This is the final in my series of posts on the views of the Jesus Seminar on the resurrection of Jesus as they are expressed in Bernard Brandon Scott (editor), The Resurrection of Jesus, A Sourcebook, Jesus Seminar Guides, Vol. 4, Polebridge Press, California, 2005. The other posts can be read here and here. Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers are from this book. This post will examine two chapters written by Thomas Sheehan, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, Chapter Six “The Resurrection: An Obstacle to Faith” and Chapter Seven, “How Did Easter Originally Happen?”.
Sheehan complains, “The Easter victory of Jesus is the bedrock of the Christian faith, but it is turned into a stumbling block by the naïve and misleading interpretations of the “resurrection” that Fundamentalists keep serving up.” (p. 93)
How many Fundamentalist “interpretations” of Jesus’ resurrection are there? I thought there was only one.
Sheehan seems to think he can prove his hypothesis by name-calling. He says, “Fundamentalism is a form of smiling nihilism, well-intentioned but ultimately destructive.”(p. 93) He accuses them of “pseudo-scholarship” (p. 104), “ignorant and unbiblical nonsense” (p. 101), “naïve, backwater interpretations”(p. 103), “fudging the facts”, “sleight-of-hand exegesis” and “telling lies (p. 104), and “violating every rule of serious scholarship.”(p. 100)
Somebody’s got the grumpies.
Belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus is not something only “Fundamentalists” believe in. The Christian church has believed in it throughout its history. It is a foundational belief of every major Christian denomination, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant.
Sheehan would apparently like us to believe that the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus is something only backward, intellectually dishonest Fundamentalists believe in, and most scholars and theologians agree with the liberal Jesus Seminar. Sheehan is just wrong. In a 2005 article “Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present, What are Critical Scholars Saying?” Gary Habermas wrote that over 2000 scholarly publications on Jesus’ death and resurrection were published in Europe and North America between 1975 and 2005. About three quarters of these had a “moderate conservative” approach to the resurrection and believed that Jesus had been either raised in a physical body or in an often undefined physical body. (Gary Habermas, “Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present, What are Critical Scholars Saying?”, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2005, pp 136-140) The Jesus Seminar do not represent the majority or mainstream scholarship. Members of the Jesus Seminar seem to be living in an echo chamber where they are only familiar with scholars who agree with them. They are not up to date with a lot of New Testament scholarship. They do not realize they are actually in the minority.
This is evident from how, as I pointed out in Part Two, the bibliography of The Resurrection of Jesus, A Sourcebook contains one pro-physical resurrection book, The Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas, one anti-resurrection book, The Resurrection of Jesus, History, Experience, Theology by Gerd Ludemann and The Cross That Spoke by John Dominic Crossan which dubiously claims the earliest resurrection narrative is in the Gospel of Peter (pp. 117-118). All the other listed books do not deal directly with the historicity or not of Jesus’ resurrection. They do not appear to have carried out much research on the topic. They need to read more books.
Sheehan purports to trace the supposed development of Christian belief from believing that Jesus had been exalted to Heaven to believing he had been physically resurrected in four stages over about 65 years. He claims that in Stage One 30 AD the original Christians only believed that Jesus had been exalted and taken up to Heaven after he died. Sheehan writes, “The Easter victory of Jesus, properly understood from the Bible and believed in by Christians, refers to God’s appointment of the crucified Jesus to be the absolute savior of the human race. Christians maintain that this happened outside time and space : it is a matter of faith and not susceptible of proof.” (p. 94)
In contrast, the “Fundamentalists” would say the resurrection was a historical event which happened in time and space and there is proof for it.
Sheehan claims, “The virtually unanimous opinion of mainstream scholars of the New Testament is that the earliest language believers used for the Easter victory of Jesus was not “resurrection” but “exaltation” to glory directly from the cross.” (p. 94)
His hypotheses is flawed on many levels. As we have seen, what Sheehan calls “mainstream scholars” are in the minority. Sheehan thinks he is tracing the development of Christian belief in the resurrection by looking at the order in which these beliefs were written down, and because the resurrection accounts in the Gospels were written later and contain more information, he assumes this information did not exist earlier. He is assuming that what was written down is everything that was believed or known at the time. As I suggested in Part Two, Paul probably knew more about Jesus’ resurrection than what he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15.
