the last half century, have begun to engage in the discussion of Jesus’ resurrection, a development that can only be salutary due to the sophisticated tools of philosophical analysis that they bring to questions like the problem of miracles, personal identity, probability, and so forth.
We have truly entered a new era of resurrection scholarship.
Assessment
Historical Study and Jesus’ Resurrection
Despite its pivotal nature for our understanding of Jesus, many historical Jesus scholars would probably still agree with Barth that the resurrection is not a legitimate object of historical research and is therefore strictly off-limits for the historian. Even if it occurred, such an event is not open to historical investigation
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and can therefore be affirmed only on non-historical grounds, for example, through religious experience or faith.
Structure of the Argument
Before we look at the reasons some critical scholars have offered for placing the resurrection in historical quarantine, it will be helpful to say something about the structure of a historical argument for Jesus’ resurrection. Any historical argument for Jesus’ resurrection will have two steps, even if these are not clearly delineated: (1) to establish the facts which will serve as historical evidence and (2) to argue that the hypothesis of Jesus’ resurrection is the best or most probable explanation of those facts. Step (1) will involve an investigation of the historicity of events such as the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb; step (2) will assess the comparative merits of rival hypotheses offered as explanations of the facts established in step (1).
Bart Ehrman’s Objections
With this two-step procedure in mind, consider the claim of Bart Ehrman that there can be no historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.7 Ehrman takes it for granted that historians have no privileged access to what happens in the supernatural realm; they have access only to what happens in the natural world.8
Therefore a supernatural act by its very nature lies outside the purview of the historian. The historian qua historian cannot tell us whether God is the cause of some event; he can at best tell us that certain people regarded an event as miraculous.
So, with respect to the resurrection, “Historians . . . have no difficulty whatsoever speaking about the belief in Jesus’ resurrection, since this is a matter of public record. For it is a historical fact that some of Jesus’ followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution.”9 But the truth or falsity of that belief is not within the purview of the historian.
Readers who have followed my argument to this point will recognize Ehrman’s objection as a variation on Troeltsch’s historiographical ban on miracles, which we encountered in chapter 6. Once we differentiate the two steps in a historical argument for the resurrection, however, then it becomes apparent that Ehrman’s objection, even if conceded, strikes at most against step (2) of the argument. The resurrection of Jesus is, indeed, a miraculous explanation of the evidence. But the evidence established in step (1) is not itself miraculous. None of the relevant facts is in any way supernatural or inaccessible to the historian. Take the fact that Jesus’
tomb was found empty on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion. There is nothing miraculous about the discovery of an empty grave. To give an analogy, after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, a plot was hatched by enemies of Lincoln to steal his body as it was being transported by train back to Illinois. The 7. See http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=debates_main.
8. Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16, 294, 227.
9. Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 231.
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historian will obviously want to know whether this plot was foiled or not. Was Lincoln’s body missing from the train? Was it successfully interred in the tomb at Springfield? Or take the postmortem appearances of Jesus. A Civil War historian will want to know if Lincoln’s closest associates like Secretary of War Stanton and Vice President Johnson experienced appearances of Lincoln alive after his death.
These are questions any historian can investigate. And it’s the same with the facts relevant to the resurrection hypothesis. Hence, even if Ehrman were correct that the historian, due to a methodological constraint, cannot infer the resurrection of Jesus, he may still investigate the events which constitute the evidence which the resurrection hypothesis seeks to explain.
Indeed, Ehrman himself, after expressing initial skepticism concerning some of those facts, came to regard them all as historically well founded. With respect to Jesus’ burial and empty tomb, he judges that “the earliest accounts we have are unanimous in saying that Jesus was in fact buried by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and so it’s relatively reliable that that’s what happened. We also have solid traditions to indicate that women found this tomb empty three days later.”10 As for the postmortem appearances, Ehrman agrees with virtually all scholars in holding that “we can say with some confidence that some of his disciples claimed to have seen Jesus alive.”11 And we have already seen that he thinks that the historian can establish that shortly after Jesus’ execution some of his followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead; in fact, Ehrman surmises that had Jesus died and no one believed in his resurrection, no new religion would have emerged following his death.12 So Ehrman himself has no problem with the historian’s carrying out, indeed, carrying out successfully, step (1) of a historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus.
