Last of all, as to one untimely born, he was seen also by me. (15:8)
Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (9:1)
He does not say when or where these earlier “sightings” by the others took place but since he mentions “the Twelve,” he might be referring to a time when Judas Iscariot, who was dead, had been replaced, which would mean several weeks had passed since the crucifixion of Jesus.19
Mark has no accounts of anyone seeing Jesus but the young man who meets the women at the tomb and tells them explicitly to go tell the disciples they will see Jesus in Galilee.
Matthew relates that the women who first went to the tomb are told by an angel to go tell the disciples they will see Jesus in Galilee. As they run to convey this message they meet Jesus, who repeats the message, even more explicitly, “Tell my brothers to go to Galilee and there they will see me” (Matthew 28:10). Matthew closes his gospel with the scene on a mountain in Galilee, clearly somewhat later, in which the eleven disciples see him, though he mentions that some of them doubted it was Jesus.
Luke writes that later on that first Sunday two men who were walking on a road outside Jerusalem met Jesus and shared a meal with him, at first not recognizing him. Subsequently he says that Peter then saw Jesus, but no details are given, only the report. That evening Jesus appears in the room where the eleven disciples are gathered and eats with them, showing them his physical body of flesh and bones and convincing them he is not a ghost or spirit.
John says that Jesus first appears to Mary Magdalene, outside the tomb on Sunday morning. Later that evening he appears to the rest of the disciples, showing them his wounds, but Thomas is not present. Eight days later he appears again, where they are staying, and Thomas is able to see and even touch his wounds, which convinces Thomas he is not seeing a ghost.
The Appendix to John (chapter 21) relates a separate story, unconnected to the main narrative and taking place in Galilee, where Peter and the other disciples have returned to their fishing but see Jesus on the shore from a distance. They come to land and he is cooking fish on a charcoal fire and they eat together.
The Gospel of Peter ends with the disciples leaving Jerusalem a week after the crucifixion and returning to Galilee. Even though Mary Magdalene and the women have found the tomb empty, the disciples have no faith that Jesus is alive. They are in despair, mourning the death of Jesus, and they return to their fishing business. Unfortunately the text breaks off at that point.
Two important observations emerge from this breakdown of sources.
1. The earlier texts (Mark, Matthew) agree that the disciples encountered Jesus only in Galilee sometime after the empty tomb was discovered. They are actually told to go to Galilee, where they will see him. Since they would not have left Jerusalem until after the eight-day Passover festival ended, their experiences would have been several weeks after Jesus’ death. Matthew’s account indicates that whatever encounter they had, it was more visionary in nature, and subject to doubt. As a kind of addendum to the Galilee tradition, even though they come later chronologically, the Gospel of Peter and the Appendix to John indicate that Peter and the others returned to their homes in Galilee and that Peter and his brother Andrew resumed their fishing business.
2. The later accounts (Luke and John) put Jesus’ appearances in Jerusalem as immediate, on the same day as the tomb is discovered empty. Jesus appears as a flesh-and-blood human being, shows his wounds, and eats meals to demonstrate that he is not a ghost or spirit. The strong impression one gets is that the empty tomb is directly tied to Jesus appearing and one is dealing here with the idea of resurrection as the literal resuscitation of a corpse.
These dichotomies are quite striking: Where: Galilee or Jerusalem? When: immediately on the day the tomb was discovered or weeks thereafter? And what: visionary-like experiences or resuscitation of a physical corpse? The internal evidence is decidedly in favor of the Mark/Matthew tradition. To even imagine that the kinds of stories that Luke and John relate, set in Jerusalem, were circulating when Mark wrote his gospel is highly improbable. That Mark could publish the first gospel in Christian history and include no appearances of Jesus, with the focus on Galilee, not Jerusalem, pushes our evidence decidedly in favor of the Galilee option. It is also hard to imagine a text like the ending of the Gospel of Peter even existing unless it were related to a strong tradition of remembering the despair and sorrow of the disciples following Jesus’ death, as they returned to their vocations in Galilee, giving up hope. It is not an edifying story, but it is a realistic one, and it fits our earlier evidence.
Some have argued that these differences in our gospel accounts are the expected result of reports from a variety of witnesses but all testify to the same essential fact—Jesus was raised from the dead. Sometimes the analogy of an automobile accident is suggested. When eyewitnesses report what they saw, each reflects a particular perspective, and there are always differences in details, but the essential facts related to the accident are usually the same. Such an analogy fails in the case of the gospels. First, there are no eyewitness accounts at all. Second, the reports we have don’t even agree on where the sightings of Jesus took place—Galilee or Jerusalem? What we have is a series of theologically motivated traditions written decades after the event, removed from both place and time, battling out competing stories of what happened after Jesus died. They cannot be harmonized. Luke even has Jesus telling the eleven apostles that they are not to leave Jerusalem, which closes the door on even the possibility of subsequent appearances of Jesus in Galilee as alluded to in Mark and recorded in Matthew (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:3–4).
Paul is a decisive witness for this reason. He does claim to have seen something firsthand, and he equates his “sighting” experiences with those of Peter, James, and the rest of the apostles, based on his personal acquaintance with them. Given his view of resurrection of the dead, as being reclothed in a glorious heavenly body, he would have found the emphasis on flesh and bones meaningless. When Paul says Jesus was “buried” he is indicating that he knows the tradition of Jesus’ body being put in a tomb (1 Corinthians 15:4). His point is to emphasize that Jesus truly was dead and buried. What was then “raised on the third day,” just as in the Gabriel Revelation, was not the perishable mortal body but a new spiritual body, no longer “flesh and blood,” the old body having been shed like discarded clothing (1 Corinthians 15:42–50; 52–54).
Jesus’ own teaching about resurrection, preserved in the Q source, as we have seen, emphasizes an angelic-like transformation in which even the sexual distinctions between male and female are obsolete (Luke 20:34–36). This parallels precisely Paul’s view of resurrection.
So why does this shift from Galilee to Jerusalem come about in Luke and John? And why their insistence on connecting the empty tomb with the literal appearances of Jesus as revived from the dead in the resuscitated corpse that had been buried? I think we can assume that the reasons were largely apologetic. These texts come late in the first century and even in the early second century. Sophisticated Greek critics of Christianity such as Lucian, Trypho, and Celsus were on the horizon.20 Their common charge was that Christianity thrived only among the ignorant, simple-minded, and gullible classes of society, who were led astray by the foolish tales of deluded women and hallucinations passed off as “visions.”21 There were also similar, rival tales of other “divine men” circulating, such as Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean wonder worker, born about the same time as Jesus in Asia Minor, who traveled throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. According to his followers, Zeus fathered Apollonius, so he, like Jesus, was a “Son of God.” According to his biographies or “gospels,” he healed the sick, raised the dead, and ascended bodily into heaven.22 Various versions of Apollonius’s death were passed along, including one where he was arrested by persecutors, set himself free, and was taken up from the earth into heaven. According to another story he appeared mysteriously to a doubtful follower after his death and convinced him of the doctrine of immortality. A fascinating stone inscription containing the following epigram has turned up in Asia Minor not far from Tarsus, where Paul grew up: