How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee

CHAPTER 5

The Resurrection of Jesus

What We Can Know

I RECEIVE A LOT OF e-mails from people who are concerned that I lost my faith. Many of them tell me that I must never have had a personal relationship with Jesus; obviously my faith was all intellectual and I “reasoned” my way out of it. In their view, if I weren’t a scholar and such an egghead but realized that faith in Jesus is a matter of relating to a person as one’s Lord and Savior, I would still be within the believing community. I’m never quite sure why strangers are so concerned about me. And I wonder if the fact that I left the faith is somehow seen as threatening, at least among people who have a gnawing suspicion, which they never explicitly acknowledge to themselves, that their own faith may need to be reexamined. Whether that’s the case or not, it simply is not true that I never had a personal relationship with Jesus. Quite the contrary: Jesus and I were very close, and for many years. He was my daily companion, comforter, guide, and teacher, as well as my Lord and Savior.

At the same time, it is true that conservative evangelical Christianity—the kind I converted into—is not entirely about a personal relationship with the divine. It has a strong intellectual component as well. This is one of the great ironies of modern religion: more than almost any other religious group on the planet, conservative evangelicals, and most especially fundamentalist Christians, are children of the Enlightenment.

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment arose during an age when reason, not revelation, came to be valued as the ultimate source of true knowledge. The natural sciences were on the rise, technologies were developing, and philosophies of the mind were in vogue. The Enlightenment caused the demise of traditional religion for many educated people and others whose views were shaped by them. Among other things, the Enlightenment encouraged reasoned skepticism of every religious tradition that was based on the miraculous, the supernatural, and revelation. By stressing the power of human thought, the Enlightenment dispelled the myths of the dominant religious traditions. It emphasized the importance of a person seeking objective verification for what he or she thinks and believes.

When I say that conservative evangelical Christians and fundamentalists are children of the Enlightenment, I mean that more than almost anyone else, thinkers among these groups are committed to “objective truth”—which was precisely the commitment that led to the demise of Christianity in the modern world in the first place, especially in Europe. And so this evangelical commitment is ironic. Or maybe it’s a case of trying to fight fire with fire. But the reality is that modern Christian apologists stress the importance of objectivity and champion it more than anyone—much more than most other educated people in our world. University intellectuals almost never speak of “objectivity” any more, unless they happen to live on the margins of intellectual life.

But Christian apologists do, and when I was one of them, I did as well. That is why Christian apologists are so keen to “prove” that the resurrection happened. This is a standard weapon in the apologetic arsenal: you can look at all the evidence for the resurrection, objectively, and conclude, on the basis of overwhelming proof, that God really did raise Jesus from the dead. No other explanation can account for the objectively established historical data—for example, that Jesus’s tomb was empty and that his disciples claimed to see him afterward. And so apologists proceed by taking these two data as “facts” and showing that no other explanation is plausible (that the disciples stole the body, that they went to the wrong tomb, that they were hallucinating, and so on).

If one wants to play the objectivity game (it is a game; there is nothing objectively that makes objectivity objectively true), it is relatively easy to poke holes in this apologetic ploy—a ploy that I myself used for years when I was a Christian trying to convert people to believe in the resurrection. For one thing, as I’ve already argued, there are very serious reasons to doubt that Jesus was buried decently and that his tomb was discovered to be empty. Moreover, as I’ve argued, any other scenario—no matter how unlikely—is more likely than the one in which a great miracle occurred, since the miracle defies all probability (or else we wouldn’t call it a miracle).

But apart from whether it makes sense to wrangle over the “objectively” best explanation for the data, there is the bigger problem—namely, that faith in a miracle is a matter of faith, not of objectively established knowledge. That is why some historians believe that Jesus was raised and other equally good historians do not believe he was. Both sets of historians have the same historical data available to them, but it is not the historical data that make a person a believer. Faith is not historical knowledge, and historical knowledge is not faith.

At the same time, the historian can talk about certain aspects of the resurrection tradition without presupposing either belief or unbelief. This is not a matter of requiring historians to have anti-supernaturalist biases. It is a matter of suspending one’s biases—whether they are supernaturalist or anti-supernaturalist—in order to do what historians do: reconstruct to the best of their ability what probably happened in the past on the basis of the surviving evidence, and admitting that there are lots of things that we not only do not know, but also cannot know, historically.

In the previous chapter I argued that there are some things, given our current evidence, that we cannot know about the resurrection traditions (in addition to the big issue itself—whether God raised Jesus from the dead): we cannot know whether Jesus was given a decent burial, and we cannot know, therefore, whether his tomb was discovered empty. But what can we know? We can know three very important things: (1) some of Jesus’s followers believed that he had been raised from the dead; (2) they believed this because some of them had visions of him after his crucifixion; and (3) this belief led them to reevaluate who Jesus was, so that the Jewish apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee came to be considered, in some sense, God.

The Belief of the Disciples

THERE CAN BE NO doubt, historically, that some of Jesus’s followers came to believe he was raised from the dead—no doubt whatsoever. This is how Christianity started. If no one had thought Jesus had been raised, he would have been lost in the mists of Jewish antiquity and would be known today only as another failed Jewish prophet. But Jesus’s followers—or at least some of them—came to believe that God had done a great miracle and restored Jesus to life. This was not a mere resuscitation, a kind of near-death experience. For Jesus’s disciples, Jesus was raised into an immortal body and exalted to heaven where he currently lives and reigns with God Almighty.

I say “some” of his followers because it is not altogether certain that all of the disciples came to believe this, for reasons I explain below. Our records are simply not good enough to allow us to know exactly which among Jesus’s closest followers came to accept this great miracle. Some obviously did, but our accounts were written many years after the fact, and we hear almost nothing about “the Twelve.”

The other matter of uncertainty is when belief in Jesus’s resurrection and exaltation began. The tradition, of course, states that it began on the third day after he died. But as I argued in the analysis of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, the idea that Jesus rose on the “third day” was originally a theological construct, not a historical piece of information. Moreover, if it is true that the disciples fled from Jerusalem to Galilee when Jesus was arrested, and that it was there that some of them “saw” him, they could not have seen him on the first Sunday morning after his death. If they fled on Friday, they would not have been able to travel on Saturday, the Sabbath; and since it was about 120 miles from Jerusalem to Capernaum, their former home base, it would have taken a week at least for them to get there on foot.¹ Maybe some of them, or one of them, had a vision of Jesus in Galilee soon after he was crucified—possibly that following week? The week after that? The next month? We simply don’t have sources of information that make this kind of judgment possible.²

It is striking, and frequently overlooked by casual observers of the early Christian tradition, that even though it was a universal belief among the first Christians that Jesus had been raised from the dead, there was not a uniformity of belief concerning what, exactly, “raised from the dead” meant. In particular, early Christians had long and heated debates about the nature of the resurrection—specifically, the nature of the resurrected body. Here I explore three options for what that resurrected body of Jesus actually was, as evidenced in writings from the early church.

The Raising of a Spiritual Body

I start with our earliest recorded source, the writings of Paul, and once again with his “resurrection chapter” (1 Cor. 15), so named because it is devoted to the question of Jesus’s resurrection and the future resurrection of believers. Here Paul stresses that Jesus rose from the dead in a spiritual body. Both terms are important for understanding Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus: Jesus was raised in the body; but it was a body that was spiritual.

