Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: Historical and Theological Reflections 0198838964, 9780198838968

Table of contents :
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction
1. The Historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection
2. Remembrance of the Risen Jesus
3. The Old Testament Witness
4. The Strangeness of Jesus’ Resurrection
5. Jesus’ Resurrection and Catholic Apologetics
6. Contemplating Jesus Risen
7. Why Doesn’t the Risen Jesus Appear to Each Generation?
Conclusion
Bibliography
Subject and Person Index

Citation preview

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DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD?

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Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections

MATTHEW LEVERING

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Matthew Levering 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961450 ISBN 978–0–19–883896–8 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To Brooks Levering

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Acknowledgments I owe a large debt of gratitude to all the friends who helped me to revise this book. Matthew Minerd gave me excellent criticisms of Chapter 5. Ryan Hemmer and Eric Mabry assisted me with the theology of Bernard Lonergan. Nicholas Lombardo, OP, helped me to focus upon precisely what I wanted to argue with regard to Jesus’ Resurrection; and Douglas Farrow refined this further. Alex Pierce read a draft of the whole manuscript and offered probing criticisms and questions. Br. Norbert Keliher, OP, made recommendations that improved the writing style of the Introduction. I also owe thanks to conference organizers and audiences who helped me to clarify my approach during the period in which I was drafting this book. Thanks first to Piotr Roszak and Jörgen Vijgen for inviting me to present “The Context of Christ’s Resurrection: The Old Testament in Aquinas’s Commentary on John 20–21” at their April 2017 conference on “Towards a Biblical Thomism: Aquinas and the Renewal of Biblical Theology,” jointly sponsored by the Faculty of Theology of the Nicolaus Copernicus University (Torun, Poland) and the Thomistic Institute (Warsaw). This paper contributed to the formation of Chapter 3. At this conference, I met for the first time a number of wonderful Polish scholars, as well as other leading European experts on Aquinas. During the same trip to Poland, I delivered a short lecture on “Theology and Conversion: Anthropocentric or Theocentric?” to a conference sponsored by the Pontifical Faculty of Theology (Warsaw) on the theme “Is Theological Conversion Necessary?” My paper, a portion of which is found in Chapter 1 of the present book, was published as “Theology and Conversion: Anthropocentric or Theocentric?” Warszawskie Studia Teologiczne 30 (2017): 7–14. In July 2017, Paul Gavrilyuk made it possible for me to speak on “Historical Memory and the Resurrection of Jesus: Encountering the Risen Christ,” at his conference on “Rethinking the Resources of the Christian Tradition: Retrieval, Renewal, Reunion?” jointly sponsored by the St. Paul School of Divinity and the University of St. Thomas. I received helpful feedback from a number of scholars, including Mark McInroy, Cyril O’Regan, and Sarah Coakley. This paper was published under the same title in a symposium in International Journal of Systematic Theology 20 (2018): 157–85. A revised version of this paper forms Chapter 2 of the present book. In September 2017, under the auspices of the Institute for Priestly Formation and Deacon Jim Keating, I presented a paper on “Contemplation and the Resurrection of Jesus,” which will be published in a volume edited by Deacon Keating along with papers by other friends who made that conference especially inspiring.

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 6 is a revised version of my paper. In September 2017, the Lonergan Society at Marquette University invited me to deliver a lecture on “The Truth of Jesus’ Resurrection: Learning from Twentieth-Century Catholic Theological Approaches.” I benefitted from comments by a number of Lonergan scholars. This paper formed the basis of Chapter 5. Lastly, I presented “The Strangeness of Christ’s Resurrection” to two audiences, first in January 2018 to a conference on “Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers” jointly sponsored by the Aquinas Center of Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute, and second as the invited “Theological Lecture” at the 129th Alumni Reunion of the Pontifical North American College in June 2018. I am grateful for criticisms from both audiences, especially an important concern raised by Fr. Khaled Anatolios at the Ave Maria conference. During the writing of this book, my wife Joy was so wonderful, supporting my purchasing of books needed for research, caring for friends and for members of the Winchester House community, and enabling our children— two of whom are now in college—to thrive. May God reward her for her amazing love and for her constant hard work. In love, she follows Paul’s dictum: “I will gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Cor 12:15). I also owe a major debt to the administration, faculty, and students of Mundelein Seminary, especially the rector Fr. John Kartje and the academic dean Fr. Thomas Baima. Mary Bertram, the administrative assistant for the dean’s office, has assisted me in so many tasks. Christopher Rogers, director of the Mundelein Seminary library, has been supportive in purchasing books needed for research. My research assistant David Augustine, already a significant scholar in his own right, constructed the Bibliography for this book. At Oxford, Tom Perridge ensured that the book would be published by Oxford University Press. He has been a true supporter of my research and I thank him for it. I also thank the Oxford peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions, including Francesca Murphy’s valuable suggestion to cut the footnote material by half, a suggestion that I followed. Last but certainly not least, many thanks to Jim and Molly Perry who graciously endowed the chair that I hold at Mundelein Seminary. I dedicate this book to my beloved brother, Brooks Levering. I am blessed to have such a brother, as well as to have my sister-in-law Heather and my nephew Jack and niece Lily. Onward to the fullness of life with the risen Lord, to whom we are united in faith, hope, and love even now. For we know in faith that Jesus Christ was “raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:4).

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Contents Introduction

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1. The Historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection

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2. Remembrance of the Risen Jesus

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3. The Old Testament Witness

91

4. The Strangeness of Jesus’ Resurrection

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5. Jesus’ Resurrection and Catholic Apologetics

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6. Contemplating Jesus Risen

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7. Why Doesn’t the Risen Jesus Appear to Each Generation?

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Conclusion Bibliography Subject and Person Index

210 219 251

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Introduction According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 75 percent of Americans believe that Jesus rose from the dead.¹ While this result strikes me as high, since in other surveys 18 percent of Americans report themselves to be atheists, it is clear that at the present moment more than half of Americans believe in Jesus’ Resurrection. I contend that they have good reason to do so, and I have written this book in order to make the case. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar finds that Jesus’ “Resurrection casts the decisive light on all that preceded it.”² But did Jesus’ Resurrection really happen, as a real event that took place in human history when the crucified corpse of Jesus of Nazareth, sometime around  30 rose to glorious life? In this book, I identify what is essentially a threefold basis for concluding that Jesus rose from the dead. This threefold basis does not offer a proof of Jesus’ Resurrection, but it does demonstrate that it is reasonable to think that Jesus’ Resurrection happened, even if—having ruled out both “excessive skepticism and facile credulity”—full-fledged faith in the risen Jesus also requires what the theologian Thomas Joseph White calls “a moment of abandonment” in which we freely commit ourselves to the God who reveals himself.³

¹ See http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/march_2016/ three_quarters_of_americans_believe_jesus_rose_from_the_dead. W. Waite Willis, Jr. reports that a 1994 Harris poll found that 87 percent of Americans believed in the Resurrection of Jesus: see Willis, “A Theology of Resurrection: Its Meaning for Jesus, Us, and God,” in Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine, ed. James H. Charlesworth et al. (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2006), 187–217, at 187. ² Hans Urs von Balthasar, Light of the Word: Brief Reflections on the Sunday Readings, trans. Dennis D. Martin (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 72. C. F. Evans opens his Resurrection and the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1970) with a similar point: “To a greater extent than it is anything else, Christianity—at least the Christianity of the New Testament—is a religion of resurrection” (1).” ³ Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 5; cf. 173. It may seem that, as a believing theologian, the only question that I can or should ask is “Why did Jesus rise from the dead?” rather than “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” In my view, neither a believing scholar nor an unbelieving scholar can really bracket his or her faith or lack thereof; but faith does not mean being unreasonably closed to evaluations of the sufficiency or insufficiency of historical evidence.

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The threefold basis for the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection is as follows. First, argumentation based upon the New Testament evidence about Jesus’ Resurrection suggests that the best way of accounting for this evidence is to hold that Jesus’ Resurrection happened. This evidence includes the shift of his Jewish disciples from a one-stage eschatology to a two-stage eschatology, the radical reconfiguration of their expectations for the Messiah, and the contents of the Resurrection narratives themselves.⁴ The evidence also includes what von Balthasar calls the disciples’ sudden acquisition of “their spiritual wealth and their unified view of things,” as well as the fact that Jesus’ Ascension befits his mission rather than being merely a way of papering over his absence.⁵ Lastly, the evidence includes the active presence of eyewitnesses to Jesus during the time of the writing of the Gospels, enabling the Gospels to mediate to us the apostolic remembrance of Jesus. The most plausible alternative way of accounting for the evidence is to suppose that the first disciples were fooled by hallucinatory visions. Such visions, however, are too commonplace in human life to be likely to have caused the proclamation that a crucified Messiah had been “resurrected” to glorified life. Even had they been deluded by visions, Jesus’ disciples could still easily have avoided the claim of bodily resurrection, with its entailment of a radical eschatological shift. Second, the sheer strangeness of the apostles’ claim that a crucified man rose bodily from the dead to a glorified bodily existence tells in favor of the credibility of their claim. They did not choose to describe his postmortem presence along culturally accepted lines such as a heavenly spirit-journey or the exaltation (or translation/apotheosis) of a martyr-hero.⁶ They could have

By contrast, in The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), Michael R. Licona strives to bracket his faith in Jesus’ Resurrection as part of his research into the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. ⁴ John Barton questions whether such an eschatological worldview can be plausible for modern Christians. He observes, “Where there is no longer a belief in an eventual restoration of all creation (apokatastasis), Jesus’ resurrection lacks the intelligibility it had for some early Christians” (Barton, “Why Does the Resurrection of Christ Matter?,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, ed. Stephen Barton and Graham Stanton [London: SPCK, 1994], 108–15, at 111). I think that persons who do not yet share the full Christian worldview can nonetheless conclude on reasonable grounds that Jesus rose from the dead. I do not see why people who believe, quite reasonably, in the Creator God would find unintelligible “belief in an eventual restoration of all creation.” ⁵ Hans Urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations, trans. Mary Theresilde Skerry (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 15. ⁶ For these culturally accepted lines in paganism, see Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2015). Miller points out that the early Christians knew of many pagan ascensions/exaltations: for example, those of Hermes, Asclepius, Dionysus, Heracles, Perseus, Bellerophon, immortalized emperors, and so on. To these, although Miller’s book focuses on pagan examples, numerous Jewish ascension/exaltation stories could be added. In Miller’s view, the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension simply reflect “the stock themes of the classical ‘demigod’ tradition of Mediterranean culture,” but secondcentury Christians sought to make him the sole such demigod. Central to Miller’s argument is

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made things much easier on themselves had they not insisted that the crucified Jesus was buried and then rose from the dead, thereby inaugurating the eschaton as the Messiah, but without any visible renewal of the cosmic order.⁷ Similarly, the apostles insisted that Christians must follow the path of the Cross in order to be united with the risen and ascended Lord. Although they could have adopted a much less costly path, they did not invent an easier way of life while awaiting the return of Christ. Third, the supreme love found in Jesus’ teachings and in his innocent death accords with what we would expect from the Old Testament revelation of the free and personal Creator God who makes covenant with Israel and whose “steadfast love” ensures that “in his love and in his pity he redeemed” his people (Is 63:7, 9).⁸ It makes sense not only that God exists, but also that he would reveal himself personally to his rational creatures.⁹ God reveals himself in Jesus as supreme love, answering to the yearning not only of the Israelites, but also of pagans such as Socrates who desired to enter into the divine “sanctuary of Love.”¹⁰ Instructed by God, the Israelites recognized that this entrance would require the forgiveness of sins. When we contemplate the whole of Jesus’ words and deeds, and the whole of the New Testament’s testimony in relation to the Scriptures of Israel, this contemplation reveals that view that syncretistic “Hellenistic Judaism” was the starting point for the texts of the New Testament, including for these texts’ “themes of Hellenistic exaltatio” (ibid., 12). Thus, Miller argues that the Resurrection/Ascension narratives of Jesus are merely “translation fables” or instances of the “broader Mediterranean hero fabulation and the Roman apotheosis traditions of the period” (ibid., 14). For reflection on the texts treated by Miller, see N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 32–84. See also Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Empty Tomb in the Gospel According to Mark,” in Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology, ed. Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 107–40; Collins, “The Worship of Jesus and the Imperial Cult,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism, ed. Carey C. Newman, James R. Davila, and Gladys S. Lewis (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 234–57; Stephen J. Patterson, The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998); and Stanley E. Porter, “Resurrection, the Greeks and the New Testament,” in Resurrection, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 52–81. ⁷ Markus Vinzent argues that prior to Marcion in the second century, Jesus’ Resurrection was absent from “Christian consciousness and belief” (Vinzent, Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011], 182), because “[t]he Pauline heritage of belief in the Resurrection of Christ had faded over time” (ibid., 77) and because the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John were written under Gnostic auspices in Rome shortly after Marcion’s death (ibid., 92). Vinzent’s argument is, however, eccentric to the extreme. ⁸ Maurice Wiles has pointed out that “the more isolated a phenomenon it [Jesus’ Resurrection] is understood to be, the more difficult the process of establishing its truth becomes” (Wiles, “A Naked Pillar of Rock,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, 116–27, at 121). ⁹ See Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 1. ¹⁰ Plato, Symposium, 211c–212b, trans. Michael Joyce, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 527–74, at 562–63.

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to us a profoundly unified form. Although Jesus’ mode of enacting God’s promises came as a surprise,¹¹ had Jesus’ whole figure not displayed supreme love and wisdom in fulfilling God’s promises to Israel, his Resurrection to glorified bodily life would simply not have been credible. At best, his bodily return could only have been received as an intensification of the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mk 5:22–42) or of Lazarus (Jn 11), who returned to further mundane and mortal life, and whose being raised did not inaugurate the eschaton. This book develops these three interrelated sets of arguments for the historical reality of Jesus’ Resurrection. I seek to draw together historical and theological reasons for believing that Jesus’ Resurrection happened.¹² The first four chapters are more historically oriented, while the last three are more theologically focused; but theology and history are present throughout. Historically, I am committed to view that when dealing with the claim that a miraculous event occurred, historians should follow “the method of hypothesis and verification with the aim of getting in the data (in the historian’s case the source material of whatever kind), doing so with appropriate simplicity or elegance, and shedding light on other areas.”¹³ If the result is that the data are best accounted for by Jesus rising from the dead to glorified life, then historians can say this—without thereby making a theological determination about whether such a miracle is possible or fitting.¹⁴ The theologian Guy Mansini comments that “the God who creates reason does not ask us to sin against this created good when he invites us to faith in revelation.”¹⁵ If so, then the risen Jesus wants us to be able to know that it is historically reasonable to believe that he rose from the dead, and also to know the full truth of his Resurrection. To know the latter—and indeed also to have

¹¹ Even while emphasizing fulfillment, therefore, I affirm that this is a radically surprising and surpassing fulfillment. On this point, see Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 20–1. ¹² See also Jean-Pierre Torrell, OP, Résurrection de Jésus et resurrection des morts. Foi, histoire et théologie (Paris: Cerf, 2012). ¹³ N. T. Wright, “Christ and the Cosmos: Kingdom and Creation in Gospel Perspective,” in Christ and the Created Order: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science, vol. 2, ed. Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 97–109, at 107. ¹⁴ Richard Swinburne remarks, “It is simply not possible to investigate whether Jesus rose from the dead without taking a view about how probable it is that there is a God likely to intervene in human history in this kind of way” (Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 202–3). I agree, but my point is that the historian—qua historian—need not (and indeed cannot) take a view on the probability of whether there is a God. Metaphysics and theology are required for knowledge of God, because God is not an empirically detectable reality but rather is the transcendent (and perfectly immanent) infinite source of all finite realities. See also Wolfhart Pannenberg, “History and the Reality of the Resurrection,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa, 62–72, at 62. ¹⁵ Guy Mansini, OSB, Fundamental Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 3.

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the best insight into the former—requires paying attention to the witness of the Old Testament and allowing it to teach us about God and his plan. To know the full truth of Jesus risen, we also need to experience his presence in the celebration of the Eucharist and to experience the fruitfulness of his selfsacrificial path, in union with the risen and ascended Christ and with his holy people the Church.

PARTICIPATORY KNOWLEDGE AND THE L IMITS OF H ISTORIOGRAPHY With respect to what might be called the “participatory” paths for knowing the full truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, the biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson has remarked that “Jesus is most fully and consistently learned within the context of the believing community of the church, because the risen Lord identifies himself with this community” and because in this community “Jesus is known and loved . . . as a personal presence and sustaining power.”¹⁶ At the outset of this book, let me register my agreement with Johnson. Historicalcritical scholarship cannot suffice by itself for knowing that Jesus rose from the dead, especially when Jesus’ Resurrection is properly understood as the Resurrection of the incarnate Son of God. While the surface layers of history can be probed by historical inquiry,¹⁷ other deeper layers involve the intimacy and ¹⁶ Luke Timothy Johnson, Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 23. In the words of another biblical scholar, Stefan Alkier, “[t]he investigation of historico-empirical reality,” while necessary and valuable since it has to do with “an ineluctable realm of the reality we experience,” is not the only path for seeking to know whether the disciples’ testimony is true (Stefan Alkier, The Reality of the Resurrection: The New Testament Witness, trans. Leroy A. Huizenga [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013], 2). See also Matthew J. Ramage, Jesus, Interpreted: Benedict XVI, Bart Ehrman, and the Historical Truth of the Gospels (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 261; Adrian Thatcher, “Resurrection and Rationality,” in The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, ed. Paul Avis (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1993), 171–86, at 180. For background to Thatcher’s argument, see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). ¹⁷ No historiographical inquiry can be unbiased: as John P. Meier says, “Objectivity in the quest for the historical Jesus is, to borrow a phrase from the theologian Karl Rahner, an ‘asymptomatic goal.’ It is a goal we have to keep pressing toward, even though we never fully reach it. . . . Concretely, it means knowing one’s sources, having clear criteria for making historical judgments about them, learning from other questers past and present, and inviting the criticism of one’s peers” (Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person [New York: Doubleday, 1991], 4–5). The problem is that even in fixing these “clear criteria” with regard to the figure of Jesus (accessible, as Meier emphasizes, only through theologically and typologically inflected texts), one already has to make theological judgments. Meier grants that “[t]here is no neutral Switzerland of the mind in the world of Jesus research” (ibid., 5). For Meier, “adhering to certain commonly held criteria” is the key solution, and he therefore argues that he is in fact able to make “a strict distinction between what I know

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communion that exist between persons and also between the Creator God and persons—the innermost personal and ontological dimension of history.¹⁸ It follows that Jesus’ Resurrection, while open to historical-critical inquiry, requires additional kinds of reasoning that answer more fully to the dimensions of lived human history. With regard to historical-critical inquiry, we must also keep in mind that, as the biblical scholar John Meier says, “all historical knowledge about human persons is limited by the very nature of the case” and, by comparison with more recent history, “[a]ncient history is much less quantifiable, much more dependent on inference based on such rough rules of thumb as the best explanation available, the more or most probable explanation, particular criteria for judging historicity, and analogy.”¹⁹ Meier’s point is that even when there is a good deal of nearly contemporaneous writing about an ancient historical figure—as there is about Jesus—the ability of historians to arrive at conclusions that go beyond tentative probability is quite limited. Does it therefore follow that we should bracket the question of the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection? Here I noted that another eminent biblical scholar, Walter Moberly, has recently warned against starting discussions of the Bible with “questions of historical reliability.”²⁰ Moberly remarks that according to the New Testament, the risen Jesus did not show himself to his opponents and say “I told you so.” Rather, Jesus consistently exercises a “noncoercive” authority, an authority rooted in the humility of interpersonal love and wisdom.²¹ By manifesting his risen body only to a chosen circle of people (even if this circle included a few hundred, as Paul suggests), the risen Jesus

about Jesus by research and reason and what I hold by faith” (ibid., 6). I accept that such a distinction can be made, but not as strictly as Meier supposes. What is included in the “criteria” that define what counts as “reason” will involve theological choices. In Meier’s multi-volume project, “a treatment of the resurrection is omitted not because it is denied but simply because the restrictive definition of the historical Jesus I will be using does not allow us to proceed into matters that can be affirmed only by faith” (ibid., 13). ¹⁸ This point explains the role of typological reasoning in the Gospels. See most recently Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014); Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016). On the “outside” and “inside” of historical events, see J. I. H. McDonald, The Resurrection: Narrative and Belief (London: SPCK, 1989), 137. ¹⁹ Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person, 23–4. Meier adds, “We cannot know the ‘real’ Jesus through historical research, whether we mean his total reality or just a reasonably complete biographical portrait. We can, however, know the ‘historical Jesus.’ . . . Having abandoned the naïve hope of knowing the ‘real’ Jesus by means of historical criticism, what do we mean when we say that we are pursuing the ‘historical Jesus’ or the ‘Jesus of history’? In brief, the Jesus of history is a modern abstraction and construct. By the Jesus of history I mean the Jesus whom we can ‘recover’ and examine by using the scientific tools of modern historical research” (ibid., 24–5). ²⁰ R. W. L. Moberly, The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 7. ²¹ Ibid., 153.

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ensured that the path knowing his reality will always be through his community of apostles. As a result, Moberly says, “Jesus’ resurrection is a reality that is likely to be recognizable only by, and make sense only to, a certain kind of openness and trust.”²² Moberly calls for an engagement with the Bible that allows for a participatory knowledge in which a significant part of the Bible’s “plausibility structure” is found in the requirement of “personal responsiveness” to God’s word.²³ I share Moberly’s appreciation for participatory knowledge and his sensitivity to biblical genres.²⁴ Once the genres of the Resurrection narratives are in view and historical reliability is not equated with the norms of modern historiography, Moberly and I (and Johnson) would also agree in affirming the reliability or truth of the New Testament’s proclamation that Jesus has risen from the dead. Yet, the case of Jesus’ Resurrection requires that questions of historical reliability not be sidelined, even at the outset. Although I agree with Moberly that a participatory stance will be more open to the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection,²⁵ it is important also to insist upon the reasonableness of affirming Jesus’ Resurrection on historical grounds. Faith in Jesus’ Resurrection is not unreasonable.²⁶

RESPONDING TO TROELTSCH All scholars can agree that “belief in the risen Jesus as Lord and Messiah (Acts 2.36) marked the effective bifurcation” of Judaism and Christianity,²⁷ but many scholars—including some Christian ones—concur with the theologian Ernst Troeltsch that Christian truth-claims cannot be evaluated by historians and thus cannot be considered “historical.” In 1898, Troeltsch famously argued that a “basic postulate of the historical method” is that “[a]greement with normal, customary, or at least frequently attested happenings and conditions ²² Ibid. ²³ Ibid., 138–9. ²⁴ See my Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). Among the genres present in the New Testament’s presentation of the risen Jesus, J. I. H. McDonald identifies “confessional formula, sermon, dialogue, apocalyptic vision and narrative” (McDonald, The Resurrection, 136). McDonald comments, “Narrative is not history, though it may be historically significant. Both narrative and history are concerned with truth” (ibid., 137). By “history,” McDonald means modern historiography. ²⁵ See also McDonald, The Resurrection, 1. ²⁶ For the opposite assumption, see Michael L. Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 210–14. For Satlow, the idea that Jesus rose from the dead or that in Jesus God was revealing himself is something that cannot be taken seriously by reasonable people; Jesus’ Resurrection does not even merit a mention (pro or contra) in his description of Christian origins. ²⁷ McDonald, The Resurrection, 137.

