Robert M. Price and Jeffrey Jay Lowder, editors
THE EMPTY TOMB
Jesus beyond the grave
545pp. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. $30; distributed in the UK by Lavis, Oxford. £21.50.
1 59102 286 X
Towards the end of the second century, the pagan Celsus wrote an attack on Christianity; Origen has made the text famous by his rejoinder. Celsus put part of his assault into the mouth of a Jew, lambasting the Jews among the Christians:
We must examine this question, whether anyone who really died ever rose again with the same body . . . . After death he rose again and showed the marks of his punishment. But who saw this? A hysterical female, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery, who either dreamt in a certain state of mind and through wishful thinking had a hallucination . . . or, which is more likely, wanted to impress the others by telling this fantastic tale, and so to provide a chance for other beggars.
The Empty Tomb is a collection of essays. Here R. C. Carrier argues that Paul himself imagined a stark discontinuity between a buried corpse and the supernatural body which (Paul believed) would follow resurrection. K. Parsons writes about hysteria, in individuals and groups. J. D. M. Derrett asks who profited by the dissemination of the story. Some possibilities are aired which Celsus, it seems, ignored. Carrier considers the possible theft of Jesus’ body. Several contributors speculate, as J. D. Crossan has, that Jesus was buried not in a tomb at all, but in a pit for executed criminals. Several point to the rabbinic rule that no corpse may be confidently identified after three days of decomposition; surely the authorities in Jerusalem had no reason to check for Jesus’ corpse so soon?
How much have we moved on, over the past 1,800 years? The arguments are now run in more detail. To the New Testament texts the authors of The Empty Tomb take some sharp blades wielded well. (They are no doubt at ease, themselves, with Greek and Hebrew; their copy-editor is not.) They swing some heavy but blunter instruments at pietistic thought and covert apologetics. Perhaps they are so strident because they are responding to fundamentalist voices which are less often or less vehemently raised in Britain than in the United States. The authors will simply have no truck with non-natural explanations; Richard Dawkins, one of the book’s dedicatees, is hailed as “adept at opening eyes, not least our own”. The authors treat Christian claims with just the bracing rigour with which they assess the (palpably false) claims of Rastafarians or the Heaven’s Gate sect; the Christian sect, after all, grew in more fertile soil than either of these.
Historical and literary criticism has boiled almost all the flesh off the Easter stories. Some scholars suspect we are down to the bones: the women’s discovery, as Mark portrays it, of the empty tomb; and the list – or lists – of appearances preserved by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. It is not much, but it may be enough to get Jesus out of his tomb: by crediting Mark’s story; and by exposing the assumptions which underlie the Pauline list. There may of course be a historical core to more of the Easter stories; but, beneath the authors’ debts to Mark, their typological instincts and their own apologetic needs, it is hard to pinpoint that core with any confidence. (The post-resurrection Emmaus story represents, as is now widely recognized, an invitation to eat in the new Eden what was forbidden in the old. Emmaus itself is still too often sought on the map. It is to be found in the inter-testamental text 1 Maccabees 4, whose heroes win their first victory at Emmaus; thus, we read, all the nations will know there is one who redeems and saves Israel.)
Of making many books about the resurrection, there is no end. Three years ago, Tom Wright, now Bishop of Durham, published his monumental study, The Resurrection of the Son of God (reviewed in the TLS, April 18, 2003), with which the authors of The Empty Tomb are in constant dialogue. Last year saw the publication of Dale Allison’s Resurrecting Jesus; and Crossan, Wright and others have lately produced a conversation in print, The Resurrection of Jesus (2006). Allison offers a gracious overview, stating openly the experiences and hopes which, he acknowledges, have gone to shape his views. Wright is (famously) made of sterner stuff: he argues that the knowledge of the empty tomb and the sightings of Jesus are together the necessary and sufficient conditions for the rise of the faith to which the New Testament bears witness; and that we are entitled therefore – as historians – to regard the claims to that knowledge and the records of (at least most of) those sightings as highly likely to be reliable. But what a strange figure this Jesus is. Luke, well aware of it, denied he was a ghost, and made him a close relative of Tobias’ angel. Wright introduces the term “transphysical” to describe him; the word is a cipher. (Ignotum per ignotius.) Wright has certainly laid out sufficient conditions for what lay ahead; but are they necessary?