Many readers of 1 Corinthians undervalue and misinterpret the first point. But Paul is emphatic: Jesus was bodily raised from the dead. Paul states this view vigorously in 1 Corinthians 15, and in some sense the entire chapter is written to make the point—precisely because Paul’s opponents in Corinth had a different view. In their opposing view, Jesus was raised in the spirit, not in the body, such that Christians who enjoy the resurrection with him in their own lives are also spiritually raised—not in their bodies but in their inner beings. These opponents believed that they were already experiencing the full benefits of salvation in the present. Paul mocks this view in his letter by sarcastically reflecting their own views back to them: “Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings!” (1 Cor. 4:8). That he is not stating this as fact, but sarcastically, is clear from the context: in the next breath he tells them that he wishes it were true. But alas, it is not. This current evil age is an age of weakness and powerlessness. It is only in the age to come, when Christ returns from heaven, that his followers will enjoy the full benefits of salvation when they are raised from these poor, lowly, weak, inferior, mortal bodies to be given amazing, spiritual, immortal bodies such as Jesus himself had at his resurrection.

And that is the point of 1 Corinthians 15. The fact—Paul takes it as a fact—that the resurrected bodies of believers will be like the resurrected body of Jesus shows that the resurrection has not yet taken place. It is a bodily (not purely spiritual) event, and since it is a bodily event, it obviously has not happened yet because we are still living in our pathetic mortal bodies.

But the body Jesus had when he was raised was not simply his resuscitated corpse brought back to life. It was an astoundingly immortal body, a “spiritual” body. A body, yes. A material body, yes. A body intimately connected to the body that died and was buried, yes. But a transformed body that could not experience pain, misery, or death.

Paul reports that some of his opponents mock his views that there is to be a future resurrection of bodies: “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’” His reply is forceful: “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Cor. 15:35–36). He goes on to say that it is like a seed. It goes into the ground as a bare seed, but it grows into a live plant. The body is like that. It dies a paltry, bare, dead thing and is raised gloriously. For “there are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another” (15:40). Then he explains that it is this way “with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (15:42–44).

And so the body of the believer that is to be raised is still a body—and it is intimately connected with the present body—but it is a glorious, immortal, spiritual body, the present body transformed. And Paul knows this because that is the kind of body that Jesus had when he himself was raised.

Some modern readers have trouble understanding how there can be such a thing as a “spiritual body” that is still an actual body. The problem is that today we tend to think of “spirit” and “body” as two opposite things, with the spirit being invisible and nonmaterial and the body being visible and material. For us, spirit is intangible and body is made of “stuff.” Most ancient people, however, did not see spirit and body this way, which is why it is possible for Paul to speak of a spiritual body. It was widely believed in antiquity that the spirit we have within us was also made of “stuff.” It was material. But it was very highly refined material that could not be seen with the eyes. (Kind of like what people think when they imagine they’ve seen a “ghost”—there’s something there, made of stuff, since it can be seen, even though it’s pure spirit.)³ When Paul speaks of a spiritual body, then, he means a body not made of this heavy, clunky stuff that now makes up our bodies, but of the highly refined spiritual stuff that is superior in every way and is not subject to mortality. That’s what the future bodies will be like, because that’s what Jesus’s resurrected body was like. His body did indeed come out of the grave. But when it did, it was a transformed body, made of spirit, and raised immortal.

Modern readers are not the only ones who find Paul’s views confusing or who read Paul to mean something that he didn’t say. We know that other Christians stressed either one or the other aspect of his spiritual body to an extreme. Some maintained that Jesus was not raised in the body at all but only in the spirit, and others insisted that his raised body was so closely connected to his corpse that it bore all the marks of its mortality still upon it.

The Raising of the Spirit

Some ancient Christians—taking a line very similar to that found among Paul’s opponents in Corinth—maintained that Jesus was raised in the spirit, not in the body; that his body died and rotted in the grave, as bodies do; but that his spirit lived on and ascended to heaven. This view became prominent among various groups of Gnostic Christians.

There is no need for me to go into a lengthy discussion of early Christian Gnosticism in this context; there are numerous excellent studies.⁴ For my purposes here it is enough to say that a variety of groups after the New Testament period—all of whom claimed, of course, to represent the “original” views of Jesus and his disciples—maintained that the material world we inhabit is a wicked, fallen place and that it stands at odds with the greater, purely spiritual realm to which ultimately we belong. The way to escape our entrapment in this world of matter is to acquire secret “knowledge” (= gnosis) from above of who we really are, how we came to be here, and how we can return to our heavenly, spiritual home. In this view, Jesus is the one who came down from the heavenly realm to provide us with this secret knowledge. These groups are called Gnostic because of their emphasis on gnosis/knowledge.

I will discuss this view of Christ more fully in Chapter 7. At this stage it is enough to stress that for many of these Gnostics, the figure we think of as Jesus Christ was not a single person, but was actually two persons—a divine being from above who had come temporarily to inhabit the material body of the man Jesus. In this view, the material body, belonging to the material world, and to the inferior God who created it, was transcended at Jesus’s death and resurrection, such that the body was killed but the divine spirit, which was distinct from it, was not touched. The divine spirit returned to its heavenly home, while the body was left to corrupt here on earth. In this view, the physical body was not transformed into a spiritual body, as in Paul; it was abandoned to the grave. The spirit lived on past the crucifixion—so much so that it did not actually need to be “raised.” It simply escaped the flesh at the crucifixion.

You can find this view in a book called the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which was discovered along with a cache of other Gnostic writings in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. This text gives a firsthand account of the crucifixion of Jesus as observed by Peter himself. What is striking—and very strange indeed—is that while Peter is actually talking to Jesus, he sees another Jesus being crucified. So there are apparently two Jesuses here, at the same time. And more than that, Peter sees yet a third figure hovering above the cross and laughing. This also is Jesus. In his completely understandable confusion, Peter asks Jesus (the one he is talking with) what it is he is seeing. The Savior tells Peter that they are crucifying not him, but only “his physical part.” It is the laughing Jesus above the cross who is “the living Jesus.” Peter is then told:

He whom they crucified is the firstborn, and the home of demons, and the clay vessel in which they dwell, belonging to Elohim, and belonging to the cross that is under the law. But he who stands near him is the living Savior, the primal part in him whom they seized. And he has been released. He stands joyfully looking at those who persecuted him. . . . Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception. . . . Indeed, therefore, the suffering one must remain, since the body is the substitute. But that which was released was my incorporeal body. (Apoc. Pet. 82)⁵

And so, what is killed is merely the physical shell of Jesus, which belongs to the God of this world (Elohim—the Hebrew term for God in the Old Testament), rather than the true God. The real Jesus is the incorporeal spirit that inhabited that body for a time but then was released. This “living Jesus” is laughing because his enemies think they can kill him, but in fact they can’t touch him. The divine Spirit of Jesus is raised, according to this view, not Jesus’s body.⁶

The Raising of the Mortal Body

We don’t know how early such full-blown Gnostic views came to expression in the Christian movement; they were certainly in place by the middle of the second century, and possibly earlier. But there were tendencies toward such views already in the New Testament period. If my reconstruction of the events in Corinth stated above are correct, then already in the 50s some believers in Jesus would have been open to the view that Jesus’s spirit, not his physical body, was raised from the dead. Further evidence that some Christians held this view can be found in the fact that some of the later Gospel traditions go to some lengths in order to counter it.

