From Joseph Smith to Jesus: A Historical Reckoning
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Part Five: Resurrection and Atonement: The Persistence of the Vision of Jesus
The resurrection is the question the entire tradition hinges on, but history doesn’t offer direct access to such supernatural events. However, we can examine the earliest reports that Jesus was seen alive again afterward. With neither credulous acceptance or contemptuous dismissal, we engage the evidence and the development of the Easter tradition through the historical matrix.
I. What History
Can and Cannot Say
II. The Community in Crisis and the Disciples’ Incomprehension
III. The Righteous Sufferer and the Scriptural Template
IV. The Cognitive Science of Religion
V. Grief, Vision, and the Psychology of Prophetic Loss
VI. Paul’s Witness: The Earliest Account
VII. The Women at the Cross and the Tomb: Mourning as Historical Memory
VIII. The Empty Tomb and the Logic of Resurrection Belief
IX. The Escalating Tradition: From Paul to John
X. N.T. Wright and the Case for the Physical Resurrection
XI. Christological Escalation: From Exaltation to Incarnation
XII. The Son of Man Identification: The Herald Becomes the Coming One
XIII. Atonement Theology as Post-Hoc Meaning-Making
XIV. The Emmaus Road
Continued from Part 4.
I. What History Can and Cannot Say
Here we begin with what cannot responsibly be said, and then move to what can.
As a discipline, historical inquiry operates within a specific set of methodological constraints. It works with evidence – documents, artifacts, patterns of behavior, the testimony of witnesses filtered through the long passage of time and the distorting effects of memory, interest, and community. It seeks to establish, with appropriate degrees of confidence and appropriate acknowledgment of uncertainty, what probably happened and why. History is not equipped, and has never claimed to be equipped, to adjudicate supernatural claims. This is because the historical method has no tools for evaluating a one-time suspension of the regularities of the physical world. The resurrection of a dead person, if it occurred, is precisely the kind of event that lies beyond the reach of historical verification or falsification. The historian, as historian, cannot say it probably happened. The historian, as historian, also cannot say definitively it did not. What the historian can do is examine the documentary evidence, trace how the tradition developed, and ask what we can responsibly conclude about what the earliest followers of Jesus actually experienced and claimed.
And here, the historical record yields something genuinely extraordinary. Not necessarily a miracle, but an undisputable fact that transformed Jesus’s movement. Within a remarkably short time after the crucifixion, at least some of the followers of Jesus were claiming that he was seen alive again. Not alive in a merely metaphorical sense – not alive in the way that a teacher's ideas live on in students, or the way a movement persists after its founder's death. Alive in some more immediate and present sense than that, which they struggled to articulate and which the tradition would spend the next several centuries trying to specify with increasing theological precision.
Something certainly happened to generate these claims. That is the one statement about the resurrection that historical inquiry can make with genuine confidence. What exactly that something was is the question this part of the series will now investigate.
II. The Community in Crisis and The Disciples’ Incomprehension
Consider the situation of Jesus's followers in the days immediately following the crucifixion. They were not trained theologians merely musing over the meaning of their teacher’s martyrdom in a passive sense. These were frightened, scattered, grieving people who had staked everything on the belief that the man they had followed was something extraordinary. They expected the end of the age and the arrival of God’s kingdom as he had predicted. Yet, he had been publicly executed in the manner reserved for the most contemptible criminals. Everything they had hoped he would accomplish, the exact opposite had happened. The Kingdom had not come; the Romans were still in charge. The Temple was still collaborating with Rome. David's throne remained occupied by client-king administrators appointed by their imperial oppressors.
The attitude and comprehension of Jesus’s earliest disciples in the midst of this crisis here warrants full investigation. And so, we turn to a feature of Mark’s Gospel that tends to disappear in harmonized readings of the tradition but, once noticed, is difficult to un-notice. It bears directly on the question of what the disciples understood about Jesus’s mission during his lifetime as opposed to what they came to understand afterward. The community in crisis was evidently not a community that had been carefully prepared for what happened. It was a community that did not anticipate what was coming, and the earliest Gospel is remarkably transparent about that fact. In Mark’s narrative, the disciples are consistently and relentlessly depicted as failing to understand what Jesus is doing and saying. We have touched on elements of this quizzical response previously in the series, but here we take an accounting specifically as evidence that the earliest disciples were not trained to expect what later tradition presumed about the culmination of Jesus’s ministry in passion week. Mark gives a sustained and deliberate portrait that runs from the beginning of the ministry to its catastrophic end.
The pattern begins early. In Mark 4, after Jesus teaches in parables, the disciples come to him privately and ask what the parables mean – prompting Jesus’s sharp response: “Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?” (4:13). After the first feeding miracle in Mark 6, the disciples are bewildered by Jesus walking on the water, and Mark offers an editorial comment that is as blunt as anything in the Gospel tradition: “For they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened” (6:52). The language is striking; hardened hearts is the language Mark elsewhere uses for Jesus’s opponents, not his followers. After the second feeding miracle in Mark 8, Jesus confronts them directly: “Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear?” (8:17-18). The echo of Isaiah’s indictment of a people incapable of receiving the prophetic message is unmistakable and almost certainly deliberate. Mark is depicting the disciples not merely as slow learners but as participants in the same pattern of incomprehension that the prophetic tradition attributed to Israel as a whole.
The incomprehension in Mark extends beyond the circle of disciples to the people who knew Jesus longest and most intimately – his own family. In Mark 3:21, when Jesus’s ministry begins attracting crowds large enough to prevent him from eating, his family comes to seize him, saying “he has gone out of his mind.” The word is exestē: he is beside himself, he has lost his reason. This is a dramatically clinical judgment by the people who grew up with him. And it’s followed a few verses later by a scene in which Jesus’s mother and brothers arrive outside a dwelling he is teaching at, asking for him, and Jesus responds by looking at those seated around him and declaring: “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:34–35). As we have seen in Part Three of this series, the redefinition of family around the community of the Kingdom rather than the bonds of kinship is itself a radical social claim in a culture organized around household and lineage. The criteria of coherence and embarrassment validate this pericope. But the detail that matters most for the historical argument I am making here is that Jesus’s inner circle was repeatedly portrayed as not understanding his mission by Mark.
The saying preserved in Mark 6:4 also coheres with this portrait and passes the criterion of dissimilarity: “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown and among their own kin and in their own house.” The specificity is notable – not merely hometown, but relatives and household. A community inventing a prophetic legitimation saying would be highly unlikely to invent the detail that the prophet’s own family rejected him. The saying survives because it described something that likely happened, and it happened because the Kingdom proclamation that Jesus was enacting looked, to the people who had known him as a carpenter’s son in Nazareth, like the behavior of a man who had taken leave of his senses. The saying also survives because it happens to align with Mark’s literary theme of bewilderment during Jesus’s lifetime.
The incomprehension reaches its sharpest expression in the three passion predictions: passages in which Jesus tells his disciples, explicitly and privately, what is about to happen to him. In a carefully structured sequence, Jesus announces three times in Mark’s narrative that the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, be killed, and after three days rise again. Three times the disciples respond in ways that demonstrate they have not understood what he has said. After the first prediction (Mark 8:31-33), Peter rebukes Jesus and Jesus responds with the harshest words he directs at anyone in the Gospel: “Get behind me, Satan.” Peter cannot accept a suffering Messiah because a suffering Messiah is a contradiction in terms in the framework of first-century messianic expectation. As Part Three established in its treatment of the messianic category, a suffering Messiah was not a variant of any first-century expectation. Rather, it was a negation of it. The Messiah defeated Israel’s enemies; he did not submit to them. Peter’s theological expectation is wrong in Mark’s later telling, but it was a theology with deep roots in the tradition Jesus is operating within.
After the second prediction (Mark 9:30-34), the disciples do not respond to the prediction at all. Instead, Mark tells us they argued among themselves on the road about which of them was the greatest. The juxtaposition is devastating and intentional: Jesus has just told them he is going to die, and their response is to jockey for position in the kingdom they still expect him to establish. After the third prediction (Mark 10:35-41), James and John approach Jesus with a request: “Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” They were still reasonably thinking in terms of a political kingdom – thrones, positions of honor, the distribution of power in the restored Davidic state. But Mark frames Jesus’s response as pointing them toward the cross: “The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized you will be baptized, but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to appoint, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared” (9:39-40). There is no indication in Mark’s narrative that the redirection registers. The other ten disciples are angry at James and John, not because the request is theologically misguided but because James and John got there first. In Mark, everyone is competing for the same misunderstood prize.
This triple sequence (i.e. prediction, incomprehension, correction) is one of the most carefully constructed literary patterns in Mark’s Gospel, and its implications for the historical argument I am making are significant. If the disciples had understood during Jesus’s lifetime that he was going to die and rise again – if this had been clearly communicated and received – then the catastrophic disorientation that followed the crucifixion becomes difficult to explain. People who have been told what is coming in explicit terms do not flee in terror and incomprehension when it arrives. The flight of the disciples was firmly established in Part Four as among the most secure details in the entire passion tradition by virtue of the criterion of embarrassment. It is the behavior of people for whom the crucifixion was not remotely expected; rather it is a devastating and confusing catastrophe that contradicted everything they had believed.
Mark’s ongoing portrait of the disciples’ incomprehension is one of the most historically reliable features of his Gospel precisely because it serves no apologetic purpose and creates considerable theological difficulty. A community in the process of establishing the authority of its founding apostles would be unlikely to invent a tradition in which those apostles consistently failed to understand the central message of the teacher they claimed to represent. Peter, the rock on whom the later tradition would build the church, rebukes Jesus and is called Satan. James and John, the sons of thunder, are angling for political appointments while Jesus is predicting his death. The twelve, collectively, are depicted as having hearts as hardened as the Pharisees’. It is the kind of unflattering portrait that survives in a tradition only because the historical implications were too well known to simply dismiss. And indeed, the subsequent Gospels’ handling of this material confirms what the criterion of embarrassment predicts in the redactional transmission. The editorial trajectory runs in exactly the direction we have come to expect: the incomprehension is progressively softened, explained, or removed.
Working from Mark as his primary source, Matthew retains the passion predictions but consistently adjusts the disciples’ response. Where Mark has the disciples failing to understand and being afraid to ask, Matthew frequently adds that they understood or at least replaces the incomprehension with a more dignified response. After the second passion prediction, where Mark says the disciples “did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him,” Matthew replaces this with “and they were greatly distressed” – a reaction that presupposes comprehension rather than confusion (cf. Mark 9:32; Matthew 17:23). The disciples in Matthew are sorrowful because they understand what Jesus has said. The disciples in Mark are silent because they do not. The editorial adjustment is small, but the theological difference is significant: Matthew’s disciples grasp the teaching and grieve. Mark’s disciples miss it entirely.
Luke makes similar adjustments but adds a specific theological explanation for the incomprehension that Mark does not provide. After the third passion prediction, where Mark simply has the disciples failing to understand, Luke adds: “But they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” (Luke 18:34). The phrase “was hidden from them” introduces a veil of divine concealment – the disciples did not understand because God had not yet permitted them to understand. This is a significant theological move; it transforms the incomprehension from a failure of the disciples (which is how Mark presents it) into a feature of the divine plan (which is how Luke reframes it). The disciples are no longer obtuse. They are participants in a mystery that will be revealed in its proper time. The embarrassment is managed by relocating its cause from the disciples’ inadequacy to God’s sovereign and prudential timing.
John’s Gospel, as we have come to expect from the latest and most theologically developed Gospel in the canon, resolves the problem most completely. The disciples in John are not confused about who Jesus is. Jesus himself is not ambiguous about his identity or his mission. The “I am” declarations littered throughout Jesus’s ministry in John leave no room for the kind of uncertainty that pervades Mark’s narrative. The Johannine Jesus knows exactly who he is from the beginning, announces it openly, and acts with the serene confidence of someone executing a plan that cannot fail. The Messianic Secret – the consistent pattern in Mark of Jesus deflecting or suppressing recognition of his identity – does not exist in John because, in John’s theological framework, there is nothing to conceal. The incomprehension motif has been entirely eliminated because the Christology has developed to a point where it is no longer theologically tolerable.
A tradition that begins with genuine incomprehension and then progressively removes it is doing exactly what traditions do: managing the evidence to match the developing theology. Mark’s confused, frightened, uncomprehending disciples are almost certainly closer to the historical reality than John’s serene audience who gladly join as participants in a cosmic plan. And that incomprehension – genuine, profound, and unresolved during Jesus’s lifetime – is what makes the post-crucifixion crisis intelligible. They were unprepared. They did not understand. And the meaning-making that followed was not coincidental retrieval of something they had been taught and temporarily forgotten; it was the construction of something new, forged in the crucible of a loss they had not anticipated and could not explain within their previous frameworks.
My conclusion based on this evidence is that Jesus never predicted his own death and resurrection to his disciples. The passion predictions in Mark saying the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, be killed, and after three days rise again are Mark’s theology placed on Jesus’s lips. It is the community’s post-Easter understanding written backward into the narrative as foreknowledge. As Part Three’s treatment of the Son of Man sayings established, the historical Jesus’s Son of Man language most likely referred to a coming figure distinct from himself rather than a self-designation. The passion predictions are therefore doubly post-Easter: they presuppose not only the theology of voluntary atoning death but the identification of Jesus with the coming Son of Man, which was itself the tradition’s construction rather than Jesus’s own claim. The editorial trajectory confirms that if the predictions were genuine historical memory, the later evangelists would not need to progressively soften, explain, and theologically manage the disciples’ failure to comprehend them. The incomprehension is authentic whereas the predictions are not.
This doesn’t mean that Jesus was entirely naive about the danger he faced. His mentor was John the Baptizer, and he knew what happened to John. It is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that Jesus anticipated his actions in Jerusalem might provoke Rome into retaliatory violence. A prophet who performs the prophetic sign-acts that Jesus did at Passover could not have been blissfully unaware of the risks. But there is a difference between anticipating danger and predicting one’s own death and resurrection as the fulfillment of a divine plan. The participatory eschatology that this series has identified as Jesus’s most distinctive contribution suggests a different expectation: that his prophetic sign acts in Jerusalem were intended as provocations not toward Rome but toward God – that by enacting the Kingdom’s arrival at the seat of power, at the moment of maximum eschatological tension, Jesus was creating the conditions under which God’s decisive intervention would come. The Kingdom was at hand. The signs had been performed. The confrontation had been staged. Now, finally, God would act.
