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Loading...QUESTION:
Are we to understand from this that some of the actual disciples, the inner circle, doubted? Is this the origin of the “Doubting Thomas” character in John? Maybe not everyone got a vision of the risen Christ? Perhaps these are hints that after the crucifixion some of the group ran away and DIDN’T come back!
RESPONSE:
This is a question specifically about the stories of the resurrection of Jesus, and it is one that I’ve been pondering myself intensely for a couple of weeks. It would help to have the data in front of us.
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This is a really good and important question and I think your explanation sheds important light on how the resurrection story got started (with only a couple of the disciples) and was developed and interpreted (in the gospel traditions and Paul).
I surprised, though, that there is no doubting tradition in Paul, since he wrote before the gospel writers and met some of the disciples.
Yes, good point. But I think Paul wants to stress believability, not doubt.
If Paul met some of the disciples and was aware that some of them were doubters, or unbelievers, or whathaveyou, then why would he relay the tradition that Jesus appeared to “the twelve” in 1 Cor 15??? I’m really interested in your answer to that! If you can provide a good answer to that, you’ll pretty effectively shut the like of Gary Habermas down, who relies heavily on 1 Cor 15 as evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
I’m not sure there’s any evidence to suggest that Paul knew the twelve, let alone that he knew whether they all believed or not. He had heard of an appearance to the group of Jesus’ disciples, and he calls them “the twelve” (even though, even in traditional thinking, there were not twelve of them at the time)
By, “I’m not sure there’s any evidence to suggest that Paul knew the twelve,” do you mean that you’re not sure whether he knew all of them or that you’re not sure whether he knew ANY of them? I thought he mentions meeting some of them in Galatians and certainly mentions meeting Cephas, who I thought was Peter. If he met Peter, wouldn’t he be in a position to know whether the statements in 1 Cor 15 were true or not, and if “the twelve” mentioned believed the resurrection? I suppose Paul would still be willing to relay this creed to bolster his readers’ faith even if he knew that some of the 12 had fallen away from the faith.
Yes, he certainly knew Cephas. I meant that I don’t think we have solid evidence that he met the entire group — although surely he did hear something about them from Cephas. It’s a good point: if there were doubters among them, wouldn’t that be more wisely known? I’m not sure at this point what I think about that. (But one point to make: “the twelve” seems to be some kind of description of the original disciples, not necessarily an indication that each of hte twelve were included — especially if the stories about Judas having already died are to be accepted.)
Any chance of revisiting debates?
On the blog? Yes, I may take up some of the issues.
My vote, if you do: Craig’s use of Bayesian probability.
Craig’s (mis)use of Bayesian probability was pretty well handled by Dr. Freed (in my opinion) in this youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rz9J6qXIzc
I am not a believer and I almost agree with all your logical analysis of the NT but I don’t think you are making a solid case here;
If you witness the death and burial of a person and then see that person face to face, whether envisioning or for real, wouldn’t you doubt?
I don’t think doubting proves what the disciples had seen was a vision nor being the real Jesus in the other hand.
As for the forty days after the resurrection, have you addressed this issue in any of your books?
Yes, you would think so. But people who report visions tend to believe them wholeheartedly, odd as it may seem to those of use who haven’t had them.
Nope, I haven’t dealt with the 40 days at any length.
What I mean is that you need more than ‘DOUBT’ to prove they had a vision. Is there any further supporting evidence?
The possibility of them having a vision is similar to saying the physical resurrection really happened; neither can be proved historically.
I think this theory is biased and needs more historical evidence
Wouldn’t simply saying that anyone who saw a “risen” people would doubt it is a presentist interpretation. Fantastic stories or even “miracles” are not part of our everyday world. However, the belief in them was far more common in the 1st century, so it seems to me that it was far more likely that people then would be more willing to believe someone had risen from the dead. Visions, messages in dreams and the like were also more readily accepted as being “true”, so it would also seem to me that people would be less likely to doubt them than today.
Possible!
When my beloved dog died unexpectedly I had two visions: one was a black empty space in front of my legs where he would have been standing in front of me, a few weeks later he was “himself” and I got to pet him. The first “vision” I was awake, the second asleep. I don’t think I believed he actually came back, he was safely in his grave. The experience of petting him seemed real. When I woke up I felt as though I got to say good-bye to him. Still makes me cry to think of him. Maybe I should write the Gospel of Tracker!
