Paul and Jesus

So why does this shift from Galilee to Jerusalem come about in Luke and John? And why their insistence on connecting the empty tomb with the literal appearances of Jesus as revived from the dead in the resuscitated corpse that had been buried? I think we can assume that the reasons were largely apologetic. These texts come late in the first century and even in the early second century. Sophisticated Greek critics of Christianity such as Lucian, Trypho, and Celsus were on the horizon.²⁰ Their common charge was that Christianity thrived only among the ignorant, simple-minded, and gullible classes of society, who were led astray by the foolish tales of deluded women and hallucinations passed off as “visions.”²¹ There were also similar, rival tales of other “divine men” circulating, such as Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean wonder worker, born about the same time as Jesus in Asia Minor, who traveled throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. According to his followers, Zeus fathered Apollonius, so he, like Jesus, was a “Son of God.” According to his biographies or “gospels,” he healed the sick, raised the dead, and ascended bodily into heaven.²² Various versions of Apollonius’s death were passed along, including one where he was arrested by persecutors, set himself free, and was taken up from the earth into heaven. According to another story he appeared mysteriously to a doubtful follower after his death and convinced him of the doctrine of immortality. A fascinating stone inscription containing the following epigram has turned up in Asia Minor not far from Tarsus, where Paul grew up:

This man, named after Apollo and shining forth Tyana,

Extinguished the fault of men.

The tomb in Tyana (received) his body,

But in truth heaven received him

So he might drive out the pains from men.²³

As with Jesus there were debates among his devotees as to whether his body remained in a tomb or whether he was assumed bodily into heaven. The early-third-century Roman emperor Caracalla built a shrine to Apollonius, and Caracalla’s successor, the emperor Alexander Severus, is alleged to have had a private shrine in which the images of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ, and Apollonius were given divine honors.²⁴

If Jesus’ followers came to believe in his resurrection only after a period of despair, and in Galilee, far removed from the empty tomb in Jerusalem, based on visionary experiences, they were surely open to the charge that the entire phenomenon was mass hallucination. That Matthew, who gives us our first and earliest account of such a group appearance, says it took place on a mountain but that some of the eleven disciples doubted, while others believed, was clearly quite problematic for Luke and for John, writing a generation later (Matthew 28:17).

That is also why Luke, alone of our four gospels records a scene in which Jesus ascends bodily from the earth, taken away in a cloud from the Mount of Olives, just east of Jerusalem, as the eleven apostles stand gazing into the sky (Acts 1:9–10). To leave him bodily on earth, eating and drinking, in his physical form, simply would not do, since one would presume that like others “raised from the dead” by Jesus, he would have eventually died again as he grew older. And John, although he has no ascension scene per se, records that Jesus said that he was “ascending to where he was before” (John 6:62).

These New Testament gospels and the book of Acts take us decades beyond Paul, into a time and place that he never lived to see. It is deeply ironic that Paul is in some ways the shadow behind all four of our gospels, yet to understand Paul we need to put the gospels aside, which means, at least in terms of sources, to learn to read the New Testament backward. If we can resist making assumptions and pick up Paul’s letters with fresh eyes, we will capture an amazing moment in time, for which he is our only firsthand source. We will learn how Paul transformed the original Christianity into a new religion that claimed to abrogate and supersede the “old” by moving everything from earth to heaven.

FOUR

LAST BUT NOT LEAST