The End of Christianity (31 page)

Third, speaking of Joseph of Arimathea, why does Matthew tell us that Joseph was rich (27:57)? It can hardly be intended as one more fulfillment of prophecy (as one might suggest, but Matthew does not say), this time Isaiah 53:9, “And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death.” For one thing, Matthew always calls attention to prophetic fulfillments (see the nativity story, etc.: Matthew 1:22; 2:517, 23; 4:14).
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For another, he can hardly have considered Joseph a wicked man and indeed says just the opposite (Matthew 27:57). So what is the detail doing there? I believe it is meant to provide narrative motivation for grave robbers breaking into the newly sealed opulent tomb in which only the bruised and beaten scarecrow Jesus awaits, contrary to their expectations. Robbers, as they did in ancient novels of this period (e.g., Chariton's
Chaereas and Callirhoe
, Xenophon's
Ephesian Tale)
, break into newly sealed, opulent tombs hoping to find rich funerary tokens, a la the Pharaohs, but find only a victim of unwitting premature burial returning to consciousness.
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The existence of such tales makes for a strange coincidence otherwise.

Fourth, Luke's reunion scene in which Jesus demonstrates his corporeality (Luke 24:36–43) may naturally be read as a striking parallel to that of Apollonius of Tyana when he reappears across the Mediterranean to greet his disciples who have assumed him executed by the Roman tyrant Domitian and now think him a ghost:
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Damis groaned out loud, and something like, “Gods above, will we ever see our good, noble comrade?”

Apollonius, who was now standing at the entrance of the grotto, heard this and said, “You will, in fact you already have.”

“Alive?” asked Demetrius, “But if dead, we have never stopped weeping for you.”

Apollonius stretched out his hand, and said, “Take hold of me. If I elude you, I am a ghost come back from Persephone's domain, like the ghosts which the gods below reveal to men when mourning makes them too despondent. But if I stay when you grasp me, persuade Damis, too, that I am alive and have not lost my body.”

The point of the Apollonius scene (and I believe the point of the Lukan) is pointedly
not
that the hero has died and returned in some manner from the dead, but rather that he has escaped death. He did not die. In both cases we are told the disciples first imagined they were seeing their master's ghost, only to be assured of his living corporeality.
He has not died after all.
Why does John change the story (which he found either in oral tradition, i.e., liturgical usage, or in Luke), so that the point is now not only corporeality but tangible, mortal wounds? Precisely to close off this possibility of understanding Jesus as having eluded death. It is only in John 20 that we ever read that Jesus was
nailed
to the cross instead of, say, being merely tied to it, as was often done. It is only in John 19:34–37 and 20:25, 27 that we read of a fatal stab wound through the ribs (for which an anonymous eyewitness is promptly cited of whom no one before has ever heard). John has added these “details” to make sure the reader knows Jesus was really dead, something he must have had to do since many did not think so. This is also likely why he laughs off the speculation of Jesus’ enemies that he might be planning to leave Palestine to travel among the Diaspora (John 7:35); that's what he must have done if he survived crucifixion, fleeing Palestine as Aristotle did Athens when trouble reared its head, “lest Athens sin twice against philosophy.”

It is quite common for the followers of slain heroes and leaders to claim their man did not die but only went into hiding,
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so the fact that some early Christians told the story of Jesus this way is hardly proof that he did actually survive crucifixion (though some scholars whose erudition far exceeds mine and that of the apologists think he did).
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But my point is that, in view of all these factors in the text, which otherwise are all pointless red herrings in the narrative (even if they happened that way, why would the evangelists have bothered recording them?), it is by no means some expedient of desperation to suggest that Jesus was drugged on the cross, taken down prematurely, and survived at least for a while. (One might even take the ascension story as a euphemism for his soon following death.) This is only to follow the lead of the texts themselves, as I see it.

