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The idiom of resurrection, as we have so far traced its path, has been used to portray the renewal of the earth as a living entity, and to describe the restoration of the corporate body of Israel when its national life was threatened with extinction. The idiom has not yet assumed any significance for the life and death of the individual person. Although this was destined to take place, it was a much later development, mainly to be traced in the last three to four centuries before Christ.

The reasons for this are clear. For ancient man the belief in some form of life after death was universal. The dead were believed to live in an underworld, though there was considerable variety in the way such life was conceived. The practice of burying the dead in the ground no doubt contributed to the vague mental picture of another world beneath the surface of the earth. There was such a marked difference to be observed between the live person, and the corpse which remained after his death, that it was natural to assume that the living soul or spirit of the man survived in another world, invisible and, for the most part, out of contact with those remaining in this world. This widespread ancient belief lingered on in Israel, by whom the underworld was known as Sheol. The fact that necromancy was strongly forbidden shows that it was still practiced, though no longer officially approved. The best-known example in the Old Testament tells how Saul conversed with the spirit of the dead Samuel through the mediumship of the witch of Endor.¹

But in strong contrast with most of her predecessors and contemporaries, Israel developed a much more materialistic view of human life. The individual man was regarded as a unity, incapable of subdivision. Man was thought to be made from the dust of the ground and to become a living creature only when God breathed into him the breath of life. Therefore man lives only so long as that breath remains in him. When he gasps his last breath and breathes out (expires), he dies; his personal being disintegrates, leaving no living ‘soul’ to depart from the body and live elsewhere.

The people of Israel were rather unique in taking the mortality of man so seriously. The psalmists frequently refer to the finiteness of human life, likening man to a flower that flourishes only for a short time. While the references to Sheol represent the lingering remnants of the once universal belief in life after death, it was never thought that Sheol held any comfort or hope for man beyond death. Eventually Sheol simply became another way of describing the nature of death, which, for the Israelite, was life reduced to its absolute minimum. So the psalmist cried out with questions which could be answered only in the negative.

In many ways the book of Ecclesiastes expressed the logical end of this traditional Israelite view, which laid increasing emphasis on the reality of the material universe and the mortal, finite nature of the human creature. In one of the latest books of the Old Testament to be written, this author exhorted his readers to remember their Creator in the days of their youth ‘before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, before the pitcher is shattered at the spring and the wheel broken at the well, before the dust returns to the earth as it began and the spirit returns to God who gave it’.³

It cannot be said, however, that during the classical period of ancient Israel the Israelite found his finiteness a burden. He did not feel prompted to lament the emptiness of all human endeavor in the way the author of Ecclesiastes did. He felt it was a tragedy if a man was cut off before his time, or if he died childless. But where an Israelite survived to a ripe old age, and was surrounded with his offspring, he was able to contemplate his imminent death not only without complaint, but with genuine thankfulness to God for such a full and blessed life.

This grateful and optimistic acceptance of his mortal nature was aided by the fact that the Israelite was more conscious than we of belonging to a corporate body of people, whether a family, a tribe, or a nation. The corporate body was not usually faced with the crisis of death, for by natural regeneration it lived on from generation to generation. Any yearning the Israelite might have had for immortality was at least partly met by ensuring that there were descendants ‘to keep his name alive’. This concern is reflected in the strange custom of Levirate marriage in which a man was expected to perform a duty to a brother who had died childless by acting on his behalf in fathering a child through his widow. ‘Her husband’s brother shall have intercourse with her; he shall take her in marriage and do his duty by her as her husband’s brother. The first son she bears shall perpetuate the dead brother’s name so that it may not be blotted out from Israel.’⁴

Up until the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. the Israelites were not so troubled by what we may call the unfinished character of so much human striving. It was still possible to affirm quite confidently that righteousness would receive its due reward and wickedness would eventually be punished. For if a man did not receive his due reward or punishment within the compass of his own life time, then his descendants would certainly be blessed or cursed accordingly, even if it took to the third or fourth generation before the account was balanced. The writer of Psalm 37 expressed the commonly held view that all men receive their just deserts in this life:

As late as the seventh century BC. a school of writers, commonly known today as the Deuteronomists, compiled their history of Israel in such a way as to demonstrate that the meaning of history is to be discerned as a system of just rewards for good and bad behavior. This doctrine is set forth at some length in the book of Deuteronomy, particularly in chapters 8, 11, 28 and 30 and is summarized in the following words: ‘If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God . . . then you will live and increase . . . But if your heart turns away and you do not listen … you will perish: you will not live long in the land . . . I offer you the choice of life and death . . . Choose life and then you and your descendants will live.’⁵

But from the exile onwards the sense of corporate existence became rather less intense and the awareness of personal individuality became more pronounced.⁶ Ezekiel protested against the injustice of expecting one man to suffer because of the sins of another and proclaimed that God’s justice would be meted out to men according to their individual deserts. ‘It is the soul that sins, and no other, that shall die; a son shall not share a father’s guilt, nor a father his son’s. The righteous man shall reap the fruit of his own righteousness, and the wicked man the fruit of his own wickedness.’⁷

This new emphasis on the personal fortunes of the individual could not help but raise serious doubts about the adequacy of the traditional belief that God prospers the righteous and punishes the wicked. Men observed too many examples in which it did not work out like that in human experience. The doubts which challenged the traditional orthodoxy reached their classical expression in the book of Job. The three so-called ‘comforters’, arguing on the basis of the time-honored doctrine that men got what they deserved, were sure that all of Job’s troubles could be adequately explained in terms of sins he must have committed. In the face of their accusations, Job continued to protest his innocence.

It is within this epic poem that we catch glimpses of how the Israelite mind was being prompted to find a solution to this growing problem. At points where Job gives up hope of ever seeing justice in this life he casts a glance beyond death. He knows from the beginning that it is rather a forlorn hope, for man is a mortal creature who comes to an end at death.

But hopeless and wistful though he knows his thought must be, he nevertheless must give expression to it.

Job continues to look for vindication. Unfortunately the other main passage where his hope is expressed is so obscure in the Hebrew that we cannot state with confidence what the author intended. The words certainly cannot support the traditional interpretation long made familiar by Handel’s Messiah, but they are still worth pondering as an indication of the direction in which Israel’s thinkers were moving.

The book of Job belongs to Israel’s Wisdom literature, and for our present purpose we may couple with these extracts some further hints of an other-worldly hope to be found scattered through the Psalms.¹⁰ But the hope that Job was feeling after came to more explicit expression in another stream of Israelite thought, that of the prophets. There were some marked differences between the post-exilic prophets and their pre-exilic predecessors. The living voice of prophecy was soon to be stilled; it was later partly replaced by the written word of apocalypses. To understand the words now to be quoted from both prophet and apocalyptic writer, we must carefully note the growing interest in eschatology.

From the fall of Jerusalem onwards the Jewish remnant of Israel were destined never to enjoy again the independence and the stability known by their ancestors. They lived in a world of changing Empires, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman. They existed in scattered communities. From time to time they suffered persecution, and even martyrdom. They longed for the end of injustice, oppression and instability. Their faith led them to expect their God, the Lord of history, to bring to an end the present wicked age of the world and to replace it with a new age. Even the pre-exilic prophets had hoped for a warless age when men would beat ‘spears into pruning-knives’.

But in the post-exilic period the hopes for the end of the age became more intense, and the pictures with which they described the end and the new beginning became grander in scale and more mythological in character. It is this concern with the end-time, the end of the age, that we call eschatology. It was destined to be a prominent element in Jewish, and later in Christian, thought until well into the second century AD. Apocalyptic writing, so called because it claimed to reveal knowledge of the end to come, painted word-pictures of the international and cosmic conflict to be followed by the universal judgment in which all men received their just deserts.

Many of the eschatological motifs which flourished in later apocalypses are to be found in embryonic form in Isaiah 24-27 a passage sometimes referred to as ‘the Little Apocalypse’. It is generally regarded as being post-exilic in origin, and may stem from the late fourth century when Alexander the Great was causing such upheavals on the international scene. Here we find the earliest appearance in the Bible of the resurrection idiom in an eschatological form. The writer complains that his people have been mastered by Lords other than their God, and though they have suffered like a woman in labor they have not been able to bring forth new life. Suddenly he bursts forth:

Although some scholars have interpreted these words metaphorically, just like Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones, it is much more probable that we have here a clear expression of resurrection as applied to individual Israelites who have lived and died. It is more likely to be a wish or a prayer than a confident prediction of the future. Nevertheless, it is reasonably unambiguous and this in spite of the fact that this hope is preceded a few verses earlier by a reverse statement in which the traditional view of mortal man is applied to Israel s enemies.

What prompted this unexpected and almost irrational outburst of hope? It can be argued that there were already sufficient factors within Israel’s own thinking for such a form of hope to arise. Because of her understanding of the nature of man and his mortality, she saw no hope in any of the traditional doctrines of life after death. The only life she recognized as real was that lived out by the whole man in the unity of what we call body and soul. Any hope for the individual man, subsequent to the death and dissolution of the body, must entail the restoration of the former body. When one couples with this the strong faith that the God of Israel would never willingly abandon his people, the developing interest in the destiny of the individual, and the shattering experience of oppression, persecution and martyrdom, we have ample reasons for the spontaneous development of this confident hope in a future resurrection from death. R. Martin-Achard is thus able to say, ‘Faith in the resurrection is thus definitely born of Yahweh’s revelation to Israel.’¹³

Nevertheless, there were other factors at work and most scholars agree that they played some role in shaping the particular form that the resurrection faith of Israel assumed, even though there is difference of opinion as to the extent to which they may have initiated it. In Isaiah 26:19, for example, many hear mythological overtones in the words, ‘for thy dew is a dew of sparkling light’. In the Ugaritic tests dew was always associated with the restoration of vitality, and consequently played a part in the Baal myth, for the very good reason that in Palestine the night dew assists in keeping vegetation alive during the almost rainless four months of summer.¹⁴ Some also regard the reference to Leviathan, ‘that twisting sea-serpent’ and ‘monster of the deep’, in Isaiah 27:1, as an echo of a Phoenician tradition concerning a demonic monster who guarded the gate of the underworld. This latter verse would then be saying in effect that the Lord would conquer the powers of the underworld at the end of time and thus allow his own faithful ones to rise from the dead and return to the land of the living.

We must always remember that the extant writings from the ancient world represent only a small portion of what was being thought and said and even written. Many of the links in the chain of development followed by the resurrection symbol are lost to us for ever. It does appear, however, that in this passage we can discern a thin line, however tenuous, which links the Canaanite Baal myth of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ with the rise of resurrection as an eschatological symbol, soon destined to develop rapidly in Jewish thought. So Martin-Achard concludes: ‘the people of Yahweh found the concept of resurrection in Canaan; but for a long time this formed part of a realm over against which Yahweh stood in His sovereign will, so that, with regard to resurrection, the religion of the Canaanites played a negative part, by obliging the Israelites to make their stand against it; it had, nevertheless, a sort of indirect action, in making possible a sort of purification of this belief, which, in another age and within another context, received a new content.’¹⁵ The eschatological form of the resurrection idiom which we see beginning to take shape in the little Apocalypse of Isaiah had these two important new elements, first that it was primarily concerned neither with cosmic renewal nor with the restoration of national identity, but with the return to life of individual Israelites long dead, and second that this hope was to be consummated at the end-time.

The second, and only other, explicit mention of the resurrection of the dead to be found in the Old Testament is in the book of Daniel. This is nowadays regarded as the latest writing to find a place in the Hebrew Bible, being, in its final form at least, a product of the second century BC. It is to be associated with the Maccabean revolt, which proved to be a very severe testing for those Jews who wanted to remain faithful to the Jewish heritage and way of life. They felt themselves called to a fight to the death against the forces of the Seleucid Emperor, Antiochus Epiphanes, who was bent on carrying through a program of hellenizing his empire and blotting out every vestige of Judaism. Such a crisis naturally gave great impetus to all eschatological ideas, which regarded the present world order as being so wicked and chaotic as to be on the verge of complete collapse, and which looked forward in hope to a divine judgment in which all injustices were righted, and to the establishment of a new order in which righteousness would prosper. The author of Daniel (in the form of a vision revealed to the fictional prophet, Daniel) sketched the fortunes of the Jewish people from the beginning of the Persian period down to the death of their arch-enemy Antiochus, which he expected shortly to take place, and then he wrote:

The author first of all encouraged his readers with the conviction that in the coming catastrophe the faithful ones would not perish, but would be delivered. Then he turned to the queries they would have in their minds about those who had already died in the conflict and he assured them that many of those who had fallen into the sleep of death would be re-awakened to life. At this point he went further than the passage in Isaiah 26:19, for he held out the hope that not only the faithful martyrs would be raised to everlasting blessedness, but the unfaithful apostates would be raised to receive their eternal punishment. In the crisis of the Maccabean period it had become unthinkable that martyrs and traitors should share eventually the same lifeless fate in the underworld of Sheol. The punishment of the wicked was becoming just as urgent an issue as suitable recognition for the faithful.

Among those destined to be rewarded with everlasting life, there was to be recognized a special class, worthy of the highest honors. They are described as ‘the wise leaders’ and ‘those who have guided the people in the true path’. These had evidently taken the lead in resistance to the evil pressures, and perhaps were the martyrs, for they are probably to be linked with those described a little earlier. ‘Wise leaders of the nation will give guidance to the common people; yet for a while they will fall victims to fire and sword, to captivity and pillage.’¹⁷

Of course, the author implied that the underworld of Sheol continued to remain the permanent resting-place for all others (whether good or bad, and presumably all Gentiles) who were not to be raised for participation in the great judgment. This expression of hope in a resurrection for those chosen, comprising ‘only the best and the worst’¹⁸ of the Jews, did not arise out of any reasoned argument, but on the contrary stemmed from an almost irrational and certainly emotion-filled plea for a final vindication. The current eschatological trend provided the setting in which this desire for vindication could find an answer.

Although once again it may be argued that the Jewish scene contained all the necessary elements for the rise of this eschatological hope, it can nevertheless be shown that Zoroastrian thought from Persia was a contributing factor, even if it did not actually originate it. For two hundred years the Jews lived within a Persian empire, and even after Alexander the Great destroyed the empire, the influence of Persian thought continued. There is no strong evidence to show that the Jews made any wholesale borrowing of ideas from Persian religion, but it is almost certain that such ideas acted as a stimulus to Jewish thought and helped to shape some of the fresh expressions that it took.

R. C. Zachner probably goes too far when he claims that, ‘from the moment the Jews first made contact with the Iranians they took over the typical Zoroastrian doctrine of an individual afterlife in which rewards are to be enjoyed and punishments endured.^’19 In so far as it is possible to learn what contemporary Zoroastrianism actually taught, there would appear to be considerable differences between the developing Jewish doctrine of resurrection and the Zoroastrian understanding of the after-life, where resurrection may be regarded as being implied, but where it did not actually become explicit or prominent.²⁰

Nevertheless, it was subsequent to the period of Persian influence that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead began to develop in Israel, at first for the just and later also for the wicked. The Jews actually borrowed the Persian word ‘paradise’ in order to describe the dwelling-place of the blessed. The Jewish interest in angels, developing into a hierarchy of named angels, owed much to Persian influence, as did also, probably, their increasing concern with an eschatological judgment on a cosmic scale.

It is perhaps not accidental that the clearest expression in the Old Testament of a future resurrection of the dead is found in the book purporting to be the visions of a certain Daniel, reputed to be an official in the court of ‘Darius the Mede’. Further, the section of the Jews who took the lead in promoting the belief in the future resurrection of the dead were called the Pharisees, and one of the theories about the origin of this name traces it to the Aramaic form of ‘Persians’, and suggests that it was a nickname applied by the Sadducees to those Jews who showed a willingness to introduce Persian doctrines into Judaism.

The belief in a general resurrection at the end-time was certainly a novel development in Judaism. Even by the first century AD. it had by no means reached universal acceptance. It was held most strongly by the Pharisees, who, in many respects, were the ardent progressives in the Jewish religion of their day. It was completely unacceptable to the Sadducees, the priestly aristocratic party, who were the conservative traditionalists of Judaism. Josephus tells us that the Sadducees held that ‘souls die with the bodies’,²¹ and they denied all other-worldly punishments and rewards.²² They also rejected the developing doctrine of angels and the increasing prominence given to a supernatural world. In all this they were remaining faithful to the general position of classical Israel.

The division between Pharisee and Sadducee is clearly reflected in the New Testament, particularly in the question on the resurrection put to Jesus by the Sadducees,²³ and also when Paul used the fact to advantage by winning the sympathy of the Pharisees and thus causing the Council to be divided and to end in an uproar.²⁴ This division serves vividly to illustrate the strong differences of opinion which existed in the Jewish setting of the time of Jesus. The diversity of belief among the Jews upon the subjects of the ultimate destiny of man in general, and of the resurrection in particular, was such that we must devote the next chapter to it. In this chapter we have tried to show how the resurrection idiom found a new mode of expression, an eschatological one, by which some Jewish believers proclaimed their hope for the final vindication of the faithful at the end-time.

Notes:

I. 1 Sam. 28:3-25.

2. Ps. 88:10-12. Perhaps the fullest picture of Sheol found in the Old Testament is in Job 31:3-19.

3. Eccles. 12:6-7. There is little justification for interpreting ‘spirit’ in this context as a personal, immortal soul. It simply represents the impersonal breath received from God as a necessary constituent of the living person.

4. Deut. 25:5-6.

5. Deut. 3016-20.

6. At the beginning of this century it was common to suggest that individualism appeared in Israel’s thought only from Jeremiah onwards. But the reaction which followed this overemphasis must not be allowed to blind us to the relative individualism of the post-exilic period, probably aided by the contacts with the Babylonian, Persian and Greek cultures.

7. Ezek. 18:20.

8. Job 14:7, 10, 12, 13-15.

9. Job 19:23-7.

10. Pss. 16:9-11, 49:15, 73:23-8.

11. Isaiah 26:19.

12. ibid., 2614.

13. From Death to Life, p. 222.

14. A similar allusion to Ugaritic mythology probably lies behind ‘I will be as dew to Israel’, Hosea 14:5.

15. op. cit., p. 204.

16. Dan. 12:1-3.

17. Dan. 11:33.

18. C. F. Evans, op. cit., p. 16.

19. The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, p. 58.

20. Yasna lx:11-12 reads, ‘In order that our minds may be delighted and our souls the best, let our bodies be glorified as well, and let them, O Muzda, go likewise openly (to Heaven) as the best world of the saints devoted to Ahura, . . . and may we see thee and may we approaching come round about thee, and attain to entire companionship with thee.’ Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXXI, p. 312.

21. The Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, Chap. 1:4.

22. Wars of the Jews, Book II, Chap. viii:14.

23. Matt. 22:23-33.

24. Acts 23:6-10.

When we turn from the myths of the Ancient Near East to the literature of Israel preserved in the Old Testament, we find ourselves moving in quite a different world of thought. The Old Testament was written over the long period of about a thousand years, contemporaneous with the time when the myths we have been discussing were still playing a convincing role. Yet the Old Testament is almost completely free of myths of that kind. They were replaced by a remarkable concern with history and this strongly characterizes two-thirds of the Hebrew Bible. The change from myth to history is further illustrated by the way in which the main annual festivals of Israel were gradually transformed. Originally these celebrated the pastoral and harvest seasons; eventually they commemorated those historical events which were of permanent significance for Israel.¹

Israel not only abandoned many aspects of the mythological view of ancient man, but her prophets fought a continual battle against their re-emergence. There is ample evidence in the Old Testament of the prophetic resistance to the resurgence of the Baal cult, which, with its accompanying religious prostitution, provided the ritual for celebrating and promoting the new vitality and growth at the appropriate time of the year.

