We should also note that anyone inventing a story from beginning to end would have been very unlikely to make women the witnesses to an empty tomb. In the Judaism of that time women were not proper witnesses, as is abundantly clear from the resurrection traditions. According to Luke the apostles considered the women’s report of the empty tomb “an idle tale”; they did not believe them (Luke 24:11). The following is also very revealing in this context: the attestation of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 speaks only of men, naming Cephas, James, the Twelve, and more than five hundred “brothers.” There were most certainly women among those five hundred, but they are not mentioned. Why? Because they were not regarded as qualified witnesses. Likewise unnamed in 1 Corinthians 15 is Mary Magdalene, although Matthew, John, and the “canonical ending” of Mark make it known that she had a vision of the Risen One at the tomb.13 Luke says nothing about her vision; instead, in his account Peter runs to the tomb to seek proof of the women’s testimony (Luke 24:12). All this shows how little value was placed on women’s witness in the milieu of the time. From that point of view it is improbable that the early church would have invented a tomb story as a sign of Jesus’ resurrection in which women appeared as the witnesses.
Finally, we should observe that there was polemic opposition to the story of the empty tomb. Significantly, that polemic never disputes the fact of the empty tomb as such; it is only reinterpreted: the disciples stole Jesus’ body or a gardener had transferred it to another tomb.14 All this presupposes an empty tomb. This supports the historical basis of the tomb story and speaks against the assertion sometimes heard that Jesus was tossed into a mass grave or that his tomb was unknown.
So, until there be proof to the contrary, we should posit an empty tomb that became a sign15 and a signal for the disciples remaining in Jerusalem. Reports would then have been transmitted to and from Galilee. The coincidence of visionary experiences and the empty tomb led the disciples to a single interpretation of the Easter event, summarized in the statement “God has raised Jesus from the dead.” The news of the empty tomb must at first have strengthened the apocalyptic expectations of the Galileans, because the spontaneous opening of graves was part of the general resurrection of the dead. At the same time, however, this news strengthened their resolve to return to the capital.
It has probably become clear long since that this chapter is attempting to make the elevated eschatological expectations of the disciples after Easter the key to the sequence of Easter events. I do believe that without the end-time atmosphere I have described we can neither correctly order nor understand the sequence of events following immediately on the death of Jesus. Here is another example.
The Election of Matthias
In Acts 1:15-26 Luke writes that the first order of business within the community was the choice of Matthias to join the group of the Twelve, which was incomplete as a result of Judas’s betrayal. We have no reason to question the very ancient tradition on which Luke relies for his account of this election. What is crucial to note is that there was never another such election afterward. It might have seemed like a good thing to augment the Twelve each time one of its members died and so continue the group as such. But that simply did not occur. Why? The information that the Twelve gradually came to play less and less of a role as a leadership group for the earliest community may not suffice as an explanation. Why did they so rapidly cease to play that role? Apparently because it was not their proper work. The original function of the Twelve within the earliest community was eschatological and can be read in Matthew 19:28: “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”
During Jesus’ lifetime the Twelve were an institutionalized sign of Jesus’ focus on the whole of Israel. He made them the official witnesses of his message and the personal symbol of the claims of the reign of God on the whole people of the twelve tribes. That was already a clearly eschatological function, one whose symbolic language was irrevocably linked to the number twelve. If the eschatological-symbolic function of the Twelve with respect to Israel continued after the death of Jesus—and the appearances of the Risen One must certainly have suggested that—then the group of the Twelve had to be augmented and made complete again precisely because of the approaching end-time events. Only in the number twelve was the sign visible, and only in the full power of the sign could the Twelve be witnesses for the Son of Man to Israel at the immediately approaching last judgment.
This offers the simplest explanation for why the group of the Twelve, though quickly restored to its full complement after Jesus’ death, was not further augmented in later years: the first and only election took place in that particular historical phase of the earliest community when the disciples’ expectations of the end had reached their highest degree of intensity. Again it proves to be a valid principle to regard the movements and activities within the earliest community entirely from the point of view of their highly expectant consciousness of the end time.
The Pentecost Event
This interpretive key applies also to the event that took place at the Jewish Feast of Weeks in Jerusalem. Luke tells of it immediately after he has recounted the choice of Matthias:
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1-4)
This narrative and its continuation make up a text that already had a long history of tradition behind it, in the course of which it had been changed and brought up to date; it was then reworked again and expanded by Luke himself. Let us for the moment set aside the motifs of wind and fire. They are part of an older, pre-Lukan layer of tradition that told of miraculous speech and whose model lay in Jewish interpretations of the Sinai story. God gave his Law on Sinai in fire and loud thunder, and despite all their different languages all the peoples of the world could understand what God spoke on Sinai.16
The earliest level of the narrative, however, was not about a miracle of speech but about the phenomenon of “speaking in tongues,” or glossolalia. The final text says that they spoke “in other tongues,” that is, in foreign languages, but behind that is an original lalein glōssais, a “speaking in tongues,” namely, inarticulate, ecstatic speech.17 We can take it as certain that the oldest narrative core of Acts 2:1-36 told of the outbreak of ecstatic praise of God in inarticulate speech within the original Jerusalem community.