Sheehan focuses on a few early passages which refer to Jesus’ exaltation, rather than his resurrection (p. 94) and claims this was all the early Christians believed about what happened to Jesus. He ignores other passages. Bart Ehrman, who is an agnostic with no axe to grind, writes that the speeches in Acts contain very early information,
“Nut the speeches in Acts are particularly notable because they are, in many instances, based not on Luke’s fertile imagination but on oral tradition. the reason for thinking so is that portions of these speeches represent theological views that did not mesh well with the views of Luke himself, as these can be ascertained through a careful reading of his two-volume work. In other words, some of the speeches in Acts contain what scholars call preliterary traditions: oral traditions that had been in circulation from much earlier, now only in their written form in Acts.” (Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, Harper Collins, new York, 2012, p. 109)
Ehrman cites three speeches (Acts, 2:22-24, 3:13-15, 13:27-29) which he believes contain early information about Jesus and they all say that he rose from the dead (Did Jesus Exist?, p. 112-113). Peter’s speech in Acts 2 also refers to Jesus’ exaltation (Act 2:33). Again, the Jesus Seminar are framing the debate as either/or, Jesus was either resurrected or he was exalted. The Bible says both. Jesus was resurrected and then he was taken up to Heaven and exalted.
Sheehan draws a distinction between Stage One 30 AD, his selective early references to Jesus’ exaltation, and Stage Two 50-65 AD, Paul’s writings’ on Jesus’ resurrection (pp. 94-96). This approach is flawed because there is simply too little information to base his hypothesis on.
Sheehan argues that the Greek word “egeiro” which was used to say Jesus was “raised” means “to awake”, so Jesus was only “awakened” from the dead, meaning God woke up his soul and took him to Heaven (pp. 96-97). “Egeiro” does mean “to awake”, but Paul was clearly using it as a metaphor for resurrection, someone wakes up from the dead and comes back to life. This is evident in 1 Corinthian 15 when he used the terms interchangeably.
“Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised (egeiro) from the dead, how do some among you say there is no resurrection (anastasis) of the dead? But if there is no resurrection (anastasis) of the dead, then Christ is not risen (egeiro)” (1 Corinthians 15:12-13).
They mean the same thing.
Sheehan also argues that the word “ophthe” used to describe Jesus’ appearances in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 means Jesus “was made manifest” and it is the same word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to describe God appearing to Abraham (p. 97). It sounds like there was something supernatural or visionary going on and they were not just seeing a physical person who had been resurrected.
“Ophthe” is the third person singular aorist passive of “oroa” which simply means “to see”. It can be used to describe seeing something non-physical, supernatural or visionary, but it can also be used to describe seeing something physical, like I just did with the English verb “see”. “Opthe” is a passive verb. Jesus was not doing the action. He did not appear or manifest to his followers, as some translations mistakenly give the impression. He was seen by them. The New King James Version translates it literally,
“And that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me also, as one born out of due time.”(1 Corinthians 15:5-8)
Sheehan’s Stage Three 70 AD refers to the Mark’s description of the empty tomb. Sheehan assumes that Mark was written around 70 AD or after and the other Gospels were written later.
As I have argued in other posts, internal evidence suggests that Mark and Luke were written before 70 AD. Acts, the sequel to Luke, ends with its subject Paul still alive in Rome. Paul was executed in the mid 60s, which Luke would surely have mentioned if Acts was written after his death. This suggests Acts was written in the early 60s and Luke must have written earlier. Most scholars agree that Luke used Mark as a source, which suggests Mark must have been written in the 50s, much closer to the events it describes than the 70 AD date which Sheehan asserts. Sheehan’s hypothesis about the gradual development of belief in the physical resurrection is built on a shaky foundation of an unlikely timeline.
it is not only “naïve, backwater” (p. 103) Fundamentalists who argue for earlier dates for the Gospels. In his 1976 book Redating the New Testament John Robinson, who was very liberal and would have felt at home among the Jesus Seminar, argued that the whole New Testament must have been written before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
Like other Jesus Seminar scholars Sheehan thinks that Mark intentionally ended his Gospel at 16:8 and never described any resurrection appearances of Jesus, “According to Mark, Jesus does not appear to anyone after his death .. After his burial Jesus is never seen again.” (p. 98)
There were already reports of the risen Jesus appearing to people in 1 Corinthians 15 . Is Mark supposed to have been a step backwards in the development of belief in the resurrection?