In Luke’s Gospel, for example, written possibly around 80–85 CE, when Jesus is raised the disciples have trouble believing that it is really him, in the body—even when they see him. This is explicitly stated in Luke 24:36–37: “While they were saying these things, Jesus himself stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and afraid, and thought that they were seeing a spirit” (sometimes translated “ghost”). Jesus rebukes them and tells them to feel his body so they can see it is real: “Look at my hands and my feet, to see it is I. Handle me and see—for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (24:39). They still have trouble believing it, and so he asks them for something to eat. They give him a piece of broiled fish, and he eats it before their eyes.

The point of this story is that it really is Jesus, the same Jesus who had died, and he still is thoroughly a body, with flesh, bones, mouth, and, presumably, digestive system. Why such an emphasis on the bodily nature of the resurrected Jesus? Almost certainly because other Christians were denying that it was the body that was raised. If there had been a debate between Paul (from 1 Corinthians) and Gnostics (from the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter) about whether Jesus was raised in the body, Luke would land firmly in the Pauline camp.

But with a possible difference. When Paul speaks of Jesus’s spiritual body, he is emphatic in 1 Corinthians that that body is transformed into an immortal being. That, for Paul, is necessary, because the flesh-and-blood body is not of the right “stuff” to enter the kingdom of God. As he states unequivocally in that context: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (1 Cor. 15:50). The mortal, perishable body will be transformed into something else—an immortal, imperishable, spiritual body. Only then will it inherit eternal life. And so that is the kind of body, for Paul, that Jesus also had at his resurrection.

But for Luke it appears that Jesus’s resurrected body was simply his corpse that had been reanimated. It is true that he does not say that the body is still “flesh and blood” (to use Paul’s term for what cannot enter the kingdom). But he explicitly does say it is “flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39). And unlike a spirit, it can eat a meal of broiled fish. It looks as if Luke is emphasizing that Jesus’s resurrection was precisely in the body to counter those who wanted to argue that it was in the spirit. In doing so, he may have altered Paul’s views by emphasizing even more the very real fleshly character of Jesus’s body, not as transformed, but as in pure continuity with the body that died.

Later one finds a similar emphasis in John, in the scene of “doubting Thomas.” According to John 20:24–28, Thomas was not with the other disciples when Jesus first appeared to them. He does not believe that they have seen the risen Lord and tells them, somewhat overemphatically, that he won’t believe it until Jesus appears to him and he can feel the wounds in his hands and side. And sure enough, Jesus shows up and tells Thomas to do just that. Thomas instantly believes.

Here again, Jesus is in the very body that was crucified, wounds and all. Thus, both Luke and John want to emphasize the reality of Jesus’s resurrected body and, correspondingly, its absolute continuity with the crucified body, so that it is not obviously “transformed” into something else, as it was in Paul. One could argue that it is no longer a normal body, because even in these Gospels Jesus seems to be able to show up through locked doors, and so some kind of transformation appears to have occurred. But it needs to be remembered that even during Jesus’s life his body allegedly had superhuman abilities—it was able to walk on water, for example, and to become “transfigured” in the presence of his disciples. And so the stress of Luke and John appears to be that it really was the same body, raised from the dead.

This was the view that ultimately became the dominant one throughout Christianity in later periods, in no small measure because, as we will see in Chapter 8, some Christians denied that Jesus ever had a body at all. A stress on the physicality of Jesus was meant to put any such view to rest. Jesus had a real body during his life and even after his resurrection. Paul’s stress that it was a different kind of body—one made of spirit instead of flesh and blood—came to be deemphasized with the passing of time.

It is hard to know what the very earliest Christians, before Paul, thought about Jesus’s body after the resurrection—whether they had a view more like that found in Paul, our earliest witness, or more like the one found Luke and John, who were writing later. What is certain is that the earliest followers of Jesus believed that Jesus had come back to life, in the body, and that this was a body that had real bodily characteristics: it could be seen and touched, and it had a voice that could be heard. Why did they come to think this, at the very beginning of the Christian tradition? What made them believe that Jesus had been bodily raised from the dead? Something did. And I think we know what it was. Some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after he had been crucified.

The Visions of Jesus

IT IS INDISPUTABLE THAT some of the followers of Jesus came to think that he had been raised from the dead, and something had to have happened to make them think so. Our earliest records are consistent on this point, and I think they provide us with historically reliable information in one key respect: the disciples’ belief in the resurrection was based on visionary experiences.

The Importance of Visions to the Resurrection Faith

I should stress that it was visions, and nothing else, that led the first disciples to believe in the resurrection. Frequently it is stated that a combination of things led to this faith: the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus. My view is that an empty tomb had nothing to do with it. This is not only because the reports of an empty tomb are highly doubtful, as I have tried to show, but even more because an empty tomb would not produce faith, as I will try to demonstrate, and even more important because the earliest records indicate that the tomb did not produce faith.

I begin with our early records. The oldest tradition that we have of the resurrection faith is the pre-Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, which we examined in Chapter 4. This creed says nothing about an empty tomb and indicates that the reason the disciples came to believe in the resurrection was that Jesus appeared to them. The same thing is true of Paul himself: he believed because of a vision, not because he saw an empty tomb (Gal. 1:15–16; 1 Cor. 15:8).

Several of the Gospel accounts, which were written later, present the same view. Our first Gospel is Mark; it records the “fact” that the tomb was empty, but strikingly, no one is said to come to believe that Jesus was raised because of it. Even more striking, in Luke’s account the report that the tomb was discovered to be empty was dismissed as “an idle tale” and is explicitly said not to have led anyone to believe (24:11). Only when Jesus appears to the disciples do they come to faith (24:13–53). The same view is advanced in the Gospel of John. Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb and is confused, but she does not believe. She instead thinks someone has moved Jesus’s body to a different location (20:1–13). Not until Jesus appears to her does she comes to believe (20:14–18).

These stories show what should have come as a logical surmise even without them: if someone was buried in a tomb and later the body was not there, this fact alone would not make anyone suspect that God had raised the person from the dead. Suppose you place a corpse in a rock-hewn tomb. Later the body is missing. What is your immediate thought? It is definitely not “resurrection.” Instead, it is “grave robbers!” Or, “someone has moved the body.” Or, “hey, I must have come to the wrong tomb.” Or something else. You do not think, “Oh my! This person has been exalted to the right hand of God!”

I want to stress this point in contradistinction to the view set forth by Dale Allison in a book that is otherwise a fine discussion of the resurrection of Jesus.⁷ But on one point (well, several others too) I disagree with him. Allison wants to maintain that if the disciples of Jesus had visions of him after his death—both Allison and I agree that they did—this would not lead them to think that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead unless they could examine the empty tomb to see that it was so. On the surface this view seems reasonable enough, but the problem is that it overlooks exactly who these followers of Jesus were and what they believed before the events leading up to Jesus’s death and its aftermath.

Jesus, as we have seen (and Allison agrees with this), was a Jewish apocalypticist who, among other things, agreed with other Jewish apocalypticists that at the end of this current wicked age the dead would be judged and resurrected. In Jesus’s view, the dead would be raised bodily to face judgment, either to be rewarded if they had sided with God or to be punished if they had aligned themselves with the forces of evil. This afterlife in the kingdom would entail a bodily resurrection.

