Post-resurrection appearances

In his first letter to Christians living in the pagan super-city of Corinth, near Athens, around 54 AD, the apostle Paul wrote:

3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received:  that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,  4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,  5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.  7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.  8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.  9 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
— 1 Corinthians 15:3-9, NRSV

Several points may be noticed here:

• Paul is, except in the case of his own claimed experience, passing on what he has been told.  His own experience accompanied his conversion around two years after Jesus’ death.  His subsequent visits to Jerusalem were in 38, 46 and 49 CE.  (With all such dates there is a year or two's uncertainty;  refer to Galatians 1-2 and Acts 15.)  He met with Jesus’ apostles on his first return visit in 38, and most likely heard their accounts then.  This probably dates the eyewitness testimony to these appearances to within five years of Jesus' death, and certainly within fifteen.
• Paul's statement ‘most of whom are still living’, is plainly an appeal to available evidence, corroborating his own testimony.  The listing of witnesses was a standard means of proof in ancient documents, whether legal or historical.  If these people existed, Paul would likely have met some of them in Jerusalem, or in Antioch, where he lived for 14 years afterward and where Acts presents many of the Jerusalem Christians relocating.  If not, this is an ambitious (and intentional) deception, even over in Corinth; Hellenistic Jews frequently travelled to and from Jerusalem for religious festivals.

We may note a number of other claimed appearances, though we need not go into this level of detail in each of them.  Briefly stated, Jesus is said to have appeared:

1. First of all to a woman alone, then to a group of women, on the Sunday morning.  (John 20:10-18, Matthew 28:8-10)  These are the two most astonishing facts of all regarding the historicity of the appearances.  Who, in fabricating an account, would have chosen witnesses whose testimony was inadmissible in a court of law?  That is what women's testimony was at this time and place in history.  Wouldn't they have chosen one of the apostles?
2. To two disciples (not apostles) for several hours, in which time he joins them on a journey and then shares a meal with them.  He then appears again to a larger group with them also present.  (Luke 24:13-49)
3. To ten of the apostles in a locked room, with Thomas absent (who doesn't believe them when they tell him), and then later with him present (John 20:19-23, 26-30).
4. To a group of seven apostles and disciples on the shore of the sea of Galilee, while they are fishing (John 21:1-14).
5. To the eleven apostles (and others?) on a mountain in Galilee (Matthew 28:16-20).
6. To a group including the apostles on the Mount of Olives, near Bethany, where they see him for the last time (Luke 24:50-52, Acts 1:4-9).

On the consistency of the resurrection narratives in the gospels and Acts, refer to Accounts and Contradictions.

Some notes on these appearance claims:

• The accounts in the gospels partly overlap with Paul's listing, but there is unique information in each grouping.  Since we have no reason for expecting either to be exhaustive, this is not a problem.  In fact the prologue to the Book of Acts, continuing from Luke's gospel, complicates any chronology attempt enormously by saying:

After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
Acts 1:3

• The appearances are of very diverse kinds.  Jesus is noted to appear to two skeptics:  to Paul, who was having Christians arrested and executed at the time, and to his brother James, who had been skeptical about him during his lifetime.  He is noted to have appeared to groups as well as to individuals:  to the the group of apostles on two occasions — for the purposes of legal identification in a modern court, recognition by a prior aquaintance carries the greatest testimonial value — and also to a group of more than 500 people.
• He appears in a striking diversity of situations.  In a tomb, on a road, over dinner, in a locked room, on a seashore and on two separate mountains — and usually unexpectedly. This is significant for evaluating the options for hallucination, or well-intentioned self-deception, to which we turn now.

It is sometimes suggested that hallucinations are the best way to account for the early Christian belief that Jesus, risen from the dead, had appeared to various people. Perhaps in their sorrow and grief, certain individuals, having worked themselves into a state of religious hysteria, convinced themselves that they had seen Jesus? — whereopon they told others about it, and one thing led to another, and before you knew it… There are several weaknesses of this line of reasoning.

Firstly, hallucinations are usually recognized as such. Only with bodily deprivation (sleep, food), or drug influence does this change. While it is not uncommon for a grieving person to experience some kind of an hallucination (auditory or even visual) of a loved one, most people in history have experienced grief and loss without producing resurrection accounts. To be plausible, an hallucination theory could assume only a small number of incidents, which grow by legendary embellishment, which we discuss elsewhere.

Secondly, hallucinations are subjective, necessarily private experiences -- you can't share one with others, or control how they percieve one. You might acheive this through hypnosis with an adequately suggestible person, but the case for the ancient Jews as master hypnotists remnains to be established. Certainly, mass hypnosis is implausible: suggestibility on the scale required (for whole groups, in many settings, weeks apart, etc) is unheard of, and who would have the time and skills to prepare that many subjects? The only way to synchronize hallucinations would appear to be in retrospect, through a kind of cultic groupthink, in which all concerned can reinterpret or refashion their experiences into a common mould.

This is not quite as speculative as hallucination, and like hypnosis, could well work with certain individuals. It is, however, hard to see it working on his followers en masse, let alone on skeptics like James or Paul, or on a crowd of five hundred. It may be added too that in some of the appearances (eg. to Mary or Cleopas) Jesus is not recognized at first by them. This is strange if they themselves are producing the hallucination -- and stranger still if they’re inventing the account.

Thirdly, even if a string of shared hallucinations had occurred, or everyone had worked themselves up to believe they had, there would still have been a body in a tomb to be disposed of.

Non-physical resurrection concepts are probably the most sophisticated of the recent contributions to the resurrection debate.  The argument goes that the earliest resurrection reports indicate an evolution in the way that early Christians understood Jesus.  Instead of a single (giant, improbable) step from Jesus being believed dead to being believed physically resurrected, this view proposes that Jesus was first believed dead, then believed spiritually resurrected, and then (eventually) believed to be physically resurrected.  So both stages then become amenable to purely naturalistic explanations:  One may turn to psychology for dreams and visions, fraud or mild hallucinations at the first stage, and then to sociology for legendary embellishment at the second stage (so this overlaps the embellishment/legend/myth hypotheses of the following pages).

This is argued mainly from Paul's account of the appearances in 1 Corinthians 15, all but universally agreed to predate the gospels (~54 CE or thereabouts).  Occasionally an argument from Mark is attempted, since Mark 16:9-20 is usually agreed to have been written some time after the rest of the gospel (as it does not appear in the earliest manuscripts) and Mark is commonly (but not universally) understood to predate the other gospels.  But it is difficult to see how the supposedly extended remix adds much to 16:1-8 in terms of physicality.  The body is still missing from the tomb in 16:6, so I will focus instead on the arguments from Paul and 1 Corinthians.

| Continuing … 30/7 |

The primary difficulty is that Jewish resurrection belief was physical, not spiritual.  [ continue ]