As I have already mentioned, the most plausible explanation for the abrupt ending of Mark 16 is that the back page fell off. Sheehan is reading theological meaning into a page falling off an ancient manuscript.
Sheehan’s flawed assumptions about the dates of the Gospels and the ending of Mark are compounded into the invention of his Stage Four 85-95 AD which refers to the narratives of appearances of the risen Jesus in Matthew, Luke and John. Sheehan calls the resurrection narratives “imaginative stories”(p. 99), as though the Gospel writers were making them up. As I have already said, if the Gospel writers were making it up, we would expect them to have made up stories about Jesus coming out of the tomb and they would not have said the first witnesses to the empty tomb were women.
Sheehan is assuming that what was written down about Jesus’ resurrection was everything that Christians believed at the time. There could have been other reasons why the more detailed accounts of the resurrection were written down later. The Christian message was originally spread orally and could have included accounts of the resurrection appearances. It was only later when the Christian communities no longer had access to those who had known Jesus and the first generation was dying off, did it become necessary to write it down and preserve accounts of what Jesus did.
Like many critics, Sheehan makes a big deal out of the “contradictions” in the resurrection narratives, such as how many women went to the tomb and how often Jesus appeared to the disciples (p. 100). These contradictions are supposed to prove that the accounts are unreliable. These critics are reminiscent of Holocaust deniers who pick through the accounts of Holocaust survivors looking for mistakes and contradictions which they use to claim the Holocaust did not happen.
As I said in Part Two, historians are not that bothered by contradictions. Along with others who work with eyewitness testimony, such as journalists and lawyers, they know that human memory is fallible and people remember things differently and make mistakes. It does not mean the event, which they imperfectly recalled, did not happen.
For example, according to the Roman historian Suetonius, Nero was in Rome during the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD (Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, Nero, 38), but, according to another historian Tacitus, Nero was nearly 50 kilometres away in Antium (Tacitus, Annals, 15:38-39). This does not mean the Great Fire of Rome did not happen. Somebody got it wrong.
Critics appear to be confusing the issue of inspiration and inerrancy with historical reliability. If you were to prove to me there is an irreconcilable and unexplainable contradiction in the resurrection narratives, I would have to modify my views on Biblical inspiration and maybe join a more liberal church, but I would not stop believing in Jesus’ physical resurrection because belief in the resurrection is based on the historical evidence, not whether or not the text is divinely inspired. I do not need to believe Thucydides was divinely inspired to believe the Peloponnesian War happened.
However, the differences in the Gospel accounts at not irreconcilable contradictions. The Gospel writers were not creating legal documents which had to be written in such a way that they meant one thing only and excluded all other possible meanings. Two people can say different things and they can both be true. If I were to say to one person, “I saw Bob at church today”, to another person, “I saw Bob and Harry at church today”, and to a third, “I saw Jack at church today”, these statements are different, but they can all be completely true.
John says that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb (John 20:1). It might sound like she was the only one there, while the other Gospels mention other women. However, in the next verse, she says to Peter, “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they laid Him.” (John 20:2) It appears there were other women there but John only focused on Mary Magdalene.
John says Peter and John ran to see the empty tomb (John 20:3-7). Luke says Peter went to see the empty tomb (Luke 24:12). It may sound like a contradiction but Luke later says more than one person went to see the empty tomb (Luke 24:24). It looks like Luke knew that John also went to the empty tomb, but he only mentioned Peter.
John says there were two angels at the tomb (John 20:12). Luke says there were two men (Luke 24:4). Again, this might sound like a contradiction, but Luke later also calls them angels (Luke 24:23). Luke was using the words men and angels interchangeably. Similarly in Genesis 19-20 angels were also called men.
