The entire content and tone of the Didache reminds one strongly of the faith and piety we find in the letter of James, and teachings of Jesus in the Q source. The most amazing thing about the Didache in terms of the two types of Christian faith—that of Paul and that of Jesus—is that there is nothing in this document that corresponds to Paul’s “Gospel”—no divinity of Jesus, no atonement through his body and blood, and not even any direct reference to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. In the Didache Jesus is the one who has brought the knowledge of life and faith, but there is no emphasis whatsoever upon the figure of Jesus apart from his message. Sacrifice and forgiveness of sins in the Didache come through good deeds and a consecrated life (4.6). What we have surviving in the Didache is an abiding witness to a form of the Christian faith that traces directly back to Jesus and was carried on and perpetuated by James, and the rest of the twelve apostles.
As we turn to Paul and begin to examine the elements of his understanding of the Christian message, it is important that we place him within this world of Jesus and the form of Christianity that he first encountered when he joined the movement. As we will see, Paul had his own fiercely independent “Gospel,” which contrasted sharply to the Christianity of Jesus, James, and their earliest followers. Paul completely transformed everything from earth to heaven, and the largely untold story of how that happened is preserved in his own words within the New Testament itself.
Paul occupies a unique place historically in that he not only sets forth his own independent version of what he calls “the Gospel,” but he is our earliest witness to faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Since Paul’s letters all date to the 50s A.D., and are thus our earliest Christian documents, they can provide us with some important historical clues as to how Christians might have understood Jesus’ resurrection in the very earliest years of the movement—even before there were written gospels, and for that matter, even before Paul joined the movement. Before examining Paul’s understanding of his own mission and message it makes sense to probe as far back as possible, using him as our earliest source, in trying to grasp what happened immediately after Jesus’ death. As we will see, his view of Jesus’ resurrection differs substantially from that of the later gospel accounts.
TWO
RETHINKING RESURRECTION
OF THE DEAD
Since I was in college I have read every book on Jesus I could get my hands on, whether scholarly, popular, or even fiction. Irresistibly, like so many who were raised in the Christian faith, I found myself skipping to the end of a book to see just how the author handled the events following Jesus’ crucifixion and death. No matter what else a writer might say about Jesus, the question of what happened “after the cross” was fascinating and critical in my mind. All four gospels report that Jesus’ dead body was hastily laid in a rock-hewn cave tomb and blocked with a stone late in the afternoon on the day he was crucified but that the tomb was found empty by his followers on the following Sunday morning. New Testament scholars, historians, and even novelists seem incapable of offering a rational explanation as to what most likely happened that first Easter weekend. This seems to be the mystery of the ages when it comes to understanding Christian origins.
What happened to the body of Jesus? One recent historian wrote, after comprehensively surveying the historical and archaeological evidence: “The reality is that there is no historical explanation for the empty tomb, other than if we adopt a theological one, i.e., the resurrection. I leave it up to the reader to make up his own mind.”1
What I had failed to consider in all those years of analyzing our New Testament gospel accounts was that the answer to this insoluble problem was found in the letters of Paul. I am convinced that there is a rational historical explanation for the resurrection of Jesus and the “appearances” to the disciples that can stand up to proper historical scrutiny, but if one reads the gospels alone, without using Paul as a key, everything remains a mystery. If we begin with Paul, suddenly everything becomes clear and we can sort through the gospels in a way that makes real historical sense.
It is easy to assume that the four New Testament gospels provided us with our earliest reports that Jesus’ tomb was found empty, and that he was raised from the dead, whereas in fact they are our latest witnesses, ranging in date from A.D. 80 to 120 or even later.2 Paul writes in the early 50s A.D., just twenty years after Jesus’ crucifixion. That is not to say the gospels are without historical value. The problem is that they report a garbled mix of contradictory stories that have to be critically analyzed and sorted out chronologically. It is Paul’s earlier testimony that provides us the insight to be able to do just that. Paul not only reports his own visionary experience but also passes along testimony he received from face-to-face contact with Peter, James, John, and the other apostles—interpreting for us what it meant to say Jesus was “seen” by this or that person following his burial.
Paul is the essential missing piece for understanding historically this most important cornerstone of the Christian faith. Ironically, evangelical Christian scholars often use Paul to make the point that he is our earliest source mentioning Jesus’ resurrection, but then they promptly forget what Paul says when they turn to consider the subsequent gospel accounts.
In order to understand the historical background and context of Paul’s language about Jesus’ resurrection, and resurrection of the dead more generally, we need to diverge a bit from Paul’s time and the Jewish culture of his day. It is essential that we first understand the views of afterlife among the Greeks, since Paul assumes that his readers, who were his contemporaries, shared a Greek cultural outlook. The Jews, on the other hand, represented to the Greeks a strange and naïve view of the matter of death and afterlife, one that the Greeks thought was patently absurd. In contrast the Jews had come to their view of resurrection from the dead from a completely different place.
I always begin my college course on Paul by assigning an article I published some years ago called “What the Bible Really Says About Death, Afterlife, and the Future.”3 Until one knows a bit about how the idea of resurrection of the dead developed and what was at stake in its unique view of the afterlife, there is no way to really comprehend Paul’s “Gospel.”
To put things succinctly: the notion of resurrection of the dead is a distinctly Jewish way of thinking about life after death. Even today people easily confuse the idea of resurrection with the notion of the immortality of the soul. They are two separate but related views of afterlife, both affirming what is commonly called eternal life, but there are important differences between them.4 I want to begin with the Greek side of things.
GREEK DUALISM
The Greek idea of immortality of the soul presupposed a dualistic understanding of the human person as consisting of two separate components. The physical body, mortal and perishable, was viewed as a kind of “house” for the true self, which was the inner spirit or soul of the person and would never die. Death was not the end of the individual, but a release of the soul from the restrictions of the body. Plato, for example, likened the mortal physical body to a prison, from which the pure soul achieved release and moved to a more blessed place to continue on its path of spiritual development. The body, with its passions and sensual limitations, was seen as an obstacle to the soul’s highest spiritual development. Detachment from the body was both the ideal and the goal of the higher spiritual life. According to Plato, “the soul of the philosopher greatly despises the body and avoids it and strives to be alone by itself.”5 Although one was not permitted to take one’s own life, unless by necessity, nonetheless death was infinitely better than the imprisonment of the body, and philosophy, in essence, was “a training for death.”6