The Resurrection of Jesus: The Origins of the Tradition and its Meaning for Today

By Alan Robson

Discussion of the Resurrection usually centres on whether it was an historical event. The Resurrection stories, primarily those of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus to his disciples, are judged as to whether they are likely to be true. This approach will not do, for it ignores the bewildering complexity of the literature of the New Testament and of the differing - and not altogether consistent - patterns of thought represented in it. The Resurrection meant different things to different people at different times during the first century. The earliest Christians had to find ways of explaining what to them was the vital (eternal?) significance of Jesus of Nazareth, and the New Testament writings reflect the various ways in which the 'Jesus event' was interpreted during these formative years. Resurrection ideas formed part of this interpretative process.

This book is a serious analytical study of the resurrection language and stories of the New Testament. For the benefit of non-theologians it begins with two chapters on the composition of the Gospels and the inter-relatedness of the first three. There follows a thorough critical study of the texts relating to the Resurrection. The conclusion is that it is the message of the Resurrection that matters (e.g. that the truths found in Jesus are eternal truths) and not its historicity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483546827

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXTS

If we are to understand what is said about the Resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament we must first know something about the nature of the texts in which we find this tradition, and how such texts are to be read and understood. In this study we shall be concerned primarily with the gospels, but it will also be necessary to look at the Acts of the Apostles and some of St Paul’s epistles. All the Pauline epistles had been written before the first gospel (Mark) appeared in about 65CE. This was followed by Matthew and Luke between about 75 and 85, and then by John, probably in the nineties of the first century. The Acts of the Apostles is a second volume to Luke’s Gospel but, although it was written late in the first century, some of the material in the earliest chapters comes from very early sources and gives us valuable insight into the preaching and teaching of the christian community in the earliest years and before the first of Paul’s epistles. This relative dating of the documents is important, because it enables us to compare the later tradition of the church with the earlier, and to gain some knowledge of how the tradition was actually developing.

The most important documents for our purposes are the four gospels, and it is vital that we understand what sort of literature they are, how they were composed and what their purpose is. It is popularly supposed that the gospels are much easier to understand than the epistles. These latter, it is said, are full of abstract theological argument, whereas the gospels are mostly concrete stories. This observation is true as far as it goes, but concrete stories are not always as easy as might appear. It is possible to read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as entertaining stories without realising that it was written as a biting satire on eighteenth century society. Albert Camus’s ‘The Outsider’ appears to be the story of a feckless young man who comes to a tragic end, but Camus’s purpose in writing it was to give concrete expression to his philosophy of the ‘the Absurd’ as expounded in abstract terms in his ‘Myth of Sisyphus’. George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ is on the face of it an unlikely but amusing and sometimes disturbing story of farmyard animals taking over the running of the farm, but it is of course a thinly disguised account of the evils of totalitarian government. Similarly, the gospels look like straightforward accounts of the life of Jesus from his conception and birth (in Mark, from his baptism) to his death and resurrection. Sadly, this is how the church has encouraged us to understand them, but it is quite untrue. Superficially, the gospels look like ‘lives’ of Jesus, biographies, but they are no such thing, and this is the first point we have to grasp if we are to understand them.

These works are known as gospels, and the word ‘gospel’ means a proclamation of good news. So each of the gospels is the proclamation of a message. To this extent Mark’s ‘Gospel’ is more like Camus’s ‘The Outsider’ or Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ than, for example, Roy Jenkins’s ‘Life of Churchill’. Camus was preaching a philosophy of life, and Orwell was preaching the evil of certain kinds of political philosophy, like Soviet Communism. Similarly, Mark was preaching a new understanding of God (and therefore of the meaning of life) based on the events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth. He has a message for us, and it is the whole book that presents the message. We must therefore study his gospel in its entirety in order to discern the message. Matthew, Luke and John followed the example of Mark in presenting the ‘gospel’ in this particular form, and they did so because each of them had his own way of understanding and presenting the message; each had his own angle on it.

