How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (19 page)

Paul’s letters are the first Christian writings that we have from antiquity; he was writing, for the most part, in the 50s of the Common Era, so some ten or fifteen years
before
our earliest surviving Gospel, Mark. It is hard to know exactly when 1 Corinthians was written; if we place it in the middle of Paul’s letter-writing period, we could put it around 55
CE
or so—some twenty-five years after Jesus’s death.

What is striking is that Paul indicates that this statement of faith is something he already had taught the Christians in Corinth, presumably when he converted them. And so it must go back to the founding of the community, possibly four or five years earlier. Moreover—and this is the important part—Paul indicates that he did not devise this statement himself but that he “received” it from others. Paul uses this kind of language elsewhere in 1 Corinthians (see 11:22–25), and it is believed far and wide among New Testament specialists that Paul is indicating that this is a tradition already widespread in the Christian church, handed over to him by Christian teachers, possibly even the earlier apostles themselves. In other words, this is what New Testament scholars call a
pre-Pauline tradition
—one that was in circulation before Paul wrote it and even before he gave it to the Corinthians when he first persuaded them to become followers of Jesus. So this is a very ancient tradition about Jesus. Does it go back even to before the time when Paul himself joined the movement around the year 33
CE
, some three years after Jesus had died?
⁴
If so, it would be very ancient indeed!

There is evidence in the passage itself that it, or part of it, is pre-Pauline, and it is possible to determine just which parts were the original formulation. As we will see more fully in Chapter 6, there are a number of “preliterary” traditions in Paul’s writings and in the book of Acts—that is, quotations of statements of faith, poems, possibly even hymns that were in circulation before being cited in our surviving literary texts. Scholars have devised a number of ways to detect these preliterary traditions. For one thing, they tend to be tightly constructed, with terse statements that contain words not otherwise attested by the author in question—in this case Paul—and to use grammatical formulations that are otherwise foreign to the author. This is what we find here in this passage. For example, the phrase “in accordance with the scriptures” is found nowhere else in Paul’s writings; nor is the verb “he appeared”; nor is any reference to “the Twelve.”

This passage almost certainly contains a pre-Pauline confession, or creed, of some kind. But is the entire thing, all of vv.3–8, part of that creed? The second half of v.6 (“many of whom survive . . .”) and all of v. 8 (“last of all he appeared even to me . . .”) are Paul’s comments on the tradition, so they could not have originally been part of the creed. There are very good reasons, in fact, for thinking that the original form of the creed was simply vv. 3–5, to which Paul has added some comments of his own based on what he knew. One reason for restricting the original pre-Pauline creed to just these three verses is that doing so produces a very tightly formulated creedal statement that is brilliantly structured. It contains two major sections of four statements each that closely parallel one another (in other words, the first statement of section one corresponds to the first statement of section two, and so on). In its original form, then, the creed would have read like this:

           
1a Christ died

                 
2a For our sins

                      
3a In accordance with the scriptures

                           
4a And he was buried.

           
1b Christ was raised

                 
2b On the third day

                      
3b In accordance with the scriptures

                           
4b And he appeared to Cephas.

The first section is all about Jesus’s death, and the second is all about his resurrection. The parallel statements work like this: first there is a statement of “fact” (1a: Christ died; 1b: Christ was raised); then there is a theological interpretation of the fact (2a: he died for our sins; 2b: he was raised on the third day), followed by a statement, in each section, that it was “in accordance with the scriptures” (3a and 3b, worded identically in the Greek); and finally a kind of proof is given by means of the physical evidence for the claim (4a: he was buried—showing that he really was dead; 4b: he appeared to Cephas [that is, the disciple Peter]—showing that he really was raised).

This then was the very ancient pre-Pauline tradition that Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15 and that he expands, at the end, by giving even more “witnesses” to the resurrection—including himself, the last to see Jesus alive afterward (some two or three years after Jesus’s death). Some scholars have argued that this terse statement of faith originated in Aramaic, meaning that it might go all the way back to the Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Palestine during the early years after his death; other scholars are not so sure about this. In either case, it is a powerful, concise, and cleverly constructed creedal statement.

If this reconstruction of the original form of this statement is correct, several interesting and important observations can be made. First, if it is right that the second statement of each section is a “theological interpretation” of the statement of “fact” that precedes it, then the idea that Jesus was raised on the third day is not necessarily a historical recollection of when the resurrection happened, but a theological claim of its significance. I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day Jesus was raised. The women go to the tomb on the third day, and they find it empty. But none of the Gospels indicates that Jesus arose that morning before the women showed up. He could just as well have arisen the day before or even the day before that—just an hour, say, after he had been buried. The Gospels simply don’t say.

If Paul’s statement is indeed a theological interpretation rather than a historical claim, one needs to figure out what it means. It is important to stress that this “third day” is said to have been in accordance with the testimony of scripture, which for any early Christian author would not have been the New Testament (which had not yet been written) but the Hebrew Bible. There is a widespread view among scholars that the author of this statement is indicating that in his resurrection on the third day Jesus is thought to have fulfilled the saying of the Hebrew prophet Hosea: “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (Hos. 6:2). Other scholars—a minority of them, although I find myself attracted to this view—think that the reference is to the book of Jonah, where Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights before being released and, in a kind of symbolic sense, brought back from the dead (see Jonah 2). Jesus himself is recorded in the Gospels as likening his upcoming death and resurrection to “the sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:39–41). Whether the reference is to Hosea or Jonah, why would it be necessary to say that the resurrection happened on the third day? Because that is what was predicted in scripture. This is a theological claim that Jesus’s death and resurrection happened according to plan. This will be an important point for us later when we consider what we can say about when the earliest followers of Jesus first came to think he was raised from the dead—and on what grounds.

