Last year, Lydia McGrew did an interview with the White Horse Inn on harmonizing the resurrection accounts:
I'm going to quote some excerpts:
00:02:54 Lydia McGrew: I tend to think it [John's Gospel] was written later, on the basis of my interpretation of the patristic evidence, but I think for all that it includes, it could have been written before the fall of Jerusalem. That is to say, the internal evidence is consistent with an earlier date and was certainly written by someone highly familiar with Jerusalem before the fall. I also think that all this specificity that you're talking about there completely destroys any claim that John is of a partially non-historical or holy non-historical genre. So, there's sometimes genre claims you will hear about the Gospel of John. What genre is it? Craig Evans, in particular, has made these statements and I disagree with that. I think John gives clear indications, over and over again, of his historical genre.
00:07:52 Lydia McGrew: This is what we get when we have oral history. In oral history, people tell things that are salient to them—salient, meaning “stand out in their mind,” and they don't always explain everything. If you talk to someone about his memories of the war or something like that, World War II, the Gulf War, whatever it might be, you say things and you might have to ask him further questions to figure out how it all fits together.
00:08:23 Lydia McGrew: So, this is the way people talk in this kind of unpremeditated way, and sometimes they accidentally raise questions that they don't answer, and I think that's how John is talking and how John is writing from his own memories and knowledge.
00:09:11 Lydia McGrew: I would instead like to say it's the central piece of evidence for the Christian faith. I don't generally like to get involved in creating competitions between important articles of the Christian faith. So, is the Incarnation more important versus the Resurrection? But evidentially speaking, the Resurrection is the evidence of the Incarnation. It's the central evidential miracle. And so, that's how I would put it. I would put it in epistemic term.
00:10:36 Lydia McGrew: Well, I think that the independence of the accounts is very evident in the fact that they are different. And I also think that scholars have made a big deal about alleged discrepancies, some of which are more of a problem than others, and people are worried by that. If I may put it this way, they lose their nerve. Someone who is a welcome alternative here is John Wenham, and I highly recommend his book, Easter Enigma.
00:12:23 Lydia McGrew: Well, the nice thing about those is that they're not even discrepancies at all. They're just differences. There's a principle in the law of evidence in court, and this goes all the way back to the English common law that says affirming that one person was involved does not mean denying that another person was involved. That's just the way that people talk. It's not an attempt to give the impression that that's the only person who was present. It's just mentioning one person and not mentioning someone else. And so, that's really important here, that this is all completely compatible, that these are just the witnesses that were salient, that stood out to particular gospel authors.
00:13:25 Lydia McGrew: It [Jn 20:2] shows that, at some point, Mary Magdalene was discussing this with some other women who were with her at the tomb. I don't think they're with her at that moment. I think she went back alone but she's talking about this consultation that she had with the other women. So, it's very oblique allusion to the presence of other women, which is very nice because it really shows some knowledge of what Mary Magdalene probably really did say to Peter and John.
00:15:07 Lydia McGrew: Mary Magdalene is still distraught. She's distraught in John's narrative until she actually sees Jesus. And so, the first thing, I think, we need to say here is that the women did not actually see the angel roll back the stone. John Wenham has noted that the Greeks would often use the simple past tense. “There was an earthquake.” “An angel rolled back the stone” and “the angel sat on it.” But what they mean—what we English people call pluperfect, there had been a great earthquake. The angel had rolled back the stone and so forth. I don't think the women saw that at all. Matthew narrates it and you might think from reading his narrative, the women saw it, but I think he learned it from somebody else. So, let's just start there. I don't think the women saw that. So, Mary Magdalene has not seen any angel at the time when she speaks to Peter and John, and I think we can figure that out from reading John's gospel. So then, I think you can coordinate them just by saying that Mary Magdalene just did not stay with the other women. Sometimes, New Testament scholars imply the people are all chained together. It's almost like they're looking at it as a statue or something—it’s all stone, and if they start together, they have to stay together. So that is not true. I think she saw it. Maybe she peeked and saw the stone was rolled away, maybe peeked in briefly, saw that you couldn't see the body, consulted for a minute, “What happened, what happened?”—maybe somebody took the body. I'm going to go tell Peter and John. Maybe they can talk to Joseph of Arimathea and off she runs.
00:16:34 Lydia McGrew: And then the other women, I think, said something to the effect, “Let's see what's going on here a little more,” and they go inside and then they see the angel inside. So, what's great about this is we don't have to have anybody switching the order of anything here. John is just following Mary Magdalene, completely in order. And you can think of the camera in Matthew and Mark and Luke just following the other women completely in order as to what happened, and it's a very economical harmonization, and I think it really explains everything.
