We can trace the early evolution of beliefs about Jesus by dissecting the gospels into their primary sources. Although Mark is the earliest of the canonical gospels, penned around 70 AD, the lost source Q is much earlier. No intact versions of Q survive, but the text can be recovered by analysis of Matthew and Luke, who drew on Q as well as Mark. The details of the reconstruction are laid out by John S Kloppenborg in “Q, the Earliest Gospel” [Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, also available on Amazon Kindle].

Q is so different from the later gospels that it might almost be talking about a different person. Mark hammers the mystical theme of the dying and rising savior: everything leads to the cross. But in Q, there is no mention of a sacrificial death. Q is the source of the Sermon on the Mount {which becomes the Plain in Luke}, and of most of the sayings of Jesus. Instead of the miracles which litter Mark’s gospel, in Q we have parables and morality teachings, set in the concrete language of the agricultural worker: – tales of sowing and harvesting, the herding of sheep, the rapid growth of the mustard plant, unproductive trees being uprooted, casual laborers being hired and paid. In Q, there is none of the mysticism which developed as the Jesus tradition moved, in the hands of Paul and the gospel writers, away from its Jewish roots and out into an environment of Greek-speaking Gentiles.

The teachings of Jesus in the Q source are those of a prophet who preaches morality, not of the walking God who teaches about his own identity in the later gospels.

Where then is the earliest trace of supernatural beliefs about Jesus? It is, in fact, very early indeed. Paul quotes a creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. It is a form he was taught rather than being his own composition. The core of the creed is a pair of statements with a parallel structure:

    Christ died for our sins, as foretold in scripture, and He was buried.
    Christ was raised on the third day, as foretold in scripture, and He appeared to Cephas.

Scholars are virtually unanimous in placing the origin of this creed in the 30s AD, within a very few years of the crucifixion. The central concern of the creed is the resurrection. As quoted by Paul, it goes on with a listing of those witnessing the appearances of the resurrected Jesus.

The belief in the resurrection was clearly what motivated the disciples. But they did not foresee a resurrection. They did not anticipate a glorious return to life. They fled in fear and disarray from the arrest and crucifixion of their leader.

But then, they came to believe Jesus was resurrected. He was not a false prophet who had met an ignominious fate. He was the one who conquered death itself. Their beliefs were transformed. They were transformed. Jesus had been revealed as God, and the disciples became confident evangelists who would defend their beliefs even at the cost of their own lives.

That much of the story of early Christianity is fairly clear from the historical evidence. A majority of scholars concur on the broad outline. But the unresolved question is the basis of the disciples belief in the resurrection.

Skeptics and apologists take it for granted that a resurrection is impossible. Therefore either the resurrection did not actually happen, or it was a genuine supernatural miracle. The basis of this judgement is seldom examined. Impossibility is taken as self-evident.

But if we analyze the story in the light of contemporary medical insights into life, death and resuscitation, the notion of absolute impossibility melts away. The crucifixion of Jesus was highly unusual by Roman standards. Taking these factors into account, it becomes plausible that he was the one among tens of thousands of victims who actually survived. The biblical scholars and historians who assume the impossibility of the story simply do not know anything about the statistics of rare events. They fall into the fallacy {well known in the biomedical sciences} of post-hoc analysis.

Worse, any naturalistic explanation of the resurrection as a resuscitation or survival is dismissed in the literature by quoting Strauss’ 19th century demolition of the Swoon Theory. The Strauss comments about a survivor being “half-dead” and “weak and ill,” matches terminal diseases such as cancer, or cellular poisoning by chemotherapy drugs, but are not apt descriptions of trauma patients, or of those resuscitated after a cardiac arrest. As every medico and paramedic treating emergencies knows, such patients are often remarkably chipper.

Once we realize that the survival of Jesus was a highly unusual event, unique in the historical record, but not actually impossible, the logic of early Christianity falls into place. The belief flowed from the experience of a surviving Jesus, who, although badly damaged, was able to engage in sensible dialog with his disciples. These ideas are laid out in my Kindle eBook entitled “The Miracle of the Resurrection” [2016]. You can find it online at Amazon.com and read the first couple of chapters online simply by clicking on the cover image. I wrote it out of sheer frustration over how little modern medical insight has been applied in the scholarly literature to the resurrection story.