The chief aim of the prophetic ministry of Elijah was to oppose the Tyrian Baalism then being rekindled by the queen Jezebel. In the following century Hosea was still trying to convince Israel that it was not Baal but their own God YHWH ‘who gave her corn, new wine, and oil . . . who lavished upon her silver and gold which they spent on the Baal’.² Many scholars have noted the disguised reference to Adonis made by Isaiah, and which the New English Bible has rendered,

In the time of Jeremiah the Jewish women were rebuked for ‘kneading dough to make crescent-cakes in honour of the queen of heaven’, the latter being the Babylonian goddess Ishtar.⁴ A little later Ezekiel found them ‘sitting and wailing for Tammuz’.⁵

In view of the fact that Israel pioneered a new road in the ancient world, abandoning the nature myths, and concerning herself with the events of her own history, it is not surprising that the myth of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ found no place at all in the thinking of her prophets. Israel’s God, YHWH, was the Lord of human history, the creator of the world, the only true God; and while the annual processes of generation, growth, harvest and decay therefore all emanated from Him, they did not constitute the paramount activity for which He was honoured.

For a long time the idiom of resurrection was not required in Israel, and when at last it did arise, very late in her history, it was used for a different purpose in order to meet different needs. Because Israel’s faith looked to the dynamic, history-controlling and eternal YHWH, death presented no great problem to her. Israel’s future seemed assured because of the YHWH who had brought them out of slavery in Egypt. From the time of Israel’s entry into the land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ down to the period of the divided kingdoms, Israel had prospered, and looked forward to further prosperity. She drew hope for the future from her former miraculous deliverance from Egypt.

At this point we must take into account the fact that Israelite thought was much more corporate in its concerns than ours is today. For the Israelite the destiny of the individual was completely overshadowed by the destiny of the corporate body of Israel. Consequently the death of the individual did not raise the same sense of tragic concern and questioning that it may do for us. The death of the individual was of small significance compared with the life of the people. Israel, as a people, moved on from generation to generation, perpetuating itself as it went along. So long as Israel lived a reasonably secure existence, unthreatened by external disasters, the hope for the future was not a question which loomed very large. We may notice even in our own setting that when there is little on the visible horizon threatening us either as individuals or as a community, we live largely for what we are doing at the moment. It is when our future is threatened, or when our present existence is intolerable, that our attention is turned to the unknown future and we are led to face it either in hope or despair.

So it was with Israel. It was not until her existence as a people was being seriously threatened by the rapidly expanding empire of Assyria that she found a use for the idiom of resurrection. We find the first example in the book of the prophet Hosea. The eighth and seventh century prophets of Israel, some of whose words have been preserved in the books of the Bible which bear their names, were essentially prophets of crisis. They clustered round the two critical periods of national disaster, when first the northern kingdoms of Israel was swallowed up by Assyria in 721 BC. and later the southern kingdom of Judah succumbed to Neo-Babylonia in 587 BC.

Hosea was the only northerner to arise among these two groups of prophets, and it is in the book which has preserved his prophetic oracles that we find the following words:

These words are commonly regarded today as a kind of penitential psalm which was used liturgically in the sanctuary at the time of a national emergency. If this be so, they are here being quoted as an example of the easy optimism which stems from the nature religions and which now comes under divine judgment. They are immediately followed by a divine oracle uttered by Hosea in which Israel is rebuked by God for the superficial character of her penitence and for her belated profession of cupboard-love loyalty which could be displayed when it suited Israel, but which could also vanish quickly ‘like the morning mist’.

Our immediate interest with these words is to examine them to see if they are in any way connected with the idiom of resurrection in the way that is sometimes claimed of them. Robert Martin-Achard has gathered together a number of points about this passage.⁷ These suggest that it forms an important step in the path we are pursuing by showing how the idiom of resurrection came to take a new form in Israel after it had been abandoned in its mythological form.

First we note the two phrases ‘after two days’ and ‘on the third day’. These are synonyms and are sometimes used in the Old Testament simply to describe a comparatively short interval of time. They may be regarded as meaning ‘without delay’ and they are used in this way of Abraham’s journey for the intended sacrifice of Isaac,⁸ and of Hezekiah’s recovery from illness.⁹ Even in these two instances there may be overtones that have been lost to us because we were not familiar with the long associations these terms had possessed.

For we must not ignore the fact that these very expressions had played an important role in the myths of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ which were still very much alive in the wider cultural environment of Israel. A Sumerian reference to the descent of Inanna into the underworld states that the goddess remained there for three days and three nights. It is recorded by Plutarch that the death of Osiris was celebrated on the 17th of the month and his ‘discovery’ or ‘resurrection’ was on the 19th day (and this by ancient reckoning was the ‘third day’) Lucian records that ‘at Byblos the faithful expect the resurrection of Adonis "on another day" ⁷. The counterpart of the Adonis cult in Rome was that of Attis, whose untimely death was celebrated every spring in a three-day festival, in which, on the third day, he was found; then rejoicing replaced the two-day exhibition of grief and mourning.

Several reasons have been put forward for the prevalence of this three-day period in the various forms of this resurrection myth. Some think it may point to the vestige of a moon cult, for the moon remains invisible for three days in the monthly cycle. Others point to the widespread belief that the soul was thought to remain near the corpse for three days before departing to the underworld at the expiry of that time. Consequently, if the soul was to re-animate the body it had to happen within that time. The resurrections (or more correctly resuscitations) which, according to ancient tradition had been performed by Elijah and Elisha, depended partly upon this belief.¹⁰ The same belief supplies us with the reason why the story of the raising of Lazarus lays such emphasis on the fact that he "had already been four days in the tomb". It is tantamount to saying that he was beyond all hope of resuscitation. The number three may have been arrived at because experience showed that it was usually after the third day that the signs of decomposition of the body became obvious. Consequently Martha complained, ‘Sir, by now there will be a stench; he has been there four days.’¹¹

For these, or possibly other, reasons there had been a long association of a three-day period with the ancient resurrection myths. Do the phrases ‘after two days’ and ‘on the third day’ have any such association in this passage from Hosea, where, to describe the hoped for restoration of Israel, they are used in conjunction with the three verbs, ‘restore to life’, ‘raise to life’, and ‘live’ which form the basic vocabulary of resurrection?

An affirmative answer to this question receives some confirmation from the fact that within the immediate context we find some other words and phrases which point to the influence of the Baal cult on the language of Hosea and his contemporaries. The lion, to which YHWH is compared,¹² was often used in Baalism as the symbol of death. ‘It will come to us like a shower, like spring rains that water the earth’ is an affirmation which could equally well have been made about Baal, for he was the god of rain, and when he ascended from the underworld in the spring, rain accompanied his return. James L. Mays comments on these verses, ‘Here, and in the last two metaphors, Israel’s God is brought within the frame of reference of the deities of Canaan whose activity was a function of weather and season. Rain is the peculiar provenance of Baal in Canaanite theology."¹³

Hidden allusions are never easy to be sure of and particularly is this the case with an ancient text, but one can at least see the reasons why Martin-Achard comes to the conclusion that these verses from the book of Hosea not only apply the idiom of resurrection to Israel’s hope for the future, but also show where it came from. ‘The Israelites took the conception from the Canaanites who, in deifying the forces of nature, primarily explain the appearance and disappearance of the vegetation as the death and resurrection of the gods; thus originally, the resurrection has nothing to do with Yahweh-worship; it comes from the agricultural cults.’¹⁴

Once we remember the strong influence of the Baal cults in Israel right down to the time of Hosea, it is easier to recognize the genuineness of these allusions. But it is just as important to recognize the way in which Israel dealt with and transformed the use of the idiom resurrection, which, on the above thesis, it eventually allowed to be borrowed from the pre-Israelite myth of the ‘dying-and-rising god’. Prophetic voices like that of Hosea protested strongly against the trend which could have allowed the Israelite faith in YHWH to have been swallowed up in the Baal nature cult. ‘Hosea has to give his contemporaries a renewed vision of the true face of their God. Yahweh is not some sort of Baal, a blind and brutal natural force . . . His destiny, like that of His people, is not identical with the cycle of the seasons, the regular succession of the day and the night, the growth and decay of the vegetation; Yahweh is the Lord of history, whose word alone creates and preserves Israel in life.’ ¹⁵

If this passage from Hosea has been correctly interpreted as a short penitential psalm, it probably reflects the popular thought of Israel rather than that of the prophet, who quotes it only to rebuke its spirit of over-confidence. Even so, the passage reveals some significant differences from the pure Baal cult. The Israelite hope in YHWH may be expressed in the language drawn from the cult which celebrated Baal’s resurrection, but there is no suggestion that YHWH himself undergoes a death and renewal process. The idiom of resurrection, if it is truly present here, is applied to Israel herself, and not to Israel’s God. It is no longer being expressed in a mythological manner, even though it has drawn upon the language common to mythology; rather the idiom of resurrection has here assumed a metaphorical form, by which Israel prays for the revitalizing of her life as a people. One is reminded of the way in which John Milton so frequently used the terms of classical mythology in his poetry in order to express his Christian faith.

This process may be described as a demythologizing of the idiom of resurrection. The chief points of change are, first, that the scene has been transferred from the supernatural world of the gods to the earthly sphere of human history; secondly, that It is not a god who experiences the renewal of life (for the God of Israel is not himself subject to death and resurrection, but on the contrary initiates and controls these events) but the people of Israel, who look in hope for restoration when their existence is threatened; and thirdly, that this hope is expressed as a metaphor describing the historical future, rather than as a myth of cosmic renewal. Finally we may note that this first hint of the resurrection idiom to rise to the surface in an Israelite form comes just a few years prior to the virtual extinction of this northern section of the people of Israel.

The above three points come to fuller expression in the next Important stepping stone provided for us by the Old Testament. This is the well-known vision of what took place in the valley of dry bones as described in Ezekiel 37. This is the earliest material in the Old Testament in which there is an unmistakable description of a resurrection from death to life, and that in spite of the fact that the basic words ‘rise’ and ‘dead’ never occur. Here, however, there is no longer visible any link at all with the myth of the ‘dying-and-rising god’. In later times both Jews and Christians interpreted this vision as a pre-view of the resurrection of the dead at the last day. Some of the early Christian Fathers saw it as a prophecy of individual resurrection.

Modern study of the passage has made it clear that it was not personal resurrection beyond death that concerned Ezekiel here. He himself supplies the key to the correct interpretation when he reports that his fellow-Israelites, languishing in exile in Babylon, had lost the will to live, complaining, ‘Our bones are dry, our thread of life is snapped, our web is severed from the loom.’¹⁶ The prophet was inspired to engender new hope in them by relating a vision in which he found himself set down in a valley of dry human bones, the grim memorial of some disastrous battle long before. It may have been a battle in which Nebuchadrezzar had annihilated the fleeing Israelite army at the fall of Jerusalem. In his vision Ezekiel found himself performing his prophetic mission by being the voice at whose command the bones came together, then to be refleshed, and finally to be revived with the living spirit or breath which comes from God. So they stood on their feet again as a mighty living army.

The whole vision is a parable or metaphorical description of the way in which Ezekiel was being used to bring fresh hope to the dispirited Israelite exiles in Babylon by helping them to look forward in hope to the time when, as a people, they would return to their own land and once again flourish as in the former days. The parabolic nature of this vision is confirmed by the fact that it is followed by a second picture (which some think may have been added later) in which it is not a battlefield but a graveyard from which Israel will rise to new life. The prophet was required to declare, ‘These are the words of the Lord God: O my people I will open your graves and bring you up from them, and restore you to the land of Israel. . . . Then I will put my spirit into you and you shall live, and I will settle you on your own soil.’¹⁷ It is clear that these two descriptions of resurrection are intended as vivid expressions of the promise that the exile would end and Israel would be restored in the fullness of life to the land of their fathers.

Many scholars connect this vision of Ezekiel with the Hosea passage studied above. Both have to do with the revival of national life and both use the idiom of resurrection to describe it. In each case it is the resurrection of the whole people, the national community of Israel, that is envisaged, and not that of individuals. For this reason the resurrection idiom is to be regarded as a metaphorical description of a coming event. Here, even more than in Hosea, the mythological interest in resurrection is absent, for the scene being described by Ezekiel has nothing to do with an unseen supernatural world, but refers to a future event in the sphere of human history to which Ezekiel points his people forward in hope and confidence.

The Babylonian exile dealt such a blow to the vitality of the people of Judah, already a remnant community surviving from the larger Israel of David’s time, that it was natural to speak of the experience in terms of the death of the nation. Jeremiah likened the exile to the swallowing of Israel by the emperor Nebuchadrezzar, or by Bel the god of Babylon. So he imagined Israel uttering the following lament:

In response to this lament came a prophetic oracle in which the God of Israel

It is very likely that it was this metaphor from the book of Jeremiah which inspired the writer of the book of Jonah. Many scholars regard the figure of Jonah in this book as a symbolic representation of the people of Israel, and then the period of three days and three nights during which Jonah remained in the belly of the great fish represents the exile in which Israel was swallowed by Bel. The psalm which has been placed in the mouth of Jonah was not originally composed for the present context for it is a thanksgiving for deliverance from death. It may have been written to celebrate the divine act by which Israel believed herself delivered from exile in Babylon, which, so far as Israel was concerned, was no better than Sheol, the underworld of the dead.

Seeing that the above cry was said to be uttered ‘out of the belly of Sheol’, and the response of God was to bring ‘up alive from the pit’, it is fairly certain that we have here an expression of the idiom of resurrection. But, as with the two earlier examples, the idiom is intended to be taken metaphorically and to describe how Israel was raised to new life by God when she was delivered from exile. The writer of the book of Jonah is indebted to Jeremiah, and perhaps also to Ezekiel.

It is particularly interesting to note the specific mention of the period of three days and three nights which Jonah spent in the belly of the fish. It can hardly be accidental that this phrase coincides with the period of time associated with resurrection in the myths of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ and again in the Hosea passage. We have continually to remember that the spring festivals celebrating the return of the vegetation god on the third day were still being celebrated in the contemporary non-Jewish cultures of the Ancient Near East. But though such phrases as this help to mark out the path being taken by the resurrection idiom in its journey from a mythological cosmic setting into the Jewish national hope, we must also note carefully that now for the third time the resurrection idiom is being applied metaphorically, and to a national community rather than to either a god or a human individual.

The last example we shall take is from the book of Esther. This book was probably written towards the end of the Persian period, though some date it as late as the second century BC. The story itself is nowadays usually regarded as fictitious, and one of its purposes was to explain the origin of the feast of Purim. This feast and the story of Esther to which it is now attached have to do with an attempt to annihilate the Jews by mass extermination. For this reason the book became very popular among the Jews from the second century BC. onwards since it brought the much needed encouragement in their frequent periods of persecution by setting forth a story of ultimate victory.

Although the resurrection idiom is not explicitly present in this example as in the others quoted above, there are nevertheless to be found in the story some striking factors which suggest that something very close to it lies beneath the surface. In the first place the author seems to have been influenced by the motifs of Babylonian mythology, even though, in characteristic Israelite style, he has transformed them into an historical setting. The name of the hero, Mordecai, appears to be derived from Marduk, the name of the chief god of Babylon. Esther, the name of the heroine, is almost identical with Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love and queen of heaven referred to in the last chapter. An alternative name is mentioned for Esther, Hadassah, which is the Babylonian word for ‘bride’, a title used of Ishtar. Some also see a connection between the name of the villain, Haman, and the Elamite god Humman.

Then there are some striking parallels between the actions of Esther and those of Ishtar (or her prototype Inanna). As Ishtar risked her life to descend into the underworld to appear before its monarch, so Esther took her life into her hands to appear before the king in what seemed the impossible task of saving her people from certain death. As Ishtar had arranged for a certain plan to operate if she had not returned in three days, so Esther arranged that the Jews should ‘take neither food nor drink for three days, night or day’,²¹ and on the third day she put on her royal robes to approach the king, who had already issued letters ‘with orders to destroy, slay, and exterminate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day’.²¹

For these and other reasons a number of scholars have discerned links between the book of Esther and Babylonian mythology. At the same time it must be said that these links are not certain and if the resurrection symbol is present there, it is only by implication. It has been included here, however, because its overall theme is undoubtedly the threatened extinction or death of Jewry, and the way in which, at the eleventh hour, the tables are turned on their enemies and Jewry receives a new lease of life. In this sense it stands in genuine succession to the expressions of national resurrection expressed in Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Jonah.

In the intervening centuries of the Christian era, the Jewish people have pursued a course which is quite unique in human history. In this long period they have not only retained their identity as a people, scattered though they have been, but they have done this in spite of the many persecutions to which they have been subjected. Their history as a people, from the time of the ancient Babylonian exile onwards, has been strongly marked by the theme of death and resurrection. The threat of death and subsequent renewal or resurrection, such as is portrayed in the story of Esther, has been lived through again and again.

In no period has this been more vividly and tragically true than in our own century. No persecution has been attempted on such a vast and systematic scale as the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. The Memorial to the Six Million, now erected in Jerusalem, silently marks this most recent attempt to achieve the death of a people, a people with a history more than three thousand years old. This dreadful threat to their national community must have contributed considerable drive to the present establishment of the modern state of Israel. If in our time we have seen a great people brought near to the point of extinction, we are also witnessing in Israel what can genuinely be called a resurrection of an ancient people. The resurrection of the formerly dead language of Hebrew to be the living language of Israel is but one of several aspects of this modern miracle which could be cited to illustrate our theme. It may be said that in many ways the rise of the new state of Israel is the modern counterpart of that aspect of resurrection which we have been looking at in this chapter, the use of the idiom of resurrection to express in metaphorical form the hope of an historical renewal after the national life has been near to the point of extinction.

Notes:

1. This has been discussed in Chapter 9 of God in the New World.

2. Hosea: 2:8.

3. Isaiah 17:10.

4. Jeremiah 7:18, and also 44:17, 18, 19, 25.

5. See Chapter 5, note 5.

6. Hosea 6:1-3.

7. From Death to Life, pp. 81-6.

8. Genesis 22:4.

9. 2 Kings 20:5.

10. I Kings 17:17-24 and II Kings 4:31-7, 13:21.

11. John 11:39.

12. Hosea 5:14.

13. Hosea, a commentary, p. 96.

14. Op. Cit., p. 86.

15. R. Martin-Achard, op. cit., pp. 85-6.

16. Ezek. 37:11.

17. Ezek. 37:12, 14.

18. Jeremiah 51:34.

19. Jeremiah 51:44-5.

20. Jonah 2:2-6.

21. Esther 3:13.

Our story takes us as far back in history as our knowledge of human thought goes. We shall confine our attention to the Ancient Near East, for this supplied the cultural roots for all Western civilization. There the two river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia cradled the civilizations which began to flourish from the fourth millennium before Christ. W. F. Albright writes: ‘Archaeological research has thus established beyond doubt that there is no focus of civilization in the earth that can begin to complete in antiquity and activity with the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean and the region immediately to the east of it -- Breasted’s Fertile Crescent. Other civilizations of the Old World were all derived from this cultural center or were strongly influenced by it; only the New World was entirely independent.’¹

The culture and beliefs of men in the Ancient Near East were by no means the same through all the areas of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Greece, etc., but they did share certain common problems and themes. This is due to the fact that when men slowly abandoned the nomad existence of the hunter and pastoralist for the settled existence of the agriculturist, they found themselves in a context in which their existence depended upon certain common factors and cycles of time. They recognized their dependence upon the sun, not only for bodily warmth, but also for growth of their crops and fruits. The sun itself went through a daily cycle. The moon had a monthly cycle. The earth itself knew an annual cycle, clearly marked by the changing seasons.