Many defenders of the resurrection will be quite content to let the case rest there, leaving the best explanation of these facts to be settled between an inquirer and God—after all, not everything has to be, or even can be, settled historically!
In scholarly books on the resurrection, perhaps 90 percent of the space is typically devoted to step (1) of the argument. Take, for example, N. T . Wright’s massive study The Resurrection of the Son of God, the most important book on Jesus’ resurrection today. Wright’s argument may be summarized as follows:13
1. Early Christians believed in Jesus’ (physical, bodily) resurrection.
10. Bart Ehrman, “From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity,” Lecture 4: “Oral and Written Traditions about Jesus” (The Teaching Company, 2003).
11. Ehrman, Jesus, 200.
12. Ehrman, New Testament, 276 .
13. See my analysis of Wright’s loosely formulated seven-step argument in “Wright vs. Crossan on the Resurrection of Jesus,” in The Resurrection: The Crossan-Wright Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis and London: Augsburg Fortress and SPCK, 2006), 139–48.
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2. The best explanation of that belief is the hypothesis of the disciples’ discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb and their experience of post-mortem appearances of Jesus.
2.1. The hypothesis of the disciples’ discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb and their experience of postmortem appearances of Jesus has the explanatory power to account for that belief.
2.2. Rival hypotheses such as spontaneous generation within a Jewish context, dreams about Jesus, cognitive dissonance or a fresh experience of grace following Jesus’ death, etc., lack the explanatory power to account for that belief.
3. The best explanation for the facts of Jesus’ empty tomb and postmortem appearances is the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead.
Virtually the entirety of Wright’s book is devoted to establishing points (1) and (2); when it comes to (3) he simply laterals the ball to Gary Habermas, referring the reader to Habermas’s treatments of rival hypotheses.14 Wright has almost nothing to say in defense of the resurrection hypothesis as an explanation for the empty tomb and postmortem appearances; he is content, having firmly established those facts, to invite the modern secularist to reconsider his naturalistic worldview and see if the resurrection hypothesis doesn’t make good sense.15
But why must we stop there? Why think that step (2) is off limits to the historian? We saw that Troeltsch’s principle of analogy can be stood on its head so as not to constrain the historian to purely naturalistic hypotheses. Moreover, we have given objective criteria for the identification of some event as a miracle. So what is the problem? Ehrman seems to suggest that it is the historian’s lack of access to the supernatural realm, which prevents his justifiably inferring that some event has a supernatural cause. But this objection is very weak. In the first place, the historian need not have direct access to the explanatory entities postulated by one’s hypothesis. Think of the analogy of contemporary physics. Physicists posit all sort of entities to which they have no direct access: strings, higher dimensional membranes, even parallel universes. They postulate such entities as the best explanation for the evidence to which we do have access. Nor is such a procedure unique to theoretical physics; the historical sciences like paleontology, geology, and cosmology do exactly the same thing. Dinosaurs, like quarks, are theoretical entities to which we have no direct access but which are postulated as the best explanation of the evidence we have. Indeed—and here we come to the second point—the historian doesn’t have direct access to any of any of the objects of his study! This was one of the problems we encountered in dealing with the objectivity of history in chapter 5. The past is gone, and things and events of the past can be inferred only indirectly 14. N. T. Wright, C hristian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3: The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 718.
15. Ibid., 710–16.
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on the basis of present evidence. Inaccessibility is thus not an epistemologically differentiating feature of natural as opposed to supernatural entities.
Finally, even if we were to concede that the professional historian must as a member of his guild act under the constraint of methodological naturalism, the question remains why we should so act. Why can’t I as a philosopher or just as a human being judge that the best explanation for the facts of the case is a miraculous explanation? Indeed, why can’t the historian himself, in his off-hours, so to speak, make a similar judgment? Would it not be a tragedy if we were to fail to come to know the truth about reality simply because of a methodological constraint? Apart from some good reason for thinking that inference to a supernatural explanation is irrational, why should we, when we are not acting as professional historians, pay heed to a mere methodological constraint?
