Historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus
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|Death and Resurrection of Jesus|
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The historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus has been the subject of historical research
Historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus
|Part of a series on|
|Death and Resurrection of Jesus|
|Portals: Christianity Bible|
The historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus has been the subject of historical research and debate, as well as a topic of discussion among theologians. The accounts of the Gospels, including the empty tomb and the appearances of the risen Jesus to his followers, have been interpreted and analyzed in diverse ways, and have been seen variously as historical accounts of a literal event, as accurate accounts of visionary experiences, as non-literal eschatological parables, and as fabrications of early Christian writers, among various other interpretations. It has been suggested, for example, that Jesus did not die on the cross, that the empty tomb was the result of Jesus' body having been stolen, or, as was common with Roman crucifixions, that Jesus was never entombed.
Origin: Cultural and theological background
|Events in the|
|Life of Jesus|
according to the canonical gospels
|Book:Life of Jesus|
Resurrection and the afterlife of the soul
Of the three main Jewish sects of the 1st century AD, the Sadducees held that both soul and body perished at death, the Essenes that the soul was immortal but the flesh was not, and the Pharisees that the soul was immortal and that the body would be resurrected to house it. Of these three positions, Jesus and the early Christians appear to have been closest to that of the Pharisees. Resurrection was available to the righteous alone, and would make them equal to God and the angels, as the Gospels have Jesus tell: "Those who are accounted worthy... to the resurrection from the dead... are equal to the angels and are children of God..." (Mark 12:24-25, Luke 20:34-36). Nor would the resurrected body be one of flesh and blood, but an immortal fleshless body of the same celestial nature as the sun, moon and stars.
Jews did not believe that the dead could enter Heaven – mankind's place was the earth, and heaven was for God and the heavenly beings. The Greeks held a similar view, but they also held that a man of exceptional merit could be exalted as a god after his death. The successors of Alexander the Great made this idea very well known throughout the Middle East, in particular through coins bearing his image – a privilege previously reserved for gods – and although originally foreign to the Romans, the doctrine was soon borrowed by the emperors for purposes of political propaganda. According to the theology of Imperial Roman apotheosis, the earthly body of the recently deceased emperor vanished, he received a new and divine one in its place, and was then seen by credible witnesses. Thus, in a story similar to the Gospel appearances of the resurrected Jesus and the commissioning of the disciples, Romulus, the founder of Rome, descended from the sky to command a witness to bear a message to the Romans regarding the city's greatness ("Declare to the Romans the will of Heaven that my Rome shall be the capital of the world...") before being taken up on a cloud.
The experiences of the risen Christ attested by the earliest written sources – the "primitive Church" creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, in 1 Corinthians 15:8 and Galatians 1:16 – are ecstatic rapture events and "invasions of heaven". A physical resurrection was unnecessary for this visionary mode of seeing the risen Christ, but the general movement of subsequent New Testament literature is towards the physical nature of the resurrection. This development is linked to the changing make-up of the Christian community: Paul the Apostle and the earliest Christ followers were Jewish, and Second Temple Judaism emphasised the life of the soul; the gospel writers, in an overwhelmingly Greco-Roman church, stressed instead the pagan belief in the hero who is immortalised and deified in his physical body. In this Hellenistic resurrection paradigm Jesus dies, is buried, and his body disappears (with witnesses to the empty tomb); he then returns in an immortalised physical body, able to appear and disappear at will like a god, and returns to the heavens which are now his proper home.
The earliest Jewish followers of Jesus (the Jewish Christians) understood him as the son of man in the Jewish sense, a human who, through his perfect obedience to God's will, was resurrected and exalted to heaven in readiness to return as the son of man (the figure from Daniel 7 13-14), ushering in and ruling over the Kingdom of God.[need quotation to verify] Paul has already moved away from this apocalyptic tradition towards a position where Christology and soteriology take precedence: Jesus is no longer the one who proclaims the message of the imminently coming Kingdom, he actually is the kingdom, the one in whom the kingdom of God is already present. This is also the message of Mark, a gentile writing for a church of gentile Christians, for whom Jesus as "Son of God" has become a divine being whose suffering, death and resurrection are essential to God's plan for redemption.
Matthew presents Jesus' appearance in Galilee (Matthew 28:19-20) as a Greco-Roman apotheosis, the human body transformed to make it fitting for paradise. He goes beyond the ordinary Greco-Roman forms, however, by having Jesus claim "all authority... in heaven and on earth" (28:18) – a claim no Roman hero woul