One naturalistic hypothesis which has reappeared in the literature of recent decades is the idea that the resurrection appearances to the disciples were visionary in nature. Paul clearly had visions, and the experience on the road to Damascus being followed by days of blindness suggests what we would now classify as “conversion disorder.” Grief counselors and clinical psychologists tell us that the bereaved frequently report brief sightings of the departed loved one. But the gospel accounts of the appearances of Jesus are highly discordant with such visionary experiences. The most glaring disparity is the difficulty in recognition. Today, the bereaved are never in any doubt about the identity of the person in the vision. But Matthew, Luke and John all have the theme of the disciples recognizing the wounded Jesus only with difficulty. This is independently attested: none of the stories of delayed recognition come from Mark.

If Jesus survived, and was seen by his disciples, the logic of early Christianity falls into place. It is astonishing how little attention the scholarly literature gives to this possibility.

Stephen questions the unusual features of the crucifixion.

The gospel accounts indicate that the Roman prefect, Pilate, took a cautious approach to the execution of Jesus. This is often dismissed as a fictionalization by the gospel authors to placate Roman sensibilities. When we look at the facts, however, it seems entirely plausible. The point is that by this time, Pilate was a worried man.

The crucifixion took place on April 3 of AD 33, the day when Nisan 15 (the beginning of the Passover) fell on a Friday and a lunar eclipse occurred in the early evening. The eclipse began at 6:31 PM local time in Jerusalem, grew to cover over half of the disk [umbra 0.5764] at 7.56 PM, and cleared by 9:21 PM. We owe the extreme precision with which the orbit of the Moon is known to the laser ranging reflectors left by the Apollo astronauts.

Pilate now recognized just how precarious was his position. His sponsor, the oppressive and anti-Semitic Sejanus, had been disgraced and executed in October of AD 31. A long reign of terror ensued against Sejanus’ adherents. The emperor, Tiberius, had returned from Capri to take full control in Rome, and had issued a directive to his provincial governors for a more careful and conservative approach [Philo, On the Embassy to Gaius, 161].

During his preceding 7 years as governor, Pilate had formed a working accommodation with the High Priest, Caiaphas. Their common interest was the maintenance of the fragile peace. An uprising would be a disaster for Pilate, requiring an expensive military intervention to quell and disrupting the economic productivity, on which the flow of taxation monies to Rome depended, for many years to come. Order must be maintained. But excessively harsh action might prompt recriminations destabilizing Pilate’s own position. We know that in another 3 years, Pilate was send back to Rome by Vitellius for action against a Samaritan prophet who was assembling an army on Mount Gerizim [Josephus, Antiquities, 18.4.1 (85)]. Pilate’s actions seem a rather measured response by Roman standards, but the fine line between order and oppression had been crossed. Governors were walking a tightrope.

Passover was a inflammatory time for the Jews. It celebrated liberation, and resonated with every successful military campaign in their long, bloody history. Jerusalem was a powder keg, waiting for a spark. The disruptive Jesus of Nazareth, preaching of a coming Kingdom of God which would overthrow religious and military authority, could not be tolerated.

Pilate and Caiaphas acted in their common self-interest. It is entirely logical that Pilate would have given an explicit order to his centurion: “The Nazarene is to be crucified, dead, and out of sight by sundown.”

The disruptive affair would be concluded and the angry crowd could disperse before the sunset marking the holy Sabbath and the inflammatory Festival of the Passover.

The gospel accounts indicate a remarkably brief time to death, only 6 hours, and a burial instead of leaving the body on the cross. The exigencies of the situation make these unusual features entirely plausible. Jesus was suspended with nails through the wrists alone, instead of wrists and ankles {read the gospel accounts carefully: Jesus could walk reasonably well, and the only allusion to foot wounds is a very oblique reference in Luke [24:39-40]}. Without support for the body, the victim struggled to breathe, and was soon exhausted. To ensure prompt closure of the affair, it is likely that representatives of the Sanhedrin were waiting for the death. The soldiers promptly took down the body, handing it over for burial, as ordered by the governor.

