Jesus of Nazareth

by Gerhard Lohfink

  But before turning to the progress of events, I need first to offer some reflections on the structure of the Easter appearances.

  The Structure of the Easter Experience

  There is a current position that exercises a certain fascination because it makes things easier for people today. It could be described this way: After the death of Jesus there were no visions or appearances; Jesus’ disciples came to their Easter faith through “experience” that, as regards its psychic structure, was wholly within the framework of religious experiences as they are commonly understood. There was nothing unusual or ecstatic about it. The disciples mourned, but in their sorrow the death of Jesus opened itself to them in a new way. They entered into a “disclosure situation.”5 Suddenly they knew that Jesus had not remained in death but was exalted to the right hand of God. God had justified him, contrary to the sentence of his judges in the Sanhedrin. They experienced the nearness of Jesus in their hearts and the grace of his forgiveness. They turned again to the Jesus they had abandoned. Then these “disclosure experiences,” in which, of course, things drawn from Scripture played a role, were secondarily fitted into the existing narrative model of “appearances.” Originally the Easter experiences had nothing visionary or ecstatic about them.

  I consider the position thus described to be theologically possible. It would not destroy the Christian Easter faith. It by no means excludes God’s action (or the action of the Risen One) in the world. But from a historical point of view this position is untenable. It is a way of currying favor with the Enlightenment mentality, which wants to explain away everything unusual. It is impossible to eliminate the basic structure of a vision from Paul’s Damascus experience, for which we have personal testimony (1 Cor 9:1; 15:8). And the gospels also clearly show that we are dealing with typical phenomena of visions. That of Peter begins a long series of further visions that first affected the group of the Twelve and then a larger group of disciples who were later called apostles, and then no fewer than five hundred followers of Jesus at the same time. This could represent the original Jerusalem community. At some point the visionary phenomena even extended to Jesus’ family: it is said of James, the “brother of the Lord” (Gal 1:19), that the Risen One appeared to him (1 Cor 15:7). Finally, Stephen’s vision (Acts 7:55) is part of the long series of these early Christian visions.

  Not far removed from the modern position of “disclosure experiences” as described above is a much older hypothesis according to which the Easter appearances were “subjective visions.” That position can be described somewhat as follows: The disciples simply could not come to terms with the fact that their Lord and Master, Jesus, was no longer with them, and so there arose in their deep unconscious minds an image of a Jesus who returned to them to give them pardon and peace. Added to this was the profound hope for the imminent reign of God that Jesus had planted in them. Could all that be over? No! The desires and fears, the hopes and longings of the disciples were suddenly transformed into a certainty that Jesus had risen. This certainty paved the way for and erupted in visions within their souls in which the disciples saw what they longed for and dreamed of. This purely psychogenic process, extending into the innermost levels of the personality, began with Peter. He then drew his friends along with him by suggestion, and the result was a kind of enthusiastic chain reaction.

  Christian faith has always taken its stance against this emptying of the Easter appearances that reduces them to unusual but purely natural phenomena. In its defense against the position described it has emphasized the supernatural character of the Easter appearances, stressed God’s genuine action at Easter, and underlined the true revealedness of the Risen One in the sight of his disciples. So, since the Enlightenment, there have come to be two sharply opposed positions. On the one side it is asserted that the Easter visions were purely natural phenomena produced by the imagination or, more precisely, the unconscious of the disciples. Opposed to this, and in a constantly defensive position, stands the traditional view: no, the Easter appearances were purely supernatural events in which God, or the Risen One, intervened in history through revelation.

  But it has become more and more clear that this alternative—either natural or supranatural—is most unfortunate and even falsely understood; a theological resolution to this false dilemma is long overdue. It is similar to what we saw in the case of Jesus’ miracles: when God acts on people he does not make them passive objects of divine action but acts with and through them. That is, God does not eliminate the structures, laws, frameworks, and potentials of the world but acts with the aid of these and in common with them. Therefore a real vision is both entirely a human production and entirely a work of God.

  A genuine vision is first of all totally a human production: it is a bringing into play of the person’s history, past experiences, knowledge, hopes, imagination—and all this, obviously, in an unconscious process the person cannot control and in which the styles of the time and culturally conditioned forms of thinking play an important role.6 The time is long since ripe for acknowledging visions as a genuine human possibility. Then one can likewise take them seriously as also a genuine divine possibility, a way of speaking to human beings within the structures of humanity. For just as every vision is wholly and entirely a human work it can at the same time be wholly and entirely a divine work, as God thereby uses the productive imaginative power of the human in order to reveal God’s self in the midst of history.

  The principle of the doctrine of grace, that God’s action does not suppress human action but instead frees it, must be applied to the inner structure of the Easter appearances. This means that the disciples’ Easter experiences can be regarded theologically as really and truly appearances of the Risen One in which God revealed his Son in power and in all his glory (Gal 1:16) but psychologically at the same time as visions in which the disciples’ power of imagination constructed the appearance of the Risen One. By no means does the one exclude the other.

