Transcription
I want to talk to you about five questions about the resurrection that I don't think most Christians are willing to ask. But I think if we do ask them, we can start to uncover some really interesting nuances in the earliest Christian movement. So this is like Easter time. People start asking these kinds of questions. I hear people talking about the resurrection and debates and all of a sudden we have all this like did Jesus rise from the dead? How can we know? And these are the kinds of questions that people ask.
But I think there are actually some really much more interesting questions that we can ask when we stop to look at both like what the Bible says about resurrection and also like what people believe the world around that sort of thing um of the time of Jesus, Paul, church fathers, that sort of thing. So let's talk about this. I trained as a Bible scholar and these are my questions about the resurrection.
Question one, did Paul believe in a physical resurrection of Jesus? And by that I mean, did Paul believe that Jesus was a human being who died, was resuscitated, and walked out of a tomb? And I really don't think that he did. I actually think when you look at 1 Corinthians 15, which is the famous thing about like Paul like witnessing and all the witnesses to the resurrection, you'll hear talk about like 500 witnesses. If you actually read that passage closely, you'll see a couple things. The first thing you'll notice is if you could read the Greek, you'll notice that Paul uses this word a um and basically he says that um Christ a he was seen by um Cphus. He was seen by names of these people. He was seen by 500 and last of all um as one untimely born. He was seen by me.
Now this word off I did a full video on it. You can watch it here. But when we actually get this word in the septuagen, it almost always refers to some sort of visionary experience. And it's never clear that what we are seeing, what the person is actually seeing is some sort of a human being. And this is we get this for dreams for example in Septuagent. We get this for like appearances. We get this for a lot of different things. So when Paul is saying that Jesus um was seen when you actually read that in context and read the way that word is used in other places, it's the same word that the Septuagent uses to talk about visionary experiences. Of course, when you read the book of Acts, which I think was a lot later, you get a visionary experience. Paul has a vision and they're slightly contradicting ideas here about what that vision was. But either way, it's some sort of a spiritual experience, some sort of a vision.
And when you look at what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, as you go on to the rest of the chapter, you see that Paul talks about the resurrection body. And Paul is not interested in physical bodies in that sense. He's actually much more interested in what he calls spiritual bodies, pneumaticose, spiritual bodies. And in that sense, when you read this chapter in its entirety, it really sounds like Paul is not that interested in physical bodies. He thinks they're kind of gross, but he's really interested in the resurrection body as a spiritual body. And this, I think, should give us pause. And this, I think, is worth um a lot more attention than it gets because usually when I hear apologists arguing for the resurrection, they just kind of enter into this like slippage where they just treat every single mention of resurrection in the New Testament or even another sometimes another like Jewish text, for example, as if they're all talking about the same thing. And they really aren't. There's really not one specific type of resurrection. We could be talking about different things. And when you look at the earliest example that is Paul, it really does seem that Paul is talking about a spiritual resurrection with visions. And you have to ask, is that what we're actually talking about when we're talking about the earliest resurrection? Of course, Bible scholars know this. Well, I would say um they're probably split down the middle on which it is, whether it's a spiritual or Paul's imagining some type of a bodily resurrection, but we certainly don't get enough there in Paul to know that Paul thinks that Jesus walked back out of a tomb. And in fact, Paul never actually mentions the empty tomb at all. So even though it's something that would become really important in the gospels, it doesn't seem that important to Paul.
The second question, was the resurrection vital to early Christianity? I had thought about this for a long time because I thought probably what happened with Christianity is that the resurrection, you know, some something happened. People maybe had memories, saw visions, maybe there was a physical resurrection. like I've I believed all these things over my life and that's what started the Christian movement. And that's a really compelling story as the kernel of a moment that maybe launched this thing. But the really wild thing when I actually stopped and read this thing and this really came recently because I read this book by Marcus Vincson where he talks about this. I have it right here. This is Christ's resurrection and early Christianity. Really fascinating book. But he points out how many early Christian texts don't actually have the resurrection in it. And when you start to look through the early Christian texts, and Vincent does a really nice job of sketching this out. Um, he argues that the resurrection was not a central belief among all early Christians, he argues that it was a it was a belief among Pauline Christians specifically that slowly spread and came to Rome and spread through the rest of the Christian movement and eventually became the central belief of early Christianity.
Now, there's two parts to this theory. The first is the what. And once you see this, it is really compelling. You realize as you read, especially in the New Testament, because we read canonically, when you read these texts and you just kind of read about like something about Jesus being raised, for example, in Paul, and right away you're like, "Okay, that means his body coming out of a tomb." If you actually read it, you're like, "Oh, no, well, maybe that means being raised to heaven." Like, we read these canonically and we read these with a view of like all the canon put together gives us this story of what happened. But really what happens when you start to read these independently and you imagine these as threads in the earliest Christian movements you can see that a lot of Christian books both in our New Testament um but this would also be outside of our New Testament. We could think of works like the dedicay um works like the shepherd of her the epistle of Barnabas. These are both works that are in the New Testament of one of the earliest Bibles that we have which is itself also fascinating that this early bible codex saticus had extra books in the New Testament that we don't have anymore. Fascinating but these books epistle of Barnabas shepherd of Hermas you really have to look at this evidence as a whole and ask the question was this a central Christian belief or is it possible that it was a belief that came into Christianity and eventually took over the whole thing. This is a fascinating question.