If you feel your beloved dog is superior to you, maybe you should!
He knew a lot more about being a dog than I do!
I was hoping you might have some comments on the part where Jesus says he is flesh and bone and also that he still has visible and “‘touchable” wounds.
To me those statements have implications that go beyond just the appearance of Jesus to the 12, but also to what happens to our bodies when we die according to the Bible.
I recently attended a funeral of a friend at which his brother gave the eulogy. He said, ” As surely as Jesus was resurrected we shall see Keith again.”
So what do you think is the dominant theory today for believing Christians — only a soul-spirit will leave out of the body after death or some sort of actual physical body will go forward with identifiable traits?
Yes, I deal with that in one of my earlier posts, in which I discuss Luke and John’s attempt to show that Jesus’ body was real after the resurrection not phantasmal.
Thanks for this post. What has puzzled me lately is that if I was to write a gospel (after first learning to write in Greek of course), my gospel would be 90% on what happened during those forty days between the resurrection and Pentecost and only 10% of what is in there now. What I think would be the cool part is talking to a resurrected being and all the questions that arise from that uncommon event. Apparently there was little oral tradition on this. Maybe it is because several of the disciples themselves were probably skeptical of the resurrection as you mention in your post, so oral traditions on this topic were scarce. I’m still surprised that the gospel writers thought that people might be more interested in a genealogy or a scripture war with Satan instead.
Of course some of the Gnostic Gospels do just that! They’re all about the post-resurrection revelations of Jesus, where he spills the *real* beans.
TY for your response. Which Gnostic gospel(s) would be most “credible” along this line (post resurrection revelations of Jesus), or do you deal with this in any of your books?
I’m not sure what you mean by “credible.” Do you mean historically accurate? None of them! Among the ones that are particularly interesting, you might try the Apocryphon of John. It’ll blow your mind (if you can follow any of it; I can’t follow much of it!) If you want a discussion of the resurrection dialogues, look for a book by Pheme Perkins by that name.
Thanks for the info, I will look for P. Perkin’s book.
(By credible I was thinking along the lines of minimum number of magic tunas. One complaint against canonization might be that it was political, however a good aspect of the process might have been that the “orthodox documents” were generally tame.)
Once again, thanks for your extremely useful posts and for your help.
I’m not happy with the last sentence. My feeling is that from the very beginning, Christianity has been a religion of “Look! Behold who else has converted and believes.” It’s starts off with Paul (the über-opponent) and continues to this day. It is a core element of arguments from Strobel, Comfort and many others. Strobel’s schtick from the beginning has always been that he was once a doubting unbelieving and finally “saw the truth”. It seems to me that Paul would have emphasized doubt and conversion, rather than hiding it.
He does emphasize his own unbelieving. But a vision of Jesus cured him of that, and for him, once you have that vision, there can be no doubt….
This is another very intriguing topic indeed. I am so glad that a distinguished scholar is finally addressing all these weird details in those stories!
But what about the Emmaus story though? Doesn’t that kind of fit in here as well?
At first the two Apostles don’t recognize Jesus (why not?)
“Luke 24:15 As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them 16 but they were kept from recognizing him.”
They only do so when he breaks the bread but at that moment he immediately vanishes!?
“Luke 24: 30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.”
And speaking of not recognizing the ‘resurrected Jesus’, didn’t Mary recognize him either at first and thought it was the ‘gardener’ … ??
Yup!
2 more follow-up questions …
1. If the ‘resurrected body’ is a ‘perfect, spiritual body’ then how could the ‘resurrected’ Jesus still have the wounds? Or were those wounds supposed to be part of the perfection of his ‘new body’? Or is that a contradiction between Paul’s concept of a ‘resurrection’ and that of the Gospel authors’?
2. Doesn’t ‘vision’ refer to seeing someone or something that is not ‘really’ there? Something that could not be seen by someone else who had not been given this ‘vision’, or access to this ‘vision’? Unlike, for example, a tree that everyone could see who was standing in front of it. But if everyone present at the right time at the right place could have seen the object of this ‘vision’ then why call it a vision? Why not simply say that they SAW him, just like they saw the ground that they were standing on?