These cycles moved round the two opposite poles of life and death. Let us take, for example, the cycle of the sun, which received particular attention in Egypt. To the ancient Egyptian the sun’s daily journey began with birth and ended in death. The land of the East from which it rose became associated with life, birth and re-birth. The land of the West, where it sank to rest, became associated with death and life after death. The Egyptian hymn to Aton, the sun-god, runs thus, ‘When thou settest on the Western horizon, the land is in darkness in the manner of death . . . when the day breaks, as thou risest on the horizon . . . they awake and stand upon their feet . . . they live because thou hast arisen for them.’²

In contrast with the Egyptian, the nomad of the desert was more concerned with the moon than with the sun. He saw the moon wax and wane. At full moon this night luminary reached the point of maximum light and life, and enabled the nomad to move over the desert in cool comfort. As the moon waned it exhibited declining powers until it disappeared altogether -- in death -- only to reappear three days later, as a new moon. The full moon and the new moon are still reflected in the Old Testament as the chief seasons for the festivals of the nomad.

The annual cycle of the seasons was the most striking of all. Ancient man found himself living in a world which seemed to be a gigantic living entity which could hardly be described as ‘it’, for it pulsated with life akin to that which he experienced in his own person. Just as he himself oscillated between periods of vitality and tiredness, alertness and sleep, and lived out his life between birth and death, so the life of the earth itself was subject to a cosmic ebb and flow. In spring the blossoms and new shoots revealed a great burst into life, which continued until it reached the highest peak of life in summer. The autumn was marked by signs of slowing down and decay, while in winter the lowest ebb of inactivity was reached in a quiescent state comparable with death. Thus the annual cycle, the monthly cycle, and the daily cycle moved round the poles of life and death.

Over the centuries ancient man learned to express his thinking about the world in the form of myths, or stories of the gods, in whom were personified the unseen forces he presumed to be at work in the phenomena he observed. Closely associated with the myths were elaborate customs and ceremonies -- his ritual -- evolved over a long period of time. In these actions he danced and acted out what he believed to be his proper response to the living world which contained him. The details of these myths and the accompanying ritual differed from country to country, and even from city to city, but certain motifs became dominant and chief among these was the concern with life and death.

One story which seems to have been common, at least in general outline, to all the cultures of the Ancient Near East, describes how the vegetation or agricultural god dies with the decaying autumn season and is brought to life again in the spring. In Egypt he was called Osiris, in ancient Sumer Dumuzi, in Phoenicia Adonis and in Babylonia Tammuz.

As with most of the myths surviving from the ancient world, there is no one standard form of the myth of Osiris, Isis, Seth and Horus, coming to us from Egypt, and the details often become confused and inconsistent. The general picture is that Osiris, embodying the power of growth and fruitfulness, and indeed all the creative forces of nature, was killed by his brother Seth, who represented the barren red desert and the scorching wind, the natural enemies of agriculture in the Nile valley. The season of the year which marked the death of Osiris was that at which the level of the life-giving Nile sank lower, and the hot wind blew from the desert and the leaves began to fall.

Isis, the sister and lover of Osiris, went weeping in search of his dismembered body, and her tears were associated with the later inundations of the Nile and the subsequent restoration of the agricultural land to life. The various forms of the myth describe the restoration of Osiris in different ways. In one, Isis buried the limbs and flesh-pieces of Osiris in the various fields, so that the dead god would rise in the next season’s crops. In another, she restored Osiris temporarily to life so that she might become pregnant by him, and this meant that while Osiris remained the god of the underworld, he rose again to life on the earth in the person of the son Horus who was born to him. This is celebrated in the great hymn to Osiris, engraved on a tombstone about 1550 BC.:

The myth of Adonis, even though it is best known in its Greek form, originated in Phoenicia. It is commemorated still in the name of the Adonis river, which flows down from the Lebanon range into the Mediterranean not far from the famous city of Byblos. An ancient temple has been found in the vicinity of the cavern from which the head waters of the river issue forth. Each spring the river, enlarged by the melting snow, turns red because of the silt it carries down to the sea, and this was spoken of as the blood of Adonis. The myth has also been connected with the blood-red anemone which blooms on the mountains.

Adonis (derived from the Semitic word for ‘lord’) was a handsome young man, whose youth and virility symbolized the principle of growth and vitality. Every year he died, being killed while hunting a wild boar. The winter cold and lifelessness marked his absence from the earth, and he was pursued to the gloomy underworld by the beautiful Aphrodite. During her absence love and sexuality were thought to cease, and all life was threatened with extinction. In response to a messenger sent from the gods, the beauty queen was allowed to return from the underworld, and we are led to assume, though no form of the myth explicitly states it, that she was accompanied by her lover Adonis.

Thus Adonis spent one part of the year in the world of the living and then everything was alive and growing. The other part, following his annual death, was spent in the world of the dead, and then life and growth came to a standstill. More particularly he was taken to represent the corn which lies buried in the ground for half the year and then springs into life above the ground for the other half. Frazer maintained that in the great Phoenician sanctuary of Astarte at Byblos the death of Adonis was mourned annually to the accompaniment of wailing and lamentation, but that on the day after the festival, he was believed to come to life again and ascend up to heaven.⁴

What is sometimes claimed as the prototype of all these myths of the dying vegetation god is found in Mesopotamia in the myth of the Sumerian Dumuzi. He personified the creative powers of spring, and the goddess manna (Babylonian Ishtar) represented the fertility of nature. Their annual marriage was celebrated every spring and was the mythological way of describing the new fertility and growth of the spring season. The story is known as ‘manna’s Descent to the Nether World’. Although this myth was known in a later Babylonian form, which closely resembled the myth of Adonis, the prototype from Sumeria has only been slowly pieced together during this century, and some of it is still missing. It is clear, however, that unlike the Osiris and Adonis myths where the male element is dominant, in ancient Mesopotamia it was the goddess Inanna who took the major role, embodying in herself all the creative power of nature.

Inanna was the Sumerian goddess of love and queen of heaven, whose hand was wooed and won by the shepherd-god Dumuzi. But the marriage was to end in his death. Inanna, not content with being queen of heaven, set her heart -- or so it would appear -- on ruling the underworld as well, this latter being governed at that time by her sister and bitter enemy. She set off in her royal regalia for the ‘land of no return’, leaving instructions that if she did not return in three days her vizier should raise the alarm in the assembly of the gods and take steps to have her rescued. As she passed through each of the seven gates to the underworld, she was stripped in turn of her crown, sceptre, necklace, jewelry, rings, breastplate and finally her clothes, until she arrived stark naked before her sister’s throne, where the judgment of death was pronounced upon her and her corpse was hung from a nail.

After three days the vizier set in process the prearranged plan which led to the point where two sexless creatures were created by the god Enki to carry down to the underworld the ‘food of life’ and the ‘water of life’. On their arrival they sprinkled these an the lifeless corpse of manna and she revived. She was then allowed to ascend from the underworld but only if she gave someone as her substitute. So she returned to the earth, accompanied by heartless demons ready to pounce on their new victim. In the first two cities which she approached, the deities prostrated themselves before her and so saved their lives from the demons. But when she reached her husband Dumuzi, he sat in festive array on his throne and refused to grovel before her. So she ordered the demons to carry him off.

It is now clear that the story ends with the death of Dumuzi and that the journey of manna to the underworld was not undertaken in order to rescue him from death, as was once thought. The seasonal death and renewal of vegetation finds its representation in Inanna herself. It is Inanna who is brought back to life. In the later, Babylonian version of the same story, the goddess (there known as Ishtar) still plays the dominant role which ends in her renewal, and it is the young male (there known as Tammuz) who annually succumbs to death. As late as the sixth century BC. the Israelite prophet Ezekiel deplored the fact that Jewish women in Jerusalem were ‘sitting and wailing for Tammuz’ instead of being loyal to the God of their fathers.⁵

The myth which probably had greatest influence upon the ancient people of Israel is that of Baal and Anat, which, since 1930, has been partially recovered for us in tablets of Ancient Ugarit discovered at Ras Shamra. This was thought by some to be another seasonal myth describing the death and resurrection of the vegetation god, but the myth is not tied to an annual cycle and is much more concerned with the threat of periods of drought and the way to ensure the supply of the lifegiving water on which men, animals and all vegetation alike depend.

The poem revolves round the struggle of Yam-Nahar (god of seas and rivers), Baal (god of rain) and Athtar (god of springs, wells, and perhaps irrigation channels) as they each lay claim to the vacant post of viceroy to the kindly old god of heaven called El. Yam-Nahar (perhaps because the primary source of water was thought to be in the seas and rivers) was the first to attempt to build himself a palace, but he was attacked and defeated by Baal. Baal was allowed to build a palace, and this was provided with windows through which the rain would be poured on to the earth. One obstacle in his way was Mot, god of death, who caused the deaths in those times of drought when Baal failed to provide the rain. Mot was unwilling to enter the world above, so Baal descended into the underworld to search for him. While he was absent the rain ceased, the earth was parched and life failed. Since Baal was reported to be dead, El handed over the vacant power to Athtar (for when rain ceased and rivers dried up, men resorted to artificial methods, such as digging wells). Athtar ascended the throne, but being young and unmarried was not adequate for the task (i.e. artificial irrigation could not permanently replace the natural water supply). Baal’s sister Anat went searching for him, found his body and carried it to burial. Then she seized Mot and demanded that he deliver up her brother. Mot confessed that he had consumed Baal, whereupon Anat seized Mot, cut him up with a sword, winnowed him with a fan, burned him with fire, ground him up with a hand-mill and sowed him in the field. (These obviously are all actions which followed on the gathering of the previous harvest.) Then Baal came to life again. The myth announces, ‘The Prince had perished, and behold he is alive!’ The kingly father-god El saw in a vision the heavens raining fatness and the wadies flowing with honey and cried, ‘Now will I sit and rest and my soul be at ease in my breast. For alive is mighty Baal, existent the Prince, Lord of the Earth.’ Then Baal destroyed his rival Athtar, defeated Mot, and finally proved his right to the throne by taking to wife Anat, his own sister and the daughter of El.

G. R. Driver comments, ‘As thus interpreted, the poem depicts the introduction of the youthful Baal as a god of fertility into the Ugaritic pantheon and the establishment of his supremacy, under El’s suzerainty, over all the other gods, exercising power over earth as god of rain; for rain is the ultimate source of the life-giving water which is essential to the whole of nature, however it may be distributed.’⁶

Now, having briefly sketched these myths from Egypt, Phoenicia, Sumeria, Babylon and Canaan, we must ask some questions about their significance. The fact that they differ in their details is, for our purpose, of far less importance than the fact that there are the same motifs, general plot and characters running through them all. They have been commonly called the myths of the ‘dying-and-rising god’. What do they tell us about the thoughts of ancient man?

Much has been written about the ancient myth since Sir James Frazer completed his monumental task of assembling the myths and folk-lore of primitive man in The Golden Bough. He was essentially on the right lines when he described mythology as the philosophy of primitive man and defined myths as ‘documents of human thought in embryo’.⁷ H. and H. A. Frankfort have summarized the complex character of myth as follows: ‘Myth is a form of poetry which transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth; a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning in that it wants to bring about the truth it proclaims; a form of action, of ritual behavior, which does not find its fulfillment in the act but must proclaim and elaborate a poetic form of truth.’⁸

The myth was certainly the product of human imagination, but it was not simply fantasy. The myth-maker was feeling round for suitable story-models in which to express, and partly to explain, the mysterious changes and events in which he found himself caught up in the living world about him. Most likely many myths made by men lived only a short life, but those that survived and spread did so because they readily met the common need of the human society where they flourished. Besides being explanatory models of the phenomena of life, they also provided personality figures with whom ancient man could identify in the variety of human experience, such as wonder, despair, joy, sorrow. This latter was one of the psychological values of the myth. For example, apart altogether from the more obvious meaning and purpose of the myths we have been looking at, the annual lamentation for Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, etc., provided an annual outlet for man, however unconsciously it was used, to express grief for his own mortality and to that extent to come to terms with it. We may compare to some extent the therapeutic value in the traditional celebration of Good Friday by the Christian and of the Day of Atonement by the Jew.

Now the myths of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ provided the most acceptable description for ancient man of the annual cycle of growth and decay which he observed in his crops and fruits. The fact that he was so utterly dependent upon them for his continued life meant that he not only looked for an explanation of what was happening, but he sought an assurance that the dying down of the life processes in the earth would once again be followed by new life and growth as in former years. The fact that he also experienced storms, droughts and insect pests meant that he had no guarantee of this. Thus ancient man was looking for grounds on which he could face the future with hope. The myth of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ supplied him with an explanation, a ground for hope, and a means by which through the accompanying ritual, he could play his part in bringing his hope to fruition.

Now the first thing that is common to this group of myths is that they revolve round the two polar extremes of life and death, in such a way that sometimes one holds the upper hand and sometimes the other. Life and death, vitality and decay, impressed themselves upon man as powerful forces with which he had to contend, both in his own existence and in the very nature of the world where he lived. Every year a mysterious and wonderful thing took place -- it was indeed a miracle, something to be wondered at (for that is the ancient and proper meaning of the word ‘miracle’). It was this: Out of death there sprang life. When things had reached their lowest ebb, new life began to flow. The mysterious powers and processes at work he described as gods, and within the framework of his worldview that was easily the best explanation. These myths gave him hope because they told him that in the conflict between death and life, while life was not wholly victorious, yet death was by no means the last word.

The second thing we may note is that in the plot of each of this group of myths there is both a male and a female figure, and the love affair or marriage between them is closely associated with the renewal of growth, the chief purpose of the myth. Ancient man could not help but notice that mating and marriage held the key to new life by means of regeneration, at least in the world of living creatures. And it is not at all surprising that so many of the fertility rites were accompanied by religious prostitution.

But we must further note in these myths that the male figure is associated with death more than with life, while the female figure is associated more with life and renewal than with death. It is the female figure in each case who makes the journey to the land of death, or takes whatever steps are necessary to bring about the return of natural vitality to the earth. This is a natural consequence of the fact that in the creaturely world it is the female who is most closely identified with the birth of new life. It is she who experiences the labor pains, faces herself the threat of death, and eventually achieves the new birth. It is the male on the other hand who more often succumbs to an untimely death in hunting or in war. Further, the male is more symbolic of the species as a whole, and man, along with all the creatures, is mortal. Thus in each case it is the male in whom the fact of death is represented. Man as a species is born to die, but before he dies, he regenerates his species through the female. Consequently, when the death and rebirth of the vegetation was being described in a personal way, in the manner of myth, the same themes persisted.

Thirdly, though the common theme of this group of myths has frequently been referred to as the ‘dying-and-rising god’, it has more recently been pointed out that the return to life, or the resurrection, of the dead god is nowhere explicitly described. This is a very important point, and it largely depends on how we interpret the word ‘resurrection’ as to what we would expect to find if the myth were to include an appropriate description of it. It is at this point that the very poetic and symbolic nature of the term ‘resurrection’ begins to make itself felt even in the context of the ancient myth. If the myths, for example, had explicitly stated that Osiris returned from the underworld in person, that Adonis has accompanied Aphrodite back to the land of the living, that Dumuzi (Tammuz) had returned with Inanna (Ishtar), that Baal had made a triumphant tour from the underworld, then it would have to become a question of whether this would not have been more appropriately named a resuscitation.

Yet ancient man was not so naive as to think that the previous season’s growth and harvests could simply be resuscitated. The harvest had been gathered, stored and partly eaten. The spring growth that he looked for in hope was a new growth, very like the previous spring’s growth in appearance and having a great dependence upon it, yet essentially new all the same. The way in which death gave rise to life was essentially too much of a mystery simply to be described in terms of resuscitation. So it is at this very point in the myth that we find the mystery of the rising’ being spoken of in a variety of ways, and in most cases it is left to the listener to draw his own conclusions about it.

In the Egyptian myth Osiris is likened in one place to the seed which must be placed in the ground to die so that the new growth may shoot forth; and at the same time he is thought of as rising in the form of his son Horus who thus avenges the death of Osiris. In the earliest form of the Sumerian myth it is only the death of Dumuzi of which we are told; but after Inanna has taken her trip to the underworld and back, Dumuzi is somehow back on his throne ready to be consigned to death once again. In the later forms of the same essential myth the actual return of Tammuz or Adonis is not described, yet we are led to conclude that they have nevertheless returned to life.

In this quite striking way the ancient myths did full justice to the reality and finality of death on the one hand and to the mystery, on the other hand, of how death gave rise to new life. The term ‘resurrection’ of course comes to us from a much later period in history. Yet it is valid to speak of these myths in terms of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ not so much in spite of the fact that the resurrection is nowhere explicitly described, but rather just because it is not so described. Resurrection is a term which does not so much describe an observable process, as point in a symbolic way to what has always been the great mystery of the origin of life and the regeneration of new life out of death.

The fourth thing to be noted is that in creating the myth of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ in order to give expression to his hope for the future, ancient man was led to this hope and to this particular symbol by his observations of the natural world. The very cycles of the world in which he found himself gave him hope -- the daily cycle of the sun, the monthly cycle of the moon and above all the yearly cycle of the seasons of growth, harvest and decay. The myth of the ‘dying-and-rising god’ may be called the earliest expression of hope in a world where for both creatures and vegetation it could easily be concluded that death had the last say. They recognized that the life of all living things ends in death; but if there were no death, there could be no fresh life, no renewal, no regeneration. Ancient man found that, built into the very fabric of the earth, there was an answer other than death and it spelled out hope.

We shall see that later in the story there was destined to be introduced into this idiom of hope, elements which did not spring simply from the world of nature. But at the same time we should not despise the witness which ancient man has given to us. The particular form of myth in which he expressed it does not hold for us the conviction that it held for him, but the experience that it points to is just as real. We, too, often take fresh heart because the dawn of another day causes new hope to spring up within us, and we can re-echo the psalmist’s words, ‘Tears may linger at nightfall, but joy comes in the morning.’⁹

Our moods and thoughts are frequently influenced by the time cycles and the changing seasons in which our lives are set, and some particular times are instrumental in giving us new hope for the future, as they did for ancient man. It is not at all accidental that the great Christian festival of Easter celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is celebrated in the spring and has superseded the pre- Christian spring festivals of the ‘dying-and-rising god’. The very season of the year in which the Easter festival is celebrated contributes to the meaning and truth it conveys. It may even be said that there is a certain element of loss when Easter is celebrated in the autumn, as now happens in the southern hemisphere. Children may well be puzzled why eggs and bunnies ever came to be associated with Easter.

While, as we shall later see, the concern with the changing seasons ceased to play a dominant role in our tradition from the time of Israel onwards, it was never wholly eliminated. Both Paul’¹⁰ and John the Evangelist¹¹ draw an object lesson from the grain of wheat which is sown in the ground and they emphasize the fact that it is only when it falls into the ground and dies that it brings forth a harvest.