00:17:49 Lydia McGrew: I don't necessarily think they arrived separately. I don't think we have to have that going on. For one thing, she has to be with some other women in order to consult with them, as we already discussed, where she says, “We do know where they have laid him.” They presumably said to one another, “Oh my goodness, if they took him, where did they lay him?” So, there has to be some other women that she's chatting with for a second there, at least before she runs off. So, in that sense, they could have all arrived at the same time.
00:19:03 Lydia McGrew: I definitely think that Matthew leaves out the fact that Mary left. Whether he knew that she left or not, I don't know. I would definitely agree he does not mention that aspect of what you call chaos. And as far as the end of Luke 24, I actually think—I have a big discussion of this in The Mirror or the Mask. I think when we read Luke 24 carefully, he puts in enough notes this time that you can see that it couldn't all possibly fit on that day. It would have been too dark for them to even see Jesus ascend. So, Luke might, very accidentally to a reader who doesn't read carefully, give the impression that it all happened in one day, but not that he is really putting everything in one day.
00:21:08 Lydia McGrew: They give evidence of being independent in a very fruitful and relevant sense. Independent in the way that you find eyewitnesses being independent, and that's important. This isn't just independent imaginations or independent embellishments or something. This is actually independent accounts from people who are knowledgeable about what happened.
00:21:56 Lydia McGrew: It's just a question of whether the angel was inside or outside, you know, and as you say, Matthew just uses the word “they” at that point.
00:23:01 Lydia McGrew: Well, I think we definitely need to reject the idea that the shortest gospel includes the most that we can say. This idea of the shortest gospel is like a little seed and then it grows from there by people embellishing it, or that kind of thing, or like it's the little prehistoric horse and then it evolves from there and gets bigger and bigger as people add to it in a non-factual way—I think that's definitely not supportive. My work on undesigned coincidences shows that when other later-written gospels have material that is not in Mark, it's often confirmed, and it often does hail through beautifully with what is in Mark. So, it would be definitely be question begging and incorrect to assume that everything started with Mark, and anything that's not in Mark must be made up. As far as the long ending of Mark, it begins with verse 9. It's not in our oldest manuscripts, that's correct. It is quite ancient. It looks like it was known in the second century, so that's pretty ancient. In verses 1 through 8, it does include the empty tomb and the announcement to the women.
00:24:10 Lydia McGrew: Yes, it definitely does, and it breaks off –I think it breaks off mid- sentence. This is a great controversy among scholars, but I actually think that the original ending of Mark was lost and that someone perhaps, around the end of the first century, someone I think who had John actually, and probably all of the other gospels wrote sort of a summary of the appearance account and put it on there because it just felt so incomplete, and as I say, probably around the end of first century.
00:25:40 Lydia McGrew: For one thing, we have to be really careful not to really get too caught up in trying to figure out why somebody leaves something out. I think a lot of times we just don't know. For example, we just don't know why Luke leaves out all the appearances to the women. We just don't know why Matthew leaves out all the appearances to the men in Jerusalem. So, there's all kinds of things that we could wish that they wouldn't leave out and we don't know why they do. The other thing is, we do have indications that Luke is very specially connected to Peter. There are things in Luke that are unique to Luke, special about Peter—like the great catch of fish in Luke 5 that are found in no other gospels. So, I think there is definitely evidence that Luke probably interviewed Peter personally and had personal access to him, independent of Mark, and is very interested in Peter. So, that's just one possible thing, but beyond that, I don't think we can always give any really good explanation for why somebody leaves something out.
00:27:05 Lydia McGrew: Well, I think we definitely have a very vivid visual imagination. I think what it shows is that the body was not stolen. There was an author named Latham. He wrote around the beginning of the 1900s. He has a whole little disquisition with those old things that's out of copy right now, about the grave clothes and the way they were laying. It's a wonderful little booklet. Thieves would definitely not be folding up the face cloth. They would not be taking off the wrappings. They would just be carrying it off. I actually think the spices were sticky. I think they were sticky—heavy spices that were slathered in between the windings, and in that case, it would be very difficult to get them off. But no thieves are going to pause and unwind them and leave them, and if they do, they're not going to fold the face cloth. So, it's really clear that this was something miraculous that happened. I see that passage as illustrating realism and narrative, and this is something Leon Morris says. It's the way he tells it; first, the beloved disciple outruns Peter and then he doesn't go in—he hesitates. Peter comes in very much in keeping with his personality. He just goes straight in. He doesn't hesitate for a moment. The beloved disciple kind of looks and he sees the cloths lying there, and then he ponders on this and he believes. That's just very realistic. In fact, if you tried to give the different parts of that running then hesitating then Peter goes in, and he goes in sees and so forth, a symbolic meaning in terms of comparing them, it would get very speculative and very strained. So, what it seems to me to reflect, instead, is that vividness and realism of narrative.