One last point: the apologetical trump card against this possibility is that the Roman guards at the tomb would have constituted quite a barrier for an ailing, wounded Jesus. How could he have gotten by them? Again, I will not belabor the obvious:only Matthew mentions such guards, an impossibility if there was such a detachment.
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Let's assume Matthew is right and that the other evangelists somehow dismissed this portion of the story as an unimportant trifle unworthy of mention. In that case, perhaps it was these soldiers who took the elementary precaution of checking the contents of the tomb before sealing it. There had been, after all, something of an interval between Joseph burying Jesus and the Sanhedrin petitioning Pilate for the guards. They must have checked. And if Jesus were reviving, there is just no reason to believe they would have locked him in alive! Maybe they would have fled as Mark's women did, victim to superstitious fear. Or maybe they would have helped the “broken man” to safety.
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This is as plausible a reconstruction as any Evangelical harmonization of these contradictory Gospel accounts, who must resort to
the very same suppositions of events occurring that no Gospel mentions.
Is a miraculous resurrection really more likely?

NO FORWARDING ADDRESS

As I read John's Easter account in 20:11–15, I do not need to impose some sort of Jesus hating skepticism in order to “escape” the implications of the text. No, I find myself reading along reverently, appreciating the sense of numinous “ozone” in this wonderful story, and I am suddenly taken aback when Mary Magdalene finds no one in the tomb:
O God! Is there to be no end to the horrors of this weekend? What now?
She asks a man standing nearby, apparently the caretaker of the mausoleum grounds, if he has already transferred the corpse somewhere else. She does not wonder what may have happened to it. It's pretty obvious. As we, too, have been told in 19:41–42, “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.” Jesus’ remains had been deposited in this nearby tomb only as an emergency measure since time was running out. It was not meant to stay there.
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Mary is only concerned that she may be unable to find out the final resting place. This is not some weird speculation by Rationalists. This is the scenario laid out by the Gospel itself. And though the evangelist (obviously) goes on to supply an alternate explanation, that of faith in the resurrection of Jesus, the text itself has already supplied a purely natural explanation for an empty tomb as well as the implication that Christians might not have been privy (or ever become privy) to Jesus’ final resting place.
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John himself tells us that the prima facie explanation was a simple relocation of a corpse hastily stashed there for the moment. Maybe this is what happened. Bingo: Jesus is buried, the empty tomb is discovered, and it is too late to find out where the body has been taken, perhaps because the disciples did not know of the role of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Maybe the custodian Mary asked had replaced the man who had approved the removal of the body on an earlier shift, and he simply did not know what to tell her. (“No, ma'am, I don't know who he is; sorry.”) There is no bafflement here that would have us welcoming supernatural miracles as a better explanation, is there?

If we were not so familiar with the text, it would strike us as quite ludicrous to think one must draw the inference from the empty tomb that Jesus must therefore have been raised from the dead, fully as absurd as the scene from
Monty Python's Life of Brian
in which Brian's followers momentarily lose track of him in the middle of a crowd and jump to the conclusion, “He's been taken up!” “No, there he is!”
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But the disciples claimed to have seen him! Well, there are ready explanations for that, too….

HAVE WE MET BEFORE?

At first glance, the idea that the Risen Lord was, ah, somebody else, maybe some other savior, or somebody impersonating Jesus, seems silly. Mistaken identity? You've got to be kidding. But the Gospels themselves introduce this suspicion—not that someone was impersonating the slain Jesus (as people have subsequently claimed to be David Koresh, for instance), but that his mourning disciples, ill-inclined to let go of him, grasped at the straw that some unknown individual they had met shortly after the crucifixion must actually have been Jesus, alive again. If we wanted to play the role of genuine New Testament critics, and not just play the game of the apologists, we should probably come up with something like the theory of James M. Robinson that the nonrecognition motif was a function of the original understanding of the resurrection appearances as blasts of brilliant, blinding light in which no human form was easily delineated.
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Think of Revelation 1:14–16; or Mark 9:2–3; or Matthew 17:2 (often thought to be a displaced resurrection narrative); or Acts 9:3–6: all these depict a “glowrified” Jesus shining with supernatural radiance.
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As such, he is not readily recognizable. “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:5). Robinson thinks that this is the origin and natural setting of the motif. The trouble is it has been inherited by Easter accounts that have been rewritten as if the fleshly Jesus got up off the morgue gurney and announced himself: the same man in the same body. In that case, why would they have failed to recognize him any more than a relative called in to ID a stiff? The nonrecognition motif no longer fits, functioning only as a telltale reminder of the Easter faith of an earlier day. (Similarly, the stories that still depict the Risen Jesus amid unapproachable light are no longer presented technically as resurrection stories! As we now read them, they are special visions vouchsafed to individuals or small groups before or after Easter.)