John Meier’s Reservations
John Meier’s reason for prescinding from a historical investigation of Jesus’ resurrection is quite different from Ehrman’s. Indeed, Meier’s reason is so kooky that it would scarcely deserve discussion here, were it not for the status of its exponent. It is sobering to think that the world’s preeminent historical Jesus scholar plans to end his voluminous life of Jesus with the crucifixion and burial, with apparently no concern for what German scholars call “das Geschick Jesu”
( Jesus’ final fate).16
As is evident from his treatment of Jesus’ miracles, Meier is quite willing to consider the historicity of purportedly miraculous events themselves, even if prescinding from a judgment as to their miraculous nature. Meier does not rule the miracle stories off-limits, as he does the resurrection narratives, but seeks to render a historical judgment about the occurrence of the events while leaving aside the question as to their being supernaturally caused. So why does Meier refuse to investigate the resurrection or to discuss the resurrection narratives? He says that the resurrection is off-limits due to the restrictive definition of the historical Jesus which he will be using throughout his investigation. Recall that Meier defines the historical Jesus or the Jesus of history (the terms are used synonymously) as “a modern abstraction and construct. By the Jesus of history I mean the Jesus whom we can ‘recover’ and examine using the scientific tools of modern historical research.”17
We have already seen in chapter 7 the problems with this definition, but let that pass. What is it about this definition that precludes the resurrection narratives from being examined with such tools and our recovering the resurrection of Jesus as a part of the historical Jesus? Meier answers that “in the historical-critical context, the ‘real’ has been defined—and has to be defined—in terms of what exists in this world of time and space, what can be experienced in principle by any observer, 16. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 13.
17. Ibid., 25.
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and what can be reasonably deduced and inferred from such experience.”18 Here Meier appears to state three necessary conditions of something’s being real—that is, belonging to a reasonably complete biographical portrait of someone—in the context of historical inquiry. Now the three conditions stated by Meier for something’s being historically recoverable seem quite unremarkable. So which of those conditions preclude the resurrection from belonging to the historical Jesus?
Here things really become interesting. To my knowledge, Meier never denies that the third condition could be fulfilled, that is to say, that Jesus’ resurrection can be reasonably deduced and inferred from such facts as Jesus’ empty tomb, his postmortem appearances, and the origin of the Christian Way. What, then, about the second condition, that an event must be experienceable in principle by any observer? Meier denies that the resurrection “is in principle open to the observation of any and every observer,”19 but he does not explain himself. I see no reason to think that someone sitting in the tomb holding vigil over the body of Jesus would not have observed his resurrection. And again, even if it were true that the resurrection is not in principle observable by anyone, that is still no reason for ignoring the events which go to make up the evidence established in step (1) of a historical argument for the resurrection like the empty tomb, the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, and so forth. Rather Meier’s real reason for denying that the resurrection can be part of the historical Jesus is that Meier doubts that the first condition can be fulfilled. Citing Gerald O’Collins, Meier asserts that “although the ‘resurrection is a real, bodily event involving the person of Jesus of Nazareth,’ the resurrection of Jesus ‘is not an event in space and time and hence should not be called historical,’ since ‘we should require an historical occurrence to be something significant that is known to have happened in our space-time continuum.’”20
Here Meier asserts that Jesus’ resurrection was an actual, bodily event but that it did not occur in time and space. Accordingly, it can be said to have actually occurred without being “historical” in Meier’s idiosyncratic sense, that is, recoverable by the scientific tools of historical research. Now the claim that Jesus’ resurrection can be an actual, bodily event involving the person Jesus of Nazareth without being an occurrence in time and space is certainly strange. Unfortunately, Meier does not explain the paradox. But a consultation of O’Collins’s article, which is cited by Meier in both volume one and volume two on this score, as well as elsewhere, sheds light on the conundrum.
The key to understanding O’Collins’s claim that the resurrection does not occur in space and time is his conception of the resurrection as a kind of transition from this-worldly to other-worldly existence. The resurrection, on his view, is Christ’s transitioning out of space and time into a new reality. “Through the resurrection 18. Ibid., 197.
19. Ibid., vol. 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracle (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 525.