The Synoptic Gospels and the Priority of Mark

The first three gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, are known as the ‘synoptic gospels’. This is because all three have much the same material in them and are clearly inter-related. They can therefore usefully be studied alongside one another; they can be ‘seen together’, which is what the word ‘synoptic’ really means. When we study them in this way we find that there has obviously been copying from one to another, and it becomes clear that Mark was the first to be written. Matthew used Mark’s gospel as the framework of his own, copying into his own work most of what he found in Mark but frequently adding material not found in Mark. So most of what we read in Mark is found also in Matthew, and this led to the comparative neglect of Mark in the worship and teaching of the church. It also led to the belief, expressed by St Augustine of Hippo, that Matthew wrote first and that Mark produced an abbreviated and, by implication, inferior version of Matthew. All the evidence suggests that this is quite wrong, for when we study Mark and Matthew side by side we find that where both have the same material it was actually Matthew who did the abbreviating. He did this no doubt to make room for all the additional material he was going to include, for in those days there was a limit to the length of any one scroll. We also find that Matthew from time to time improves on the Greek style of Mark’s text and, more interestingly, corrects what he sees as theologically or religiously unacceptable statements in Mark. There is therefore no doubt that Mark wrote first and was copied by Matthew. He was also copied by Luke, but here it seems that Luke produced the main framework of his gospel before making use of the text of Mark. Thus, whereas in Matthew we find that the text of Mark is fairly evenly distributed throughout his gospel - and therefore seems to have provided the main framework - in Luke the text of Mark is found in three blocks which seem to have been added after he had written his first draft. Luke, like Matthew, also altered Mark for reasons of literary or (as he saw it) theological propriety.

The Material Shared by Matthew and Luke - ‘Q’

Much of the material in Matthew, Mark and Luke is therefore common to all three. The next discovery we make is that Matthew and Luke have other material in common which does not come from Mark. A careful study of this material in its contexts in the two gospels makes it very unlikely that either has copied from the other. This led to the conclusion many years ago that they must both have taken it from another written work which no longer exists, and this conclusion is still widely accepted. This hypothetical work has always been called ‘Q’ (from the German, Quelle = source). There is, however, no reason to posit such an unknown written source. Most of the verses (about 200) assigned to Q are far from identical in wording, and this would suggest that they have come down to our gospel authors by different lines of oral tradition. This, rather than a written source, would account for similarity of substance but not identity of wording. Where the wording really is identical we find ourselves with sayings of Jesus which are so memorable in terms of their structure and/or rhythm that they were not likely to be changed in the course of oral tradition. An example of this is Jesus’ saying: ‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened’. (Matt7f // Lk 11:9f). Such a saying, if it is remembered at all, will always be remembered in its original form. The theme is continued in the verses which follow, but now we find that while the substance of them is the same, the detail has become confused. Matthew continues (7:9-11): Or what man of you, if his son asks him for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?’ But Luke reads (11:11-12): ‘What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?’ The disagreement over details makes it impossible to suppose that these verses of Matthew and Luke were copied from a written document, but the differences are precisely the sort which arise when traditions are handed on by word of mouth. We conclude, therefore, that the material which is common to Matthew and Luke but which was not derived from Mark came to them through different lines of oral tradition. It is almost certain, of course, that both Matthew and Luke found this material in a written form, but what we are saying is that what had once been the same material (the same sayings of Jesus, for example), had become diversified during the early period of oral tradition and the differing versions of the same material were given permanence when the oral traditions came to be preserved in writing. Matthew and Luke probably did copy this ‘Q’ material from written documents, but they were not, as the Q hypothesis claims, the same document. There is no need for the Q hypothesis of a common written source, but the symbol ‘Q’ is still quite useful for identifying the material which is common (in substance, and sometimes in wording) to Matthew and Luke but which does not come from Mark.

Material Peculiar to Matthew or to Luke - M and L

When we have taken account of what Matthew and Luke copied from Mark, and what they have in common from other sources (Q), there remains some material which is found only in Matthew or only in Luke. This material is referred to as ‘M’ (Matthew) and ‘L’ (Luke). Not surprisingly, we find that the content of M and L tend to give to these two gospels their respective distinguishing characteristics.