When Clement of Rome, writing at the end of the first century, discussed the Christian hope of resurrection, he drew on some of the phenomena of nature to show that the symbol of resurrection is found in the natural world. ‘Let us observe, beloved, how the Ruler is continually displaying the resurrection that will be, of which he made the first fruits when he raised the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Let us look, beloved, at the resurrection which happens regularly. Day and night show us a resurrection; the night goes to sleep, the day rises: the day departs, night comes on. Let us take the crops. How does the sowing happen, and in what way? "The sower went out" and cast each of his seeds into the ground. These fall dry and bare on to the ground and decay. Then from the decay the mightiness of the Ruler’s providence raises them up, and many grow from the one and bear fruit."¹²

Today we live in a much more sophisticated world than our forbears of the Ancient Near East. Much has happened in the meantime to shape the tradition which has molded us to be the people we are. But even allowing for all this, we are still, like our ancient forbears, finite creatures who recognize our fundamental affinity with the earth on which we live. We are earth men. We have been formed from the ground. The life that has gone through the long process of evolution to make us the creatures we are is all part and parcel of the living processes of this planet, and presumably of the whole universe. Both the existence of the universe and the origin of life raise questions which lie beyond our grasp. We share with ancient man the sense of bewilderment about the processes of life and death, but out of our earth-world itself there still comes to us the same message that death is the end of every creature and every form of finite life, but always beyond death there is new life of some kind, and this observation constitutes a ground for hope -- a hope that finds an appropriate idiom in the word ‘resurrection’.

Notes:

1. From the Stone Age to Christianity, p. 32.

2. Quoted by John A. Wilson in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, p. 44.

3. Quoted by S. N. Kramer in Mythologies of the Ancient World, pp. ~

4. The Golden Bough, abridged edition, p. 335.

4. Ezekiel 8:14.

6. Canaanite Myths and Legends, p. 21. For the Baal myth see pp. 72-100.

7. Myths of the Origin of Fire, p. vi.

8. Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, p. 8.

9. P~. 30:5.

10. 1 Cor. 15:35-7.

11. John 12:24.

12. The Early Christian Fathers, ed. by H. Bettenson, pp. 36-7.

In the first chapter we opened up a discussion of what is meant by the term ‘resurrection’, and found that this quickly led us to the traditional conception of the resurrection of Jesus, a view often known as ‘bodily resurrection’, which, with minor variations, has dominated Christian tradition for about eighteen centuries. We therefore spent the last two chapters examining the historical basis upon which this view was believed to rest. This examination has led to the negative verdict, that it is no longer possible to defend on historical grounds a view of the resurrection of Jesus which necessitates an empty tomb and a restoration of the dead body of Jesus to some form of physical life.

This conclusion, it must be carefully pointed out, has been reached by many scholars (only a few of whom have been mentioned),¹ not simply because the modern mind, dominated by a mechanistic and non-supernatural view of the universe, can no longer accept the notion of a dead body coming to life again. This factor has no doubt been presents but it must be said again that if there exist what appear to be historical narratives testifying to an event of a unique and seemingly impossible character, such as has not been known in modern times, it is quite unscientific to dismiss it because of our presuppositions. The evidence must first be approached with an open mind and examined as objectively as possible for its historical reliability. This we have tried to do.

The negative verdict on the historicity of the empty tomb has been reached by scholars not because ‘they are suffering from a failure of nerve and of imagination’, believing that ‘they must not introduce any supernatural agent into the setting of the burial of Jesus’.² This judgment may have been true of some, and particularly those who were already hostile critics of Christianity. But the scholars whom we have been quoting are themselves committed to the Christian faith. In their examination of the written records, not only were they not of a mind to ‘insist on proving this tradition legendary’,³ but because of their Christian commitment they were ready to be convinced of the traditional view if only that were the conclusion to which their study of the New Testament records led them. This is true even of the frequently maligned D. F. Strauss, who wrote, ‘We might then rest satisfied with the evangelical testimonies in favor of the resurrection, were but these testimonies in the first place sufficiently precise, and in the second, in agreement with themselves and with each other.’⁴

The discovery that the tomb of Jesus was empty might well be difficult to understand within the modern world view, but it could not be dismissed as legend if the historicity of the records pointed otherwise. This is just what they do not do. On the surface they point to the discovery as a historical event, but when related to each other and to the approximate age of each Gospel, they are much more consistent with the conclusion that in the Gospels we have four versions of a developing legend which grew up as a consequence of an Easter faith which was already held.

This evaluation of the Gospel records has become clearer and more widely held during the last century or more, a period which has witnessed the development of biblical study on a scale more intensive than ever before, and using the valuable tools of historical and literary criticism. In the course of this time the position has changed from one in which only a few scholars questioned the historicity of the empty tomb to one in which this story is widely accepted as a legend. D. F. Strauss was conscious of belonging to a small minority when he ended his massive three-volume Life of Jesus with the words, ‘But there are also a few; who, notwithstanding such attacks, freely declare what can no longer be concealed -- and time will show whether by the one party or the other, the Church, Mankind, and Truth are best served.’⁵ Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the position nowadays when he said, ‘There are very few theologians today who believe the Resurrection actually happened.’⁶

It is an instructive exercise to read in chronological order the various studies of the resurrection of Jesus written during the last century, not by rationalist critics of Christianity, but by Christian scholars, most of whom were widely recognized as authorities. It makes one realize how far within a century the general consensus of New Testament scholarship has moved.⁷ We shall illustrate this with a few examples.

In 1865 Bishop Westcott could confidently write, ‘taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the resurrection of Christ’.⁸ By 1881 the Bishop was writing a little more cautiously. ‘the history is not a history of the Resurrection, but a history of the manifestation of the Risen Christ. The fact of the Resurrection is assumed, but it is nowhere described. A veil lies over all beginnings.’ (Italics mine.)⁹

By the beginning of this century a great change had taken place and James Orr prefaced his defense of the traditional position by sketching the widespread questioning and rejection of ‘bodily resurrection’ by Christian scholars.¹⁰ In 1907 Kirsopp Lake published the first study of the resurrection, in English, which rested upon a thorough application of historical criticism to the New Testament records and he concluded that ‘The empty tomb is for us doctrinally indefensible and is historically insufficiently accredited. Thus the story of the empty tomb must be fought out on doctrinal, not on historical or critical grounds’¹¹ The traditional view continued to be defended, however, and by men of the stature of James Denney. Yet Denney adopted a different kind of defense, ‘it is not the story of the empty tomb, or of the appearing of Jesus in Jerusalem or in Galilee -- which is the primary evidence for the resurrection; it is the New Testament itself. The life that throbs in it from beginning to end … is the life which the Risen Savior has quickened in Christian souls.’¹²

Between 1905 and 911 W. J. Sparrow Simpson wrote three studies on the resurrection of Jesus. In the third, after a very extended discussion, he recognized that the Scriptures themselves appear to give support to two opposing views which he referred to as the ‘materialistic’ and the ‘spiritual’. He believed, however, that they could be reconciled, for while the glorified body of the risen Jesus is normally neither visible nor tangible, it ‘temporarily reassumes the human outline, and solid frame, and former appearance, and marks of the wounds, for evidential and instructive purposes’.¹³ In the resurrection narratives the Evangelists ‘describe the re-entrance of the glorified Body of Christ into terrestrial conditions, effected for the purpose of convincing His apostles of His Resurrection, and of giving them instructions and commssions’.¹⁴ He believed that Paul, being the theologian, was not concerned with these occasional manifestations, but with the essential condition of the risen Christ and that his is therefore the profounder teaching.

Consequently Simpson deplored the crudely materialistic view of resurrection that has often dominated the Western Christian tradition, and went so far as to say that ‘If the Body of Christ had been cremated, His Resurrection-Appearances must have assumed much the same characteristics of physical identity as those which the Evangelists report.’¹⁵ He further conceded that this view of ‘bodily resurrection’ may remain equally true whether the original corpse of Jesus continued to remain in the tomb or not. Nevertheless he accepted the historicity of the empty tomb, partly because he thought it to be sufficiently well attested and partly because it was ‘indispensable for the disciples’ work and the disciples’ faith. . . . However possible it might be for those who have grasped St. Paul’s conception of the spiritual body to contemplate undisturbed the body of Jesus in the sepulchre, this is not possible for the great majority of men even yet.¹⁶

These extracts from Simpson show how far he had moved from the traditional (or what he called the Latin) view of resurrection, even though his study appears conservative by today’s standards. It was but a short step now to the point where many were to recognize not only that the New Testament presents two main views of resurrection, but that one of them is earlier than the other. G. H. C. Macgregor set them out in clear contrast when he wrote in 1939, ‘But what is implied by "Resurrection"? What conception lies behind the triumphant cry, "Christ is risen!"? The theory of traditional theology has, of course, been that of a bodily resurrection. . . This conception is quite clearly present in parts of the New Testament, particularly in the Synoptic Gospels, and may be called for convenience, the idea of "reanimation". But side by side with it is another and quite inconsistent conception, according to which the Risen Christ is a purely spiritual and "glorified" Being, who in virtue of the Resurrection has been exalted forthwith to the right hand of God, whence he manifests Himself to believers. . . . This we may call the idea of "glorification".’¹⁷

In the previous chapter we have seen some of the reasons why Macgregor, like many others, accepted the more spiritual view as the earlier one, to which materialistic features were added out of apologetic motives. ‘Faith in the Risen Christ was thus at first a simple affirmation of His exaltation to the rank of Messiah and Lord, and was quite independent of any stress upon the material reanimation of the body. This is a secondary emphasis born of the necessity of apologetics. It was only later that the material side of the Resurrection became in itself an object of belief, and was constituted the chief proof or "sign" of the verity of the Christian faith.’ ¹⁸

Contemporary scholarship has brought to light the fact that the diversity of view-point found in the New Testament stretches even beyond the two views of resurrection just referred to. Hans Conzelmann writes, ‘There is no uniform idea of the raising or resurrection of Jesus in the early period. Side by side, one can find views (a) that Jesus went straight from the grave to heaven, i.e. that resurrection and ascension, resurrection and exaltation are identical; (b) that he first returned to earth from the grave and only ascended after he had spent some time with his disciples . . . Similarly, the views of the nature of the appearances of the Risen One are also modified. If Jesus ascended directly from the grave into heaven, then he appears from time to time from heaven. If he only ascended after appearing on earth, the Easter appearances are fundamentally different from all later appearances of the exalted Lord (e.g. before Paul at Damascus).’ ¹⁹

For this short sketch we have chosen some reasonably representative New Testament scholars, and the words we have quoted from them clearly illustrate how much the understanding of the resurrection of Jesus has changed in the last century. They further demonstrate that it is the study of the New Testament itself which has brought about the collapse of the traditional view, thus confirming the plea currently being made by Bater when he says, ‘Discussions of the Resurrection have never been biblical enough.’²⁰

Those who have devoted their energies to defending the traditional view have rightly said that the affirmation of the resurrection of Jesus is basic Christian faith. Consequently they issue solemn warnings that they have issued solemn warnings that if the Easter faith of the church is surrendered or found to rest on a false foundation, then Christianity is no longer viable. There is much truth in this. No one can claim to have understood or to have embraced Christianity, who has not appreciated the significance of the proclamation that Jesus is risen from the dead.

But is ‘bodily resurrection’ the only valid view of what it means to say that Jesus is risen? If it is, then we are left with little choice but to say that Jesus did not rise from the dead, nor is he risen today. Two quite independent lines of reasoning lead us to the same conclusion. The historical study of the New Testament records has not confirmed the traditional view that the physical body of Jesus (either transformed or not) came forth from the tomb within thirty-six hours after it had been placed there, later to ascend into heaven. Secondly, it is more or less meaningless to maintain that somewhere in the universe the risen Jesus lives today as a bodily form which is either physical or transformed from a physical body. For reasons such as the latter even Simpson, in 1911, declared that continuing insistence for the traditional materialistic view of resurrection ‘accounts for much repugnance to the Christian truth’.²¹

Fortunately this threat to a basic tenet of Christianity is only apparent. The Easter faith is neither restricted nor permanently anchored to this rigid view of the Resurrection that has long been traditional. The modern study of the New Testament, which seems to have undermined the historical foundations for the traditional view, has at the same time brought to light that in any case this was not actually the way in which the first apostles understood the resurrection of Jesus. On the contrary, it resulted from a development that took shape later and mainly in the last thirty years of the first century. Since Christianity began without this rigid and materialistic view of resurrection, it can also live again without it.

New Testament study is today showing that there was considerable variety of views and no little ambiguity in what first century Christians meant when they unanimously affirmed that Jesus is risen. Bater pertinently comments, ‘If there was that much ambiguity about the resurrection of Jesus for the eyewitnesses, on whose testimony all the succeeding ages must depend, do not the efforts twenty centuries later to establish it as demonstrable and unambiguous take on a certain comical effect?’²²

We may go further and say that in the light of contemporary biblical study and of the knowledge of the world in which we live, the traditional, restricted view of resurrection is seriously defective. By attempting to pin the resurrection down to something which it, in fact, was not, we are prevented from appreciating the full scope of what the Easter faith is pointing to when it affirms that Jesus is risen. For example, it for ever tries to turn our attention back to some supposedly historical event which took place at the tomb on Easter day instead of the present realty of the risen Christ. Unless the Christian can affirm the presentness of the risen Christ (as Paul did in Galatians 2:20) then it matters little what happened at a tomb some nineteen centuries ago.

The traditional view is further defective in that, as many contemporary scholars have pointed out, it makes the truth of the Christian faith appear to rest upon the findings of the historian and so gives to Christianity a vulnerability which does not properly belong to it. Goguel expressed it this way, ‘If some document were discovered and established beyond all possibility of dispute that the body of Jesus slowly decomposed in the grave where it had been laid, Christianity with all the gifts of spiritual life which it has given to mankind would not be destroyed. On the other hand, if it were possible to prove that on the morning of the third day the body of Jesus was no longer in the tomb and every possibility of fraud had been excluded, it would not follow that those who were forced to admit this fact would on that account become Christians.’²³

More recently Ronald Gregor Smith used some rather striking words which reflect how the abandonment of the empty tomb viewpoint leads to a fuller understanding of the Easter faith. ‘We may freely say that the bones of Jesus lie somewhere in Palestine. Christian faith is not destroyed by this admission. On the contrary, only now, when this has been said, are we in a position to ask about the meaning of the resurrection as an integral part of the message concerning Jesus. The reality of Jesus with which we have to do in faith at this point is not an irrational addendum to his whole life. We are not asked to believe in the empty tomb, or in the resurrection: but in the living Lord. So far as the historically ascertainable "facts" are concerned we have the faith of the disciples nothing more.’ (Italics mine.)²⁴

A more extended discussion of the meaning of resurrection for the Christian today will come at the end of this book. The point being made at the present is that we are not really ‘in a position to ask about the meaning of the resurrection’ until we have escaped from the fetters of the rigid tradition of ‘bodily resurrection’. It is not too much to say that during the last hundred years this tradition, old as it is, has collapsed. Many other old traditions in the Christian faith have been collapsing too, but none, perhaps, which seemed so close to the living heart of Christianity. It is understandable if many Christians have witnessed this collapse with alarm.

In actual fact, however, what appeared to be a loss, turns out to be a distinct gain. As the Christian comes to abandon his belief in the empty tomb and ‘bodily resurrection’, even though he once regarded it as a sure and certain proof of the truth of Christianity, he may experience an exhilarating sense of freedom not unlike that felt by Paul when for the sake of Christ he abandoned the former things in which he trusted. Concerning these he said, ‘I count everything sheer loss, because all is far outweighed by the gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I did in fact lose everything . . . All I care for is to know Christ, to experience the power of his resurrection, and to share his sufferings, in growing conformity with his death, if only I may finally arrive at the resurrection from the dead.’²⁵ For resurrection is not something less than the traditional view has made it out to be, but something greater, something that can be expressed in quite a variety of ways, something that has had a meaning for men in very different ages in the past, and can continue to have a meaning for men today and in the future.

We are now free to explore this meaning without being restricted to a particular concept or interpretation which because of our pre-suppositions, we think the word ‘resurrection’ must possess. Now we have the freedom to move back into the pre-Christian period where the idea of resurrection had an extensive history long before it ever became part of the vocabulary of the Christian faith. This was the real background against which the apostles made their victorious Easter affirmation rather than the discovery of an empty tomb.

As we explore the path taken by the concept of resurrection over some four thousand years of the cultural history which is our heritage, we shall find the resurrection theme expressed in a great variety of ways. Resurrection has been understood in different ways in the different cultural settings and historical periods in which we find it. But it is also possible to trace the links, however tenuous, which join them all together in a fascinating line of succession. One is reminded of John Buchan’s novel, The Path of the King, where he traces the progress through many generations of the descent of royal blood. It may be regarded as a parabolic parallel to the story we are about to begin.

It is not our purpose to set one particular understanding of resurrection over against another, for each was the vehicle of truth in the particular setting in which it took shape. We shall attempt to discern why that particular form won conviction in its own setting, and why it conveyed truth to those who affirmed it as the expression of their hope.

For resurrection, we shall see, was primarily an expression of hope. It normally had to do with that which was yet to come. Even the resurrection of Christ proclaimed in the Easter faith had this future element in it as a necessary ingredient (scholars refer to this as the eschatological character of the resurrection) and it was partly due to the loss of this element that the Easter ‘event’ came to be misunderstood.

The concept of resurrection arose long before technical words were coined to describe it. The Latin word resurrectio appears to have been created for Christian use, and while the Greek equivalent anastasis is certainly pre-Christian, it does not seem to have been widely used until Christian times, some scholars thinking that, when Paul referred to it at Athens, his hearers mistook it for the name of a goddess.²⁶ The idea of resurrection first came to expression in the form of a narrative, and until the advent of the above technical terms, words of very general usage, such as ‘raise’, ‘wake up’, ‘stand up’, etc., served the purpose of relating it. In the course of time such words came to assume a more specialized or idiomatic usage. From henceforth we shall speak of the idiom²⁷ of resurrection, remembering that the words conveyed no clear-cut connotation, but were sufficiently fluid to allow a wide variety of meaning.

The idiom of resurrection came to be used as language in which men could express their hope for the future. We are now ready to trace the long and tortuous path which this idiom pursued. When we have done this, we shall be in a better position to understand how the idiom may continue to be used as an expression of our hope in the face of a fast-changing world where so much is uncertain.

Notes:

1. An exhaustive list would be too numerous but by way of example we may mention B. W. Bacon, H. D. A. Major, M. Goguel, R. Bultmann, G. Bornkamm, W. Marxsen, G. Gloege, H. Grass, G. W. H. Lampe, H. Anderson, G. H. C. Macgregor, R. Gregor Smith, N. Pittenger, J. Knox, Reinhold Niebuhr.

2. See H. H. Rex, op. cit., pp. 20-1.

3. ibid., p. 20.

4. The Life of Jesus, vol. 3, p. 365.

5. ibid., p. 446.

6. The New Theologian, by Ved Mehta, p. 34.

7. The chief books are set out in chronological order in the bibliography at the end of the book. A. M. Ramsey gives a brief sketch in Chapter 4 of The Resurrection of Christ.

8. The Gospel of the Resurrection, Fourth Edition, p. 115.

9. The Revelation of the Risen Lord, p. 4.

10. op. cit., chap. 1.

11. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, p. 253.

12. op. cit., p. 111.

13. The Resurrection and Modern Thought, p. 418.

14. ibid., p. 419.

15. ibid., p. 421.

16. ibid., p. 422.

17. ‘The Growth of the Resurrection Faith’, Expos. Times, Vol. L, p. 217.

18. ibid., p. 220.

19. An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament, pp. 64-5.

20. op. cit., p. 65

21. op. cit., p.420.

22. op. cit., p. 60.