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as we have experienced them is the criterion of probability for all events that historical criticism can recognize as having actually or possibly happened.”²⁸ This position entails that the historian, qua historian, must rule out even the possibility of Jesus’ Resurrection. For many historians, the moment the evidence must be explained by divine action is the moment that “history” is replaced by “faith.” Let me offer a recent example of this view. The biblical scholar Dale Martin rightly cautions that “saying the resurrection of Jesus is ‘historical’ is not saying merely that it ‘occurred in the past.’ It is claiming that modern historians, using the commonly acknowledged tools and criteria of modern historiography, can demonstrate that the resurrection of Jesus . . . should be accepted as ‘historical’ by other professional historians.”²⁹ But for Martin, as for Troeltsch, if at any time the historical evidence points to divine action “we have moved out of history and into faith.”³⁰ Furthermore, for Martin, as for a number of historical-critical exegetes, the Resurrection narratives are so sketchy and contradictory among themselves—and Paul’s witness in 1 Corinthians 15 to the characteristics of a risen body is so odd—that no modern historian can or should take these texts seriously as evidence. In response, I grant that the New Testament narratives of Jesus’ Resurrection are not what we would possess had they been written by modern historians, who would have filled in many more external details, removed theological elaborations and additions, and interviewed many more witnesses.³¹ Second, however, we should affirm that since that it is Jesus’ Resurrection whose historicity is at issue, the fact that Hellenistic (mainly Jewish) Christians wrote the New Testament narratives is much to our advantage. After all, the Gospels depict the event in a manner that ensures that readers will perceive

²⁸ Ernst Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology,” in Troeltsch, Religion in History, trans. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), 11–32, at 13–14. ²⁹ Dale B. Martin, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-First Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 204. ³⁰ Ibid., 212. Martin exaggerates when he states: “According to Mark, no one saw the resurrected Jesus anywhere, though we may take from the young man’s instructions that Jesus intended to appear to the disciples later in Galilee” (ibid., 207, assuming that Mark’s Gospel originally ended after 16:8). Mark’s Gospel never says that “no one saw the resurrected Jesus anywhere,” and this claim should therefore not be attributed “to Mark” as Martin does. Martin goes on to claim, “According to Mark’s narrative, no appearances took place at all” (ibid.), but Mark never says anything of the sort. For Martin, the “contradictions and differences” (ibid., 210) present in the Resurrection narratives mean that historians cannot take these narratives seriously today, but historians of the ancient world rely upon the testimony found in ancient historiographical and biographical genres, and there are ways to assess critically such testimony without throwing up one’s hands at the “contradictions and differences.” See also Jerome H. Neyrey, SJ, The Resurrection Stories (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988), 98–9. ³¹ See Dale C. Allison, Jr., “The Resurrection of Jesus and Rational Apologetics,” Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 315–35, at 325–6.

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it as the transcendent mystery that it had to have been.³² The New Testament authors also recognize Jesus’ Resurrection as “the fulfillment of Jewish Scripture,” an aspect that, as the biblical scholar Brant Pitre points out, “is neglected in many modern-day books on the resurrection.”³³ Jesus’ Resurrection does not come out of the blue, but fulfills not only Jesus’ own history but also the history of God with his people. God worked through authors primed to appreciate and depict this relationship in all its prophetic depths. Third, we can admit that the eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus did not obtain Lockean clear and distinct ideas that made the full reality of Jesus risen accessible.³⁴ We read that among the witnesses themselves, “some doubted” the evidence of their eyes (Mt 28:17). As noted above, the risen Jesus did not rise in order to ensure that no one could doubt it. This is not to say, as Celsus thought, that the disciples experienced mere “imaginary appearances” or a “waking dream”—let alone, as Celsus also proposed, that perhaps Jesus did not die from his wounds on the Cross.³⁵ Instead, we are dealing with a surfeit of ³² Joseph Ratzinger argues that this character of transcendent mystery is “why it is so difficult, indeed absolutely impossible, for the Gospels to describe the encounter with the risen Christ” and “why they can only stammer when they speak of these meetings and seem to provide contradictory descriptions of them. In reality they are surprisingly unanimous in the dialectic of their statements, in the simultaneity of touching and not touching, or recognizing and not recognizing, of complete identity between the crucified and the risen Christ and complete transformation. People recognize the Lord and yet do not recognize him again; people touch him, and yet he is untouchable; he is the same and yet quite different” (Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004], 308). ³³ Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (New York: Random House, 2016), 184. ³⁴ For Locke’s account of clear and distinct ideas, see John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Book II. In Book IV, Locke takes up the topic of faith and reason, and argues—too strongly, and in a manner that shapes later Christian apologetics (see Chapter 5 of the present book)—both that it “belongs to Reason, to judge of the Truth of its being a Revelation” (“whether it be a divine Revelation or no, Reason must judge”) and furthermore that “[t]here can be no evidence, that any traditional Revelation is of divine Original, in the Words we receive it, and in the Sense we understand it, so clear, and so certain, as that of the Principles of Reason: And therefore, Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with the clear and self-evident Dictates of Reason, has a Right to be urged, or assented to, as a Matter of Faith, wherein Reason hath nothing to do” (ibid., Book IV, ch. 18, §§8, 10, pp. 694–6). ³⁵ Origen, Against Celsus, II.60–1, trans. Frederick Crombie and W. H. Cairns, in Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, ed. A. Cleveland Coxe (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 395–669, at 455–6. For further examples of the view that Jesus did not actually die on the Cross, see Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 38–47, as well as the fascinating study by Gerald O’Collins, SJ and Daniel Kendall, SJ, “On Reissuing Venturini,” Gregorianum 75 (1994): 241–65. Influenced by Platonism and also by the fact that Jesus’ body rose glorified, Origen himself holds that “after His resurrection, He existed in a body intermediate, as it were, between the grossness of that which He had before His sufferings, and the appearance of a soul uncovered by such a body” (ibid., II.62, 456). See also the historical fiction of Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010), which invents a twin for Jesus who, after Jesus’ death, pretends to be the risen Jesus.

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reality, as befits a glorified body. Jesus is raised bodily from death, but he is raised to a glorified mode of bodily existence, in which he is no longer subject to the earthly limitations that constrain the human body in the present life. Confronted with the reality of his Resurrection, the disciples experienced the awed “fear” (Mt 28:8) and “trembling and astonishment” (Mk 16:8) that characterize the revelation of a transcendent reality, whose scope exceeds the bounds of reason’s powers.³⁶ In manifesting himself as risen, Jesus sought primarily to allow for participation in his Resurrection as a mystery of his Lordship. Fourth and correspondingly, we must insist that historical evidence cannot take the place of the apostles’ (and the whole Church’s) witness to the Lordship of Christ. Through faith in the risen and ascended Jesus, we enter into real communion with him: our lives are transformed and, in the Spirit, we become “God’s temple” (1 Cor 3:16) and the “body of Christ” (1 Cor 12:27).³⁷ As the theologian Donald MacKinnon suggests, we are dealing with a divine mystery that “touch[es] what is ultimate, which is at once within and yet wholly beyond our comprehension.”³⁸ Because it is within our comprehension, Jesus’ Resurrection has evidence capable of articulation and defense; but because it is beyond our comprehension, to know it fully and properly requires the action of Christ Jesus and the Spirit.³⁹ The theologian Brian Robinette expresses the essential mystery of Jesus’ Resurrection: “What was familiar became strange,”⁴⁰ or perhaps more accurately, became even stranger, given ³⁶ Against the view that Mark 16:1–8 implies not bodily Resurrection but rather merely Jesus’ exaltation or apotheosis or his new status as a hero whose grave should be venerated, see Peter G. Bolt, “Mk 16:1–8: The Empty Tomb of a Hero?” Tyndale Bulletin 47 (1996): 27–37, responding to (among others) Adela Yarbro Collins, “Apotheosis and Resurrection,” in The New Testament and Hellenistic Judaism, ed. P. Borgen and S. Giversen (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1995), 88–100. Bolt sums up the point in his Jesus’ Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark’s Early Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 266. Gerald O’Collins, SJ likewise responds to Adela Yarbro Collins and others in his Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 90–3, 108–9. ³⁷ For further discussion, see McDonald, The Resurrection, 33–5. See also my Retrieving the Christian Virtue of Temperance: Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming). ³⁸ D. M. MacKinnon, “Good Friday and Easter: An Interpretation,” in The Resurrection: A Dialogue by G. W. H. Lampe and D. M. MacKinnon, ed. William Purcell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 73–85, at 85. ³⁹ Put another way, the praeambula fidei are not preconditions of faith, but rather they are handmaids of the faith. The witness of the Church includes praeambula (such as the evidence for God’s existence and Jesus’ Resurrection) but does not begin with praeambula. ⁴⁰ Brian D. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 334; see also 341–2. Against the view that Jesus’ “resurrection did take place, but it did not take place in empirical space and time” because it was an event that radically transcended the limits of history, see Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Resurrection of Jesus and Roman Catholic Fundamental Theology,” in The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Resurrection of Jesus, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall,

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that Jesus was already greatly surprising and often shocking to those who encountered him during his lifetime. Fifth, there is nonetheless no need to grant that the “historical” is limited in the way that Troeltsch conceives. Historians can do their work without making an a priori judgment about the active presence of the Creator God in the world. Using the normal critical methods of assessing empirical evidence from the ancient world, historians can arrive at probabilities about what happened in the past, without needing to rule out that a miraculous event may have occurred. Historians are not competent to judge whether God has acted in history, but neither are they competent to rule out the possibility of such action in evaluating the evidence that comes to them. The historical task is to assess the evidence and to account for it in the simplest and most comprehensive manner.

THE P LAN OF THE WORK With this background in view, let me briefly survey the seven chapters of this book, which move from more historical (though still theological) to more theological (though still historical). The first chapter addresses the issues that arise when the Gospels are analyzed from a historical-critical perspective. I explore the conclusions of three interpreters of Jesus’ Resurrection: Edward Schillebeeckx, Dale Allison, and N. T. Wright. All three of these scholars profess belief that Jesus truly rose from the dead. Allison and Wright, however, sharply criticize Schillebeeckx’s position, and they also differ sharply from each other. Allison suggests that historians do not have warrant to hold that Jesus’ actual Resurrection is the best possible historical explanation of the first Christians’ proclamation. By contrast, Wright argues that historically speaking, only the concrete, bodily manifestation of the risen Jesus can adequately account for the shifts in eschatological worldview that mark the first Christians after the ignominious crucifixion of Jesus. Without denying the power of Allison’s concerns, I find Wright’s arguments to be convincing. SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 213–48, at 246. For critical discussion of the views of the early Karl Barth and of Rudolf Bultmann in this regard, see Peter Carnley, The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 96–147. For a more recent example of the perspective that Fiorenza and Carnley rightly contest, see S. H. Hooke, The Resurrection of Christ: As History and Experience (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967). Van A. Harvey argues that Barth’s position in the Church Dogmatics ends up being rather contradictory: see Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 159. The definitive study of the place of the Resurrection of Jesus within the whole of Barth’s theology, over the course of its development, is R. Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). See also Bernard Prusak, “Bodily Resurrection in Catholic Perspectives,” Theological Studies 61 (2000): 64–105.

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The second chapter has to do with historical remembrance. If Jesus rose from the dead, how can we know that this is indeed so? How is the knowledge of Jesus’ Resurrection mediated through the centuries? I argue that God provides two modes. First, indebted to the work of the biblical scholar Richard Bauckham—which I summarize—I note that the Gospels contain the testimony of eyewitnesses to the events they report. This is essentially a commonsense argument, given that the region of Jerusalem and Galilee was a small region, and many people who saw Jesus (or who knew people who knew him) were telling their stories and assessing the stories of others during the time in which Paul and the evangelists were active. In addition to the Gospels’ eyewitness testimony, God has given us a second mode of knowing the risen Jesus, namely through liturgical remembrance.⁴¹ The risen Jesus wants us to know him in and through his apostolic community, the inaugurated kingdom of God, in which the gospel is proclaimed and the Eucharist celebrated. The third chapter returns to the work of the biblical scholars Allison and Wright, this time in light of the question of what the Old Testament Scriptures can offer with respect to evaluating the historical plausibility of the Resurrection of Jesus. Wright sets forth in great detail the Old Testament background with regard to resurrection, and he offers particular insight into the Second Temple period. He shows that the people of Israel came to believe that their God would rescue them even from death. This is valuable background, but we should also look to the background that begins with the revelation of the Creator God (Genesis 1) and that continues through the Torah, prophetic books, and wisdom literature. In this way, we can learn from Israel’s understanding of “history” in the light of the Creator God who loves his people. In evaluating the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection, we should ask if it fits with the God who reveals himself and his plan of salvation in Israel’s Scriptures. With this goal in view, I survey the Old Testament citations that Thomas Aquinas includes in his commentary on Jesus’ Resurrection appearances in John 20–1.⁴² Commenting upon Jesus’ Resurrection,

⁴¹ Here I am identifying a central element of the domain that Catholics (and Orthodox) term “Tradition.” Avery Dulles, SJ comments, “Tradition is ‘divine’ insofar as it is aroused and sustained by God; it is ‘apostolic’ insofar as it originates with the apostles; it is ‘living’ insofar as it remains contemporary with every generation”; and Dulles adds, “Access to tradition is gained primarily through a grace-filled life within the community of faith . . . . [T]radition is grasped through familiarity or participation as a result of dwelling within the Church, taking part in its worship, and behaving according to its standards” (Dulles, The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, new expanded edition [New York: Crossroad, 1996], 103). Tradition is the lived reality of communion with Christ in his Spirit-filled community, and therefore is both “apostolic” and “living” in the Church. ⁴² I employ Aquinas in this book in a manner similar to how Gerald O’Collins engages Augustine in his Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ. O’Collins shows that it is helpful to bring pre-historical-critical (and post-biblical) voices into the contemporary conversation about the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection.

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Aquinas provides a wide range of Old Testament citations that, when viewed as an assemblage, instruct us profoundly about the context in which Jesus’ Resurrection is credible. My fourth chapter addresses the issue of the strangeness of Jesus’ Resurrection. Not only are the descriptions of the Resurrection appearances filled with what seem to be very strange encounters, but also the claim that a crucified man has been raised from the dead to a glorified bodily existence is utterly strange. Christian writers have long recognized the strangeness of the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. To lessen this strangeness, many authors have sought to spiritualize this claim by various means. Having already discussed Schillebeeckx’s spiritualizing proposal (Chapter 1), I set forth the views of some contemporary biblical scholars and theologians who advocate, in various ways, a spiritualized account of Jesus’ Resurrection. I argue that such efforts to decrease the radical strangeness of the claim— namely that it was really the crucified Jesus who appeared in his palpably alive (tangible but glorified) flesh—are a mistake, since the New Testament insists precisely upon the strangeness. Fully aware of what a strange claim they were making, Paul and the other New Testament authors made it anyway, refusing to take the option of lessening its strangeness in order to make it more plausible. Similarly, in his Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas appeals to John of Damascus for assistance in retaining the strangeness of the claim. Damascene lived in a culture where Muslim and Gnostic spiritualizations of Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection were commonplace. My point is that although it may seem that a spiritualized Resurrection is more plausible,⁴³ in fact it is the very strangeness of the claim that makes it more credible, since the first Christians refused the opportunity to spiritualize it in ways that would have saved them from being “mocked” (Acts 17:32).⁴⁴ As the biblical scholar Raymond Brown points out, the first Christians could “have preached that, like Elijah, Jesus was assumed into heaven and that he would return at the last judgment,” or Christians could

⁴³ Kenan B. Osborne, OFM falls into this mistake when, in seeking to defend Jesus’ Resurrection, he writes approvingly that “renewed theological scholarship on the resurrection understands the seeing, hearing, and touching of Jesus’ risen body to be secondary issues; even the empty tomb is a secondary issue” (Osborne, The Resurrection of Jesus: New Considerations for Its Theological Interpretation [New York: Paulist Press, 1997], 105). Wiles is defending the view that “for those for whom it no longer seems possible to affirm the ostensibly miraculous claims about the resurrection of Jesus, various lines of constructive possibility for a theological treatment of resurrection still lie open” (ibid., 125). See also David Jenkins, God, Miracle and the Church of England (London: SCM Press, 1987). ⁴⁴ For the contrary view that, in fact, the narratives of the Resurrection appearances bear not only Jewish apocalyptic but also profoundly Gnostic marks, see J. M. Robinson, “Jesus: From Easter to Valentinus (or to the Apostles’ Creed),” Journal of Biblical Literature 101 (1982): 5–37. J. I. H. McDonald critically assesses Robinson’s perspective on the Resurrection appearances: see McDonald, The Resurrection, 19.

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have applied to Jesus the spiritual immortality described in the Book of Wisdom.⁴⁵ Brown rightly emphasizes that “the choice of resurrection language was not an inevitability for the early Jews who believed in Jesus.”⁴⁶ The first four chapters, then, set forth the following arguments for the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection: the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection best accounts for the historical evidence (Chapter 1); we know the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection by means of eyewitness testimony and liturgical remembrance that establishes personal communion with him and with each other in accord with the kingdom-inaugurating purpose of his mission (Chapter 2); the covenantal Creator God whom we come to know in the Old Testament is the guarantor of the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection (Chapter 3); and the repeated attempts to minimize the strangeness of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead show, despite themselves, the credibility of the claim (Chapter 4). In light of the work of these chapters, my fifth chapter turns to the question of how strong the evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection needs to be in order to be credible and thereby to provide a foundation for the act of faith. Because the act of faith is supernatural, it is not based on the sufficiency of the reasons for faith, but neither is it an irrational act or a blind leap.⁴⁷ I engage the perspectives of the Catholic theologians Joseph Fenton, Pierre Rousselot, and Bernard Lonergan concerning the reasonableness of faith. Given the signal importance of Jesus’ Resurrection for demonstrating that God has in fact revealed himself in Jesus, how clear does the evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection need to be? I argue that Fenton’s contribution consists in insisting upon the importance of arguing historically for Jesus’ Resurrection,⁴⁸ whereas what is added by Rousselot and Lonergan is the significance of love in our judgments of rational credibility. Lonergan shows a path beyond Fenton’s exaggerated claim that historians must be able to show, without a doubt or fear of error, that Jesus was raised from the dead. The sixth chapter similarly examines the interplay between historical arguments and the place of love in perceiving the works of God. Arguing that the

⁴⁵ Raymond E. Brown, SS, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), 75. ⁴⁶ Ibid., 76. ⁴⁷ Andrew Davison aptly remarks that “although the ‘New Atheists’ portray Christian commitment as an absurdist leap in the dark, it cannot be that. Christianity is, after all, the religion of the Word, the Logos. We therefore rebuff the New Atheists not for being too rational but rather for not being rational enough” (Davison, “Introduction,” in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, ed. Andrew Davison [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012], xxv–xxviii, at xxvi). ⁴⁸ In a review of the recent reprint of Fenton’s mid-twentieth century apologetic work— Joseph Clifford Fenton, Laying the Foundation: A Handbook of Catholic Apologetics and Fundamental Theology (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2016)—the Church historian Patrick Carey explains some of the reasons why this work merits a contemporary audience: see Carey, “Fenton Returns,” First Things 282 (April 2018): 54–8, at 57.

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study of Jesus should involve contemplation, I examine what Thomas Aquinas has to say about contemplation and about Jesus as “truth in person.” I also reflect upon Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI’s desire to see the face of Jesus, a desire that he thinks requires various approaches to Jesus, including historical arguments. Lastly, I give attention to von Balthasar’s suggestion that in matters of divine revelation (including Jesus’ Resurrection), “love alone is credible.” On this view, Jesus’ Resurrection is credible only because of the extraordinary love that he shows on the Cross, a love that is the center of all his words and deeds during his lifetime and that expands upon and confirms God’s love for his people Israel.⁴⁹ It seems to me that this emphasis on perceiving the form of absolute love as the mark of the true and definitive revelation of God is salutary. Jesus’ Resurrection is not the resurrection of merely anyone, but the Resurrection of the incarnation of divine Love. Only as such is Jesus’ Resurrection credible. In this sense, von Balthasar is correct that “[a]ll that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves.”⁵⁰ But this contemplative fullness, while instructive, does not negate the value of historical arguments for the reasonableness of faith in Jesus’ Resurrection. My final chapter addresses a question that inevitably arises in studies of Jesus’ Resurrection. Namely, if Jesus rose from the dead, why did he not show himself again publicly and tangibly after his original Resurrection appearances to his disciples? Even if one grants, as I do, that he has shown himself to later Christians who have received mystical experiences—in a manner that does not replicate his unique appearances during the forty days or to Paul⁵¹—why has he never shown himself publicly during times of ecclesiastical division, atheistic hedonism, or extreme suffering and violence, when his public visible presence might have prevented terrible things from occurring?

⁴⁹ Or as Torrance puts it, what we discover in the risen Lord is that “God’s self-utterance in word has left its profound imprint upon the shape and content of the biblical Scriptures” (Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 4). ⁵⁰ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 105. Von Balthasar adds that the necessity of contemplation is built into the New Testament through its manner of teaching about Jesus, a manner that insists upon mystery (see ibid., 175). He states that “the Christian has an absolute duty to cultivate trinitarian contemplation; he must come to see that what Jesus shows us of himself, what he bids us imitate, is the inner life of God, appearing in Person and overtaking us” (ibid., 181). ⁵¹ See Sandra M. Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst: Essays on the Resurrection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013), 28–9: “St. Teresa of Avila testifies that, after her experience of transforming union became virtually habitual, Jesus was almost always perceptibly present at her side. Julian of Norwich speaks of seeing Jesus suffering on the cross. Catherine of Siena received a wedding ring from Jesus during an experience of mystical espousal. Despite the bodiliness of these experiences, they do not involve the quasi-physicality of the post-Easter accounts. All of these mystics refer to their experiences as ‘visions,’ Teresa specifying that they are ‘intellectual’ as opposed to imaginative visions.”