Matthew says there was “an angel” (Matthew 28:2) and Mark says there was “a young man” (Mark 16:5). “An angel” does not necessarily mean “one angel”. They probably only mentioned the angel/man who spoke.
The Gospels do not mention all the same appearances, but an omission is not a contradiction. Luke is the only one who mentions Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), but the other Gospels do not say he did anything different on Sunday afternoon. There was plenty of time to fit all the appearances in the 40 days between Jesus’ resurrection and ascension.
These “contradictions” are trivial and can be easily explained. They are nothing compared to how Roman historians contradict each other about where Nero was during the Great Fire of Rome. All they prove is how pedantic some critics are.
More serious New Testament scholars understand that the differences in the resurrection narratives do not undermine the historicity of the resurrection, but strengthen it. They show that the Gospel writers were not copying each other, but there were multiple sources for the resurrection. This is an example of the criteria of authenticity of multiple attestations which suggests the resurrection is a credible historical event.
The last five pages of Chapter Six consist Sheehan telling us how dumb the Fundamentalists are (pp. 100-104).
In Chapter Seven, “How Did Easter Originally Happen?” Sheehan attempts to explain the origins of Easter and surprise, surprise, the original Easter just happened to be an event which is acceptable to the liberal non-literal beliefs of the Jesus Seminar. This presumably means the opinions of the Jesus Seminar are on a par with first century rural semi-literate fisherman.
Sheehan claims, “In any case the New Testament does not in fact assert that Jesus came back to life on earth, or that he physically left his grave alive after he died’ (p. 108) and “He was dead. And in the spirit of the New Testament we may add a further datum: He never came back to life.” (p. 109)
The “spirit of the New Testament” apparently means the opinions of the Jesus Seminar rather than what the New Testament says because the New Testament clearly says that Jesus physically came back to life and left his grave after he died. If I did not know better, I would wonder if Sheehan had even read the New Testament. The Jesus Seminar do not want to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but the New Testament says he did.
Sheehan says that the New Testament does not “maintain that faith in him is based on an empty tomb” (p. 108) It is true that the disciples did not believe Jesus had risen from the dead because they found his tomb empty. Of course, an empty tomb does not mean someone has risen from the dead. When Mary Magdalene found the tomb empty, she first thought the body had been stolen, which is a plausible explanation. It was only after Jesus appeared to her that Mary Magdalene believed he had risen from the dead (John 20:1-18).
The empty tomb was only a temporary argument for the early Christians. If Jesus had stayed dead, his body would have decomposed and a year later his bones wold have put in a stone ossuary box. A few years after Jesus’ death, it would have been pointless for the disciples to point to the empty tomb as proof Jesus had risen from the dead because everyone would have assumed his remains had been put in an ossuary box and taken away. An empty tomb was only proof for Jesus’ resurrection if the tomb had been empty within a year of Jesus’ death.
Sheehan says, “What is more, almost forty years would pass after Jesus’ death before the Christian Scriptures so much as mentioned an empty tomb (Mark 16:6, written around 70 CE) and it would take yet another ten to twenty years after that (ca, 80-90 CE) before the Gospels of Matthew and Luke would claim that Jesus’ followers had seen and touched his risen body.” (p. 108)
As we have seen this statement contains several errors. His late dates for the Gospels are not likely. He assumes Mark intentionally ended his Gospel in the middle of a sentence. He assumes that because Mark first wrote down the empty tomb (or more accurately, is the first surviving mention) that Christians did not know about the empty tomb before then. It is the equivalent of saying that no one knew the details of the Greco-Persian War of 480-470 BC before the historian Herodotus wrote them down about 40 years later.
Sheehan writes, “Jesus’ closest disciples probably knew of his death only by hearsay. Most likely they had not been present at the crucifixion and did not know where he was buried. Having abandoned Jesus when he was arrested, they had fled in fear and disgrace to their homes in Galilee.”(p. 109)
Sheehan believes the Gospels when they say the disciples ran away when Jesus was arrested (Matthew 26:56, Mark 14:50), they presumably did not know what happened next, but not when John says he was present at the crucifixion (John 19:24-25) or when Luke says, “But all his acquaintances and the women who had followed Him from Galilee stood at a distance, watching these things [the crucifixion]”(Luke 23:49). We are supposed to believe that the women, who saw where Jesus was buried (Matthew 27:61, Mark 15:47, Luke 23:55), never told the disciples. Sheehan believes the Gospels when it suits him. He is cherry picking. He believes the bits which support his views and ignores the rest. A theory, which ignores the evidence against it, has no validity.