Tracing the Development of the Tradition

This analysis of the synoptic gospels has exciting consequences. Knowing that both Matthew and Luke copied from Mark, we can see how they copied him and what alterations they felt they had to make. A few examples will illustrate how revealing this can be. First, Mark records the baptism of Jesus: ‘In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan’ (1:9). Matthew copies this in much the same words (3:13ff), but inserts: ‘John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he consented.’ Matthew is worried by what he reads in Mark. For him the baptism of Jesus is a problem, and the problem is indicated in the dialogue which he appends to the words he took from Mark. The mission of John the Baptist was to convince the people of their sins, to call for repentance, and to baptise those who repented as a sign of the washing away of their sins. By the time Matthew came to write his gospel it was believed that Jesus had been sinless, so how could he possibly have needed to be baptised by John? The dialogue between Jesus and the Baptist is Matthew’s way of indicating the problem and dealing with it. The solution, Thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness has tested the ingenuity of many commentators on Matthew, for its meaning is far from clear. All we can confidently glean from this is that Matthew found the baptism of Jesus an embarrassment, whereas Mark had not. When we turn to Luke we find that he too was embarrassed by Mark’s bald statement that Jesus had been baptised by John, but instead of trying to deal with the problem as Matthew does - which only serves to highlight it - Luke tries to avoid it by hiding away the fact of Jesus’ baptism in a subordinate clause! He writes (3:21): ‘Now when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus had been baptised and was praying, ...’. This reduces the baptism to something of little importance and, with a bit of luck, no one would notice the difficulty implied. This seems to have been Luke’s thinking. We can infer from all this that at the time when Mark wrote his gospel the sinlessness of Jesus was not part of christian belief but that it had become so by the time Matthew and Luke were writing theirs.

Another example: at Mk 6:5 we read: ‘And he (Jesus) could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them. And he marvelled because of their unbelief.’ Matthew (13:58) alters this to ‘And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.’ The alteration is so small as to be easily overlooked, but it speaks volumes. Matthew does not like the idea that Jesus was not able to do any mighty works. Such a limitation to his power was unacceptable, so he replaces ‘Jesus could not do’ with ‘Jesus did not do ...’, implying that he could have done mighty works but chose not to because of the people’s unbelief. Again we have evidence here of how christian belief about Jesus was developing. By Matthew’s time it was not possible to believe there had been any limits to Jesus’ healing powers.

The increasing reverence attaching to the person of Jesus was matched by an increasing reverence towards his disciples. Thus we have the amusing alteration made by Matthew to Mark’s assertion that on one occasion James and John had come to Jesus asking that they might have the chief seats in the coming ‘Kingdom’ (Mark 10:35ff). Matthew cannot believe this of these two apostles, so he ungallantly attributes this unworthy request to their mother (Matt. 20:20ff)!

I said earlier that the analysis of the sources of the synoptic gospels leads to exciting results, and it does, for as we note the alterations made to Mark by Matthew and Luke we are actually hearing them thinking. My favourite example of this is the use Matthew makes of the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (20:1-16) - and he is the only one to record it. He has been copying from Mark 10:28-31, a passage in which Jesus has been promising a reversal of fortunes in the kingdom of God, so that those who have sacrificed much will be richly rewarded. This passage ends at v.31 with the summary statement, ‘But many that are first will be last, and the last first’. Matthew now interrupts his copying from Mark in order to insert at this point the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. At the end of the parable he repeats, ‘So the last will be first, and the first last’ (Mat.20:16). The reason for the insertion of the parable is abundantly clear. Matthew believed this parable was a good illustration of the meaning of the words, ‘the first will be last and the last first’ (or vice versa!). The labourers were hired at different times of the day, ‘early in the morning, the third hour, the sixth hour, the ninth hour and the eleventh hour’. At the end of the day, when they lined up for their wages, we are told that they were paid in the reverse order. Those who had arrived last were paid first, and so on until the last to be paid were the first to have been employed. So Matthew sees this parable as a concrete illustration of this enigmatic saying of Jesus. It is fascinating to be able in this way actually to hear Matthew thinking - even if at this point his thinking was undoubtedly wrong! The parable does not illustrate the adage that the first will be last and the last first. The parable is illustrating Jesus’ teaching that God provides for people according to what they need, not according to what they deserve. Those who’d worked for only one hour needed a full day’s pay to provide for themselves and their families just as much as did those who’d worked all day. This employer gives them all what they need. The point is emphasised in the complaints of unfairness from those who’d ‘borne the burden and heat of the day’, so it was necessary to the story that the workers should be paid in reverse order, because otherwise those who’d worked all day would have left the vineyard not knowing that the others had been paid the same wage.

Knowing that Mark was the first to write a gospel, and that Matthew and Luke later copied what he had written, we are able to infer from the their alterations to Mark’s text something of how the christian tradition was developing. From the material common to Matthew and Luke (Q) we may also learn quite a lot about how the tradition had developed in its oral stages, and we are able to compare different versions of the same sayings of Jesus (which constitute the bulk of ‘Q’). The ‘M’ and ‘L’ material helps us to establish the special interests of Matthew and Luke respectively. We have gone behind the gospels to the immediate sources of the gospels (Mark, Q, M and L). Now we go further back and look at how Mark’s gospel was written.