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In response, I note that according to the Gospels, Jesus himself predicted that his followers would suffer greatly. Arguably, the risen Jesus allows the conditions of the fallen world to continue not only because he seeks out fallen humans such as ourselves, but also because the path of cruciform suffering—of being stripped of earthly things to which we desire to cleave—is a path of configuration to Jesus’ self-giving love.⁵² Through the Holy Spirit, we sinners learn how to love, both by helping our suffering neighbor and by our own suffering in union with Jesus. Jesus does not inflict this suffering upon us, let alone will it, but he permits it with the assurance that (as the Lord tells Paul) “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). In developing this point in Chapter 7, I pay particular attention to contemporary biblical scholarship about the purpose of Jesus’ Ascension. According to the biblical scholar Michael Morales, the risen Jesus ascends in order to help us ascend to God rather than, as would otherwise be our wont, to cleave to the world. Likewise, the biblical scholar Brant Pitre explores how the ascended Jesus draws his people into his transcendent kingdom (ultimately the new creation) rather than allowing us idolatrously to rest content with the present world. In this way, Jesus mercifully overcomes our sin, which is rooted in cleaving to worldly things over God.⁵³ Thus, the fact that Jesus does not appear to each generation pertains to the manner of the Church’s configuration to him and participation in his reconciling work. We follow our Head in the New Exodus to the heavenly Jerusalem, nourished by the new manna (the Eucharist) and guided by his Spirit.⁵⁴ His reigning in love and pouring out his Spirit enables believers already to share in his kingdom, while awaiting the fullness of the consummation at his glorious coming. As von Balthasar comments, the result is that Christians, “nourished by a source which lies beyond the limits of this world,” possess a true “glimmer of the light of freedom in a world of murder and senselessness.”⁵⁵ My seven chapters do not attempt to exhaust the arguments in favor of the rational credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection. Other good arguments can be and have been advanced. For example, Thomas Joseph White has pointed out that Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God in ways that show that Jesus “took ⁵² I make this argument more fully in my Dying and the Virtues (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), chapter 7. ⁵³ For emphasis on the forgiveness of sins as the purpose of the Church, see Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst, 176–7. ⁵⁴ On the Spirit’s role, see the observation (with regard to the Gospel of John) by Raymond E. Brown, SS in his The Gospel According to John (xiii–xxi) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 1139. ⁵⁵ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God, trans. R. John Halliburton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 7.

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himself to be a final emissary of God at the end of the ages”; that Jesus spoke of himself as “the Son” who enjoyed a unique relationship with his divine “Father”; that Jesus claimed divine power for his ministry of healing and of forgiving sins and made clear that he was “displacing the Temple as the locus of sacrifice and reconciliation with God”; and that Jesus “saw in his own death the coming of the eschaton or end times.”⁵⁶ As White observes, if any one of these aspects of Jesus’ worldview is granted, it is evident that “we are dealing with a person who claimed to have a very unique historical status and to stand in an utterly unique relationship to the God of Israel.”⁵⁷ The glorious Resurrection (and, for that matter, the crucifixion) of such a person is more credible than it would be if Jesus had gone through life without claiming to be more than an average pious Jew. This is especially so given that the Creator God exists—a point that White elsewhere defends at length.⁵⁸ Similarly, Andrew Ter Ern Loke, in his The Origin of Divine Christology, argues the first Jewish Christians went so far as to worship Jesus, despite his having been crucified, in part because they knew that he had risen from the dead to glorified life.⁵⁹

REASONS FOR NOT DEFEND ING TH E HISTORICITY OF JESUS ’ RESURRECTION Before proceeding to my chapters, I should say a little more about the scholarly context in which I have written the book. Both believers and nonbelievers in Jesus’ Resurrection have maintained that a book like the present one is a serious mistake. Let me briefly explain their views, as a foundation for disagreement with them. For example, some Christian scholars argue that historically oriented apologetics for Jesus’ Resurrection is a distraction, because Christianity stands or falls upon the truth of Christian experience alone. Blaise Pascal famously remarks in the Pensées that it is often not reason that stands in the way of faith, but rather the heart: “You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure. Now it is up to you to begin.”⁶⁰ If we have truly lived Christian faith, then and only then will we come to know the truth of what Christianity professes. Along these lines, the biblical scholar Christopher Rowland argues that “[e]ven if we conclude that the stories in the Gospels reflect fairly ⁵⁶ White, The Light of Christ, 145–6. ⁵⁷ Ibid., 146. ⁵⁸ See Thomas Joseph White, OP, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology, 2nd ed. (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2016). ⁵⁹ See Andrew Ter Ern Loke, The Origin of Divine Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). ⁶⁰ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995), §816, p. 246.

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accurately what may have gone on, preoccupation with the historical evidence can never be a substitute for a life lived in obedience to Christ.”⁶¹ Rowland warns against a lifetime spent merely in academic sleuthing. He points out, “A narrow preoccupation with the past can so easily become the be-all and end-all of study of the Resurrection,” a “fascination, even obsession.”⁶² According to Rowland—and I share his concern about obsessive sleuthing—an obsession with historical evidence fosters two errors. First, in the quest for secure “facts” about the past, people miss the real meaning of faith in the Resurrection, which, Rowland argues, is never “merely about what may have happened then,” but instead (in his view) “is more about what those who listen to and interpret the story of the Resurrection of Jesus do about it themselves.”⁶³ Second, the search for the facts about “the events of the first Easter” tends to suppose that there was, at the outset, an uninterpreted and therefore purely objective encounter.⁶⁴ Although I agree with Rowland that the witnesses who saw the risen Jesus interpreted their experience theologically, Rowland goes further and claims that “[t]here is no privileged moment when a favoured few saw face to face while the rest of us have to make do with seeing in a glass darkly.”⁶⁵ If so, then the apostles had no privileged experience of seeing the risen Jesus, which would mean that the evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection is at best highly flimsy. Furthermore, the center of faith in the Resurrection is always Jesus’ Resurrection itself, not our faith in it, no matter how enlivening the latter is. Along Rowland’s lines, but going well beyond him, the biblical scholar Barnabas Lindars opines that “the feeling that so many people have that the empty tomb is essential for Resurrection faith proves to be both unnecessary and misleading.”⁶⁶ It is unnecessary, he thinks, because “[i]t promotes reliance on unprovable historical details.”⁶⁷ It is misleading because for Paul, according to Lindars, it does not matter “whether Jesus’ mortal and corruptible body remained in the tomb. The question whether the tomb was empty is simply irrelevant.”⁶⁸ I note, however, that Paul explicitly says that if Jesus’ corpse remained a corpse, then we are “still in [our] sins” and our “faith is futile” (1 Cor 15:17). Much like Lindars, and from an explicitly Christian perspective, Dale Martin argues that while historians can reasonably affirm that “Paul and ⁶¹ Christopher Rowland, “Interpreting the Resurrection,” in The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, ed. Paul Avis, 68–84, at 68. ⁶² Ibid., 69. ⁶³ Ibid., 68–9. ⁶⁴ Ibid., 69. ⁶⁵ Ibid.; his italics. ⁶⁶ Barnabas Lindars, “The Resurrection and the Empty Tomb,” in The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 116–35, at 134. ⁶⁷ Ibid. ⁶⁸ Ibid. See also Lindars, “The Apocalyptic Myth and the Death of Christ,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 57 (1975): 366–87, for the view that the grieving disciples could have arrived, through the process of grieving, at a deep sense that Jesus was alive in glory.

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some other disciples of Jesus sincerely believed they saw him sometime, somewhere after his death,” historians nonetheless cannot reasonably conclude anything about what these first Christians saw or why they saw it.⁶⁹ Historians can only grant that Paul and a few others “experienced a vision, or saw a figure from a distance they took to be Jesus, or saw a play of light they later decided was the body of Jesus.”⁷⁰ In Martin’s view, this does not impact Christian faith at all. This is because he holds that Christian faith need not concern itself with the question of whether anything happened to Jesus’ corpse. According to Martin, Christians today need merely to believe that something happened to Paul and some other disciples, and to affirm that whatever happened to them, “God caused it.”⁷¹ So long as we believe that God caused the disciples to believe that they experienced an encounter of some kind with “Jesus” after his death, then Martin thinks that we have enough to confess in faith that “God did in fact vindicate the prophet Jesus as God’s son and Messiah.”⁷² He considers that we do not need any precise view of what “resurrection” involves, including whether “resurrection” involves a risen “body” or whether resurrection instead names “some kind of consciousness” or simply a “rest” in God’s peace.⁷³ Rowland, Lindars, and Martin are all trying to get around problems that arise for Christian faith when biblical scholars raise doubts about historicity of the Resurrection narratives. But if the tomb was not empty, if Jesus’ crucified corpse was not actually raised to glorious life, then Christianity is baseless, no matter how rich Christian life and practice may be today (Rowland), and no matter how powerful or sincere the disciples’ experience of the “risen” Jesus may have been (Lindars, Martin). If Jesus did not manifest his risen body in a credible way, then there is no reason to believe that God caused anything; Christian faith would be almost surely based upon a misunderstanding. This point is demonstrated by the Jewish scholar Dan Cohn-Sherbok. Cohn-Sherbok holds the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection to be implausible on a number of grounds, including theological ones. For one thing, “Jesus did not fulfil the traditional role of the Messiah.”⁷⁴ This expected role included bringing about “the resurrection of the dead, the ingathering of the exiles to Zion, and a golden age of history”—or, if not precisely a “golden age of history,” then at least the “renovation of the world” and the inauguration, through judgment, of the “World to Come.”⁷⁵ If one assumes that these ⁶⁹ Martin, Biblical Truths, 212. ⁷⁰ Ibid. ⁷¹ Ibid. ⁷² Ibid., 214. ⁷³ Ibid., 214–15. See also Martin’s discussion of our hope in future resurrection, in ibid., 304–8. ⁷⁴ Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish View,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa, 184–200, at 191. ⁷⁵ Ibid. See also the observation (stating the viewpoint of the Gospel of Luke) by Graham Stanton, “Early Objections to the Resurrection of Jesus,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, 79–94, at 89: “What separates most Jews and most Christians from one another is

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Messianic expectations were not in some way taken up by Jesus, then the judgment that these things have not happened is strong evidence against Jesus’ status as Messiah. If he is not the Messiah, then his Resurrection prior to the general resurrection would be unintelligible. Like many historical-critical biblical scholars, Cohn-Sherbok also finds “the conflicting records of the gospel writers” to be highly discouraging with respect to the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection.⁷⁶ He notes that the Letters of Paul and the Gospels were written to persuade people to become Christians, and so, as a historical matter, one would need “corroborating evidence” before accepting this evangelistic testimony.⁷⁷ He emphasizes that “the Gospels do not provide conclusive proof of Jesus’ resurrection,” and he maintains that it is quite “possible, indeed likely, that those who encountered Jesus after his crucifixion had nothing more than a subjective psychological experience.”⁷⁸ At the same time, Cohn-Sherbok notes that theoretically, he still could be convinced that Jesus is risen from the dead, but it would take “solid, substantial, objective evidence.”⁷⁹ Given the lack of sufficient evidence in the New Testament, he argues that what is now required is an appearance of the risen Jesus “in the public domain,” “witnessed by multitudes, photographed, recorded on video cameras, shown on television, and announced in newspapers and magazines worldwide.”⁸⁰ This would turn the risen Jesus into rather tawdry material for the sensationalist media. But Cohn-Sherbok, to his credit, would also require theologically compelling evidence, namely, “the ingathering of the exiles, the rebuilding of the Temple, the resurrection of all those who have died, the advent of the Days of the Messiah, final judgement.”⁸¹ From a different perspective, but equally skeptically, the biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan contends that “Jesus’ first followers knew almost nothing whatsoever about the details of his crucifixion, death, or burial.”⁸² This seems a clear stretch, since Jesus’ crucifixion was a public event and he had many followers, some of whom likely witnessed his death and/or participated in his burial. Another well-known biblical scholar, Gerd Lüdemann, believes that the massive fraud unintentionally perpetuated by the first Christians came about through a hallucinatory vision experienced by Peter soon after Jesus’ crucifixion, a hallucinatory experience that infected others with the

not the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, but whether or not Jesus fulfils the messianic hopes of Israel.” ⁷⁶ Cohn-Sherbok, “The Resurrection of Jesus,” 197. ⁷⁷ Ibid. ⁷⁸ Ibid. ⁷⁹ Ibid., 198. ⁸⁰ Ibid. ⁸¹ Ibid. ⁸² John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 163. For arguments against the truth of the empty tomb, see also Martin, Biblical Truths, 211. Numerous scholars share this view that the location of Jesus’ tomb (if any) was not known to his followers: see, among others, Joachim Jeremias, Heiligengräber in Jesu Umwelt (Mt. 23,29; Lk. 11,47): Eine Untersuchung zur Volksreligion der Zeit Jesu (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1958), 145.

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same experience.⁸³ To name one more example from the realm of biblical scholarship, Michael Goulder holds that a variety of toxic factors distorted the minds of the first Christians: cognitive dissonance, guilt, self-preservation, pressure from outside, bereavement, intense religious upbringings, a tendency to fanaticism, collective delusion, desire to have power, thirst for the admiration of others, hysteria, sheer inventiveness, and the like. Indebted to the philosopher David Hume, he concludes that it is not possible to affirm historically that Jesus was resurrected, because “[h]ypotheses, or explanations, should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary: we do not need both a natural and a supernatural explanation for any phenomenon: experience shows that we should always prefer the natural hypothesis, or we shall fall into superstition.”⁸⁴ According to Goulder, the empty tomb must be a late invention, because Paul does not mention it.⁸⁵ Similar proposals come from some natural scientists who write about religion from an atheistic perspective, in light of a nominal Christian upbringing. For example, the entomologist Edward O. Wilson correctly observes that hallucinatory visions are “widespread through the cultures of the world,” and he finds that “[n]atural sleep and drug-induced dreams have long been viewed in Western civilization as a portal to the divine.”⁸⁶ On this basis, and without further argument, he concludes that “the disciples’ account of the Resurrection” is “dreamlike” and therefore hallucinatory.⁸⁷ Along the same lines, in The God Delusion, the biologist Richard Dawkins devotes a lengthy discussion to the ability of the brain to produce optical illusions and hallucinations. He notes that the brain “is well capable of constructing ‘visions’ and ‘visitations’ of the utmost veridical power,” and he gives attention to Marian apparitions and ⁸³ Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 174. See the response by Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Die Auferstehung Jesu—Historie und Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 91 (1994): 318–28; as well as the critique of Crossan and Lüdemann in Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, 87–101, at 87. ⁸⁴ Michael Goulder, “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, 48–61, at 55. For an excellent response to Goulder, see Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 479–95. Licona also draws upon Goulder’s “Jesus’ Resurrection and Christian Origins: A Response to N. T. Wright,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3 (2005): 187–95; Goulder, “An Old Friend Incognito,” Scottish Journal of Theology 45 (1992): 487–513; and Goulder, “The Explanatory Power of Conversion-Visions,” in Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment? A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, ed. Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 86–103. ⁸⁵ See also Lidija Novakovic, Resurrection: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 151–2. Novakovic makes much of the fact that 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 does not mention an empty tomb, though she grants that verse 4 seems to indicate “the emptiness of the tomb” (ibid., 151). ⁸⁶ Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 73. ⁸⁷ Ibid.

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the like before concluding, with the Resurrection accounts implicitly in view, that he has thereby said “really all that needs to be said about personal ‘experiences’ of gods or other religious phenomena. If you’ve had such an experience, you may well find yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.”⁸⁸ The visions of a risen Jesus may have captivated a pre-scientific age, but according to Dawkins we now know, due to brain studies, that it was all an easily explicable error. Finally, in her novel Robert Elsmere, which sold over a million copies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, Mary Ward depicts the title character, an Anglican priest, losing his faith in the Resurrection of Jesus. Ward’s guiding philosophy is that the scientific and social laws that we empirically perceive at work today—including the law that dead people do not rise to glorious life—must have also held firm in Jesus’ day. As the philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, “The assumption is that we, in our rational age of impersonal orders, know perfectly well what these laws are, and have nothing to learn from first-century Palestinian fisherman.”⁸⁹ According to this assumption, loss of faith in Jesus’ Resurrection is a necessary result of the process by which “science emerges out of earlier ignorance and irrationality.”⁹⁰

THEOLOGICAL APOLOGETICS AND HUMAN REASON These arguments for denying that Jesus rose from the dead, or for denying the value of historical apologetics, are not persuasive, as I will contend in this book. But one final step is needed before turning to my chapters. While I maintain that people can reasonably arrive at the judgment that Jesus rose from the dead to glorious life, I do not think that the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection can be denied only by those who (as Rowan Williams puts it) are “just obstinate in refusing to see what was under their noses.”⁹¹ God has chosen to manifest the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection—like the truth of Jesus’ life and ⁸⁸ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 90–2. ⁸⁹ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 386. ⁹⁰ Ibid. ⁹¹ Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, 87–101, at 89. See also the concerns regarding “myopic positivism” raised by Francis Watson, “ ‘He is not here’: Towards a Theology of the Empty Tomb,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, 95–107. Inspired by Bernard Lonergan, N. T. Wright somewhat similarly argues for an “epistemology of love”—for taking interpersonal “love as the basic mode of knowing”—in his The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 195.

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death—in ways that are deeply personal and communal. As the biblical scholar C. F. Evans observes with respect to the Gospel narratives, “God’s dealings with and movement towards the world is indirect and by way of his direct dealings with . . . Jesus and his disciples.”⁹² According to Scripture, when Jesus’ Resurrection takes place, the risen Jesus makes himself directly known to only a few people. This means that much depends upon believers’ personal witness to “all nations,” a witness in and through which the risen Jesus promises to be present (Mt 28:19–20).⁹³ Because it may therefore seem that the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead has not been made clear enough to warrant our reasonable belief, let me briefly give some attention to the way in which the proclamation of Jesus’ Resurrection engages human reason. The philosopher Richard Swinburne and the theologian Gerald O’Collins have made significant contributions to this domain. In The Resurrection of God Incarnate, Swinburne first provides general background for why God would become incarnate and discussion of how evidence about Jesus should be assessed. He then examines the implications of the whole life of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels as preparation for evaluating the truthfulness of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead. As a third and final step, he analyzes the appearances of the risen Jesus, the empty tomb, the shift to Sunday as the day of worship, the problems with alternative theories of what

⁹² Evans, Resurrection and the New Testament, 149–50; cf. 152, 154. On the connection between Jesus’ Resurrection and the Church, see also Adelbert Denaux, “Matthew’s Story of Jesus’ Burial and Resurrection (Mt 27,57–28, 20),” in Resurrection in the New Testament: Festschrift J. Lambrecht, ed. R. Bieringer, V. Koperski, and B. Lataire (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 123–45, at 142–5. Evans, however, argues that the second coming and final judgment are mythological and are ruled out by modern understandings of history: see Resurrection and the New Testament, 165n34. ⁹³ With regard to the witness of the New Testament itself, see Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 4. In my view, the risen Jesus willed to manifest himself in a way that allows for people to have non-culpable doubt (even though culpability is also possible). This point affects how Christians perceive those who do not accept the gospel, and should lead Christians to seek to purify evangelization from derogatory (non-charitable) attitudes toward non-Christians. See Stephen Bullivant, The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Nostra Aetate, §4, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2: Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman P. Tanner, SJ (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 968–71, at 970–1. For a history of deplorable words and deeds by Christians against the Jewish people, surely an exemplar of anti-evangelization of a profoundly hurtful kind, see Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Cohen recognizes the major step forward made by Vatican II and Nostra Aetate, but he appears to want the Church essentially to affirm that no one, or at least certainly no Jews, was culpable for the unjust death of Jesus of Nazareth (whereas in my view all people, as sinners, bear a certain culpability for it, and some persons bore a specific culpability for it). The key point is that rejection of the gospel need not be culpable, because the human presentation of the gospel may have distorted or obscured its truth, although objectively speaking God has fittingly communicated it.

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happened, and the Resurrection as God’s vindication of Jesus’ life and promises.⁹⁴ These steps provide numerous concrete insights into the frame of reference in which Jesus’ Resurrection makes sense. Swinburne concludes that the Resurrection of Jesus is “very probable.”⁹⁵ He grants, of course, that this conclusion is inseparable from affirming that God exists and that God is wise and good.⁹⁶ Swinburne also makes the point that nothing in the history of Israel or of Jesus Christ suggests that God’s revelatory purpose was “to overwhelm us so that we have no options left.”⁹⁷ Evidently, God did not aim to obstruct our freedom to choose or reject life with him. Nor did God wish to make unnecessary the relationships that we form in sharing his truth and love with each other. In fact, these relationships (both vis-à-vis other humans and vis-à-vis the triune God) are actually the purpose of divine revelation, which builds up a people united in Christ and his Spirit, and sharing in his mission to the world.⁹⁸ In this light, Swinburne argues that the Resurrection of Jesus could not and should not have been made crystal clear in the way that some desire. Its purpose was to build a community of cruciform love, the inaugurated kingdom of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. The reality of the Church manifests itself in actions of Christ-centered mercy and love, and thus preeminently in our liturgical sharing in Christ’s self-offering in supreme love: “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom 3:23–5). Similarly, Gerald O’Collins has devoted a number of books and articles to arguing for the reasonableness of affirming Jesus’ Resurrection.⁹⁹ In his 2011 ⁹⁴ See also J. C. O’Neill, “On the Resurrection as an Historical Question,” in Christ, Faith and History, ed. S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 205–19. ⁹⁵ Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, 203. ⁹⁶ See Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). ⁹⁷ Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, 172. Novakovic points out that the disciples may have been swayed, in coming to believe that Jesus was risen, by their “intensified eschatological expectation” that Jesus had stoked (Resurrection, 153). But, as many scholars have remarked, there was no Jewish precedent for the expectation of a glorious Resurrection of one man prior to the general resurrection, and so the fact that the latter was clearly not occurring would have told against the former. ⁹⁸ Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, 172. ⁹⁹ See Gerald O’Collins, SJ, The Easter Jesus (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980); O’Collins, Jesus Risen: An Historical, Fundamental and Systematic Examination of Christ’s Resurrection (New York: Paulist Press, 1987); O’Collins, Interpreting the Resurrection: Examining the Major Problems in the Stories of Jesus’ Resurrection (New York: Paulist Press, 1988); O’Collins, Easter Faith: Believing in the Risen Jesus (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003); O’Collins, Believing in the Resurrection: The Meaning and Promise of the Risen Jesus (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012); O’Collins, What Are They Saying about the Resurrection?