Second, it is important to realize that all the statements of the two sections of the creed are tightly parallel to one another in every respect—except one. The second section contains a name as part of the tangible proof for the statement that Jesus was raised: “He appeared to [literally: “he was seen by”] Cephas.” The fourth statement of the first section does not name any authorizing party. There we are told simply that “he was buried”—not that he was buried by anyone in particular. Given the effort that the author of this creed has taken to make every statement of the first section correspond to the parallel statement of the second section, and vice versa, this should give us pause. It would have been very easy indeed to make the parallel precise, simply by saying “he was buried by Joseph [of Arimathea].” Why didn’t the author make this precise parallel? My hunch is that it is because he knew nothing about a burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. I should point out that nowhere else does Paul ever say anything about Joseph of Arimathea, or the way in which Jesus was buried—not in this creed, not in the rest of 1 Corinthians, and not in any of his other letters. The tradition that there was a specific, known person who buried Jesus appears to have been a later one. Below, I will show why there are reasons to doubt that the tradition is historically accurate.

One other frequently noted feature of this creed—and its expansion by Paul in vv. 5–8—is that Paul seems to be giving an exhaustive account of the people to whom Jesus appeared after being raised. The reason for thinking this is that after listing all the others who saw Jesus, Paul indicates that he was the “last of all.” This is frequently understood, rightly I think, to mean that he is giving the fullest list he can. But then the list is striking indeed, in no small measure because Paul doesn’t mention any women. In the Gospels it is women who discover the empty tomb, and in two of the Gospels—Matthew and John—it is women who first see Jesus alive afterward. But Paul never says anything about anyone discovering an empty tomb, and he doesn’t mention any resurrection appearances to women—either here or in any other passage of his writings.

On the first point, for many years scholars have considered it highly significant that Paul, our earliest “witness” to the resurrection, says nothing about the discovery of an empty tomb. Our earliest account of Jesus’s resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–5) discusses the appearances without mentioning an empty tomb, while our earliest Gospel, Mark, narrates the discovery of the empty tomb without discussing any of the appearances (Mark 16:1–8). This has led some scholars, such as New Testament expert Daniel Smith, to suggest that these two sets of tradition—the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after his death—probably originated independently of one another and were put together as a single tradition only later—for example, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
⁵
If this is the case, then the stories of Jesus’s resurrection were indeed being expanded, embellished, modified, and possibly even invented in the long process of their being told and retold over the years.

But what lies at the foundation of these stories? What, if anything, can we say historically about the resurrection event? At this point I need to pause to explain why historians—insofar as and as long as they are working as historians—are unable to use knowledge derived from the historical disciplines to affirm that Jesus really was, physically, raised from the dead, even if they personally believe it happened. The view I stake out here is that if historians, or anyone else, do believe this, it is because of their faith, not because of their historical inquiry. I should stress that unbelievers (like me) cannot
disprove
the resurrection either, on historical grounds. This is because belief or unbelief in Jesus’s resurrection is a matter of faith, not of historical knowledge.

The reason historians cannot prove or disprove whether God has performed a miracle in the past—such as raising Jesus from the dead—is
not
that historians are required to be secular humanists with an anti-supernaturalist bias. I want to stress this point because conservative Christian apologists, in order to score debating points, often claim that this is the case. In their view, if historians did not have anti-supernaturalist biases or assumptions, they would be able to affirm the historical “evidence” that Jesus was raised from the dead. I should point out that these Christian apologists almost never consider the “evidence” for other miracles from the past that have comparable—or even better—evidence to support them: for example, dozens of Roman senators claimed that King Romulus was snatched up into heaven from their midst; and many thousands of committed Roman Catholics can attest that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to them, alive—a claim that fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians roundly discount, even though the “evidence” for it is very extensive. It’s always easy to scream “anti-supernatural bias” when someone does not think that the miracles of one’s own tradition can be historically established; it’s much harder to admit that miracles of other traditions are just as readily demonstrated.

But the view I map out here is that none of these divine miracles, or any others, can be established historically. Conservative evangelical Christian apologists are right to say that this is because of the presuppositions of the investigators. But not for the reason they think or say.

The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions, and it is impossible to live life, think deep thoughts, have religious experiences, or engage in historical inquiry
without
having presuppositions. The life of the mind cannot proceed without presuppositions. The question, though, is always this: What are the appropriate presuppositions for the task at hand? The presuppositions that the Roman Catholic believer brings to his experience of the mass will be different from the presuppositions that the scientist brings to her exploration of the Big Bang theory and different from the presuppositions that historians bring to their study of the Inquisition. So let me stress that historians, working as historians, do indeed have presuppositions. It is important, therefore, to know something about the
kind
of presuppositions historians have when they are engaged in the act of reconstructing what happened in the past.

Most historians would agree that they necessarily presuppose that the past did happen. We can’t actually prove it, of course, the way we can prove a scientific experiment. We can repeat scientific experiments, and by doing so we can establish predictive probabilities that can show us what almost certainly
will
happen the next time we do the experiment. Historians can’t do this with past events because they can’t repeat the past. And so historians have different ways of proceeding. They don’t use scientific “proofs” but look for other kinds of evidence for what has happened before now. The basic operating assumption though, which itself cannot be proved, is that something did in fact happen before now.