But God did not act according to Jesus’s expectations. What may be the single most revealing detail in my reasoning here is the cry from the cross that Mark places on Jesus’s lips, and it is one that the later tradition found intolerable. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). The words are from Psalm 22:1, and scholars have debated whether Jesus was reciting the psalm as a whole – which moves from lament to vindication – or whether the cry is simply what it sounds like: the anguished protest of a man who expected God to intervene and has realized, in the final extremity, that the intervention is not coming. The editorial trajectory across the gospels settles this debate as decisively as any evidence can. Matthew retains the cry. Luke removes it entirely and replaces it with the serene “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (23:46). John replaces it with the triumphant “It is finished” (19:30). The direction of travel is from raw anguish toward theological composure, from the cry of a man whose expectations have been shattered toward the declaration of a divine figure executing a plan. The later tradition could not tolerate the dereliction because the dereliction contradicted their theology. Which means the dereliction is almost certainly historical, even if Mark did place Psalm 22 on Jesus’s lips to symbolically capture the moment.
As with any crucifixion victim, Jesus probably died in despair. Certainly not in triumph. He must have died believing God had abandoned him. And it was precisely from that abandonment that his followers would construct the most extraordinary act of meaning-reversal in the history of Western religion – reaching back into the deep grammar of their scriptures to find, against all expectation, a framework capacious enough to hold both the devastation and the conviction that the crucifixion was not the final word.
III. The Righteous Sufferer and the Scriptural Template
The Hebrew scriptures that Jesus and his followers knew were never treated as a static archive. They were a living tradition of interpretation, continuously read and reread through the lens of present experience. They were mined for patterns, types, and resonances that could illuminate what was happening in the present by showing how it connected to what God had done in the past.
This practice of reading scripture – finding in ancient texts a meaning that speaks to present circumstances, even when that meaning was not the original intent of the author – had a name in the first-century Jewish interpretive tradition. It was called pesher interpretation, and it was practiced routinely amongst many apocalyptic Jewish factions of the period. It was practiced with particular intensity at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls community read the prophets as speaking directly to their own situation, their own struggles, and their own hoped-for vindication. The related practice of midrash extended the same impulse more broadly: reading scripture not as a closed historical document but as a generative text that continued to yield new meanings when brought into conversation with new circumstances. The earliest Jesus movement exhibited the same custom, and in so doing identified a foundational template for what had happened to their crucified teacher.
The motif of the righteous sufferer – the innocent person crushed by unjust power, whose suffering is ultimately vindicated by God – runs throughout the Hebrew prophetic and wisdom literature. Jeremiah, himself a prophet who was imprisoned, thrown into a cistern, and reviled by his own community, became something of a template for the pattern. The Psalms of lament, including Psalm 22 that Jesus quotes from the cross in Mark's account, express the anguish of the innocent sufferer who cries out to God from the pit of abandonment and yet maintains, however desperately, the hope of vindication. By the first century, the archetype was well established.
Isaiah 53 was the most vivid and concentrated expression of this archetype in all of Jewish scripture. And what the early Jesus community did with it was, technically speaking, eisegesis – reading meaning into the text rather than out of it. They took a poem written about Israel's collective suffering in Babylonian exile and read it as a script that Jesus had fulfilled. The despised and rejected figure: that was Jesus. The wounds and stripes: the crucifixion. The burial with the wicked: the criminal's death. The vindication by God: the resurrection, which some of the communities were already proclaiming as the reversal of Rome's verdict.
This was not dishonest by the standards of first-century Jewish interpretation. Pesher and midrash didn’t operate under modern scholarly constraints about authorial intent. Reading Isaiah 53 as the script of Jesus's passion was, within that interpretive framework, a legitimate and even a profound act of meaning-making. But it is critical to emphasize for the purposes of our reconstruction – it was not prophecy fulfillment in any historically meaningful sense. Rather than predicting Jesus, the text described a pattern in Israel’s history that Jesus's followers recognized in what had happened to him, and they drew on that pattern to make sense of an otherwise catastrophic disconfirmation.
The passage is the climactic fourth of what scholars call the Servant Songs – a series of poems in the latter half of the book of Isaiah describing a figure called the Servant of the Lord, whose suffering and humiliation ultimately give way to vindication and whose experience carries meaning for the community he represents. Isaiah 53 is the most vivid and arresting of these poems: a figure "despised and rejected," "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," wounded for the transgressions of others, led like a lamb to the slaughter, buried with the wicked, yet ultimately vindicated by God, whose purposes the Servant's suffering has somehow accomplished. The poem is insistent on vindication.
Within the context of the book of Isaiah as a whole, the identity of the Servant is not mysterious. The surrounding chapters make it explicit. Israel is the Servant. In Isaiah 41:8, God addresses the Servant directly: "But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend.” The book of Isaiah, specifically the section scholars call Deutero-Isaiah comprising chapters 40 through 55, is addressed to the Israelite community in Babylonian exile. Its subject is the suffering of that community, the persistence of its hope, and the anticipated restoration that the author believes God is preparing for Israel, his suffering Servant. Nowhere in any of Isaiah’s Servant Songs is there any reference to the anticipated Davidic King, the Anointed One, the Messiah. Isaiah 53 only came to be associated with Messianic prophecy based on this revisionist reinterpretation by Jesus’s earliest followers in connection to the suffering, death of their own seemingly failed Messianic candidate. Read honestly in its own context, Isaiah 53 is a poem about Israel's experience of imperial domination – about the suffering of a people crushed by the powers of their world, whose pain is somehow understood as bearing a meaning beyond its apparent senselessness. It is a profound and painful meditation on what it means to suffer unjustly under the heel of an occupying empire, written by a poet who knew that experience firsthand. But it is not an explicit prophecy of the coming Messianic King. The scholarly consensus on this point is uncontested among critical biblical scholars of any theological stripe.
But the early Jesus communities, searching the scriptures in the devastating aftermath of the crucifixion, understandably read this poem and found the parallel arresting. The community in crisis needed a framework large enough to hold both its conviction and its devastation – and the suffering servant provided exactly that: a pattern in which unjust death was not the last word, in which the apparent defeat of the righteous was not a refutation of their cause but a painful stage within God's larger purpose. Is it possible that his punishment can make us whole? Perhaps after all it was the will of the Lord to crush him for our sakes. Perhaps his loss of life was really an offering for sin, an intercession for the transgressors. Is it not possible, then, that God will yet allot him a portion with the great? Who can imagine his future?
This is the seedbed from which the claims of resurrection, exaltation, and atonement all emerge. The passage simultaneously offered immense hope to these traumatized disciples, and inspired their spiritual imaginations with the possibility of new meaning. The interpretive act is completely understandable. But from the standpoint of historical analysis, we must acknowledge the direction of the theological development. It is the same pattern I documented in the Darwinian Deity series with respect to LDS scripture. When Joseph Smith needed theological authority for developing doctrines, he reached into the biblical text and found it – not through straightforward exegesis of what the texts said in their own context, but through a form of creative reinterpretation that read his own theological concerns back into ancient words. The mechanism is ancient and universal – human beings have always made meaning by finding their own stories within larger stories. The question for the historically honest reader is simply whether we can hold both things at once: the profound human truth of what the community was doing in their eisegesis, and the recognition that the scriptural framework they borrowed from was injected with meaning that was never the author’s intent.
IV. The Cognitive Science of Religion
The modern sciences of cognition and grief can tell us something important about the psychological conditions under which the earliest resurrection conviction formed. These sciences contribute something largely absent from standard theological and historical-critical debates but directly relevant to the question of what the earliest disciples experienced and why their post-crucifixion experience took the specific forms it did.
The cognitive science of religion is the application of cognitive psychology and evolutionary anthropology to the study of religious belief and practice. Its key insight, developed by scholars including Pascal Boyer, Harvey Whitehouse, and Justin Barrett, is that religious beliefs and practices are not arbitrary cultural constructions but predictable outputs of specific features of human cognitive architecture. For reasons rooted in evolutionary history, human minds are strongly predisposed to certain kinds of beliefs: beliefs about agents with minds and intentions behind events, beliefs about the persistence of persons beyond death, beliefs about the special significance of particular places and objects and times, beliefs about the causal efficacy of ritual. Religious systems across an enormous diversity of cultures and historical periods tend to exploit these predispositions consistently. This is why religions the world over share structural features even when their specific content varies enormously.
Harvey Whitehouse's work on what he calls the two modes of religiosity – developed in Modes of Religiosity (2004) – is particularly relevant to the question of how the early Christian movement survived and spread. Whitehouse identifies two patterns by which religious knowledge is transmitted and religious community is held together. The first, which he calls the imagistic mode, is characteristic of small, intense, face-to-face communities organized around infrequent but highly emotionally arousing experiences, viz. experiences of extraordinary intensity that bond participants together in tight networks of shared memory and mutual obligation. The second, which he calls the doctrinal mode, is characteristic of larger movements that spread through frequent, repetitive teaching and the standardization of belief across communities that may never meet in person. The early Jesus movement appears to have operated in something like the imagistic mode in its initial phase: small disparate communities, intense shared experience of persecution and expectation, the specific emotional freight of the shared meal that reenacted Jesus’s open table practice. It was only later that they developed the more doctrinal characteristics necessary for the movement's expansion across the Roman world.
This framework matters for the resurrection argument because it provides a historically adequate account of the movement's remarkable cohesion around their imagistic practice and willingness to endure persecution without requiring a physical resurrection as its cause. The early communities were bound together not primarily by an abstract doctrinal commitment to the proposition that Jesus had been physically raised – though that commitment was real for those who accepted it – but by a web of intense shared experience: the shared meal to commemorate the loss of their beloved teacher, the shared memory of Jesus's teaching, the shared experience of social marginality and periodic persecution, the shared expectation of an imminent divine vindication.
Pascal Boyer's work, most fully developed in Religion Explained (2001), adds a further dimension. Boyer argues that religious concepts tend to be memorable and transmissible precisely because they violate intuitive expectations in specific, limited ways – what he calls minimally counterintuitive concepts. A being who is both fully human and fully divine, who dies and comes back to life, who is physically present and yet passes through locked doors: these are not random violations of expectation. They are precisely calibrated to be memorable, to resist assimilation to ordinary categories, and to reward continued reflection. They spread because human cognitive architecture is designed to attend to and transmit exactly this kind of concept. His is not a debunking argument; it does not establish that the concepts are false. It does establish that the remarkable spread of early Christian belief is explicable in terms of normal human cognitive and social processes, without requiring the hypothesis that the spread was caused by the literal truth of the claims being made.
What the cognitive science of religion gives us on the whole is a naturalistic account of religious origins and transmission that is empirically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and directly relevant to the historical question of how the Jesus movement became what it became. The resurrection is not required as a historical cause, although we will probe the foundational evidence for those claims shortly. Presently, I take it for granted that the human realities of grief, community, shared experience, cognitive predisposition, and the specific social conditions of Roman-occupied Galilee are, taken together, fully adequate to explain what happened. This does not necessarily make them correct, but these are the explanations that the Humean standard discussed in Part One require us to prefer in the absence of compelling evidence for the alternative.
V. Grief, Vision, and the Psychology of Prophetic Loss
To take the earliest stratum of the resurrection tradition seriously – the visionary experiences that Paul describes and that the developing tradition would progressively literalize – requires taking seriously the psychology and sociology of grief, trauma, and religious experience. It is an attempt to understand what actually happened in fully human terms, which is the only kind of understanding historical inquiry can offer.
I will be clear about what the Humean epistemological standard already established in this series does and does not require here. Hume's argument is that the evidence against a miracle, viz. the accumulated, uniform testimony of physical regularity, will always outweigh the evidence for a specific exception to that regularity. Dead men, by the uniform testimony of all human experience across all times and places, stay dead. This is no prejudice or prior commitment in opposition to resurrection claims. This uniform continuity of testimony is the strongest form of evidence we possess about anything. What it means for the resurrection question is simply this: the historian, as historian, cannot endorse the claim that Jesus's body was physically reanimated as a matter of historical fact, because no accumulation of ancient testimony can overturn the weight of the physical regularity it asks us to suspend. It is the honest application of the evidential standard we apply to everything else and displays no inherent hostility to the tradition.
What the Humean standard does not require is the dismissal of the disciples' experiences as simply nothing. Hume's argument is epistemological rather than eliminativist (i.e. a philosophical materialist position that claims common-sense mental states like beliefs, desires, or pain do not actually exist). It tells us we cannot verify a physical resurrection; not that the early community experienced nothing, believed nothing, or that the experiences that they had carried no genuine authority or transformative power. The empirical materialist position I described in the first post – someone open to possibilities about matter and energy and consciousness that our current frameworks have not yet fully mapped – leaves room here that strict reductionism would close off. Something happened to those disciples. The Humean standard rules out one account of what it was instead of ruling out all of them.
Grief psychology has documented extensively what happens when human beings experience profound, sudden, unexpected, and traumatic loss – especially and particularly the loss of a person on whom intense love and identity-constituting hope have been concentrated. The experience is so much more than mere sadness. It involves disorientation, confusion, the collapse of the framework through which their world had been organized. And in many cases, across many cultures and many different kinds of loss, it involves visionary experiences in which the lost person seems present, seems to speak, seems to be somehow still available to the bereaved. The foundational empirical study here is Dewi Rees's 1971 survey, published in the British Medical Journal, of widows and widowers in Wales – nearly half of whom reported post-bereavement experiences of the presence of their deceased spouse, experiences they typically described as more real than ordinary perception and which they often kept private for years out of fear of being thought unwell. These experiences are not pathological. They are documented, widespread, and reported by people of every degree of psychological sophistication and religious commitment, across cultures that have no shared vocabulary for describing them. These are a product of our evolutionary psychology.
The distinction scholars sometimes draw, in this context, is between veridical and non-veridical visions. A veridical vision is one that corresponds to something actually external to the person having the experience. It is something that could be captured with a video camera if one were present on the occasion. A non-veridical vision is one that arises from the mind and the grief, the need, the adoration of the person experiencing it, without necessarily corresponding to an external state of affairs. The distinction matters philosophically, but it does not settle the question of authority. The disciples who had visions of Jesus after his death were not deceived in any meaningful sense about what they experienced. They experienced something. What they concluded about what they experienced – that God had vindicated Jesus, that Rome's judgment had been reversed, that the crucifixion was not the last word – was a reasonable conclusion to draw, within their own interpretive framework, from the experiences they reportedly had.