Paul knew the value given in Corinth to the tongues of angels. So he should. He spoke in them; and so, he proclaimed, did or could his Corinthians. Paul offered a half-heavenly life there and then to his converts, not so far from the life which the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice encouraged among the “gods” at Qumran who sang or heard them. Of course this was a life embodied in matter; Paul’s converts, wakeful children of the day, still slept at night; and he himself and other seers glimpsed the creatures of heaven in all their weighty splendour. Paul’s converts needed a Jesus who had been raised or roused from the corpses; who had launched – and not just bypassed – the life those converts thought they were living.
What were the conditions necessary for Paul’s converts to believe that they, invisibly transformed, were now living on the threshold of heaven? If a scholar such as Michael Goulder is right, the Jerusalem Church and the Petrines, among Jesus’ first followers, put the highest value on ecstatic and visionary experiences. If Margaret Barker, endlessly stimulating, is right, they were following the lead given them by Jesus. Visionaries who saw the risen Jesus could with confidence assume more about the empty tomb (if they thought about it, up in Galilee) than they knew. We are only now retracing the course of the conflicts in which, within the first century, Christian visionaries and their detractors were embroiled. A battle over the Law is a battle we can understand, one in which we might even feel we have a stake ourselves. A battle over privileged, visionary access to the risen Jesus is a battle between strangers; this past is a very different country indeed. Can we use such visions, to account for the rise of Christian faith? Hardly. (Ignotius per ignotissimum.)
Perhaps, nonetheless, we are turning away too rapidly from these visions. What did they offer? Knowledge; a knowledge denied to our ordinary processes of thought and perception. We study the Easter stories as if they purported to tell of events as straightforward as the sowing of a field of corn; and we assess them for a straightforward truth or falsehood. But their authors, it may be, were less naive than we are. They may have been addressing a need we no longer imagine we have: the need for the readers, due to be confronted with anything so strange as the resurrection, to be brought to a special understanding equipped to understand it.
All is revealed, in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus dies and the Holy of Holies is unveiled to view. What, then, must Mark achieve in his Easter story? He ends at 16:8, and sends his readers back – not least in their liturgical cycle of readings – to Galilee: to Jesus’ first appearance after Mark’s own prologue. There the readers shall discover not just the earthly Jesus, but the heavenly Son of Man who has fought in his life on earth the battle whose triumph he should be seen celebrating in visions of heaven. Mark has programmatically confused heaven and earth; for only so can he tease his readers into understanding what he believes must be understood. Mark’s whole Gospel is a parable; and those who heard it in his day as a straightforward narrative were those, in Mark’s own terms, outside. His Easter story is not written as evidence, to persuade his readers of Jesus’ resurrection; it sends them back to the story’s start, to see unveiled there the Jesus, at once earthly and risen, whom they had not recognized before.
And John? His readers have been brought to new sight, as the blind man, and to rebirth from above, as Lazarus; so they have been made ready to be admitted to the private dialogues between Jesus and his own disciples. At the crucifixion, when Jesus is elevated on the cross, it is completed. There is no need for a resurrection; let alone for the further elevation implied between his encounters with Mary Magdalene and with Doubting Thomas. What is the function, then, of the Easter story itself? It describes to the readers the place they have attained in and through their reception of the gospel. They are the Magdalene who, on Day One as the light rises, takes Jesus for the gardener and is named by him. Adam and Eve are together again in Paradise, and all creation is made new. The lover of the Song of Songs has found her beloved, and will not let him go. John’s Easter story was not written as evidence, to persuade the readers of Jesus’ resurrection; it offered its readers, already reborn, a way to reimagine, redefine and understand themselves.
Round and round we modern readers go, disputing the range of possible facts which could have given rise to the New Testament’s testimony to Easter and to the early churches. But perhaps we are not yet listening to the New Testament itself. Its authors were making claims which, they believed, would confound their readers’ understanding; and they set out to equip those readers while they were reading to understand what they were reading. We distrust Origen’s claims for the spiritual aristocracy of which he himself was so conspicuous a member. But he read the New Testament well; and may have seen, in its authors’ techniques and the aims they revealed, what we have preferred not to see. We will still, of course, want to ask what records of what history lay beneath these texts that have turned to mystagogy in our hands; and we may have reasons of our own to plunge straight into the history of Easter. But as historians we are not yet, I think, ready for the immersion; for we have not begun to do justice to the texts that seem to offer it. Those who still read Mark in our day as a straightforward narrative, as a biography, are, on Mark’s own terms, those outside: they study with all their might but shall never understand.
