Early Christian Faith
Early Christian Faith
Why did Jesus’ movement survive in contrast to those of Judean prophets like Theudas? It did so in part because Jesus’ followers distinctively believed that he remained alive.
Early Christian faith cannot easily be explained by mere visionary experiences, since these alone would not have convinced many disciples that the person they saw had returned to life bodily (whatever that claim would have meant for them). As we have noted, postmortem “appearances” (especially in dreams) were not unusual, and no one would draw the corollary of Jesus as “Lord of humanity” from claims to have seen a dead person who was “alive” only in the sense that anyone after death was believed to remain alive. Hearers would certainly not have been convinced simply because someone said, “In a vision my deceased teacher told me that he is now ruler of the cosmos.” If they believed the speaker’s experience, they might conclude that the spirit was lying boastfully; that the visionary had misinterpreted a claim about authority over many other deceased spirits; or the like.177 But the claim of a mere postmortem apparition would not have generated a movement around one believed to be a living Lord, whether its recipients were believed or not.178
Yet this claim that Jesus was the exalted Lord was no less pervasive in our early Christian sources than that he was risen; he obviously was not physically present on earth, yet he himself, and not merely a didactic tradition about him, was held to continue to reign in his church. (Indeed, at least Pauline and Johannine Christians linked a continued charismatic experience of the Spirit with their own continuing experience of Christ.) As many scholars today note, a treatment of the historical Jesus, and certainly of early claims about his resurrection, that does not take into account the early church’s newborn faith does not provide a cohesive explanation of the evidence.179 The church’s extant resurrection claims are earlier (in Paul) and more consistently documented than Jesus’ teachings are, and were undoubtedly the reason that those teachings continued to circulate widely. I suspect that historical Jesus scholarship’s fixation on sayings while sometimes neglecting the resurrection claims is a remaining legacy of nineteenth-century liberal Protestant lives of Jesus, reflecting that era’s attraction to Jesus’ ethics180 while discounting the earlier documented center of his earliest followers’ preaching. Without the disciples’ experience of resurrection, one wonders whether his movement (every known form of which held this belief) would have persisted or would have preserved Jesus’ sayings in his name to any greater degree than the sayings of countless other sages of his day have survived.181
Some might argue that we could explain the disciples’ faith in Christ as reigning Lord if the disciples before the crucifixion believed that Jesus was the messiah (which seems fairly likely, although some doubt that they held this belief), hence regarded their faith as vindicated by these apparitions. But not only would such an explanation fail to explain the terminology of “resurrection”; one also wonders to what extent Jesus could function presently as Messiah or Lord if he were merely a ghost. The explanation also conflicts with all our evidence about the more plausible emotional state of the disciples depicted in the Gospels, as well as with the antagonistic state of Paul before his belief in Jesus. The disciples might believe Jesus a pious man whose messianic mission nevertheless failed; God might raise up a different messiah in a worthier time.182 Moreover, why did it happen not to one or two disciples (who then convinced the others) but to all?183 The interim unbelief of the disciples, which in that culture would dishonor Jesus as well as themselves, meets the criterion of embarrassment.184
Of course, one could doubt all the resurrection narratives’ claims that Jesus spent time with the disciples, and did not simply appear in their visionary trances. But how would they have known that they were experiencing a resurrection appearance and not an apparition? Would they not wish fuller confirmation than what a dream could confer? Would the group as a whole stake their lives on a mere dream or apparition no different in kind from those commonly claimed by those who thought they dreamed about someone deceased?
The nature of Jesus’ “body” is another question. Paul’s “spiritual” body cannot be simply contrasted with a “physical” body; Paul contrasts it with a psychikos body adapted for life in the old Adam, not with physicality (1 Cor 15:20-22, 44-48),185 and means a body transformed and/or ruled by God’s Spirit. At the same time, he clearly intends a quite different form of “physicality” than any experience with biological existence would predispose one to understand. This body is immortal, a body of glory rather than of flesh, comparable to stars, hence perhaps angels (1 Cor 15:35-54, esp. 40-43, 50; Phil 3:21).186
Whatever its character, though, it must have been somehow “bodily” to qualify as “resurrection” and to distinguish it from other forms of apparitions. 187 Again, whatever it was, it was understood as transformative, and not supposed to leave a corpse behind (cf. 1 Cor 15:51; Phil 3:21). Whether or not one believes the Gospels’ empty tomb narratives, one can hardly imagine that the disciples would have proclaimed the “resurrection” without consulting the tomb. One can imagine even less that their detractors would not have done so to silence them.188 That so many followers had these experiences (hundreds of them reportedly on a single occasion, 1 Cor 15:6) and they also happened to find the tomb empty, as a mere coincidence without relation to some event, strains plausibility.
While I personally believe that Jesus’ resurrection provides the most plausible explanation (barring inflexible antisupernaturalism) for the disciples’ faith, it also coheres with the larger theological context of Jesus’ ministry (for first-century Palestinian Jews, if not necessarily for many modern readers).189 If Jesus was a prophet of restoration eschatology, resurrection was a common feature of that eschatological expectation. Jesus’ followers would thus naturally understand Jesus’ resurrection as a foretaste of the promised resurrection of the righteous in Israel (and for some circles, of any righteous Gentiles). (Moreover, resurrection addressed a more general human concern with death, a concern sometimes associated with Adam traditions in Jewish sources.190 Paul’s theological conclusions in this regard were not inevitable, but they were natural.)
It fits Jesus’ teachings about a role for himself after his martyrdom.191 As we have noted, it also cohered with the the christology of the movement that sprang from Jesus: if Jesus was alive in a distinct (indeed, eschatologically resurrected) way, yet clearly not present physically among the disciples, he was exalted192 and remained active through the church.193