Loading...In my post yesterday I noted something unusual about the doubting tradition in the resurrection narratives (i.e., the tradition that some of the disciples simply didn’t believe that Jesus was raised) – in addition, of course, to the fact that there is such a dominant doubting tradition! (itself a fascinating phenomenon) – which is that there is no word anywhere of the women who discover the tomb doubting, but clear indications (either by implication or by explicit statement) that some or all of the male disciples doubted. This is true of three of our four Gospels.
- Mark 16:8. (This one is by implication only) We are told that the women never tell anyone that they have found the tomb to be empty. So, the disciples are not said to believe and, in fact, so far as we know from this Gospel, no one does come to believe. (Obviously someone did, otherwise we wouldn’t have the Gospel!)
- Luke 24:10-11. The disciples think the tale of women told that Jesus has been raised as he predicted is “idle” and they do not believe it
- John 20:1-10. Peter and the Beloved Disciple do not believe Mary Magdalene that the tomb is empty; they have to see for themselves.
It should be noted that in every instance of doubt, it is the men disciples who doubt; the women (Mary Magdalene and Co.) are never said to doubt. When they see Jesus (e.g., Matthew 28) then know it’s Jesus brought back from the dead. But the men sometimes doubt. Why is that?
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Again, I’m really fascinated by how your blog is developing recently!
A couple of thoughts regarding this post then:
1. What about Mary Magdalene not immediately recognizing ‘the risen Christ’? Ok, once she recognize him she didn’t doubt but isn’t it weird that she didn’t recognize him at first and also why shouldn’t she touch him when ‘the risen Christ’ in other versions expressly tells people to touch him?
2. Why assume that Paul was referring to Peter when he said ‘received’ in 1 Cor 15:3? Why not ‘the risen Christ’, given Gal 1:12 where Paul claims that he didn’t get the Gospel from men but through a ‘revelation’ of the ‘risen Christ’?
3. (off-topic) Doesn’t Gal 1:1 definitely prove that the concept of ‘Trinity’ didn’t exist at the time yet?
Thank you.
Yes MM’s failure to recognize is anothe rcommon motif (cf. the two on the road to Emmaus). On Peter as the source for 1 Cor. 15:3, see my other comments on someone else’s question. I’m certain that there was no trinity yet in the time of Paul!
I just want to say it is a rare, in fact I suspect unique, privilege, to be able to witness a favourite author sharing his thoughts on a virtually daily basis, as he is thinking about and constructing his forthcoming book on a subject of compelling interest. In thus delving into the core historical basis of the Christian faith, is it too much to hope that we, living two thousand years after the events under consideration, might actually attain a better understanding of what really went on back then, than has been attained by millions who have thought about these things in the intervening ages? Well, we know more than previous generations about such matters as the birth of the universe and the origin of species, so maybe the prize of greater understanding of the development of earliest Christianity is also within reach. Wow!
Its odd that right after saying the disciples doubted what “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them [said regarding their vision of Jesus]” the author of Luke goes on to say that the disciples weren’t able to recognize Jesus when he appeared to them (Luke 24:13-16, 36-43). One wonders how can this be??
I think this was probably a well known (and embarrassing!) story in circulation and Luke might be creatively expanding the story in an attempt to offer an explanation of this difficult tradition. Luke seems to deal with this problem by suggesting they were prevented (by God?) from recongizing Jesus. But say this explanation was false – that the disciples truly didn’t recongize Jesus when they had a vision of him. Maybe some who “saw” Jesus didn’t believe because they didn’t reconize him [he looked different, as a “ghost” (Luke 24:37)]. If we remove Luke’s explanation/addition two early historical facts regarding the visions seem to be present based on the criterion of embarrassment/dissimilarity: (1) In some of the visions of some of the disciples Jesus was unrecognizable; and (2) In some of the visions Jesus looked like a ghost. This may explain why some doubted.
“Why didn’t the disciples always recognize Jesus after His resurrection?”
Could you recommend us some of the books which you are reading on the subject of visions?
Best place to start is Dale Allison, Resurrecting Jesus. He has a good section on this with footnotes filled with *tons* of studies of all kinds.
Great topics!
From a strictly historical perspective, I find it interesting that the possibility of some or all of these people engaging in pious fraud isn’t discussed. It definitely seems possible that one of them, perhaps the first, might have had a hallucination or event that they interpreted as a vision of Jesus. But all three seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility to me. Paul, in particular, seems likely, at least to me, to have had an incentive to bolster his credentials by claiming to have met Jesus.