The brevity of the sufferings, the prompt taking-down of the body, and the removal to a crypt were unusual features of a crucifixion. Without these features, a survival becomes utterly impossible. With them, a survival after apparent death becomes plausible as a rare event, occurring only once in a historical record of tens of thousands of crucifixions.

The standard historical argument (that the story is implausible because victims were typically left on the cross) is statistically fallacious. In the experimental sciences, it is known as the fallacy of post-hoc analysis. Naive investigators tend to focus on the one unusual result in a large body of data and claim it is significant because it differs from typical outcomes. In this historical context, we are not trying to determine what was usual. We are trying to explain a unique event. The question often addressed is, “What is the probability of a victim surviving?” This is the wrong question. It should be, “What is the probability that, among 10,000 or more victims, there will be one survival, rather than none?” Those who claim that death can be so reliably and certainly identified that there will not be one mistake among thousands of instances have never worked the scene of a natural disaster.

Good points, MReichert. A lot of the gospel accounts are obvious fictionalization, using literary devices that were common and appropriate in the culture of their day. Angels giving helpful advice were simply a means of facilitating the flow of the story. Authors of that era did not have the modern skill of presenting the inner world of a protagonist’s thoughts. In that era, angels and demons were not regarded as outrageously unusual.

Matthew, however, is a repeat offender for crossing the line into the ridiculous. The mass resurrection of the saints is downright silly. The story of guards on the tomb, petrified with fear at the sight of a laughing angel, is plain ludicrous.

Sometimes the apparent literary flourishes, though, are actually symbolic statements which carry important meaning in the context of the religious culture of the day. The tearing of the temple veil in Mark, Matthew and Luke is a key example. The reference is to the curtain separating the worshipers from the Holy of Holies – believed to be the earthly dwelling place of God’s presence, which only the high priest was permitted enter, once each year. But with the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross, the barrier was removed and God became accessible to all the people.

There are confusing hints at astronomical phenomena in the gospels and in Peter’s sermon in Acts [2:20]. A solar eclipse is out of the question at Passover, which is a full-moon festival. But lunar eclipses occur at full Moon, and there was one in the early evening of 3 April, AD 33. It probably wasn’t a fully-developed “blood moon” as suggested by Peter’s sermon, since the disk was not completely obscured by the umbra, but there could well have been reddening of the dark limb, and it certainly would have been a memorable occurrence for the disciples, prone as they were to regarding natural phenomena as indicative of divine wrath.

The only other date for the crucifixion with any plausibility is 7 April, AD 30. This date would require very tight timing between the baptism by John in AD 29 and the crucifixion. Nothing is certain, but the 3 April, AD 33 date fits better and also explains why Luke, in Acts, would have Peter referring to a blood-moon lunar eclipse in his sermon. Of course, Peter, despite being illiterate and uneducated in the Law of Moses, speaks in elegant Koine Greek, peppered with references to the Hebrew scripture. This is Luke speaking, not Peter.

Your points about death, MReichert, are absolutely correct. What seemed a straightforward concept in ancient times has become fraught in the era of resuscitation, life support, and near-death experiences.

Today, we pronounce death when we are absolutely confident that damage to life-supporting organs and systems has progressed past the point of being irreversible. That is, when we are absolutely sure that there is no prospect of restoring life. Resurrection is a religious concept, not a medical one. If we see a patient dead, and later see them alive, we do not declare that they have been resurrected from death. We simply acknowledge that were wrong about our diagnosis of death. The only characteristic of death with absolute meaning is that it is irreversible.

It is the paradoxical juxtaposition of death and resurrection which gives the religious affirmations their emotional power. But the paradox fades immediately we apply medical knowledge and straightforward logic.

If Jesus was able to engage in sensible conversation with the disciples after his recovery from crucifixion, it follows that his neural hardware had been preserved without catastrophic damage during the period of unconsciousness. Reading the gospels tells us his Glasgow Coma Scale score was no better than 3. Blood pressure of 40 systolic or below leaves pulses imperceptible, and cerebral blood flow down around half normal or less, but it is possible that enough flow remained to forestall widespread destruction of tissues.