00:29:06 Lydia McGrew: Or is it any of the other women? Whether she [Mary Magdalene] is the first or whether the encounter described in Matthew is the first. Either way, women were pretty obscure, anyway, in that culture, and it is—and I think that this does meet something that sometimes is called embarrassment—that this is not something that anybody would make up. And she was a woman out of whom seven devils has been cast, according to Luke's gospel. So, this is not a prestigious person in any other way.
00:31:39 Lydia McGrew: Well, I think that they would want something that would be forceful for their catechumens from all different cultures. And in Jewish law, women's testimony counted for less than men's did. Greek, Roman culture—none of them had, I'm sorry to say, a very high view of the value of female testimony. And so, it would make sense that if you're going to boil it down and you're going to teach it to people, you're going to boil it down to the more prestigious disciples.
00:29:57 Lydia McGrew: You could take that either way, because Jesus could move real fast at this point. Let's put it that way. He can appear to them on the road while Mary Magdalene is talking to Peter and John back at their apartment, as it were, and then he appeared to Mary Magdalene when she's weeping outside the tomb, or he can appear to her and then maybe they were going to tell—Wenham thinks they were going to tell a different group of disciples who were staying somewhere further away. So, they got, like a longer way to go, and then he appears to them at that point.
00:30:57 Lydia McGrew:I think it's [1 Cor 15:1-8] obviously condensed, the condensed version, and it may have been something that they taught to people. I don't necessarily think that it's got any priority over the gospel accounts. Some people would emphasize of this somehow being more reliable, or earlier or something, but I do think it's a condensed version that may have been taught to catechumens. For example, when preparing for them baptism or for entry into the Christian body.
00:32:17 Lydia McGrew: Yeah. It makes no claim to be exhaustive. Notice, too, that it includes James, and the appearance to James is not mentioned anywhere in the gospels, but James was a prominent James. This would be the brother of Jesus. This is not James, the son of Zebedee. James, the brother of Jesus, was a prominent leader in the early church. So, it's very obvious that that little creed, if you want to call it that, is listed for people for whom this is going to be salient. This is going to be important. They've heard of James, the brother of Jesus. So, that's why it bothers to listen because he's very much revered, actually, especially by the Jewish members of the early church.
00:33:40 Lydia McGrew: Eusebius preserved his detailed account of Mark and of James, which he preserved from an earlier writer named Hegesippus, because it was during a time when they didn't have a procurator and things were a little chaotic, and they actually threw him down from a high building, and then they came and stoned him, and so forth. And he actually got in trouble for that because they weren't supposed to be telling people on their own.
00:34:38 Lydia McGrew: I would definitely put that [“over 500 of the brothers saw him at one time,” 1 Cor 15:6] in Galilee so I would—I'm just going to wade right into that geographical question. They were obviously in Jerusalem for at least eight days, which would fit the feast that they were celebrating. Jews would not generally leave before the end of the feast, and John makes it clear that there were two appearances to the male disciples that have occurred in Jerusalem, one without Thomas and then one with Thomas eight days later. And then after that, they went to Galilee and that is recounted in Matthew. Now Matthew only mentions the 11 going to Galilee, but once again, as we discussed earlier, mentioning one group does not mean denying that others were also present. So, I believe that in Galilee when they met, it actually says in Matthew they went to the mountain that Jesus had appointed for them, and that's very interesting. When had Jesus appointed this? Well, I suppose he could have done it before he even died, but it could have been when he saw them in Jerusalem that he arranged this meeting. And that would also fit with his telling the women and the angels telling the women to tell my brother, and that doesn't just have to be 11. It can be the larger group of his followers—that I'm going to before them into Galilee. They had to arrange it. And they didn't have a stadium in Jerusalem, or something, but outdoors in Galilee, in the hills, there is plenty of room for them to meet and to see Jesus.
00:36:20 Lydia McGrew: We also know that he appeared a little earlier than that, because John expressly says it was the third time at the Sea of Galilee, as recounted in John 21. That's seven of his disciples on that occasion. So, I think the appearance to the 500 was a little bit later than that, but what's nice about that is that John has appearances both in Jerusalem and in Galilee. He makes it clear that they could go back to Galilee. So, even geographically, John sort of ties in with the synoptics there.
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