And who were the disciples? They were followers of Jesus who, of course, accepted his apocalyptic message and themselves adopted such apocalyptic views.⁸ If an apocalyptic Jew of this kind were to come to believe that the resurrection of the dead had begun—for example, with the raising of God’s specially favored one, his messiah—what would that resurrection involve? It would naturally and automatically involve precisely a bodily resurrection. That’s what “resurrection” meant to these people. It did not mean the ongoing life of the spirit without the body. It meant the reanimation and glorification of the body. If the disciples came to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, they would have on the spot understood that this meant his body was no longer dead but had been brought back to life. They wouldn’t need an empty tomb to prove it. Of course, for them, the tomb was empty. It goes without saying and without seeing. Jesus is alive again, which means his body has been raised.

The empty tomb narratives came later—after the creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 and after the writings of Paul. In other words, they were not part of the early tradition. And even when they did come to be told and discussed, Christians realized that the empty tomb itself would not generate faith—as Mark, Luke, and John inform us. Something else did. Some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him alive after he had been crucified.

Terminology: What Visions Are

Before we proceed, it is important to be clear about the terminology I am using. When I say that some of the disciples almost certainly had “visions” of Jesus after his death, what do I mean?

I am not using the term vision in any particularly technical sense. By “vision” I simply mean something that is “seen,” whether it is really there or not. In other words, I am not taking a stand on the question of whether there was some kind of external reality behind what the disciples saw. Scholars who study visions speak of those that are veridical—meaning that a person sees something that is really there—and of those that are nonveridical—meaning that what a person sees is not really there. Sometimes you see a shadowy figure in your bedroom at night because someone is really there; other times you’re “just seeing things.”

When it comes to the visions of Jesus that his disciples experienced, Christian believers would typically say that there was indeed an external reality behind them. That is, Jesus really appeared to these people. Anyone with that view would probably call such veridical visions “appearances” of Jesus. Non-Christians would say that the visions were nonveridical, that there was nothing there and that the visions were, possibly, psychologically or neurophysiologically induced. Such people would probably call these visions “hallucinations.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association defines hallucination as “a sensory perception that has the compelling sense of reality of a true perception but that occurs without external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ.”⁹ It should be noted that “sensory perception” here is understood to refer to not only “seeing,” but also to any of the other senses: hearing, feeling, smelling, and even tasting.

I am not going to take a stand on this issue of whether Jesus really appeared to people or whether their visions were hallucinations, so my case does not rise or fall depending on whether the visions were veridical or not. As an agnostic, I personally do not believe Jesus was raised from the dead and so I do not believe he “appeared” to anyone. But what I have to say about the disciples’ visions are things I could have said just as easily back in the days when I was a firm believer.

Many discussions of the resurrection are focused on just this question of whether the visions were veridical or not. Most New Testament scholars are themselves Christian and they naturally tend to take the Christian view of the matter—that the visions were bona fide appearances of Jesus to his followers. You can find such views forcefully stated in any number of publications, including the recent, and very large, books by Christian apologist Mike Licona and by renowned New Testament scholar N. T. Wright.¹⁰

But some prominent New Testament scholars argue vociferously on the other side of the question as well. For example, the German scholar and skeptic Gerd Lüdemann argues that the visions of Jesus experienced by Peter, and then later by Paul, were psychologically induced. In his view, when Jesus died his body decomposed like any other body; thus, Lüdemann says, since Christianity is rooted in the physical resurrection but Jesus actually was not physically raised, “Christian faith is as dead as Jesus.”¹¹

And then there is the late British New Testament scholar and intellectual gadfly Michael Goulder, who argued that there are numerous occasions when people once provided supernatural explanations for things that now we can explain through science. But once a natural explanation exists for a phenomenon, we no longer need a supernatural one. For example, Goulder points out that in the Middle Ages the effects of what we now would call hysteria—paralysis, tremors, anesthesia, etc.—were attributed to demon possession. No doctor today would think she was grappling with demons when treating hysteria. Now we have a natural explanation for what once required a supernatural one. Another of his examples comes from 1588, when the English fired upon the Spanish Armada and the cannon balls at first did not penetrate the distant ships. An English captain declared that this was because of “our sins.” But as the Spanish ships got within closer range, the balls did begin to penetrate. A natural explanation (relative proximity) thus superseded the religious one (“because of our sins”), making the religious one no longer required. In Goulder’s view, the same can be said of the visions of the disciples. If we can come up with natural explanations—for example, psychologically induced hallucinations—there is no need for supernatural ones.¹²

I find these debates between believers and unbelievers fascinating, but for my purposes they are beside the point. Whether one believes the visions of Jesus’s followers were veridical or nonveridical, the results I think will be the same. The visions led followers of Jesus to believe he had been raised from the dead. And so I incline toward the view of Dale Allison, who maintains the following:

The situation is such, I believe, that nothing would prohibit a conscientious historian from steering clear of both theological and anti-theological assumptions, or of both paranormal and anti-paranormal assumptions, and simply adopting a phenomenological approach to the data, which do not in and of themselves demand from historians any particular interpretation. Would it be an historical sin to content oneself with observing that the disciples’ experiences, whether hallucinatory or not, were genuine experiences that they at least took to originate outside their subjectivity?¹³

I do not think it would be a historical sin at all to leave the matter of external stimuli—were the visions veridical or not—undecided, so that believers and unbelievers can reach common ground on the significance of these experiences. That is my ultimate concern.

Who Had the Visions? Exploring the “Doubt Tradition”

In considering the significance of the visions of Jesus, a key question immediately comes to the fore that in my judgment has not been given its full due by most scholars investigating the issue. Why do we have such a strong and pervasive tradition that some of the disciples doubted the resurrection, even though Jesus appeared to them? If Jesus came to them, alive, after his death, and talked with them—what was there to doubt?

The reason this question is so pressing is that, as we will see, modern research on visions has shown that visions are almost always believed by the people who experience them. When people have a vision—of a lost loved one, for example—they really and deeply believe the person has been there. So why were the visions of Jesus not always believed? Or rather, why were they so consistently doubted?

Jesus does not appear to anyone in Mark’s Gospel, but he does in Matthew, Luke, John, and the book of Acts. Most readers have never noticed this, but in every one of these accounts we have rather direct statements that the disciples doubted that Jesus was raised.

In Matthew 28:17 we are told that Jesus appeared to the eleven, but “some doubted.” Why would they doubt if Jesus was right there, in front of them? We have already seen that in Luke 24, when the women report that Jesus has been raised, the disciples consider it an “idle tale” and do not believe it (24:10–11). Then, even when Jesus appears to them, he has to “prove” that he is not a spirit by having them handle him. And even that is not enough: he needs to eat a piece of broiled fish in order finally to convince them (24:37–43). So too in John’s Gospel, at first Peter and the beloved disciple do not believe Mary Magdalene that the tomb is empty; they have to see for themselves (John 20:1–10). But what is more germane, the text clearly implies that even when the disciples see Jesus, they don’t believe it is he: that is why he has to show them his hands and the wound in his side, to convince them (20:20). So too with doubting Thomas—he sees Jesus, but his doubts are overcome only when he is told to inspect the wounds physically (20:24–28).