1. The Gospels have a different view of the matter than Paul.
2. Visions can be veridical or non-veridical. It’s all in the eye of the beholder!
1. Would you say it’s only a different view or rather an actual contradiction?
2. It seems like I didn’t formulate my question well … it’s not about the veracity of the claim. It’s about the word that has been used to describe the event/experience: ‘vision’. When people claim to have had a ‘vision’ of someone/something, does that mean that ANYONE who had been present at the time would have seen the object of this ‘vision’ as well, just like everyone would see that tree over there? Or would the object of this ‘vision’ have only been visible for select people and the others would not have seen anything? Like in Acts 9:7 where only Paul is said to have seen the ‘risen Christ’, while his men, who were there with him, did not.
Some visions are seen by multiple people; some are seen only by one person; some are seen by one person when others are present. You get all three kinds in the New Testament.
That makes sense, finally. Thanks.
If the disciples are reported to believe that the resurrected Jesus was merely a “spirit”, how does this fit with Paul’s apocalyptic Jewish understanding of the spirit being material in some way? If the view of the spirit was that it was in important ways as material as the “flesh”, then why would the disciples seek proofs that Spirit Jesus was as substantial as Flesh Jesus? Is this a difference in philosophies between the authors/audiences or a further nuance to the ancient views on the topic?
The Gospel writers did not have Paul’s sophisticated views of the human and the nature of matter and spirit, methinks.
If some of the twelve indeed did not believe that Jesus had risen, I can only imagine the scene of these disappointed apocalypticists going about town opposing Peter and company, saying that they must have been drunk to think that they could speak in tongues!
I’m curious: what do you mean by saying Jesus was mistaken for a “spirit” in Luke 24.37-42, and that this is what the risen Jesus disproves by eating with the disciples? Dale Martin argues quite cogently in his book The Corinthian Body that the idea of a “non-physical” body, i.e. not made of some kind of “stuff,” was unheard of in the ancient world. So what would have been understood in the Gospel’s context by Jesus being thought a “spirit?” If Martin’s analysis is correct, than even docetists and gnostics who disbelieved in the resurrection of the “fleshly” body of Jesus would have thought that there was some kind of “substance” behind Jesus’s appearance in the physical world, so what would a “spirit” be in that context? And what would his eating with the disciples have proved? Presumably a docetic Jesus would have been able to look like he was eating just the same as a “fleshly” Jesus.
Of course, this makes the fact that Luke puts in the “proof” of Jesus’s eating with the disciples even more mysterious…
Yes, I completely agree with Dale Martin on this. (I better; he’s one of my closest friends) Luke though wants to differentiate between the idea that the body raised was a “spirit-body” (made of refined stuff) and that it was a “physical body” (made of courser stuff). He thinks the latter. Paul thinks the former. As I read it.
Another fascinating blog. I agree that it’s hard to imagine how people could see the Resurrected Jesus and still doubt and that this needs to be explained somehow. I appreciate the summary list of scriptures about the matter.
You have mentioned that the early Gospel texts do not list the names of authors. When did the names of Matthew. Mark, Luke, and John first get listed on Gospel texts? Thanks.
First time: Irenaeus, around 180 CE.
I’m really interested in the process of how the Gospel names first started making their way onto the texts themselves… Any ideas? I’ve heard it suggested that if they were really not written by John, Luke, ect, than we would have expected to see a lot of other proposed headers for the authorship blank.
Long story that. I deal with it in my book Forged. Maybe I’ll get to post on it down the line.
Presumably the Diciples had witnessed the resurrection of several dead, including Lazarus who had been dead for four days. So why would they have found the resurrection of Jesus so mysterious?
For them, Jesus was not resuscitated so that he would die again. He was raised immortal.
Thanks for the Irenaeus information. How about Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus? Did they list Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as Gospel authors? Thanks.
Yes, but they were produced at least 150 years later than Irenaeus.
If we do not have any of the earliest Gospel manuscripts, how do we know that these earliest Gospel manuscripts did not list Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as authors? Did some early Christian, like Marcion, refer to these Gospels without the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Thanks.
