[Music] The world of modern CST Christianity is built on the doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Mainstream Orthodoxy maintains that Jesus died by crucifixion, was buried, and three days later reemerged with flesh and blood, making public appearances for forty days before being lifted up into the sky to be installed on a throne in the heavens adjacent to God the Father. But is this what Christians have always believed?
The earliest testament to the beliefs of the early Christians is to be found, I believe, in the Gospel of Thomas, in the original shorter form of the Gospel of Mark, and the Q sayings, Q being a documentary source used by Matthew and Luke in the writing of their gospels. I share the view of many New Testament scholars who point to the angular, opaque, and thematic style and substance of Thomas, giving every appearance of a rather less finessed, polished, and harmonized text from a time before the canonical gospels. As for Q, some scholars like E.
P. Sanders reject the Q hypothesis, but in doing so, they have to explain how Luke could have been totally unaware of the birth narratives of Jesus and John the Baptist and totally unaware of The Sermon on the Mount if there were no Q, and if he'd got everything from Matthew. I find that illogical.
I think it is more logical to identify Q as a written source that Matthew and Luke both had in front of them, and so for that reason, I'm persuaded that Luke and Matthew were reading another source when they wrote their gospels. And so we have two primitive sayings gospels: Q is a collection of sayings, and the Gospel of Thomas is a collection of fourteen sayings. The themes of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are simply not there in those earliest sources.
As for Mark, I think I'm in the theological mainstream in identifying Mark as the earliest of the synoptic canonical gospels, and its earliest form is a little shorter than the version you and I will find in most modern Bibles. The sections absent from the original shorter form are significant. The original shorter form of the Gospel of Mark is to be found in the Sinai Bible, known as the Codex Vaticanus.
It was discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai and dates from the fourth century of the Common Era. In the early version of Mark's gospel to be found in the Codex Vaticanus, in the Gospel of Thomas, and in the sayings of Q, there is a notable omission: the resurrection appearances of Jesus.
In fact, in Thomas and Q, even the crucifixion is omitted. So, I find it interesting that the early Christian communities which produced and gathered around Thomas, Q, and Mark either didn't know the stories of Jesus's death and resurrection appearances, or they didn't think they were important. Now, someone might say, "Wait a minute, Paul!
Doesn't the writer still refer to resurrection appearances very briefly in verse six? " Well, let's take a look. Here is the original ending: "When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus's body.
Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, 'Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb? ' But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
'Don't be alarmed,' he said. 'You're looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen!
He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, "He is going ahead of you into Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.
"' Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. " Doesn't sound like a very emphatic ending, does it?
But to those who first read and those who first heard it read, this was a punchline. Those who had grown up in the world of Greek and Roman myths knew that when the hero's body goes missing at the end of the story, it means that they have become or are now proven to be divine. They have ascended and are now among the gods.
The Jesus story exactly fits into that pattern. This is the punchline that the writer of Mark set us up for right at the beginning of the Gospel: "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christos, the anointed one, the Messiah. " It doesn't say "the Son of God" in the original version; the writer saves that claim for the end of the Gospel.
The empty tomb and the missing body is a Greco-Roman trope, which says he has become divine; he is now to be found among the gods. The first Greek hearers of the gospels would have understood that immediately. The trope of the hero transcending death and ascending to the gods can be found in many Greek and Roman myths: Alexander the Great, Berenice, Asclepius, son of Apollo, Alanes of Crete, Apollonius of Tyana, and Aristaeus, son of Apollo.
In the case of Aristaeus, son of Apollo, there are even post-ascension appearances. So, I think Mark 16:6 is the ascension story of Jesus, and that earliest of the canonical gospels, the Gospel of Mark, is placing the story of Jesus within a familiar pattern of stories and tropes so that the Greco-Roman reader will understand straight away this is the Christian divinity claim surrounding its hero, Jesus. So, what kind of resurrection are we looking at?