And then comes one of the most puzzling verses in all of the New Testament. In Acts 1:3 we are told that after his resurrection Jesus spent forty days with the disciples—forty days!—showing them that he was alive by “many proofs.” Many proofs? How many proofs were needed exactly? And it took forty days to convince them?

Closely related to these doubt traditions are the scenes in the Gospels in which Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection and they don’t recognize who he is. This is the leitmotif of the famous story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13–31. These two do not realize they are talking to the person they have just been talking about, and they do not recognize Jesus until he breaks bread with them. Similarly, in John 20:14–16, Mary Magdalene is the first to see Jesus raised, but she does not immediately recognize him. She thinks she is talking with the gardener. So too in John 21:4–8, the disciples are fishing after the resurrection and Jesus appears to them on the shore and speaks with them. But they don’t realize who it is until the beloved disciple does.

What is one to make of these stories? Some readers have suggested that if the disciples had merely had “visions,” it would make sense that there was considerable doubt about what they had seen. This is an interesting point, but as I have already said, and as we will see more fully later, people who have visions tend not to doubt what they have seen. The most impressive thing about people who report visionary experiences in numerous different contexts is that they consistently insist, sometimes with some vehemence, that the visions were real—not made up in their heads. This applies across the board—to people who have seen loved ones after they have died (and sometimes talk to them, and hold them), to people who see great religious figures such as the Blessed Virgin Mary (whose sightings are reported and documented to an astonishing extent), to people who claim that they have been abducted by UFOs.¹⁴ People who have visions really believe them. But a number of the disciples are reported not to have believed them, until they were given “proof.”

My tentative suggestion is that three or four people—though possibly more—had visions of Jesus sometime after he died. One of these was almost certainly Peter, since reports about his seeing Jesus are found everywhere in our sources, including our earliest record of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:5. And it needs to be remembered that Paul actually knew Peter. Paul too explicitly states that he had a vision of Jesus, and I think we can take him at his word that he believes Jesus appeared to him. It is also significant that Mary Magdalene enjoys such prominence in all the Gospel resurrection narratives, even though she is virtually absent everywhere else in the Gospels. She is mentioned in only one passage in the entire New Testament in connection with Jesus during his public ministry (Luke 8:1–3), and yet she is always the first to announce that Jesus has been raised. Why is this? One plausible explanation is that she too had a vision of Jesus after he died.

These three people—Peter, Paul, and Mary, as it turns out—must have told others about their visions. Possibly others had them as well—for example, James, Jesus’s brother—but I think it is difficult to say. Most of their close associates believed them and came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead. But possibly some of the original disciples did not believe it. This would explain why there is such a strong doubt tradition in the Gospels, and why there is such an emphasis (in Luke, John, and especially Acts) on the fact that Jesus had to “prove” that he was raised, even when he was allegedly standing in front of the disciples. If historically only a few people had the visions, and not everyone believed them, this would explain many things. Mary didn’t doubt what she had seen, nor did Peter or Paul. But others did. Still, as the stories of Jesus’s “appearances” were told and retold, of course, they were embellished, magnified, and even made up; so soon, probably within a few years, it was said that all of the disciples had seen Jesus, along with other people.

Visions from a Broader Perspective

I have said that it is not important for my purposes whether the visions of Jesus were veridical or not. But in order to understand these visions more deeply, it is necessary to see what scholars who have studied such things have said about visionary experiences. Most serious research on visions is on those that are nonveridical, for an obvious reason. People who see something that is right before their eyes are simply seeing what is there. But why and how do people see things that are not right before their eyes? To appreciate more fully the early reports of visions by Jesus’s disciples, we need to explore what other people have said about the visions they have had.

One authoritative account is given by the psychologist Richard Bentall in an article titled “Hallucinatory Experiences.”¹⁵ Bentall says that the first real attempt to see whether it was possible for people to have nonveridical visions without suffering from physical or mental illness came at the end of the nineteenth century. A man named H. A. Sidgewick interviewed 7,717 men and 7,599 women and found that 7.8 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women reported having had at least one vivid hallucinatory experience. The most common vision was of a living person who was not present at the time. A number of the visions involved religious or supernatural content. The most common visions were reported by people who were twenty to twenty-nine years old.

The first truly modern survey—using modern methods of analysis accepted today in the social sciences—was conducted by P. McKellar in 1968. One out of four “normal” people reported having had at least one hallucinatory experience. Fifteen years later a study by T. B. Posey and M. E. Losch considered auditory hallucinations—in which a person hears a voice without seeing anyone. Among 375 college students, fully 39 percent reported having had the experience.

The most comprehensive survey of the general population was conducted by A. Y. Tien in 1991. This study involved 18,572 people. Remarkably, 13 percent of them claimed to have experienced at least one vivid hallucination—a statistic very close to what Sidgewick had found, using less scientific methods, nearly a century earlier. It is worth noting that the risk of schizophrenia in the general population is usually estimated as being 1 percent. This means that there are more than ten times as many people who have experienced hallucinations as who suffer from schizophrenia.

How does one explain these large numbers? Bentall argues that the ability to distinguish between self-generated events (that is, imaginary sensations originating in the mind) and externally generated ones (that is, those induced by causes exterior to the mind) is a real skill that humans acquire, and like all skills, it “is likely to fail under certain circumstances.”¹⁶ This skill is called source monitoring—since it is the skill of monitoring where the source of a sensation comes from, either inside or outside the mind. Bentall argues that source monitoring judgments are affected by the culture in which a person grows up. If a person’s culture subscribes to the existence of ghosts or the reality of dead people appearing, the chance that what one “sees” will be assumed to be a ghost or a dead person is obviously heightened. Moreover, and this is a key point, stress and emotional arousal can have serious effects on a person’s source monitoring skills. Someone who is under considerable stress, or experiencing deep grief, trauma, or personal anguish, is more likely to experience a failure of source monitoring.

This may be why two of the most frequently reported forms of visions involve the comforting presence of a deceased loved one or of a respected religious figure. Of course people have all sorts of other visions—some of them induced by mental imbalance or physiological stimulants, such as hallucinatory drugs, as so wonderfully documented in Oliver Sacks’s book Hallucinations. But for people who are not suffering from mental disease and are not ingesting LSD, visions appear to occur with particular frequency among those who are experiencing bereavement or religious awe and expectation.

Bereavement Visions

A significant amount of research has been done on visions caused by bereavement. One of the most striking features of this research is that those who experience such visions almost always assume, and wholeheartedly believe, that they are veridical. The person who has died really has come back to visit. Outsiders tend to see these visions as hallucinations. As with the visions of the historical Jesus, I see no need to take a side on the debate on whether the dead really do visit those they have left behind.

Certain typical aspects of these visions are of some relevance for understanding the disciples’ visions of Jesus—who was, after all, a beloved one who had died suddenly and tragically and was deeply mourned and grieved. As Dale Allison summarizes the research on bereavement visions, these usually entail a feeling that the lost loved one continues to be present, even in the same room, with the one mourning.¹⁷ Such visions are more commonly experienced when a person has a sense of guilt over some aspect of his or her relationship with the one who has died (recall: the disciples had all betrayed, denied, or fled from Jesus during his hour of need). Often they are accompanied by anger at the circumstances or the people who caused the loved one’s death (another obvious parallel to the disciples and Jesus). Strikingly, after the loved ones have died, the survivors idealize them, smoothing over the difficult aspects of their personalities or remembering only their good sides. And not infrequently, those suffering bereavement seek to form community with others who remember the loved ones and tell stories about them. All of these features relate closely with what we have in the case of Jesus, the beloved teacher and master who met an untimely death.

