Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [267]
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The Gospels in Contrast to Paul’s Writings
WE HAVE SEEN that Paul, the earliest Christian writer, based his work on his spiritual visions. The Gospels are later than Paul. They reflect the religious needs of a later generation of Christians. Inherent within them is not just the story of Jesus’s life from several different believers’ points of view but also a further generation’s reflections on the issues of faith, religious authority, and the afterlife. And, more than anything else, the Gospels are devices for the mission of the church, a different and broader mission than envisioned by Paul. Within the Gospels we see not only the synthesis of immortality and resurrection that Paul naturally provided but a battle to keep any extraneous notions of immortality of the soul out of the story of the Christ. It took centuries before Christianity could find an acceptable formula for incorporating it into the story of Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection. Neither body of writing gives us what actually happened. Each shows us a Christ who illustrated a unique and different view of the afterlife.
For Paul, faith meant belief in the validity of Paul’s own personal revelations of the resurrected Christ. Paul’s faith was based upon his own experience, his visionary revelations; so faith, vision, and knowledge were all deeply interwoven for him. His inward life was parallel to and indicative of the redemption of the world. Not so for those who worked within the apostolic tradition into which Paul fought so hard for inclusion. For them, the inward process became secondary and the redemption of the world primary. For them, faith meant belief in those who interpreted the story because they received their knowledge from those original apostles who sat at the feet of Jesus and witnessed the events in his life, death, and resurrection. Faith was trust that the traditions that came through the apostles was the correct teaching. It was a lineage of ministry and education but not visionary knowledge.
The earthly Jesus, conversely, had little to do with Paul’s faith for he never met the man Jesus. Paul became a Christian because of his “vision of the risen Christ.” For him, Jesus’ resurrected body was a spiritual body (soma pneumatikon). But for the evangelists, Jesus’ resurrected body was a literal, physical body revivified. This exactly correlates with the approach of the apostolic succession, which is not based on visions of Christ (although it acknowledges their validity as a conversion experience) so much as on the personal testimony of those most trustworthy men who had witnessed the events of Jesus’ life. There are, in fact, a variety of models for conversion in the Gospels (see e.g., Matt 12:38-42; Mark 1:16-20; 1:40-45; 2:13-17; 8:34-9:1; 19:46-52; Luke 5:1-11; 8:1-3; 13:1-5; 19:1-10). They involved men and some women who changed their lives radically to follow the teachings of Jesus, whose interpreters are the apostles. These stories take up a remarkable amount of space in the relatively compact narration of Jesus’ ministry in Mark, for example. The importance of these stories as new and important models for conversion, as well as Luke’s depiction of the conversion of Paul in Acts, cannot be underestimated.1 The Gospels were edited for use in Christian mission.
The apostolic notion of resurrection is deeply affected by contrasts with Paul. Even the plain description of the events in Jesus’ life came out altered from Paul’s description. What Paul described in visionary terms, the evangelists describe literally. It is as if Paul represents the mystic dimension of Christian experience while the Gospels represent the apocalyptic dimension. In flat contradiction to Paul, the Gospels (when they discuss the process of resurrection at all) strongly assert a physical,