Paul and Jesus

Of the four gospels, Mark, not Matthew, comes first, written sometime around A.D. 80 or later. Mark gives no account of Jesus’ birth at all, miraculous or otherwise, and most strikingly, in his original version, as we will see, there are no post-resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples! This fact alone provides us with an important key to unraveling the mystery surrounding the empty tomb. The author of Mark preserves for us a stage of history when the Jesus story is being told with an entirely different ending.

Matthew was written at least a decade or more later and the author uses Mark as his main source. He does not start from scratch and he obviously does not have his own independent account to offer. Matthew incorporates 90 percent of Mark but he edits Mark’s material rather freely, embellishing and expanding the story as fits his purposes. That is why most readers of the New Testament who begin with Matthew, and then come to Mark, have the strange sense that they have already read the story before. They actually have, but in Matthew’s edited version. The result is that Mark is almost always read as a cut-down version of the more complete story in Matthew.

Matthew’s embellishments are many but most particularly he finds Mark’s beginning and ending wholly unsatisfactory. How could one possibly write a gospel of Jesus Christ with no birth story of Jesus and no appearances of Jesus to the disciples after the resurrection?

What this means is that for several decades, when there were no other gospels but Mark in circulation, Christians were relating the Jesus story without the two elements that later came to be considered foundational for the Christian faith—Jesus’ virgin birth and his Easter morning appearances.

Matthew’s gospel represents a watershed moment in Christian history. He composes the first account of the miraculous virgin birth of Jesus, and he creates a spectacular scene of resurrection:

And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. (Matthew 28:2–4)

Mark has none of this. In his account there is no angel but a young man sitting inside Jesus’ tomb and no miraculous intervention from heaven. Matthew ends his story with a dramatic scene of the resurrected Jesus meeting the apostles on a mountain and giving the so-called Great Commission, to preach the gospel to all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:18–20). Luke was written several decades after Matthew, perhaps at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, and the author expands and embellishes the core Mark story even further than Matthew had done. Luke adds multiple appearances of Jesus to various individuals as well as to all the apostles, and like Matthew, he also provides his own version of a birth story.

Even with these later embellishments Luke and Matthew nonetheless provide us with an unexpected surprise, discovered by scholars over a hundred and fifty years ago. In addition to Mark, both writers had access to the Q source. This early collection of the sayings of Jesus, probably compiled around A.D. 50, was apparently not known to Mark. It can be extracted and reconstructed with some degree of certainty, but as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, we don’t have an independent copy of Q itself, only its reconstruction from Matthew and Luke. I mention it again here because one of its most important features is that in the Q source Jesus never speaks of his resurrection from the dead, whereas in Mark, who comes later, Jesus refers several times to being “raised on the third day.” This is one more example of how putting our sources in proper chronological order might enable us to reconstruct the ways in which faith in Jesus’ resurrection developed in the first few decades of the movement.

Most scholars place the gospel of John as the latest of the four gospels and certainly it is the most theologically embellished in terms of its view of Jesus as the divine, preexistent Son of God. So far as the empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus are concerned, John, like Luke, recounts multiple appearances of Jesus to his disciples in Jerusalem, as well as an appended final chapter in which Jesus also appears to several of them on the Sea of Galilee (John 21).