One particularly intriguing set of modern findings has to do with what Bill and Judy Guggenheim have called “After-Death Communications.”¹⁸ I should stress that the Guggenheims are not trained in psychology or in other fields relevant to the scientific study of visions; therefore, their analysis of their data is not useful for scholarly purposes. But the data themselves are significant, and by gathering it, the Guggenheims have performed a service of real value: they have interviewed more than thirty-three hundred people who have claimed they were contacted by a dead loved one, and they have presented numerous accounts of such contacts in their publications. Let me stress: these are pieces of anecdotal evidence. But they are fascinating anecdotes indeed and are valuable for giving insight into what people experience when they have visions of dead loved ones.

These interviews show that such visions happen both to people who are asleep and to people who are awake. Moreover, even when people have the vision in a dream, they almost always take it to mean not that they “were simply dreaming,” but that the person they saw really has survived death and is still alive and communicating with them. These experiences often happen immediately after a person’s death—but sometimes they happen a year later, three years later, ten years later, or more. They almost always bring a peaceful assurance that all is well with the person who has died. The person who is mourned is not always a family member—he or she can also be a friend or another loved one.

It appears that people who are physically or emotionally exhausted are more likely to have an After-Death Communication. In the Guggenheims’ extensive experience the communications occur more frequently when someone has died unexpectedly or tragically. The key element seems to be that a person is deeply missed. That person then communicates with the one who is grieving. It is especially striking that many of the people interviewed by the Guggenheims did not know that such a thing as After-Death Communication existed or had ever occurred—before experiencing it themselves. That was part of what made these experiences so convincing to the people who had them: they were sudden, unexpected, and vivid.

It is not the Guggenheims’ mission to compare these modern experiences to those the disciples of Jesus had. But the similarities cannot be overlooked by someone who is interested in the beginnings of Christianity. The much beloved teacher of the disciples—the one for whom they had given up everything and to whom they had devoted their lives—was suddenly and brutally taken away from them, publicly humiliated, tortured, and crucified. According to our early records, the disciples had plenty of reasons for feeling guilt and shame over how they had failed Jesus both during his life and at his greatest time of need. Soon thereafter—and for some time to come?—some of them believed they had encountered him after his death. They were deeply comforted by his presence and felt his forgiveness. They had not expected to have these experiences, which had come upon them suddenly and with a vividness that made them believe that their beloved teacher was still alive.

But unlike the modern people interviewed by the Guggenheims, these followers of Jesus were ancient Jewish apocalypticists. Many modern people who believe a loved one lives on may think their souls have gone to heaven, since that’s a common modern version of life after death. As apocalyptic Jews, the disciples believed that the afterlife entailed a resurrection of the dead. When they experienced Jesus after he had died, they naturally understood his new life in light of their own deeply held convictions. He had been bodily raised from the dead.

Visions of Esteemed Religious Figures

Of additional relevance to our reflections are visions of revered religious figures from the past, which are among the best documented kind of visionary experience. Here I briefly explore the “appearances” of the Blessed Virgin Mary and visions in the modern world of Jesus himself.

The Blessed Virgin Mary

René Laurentin is a modern-day Catholic theologian and expert on modern apparitions who has written many books on the topic.¹⁹ He has a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris and two doctorates, one in theology and one in literature. And he deeply and sincerely believes that Mary—the mother of Jesus who died two thousand years ago—has appeared to people in the modern world and that she continues to do so. Here I give just two examples from his writings.

In Betania, Venezuela, a woman named Maria Esperanza Medrano de Bianchini received peculiar spiritual powers: she could tell the future, levitate, and heal the sick. The Virgin Mary appeared to her several times, starting in March 1976. The most striking occurrence, on March 25, 1984, involved lots of other people. After the Catholic mass that morning, a number of people went to enjoy some time outdoors near the local waterfall, and the Virgin Mary appeared above it. This began a series of visions. Mary came and went, often visible for five minutes or so, the last time for half an hour. Among the observers were doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, engineers, and lawyers. People over the weeks to come started picnicking there. At times, up to a thousand people observed Mary there, bathed in light and accompanied by the smell of roses. This continued until 1988. Later, a Jesuit priest, Monsignor Pio Bello Ricardo, who was a professor of psychology at the Central University of Caracas, interviewed 490 people who claimed to have seen Mary there. They convinced him that Mary had really been at the waterfall.

A second example comes from Cairo, Egypt, from 1986, at a Coptic church. Mary had appeared there a number of times between 1983 and 1986. Once, she appeared on the roof, and four Coptic bishops authenticated the vision. They did indeed see her. At other times, she was seen by Muslims (who were not Christians, obviously). In some instances, she was actually photographed. Laurentin says that he has a photograph of a similar apparition from another Coptic suburb from 1968.

My point is not that Mary really is appearing in these times and places, but that people deeply believe she is. And not just people whom we might “write off” as being particularly gullible—but people whom we might think should “know better.” Anecdotal collections of Mary visions can be found in numerous books, such as Janice Connell’s Meetings with Mary: Visions of the Blessed Mother (1995). Connell provides fourteen chapters detailing visions of Mary, from a believer’s perspective, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as these are documented from places such as Lourdes, France; Fatima, Portugal; Garabandal, Spain; and Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. There is, for example, the “cosmic miracle of the sun” that took place at Fatima on October 13, 1917. We are told the sun was seen to spin wildly and to tumble down to earth before stopping and returning to its normal position, radiating indescribably beautiful colors. The miracle was seen and attested to by more than fifty thousand people.

Do such miracles happen? Believers say yes, unbelievers say no. But it is striking and worth noting that typically believers in one religious tradition often insist on the “evidence” for the miracles that support their views and completely discount the “evidence” for miracles attested in some other religious tradition, even though, at the end of the day, it is the same kind of evidence (for example, eyewitness testimony) and may be of even greater abundance. Protestant apologists interested in “proving” that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary.

Jesus’s Appearances in the Modern World

Jesus also appears to people today, and some of these sightings are documented by Phillip H. Wiebe in his book Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today (1997).²⁰ Wiebe presents twenty-eight case studies, which he examines from psychological, neuropsychological, mentalist, and other perspectives. Included is a vision of Jesus experienced by Hugh Montefiore, a well-known New Testament scholar at Cambridge University and later bishop of the Church of England, who converted to Christianity from Judaism at age sixteen because he had a vision in which Jesus appeared to him and told him to “follow me”—words that, at the time, the young Montefiore did not know were drawn from the New Testament.

Of particular interest are instances in which Jesus is said to have appeared to entire groups of people, rather than just to an individual. No case is more intriguing than the last one Wiebe recounts, that of Kenneth Logie, a preacher in a Pentecostal Holiness Church in Oakland, California, in the 1950s. Two appearances are worth detailing. The first occurred in April 1954 when Logie was preaching at an evening service. In the middle of his sermon, around 9:15 P.M., the door to the church opened, and Jesus walked in and came down the aisle smiling to people on the right and the left. He then walked through (not around) the pulpit and placed his hand on Logie’s shoulder. Logie, understandably, collapsed. Jesus spoke to him in an unknown foreign tongue, and Logie revived enough to reply to him in English, having understood what he said. Wiebe tells us that fifty people witnessed the event.