The earliest literature to find its way into the New Testament earlier than any of the canonical gospels is the writing of the Apostle Paul in a letter sent to the Christian community in Corinth around the year 65. Paul lays out his understanding of the Resurrection: "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.
" I'm going to come back to that phrase a little later because there may be something else going on there. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. Next, Paul basically says, "If you can't believe the resurrection of Jesus, how can you believe in resurrection for yourself?
And if there's no resurrection, then aren't we all wasting our time? " But let's jump ahead to verse 35, where he gets into the nitty-gritty of what he means by resurrection—Jesus's and our own. But somebody may ask, "How are the dead raised?
With what kind of body will they come? " How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or something else. But God gives a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed, he gives its own body. All flesh is not the same; men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another, and fish another.
There are also heavenly bodies, and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another, and the stars another, and star differs from star in splendor. So it will be with the resurrection of the dead: the body that is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable.
It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. In verse 50, I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen!
I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality.
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory. " That is not the bodily resurrection of Matthew, Luke, and John and later orthodoxy; it is a spiritual resurrection. We are raised a spiritual body.
We have lived this material life with a material body, a natural body, a perishable body, but after death, we will go on as a spiritual entity—eternal and imperishable. Now, when Paul speaks like this, he really is echoing the mainstream Greek thought of the time; he's echoing what we would find in the writings of Plato, for instance. Now, Plato believed that you and I are beings of consciousness before we become material beings and have this material experience we call life, and then after death, we continue as beings of consciousness either in some other part of the universe or maybe we go around another time.
So this idea that we have a spiritual self, a spiritual body, a spiritual existence, and then a material one, and then a spiritual one—Paul is really echoing that here. He doesn't get into the pre-existence aspect, but he is saying that when our body dies, something different emerges: a spiritual body. That is different from what resurrection means in Matthew, Luke, and John and later orthodoxy.
Remember, we are in early Christianity here—primitive Christianity. This is around A. D.
65, before any of the canonical gospels have been written. Today, because we tend to read the gospels first and they first describe resurrection to us, we tend to assume that Paul is talking about the same thing and their developed ideas of resurrection—bodily resurrection and physical appearances with Jesus eating fish and cooking meals and having his wounds touched. We assume that's what Paul is referring to here, but none of those have been written; none of that has been reported.
Those are later writings. Paul, before any of that, is talking about this other view of resurrection in which we are beings of consciousness whose existence continues after the death of our bodies. So let's keep that in mind.
Now, I want to go back to these 500 witnesses who at the same time saw Jesus. Firstly, these 500 witnesses are apparently totally unknown to Matthew, Luke, and John. When they write their gospels, they make absolutely no mention of them, which would be an odd omission if they knew about this what would have been an incredible event.
Let's just put it in context again: In 1 Corinthians, he appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve, and after that, he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers at the same time. So let's take a look in the text to see exactly what's happening here, so from verse five. .
. . and that he was seen by Keas, that's Peter, then by the 12.
If we go to an interlinear, we'll find the verse and can go word by word to see what's happening. Afterwards, he was seen above by 500 brothers at one time. So, just following the Greek word order, that's interesting, isn't it?
He was seen ἀνω by 500 brothers. What does ἀνω mean? It's translated "more than" and interpreted as "seen by more than 500," but the words say he was seen ἀνω by 500.
So, what is ἀπάνω? When drilling down into Greek words and Greek texts, this is the book that many pastors and scholars of the New Testament will use to get to the bottom of what's going on. It's the Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, and Danker Greek Lexicon.
If we go to ἀπάνω here, we can see how the word is used in different places to get an idea of the scope of the word. My apologies to any ancient and New Testament Greeks listening in. The first usage is as a positional adverb of place; it means "above" or "over.
" So, here's an example: if people are walking above them or over them, if a helicopter is hovering over a building, the word would be ἀνώ. If the clouds were over the land, it would be ἀπάνω. The second is with numbers, so "more than 500" is given as an example, so we'll take that one out.
