From Chapter 6 – The Resurrection. © 2020 by Emory Lynn.
It’s about time to pull everything together and draw a conclusion [about the resurrection]. However, there is one more very important topic that needs to be addressed. Anyone who studies the various portrayals of Jesus in the New Testament will probably be struck by the marked differences. In many cases the differences just reflect the different aspects the writers chose to emphasize. For example, unlike the other Gospels, Matthew stresses Jesus’ Jewishness and includes many parallels with Moses. Matthew’s Jesus teaches the strict observance of the Jewish law as handed down by God. A difference in emphasis such as this doesn’t necessarily constitute an inconsistency or discrepancy in comparison to the other Gospels. However, there are several differences in the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels that are inconsistent and reveal an evolving theology.
We’ve already seen how the apocalyptic message of Jesus changes in the Gospels. The expectation of an apocalyptic change in the world order was prevalent in Judaism, and was emphasized in the epistles of Paul in the mid-first century. When we get to the first Gospels to be written, Mark and Matthew, Jesus preaches of this imminent apocalyptic change that will usher in God’s kingdom on Earth. Jesus is quoted as saying it would happen during the lifetime of his disciples (Mark 9:1, Matthew 16:28). As the disciples and other apostles were dying off, Luke revised the message somewhat. The apocalypse was still expected, but it wasn’t imminent, and it might be a different kind of change to the world order. In Acts (written after the Synoptic Gospels) we also see a shift in the apocalyptic expectation: God was delaying the apocalypse until enough Gentiles had heard the good news of Jesus’ sacrifice and had the opportunity to be saved, just like the Jews. The Gospel of John represents a cessation in the press coverage of apocalyptic expectations. Now the disciples and apostles are probably all dead,16 so John doesn’t have Jesus even talk about an apocalypse. Why such a shift in the message from Jesus? It’s rather obvious; the early-Christian writers were weaving the evolving expectations of the early-Christian church into the message they had Jesus preaching.
Another example of theological evolution in the Gospels is seen in the way Jesus portrays himself. In the Synoptics, especially in Mark, Jesus tries to keep it a secret that he is the Messiah (or the Christ or the Son of God). Scholars have labeled this the Messianic Secret (discussed in the Who Was the Son of Man? box in the last chapter). Jesus cautions people he has healed, demons he has exorcised, and his disciples to tell no one who he is. Some scholars regard the Messianic Secret as a literary device employed by the author of Mark to help his audience understand why there was no oral tradition of Jesus being the Messiah during his lifetime.
The Messianic Secret is completely absent in John. In fact, the way Jesus portrays himself in John is the exact opposite. Here Jesus preaches about his divinity, his mission from God, and how he does many things in accordance with the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus even declares that he is God: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). The Jesus of John heals people and performs other miracles as a sign of his divinity. Before healing a father’s son who was at the point of death, Jesus said, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe” (John 4:48). These starkly different Gospel portrayals of how Jesus presents himself to the world cannot be rationally harmonized. At least one portrayal is fictitious.
In a similar vein, the way Jesus expresses his connection to God also evolves through the Gospels.17 Jesus increasingly refers to God as “my Father,” suggestive of a singular relationship with God. Mark’s Jesus does not refer to God as his Father. Jesus uses the expression twice in the next Gospel, Matthew. The Jesus of Luke refers to God as his Father 15 times. The Jesus of John does so 32 times. In the words of New Testament scholar Robert Price, “I think it is pretty obvious what is going on here.”
The Gospels differ dramatically on when Jesus became divine. In Mark the culmination of Jesus’ divinity occurs during his baptism by John the Baptist, just prior to the beginning of his ministry. At his baptism the heavens open and the “Spirit” descends upon him. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus becomes divine at his incarnation, when he is miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. In the last gospel, John, Jesus has been the Son of God from eternity past. In the Gospels the onset of Jesus’ divinity gets pushed further and further into the past until there was never a time when he was not the Son of God. The culmination of the evolution of Jesus’ divinity, emphasized in the Gospel of John, which is accepted now as Christian orthodoxy, cannot be found in Mark, Matthew or Luke.