Yes, authors like Justin around 150 CE quote the Gospels without indicating who wrote them. So too Marcion, quoting Luke, about the same time. It is not until Irenaeus that somoen names them.
Whoa thanks! That kind of answers the question I above just asked.. But I would still appreciate any more information you could share on this! Thanks!
Sorry — I’m not sure what the “this” refers to! (I just have your response, not the comment you’re responding to)
Thanks for the help regarding when the Gospels first had names attached to them.
Do we have any references cases where we have more (or other) documentation about how “returning from the dead” stories get started about real people? Elvis, perhaps?
That is, I’m wondering if we can learn something useful by considering what has happened in situation that we have more access to. Do these tend to follow the same sorts of pattern?
Cheers,
-j
Good question. My sense is that what we have more of is “people who never really died even though the ‘authorities’ want you to think they did.”
I wonder how you would critique my (admittedly amateur) explanation of why gospel writers tell us that some disciples doubted:
A simple rhetorical device to say that the evidence was very convincing. The strongest example of this is the case of Thomas in the Gospel of John — the writer’s point is that readers should believe Jesus was raised without additional evidence. But if you happen to be a skeptical sort of person, you can rest assured that your faith is well-placed; the resurrection really did happen and it wasn’t just a vision; Jesus appeared as flesh and blood. If even Thomas was convinced, you should be too.
Isn’t it likely that Matthew and Luke are doing the same sort of thing? Yes — the actual disciple would not have needed to see Jesus eat a piece of broiled fish, but it is easy to see how that detail would be effective in helping to convert someone who wasn’t a disciple. And thus completely understandable that both Matthew and Luke would change the story in that way (or that someone else telling them the story would have done so).
oops. I see from an answer to a different question that you say the Gospels were not meant to convert anyone, but rather to give additional information to those who had already converted. That would pretty much negate my argument. So let me revise it slightly. John’s theological agenda with the story of Thomas doubting is that believers should continue to believe even in the face of doubt or uncertainty, right? Why would we be surprised if some earlier Christians used stories of disciples doubting and getting more proof (even if theoretically unneeded) as a way of encouraging each other to keep the faith? In that case, it’s not surprising for such stories to show up in the Gospels.
It negates the idea that the episodes were there to convert people; but the could still be there either to assuage the doubts of Christian readers OR to provide Christians with ammunition they needed when speaking to non-Christians.
Yes, it could be! The doubting episodes provide grounds for including “proof,” so that they exist in order to make the proof available.
Bart, on a similar note: if the disciples did indeed expect Jesus to ‘resurrect’ then why where they surprised when the tomb was empty? Why did they want to give the corpse BURIAL rites if they expected the corpse to be reanimated soon? Why did they assume that somebody had taken the corpse? Especially if Jesus had told them beforehand that he HAD to die and ‘resurrect’?
But John 20 seems to contradict this, it claims that the disciples didn’t know about a divine plan that would require a ‘physical resurrection’: “For they did not yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead.”
As for the potential argument that the disciples expected a ‘spiritual resurrection’:
1. Given that they had (allegedly) witnessed physical resurrections before why would they in THIS case expect a spiritual one (where the corpse would stay dead and in the tomb)?
2. IF they believed in a ‘spiritual resurrection’ where the corpse would stay dead and in the tomb then doesn’t this prove that people, at that time, had different opinions about what it mean to be ‘resurrected’? That ‘resurrection’ was not exclusively supposed to mean ‘reanimated corpse walking out of a tomb’?
Thank you.
The Gospels are pretty clear that even though Jesus kept saying he’d be raised, the disciples were a bit dense and never heard him. All of which suggests that htis is story-telling, not history….
Based on those stories ALL of Jesus’ early followers were very stupid (‘a bit dense’ is to put it nicely) since not one of them got it (especially since they’ve seen people getting raised from the dead and knew of such stories from the OT)! But maybe it’s easier to find a cult following among the ‘dense’? 😉
Seriously though: why would the later authors portray them as so utterly stupid if in reality they weren’t like that? There has to be a (non-supernatural) reason, no?
