This always strikes me like asking where an entire audience of eyewitnesses got the idea that Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre, or why the surviviors of Pearl Harbor formed the fixed belief that the Japanese had attacked on December 7, 1941, or why Romans arrived at the belief that Julius Caesar was stabbed to death.
Imma go way out on a limb and say the beliefs of the early disciples came from the experience of meeting Jesus alive again after he was murdered, eating with him, handling his hands and feet, poking him in the side, and doing it again and again for 40 days. What they realized it meant is something different and that is something the Church is still unpacking. But that it happened came from the personal experience of the eyewitnesses.
An extremely useful book in this regard is THE RESURRECTION OF THE SON OF GOD by N.T. Wright. Despite the common claims reiterated in the article above, resurrection myths in pagan antiquity were of an entirely different nature than the claims of the apostles. Jesus is not announced as a figure in cloud cuckoo land, but as a convicted criminal on the order of Spartacus or some other obvious contemporary. And of such rabble, everybody, Jew and Greek, had one view when it came to the question, “Do dead people get up and walk out of their graves?”: “Of course not.”
The resurrection of the dead in that sense was believed by only one subculture in antiquity: Pharisaic Jews. And they had come to believe in it because of their theology of creation. That is, they reasoned that since God had created man to be a bodily creature, then it followed that if he was to judge man justly, he must restore that body at the jjudgment. So they anticipated a resurrection–on the Last Day, the Day of the Lord.
What nobody anticipated was the resurrection of one man–let alone a crucified criminal–right in the middle of history. Nobody, least of all the apostles, anticipated such a thing (something the gospels dwell on at length as they show us Jesus repeatedly prophesying it and the apostles repeatedly trying to figure out what he really meant.
(This, by the way, is why I think the ending of Mark is lost. Anybody familiar with the concept of Chekhov’s Gun knows that when you show a gun in Act One of the play, any storyteller worth his salt makes sure that gun is fired by Act 3. Mark, like all the gospel writers records Jesus repeatedly telling his disciples “We’re going to Jerusalem and I will be arrested. suffer, die, and on the third day, rise from the dead.” But then the gospel ends with the women hurrying away from the grave in fear and…. nothing. They don’t meet the risen Christ. After that, other hands tack on a couple of quick and dirty summaries of resurrection appearances. I don’t believe for one second that this is because the resurrection was added later. The whole gospel has been showing us Chekhov’s Resurrection Gun over and over. It’s all a build up to that. Nope. I think the ending was lost very early (a problem with the physical media of ancient MSS), and that somebody tried to patch up the maimed MSS with what we’ve got now.
Anyway, the fact of the Resurrection was arrived at as the eyewitnesses tell us:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. (Jn 1:1–2)
What it meant was mediated to them through the twin lenses of their personal encounters with Jesus both before and after the Resurrrection and (just as important) their Jewish culture, tradition, and Scripture. Trying to understand the New Testament without any understanding of the Old Testament is a fool’s errand. It is a document absolutely soaked in Jewish thought forms, images, assumptions, and ideas.
Oh, and by the way, for the earliest Christians, the “New Testament” was not a document. “This cup is the new covenant (diatheke) in my blood” is the only time the term “new testament/covenant” appears in the gospels or on the lips of Jesus and it means the Eucharist, not a book. What we call the New Testament got that name because it is the collection of books the Church reads in close proximity to the celebration of the real New Testament: the Eucharist.
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One Response
Excellent Mark… I recall being taught that the whole premise of having women as (the first) witnesses and the fact that our “hero” was cruicified and died goes against any notion that could have been brought forward. In other words, “who would believe a woman” in first century Palestine? If your “guy” is put to death, then you are not a winner? It all goes against the culture of then and now. For a person of faith, this makes it all more believable!