One further detail from the bereavement vision literature bears directly on the apologetic argument that the physicality of the later appearance traditions, viz. the touching, the eating, the extended conversations, requires a physically present body. That is patently false. Studies of non-veridical bereavement visions have documented that these experiences are not limited to the visual register. Bereaved individuals report auditory experiences (hearing the deceased speak), tactile experiences (feeling a touch or an embrace), and even olfactory ones. The sensory richness of the experience is part of what makes it so compelling to those who have it and so difficult to dismiss as mere imagination. The human mind is a powerful engine. The progressive physicalization of the resurrection appearances across the gospel tradition – from Paul’s visionary encounter, through Mark’s silent empty tomb, to the eating and touching accounts of Luke and John – is consistent with the normal phenomenology of how visionary experiences are reported, remembered, and elaborated over time. It does not require an increasingly physical Jesus. It requires only the ordinary human tendency to make an extraordinarily profound experience more concrete in the retelling.
The conditions under which those experiences arose inform our understanding. These were people who had experienced not merely the loss of a beloved teacher but the specific, catastrophic failure of an expectation. Bart Ehrman has argued in How Jesus Became God (2014) that this specific combination – profound love, shattered expectation, and the cultural framework of Jewish apocalypticism in which visions of divine vindication were both intelligible and anticipated – created precisely the conditions under which visionary experiences of a surviving Jesus would be most likely to occur. The specific Jewish tradition of martyred prophets being vindicated by God, of the righteous sufferer being exalted after death, of the resurrection as the ultimate reversal of unjust earthly judgment – all of this was available to the disciples as an interpretive framework into which their experiences could be contextualized and made sense of. The conviction that followed was neither conspiracy nor deliberate deception. It was the result of a community of grieving, traumatized people having visionary experiences that, within the only framework available to them for interpretation, could only mean one thing: God had raised Jesus. Rome had killed him, but death was not the final verdict. The Kingdom was still coming. The mission evolved and persisted.
There is, however, a significant case that the bereavement model does not straightforwardly explain, and here we address it directly: the experience of Paul. Paul wasn’t a grieving disciple, nor was he part of the inner circle. He hadn’t eaten at Jesus’s table, walked the roads of Galilee with him, or invested years of his life in the Kingdom proclamation. By his own testimony, he was an active persecutor of the movement. He was someone who had sought to destroy the earliest communities whose conviction he would eventually share. His vision on the road to Damascus cannot be explained by the grief psychology that accounts for Peter’s experience or for the experiences of the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee. Paul was a hostile, not the bereaved. Applied to Paul, the bereavement-vision model simply does not fit.
What Paul’s experience does fit, however, is a different and well-documented psychological phenomenon: the sudden conversion of a committed persecutor under conditions of intense cognitive engagement with the very movement he is opposing. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance research, which Part Six of this series will examine in the context of prophetic disappointment, is relevant here from a unique angle. A person who devotes significant energy to suppressing a movement is, by that very act, deeply engaged with its claims. The persecution itself requires sustained attention to the content of what is being persecuted.
By his own account, Paul was not indifferent to the Jesus movement. He was consumed by it, and the intensity of the opposition may itself have been the cognitive precondition for the reversal. Ehrman has noted in How Jesus Became God that Paul’s case actually strengthens rather than weakens the naturalistic account, because it demonstrates that visionary experiences of the risen Jesus were not confined to the bereaved inner circle but extended to someone whose psychological profile was entirely different – and that the visionary mode of encounter Paul describes for his own experience is the same mode (ophthe) he attributes to all the other witnesses on his list. If anything, Paul’s case suggests that the phenomenon was broader and more varied in its psychological origins than the bereavement model alone can accommodate. This is precisely what we would expect if the experiences were arising from the complex intersection of grief, expectation, cognitive engagement, and the specific interpretive resources of Jewish apocalypticism, rather than from a single causal mechanism.
VI. Paul's Witness: The Earliest Account
We have now established the conditions under which the resurrection belief emerged. The disciples were not prepared for the crucifixion – Mark’s incomprehension material makes that plain, and the dereliction cry confirms it. They were a shattered community of grieving apocalypticists whose central expectation had failed publicly and violently. The cognitive science of religion tells us that communities in precisely this condition – high arousal, shared investment, collapsed certainty – are the most susceptible to visionary experience and the most motivated to reinterpret catastrophic disconfirmation as hidden vindication. The grief psychology literature documents that bereavement visions of the recently deceased are not pathological but statistically normal, and that such experiences can carry full sensory weight for those who have them. The scriptural template was already in place: the righteous sufferer of the Psalms, the Servant of Isaiah 53, the pesher interpretive tradition that read ancient texts as scripts being fulfilled in present experience. What the earliest community had was not a formulated theology. It had an experience, a tradition, and a set of interpretive resources with which to make sense of both. It is into that milieu we must now introduce the evidence itself.
As with the documentary analysis in Part Two, we have to begin with Paul because Paul is earliest, and in a question as contested as this one, chronological priority matters. First Corinthians 15 is the oldest surviving account of resurrection appearances. It was written approximately twenty to twenty-five years after the crucifixion – earlier than any of the Gospels by at least a decade – and Paul explicitly frames it as tradition he received and is passing on, which means the core of it is older still. The passage is as follows:
“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)
What is immediately striking when reading this passage carefully and in isolation of what later tradition builds around it, is the nature of Paul's own experience. He describes his encounter with the risen Jesus as an ophthe – an appearance, a being-seen-by – which is the same Greek word he uses to describe the experiences of all the other witnesses on his list. And we know from Paul's own account in Galatians and from the Acts narratives that describe his conversion on the road to Damascus that what Paul experienced was a visionary encounter: a blinding light, a voice, a presence. It was not, by Paul's own description, a meeting with a physically resurrected man who could be touched and offered food. It was a vision.
Paul lists his own experience last, and explicitly distinguishes it as "last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me", but the distinction he draws is about timing and his own unworthiness, not about the mode of encounter. He uses the same verb for his experience as for all the others. The implication, which later tradition has worked very hard to resist, is that the resurrection appearances in Paul's list were all visionary experiences of the same general kind as his own. Not physical encounters with a resuscitated body, but something more in the nature of what the tradition of Jewish apocalypticism called visions: experiences of divine or spiritual reality that carried genuine authority and transforming power, but that operated in the register of the seen rather than the touched.
This is significant because Paul was writing at a time when many of the original witnesses were still alive, and he states as much explicitly. He was not inventing a list of experiences that no one could validate. He was transmitting a tradition that was current and verifiable by the standards of his own community. Indeed, Paul claims to have met with both Peter and James three years after his conversion (Galatians 1:18-19). Whatever those first witnesses experienced, the earliest reporter we have describes it in terms that are consistent with visionary experience rather than with the kind of physical, tangible, eat-the-fish-and-touch-the-wounds encounter that the later Gospel narratives would develop.
Paul’s language here of ophthe, the appearance, the “being-seen-by” was not operating in a cultural vacuum, and the first-century Mediterranean world in which his readers received it was not a world in which post-mortem divine appearances were unprecedented or even unusual. There is a parallel tradition, well known to every educated person in the Roman world, that deserves brief attention here. Not because the early Christians borrowed from it in any direct literary sense, but because it establishes the cultural template against which claims of this kind would have been heard and understood.
The story of Rome’s founding king, Romulus, is preserved in multiple sources, most fully in Livy’s The History of Rome and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. And its structural resonances with the early Christian resurrection tradition are striking enough to be analytically useful. Romulus, according to the tradition, disappeared during a sudden darkness while reviewing his troops on the Campus Martius. The circumstances were politically charged: Romulus had been antagonizing the Senate with increasingly autocratic behavior, and the widespread suspicion which Plutarch reports frankly was that the senators had murdered him and dismembered the body under cover of the storm, disposing of the remains so thoroughly that no corpse could be found. The body was missing, and the political authorities had both motive and opportunity. The murder, if it was a murder, threatened to delegitimize the entire founding project of the city.
What happened next follows a pattern that students of the early Jesus tradition will recognize immediately. A Roman nobleman named Julius Proculus came forward and testified publicly that Romulus had appeared to him after the disappearance. He witnessed that Romulus had descended from heaven in radiant and divine form, and declared that he had been taken up among the gods, that he was now to be worshipped as the god Quirinus, and that Rome should continue to pursue its imperial destiny with confidence. The politically devastating version of events – murder by the Senate, body destroyed, founding king eliminated by the very institution he had created – was displaced by the theological version: not death but apotheosis, divine exaltation rather than elimination, not the end of the story but transfiguration into something that confirmed rather than refuted the founder’s significance. Romulus became an object of cult worship. The inconvenient death was absorbed into a narrative of divine vindication. And the testimony of a single named witness, reporting a visionary encounter with the glorified founder, was the mechanism through which the transformation was accomplished.
Obviously, the parallel is not exact. To press the comparison too hard in either direction distorts both traditions. Romulus was a king, not a crucified prophet. The political dynamics of the Roman Senate are different than the political dynamics of Roman-occupied Judea. The Romulus tradition doesn’t involve a community of grieving followers processing traumatic loss in the way the early Jesus community was; it involves an institutional crisis of legitimacy within a ruling elite. And the theological content is different in kind: Romulus’s apotheosis is a straightforward elevation to the divine pantheon, while the early Christian resurrection claim carried the specific freight of Jewish apocalyptic expectation and messianic vindication that the Roman tradition had no equivalent for.
But the structural correspondences are relevant. In both traditions, you have a founding figure whose death is politically charged and potentially delegitimizing. In both, the body is unavailable. In both, a named witness – Julius Proculus, Simon Peter – comes forward to testify to a post-mortem appearance in which the founder is revealed in divine glory. In both, the appearance testimony serves to transform the meaning of the death: what looked like defeat becomes vindication, what looked like ending becomes confirmation, what looked like the refutation of the founder’s royal claims becomes the proof of their ultimate truth. In both, the resulting tradition serves the specific needs of a community that requires the founder’s cause to have survived the founder’s death.
What the Romulus parallel establishes is not that the early Christians copied a Roman story. There is no evidence of direct literary dependence, and the proposal would be historically implausible in any case. The Palestinian Jesus movement was Jewish, not Roman, and their interpretive resources were drawn from the Hebrew scriptures, not from Livy. What the parallel establishes is something more important for the historian’s purposes – that the cultural world in which the early Christian proclamation was heard and transmitted already possessed a well-established narrative template for processing the death of a founding figure through post-mortem appearance and divine exaltation. The pattern was culturally legible. When Paul stood before Gentile audiences in Corinth or Thessalonica or Rome and proclaimed that the crucified Jesus had appeared to witnesses after his death and had been exalted to divine status, he was not introducing a category his hearers had never encountered. He was filling a recognized form with new content. And that content was, in important respects, more radical than the Romulus tradition: a crucified criminal rather than a disappeared king, a Jewish peasant rather than a city’s founder. But it operated within a narrative structure his Greco-Roman audiences would have found intelligible rather than incomprehensible.
This matters for the question of what kind of explanation the resurrection appearances require. The apologetic argument – advanced most forcefully by N.T. Wright, whom we will engage directly in a subsequent section – holds that nothing short of a literal physical resurrection adequately explains the early community’s belief. Without settling the question, the Romulus parallel complicates that claim considerably. A community in the ancient Mediterranean world did not need a physical resurrection to generate a post-mortem appearance tradition, a divine exaltation claim, or a cult of worship directed at the founder. It needed a founding figure whose significance was too great to be contained by his death, a community with sufficient investment in his cause to require that the death not be the last word, and a cultural repertoire that included the narrative resources for transforming death into apotheosis. All of those conditions obtained in the early Jesus movement. The physical resurrection is one possible explanation for what followed. It is not the only culturally available one. And the historian, working within the Humean epistemological framework established in this series, is obligated to prefer the explanation that doesn’t require the suspension of physical regularity when a historically adequate alternative is available.
The later Gospel tradition’s progressive physicalization of the appearances – the invitation to touch the wounds in Luke and John, the eating of broiled fish, the extended embodied interactions – represent a development beyond anything the Romulus tradition claims and beyond what Paul’s own language describes. The escalation from visionary encounter to physical verification follows the trajectory the series has documented throughout: from the earlier, more ambiguous account toward the later, more physically emphatic one. This is the direction of a community increasingly concerned to establish, against skeptics both internal and external, that what its witnesses experienced were veridical. The vision came first; the physicality is apologetic.
But before tracing that escalation across the documents, there is a prior question that the evidence examined in the preceding installment compels us to confront. If the historical default for crucified victims was exposure, scavenging, and disposal in a common grave, then what are we to make of the burial tradition and the empty tomb?
VII. The Women at the Cross and the Tomb: Mourning as Historical Memory
In all four Gospel accounts, women are the primary witnesses at the cross, at the burial, and at the empty tomb. Mark names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. Matthew names Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary.” Luke refers to “the women who had followed him from Galilee.” John places Mary Magdalene at the tomb alone on Easter morning, and she is the first to encounter the risen Jesus. The consistency of this testimony across all four Gospels – documents produced by different communities with different theological agendas and different literary strategies – is striking. The women are there in every version. The male disciples, by the tradition’s honest admission, are not.
The apologetic significance of this detail has been widely noted, most forcefully by N.T. Wright: no community inventing a resurrection story for persuasive purposes in the first-century Mediterranean world would have chosen women as its primary witnesses, given that women’s testimony carried little legal or social weight in Jewish legal practice. The criterion of embarrassment does find application here. But the historical significance of the women in the tradition runs deeper than the apologetic point, and it connects to a specific social institution that the tradition’s later reception has largely forgotten. It’s one that illuminates not only why the women appear in the narrative but what role they almost certainly played in the earliest community’s actual experience of grief and memory.
In first-century Jewish Palestinian culture, women served as the primary agents of mourning, lamentation, and memorial. It was a recognized social role with deep roots in the biblical tradition and in the broader culture of the ancient Near East. Women were the keeners – the ones who wept publicly, who composed and performed laments, who maintained the rituals of grief that held the community together in the face of death. The professional mourning woman, the meqonenah, appears in Jeremiah 9:17, where the prophet calls for the skilled women to be summoned, for the wailing women to come, that they may raise a lament. The practice was more than mere emotional outlet; it was a social institution. Women were custodians of communal grief, the ones whose voices carried the community’s loss into public expression and collective memory.