20. Ibid., 1:201.
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Christ passes out of the empirical sphere of this world to a new mode of existence in the ‘other’ world of God.”21 Through the resurrection Christ moves outside the ordinary datable, localizable conditions of our experience to become an other-worldly reality. Whereas those raised from the dead by Jesus during his earthly ministry “resume life under normal bodily conditions” so that “their space-time lives continue,” Jesus “does not return to life in our space-time continuum.”22 Christ “on the far side of the resurrection” did not continue to exist under the bodily conditions which we experience and within which the historian operates.23
Now as an aside, it should be said that O’Collins’ claim that Jesus’ resurrection did not involve a return to life in our spacetime continuum presupposes a patent misreading of the Gospel narratives, not to speak of Jewish texts. One of the merits of Wright’s exhaustive study of ancient texts concerning resurrection from the dead is his demonstration that the notion of resurrection was not a flight to an other-worldly, non-spatio-temporal realm but inherently involved the restoration of life in the realm of space and time.24 That life was not, of course, a mere reanimation to mortal existence, but it was bodily, physical, and spatio-temporal. O’Collins has turned Jesus’ resurrection into Jesus’ assumption into heaven on the pattern of Enoch and Elijah, a quite different category than resurrection of the dead.
But let that pass. Let us grant O’Collins that with the resurrection Jesus of Nazareth’s four-dimensional earthly existence came abruptly to an end. Still, we might object, the final three-dimensional configuration of that existence had specific spatio-temporal coordinates. It was at that place and time that the resurrection occurred. Pannenberg makes a similar point, observing that if the empty tomb is historical, then the resurrection did occur in space. “If it really took place,”
he says wryly, “it took place in Palestine and not for instance in America.”25 One might add, “And it took place in time as well, sometime around A.D. 30 and not, for instance, in 1967.”
In his response to Pannenberg, O’Collins’ conception of the resurrection as a transition becomes crucial. He responds,
It seems odd, however, to speak of a transition “out of ” space, viz. to a reality not locatable in space, taking place in space, viz. in Palestine. For even if the “initial point” of this transition were located in space, this would not justify us in concluding that the transition “took place” in space. Besides it seems preferable to talk of the tomb containing the body of the historical Jesus not as “the initial point” of the transition, but as being the last place where Jesus in the normal historical sense was locatable.26
21. G. G. O’Collins, “Is the Resurrection an ‘Historical’ Event?” Heythrop Journal 8 (1967): 384.
22. Ibid., 385.
23. Ibid.
24. Wright, C hristian Origins, vol. 3; see 3:625–26 for a particularly powerful statement of the point.
25. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology as History, 265, n.76, cited by O’Collins, “Resurrection,” 386.
26. O’Collins, “Resurrection,” 387.
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We can set aside immediately the red herring of the tomb’s not being the initial point of the transition, for no one has suggested that. Rather the idea is that the four-dimensional entity which in its final stages is Jesus’ corpse has its terminus at a certain spatial location which is in the tomb. Why not say that the resurrection occurred there (and then)? The answer, says O’Collins, is that a transition out of space ought not to be said to occur in space.
There’s something both right and wrong about this answer. Compare a shopper’s exiting a grocery store. Does his exiting the store occur in the store? At any point in the store right up to and including its boundary point, the shopper has not yet exited the store. But once he is outside the store, there is no first point at which he can be said to exit the store, for between any exterior point and the store’s boundary there is a dense series of closer points at each of which the shopper had already exited the store. So where does his exiting the store occur?
It’s evident that O’Collins has unwittingly entangled himself in the ancient Greek paradoxes of motion.27 Transitional events like stopping, exiting, and dying occur over non-zero intervals of time, and it is conceptually absurd to specify any single spacetime point as the instant of change. There will be either a last instant of the state of the object before the change, with no first instant of its state after the change, or else a first instant of the state of the object after the change, with no last instant of its state before the change. What there cannot be is any instant at which the change itself can coherently be said to occur.
That the ancient paradoxes of motion are, indeed, the culprit behind O’Collins’s argument, and not the nature of the resurrection, is evident from the fact that even if the resurrection were conceived as a transformation wholly within space and time, one could not specify a single spacetime point at which it happened. At any point it would either not yet have happened or have already happened.