In that case, however, we can imagine the whole context as follows: Peter, the Twelve, and other disciples returned to Jerusalem, at the latest for the Feast of Weeks. They were still in the thrall of their visions of the Risen One and the impressions from what they had heard about the empty tomb. They arrived in a high-strung state of eschatological expectation, looking for the Parousia, the final, ultimate appearance of the Risen One, to take place publicly in the capital city itself.
They joined with the disciples, male and female, who had remained in the city. All of them gathered to exchange experiences and pray (cf. Acts 1:13-14), and then, on the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), in the midst of such a gathering, there was an eruption of ecstatic speech that seized them all and shook them to the core. This prayer experience left them with a deep faith conviction. It formed the group of Jesus followers definitively into a community and—this is crucial—it was interpreted by the community as an experience of the Spirit. This was the beginning of such experiences of the Spirit in the church. There have again and again been glossolalic phenomena since then. In the course of the later mission they extended to other communities (cf. Acts 10:46; 19:6). Even twenty years later we find them in Corinth. It was probably at the same time, and in
connection with the speaking in tongues, that the charism of prophecy appeared in the earliest community (cf. Acts 11:27), and it would accompany the development of communities for a long time.
What is decisive in our context is the following: In the Old Testament and in Judaism there was a clear-cut tradition that described the coming of the Spirit of God as a phenomenon of the end time, indeed, as a sign preceding the end of the world. We need only recall Joel 3:1-5, a text quoted by Peter in his Pentecost discourse. The quotation begins as follows: “then afterward [lit.: in the last days] I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28). This text clearly shows how, already in the Old Testament,18 the coming of the Spirit can introduce the end time. It was against that background that the sudden and elemental experience of the Spirit was comprehensible to the earliest community in Jerusalem. The ecstatic phenomena of the day of Pentecost and their interpretation in terms of the Spirit of God would have been unthinkable without the firm conviction of the participants at that time that the end-time events had already begun. The ecstatic shock of the Pentecost assembly was immediately understood to be the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit of which the Old Testament prophets had spoken. This again supports our interpretive approach, which says that without the network of coordinates that made up the tense expectation of the Parousia the history of the earliest community cannot be understood at all.
Further Indications
What we have seen thus far could easily be expanded. We would then have to speak especially of baptism, which was practiced from the beginning of the earliest community and appeared as suddenly and abruptly as the experience of the Spirit. It can only be understood phenomenologically as an eschatological sacrament, a saving seal in view of the nearness of the end.19
We should also speak of the earliest community’s self-perception, recorded in the terms it applied to itself. It would become clear that concepts such as “the saints” (Acts 9:13), “the elect” (Mark 13:19-27), or “the church of God” (Gal 1:13) reveal a fundamentally eschatological structure. They refer to the Israel of the end time, which God has created, chosen, and sanctified for God’s self.
Finally, we would have to speak of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which also points toward the eschatn. The maranatha, “Our Lord, come!” (1 Cor 16:22), at worship sounded forth already in the earliest Jerusalem community. When we read in Acts 2:46, “they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts,” we are reading of the end-time rejoicing of the community that erupted in their eucharistic celebrations; this is about the overflowing joy of people who rejoice and can be jubilant that in their meals they were permitted to anticipate the eternal banquet with God they expected to encounter in the very near future.
World-Altering Expectation
But none of that can be pursued here. Even this brief description has probably shown already what approach we need to take if we are to understand the course of the Easter events. Here I will propose only one more question: What happened in the long term to that understanding of Easter, that tense and eager expectation of the Parousia in the first weeks after Jesus’ death? Did history invalidate it and lay it to rest? Was it an illusion? Was it all like a grass fire that blazes up suddenly and just as suddenly collapses?
It is helpful, in trying to answer this, if we recall a basic feature of all the appearance accounts. There is not a single Easter narrative in the New Testament that would point our attention to the “beyond,” to heaven, to eternal happiness or the disciples’ own resurrection. Nowhere in the Easter stories in the gospels do we find the basic idea of many of today’s Easter sermons, meditations, hymns, and petitions: because Christ is risen we can be certain that we will also rise.
