The Fourth Fundamental: Miracles and the Resurrection, Part V

Did Jesus literally and physically walk out of
his grave, restored to life, on the third day following his
crucifixion? Those who drafted the Five Fundamentals thought so
and insisted that anyone who did not say a convincing “yes” to
that proposition could no longer claim to be a Christian. The
resurrection of Jesus in a physical, bodily form was thought of
as the central miracle, the one unwavering truth to which all
must adhere. It gives one a sense of how badly eroded these
fundamental convictions have become in our time when we realize
that no reputable biblical or theological scholar today would be
willing to assert that the resurrection of Jesus must be
understood as a physical resuscitation of his dead body to live
again inside the life of this world. Unfortunately, most people
are not biblical scholars and they do not realize that this
interpretation of the Easter experience that turns it into a
narrative about the three days dead Jesus literally walking out
of the tomb is the product of the third Christian generation and
finds its origin primarily in the late ninth and early tenth
decades when the gospels of Luke and John were written. This
resuscitated body was never the transformative experience that
occurred at some point after the crucifixion and that convinced
Jesus’ disciples that something about his life transcended the
ultimate barrier of death and opened a pathway into the eternity
of God.

Paul, the first writer in the New Testament knows of no
resuscitated body. He does say that “if Christ be not raised we
of all people are the most to be pitied.” The question is,
however, what did he mean by the word “raised?” We note first
that Paul always uses a passive word for the resurrection.
Jesus never rises for Paul, God always raises him. God is the
one who initiates the action. Jesus is the one acted upon. So
the question becomes: to what did God raise Jesus? For Paul it
was clearly that God raised him into what God is, that is into
the eternal presence out of whom Jesus could manifest himself to
certain chosen witness. In Romans (1:1-4), Paul states this
very overtly. God designated or declared Jesus, to be the Son
of God by the action of “the spirit of holiness” in raising him,
not from death back to life in this world, but from death into
God. Resurrection and ascension were two parts of the same
action for Paul. Later when resurrection was changed to mean
resuscitation, a means to get Jesus back into the life of God
had to be developed. That is what accounted for the 10th decade
narrative of Jesus ascending into the sky. When the minds of
first century Christians tried to conceptualize their experience
it was almost inevitable that they would in time literalize
these symbols, but that was not the way this life changing
experience was first understood.

A second piece of Pauline writing develops this
point even further with two specific references: In I
Corinthians 15, written perhaps three years before the epistle
to the Romans, Paul makes it clear that resurrection had nothing
to do with a physically resuscitated body. He says, “Flesh and
blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” He talks about a
spiritual body growing out of the physical like a stalk of corn
grows out of a seed. He stretches vocabulary almost to a
breaking point to say that resurrection is real, but it is not
physical. Later in that same epistle Paul lists those to whom
the raised Christ “made himself known.” That word is frequently
translated “appeared,” making people think of a physical
encounter when the word more closely means “was made manifest”
and suggests that the viewer has had his or her eyes opened to
see a new reality. It has a sense about it of infinite sight,
an insight or a second sight. Paul’s list of those to whom the
raised Christ was made manifest is fascinating in many ways:
Cephas (i.e. Peter) is first, and then come “the Twelve.”
Please note that the group identified as “the Twelve” still
apparently includes Judas Iscariot. Paul dates the resurrection
“on the third day” by which time it would have been quite
impossible for a replacement for Judas to have been elected.
Indeed Luke says the choice of Matthias to replace Judas
Iscariot did not take place for weeks. It is interesting to
trace the origins of the story of the betrayal. It makes its
first appearance when Paul dates the Last Supper as having
occurred “on the night he was handed over.” It is the word
translated “handed over,” that was later rendered betrayed, that
becomes the catalyst around which the narrative about Judas
Iscariot developed. Judas Iscariot does not appear to have been
an original part of the earliest Christian story. There is no
other reference to a betrayal in the entire Pauline corpus. It
is quite obvious that Paul did not know the tradition that one
of the Twelve had been a traitor. That narrative begins only in
Mark. Paul’s list of “witnesses” continues with the mention of
“500 brethren,” a story that has no counterpart in any gospel.
Then it moves to James who is unidentified. Is this James
Zebedee, James the son of Alphaus or James the brother of Jesus?
The consensus among scholars today is that this is James the
brother of Jesus, who became the leader of the church in
Jerusalem and Paul’s adversary. Next come “the Apostles.” Who
are they? Paul has already listed “the Twelve.” Is this a
different group? Finally, Paul lists himself as one to whom
Jesus was made manifest. Paul’s conversion is placed by most
scholars between one and six years after the crucifixion. Paul
could not have possibly seen a resuscitated, physical body. The
book of Acts calls Paul’s “seeing of the Lord” a vision on the
road to Damascus. While Paul himself does not mention the road
to Damascus, he does talk about an ecstatic experience in which
he was lifted to the “third heaven,” where he saw things that
people do not normally see. Reading Paul convinces the scholars
that resurrection understood as a physically resuscitated body
was not an idea that Paul ever entertained. Recall that Paul
wrote between the years 50 and 64.