The Easter stories as we now read them feature a fleshly Jesus, without the special effects, and yet there is this persistent motif of doubting it is really him, or even thinking he is someone else. The disciples on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35) talk with the man for hours, and only as he vanishes does it occur to them it was their old master. The disciples, even as they are issued their marching orders, wonder if it is really him (Matthew 28:17: “but they [not “some”] doubted”).
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Mary at the tomb does not recognize Jesus either (John 20:14). The disillusioned disciples, readjusting to a mundane career, see Jesus on shore, but they do not recognize him (John 21:4). Let us give apologists the benefit of the doubt and consider the implications if these Gospel Easter stories were, as they insist, genuine accounts of Easter encounters. All this non recognition business, which we should never have expected, inevitably invites the suspicion that the Easter encounters were actually sightings of, encounters with, figures only
later
identified with Jesus, and then as a means of escaping grief and despair.

“Realizing” it in retrospect was not as good as realizing it at the time, but then there was an advantage, too: it could not be debunked. It is like when someone gives directions to a lost person who looks familiar but cannot be placed, and later a friend tells him, “I heard so-and-so celebrity was in town today, unannounced.” And then one thinks, “That must have been
him!
If only I'd realized it then! I could have asked for an autograph!” But what the heck, it's still pretty exciting. And of course, it might
not
have been the celebrity, and since you can no longer verify it one way or another, you can still tell the story, the element of uncertainty only enhancing it.

Mark (6:14; 8:28) supplies a striking precedent when he tells us (twice, no less) that many people believed they were seeing or hearing about a resurrected John the Baptist, even though Mark claims to know better: it was a case of mistaken identity, since the figure was actually Jesus. It is no great stretch to wonder if the same thing happened in the case of Jesus. After all, there were plenty of such figures around. Celsus tells us of the prophets one was always liable to run into in Phoenicia and Palestine:

There are many, who are nameless…, who prophesy at the slightest excuse for some trivial cause both inside and outside the temples, and there are some who wander about begging and roaming around cities and military camps; and they pretend to be moved as if giving some oracular utterance. It is an ordinary and common custom for each one to say, “I am God (or a son of God, or a divine Spirit). And I have come. Already the world is being destroyed. And you, O men, are to perish because of your iniquities. But I wish to save you. And you shall see me returning again with heavenly power. Blessed is he who has worshipped me now! But I will cast everlasting fire upon all the rest, both on cities and on country places. And men who fail to realize the penalties in store for them will in vain repent and groan. But I will preserve for ever those who have been convinced by me.”
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Jesus might be taken for one of these, or one of these for Jesus. The Olivet Discourse explicitly warns its readers not to mix up people like Simon bar-Giora and Jesus ben-Ananias with Jesus Christ (Mark 13:5–6, 21–23), something someone must have been doing, or we would be reading no warning not to! In the same way, Paul was taken for the revolutionary Egyptian prophet in Acts 21:38, also mentioned by Josephus. Simon Magus is said to have claimed to be Jesus, returned already: “He taught that it was he himself who, forsooth, appeared among the Jews as the Son…. and was thought to have suffered in Judaea, although he did not really suffer.”
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