  Only if we understand the Easter appearances as thus described do we take them seriously, both theologically and anthropologically. Then we need no longer shrink from the idea that visionary phenomena spread, after Good Friday, in a kind of chain reaction, and that they were altogether inculturated in the respective visual and linguistic abilities of the recipients. We can then understand, for example, how the disciples could “see” and “hear” the Risen One and even “touch” him.

  The considerations presented in this section are important because they put interpreters in a position to look without historical prejudice at visionary, pneumatic, and ecstatic phenomena in the earliest community and not, out of pure fear of what is unusual, to turn immediately to magical words such as “legend” or “community construct.” The Easter appearance phenomena really happened. That can be determined by purely historical means.

  “Resurrection” as an Imaginative Model

  In our inquiry into the structure of the Easter experience we have left one question open: namely, the problem of the imaginative model within which the Easter experience took place. That model must have been present already in the disciples’ unconscious. It must have been available as an existing form, an imaginative and linguistic possibility. Otherwise there could have been no perception of Christ at all, and it would have remained unutterable. But what was available in the Judaism of the time with which one could grasp such a profound reality? There were three possibilities:

  The idea of the “exaltation” by God of a person humiliated by suffering and death. This model is found, for example, in Isaiah 52:13-15: the “servant of God,” crushed and pierced, is heard and exalted by God. But Psalm 110 was also an important background: this was about the true king of Israel, who is permitted to sit at God’s right hand as God’s throne companion and is thus exalted over all his foes.

  Likewise available was a notion according to which an individual who stood out above others would be swept away from earth by God at the end of his or her life. The history of religions
has adopted the concept of “rapture” or “translation” for this. The category of “rapture” also existed in the Old Testament: it is said of Enoch that God took him (Gen 5:24), and there is even a long narrative about Elijah’s translation (2 Kgs 2:1-18).

  Finally, there existed the idea of the general “resurrection of the dead” at the end of time. It is attested only marginally in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2, but it began to play a larger role in the intertestamental literature. At the time of Jesus it had made its way into the thinking of large parts of the population. In contrast to the notions of exaltation and rapture, and also contrary to certain statements of hope in the psalms,7 this is not about the fate of an individual but about the destiny of the many. And, also in contrast to the ideas of exaltation and rapture, the concept of the resurrection of the dead applied to an eschatological event. That is, the place assigned to the resurrection of the dead was the end of history, or the end of the world.

  In which of these three categories did the primitive church articulate its Easter faith? In fact, it employed all three categories. It said: God has exalted Jesus to his right hand;8 it said: God has taken Jesus away into heaven;9 but above all it said: God has raised Jesus from the dead.10 It is highly revealing, however, that the idea of rapture is not present at the beginning of the history of tradition. It was introduced at a relatively late period, above all by Luke. It is only he who tells of a visible ascension into heaven, which is nothing but a kind of “rapture.” His intention is thus to give a visible form to Jesus’ exaltation and at the same time to set an end to the Easter appearances.

  But the category in which the immediate Easter experience was received and put into words, the one that dominated the first visionary phenomena, was that of the general resurrection of the dead at the end of time. This is evident from the broad reception as well as the early dating of the texts in question. The oldest Easter creed was: God has raised Jesus from the dead. Certainly the idea of the exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God and thus his affirmation as Messiah and Lord must have been intimately connected from the very beginning to the statement about his resurrection. But the original thought model in which the Easter experience was expressed—in which, indeed, it was “understood”—was that of the general resurrection of the dead.

  This fact is of great significance for the description of the dimensions of the Easter events that are accessible to historians, because it makes clear that Peter, the Twelve, and the regathering community of disciples thought and acted within an extreme state of eschatological consciousness. They were deeply convinced that with the resurrection of Jesus the eschatological resurrection of the dead had already begun. But that meant that the end time, the period immediately before the end of the world, had broken upon them. The experience of the Risen One in the Easter visions in Galilee and Jerusalem must have been shocking, deeply moving, and all-shattering: now the dead will rise, the end of the world is near, the great eschatological turning has begun.

  The following is important in this context: for Jewish thinking at the time the turn to a new era, to a new creation of the world by God, certainly did not have to take place on a single day. The end-time events could occur during a certain period. It is certainly not out of the question, and indeed it is quite likely, that Jesus’ disciples, while seeing him as the first of those raised from the dead, at the same time expected that the universal resurrection of the dead and the end of the world would follow within days or weeks. This “extension” of the events is still evident in the ancient confessional statement: “Christ [is] the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor 15:20) or “the firstborn from the dead” (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5)—that is, the first, the beginning of the resurrection of the dead that is being introduced in him.