The religious interpretation is that the neural hardware had undergone the complete dissolution characteristic of death and had later been magically restored to a functional state, with all the information representing Jesus’ knowledge and personality correctly coded in the synapses. The medical interpretation is simply that sufficient (minimal) blood flow remained during the period of coma to prevent catastrophic damage.

It took several chapters in a book on the resurrection to sort out these issues [The Miracle of the Resurrection, on Amazon Kindle, free on the subscription service and at the minimum price of 99 cents to purchase].

As an example of the difference between rational thinking and religious tradition, here is a quote from the book. “Consider the fortunate householder who returns to the scene of devastation following a major earthquake to find his house, alone among all those in the street, still standing. Very few would entertain the possibility that the dwelling had been flattened, along with all the others, but that divine intervention had rebuilt the house from the rubble. Yet that is exactly parallel to the apologist’s proposal for the body of Jesus: destruction and rebuilding, rather than preservation.”

As to magical powers of healing, we notice today that faith healers and TV evangelists have enthusiastic followers. The psychological component of a therapeutic interaction is known to be very important. For an exorcist, epilepsy is productive territory. With a sense of timing, the exorcist steps in just as the major seizure (grand mal fit) has passed through the tonic and clonic phases, and the victim is about to recover consciousness. To a first century audience, the healer has banished a demon.

My general approach to miracles is that they are do not “transcend natural laws” or “require supernatural intervention.” Rather they are rare events which are important for their cultural impact and inspirational value. The resurrection was a turning point in history. Without it, Jesus and his followers would have been forgotten. But it set in motion cultural and religious changes which shaped much of history on our path towards the modern world.

If you want to take a materialist, scientific viewpoint, there is nothing which is ultimately incomprehensible — merely phenomena which we have yet to acquire the wisdom to understand. In traditional religious terms, God created Nature, and works through His creation. Seeing God and Nature as antitheses is surely perverse.

The workings of the Jewish calendar help us select plausible dates for the crucifixion, because Passover begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan. Being a fixed date, it will rotate through the days of the week as the years roll by, much as Christmas and New Year’s Day rotate through our weekdays, though in a less straightforward manner as the Jewish months are counted from the new Moon.

We have pretty near universal agreement that the crucifixion took place on Friday, the only quibble being the comment in John [19:14] about “the preparation day for the Passover.” This works as long as we remember that Jewish days commence at sundown, not midnight, so what we call Friday is both the preparation day and the start of the first day of Passover.

The calendar mechanics indicate that Nisan 15 fell on a Friday only three times during the governorship of Pilate: on April 11 of AD 27, April 7 of AD 30 and April 3 of AD 33. If we accept the evidence of Luke, who tells us John the Baptist began his ministry in the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar [Luke 3:1-2], which is AD 29, we can rule out the AD 27 Passover. Thus we are left with AD 30 or 33 as the year of the crucifixion. Either date is roughly concordant with Paul’s journey to Damascus occurring 7 years after the crucifixion, according to a reconstructed Siriac document [van Voorst, Robert E. The Ascents of James. Society of Biblical Literature, 1989]. The governor, appointed by Aretas IV [2 Corinthians 11:32], is known to have served from AD 37 to 39.

My own preference for 33 AD comes from trying to guess Luke’s motivations in writing the sermon attributed to Peter (Cephas, the illiterate fisherman) in Acts 2:14-40.

Luke has a habit of playing fast and loose with the facts. We have many disagreements between Luke’s stories of Paul, and Paul’s own accounts in his letters. One of the more devastating is that Luke does not seem to know about Paul’s journey to Arabia immediately after his conversion experience, or that his return to Jerusalem was delayed for three years, or that in Jerusalem he met only James and Cephas [Galatians 1:17-19]. Luke instead claims that Paul returned promptly to Jerusalem, where he was presented to all the apostles by Barnabas [Acts 9:26-30]. Perhaps Luke’s errors are simply from a failing memory, or the unreliability of eyewitness accounts of events several decades in the past.