Mark, writing in the early years of the 8th decade, never
relates an account of the raised Christ appearing to anyone.
He just confronts his readers with an empty tomb, a symbol of
the conviction that death cannot contain him. Matthew, writing
in the early to mid 9th decade takes the first step toward a
physical understanding of resurrection when he portrays the
women in the garden as being capable of grasping the feet of
Jesus. My perception is that one cannot grasp feet that are not
physical. Two things, however, call Matthew’s accuracy in this
instance into question. First, he has quite deliberately
changed Mark’s narrative upon which he bases his entire gospel.
In Mark the women never see anything other than an empty tomb.
Matthew has thus altered his original source. Luke, who also
has Mark in front of him as he writes, follows Mark’s text
accurately. In Luke the women do not see the raised Christ.
Even if one is a biblical literalist one has to face the fact
that in the New Testament, by a two to one vote, this story in
Matthew is regarded as an inaccurate alteration of the original
text.

The second thing that calls into question the
accuracy of Matthew’s story of the woman seeing a physical,
raised Jesus in the garden is that in this gospel’s only other
resurrection narrative it is clearly not a resuscitated,
physical Jesus who meets with the disciples. It is rather a
vision of a glorified Christ who comes out of the sky robed in
all of the messianic symbols that were traditionally attached to
the Son of Man who would inaugurate the Kingdom of God. This
visionary Christ comes to give the disciples the great
commandment that launched the church. It is clearly not a
resuscitated body, but a transformed, glorified one. Please
recall that when Matthew wrote, no account of Jesus’ ascension
had yet entered the developing Christian story. When we discover
that in our earliest New Testament sources of Paul and Mark
there is no physical, bodily seeing of the raised Jesus, then it
becomes obvious that the physicality of the resurrected body is
a later development of the tradition. Mark’s women confront the
emptiness of the tomb, hear a resurrection announcement given by
a young man in a white robe and then flee in fear saying nothing
to anyone, despite the fact that the messenger had instructed
them to go to Galilee with the promise that Jesus would meet him
there. Is this to be understood as the promise to meet Jesus in
some resurrected, physical form in Galilee? Or is it the
eternal command to return home to one’s roots if one is to
encounter the holy? In time it was certainly read in the former
sense, but the evidence points to the latter sense being the
original meaning.

When one comes to the late ninth and tenth
decades writing of the gospels of Luke and John, the seeing of
the raised Lord has surely become physical. The flesh of his
raised body can be physically touched. Indeed Jesus invites
them to do so, maintaining that he is not a ghost since ghosts
do not have flesh and blood. This raised Jesus eats,
demonstrating a functioning gastro-intestinal system, he talks,
teaches and interprets Scripture, demonstrating functional vocal
chords, larynx and brain, and he walks with Cleopas and his
friend on the road to Emmaus revealing a functioning skeletal
system. The resurrection is now understood as a very physical
phenomenon. Yet both Luke and John indicate that these images
may be more symbolic than real since they also add very
non-physical dimensions to the resurrected Jesus. In Luke, the
body of Jesus can materialize out of thin air and it can also
disappear in the same manner. In John, Jesus can enter the
locked and barred upper room without bothering to open the
doors.

To turn the conviction that Jesus has somehow transcended the
ultimate barrier of death and broken its power into a literal
narrative about the resuscitation of a deceased body was
probably inevitable, given the human need to use words to talk
about life changing experiences. There are, however, great
amounts of textual evidence that this was clearly not what
Easter meant originally. What then did it mean? That is my
topic for next week’s column.

John Shelby Spong

Note from the Editor: Bishop Spong’s new book is available now at bookstores everywhere and by clicking here!

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