In which case, it leaves only one occasion where it means "more than" in number, and that's in the Gospel of Mark. Now we have its second use as a preposition; again, it's positional, as in "over the mountains" or "above the place where the child was. " Here's this word ἐπάνω.
Then we have it as a positional preposition in a figurative sense, and we have an example in Socrates where we use the word ἀνώ to mean that someone is in authority over others. So, the fundamental meaning is positional: above, over. It is possible that this appearance was not on the ground, that it was not at ground level, but was a vision in the sky.
That would go some way to explaining how 500 people could see an individual all at one time. If you've got a crowd of 500 people, and in the middle of them is an individual, you've not got 500 eyewitnesses. An appearance in the sky now gives you 500 witnesses seeing all at the same time.
Except that it changes the nature of that Resurrection appearance. If we go back again to 1 Corinthians 15, we realize Paul is equating his experience of the resurrected Jesus with the appearances to the 500, to James, and to Peter and the 12. But Paul did not encounter a physical human body; his experience was more like that of the 500.
If it was a vision in the sky, Paul was blinded by a light, and he heard a voice. That was his experience of the resurrected Jesus, something very different from the resurrection appearances of Matthew, Luke, and John and the beliefs of later orthodoxy. Now, when the Apostle Paul talks about Resurrection, he sounds very emphatic.
This is Paul in Romans 10:9: "If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. " Now, Paul believes Jesus was raised, but for him, Resurrection means that our bodies die and then we go on as spiritual entities, and again, that's very different from Matthew, Luke, and John's description of Resurrection. When Paul talks about his own experience of encountering Jesus, he is not describing a face-to-face meeting with another human being, one of whom happens to have come back from the dead.
Paul tells us what he experienced three times in the New Testament: we have it in Acts 9, Acts 22, and Acts 26. It was not a flesh-and-bone person that he described in any of those three tellings. Paul experienced light, a voice, love, which for him was forgiveness and restoration, and a transformed purpose, and it is that kind of rebirth that he wishes for those to whom he is preaching.
That's what encountering the risen Jesus meant for him, and he believes it will mean the same for those to whom he's preaching. Now, if you had asked me as a zealous young Christian convert, "Paul, have you had an encounter with the Risen Jesus? " I would have said yes.
But if you'd actually pressed me and got the details of my story, another story would have emerged, very similar to what we hear from the Apostle Paul. So, like the Apostle Paul, I didn't encounter a physically resurrected human body; I experienced overwhelming light. I had an experience of an overwhelming sense of love, and the impact of it was a transformed sense of purpose.
So, I identified very closely with Resurrection as Paul understood it; I just didn't get the booming voice. And remember, Paul equates this experience—the kind I had and the kind he had—with the resurrection appearances to Peter, James, the 12, and the 500. And so, we have to say there is a difference in what the Apostle Paul means by Resurrection appearances in A.
D. 65 and what the second-century canonical gospels mean when they start talking. When the Apostle Paul argued for this spiritual Resurrection, our loss of a physical body, and our going on as spiritual bodies or beings of consciousness, to use more modern language, he was speaking in the language of mainstream international thought, and in particular, as it was expressed in Plato and the Stoics.
This was the worldview in which everybody lived and breathed at that time. So, in one sense, Paul was not saying anything super controversial; it just conflicted with the worldview of certain strands within Judaism. Particularly the doctrines of the Sadducees, who didn't believe in the resurrection, didn't believe in spiritual bodies housing material bodies.
Their worldview was different, so there was a clash, but not with the bulk of Paul's audience. He's writing to a Greek audience who think in Greek terms, and so what he's saying makes perfect sense and sounds very, very familiar. I think we have to bear that in mind when we come to the early apologists to realize what it is they are defending when they get into arguments to defend the Christian faith.