Luke strives for a narrative that seems logical, preferring narrative coherence over historical accuracy. One is reminded of Tom Clancy’s comment about his military thrillers: the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. Why did Peter’s sermon, at least as concocted by Luke, include the reference [from Joel] to astronomical phenomena? The eclipse of the moon occurring coincident with the 33 AD date does strongly suggest a source for an oral tradition associating the crucifixion with celestial phenomena… Of course, this is hardly conclusive… And I agree it reads as a prediction, not a history. But my point is, why did Luke choose to include a reference to celestial phenomena? Peter clearly could not quote Hebrew scripture: he was illiterate and unschooled in scripture. The passage is Luke’s.

As to the quality of Luke’s writing, we note that the introduction to his gospel [Luke 1:1-4] is a single sentence in the original Greek, constructed in a highly stylized form matching the introduction to histories in the classical Greek tradition. At other times, the style slips, particularly around references to Hebrew scripture as rendered in the Septuagint.

As you point out, MReichert, the narrative becomes very clunky in much of Acts, which lacks the clarity of message and story-line in the gospel. To me, it seems Luke often has trouble with his sources, trying to make sense of traditions that are incomplete, conflicting, or just plain wrong. For example, the resurrection appearances in Luke have nothing like the logical clarity of the account of the arrest, trials and crucifixion.

As to the duration of the ministry of Jesus, the conflict between the synoptic gospels and John is profound. We come to the problem of whether any of the gospel accounts are based on eyewitness testimony. Mark, writing ragged Greek from a minuscule vocabulary to an audience unfamiliar with Jewish custom, does not read (to me, at least) like an eyewitness. He is phenomenally short on actual sayings of Jesus, lacking the material from the Q stream. Luke explicitly says he is not a personal witness. Matthew, supposedly the tax-collector, is off with the fairies in his fictionalization. John, the fisherman from Galilee, clearly did not write the Greek philosophy and sophisticated Christology of the 4th gospel. He may, however, have recounted his stories of Jesus to the learned scholars of Ephesus, in his extreme old age, late in the 1st century.

One of the more scholarly works to give eyewitness status to the source (not the authorship) of John, is Hugh J Schonfield (1901– 1988), in his conspiracy theory book, The Passover Plot [first published 1965, and now available on Kindle]. He seems to have a much better grasp on New Testament sources than most of the revisionist theologians.

I do not believe the duration of the ministry can be solved with any certainty. The 3 years of John is consistent with the 33 AD date. But the short, sharp narrative of the synoptic gospels, suggesting 6 months or so, fits well with the psychiatric cliche of a person, transformed by a powerful insight (or a “chemical imbalance”), embracing the world while losing empathy with his family and former closest friends.

The quick pace of the synoptic stories fits with the resurrection appearances taking place in Jerusalem. But on detailed examination, this location is implausible. The city is 50 kilometers from the sea, and could not possibly have fresh fish to broil, in a society without refrigeration or mechanized transport. Galilee, where the disciples were fishermen on Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee), is the obvious location, just where Jesus told the disciples to meet him [Matthew 28: 10]. Gross errors like this suggest we cannot regard details of location and timing as reliable.

I would thoroughly endorse your skepticism, MReichert, on the traditional claim of divine authorship, or inerrant inspiration, of scripture. Inerrancy is only credible to those who read without comprehension: a distressingly common affliction among the “bible study” community.

Darkness from noon to 3 PM, as claimed by Mark [15:33] has no plausible astronomical explanation. Solar eclipses occur only at new Moon, whereas Passover is a full Moon festival. The lunar eclipse on April 3, AD 33, occurred just after sunset and cannot be relevant to phenomena during daylight. Mark may be making a symbolic statement, like the tearing of the temple veil, or simply adding a literary flourish for dramatic effect.

A lunar eclipse in the evening after the crucifixion may have been carried in the oral tradition and perhaps been what inspired Luke to bring the “blood Moon” theme into his reconstruction of Peter’s sermon [Acts 2:14-40].

The issue of dating Paul’s escape from Damascus is mentioned by James D Tabor in “Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity” [Simon & Schuster, 2012]. See footnote 1 in the Chapter INTRODUCTION: PAUL AND JESUS. See also Robert Jewett, “Dating Paul’s Life” pp. 30-33 [SCM press, 2012]; and in the Google collection of online books, Colin G. Kruse, “The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians: An Introduction and Commentary” p. 198.