Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [282]
Last and most importantly, the voice commands the listeners to obey Jesus, just as the voice of God commands the Hebrews not to foresake the angel of the Lord in Exodus 23:21-22. This suggests strongly that Jesus is now being further announced not just as Son and Messiah but also as the angelomorphic messenger, the man-shaped divine creature enthroned in God’s presence who can be identified with the angel who carries and, in some way, respresents the name of God, as in Exodus 23. The proper name for this figure in Jewish life contemporary with Jesus is the Kavod, the “Glory,” who is pictured as a large and shining human figure (see Ezek 1:26). This is the capital announcement of early high Christology, especially in Mark where it functions as the only appearance of Jesus’ resurrected body. Jesus is being acknowledged as human transformed into divinity-i.e., the principal angel of God, who partakes in God’s name as Exodus 23 predicts.
To what does this correspond in the experience of the Early Church? One distinct possibility for interpretation, among the many that have been tried, has not been much discussed by scholars: The transfiguration is not only a misplaced resurrection appearance but also a narrative of the ecstatic, spiritual life of Christians in the Early Church period.18 The transfiguration reflects visionary experience, not unlike Paul’s; but it has been concretized by the Gospel tradition. Jesus continued to be experienced personally within the church after his death and resurrection, primarily within the ecstatic (RASC) experience of the Early Church. This transfiguration story may tell us something of the way in which he appeared to the early Christians, the form that Jesus’ appearance took in the Early Church. It is certainly not very different from the kinds of visions of the Christ that Paul represents to us. It should be added to the other descriptions of ecstatic experiences, like speaking in tongues, in the Early Church.
Who is to say that Paul’s experience was not in some ways typical of the early Christians? He was more articulate and more privileged in receiving spiritual gifts. But perhaps his experience was more typical than he admits. What makes Paul’s experience so anomalous is that the Gospels, as opposed to Paul, assert the physicality of Jesus’ resurrection-his resurrection in bodily form. But Paul’s insistence on Christ’s spiritual body becoming more and more manifest should be equally important to church tradition.
Nor is the resurrection tradition in Christianity ever very far from the issue of martyrdom, which is where it began in the books of Daniel and 2 Maccabees. Like Paul, who identified with Christ and who saw that identification with Christ to take place in suffering as well as in baptism, the Gospel tradition seeks to glorify the persecution that some of the faithful are undergoing. The obvious example is the stoning of Stephen, which is narrated in Acts 7. Most of the chapter is given over to a speech that appears to be a missionary speech against the Jews. After the trial, the transformative aspects of martyrdom are narrated in Stephen’s execution scene:
Now when they heard these things they were enraged, and they ground their teeth against him. But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the Glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the “son of man” standing at the right hand of God.