Whether the women were physically present at the cross, and whether they witnessed whatever disposal of the body actually occurred, are questions the historian cannot answer with certainty. What we know with confidence is that the male disciples fled. Mark is blunt about this, and the later Gospels’ progressive softening of the flight confirms its historicity. What we also know is that wherever the shattered community regrouped in the days and weeks following the crucifixion, the women would have been performing precisely the social role the tradition ascribes to them: mourning, lamenting, memorializing. As the custodians of the community’s grief, they were the ones whose culturally sanctioned work it was to carry the memory of the dead, to give voice to the loss, to compose and perform the laments through which the community processed its devastation. This was not a role they chose in response to the crucifixion. It was the role they already occupied within the social structure of first-century Jewish life.
Mark, constructing the empty tomb narrative in our earliest Gospel that the next section will argue is a narrative creation rather than historical reportage, had to populate that narrative with characters. The women were the obvious and historically grounded choice. Not necessarily because Mark knew they had been at a specific tomb on Easter morning, but because the women were already fixtures in the community’s earliest memory of the period surrounding Jesus’s death. They were the ones mourning, lamenting, and carrying the community through the crisis. When Mark composed the empty tomb scene – the women arriving at dawn with spices to anoint the body, discovering the stone rolled away, encountering the young man in white – he was weaving into his narrative the figures who had been central to the community’s memorialization of the post-crucifixion period from the start. The detail that they came to anoint the body coheres powerfully with the mourning role: this is what women did when someone died, whether or not there was an identifiable tomb to visit. Mark is honoring the memory of the women’s centrality to the community’s grief, even as he constructs a narrative whose specific setting is his own literary creation.
This reading resolves what might otherwise appear as a tension between the criterion of embarrassment (which points toward historicity) and the argument that the empty tomb is a narrative construction (which points away from it). The tension dissolves once we distinguish between two different questions: were the women central to the earliest community’s experience of Jesus’s death? Almost certainly yes – their mourning role virtually guarantees it. Were they physically present at a specific rock-hewn tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea on the morning of the third day? That is a different question, and it depends on the historical status of the tomb itself, which the following section will interrogate. The women’s presence in the narrative is grounded in historical memory of their role. The specific setting in which Mark places them may not be.
Paul’s conspicuous omission of the women from his witness list in 1 Corinthians 15 admits of more than one possible explanation. The first explanation is rhetorical: Paul was writing for communities in the Greco-Roman urban world, composing an argument about the reality of the resurrection for an audience that would have evaluated its witnesses by the social standards of that world, and in that context naming women as primary witnesses would have weakened rather than strengthened the argument. The second explanation is simpler and perhaps more historically probable: Paul may not have inherited the women’s tradition at all. Paul spent remarkably little time with the Jerusalem community. As previously cited, Paul only briefly visited the Jerusalem community before spending years in Syria and Cilicia.
The traditions Paul received and transmitted may not have been the full inventory of everything the Jerusalem disciples remembered. And as we might expect given the elevated legal and social status of Jewish men, Paul focused his transmission on the testimony of the male apostles. If the women’s role in the mourning and memory of Jesus’s death was carried primarily within the Palestinian community’s oral tradition – within the networks of women who had performed the grief work and preserved the memory – Paul may simply never have encountered it in the form that Mark would later incorporate into his Gospel. His silence about the women may reflect not a rhetorical decision to exclude them but a genuine gap in his received tradition. Which is itself evidence of how geographically dispersed and unevenly transmitted the earliest Jesus traditions were, a point Part Six of this series will develop at length.
VIII. The Empty Tomb and the Logic of Resurrection Belief
The women's presence in the tradition is grounded in historical memory of their mourning role, but the specific setting in which Mark places them raises a prior question. Before asking whether the tomb was empty, we must ask whether there was a specific, historically known tomb at all. This is a question about the empty tomb tradition, not about resurrection belief as such. We know the earliest proclamation located resurrection in the appearance experiences, not in the physical condition of a burial site, and a body disposed of in the manner typical of Roman crucifixion victims would be no obstacle to divine action. But if Jesus was buried in a known location, the empty tomb tradition can possibly function as evidence for or against bodily resurrection. If no one knew where the body was – if it was disposed of in a mass grave, or consumed as carrion by vultures or wild dogs – then the empty tomb is not a historical datum to be explained. It is itself a tradition that requires explanation.
Let us return to Paul. Our earliest written source on the resurrection never once mentions an empty tomb in any of his letters. In 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, the pre-Pauline credal formula that Paul recites is structured as a four-part sequence: died, buried, raised, appeared. The word “buried” appears without elaboration. Mark’s narrative details are absent. There is no tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea, no women discovering an empty grave on Sunday morning. No angels. No grave clothes. Just a burial.
Some scholars, and particularly those who defend the historicity of the empty tomb, argue that “he was buried” logically implies a specific burial location, and that “he was raised” therefore implies an emptied tomb. In The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), N.T. Wright makes this case at length, arguing that in a Jewish context “resurrection” necessarily meant bodily resurrection and therefore presupposes the absence of a body from wherever it had been laid. But this reading involves a significant logical leap. The word “buried” may function in the creed not as a claim about a specific tomb but as a confirmation of death – the second event in a rhetorical sequence (“died... was buried”) that establishes beyond doubt that Jesus was really dead before asserting that he was raised. As Crossan has argued, the burial reference may parallel the function of the word in common idiom, viz. when we say someone died and was buried, we are not necessarily making a claim about the location of interment. Rather, we are emphasizing the finality of death.
Bart Ehrman has pressed the same point in How Jesus Became God: Paul says nothing about Joseph of Arimathea or a tomb. He simply states Jesus was buried. A dead body had to be put somewhere, so this is the least controversial claim imaginable and it does not require knowledge of a specific tomb. As we have noted, Paul visited Jerusalem and spoke with Peter and James. Yet he never once mentions an empty tomb in any of his letters. This is a man who argued passionately for the reality of the resurrection, who structured his entire theology and apostolic authority around it, and who engaged in extended debate with Corinthians who doubted bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:12–19). If he knew of a specific tomb that had been found empty, his failure to mention it in this context is minimally puzzling. The simplest explanation is that the empty tomb tradition had not yet developed.
When we turn from Paul to the Gospels, we encounter a burial narrative that grows more detailed, more theologically charged, and more apologetically shaped with each successive telling. This pattern is precisely what we have come to expect if the tradition is developing over time to meet emerging theological and polemical needs. Mark’s earliest Gospel (15:42–47) offers the sparest account. Joseph of Arimathea, identified as a “respected member of the council who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God,” requests the body from Pilate. Pilate is surprised Jesus is already dead, confirms it with the centurion, and grants the body. Joseph wraps it in a linen cloth and lays it in a tomb hewn from rock. Two women observe where the body is laid. The narrative is terse, functional, and notably lacking in theological embellishment. Joseph is not called a disciple. The burial is not described as honorable or elaborate. As many scholars have noted, it reads less like a loving act of devotion and more like a hasty act of legal compliance – getting the body off the cross before sundown in accordance with Deuteronomy 21:22–23.
Matthew (27:57–66) makes several significant additions. Joseph is now explicitly identified as a “disciple of Jesus.” The linen cloth becomes a “clean” linen cloth. The tomb is specified as Joseph’s “own new tomb,” which implies he was the sole occupant and thus easier to confirm its emptiness. Most strikingly, Matthew adds the story of the guard at the tomb. Responding to the Son of Man sayings in which Jesus predicted he will rise again on the third day, the Pharisees and chief priests ask Pilate to secure the tomb to prevent the disciples from stealing the body and claiming resurrection. This addition is transparently apologetic: it exists to preempt the charge that the disciples faked the resurrection by theft, a polemic that Matthew himself acknowledges was circulating (“this story has been spread among the Jews to this day,” 28:15). The very existence of this material tells us that by Matthew’s time, the empty tomb tradition was known and being contested. His gospel is shoring up its defenses. Historically, it strains credulity that Pilate would accept pleas to guard the tomb of a crucified dead man, whatever his purported predictions of resurrection beforehand. Luke (23:50–56) further sanitizes the narrative. Joseph is now described as “a good and righteous man” who “had not consented to their plan and action” in his participation on the council. Luke is distancing Joseph from any complicity in the Jewish handoff for Roman crucifixion, making him a Jesus sympathizer rather than merely a pious Jew concerned about burial law. The tomb is specified as one “where no one had yet been laid,” a detail that, in addition to Matthew’s effort to make his entombment solitary, serves the theological purpose of ensuring the purity and uniqueness of the resurrection site.
John (19:38–42) provides the most elaborate version. Joseph appears again as a disciple of Jesus, though now explicitly a secret one. He is joined by a figure unique to John’s gospel, Nicodemus, who brings a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about a hundred pounds. Jesus’s entombment has become a royal burial. The hasty, minimal interment of Mark has become an extravagant act of devotion. The theological trajectory is unmistakable: with each retelling, the burial becomes more honorable, more intentional, more clearly the work of devoted followers, and more emphatically located in a specific, identifiable, and significant tomb.
Raymond Brown, despite his broadly conservative conclusions about the burial tradition, acknowledges this trajectory in The Death of the Messiah (1994): John’s burial account has developed the farthest from the earliest empty tomb tradition. The question is whether this development represents the natural filling-in of remembered detail or the progressive construction of a narrative that did not exist in its earliest forms. The traditional Christian narrative assumes a straightforward causal sequence: Jesus was buried in a known tomb; the tomb was found empty; the risen Jesus appeared to witnesses; therefore, resurrection. The empty tomb is the first domino.
But once we account for what normally happened to crucified bodies, the historical evidence supports an alternative sequence – one that many critical scholars find more persuasive. Jesus was crucified and died. His body was disposed of in whatever manner Rome saw fit, most likely not in an individually marked tomb. Some of his followers had visionary experiences they interpreted as encounters with a risen Jesus. Over time, the conviction that God had raised him bodily generated the narrative tradition of a specific tomb and its discovery empty. Crossan articulates this position with directness: Jesus’s interment in a tomb of unknown ownership is most likely a Markan creation. The empty tomb, in his reasoning, is not a historical event that generated resurrection faith but a narrative consequence of an already-existing resurrection faith that invited retelling in a story. If you believe God raised Jesus from the dead, you want an accounting of where the body was interred and how it was discovered missing. The empty tomb tradition satisfies that desire. It is the narrative embodiment of an already-held conviction rather than evidence to propel belief in the unbelieving.
The Gospels themselves confirm this reading, perhaps despite themselves. Even in the narratives that advocate most strongly for the event, the discovery of the empty tomb does not generate resurrection belief. The disciples dismiss the women's report as 'an idle tale' and do not believe them (Luke 24:11). Luke's own narrative compounds this a few verses later: when the Emmaus disciples later relay the women's account, they describe it specifically as “a vision of angels” (optasia, 24:23) – visionary language that Luke preserves unremarked, and that sits closer to the earliest stratum of resurrection proclamation in which the conviction that Jesus was alive came through visionary experience rather than physical encounter. Thomas refuses to believe without physically touching the wounds (John 20:25). In every case, it is the appearance – not the empty tomb – that produces conviction. The tradition’s own witnesses testify that the empty tomb was not the origin of resurrection faith; the appearances were. This supports the historical conclusion that the visionary experiences came first and the empty tomb tradition was constructed afterward to provide believers with a narrative construct for what happened physically.
E.P. Sanders, in a cautious and measured approach, captures the uncertainty well in The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993): the experiences are, in his judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences he does not know. Sanders is willing to affirm the experiences as historically real events in the lives of the disciples while leaving open the question of what, if anything, those experiences tell us about the fate of the body. N.T. Wright, from the other end of the scholarly spectrum, insists that visionary experiences alone can’t account for the specific form that resurrection belief took. In The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), he argues that within the Jewish conceptual framework, “resurrection” meant bodily resurrection – the transformation and re-embodiment of the dead person – and that no Jew would have used this language to describe a mere vision or spiritual experience. Wright contends that only an actually empty tomb, combined with genuinely embodied appearances, can explain why the disciples proclaimed resurrection rather than, say, translation to heaven (like Elijah) or angelic transformation (like the martyrs in Daniel 12). This argument will be engaged at greater length in a subsequent section.
A brief word warrants examination here about the fraud hypothesis: the claim, attested by the late first century in Matthew 28:13–15 and later taken up by Celsus in the second century, that the disciples stole the body and fabricated the resurrection to establish their own authority in the coming Kingdom. The charge has a lengthy pedigree in anti-Christian polemic and sometimes surfaces in popular debate.
In my judgment, the fraud hypothesis is not historically credible. The standard apologetic rebuttal is that the disciples would be unlikely to have died for a lie. Fair enough. But this rests on the assumption that people cannot be sincerely mistaken about experiences they interpret as divine encounters. The deeper problem with the fraud hypothesis is that it shares a fatal assumption with the apologetic response it opposes: both sides take the empty tomb as a historical given and then argue about its cause. The apologist says God emptied the tomb; the fraud theorist says the disciples emptied it. But as the preceding analysis has shown, the historian’s prior question is whether the empty tomb tradition is itself historical, and there are strong reasons to doubt that it is. If there was no known tomb, there was no missing body, and the fraud hypothesis is answering a question that the evidence doesn’t require us to ask.
Matthew’s guard-at-the-tomb narrative (27:62–66, 28:11–15) is itself the best evidence for how this debate functioned in the late first century. The passage is transparently constructed to rebut the theft charge: the chief priests and Pharisees ask Pilate to secure the tomb, a guard is posted, the stone is sealed. When the tomb is found empty, the guards are bribed to say the disciples stole the body while they slept. The apologetic and the counter-apologetic are locked in a shared framework, each presupposing the empty tomb that the other is trying to explain. What neither side in this ancient debate considers is the possibility that the entire framework – known tomb, discoverable absence, physical removal – is a narrative construction rather than a historical starting point. The fraud hypothesis, like the apologetic response, mistakes a tradition for fact.