Are there any scholarly reasons to believe that all three of them had sincere visions? Just curious.
Well, it’s a judgment call. But it’s hard to believe that someone like Paul was willing to be flogged, beaten, stoned, and so on if he didn’t really believe what he was saying….
But isn’t the historicity of Paul’s persecution based off the assumption that Paul’s telling the truth in the first place?
Well, I don’t think it would be sound historically to assume that he was flat out lying about everything he said. When he reminds his Corinthians readers of all the times he had been beaten up and flogged and stoned and so on, it would have been rhetorically ineffective, to say the least, if instead he had been living the high life all those yeras. So I think he must be speaking the truth in those instances.
What if he had been living a modest working class life? Could he have been stretching the truth just enough to be convincing? Especially since he was known as a “liar” or “spouter” in certain quarters.
Hummm…, Peter, Paul & Mary. Good names for folksingers, but not visionaries or reliable witnesses.
Do you really think these three were anything more than characters in a dramatic contrivance? Anymore than Macbeth, who also saw things that weren’t there and who believed what he saw was real? Do you think the Prophet Muhammed actually saw and heard Gabriel speaking to him, or that Joe Smith talked to Moroni??
Visions, hallucinations, dreams and the like have down-to-earth explanations, not supernatural ones, and they offer very little in the way of evidence beyond the state of mind of the dreamers and, more importantly, the intentions of the authors who fabricated the scenes in the first place, not to mention the evangelicals who continue to perpetuate the illusions.
As you say, it is conceivable some followers imagined (or even pretended they saw Jesus or someone else (one of his brothers, perhaps?) who may have looked like him, that some believed and others did not, but the world back then was awash in similar sightings and oral fabrications that had no connection to historical happenings. Other cults were doing quite well with their own hallucinations and it took Christianity a very long time to build up a head of steam — even longer to dispel the heretics.
Yes, I think these were real people and that they believed they saw Jesus alive. I personally don’t think they did see Jesus alive. But they had some kind of vision — as people frequently do!
Yes, perhaps. But there’s more to it than that. If, as you say, they were “real people,” then in what sense were they real? Whatever we know about them comes to us from narratives called gospels that are much more literary and far more religious than anything we would recognize as historical writing. If they didn’t see Jesus alive (and we both know they didn’t and only thought they did), then what’s the point, really? How does a description of their seeing someone who wasn’t there make them more real just because you think so and because hallucinations and wishful thinking and other sorts of visions frequently come to people of all ages and cultures? And when as a scholar you stamp them “real,” aren’t you in danger of “resurrecting” these essentially one-dimensional characters to a level of existence equal to other more legitimately real players in human history?
I should probably add that seeing apparitions is as common these days as in times past. And they are not always indications of psychic disorders, any more than they are proof of bodily resurrections. Experiencing the dead coming back to life is, in point of fact, a common occurrence among men and women (and even children). Speculatively speaking, if the Nazarene had never been born or crucified, someone else would likely have taken his place in religious history and given another name.
I’m not sure I’m following what you’re objecting to. But all I’m saying is that people have visions all the time, even if these are not of some kind of “objective” reality. But the visions themselves are real (as, of course, were the people who saw them)
What I’m getting at, and what I’m trying to convey here, has to do with the scholarly implications of assigning them (the visions and the people) a standard of reality beyond what they deserve. Too often, normative Christians were (and still are) inclined to extrapolate unwarranted conclusions from flimsy beginnings. If these three “witnesses” saw something that seemed miraculous at the time and then told others what they saw, we only know about the sightings because other people put their interpretive spin on the perceptions decades later. These interpretations have been dramatically embellished and endlessly repeated as “gospel truth” to the detriment of historical objectivity. For example, when we talk about the plays of Shakespeare, we know many of his characters were also based on “real people,” but we don’t tend to think the real Macbeth, or the real Hamlet, or the real Julius Caesar actually said or did whatever the playwright put down on parchment. The scenes describe much more than someone seeing “apparitions,” and tell us next to nothing about the players themselves in a factual sense.
Assuming you are right about Peter, Paul and Mary, what do their misperceptions of “objective reality” imply, other than “some listeners believed and some doubted”? Maybe it was just a matter of ancient writers playing to their most receptive audience.
Bart,
Would love to see a post on the “sleeping saints” who “came out of the graves” after the resurrection. Matthew 27 claims they appeared “unto many”. Love your work.
