Who Would Invent the Resurrection?

One of the reasons I find the Resurrection credible is that it’s just not what anybody would make up.

The fastest growing cult in the first century was the cult of Augustus. Like his adoptive father Julius Caesar, Augustus was promoted to godhood at his funeral. It was easy to do. In Julius’ case, a convenient comet made it simple. Get a prominent citizen to say that the newly minted god’s spirit was glimpsed ascending on high or appearing in a dream or vision and you are off to the races. With Titus, they released a bird from the funeral pyre. Easy peasy.

It would have been easy to claim that Jesus’ spirit lived on. Most people, then as now, were ready for ghosts and phantasms and spirits–including the apostles (though in the first century, the notion that a crucified criminal could be a god was a second shock. In Greco-Roman culture it was the people with the power to crucify others who got the god treatment, not their victims. And in Jewish culture, “cursed is he who is hanged upon a tree” seemed to be prima facie proof that Jesus was accursed, not God).

Still and all, if you want to say that your adored figure, criminal or no, lived on, exactly what nobody was prepared for–and what people still find hard to wrap their heads around then as now–is the weirdness of the Risen Christ. Ghosts? Sure! Great! But the report of the early Church all speak of a body that walked out of a tomb, leaving it empty. More than this, they describe that body is being somehow the same yet not the same: that is, for want of a better word, transphysical. He is repeatedly described by the eyewitnesses and those close to them as present to them not “in spirit” but as having a body that is related to the old natural body of Jesus of Nazareth (such that his tomb is empty), yet which has properties and powers we don’t have. He can eat and be touched, but can also disappear and reappear at will. He is not recognized on three occasions, yet is recognizably the same man.

It is all extremely strange and so utterly unnecessary to invent if you are just cooking up a cult in imitation of any other tale of life after death. People, then as now, were ready to believe in life after death as a spirit being. Nobody, including the apostles, was ready for this and the gospel accounts (and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15) all strain at the limits of language to try to express the experience of the early Church in their encounters with the Risen Christ. It is plainly the language of people who are not inventing something, but who simply lack the ability to express what they experienced. That feels extremely real to me and always has.

Oh, and the story has one other huge disadvantage to the early Church: ghosts cannot threaten Caesar’s crown with rival claims of kingship. Nor can gods. That is why Jews were not seen as treasonous despite worshiping their God as “King of the Universe”. Romans, as was their custom, let them practice their traditional cultic worship and ascribe their god the customary honorifics of royalty and so forth. Spirit beings were never going to stage a coup. But Christians kept on insisting, not that a spirit like the God of Israel was wafting about in the ether, but than a man with a physical body and walked out of tomb with identifiable GPS coordinates and was now King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Unsurprisingly, that was seen as a threat to the Roman Imperium and, from time to time, when scapegoats were needed, or twitchy local governors felt insecure other political problems arose, it made Christians vulnerable to getting killed. All that could have been avoided had the early Church not insisted on their weird transphysical bodily Resurrection and just gone with “Jesus spirit marches on!” stuff. It’s almost as if they were stuck with the data of their experience and of the memory of what actually happened to them and did not feel free to just make stuff up.