In fact, the burial tradition’s progressive elaboration is one instance of a much larger pattern. When we trace the resurrection tradition as a whole across the documents, from Paul through Mark through Matthew and Luke to John, the same escalatory trajectory that shapes the burial narrative shapes every other dimension of the resurrection claim.
IX. The Escalating Tradition: From Paul to John
The now-familiar pattern of escalation asserts itself again when we trace the resurrection tradition across the documents.
Our earliest source, Paul, has no empty tomb – a point already established in the preceding section. What his resurrection theology adds is equally significant: his account in 1 Corinthians 15 is built around the transformation of the body rather than its strict resuscitation. For Paul, the resurrection body is a “spiritual body” as opposed to a “physical body,” imperishable rather than perishable, heavenly rather than earthly. However, a plain reading of these passages can cause misunderstanding. When Paul writes that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (15:50), he is not saying the body is discarded at resurrection. For Paul, sarx – flesh – is a technical term for the sin-corrupted aspect of the human that alienates it from God, not a synonym for the physical body (soma). The body is transformed, not abandoned. What is buried as a psychic body (animated by psyche, the natural life-force) is raised as a pneumatic one (animated by pneuma, the divine spirit) – the same body, reconstituted in imperishable substance. This is why Paul can simultaneously insist on bodily resurrection and describe the result as a spiritual body without contradiction. The later Gospels' physically emphatic appearance accounts represent a different theological register than Paul's, but they are not correcting him on whether the body was raised. They are elaborating what kind of body appeared. Paul would certainly agree that Jesus’s resurrection was bodily, but he appears not to have conceived of it as the reversal of physical death that later tradition would describe.
Mark's Gospel is the next earliest document, and it introduces the empty tomb in a form that is comparatively sparse. The women come to the tomb, find the stone rolled away, encounter a young man in white who tells them Jesus has been raised and that they should tell the disciples he has gone ahead of them to Galilee. Then, in what most scholars believe is the original ending of Mark, the women "went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid" (16:8). The earliest Gospel ends with no resurrection appearances, no risen Jesus encountered in person. The longer endings of Mark 16:9-20 – the verses that appear in later manuscripts and include resurrection appearances – are widely recognized by textual scholars as later additions, almost certainly composed in the second century to harmonize Mark with the other Gospels and to provide the appearances that the original ending conspicuously lacks. The manuscript evidence for this is strong; the original Mark ends in silence and fear.
Clearly the tradition was uncomfortable with the original Markan resurrection ending. And yet, Mark may have embedded an earlier tradition around Jesus’s exaltation that foregoes the Evangelists’ conception of resurrection altogether in his Gospel. The transfiguration narrative of Mark 9:2-8, pictured right in Fra Angelico, The Transfiguration (c. 1440–41, Museo di San Marco, Florence), has long attracted scholarly suspicion as a misplaced tradition. The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921) by Rudolf Bultmann was among the first to argue systematically that it preserves an early post-Easter experience that Mark relocated backward into the ministry narrative for theological purposes. The formal features of the story sit awkwardly in a pre-passion context: the luminous transformation, the divine voice of affirmation, the appearance of heavenly figures, the disciples' prostration and terror. These are the standard elements of post-Easter exaltation accounts, not of episodes from an ongoing earthly ministry. Mark's placement of the transfiguration immediately after Jesus's saying that "some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power" is certainly intentional: the transfiguration becomes the fulfillment of the prophecy in the very next verse. It is theologically convenient in a way that raises compositional questions.
The suspicion is sharpened by the evidence from outside the Synoptic tradition. The Ethiopic version of the Apocalypse of Peter, a second-century text that most scholars regard as later than the canonical Gospels but which may preserve earlier floating traditions, contains a version of the transfiguration story in which the narrative does not end with the disciples descending the mountain. Instead, after the divine voice speaks, a great white cloud descends and carries away not only Moses and Elijah but Jesus himself – a translation to heaven, an ascension, an exodus. The cloud is not the vehicle of divine speech as in the Synoptic versions. It is the vehicle of divine departure. This detail illuminates several anomalies in the canonical accounts that are otherwise difficult to explain. Peter's impulse to build three tabernacles – which Mark himself acknowledges was a confused response noting that Peter “did not know what to say” – makes considerably more sense as a gesture toward keeping Jesus present if the tradition underlying the story was one in which Jesus was about to be taken away. The tabernacles are an attempt to prevent a departure that the Synoptic relocation of the story has rendered narratively nonsensical. Luke's version compounds the intrigue: he alone records that Moses and Elijah were speaking with Jesus about his “exodus which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.” Exodus is a strikingly specific word, and one that points toward departure and translation rather than death and resurrection. The author of 2 Peter, notably, references the transfiguration by locating it on “the holy mountain” – a phrase that appears in none of the Synoptic accounts but does appear in the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Peter, suggesting that whoever wrote 2 Peter may have known a version of the tradition closer to that text than to the canonical Gospels.
Whether the tradition underlying the transfiguration was originally a resurrection appearance, an ascension, or a translation in the mode of Elijah and Moses cannot be determined with confidence. The presence of those two figures is itself suggestive: both departed the earth without ordinary death in the Hebrew tradition, and both appear here flanking Jesus at the moment of his glorification. The direction of dependence between the canonical accounts and the Apocalypse of Peter is genuinely uncertain, and Bultmann's misplaced-resurrection-appearance hypothesis remains contested. What can be said is that at least one ancient version of this tradition understood it as a story about Jesus being taken up to heaven, and that the canonical Synoptic versions preserve residual details that only fully cohere against that earlier backdrop. The open question about what the tradition originally was is itself significant: it is further evidence that the earliest post-Easter experiences of Jesus were understood through a variety of exaltation frameworks – translation, ascension, resurrection, heavenly enthronement – before the tradition consolidated around the physicalized resurrection appearances that the later Gospels would make normative. Wherever it originally belonged in the tradition's development, the transfiguration is a glimpse onto that earlier, more fluid moment.
Matthew and Luke, building on Mark and composed a decade or more later, both add resurrection appearances, but the appearances they describe are in significant tension with each other. Matthew's risen Jesus appears to the disciples in Galilee, on a mountain, and commissions them to go and make disciples of all nations. Luke's risen Jesus restricts all the resurrection appearances to Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings, and insists that the disciples remain there until Pentecost. More than minor discrepancies in a shared account, these are contradictory geographical frameworks reflecting different theological programs. Neither can be historically harmonized with the other without doing violence to both. What Matthew and Luke do share, however, is a move toward physical concreteness that Mark's truncated ending never makes. Luke is the more explicit: his risen Jesus invites the disciples to handle him – “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (24:39) – and then eats a piece of broiled fish in their presence to demonstrate physical reality. Matthew is less emphatic on the physical details but presents a Jesus who is encountered, grasped, and worshipped in fully embodied terms. The apologetic direction is clear: against any reading of the resurrection as visionary or spiritual, both evangelists are asserting tangible, verifiable presence. John, as we will see, takes this trajectory further still.
The latest of the four Gospels, John, presents the most physically emphatic and theologically elaborate resurrection encounters. Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb alone, weeping, and mistakes the risen Jesus for the gardener – a moment of non-recognition that John uses to stage the dramatic reversal of her recognition when he speaks her name. Jesus then appears to the disciples through locked doors, a detail that has generated some theological puzzlement: a body capable of passing through solid matter is not straightforwardly a resuscitated corpse. But John immediately counterbalances that strangeness with maximum physical insistence. He shows the disciples his hands and his side. He breathes the Holy Spirit directly onto them. And when Thomas refuses to believe without tactile proof, Jesus returns specifically to meet that demand – “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side” (20:27). The invitation to probe the wounds is John's most pointed apologetic gesture: this is not a vision, not a ghost, not a spiritual presence. It is a physical body that can be examined. John then adds a final appearance on the beach at the Sea of Tiberias, where the risen Jesus has already built a charcoal fire and is cooking fish by the time the disciples arrive. The domesticity is deliberate. A Jesus who tends a fire and serves breakfast is a Jesus embedded in the most ordinary physical transactions of human life. John's resurrection is both the most mysterious and the most insistently corporeal. That tension is the mark of a tradition trying to hold together two things at once: the strangeness of what the earliest witnesses claimed and the physical verifiability that later apologetics required.
The direction of the escalating trajectory is consistent and clear: from the visionary encounters implied by Paul's earliest account, through the silent and frightened women of Mark's empty tomb, through the geographically contradictory but mutually physicalized appearances of Matthew and Luke, to the increasingly corporeal and dramatically staged encounters of John. Each layer of the tradition is more concrete, more tangible, and more insistent on the physical reality of the resurrection than the layer before it. This is exactly the direction we would expect the tradition to move if it were responding to the pressure of skeptical challenges – if communities were being asked to defend the resurrection against those who questioned it and were developing increasingly robust physical proofs in response.
That trajectory didn’t stop with the canonical Gospels either. It continued into texts that the emerging orthodoxy would ultimately exclude from the canon. Texts that survive to us only in fragments, but that are valuable precisely because they show where the developmental logic of the tradition was heading when left unchecked by the restraint that the canonical authors, to varying degrees, still exercised. The most striking example is the Gospel of Peter, a second-century passion and resurrection narrative that survives in a single fragmentary manuscript discovered at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886. What makes the Gospel of Peter unique among all surviving gospel literature is that it narrates the resurrection itself – the one event that none of the four canonical evangelists dared depict. Mark gives us an empty tomb and the flight of terrified women. Matthew adds an earthquake and an angel who rolls back the stone, but Jesus has already risen; the event itself remains undescribed. Luke and John provide extended appearance narratives, but the moment of resurrection occurs offstage, implicit between scenes. The canonical tradition consistently treats the resurrection as something known only by its aftermath, never by direct observation. Not so for the Gospel of Peter. In its account, Roman soldiers standing guard witness the heavens open, two enormous figures descend in blazing light, the stone rolls away of its own accord, and the two figures enter the tomb and emerge supporting a third figure, Jesus, whose head reaches beyond the clouds. Behind them, the cross itself follows out of the tomb and speaks, answering a voice from heaven. The restraint of the canonical accounts has given way entirely to spectacular, public, unmistakable divine theater.
This is what the elaboration trajectory looks like when it reaches its destination. The canonical Gospels are demonstrably our most reliable preservation of historical memory about Jesus, granted in the fictionalized narrative form that the bios genre inhabits. But they were not the only literary iterations the movement produced. Dozens of gospels, acts, apocalypses, and epistles circulated in the second and third centuries, each reflecting the theological concerns of the community that produced it. Most are lost entirely. Some, like the Gospel of Peter, survive only in fragments. What they collectively demonstrate is that the tradition was still generating new narrative material about Jesus well into the second century and beyond – and that the material it generated followed the same escalatory logic visible within the canon itself: more miraculous, more spectacular, more physically emphatic, more concerned to eliminate ambiguity and establish certainty. The curators of the emerging orthodoxy who assembled the New Testament canon selected four Gospels from this larger field and excluded the rest. Their selection was far from arbitrary – the canonical Gospels are genuinely earlier and closer to the sources – but the canonical Gospels were also not inevitable. It was both incidental circumstance and institutional decisions, made by specific people with specific theological commitments, and it froze one particular stage of the tradition’s development while suppressing both what came before and what came after.
X. N.T. Wright and the Case for the Physical Resurrection
In the process of evaluating what probably happened historically underneath the escalation of resurrection claims, we need to engage directly with the most serious historical case for a physical resurrection. That case is made by N.T. Wright, who is far removed from a credulous apologist but rather one of the most technically rigorous New Testament scholars working today, and whose arguments warrant more than a footnote.
Wright's primary argument, developed at exhaustive length in The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), is that the early Christian proclamation was historically anomalous in a way that demands explanation on its own terms. First-century Jewish resurrection belief was specific: resurrection was something that happened to all the righteous dead at the end of history – a general, final, cosmic event. It was not something that happened to one person in the middle of history, ahead of schedule, before the general resurrection. When the early Christians proclaimed that Jesus had been raised, they were not simply adopting an available Jewish category and applying it to their fallen teacher. They were doing something unprecedented: claiming that the general resurrection had begun in a single individual before the end had come. Wright argues that claim required a cause, and the only historically adequate cause is that the tomb was empty and the disciples had genuine encounters with a physically risen Jesus.
Wright is correct that the claim, as he reconstructs it, would have been anomalous. He is right that it requires explanation. Where the argument becomes vulnerable is in the conclusion it draws: that the only historically adequate explanation is the physical resurrection. Ehrman's response is the most direct: Wright's argument proves too much. If we require a physically real supernatural cause for every anomalous belief, we are committed to taking seriously the claimed causes of a great many anomalous beliefs in the ancient world that no contemporary historian can actually endorse. The question is not whether the disciples believed something anomalous – they apparently did in hindsight. Rather, the question is whether the historian is entitled to conclude that the only adequate explanation for that belief is that the event they attest literally happened. The historian's toolkit includes grief, visionary experience, the psychology of traumatic loss, and the specific interpretive framework of Jewish apocalypticism, all of which together constitute a historically adequate explanation for the anomalous belief without requiring the physical resurrection as its cause.
Wright's second major argument concerns the empty tomb. He contends that the empty tomb tradition is early, multiply attested, and passes the criterion of embarrassment: the primary witnesses in all four Gospel accounts are women, whose testimony carried little legal or social weight in first-century Jewish culture. No community inventing a resurrection story for apologetic purposes would have chosen women as its primary witnesses. The fact that women are named as the discoverers of the empty tomb is therefore a strong indicator of historical authenticity. This is a genuine point, as I have acknowledged in an earlier section. The counter-argument – made forcibly by Ehrman and others – is that the empty tomb tradition is not as early or as independently attested as Wright claims. Paul has no empty tomb, and he was writing at a time when the tradition was still current and verifiable. Matthew and Luke both derive their empty tomb accounts from Mark rather than from independent sources. And John, while not reflecting any literary dependence on the Synoptics, does display awareness of their general contours. Thus, multiple independent attestation not precisely the case here. As for the women witnesses, Crossan's counter-argument is that the women at the tomb may simply reflect the historical memory of who was present, if distantly, at the crucifixion and burial rather than the invention of resurrection witnesses.