And why would they invent stories about an empty tomb if there wasn’t one? Because they understood ‘resurrection’ as a physical resurrection and concluded from this that since, according to them, Jesus got buried this must have resulted in an empty tomb then (with an ex-dead Jesus walking out of it)? Again, there has to be a (non-supernatural) reason for the existence of such a story line, no?
Sorry for the many questions 😉
The normal explanation for the failure of the disciples to understand is that hte predictions of Jesus’ death and resurrection are not historical, but were placed on the lips of Jesus by later story tellers. But then they had the problem of explaining why no one expected it to happen. Their solution: the disciples were just too thick.
Empty tomb: similar problem. If you claim Jesus was raised, and someone points out that as a crucified man his corpse was probably tossed into a common grave, you had to have a story that he was actually buried in a well-konwn site that was later empty.
Bart, coming briefly back on this: the behavior of the followers of Jesus (as described in the Gospels), at around his execution and death, is the normal, standard behavior that one would expect from people who thought that a MERE MORTAL has died (or is about to die)!
Doesn’t this then, logically, actually prove one of the following two scenarios?
1. Jesus never claimed to be God. Hence the utter shock and surprise of his followers about a. the alleged empty tomb and b. the visions of the ‘resurrected Jesus’. Had they known or believed that Jesus was actually God then this was to be expected.
2. Jesus told them these things but his followers didn’t actually take him seriously, they didn’t actually believe what he said. Which would mean that Jesus had failed in communicating his actual message to his closest disciples.
Either scenario is a problem for the Christians.
There could be other scenarios. Most conservative Christians would say that Jesus taught these things but the disciples were too thick to understand. (As one other option)
But wouldn’t that fall into the ‘Jesus failed in communicating his main message to his closest followers’?
It would of course also raise the question as to why he seems to have chosen the dumbest of the dumb then as followers 😀
Yes, from the time of the early church it was argued that Jesus chose such people precisely to show that God’s power is not the same as human’s and his interests are not ours and he can save even the lowest lowlifes!
Furthermore the GoJ seems to indicate that the disciples did not expect a ‘resurrection’ because they didn’t understand ‘Scripture’ yet (John 20:9)!
“For they did not yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead.”
So the problem was not that they didn’t understand/believe what Jesus allegedly told them but that they didn’t understand the ‘coded messages/prophecies’ in Scripture. This seems to be additional evidence that Jesus did not, prior to his death, tell them that he was God and that he would have to ‘die’ in order to ‘resurrect’.
Or how would you interpret John 20:9?
Yup, same theme there too.
Hi Bart, when I considered myself a conservative Christian I found the stories of the disciples doubting the resurrection to be very encouraging. I struggled with doubt and to see that the disciples doubted too helped me to know it was okay to have doubts.
Do you think there’s any probability that the tradition of the doubting disciples could have been invented to encourage those they were writing to or is this far fetched?
I too have wondered this, and think it’s an interesting option.
I realize this is an ancient blog entry, but, I’m gonna comment anyway…
About this “doubt” thing. I’ve got a good buddy, software engineer that I worked with at IBM. He’s a full-fledged agnostic / atheist / skeptic – (I think perhaps very akin to Dr Ehrman? Perhaps?) , and I asked him once:
“What if Jesus walked into your house, introduced himself as Jesus of Nazareth, showed you his crucifixion wounds, even let you touch him. Would you believe then that he was resurrected?”
His answer was an unequivocal “No”. Not even if he somehow *knew* that the being that represented himself as Jesus was totally understood by him (my friend) to actually *be* Jesus.
Why not? Well, it’s simple: there *must* be some other explanation.
In other words, in the true form of a true skeptic, “anything is more probable than a miracle”. Anything is more probable than a resurrection. Therefore, it could not be a resurrected Jesus.
That’s not at all some kind of “new” argument. There have been atheists and skeptics since long before Jesus ever came along. They’ve never been hard to find. In fact, unless one lives in a monastery or some equally-cloistered lifestyle, such skeptics are impossible to avoid.
So, I don’t have any problem at all if some of the disciples (which, incidentally, did not necessarily mean the “original twelve”, but few make note of that) did not believe. Even if “many proofs” were made. In fact, to me, it’s a “given” that such would be the case. – a “no-brainer”, as some might say.