23. op. cit., pp. 29-30.

24. Secular Christianity, p. 103.

25. Phil. 3:8, 10-11.

26. Acts 17:18.

27. I am indebted to Professor Dietrich Ritschl for this suggestion.

The traditional mental picture associated with the belief in the resurrection of Jesus has been so centered on the story of the empty tomb, that we must now examine it and discuss its origin and historical value. At the outset we do well to remember that even if the historicity of this discovery by the women could be confidently substantiated, it would still not be a proof of the resurrection of Jesus. In the Gospel stories themselves the discovery of the empty tomb does not by itself lead to faith in the risen Christ. Even in the New Testament there is a sense in which the empty tomb plays a secondary role, namely, to confirm an Easter faith already established rather than to initiate it, for by far the chief emphasis of the New Testament is that faith in the risen Christ originated out of his appearances to the disciples.^l

We are examining the origin and historicity of the tomb story to see if the conception of resurrection that it leads to is the only one and the true one. We have four versions of the tomb story in the New Testament. Yet, as we have already pointed out, there is good evidence for concluding that they are not only not narrated to us directly by eye-witnesses, but that, in addition, they are not even independent of each other.

This means that the version of the tomb story we must turn to is that of Mark, for, being by far the earliest, it is independent of the other three and is therefore the crucial one. It will be shown in a later chapter that Matthew and Luke used Mark’s story as the basis for their own, and each made his own changes and additions. John’s Gospel is recognized as the latest, and has quite unique characteristics, but even here the tomb story still carries the bare outline of Mark’s story, and there is no good reason for believing that this outline belongs to a tradition which is wholly independent from Mark. Rather it represents what has been called the ‘end-product of the development of the story of the empty tomb’.² The fact that it is the latest, and at the same time the fullest, account of the discovery of the empty tomb, points to the conclusion that it represents a late stage in a developing tradition. But the fact that it is the fullest and possesses the greatest human appeal of all the versions, also means that it has been the most popular -- the one read most commonly, for example, on Easter day. We must take care therefore not unconsciously to read the content of John’s version back into the earlier one of Mark where it may not properly belong.

For Mark’s account of the discovery of the empty tomb turns out to be remarkably short. The oldest manuscripts take us no further than Mark 16:8. What follows is now universally regarded as a later addition, made in the light of the material in the three later Gospels. It has been called ‘a sort of compendium of the proofs and promises of the resurrected Lord, made up some time after the beginning of the second century’.³

Mark’s account of the discovery of the empty tomb (now reduced to eight verses) is not however a complete narrative in itself but is dependent upon the burial story which precedes it, and of which it now forms the conclusion. The chapter division (which, in any case, was added much later) can easily give us a false impression. The tomb story which we wish to look at has a clear beginning at Mark 15:40 and runs through to 16:8.

Once we have isolated the limits of the tomb pericope some quite striking facts leap into prominence. The key persons in the story, viz. Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, appear nowhere else in the whole Gospel (the mention of Pilate and the centurion are only incidental to the burial story). Moreover, these persons are never heard of again; they find no mention in the early chapters of Acts, which is our only picture of the primitive church.⁴

On the other hand, all the chief characters of Mark’s Gospel, except Pilate and the centurion, are noticeably absent in this pericope. Is it not strange that, when Mark narrates what later generations have often regarded as the sine qua non of the Gospel, there is a sharp hiatus in the key personnel? One would have expected those who had discovered the empty tomb to have played a prominent part in the primitive church.

When we examine the tomb story further, we find that it divides into two parts, and though the second is dependent upon the first, the first is complete in itself. That is the burial story (vv. 42-46) in which Joseph of Arimathea alone is the active figure. The women who play such an important role as the discoverers of the empty tomb are simply stated to be observers at the cross (vv. 40-1) where they were ‘watching from a distance’, and once again observers at the burial (v. 47) in that they ‘saw where he was laid’. They play no active part in the burial and it is for a reason other than the burial that they are now mentioned in both places.

Was there a time when the story of the burial by Joseph was told by itself without being followed by what now forms the sequel? The particular way in which the references to the women are introduced supports the view that there was. It was important to establish the fact that they knew who was crucified and where he was buried, before their discovery of an empty tomb could be of any significance, but the narrator has introduced these references in such a way as not to disturb the already existing forms both of the Passion narrative and of the burial story. Goguel comments that ‘with a certain clumsiness they (the evangelists) fail to create a real connection between the story of the burial and that of the discovery of the empty tomb’.⁵

In the last chapter we began the discussion of the burial story but left the question of historicity open. The tradition may stem from an historical foundation, and again, quite equally, it may not. In support of the latter Goguel believes that it is possible to learn something of the development of the burial story by distinguishing between a ‘ritual burial’ and an ‘honorable burial’.

The basis for the ‘ritual burial’ was the Jewish law found in Deuteronomy 21:22-3. ‘When a man is convicted of a capital offence and is put to death, you shall hang him on a gibbet; but his body shall not remain on the gibbet overnight; you shall bury it on the same day, for a hanged man is offensive in the sight of God. You shall not pollute the land which the Lord your God is giving you as your patrimony.’

This law determined what the Jewish practice was. Though it was the custom of the Romans to leave the bodies of the crucified on the cross until they rotted away, on this occasion they may have allowed the bodies to have been taken down just before sunset as a concession to the Jewish interests, particularly when feeling was running high at the time of the Passover festival. According to Goguel the New Testament preserves direct evidence of a ritual burial for Jesus in the words attributed to Paul in Acts 13:28-9, ‘Though they failed to find grounds for the sentence of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed. And when they had carried out all that the scriptures said about him, they took him down from the gibbet and laid him in a tomb.’ There is further evidence of the same tradition in John 19:31, ‘Because it was the eve of Passover, the Jews were anxious that the bodies should not remain on the cross for the coming Sabbath, since that Sabbath was a day of great solemnity; so they requested Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down.’⁶ Goguel believes that ‘The tradition referring to the ritual burial must have been very much alive to have left traces in a book by a writer, who in his gospel had related the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea.’⁷ Incidentally, this well-established custom was in itself quite sufficient to be the origin of the phrase ‘that he was buried’ in the early creed quoted by Paul.

The story of Joseph of Arimathea, found in Mark and followed in the later Gospels, is called by Goguel an ‘honorable burial’, for the motive is no longer simply to prevent the desecration of the land, but to do all that is fitting to the mortal remains of an honorable man. Joseph is said to have been ‘a respected member of the Council, a man who looked forward to the kingdom of God’. Such a man was obviously displaying real courage when, out of his secret admiration for Jesus, he made the approach to Pilate, at the same time running the risk of earning the disfavor of all his fellow Councilors. This was no ‘ritual burial’ for he went to the trouble of buying a linen sheet. It is a very different account of burial from what might have been given if a group of anonymous Jews had been concerned simply to throw the body of Jesus (and perhaps those of the two thieves also) into the grave or tomb of the common people in order to prevent the precincts of the holy city from being defiled.

But if the story of the ‘honorable burial’ is historical, and was known from the beginning, then there was no cause for the story of a ‘ritual burial’ to arise, such as seems to have left traces in the tradition. Goguel believes ‘the honorable burial’ is the transformation of the other. We can readily see how the story of the ‘ritual burial’ would arise. Once the Easter faith had come to birth among the disciples, who, we are told, had scattered at the time of the crucifixion, questions would eventually be asked as to what had happened to the body of Jesus. Because of the Jewish practice, they had very good reason for believing that some unknown Jews in Jerusalem had treated the body of Jesus in exactly the same way as they would have done with any other executed criminal, and thus buried it. Goguel notes that ‘there is no particular reason to doubt that this is what happened’.⁸

Once the story of the ‘ritual burial’ was started, it was natural for oral tradition among Christians to transform it into an honorable burial’. The unknown Jews now became personalized and identified in one Joseph of Arimathea. It is possible that Arimathea (like the later Emmaus) is actually an imagined site, for it is not known from any other source.⁹ It is just possible that the name ‘Joseph’ may have been used to personalize the unknown Jew, presumed to have been responsible for the ritual burial, because of the biblical tradition which told of the care with which Joseph, the patriarch, transported the body of his father all the way back to Machpelah for burial.¹⁰

The form and the content of the burial story in Mark’s Gospel is therefore no guarantee of its historicity. On the contrary we can well understand how such a story could have arisen in the early church, and developed to the form in which Mark records it. Further, when we compare it with the versions in the later Gospels, we can see the way in which the development was still continuing. In Matthew Joseph has become a rich man, who had already himself become a disciple of Jesus, and who used for the burial of Jesus the tomb he had already prepared for himself. Luke has slightly condensed Mark’s story, but notes that Arimathea (possibly because he had not heard of it before) was a city of the Jews. In John’s version Joseph has been joined by Nicodemus (known from John 3:1-12) and it was they and not the women who anointed the body with spices, specified in detail as ‘a mixture of myrrh and aloes, more than half a hundredweight’. It seems to be typical of developing traditions that information of this kind becomes more detailed the later the version. Even today those who recount a story they have been told earlier may often find themselves creating a detail or two to add verisimilitude to their narration.

We must now look at the relationship of the burial story with the rest of the Gospel. We have already noted the hiatus, so far as the chief characters are concerned, between the tomb pericope as a whole, and the rest of the Gospel. Is it possible that the Gospel was originally intended to end with the words of the centurion? ‘Truly this man was a son of God’ would have made a very fitting climax to a Gospel which ‘has been described as "the martyr Gospel" -- that is, the Gospel designed for the strengthening and encouraging of Christians facing martyrdom.’¹¹

We have become so used to the pattern of the four canonical Gospels, all of which end with the tomb story and three with further resurrection stories, that it is easy to regard it as unthinkable that a Gospel should have ended in any other way. We must remember, however, that Mark’s Gospel was the first, and there was no established pattern to which it had to conform. Just as there are no birth stories in Mark, so also the author could have ended his Gospel with the passion narrative if he had so wished, particularly in view of the theological emphasis which runs through the Gospel. When D. E. Nineham comes to the words of the centurion in his commentary, he notes, ‘In a very real sense this verse rounds off not only the crucifixion narrative but the whole Gospel.’¹²

Did Mark have it in mind as he was writing his Gospel that he would end with the tomb story? This is a question which cannot easily be settled one way or the other. We can certainly say that his real climax is in the Passion narrative, for the tomb pericope which now ends the Gospel has little of the Easter joy and human interest that are to be found in John’s tomb story. Indeed, if our associations with the tomb tradition had not already been well and truly colored by the latter, this short and abrupt narrative in Mark may have left us with no more than an unsettling feeling. The story does not continue the magnificent theme of cross-bearing that dominates the Gospel, nor does it express the Easter faith. As it stands it comes near to being an anti-climax, and is saved from this only by the words of the unknown man, usually taken to be an angel (and this, incidentally, is the most difficult part of the story to accept as historical). It reads, not as a joyful climax, but as an epilogue, or even more as an appendix, added perhaps to satisfy questions being asked by the curious.

We have seriously to reckon with the possibility that the author of this first written Gospel had no intention of ending it with the tomb pericope which is now to be found there, firstly because, in several respects, it is not integrally related to the rest of the Gospel, and secondly, because this ‘martyr Gospel’ sees the cross as its chief theme, and presents the death of Jesus on the cross as sufficient in itself to create faith, in that it brings forth a confession from the lips of a Gentile. In other words, it is possible that the tomb story was added later, either by the same author or by someone else, and that it formed an appendix. From a literary point of view this is just what it appears to be.

It is worthwhile noting that in the later Gospels these features are not so noticeable. There the resurrection narratives do form a fitting climax to the whole Gospel in each case, and they do express the surprise and joy of the Easter faith. In all three cases the empty tomb story is brought into closer relationship with the disciples. Thus the sharp change between Mark’s tomb pericope and the rest of the Gospel is much less marked, and while the link between it and the Passion narrative remains almost the same in Matthew, it no longer obtrudes in Luke and has disappeared altogether in John, where Passion narrative and tomb story have finally become welded into a continuous narrative.¹³

The suggestion that the Gospel of Mark has received the addition of an appendix not originally intended need cause no surprise, for in the ancient world it was not at all uncommon for such a thing to happen to a book. We know that later material was in fact added after Mark 16:8, probably early in the second century, and for most of Christian history this was accepted as coming from the original author. Many regard the last chapter of John as being a later addition to the Gospel, which already has a natural ending in John 20:30-1. In the books of the Old Testament there are many examples of this same phenomenon. Such an addition could be made by the author himself, as a kind of afterthought, or it could just as easily be made by someone who was copying it or editing it for wider distribution.

If this supposition is anywhere near the truth, something further yet emerges. Once the tomb pericope is separated from the rest of the Gospel it is seen that it could not have existed in this form as an independent tradition, for the mention of the women with which it begins has had to take the form it does in order to link what follows with the preceding Passion story. And yet the references to the women who were ‘watching from a distance’ and who ‘saw where he was laid’, are essential premises for the later discovery narrative.

Let us set down three observations: (a) Mark 15:40-16:8 possesses several features which divide it so sharply from the Passion narrative that it could hardly have been the natural continuation of that in the stage of oral tradition, (b) this pericope, however, could not have existed in its present form as an independent tradition, (c) the pericope itself falls naturally into two parts, the first of which can exist as an independent story, but the second of which cannot, for it depends upon the first. These conditions find a satisfactory explanation in supposing that the Gospel was originally intended to end with the words of the centurion. Then someone, possibly even the original author, added the burial story (vv. 42-6). Subsequently to this, a second appendix, concerning the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, was added, but in such a way as not to intrude into either the Passion narrative or the burial story. We have already noted what Goguel called the ‘clumsiness’ with which this later step was taken. The links, which state that the women were observers from a distance at both the crucifixion and the burial, appear to be editorial additions made by a literary editor, rather than part of an original narrative from oral tradition.

We have already noted that there are reasons for thinking that the burial story had been in circulation in oral tradition for some time, as it exhibits signs of having passed through a transformation. But when did the discovery story originate? Some have maintained that Mark actually created the story of the empty tomb.¹⁴ Since it is really dependent for its meaning and significance upon the burial story to which it is now linked, but which appears to have been once complete in itself, it probably never existed separately, at least not in the form of words in which it is now expressed. This suggests that the empty tomb story originated no earlier than the time when Mark’s Gospel was being completed.

Such a suggestion receives some confirmation in the last words of Mark 16:8. Ever since it was realized that the earliest extant manuscripts do not take us beyond this verse, there has been considerable discussion about the end of Mark’s Gospel, for the words ‘and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid’, seem an exceedingly weak and rather strange way in which to draw the Gospel to a conclusion. It has been commonly supposed that the original end has been lost, or suppressed, or alternatively that for some reason the original author never succeeded in finishing his Gospel. A more likely explanation was first put forward by Wellhausen,¹⁵ and it has been widely adopted.¹⁶ This states that the story of the discovery of the empty tomb ends with these strange words in order to explain to readers why, as late as the mid-first century, they had never heard of this story before. The author of this appendix would be aware that readers would be genuinely puzzled by the sudden appearance of what seemed to be an important piece of evidence, and so he implied that it had never come out into the open before because for a long time the women who witnessed it were so afraid that they said nothing to anyone.¹⁷ This explanation of these otherwise strange words is even more convincing if this verse is seen, not as the original author’s conclusion of the whole Gospel, but as the end of an appendix added to the Gospel.

There was yet a further addition to be made. The only reference to an appearance of the risen Christ to be found in the tomb story is in Mark 16:7, ‘But go and give this message to his disciples and Peter: "He is going on before you into Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you."’ This seems to point back to Mark 14:28, ‘But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.’ It has been pointed out by many that both of these verses are strangers in their respective contexts, for in each case the words that follow more naturally point back, not to these verses, but to the words which precede them.¹⁸ We may further note that both Mark 14:28, 16:7 are repeated by Matthew (26:32, 28:7) but in contrast with Mark’s Gospel, Matthew reports that the women immediately ‘ran to tell the disciples’. Luke, on the other hand, does not repeat the earlier verse, and when in the tomb story he comes to the second verse, he changes the content of what the women are told to ‘Remember what he told you. . .’ But along with Matthew, Luke narrates that ‘returning from the tomb, they reported all this to the Eleven and all the others’. Both Matthew and Luke therefore reject the implication in the present arrangement of the Marcan story that the women disobeyed the command of the unknown messenger in keeping silent about the message they were instructed to tell the disciples and Peter. But this implication was only unwittingly introduced into Mark, if and when the addition of 16:7 was made. Originally the silence of the women did not refer to the instruction given to them, but to the discovery of the empty tomb and the announcement of the messenger that Jesus was risen.¹⁹

We can summarize the discussion up to this point by saying that the literary form of Mark’s tomb pericope shows definite signs of having developed in three stages, consisting of two appendices with one third final addition (leaving aside the fact that in the second century a still further addition of Mark 16:9 -- 20 was made) and that because of this, it may not have been part of the author’s original plan as he set out to write his Gospel.

At this point, however, it must be clearly stated that most New Testament scholars still accept the tomb pericope as part of the oral tradition already in circulation at the time Mark wrote his Gospel. Many of these assume it to be a legend that developed in the later apostolic period. B. W. Bacon wrote: ‘The present narrative is as certainly earlier than the elaborations of Matthew, Luke and John, as it is certainly later than the series of visions in Cor. 15:3-8 which are to Paul the proof of the living and glorified Christ. Manifestly constructed as it is only for insertion between the Crucifixion and a modified form of the appearance to Peter in Galilee, it has led ultimately by gradual stages . . . to the well-nigh complete suppression of the Apostles’ experiences in Galilee in favor of the women’s in Jerusalem.’²⁰

There are other scholars who defend the substantial historicity of the tomb pericope, and since we must reckon with this possibility, we now turn from the literary form of the story to its content to see in what way the latter may point to historical reliability rather than to legend. We must allow for the fact that both the burial story and the discovery story are very short and contain very few details. Some of the elements we may have expected to find there are absent, it may be argued, simply because of brevity. Nevertheless it is really details of this kind that one is justified in looking for if the story is to have the ring of truth. Some of these very points seem to have caught the attention of Matthew and Luke, who have adjusted their versions accordingly.

First of all, how much time was there for the burial by Joseph, between the death of Jesus on the cross and the sunset at which the sabbath began, and before which the burial should be completed? It would appear to be about three hours at the most, since the Passion narrative states that Jesus ‘gave a loud cry and died’ at ‘three in the afternoon’. But the Marcan story of Joseph begins by saying that the evening had already come, the narrator here betraying no awareness that he has in fact left no time at all in which the burial could take place. Matthew, perhaps aware of this difficulty, has omitted the word ‘already’, making it possible for the words to mean, ‘while evening was coming’, and both Luke and John have understandably omitted the whole of this time reference which reduced the available time to nil, and instead have ended their versions of the burial by saying that the sabbath was then about to begin.

Now even if the full three hours had been available, there was still none too much time, seeing that it involved obtaining official permission from Pilate and this in turn entailed the summoning of the centurion. There was probably time for the ‘ritual burial’ referred to above, but was there time for an ‘honorable burial’, which involved Joseph in going to buy a linen shroud? Once again the later Evangelists appear to be more conscious of the shortness of time available and they omit all references to the summoning of the centurion and to the actual purchase of a linen shroud.