Instead, all the Easter texts culminate in the Risen One’s sending of the disciples. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” says Matthew 28:19. “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation,” says Mark 16:15. In the name of the Messiah “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things,” reads Luke 24:47-48. Finally, “as the Father has sent me, so I send you,” according to John 20:21. Even Paul said nothing in response to the question of why the Lord had appeared to him except that God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles” (Gal 1:15-16). And to round off the whole, in Acts 1:11 the disciples who are staring after the vanishing Christ hear, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That is, they should not fixate on heaven but be Jesus’ witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
Matching all these texts is the remarkable circumstance that it was precisely this original Jerusalem community—which, as we saw, expected the return of the Risen One and the end of the world in the immediate future—that stood up before Israel, preaching and missionizing (Acts 2:38-40). The expectation did not falter; rather, it compelled them to gather Israel and lead it to repentance in light of the approaching end. The same can easily be demonstrated in the case of Paul, who in spite of his imminent expectation of the end traveled the Mediterranean world to win as many people as possible for Christ (cf. Rom 15:17-21).20
Real, genuine biblical expectation of the approaching end does not grow lame, does not allow one to stand idly looking up to heaven, but instead draws our eyes directly to the world and its distress. So it was in the early communities; so it had already been for Jesus. We have seen that his proclamation of the reign of God (cf. chap. 2 above) was tied to the most intense expectation of the approaching end imaginable—namely, an expectation that was constantly being fulfilled “today.” That kind of expectation knows that it must act because it is about “now,” and because there is no time afterward. Every hour is then precious; the time must be used up entirely just because it has an end-time quality. Jesus’ purpose was nothing else but to gather Israel in view of the already approaching reign of God and to lead it to repentance.
Jesus’ disciples had experienced all that intimately; they had internalized it, and with the appearances of the Risen One it broke out in them anew. Their urgent expectation of the Parousia was therefore never pointed only to what was to come, but instead, just as in the mind of Jesus, always also to today. This is evident in their idea of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments. In earliest Christianity the Holy Spirit is certainly the beginning of the end time and the deposit on fulfillment, but at the same time that Spirit is the power of God for the new creation of the world. When the Spirit is received and given room in the church, the world will be created anew—toward its perfection.
The sacraments too are eschatological. That is evident in the Eucharist, which is characterized by the cry, “come, Lord Jesus!” and yet this very sacrament binds Christians together as brothers and sisters and so creates new community. Something similar is true of baptism. It is an eschatological sign; it seals one for the end, and yet precisely this sacrament obligates us to a new life in the world. Whoever has died with Christ in baptism is born into the new society of the church. The sacraments contain eschatological dynamite, and yet they are the place where the earliest church made real its present eschatology.
It is against this horizon of the coming of Christ, already being fulfilled and yet again and again delayed, that the anticipatory texts of the New Testament must be interpreted. Then the Easter expectation in Christian communities would mean anticipating that at every hour the Spirit of Christ will show the community new paths, expecting new doors to open at any moment, counting on it that at any hour the Spirit can transform evil into good, hoping at every hour that the impossible will become possible, and never saying “later!” but always “now!” Then the texts of expectation in the New Testament are not something embarrassing, something we need to be ashamed of, and also no
t something time-bound that we can leave behind us; instead, they are at the center of what it means to be Christian.
From this point of view I would never say that Jesus and the earliest church were misled or disappointed in their imminent expectation. Jesus was profoundly certain that God was acting now, and acting with finality and in unsurpassable fashion. He was certain that in that action God was expressing God’s very self in the world, totally and without reservation. This “totality” and “finality” are, however, faced with the fact that human beings normally reject such a “totality” insofar as it applies to themselves and their own response. They do not want to commit themselves definitively but prefer to delay their own decisions and leave everything open for the time being. So there arises a deep discrepancy between God’s “already” and the human “not yet.” But because God has expressed God’s self wholly and absolutely in Jesus there is no time left for “delaying the decision.” Jesus’ hearers and the apostles had to decide now, in this hour. And they had to decide not only for God’s sake but also because of Israel’s need and the immeasurable suffering of the world.
I wonder whether, within the eschatological thinking of his world, in which he himself was deeply rooted, Jesus could have formulated and expressed this urgent “now” for decision in any other language than that of imminent expectation.21 We ourselves stand within an imaginative horizon of endlessly extended time in which there is no genuine kairos, but only events. Are we really closer to the truth of our existence and of human history than Jesus, with his eschatological emphasis? I doubt it very much indeed. Obviously we have to translate the eschatological language of Jesus and the early church. When we do, we see that it was not Jesus who was mistaken; it is we who constantly deceive ourselves, not only about the fragility and exposure of our lives, but also about the nearness of God.
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