Wright's third argument concerns the ophthe language in Paul's list of appearances. He contends that Paul is using a standard formula for verifiable personal encounter, and that Paul's inclusion of his own Damascus road experience does not mean all the appearances were visionary but rather that his anomalous encounter belonged to the same category as the earlier physical ones. But as the preceding section on Paul’s witness has established, Paul uses the same verb for every appearance including his own, and his resurrection theology describes transformation rather than resuscitation – the same body reconstituted in imperishable, pneumatic substance. That is a bodily resurrection, but not one that requires an empty tomb, nor the physically palpable, wound-bearing, fish-eating presence the later Gospels insist upon. Wright's argument requires Paul's ophthe language to be consistent with Luke and John. Paul's own text does not necessarily support or require that extension.
Wright's broadest argument is historiographical: no combination of factors other than the physical resurrection provides a historically sufficient explanation for the explosive early growth of the Jesus movement, its specific theological claims, and adherents’ willingness to die for those claims. He argues that people do not die for a visionary experience. They die for witnessed physical events. This is rhetorically powerful but historically the most vulnerable argument he wields. People have died for visionary religious experiences throughout human history, and in contexts where there is no stipulation to endorse the literal truth of what they died for. The martyrdom argument establishes sincerity, not historicity. Crossan's response is sharp: the early movement's growth is adequately explained by the content of what it proclaimed – the Kingdom of God as a present social reality of radical inclusion and distributive justice in a world of grinding imperial extraction – and the community's experience of that proclamation as genuinely transforming. We do not need physical resurrection to explain the movement’s rapid growth.
Let us further interrogate the sharpest version of Wright’s argument. Grant that the physical resurrection is not the only possible explanation for the movement’s growth. Grant that visionary experiences, grief psychology, and the apocalyptic framework are historically adequate to explain why the disciples became convinced that Jesus was alive. The question remains: why did they reach for resurrection – a category that in its normal Jewish usage referred to a future, collective, bodily event at the end of history – rather than the readily available alternatives? The tradition already possessed categories for what happens when God vindicates a righteous figure after death. Enoch was taken by God and did not see death. Elijah was assumed into heaven in a chariot of fire. The martyrs of Daniel 12 were promised vindication in the age to come. Any of these frameworks could have been applied to Jesus without requiring the specific claim that resurrection carried. Even if we admit, as we must given our review of the transfiguration narrative in the previous section, that resurrection was not the only category the early Jesus followers reached for to explain their experiences, the fact remains that resurrection became dominant. Why resurrection then?
The answer lies in recognizing that Wright’s argument implicitly assumes a causal order that the evidence does not support. Wright’s model runs: the disciples’ existing belief framework determined how they interpreted their experiences. And since “resurrection” was so conceptually constrained, only a genuine bodily resurrection could have produced the specific belief they arrived at. But as we have seen, the evidence points in the other direction. The experiences came first. The categorization came second. They had encounters – visionary, overwhelming, interpreted as real within the frameworks available to them – and then reached for the strongest available language to make sense of what had happened to them. The available alternatives did not fit. Enoch and Elijah were taken and translated to heaven in a single, unrepeated departure. What the earliest sources describe is something different: repeated appearances to multiple individuals and groups over a period of time, with a sense of ongoing presence and agency that the assumption model does not accommodate. Martyr vindication in the Daniel 12 tradition promised future reward at the end of history; it did not describe a present, active, encountered figure. At least some of the disciples read it as a heavenly departure or exaltation. But the encounters proliferated enough that “resurrection” became the only term in their conceptual vocabulary weighty enough to carry what they believed those encounters meant: not merely that God had received Jesus but that He had vindicated him, decisively and presently, reversing the verdict of the cross in a way that demanded the most powerful apocalyptic language available.
Critically, Wright overstates the degree of conceptual innovation this required. The disciples were not applying a collective, end-time category to a single individual as a freestanding theological novelty – which is entirely how Wright frames the anomaly. To the contrary, they were declaring that the end-time event had begun. Jesus was the firstfruits, the aparche in the language Paul would use within twenty-five years. The firstfruits language is self-explanatory. It is the first portion of the eschatological harvest, offered as a pledge and guarantee that the full ingathering was pressingly imminent. For the earliest disciples, the general resurrection had not been or individualized or delayed indefinitely. It had been inaugurated in a single person, and its completion was expected within the lifetimes of those who had witnessed its opening act. The category of resurrection was not being redefined from collective to individual as Wright argues. It was being applied in its full collective, eschatological force, with the claim that the process was now underway. It was only later – as the parousia (second coming) failed to materialize and the harvest did not follow the firstfruits – that the tradition was forced to reinterpret what had originally been an imminent collective expectation into something more closely resembling the individual resurrection and afterlife that subsequent Christian theology would develop. The conceptual innovation Wright identifies is real, but it belongs to the later decades of delayed-parousia theology, not to the initial moment of proclamation. The earliest disciples didn’t need to re-invent an existing category; their resurrection claims insisted upon the common apocalyptic expectation.
Wright’s anomaly argument is further weakened by the fact that the early Jesus movement’s resurrection claim was not without parallel in its own immediate cultural environment. Mark 6:14–16 preserves a striking tradition: Herod Antipas, hearing reports of Jesus’s activity, concludes that Jesus is John the Baptizer raised from the dead. A mysterious “they” likewise reports to Herod that “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead, and for this reason these powers are at work in him” (6:14). This tradition may preserve historical memory. Mark has no theological incentive to record that people in first-century Palestine were attributing resurrection to a figure other than Jesus, which is precisely what makes the criterion of embarrassment applicable here. If anything, this passage undermines the uniqueness of the claim Mark’s own Gospel is building toward. Its presence in the text suggests it was possibly a circulating rumor and that the resurrection label was within reach. It demonstrates that “resurrection” was a category that first-century Palestinians were already reaching for to explain the continuing power and influence of executed charismatic leaders. The Jesus movement was probably not the first or only group to make such claims. It was participating in a culturally available response to the death of a prophetic figure.
Less well known but arguably more striking is a second parallel involving the Samaritan messianic teacher known as Dositheus. He was a rough contemporary of Jesus, likely active in the 30s or 40s CE, whose movement persisted for centuries and whose followers held to the deathlessness of their Messiah. As Nathan C. Johnson has argued in a recent study, “The Survival of Popular Movements in Antiquity,” the Dosithean movement presents a direct challenge to the claim that the Jesus movement’s persistence was unique or that it requires a unique explanation. Origen wrote in the third century, reporting that Dositheans “preserve books by Dositheus and certain myths about him to the effect that he did not taste death, but is still alive somewhere” (Commentarium in Johannem 18.27.162). Like Jesus’s body, his became a site of contestation between followers and detractors – followers claimed it was never found or that he had ascended; hostile sources claimed it was discovered rotting in a cave. One Dosithean sect apparently believed that people would be resurrected because of his death. Burial practices testified to this belief: according to the sources, when Dositheans died, they were girdled with a sturdy belt and given a staff and sandals, “for they said, ‘When we arise from the tomb, we will arise in haste.’” The movement spread geographically across Palestine, the Transjordan, and Alexandria, diversified into as many as seven to nine distinct sects, developed its own scriptures and synagogues, and persisted for at least eight to nine centuries – all while maintaining the claim that its messianic founder had not truly died.
The vast majority of records from that period are lost, and we have no way of knowing how common such claims were. But these two examples – the Baptizer tradition in Mark and the Dosithean movement in Samaria – are sufficient to demonstrate that the early Jesus movement’s proclamation of its leader’s resurrection was not unprecedented, not culturally anomalous, and not without parallel. The eschatological expectations of imminent general resurrection that pervaded first-century Palestine, expectations that Dale Allison’s Constructing Jesus (2010) documents in detail, created the conditions in which the death of a charismatic messianic leader could be processed through the category of resurrection rather than through the available alternatives of translation, assumption, or martyrdom. The category was in deep circulation and usage in first-century Judea. What the earliest disciples contributed was the conviction that, in this case, the general resurrection had actually begun.
Dale Allison, whose Resurrecting Jesus (2005) takes Wright's arguments with full seriousness and whose intellectual honesty is generally more searching than either Wright or the skeptics, makes a point worth emphasizing. The historian who examines the resurrection question does not emerge with a confident verdict in either direction. Allison concludes in uncertainty, acknowledging that the evidence is truly ambiguous, and that the experiences of the early community were genuine even if their interpretation is questionable. That calibrated uncertainty is a valid position. But in my estimation and on the Humean standard I hold to throughout this series – the standard that holds that the accumulated evidence for physical regularity will always outweigh the evidence for its suspension – the weight comes down on the side of the visionary reading. The physical elaboration of later accounts belies its original human experience.
XI. Christological Escalation: From Exaltation to Incarnation
The theological consequence of those early visionary experiences was a Christological development that is demonstrable, consistent, and traceable across the documents. But its full picture is more complex than a simple low-to-high escalation suggests. Paul's letters, which predate all four Gospels by decades, complicate the narrative in ways that are important to consider.
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though
he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death–
even death on a cross.
Therefore God
exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”
(Philippians 2: 5-11)
Paul's Christology is already extraordinarily elevated. The Philippian hymn cited above predates even Paul's letters – he quotes it as received tradition rather than composing it himself, making it among the earliest surviving Christological reflection we have. In it, Jesus is described as one who existed in the “form of God” before his earthly life, who “emptied himself” to take on human form, and who was then highly exalted by God at the resurrection. This is a pre-existence Christology; the divine identity is not acquired at baptism or at resurrection but was present before the incarnation. In some respects it is structurally as elevated as John's Prologue, even if expressed in different conceptual vocabulary. And Paul was writing this in the 50s CE, at least two decades before Mark had written a word.
What this means is that the escalation visible across the Gospels does not tell the whole story of early Christological development. It tells the story of one particular stream – communities working within the Synoptic tradition, whose Christology began with the earthly ministry and moved progressively upward toward divine exaltation – rather than the full range of early reflection on who Jesus was. Paul's communities were apparently doing something quite different from the beginning: drawing on Hellenistic divine-man traditions, Jewish wisdom theology, and the tradition of heavenly intermediary figures attested in Jewish apocalyptic literature to construct an elevated portrait of Jesus that owed less to the memory of his earthly ministry than to the experience of his risen presence and its theological implications. As we have seen, the documents themselves sometimes preserve earlier layers that their authors absorbed rather than composed, and that are not fully integrated with the theology the document as a whole assumes.
Very early Christological fragments embedded in Acts – the speeches in chapters 2 and 13 that speak of God making Jesus "both Lord and Messiah" through the resurrection – suggest that an even earlier layer of the tradition understood the divine identity as conferred at the resurrection rather than pre-existent from eternity. Luke preserves these formulas as received proclamation language, deploying them as rhetorical bridges to Jewish audiences in the missionary speeches, without feeling obligated to reconcile them with the more elevated Christological framework his own nativity narrative already assumes. The highly varied and individually dispersed nature of the early Jesus movement’s spread (which will be detailed in Part Six of this series) produced multiple starting points, multiple trajectories, all developing in the same decades. Accordingly, the documents that preserve them are themselves archaeologically complex, carrying earlier strata within compositional frameworks that have moved beyond them.
The transfiguration narrative of Mark 9 is one further concrete exhibit of exactly that phenomenon. As a preceding section already argued, the tradition underlying it most plausibly originated as a post-Easter exaltation account – a story about Jesus being taken up to heaven – before Mark relocated it backward into the ministry narrative. What matters for the Christological argument here is not the resurrection question but what the tradition's primitive register reveals: one of the earliest reflections on Jesus's divine identity was anchored to a moment of exaltation, of God's vindicating act after death, rather than to a pre-existent divine nature that preceded his earthly life entirely. Like the Acts speeches embedded in Luke's later narrative, the transfiguration carries an earlier Christological stratum inside a document whose theological program has since moved beyond it. It is a residue of a more primitive framework in which Jesus became what he was, rather than having always been it.
When we hold all of these streams in view simultaneously, the picture is not a single linear escalation from low to high Christology but a field of divergent trajectories developing in parallel across different communities, with different starting points and different emphases. The communities that produced the Q material – whatever its precise compositional history – appear to have had little interest in Christological elevation at all, focusing on the wisdom teaching with minimal investment in the theological apparatus of death, resurrection, and cosmic lordship. The Markan communities were working from a different starting point than Paul's communities and arrived at a different portrait. John's community, writing latest and most elevated of all, may have been influenced by both the Synoptic tradition and the Pauline tradition while developing its own distinctive synthesis.
Tracing the trajectory across the sources – from divine identity conferred at resurrection, to conferred at baptism, to pre-existent before birth, to eternal co-equality with the Father – the escalation culminates in the Nicene Creed of 325 CE: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.” But that trajectory is one strand of a much more complex and plural development. This complexity is not merely a qualification to the escalation argument. It is an early glimpse of something the next post of this series will examine at length: that the diversity of early Christianity was no late development, a falling away from an original unity, but a feature of the tradition from its earliest recoverable moment. There was real and discernible escalation, but the plurality that surrounded and complicated it was historical.
XII. The Son of Man Identification: The Herald Becomes the Coming One
Part Three of this series argued that the historical Jesus spoke of the Son of Man as a figure distinct from himself – a coming heavenly judge drawn from the Danielic tradition whose arrival Jesus was announcing as part of the imminent eschaton. The community’s post-Easter experience reversed that understanding completely. However it was experienced, the resurrection produced a conclusion that would reshape every dimension of the tradition including this one: the herald became the coming one; Jesus was the cosmic Son of Man.
Although it may have taken years or even decades to realize it, the logic of the identification is somewhat simple. If God had raised Jesus from the dead – if the crucified prophet had been vindicated through resurrection – then Jesus must have been more than merely the announcer of the Kingdom’s arrival. In some sense, he must have been its cosmic agent. The very figure whose coming he had prophesied turned out to be himself, revealed through the resurrection as the one who would return on the clouds of heaven to complete what the crucifixion had interrupted. The resurrection did more than simply reverse the verdict of the cross; it promoted Jesus from prophet to cosmic judge, from herald to the Son of Man.