But was this a task which could be performed by one man on his own? The Marcan version presents it as if it was. A little thought makes one realize that it would have been very difficult, perhaps well-nigh impossible, for one man to carry the body the distance required, and to roll the large round stone against the entrance. One of the reasons why the stone was so large was to prevent unlawful entry. This is a fact that the narrator of the discovery story was certainly aware of when he knew that not even several women could have rolled it away. It could be said that Joseph employed servants, who, as such, did not warrant any mention in the story. Nevertheless, the mention of them would have added a little more verisimilitude to the story and it may have been awareness of this difficulty which caused John to mention that Joseph was assisted by Nicodemus.

There are already then in the burial story some difficulties standing in the way of its historicity. Let us now turn to the discovery story. We start with two aspects which appear historically improbable even to von Campenhausen, as he attempts to defend the historicity of the empty tomb. He writes, ‘The desire to anoint, "on the third day", a dead body already buried and wrapped in linen cloths, is, however it be explained, not in accordance with any custom known to us, and in itself unreasonable in view of the Palestine climate. Furthermore, the assertion that the women only realized when they were already on the way that they would need help to roll away the stone and gain access to the tomb implies a degree of thoughtlessness quite out of the ordinary. Accordingly, the later evangelists all made changes in this place, and tried to help out with omissions, new interpretations or broader rational explanations.’²¹

Matthew Omits all reference to the anointing and says the women came ‘to look at the grave’. In John the anointing is transferred to the burial story, where it was now done by Joseph and Nicodemus, while Mary simply came to the tomb for an unspecified reason. All three later evangelists seem to have recognized how impractical it would have been for the women to continue to the tomb once the problem of the stone occurred to them, and they omit this element in the story. It was probably the intention of the Marcan narrator to prepare the reader so that he would appreciate more fully the miracle of the opened, and hence emptied, tomb, and to forestall the counter-explanation that it was simply due to theft.

Von Campenhausen recognizes that the Marcan narrative ‘has, to some extent, an undoubtedly legendary character,’²² and he is prepared to dispense with the form of the young man whom he, like most, takes to be an angel. Then he looks for an historical core and finds it in the names of the women and their discovery that the tomb was empty. But once the non-naturalistic elements are removed, i.e. the removal of the stone, and the presence and words of the messenger, it is difficult, as C. F. Evans points out, ‘to see what historical nucleus would be left’,²³ for ‘the crux of the story involves the legendary element of the angel’.²⁴ The whole point of the story is not that the tomb was found empty, which by itself said nothing at all, but that it was empty because Jesus had risen, the interpretation proclaimed by the unknown messenger, and without which the significance of the story disappears. If the historicity of the story is to be defended, so also must be the women’s witness to the unknown man and his words, but this takes one further than von Campenhausen is evidently prepared to go.

Von Campenhausen believes that if the story were simply a legend ‘it would not have specified three women (who, by Jewish law, were not competent to testify) as the decisive witnesses’²⁵ and he is supported at this point by H. H. Rex who claimed that ‘This is in itself a point in favor of the authenticity of the tradition.’²⁶ The weakness in this argument is that the women are not being appealed to as witnesses to the resurrection in any case. It is true that in the later Gospels the empty tomb story assumes an apologetic role in the proclamation of the Easter faith but that is not its function here since the last we hear of the women is that they told no one. If the story had an historical foundation, and if the women had been regarded as witnesses to something vital, they would have found a place in the Pauline tradition.

In this earliest form of the discovery story, the women, the chief human characters though they be, may be said to be incidental to the story. The narrator is using them as the recipients of the divine message so that the reader of the story may hear the vital message, viz, that Jesus is risen. Thus C. F. Evans writes, ‘The empty tomb interprets the message of the resurrection, not vice versa. . . . Thus in Mark, the visit to the tomb is the means by which the resurrection itself is declared, and not a prelude to, or presupposition of, appearances of the risen Lord to follow. It is only when in the other Gospels it lies side by side with such appearances, with which awkward connections have then to be made, that it takes on the note of apologetic.’²⁷

We may now start to draw together the threads of this examination of the origin and historicity of the tomb story. Both the literary form and the actual content of the earliest version, viz, the Marcan, show not only that it definitely contains some legendary elements, but that it is unlikely to have had any historical foundation at all. It appears to have developed in several stages and may have been added to the Gospel in the form of appendices. This means that though the burial story may have been known somewhat earlier, the discovery story originated about the same time as the composition of Mark’s Gospel. This then would account for Paul’s silence about the empty tomb, since if it had been historical he should have known about it no later than his conference with Peter and the other apostles.

The discovery story probably reflects the changing understanding of the nature of the resurrection which can be traced in the first century. We have seen that Paul denied that resurrection should be thought of in terms of flesh and blood, but by the end of the century this is exactly how it was conceived, and the materialistic descriptions of the risen Jesus were being used to counter certain known trends, which were then tending to remove even the historical Jesus from the material world of flesh and blood.

At some point in this development, which coincided approximately with the writing of Mark’s Gospel, it came to be assumed that the resurrection of Jesus necessarily implied an empty tomb. At such a point a writer would have no reason for believing that he was misleading his readers if he referred to the resurrection within the context of a story which seemed to him to be a necessary corollary of the Easter event. This is exactly how midrashic²⁸ stories arose, and they were necessarily legendary. Moreover, since it is likely that none of the original Apostles was still living, there was no-one to raise authoritative objections.

The use of the women as the characters and the mention of the anointing of the body may be elements suggested to the author of this legend by the story in Mark 14:3-9, in which an unknown woman, and the only woman ‘disciple’ mentioned elsewhere in Mark’s Gospel, anointed the feet of Jesus with costly perfume.

This story in itself shows evidence of development because the universal Christian mission referred to in v. 9 is post-Pauline. But our immediate concern is with the words, ‘she is beforehand with anointing my body for burial’. D. E. Nineham comments, ‘after Jesus’ death no opportunity ever presented itself for the proper anointing of his corpse a circumstance which apparently caused considerable distress to his intimate friends and disciples -- and to some of those who knew of this incident it came to appear as "a kind of anticipatory rectification of the omission". In time this interpretation of it was attributed to Jesus himself.’²⁹

Consequently, if this concern to rectify the omission of an honorable burial helped to shape the form of this incident, and also the burial story, as we have seen above, it is understandable if it should have provided the basis for a legend about the tomb. This story in Mark 14 may have been not only the stimulus for the discovery story, but the fact of its own development adds a little further support to the view that the women’s attempt to anoint the body, resulting in the unexpected discovery, was a later development. Some decades later, the Fourth Gospel, by advancing the anointing to the burial story, succeeded in reporting that everything possible had been done to perform the customary rites for the dead body of Jesus.

Once the empty tomb story began to circulate, it is only natural that it would be seized upon for its apologetic value, and this is exactly the concern which became more prominent in the later Gospels. But in Mark the discovery has not yet reached that status. It does not bring to the women any of the joy of the Easter faith. The women simply fade out of the story leaving the readers to hear for themselves the words of the unknown interpreter, ‘He is risen.’

From the time this story appeared at the end of a Gospel, the first Gospel, it set the pattern for all later Gospels, which not only presented the story of the empty tomb in more developed forms, but also added further resurrection stories. The Fourth Gospel had little choice but to follow this pattern too, even though it could be said that John the Evangelist had developed such a view of Christ and the resurrection that resurrection narratives were really superfluous. In that Gospel, already in his ministry, Jesus could say of himself, ‘I am the Resurrection’, while in his death on the cross Christ was so glorified and ‘lifted up’ that C. H. Dodd can comment, ‘To this the resurrection can add nothing; for the spiritual reality of resurrection is already given in the act of self-oblation.’³⁰

For reasons similar to, and including some of, those offered above, many scholars would today agree with C. F. Evans when he writes, ‘attempts to establish an historical kernel of the empty tomb story are not very convincing’.³¹ On the contrary, the literary form and content of the earliest known version of this story, along with the additions to it to be observed in the later Gospels, present just the phenomena we would expect if a legend were to arise shortly after the death of Paul (and any other surviving apostles), and from a simple, relatively colorless beginning, to receive further elaborations which added verisimilitude, human interest and, above all, the joy of the Easter faith.

This now concludes our discussion of the arguments usually advanced in order to support the traditional view of the raising of Jesus as ‘bodily resurrection’. We find that the age-long tradition of the ‘events’ of Easter day, so old that it was caught up in the New Testament itself, can no longer be defended as an historical description of the resurrection of Jesus. Hugh Anderson in his excellent survey of the state of New Testament studies today speaks of ‘the almost complete failure of historical criticism to authenticate and establish for us the "history" of Easter’.³²

Notes:

I. See W. Marxsen, The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, p. 25.

2. Evans, op. cit., p. 120.

3. B. H. Branscomb, The Gospel of Mark, p. 313. See also D. F. Nineham, The Gospel of Saint Mark, pp. 449-53.

4. In the latest Gospel-John-the first mention of the women, including Mary Magdalene, is made at the foot of the cross, before Jesus died. The only other reference to Mary Magdalene is in Luke 8:2. There are no grounds for identifying Mary Magdalene with the woman who broke the jar of ointment (Mark 14:3-9), the only other woman referred to in Mark’s Gospel. This latter woman is identified with Mary, the sister of Martha, in John 11:2.

5. op. cit., p. 37.

6. The apocryphal Gospel of Peter reports Herod as saying, when Joseph’s request is referred to him, ‘Brother Pilate, even if none had begged for him, we should have buried him, since also the sabbath dawns; for it is written in the law that the sun should not set upon one that has been slain.’

7. op. cit., p. 31.

8. op. cit., p. 33.

9. Attempts have been made to locate it, but they depend upon a good deal of speculation.

10. Gen. 50:1-14.

11. D. E. Nineham, op. cit., p. 33.

12. op. cit., p.431. B. W. Bacon also recognized this verse as a culmination. ‘What now follows after 15:39 was added, together with the story now suppressed but echoed still in Jn. 21, Lk. 5;4-8, and Ev. Petri, of the appearance to Peter and the other disciples.’ The Beginnings of Gospel Story, p. 227.

13. Compare carefully Mark 15:39-42, Matt. 27:54-7, Luke 23:47-50, John 1925-38.

14. Thus Neill Q. Hamilton, ‘Resurrection Tradition and the Composition of Mark’, J.B.L., Vol. LXXXIV, pp. 415-21.

15. Das Evangelium Marci, 1902.

16. e.g. V. Taylor, H. Grass, G. Bornkamm.

7. There is possibly a similar apologetic motive present in Luke 2:19, 51.

18. See Vincent Taylor, The Gospel According to St Mark, pp. 549, 608. In the latter reference the support of Wellhausen, Meyer, Bultmann, Kiostermann and Creed is cited for the secondary nature of Mark 16:7. See also D. E. Nineham, op. cit., pp. 388, 445-7, where he states, ‘Most commentators think the verse was inserted into the tradition by St Mark.’

19. Vincent Taylor, op. cit., p. 6o8, ‘There is then no longer any need to ask why the message to the disciples and to Peter was not delivered, while the reference to the silence of the women is apologetic. Mark seeks to explain why the story was not known earlier.’

20. The Beginnings of Gospel Story, p. 230.

21. op. cit., p. 58.

22. op. cit., p. 75.

23. op. cit., p. 76.

24. ibid., p. 77.

25. Op. Cit., p. 75.

26. Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? p. 19.

27. op. cit., p. 78.

28. See Chapter 9 for an explanation of midrash.

29. op. cit., p. 372.

30. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 441-2.

31. op. cit., p. 76.

32. Jesus and Christian Origins, p. 189.

It is common for people to say that there is much about the resurrection of Jesus that they do not profess to understand, but that the evidence makes it clear that something of a unique and miraculous order occurred, which had the effect of leaving the tomb of Jesus empty, and of convincing the disciples that Jesus was alive in some real sense. However unexpected, strange and bizarre a reported event may appear to us to be, the evidence for it must be given a fair hearing and examination before it can be dismissed as unhistorical.

For those who have defended the traditional interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus as an historical event involving the raising and removal of a physical body, that which has carried most weight is simply the fact that, on a plain reading of the New Testament, the Bible itself seems to give unqualified support to such a view, in some places if not in all. During the long period when the Bible was regarded as being historically accurate at all points and literally inerrant, this argument so clinched the matter that there was nothing more to be said. It was only when this rigid view of scripture came to be questioned, and eventually abandoned by most, that men were free to examine the historicity of the many biblical narratives with the tools of historical method. From this point onwards, it was no longer sufficient simply to say, ‘The Bible says . . .’ in order to win assent.

Nowadays even the most conservative defenders of the ‘bodily resurrection’ of Jesus do not hesitate to support their case by arguments resting on an historical or literary basis. The debate among Christians about the meaning and nature of the resurrection of Jesus has moved from the appeal to inerrant scripture, which was regarded by most until a century ago as being quite sufficient, to the arena where the tools of historical and literary criticism are regarded as legitimate.

The next important line of defense consists in the claim that the New Testament has preserved records of such historical value that their testimony to the ‘bodily resurrection’ establishes it beyond all reasonable doubt as an historical event. Thus E. M. Blaiklock, a classical scholar, claims, ‘The trial and death of Jesus are better documented than most other events in ancient history. The events which follow the trial and death can similarly be submitted to the historian’s scrutiny.’¹

When an historian is trying to uncover the facts about some past event, he looks for written material contemporary with the event, especially, if possible, for material which has been written by eye-witnesses of the event. Even an eye-witness may not be wholly reliable, but other things being equal, his word will always carry more conviction than that of a person who is reporting second-hand something which he has been told by others, concerning an event which happened at another place or at an earlier time.

To what extent do the four Gospels meet these requirements, for it is largely upon them that the historical case for the ‘bodily resurrection’ depends? Until last century it was commonly thought that the first and last Gospels were written by the apostles Matthew and John, respectively, and that the second Gospel had been written on the basis of personal recollections which Mark had received from the apostle Peter. This meant that three of the Gospels were written by (or directly dependent upon) men who were eye-witnesses of what they recorded. No historical evidence could be stronger than that, and if these traditions of authorship could be upheld today, they would undoubtedly constitute a very strong case for the traditional view. Those who maintain that the historical evidence for the ‘bodily resurrection’ is strong, usually rely heavily on the traditional view of Gospel authorship.

But these traditions of authorship can be traced no further back than the second century AD. A large number of leading New Testament scholars have now rejected these traditions as unhistorical, leaving us with two conclusions: the first, that none of the Gospels was written by an eye-witness of the events described in it, and the second, that the earliest Gospel, that of Mark, was written thirty-five years or more after the death of Jesus, and the other three Gospels were written nearly sixty years or more after the same point.

Many have been ready to accept this consensus of scholarly opinion on the date and authorship of the four Gospels, but have not realized the shattering implications of this concerning the status of the empty tomb story as historical evidence. C. F. Evans writes, ‘when also it was shown that Mark was the earliest of the Gospels, and that Matthew and Luke had written theirs by reference to his, then the situation was vastly changed. At the heart of the resurrection tradition appeared a vacuum, the nature and meaning of which scholars continue to debate.’²

The long gap between the death of Jesus and the writing of our present records means that we have to reckon with the probability that the traditions about Jesus and his resurrection developed and expanded during the period of oral tradition. Goguel points out that ‘Among the stories to be found in the gospel tradition those concerning the resurrection show the greatest diversity in form and it may therefore be assumed that they have changed the most in the course of development.’³

The inconsistencies and contradictions which exist within the Gospel resurrection narratives have long been known. But so long as the Bible was thought to be inerrant, it was assumed that these contradictions were only apparent. They were usually treated as pieces of a jig-saw puzzle which must be ingeniously fitted together to form one full and more complete narrative. It is now frankly recognized that ‘it is not simply difficult to harmonize these traditions, but quite impossible’.⁴ Each of the resurrection stories as presently told is complete in itself and is not intended to be added to, or compared with another. Goguel writes, ‘The stories as we have them compel us to admit that they were diverse and incapable of being reduced to a uniform pattern from a very early time.’⁵

In spite of the diversity in the resurrection narratives there is one important common theme which C. F. Evans draws to our attention when he says, ‘The one element which the traditions, in all their variety, have in common is that the appearance of the risen Lord issued in an explicit command to evangelize the world, yet the early decades of the history of the church, in so far as they are known to us, make it difficult to suppose that the apostles were aware of any such command.’⁶ Since Paul believed he was pioneering a new missionary policy when he decided to take the Gospel to the Gentiles, it seems either that the conviction that the church’s mission was to the whole world was read back into the resurrection narratives⁷ or, more likely, that some at least of the resurrection narratives originated and were developed in the post-Pauline period.

When at last it became fashionable to admit that there are irreconcilable contradictions in the four versions of the empty tomb story, this fact was used by many as a popular argument in favor of their essential reliability. The argument goes something like this:

It is sometimes added, almost with a note of triumph, that if the four Gospels had said exactly the same, then we would have had real reason to suspect that there had been collusion.

This argument has quite an appeal at first until it is realized that the parallel is a false one. In the first place, as we have seen, the four evangelists were not themselves eye-witnesses, but writers depending upon the traditions received from others. But what is even more striking in this particular case is that, unlike the four witnesses giving their independent testimony, the four Evangelists were not independent. It is generally agreed now that both Matthew and Luke had access to a copy of Mark’s Gospel as they wrote, and that they copied various sections almost unchanged from Mark and adapted others. In the case of the empty tomb story, it can be shown with some degree of probability that Matthew and Luke have used Mark’s story as the basis of their own, and have elaborated it at different points in their own way. Certainly there is more difference between these three and John’s account (and this incidentally greatly increases the degree of contradiction) but it is possible, and perhaps even likely, that John was familiar with one or more of the earlier Gospels, or at least with oral tradition which had been initiated or influenced by them.⁸

The argument, as outlined above, therefore collapses and we are left with the striking fact that the later the Gospel the more elaborate becomes the story of the empty tomb,⁹ a phenomenon which is perfectly consistent with a developing and expanding tradition, but one which is inconsistent with eye-witness accounts, where one expects more detail and more reliability the nearer one is in time to the event being described. We may well conclude with C. F. Evans that ‘It is not natural confusion but rather the lack of it, and the influence of rational reflection and apologetic, which have given rise to the contradictions.’¹⁰

Arising out of the Gospel traditions there is another common and important argument which runs like this. Jewish authorities tried to stamp out the rapidly growing Christian movement from the beginning. Since Christians were proclaiming that Jesus was risen from the dead, what better way of confounding them could there be than to open the tomb of Jesus, produce the dead body and show with convincing evidence that he had not risen? Why did they not do so? It is unthinkable that the disciples stole the dead body of Jesus and hid it before making their proclamation, for their subsequent behavior, leading sometimes to martyrdom, was simply inconsistent with a faith founded on a known deception. Since it was in the interests neither of the Jews nor of the Christians to have been responsible for removing the dead body of Jesus illicitly, the conclusion to be drawn is that the Jews were unable to produce the body of Jesus simply because they, too, knew the tomb of Jesus to be empty. And the tomb was empty for no other reason than that Jesus had risen bodily to new life and departed.

The fallacy in this argument stems from two hidden premises which have become so much part and parcel of Christian tradition that they are usually assumed at the outset, and remain unexamined even by those who are, in other ways, trying to examine the Gospel evidence on historical grounds. If they can be substantiated, this argument is a very important one, but if not, the argument is rendered invalid. The two premises are that it was common knowledge to both Jew and Christian where the body of Jesus had been buried, and that the resurrection of Jesus was being publicly proclaimed in Jerusalem within a few days after the crucifixion.