Strange things happen. But what happened five years later was even stranger. And two hundred people saw and confirmed they had seen it. And remarkably, it was captured on film. The reason it was filmed, Logie later said, was that very strange things had been happening in the church and they wanted to document them. Wiebe himself saw the film in 1965. A woman from the congregation was giving her testimony when suddenly she disappeared and was replaced by a male figure who was obviously Jesus. He was wearing sandals and a glistening white robe, and he had nail marks in his hand. His hands were dripping with oil. After several minutes, during which he apparently said nothing, he disappeared and the woman reappeared.

Unfortunately, by the time Wiebe had decided to write his book, some twenty-six years after first seeing the film of the event, the film had disappeared. Logie claimed it had been stolen. Still, Wiebe was able to find, and interview, five people who had been there and agreed that they had seen the event. Moreover, there still were surviving photographs of the other odd occurrences in the church back in 1959: images of hands, hearts, and crosses had started to appear on the church walls, with liquid like oil flowing from them and a fragrance being emitted from them. The walls were checked by a skeptic, who had no natural explanation for these appearances (no hidden windows or the like). Wiebe has seen the photographs.

Skeptics may point out that the time between when these events allegedly happened in the 1950s and Wiebe’s written account of them amounts to several decades, so one may be justified in suspecting the accuracy of the witnesses’ memories. But Wiebe points out that about the same amount of time fell between the life of Jesus and the accounts of the earliest Gospels.

The Disciples’ Visions of Jesus

Let us return to the visions that Jesus’s disciples apparently had. Christian apologists sometimes claim that the most sensible historical explanation for these visions is that Jesus really appeared to the disciples. Let me bracket for a second the question of whether a historian can conclude that a miracle probably happened in the past (the historian definitely cannot, as I’ve argued; but I’ll bracket the question for a moment). Often one hears from these apologists that the visions must be veridical because “mass hallucinations” cannot happen—so if Paul says “five hundred brothers” all saw Jesus at one time, it defies belief that this could have been imagined by all five hundred at once. There is a certain force to this argument, but it does need to be pointed out that Paul is the only one who mentions this event, and if it really happened—or even if it was widely believed to have happened—it is hard to explain why it never made its way into the Gospels, especially those later Gospels such as Luke and John that were so intent on “proving” that Jesus was physically raised from the dead.²¹ Apart from that, most people at the end of the day believe that mass hallucinations are not only possible, but that they really can happen. Precisely those conservative evangelical scholars who claim that mass hallucinations don’t happen are the ones who deny that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to hundreds or thousands of people at once, even though we have modern, verified eyewitness testimony that she has.

Sometimes such apologists claim that a hallucination could not possibly produce the result that Jesus’s appearances did: causing a complete moral and personal transformation of the disciples. This view, too, cannot be sustained after more than a moment’s thought. In order for a vision to have its effect—to relieve guilt, to remove shame, to provide a sense of comfort, to make a person want to live again, or any other effect—it does not have to be veridical. It has to be believed. Some of the disciples wholeheartedly believed that they had seen Jesus after he had died. They concluded that he had been raised from the dead. That changed everything, as we will see. Whether Jesus was really there or not has no bearing on the fact that the disciples believed he was.

Finally, in a more scholarly vein, some people have argued that a vision of Jesus would not lead the disciples to believe that he had been raised from the dead because Judaism at the time did not have a sense that an individual would be resurrected before the “general resurrection” at the end of time, when all people would be brought back to life. This too is an interesting argument, but it also is not convincing to someone who knows something about ancient beliefs of life and the afterlife. The New Testament itself reports that Herod Antipas believed that Jesus was actually John the Baptist “raised from the dead”; therefore, some such belief was not implausible. Moreover, a belief was attested in non-Christian Jewish circles that the emperor Nero would return from the dead to wreak more havoc on the earth, as reported in a group of Jewish texts known as the Sibylline Oracles.²² It was not unthinkable that someone would come back from the dead (as, for example, Lazarus did). But anyone who was an apocalyptic Jew like Jesus’s closest follower Peter, or Jesus’s own brother James, or his later apostle Paul, who thought that Jesus had come back to life, would naturally interpret it in light of his particular apocalyptic worldview—a worldview that informed everything that he thought about God, humans, the world, the future, and the afterlife. In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom. That’s how the disciples interpreted Jesus’s resurrection. Moreover, that is why Jesus was understood to be the “first fruits” of those who had died (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:20): because he was the first to be raised, and all others were to be raised soon as well. In that sense his resurrection was the beginning of the general resurrection.

At the end of the day, belief in Jesus’s resurrection “works” whether the visions were veridical or not. If they were veridical, it was because Jesus was raised from the dead.²³ If they were not veridical, they are easily explained on other grounds. The disciples were bereaved and deeply grieving for their dearest loved one, who had experienced a sudden, unexpected, and particularly violent death. They may have felt guilt about how they had behaved toward him, especially in the tense hours immediately before his death. It is not at all unheard of for such people to have an “encounter” with the lost loved one afterward. In fact, such people are more inclined to have just such an encounter. My view is that historians can’t “prove” it either way.

The Outcome of Faith

EVEN THOUGH HISTORIANS CANNOT prove or disprove the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection, it is certain that some of the followers of Jesus came to believe in his resurrection. This is the turning point in Christology. Christology, as I have said, is a term that literally means the understanding of Christ. My point in this chapter—indeed, in this book—is that belief in the resurrection changed everything Christologically. Before the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection, they thought he was a great teacher, an apocalyptic preacher, and, probably, the one chosen to be king in the coming kingdom of God. Since they followed him wholeheartedly, they must have subscribed to his teaching wholeheartedly. Like him, they thought the age they were living in was controlled by the forces of evil, but that God would soon intervene to make right all that was wrong. In the very near future, God was going to send a cosmic judge over the earth, the Son of Man, to destroy the wicked powers that were making life so miserable in this world and to set up a good kingdom, a utopian place where good would prevail and God would rule through his messiah. The disciples would sit on thrones as rulers in the coming kingdom, and Jesus would be seated on the greatest throne of all, as the messiah of God.

But he was purely human. He was a great teacher, yes. A charismatic preacher, yes. And even the son of David who would rule in the future kingdom, yes. But he was a man. Born like other humans, raised like other humans, in nature no different from others, only wiser, more spiritual, more insightful, more righteous, more godly. But not God—certainly not God, in any of the ancient senses of the term.

That all changed with the belief in the resurrection. When the disciples came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, they did not think it was a resuscitation such as you can find elsewhere among the Jewish and Christian traditions. In the Hebrew Bible, Elijah was said to have brought a young man back from the dead (1 Kgs. 17:17–24). But that young man went on to live his life here on earth and then he died. Later there were stories about Jesus raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead (Mark 5:21–43). She did not ascend to heaven and become immortal: she grew up, grew old, and died. Jesus allegedly raised his friend Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1–44). He too eventually died. These were all instances of resuscitation, when the body came back from the dead in order to live and then die again. They were the ancient equivalents of near-death experiences.