Nevertheless, just as it is perfectly acceptable to say that the shopper exited the building, say, through the front door rather than the rear entrance in the sense that that was the last location at which he existed prior to being outside the store, so Jesus’ transformation to his glorified state can be similarly located in the sense that one can specify the spacetime point at which his corruptible existence ended prior to his being in a glorified state. Moreover, in ordinary language we content ourselves with approximations rather than spacetime points. Just as the historian can determine where someone exited a building or when someone died, there is no realistic objection based on continuity considerations to the historian’s determining where and when Jesus’ resurrection occurred.
The final irony of Meier’s appeal to O’Collins’s argument as justification for ignoring the resurrection narratives is that O’Collins, himself a strong proponent of the historical credibility of Jesus’ resurrection, in the very same article goes on to insist, “To argue that the resurrection of Christ is not appropriately described 27. See the engaging discussion of these paradoxes by Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), chap. 26.
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as an historical event is not to assert that historical evidence and inquiry are irrelevant.”28 He lists three areas of inquiry: (1) the “proclaiming faith” of the disciples can be investigated by the historian; (2) Christ’s appearances at definite times and places to a particular number of persons are historical from the side of those who encountered him; and (3) the empty tomb can be the object of investigation by the historian. These are precisely the three independently established facts which I shall argue are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus, namely, the origin of the Christian Way, Jesus’ postmortem appearances, and the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb. Even given O’Collins’s conclusion that Jesus’ resurrection was not “historical” in his Pickwickian sense, still all the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection remains intact to be explored by the scientific tools of historical research.
That leads to a final point. O’Collins’s argument that the resurrection of Jesus did not occur in space and time is the result of a prolonged historical study of the New Testament evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. But in the absence of any such investigation, how does Meier know whether or not Jesus’ resurrection, if it took place, took place in space and time and whether it was observable or not? How can he know a priori that Wright is not correct that Jesus’ resurrection was a spatio-temporal event which was in principle observable by any fair-minded and interested observer? How does he know that Jesus’ resurrection can only be affirmed by faith and not through historical investigation, apart from such an investigation?
I can think of only one answer to that question: theology. It is a theological conviction on Meier’s part that Jesus’ resurrection is affirmable only by faith. Meier’s theological commitment intrudes in a comment like the following on Pannenberg’s historical approach to the resurrection: “In my opinion, Pannenberg’s overall approach to revelation and faith on the one hand and history and reason on the other creates more difficulties than it solves. At times it comes close to saying that the object of faith can be proven by historical research.”29 What is, of course, ironic about this is that Meier eschews theological commitments in his work as a historian, aspiring to approach questions from a theologically neutral stance. But it seems clear that the reason Meier as a historian won’t touch the resurrection is that his prior theological commitments preclude this. We can only hope that he will shed those commitments and bring his considerable talents to bear on the question of the historicity of Jesus’
postmortem appearances, his empty tomb, the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection, and ultimately, upon the event of Jesus’ resurrection itself.
Dale Allison’s Doubts
Philosophical problems of a different kind make it difficult for Dale Allison, an eminent New Testament scholar, to accept Jesus’ literal resurrection.30 At the heart 28. O’Collins, “Resurrection,” 385.
29. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 2:529.
30. Dale C. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2005), 219–28.
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of his doubts about a literal resurrection of the dead is the problem of the identity of the resurrection body with the mortal body in cases in which the mortal body has been completely destroyed. If spatio-temporal continuity is a necessary condition of identity over time, then the discontinuity caused by the dissolution of the mortal body implies that the resurrection body is at best a duplicate of the mortal body but is not identical to it. So it would seem impossible in such a case to hold that that very body will be raised.
It’s odd that these concerns should cause Allison to have doubts about the literal resurrection of Jesus, since in Jesus’ case the mortal body was not destroyed, so that no spatio-temporal discontinuity existed to preclude identity. It was clearly the body in the tomb that was raised (hence, the empty tomb). Even if, in cases in which the mortal body has been utterly dissolved, God has to create a brand-new look-alike out of nothing, how could this conclusion possibly impact the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection?
