Paul and Jesus

The disciples were in great despair over Jesus’ death, having lost all hope that he could be the Messiah. After all, a dead Messiah is a failed Messiah. None of them was expecting Jesus to die, much less rise from the dead, so how were they suddenly transformed from disappointed hopelessness to dynamic faith? Rather than wither away, the Jesus movement began to mushroom, gaining strength and numbers as the apostles proclaimed all over Jerusalem that they had seen Jesus alive and his tomb was empty. How can such a dramatic change, three days after Jesus’ death, be explained any other way? Why were the apostles willing to face persecution and even death if they were spreading a story they knew to be false?

There are a limited number of nonsupernatural explanations to explain what might have happened. The oldest explanation, that the disciples stole the body to deliberately promote the fraudulent claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead, is mentioned in the gospel of Matthew as a rumor that was spread among the Jewish population (Matthew 28:13–15). A second explanation, that some unknown person with no connection to the disciples, usually said to be a gardener, removed the body, also shows up in some later Jewish texts. The earliest source for this story is Tertullian, a late-third-century Christian apologist. He writes that some Jews were claiming that a gardener, upset that crowds visiting Jesus’ tomb were trampling his vegetables, reburied the body elsewhere, never revealing the location.² In more recent times, the so-called Swoon Theory, popularized by Hugh Schonfield’s 1965 bestseller, The Passover Plot, suggested that Jesus was not really dead but unconscious, either through a drug or from the trauma of crucifixion, and that he revived in the tomb.³ The most common explanation among biblical scholars is that Mark, our earliest gospel writer, invented the entire burial and empty tomb story to bolster faith in the resurrection of Jesus. It is Mark’s invention, lacking any historical basis.⁴ I find this last explanation highly unlikely since it is hard to imagine the early followers of Jesus relating his death on the cross, but then saying nothing about what happened to his body. It would essentially be a story with no ending. But perhaps more to the point, Paul, our earliest source, written decades before the gospels, knows the tradition that Jesus was at least buried. I think Mark does his share of inventive mythmaking—but not regarding the fact of Jesus’ burial, or even that his tomb was found empty on Sunday morning by his followers. That seems to me to be at the minimal core of what we can responsibly say about what happened after the cross.

Geza Vermes, in a recent work, The Resurrection: History and Myth, surveys these various alternative explanations and concludes that none of them “stands up to stringent scrutiny,” despite our need for some rational, scientific explanation.⁵ Like so many others he concludes that historical investigation, given our limited evidence, has reached a dead end, given the contradictory and mythological nature of our evidence—namely the texts of the New Testament. Is there a way through this impasse?

Since the earliest surviving Christian texts are seven letters of Paul (1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon), dating to the early 50s A.D., twenty years after Jesus’ death, it makes sense to give them priority, particularly in our attempting to solve the mystery of what happened after the cross. Not only are these letters the earliest evidence we have, but they come to us firsthand, as first-person testimony from one who had direct dealings with Peter, James, and the other apostles.

If gospels were written a generation or more later, when Paul, Peter, and James were dead, and the Romans had shattered the original Jerusalem church following the destruction of the city in A.D. 70, they should be considered as secondary evidence. It comes as a surprise to many people familiar with the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to learn that all four are anonymous productions, written in the generation after the apostles, and based on a complex mix of sources and theological editing. Scholars are agreed that none of the gospels is an eyewitness account and the names associated with them are assigned by tradition, not by any explicit claim by their authors. In other words, the names themselves are added as titles to each book but are not embedded in the texts of the works themselves. Each gospel writer had his own motives and purposes in telling the Jesus story in a way that supported his particular perspectives. None of them is writing history but all four can rightly be called theologians. From a distance their differences might seem minimal, but once carefully examined they are quite significant, revealing a process of mythmaking that went on within decades of Jesus’ death.