The second part of Marcus Vincent's argument, and this is where I think he gets a lot more push back, is the why. And his explanation is that this guy named Marcian. Marcian of Senopi was a shipper, quite wealthy Christian um came to second century Rome and that he brought um the idea is that he brought Paul's letters with him and then that idea of resurrection moved into early Christianity. This is really compelling. This is really really interesting. But whether you take that or not, the first part stands like the first part that there's a lot of early Christian literature for which the resurrection does not seem to be central. And I mean, you might just say, well, they all knew about it and they just didn't talk about it. Maybe. But if you look closer, you might see what I've seen the more I start to read this stuff is all of a sudden you realize again the slippage that I talked about at the beginning that it doesn't seem like everybody's talking about the same thing. But you put these books together in canon and all of a sudden you see the story that, you know, the the big capital S story. You just see it once you have these together. But it's not always obvious that those were meant to be together.
The third thing that we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about is what resurrection actually meant in antiquity. And if you imagine a reader of the New Testament, it's not like they would be reading about a resurrection for the first time if they're reading about Jesus' resurrection. We could think about ideas of resurrection or glorification in the Jewish tradition, which certainly happened. I did this thing cuz I came across this in my research that I didn't even realize that Pho and Josephus didn't think Moses died. They thought Moses ascended like straight to heaven without dying. We obviously get figures like Enoch, figures like Elijah who go to heaven without dying. There was also commonly an idea that people could be vindicated after their death, especially in the Jewish tradition. And if a prophet was killed um sort of like a an unwarranted one unwarranted death, they could be vindicated. And that vindication was the body disappearing, bodies being raised, being raised posthumously, whatever. Um and that might be actually what we're seeing in Mark. And that is fascinating. But that's in the Jewish tradition. But we also have this Greco Roman tradition of people being divonized after their death. Most notably, I did a full video on this and you can see this too right here. the emperors after their death. It was common for the emperors of Rome to be divonized, to be seen alive after their death. And because often emperors were hereditary, these emperors were called the son of God. And this was happening before Christianity even emerged. So the idea that Jesus is the son of God who was raised and seen alive after his death and like raised and divonized after his death is not something that's totally foreign to either Jewish or to Greek culture. And that's actually really interesting that what we have to imagine when people heard these stories about Jesus, they didn't just hear like the first time I've ever heard about somebody resurrected. They're hearing stories that were fairly common in the ancient near east and in the Mediterranean. And you can actually watch a video I did with Richard C. Miller where we talked about resurrection stories here.
The fourth question I would be asking about the resurrection is why the stories of resurrection even in the canonical gospels differ so much. They are just so different. And even if you look at the differences between Matthew and Luke, you have almost like completely different stories. In Matthew, the disciples go to Galilee and see Jesus on a mountain there. Maybe it's like a fulfillment of Mark. Cuz at the end of Mark, um if you remember, there's an earlier ending of Mark that doesn't have the long ending of Mark. the earlier ending, this sort of angelic- like figure in the empty tomb tells the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee. They'll see him there. Sure enough, on in Matthew, they have this experience on a mountain where they see him. But that's weird. Like it says, and some doubt it. So why would you doubt like if you all saw Jesus on a mountain? Anyways, different resurrection question. Um, but then in Luke, you actually have a very different story. It all happens in Jerusalem and you have different orders and you have different people find the tomb at different places. And what happens a lot is that people want to talk about these as if they're eyewitness accounts, but there's enough very like it's not small contradictions. Sometimes people think about contradictions in the Bible to be like, "Oh, it's small like one person went to the tomb versus two people." But like we're actually talking about what type of appearances um there were, where they happened, who Jesus appear to, like all of these things are vastly different traditions. And that suggests to me um similar stories certainly but that evolved in different places and have very different ideas attached to them. And that's a concern if you want to harmonize these into one sort of universal tradition which I think maybe the gospel of John does because the gospel of John kind of takes the parts from both.
Number five, the final thing I think we need to pay attention to is the extent to which these stories can evolve and be shaped by theology. when you look at even and this one even shows up in the text critical problems that you have certain text critical issues. So, for example, in Luke 24, you have this story of Jesus eating fish. And this is widely believed to have probably been a later addition to this story to answer a second century belief that Jesus may not have actually resurrected as a full human being, but maybe he was just some sort of like appearance. And it becomes very important in Luke 24 for Jesus to eat fish and to say things like, "Touch me and see that I am not a numa. See that I am not a spirit." Which is interesting because Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 says that the resurrection is a spiritual body, a numaticose body. And in Luke, Jesus says, "Touch me and say that I'm not a numa." We actually get like a complete contradiction there of how Paul and Luke are actually understanding the resurrection body, which is wild. But the point is that Christians over the first few centuries would disagree over what type of body Jesus had and what type of resurrection Jesus had. And the thing is we can actually see that a lot of these disagreements end up being worked into the text. So people obviously were working with some text but they might add a little bit to kind of bolster the case for their theological point. So whatever these stories looked like when they were like first written if you could imagine that we actually have a form of scribal interference by scribes putting in things to bolster their theological positions which is wild and also a little bit troubling.
So, as somebody with some training in biblical scholarship, these are my questions about the resurrection. And when I hear debates about the resurrection, I very rarely hear these discussed. And next time, if you're listening to one, because it is Easter, so there's going to be a lot going on right now, especially next time you're listening to a debate about did Jesus really rise from the dead, listen for these things. Listen to see if people even know about this stuff. Because I hear all this nonsense about basian analysis and eyewitness testimonies. And really, I don't think enough people just stop to pay attention to even what we have in the sources. Not enough people stop to just pay attention to what the Bible says about the resurrection. And if we actually did that, we would probably come away with some much more interesting questions about it. I hope you enjoyed that. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. If you haven't yet subscribed to this channel, please consider taking a second, subscribe down below. that helps to get the word out about the work that we are doing here. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I'll see you next time.
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