But that is not what the disciples believed about Jesus. The reason is clear. They believed Jesus had come back from the dead—but he was not still living among them as one of them. He was nowhere to be found. He did not resume his teaching activities in the hills of Galilee. He did not return to Capernaum to continue his proclamation of the coming Son of Man. He did not come back to engage in yet more heated controversies with the Pharisees. Jesus in a very palpable and obvious sense was no longer here. But he had come back from the dead. So where was he?

This is the key. The disciples, knowing both that Jesus was raised and that he was no longer among them, concluded that he had been exalted to heaven. When Jesus came back to life, it was not merely that his body had been reanimated. God had taken Jesus up to himself in the heavenly realm, to be with him. God had exalted him to a position of virtually unheard-of status and authority. The expectation that Jesus would be the future king in the kingdom, a human messiah, was just a foretaste of what was really in store for him. God had done something far beyond what anyone could have thought or imagined. God had taken him into the heavenly sphere and bestowed divine favor upon him such as had never, in the disciples’ opinion, been bestowed on a human before. Jesus no longer belonged to this earthly realm. He was now with God in heaven.

This is why the disciples told the stories of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances the way they did. Jesus did not resume his earthly body. He had a heavenly body. When he appeared to his disciples, in the earliest traditions, he appeared from heaven. And his heavenly body could do things no earthly body could do. In Matthew’s Gospel, when the women arrived at the tomb on the third day, the stone was not yet rolled away. It rolled away as they arrived. But the tomb was empty. That meant that Jesus’s body had been taken through solid rock. Later, when he appeared to the disciples, he walked through locked doors. Jesus had a heavenly body, not just an earthly body.

Let me return to a comment I made earlier: that even in the Gospels Jesus appears to have a heavenly body during his earthly life—one that can walk on water, for example, or be transfigured into a radiating glow in the presence of some of his disciples. But it is important to remember: these Gospels were written by believers in Jesus decades later who already “knew” that Jesus had been exalted to heaven. As storytellers told the stories of Jesus’s earthly career, year after year and decade after decade, they did not separate who Jesus was after his death—the one who had been exalted to heaven—from who he was during his life. And so their belief in the exalted Jesus affected the ways they told their stories about him. They recounted miracles that he had done as a divine human—healing the sick, casting out demons, walking on water, multiplying the loaves, raising the dead. Why could Jesus do these things? They were attributed to him by his later followers who already “knew” that he wasn’t a mere mortal because God had exalted him to heaven. As a heavenly being, Jesus was in some sense divine. The storytellers told their tales fully believing that he was uniquely divine, with that belief affecting how they told their stories.

Before these storytellers began their work of recounting the words and deeds of this divine man, the earliest believers—as soon as they had visions of Jesus and came to believe he had been raised from the dead—thought he had been exalted to heaven. His appearances to them were appearances from heaven. That was where he lived now and would live for all eternity, with God Almighty.

In some later traditions this belief came to be modified in an important way. Today, most Christians think that Jesus died; that he was raised from the dead on the third day; that he then appeared, while still on earth, to his disciples; and that only after that he went up to heaven, in his “ascension.” As it turns out, the ascension is mentioned in only one book of the New Testament, the book of Acts.²⁴ The author of Acts—let’s call him Luke—presents an innovation here in his story of Jesus. If you will recall, Luke is especially committed to showing that Jesus’s resurrected body was a real, honest-to-goodness body. It had flesh and bones. It could be felt. It could eat broiled fish. Luke stresses this point because other Christians were saying that Jesus, at least in his resurrected form, was a spirit, not a body. For Luke, he was a body. And to make that point even more emphatic, Luke tells the story of the ascension. Possibly Luke himself came up with this story. As we have seen, according to the book of Acts, Jesus spent forty days with his disciples, showing them “with many proofs” that he really was alive again (1:3). And then, after the forty days, he physically went up to heaven—and the disciples watched him go. This account is meant to emphasize yet further the real bodily nature of Jesus after his resurrection.

But it stands in tension with the views found elsewhere in the Gospels, which say nothing about a physical ascension of a real, bony, fish-eating body. The earliest tradition was different from what is in Acts. In that earlier tradition, Jesus’s resurrection was not simply a reanimation of a body that was then to be taken up into heaven. The resurrection itself was an exaltation into the heavenly realm. “God raised Jesus from the dead” was taken to mean that God had exalted Jesus from this earthly realm of life and death into the heavenly sphere. In this older understanding, Jesus appeared to his disciples by coming down briefly from heaven. This certainly is the understanding of our earliest witness, Paul, who speaks about his own vision of Jesus in exactly the same terms as the visions of the others two or three years before him—Cephas, James, the Twelve, and so on. There was nothing categorically different about any of these appearances. They were all appearances from heaven.

If the first believers in Jesus’s resurrection understood it to mean that Jesus had been taken into heaven, how exactly did that lead them to change what they thought about Jesus? How did it mark the beginning of Christology? How did it cause his followers to believe that Jesus was God?

This is the subject of the next chapter, but for now, here’s a brief foreshadowing. The followers of Jesus, during his life, believed that he would be the king of the future kingdom, the messiah. Now that they believed he had been exalted to the heavenly realm, they realized they had been right. He was the future king; but he would come from heaven to reign. In some traditions of the Jewish king in the Hebrew Bible, as we have seen, the king—even the earthly son of David—was thought to be in some sense God. Jesus now had been exalted to heaven and is the heavenly messiah to come to earth. In an even more real sense, he was God. Not God Almighty, of course, but he was a heavenly being, a superhuman, a divine king who would rule the nations.

Before Jesus’s death the disciples believed he would sit on the future throne. If God has taken him up into heaven, he is already sitting on a throne. In fact, he is at the right hand of God. On earth the disciples considered him their master and “lord.” Now he really is their Lord. The disciples recalled the scripture that said, “The LORD says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool’” (Ps. 110:1). God had taken Jesus, exalted him to his right hand in a position of authority and power, made him the Lord of all, who would rule over all things. As one who ruled from beside God’s throne, Jesus was in that sense also God.

The king in Israel was also known as the “Son of God.” Jesus clearly was that—both by virtue of his being the future king and by the fact that God had elevated him to the heavenly realm. God had showered his special favor upon Jesus and made him in a unique sense the Son of God—far above the status enjoyed by the descendants of David. God had adopted Jesus to be his Son, his unique Son. Just as the emperors were sons of both God (since their adopted fathers were “God”) and gods, so too Jesus, as the Son of God, was in that sense God.

Jesus, then, was coming to rule from heaven. In his own teaching he had proclaimed that the Son of Man was to appear as the cosmic judge over the earth. But now it was obviously Jesus himself who was coming from heaven to rule. The disciples very soon—probably right away—concluded that Jesus was the coming Son of Man. So when they told stories about him later, they had him speak of himself as the Son of Man—so much so that it became one of his favorite titles for himself in the Gospels. As we have seen, the Son of Man was sometimes understood to be a divine figure. In that sense also, then, Jesus was God.

It should be noted that all four of these exalted roles—Jesus as messiah, as Lord, as Son of God, as Son of Man—imply, in one sense or another, that Jesus is God. In no sense, in this early period, is Jesus understood to be God the Father. He is not the One Almighty God. He is the one who has been elevated to a divine position and is God in a variety of senses. As I have been arguing and will argue extensively in the next chapter, whenever someone claims that Jesus is God, it is important to ask: God in what sense? It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and “of the same essence” as the Father.