Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [271]
THE SCANDAL OF THE RESURRECTION
Crossan is certainly right that lack of burial would have been a scandal in the ancient world and that burial itself was somewhat unlikely for a political execution. But Christianity could have accommodated to that scandal if Jesus’ body actually remained unburied. That does not end the issue of scandal in the resurrection narrative. Few commentators actually describe what seems to me to be the obvious scandal that the tradition of the empty tomb seeks to ameliorate. The fact is: No one actually saw Jesus arise.8 This is a critical difficulty for the early mission of the church. The empty tomb tradition does face and then finesse the issue that no one saw Jesus rise. That does not firmly argue against its historicity but it tends to make a historian suspicious.
What can be demonstrated historically only is that no one actually saw Jesus’s resurrection. Had there been witnesses they would not have been left out. I agree with Lüdemann that the original experience of the risen Christ must have been visionary appearances after death and that they must have started, as tradition has it, on the first day after the Sabbath, Easter Sunday. Paul gives us a good example of the intensity and purity and piety of those visions. If Paul is an example, believers would certainly have viewed visions as the actual presence of Christ and anticipatory of the end-times, which had already started and would soon be fully actualized. I suspect the visions of Peter and even James and the others were similar: They convinced Jesus’ followers that he not only survived in a new spiritual state but that that state was as the manlike figure in heaven, “the Son of Man,” whose reign inaugurated the millennium. Missionary work, however, demanded even more obvious proof. It demanded that Jesus himself, in the same body, walked among them.
This could hardly have been an issue for Paul, who had seen the risen Christ and was sure of Christ’s presence in his life. For Paul the scandal of the new faith was the scandal of the cross, not the scandal of the resurrection. It was that: “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). The notion of a crucified Messiah was an oxymoron, a contradiction-in-terms to Jews, who thought that the Messiah should be victorious, just as surely as it was folly to the gentiles, who thought an executed man was unworthy of veneration. Paul gives us the difficulty of the first generation of hearers of the Christian message in naked terms. The Gospels give us the developed missionary strategy for removing these doubts.
The Gospels, which go into the details of Jesus’ life (which Paul never did) and so answer all such questions narratively, also provide cogent, historical answers, a missionary strategy to alleviate the doubts of the hearers to all historical problems, including why no one actually witnessed the resurrection. This raises the historical witness question to a crucial level. The empty tomb itself becomes the vehicle for alleviating that dearth of testimonial evidence for the resurrection, as well as the demonstration that the post-resurrection appearances were not hallucinations.
THE CORE OF THE EMPTY TOMB TRADITION
The core of the empty tomb tradition, at least in Mark, is simply that when some of the women (as we shall see, there is considerable confusion as to who went to the tomb in the various Gospels) came