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Friday, March 22, 2013

Unusual Agreement Among The Gospel Resurrection Narratives

There are many differences among the resurrection narratives in the gospels. Critics of the resurrection often bring up those differences, and we've discussed them here many times. But there are a lot of similarities among the accounts as well. Some of the similarities are what you'd expect to see. You'd expect resurrection accounts to involve an empty tomb, for example. Or if two or more of the gospels agree by including Peter in the events they narrate, for instance, that's not surprising. Given Peter's prominence among Jesus' disciples, you'd expect him to be involved. However, there are other agreements among the gospels that you wouldn't expect. Those unexpected agreements are unusual to different degrees, and they have different levels of evidential value. But some are highly significant, and their individual and cumulative weight have to be taken into account in any attempt to address the historicity of the resurrection. What I want to do in this post is discuss some examples that aren't often mentioned.

I'm sure many of you, if not all of you, are familiar with the unusual gospel agreements that are more commonly brought up. The gospels agree that Jesus was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, for example, something highly unlikely to have been made up. They all have Jesus' tomb found empty by a group of his female followers early on a Sunday morning. The gospels agree that a resurrection took place, as opposed to something more in line with mainstream Jewish belief at the time, such as that Jesus was resuscitated, bodily assumed, or seen in a vision. Mainstream Jewish belief at the time was that there would be no resurrection of an individual prior to the general resurrection. The fact that the gospels agree in claiming a resurrection, when so many other and more widely accepted options were available, is striking. And the gospels all refrain from narrating the resurrection itself. They just describe the events surrounding it. And so on. Agreements among the gospels like these have been widely discussed. I want to address some others that aren't mentioned so often.

In all of the gospels with resurrection narratives and the first chapter of Acts, the resurrection body is portrayed as not much different than an ordinary body prior to death. In contrast, resurrected individuals and other exalted figures are portrayed much differently in other sources written prior to and after the gospels and Acts and even within those five documents themselves. As Jonathan Kendall explains:

"This is another feature mitigating against the possibility of legendary embellishment, especially since even the angels in the post-resurrection narratives are in a couple of places described as wearing very radiant, white garments (Matthew 28:2-3; Luke 24:4)....[Jake] O'Connell notes that Second-Temple literature regarding the exaltation of saints, the appearances of the exalted Jesus to Paul, Stephen, and John of Patmos, Jesus' coming as the glorious Son of Man (cf. Mark 13:26; 14:62), as well as his role per the early church as the High Priestly Messiah would make fabricated or legendary accounts of Jesus' resurrection all the more likely to come in the form of heavenly visions....Rather, playing on the fact that collective visions invariably carry as a pre-requisite the role of expectation, O'Connell argues at length that at least some of the disciples should have seen Jesus in exalted, glorious form (e.g. Acts 9:3; Revelation 1:9-20) if they were hallucinating....O'Connell utilizes numerous texts to demonstrate that the resurrection body was generally expected to be glorious in nature." (in J.P. Holding, ed., Defending The Resurrection [United States: Xulon Press, 2010], 327, 352)

Think of Daniel 12:3, 2 Maccabees 15:13, Matthew 13:43, or Mark 9:3, for example. Why do all of the gospel authors agree in departing from how resurrected individuals and other exalted figures were expected to appear? If the first stage of Jesus' resurrection was more mundane, and it wasn't until later that he appeared in a more glorious manner, then this agreement of the gospels and Acts makes sense. They're reporting what actually happened, and what actually happened was a departure from common expectation. But how likely is it that the authors would have agreed in fabricating such an unusual scenario? Or that some prior source they all relied on would have made up such a scenario, then gotten all of the relevant sources to accept it?

Something else stands out regarding Jesus' resurrection body. He still had discernable crucifixion wounds (Luke 24:39, John 20:27). Matthew and Mark don't comment on the subject, but the two sources who are writing in contexts in which it would be relevant to mention the crucifixion wounds agree that the wounds were still discernable. Since resurrection is associated with healing, it would be unusual if even one of the gospels portrayed Jesus as retaining his wounds. That two gospels mention it is even more significant.

Then there's the diminished role of the Old Testament background in the resurrection narratives. Though the gospel authors say much about prophecy fulfillment and other Old Testament themes in the pre-resurrection narratives, there's a lot less such material in the resurrection accounts. As Richard Bauckham notes:

"It is well recognized that the narratives of the passion and especially the crucifixion itself constantly quote or allude to the Old Testament, especially to the words of righteous sufferers in the Psalms. There is an intertextual network that serves to interpret the passion of Jesus by setting it within the experience and the expectation of Israel. But when we read on to the accounts of the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances there are hardly any such allusions. The stories show little sign of following literary precedents, and standard narrative motifs, the building blocks of many an ancient story, are rare. For all the ingenuity of scholars these stories remain strangely sui generis and lacking theological interpretation. None of the standard Jewish formulas or images of resurrection occur. We seem to be shown the extraordinary novum, the otherness of resurrection, through the eyes of those whose ordinary reality it invaded. The perplexity, the doubt, the fear, the joy, the recognition are those of deep memory, mediated, to be sure, by literary means, but not entirely hidden behind the text." (Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], 504-505)

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