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Rethinking Fundamental Theology, he sums up his approach to defending historically the truth that Jesus rose from the dead. He first shows how implausible it is to suppose that the Resurrection accounts were in fact originally expressions of the disciples’ internal conversion experiences or Spirit-inspired new consciousness.¹⁰⁰ The Resurrection appearances, as narrated in the Gospels, all come from Jesus’ initiative and do not involve ecstatic or dream-like or apocalyptic experiences on the part of the disciples. The only possible exception is Paul’s blinding encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3–9), but “there is no mention of this phenomenon when Paul himself refers to his encounter with the risen Christ (1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8: Gal. 1:12, 16).”¹⁰¹ Second, O’Collins observes that, in seeking non-miraculous explanations of the Resurrection appearances, scholars have frequently appealed to the workings of “hallucinations, mystical experiences, near death experiences, bereavement experiences, and so forth.”¹⁰² He grants that there may be some similarities, but he notes that too few scholars have given equal attention to the extensive dissimilarities. In the case of hallucinatory visions prompted by bereavement, for example, Dewi Rees’s study of this common phenomenon does not report any instance of more than one person seeing the vision of the dead person, and in 36 percent of the cases the vision continues to appear for many years. Scholars or popular writers who argue that the Resurrection appearances were hallucinatory visions or who simply wave them away as hallucinations or dreams (as, for example, Lüdemann, Goulder, Wilson, and Dawkins) have not engaged such dissimilarities with careful attention.¹⁰³ Beginning from the principle that Jesus’ Resurrection could not have happened, they neglect the fact that people who experience hallucinatory visions do not report that the person they have seen has been resurrected.¹⁰⁴

(New York: Paulist Press, 1978); O’Collins, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1973). ¹⁰⁰ See Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Rethinking Fundamental Theology: Toward a New Fundamental Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 148. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., 150. ¹⁰² Ibid., 152. ¹⁰³ For a fuller discussion see O’Collins, “Easter Appearances and Bereavement Experiences,” Irish Theological Quarterly 76 (2011): 224–37, reprinted as an appendix in O’Collins’s Believing in the Resurrection. In this article, O’Collins responds to Rees’s response to O’Collins’s earlier criticisms. Note that for Rees, the term “hallucination” is pejorative, and so he prefers the term “bereavement experience,” which O’Collins accepts. See Dewi Rees, Pointers to Eternity (Talypon, Wales: Y Lolfa Press, 2010); as well as Gerald O’Collins, “The Risen Jesus: Analogies and Presence,” in Resurrection, ed. S. E. Porter, M. A. Hayes, and D. Tombs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 195–217. ¹⁰⁴ See also Robert H. Gundry, “Trimming the Debate,” in Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment?, 104–23, at 108–9: “Visions of the Virgin Mary, to which Lüdemann himself appeals, have not generated belief in her resurrection so much as the reverse: belief in her assumption to heaven (sometimes understood as entailing resurrection) has generated visions of her. . . . Normally, visions of deceased people have not been thought to imply physical resurrections

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Third, O’Collins adds that no one disputed that the tomb was empty; the only dispute recorded by the Gospels has to do with why it was empty. He argues that if the early Christians had invented the empty tomb, they would not have attributed its discovery to women.¹⁰⁵ He points out that Paul recognizes that Jesus was buried (1 Cor 15:4). Furthermore, Paul’s insistence that Jesus was raised from the dead implies that Jesus was raised from the tomb.¹⁰⁶ Fourth, O’Collins emphasizes that when Jesus was crucified, he was completely humiliated, having died among pagans and sinners in a manner that corresponded to the Deuteronomic curse (Deut 21:23). His disciples, therefore, would have needed strong reason to proclaim him the Messiah of God. Fifth, O’Collins notes that resurrection moved from the periphery of contemporary Judaism to the very center of the apostolic proclamation.¹⁰⁷ Likewise, whereas Second Temple Jews expected the general resurrection to occur at the end of history, the early Christians proclaimed that one person had already been gloriously raised prior to anyone else.¹⁰⁸ These radical shifts need an explanation, and the most plausible one is Jesus’ actual Resurrection.

resulting in empty tombs; rather, they have been thought to consist of ghostly apparitions. So it is hard to accept Lüdemann’s thesis that reports concerning the emptiness of Jesus’ tomb were made up because subjective visions of the postmortem Jesus were thought to imply his physical resurrection.” Gundry also shows that “[w]hether seen on earth or in heaven [in Rev 5:6 for example], Jesus remains as physical after resurrection as he was before resurrection,” so that “the heavenliness of a vision does not imply nonphysicality” (ibid., 116); and Gundry demonstrates that “Lüdemann lacks a good basis for his opinion that the earliest tradition concerning the risen Jesus has him appearing from heaven in a non-physical form” (ibid., 117). ¹⁰⁵ John M. G. Barclay offers a different viewpoint: “The prominence of women is also not as strong an argument as it seems, since it could arise simply from literary necessity: if Mark was working from a source which had only women as witnesses of the burial of Jesus, only they could be responsible for discovering the tomb empty” (Barclay, “The Resurrection in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa, 13–30, at 23). Almost all biblical scholars, however, hold that Mark could have taken the liberty of adding a male witness. ¹⁰⁶ For a historical-critical study that supports this emphasis, see for example Martin Hengel, “Das Begräbnis Jesu bei Paulus und die leibliche Auferstehung aus dem Grabe,” in Auferstehung— Resurrection, ed. Friedrich Avemarie and Hermann Lichtenberger (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 119–83. ¹⁰⁷ This argument, O’Collins observes, was put forward by C. F. Evans, Resurrection and the New Testament, 40. As we will see, it also has a central place in N. T. Wright’s work on Jesus’ Resurrection. ¹⁰⁸ O’Collins notes that this argument is central to Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Jesus: God and Man, trans. L. L. Wilkins and D. A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968), 96. It is also central, not surprisingly, for N. T. Wright. For critical reflection on Pannenberg’s broader perspective, see O’Collins, “Is the Resurrection an ‘Historical’ Event?,” Heythrop Journal 8 (1967): 381–7; here O’Collins holds that Jesus’ Resurrection did not take place “in” space–time history, because of the Resurrection’s transcendent character. I consider that Jesus’ Resurrection, because it involved a corpse, did indeed take place in space–time history. On Pannenberg, see also Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 17; Sarah Coakley, “Is the Resurrection a ‘Historical’ Event?: Some Muddles and Mysteries,” in The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, ed. Paul Avis, 85–115.

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In his various books on Jesus’ Resurrection, O’Collins develops other arguments as well. For example, he warns against over-literalism in reading the narratives of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances, as though these narratives contained no literary shaping or details provided by the evangelists.¹⁰⁹ He does not think we need to suppose that the risen Jesus literally ate a fish.¹¹⁰ An exaggerated literalism, he remarks, easily produces the backlash of skepticism. He emphasizes the central place of the language of sight in the New Testament’s various presentations of the Easter encounters.¹¹¹ He also strongly connects Jesus’ Resurrection with love, both the Father’s love and Jesus’ love.¹¹² This emphasis on love avoids the encroachment of dry rationalism in arguments favoring the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, important as historical arguments are. I find the arguments of Swinburne and O’Collins to be quite powerful. Nonetheless, it seems that when all is said and done, a major problem remains. Namely, if Jesus truly rose from the dead, the world would surely now be a much better place than in fact it is. Why should anyone pay attention to arguments about Jesus’ Resurrection, nearly 2000 years after the event was supposed to have taken place, given that in many ways the world has only gone from bad to worse? In this vein, Joseph Ratzinger comments that “[w]hat really torments us today . . . is the inefficacy of Christianity: after two thousand years of Christian history, we can see nothing that might be a new reality in the world; rather, we find it sunk in the same old horrors, the same despair, and the same hopes as ever.”¹¹³ ¹⁰⁹ For the significant differences present in the narratives about Jesus’ Resurrection appearances, see for example Barclay, “The Resurrection in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” 24; as well as Dunn’s extensive survey in Jesus Remembered, 841–66. In addition to setting forth the differences, however, Dunn identifies five common elements in the narratives. With regard to judging the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances, Barclay takes a middle position between skeptics and defenders (Barclay, “The Resurrection in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” 26). ¹¹⁰ See O’Collins, Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ, 80. ¹¹¹ See ibid., 78–9, 99–106 (much of which is focused on debating the hallucinatory-visions explanation). See also O’Collins, “The Appearances of the Risen Christ: A Lexical-Exegetical Examination of St Paul and Other Witnesses,” Irish Theological Quarterly 79 (2014): 128–43. ¹¹² In Jesus Risen, O’Collins associates this point with Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, 301–10 (O’Collins cites the 1969 Burns & Oates edition, whose pagination is different than my edition) and also with Bela Weissmahr’s “Kann Gott die Auferstehung Jesu durch innerweltliche Kräfte bewirkt haben?,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 100 (1978): 441–69. O’Collins is well aware that, as Francis J. Moloney, SDB states, “There is no ‘knock-down’ objective historical proof for the resurrection events reported in the gospel narratives” (Moloney, The Resurrection of the Messiah: A Narrative Commentary on the Resurrection Accounts in the Four Gospels [New York: Paulist Press, 2013], 148). ¹¹³ Joseph Ratzinger, What It Means to Be a Christian: Three Sermons, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 25–6. Jesus himself wonders in the Gospel of Luke, “when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Lk 18:8). According to Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, however, “These words provide a Lucan comment on the delay of the revelation of the day(s) of the Son of Man. In effect, Luke is aware of the delay and poses to Christians of his day the real question

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Ratzinger’s answer to the problem he describes is love. The world is certainly in a terrible state, as it always has been—and as the New Testament foretells it will be until the end of time.¹¹⁴ But in the midst of the world, God’s merciful love has been revealed in Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection. This love ensures that even now we are not in bondage to sin and death. Although the Church has been filled with sinners, and many Christians have done and still do terrible things, the Church has also borne witness to Christ’s self-sacrificial love in many saintly lives and many self-giving actions, rooted in the unmerited gift of sacramental participation in the Savior, who alone embodies perfect love. By the power of the Holy Spirit, love enables us to let go of our selfcenteredness. When we do so, we find life in Christ.¹¹⁵ Thus, faith in Jesus’ Resurrection bears witness to its own truth by drawing us into the eternal communion of divine love, which we experience now even as we are journeying toward its consummation. We experience, in Augustine’s words, that “[o]ur head has now picked us up in his body; where he is, the members of his body will follow,” because “he is with us” already in love.¹¹⁶ We learn that Jesus is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).

whether there will still be disciples of strong faith when that revelation comes” (Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (X–XXIV) [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985], 1181). ¹¹⁴ For discussion see von Balthasar, Engagement with God, 7. ¹¹⁵ See also David McCarthy Matzko, “Christ’s Body in Its Fullness: Resurrection and the Lives of the Saints,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, 102–17, at 105. ¹¹⁶ Augustine, Sermon 395: “On the Lord’s Ascension,” 432. For Augustine’s privileging of the Ascension as the highpoint of the liturgical year, see J. G. Davies, He Ascended into Heaven: A Study in the History of Doctrine (London: Lutterworth, 1958), 170.

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1 The Historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection Although Gerald O’Collins is well known for defending the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection, even O’Collins has remarked that “the path to sharing and growing in Easter faith has come by experiencing the risen Christ in worship with others, much more than by analysing evidence in favour of the resurrection.”¹ In this vein, O’Collins notes that Easter faith has always “been a matter of knowing the risen Christ in direct and lasting experience rather than knowing things (the ‘relevant’ data).”² Yet at the same time, O’Collins remains profoundly committed to “analysing evidence in favour of the resurrection” and to seeking to know “the ‘relevant’ data” about Jesus’ Resurrection. Central to the relevant data about Jesus’ Resurrection is what kind of experience lies behind it on the part of the disciples. Did they encounter and interact with the risen Jesus after his death, as the Gospels attest? Or did they experience him in a different way, similar to how we experience him today, namely by meditating upon him in faith and experiencing him interiorly as alive? Did they see hallucinatory visions, or did they see the raised, glorified body that had once been the corpse of Jesus? If “Easter faith” means knowing the risen Christ, does the study of the New Testament enable us to say anything about whether they actually knew Christ in his risen flesh, as distinct from drawing their conclusions from their faith experience or from seeing hallucinatory visions that they understood to be a resurrected Jesus? It might seem that no historical answers to these questions are possible and therefore we have the simple choice of believing the Gospels or not. It might also seem that faith cannot proceed unless we first demonstrate its truth historically. In this regard, O’Collins identifies two extremes, both of which he rejects: on the one hand, holding that historical investigation and Christian faith belong to utterly separate domains, so that the claim that Jesus is risen cannot be historically investigated in any way; on the other hand, holding that ¹ Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Easter Faith: Believing in the Risen Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 2003), 61. ² Ibid.

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faith stands or falls upon the results of historical research.³ I agree with O’Collins that these extremes must be rejected. Although faith does not stand or fall upon the results of historical research, those who insist that the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection has nothing to do with the domain of historical investigation are mistaken. The witnesses to Jesus’ Resurrection proclaimed that it actually happened in time, and so we are right to investigate the testimony of the New Testament historically. Indeed, if the historical evidence could show that Jesus’ Resurrection were utterly implausible (even given belief in God)—as for instance I consider the story of the origins of the Book of Mormon to be—then historical evidence could in fact rule out faith in Jesus’ Resurrection. At the same time, faith requires more than historical foundations, since faith draws us into a supernatural communion that humans cannot achieve on our own. Thus, O’Collins observes that “faith neither bases itself simply on historical knowledge nor forms a mere prolongation of such knowledge, as though the critical examination of history (e.g. evidence from biblical historians) could by itself establish and maintain faith. Christian faith does not exist independently of historical knowledge, but it cannot be reduced to it.”⁴ Not surprisingly, when contemporary scholars undertake the task of historical investigation of Jesus’ Resurrection, they arrive at different conclusions. In this chapter, I explore in detail three representative historical answers to the question of what happened on the first Easter. All three scholars profess belief in Jesus’ Resurrection, but they differ sharply with regard to what they think historians can say about the experience of those who first proclaimed that Jesus is risen from the dead. Edward Schillebeeckx suggests that the Resurrection narratives arose from faith-experiences of the disciples and conveyed their new understanding that Jesus was alive, without thereby requiring us to hold that they actually saw the glorified body of the risen Jesus. Dale Allison considers that the disciples must indeed have seen Jesus after his death, but that from a historical perspective these sightings are most likely to have been hallucinatory visions. Lastly, N. T. Wright thinks that the historical evidence indicates that the disciples had concrete encounters with the risen, tangible, glorified Jesus.⁵ ³ See O’Collins, Easter Faith, 26–7. As an instance of the latter extreme, O’Collins cites Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, trans. L. L. Wilkins and D. A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968), 99. ⁴ O’Collins, Easter Faith, 31–2. ⁵ See also Pheme Perkins, Resurrection: New Testament Witness and Contemporary Reflection (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). Perkins argues that “it is not reasonable to presume an overly subjective account of resurrection that would presume to trace it all back to the single conviction that despite the disaster of the crucifixion Jesus’ cause continued. Nor, on the other hand, can one find evidence to support the elaborate attempts that have been made to provide a naturalist account of the emergence of resurrection preaching. Since the empty tomb tradition would not have served to prove that Jesus had been raised in the first century, we can presume that it has a base in early tradition. Once the appearance traditions are connected with the stories of the empty tomb, then resurrection can explain why Jesus’ tomb was empty” (ibid., 102). She criticizes as reductive Willi Marxsen’s position that 1 Corinthians 15:8 is simply Paul’s way of assimilating Paul’s “own experience of God’s bringing him to faith in Jesus to the language of the

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The central concern of this chapter is to try to assess which of these scholars has adopted the most probable view. Does the evidence of the New Testament allow us to conclude that the first believers likely experienced real, physical encounters with the risen Jesus? I begin with Schillebeeckx’s answer.

E D W A R D S C H I L L E B E E C KX’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESURRECTION FA ITH Toward the end of his Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, Edward Schillebeeckx states that some influential “exegetical theologians”—he has in view Willi Marxsen and Rudolf Bultmann—seem to imply that “the resurrection was achieved not in the person of Jesus but only in the believing disciples, as it were. ‘Resurrection’ is then more a symbolic expression of the renewal of life for the disciples, albeit empowered by the inspiration they drew from the earthly Jesus.”⁶ Against this opinion that “resurrection” is fundamentally a apostolic appearance traditions” (ibid., 108n53). At the same time, her conclusions are more ambiguous than Wright’s, as when she states that “the conviction that Jesus had been raised” is “the symbol of the insistence that . . . salvation cannot be found anywhere except in Jesus” (ibid., 102–3). She engages with and draws upon such works as Marxsen, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970); G. Rochais, Les Récits de resurrection des morts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); George W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Pierre Grelot, “The Resurrection of Jesus: Its Biblical and Jewish Background,” in The Resurrection and Modern Biblical Thought, ed. P. De Surgy (New York: Corpus, 1970), 1–29; Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology, vol. 1: The Proclamation of Jesus (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971); Reginald H. Fuller, The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980); J. Kremer, Das älteste Zeugnis von der Auferstehung Christi: Eine bibeltheologische Studie zur Aussage und Bedeutung von 1 Kor 15, 1–11 (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1967); E. L. Bode, The First Easter Morning: The Gospel Accounts of the Women’s Visit to the Tomb of Jesus (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1970). For summary and evaluation of Perkins’s approach to the narratives of the risen Jesus’ appearances, see Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Interpreting the Resurrection: Examining the Major Problems in the Stories of Jesus’ Resurrection (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 11–17. Arguing that the risen Jesus manifested himself in concrete modes to the disciples, O’Collins criticizes Perkins’s attribution of Jesus’ appearances to ecstatic, Spirit-filled, visionary experiences on the part of the disciples, although Perkins is more open to the view that the risen Jesus concretely manifested himself than are many scholars. ⁶ Edward Schillebeeckx, OP, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 644–5. See Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch (London: SPCK, 1953); Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1965), 26; Marxsen, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; Marxsen, “The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical and Theological Problem,” in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, ed. C. F. D. Moule (London: SCM Press, 1968), 15–50; Gordon Kaufman, Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 418–34. Marxsen argues that “the question of the resurrection of Jesus is not that of an event which occurred after Good

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metaphor rather than something that actually happened to Jesus, Schillebeeckx insists that in fact, “resurrection was achieved . . . in the person of Jesus.”⁷ He explicitly dissociates himself from any position that says otherwise. Resurrection was achieved in Jesus; the term is not merely a way of expressing the disciples’ “renewal of life” empowered by Jesus. At the same time, Schillebeeckx argues that there is significant value in what Marxsen and Bultmann are saying. According to Schillebeeckx, such scholars are “reacting against a sort of empiricist objectivism in which, apart from the act of faith—and so without any faith experience—people were supposedly able to see the resurrected Jesus.”⁸ The disciples, Schillebeeckx holds, did not encounter the risen Jesus in a manner that could do without the eyes of faith. During what Schillebeeckx describes as the “Easter experience,” the disciples underwent a “conversion process” that enabled the disciples to see the risen Jesus and to become Christians.⁹ On this view, Jesus’ objective Resurrection is not knowable apart from this subjective conversion process, because the two are bound up within each other. Schillebeeckx states, “Apart from the faithmotivated experience it is not possible to speak meaningfully about Jesus’ resurrection. It would be like talking about ‘colours’ to somebody blind from birth.”¹⁰ Jesus’ Resurrection produced the faith-saturated stories of his appearances; but if we do not have faith, we cannot get behind these Friday, but that of the earthly Jesus, and the question, inseparably linked with it, of how this purpose later became a reality of experience which can still be experienced today” (“The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical and Theological Problem,” 50). He argues particularly against Ulrich Wilckens, “Das Offenbarungsverständnis in der Geschichte des Urchristentums,” in Offenbarung als Geschichte, ed. Wolfhart Pannenberg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961), 42–90. In “The Tradition-History of the Resurrection of Jesus,” in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, 51–76, Wilckens argues that “[i]t was the appearances of the risen Jesus in Galilee which inspired belief in the resurrection” (emphasis added) and insists that “[t]o isolate the ‘true’ content of our Christian faith from its ‘past’ historical form also means to abandon Jesus as the central object of our faith” (73, 76). For further discussion of this debate see Robert C. Ware, “The Resurrection of Jesus,” Parts I and II, Heythrop Journal 16 (1975): 22–35; 174–94; Hans-Georg Geyer, “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A Survey of the Debate in Present Day Theology,” in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, 104–35; as well as the critique of Marxsen by Leo Scheffczyk, Auferstehung: Prinzip des christlichen Glaubens (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976), 24–9, 108–40, 163–6. See also Edouard Le Roy’s argument that the Resurrection narratives describe a transcendent event in the religious experience of the disciples rather than an event that happened to Jesus in history: see Le Roy, Dogme et critique (Paris: Bloud et Cie, 1907). Since Le Roy nonetheless believes that Jesus has entered into glorified life, his overall position strikes me as quite similar to Schillebeeckx’s. For critical discussion of Le Roy’s position, see Gustave Martelet, SJ, The Risen Christ and the Eucharistic World, trans. René Hague (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 67–72. For the argument—which, if correct, would happily surprise me and many others—that in fact Bultmann insists upon Jesus’ real bodily Resurrection in time (though in an analogous, eschatological sense of time), see Gareth Jones, “The Resurrection in Contemporary Systematic Theology,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 31–47. ⁷ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 644. This is, of course, an ambiguous way of phrasing it. ⁸ Ibid., 644. ⁹ Ibid., 645. ¹⁰ Ibid.

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faith-saturated stories to come to a knowledge of his Resurrection. Put simply, the only path to knowledge of Jesus’ Resurrection is the path that the disciples followed: the path of conversion to faith, a faith that belonged intrinsically to their experience of seeing the objective reality of Jesus’ Resurrection. For Schillebeeckx, therefore, “Without being identical with it, the resurrection of Jesus—that is, what happened to him, personally, after his death—is inseparable from the Easter experience, or faith-motivated experience, of the disciples: that is to say, from their conversion process, in which they perceive the work of the Spirit of Christ.”¹¹ Indeed, Schillebeeckx makes clear that no unconverted disciple could have seen the risen Jesus. As Schillebeeckx remarks, “Apart from this experience of Christian faith the disciples had no organ that could afford them a sight of Jesus’ resurrection.”¹² Schillebeeckx grants that “no Easter experience of renewed life was possible without the personal resurrection of Jesus.”¹³ He grants, too, that ontologically speaking, Jesus’ “personal-cum-bodily resurrection” has “a logical and ontological priority” that “‘precedes’ any faith-motivated experience.”¹⁴ This logical and ontological priority, however, does not mean that the disciples could have seen the risen Jesus without the eyes of faith. Schillebeeckx is explicit that without the “faith-motivated experience” in which they experienced the Holy Spirit, the disciples would have lacked any “organ” of sight that could have enabled them to see the risen Jesus. How, then, did the disciples see the risen Jesus? What does seeing the risen Jesus involve? Schillebeeckx explains that “in and through the very experience of Jesus’ renewed presence and the renewed offer of salvation (after his death) the disciples were enabled to arrive at the settled conviction that Jesus had risen.”¹⁵ What does the “experience of Jesus’ renewed presence” mean here? The key is conversion to faith, which provides the organ for experiencing Jesus’ “renewed presence” in the ways that this presence manifested itself. For Schillebeeckx, then, the experience of Easter was an experience of faith, namely, “the reassembling of the disciples . . . in the power of the risen Christ himself.”¹⁶ It follows that any account of the Resurrection appearances that supposes that the disciples, using their natural powers, saw and heard the risen Jesus, prior to experiencing a conversion of faith, is for Schillebeeckx a rationalistic account. The disciples’ faith-saturated experience may be logically

¹¹ Ibid. ¹² Ibid. ¹³ Ibid. ¹⁴ Ibid. ¹⁵ Ibid., 646. ¹⁶ Ibid. Against a purely “naturalistic” portrait of Jesus’ rising from the dead, Martelet grants that “[t]here is something . . . in the Resurrection which transcends the world’s experience, since it relates to a human existence which has been divinely transfigured by the abolition of the dominion of death” (Martelet, The Risen Christ and the Eucharistic World, 74). But Martelet, unlike Schillebeeckx, insists that “the transcendent and yet historical fact of Jesus Christ risen” involves historical appearance of the risen Jesus, in his glorified and tangible flesh, to eyewitnesses (ibid., 80; cf. 91)—even though the transcendent event of Jesus’ rising could not have been witnessed within the limits of this world.