We shall look at the latter first. There was certainly an interval between the death of Jesus and the public proclamation that Jesus was risen from the dead. We do not know how long it was. Even the Acts of the Apostles, probably written more than sixty years later, recognizes the gap to have been seven weeks, placing the first public proclamation of the resurrection on the day of Pentecost. Since this Lucan chronology is not confirmed elsewhere in the New Testament, it is by no means certain, and the interval of time may well have been longer, for it is unlikely that later tradition would lengthen the gap rather than shorten it. This means that even if the whereabouts of the tomb of Jesus has been known to the Jews, the gap of seven weeks, and perhaps even longer, was such that there would have been little point in trying to disprove the resurrection claim by this method, for the corpse, if there, would no longer have been in an identifiable state. By the weakness in this premise alone, the argument loses most of its forcefulness. ¹¹

Goguel concludes, ‘If no one thought of making an enquiry about the empty tomb, it can only have been because discussions were raised at such time and place as made enquiry impossible. Either those who affirmed that the tomb was empty lived so far away from Jerusalem or such a long time after the burial of Jesus that their statement could not be verified or else no verification was ever possible because the tomb of Jesus could not be identified. This last seems to be the hypothesis which must be retained.’¹²

This brings us back to the first and more important premise stated above. Was it common knowledge to both Jew and Christian where the body of Jesus had been buried? Christian tradition has long thought so. It is just here that it is all too easy to beg the question by assuming the historicity of the burial story in order to prove the historicity of the empty tomb. But the burial story is simply the first half of the empty tomb story, for there cannot be an empty tomb of any significance until there is first of all a full one. The question of origin and historicity of this whole story is so important that we must devote the following chapter to it. We shall here take up one or two preliminary points about the historicity of the burial story.

It is interesting to note that Hans von Campenhausen, one of today’s important defenders of the historicity of the empty tomb, twice emphatically affirms the historicity of the burial story but without much supporting evidence. ‘Of course’, he says, ‘it is possible . . . to hold the account of Jesus’s burial to be unhistorical. This, however, in view of the mention of Joseph by name, is quite unwarranted.’¹³ Later he writes, ‘The name of Joseph of Arimathea and, with it, the account of the burial of Jesus must be historical; they cannot be simply discarded.’¹⁴

It is not at all obvious why the mention of a proper name makes the story historical. Stories such as those in the books of Ruth, Esther, Judith, which are nowadays taken as fictional rather than historical, use not only plenty of proper names, but often supply unnecessarily exact details. The very facts that Joseph of Arimathea is never referred to elsewhere, and played no part that we know of in the early church, and that Arimathea is not known from any other source as a place name, actually point to fiction rather than to history.

D. E. Nineham points out that ‘most commentators accept at any rate the basic facts of the story, arguing that Christians would have been unlikely to invent a tradition in which Jesus receives hurried burial from a pious Jew, and his own followers have no part in the proceedings’¹⁵ and then goes on to add that ‘scholarly opinion has perhaps been a little inclined to overlook the possible influence of the Old Testament on the story’.¹⁶

Once we take into account the capacity of the ancient Jewish mind to create a story as a way of expounding and showing the relevance of a Biblical text (this practice will be described in Chapter 9), it is not at all difficult to see how the story of Joseph of Arimathea could have been partly shaped by Isaiah 53:9, ‘And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death,’ found in the famous chapter on the suffering servant, which was certainly interpreted by the early Christians as a prophecy of the death of Jesus. This verse probably did not originate the story, however, for it is more likely that the origin of the story was a little more complex, as the next chapter will show.

If the burial story were historical, and it consequently showed that the tomb from which Jesus rose was identifiable, we would expect some further interest to have been taken in it by the early church. On the contrary, there is no hint that a particular tomb received any special attention during the years when Jerusalem was the headquarters for the young Christian church. The earliest known search for the particular tomb takes us no further back than the beginning of the fourth century. G. W. Lampe notes, ‘Even assuming that Jesus’ grave was known, which is by no means certain, it seems very possible that neither party was interested in it, or regarded the truth of Easter as dependent on it, until long after the event.’¹⁷ We shall now leave further discussion of the historicity of the tomb story until the next chapter. We have opened up the question sufficiently to show that there is a very real possibility that the whereabouts of the burial place of Jesus was not known when his resurrection first began to be proclaimed, and that unless this can be established as an historical fact, that argument for the ‘bodily resurrection’ which we have been considering remains invalid.

We must now turn to the arguments based on the testimony of the apostle Paul. Here we are on much firmer ground than in the case of the Gospel narratives, for not only is it the earliest written testimony to the resurrection (written about twenty to twenty-five years after the death of Jesus), but it is first-hand testimony, and most probably the ‘only written testimony to come from one who could claim to be himself an "eye-witness" of the resurrection’.¹⁸ Admittedly Paul, on his own admission, was in a very unusual category. He had not been one of the twelve disciples and, so far as we know, he had never met Jesus during the days of his public ministry. But he was a first-hand witness to the resurrection of Jesus in that it was his encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus which brought about his conversion. Moreover, he testifies that he went ‘up to Jerusalem to get to know Cephas’ and ‘stayed with him for a fortnight’ and also saw James the Lord’s brother (Gal. I :16-19). Consequently he was well acquainted with the earliest witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus, and constitutes our chief historical link with them.

But while Paul’s testimony is, historically speaking, of first-class value, when it comes to the question of the story of the empty tomb and the physical nature of the resurrection, his words, far from bringing firm confirmation of the ‘bodily resurrection’, are open to a variety of interpretations, and, on the whole, point to quite a different view of resurrection. We shall look first at the important passage in Corinthians 15:3-8.

It is commonly recognized that Paul is here quoting a credal formula, which consequently antedates his letter by some years. Many have seen in the phrases ‘that he was buried’ and ‘that he was raised to life on the third day’ clear confirmation that Paul knew the whole of the tomb story, even though he did not appeal to the discovery of the empty tomb as evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. But such an interpretation is by no means the only one.

Marxsen and Wilckens are both adamant that the phrase ‘that he was buried’ ‘belongs in the context of the statement concerning his death: Jesus died and was buried, the fact of his dying is final’.¹⁹ This still leaves open the possibility that those who produced the original formula may have known certain traditions about the grave of Jesus. But if Wilckens is right in saying that ‘Paul himself obviously has no concrete knowledge about Jesus’ grave, nor of the finding of the empty tomb’,²⁰ then any such traditions could hardly have been historical, for if so, Paul would certainly have learned of them when he conferred with Peter. Hans von Campenhausen also agrees that ‘this expression may simply be used to underline the reality and apparent finality of the death itself, and say nothing beyond this’.²¹ We may take the reference to the burial in this early formula to mean simply that there was no doubt about the death of Jesus, a necessary fact to establish if the wonder of the resurrection was to be fully appreciated.

Now we come to the phrase ‘on the third day’. It is often argued very strongly that this can be nothing else than a specific reference to the empty tomb story. There is a fundamental weakness in this claim. The formula ‘on the third day’ refers neither to the time of the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, nor to the time of the first appearances, but to the resurrection itself. This is the very event which no New Testament narrative even attempts either to describe or to date.

We must further note that the phrase ‘on the third day’ is qualified by the words ‘according to the scriptures’, which thus specifically direct our attention back to the Old Testament, rather than to any apostolic tradition about an empty grave. We do not know for certain what Old Testament passage was here intended, but there are some grounds for supposing that it was Hosea 6:2, ‘after two days he will revive us, on the third day he will restore us, that in his presence we may live.’ We shall show in later chapters the role this verse may have played in the developing tradition of the resurrection.

In this chapter we are simply showing that the use of the term ‘on the third day’ does not necessarily mean that Paul was familiar with the account of the empty tomb, and that some scholars feel quite certain that he was not. G. W. H. Lampe says of this important passage, ‘Had he known that the tomb was found empty it seems inconceivable that he should not have adduced this here as a telling piece of objective evidence.’²²

It is probable that the term ‘on the third day’ had an origin that was both older and more complex than the empty tomb story, and later chapters will attempt to throw some light on this. In the earliest Christian traditions, ‘on the third day’ seems to have been used synonymously with ‘after three days’, as the use of them both in Matthew 27:63-4 seems to illustrate. But whereas the first form could be held to be consistent with the empty tomb story, the second cannot. It is significant that the earliest Gospel, Mark, uses the term ‘after three days’ consistently in the prediction passages, but where these are quoted in Matthew or Luke the phrase has been changed to ‘on the third day’.²³ The change can be explained by saying that between the writing of the first and the later Gospels the story of the empty tomb had become more widely known, and the phrase ‘after three days’, as a dating of the resurrection event, fell out of use.

Because the term ‘on the third day’ qualified when ‘he was raised to life’, and is in turn qualified by ‘according to the scriptures’, we are justified in looking elsewhere than the discovery of the empty tomb for its meaning. C. F. Evans concludes, ‘But, since the resurrection is represented as the hidden act of God himself, no date could be assigned to it, and no one could tell "when" it took place, as opposed to "when" the tomb was found empty or the Lord appeared to men. It would appear, therefore, that "on the third day" is not intended as a chronological but as a theological statement.’²⁴

What then did Paul believe he was affirming when he testified that Jesus had been raised from the dead? Some maintain that even if it cannot be shown conclusively that Paul knew of the empty tomb, his conviction that Jesus was risen would in any case have caused him to assume that the tomb was empty. Neville Clark writes, ‘It is a bodily resurrection that is in question. Any other kind of resurrection would indeed have been almost inconceivable for the Jew.’²⁵ Similarly, D. W. B. Robinson says of the early Christians, ‘it is scarcely conceivable that they concluded he had been raised from the dead without supposing that it was His body in the tomb which had been raised. There simply was no other concept of "resurrection" so far as we know. Modern writers who say they believe in the resurrection, while denying the empty tomb, are using the term "resurrection" in a novel sense of their own. The only kind of resurrection known to the apostolic faith was "the resurrection of the flesh". ²⁶

In later chapters we shall show, with extracts from ancient writings, that far from there being only one view of resurrection, there was in fact a remarkable diversity in the way in which this concept was understood. Further, it will be shown, this diversity continued to some degree among the early Christians and is present in the New Testament, and in spite of the fact that the more materialistic interpretation became dominant by the end of the first century, some diversity of thought continued into the following centuries.

But at this point it is sufficient only to point out that in the chapter of I Corinthians 15 itself, Paul actually discusses the nature of the general resurrection and attempts to answer the question, ‘With what kind of body do they come?’ When he draws such a very clear distinction between the physical body (of the here and now) and the spiritual body (of the resurrection) he is showing quite clearly that in his view resurrection is emphatically not ‘the resurrection of the flesh’. Indeed he goes so far as to say that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’.

Paul does not hesitate to affirm the common Old Testament belief that man’s present body of flesh, being made from the dust of the earth, is destined to return to the earth, for in this life ‘we have worn the likeness of the man made of dust’. For Paul the spiritual resurrection body is related to the body of dust which perishes, but is not to be identified with it, and this is well illustrated by his simile of the seed, which is placed in the ground to die in order that the new life may shoot forth. There is thus in Paul’s thought never any possibility of confusing resurrection with resuscitation, as there is in the Gospel narrative of the empty tomb.

While Paul’s thought is by no means always clear, and perhaps from letter to letter not always exactly the same, it is nevertheless certain that his concept of resurrection can be clearly distinguished from that of the traditional ‘bodily resurrection’.²⁷ Paul does not speak in terms of the ‘same body’ but rather in terms of a new body, whether it be a ‘spiritual body’,²⁸ ‘the likeness of the heavenly man’,²⁹ ‘a house not made by human hands, eternal and in heaven’,³⁰ or, a ‘new body put on’ over the old.³¹ In using various figures of speech to distinguish between the present body of flesh and blood and the future resurrection body, he seems to be thinking of both bodies as the externals which clothe the spirit and without which we should ‘find ourselves naked’.³² But he freely confesses that the ‘earthly frame that houses us today’³³ may, like the seed, and man of dust, be destroyed, but the ‘heavenly habitation’, which the believer longs to put on, is already waiting in the heavenly realm, for it is eternal by nature.

Was Paul thinking in terms of this view of resurrection when he affirmed that Jesus was raised from the dead? We have no good reason to think that he was not, for in I Corinthians 15 he draws no distinction between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of the believer. On the contrary he speaks of the resurrection of Jesus as being ‘the first fruits’ of the resurrection to come. On the basis of what Paul writes in this chapter we are justified in saying that if someone had offered to show Paul where the decayed corpse of Jesus could be found, Paul would have shown no interest, for the dead body would have been to him no more than the dead seed, the man of dust, the earthly frame, and Paul himself had seen the risen Jesus in his glorified form, and that was all that mattered.

We may go further and say that if the resurrection of Jesus, and the resurrection hoped for by the Christian, are two different things, then Christian faith itself becomes vulnerable at quite another point. So G. W. H. Lampe writes: ‘if his body was raised physically from the grave and did not see corruption, or if his body was transformed after death into something different, in such a way that in itself it was annihilated, then he did not experience the whole of our human destiny. . . . For it is demonstrable that our bodies of flesh and blood will be dissolved, and that in whatever mode of existence we may be raised from death it will not be by either the resuscitation of this mortal body or its transformation.’³⁴

We have now looked at the arguments for ‘bodily resurrection’ based on appeal to the Gospel narratives and have shown that while they certainly support this view of resurrection, some to a lesser, some to a greater degree, the historicity of the narratives is seriously open to question. We have looked at the testimony of Paul, whose first-hand witness meets the historical tests, but we have found a view of resurrection which points away from the raising of a physical body to that of a spiritual body.

We shall now deal with one final argument. It has to do with the integrity of the first Christians. Defenders of the traditional view too often draw the conclusion that if the Gospel narratives of the resurrection are not historically true, then it makes the apostles and early Christians to be liars. All would agree that there is something faulty with any line of reasoning which has this as its necessary conclusion, because on all other grounds the witness recorded in the New Testament leaves us with an impression of men whom we have every reason to trust for their honesty and integrity.

New Testament scholarship presents us today with the probable conclusion that none of the New Testament was actually written by those who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus, except Paul, and we are not here concerned with his letters, but with the Gospel narratives. There was a long gap between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels as we now have them, and the process by which the Gospel resurrection narratives came into their present form is a very complex one, which we shall discuss in Chapter 11.

We need to appreciate the way in which a story grows and develops in the course of being frequently passed on. Unless a story is learned by heart and word by word, and most are not, it will contain some new incidental elements, new interpretations or emphases, each time it is personally recounted. This is no reflection at all on the integrity of the narrator.

Then we need to allow for the story-creating genius of the Jewish people, which included the first Christians. To put it baldly, a Jew told stories where a Greek might have philosophized in abstract words. Jesus told parables as the most effective way of describing the Kingdom of God. Those who read Esther and Judith, and those who heard the parables. were not as concerned to distinguish between history and fiction as we may be. Since this was the context in which stories of Jesus were being orally transmitted, we must allow for a good deal of remolding before they came into the possession of the Evangelists. We must even allow for the rise of wholly new stories, deliberately created as the most effective form of Christian proclamation and of describing Jesus as Lord and Messiah.

From the material available the Evangelists made their selection and each adapted it for the particular theme he wished to develop in his Gospel. Each Gospel was no doubt intended, and sincerely believed, by its author to be true in every real sense, but at the same time it could not help but bear the stamp of the limitations under which each author worked. The result is that, as C. F. Evans has noted about the reported words of the risen Christ, ‘Not only does the Lord not say the same things in any two gospels, but that it is hardly the same Lord who speaks. In Matthew it is evidently a Matthaean Lord who speaks, in Luke a Lukan Lord and in John a Johannine Lord.’³⁵

Luke is generally recognized as the Evangelist who comes nearest to our form of history-writing. But the preamble to his Gospel ‘does not mean that we have in Luke historically more reliable information; it merely tells us something of his intentions. Luke was not like the modern secular historian, and therefore we should not think of him as such, nor should we tacitly assume that his writings were the outcome of modern methods.’³⁶ Neither are we justified in charging Luke, or the other Evangelists, with fabricating falsehood. It is we who do them and the early Christians an injustice if we insist on reading back the concerns and methods of our own time into their setting, where they do not properly belong.

Apart from what may be claimed for the empty tomb story, to which we presently turn, we have now surveyed the chief arguments used to support the traditional view, known as ‘bodily resurrection’, and have shown why many scholars nowadays fail to find them convincing.

Notes:

1. Layman’s Answer, p. 71.

2. Resurrection and the New Testament, p. 67.

3. The Birth of Christianity, p. 56.

4. C. F. Evans, op. Cit., p. 128.

5. op. cit., p. ~8.

6. Op. Cit., p. 130.

7. Thus C. F. Evans, op. cit., p. 152.

8. There is no evidence that John’s Gospel is directly dependent upon the Synoptic Gospels.

9. This conclusion is based on the following commonly accepted dating: Mark AD. 65-70, Matthew AD. 80-90, Luke AD. 85-90, John AD. 90-100.

10. Op. Cit., p. 129.

11. Some regard Matt. 27: 62-6, 28:11-15, as evidence that the Jews did in fact examine the tomb. But this tradition, found no earlier than Matthew’s Gospel, more than fifty years after the event, almost certainly stems from much later apologetic, suggesting, as it does, that the Jews, unlike the disciples, were ready for the Resurrection even before it happened.

12. op. cit., p. 36.

13. Tradition and Life in the Church, p. 57.

14. ibid., p. 76. So also Pierre Benoit, The Passion and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, p. 229. ‘He [Joseph of Aramathea] is certainly historical; we know his position and his birthplace; he makes himself felt, in the gospel narratives, as a man of flesh and blood.’

15. The Gospel of St Mark, p. 433.

16. ibid.

17. op. cit., p. 53.

18. C. F. Evans, op. cit., p. 42.

19. The Significance of the message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, p. 57.

20. ibid., p. 58.

21. op. cit., p. 55.

22. op. cit., p. 43.

23. Mark 8:31 (Cf. Matt. 16:21, Luke 9:22), 9:31, 10:34.

24. op. cit., p. 48.

25. Interpreting the Resurrection, p. 82.

26. op. cit., p. 26.

27. See G. H. C. Macgregor, ‘The Growth of the Resurrection Faith’, Expos. Times, Vol. L, p. 217-20.

28. 1 Cor. 15:44.

29. 1 Cor. 15:49.

30. 2 Cor. 5:1.

31. 2 Cor. 5:4.

32. 2 Cor. 5:3.

33. 2 Cor. 5:1.

34. op. cit., p. 59.

35. op. cit., p. 67.

36. W. Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament, p. 156.

Before we can enter profitably into discussion with one another on any particular subject, it is important to ensure that we are all using our words in much the same way. Words are not the fixed objects which people often imagine them to be. Many words change their meaning over a period of time. Even at one particular time a word may possess not just one meaning, but in fact hold together a whole family of meanings. One meaning may be intended in one place but at a later stage another meaning implied. Because words sometimes depend upon their context for their exact meaning, even the speaker himself may be misled, not realizing that the new verbal context has given the word a slightly different meaning from what it had in an earlier context. This ambiguity in the very nature of the verbal language with which we communicate means that the value of our discussion or debate may be greatly reduced if, unknowingly,. we are using one or more of the key words in different ways. Where difference of opinion rests solely on the different uses of words, it is called a merely verbal argument.

Some verbal battles can be avoided at the outset if we simply take more care with our use of words. But they are not so easy to avoid wherever it is a question of that small number of basic words in the language, which by their very fundamental nature are either difficult or impossible to define in terms of others less basic. One such word, for example, is the basic term ‘God’ and the problem to which we have been referring often causes the modern debate between atheist and theist to be fruitless, for there is little use in discussing whether God exists until there is some agreement about the precise meaning to be given to the word.