Heath
Indeed! Another fascinating detail: zombies in Jerusalem 🙂
Yes, I would love to hear the fundamentalist’s explanation for this one. My family, as Christian as it gets, dodge the issue completely.
It makes total sense. Especially given the apocalyptic climate of the time, as well as Jesus’s disciples’ belief that Jesus and his teachings were the key to the arrival of the kingdom, then it it only seems logical that believers would start mushrooming up all over the place in the earnest hope and expectation of throwing off the yoke of Rome through the establishment of God’s kingdom (headed, of course, by the resurrected Messiah).
The initial believers would have seen these events through a Jewish prism of interpretation, though by the destruction of the second temple a disconnect would have begun to ensue. Had God given up on his people and their land? Of course not! God simply turned against those Jews who failed to recognize Jesus as the true Messiah while creating a *new* Israel in the form of the Church. Of course!
By the time of the crushing of the Bar Kokhba rebellion by Rome (and its ensuing Jewish Diaspora), Christianity had sufficiently moved away from its Jewish apocalyptic roots and into the Pauline form of mystery religion that the resurrected Jesus took on a whole new significance for all generations to come. I find it amazing to think that something as fantastic as the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead was able to survive a complete transition from one framework to another while still gaining ground. Talk about perfect timing: true world-historical irony!
Bart, do you think that each of the gospels are trying to do something different with the notion of the resurrection, as they do with other elements of Jesus’s life, passion, and death? Do you see a consistent, proto-Orthodox understanding of Jesus being literally raised from the dead across the board, and for the same purpose?
Yes indeed! I think Mark wants to emphasize that the tomb was empty, but that no one knew about it (till his writing), and possibly that the disciples, who are dunderheads in Mark, never did get it. Luke and John want to stress the resurrection was of a real physical body, reanimated by God. Each one has his own emphases, of course (they all want to stress that God raised Jesus from the dead). But the idea that it was a real physical resurrection became a center-piece for proto-orthodox (as opposed to gnostic) belief.
Question — Peter would not have had the same vision as Paul though, right? Peter would have seen the vision of Jesus with the body that had wounds and weakness (hunger). Paul seems to be arguing that the risen – ascended body would be transformed into a different state. Since Paul’s vision experience came after the 40 days of Easter – he was too late to claim to see the risen Jesus the same as the others did, right or not? Am I understanding this correctly?
We have no idea what it is Peter saw (it’s never described); Paul’s vision came a couple of years later, but he seems to portray it as the same kind of visoin the others had (1 Cor. 15:3-8; 1 Cor. 9:1). He, of course, gives no indication that Jesus was around for 40 days and then ascended to heaven.
I like the way that you form tentative hypotheses which are subject to change as you learn more. This approach is quite unusual in religion and/or politics I am afraid. Most people, in contrast, using confirmation bias, spin whatever religious or political information they read or hear to fit their preconceived ideas.
Why are you so sure 1 Cor. 15:5 refers to receiving from Peter, and this took place at the visit mentioned in Galatians 1 rather than a later occasion?
Well, he “received” it before writing 1 Corinthians; it is usually thought to be a primitive confession of the church; it privileges the appearances to Peter and James; and so it’s plausible that he “received” it from Peter and James; and the one time he talks about meeting up with them is Galatians 1. But I’m open to other options if another strikes you as more easily demonstrable (or at least more plausible)
But if he got the ‘good news’ from Peter then why did Paul also claim (in Galatians) that he did not get the ‘good news’ from other humans but through a ‘revelation’ from ‘the risen Christ’ himself? Wasn’t he referring to the same ‘good news’? Or was he simply inconsistent here?
His “revelation” came direct from Christ, not anyone else; and this was the revelation that Gentiles could enter into a right standing before God without being circumcised. But Paul still inherited things from those who came before him, including the confessional statement in 1 Cor. 15:3-5 (as he himself indicates).
Bart, you maintain that people who have visions tend not to doubt them. This may be true once people step forward to report their vision — people who have a vision that they’re not certain about are likely to keep quiet about it. Perhaps there are steps involved in accepting a vision to be real, and that doubt is one of the initial steps.
Also … could it be that the Gospel description of the doubt of male disciples is a rhetorical device? If I describe to you a fantastic story, and you reply “I don’t believe it”, I might reply “I didn’t believe it at first either.” It’s my way of saying that I’m not easily convinced about such things, and that you can trust my report.
Yes, that’s probably part of it. One problem is that Matthew 28:17 doesn’t put it that way: they saw Jesus and the *still* doubted.