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and ontologically distinct from Jesus’ Resurrection, but their perceiving the truth about the risen Jesus happened in and through conversion and the communal eyes of faith. Schillebeeckx argues that he is not advocating “fideism,” let alone proposing that Jesus is solely risen in our hearts (Bultmann); rather, he considers that he is simply moving “beyond empiricism.”¹⁷ He emphasizes, “Precisely in and through the (faith-motivated) Easter experience and the experienced renewal of life (expressed in the New Testament model of ‘appearances’) there is articulated what happened to Jesus himself: He is alive!”¹⁸ What is the “empiricism” that Schillebeeckx fears? It is first and foremost the notion that the disciples could have seen the risen Jesus without already possessing the eyes of faith. In the accounts of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances, Schillebeeckx holds, those who lacked the eyes of faith were unable to recognize him properly; they had first to be converted. Those who recognized Jesus as risen could not simply see the risen Jesus as one normally sees a person; rather, their seeing of Jesus involved a “subjective, interiorizing, experiential aspect” that according to Schillebeeckx was necessary for seeing the risen Jesus.¹⁹ He thereby advocates a strict symbiosis between the Resurrection appearances and the faith of the first community of disciples. The faith of the community was a generative part of the Resurrection appearances.²⁰ Believers today encounter the risen Jesus today in the same essential way, although Schillebeeckx grants “the unrepeatable and peculiar status of the first apostles, who had known Jesus before his death.”²¹ Earlier in his book, Schillebeeckx asks whether “the Easter manifestation of Christ derive[d] from what we might call a Christian ‘conversion vision.’”²² After explaining that the Resurrection of Jesus is “meta-empirical and metahistorical,” he locates the historically knowable side of the Resurrection in the interpreted “experiential events” of the disciples.²³ He argues that these events cannot be Jesus’ Resurrection appearances, since as recorded in the New Testament, these appearances “already presuppose belief in the resurrection.”²⁴ He points instead to the process of conversion undergone by the disciples, in which they moved from despair to confident proclamation. ¹⁷ Ibid. ¹⁸ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 647. ¹⁹ Ibid. ²⁰ See ibid. Note that Schillebeeckx’s discussion of the Gospel of John’s treatment of Jesus’ Resurrection is presented in his companion volume to Jesus: see Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. John Bowden (New York: Seabury Press, 1980). He finds in John the same basic focus on the interior conversion of the disciples. For example, he states, “After Jesus’ death, on their visit to the empty tomb, no one—apart from the ‘beloved disciple’, who ‘saw and believed’ (20.8)—not even Mary Magdalene or Peter, thinks of Jesus’ resurrection. . . . After inspecting the empty tomb, ‘the disciples returned home’ (20.10) as though nothing had happened. There is no belief in the resurrection without Easter grace, and an empty tomb is still not an Easter experience. On the other hand, they are not terrified and have no fear because of the empty cave in the rock” (ibid., 416–17). ²¹ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 647. ²² Ibid., 380. ²³ Ibid. ²⁴ Ibid., 381.

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In Schillebeeckx’s view, therefore, “The resurrection was believed in before there was any question of appearances.”²⁵ He holds that in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ Resurrection appearance serves to ground the Church in Jesus’ authority as the Christ; the words that (in Matthew) the risen Jesus speaks were in fact spoken by Jesus prior to his death.²⁶ In the Gospel of Luke, similarly, Jesus’ Resurrection appearance serves to manifest Jesus as the Christ, and John’s Resurrection appearances of Jesus are about accepting Jesus as the Christ. For Schillebeeckx, the doubts expressed by the disciples (such as doubting Thomas, or the doubters in Matthew 28:16) make clear that when it comes to perceiving Jesus as the Christ, everything revolves around “a divine act of grace.”²⁷ Human resources cannot suffice to perceive Jesus as the Christ. Paul exemplifies the “conversion vision” or “divine act of grace” that Schillebeeckx has in mind. Indeed, Schillebeeckx does not think that Paul had a “vision” at all. Rather, “[w]hat Paul actually experiences is, because of its character as grace, extrapolated in advance as a ‘vision’.”²⁸ In Acts 9, Paul moves from not knowing Christ, to being blinded by Christ’s light, to seeing Jesus as the Christ through “a pure act of grace on God’s part.”²⁹ In other words, Paul simply comes to faith. Schillebeeckx argues that Paul’s blindness in Acts 9 is spiritual (vis-à-vis Jesus), not physical, whereas in Paul’s recounting of his conversion vision in Acts 22 the blindness has become physical, so as ²⁵ Ibid., 354. C. F. D. Moule comments in 1968 that “among Christians who unite in affirming, as central to the Gospel, the final and absolute aliveness of Jesus after his death, the greatest cleavage in contemporary interpretations of this affirmation is between those, on the one side, who hold that the resurrection is the expression of a faith already reached by the first Christians, rather than its cause, and those, on the other side, who hold the opposite, namely, that the resurrection was the cause of a faith which did not previously exist” (Moule, “Introduction,” in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, 1–11, at 2). By contrast, today the main divide is between scholars who think that the appearance-visions of Jesus were hallucinations and scholars who think that the appearances were truly the risen Jesus manifesting his glorified body. Moule cites Neville Clark as a significant British proponent of the position that the appearances created faith (rather than the appearances arising from faith): see Clark, Interpreting the Resurrection (London: SCM Press, 1967). ²⁶ See N. T. Wright’s succinct summary of Schillebeeckx’s position in Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 701–2. ²⁷ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 360. Gerald O’Collins, SJ criticizes Schillebeeckx on theological grounds: see O’Collins, Jesus Risen: An Historical, Fundamental and Systematic Examination of Christ’s Resurrection (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 117. Yet, O’Collins grants that “given the new status of the risen Christ as constituting the beginning of the end of the world (1 Cor. 15:20, 23), those who saw him needed to be offered and to receive some graced powers of perception. Seeing the risen Christ required some transforming grace for the recipients of that experience. They had to be made in some sense like him, a grace that was not given to, or at least not received by, the guards at the tomb or by Paul’s companions on the road to Damascus” (O’Collins, Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, and Reception [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 99–100). I hold that Christ could manifest his risen body at will to people and could also withhold that manifestation. Thus, in my view, he could have manifested his risen body without percipients necessarily requiring grace to see him. ²⁸ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 368. ²⁹ Ibid., 369. See Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 703.

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to enhance Christ’s status as the light for the Gentiles and Paul’s status as the missionary to the Gentiles. In Acts 26:12–18, Paul tells the story of his conversion again, and this time we find “an ‘Easter appearance’ of Christ,” again with an emphasis on Paul’s vocation. In all three accounts, Schillebeeckx finds a common thread, namely that “a Jesus appearance is not the object of neutral observation; it is a faith-motivated experience in response to an eschatological disclosure, expressed in a Christological affirmation of Jesus as the risen One, that is, disclosure of and faith in Jesus in his eschatological, Christological significance.”³⁰ Thus, the Resurrection appearances are not what at first glance they might seem to be, namely encounters in which the physical and tangible presence of the risen Jesus breaks in upon the disciples. Rather, the narratives of the Resurrection appearances are the community’s way of expressing its experience of God’s sheer grace and of expressing faith-filled conversion to Jesus as the Christ.³¹ As we have seen, Schillebeeckx does not want to reduce the Resurrection to solely an interior event, but he also insists that the conversion of the disciples from despair to confident proclamation cannot have been caused by actual Resurrection appearances, let alone by an empty tomb, since the appearances already belong to the side of faith. He emphasizes that the “appearance stories . . . assume the fact of the reassembled community and its Christological kerygma.”³² If the Resurrection appearance stories presuppose faith, how is it that they can also be about coming to faith, through “conversion to Jesus as the Christ, who now comes as the light of the world”?³³ Schillebeeckx holds that the answer lies in the later redaction of the stories, which originally were about conversion (to Jesus as the Christ), but which are now planted solidly within the realm of faith, presuming the existence of the Church. He points out, “In the gospel account the apostles have already come together before the appearances, apparently in expectation of things to come.”³⁴ Even so, in the narratives of the Resurrection appearances there is a recollection of a primal “historical occurrence.”³⁵ This historical occurrence, he speculates, was the disciples’ coming to acknowledge Jesus in “the totality of his life” (including his death).³⁶ When they grasped the meaning of his life as a whole, including ³⁰ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 378. ³¹ For criticism of this position, see Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 703–4; see also Peter Stuhlmacher, “The Resurrection of Jesus and the Resurrection of the Dead,” Ex Auditu 9 (1993): 45–56. ³² Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 382. ³³ Ibid., 384. ³⁴ Ibid., 385. ³⁵ Ibid., 386. ³⁶ Ibid., 387. As Alan Kirk points out, “The death of Jesus, through political violence, would bring about the sort of radically altered situation, dissolution of previous group frameworks, and discontinuity from all that had gone before such that if the community were to survive it would need to reconstitute its memory, and with the same stroke the coherence of its own social and moral identity, in the context of intense commemorative activities” (Kirk, “The Memory of Violence and the Death of Jesus in Q,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early

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his death, they came to perceive that he was the Christ. This was their “Easter experience,” their experience of finally truly “seeing” Jesus, a true seeing that is the point of the stories of the Resurrection appearances.³⁷ Simon Peter was the first to “see” Jesus in this way, and Peter’s experience came about by sheer grace, God’s gift. Having undergone his “conversion,” Peter reassembled Jesus’ disciples, and they then confirmed each other in “belief in the resurrection,” a belief that involved seeing (i.e. understanding) Jesus truly as the Christ and thus seeing God’s offer “of salvation through the heavenly Jesus, which meant that the disciples’ return to Jesus became a return to the living, crucified One.”³⁸ In sum, Schillebeeckx’s reconstruction of what lies behind the stories of the Resurrection appearances amounts to the following: the disciples, viewing for the first time Jesus’ life and death as a totality, recognize (through grace and by faith) that Jesus must have been the Christ and that salvation is now available through God’s Christ. Although Schillebeeckx insists that he believes that Jesus is truly risen, his reconstruction of what lies behind the stories does not cause one to brim with confidence that Jesus has risen from the dead in any sense that meaningfully includes the body. Given Schillebeeckx’s reconstruction, the most likely scenario is that Jesus remained dead and the disciples perpetuated a faith-filled, well-meaning mistake. Without intending to do so, Schillebeeckx outlines the possible contours of such a mistake. He asks rhetorically, “May it not be that Simon Peter—and indeed the Twelve—arrived via their concrete experience of forgiveness after Jesus’ death, encountered as grace and discussed among themselves (as they remembered Jesus’ sayings about, among other things, the gracious God), at the ‘evidence for belief ’: the Lord is alive?”³⁹ I note that if this was how the disciples arrived at the conclusion that Jesus is risen from the dead, namely by

Christianity, ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher [Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005], 191–206, at 206). Kirk gives a helpful sense of the crushing blow that was Jesus’ death, placing the future of the community of disciples in serious doubt. But Kirk does not consider the possibility that Jesus rose from the dead. Instead, he posits that the resourceful community “takes up Jesus’ ethical teachings, places them in the new framework of the postdeath situation, aligns them with the reality of Jesus’ violent death, gives them fresh, stabilizing connections with Israel’s cultural memory, and thereby reconstitutes itself as a moral community centered on commemoration of Jesus, a commemoration that becomes the ‘Mythomotorik’ driving its historical development” (ibid.). The central role of Jesus’ Resurrection among the first Christians is left unexplained. See also Kirk’s “Social and Cultural Memory,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text, 1–24. Kirk draws upon Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), whose work focuses upon cultural memory’s dynamic role in present-day identity formation (with the “past” itself being a cultural construct). ³⁷ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 387. ³⁸ Ibid., 390. See the criticisms made by Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 559, 704–5. ³⁹ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 391.

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canvassing their experience of merciful grace in light of Jesus’ sayings, then the disciples had insufficient evidence for proclaiming Jesus’ Resurrection. A bit later in his book, Schillebeeckx interprets 1 Corinthians 15:4, “he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” The same argument appears that we found above: Schillebeeckx suggests that the disciples reasoned about the totality of Jesus’ life and death, and eventually arrived at the conclusion that he must be the Christ and must be alive. As he puts it, “At first those Christians did not know what to make of Jesus’ suffering and death; so great however was their faith in God that they had more confidence in him than in all that the concrete and painful facts of history so manifestly shouted aloud.”⁴⁰ The confidence of the disciples, as they contemplated the totality of Jesus’ life and death, eventually overcame the seeming fact that he was dead. Gradually, they came to a realization that he was alive: “The insight provided by their faith may have needed time; in the end they knew: through their official authorities men might give judgement against this righteous one; but he cannot be forsaken by God.”⁴¹ Whatever the seeming fact of his death might suggest, they knew that God was with him, the same God who had redeemed Israel from Egyptian slavery. Their claim that “he was raised on the third day,” therefore, describes their own interior recognition that it must have been so. The determining factors in this “credal affirmation,” says Schillebeeckx, were their memories of Jesus’ earthly life, their experience of a graced and merciful process of conversion, and the Jewish religious expressions and scriptural teachings that they knew well.⁴² In this light, Schillebeeckx interprets the “third day” not as a particular day, but in Jewish (and scriptural) understanding “the decisive day, the crucial turning-point or definitive conclusion of a matter.”⁴³ The “third day” signals the deliverance that God wills to bring about from the midst of a deadly situation. It is not a chronological signifier but rather a proclamation of the ⁴⁰ Ibid., 526. ⁴¹ Ibid. ⁴² Ibid., 527. See Wright’s comments in The Resurrection of the Son of God, 573 (though he does not name Schillebeeckx here, since he instead has in view certain accounts of the origins of Paul’s Christology): “a historical scheme is sometimes proposed which seems to me to get things exactly the wrong way round. According to this view, the first thing the disciples came to believe about Jesus after his death was that he had been exalted to heaven, quite possibly in a sort of apotheosis or divinization; then they came to express that belief in terms of his being alive again after his death; then they came to use the language of resurrection to describe this new aliveness; then they made up stories about an empty tomb; and then, finally, they made up further stories about Jesus eating and drinking and inviting them to touch him.” For Paul as “a Jewish apocalyptic-mystagogue of the first century,” whose heavenly-travel mystical experiences (merkabah mysticism) produced his conversion and can account for his understanding of the exalted Christ see Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 35. See also Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 448, to the effect that hallucinatory “visions” were the cause of belief that Jesus rose from the dead. ⁴³ Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 529.

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victory of God. Temporally speaking, it means that the previously doubting disciples, now persuaded that Christ is alive and is the source of salvation, have entered into the “day of salvation.”⁴⁴ More than this, the disciples now have come to believe that Jesus’ resurrection is “the definitive and eschatological saving fact.”⁴⁵ Their reflection on the totality of Jesus’ life and death and their renewed confidence that “God’s mighty hand” would not fail to vindicate his “suffering prophet” have led them to the affirmation that, indeed, “God’s rule has assumed the aspect of the crucified-and-risen One, Jesus of Nazareth.”⁴⁶ On this view, although the “third day” does not tell us anything chronological, it tells us everything about what Jesus’ disciples came to believe about God’s response to the death of Jesus: God’s eschatological day of salvation in Jesus Christ who is alive. Schillebeeckx concludes, “The resurrection is Jesus’ solemn enthronement . . . as Lord, Messiah, Son of God: that is the gist of a very early Christian interpretation.”⁴⁷ No matter how much Schillebeeckx assures us that his position does not undermine his own belief in Jesus’ Resurrection, I find that by placing all weight upon the (graced) changing of the disciples’ minds as they pondered Jesus’ life in its totality, Schillebeeckx leaves the door wide open for the charge of wishful thinking. Again, for Schillebeeckx the disciples’ proclamation of the risen Jesus ultimately depends upon their conversion to a shared understanding that given the totality of Jesus’ life and death, his “Abba experience” and his unique “religious consciousness” of “being of the Father,”⁴⁸ he must be alive as the Christ and thus as the source of salvation. Schillebeeckx states, “Either this man lived an illusion—as some are able to say because after his death history went on its customary way—or we put our trust in him, partly on the strength of his career as a whole and the manner of his dying, a trust which is only possible in the form of an affirmation of God, namely, that God vindicates him.”⁴⁹ According to Schillebeeckx, when the disciples arrived at this trust-filled understanding of Jesus’ praxis, they attained to the same trustfilled understanding that had distinctively marked Jesus while alive (through his distinctive “Abba experience”⁵⁰). Jesus “brings to us—through his person, preaching, way of life and death—the vital message of the unrestricted selfgiving which God is in himself and is also willing to be for us human beings,”⁵¹ so that we too can now live in this way. Thus, Schillebeeckx holds that the apostles proclaimed their new faith that Jesus’ “pro-existence [existence for others] as man is the sacrament among us of the pro-existence or self-giving of God’s own being” and is the “sacrament of God’s universal love for human beings” that models “the praxis of the kingdom of God.”⁵²

⁴⁴ Ibid. ⁴⁵ Ibid., 531. ⁴⁶ Ibid., 531–2. ⁴⁷ Ibid., 533. ⁴⁸ Ibid., 654–5. ⁴⁹ Ibid., 659. ⁵⁰ See also ibid., 660. ⁵¹ Ibid., 669. ⁵² Ibid., 670–2.

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There is obviously a significant difference between proclaiming (as Schillebeeckx thinks the disciples did) a new understanding of God and Christ, an understanding rooted in Jesus’ own distinctive self-understanding and praxis, on the one hand; and proclaiming (as Schillebeeckx denies the disciples originally did) encounters with the crucified Jesus who, now alive in his glorified flesh, gives concrete evidences that he has been bodily raised from the dead, on the other hand.⁵³ If the former is all that happened, then we have little reason to find plausible the apostles’ testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection.

D A L E A L L I S O N : VI S I ONS OF J E S U S ? Dale Allison sums up what he considers to be the two alternatives: “Either God raised Jesus from the dead, or the disciples somehow got the job done in their imaginations,” motivated by a deep desire for “[t]he eschatological pattern of humiliation and suffering followed by vindication” to be really true.⁵⁴ Allison ⁵³ Like Wright, I connect Schillebeeckx’s perspective with classical “liberal” theology, although Friedrich Schleiermacher himself, often credited with inaugurating Protestant liberal theology, held that people who “suppose that the disciples were deceived and took an inward experience for an outward, ascribe to them such weakness of intellect that not only is their whole testimony to Christ thereby rendered unreliable, but also Christ, in choosing for Himself such witnesses, cannot have known what is in men.” See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. J. Y. Campbell et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), 420. However, Schleiermacher also states that “[t]he disciples recognized in Him the Son of God without having the faintest premonition of His resurrection and ascension, and we too may say the same of ourselves; moreover neither the spiritual presence which He promised nor all that He said about His enduring influence upon those who remained behind is mediated through either of these two facts. . . . Belief in these facts, accordingly, is no independent element in the original faith in Christ, of such a kind that we could not accept Him as Redeemer or recognize the being of God in Him, if we did not know that He had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, or if He had not promised that He would return for judgment. Further, this belief is not to be derived from those original elements; we cannot conclude that because God was in Christ He must have risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, or that because He was essentially sinless He must come again to act as Judge. Rather they are accepted only because they are found in the Scriptures; and all that can be required of any Protestant Christian is that he shall believe them in so far as they seem to him to be adequately attested” (ibid., 418–20). The last part of this passage seemingly separates (liberal Protestant) faith from the necessity of believing that Christ rose from the dead. See also Schleiermacher’s observations on pages 700–1. However, for a reading of this passage that argues that Schleiermacher believed in Jesus’ Resurrection or at least in Jesus’ heavenly ascension, see Bernd Oberdorfer, “Schleiermacher on Eschatology and Resurrection,” in Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments, ed. Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 165–82. ⁵⁴ Dale C. Allison, Jr., Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2005), 214–15. See also Allison, “The Resurrection of Jesus and Rational Apologetics,” Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 315–35, at 330–1, where Allison raises the point (without drawing a firm conclusion from it) that “[s]ocial psychology abundantly demonstrates that people strongly tend to interpret their experiences in terms of previously established categories and expectations, even when those categories and expectations have

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thinks that it is not credible to suppose that the first Christians were simply liars,⁵⁵ and so if one holds that the disciples merely imagined the risen Jesus, one must posit a connection between stress and grief, on the one hand, and the production of (collective) interior hallucinations, on the other.⁵⁶ Allison notes that “Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, already envisioned this possibility, and such was the skeptical view of David Friedrich Strauss in the nineteenth century.”⁵⁷ Allison considers the production of hallucinatory visions, including collective ones, to be quite possible, and he gives numerous examples of such visions.⁵⁸ He points out, however, that even were one to accept that the disciples were plagued by guilt and grief (rather than supposing, for instance, that the disciples felt foolish and angry for having followed a false Messiah), one would still be “left with the question why a hallucination led a first-century

seemingly proven inadequate . . . . Would not the evidence for the resurrection be stronger if we could believe that Jesus did not forecast his resurrection, so that the appearances were utterly surprising, totally unprepared for, and so out of the blue?” According to Allison himself, however, “Jesus expected to suffer and perish in the tribulation of the latter days and to be vindicated at the resurrection of the dead” (ibid., 330). This means—as Allison recognizes—that avoiding the claim that Jesus has been raised bodily in the midst of history would have fit best with the disciples’ “previously established categories and expectations.” ⁵⁵ See Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 207–8. This was the view of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Reimarus: Fragments, ed. Charles H. Talbert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 199, 248–58. ⁵⁶ In this regard, he cites Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 97–100; see also 176. Lüdemann cites Yorick Spiegel, Der Prozess des Trauerns: Analyse und Beratung (Munich: Kaiser, 1973). For a more popular presentation of Lüdemann’s conclusions, see Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus? A Historical Approach to the Resurrection (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995). See also Gerd Lüdemann and William Lane Craig, Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment? A Debate between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, ed. Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000). ⁵⁷ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 206. He cites Origen, Against Celsus, 2.55, 60; David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 739–44. See also Charles T. Gorham, The First Easter Dawn: An Inquiry into the Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus (London: Watts, 1908); Michael Goulder, “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 48–61; Goulder, “Did Jesus of Nazareth Rise from the Dead?,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, ed. Stephen Barton and Graham Stanton (London: SPCK, 1994), 58–68. ⁵⁸ In my Jesus and the Demise of Death: Resurrection, Afterlife, and the Fate of the Christian (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), 33, I erroneously presented Allison’s viewpoint as a version of Schillebeeckx’s position. In his “The Resurrection of Jesus and Rational Apologetics,” Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 315–35, Allison insists, “I believe that the disciples saw the postmortem Jesus and that he saw them, which is my way of saying that these experiences, whatever their precise nature, were veridical” (315); and he adds, “As I believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, I obviously cannot regard the event that is the object of my belief as less than likely. How could I assent to something I deemed improbable?” (328). Yet, the same essay also includes statements such as this: “I think it more probable than not that Jesus’s tomb was empty, but I hold this conviction with less than supreme confidence. I might change my mind someday” (ibid., 315). In his view, given that not all aspects of Jewish eschatology need to be interpreted literally, one might affirm Jesus’ Resurrection without affirming Jesus’ bodily Resurrection.