Allison says that in such a case Jesus’ resurrection becomes the exception, an aberration. I think this assertion is highly doubtful. In Jewish belief the primary object of the resurrection was the bones of the deceased (hence, the Jewish practice of preserving the bones in ossuaries for the eschatological resurrection), and skeletal remains are amazingly durable, existing even from prehistoric times. Moreover, the world’s population explosion guarantees, barring worldwide catastrophe, that there will always be more recently deceased than long deceased. But leave that aside.
These doctrinal issues are just irrelevant to a historical assessment of our sources.
Suppose we say that when the eschatological resurrection occurs, God elects to raise the (skeletal) remains of any of the dead whose remains still exist and to create new bodies for those deceased who have no remains. How could this possibly affect one’s estimation of the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection?
I frankly think that Allison’s real problem is just the all too common prejudice against physical, corporeal immortality. He says, “I believe, rightly or wrongly, in a future existence free from the constraints of material corporeality as we have hitherto known them.”31 Philosophical problems about identity are then exploited in the attempt to justify this prejudice. But those problems at most show that the resurrection bodies of people whose mortal bodies have been utterly dissolved are duplicates of those bodies rather than the numerically identical bodies. That does nothing to undermine a doctrine of physical, corporeal immortality. Allison’s scepticism is therefore just an unjustified bias.
Notice that having a duplicate body does nothing to preclude personal identity of the deceased and resurrected individual if one believes, as Allison does, in the reality of a soul distinct from the body. Jewish belief was that when the body died, the soul went to be with God until the eschatological resurrection, at which time the remains of the dead would be raised, the body reconstituted, and the soul re-united with the body. By postulating such an intermediate state between death and 31. Ibid., 225.
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resurrection, personal identity was ensured, even in cases in which there were no remains to be raised. Problems with personal identity arise only for the theologian who is a materialist or who denies the intermediate state of the soul after death.
Since Allison is a dualist, there should be for him no problem at all concerning the personal identity of those raised by God from the dead.
All this goes to show the irrelevance of doubts about bodily identity in the case of those whose mortal bodies have been destroyed to the question of Jesus’s literal resurrection.32 Therefore, I’ll not delve into the knotty question of whether spatio-temporal continuity is, in fact, as Allison assumes, a necessary condition of physical identity over time. I simply note that this is hugely controversial, so that it is far from obvious that God could not create a physical object, destroy it, and then recreate that very same object.33
Bayes’ Theorem and Inference to the Best Explanation
In building a historical case for the resurrection of Jesus, we are engaged in an inductive argument for a particular historical hypothesis. Although Bayes’ Theorem can be useful for calculating the probability of some hypothesis on a given body of evidence and while philosophers such as Richard Swinburne have argued for the resurrection hypothesis by Bayesian means,34 professional historians do not really avail themselves of Bayes’ Theorem in the justification of historical hypotheses.
One reason is that the values assigned to some of the probabilities involved are little more than conjectures. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection the probability of Jesus’ resurrection on the background information Pr(R⏐B) depends, we have seen, on the probability that God would raise Jesus of Nazareth from the dead Pr(R⏐G), which is speculative. A Bayesian approach will continue to have heuristic value in helping us to discern the relevance of various considerations involved in 32. To summarize, they are irrelevant for four reasons: (1) what is critical with respect to the resurrection of the dead is not bodily identity, but personal identity, which is guaranteed by the enduring soul; (2) Jewish belief was that the bones of the dead would be raised, so that strict bodily identity is not at issue; (3) in Jesus’ case bodily identity is unproblematic; and (4) such doctrinal concerns about eschatological resurrection should make no difference to one’s appraisal of historical evidence.
33. See, e.g., Trenton Merricks, “There Are No Criteria of Identity over Time,” Nôus 33 (1998): 106–24, who argues that there are no informative, necessary, and sufficient conditions of identity over time.
34. Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); see also Timothy and Lydia McGrew’s contribution to Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William L. Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). Plantinga launched a misconceived attack upon Swinburne’s Bayesian approach based upon what he called the problem of dwindling probabilities (Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 268–80), which drew responses from both Swinburne (“Natural Theology, Its ‘Dwindling Probabilities,’ and ‘Lack of Rapport,’” Faith and Philosophy 21 [2004]: 533-46) and McGrew (“Has Plantinga Refuted the Historical Argument?” Philosophia Christi 6 [2004]: 7–26). See further Alvin Plantinga, “Historical Arguments and Historical Probabilities: A Response to Timothy McGrew,” Philosophia Christi 8 (2006): 7–22; Timothy and Lydia McGrew, “On the Historical Argument: A Rejoinder to Plantinga,” Philosophia Christi 8 (2006): 23–38. Plantinga concedes that the McGrews’ Bayesian approach is not compromised by the problem of dwindling probabilities and is a substantial contribution to our understanding of historical arguments.
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arguing a case for Jesus’ resurrection, for example, how certain arguments lower Pr(E⏐not-R&B), while others raise Pr(E⏐R&B).
An argument for Jesus’ resurrection which conforms to actual historiographical practice will be formulated as an inference to the best explanation.35 According to this approach, we begin with the evidence available to us and then infer what would, if true, provide the best explanation of that evidence. Out of a pool of live options determined by our background beliefs, we select the best of various competing potential explanations to give a causal account of why the evidence is as it is and not otherwise. The process of determining which historical reconstruction is the best explanation will involve the historian’s craft, since various factors will have to be weighed, such as explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, degree of being ad hoc, and so on.36 Since the competing explanations may meet the various criteria to different degrees, the determination of which is the best explanation may be difficult and require a good deal of skill.
In my estimation the hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” furnishes the best explanation of the historical data relevant to Jesus’ final fate. The inductive grounds for the inference of this explanation consist primarily in the evidence of three independently established facts: (1) the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers on the first day of the week following his crucifixion, (2) various individuals and groups thereafter experienced on different occasions and under varying circumstances appearances of Jesus alive, and (3) the first disciples came sincerely to believe in Jesus’ resurrection in the absence of sufficient antecedent historical influences from either Judaism or pagan religions. If these three facts can be historically established with a reasonable degree of confidence (and it seems to me that they can) and if alternative naturalistic explanations for these facts can be shown to be implausible (and the consensus of scholarship is that they can), then unless the resurrection hypothesis is shown to be even more implausible than its failed competitors (and my experience in debating the comparative merits of the hypotheses convinces me that it cannot), then the preferred explanation ought to be the one given in the documents themselves: God raised Jesus from the dead.
The significance of this event is then to be found in the religio-historical context in which it occurred, namely, as the vindication of Jesus’ own unparalleled claim to divine authority. I think that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is such that a well-informed investigator ought to agree that it is more likely than not to have occurred.
The Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection
As alluded to above, the case for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus seems to me to rest upon the evidence for three great, independently established facts: 35. For an account see Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1981).
36. For discussion see C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19.
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the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian faith. If these three facts can be established and no plausible natural explanation can account for them as well as the resurrection hypothesis, then one is justified in inferring Jesus’ resurrection as the most plausible explanation of the data. Accordingly, let us examine the evidence for each of these facts.
The Empty Tomb
THE FACT OF JESUS’ EMPTY TOMB
Here I’ll summarize briefly eight lines of evidence supporting the fact that the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers on the first day of the week following his crucifixion.
1) The historical reliability of the story of Jesus’ burial supports the empty tomb.
Now you might ask, how does the fact of Jesus’ burial prove that his tomb was found empty? The answer is this: if the story of Jesus’ entombment is accurate, then the location of Jesus’ tomb was known in Jerusalem to both Jew and Christian alike. But in that case, the tomb must have been empty when the disciples began to preach that Jesus was risen. Why? First, the disciples could not have believed in Jesus’ resurrection if his corpse still lay in the tomb. It would have been wholly un-Jewish, not to say foolish, to believe that a man was raised from the dead when his body was still in the grave. One of the greatest merits of N.