As we have seen, the scope of that promotion echoes the ways in which the earliest community elsewhere elevated Jesus. Part Three established that the historical Jesus grounded his authority to pronounce forgiveness not in divine identity but in Kingdom authority – the herald's prerogative to announce what God was doing rather than the claim to be divine in so doing. The post-Easter identification collapsed that distinction as thoroughly as it collapsed the herald/coming-one distinction. The one who had said "your sins are forgiven" as the prophet of the arriving Kingdom became, in the community's retrospective reading, the one who could say it because he was God (if not the Father). The elevation was total: from prophet to cosmic judge, herald to the one who was heralded, Kingdom announcer to divine Son. The Son of Man identification is perhaps the clearest single marker of that elevation, but it was part of a comprehensive reframing project of who Jesus must have been all along.
These types of re-identification emerged and evolved quickly. Paul, writing in the early 50s CE, already assumes that Jesus is the one who will descend from heaven at the parousia (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17). He doesn’t argue for this identification, he presupposes it. By the time Paul is writing, his communities had already collapsed the distinction that the historical Jesus appears to have maintained. The recasting of John the Baptizer's role is another example of the editorial fingerprints the process left behind. Within the herald framework Jesus inhabited, John was his prophetic predecessor – the voice whose movement Jesus joined, whose program he extended, whose execution he absorbed as a warning about the cost of the mission. John and Jesus occupied adjacent positions in the same apocalyptic sequence: both heralds, both announcing the imminent arrival of the Kingdom and its cosmic judge in their own respective programmatic approaches. Once the community concluded that Jesus was that judge, that the herald was the coming one, John's position in the sequence had to be reassigned. His standing alongside Jesus as a fellow herald of something beyond them both no longer made sense; he was repositioned as the one who had prepared Jesus’s way.
The Malachi forerunner typology was already embedded in the tradition: Elijah returning to prepare the way of the Lord before the great and terrible day (Malachi 4:5). John's own self-presentation – the wilderness, the camel hair, the leather belt matching Elijah's description in 2 Kings 1:8 – already invited that identification. What the post-Easter tradition did was redirect it. John was the return of Elijah, but now Elijah was preparing the way for Jesus specifically, who had been recategorized as the eschaton's cosmic judge. Mark 1:2–3 opens the Gospel by quoting Malachi and Isaiah together as a prediction of John. Matthew 11:14, in which Jesus himself identifies John as 'Elijah who is to come,' represents the identification already so complete that it is written back into Jesus's own speech. The trajectory is analogous to others this series has traced elsewhere: the community's post-Easter conclusions migrate backward through the tradition until they appear to have been present from the beginning.
As we have already documented, the Synoptic tradition preserves the outcome of this re-identification process. The passion predictions in Mark – the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, be killed, and after three days rise – represent the community writing the identification backward into Jesus’s own speech. By having Jesus predict his own suffering using the Son of Man title, the tradition accomplishes two things simultaneously: it establishes that Jesus knew he was the Son of Man all along, and it reframes the crucifixion as a foreknown element of the divine plan rather than an unexpected catastrophe. The disciples’ incomprehension in Mark is the honest residue of the original situation: Jesus had not told them he was the Son of Man, and the crucifixion was not what Jesus or his disciples had expected.
Matthew and Luke-Acts inherit the identification from Mark and elaborate it. Matthew’s eschatological discourse (chapter 25) places Jesus explicitly on the Son of Man’s judgment throne, separating the nations as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The identification is complete: Jesus is the judge, the Son of Man, the one who will come in glory. In Acts 7:56, Luke has Stephen at his martyrdom declare “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” The Danielic figure, now identified as the risen Jesus, occupies the position of cosmic authority. John’s Gospel characteristically takes the identification furthest by collapsing it into the present. The Son of Man has already been “lifted up” and the judgment the Synoptics anticipate at the parousia is, for John, already underway in the encounter with the earthly Jesus.
The tradition moves from the earlier, more ambiguous, more historically embedded account toward the later, more theologically resolved, more christologically elevated one. The historical Jesus announced the Son of Man; many post-Easter communities announced that Jesus was the Son of Man. My view is that this isn’t a story of fraud or deliberate falsification. It is the natural and humanly intelligible process by which a community that has had a transformative experience – the visionary encounters, the conviction of vindication, the ongoing experience of Jesus’s presence in the shared meal and the reading of scripture – revises its understanding of the figure at its origin. The herald must have always been the coming one; the prophet must have always known he was the judge; the suffering must have always been part of the plan. The earliest Jesus movement is doing what communities always do when the meaning of the founder’s life becomes clearer in retrospect than it was in the moment: it reads the ending back into the beginning and tells the story as though the conclusion were visible from the start.
The Son of Man identification is the moment at which Jesus the apocalyptic prophet becomes Jesus the cosmic judge, the moment at which a message about the Kingdom becomes a message centered on the messenger, the moment at which the one who pointed forward to God’s coming act becomes the one in whom all of God’s acts were realized. Everything else in the Christological escalation – the movement from exaltation to pre-existence to incarnation to Nicene co-equality – follows from this initial identification. Once the herald is the coming one, the question of his nature becomes the defining theological question of the next three centuries. And the answers that question generated would have been unrecognizable to the Galilean prophet who stood by the Jordan and announced that someone greater was coming.
XIII. Atonement Theology as Post-Hoc Meaning-Making
There is a parallel escalatory development that occurred throughout the decades and centuries that followed Jesus’s crucifixion. The belief that Jesus had risen again and that his identity had been elevated to Son of Man and Son of God mutually licensed and compelled his earliest disciples to redefine the purpose of his death. As the preceding sections have established, a community in crisis reaches for whatever frameworks its tradition makes available to contain the collision between conviction and catastrophe. For first-century Jews steeped in the Hebrew scriptures, the natural place to look was those same scriptures. And as it turned out, the scriptures contained something that seemed almost uncannily suited to the shape of what had just happened.
The historical Jesus, as Part Three established, exhibited no theory of sacrificial atonement. His operative soteriology was simpler and more radical: repentance – the genuine reorientation of a life toward God and neighbor – was met by God's direct forgiveness, unbrokered by sacrifice, priesthood, or Temple fee. That is what Jesus practiced in the forgiveness episodes, what the Lord's Prayer encodes, and what the prophetic tradition he stood within had always insisted was the deeper logic beneath the priesthood cult. Whatever his death meant, it was not something the figure of history had framed as an atoning sacrifice. That framing came from the community that survived him and placed sacrificial predictions on his lips. And yet, as the earliest movement spread, the atonement frameworks the community found were multiple, and their multiplicity is itself the most important evidence of their post-hoc nature.
What emerged over the decades following the crucifixion was not a single, coherent explanation of why Jesus had died but a profusion of explanations – different metaphors, drawn from different domains of first-century experience, addressing different audiences, and in some cases arriving at conclusions that are not only distinct but mutually incompatible. The tradition has generally treated this diversity as richness: multiple facets of a single jewel, each illuminating a different dimension of the same underlying reality. The historian, looking at the same evidence, sees something different – a community casting about in multiple directions simultaneously, reaching for whatever framework might be adequate to contain a loss that no single framework could contain. The diversity is evidence of a search, and the urgency and profundity of that search is itself testimony to the depth of the crisis the crucifixion produced. The community reached for so many frameworks precisely because the event demanded interpretation with an intensity nothing else in their experience had generated. The multiplicity is both a sign of confusion and a sign of the stakes.
The earliest recoverable layer of interpretation is visible in what most scholars regard as a pre-Pauline creedal formula preserved in 1 Corinthians 15:3: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” Paul is explicitly quoting received tradition here – “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” – which means this formulation predates his letters and likely originated in the first decade after the crucifixion. The phrase "for our sins" (hyper tōn hamartiōn hēmōn) has been read through so many centuries of Anselmian and Reformation theology that modern readers inevitably hear penal substitution in it: Christ absorbing the punishment that sinners deserved. But the conceptual range of redemptive death language in Second Temple Judaism does not require or even suggest that reading. In 4 Maccabees 6:28–29, the martyr Eleazar prays that his death will serve as a purification (katharseion) for the people and his blood as a ransom (antipsychon) for their lives. The framing is not juridical substitution but covenantal restoration: a faithful death that repairs the damage caused by Israel's collective unfaithfulness. The martyrological tradition in 2 Maccabees 7 operates similarly; the deaths of the faithful are understood to turn aside God's wrath from the nation, not by absorbing a legal penalty but by demonstrating the covenant loyalty that Israel's sins had violated. This is the conceptual world in which the earliest Christians reached for redemptive death language – and it is a world in which hyper plus sins would have carried covenantal rather than penal purpose.
If the earliest creedal formula carries this martyrological sense – and the Second Temple context makes this overwhelmingly more probable than an Anselmian reading that would not exist for another millennium – then “Christ died for our sins” meant something closer to this: his faithful death unto the point of martyrdom served to restore Israel’s broken covenant relationship with God, within the larger eschatological drama his followers believed was reaching its climax. David Brondos in Paul on the Cross (2006) develops this argument at length, contending that Paul’s “for our sins” language draws on the narrative of Israel’s story (that of sin, exile, and restoration) rather than on a transaction between divine justice and a substitutionary victim. Simon Gathercole’s Defending Substitution (2015) pushes back, but even his account acknowledges the martyrological background as the starting point from which later substitutionary readings developed.
Writing within twenty to twenty-five years of the crucifixion and thus closer to the event than any other surviving author, Paul reaches for at least four distinct metaphors across his letters and they sit uncomfortably together. In Romans and Galatians, Jesus's death is a sacrifice of atonement, viz. hilasterion [the mercy seat – the lid of the ark of the covenant on which lamb's blood was sprinkled], propitiation at the place where God and humanity are reconciled through the shedding of blood, drawing on the sacrificial logic of the Temple cult that Jesus himself had confronted. In the same letter to the Romans, the death is also described in legal and forensic terms: justification, the declaration of righteousness before a divine tribunal, as though the cross were a courtroom transaction in which the whole of human sin incurred a cosmic debt that the crucifixion discharged. In 1 Corinthians, Jesus is “our paschal [Passover] lamb” – a different sacrificial framework entirely, evoking not the Day of Atonement but the Exodus, the blood on the doorposts that turned aside the angel of death and liberated a people from empire. And in the cosmic register that Paul reaches for in passages like Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15, the crucifixion and resurrection together constitute a victory over the cosmic powers – sin, death, and the elemental forces of the present age – as though the cross were not a payment or a sacrifice, but a battlefield.
These are not four ways of saying the same thing. A sacrifice offered to God to satisfy the requirements of divine justice is a fundamentally different transaction than a ransom paid to liberate captives from hostile powers. In the sacrificial model, God is the recipient of the offering. In the ransom model, God is the one doing the liberating, and the powers being paid off, or defeated, are the adversaries. The logic runs in opposite directions. So too, a legal declaration of righteousness before a divine court operates by a different mechanism than the Passover blood that turns aside destruction: one is juridical, the other is apotropaic (rituals or symbols believed to possess the power to ward off evil or harm); one addresses guilt, the other addresses mortal danger. Paul reaches for all of these frameworks, sometimes within the same letter, because none of them is quite adequate on its own and because the event he is trying to interpret exceeds the capacity of any single metaphor to capture it.
The letter to the Hebrews (roughly late first-century), written by an unknown author and almost certainly not Paul, develops yet another framework with sustained theological sophistication: Jesus as the ultimate high priest who enters not the earthly Temple but the true heavenly sanctuary, offering not the blood of goats and bulls but his own blood once for all, thereby renders the entire sacrificial apparatus of the old covenant obsolete. The Christology of Hebrews is among the most developed in the New Testament, and its atonement theology is internally coherent in a way that Paul’s more improvisational metaphor-switching is not. But its coherence comes at a cost: it is coherent because it commits fully to a single framework, the priestly-sacrificial, and works it out with relentless consistency. It does not attempt to reconcile itself with Paul’s legal, Passover, or cosmic-victory frameworks, because reconciliation is not possible. They are different explanations of the same event, produced by different theological minds for communities with different conceptual resources.
John’s Gospel offers something different again. The crucifixion in John is not primarily a sacrifice, a legal transaction, a ransom, or a priestly offering. It is the “lifting up” of the Son of Man – a deliberately double-edged phrase that means both the physical elevation on the cross and the glorification of the divine Logos returning to the Father. In John’s telling, the crucifixion is not a tragedy that requires theological repair. It is the completion of the mission: “It is finished.” The serene Jesus of John’s passion narrative, who carries his own cross, who is not surprised or overwhelmed, who dies with a word of accomplishment rather than a cry of desolation, is so far from the anguished figure of Mark’s account that the two portraits are difficult to attribute to the same event, let alone to the same theological understanding of what that event means. John’s atonement theology, to the extent the term even applies, is a theology of revelation and return rather than of sacrifice and substitution.
Luke-Acts represents something more striking still: a two-volume work that had access to the Markan tradition of atoning sacrifice and deliberately set it aside. Mark 10:45, where Jesus declares that the Son of Man came "to give his life as a ransom for many," is one of the clearest atonement statements in the Synoptic tradition. Luke completely omits it. And Mark 15:37–39, where the tearing of the Temple curtain at the moment of Jesus's death symbolizes the opening of access to God through that death, underwent a consequential rearrangement in Luke's account: the curtain tears before Jesus dies, transforming the symbol from one of salvific access into one of divine judgment on the Temple and the powers that condemned him.
The most textually revealing case is Luke 22:19–20. In most surviving manuscripts, Jesus at the Last Supper speaks the familiar words of eucharistic institution: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” and “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” But in some of the earliest reliable Greek manuscripts, along with several early Latin witnesses, the passage is shorter. Jesus takes the cup and says “Take this and divide it among yourselves,” takes bread and says “This is my body,” and moves directly to announcing that the betrayer's hand is at the table. The sacrificial language is absent. As Ehrman argues in Misquoting Jesus (2005), the longer version appears to be a scribal addition harmonizing Luke's account with the eucharistic formula already established in the other Gospels and in the Pauline liturgical tradition (1 Corinthians 11:23–25). Luke, as an author composing a new work, had theological reasons to reshape his sources away from the sacrificial interpretation that other strands of the tradition were developing. Later scribes made theologically motivated changes too, but characteristically in the opposite direction – toward harmonization and doctrinal reinforcement. It is easy to explain why a scribe would insert the familiar eucharistic formula into a text that lacked it. It is difficult to explain why one would remove it. The shorter reading is the harder reading, and in textual criticism, the harder reading is generally the earlier one.