Dr Ehrman –
On the off-chance that you might respond (this being a rather ancient blog entry)
re: “So here’s my hunch. What’s really going on is that the early Gospel writers knew full well that there were members of the twelve disciples who never did come to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. That would explain the tradition that “some” doubted. ”
This would mean, though, that the creed of 1 Cor 15, which says that Jesus appeared to “the twelve”, was being recited while (probably) most, if not all “the twelve” were still alive – and, those that had no idea what the “creed” was about could refute it (“hey, I never saw nuthin'”, or “hey, the other guys were looking at the sun peering from behind some clouds, and claimed it was Jesus, but, I just took it as clouds”, etc)…
what’s your “hunch” on how that worked out?
My sense is that this creed is being recited in places of Greek-speaking Christianity, where most of the twelve never went (and couldn’t understand the language). It’d be like someone in Mexico City making a comment about the pastors of your church in Rochester. Even today there’d be very few ways of knowing; in the ancient world, far fewer.
Am I to understand that you’re arguing that someone couldn’t simply translate this to Aramaic? And, therefore, this fundamental creed simply never made it to Galilee – Jesus’ home?
Let me say I speak a smattering of a few languages – some better than others. In a couple of them, I can actually translate from one person, speaking one language, to another person, speaking another language – on the fly! (I live in Texas. Such opportunities come up all the time along the border).
So it is exceedingly difficult to imagine that the non-believing disciples – a few of the “inner twelve” that didn’t believe Jesus was resurrected – simply never came into contact with other people who were believers and who had heard this creed, and who wanted to talk to them. The whole purpose of a creed is as a tool to make something easier to remember and pass along, and Paul got this in Jerusalem, either from Galileans who spoke Greek, or from Greek speakers who were closely associated with Galileans (Peter, James and John). The idea that Peter, James and John had, themselves, never heard someone recite this creed to them in Aramaic is, to me, a bit of a stretch. And the idea that this creed simply bypassed Galilee because of a language restriction is, to me, an almost untenable idea.
I guess we just don’t share the same “sensibility” on this one.
I’m saying the creed originated in Greek, not in Jesus’ homeland, and there’s no evidence it ever made it’s way back to Palestine. Even if it did, that wouldn’t affect what unknown Christians were saying hundreds of miles away in a different language, with no lines of communication. It shouldn’t seem that weird. People say things about *me* all the time, and probalby about *you*, within two minutes of where I am (or you are); I don’t know what htey said, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have any way of stopping them from saying it, even if I told them they were wrong. (As I have discovered thousands of times….)
My mistake – and my apologies. I was *thinking* (incorrectly) that you thought it possible (or likely) that Paul learned this creed in his first visit to Jerusalem – but – that was a Crossan viewpoint, who wrote “The most likely source and time for his reception of that tradition would have been Jerusalem in the early 30s when, according to Galatians 1:18, he “went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [Peter] and stayed with him fifteen days”.
re: “People say things about *me* all the time, and probalby about *you*, within two minutes of where I am (or you are); I don’t know what htey said, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have any way of stopping them from saying it, even if I told them they were wrong. ”
I can assure you that whatever they’re saying about you is really good.
I have no such assurance about what they’re saying about me.
Thanks so much for getting back to me on this!
Perhaps this comment is most appropriate for the anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death but I’ve been a fan of his since I was a kid and there’s a particular interview about him that crossed my mind today as I was reading the Gospel of Luke. The interview is with Larry David and a man named Dave Dave. Dave Dave was a burn victim as a child, covered in scars, and Michael Jackson befriended him and became a father figure towards him and in this interview Dave Dave was explaining how much MJ meant to him. Now, if you go into the comments section everyone is convinced that Dave Dave is actually Michael Jackson in disguise and I thought of this interview when reading the story about two disciples (outside of the 11) who came to believe a random man they met in the street was actually Jesus. It does make sense because there have been countless Elvis sightings as well and he’s probably the most famous example. So I’m wondering if certain disciples just met people who reminded them of Jesus and convinced themselves that he had risen. Possible! But we will never know.