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Jew to confess that Jesus had been ‘raised from the dead.’”⁵⁹ After all, they could have appealed to plenty of other categories besides eschatological resurrection, which up to that point (as distinct from resuscitation) had been reserved for the general resurrection at the end of time. Allison observes that “Peter and his fellow believers could have said, in a manner reminiscent of Jub[ilees] 23:31, that while Jesus’ bones rested for now in the earth, his spirit was exalted to heaven. Or they could have spoken about Jesus the way the Testament of Job, without using the language of resurrection, speaks about its hero: Job’s soul was taken to heaven immediately after his death while his body was prepared for burial.”⁶⁰ In addition to this question about why the first Christians would have described a hallucinatory vision in terms of eschatological “resurrection,” Allison also asks whether it makes sense to attribute the same essential hallucinatory vision to multiple witnesses, including some witnesses who apparently saw Jesus at the same time as did others. With regard to the latter question, Allison argues that we have “many firsthand accounts of several people seeing at once the apparition of a person recently deceased. There are likewise innumerable accounts of various people seeing an apparition over an extended period of time.”⁶¹ In terms of a vision seen by one person alone, he himself testifies to seeing his friend Barbara shortly after her death, and he notes that she did not look like a ghost, though she did look “brightly luminous” or “transfigured.”⁶² He makes clear that the experience of seeing a hallucinatory vision certainly does not mean that the percipient is mentally disturbed.⁶³ At some length, he also suggests that there are parallels between the New Testament’s narratives of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances and later accounts of apparitions, just as there are also parallels between the narratives of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances and “tales from Jewish tradition and Greco-Roman mythology.”⁶⁴ At the same time, he admits that, to say the least, “[t]ypical encounters with the recently deceased do not issue in claims about an empty tomb, nor do they lead to the founding of a new ⁵⁹ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 243. He notes that this question is raised by David Catchpole, Resurrection People: Studies in the Resurrection Narratives in the Gospels (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000), 208–9. ⁶⁰ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 244. See also Gerald O’Collins’s three points in opposition to the hallucination hypothesis, in his Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ, 105–6: (1) there was no prior belief in a crucified Messiah being raised from the dead that could have fueled such a hallucination; (2) there was no prior belief in one person being raised from the dead prior to the general resurrection; (3) research on bereavement does not provide a real analogy to what the disciples reported. For O’Collins’s critical assessment of Allison’s Resurrecting Jesus, see O’Collins, Believing in the Resurrection: The Meaning and Promise of the Risen Christ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012), 12–16. ⁶¹ Ibid., 270. ⁶² Ibid., 275. ⁶³ Pace Gary Habermas, The Risen Jesus and Future Hope (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 12. ⁶⁴ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 283. See also Allison’s “The Resurrection of Jesus and Rational Apologetics,” 329, 331–3.

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religion . . . . Apparitions do not, furthermore, typically eat or drink, and they are not seen by crowds of up to five hundred people.”⁶⁵ But he also argues that the historicity of the New Testament’s Resurrection appearances may perhaps be best defended by identifying them as hallucinatory visions, since otherwise they seem to contain many elements that mark them as legends. What about the former question, namely, why the first Christians described their hallucinatory visions (if they were such) in terms of the eschatological “resurrection” of Jesus? Allison supposes that in an eschatologically charged context featuring the resurrection of the dead, and in light of the hoped-for pattern of suffering and vindication, it is possible that this eschatological framework could have been applied to hallucinatory visions of Jesus, because “[c]ontext begets meaning.”⁶⁶ He suggests that an eschatologically “resurrected” Jesus would not have had to have a physical body: he could have been angellike.⁶⁷ In fact, the bodies of persons seen in hallucinatory visions may include both earthly and angel-like elements. The fact that the Gospels depict the risen Jesus as having a physically tangible body does not mean that what is being described is not a hallucinatory vision.⁶⁸ Allison adds that we also cannot assume that a vision does not derive from something real on the other side of death. Ultimately, however, Allison grants that the language of “resurrection” poses a real difficulty for the explanation based upon hallucinatory visions. In the eschatologically charged context of Jesus’ day, there was no expectation that anyone would be raised from the dead prior to the general resurrection, ⁶⁵ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 283. A commonly noted exception is the Marian apparition at St. Mary’s Coptic Church in Zeitoun, Egypt, where apparently tens of thousands of Muslims and Christians saw Mary, though Mary said and did nothing: see Victor DeVincenzo, “The Apparitions at Zeitoun, Egypt: An Historical Overview,” Journal of Religion and Psychical Research 11 (1988): 3–13. ⁶⁶ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 284. ⁶⁷ See ibid., 287–93. Allison connects this with N. T. Wright’s account of Jesus’ “transphysicality”: see Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 608–15, discussed in Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 292–3. Allison argues, “Given, then, that Christians in other ways thought of Jesus as being like an angel, his ‘transphysicality,’ his solid reality with unreal abilities, is not so peculiar: if he were like an angel, he would have ‘transphysicality’ ” (Resurrecting Jesus, 293). Allison cites Charles Gieschen’s Angelmorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Broaching the same issue of “transphysicality,” Sandra M. Schneiders seeks to define “body as implying materiality but not necessarily physicality” (Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst: Essays on the Resurrection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013], 24). She argues that in affirming a bodily Resurrection of Jesus, we need not be weighed down by the scientific constraints imposed by “physicality”; but, at the same time, she is clear that the risen Jesus is not “a nonbodily spirit” (ibid., 27). ⁶⁸ Allison therefore challenges, at least with regard to the import of earthly bodiliness, modern skepticism about Luke 24:39, John 20:24–9, and John 21:9–14, texts that many modern scholars regard “as relatively late and apologetical, perhaps even directed at an emerging Docetism,” by contrast to the earliest “primitive tradition” that is allegedly found in “Paul’s notion of a spiritual body” (Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 289). As Allison points out, in many Second-Temple texts, angels are not recognized as angels, because they appear to have fully human bodies.

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which would only occur when God restored his people. The first Christians reinterpreted this eschatological expectation to include first the resurrection of Jesus and then in due time the general resurrection. Normally, as Allison says, people do not revise their eschatological expectations except for a significant reason. A major dissonance must therefore have led the early Christian to shift from a one-stage eschatological resurrection to a two-stage eschatological resurrection. But their eschatological expectations need not have been decisively disrupted by Jesus’ death, since after all Jesus “had foreseen, for himself and for others, suffering and perhaps even death in the eschatological tribulation, understood as near.”⁶⁹ The disciples could simply have interpreted his death as part of the eschatological tribulation in which they also were immersed, and they could have anticipated a bodily resurrection for Jesus and for themselves at the final eschatological restoration, when the days of tribulation were complete.⁷⁰ Along these lines, Allison explains that, in accord with the workings of social psychology, the disciples would almost certainly “have done their best to match event to expectation,” which “would have meant (a) interpreting his death as part of the end-time chaos; (b) anticipating for themselves suffering and violent ends in the near future; and (c) keeping their hopes firmly fixed upon the coming consummation, when the dead, including Jesus, would be resurrected.”⁷¹ They could have assimilated his death completely from within their original eschatological expectation, which included a period of great tribulation (perhaps endured first by the Messiah) prior to a general resurrection. The dead Jesus could easily have been recognized as a martyr, and perhaps also even as the Messiah, within the eschatological framework of an end-time tribulation followed by consummation. Within this eschatological framework, the disciples could have appealed to “the triumph of his soul or spirit” and envisioned “his resurrection, like that of everyone else dead and buried, as still belonging to the eschatological future.”⁷² Thus, something surprising must have caused the radical change in the eschatological expectations of the disciples, in order for them to use the language of resurrection to describe what happened to Jesus. Somehow, they must have been converted, not merely as Schillebeeckx thinks by their own experience of Jesus’ martyrdom, but by something confronting them and compelling a change. Allison points out, “Not only did the resurrection stand in tension with the collective character of both Jewish expectations and Jesus’ prophecies, but it implied two acts of vindication—the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Son of Man—and thereby split into two the one ⁶⁹ Ibid., 323. ⁷⁰ Allison develops this point in his The End of the Ages Has Come: An Early Interpretation of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). ⁷¹ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 323. ⁷² Ibid., 325.

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eschatological act of redemption that Jesus’ words had held together.”⁷³ Allison considers that this shift in eschatological expectations must have come from an encounter with Jesus after his death that convinced his disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Instead of arising from cognitive dissonance, affirmation of the Resurrection of Jesus would have caused the cognitive dissonance. No wonder, then, that some of the disciples doubted (Mt 28:17; Mk 16:14; Lk 24:25, 38; Jn 20:24–5), given that their eschatological worldview was being upended.⁷⁴ Allison puts the central point quite strongly: “if there was no reason to believe that his solid body had returned to life, no one would have thought him, against expectations, resurrected from the dead. Certainly visions of or perceived encounters with a postmortem Jesus would not, by themselves, have supplied such a reason.”⁷⁵ Allison nonetheless maintains that the reason the disciples believed that Jesus’ “solid body had returned to life” could in fact be hallucinatory visions combined with belief in an empty tomb. He is ambivalent about whether Jesus’ tomb truly was empty “rather than being presumed or hoped to be vacant.”⁷⁶ At the same time, he pays significant attention to the Gospel accounts of the role of women in finding the tomb empty, and he disputes the arguments against the historicity of the women’s role. In his Antiquities 4.219, the Jewish political leader and historian Josephus says of courtroom procedure, “From women let no evidence be accepted, because of the levity and temerity of their sex.”⁷⁷ Since this stricture was enforced in the Jewish culture of Jesus’ day, Allison thinks that historians may tentatively support the view that the women found an empty tomb. But perhaps someone removed the corpse, or perhaps the women went to the wrong tomb. Allison grants that such speculations are “unlikely,” but they are also “not impossible,” and they gain in likelihood when the alternative explanation is bodily resurrection.⁷⁸ In the end, Allison concludes that “[h]istory keeps its secrets better than many historians care to admit.”⁷⁹ Obviously, the Gospel narratives about Christ’s Resurrection leave out a tremendous amount of data that modern historians wish had been included. Historical agnosticism is often the result of historical research, even in cases where much more data is present than what we have available for Christ’s Resurrection. This point tells against both skeptics and defenders of Christ’s Resurrection, since both sides tend toward overconfidence in their ability to demonstrate historically what happened. ⁷³ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 324. ⁷⁴ Among scholars who think that the motif of the doubting disciples is more than a literary device, Allison cites Howard M. Teeple, “The Historical Evidence of the Resurrection Faith,” in Studies in New Testament and Early Christian Literature: Essays in Honor of Allen Wikgren, ed. David E. Aune (Leiden: Brill, 1972). ⁷⁵ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 324–5. ⁷⁶ Ibid., 320. ⁷⁷ See ibid., 328. ⁷⁸ Ibid., 334. ⁷⁹ Ibid., 337.

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Even in the Gospels, those who witnessed the risen Jesus were often blind or doubtful at first. Allison also highlights the role played by the presuppositions that we bring to bear upon what historically accessible evidence there is. He finds that outside of a “Christian web of belief,” the Resurrection of Jesus will be unintelligible and will inevitably be rejected.⁸⁰ Central to this “web of belief ” are God’s existence as Creator, God’s goodness and love, God’s desire to redeem and dwell with his human creatures, and the fact that “Jesus is someone who should have been raised from the dead.”⁸¹ Allison notes that his own belief in the soul, alongside his disagreement with “eschatological materialism,” allows him to hold that an afterlife does not depend, either for Jesus or for us, “upon the recovery of our current flesh and bones.”⁸² It follows that he feels “no pressing need for an empty tomb,” since Jesus could have “triumphed over death and made this known to his followers” through visions that had nothing to do with the condition of his corpse.⁸³ Against the dismissal of the value of such visions, he argues that N. T. Wright mistakenly ignores the fact that “people often perceive apparitions not as ghostly shades but as solid, as wholly real.”⁸⁴ It should be clear that Allison’s position is highly complex. His emphasis on the limits of what historians can judge to be true does not prevent him personally from affirming that “the disciples saw Jesus after his death” and that “these experiences, whatever their precise nature, were veridical.”⁸⁵ Nonetheless, he presents a strong case for historical skepticism about whether Jesus actually rose bodily from the dead. In the end, without firmly adopting a skeptical position himself,⁸⁶ he thinks that historians have sufficient warrant to ⁸⁰ Ibid., 341. He directs attention here to Francis Watson, “ ‘Historical Evidence’ and the Resurrection of Jesus,” Theology 90 (1987): 365–72. ⁸¹ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 349. ⁸² Ibid., 344. For Allison, even if Jesus’ Resurrection was bodily, this would pose a troubling issue: our resurrection cannot be bodily in the same way that Jesus’ was, since our corpses corrupt and disintegrate. He is responding to Stephen T. Davis’s “Comments on Dale Allison’s Resurrecting Jesus,” Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 285–91. In my view, our bodily resurrection never was conceived as a precise parallel to the raising of Jesus’ incorrupt corpse. Given the existence of the spiritual soul (which Allison himself affirms on biblical grounds), our body can be “reconstituted” and “transformed”—and can truly be our body—without the atoms being precisely the same. See also the reflections on the “organic connection between the resurrection of Jesus and the future, bodily resurrection of believers” in Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1987), 41. For an eloquent articulation of the position that I hold, see Bruno Niederbacher, “Thomas Aquinas on the Numerical Identity of the Resurrected Body,” in Personal Identity and Resurrection, ed. Georg Gasser (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 145–59. ⁸³ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 343. ⁸⁴ Ibid., 347. ⁸⁵ Ibid., 346; Allison, “The Resurrection of Jesus and Rational Apologetics,” 315. ⁸⁶ Allison approvingly quotes the words of the nineteenth-century essayist James Anthony Froude: “Of evidence for the resurrection in the common sense of the word, there may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not enough . . . to produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be something far different from that suspended judgment in which history alone

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be able reasonably to deny Jesus’ Resurrection and to affirm instead that hallucinatory visions were at the root of the proclamation of his Resurrection.

N. T. WRIGHT: THE BODILY RESURRECTION OF JESUS AS A HISTORICAL JUDGMENT Allison had the benefit of writing after N. T. Wright’s 2003 The Resurrection of the Son of God. In Allison’s view, Wright claims too much and does not take seriously enough either the limits of historical reconstruction or the possibility that the disciples experienced visions of Jesus after his death that, in conjunction with a somehow empty tomb, persuaded them that Jesus was risen from the dead. In a lecture delivered first at the University of St. Andrews in 2007 under the title “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” Wright took the opportunity to summarize his basic argument and to respond implicitly to his critics.⁸⁷ In assessing the conversion of the disciples after Jesus’ death, Wright makes two primary points. First, he argues that the disciples’ eschatological shift in fact has seven elements, each of which strengthens the view that only a major event could have produced such a conversion. Second, Wright addresses the possibility of hallucinatory visions, specifically with respect to whether such visions could likely have caused the proclamation that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Wright is well aware that arguments for Christ’s Resurrection ultimately make sense only within a Jewish or Christian worldview, but he does not think that his arguments for the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection can be accepted only by a believing Jew or Christian. On the contrary, he thinks that his arguments flow from the way in which historians assess testimony to events that putatively occurred in the past. In his view, his arguments can be judged successful or not depending on whether he has followed standard historiographical procedure correctly.

would leave us” (Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects [New York: Dutton, 1964], 211–12; quoted in Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 348). See also the judgment of William Lane Craig, “Dale Allison on Jesus’ Empty Tomb, His Postmortem Appearances, and the Origin of the Disciples’ Belief in His Resurrection,” Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 293–301, at 293–4. ⁸⁷ N. T. Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” in Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 41–63. For other writings in which Wright takes the opportunity to revisit his book on Jesus’ Resurrection, see Wright, “An Incompleat (but Grateful) Response to the Review by Markus Bockmuehl of The Resurrection of the Son of God,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26 (2004): 505–10; Wright, “Resurrecting Old Arguments: Responding to Four Essays,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3 (2005): 187–209.

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Summarizing The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright states that “the foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that this Jewish hope [in the resurrection of the dead] has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity.”⁸⁸ He then lists seven early Christian mutations of Jewish eschatology.⁸⁹ First, whereas in Second Temple Judaism there was a wide range of eschatological beliefs, in early Christianity we find a near-unity about the resurrection of the dead. Second, whereas in Second Temple Judaism the theme of resurrection does not have a central place, in early Christianity it does. Third, Second Temple Judaism includes a spectrum of views about what the resurrected body will look like— from a resuscitated body to a star-like body—whereas early Christians are united in believing that the resurrected body will be a physical body, but transformed and incorruptible. Fourth, “No first-century Jew, prior to Easter, expected the resurrection to be anything other than a large-scale event happening to all God’s people, or perhaps to the entire human race, at the very end.”⁹⁰ By contrast, the early Christians believed that one person, embodying and fulfilling God’s people Israel and God’s purposes for the whole human race, had been resurrected as an anticipation and guarantee of the general resurrection. Fifth, early Christian eschatology—centered upon Jesus—was “collaborative” in the sense that early Christians believed that “God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.”⁹¹ Sixth, while in the Old Testament “resurrection” at times functions metaphorically to describe the return from exile and the restoration of Israel, in the New Testament “resurrection” at times functions metaphorically to describe a life lived in Christ through baptism and the grace of the Holy Spirit. Seventh, whereas in Second Temple Judaism the Messiah was expected to conquer the pagan rulers, to rebuild the Temple, and to establish political justice in the world (and was not expected ⁸⁸ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 46. ⁸⁹ In The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright identifies the same basic mutations, but lists them somewhat differently: see 476–9. ⁹⁰ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 48. For the view that Paul is responsible for this eschatological shift, on the supposition that the apostles (before Paul began to preach) conceived of Jesus’ Resurrection as his vindication and exaltation (as in 2 Maccabees) but not as the inauguration of the eschatological resurrection, see Joost Holleman, Resurrection and Parousia: A Traditio-Historical Study of Paul’s Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Holleman, “Jesus’ Resurrection as the Beginning of the Eschatological Resurrection (1 Cor. 15,20),” in The Corinthian Correspondence, ed. Reimund Bieringer (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996), 653–60. Holleman argues that Jesus’ Resurrection really does not have a strong link, in itself, to the eschatological resurrection. I think that Holleman’s reconstruction of a pre-Pauline view is not warranted. In my view, the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah would suffice—in connection with his life, teaching, and sacrificial death—to make clear the link between his glorious Resurrection and that of his people. ⁹¹ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 49.

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to die), in early Christianity Jesus was proclaimed to be the Messiah despite the evident fact that he had not accomplished what the Messiah was universally expected to accomplish and in fact had been ignominiously crucified. Of these mutations, the fourth and the seventh are in my view the most important: the change in Jewish eschatology to include first the raising of Jesus and then the general resurrection at the eschatological consummation, and the change in the understanding of the Messiah to affirm that a crucified man who had not conquered Rome or rebuilt the Temple or established a just reign over the world is in fact the anticipated Messiah.⁹² Wright argues that these are seismic shifts, and he considers that the most likely historical explanation for them is that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, as the first Christians universally said that he was. In Wright’s view, it is simply “impossible . . . to account for early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah without the resurrection.”⁹³ Why change Jewish eschatology from a one-stage resurrection to a two-stage resurrection unless someone actually had been resurrected? As noted above, Allison is quite sympathetic to Wright on this point. In Allison’s view, however, this could have been accomplished with persuasive visions, and so bodily resurrection still cannot be shown to be the likeliest historical explanation. For Allison, visions—whether as hallucinatory fantasies or as God’s way of communicating the truth that Jesus is in glory—can suffice as a historical explanation, assuming a somehow empty tomb, because the dead person can seem in a vision to be possessed of a real body. Wright responds that as a historical matter, the claim that belief in Jesus’ Resurrection first arose due to hallucinatory visions has to face the problem that such visions are quite common, as Allison also recognizes. When we see visions of dead people, it takes a lot for us to be persuaded that they have been bodily resurrected—and this is why the case of Jesus is so unusual. If we see a

⁹² By contrast (as noted critically by Allison, and as also critiqued by Wright in The Resurrection of the Son of God, 700), Henk Jan de Jonge argues that the original “Christian preaching” was merely “the continuation of the positive response which the historical Jesus had inspired among his followers before his death” (de Jonge, “Visionary Experience and the Historical Origins of Christianity,” 52–3). ⁹³ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 49–50. In The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright states this in logical terms of “sufficient” and “necessary” conditions: “The actual bodily resurrection of Jesus (not a mere resuscitation, but a transforming revivification) clearly provides a sufficient condition of the tomb being empty and the ‘meetings’ taking place. Nobody is likely to doubt that. Once grant that Jesus really was raised, and all the pieces of the historical jigsaw puzzle of early Christianity fall into place. My claim is stronger: that the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides a necessary condition for these things; in other words, that no other condition could or would do. All the efforts to find alternative explanations fail, and they were bound to do so” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 717). Wright adds that he does not mean to say that he has arrived at “a ‘proof ’ of the resurrection in terms of some neutral standpoint,” since he recognizes that what one holds regarding the existence of God (for example) will inform whether one can believe that Jesus was resurrected (ibid.). He thinks that what he has presented works logically “by inference to the best explanation” (ibid., 716).

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vision even of a person who looks quite bodily (rather than ghostly), we still tend to assume that what we are seeing is a vision. To assure us that we are not simply seeing a vision, we require tangible evidence, evidence that can only be given to us by the person whom we are seeing. Wright argues, “For the disciples to see, or think they saw, someone they took to be Jesus would not by itself have generated the stories we have.”⁹⁴ Again, this is because of the nature of visions: “Everyone in the ancient world (like many today) knew that people sometimes had strange experiences involving encounters with the dead, particularly the recently dead.”⁹⁵ Even if the disciples felt that the vision was of a truly alive Jesus, they would not have easily turned to the category of bodily resurrection, because “they weren’t expecting such a resurrection.”⁹⁶ Indeed, their eschatology had no place for it, whereas their eschatology did have plenty of room for a spiritual ascent or exaltation after death.⁹⁷ Wright also thinks that as a historical matter the tomb would have had to be empty. Since Jesus was buried in a “standard primary burial” that was intended to be followed by a later burial of his bones in an ossuary, it would have been expected that someone would go to his tomb eventually to collect his bones, and so the location of his tomb would have been remembered and the tomb would have been carefully sealed.⁹⁸ An empty tomb would not have been enough for the category of resurrection to be employed, since people knew that all sorts of things could happen to a corpse, including being moved. The necessary thing would have been an empty tomb joined to “sightings of ⁹⁴ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 56. Dunn takes the same position (Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 874). ⁹⁵ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 56. As Wright comments in The Resurrection of the Son of God, “The more ‘normal’ these ‘visions’ were, the less chance there is that anyone, no matter how cognitively dissonant they may have been feeling, would have said what nobody had ever said about such a dead person before, that they had been raised from the dead. Indeed, such visions meant precisely, as people in the ancient and modern worlds have discovered, that the person was dead, not that they were alive” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 691). Wright is responding Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (London: SCM Press, 1994); and John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998). ⁹⁶ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 56. ⁹⁷ For this argument, see also John Muddiman, “ ‘I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body,’ ” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, 128–38, at 133–4; Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 835, 866–8. Dunn notes that Second Temple Jews also had the category of rapture (or translation to heaven) prior to death. ⁹⁸ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 56. See also Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 707–8; and especially Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 834–7. Dunn adds that within Second Temple Judaism, “the desire to honour the memory of the revered dead by constructing appropriate tombs and (by implication) by veneration of the site is well attested,” but the first Christians did not venerate Jesus’ tomb, evidently because they “did not believe any tomb contained his body” (ibid., 837–8). This seems strange, because the tomb would have been the site of the Resurrection. I note that the first Christians believed that they could have contact with the risen and ascended Jesus more directly than through veneration of the tomb.