T. Wright’s exhaustive study of pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about resurrection is his demonstration that “resurrection” always meant physical, bodily resurrection. He insists, “Let us be quite clear at this point . . . when the early Christians said ‘resurrection’ they meant it in the sense it bore both in paganism (which denied it) and in Judaism (. . . which affirmed it). ‘Resurrection’ . . . meant bodily resurrection; and that is what the early Christians affirmed.”37 The suggestion by some critics that the disciples were so convinced of Jesus’ resurrection that they never bothered to visit the gravesite is, frankly, rather silly when you think about it (they never went back, if not to verify, even to see where the Lord lay?) and contradicts the evidence that the site of the tomb was preserved in Christian memory.
Second, even if the disciples had preached Jesus’ resurrection despite his occupied tomb, scarcely anybody else would have believed them. One of the most remarkable facts about the early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection was that it flourished in the very city where Jesus had been publicly crucified. So long as the people of Jerusalem thought that Jesus’ body was in the tomb, few would have been prepared to believe such nonsense as that Jesus had been raised from the dead.
And third, even if they had so believed, the Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair simply by pointing to Jesus’ tomb or perhaps even exhuming the body as decisive proof that Jesus had not been raised. If even no longer identifiable remains lay in the tomb where Jesus had been buried, the burden of proof 37. Wright, C hristian Origins, 3:209.
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would have lain upon the shoulders of those who said that these were not Jesus’
remains. But no such dispute over the identification of Jesus’ corpse ever seems to have taken place. As we shall see, the dispute between Jewish non-Christians and Christians lay elsewhere. To suggest that the Jewish authorities didn’t take this business about Jesus’ being risen as anything more than a minor nuisance not worth dealing with is, again, fantastic, and contrary to the evidence that they were deeply concerned about squelching the nascent Christian movement (think of their engaging Saul of Tarsus!). Thus, if the story of Jesus’ burial is historical, then it is a very short inference to the historicity of the empty tomb as well. For that reason, critics who deny the historicity of the empty tomb feel constrained to argue against the burial account as well.
Unfortunately for those who deny the empty tomb, Jesus’ burial in the tomb is one of the best-established facts about Jesus. Space does not permit me to go into all the details of the evidence for the burial. But let me just mention a couple of points:
First, Jesus’ burial is multiply attested in extremely early, independent sources.
The account of Jesus’ burial in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea is part of Mark’s source material for the passion story. This is a very early source which is probably based on eyewitness testimony and which the commentator Rudolf Pesch dates to within seven years of Jesus’ crucifixion.38 Moreover, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5
quotes an old Christian tradition that he had received from the earliest disciples.
Paul probably received this tradition no later than his visit to Jerusalem in a.d. 36
(Gal. 1:18), if not earlier in Damascus. It thus goes back to within the first five years after Jesus’ death. The tradition is a summary of the early Christian preaching and may have been used in Christian instruction. Its form would have made it suitable for memorization. Here is what it says:
. . . that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He was buried,
and that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.
Notice that the second line of this tradition refers to Jesus’ burial.
But, we might wonder, was the burial mentioned by Paul the same event as the burial by Joseph of Arimathea? The answer to that question is made clear by a comparison of the four-line formula passed on by Paul with the Gospel narratives on the one hand and the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles on the other:
38. Rudolph Pesch, Das Markusevangelium, 2 vols., Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament (Freiburg: Herder, 1976–77), 2:21, 364–77. Mark Allen Powell, chair of the Historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature reports, “The dominant view. . . [is] that the passion narratives are early and based on eyewitness testimony” (Mark Allen Powell, critical notice of The Birth of Christianity, by John Dominic Crossan, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68 (2000): 171.
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1 Corinthians 15:3–5
Acts 13:28–31
Mark 15:37–16:7
Christ died . . .
Though they could charge
And Jesus uttered
him with nothing deserving
a loud cry and
death, yet they asked Pilate
breathed his last.
to have him killed.
he was buried . . .
they took him down from
And he [ Joseph]
the tree and laid him in a
bought a linen
tomb
shroud, and taking
him down, wrapped
him in the linen
shroud and laid him
in a tomb.
he was raised . . .
But God raised him from
“He has risen, he is
the dead . . .
not here; see the place
where they laid him.”
he appeared . . .
. . . and for many days he
“But go, tell his
appeared to those who came
disciples and Peter
up with him from Galilee to
that he is going before
Jerusalem, who are now his
you to Galilee; there