Sheehan speculates that Peter in Galilee was feeling guilty about having abandoned and denied Jesus, “In those dark days after Jesus’ death, Simon had a religious insight, a “revelatory experience” that he took as a message from God’s future. We cannot know exactly how the insight dawned on him. But we know that pious Jews of his time felt at home with a broad spectrum of ecstatic visions and manifestations.”(p. 110)
“Simon “saw” – God revealed it to him in an ecstatic vision – that the Father had taken Jesus into the [sic?] God’s own power, and would send him again soon, in glory, to usher in God’s kingdom.” (p. 111)
Either “we cannot know” what happened or we know that Peter had an “ecstatic vision”. The words “ecstatic visions’ seem to imply the people having the experience are half out of their minds and not in control of themselves. In the examples, which Sheehan cites (Mark 8:28, Luke 1:11, Acts 7:55, 9:3, Galatians 1:12), the person having the experience appears conscious and in control. They are simply seeing something supernatural.
Sheehan claims that Peter told the disciples, “they all reflected on what they had earnestly hoped for and renewed their faith” and “they too sensed the gift of God’s future overcoming their lack of faith. They too “saw” God’s revelation and had their own Easter experience.”(p. 111)
This is all speculation. Sheehan has no evidence this is what happened. He is making it up.
Belief in the resurrection was supposedly founded on Peter’s experience, but Peter is a minor character in the resurrection narratives. Luke and Paul say Peter saw the risen Jesus, but they do not describe his encounter (Luke 24:34, 1 Corinthians 15:5). If Peter really was the foundation of Easter, we would surely expect the resurrection narratives to have developed around him. Instead, the emphasis in the Gospels is on women being the first witnesses to the empty tomb. The women do not get a mention in Sheehan’s supposed reconstruction of the original Easter. He does not attempt why the Gospel writers would downplay Peter and make the first witnesses women who, as I have said, would not have been taken seriously as witnesses in the ancient world.
Sheehan writes that Paul said that “God has ‘glorified” his servant (Acts 3:13), that he “exalted” him to his right hand (2:33), that he had assumed him into heaven and “designated” him the agent of the coming eschaton (3:20) without any mention of the physical resurrection.” (p. 112)
Sheehan’s cherry bucket must be overflowing. Peter’s sermons, which Sheehan cites, clearly talked about Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 2:24, 30, 32, 3:15). When Peter said that King David “is both dead and buried, his tomb is with with us to this day” (Acts 2:29) in the context of Jesus being raised from the dead, he meant David’s tomb was still occupied, but Jesus’ tomb was empty because had had been physically resurrected.
Sheehan writes that “in the apocalyptic context of the times, a resurrection did not necessarily mean that a dead person came back to life and physically left his grave.”(p. 112) That is what resurrection means. The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection show that they understood the resurrection as physical. Just because Sheehan does want to believe Jesus was physically resurrected, does not mean he can change the meaning of the word “resurrection”.
Sheehan argues that the early Christians equated Jesus’ exaltation and glorification with resurrection. The Jews understood the difference between someone being glorified and exalted in Heaven and someone coming back to life on earth. If Sheehan is right and Jesus was originally believed to have been exalted and glorified in Heaven, that does not explain why in a relatively short period of time, his spiritual glorification was transformed into a physical resurrection on earth. What was wrong with still believing Jesus had been exalted in Heaven?
According to the Jesus Seminar, belief in Jesus’ physical resurrection was basically a result of a stuff up on God’s part. God supposedly exalted Jesus in Heaven and gave his disciples visions of the exalted and glorified Jesus which, for some unexplained reason, they turned into a belief that Jesus had been physically resurrected on earth and dishonestly made up stories about his physical resurrection, and Christians have believed this mistake for nearly 2000 years. Maybe God’s omniscience was turned off that day.
Malcolm Nicholson 