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and meetings with the risen Jesus,”⁹⁹ in order to persuade the disciples that he was not a vision (and therefore not a spirit ascending to God, which would have fit into their expectations) but rather was truly alive with a transformed, tangible body. In the Gospels of Luke and John, we find descriptions of encounters with Jesus after his death in which the risen Jesus shows his disciples that he is not a mere vision or ghost, but has a real body. For example, in the Gospel of Luke the risen Jesus, finding that his disciples think he may be a mere “spirit” (Lk 24:37), tells them: “Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see” (Lk 24:38–9). Luke presents Jesus as eating in their presence, explicitly in order to show that he is not reducible to a hallucinatory vision or to any kind of vision or spirit. Similar events are found in John 20:20 and John 20:27.¹⁰⁰ Often, Wright recognizes, these accounts are dismissed as late apologetic elements, added by the evangelists Luke and John in order to guard against the charge that the disciples simply saw a spirit or in order to fight a Docetic view of Christ. Wright observes, however, that the Gospels of Luke and John also include elements that make Jesus’ body seem more like a spirit, which the evangelists need not have included if they were motivated by the apologetic purposes ascribed to them.¹⁰¹ For example, in John 20:14, Mary Magdalene ⁹⁹ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 56. Wright adds in The Resurrection of the Son of God, “A further, more recent suggestion can also be ruled out: that, after his crucifixion, Jesus’ body was not buried, but left instead for dogs and vultures to finish off. Had that happened, no matter how many ‘visions’ they had had, the disciples would not have concluded that he had been raised from the dead” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 709–10). Here Wright is criticizing John Dominic Crossan’s proposal in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), chapter 6. ¹⁰⁰ See the observation of Sandra Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst, x: “John 20 is not a collection of disconnected or interchangeable episodes but a single narrative, composed of a number of ‘scenes’ or acts,’ which together present a coherent and integrated interpretation of the Resurrection.” Schneiders adds that “John’s Gospel as a whole, and especially his interpretation of the Resurrection, [are] quite different from that of the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). This difference is not a matter of contradiction but of mutually enriching complementarity” (ibid., xi). ¹⁰¹ See Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 606: “it makes no sense to think of Luke sitting down to compose an anti-docetic narrative about the genuine human body of Jesus and allowing himself so far to forget this important purpose as to have Jesus appear and disappear, not to be recognized, and finally ascend into heaven. Similar things must be said of John.” For the same point, see Muddiman, “ ‘I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body,’ ” 131–2. Muddiman adds that Luke and John, rather than editorially seeking to shore up Jesus’ Resurrection by emphasizing its physicality, respectively choose to foreground the themes of accordance with Scripture (Luke) and seeing by faith (John). The problem is highlighted (though perhaps unconsciously) in Rafael Rodríguez’s colorful description of Luke’s “insistence that the apostles’ encounters with the risen Lord were more than visionary experiences (see Luke 24:37–43; Acts 1:3; cf. Luke 24:23), despite Christ’s strange ability to disappear suddenly (Luke 24:31), to appear suddenly in the midst of a crowd (Luke 24:36), and even to ascend up into the clouds (Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9)” (Rodríguez, “ ‘According to the Scriptures’: Suffering and the Psalms in the

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does not recognize the risen Jesus, and in John 20:19, the risen Jesus enters through closed doors. In Luke 24:31, Jesus first is not recognized for a lengthy period of time, and then vanishes from sight in the middle of a meal with Cleopas and his companion. In Luke 24:51, Jesus, while blessing his disciples, ascends into heaven. Wright’s point is that we cannot rightly ascribe an apologetic (and falsifying) intention to the evangelists, when they are writing about the risen Jesus’ tangibility, that we then ignore when the same evangelists are showing that Jesus’ risen body was not a normal one at all. In fact, it is quite likely that if a body has been risen to glorified life—rather than resuscitated—such a body could be both tangible and capable of strange things.¹⁰² The combination that the Gospels record is only implausible if we assume that resurrection cannot happen. On historical grounds, then, Wright holds both that visions of Jesus after his death would not have been enough to persuade the disciples to apply the category of “resurrection,” and that the narratives in the Gospels that describe the risen Jesus offering bodily evidence of his resurrection cannot be dismissed as apologetic inventions. In support of the latter point, Wright details four aspects of the Resurrection narratives that suggest that the narratives were not late inventions by the evangelists.¹⁰³ First, the Gospels as a whole are filled with Old Testament allusions and quotations that show the hand of the evangelist

Speeches in Acts,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz, ed. Tom Thatcher [Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014], 241–62, at 251). Aware of Wright’s perspective, Outi Lehtipuu takes the opposite tack (unpersuasively in my view) and argues that the Gospels of Luke and John show that the evangelists were ambivalent about the bodily character of the resurrection: Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 45–6. See also Peter Lampe’s argument by contrast to Paul, “later evangelists pretend to ‘know’ ” what Jesus’ resurrected body looked like (Lampe, “Paul’s Concept of a Spiritual Body,” in Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments, ed. Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002], 103–14, at 109). Gerhard Delling thinks that Luke’s and John’s “crude emphasis to the correspondence between the body of the earthly Jesus and that of the risen Jesus, would certainly not have been acceptable to Paul”; but Delling argues that more important are the “fundamental agreements” between Paul and the evangelists: see Delling, “The Significance of the Resurrection of Jesus for Faith in Jesus Christ,” in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, 77–104, at 86. ¹⁰² For discussion of Wright’s arguments in this respect, see Joseph J. Smith, “N. T. Wright’s Understanding of the Nature of Jesus’ Risen Body,” Heythrop Journal 57 (2016): 29–73. See also Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst, 28. Schneiders goes on to say perceptively that “Jesus’ [risen] body is real. How its relation to materiality is actualized in any given situation depends on how Jesus chooses to be present. If the appropriate mode of presence requires a quasi-physicality in order to express, to symbolize or ‘body forth,’ his identity, his consistency, his interactive presence, there is no reason why it cannot assume the qualities of physicality such as the ability to be touched or to eat” (ibid.). ¹⁰³ For these four aspects, see the more extensive presentation in The Resurrection of the Son of God, 599–608.

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at work.¹⁰⁴ By contrast, the Resurrection narratives in the Gospels generally do not have Old Testament allusions and quotations.¹⁰⁵ Second, the Resurrection narratives present the women as the first witnesses, suggesting to Wright that “[h]ad the tradition started in the male-only form we find in 1 Corinthians 15, it would never have developed—in such different ways—into the female-first stories we find in the Gospels.”¹⁰⁶ Third, the portraits of the risen Jesus offered by the Resurrection narratives are not what would have emerged “from people mulling over the scriptures following Jesus’s death or a new experience of inner illumination,” since had the portraits arisen in these ways, they would have followed the prophecy of Daniel 12:3 and depicted “the risen Jesus shining like a star.”¹⁰⁷ Fourth, the Resurrection narratives lack “mention of the future Christian hope,” which is often elsewhere (as in the letters of Paul) discussed in an explicit way in connection with Jesus’ Resurrection.¹⁰⁸ All four of these indicators lead to the conclusion that the Resurrection narratives are not late apologetic writing by the evangelists whose goal was “to give a pseudohistorical basis for what had been essentially a private experience.”¹⁰⁹

¹⁰⁴ In seeking to undermine the reliability of the Gospels themselves (and thereby by implication the narratives about Jesus’ Resurrection), Antony Flew emphasizes the presence of Old Testament allusions—in his view quite unpersuasive—in the Gospels: see Flew, “Negative Statement,” 3–13, at 8–9, and Flew, “Rebuttal,” 33–7, at 36–37, in Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate, ed. Terry L. Miethe (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). For the Synoptic Gospels’ use of Jonah and the Psalms to prefigure Jesus’ Resurrection (prior to the Resurrection narratives), see Maarten J. J. Menken, “Interpretation of the Old Testament and the Resurrection of Jesus in John’s Gospel,” in Resurrection in the New Testament: Festschrift J. Lambrecht, 189–205. Menken notes that John lacks such prefiguration, and in his view John 20:9 explains why: “as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” ¹⁰⁵ See Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 601. Wright adds that although John Dominic Crossan elsewhere writes “of the way the evangelists and/or their sources have ‘historicized prophecy’, not least in the crucifixion narratives,” Crossan “cannot even begin to say the same about the resurrection narratives” (ibid.). See also C. F. Evans, Resurrection and the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1970), 12. ¹⁰⁶ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 53. Wright comments in The Resurrection of the Son of God, “It is, frankly, impossible to imagine that they were inserted into the tradition after Paul’s day . . . . Even if we suppose that Mark made up most of his material, and did so some time in the late 60s at the earliest, it will not do to have him, or anyone else at that stage, making up a would-be apologetic legend about an empty tomb and having the women be the ones who find it” (607). ¹⁰⁷ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 54. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 55. See also Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 603–4 with regard to Paul’s letters and 1 Peter. Wright grants that “Paul is capable of referring to Jesus’ resurrection without immediately making the link: as we saw, he declares in opening and closing the theological argument of Romans that the resurrection validates Jesus’ Messiahship, his status as ‘son of god’, and his consequent status as the world’s true lord and ruler. But even there the connection of Jesus’ resurrection with that of all his people is implicit [see Romans 1:4 and Romans 15:12]” (ibid.). ¹⁰⁹ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 55.

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Has Wright thereby moved beyond what historical research can conclude with any probability,¹¹⁰ through his defense of the view that hallucinatory visions cannot have persuaded the disciples to employ “resurrection” language or to proclaim the crucified Jesus as the Messiah while Rome was still in power and the Temple not rebuilt? Wright has certainly confirmed Allison’s argument that had not something extraordinary happened (which, as we saw, Allison thinks could simply be visions), the disciples would not have proclaimed Jesus to be risen. Schillebeeckx’s view of the grief-stricken disciples arriving at a Spirit-filled new understanding that Jesus was the Christ, and doing so without visions or sightings of Jesus, can be safely ruled out.¹¹¹ In addition, Wright has also shown that the theory of hallucinatory visions does not do justice to the specific traits of the Resurrection narratives or to the kind of evidence that the disciples would have needed in order to change their eschatology and to change their understanding of the requisite tasks of the true Messiah. Wright’s conclusion is that “far and away the best historical explanation is that Jesus of Nazareth, having been thoroughly dead and buried, really was raised to life on the third day with a new kind of physical body.”¹¹² As Wright recognizes, of course, much depends upon what one means by “best historical explanation.” Often historians themselves are skeptical of even very good historical explanations, because humans in particular circumstances can do so many unpredictable things. Every “best historical explanation” has a

¹¹⁰ In The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright makes clear that “[a]lmost nothing is ever ruled out absolutely; history, after all, is mostly the study of the unusual and unrepeatable. What we are after is high probability; and this is to be attained by examining all the possibilities, all the suggestions, and asking how well they explain the phenomena” (706). ¹¹¹ Recall Wright’s critique of Schillebeeckx’s view, in The Resurrection of the Son of God, 701–6. Schillebeeckx’s reconstruction of the Easter events parallels his view of the development of doctrine. See Schillebeeckx, “Towards a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics,” in his God the Future of Man, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 1–49. For Schillebeeckx, in the ongoing history of the Church, authentic insights are grounded not in the particular teachings or deeds of Jesus, but rather in the community’s ongoing perception of Jesus’ total life and death. For an exemplification of this viewpoint, see his Christ, 425: “Johannine theology rewrites the traditional apostolic faith by bringing it up to date in terms of the community within which it is set . . . . For in the spirit of Johannine theology every community throughout the world has to write its own history of the living Jesus” See also Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1993). For concerns regarding Schillebeeckx’s approach, see Henri de Lubac, SJ’s “The ‘Sacrament of the World’?,” Appendix B in de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Richard Arnandez, FSC (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 191–234. ¹¹² Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 57. Wright criticizes John Dominic “Crossan’s attempt . . . to retain the words ‘bodily’ and ‘embodied’, but to mean by them not that Jesus’ body was itself raised from the dead but that his life somehow continues in the embodied communities that work for justice in the world”—an attempt that Wright associates with “a kind of postmodern Catholic ecclesiology” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 729 fn 24, citing Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity, xxvii–xxxi).

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chance of being wrong, a chance that arises due to the freedom, oddity, and inventiveness of humans.¹¹³ In addition, Wright grants that an epistemological conversion will be necessary for those who wish not only to posit but also to accept the “best historical explanation,” which is the explanation that the Gospels provide. As Wright says, “We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples’ minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God’s new creation right in the middle of the old one.”¹¹⁴ Jesus’ Resurrection, even if its truth is open to historical investigation, obviously “burst[s] the boundaries of history.”¹¹⁵ As Wright emphasizes, such bursting of history’s boundaries is not anti-historical, because for centuries God prepared for Jesus’ Resurrection and the inauguration of the new creation, and because the history of salvation continues today.¹¹⁶ ¹¹³ Nicholas Lombardo, OP remarks astutely, “We often suffer from the illusion that we can achieve mathematical certitude about the historicity of past events. But we cannot: the certainty proper to mathematics is not the certainty proper to historical knowledge” (Lombardo, The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 122). Lombardo underscores that in the case of the Gospels, we can make historical judgments but we cannot get around the question of whether the testimony is trustworthy. Inevitably, there will be an element of personal subjectivity in our decision about whether or not to trust the testimony. Lombardo adds that the “question about the Gospels’ degree of historical reliability turns especially on the question of the evangelists’ sources, and whether the evangelists could plausibly have had access to accurate information about Jesus” (ibid., 124). He argues in favor of Richard Bauckham’s position, which I set forth at some length in the next chapter. ¹¹⁴ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 60. See also The Resurrection of the Son of God, 737: “No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including intellectual and cultural tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent.” ¹¹⁵ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 60. ¹¹⁶ Wright denies the triumphalist or exclusivist implications that some critics of Christianity associate with this claim. He refers to “a popular view of what Christians, particularly conservative Christians, are supposed by others to believe—namely that they are the favoured few, sharing Jesus’ privileged status, a cut above the rest of humanity. Jesus’ resurrection . . . is sometimes seen as an immoral doctrine, because it appears to legitimate Christianity over against all other religions. It appears to be a triumphalist doctrine, clinging for security to the idea of an omnipotent god who can intervene in the natural world at any point and sort things out, but who apparently chooses not to in most cases . . . . The idea of Jesus as a representative, such a key notion in all early Christian expositions of his resurrection, has been screened out both from the ‘meaning’ which is here under attack and from the critiques which, in demolishing this meaning, have felt obliged to demolish the resurrection along with it” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 722–3; 735–6). For the caricature of the doctrine of Jesus’ Resurrection against which he is responding, see Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity and A. J. M. Wedderburn’s Beyond Resurrection (London: SCM Press, 1999), chapters 9–10. Wedderburn describes his own project as one of “pleading agnosticism about what happened on Easter Day and . . . seeking to detach the validity of Christ’s call to follow him from any decisions about what did or did not happen on that day” (Beyond Resurrection, 220). See also Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus:

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Although Wright affirms that we will need the eyes of faith in order fully to embrace the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection, his central point is that Christian faith “is not blind belief that rejects all history” or that occupies a “separate watertight compartment” apart from what historical research can profitably investigate.¹¹⁷ I concur with Wright in this insistence. As Wright says, there is strong evidence within history that Jesus was resurrected. Visions of the recently dead are too common and too well understood (as spiritvisions) to be the likely source of a radical change of eschatology and a radical reconfiguration of Messianic expectations. Jews who experienced such visions would seek clear evidence that the visions were ontologically objective before applying the category of “resurrection” and proclaiming a crucified man to be the Messiah. While insisting that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the best historical explanation and merits acceptance by all historians, Wright appeals in his essay—more clearly than in The Resurrection of the Son of God—to “an epistemology of love.”¹¹⁸ Without depreciating the value of historical arguments, he admits that Jesus’ “resurrection cannot simply be known from within the old world of decay and denial, tyrants and torture, disobedience and death.”¹¹⁹ This is so because when we properly know the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, we know not only an event in this old creation but also an event of the (now inaugurated) new creation. To embrace this radically new world, our knowing must be formed by faith and love, or else our minds will revert back instinctively to the certainties of the fallen world that we know all too well. If faith and love are ultimately required for fully accepting the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, do historical defenses of Jesus’ Resurrection fall back upon subjective dispositions after all? Against such a view, Wright observes that love seeks realities, not chimeras. Love opens us to embrace realities that are at work in history and that are outside our control—such as other persons, or

A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), 183–9. While rejecting Wedderburn’s argument for the necessity of agnosticism about the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection, Licona grants that “the data surrounding what happened to Jesus is fragmentary and could possibly be mixed with legend” (ibid., 185). ¹¹⁷ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?” 61. ¹¹⁸ Ibid. I will discuss Bernard Lonergan’s contributions further in Chapter 5. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., 62. See also Thomas F. Torrance’s remark that “the risen Jesus Christ cannot be discerned within the frame of the old conditions of life which by his resurrection he has transcended, and cannot be understood except within the context of the transformation which it has brought about” (Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998], 37). Torrance notes that this point was also made by William Milligan, The Resurrection of Our Lord (London: Macmillan, 1884), 31–8. Torrance emphasizes that the fullness of Jesus’ Resurrection “is not something that can be disclosed through extraneous means, or be apprehended except by participating in it and dwelling in it, i.e. from within its reality” (Space, Time and Resurrection, 38; cf. 46 on the full truth of Jesus risen).

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Jesus’ Resurrection, or God. It is therefore important that “the historical arguments for Jesus’s bodily resurrection are truly strong.”¹²⁰ This is so even if we must allow our knowing and our loving to be shaped by what Jesus has inaugurated, so that our minds are raised up by God to the level of the gift that God has given, our “new and larger home.”¹²¹

CO NCLUSION That Jesus’ disciples underwent a profound conversion is something upon which Schillebeeckx, Allison, and Wright agree. The question is what caused the conversion. Schillebeeckx and Wright, at least, agree that divine grace moved the disciples to come to know Jesus in a new way, in faith and love. But for Schillebeeckx, the conversion is not caused by any new action on the part of Jesus Christ after his death. Instead, moved by grace, the disciples—perhaps first Peter—came to a new understanding after Jesus’ death that Jesus was in fact the Christ and that Jesus must be alive. On this view, neither Peter nor anyone else ever saw Jesus again after Jesus’ death. By contrast, the conversion that Wright has in view arises from the embodied activity of the risen Jesus Christ, activity that included the concrete manifestation of his risen body, during which he spoke to his disciples and invited them to touch him in order to distinguish himself from a hallucinatory vision. From this perspective, Christ’s own embodied agency, his initiative, and his teaching and action in his risen flesh ground the conversion of the first disciples, from which all later Christian conversion stems. Without the bodily appearances of the risen Jesus, the grief-stricken community of the disciples, graced or not, would not have been able to change either its eschatology or its understanding of what the Messiah should accomplish on earth. It took Christ’s actual bodily Resurrection and his activity in his risen flesh for the community of disciples to undergo such a profound conversion. At the same time, Jesus’ whole life and death were important for this conversion, since absent Jesus’ extraordinary teachings and the fact that he acted as only God could act, his Resurrection would make no sense. Allison argues for something like a middle ground. He certainly does not agree with Schillebeeckx that the disciples simply came to a new understanding; the change in their eschatology requires more explanation than simply that under the impulsion of grace they thought more about Jesus’ life and death. Allison and Wright are in agreement that if it had simply been a matter of the disciples’ deepening their reflection, then they would never have used ¹²⁰ Wright, “Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?”? 63.

¹²¹ Ibid.

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the language of “resurrection.” But for Allison, their conversion can be ascribed to (hallucinatory) visions of Jesus after his death, combined perhaps with a somehow empty tomb, a situation that need not have been caused by actual resurrection. For Allison, the question of whether Jesus rose bodily is not so pressing because, while Allison believes in an afterlife, Allison is not entirely sure what good it would do (or even whether it is possible) to regain our bodies. Allison would nonetheless be glad to believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead, if the evidence clearly warranted it. Speaking in his role as a historian, however, he thinks that visions, combined with a somehow empty tomb, are the likely cause of the conversion of the disciples. Admittedly, as Sarah Coakley observes with regard to the testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection, “We are dealing in this case with purported violations of natural law [namely, that the dead remain dead]; and that means that scepticism is appropriate until substantial evidence in favour of the violation is provided.”¹²² The narratives of the Resurrection appearances may not by themselves be “substantial evidence” by the lights of modern historiography, since they contain too few details and too many contradictions and theological lessons. But, as Wright shows, the narratives contain core areas of agreement and numerous details that militate against their being simply invented, and their key claim—that Jesus rose bodily to a glorified life and that he manifested himself clearly to skeptical witnesses—comes through powerfully.¹²³ Taken as testimony to the risen Jesus’ bodily manifestation of himself to the disciples, the narratives of the Resurrection appearances account for the proclamation of Jesus as Messiah (despite his crucifixion) and for the radical shift in eschatology. When combined with Jesus’ striking life and death, they stand as “substantial evidence.” I think that hallucinatory visions cannot plausibly have been the source of the apostles’ proclamation that Jesus rose from the dead. It is unlikely that anyone, especially Jews who expected a general ¹²² Sarah Coakley, “Is the Resurrection a ‘Historical’ Event?: Some Muddles and Mysteries,” in The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, ed. Paul Avis (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1993), 85–115, at 100. ¹²³ As Francis J. Moloney, SDB comments, “A comparative study of the four Gospels shows that the following elements form the core of each gospel story [i.e. each Resurrection narrative], no matter how differently they were shaped in the fourfold storytelling traditions of the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John: 1. On the third day women (in John only one woman: Mary Magdalene) discovered an empty tomb. 2. A young man (Mark), and angel (Matthew [John: two angels], or two men (Luke) at the tomb proclaimed to the women (in Mark, Matthew, and Luke) that Jesus had been raised by God. 3. The risen Jesus appeared to a number of people. This element is missing in Mark, but the tradition is presupposed by the instruction given to the women in Mark 16:7 that they are to tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of them into Galilee, where they will see him. 4. The risen Jesus commissions the disciples for their future task, in different ways promising that he (Matthew and John 21 [?]) or his Spirit (Luke and John [the Paraclete]) will be with them always” (Moloney, The Resurrection of the Messiah: A Narrative Commentary on the Resurrection Accounts in the Four Gospels [New York: Paulist Press, 2013], 139–40).