‘Resurrection’ is another such word. We shall see later that it has been used with quite a wide range of meanings. But many think that the meaning which they themselves attach to it is not only perfectly clear to all but is the only possible meaning that could be attached to it. James Denney spoke for many when he wrote, ‘The rising is relative to the grave and the burial, and if we cannot speak of a bodily resurrection we should not speak of resurrection at all.’¹ D. W. B. Robinson writes, ‘The expression, to rise or to be raised from the dead, seems clearly enough to mean that a person who has died and been buried (or perhaps left on the ground) rises up, alive again, from that dead condition. It is everywhere taken for granted that he rises in his body; indeed it may be said that it is his body which rises up or comes out of the grave.’²

This Strong conviction of clarity and certainty that a person may have about a particular word contributes greatly to the problem of communication. When the mathematician who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll described Humpty Dumpty as saying to Alice, ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less’, he was making (as he did so often in the adventures of Alice) a shrewd observation about a common human weakness. When people declare that the word ‘resurrection’ can mean only one thing, they are really saying that ‘resurrection’ can mean only what they take it to mean -- neither more nor less.

R. Robert Bater has recently pointed out that even among biblical scholars and theologians it has far too often been an unquestioned assumption ‘that we know what we mean by the Resurrection’.³ How much more is this the case among the non-theological! He writes, ‘When someone asks whether we are saved, it is reckless to answer without knowing what assumptions lie behind the question. When someone asks whether we believe in the Resurrection, we should also be perplexed. It is altogether likely that the questioner assumes a uniform and unambiguous biblical testimony identical with his own mental image of the Resurrection.. In the face of the rich variety, ambiguity and inconsistency of Resurrection narratives (to say nothing of the Resurrection-Ascension identity) in the Epistles, the Gospels, and in the Acts, it is clear that church and popular tradition have deceived us into taking too much for granted.’³

In this book we set out to sketch how the concept of resurrection arose, to illustrate the diversity with which it has been understood, to show how Christianity came to use and depend upon it, and to suggest in what ways the concept may continue to be relevant to men of Christian faith within the context of thought today. We have spoken deliberately of the concept of resurrection, for concepts are usually much older than the words which are created to signify them, and in this case the word ‘resurrection’ (or its equivalent in the classical languages) was comparatively late in appearing.

But we cannot adequately trace the development of the concept of resurrection, if we already have a preconceived idea of what the word means. Because we are living in the aftermath of more than nineteen hundred years of Christian history and are ourselves the products of Christian culture, it is almost certain that the image or concept that we associate with the word ‘resurrection’ will be largely, if not wholly, colored by the understanding that has been dominant within Christian tradition. It is simply anachronistic, however, to read this kind of meaning back into the pre-Christian period, or even into the period of Christian origins. Our story really begins as far back on the other side of the birth of Jesus Christ as we are on this side.

If we consult the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary we are told that ‘resurrection’ means: ‘1. ‘The rising again of Christ after his death and burial. 2. The rising again of men at the Last Day. 3. The action or fact of rising again from sleep, disuse, etc.: revival; restoration to previous status or vogue.’ First of all we notice how the word is defined in terms of Christian tradition. This dictionary entry further illustrates the fact that for most people the first mental association prompted by the word is the particular resurrection which is affirmed of Jesus Christ; this association then largely fashions how the general resurrection is to be understood; and from them both the word can be extended for use in a metaphorical way. Historically speaking, as we shall see later, the concept developed in a process almost the reverse of this. First there arose the concept of restoration to new life, understood in a variety of contexts; this led to a conviction about the resurrection of some or all of the dead at the end of the world; in the light of this conviction, the first Christians came to make their important affirmation that Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead.

In view of the Christian tradition we have inherited, we do not start our discussion of resurrection from scratch. As the dictionary entry has illustrated, the connotation of the word ‘resurrection’ with which we start is already biased in the direction of the orthodox Christian tradition. We must examine the significance of this bias before we are free to start our enquiry at the beginning with an open mind.

As the Oxford Dictionary has indicated, the word ‘resurrection’ usually makes us think first of all of the resurrection of Jesus. What kind of mental picture takes shape in our minds when we think of this? If we were to ask a group of people at random today, we would probably get a variety of answers. There has always been some diversity, but this has greatly increased in the last hundred years, during which the resurrection has come more and more under close scrutiny. But if we go back before the mid-nineteenth century, it is likely that the answers would conform to a more uniform pattern. Let us try to sketch what could be called the traditional view of the resurrection of Jesus, and then check it with some widely accepted statements. Here is an attempted summary:

The latter part of this brief description is based on the traditions written in the New Testament. The first part is reconstructed in the imagination, or at least inferred, for of course the New Testament nowhere describes the actual event of the rising of Jesus from the dead. Bater has rightly pointed out that another false assumption in so much discussion about the resurrection of Jesus is ‘that the New Testament narrates the Resurrection’. ‘In point of fact what are called resurrection narratives are therefore narratives of an inferred resurrection or of some sequel to the resurrection. All the would-be witnesses just miss the event itself.’⁴ Kendrik Grobel asks whether this is ‘a tacit avowal (on the part of the Evangelists) that the occurrence was such that no human witnesses could have seen anything had they been present’.⁵

The New Testament does, however, describe how the bound Lazarus walked out of the tomb when Jesus raised him from the dead, and it is possible that Christians have often unconsciously transferred the mental picture of the resurrection of Lazarus to the resurrection of Jesus in order to fill the gap left in the Gospel records. In the second century the apocryphal Gospel of Peter⁶ attempted to fill in the missing piece in the story of the resurrection, but it produced nothing like the above description. In it two men descended from heaven, entered the tomb, came out carrying a third man between them, with a cross following after, and their heads already reached into heaven. This is a mythological description of the exaltation of Jesus to heaven.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized at this point that the New Testament is silent concerning the crucial element in what was to become the traditional understanding of the resurrection of Jesus. The New Testament traditions leave the actual rising as a conclusion to be drawn from the circumstantial evidence they provide, namely the appearances of the risen Jesus, and an empty tomb. The mental image of what took place at the resurrection, such as is described in the words of D. W. B. Robinson above, must be supplied by the imagination, or by the transference of the Gospel description of the raising of Lazarus.

The traditional Christian view of the resurrection of Jesus, as sketched above, was held with conviction from the end of the first century right down to the modern period. We find it basically confirmed in the fourth of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England: ‘Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.’ Similarly the Westminster Confession of Faith says of the Lord Jesus that ‘On the third day he arose from the dead, with the same body in which he suffered; with which also he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth at the right hand of his Father.’ (Italics mine.)

Documents like this, enshrining the most conservative form of the Christian tradition, lay great emphasis on the identification of the risen body of Jesus with the dead body of Jesus which had been laid in the tomb. J. A. Scheps defends this extreme view by going so far as to say that the risen ‘Jesus could not have entered through the closed doors because, according to his own words, he had a body of flesh and bones that could be handled, take food and the like’(!)⁷ It is also usually insisted that the dead body did not undergo any of the normal processes of decay during its period in the tomb.

Provided that heaven was vaguely imagined in largely materialistic terms, existing beyond the clouds in the region above the earth, such a view could be held with some conviction. But there has always been some debate about the exact nature of the risen body of Jesus. This question had to come to the fore in the modern period with the rise of an altogether different world view. The effect of this on the traditional view of the resurrection of Jesus has been briefly sketched in God in the New World. There it was pointed out that the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus were ‘meaningful and even to a certain degree reasonable within the ancient world view. The idea of a physical body from this earth being raised to the heavenly sphere above did not appear impossible, even if it rarely happened. The Old Testament told stories of how Enoch and Elijah had made similar ascensions. But the disappearance of this kind of heaven from our space universe, according to our contemporary world view, removes this version of the Resurrection and the Ascension from the miraculous to the meaningless.’⁸

Most Christian writers, including even the more conservative ones, are today more cautious than the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents quoted above, when they discuss the nature of the risen Christ. James Denney, for example, writing sixty years ago, concluded that some elements of the resurrection narratives must certainly be legendary, on account of ‘a tendency to materialize the supernatural’. ‘There does seem something’, he further writes, ‘which is not only incongruous but repellent in the idea of the Risen Lord eating. It makes him real by bringing Him back to earth and incorporating Him again in this life, whereas the reality of which His resurrection assures us is not that of this life, but of another life transcending this.’⁹

As soon as it is realized that the risen Christ cannot today, in our world view, be regarded as possessing a physical body identical with that of his earthly life, then it becomes necessary not only to conjecture that his life (and body) transcends our material form of existence, but that, in addition, there was a particular time when the body of Jesus was transformed from the physical to the transcendent.

So James Orr, who was defending the traditional view against the attack of ‘liberalism’, declared it to be an error ‘to speak of the ordinary conception of the Resurrection as that of a simple reanimation of the mortal body. No one will think of it in that light who studies the narratives of the Gospels. They show that while Jesus was truly risen in the body, He had entered, even bodily, on a new phase of existence, in which some at least of the ordinary natural limitations of body were transcended.’¹⁰

Thus, in order to reconcile the traditional view of the bodily resurrection of Jesus both with the diversity which exists in the Gospel narratives, as well as with the modern world view, it became common to think in terms of a transformation of the body of Jesus at the time of the resurrection. A. B. Bruce attempted in 1892 to defend the substance of the traditional view by saying, ‘In the resurrection of Jesus, two processes seem to have been combined into one: the revivification of the crucified body, and its transformation into a spiritual body endowed with an eternal form of existence; the first process being merely a means to an end₁ the actual, if not the indispensable, condition of the second.’¹¹

Of course (it was freely admitted) no one is able to describe the exact nature of this higher form of existence. But as long as the Gospel narratives were regarded as historical, they were thought to throw some light on it. Yet even they applied only to the limited period during which Jesus was believed to have appeared to his disciples. What happened thereafter? Forrest was thinking of a transformation which took place in two stages when he wrote, ‘Christ hovers, as it were, on the borderline of two different worlds, and partakes of the characteristics of both, just because He is revealing the one to the other. . . During the forty days His body was in a transition state, and had to undergo a further transformation in entering into the spiritual sphere, its true home."¹²

The idea that the resurrection involved a transformation of the body of Jesus is a very interesting one (and it is by no means wholly new, for it was conjectured by some of the ancient writers). But it must be recognized that it immediately concedes that there was at least some element of discontinuity present in the resurrection of Jesus. The risen Jesus was not the mortal man he was before his death on the cross. He was no longer subject to death and therefore he no longer shared with us a mortal body.

What kind of body, then, do we suppose the risen Christ to have had, firstly, on the occasions when he is said to have appeared to the apostles, and secondly, in the present when apparently he appears to no one? Unless we can be more precise as to what kind of body it was (and is), we cannot be dogmatic as to how it was related to the former physical body which was like our own, and if we are unclear about that relationship, we are less clear than is often assumed about the nature of the resurrection.

It must further be recognized that the idea of transformation, whether in one or two stages, is pure conjecture, and is itself a departure from the Gospel narratives, where there is no explicit reference to any kind of transformation. On the contrary, in those places where the risen Christ is described, it is the idea of continuity with the pre-crucified Jesus which is stressed.

Admittedly, the idea that the resurrection of Jesus involved a transformation appears to receive some support indirectly from the Gospel narratives themselves, for while on the one hand they portray a Jesus who can be touched and who can eat food with his disciples, they also portray a Jesus who can pass through closed doors and appear and disappear at will. While on the one hand the disciples are said to have been glad ‘when they saw the Lord’, Mary Magdalene and the two on the road to Emmaus did not recognize him at all at first sight.

The idea of a transformation from a physical to a spiritual mode of existence has been made necessary, particularly in modern times, because resurrection can be spoken of in two contexts which were not at all clearly distinguished from each other in the ancient world but which more and more need to be kept distinct from each other in our world of thought. These two contexts may be conveniently referred to as the historical and the mythological.

By ‘mythological’ we mean that unseen world, intangible to man, from which angels and evil spirits are thought to exert their mysterious influences upon man. Because it is out of reach, man has to fall back upon his imagination in order to describe it, and he has no way of producing objective evidence to demonstrate its reality to those who do not share his presuppositions. Just because the mythological world rests so much upon the imagination, the description of it enjoys almost unlimited scope, and that is both its strength and its weakness. Its value is that it opens up a way, rather parallel to poetry, in which man can communicate verbally about that which he finds he can express adequately in no other way. Its weakness is that depending so much upon the human imagination, it can quickly move out of touch with the objective, real world. The Book of Revelation is composed largely of mythological language and well illustrates both its value and its limitations.

Historical events on the other hand are to be distinguished from mythological events in that they do not take place in the unseen world, but in the observable world of space and time, where they may be witnessed by all who happen to be in the vicinity. There is always something public and open about an historical event in that anyone could have seen it, if only he had been there. In comparison with the mythological event, the historical event depends far less upon the subjective impressions of the observer, and the element of subjectivity can to some degree be minimized by checking the evidence with other witnesses. The historian who is trying to reconstruct an historical event is looking for corroboration from as many reliable and dispassionate witnesses as possible.

As indicated above, our thought world today is such that we observe a much stricter differentiation between the historical and the mythological than did ancient man. In the Resurrection stories both elements are in most cases clearly evident. Where they speak of angels, voices from heaven, the ascension of Jesus into heaven, they have definitely drawn upon the language and concepts of mythology.

But other parts of the same narratives are expressed in the language of the historical world, and, if adequately substantiated, they should be accepted as historical evidence. It is just at the point where the historical language intermingles with the mythological language that we meet the problem of what the resurrection means, and see the reason why many want to speak of it in terms of transformation. At the point where the story moves from the historical into the mythological (or, if it is preferred, from the observable world to the spiritual world) so the body of the risen Jesus must undergo the transformation required by the change of context. G. W. H. Lampe writes: ‘Bodily resurrection, therefore, to which the empty tomb would be appropriate, and a raising to a new and non-material dimension of existence, to which it would not, seem to be confusedly woven together in the Synoptic traditions when these are taken as factual records.’¹³

Let us take the example of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. We need not here discuss whether such an event actually took place (and today only the most conservative scholars think that it did). What is important is that it is narrated in historical language. The dead body of Lazarus came to life and walked out of the tomb, and all the bystanders witnessed it. It was a public event. But if it actually happened this way, then Lazarus was being resurrected and restored to his former mortal existence, and the time would come when he would die again, and his body go through the normal processes of decay for the last time.

If it could be shown that this actually happened, then the raising of Lazarus would be termed an historical event. But however much this picture may have influenced Christian tradition, the resurrection of Jesus could not have been like this, for either Jesus would have been subject to death at some later time (which is the negation of the resurrection faith), or he would be walking the earth to this day (which is absurd), or he would be in some corner of this space-time-universe where theoretically he could be found by some future astronaut (which is equally absurd). The last alternative did not appear so absurd however in the ancient world, and it is substantially what the ascension of Jesus to heaven implied, and what many Christians of the late first century believed. It is also the point where the description of the resurrection of Jesus moved out of historical language into mythological language.

The resurrection of Lazarus, if it could be adequately attested, would be called an historical event. But it would be more satisfactory to describe such an event as resuscitation than as resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus was not a resuscitation. It cannot be adequately described within the limits imposed by historical language, as resuscitation can, nor does it meet the canons of an historical event, for it was not a public event observed by anyone at all, let alone by all and sundry. We can agree with H. H. Rex when he writes, ‘The resurrection of Jesus is certainly not a historical event in the sense in which his crucifixion is accepted as a historical event. The historicity of the latter could be verified by anyone who cared to visit the scene of the crucifixion, believer and non-believer alike. The same claim has not been made by any New Testament author for the resurrection. No unbeliever ever saw the risen Lord . . . the risen Lord did not appear to men like Pontius Pilate, king Herod, or the Jewish high priests.’¹⁴

Whatever historical events were associated with the rise of the Christian faith (and these will be examined later) the resurrection of Jesus describes something which in the main lies beyond historical enquiry. Christians proclaimed the Resurrection as an act of God, and as Neville Clarke says, ‘historical techniques can never establish events as acts of God’.¹⁵

Hans Conzelman writes, ‘The question whether the resurrection of Christ is a "historical event" is theoretically inapposite. Of course it is a historical event for Paul, in so far as he cannot know the modern theoretical distinction between historical and supra-historical (in effect: unhistorical). We for our part cannot retreat behind his reflection. But for faith, the particular stage of consciousness reached by thought is quite unimportant. Faith at any stage is -- faith. Its object cannot be experienced. Only the cross can be perceived . . . The question of the historicity of the resurrection must be excluded from theology as being a misleading one.’¹⁶

The conclusion that the resurrection of Jesus lies outside the scope of historical enquiry does not necessarily mean that it is thereby less true or real, for truth cannot simply be identified with that which can be established historically. But it does mean that the Christian affirmation of the resurrection of Jesus is not something which can be shown to be true or false by using the historical method of enquiry. Many are reluctant to accept this conclusion because there has been a popular and widespread practice of defending the truth of Christianity by saying that it is an historical religion, a claim which usually implies that its most striking tenet -- the resurrection of Jesus -- is firmly attested by historical evidence.

But the truth of Christianity cannot be proved by historical evidence or by any other rational process. The substance of Christianity can be grasped only by faith. The crucifixion of Jesus is an historical event which can be fairly well attested. But Christianity does not affirm simply that a man was crucified, (the two thieves also were crucified) but that it was Jesus, Son of God, who was crucified, and that in some way he died for the sins of men. No amount of historical enquiry can show that it was the Son of God who was crucified, or that he died for the sins of men. In the same way the resurrection of Jesus cannot be identified with the re-animation of a corpse (which, if it occurred, would be subject to historical enquiry), but it has to do with the very nature of the Christian’s faith concerning this same Jesus, and the faith of the Christian believer is not open to historical enquiry.

Further, because the resurrection of Jesus has to do with faith rather than with objective historical fact, it can be described and understood in more than one way. This has been so from the beginning. We shall later see that, prior to the advent of Christianity, there was considerable diversity in the way men understood resurrection language. Christianity came to birth within this diversity and reflected it at many points. This diversity has now clearly been shown to exist in the New Testament writings. They do not all speak of the resurrection of Jesus in the same way, though there has long been a tendency to attribute to the New Testament a uniformity of viewpoint that it does not possess.

The traditional understanding of resurrection not only vastly oversimplifies the New Testament traditions but is open to serious objections. Before we pursue the matter further to see if there is a more adequate understanding of resurrection to be found we must examine the chief arguments used to defend the traditional one. For so long as these appear to contain some power to convince, we are not ready to look further afield. To these arguments we shall now turn.

Notes:

1. Jesus and the Gospel, p. 113.

2. ‘The Empty Tomb’, an essay in The Third Day He Rose Again, p. 25.

3. Towards a More Biblical View of the Resurrection in Interpretation, January 1969, p. 51.

4. op. cit., p. 52.

5. Theology as History, ed. By J. M. Robinson and J. Cobb, p. 172.

6. See Chapter 11.

7. The Nature of the Resurrection Body, p. 141

8. God p. 146.

10. The in the New World, p.41.

9. op. cit., Resurrection of Jesus, p. 54.

11. Apologetics, p. 398.

12. The Christ of History and Experience, pp. 150, 152.

13. The Resurrection, p. 54.

14. Did Jesus Christ Rise from the Dead? p. 11.

15. Interpreting the Resurrection, p. 94.

16. An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament, p. 204. See also W. Marxsen, The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, pp. 21-2.