What is found in the Synoptics is called low Christology—an emphasis on the humanity of Jesus. What is found in John is called high Christology—an emphasis on Jesus having always been the Son of God. It is misleading to say that low and high Christology are just different aspects of Jesus’ life that the different Gospel authors chose to emphasize. It seems to be an indication of when the Gospel writers thought Jesus became divine. Mark had no problem with Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist for the same reason as everyone else—the repentance of sin. After all, Jesus hadn’t yet received the Spirit of God. Strangely Luke had no problem with the baptism either, in spite of Jesus having been born divine in this gospel. Matthew, however, recognized that baptism for the repentance of sin was inappropriate for a divinely born Jesus. In Matthew’s gospel John the Baptist objects to baptizing Jesus, but Jesus says it’s OK, it’s really for the fulfillment of righteousness. The Gospel of John, with Jesus always having been the Son of God, gets around the baptism conundrum by simply omitting it altogether. John also tellingly omits the virgin birth, which is hardly suitable for someone who is already the Son of God. What appears to be happening is theological evolution with no evidence of divinely inspired writing.
Another portrayal of Jesus that evolves through the Gospels is the way he reacts during his passion. The Jesus of Mark is distressed and fears God has forsaken him. He faces his crucifixion with trepidation. His dying words on the cross are “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, which was lifted from Psalms 22:1: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”). Matthew also portrays Jesus’ with trepidation and repeats his dying words about God having forsaken him (Matthew 27:46). Luke seems to think that trepidation is unbecoming of the Messiah. The Jesus of Luke knows full well what is in store for him and that it’s all God’s will. He displays confidence and control. His dying words on the cross are “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46, which comes from a different Old Testament verse, Psalms 31:5: “Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O LORD God of truth.”). The Gospel of John likewise portrays Jesus as confident during his passion. He clearly understands who he is and the sacrifice he must make and why. His last words are a pithy “It is finished” (John 19:30). Jesus’s dying words in the different Gospels are far too different to be harmonized, just as the very different portrayals of Jesus can’t legitimately be harmonized.
The writings of Jesus’ resurrection likewise evolve through the years of early Christianity. The first known writings about Jesus are quite different from the writings that would come later. In the mid-first century the community that produced the Q source (the hypothesized source of the scriptures common to Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark) did not see Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah. The Q source says nothing about Jesus’ death or his resurrection, accounts that would come later and become the focus of Christianity. The people of the Q community, if it existed, did not recognize Jesus as the resurrected Christ who provided salvation for believers. They were interested in what Jesus had to say about living in the there and then, because that’s what helped them get through life that was very difficult at the time. Some scholars think the Christian church was founded on Jesus’ teachings and not on his sacrifice for the salvation of the world.
Paul’s epistles, all written in the mid-first century, mention the resurrection but provide no details regarding where, when or how it happened. Paul only mentions the end result, which to him was a transformation from a bodily existence to a resurrected spiritual existence. None of the New Testament epistles corroborate the bodily-resurrected Jesus of the Gospels. This suggests an absence of an oral tradition for a bodily-resurrected Jesus prior to the second Gospel, Matthew. There also is no mention of the empty tomb in any of the epistles. In the Gospels the empty tomb is important to understanding what happened to Jesus’ body.
The original text of Mark, written at least 35 to 40 years after Jesus’ death, ends with no witnesses to the risen Jesus. A half-century or more after Jesus’ death, Matthew writes that 13 people (two women and the 11 disciples) had encounters with the risen Jesus, with all occurring in Galilee on the day of the resurrection or immediately afterward. It should be clearly understood that Matthew, by being placed ahead of Mark in the Bible, even though it was written later, gives the erroneous impression that there were many witnesses to the resurrected Jesus in the gospel record from the beginning.
