Paul and Jesus

2. The later accounts (Luke and John) put Jesus’ appearances in Jerusalem as immediate, on the same day as the tomb is discovered empty. Jesus appears as a flesh-and-blood human being, shows his wounds, and eats meals to demonstrate that he is not a ghost or spirit. The strong impression one gets is that the empty tomb is directly tied to Jesus appearing and one is dealing here with the idea of resurrection as the literal resuscitation of a corpse.

These dichotomies are quite striking: Where: Galilee or Jerusalem? When: immediately on the day the tomb was discovered or weeks thereafter? And what: visionary-like experiences or resuscitation of a physical corpse? The internal evidence is decidedly in favor of the Mark/Matthew tradition. To even imagine that the kinds of stories that Luke and John relate, set in Jerusalem, were circulating when Mark wrote his gospel is highly improbable. That Mark could publish the first gospel in Christian history and include no appearances of Jesus, with the focus on Galilee, not Jerusalem, pushes our evidence decidedly in favor of the Galilee option. It is also hard to imagine a text like the ending of the Gospel of Peter even existing unless it were related to a strong tradition of remembering the despair and sorrow of the disciples following Jesus’ death, as they returned to their vocations in Galilee, giving up hope. It is not an edifying story, but it is a realistic one, and it fits our earlier evidence.

Some have argued that these differences in our gospel accounts are the expected result of reports from a variety of witnesses but all testify to the same essential fact—Jesus was raised from the dead. Sometimes the analogy of an automobile accident is suggested. When eyewitnesses report what they saw, each reflects a particular perspective, and there are always differences in details, but the essential facts related to the accident are usually the same. Such an analogy fails in the case of the gospels. First, there are no eyewitness accounts at all. Second, the reports we have don’t even agree on where the sightings of Jesus took place—Galilee or Jerusalem? What we have is a series of theologically motivated traditions written decades after the event, removed from both place and time, battling out competing stories of what happened after Jesus died. They cannot be harmonized. Luke even has Jesus telling the eleven apostles that they are not to leave Jerusalem, which closes the door on even the possibility of subsequent appearances of Jesus in Galilee as alluded to in Mark and recorded in Matthew (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:3–4).

Paul is a decisive witness for this reason. He does claim to have seen something firsthand, and he equates his “sighting” experiences with those of Peter, James, and the rest of the apostles, based on his personal acquaintance with them. Given his view of resurrection of the dead, as being reclothed in a glorious heavenly body, he would have found the emphasis on flesh and bones meaningless. When Paul says Jesus was “buried” he is indicating that he knows the tradition of Jesus’ body being put in a tomb (1 Corinthians 15:4). His point is to emphasize that Jesus truly was dead and buried. What was then “raised on the third day,” just as in the Gabriel Revelation, was not the perishable mortal body but a new spiritual body, no longer “flesh and blood,” the old body having been shed like discarded clothing (1 Corinthians 15:42–50; 52–54).

Jesus’ own teaching about resurrection, preserved in the Q source, as we have seen, emphasizes an angelic-like transformation in which even the sexual distinctions between male and female are obsolete (Luke 20:34–36). This parallels precisely Paul’s view of resurrection.