I am a bit confused now. Did Paul believed what he experienced and the other male witnesses were visions of the risen Jesus or did he believe that Jesus had been physically raised from the dead, as you mention in your earlier post? Thank you.
He thought he had seen Jesus but he it was because Jesus “appeared” to him — which is typical language ofr a vision. Since Jesus was “seen” as a physical entity, Paul concluded that Jesus had been physically raised from the dead.
I’m still confused about ‘visions’ too … So if we assume that Jesus appeared as a physical entity to Paul in his ‘vision’ does that mean that there really WAS a physical entity at THAT place at THAT time that other people could have seen as well if they had been there with Paul at that time? I thought ‘visions’ where rather things that some people ‘saw’ (in their heads in a sense) but others would have not seen it since they did not have that ‘vision’?
Everyone can agree that Person X had a vision. Some will say the vision was veridical (that there was an objective reality behind it) and others will say not.
Thanks for your response, Bart!
Once question I have is regarding the resurrection involves Gospel of John:
I was speaking with a scholar who suggested that the Gospel of John actually has Gnostic *seeds* in it, and that her clue to this was the mention of the “Father of the Devil” (John 8:44—which has been translated against the grammar to make the Devil the father of the *Jews*). Do you see the author of John as straddling the Proto-Orthodox and Proto-Gnostic camps? And does a Proto-Gnostic understanding of the Gospel of John provoke a different reading of the resurrection text?
(And do you think that the story of the Woman caught in adultery was a textual *sleight of hand* to break up the text that seems to cause so many problems for later Johannine Proto-Orthodox apologists?)
Thanks!
I think your friend is misreading the Greek of John 8:44; it is a noun put in an attributive position in a normal way “you are from (your) father, the devil.” In any event, I think John is too early to be either proto-orthodox or gnostic. It was much beloved by believers in both camps.
The vision theory is a good one the more i think about it. Having done research on the unitarians and all their ” messiah’s visions its possiple that this phenomenone is a rather frequent event…. but having done some research on the mormons i think one must at least consider the possibility that an outward fraud had taken place…people were lieing….they were also willing to suffer and die…
Here’s a good book on how our brains are nothing but positive-feedback loop machines which may explain why our brains mis-interpret patterns.
http://www.michaelshermer.com/the-believing-brain/
Hi, Bart,
Actually, it wasn’t a friend of mine, per se. It is a scholar and professor or early Christianity. She maintained that the reading of John 8:44 was against the grammar of the passage, and that this was a trend that began in the 2nd century by those who did not want to concede that John actually had a reference to the Father of the Devil in it.
Her further contention was that much of the disagreement and criticism coming out of the later letters of John seem to pivot around this verse, so that the Gnostics seemed to run with one interpretation while the proto-Orthodox tried to reel in the theology along more conventional lines.
I do not know how to translate Greek (or why it should be translated one way or the other), so I was wondering if there is any merit in that thought. If there is, then it would change the whole approach to the Gospel of John. Is this way out of left field? She seems to be a well respected scholar.
Thanks!
In Greek there are two ways to put one word in apposition to another (in the phrase: “the good man,” good is in apposition to man): either like in English, article adjective noun; or, unlike in English article noun article adjective (the man the good [one]). So too with nouns in apposition, the normal order would be article noun article noun (where the second article-noun is the same number and case as the former). The problem is that this can lead to ambiguity, especially when the nouns are in the genitive, since the same construction could be read as attribution or as a different kind of noun with a genitive noun following and hanging on to it.
That’s what you ahve in John 8:44. She is taking it as a noun with a genitive following; most interpreters see it as two nouns in apposition. The grammar cannot decide the issue, only context can. But the context is not decisive, except to say that Jesus here is really badmouthing the Jews and is contrasting “his” father with theirs. I think most interpreters would question whether her reading makes sense in the context. If she’s right about the grammar, then what it says is “you are from the faither of the devil and you wish to do the desires of your father.” The second half is condemnatory, but it can be condemnatory only if “your father” is not a person whose desires you want to emulate. And so it seems unlikely that it would be “God” (or whoever is the father of the devil).
I’d be interested in knowing her evidence that there was a split between proto-orthodox and gnostic interpretations of this verse int he second century. So far as I know, there isn’t any evidence at all! But I’d love to know if there is some. My sense is that her concerns derive more from our own context in a post-holocaust world where we really don’t want Christians (let alone Jesus) saying nasty things about Jews being children of the devil. But that does seem to be what John says.