Resurrection is the Faith

We’re in the Easter season so it is time for podcasters who are critical of Christianity to tell us why the resurrection isn’t what we think it is. Who am I to judge since I am also frequently critical about many parts of what we assume to be the faith? Christians do a lot of bizarre things that deserve to be called out. Many Christians have some unique ideas about the resurrection, too, so we’re all entitled to share our opinions. But lately my social algorithms are pushing a particular idea about the resurrection my way, namely that the belief in the resurrection really wasn’t the prominent driver for early Christian faith. According to these thinkers, Paul invented it.

I know every Chrisitan walks a different path, but personally I cannot make sense of faith in Jesus without the resurrection. The main reason to be a Christian is that you think Christ is the ultimate revelation of God and humanity. But without the resurrection, why would we think that Jesus is anything more than a wise teacher? Why should we put our faith in a wandering healer and mystic who was executed as a political threat? There are a ton of martyrs in modern life who are worth emulating for various reasons, but we don’t build our entire religious life around them. Alex Pretti by all accounts lived a genuine and loving life and died protesting empire while trying to protect another person’s life and dignity. He was executed by the state. He was way more Jesus-y than I can claim to be. Yet no one is compelled to say we should follow him as a revelation of God. No one is worshipping Martin Luther King, Jr. or Dietrich Bonhoffer.

Whatever you think about the plausibility of a resurrection, most historians think that something happened. That something could be just as our creeds attest, that Jesus was raised on Easter. Or maybe it’s something closer to the rainbow body. Marcus Borg famously argued for more of a spiritual event than a physical resurrection. Certainly, many of us today believe we continue to know and experience Christ, so the disciples had a similar experience. It could be physical, literal, psychological, mass hallucination, spiritual, but I don’t think it can be a slowly developing legend. In other words, what they believed in might not be true, but they believed it or else I think the Jesus movement dies out. Whatever it was, historians generally find evidence of belief in the resurrection in Paul, in the New Testament writings and in early patristic writings and sermons. There are even non-Christian sources who point to belief in the resurrection amongst early followers.

Here are some important points to make about these:

• Paul gives some very early (50s CE) testimonies in his letters including what looks like an early creed that lists some post-resurrection Jesus sightings. He doesn’t claim to have invented this, but to have received this information from others. Maybe Paul is being cute to sell the idea, but I think the easier explanation is that people believed in the resurrection immediately and passed it along as the main reason they should take Jesus seriously.
• The Gospels talk about empty tombs and appearances, and while not as early as Paul’s letters, they’re still first century documents that I believe were written to preserve oral traditions in the very early church.
• Acts describes the apostles preaching that Jesus was raised as do parts of 1 Peter and Hebrews.
• Early patristic authors interpret scripture considering the resurrection.
• It all seems like a lot of people trying to make sense of the resurrection, not invent one. If you thought that Jesus had a great school of thought to improve Israel’s relationship with God, you would just say that and argue that we need to carry on the work. Insisting that one executed criminal was the first fruit of the resurrection is a weird way to go about things.

I can understand why some scholars emphasize Paul the most. His letters are the earliest and arguably most influential. The Gospels conflict in areas that represent theological differences among different writers and communities, so it seems fair to treat them as later theological reflections than Paul’s writings. But that is far from saying that there is no evidence outside Paul that early Christians believed in the resurrection. The earliness of Paul makes his writing uniquely valuable, but even Paul seems to be quoting a creedal formula about the resurrection. He writes clearly that other people told him about the resurrection.

1 Corinthians 15: 3-8

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

One particularly interesting case among my Easter season algorithms is Professor Markus Vinzent. I saw him on a couple YouTube podcasts saying that he thought that resurrection belief wasn’t universal amongst the early Christians. Again, it’s hard for me to imagine a faith taking off much wider than Jesus’ closest followers after Jesus died unless people believed in the resurrection. That’s not to say the resurrection happened (though I personally think it did). Just that people believed it happened. Why else follow a crucified teacher?

But Vinzent asserts that the resurrection was a Pauline invention that eventually spread through the early church and eventually morphed into the faith we have today. He claimed that certain early writing like the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas do not mention the resurrection. Fine, but that’s not the point of those writings. It’s a simple logical error to say that the absence of a particular doctrine in a writing can be equated to lack of belief. Both texts reflect some catechetical and ethical purposes that are based on central faith claims but don’t feel the need to repeat them.

He then went on to say that after Paul invented the resurrection story, Marcion was the one who really spread it around. Given that Marcion’s writings are dated from late first to early second centuries, this would indicate a late development. Once again, why are people following a dead Rabbi as the Christ without the resurrection? You might admire a dead guy, but you don’t think he’s the Messiah. Besides, early church writers cite Paul well before Marcion, and the New Testament and Acts predate Marcion as well.

Vinzent seems to think since Paul came first, the Gospels second, then early church fathers later, that the belief in the resurrection developed over time and wasn’t a part of the earliest faith before Paul. Yet, mainstream scholarship puts the authorship of Mark in the early part of the 70s CE (and I’ve become willing to accept an earlier date than that). Matthew and Luke borrow many ideas from Mark. Vinzent also seems to think that the Gospels were written even later and while I’m open to them being edited over time and including some layers of tradition, you still cannot overcome multiple attestations of resurrection belief.

It is a key part of my understanding of my own faith that the resurrection shaped the development of theology, but Vinzent believes it’s the other way around. I have a hard time reading the New Testament and trying to make sense of the theological claims unless they believed in a resurrection. You can and should argue that Paul’s theological musings about the resurrection influenced later thinking about the resurrection. But why is he musing so deeply about it in the first place? Paul argued for a lot of things that other apostles disagreed with, those arguments are recorded, but they didn’t argue about the resurrection. If anything, Paul including that he received creedal information about the resurrection from others indicates that he was trying to use common belief in the resurrection to support his theology, not the other way around. The appearances were already a primary part of the tradition and that’s what allows Paul to use knowledge of the resurrection rhetorically. Now obviously, the Gospels are all uniquely shaped by differing theological traditions. But those traditions don’t even take shape without the resurrection. The stories are different, but they come from the same basic raw materials. And once again, just to sound like a broken record, what theology would even come from an executed leader? Who would follow that? I would agree that Dietrich Bonhoffer made many great points, but I’m not giving up my citizenship and very life to insist Bonhoffer is The Way.

Clearly some of the evidence we take for granted today points to a rapidly developing post-resurrection theology. We don’t have any eyewitness accounts because the New Testament is written well after the fact. Sure, tradition states that these histories came from Jesus’ followers themselves, but you don’t have to insist on eyewitness traditions to understand that the resurrection was the whole enchilada of belief. The Gospels deliberately develop new theological angles. I have no idea what the post-resurrection appearances were like, and which were literal and which were imagined theologically in later decades. Were they physical interactions? Were they visionary or internal in nature? What is memory, or flawed memory or literary device? I’m simply arguing that there was some real and shared experience that changed the course of history, it wasn’t tacked on later.

Early devotional practices and creeds like the passage from 1 Corinthians above and the rapid development of theology is not a bug, it’s a feature. I think the best explanation for devotion of Christ is an experience of Christ.