  When we read through the Easter stories in the gospels, however, we find scarcely anything left of the eschatological tension and shock of the first Easter days. That could make everything I have said here seem like a construct far removed from reality. But we must consider that the four gospels were written decades after the Easter events. At the time they were composed people had long since begun to translate the expectations of the beginning into statements that projected the intent of the oldest eschatology into a new language horizon. So we cannot expect still to find in the Easter narratives of the gospels the eschatological tension of the earliest time. Nevertheless, there is a series of indicators showing that Jesus’ resurrection was experienced as an end-time event and an immediate prelude to the general resurrection of the dead. I will trace these indicators in the next section.

  The Resurrection of Old Testament Saints

  In Matthew 27 we find an oddly unwieldy text with which today’s readers for the most part cannot begin to cope. It follows immediately after Matthew’s account of Jesus’ death: “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many” (Matt 27:51-53). It is clear that this text, the second part of which works with a tradition unknown to Mark, is meant to indicate the salvation-historical significance of Jesus’ death. It uses apocalyptic motifs: earthquake, splitting of rocks, graves opening. But that is by no means an adequate explanation of the text. It also reflects the atmosphere of the Easter days. The appearance of dead saints (namely, the righteous of the Old Testament), who can be seen as persons raised from the dead, must rest on visionary experiences in the earliest Jerusalem community. Apparently the Easter experiences were originally much more complex and experienced as far more apocalyptic than we would like to think today. Matthew 27:52-53 represents the highly tense eschatological atmosphere of the first days and weeks after the death of Jesus.

  The Return of the Galileans

  Another phenomenon points in the same direction and can substantiate what has been said thus far. We have seen that the appearances before the Twelve began in Galilee. On that basis we would have to assume that the original community assembled in Galilee and remained there. A number of scholars have, in fact, posited an original Galilean community in addition to the one in Jerusalem, but that has remained simply a postulate; thus far it has been impossible to offer historical proof of an initial community on the Sea of Galilee.

  We are, however, faced with the fact that Peter, the Twelve (without Judas Iscariot, of course), and other disciples were in Jerusalem, at the latest on Pentecost. There, and not in Galilee, the first community gathered, and at first it was firmly tied to Jerusalem. Peter and the other disciples did not remain in Galilee. How can we explain their return to the capital city, which was still so dangerous for them?

  A primary reason must have been the centering of the end-time events in the holy city, which was a matter of course in Jewish thought. It was from Zion that the conclusive gift of salvation would emanate, and from Jerusalem judgment and resurrection would take their beginning. It must therefore have been almost a necessity for the disciples in Galilee, when they saw the general resurrection of the dead beginning in their visions of the Risen One, to wait for those events in Jerusalem and nowhere else. So, at the latest in time for the feast of Pentecost, they returned with the other pilgrim caravans to the capital city, gathered together, and awaited the progress of the end-time events.

  The Empty Tomb

  Indeed, there may have been another reason for this return, in addition to the impulse given by the appearances of the Risen One: in all probability not all the disciples had fled to Galilee. Individuals among Jesus’ followers and sympathizers had stayed in the capital city, especially those who were less threatened or whose families were resident in Jerusalem. We have firm evidence that a group of women remained in the city; these included Mary Magdalene (Mark 16:1; cf. Acts 1:14). On the morning of the first day of the week these women went to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body. They prob
ably wanted to make up for what Joseph of Arimathea had been unable to do because of lack of time.11 But they sought in vain for Jesus’ corpse; they found the tomb empty.

  That, at any rate, is what Mark says in 16:1-8. His account has repeatedly been called into question. Even in the first century the empty tomb was interpreted as a fantastic invention, a shameless fraud, or a simple mistake. Since the eighteenth century the empty tomb has had it even worse. Enlightened minds repeatedly declare it a legend or part of a great myth.

  It is true that the tomb story contains fictive elements. The longer the story was told, the more they multiplied. The “stone rolled away” in Mark becomes in Matthew “an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, [who] came and rolled back the stone and sat on it” (Matt 28:2). Mark’s one angel becomes two in Luke (Luke 24:4). And the apocryphal Gospel of Peter describes how Jesus himself emerged from the tomb; his form reached not only to heaven, but beyond (GosPet 10:39-40).

  But I do not see myself in a position to call the whole story that lies behind Mark 16:1-8 a fiction. There are elements in it that still bear the whiff of real events.

  First of all, there is the burial by Joseph of Arimathea and thus certain knowledge of the location of the tomb. That knowledge cannot have vanished from the minds of the original Jerusalem community.

  Then there is the date: the first day of the week. That day would from that time forth play an extraordinary role in the history of the church: the first day of the Jewish week became the Christian Sunday, the “day of the Lord.” In the Jewish method of counting this was the “third day” after Jesus’ death. The very oldest creedal formula we have speaks of Jesus’ being raised “on the third day” (1 Cor 15:4). Where does that date come from? It is not “spun out” of the Old Testament, e.g., from Hosea 6:2,12 nor does it date the first appearances of the Risen One. The dating on the “third day” can only come from events that took place at the tomb.