From Death to Resurrection: The Case of Jesus

One of the few things that New Testament scholars seem able to agree on is that a certain Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in the year 30 CE. Never mind what the man may or may not have taught. He died on a cross, and his death is arguably the most important death in the history of Western Civilization. Here I will examine what is alleged by New Testament authors and by selected modern theologians to have happened shortly after the death of Jesus.

In the epistles of Saint Paul – which is to say, starting from as early as twenty years after the death of Jesus, and well before the gospels as we know them were composed—we find the assertion that Jesus is not dead after all. Or rather, he died, but then he also rose from the dead. Psychoanalytically speaking, there is a denial of death following closely on the tail of an affirmation of redemptive death:

“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 [Peter], then to the twelve.” Paul goes on to declare, “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 “(1 Corinthians 15:3-8; all translations of the Greek original are from the New Revised Standard Version).

The last phrase in this quotation probably refers to the famous experience Paul had in the vicinity of Damascus, and which ultimately transformed him from a persecutor of Christians into a witness of the resurrected Jesus, just as the apostles were witnesses. Paul believed that he encountered a resurrected Jesus, and was able somehow to recognize him as such, even though he had not been personally acquainted with him. He may also have been trying to gain some compensatory political authority in relation to those who had known Jesus or who were apostles. In any case, Paul does assert that Jesus was actually seen (ōphthē) by him, and probably more than once.

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One way to interpret Paul—and the later gospel writers—is to view the resurrection of Jesus in non-literal terms. This had been done already by the early Gnostic and Docetic Christians, and is being done right down to the present day. Thus Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan read biblical stories of the resurrection of Jesus as “parabolic narratives” (The Last Week, 2006). To worry about whether Jesus really came back to life after he died is to miss the point according to these two eminent Bible scholars, for the point is that Jesus lives:

“He continues to be experienced after his death, though in a radically new way. He is no longer a figure of flesh and blood, confined to time and space, but a reality who can enter locked rooms [John 20:19, 26], journey with followers without being recognized [Luke 24:13-35], be experienced in both Galilee and Jerusalem [Mark and Matthew vs. Luke], vanish in the moment of recognition [Luke 24:31], and abide with his followers always, ‘to the end of the age’” [Matthew 28:20] (p. 204).

It would seem, then, that the resurrection of Jesus was not grounded in “factuality.” Borg and Crossan speak of “visions” which, they insist, are not necessarily the same thing as “hallucinations” or “mental disturbances” (p. 207). As for Paul, Crossan asserts: “Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus certainly occurred in a trance” (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 168). No reference is made to the psychological literature on these phenomena.

All of this constitutes a very interesting concession to psychological reality, and indicates that the denial has not fully come into play: the death of Jesus has not been transformed into its literal opposite, but only its metaphorical opposite. But those who take their Bible literally will hardly be convinced that Paul had “parabolic narratives” or “visions” or “trance” in mind when he wrote:

“Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection from the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” Furthermore, “we are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ – whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised.” (1 Corinthians 15:12-16).

The literalists understand Paul to mean exactly what he appears to be saying in these famous words. For them and for Paul a defensive denial of the fact of bodily death is here fully deployed. Various creeds of the early Church also asserted that Jesus rose from the dead. This denial continues to be deployed, sometimes in highly elaborate fashion, right down to the present day. Otherwise we would not still be seeing the publication of serious theological treatises on this topic, such as N. T. Wright’s 800-plus-page tome The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) or Richard Swinburne’s The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003). Wright comes to the “secure historical conclusion” that the tomb of Jesus was in fact empty and that various people literally met with Jesus after he died (p. 710). Taking a very different tack, Swinburne utilizes mathematical probability theory to demonstrate that, given the existence of God, “. . . the total evidence makes it very probable that Jesus was God Incarnate who rose from the dead” (p. 203). The appearances Jesus made after his crucifixion were most likely “historical” (Wright) or “veridical” (Swinburne), not merely “parabolic”

(Borg and Crossan).

Unlike most theologians, maverick Gerd Lüdemann does not refrain from consulting and applying the relevant psychological literature in order to interpret the supposed resurrection of Jesus. For example, Lüdemann has taken the trouble to acquaint himself with some of the research on bereavement, and he interprets the post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus to Peter and to others who were personally attached to Jesus as manifestations of at least the initial stage of the mourning process: “. . . normal reality controls can break down when the unconscious is unable to bear the loss of a beloved person and creates artificial fulfillments for itself” (The Resurrection of Christ, 2004, p. 165). However, Lüdemann rightly regards the reaction of Peter (and, implicitly, of the others who had been attached to Jesus) as “an example of unsuccessful mourning.” That is because the idea of the resurrection of Jesus became established and persisted in the minds of believers, and in addition a new

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religious community was founded upon the delusional belief that Jesus remained alive and would continue to live forever. By contrast, in successful mourning, visions or hallucinations are temporary, and the death of the beloved is eventually accepted as final and permanent.

Support for such a view is offered by Paul himself, who affirms that there is no need to mourn: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died” (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14). Mourning is also irrelevant to the appearance of a resurrected Jesus to Paul’s “more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time,” for it is highly unlikely that so many people could each have been personally attached to Jesus before he died. Here atheist Lüdemann moves beyond the notions of “vision” and “trance” which even theist Crossan is willing to entertain, and, quoting Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 classic La psychologie des foules, he states that “the mechanism of the collective hallucination” was at work. In an excited crowd, Lüdemann says, “the members . . . are often subject to contagious suggestion” (p. 80). All it takes is one individual to start the chain reaction, and the result is a group delusion.

The death of Jesus, then, was denied. The denial initially took the form of apparitions of a risen Jesus. But the apparitions following the bereavement of Jesus’ immediate followers constituted only the leading edge of a massive denial of the permanence of death which developed among early Christians. The “Easter faith” was the one which persisted and became the “orthodox” faith. According to this faith, the crucifixion was a “redeeming” event, not a gratuitously painful and shameful death. With time, moreover, the shame of crucifixion was transformed into victory by the process of reaction formation. Indeed, the sign of the cross came to signify victory generally, not only victory over death. In the political-military arena the cross was now capable of signifying victory over every conceivable enemy—from Muslims, heretics, and pagans attacked by cross bearing crusaders (crucesignati) in medieval times to Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others massacred under the sign of the hooked cross (Hakendreuz) of Roman Catholic dictator Adolf Hitler in the twentieth century.

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