If the shorter text is original, Luke's Gospel contains no passage in which Jesus's death is described as a sacrifice offered on behalf of others. The pattern across Luke-Acts is consistent: the omission of Mark's ransom saying, the repositioning of the Temple curtain, the removal of “poured out for many” from the cup-word. In their place, Luke constructs a soteriology in which Jesus dies innocent, his death exposes the guilt of those who condemned him, and the recognition of that guilt drives the hearer to repentance. Repentance opens the door to divine forgiveness. The cross is indispensable as the catalyst for moral reckoning, but the mechanism is repentance, and the saving act is God's forgiveness in response to it. The missionary speeches in Acts confirm the pattern: in chapters 3, 4, and 13, the apostles proclaim Jesus's death and resurrection, call their audiences to repentance, and promise forgiveness of sins. The soteriological weight falls on the resurrection as vindication and the repentance it authorizes.
Luke represents a strand of the tradition that received the core narrative, including Markan source material with its explicit sacrificial framing, and constructed an alternative soteriology that located the saving significance of the Christ-event in the resurrection and the moral transformation it provoked rather than in the mechanics of the death itself. This was a live theological option within the first-century tradition. It became a dead one through the consolidation process by which proto-orthodox theology standardized the sacrificial reading, a process visible in miniature in the scribal insertion of the longer Last Supper text back into the very Gospel that had declined to include it.
The post-biblical tradition continued the proliferation rather than resolving it. The patristic period developed the ransom theory most associated with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa – taking Paul's liberation metaphor further by identifying its transactional counterparty: the devil. On this account, humanity was held captive by the devil, and Christ's death was the price paid for their release. Some versions added a mechanism of divine deception; the devil accepted Christ's death as payment only to discover too late that he could not hold the divine nature captive. The image was vivid and enormously influential for nearly a millennium of Christian thought, but it raised questions its own proponents struggled to answer. To whom is the ransom paid? If to the devil, does God negotiate with evil? If to God, the metaphor collapses back into sacrifice. Gregory of Nazianzus found the whole framework objectionable on precisely these grounds and said so emphatically in his Fourth Theological Oration.
Anselm of Canterbury, writing in the eleventh century, reframed the question in feudal terms that would have been unintelligible to Paul: human sin is an offense against God’s infinite honor, and because the offense is against an infinite being, only an infinite satisfaction can restore what has been damaged. No mere human can offer infinite satisfaction; therefore, God must become human in order to offer as a human what only God can provide. The framework is elegant, internally consistent, and entirely medieval; it maps the logic of feudal honor culture onto the relationship between God and humanity with the precision of a legal brief. It is also, as a historical matter, a theological innovation of the eleventh century, not a recovery of primitive Christian teaching. Paul would not have recognized it. Eight centuries later, Joseph Smith canonized Anselm’s logic in new scripture: the Book of Mormon declares that only “an infinite atonement” can overcome death and satisfy the demands of justice (2 Nephi 9:7, Alma 34:10–12), giving systematic and cosmic scope to a concept no New Testament author had articulated. The escalation of atonement theology continued wherever the tradition found new soil.
The Reformation sharpened Anselm’s framework into the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement that has become, for much of evangelical Protestantism, virtually synonymous with the gospel itself. In Calvin’s formulation, and in the subsequent development by Reformed scholastics, the cross is not merely a satisfaction of divine honor but a legal substitution: Christ bears the specific penal consequences that divine justice requires for human sin. God’s wrath, which sinners deserve, is absorbed by Christ in their place. The forensic and retributive logic is explicit: someone must be punished, and Christ volunteers to take the punishment so that the guilty can go free. This is the version of atonement that dominates contemporary evangelical preaching, that shapes the altar-call logic of revivalist Christianity, and that many believers take to be simply what the crucifixion means – the plain and obvious reading of the event. But it’s not. It is the sixteenth-century endpoint of a meaning-making trajectory that began in the confused and grieving weeks after a Roman execution, passed through more than a thousand years of theological elaboration, and arrived at a formulation that would have been foreign to every author in the New Testament.
Gustaf Aulén’s 1931 study Christus Victor recovered what he argued was the oldest strand of atonement thinking – the dramatic or classical model, in which the cross is understood not as a transaction (whether sacrificial, legal, or honorific) but as a cosmic battle. Christ confronts and defeats the powers of sin, death, and the devil, and the resurrection is the proof of victory. Aulén argued that this was the dominant understanding in the early church before the Western tradition’s preoccupation with legal and sacrificial categories displaced it. Whether Aulén’s historical claim is entirely correct is very much debated, but the Christus Victor model does represent an extension of one of Paul’s metaphors with a genuinely different logic than the substitutionary one: in this framework, God is not the one demanding satisfaction or punishment. God is the one fighting. The cross is not a courtroom or an altar. It is a battlefield.
The point of cataloging this diversity is not to adjudicate between the models or to rank them by historical primacy. It is to make visible what the tradition has perpetually obscured: that there is no single, original, self-evident meaning of the crucifixion that the early community simply received and transmitted. Instead, there is an ongoing and energetically contested project of interpretation – communities reaching for metaphors adequate to an event that shattered the earliest expectations, finding multiple metaphors because no single one was adequate, and then elaborating those metaphors across centuries of theological development into systems of increasing specificity and decreasing compatibility with one another. The sacrificial reading cannot be reconciled with the Christus Victor reading without doing violence to both. The penal substitutionary model is logically incompatible with the Anselmian honor model it claims to refine. The Johannine theology of glorification-through-lifting-up occupies a different conceptual universe than Paul’s Passover lamb. Rather than facets of the same jewel, these are accretions of theological shaping and invention around a core of crisis.
It is that profusion of incompatible frameworks, none of them traceable to Jesus himself, all of them produced by communities after the fact, which is the clearest possible evidence that what we are looking at is not the transmission of a received meaning but the construction of meaning in the aftermath of a catastrophic event that had no obvious theological significance at all. A Roman political execution of a prophetic figure was, in the first century, a tragically routine event. The theological significance was neither intrinsic nor self-evident to the event itself. It was applied to the event by people who needed the event to mean something other than what it appeared to mean, and who found in their scriptural tradition and their theological imagination the resources to construct that meaning time and time again.
XIV. The Emmaus Road
In all of the resurrection narratives offered by the Gospel tradition, the one that speaks most clearly to what I think the resurrection actually meant at its deepest level for the community that first proclaimed it is a story that never happened. Or rather: a story that is true in a way that does not require it to have happened historically. What I am doing with the Emmaus Road story is bringing narrative-critical attention to it alongside the historical. I am asking not only what probably happened but how the story functions – what its structural choices encode, why the recognition comes at the table rather than on the road, what the vanishing means as a narrative beat rather than a physical event. Those literary observations are inseparable from the historical argument in this case; they are the evidence for it. The story's architecture is itself testimony about what the earliest communities experienced and how they understood the presence of Jesus in their ongoing life together.
The Road to Emmaus appears only in Luke's Gospel (24:13-35). Two disciples – one named Cleopas, one unnamed – are walking from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus on the day of the resurrection. They are talking about everything that has recently happened. Then a stranger falls in with them on the road, and they are astonished that he seems not to know what they are discussing. They tell him the story: Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word, whom they had hoped would be the one to redeem Israel, was arrested, handed over, and crucified. And now they have learned that some of the women had been to the tomb just that morning and found it empty, and some had reported a vision of angels. But Jesus they had not seen. The stranger expresses surprise at their incomprehension, and begins to walk them through the scriptures, explaining everything that had been written about the Messiah's suffering and glory. They arrive at Emmaus as the day is ending, and they urge him to stay. He comes in and sits at table with them. He takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. And in that moment of the breaking of the bread, their eyes are opened and they recognize him. He vanishes from their sight immediately.
John Dominic Crossan has argued with an elegance that I find wholly persuasive that the Emmaus story is not a historical account of a literal walk on a literal road. It is a crystallization of the early Jesus community's most earnest and luminous account of its own experience of resurrection. It is not so much a historical event that happened individually to specific witnesses, but as an ongoing practice through which the community continued to encounter the presence of Jesus after his death.
Consider what the two disciples on the road are doing when they finally recognize Jesus. Instead of being in a garden near an empty tomb, rather than being in an upper room behind locked doors, they are on a road reflecting on Jesus and talking about the scriptures. They are at a table breaking bread with a stranger they have welcomed in. Three things: they are walking with Jesus on The Way, engaging in the interpretation of scripture, and sharing a meal with the unexpected stranger. These are no incidental details. They are the three central practices of the earliest Christian communities – the acceptance of Jesus’s pronouncement of The Way, the reading and reinterpretation of the Hebrew scriptures in light of what had happened to Jesus, and the communal meal that enacted in the present the radical table fellowship of Jesus's own ministry.
With the precision of a parable, the Emmaus story encodes the primitive community's answer to its own most urgent question – where do we find Jesus now that he is gone? The answer is this: in the same places you found him before. In the wrestling with scripture, in the welcome of the stranger, in the bread broken and shared at a table where, by the logic of the Kingdom he proclaimed, no one is excluded and no one goes hungry. He is present in those practices not as a ghost haunting a specific location, but as a pattern of action and attention and relation that persists in the Kingdom community that continues to enact it. He vanishes from their sight as soon as they recognize him because the recognition is the point; his presence persists in the ongoing practice despite the physical vanishing.
The Emmaus story also encodes something else that is deeply resonant about the early community's hindsight experience: the failure of recognition during Jesus's own lifetime. The two disciples did not understand who Jesus fully was while they were walking the path with him. His death was far removed from what they expected – in fact, it was the exact opposite of what they anticipated, which is why they were walking away from Jerusalem in grief and confusion rather than toward it in triumph. In the form the Emmaus story gives it, the resurrection experience is not simply the reversal of the crucifixion. It is the transformation of the community's understanding; the moment when the scriptural patterns that had been present all along, but incompletely grasped, finally came into focus. "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us" (Luke 24:32)?
John Dominic Crossan, in his 2012 study The Power of Parable, puts it with the economy of a koan: “Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens.” The story is a parable, and in calling it that, Crossan is making a precise literary and theological claim. The Emmaus story belongs to the same mode of truth-telling as the parables Jesus himself taught: not fiction in the dismissive sense, but truth-bearing narrative that illuminates lived reality more honestly than a factual account could. When it tried to describe its experience of his continued presence, the earliest communities that had been shaped by Jesus's parabolic teaching reached for the parabolic form. The man who taught in parables is remembered in a parable. The form is itself the message.
Crossan’s argument extends this observation from the Emmaus story to the Gospels themselves. As Crossan puts it, the parabolizing impulse Jesus modeled for his followers became a “bad habit” – one the movement could not shake when it turned from transmitting Jesus’s sayings to composing narratives about Jesus himself. The Gospels are not mere collections of parables and purely fictionalized narratives with biographical connective tissue. The Gospels are themselves parabolic history: mega-parables, in Crossan’s formulation. The are narratives constructed to reveal, through literary and theological shaping of historical memory, what the authors believed the events meant. Mark’s Gospel is a mega-parable about the messianic secret and the meaning of suffering discipleship. Matthew’s is a mega-parable about Jesus as the new Moses, delivering a new Torah from a new mountain for a new Israel. Luke’s is a mega-parable about the progressive extension of God’s mercy from Israel to the nations. John’s is a mega-parable about the descent and return of the divine Logos, in which every episode is a sign pointing beyond itself to a theological reality the narrative exists to disclose.
Each evangelist inherited traditions – sayings, stories, pericopes circulating in the oral world their communities inhabited in addition to Mark’s literary contribution – and composed them into a narrative whose organizing logic was theological, primarily revelatory rather than reportorial. The differences between the Gospels are more than the discrepancies of confused witnesses. They are the differences between parable-makers working overlapping raw material into variant stories for different audiences with distinctive theological purposes. The genre this series introduced in Part Two, the Greco-Roman bios which organized its subject’s life by theme and significance rather than by strict chronology, is the literary vehicle the evangelists adopted for their parabolic project. The bios gave them a recognized form. The parabolic impulse gave them its function: theo-political proclamation rather than modern biography.
The man who taught in parables was thus remembered in parables, and “remembered” must be understood precisely. They didn’t simply invent Jesus. The Gospels preserve genuine historical memory: a Galilean ministry, a baptism, a crucifixion under Pilate, a reputation for healing and teaching. But the memory is instrumental. In the final product it serves the parable, not the other way around. The evangelists used it the way a parable-maker uses the familiar world of the audience – as raw material shaped, selected, rearranged, and sometimes invented to serve a revelatory purpose that is not accountable to the memory itself. This is parabolic history: real memory, selectively and creatively composed into narratives whose organizing purpose is theological disclosure. The tradition’s failure to recognize this outright, and its insistence on reading as documentary history what was composed as revelatory narrative, is what produces the interpretive errors that the later tradition would inherit.
Recommended Reading
Dewi Rees. "The Hallucinations of Widowhood" (1971). British Medical Journal.
Harvey Whitehouse. Modes of Religiosity (2004). AltaMira Press.
Pascal Boyer. Religion Explained (2001). Basic Books.
Bart Ehrman. How Jesus Became God (2014). HarperOne.
Rudolf Bultmann. The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921). Blackwell.
E.P. Sanders. The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993). Penguin Press.
N.T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003). Fortress Press.
Dale C. Allison Jr.. Resurrecting Jesus (2005). T&T Clark.
Dale C. Allison Jr.. Constructing Jesus (2010). Baker Academic.
David Brondos. Paul on the Cross: Reconstructing the Apostle's Story of Redemption (2006). Fortress Press.
Simon Gathercole. Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul (2015). Baker Academic.
Gustaf Aulén. Christus Victor (1931). SPCK.
Bart D. Ehrman. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005). HarperSanFrancisco.
Bart D. Ehrman. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993). Oxford University Press.
John Dominic Crossan. The Power of Parable (2012). HarperOne.
Nathan C. Johnson. “Survival of Popular Movements in Antiquity and the Historical Jesus.” In The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, edited by James Crossley and Chris Keith. Eerdmans, 2024. pp. 541–556.
This is Part Five of a seven-part series. Part Four — Christ Crucified: Jesus Politics and Rome’s Response — examined the political execution and the tradition's essential subversive politics. Part Six will take up what happened next: the extraordinary diversity of early Jesus movements beyond the canonical tradition, the dynamics of prophetic disappointment, and how an apocalyptic proclamation of imminent transformation became the institutional religion of the Roman Empire.