Mark: The Composition of the Gospel

The Church has always included in its worship readings from the Bible, which for practical reasons are always quite short. [It is worth noting that this has the unfortunate result of suggesting that any piece of biblical text can be understood - and can carry authority - independently of its context, and has undoubtedly had a most disastrous effect on our attitude to the Bible.] The task of isolating short passages which have some sort of coherence from most biblical books is inevitably very difficult, just as it would be to isolate short passages from any literary work. In the case of the Gospels, however, especially the first three, it is very easy to do this because they actually consist almost entirely of short stories, or little groups of sayings, so it is a simple task to extract from them short coherent readings. We thus discover something of the greatest importance about the writing of a gospel, and that is that when St Mark set about writing the first gospel he was not writing a continuous narrative in the way that I, for example, am writing my narrative here.

It seems that when Mark sat down to compose his gospel he had in front of him a heap of bits and pieces of tradition about Jesus: stories of his exorcisms and miracles, of his disputes with authorities like the scribes and pharisees, some of his parables, his more memorable sayings, and the like. He also had before him an account of the final days of Jesus’ life on earth from the last supper to his crucifixion and burial. The whole of this latter sequence might already have existed more or less as he reproduces it, for this had formed the essence of christian preaching almost from the start and could have acquired this degree of continuity and coherence long before Mark chose to write. Even so, one can see that this continuous narrative of Jesus’ last days is itself also made up of a number of originally quite separate traditions. [No doubt Mark also had ‘resurrection’ stories, though, as we shall later have occasion to discuss at length, his account of the resurrection of Jesus is both brief and enigmatic: he seems himself to have composed the story of the ‘empty tomb’ - and he chose not to include any stories of Jesus appearing after his resurrection.]

The bits and pieces of tradition which lay before Mark had been collected over the years from preachers and teachers who had used them to illustrate their sermons and teaching. If it is true, as has long been thought, that Mark’s gospel was written in Rome, then the materials available to him for the writing of his gospel were those which had been collected by the christian community in Rome from visiting apostles, preachers and teachers. It goes without saying that all the embryonic christian communities of the early years would have been keen to hear more about this Jesus whom they had come to believe in as ‘Lord and Saviour’, so all the communities around the Mediterranean world would have been collecting material about Jesus as they heard new traditions from visiting christians or as members of one community returned from visiting others from whom they had picked up new stories.

These separate stories, sayings, etc. would have been used by preachers and teachers as the basis for more extended discourses and teaching. A preacher might have begun by recounting the story of Jesus’ healing of the paralytic (now found at Mark 2:1-12) and then gone on to speak at length about the forgiveness of sins - or about the opposition to Jesus which led ultimately to his crucifixion - or both, since they had come to understand Jesus’ death as an atoning sacrifice. This one story had thus become the basis for certain elements in the church’s teaching, or, as we might say, a ‘text’ for a ‘sermon’. Some idea of how this worked might be obtained from John’s Gospel, which is very different in form and content from the synoptic gospels. Whereas the latter consist entirely of a sequence of traditions, mostly stories, John’s gospel has relatively few stories, but extensive discourses, or sermons. Any one story tends to be used by John as the basis, or the ‘text’, for a long discourse. Thus, the story of the feeding of the five thousand (6:1-14) is used as the basis for a discourse on Jesus as ‘the bread of life’ (6:25-59). In John, of course, all these discourses are attributed to Jesus himself, but their style and content is so different from what we read of Jesus’ teaching in the synoptic gospels that we have to conclude that it is really John who is their author. Further evidence of this is found in the fact that very often it is difficult to distinguish between what according to John is being said by Jesus and what is being said in the way of commentary by John himself. A monument to this difficulty is preserved for all time in the Book of Common Prayer where, in the Communion service, the priest is directed to say after the confession and absolution, ‘Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him: .... So God loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life‘. What is quoted here from Jn 3:16 as a saying of Jesus himself is actually a comment of John following on teaching of Jesus which actually ends at verse 15, but one can see how easily such a mistake is made.

Each local christian community, therefore, would have had its own collection of separate traditions about Jesus, or ‘units of tradition’ as we might call them in order to signify that each had a quite separate existence. These would have been written down, but then, quite naturally, they would have been ‘arranged’ for the sake of tidiness and ease of reference. If one has lots of ‘bits and pieces’ which one wishes to preserve by sticking into a scrap book - or photographs one wishes to preserve in an album - one must first decide in what order to arrange them. It could be in chronological order, or in order of size, or of similarity of content, or in any number of ways.