Luke was written not long after Matthew and now the number of witnesses has grown to 17 (four women, Cleopas and his companion, and the 11 disciples). Luke agrees with Matthew that every encounter with the resurrected Jesus was on the day of resurrection or immediately afterward, yet the two gospels disagree on where they all happened; Luke says Jerusalem; Matthew says Galilee, which would have been several days journey from Jerusalem. Luke provides the first account of Jesus’ burial clothes being left in the empty tomb (with no mention of the Shroud-of-Turin image, by the way), the first account of anyone seeing the risen Jesus more than once, and the first account of Jesus’ ascension. Luke focuses the narrative on physical interaction, with Jesus telling the disciples to behold his hands and feet, and demonstrating his bodily resurrection by eating with the disciples.
The Gospel of John was written about 60 to 65 years after the crucifixion and reports on additional physical interactions with Jesus, which culminates with the doubting Thomas examining Jesus’ wounds. In John the encounters with the resurrected Jesus are over an eight-day period, rather than just on the day of resurrection or immediately afterward, as presented in the Synoptics.
Acts leaves the Gospels in the dust when it comes to reporting on the resurrected Jesus. Recall that Luke and Acts were written by the same author. Yet, in the latter-written Acts, Jesus meets many times with his disciples over a 40-day period. The disciples are all present to see Jesus ascend to heaven.
What we have in the New Testament is a distinct paper trail of legend building. As the decades pass after Jesus’ crucifixion the Gospel evangelists provide a steadily growing amount of information about Jesus’ activities following his resurrection. However, with the single exception of Paul’s narrative of his so-called “vision” of Jesus, that has the hallmark of a hallucination, there are no first-person accounts in the entire New Testament of interactions with Jesus. The events are very inconsistent in many places in the New Testament, and there is no corroboration of any of it in non-Christian literature. The forgeries that scholars have identified in the New Testament (discussed earlier in this chapter) unmask a dissatisfaction by a few early-Christian apologists of the actual evidence for the resurrection and their attempts to overcome the problem.
All of this should be understood in context. Christianity was being spread by word-of-mouth through different cultures, countries and languages. Christians were seeking converts from groups that were skeptical of the resurrection—Jews and pagan Gentiles. Such skepticism naturally encourages countermeasures of exaggeration and fabrication. This is also a fertile context that spawns parallels with other religions. The only parallels I’ve discussed so far are the virgin birth and the birthday of the Roman sun god Sol Invictus (December 25) that was also claimed by Christians to give Jesus a birthday to commemorate. Space limitations have prevented discussing the numerous other characteristics that Jesus shared with various godmen and pagan gods, many of which existed long before the first century. I’ll let Robert Price provide a brief description of that important state of affairs:
Such elements [that glorify, even deify, someone after death, particularly after martyrdom] are common to the Mythic Hero Archetype and are embodied in tales all over the world and throughout history. One may discover them, along with other noteworthy data paralleling the career of Jesus in the Gospels, in the legends of Oedipus, Apollonius of Tyana, Asclepius, Hercules, Romulus, Empedocles, and others. Specifically, the notion of a death and resurrection that accompanies, celebrates, facilitates, or coincides with the change of seasons and renewal of nature is so common in the very neighborhood of the Gospels, attested as far back as the Baal religion of the Old Testament. What we read of Jesus, we have already read concerning Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris, Attis, and others. There is nothing unique here (though of course each particular version has accumulated specific points of distinctiveness, as we would expect). Apologists have for a generation or two succeeded in distracting attention from the force, even the existence, of these parallels by a series of specious, special-pleading arguments that can no longer be taken seriously (never could, really) by serious students of comparative religion and myth.18
Notes:
16. There are unverified reports that John lived to about 100 CE.
17. Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?, (Prometheus Books, 2003), p 286.
18. Robert M. Price, The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave, edited by Robert M. Price and Jeffrey J. Lowder, (Prometheus Books, 2005), Kindle eBook pp 14-15.
