Paul and Jesus

Since I was in college I have read every book on Jesus I could get my hands on, whether scholarly, popular, or even fiction. Irresistibly, like so many who were raised in the Christian faith, I found myself skipping to the end of a book to see just how the author handled the events following Jesus’ crucifixion and death. No matter what else a writer might say about Jesus, the question of what happened “after the cross” was fascinating and critical in my mind. All four gospels report that Jesus’ dead body was hastily laid in a rock-hewn cave tomb and blocked with a stone late in the afternoon on the day he was crucified but that the tomb was found empty by his followers on the following Sunday morning. New Testament scholars, historians, and even novelists seem incapable of offering a rational explanation as to what most likely happened that first Easter weekend. This seems to be the mystery of the ages when it comes to understanding Christian origins.

What happened to the body of Jesus? One recent historian wrote, after comprehensively surveying the historical and archaeological evidence: “The reality is that there is no historical explanation for the empty tomb, other than if we adopt a theological one, i.e., the resurrection. I leave it up to the reader to make up his own mind.”¹

What I had failed to consider in all those years of analyzing our New Testament gospel accounts was that the answer to this insoluble problem was found in the letters of Paul. I am convinced that there is a rational historical explanation for the resurrection of Jesus and the “appearances” to the disciples that can stand up to proper historical scrutiny, but if one reads the gospels alone, without using Paul as a key, everything remains a mystery. If we begin with Paul, suddenly everything becomes clear and we can sort through the gospels in a way that makes real historical sense.

It is easy to assume that the four New Testament gospels provided us with our earliest reports that Jesus’ tomb was found empty, and that he was raised from the dead, whereas in fact they are our latest witnesses, ranging in date from A.D. 80 to 120 or even later.² Paul writes in the early 50s A.D., just twenty years after Jesus’ crucifixion. That is not to say the gospels are without historical value. The problem is that they report a garbled mix of contradictory stories that have to be critically analyzed and sorted out chronologically. It is Paul’s earlier testimony that provides us the insight to be able to do just that. Paul not only reports his own visionary experience but also passes along testimony he received from face-to-face contact with Peter, James, John, and the other apostles—interpreting for us what it meant to say Jesus was “seen” by this or that person following his burial.

Paul is the essential missing piece for understanding historically this most important cornerstone of the Christian faith. Ironically, evangelical Christian scholars often use Paul to make the point that he is our earliest source mentioning Jesus’ resurrection, but then they promptly forget what Paul says when they turn to consider the subsequent gospel accounts.

In order to understand the historical background and context of Paul’s language about Jesus’ resurrection, and resurrection of the dead more generally, we need to diverge a bit from Paul’s time and the Jewish culture of his day. It is essential that we first understand the views of afterlife among the Greeks, since Paul assumes that his readers, who were his contemporaries, shared a Greek cultural outlook. The Jews, on the other hand, represented to the Greeks a strange and naïve view of the matter of death and afterlife, one that the Greeks thought was patently absurd. In contrast the Jews had come to their view of resurrection from the dead from a completely different place.

I always begin my college course on Paul by assigning an article I published some years ago called “What the Bible Really Says About Death, Afterlife, and the Future.”³ Until one knows a bit about how the idea of resurrection of the dead developed and what was at stake in its unique view of the afterlife, there is no way to really comprehend Paul’s “Gospel.”

To put things succinctly: the notion of resurrection of the dead is a distinctly Jewish way of thinking about life after death. Even today people easily confuse the idea of resurrection with the notion of the immortality of the soul. They are two separate but related views of afterlife, both affirming what is commonly called eternal life, but there are important differences between them.⁴ I want to begin with the Greek side of things.

GREEK DUALISM