Today, we tend to think of Christianity as equaling the later Orthodox view, but what I've just said places Paul alongside Q and Thomas and the original version of Mark and says no, there was another strand here, as well as the developed Orthodoxy that saw resurrection in a different way, in a more spiritual way. This more spiritual and subjective idea of resurrection, a vision of transcending this material life, can be found not only in primitive Christianity before the emergence of Orthodoxy but also in the Gnostic and extra-canonical texts of the 200s. Some of those Gnostic and extra-canonical texts were contemporaneous with the texts that became canonical.
So we have to recognize that in the beginning, Christianity was a kaleidoscope of stories, ideas, experiences, and theologies. What became Orthodoxy was just one strand within that kaleidoscope. Now, today, people who consider themselves Christian apologists are generally defending the later Orthodoxy.
They look for evidence to support Orthodoxy and find ways to dismiss evidence that doesn't support it. For many apologists today, I think the credibility of Jesus stands or falls with the historicity of the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus, and that's what they think the Apostle Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15. But early Christians took a different view.
Justin Martyr was an apologist, and he saw his job as demonstrating the reasonableness of faith. But he didn't do what modern apologists do. His argument was, "Look, we Christians are not saying anything new.
The claims we're making about Jesus, the way he transcended death, the way we believe he's divine, we're not saying anything new. You Greeks and Romans have been saying this about your heroes for a long time. You've had virgin birth stories, you've had resurrection stories, you've had miracle stories, you've had heroes who become divine.
These are familiar stories. They are well-worn stories; you already know these stories. Allow us to say this about our Jesus.
" He saw Jesus as the fulfillment of these familiar Greco-Roman tropes, and it was the Christians' right to do that for which Justin Martyr was martyred. I think that's very different from someone who calls himself an apologist today, who essentially is filtering information so that they can make a good case and hopefully win some converts. When I say that, I'm talking about myself because in my earlier years as a zealous Evangelical apologist for Christianity, that's how I saw my role.
I wanted to be able to garner better arguments to prove Christianity, and anything that sort of mitigated that, well, I wasn't so interested in it. But I think we go back to the beginning, and we realize that early Christians set the Christian stories in the context of world thought. They set theology in the context of international philosophy, and they set the stories of virgin births and miracles and deaths and resurrections in the wider context of those stories, which were tropes that were familiar to the Greco-Roman ears who were the first to come across Paul and Thomas and Q and the canonical gospels and the extra-canonical ones and the Gnostic texts.
I think if we approach these texts other than in the context of Greek thought, we're going to miss what they're saying because if we don't know the tropes, we won't know when we are reading punchlines in the stories of the New Testament. Now, of course, I understand the modern apologist's urge to pin down what really happened, and I think in my earlier years as an evangelist, that was always where I wanted to go: what really happened? And there's nothing wrong with that as long as we're willing to accept that the kaleidoscope of early Christian texts isn't necessarily going to be able to settle that question for us.
I think we get into circular logic if we dismiss the ancient Christian sources that give us answers we don't want and accept only the early Christian sources that agree with what we believe today. I think that is completely circular, and it's built on an assumption of Orthodoxy in the first place. It is not getting down to what really happened.
Personally, I find it enriching to listen again to the full kaleidoscope of early Christian sources and give a second hearing to Christian communities whose understanding of the story of Jesus did not become mainstream. I find it interesting to listen to communities for whom the narratives of death, resurrection, and ascension were not the main part of the story. They had another focus; they had another interest.
I am interested to listen to those early Christians whose faith didn't become the religion of worship and obedience, which became the imperial department of religion. I love the mysticism and the call to explore that I find in the extra-canonical and in the Gnostic texts. So it's a different interest with which I go to these texts now.
In my youth, I would go because I was just looking for proofs of the Orthodoxy I already held. Now, I go back to that kaleidoscope, and I ask, what were the first Christians experiencing? What did they believe?
What was the wisdom they carried and that they were martyred for or that they buried in the desert for? Protection of those texts: What was the wisdom that they wanted to pass on to future generations? I want to know.
In the full kaleidoscope of primitive and early Christianity, I find a wonderful invitation to explore who Jesus may have been, who we are, and what you and I may be capable of.