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resurrection, would have applied “resurrection” language to a hallucinatory vision, even a body-like vision. In sum, the substantial evidence identified by Wright makes Jesus’ actual Resurrection the “best historical explanation” for the testimony of the narratives, whose diverse details (but shared core content) fit with the degree of literary freedom permitted in the Hellenistic genre of history. Nonetheless, the best historical explanation remains a probability, not a proof. One never quite knows what humans will or will not do, or what might or might not have happened in the past. Even once one removes irrational bias against the existence of God, it remains the case that a moderate skepticism in ancient historical matters is salutary, given human quirkiness and the confusion that often accompanies events. Historians are correct to be skeptical of explanations that depend upon miracles, since miracles are not normal occurrences. When the best historical explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead, therefore, this does not mean that historical doubts must go away entirely. As Wright says, the determination that the best historical explanation is that Jesus actually rose “cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.”¹²⁴ Affirming that Jesus’ Resurrection is the best historical explanation of the available evidence differs from affirming that his Resurrection did indeed actually happen. Affirming the latter requires not only belief in God but also (inevitably) belief that God was acting in Israel’s history.¹²⁵ The biblical scholar Lidija Novakovic comments that arguments about the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection are often characterized by an underlying disagreement about the meaning of “historical,” in which one side holds that “the term ‘historical’ means that an event took place in time and space” and the other side holds that “the term ‘historical’ is applicable only to the events whose occurrence can be demonstrated with historical arguments based on empirical evidence that are independent of someone’s religious beliefs.”¹²⁶ I grant that it is impossible for Jesus’ Resurrection, as such, to be independent of “religious beliefs,” since atheism is incompatible with Jesus’ corpse actually ¹²⁴ Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 718. ¹²⁵ Thus Richard Bauckham holds that “[t]o agree with the early Christians about what happened to Jesus requires taking on at least something of their wider religious worldview,” a point that Wright would accept. See Bauckham, Jesus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98. Bauckham goes on to say, “Otherwise, one can perhaps get no further than saying that something entirely extraordinary must have happened for Jesus’ disciples, left deeply disillusioned, to come to believe that God had raised him from death” (ibid.). ¹²⁶ Lidija Novakovic, Resurrection: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 128. Her view is that “[t]hose who say that Jesus’ resurrection is not accessible to historical investigation are in conformity not only with modern understanding of the nature of historical enquiry but also with the New Testament documents themselves, which are unanimous that Jesus’ resurrection was not an observable event but a divine act that can only be expressed through the confession that God raised Jesus from the dead” (ibid., 156). Certainly historical investigation cannot enable us to observe the event of Jesus’ Resurrection.

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being raised.¹²⁷ But Wright has successfully shown that the best historical explanation for the testimony of the New Testament is that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. As Wright shows, there is not a better explanation of the evidence, although one is still free to deny that Jesus rose, and although there are other possible explanations.¹²⁸ The theologian Hans Frei has proposed with regard to Jesus’ Resurrection: “To know who he is in connection with what took place is to know that he is. This is the climax of the story and its claim. What the accounts are saying, in effect, is that the being and identity of Jesus in the resurrection are such that his nonresurrection becomes inconceivable.”¹²⁹ There is something deeply right about this way of putting the matter, insofar as the Gospels were written after the fact of Jesus’ Resurrection. Given that Jesus is in fact Messiah and Lord, worthy of divine worship, then of course Jesus was resurrected. On the basis of their recognition that Jesus was and is Messiah and Lord, the New Testament authors sought to make possible “a genuine encounter,” in and through the community of believers, with the living Lord Jesus Christ, who, as the Savior, is most truly known through faith and love rather than through academic arguments.¹³⁰ ¹²⁷ Coakley correctly remarks that “[i]f Christian theism (and, with that, cases of ‘miraculous intervention’) can already be presumed by the historical investigator when the evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection is evaluated, then much follows; it is not that the evidence per se is strengthened, but rather that the degree of scepticism normally accorded to a ‘law violation’ is duly tempered” (Coakley, “Is the Resurrection a ‘Historical’ Event?” 108). ¹²⁸ Novakovic comes down on the side of Allison, arguing that historical explanation can neither affirm nor exclude Jesus’ Resurrection. She emphasizes that it is impossible for one’s “religious convictions” not to “affect the evaluation of the data” (Resurrection, 154). See also Alan F. Segal, “The Resurrection: Faith or History?,” in The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 135–8, at 135. ¹²⁹ Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 145. ¹³⁰ Matthew J. Ramage, Jesus, Interpreted: Benedict XVI, Bart Ehrman, and the Historical Truth of the Gospels (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 192. For a salutary emphasis that “[t]he separating off of the limited Christian brotherhood is not the creation of some esoteric circle, but is intended to serve the whole” and that “[t]he brotherhood of Christians fulfills its responsibility for the whole through missionary activity, through agape, and through suffering,” see Joseph Ratzinger, The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993 [German edition 1960]), 75. Drawing upon the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ratzinger insists upon “the mystery of this vicariousness, given in Christ and forming the basis of all election” (ibid., 79), and he concludes that “[t]he Church, as such and as a whole, is the bearer of this vicarious election, the highest mission of which is to become vicarious rejection . . . . Just as the individual who is chosen can never cut himself off from those whom he thinks are not, so the Church, as a chosen community, cannot cut herself off from those who are not God’s people. Election is always, at bottom, election for others . . . . The last and highest mission of the Christian in relation to nonbelievers is to suffer for them and in their place as the Master did” (ibid., 79, 83). See also the same point in Joseph Ratzinger’s What It Means to Be a Christian: Three Sermons, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 43–62; as well as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God, trans. R. John Halliburton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 33–4.

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Yet, the New Testament authors wanted to communicate that Jesus’ Resurrection actually happened and that had he not risen from the dead, his disciples would not have proclaimed him Messiah and Lord. The desire to communicate that Jesus truly rose from the dead is one reason why the Gospel of John, for example, describes the risen Jesus’ encounter with doubting Thomas and concludes by approving the beloved disciple “who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true” (Jn 21:24).¹³¹ The New Testament authors were not simply writing for those who already believed Jesus to be Messiah and Lord; they were seeking to share utterly extraordinary events that had radically changed their own views of what Israel’s God was doing. The Resurrection narratives expose a profound change in Jewish understanding of the nature of the eschaton and the work of the Messiah. Moreover, the Resurrection narratives contend that Jesus’ actual bodily rising from the dead was what caused this profound change of perspective. Neither the alltoo-human community of disciples, nor “a spirit” (Lk 24:37) of the kind that appears in a hallucinatory vision, nor a mere angelophany was the source of the change. The best historical explanation of the radical reworking of the disciples’ eschatology, with their shockingly new belief in the crucified Messiah who rose from the dead to glorified life prior to the general resurrection, is that Jesus of Nazareth showed in persuasive ways that his corpse had been raised to glorified life.

¹³¹ See Glenn W. Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). According to Most, “Doubting Thomas seems to have been devised by John largely in order to invoke, exaggerate, and then resolve doubt, and thereby to lay doubt to rest once and for all” (ibid., 223). I do not think that John presumes that doubt can be laid “to rest once and for all.” It is an ongoing possibility, and so is faith, which John exhorts us to embrace: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (Jn 20:29).

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2 Remembrance of the Risen Jesus According to the Gospel of Matthew, the risen Jesus envisioned a period during which his people, sharing in his eschatological tribulation, journey toward (and with) him through historical time until the final consummation. He therefore instructed his disciples to embark on the mission of bearing witness about Jesus to “all nations” (Mt 28:19). The disciples’ mission is shaped sacramentally by the command to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and is shaped doctrinally and morally by the command to “[teach] them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19–20). The risen Jesus proclaimed that “[a]ll authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” and he promised that “I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:18, 20). He also promised his disciples that “you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8). Nonetheless, this “power” from the Holy Spirit may often seem somewhat lacking. In Christian history, we see so many painful sins, divisions, and trials. Most importantly for the purposes of the present chapter, “the sacred historical memory of the primitive Church”¹—which includes the content of the Christian tradition and the proper modes of handing it on—has always been highly contested. Paul’s letters make it clear that the historical memory of Jesus was contested in certain ways from the outset. For example, Paul complains that the Corinthian Christians are not “united in the same mind and the same judgment,” but rather are “quarreling” about central elements of the gospel of Christ (1 Cor 1:10–11). Paul bemoans the fact that “each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ’” (1 Cor 1:12). The question, then, is why the risen Jesus chose to communicate the truth of his Resurrection (and the other salvific mysteries of his life) to later generations in ways that only involved his unmediated presence for “forty days” after his Resurrection (Acts 1:3). Why did the risen Jesus risk the

¹ Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 13.

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communication of the truth of his Resurrection to the Church’s historical memory? In response to such questions, Augustine answers that although God could act without the mediation of humans, there are good reasons that God has not chosen to do so. Augustine gives the example of Paul’s encounter with the risen Lord on the Road to Damascus, in which “Paul himself, although prostrated and taught by the divine and heavenly voice, was nevertheless sent to a man that he might receive the sacraments and be joined to the church.”² According to Augustine, it is fitting that God work through his human temples, filled with the Holy Spirit, rather than bypassing them. Above all, Augustine notes that “charity . . . would not have a means of infusing souls and almost mixing them together if men could teach nothing to men.”³ I agree with Augustine about the wisdom and goodness of God’s plan to communicate the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection in mediated ways to all but the first eyewitnesses. This plan accords with the fundamental purpose of Jesus’ Resurrection, namely building up the messianic people of God in charity. Yet, do we have reason to think that the Church’s mediation is truly effective in enabling us to share in the apostolic communion with Jesus risen? In this chapter, I examine this question by exploring scriptural and liturgical remembering. With regard to scriptural remembering, I draw especially upon the work of Richard Bauckham, who argues that the Gospels are based upon eyewitness testimony.⁴ He points out that eyewitnesses were alive and actively describing their memories in the region and time period in which the Gospels were written; and he finds specific indications of eyewitness testimony in particular Gospels.⁵ The fact that there were many eyewitnesses (as well as ² Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Prologue.6, p. 5 (emphasis added). ³ Ibid., Prologue.7, p. 6. ⁴ Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 3. After writing this chapter, I discovered the second edition of Bauckham’s book (Eerdmans, 2017), which contains a short “Preface to the Second Edition” (xviii–xix) and three new chapters added at the book’s end. The first such chapter (chapter 19) addresses the function of Peter in Mark’s Gospel and also explores the identity of Mark. He argues that “evidence about the rarity of the name Marcus among Jews” suggests that the New Testament references to Mark are likely to the same Mark who is explicitly connected with Peter (and with Paul). The second new chapter (chapter 20) defends his view that the Beloved Disciple is the Elder John. The third new chapter (chapter 21) bears the telling title “The End of Form Criticism (Confirmed)” (ibid., 590). Here, while strengthening his critique of form criticism, he emphasizes that he affirms “the creative role—literary and theological— of the Gospel writers themselves” (ibid., 592). See also the recent studies by Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014); and Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition (London: SPCK, 2013). ⁵ For a summary of the form-critical understanding of “the Jesus tradition,” rooted in the view that the eyewitnesses died and then the second-generation Christians recalled the eyewitnesses’ stories in a manner that re-shaped them in accord with the situation of second-generation Christian communities, see Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, “Jesus Tradition as Social Memory,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early

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people who had heard or talked with eyewitnesses) makes the Gospels more credible historically than if they had been written long after the eyewitnesses and those who knew them had passed away. As the biblical scholar James Dunn remarks, the traditions of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances were stories that “were regarded . . . as personal testimony” and “belonged first and foremost to the one(s) who witnessed the appearance.”⁶ The conclusion that I draw from Bauckham’s work is that the historical memory that we receive in the scriptural texts inserts us into the personal and ecclesial experience of those who knew Jesus during central points of his earthly life, including those who saw the risen Jesus.⁷ Loveday Alexander comments, “Luke’s picture of the ‘collegium of the apostles,’ focused on the task of shaping the Jesus story and interpreting its significance in the light of the Jewish Scriptures, is exactly what we should expect in the light of Hellenistic school tradition.”⁸ My argument is that, thanks to the presence of

Christianity, ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 25–42, at 26. From this perspective, with which Kirk and Thatcher disagree, the goal of exegetical inquiry is “to sift nuggets of genuine memory out of the mass of tradition in which the evangelists have embedded them” (ibid., 27). Influential representatives of this perspective include Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). For a critique of Bultmann (and form criticism) on memory, see Werner H. Kelber, “The Case of the Gospels: Memory’s Desire and the Limits of Historical Criticism,” Oral Tradition 17 (2002): 55–86. ⁶ James D. G. Dunn, Christianity in the Making, vol. 1: Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 863. See also Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 169; as well as Gerhard Delling’s emphasis on the testimony of the witnesses in his “The Significance of the Resurrection of Jesus for Faith in Jesus Christ,” in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, ed. C. F. D. Moule (London: SCM Press, 1968), 77–104, at 103–4. ⁷ See also Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 832n24. For studies that undergird the approaches of Dunn and Bauckham, see also Terence C. Mournet, “The Jesus Tradition as Oral Tradition,” in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives, ed. Werner H. Kelber and Samuel Byrskog (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 39–61; Mournet, Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency: Variability and Stability in the Synoptic Tradition and Q (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, with Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998 [a reprint of groundbreaking books published in 1961 and 1964]). See also certain criticisms of Dunn in Gerhardsson’s “The Secret of the Transmission of the Unwritten Jesus Tradition,” New Testament Studies 51 (2005): 1–18; as well as the view of Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher that Gerhardsson overreacts to form criticism by “severely” underestimating the impact of “social settings of reception” (Kirk and Thatcher, “Jesus Tradition as Social Memory,” 35). See also, along a different path from that of Dunn but with similar results in its understanding of tradition, Jens Schröter’s effort to retrieve the social settings of reception so as to gain insight into the Jesus who is being remembered: Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997). ⁸ Loveday Alexander, “Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools,” in Jesus in Memory, 133–53, at 152. Alexander differs from Bauckham in some details.

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eyewitnesses, we have good reason to believe that this collegium was successful in remembering Jesus, including Jesus risen. The second mode of historical memory that connects later believers with Jesus and his disciples/apostles consists in liturgical remembrance.⁹ I explore this remembrance by focusing upon what biblical scholars have to say about Luke 22:19’s reference to liturgical remembrance or ἀνάμνησις, in light of theological reflection upon the unity of word and sacrament. Here again, the passing of the generations need not produce a separation of later believers from the disciples’ communion with the risen Jesus. Through liturgical remembrance, which includes proclamation of Scripture, later believers share intimately in the disciples’ communion with the risen Jesus.¹⁰ Later believers thereby enjoy what Rowan Williams terms “God’s invitation to grow in his company.”¹¹ These two modes of remembering Jesus—which become one mode in word and sacrament—unite us with the apostles’ Spirit-filled remembering of the crucified and risen Jesus. The purpose of Jesus’ Resurrection is not merely to provide us with information about the afterlife (whether Jesus’ or ours) but to enable us to offer ourselves in and with him, as his apostolic Church, to the Father through Spirit-filled holy worship. In Christ Our Passover: The Indispensable Role of Resurrection in Our Salvation, F. X. Durrwell aptly observes, “Founded long ago, the Church must be constantly refounded through an encounter of communion with the Risen One, just as it was in the beginning.”¹² The uniquely privileged apostolic encounter with the risen Christ is shared with all believers through the scriptural and sacramental modes of the Church’s remembering. Later believers thereby come to know the same risen Jesus known by the apostles whom Jesus called to communion with himself and each other. In and through these two modes of remembering, we encounter and praise the risen Lord, as we grow “to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph 4:14).¹³

⁹ I disagree with Terrence W. Tilley’s view that we have access to the community’s remembered Jesus rather than to Jesus himself: see Tilley, The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology as Reconciling Practice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008). ¹⁰ See also Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM., Jesus Risen in Our Midst: Essays on the Resurrection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013), xix. ¹¹ Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 94. ¹² Francis Xavier Durrwell, CSSR, Christ Our Passover: The Indispensable Role of Resurrection in Our Salvation, trans. John F. Craghan (Ligouri, MO: Ligouri Publications, 2004), 109. ¹³ On the value of the progression of time for the Church’s life, see Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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HISTORICAL MEMORY AND THE GOSPELS: RICHARD BAUCKHAM ’S J E S U S AN D THE EYEWITNESSES In this first section, I will sympathetically survey the argument of Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, supplemented by a recent exchange between Bauckham and Dale Allison as well as by the contributions of some other biblical scholars. The argument that Bauckham mounts does not require that all his specific claims be correct. Rather, what is required is that his grounding of the Gospels in eyewitness testimony be accurate.¹⁴ Eyewitness testimony does not guarantee truthfulness in details, but it does give us access to the apostolic remembrance of Jesus in a manner that cannot be easily dismissed, especially when one appreciates the conditions of reliable remembering. Bauckham knows that most biblical scholars hold that we should not trust the Gospels’ testimony without independent verification. For such scholars, we “must test every aspect of the evidence so that what the historian establishes is not believable because the Gospels tell us it is, but because the historian has independently verified it.”¹⁵ Like the Gospels themselves, however, the historian’s Jesus does not provide pure, unadulterated access to the earthly ministry and aims of Jesus. If the Gospels themselves do not give an accurate portrait on their own terms, then it is not likely that later historical reconstructions (inevitably rooted in the data provided by the Gospels, and

¹⁴ Rafael Rodríguez argues that what in fact we possess is the fruit of a chain of oral performances that rather quickly produced a “stable core” of communal collective memory, but whose authenticity vis-à-vis the historical Jesus cannot be verified (Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text [London: T&T Clark, 2010], 62–3). He seeks to understand why the performances of these stories had such a significant impact in their context and how—especially in terms of the politics of the day—they formed “coherent, culturally conditioned and relevant portrayals of Jesus” (ibid., 224; cf. 47–50 on ideological/political shaping of memory). In explicit contrast with Bauckham, Rodríguez emphasizes “the social aspects of oral history and collective memory” (Structuring Early Christian Memory, 6n7; cf. 43). Bauckham does not, of course, deny that the retelling of memories has a social context that influences the retellings, but he also notes, in accord with his own emphasis, that multiple retellings may help to solidify the accuracy of individual memory. Rodríguez warns that Bauckham conceives of “the individual as an isolated entity” (Structuring Early Christian Memory, 47), but I do not think this is the case. For his approach, Rodríguez is indebted to Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996); Whitney Shiner, Proclaiming the Gospel: First Century Performance of Mark (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003); Barry Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 221–36; Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). See also Schwartz’s highly pertinent “Christian Origins: Historical Truth and Social Memory,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text, 43–56, in which Schwartz notes that the evangelist Mark wrote around the same number of years after Jesus’ public ministry as did Lincoln’s friend William Herndon after the events reported by the friends of Lincoln interviewed by Herndon (51–2). ¹⁵ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 3.

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motivated by present-day agendas) will be much more accurate with respect to the figure of Jesus. Bauckham observes that history and theology here tend to reach a separation point: theology chooses to trust the Gospels, and history chooses to trust its reconstructions, in part due to history’s skepticism regarding miraculous events. But Bauckham maintains that this separation need not occur. Specifically, modern historians and theologians should converge by realizing that “historically speaking, testimony is a unique and uniquely valuable means of access to historical reality,” even if testimony should not be accepted uncritically.¹⁶ In making this proposal that historical research into the Gospels needs to recognize the historical value of testimony, the first question Bauckham must face is whether the Gospels are in fact based upon eyewitness testimony. He aims to show that the Gospels almost certainly rely upon and convey the testimony of eyewitnesses.¹⁷ This is not a defense of biblical literalism; he grants that “eyewitnesses and others exercised the ordinary freedom allowed in the ancient world to anyone who told a story, the freedom, that is, to tell a good story effectively and to vary the details around a stable core.”¹⁸ In making his case that the Gospels are built upon eyewitness testimony, Bauckham begins with Papias, whose early-second-century Exposition of the Logia of the Lord is extant only in fragments, largely as quoted by Eusebius of ¹⁶ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 5. For expansion of this point, see Bauckham’s second edition, 607–10. As Bauckham notes, we must both affirm that “[a]s a general rule, sources close to the events do have a special value” and that “eyewitness memory is fallible, sometimes highly misleading” (2nd ed., 609). He observes quite rightly, “What protects us from gullibility is alertness to reasons for doubting a testimony, but this is not the same as treating all testimony as dubious until we have produced reasons for relying upon it” (ibid., 608). He adds that “the study of eyewitness testimony in legal contexts, on which a great deal of the psychological research has been done, is a special case (as the researchers themselves make quite clear) and only marginally relevant to the case of the Gospels, as I explained [in the first edition]” (ibid., 610). As he points out in conclusion, “Sometimes excessive scepticism goes hand-in-hand with a misplaced desire for certainty. Everything must be doubted so that what survives the sceptical onslaught is something we can be really sure of” (ibid., 613). See also Bauckham’s “The General and the Particular in Memory: A Critique of Dale Allison’s Approach to the Historical Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 14 (2016): 28–51. ¹⁷ As Bauckham observes, the Gospel of Mark appeared during the lifetime of eyewitnesses, while the other three Gospels appeared when the generation of eyewitnesses was beginning to die out. He points out that the period between the events recorded in the Gospels and the writing of the Gospels would have been a period marked continuously by the active presence of the eyewitnesses to the events. This contrasts with the transmission of oral tradition over a long period of time, in which the eyewitnesses no longer are present to shape the transmission. For cogent arguments that Mark 16:1–8 is based upon “an existing narrative” rather than being an invention of the evangelist, see Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1083. ¹⁸ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed., 595; cf. 599. This clarification is helpful, lest readers suppose that Bauckham thinks that eyewitness testimony means that everything in the Gospels is thereby historically accurate. Bauckham thinks that eyewitness testimony grounds a strong claim to broad historical accuracy, but not to the kind of strict accuracy for which modern historians strive.

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Caesarea. In a passage quoted by Eusebius from the Prologue of Papias’s book, Papias describes his efforts as a young man to gain information from those who knew the apostles directly. Papias implies that when he was young, at least some of the apostles were still alive and actively teaching. Estimating that Papias was born between  50 and 70, Bauckham finds that Papias was “young enough for his adult life to overlap with that of the longest-lived of Jesus’ young contemporaries.”¹⁹ Papias claims to have received information from Aristion and John the Elder, both of whom Bauckham understands to be disciples of Jesus (though not members of the Twelve). Even if Papias did not meet Aristion and John, they were alive and Papias met people who had been taught by Aristion and the elder John. Papias reports that he also inquired into what other disciples of Jesus, now dead, had taught to those who had met them. For Bauckham’s purposes, the central point is that during the time that the Gospels were written—during Papias’s youth—there were still some eyewitnesses alive, and the testimony of eyewitnesses was valued above all else. The Gospels belong to a time in which eyewitness testimony was still available and in which people sought out eyewitness testimony. Since this is so, Bauckham concludes that it is quite possible that many of the named persons in the Gospels were active and well known in the early Christian communities, and that they were sources for material about Jesus. Along these lines, he suggests that Luke’s “Cleopas” and John’s “Clopas” may be the same person: “Clopas is a very rare Semitic form of the Greek name Cleopas, so rare that we can be certain this is the Clopas who, according to Hegesippus, was the brother of Jesus’ father Joseph.”²⁰ Luke, then, may have heard the Emmaus Road story from either a very aged Cleopas, or, more likely, from a member or members of the Jerusalem church who had heard the story from Cleopas. Similarly, Bauckham examines the lists of the women witnesses of the burial and the empty tomb, and he posits that the evangelists list only women known to them as witnesses, rather than adding women who had been mentioned earlier in their Gospels. He considers it probable that “these women were well known not just for having once told their stories but as people who remained accessible and authoritative sources of these traditions as long as they lived.”²¹ He adds that the people who are specifically named in Mark’s stories of Jesus’ healing miracles may well have lived for a good while longer and continued to testify to Jesus, thereby accounting for why Mark thought it worthwhile to include their names rather than, as in other such stories, leaving them anonymous. ¹⁹ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 18. ²⁰ Ibid., 47. ²¹ Ibid., 51. See also John Muddiman, “ ‘I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body,’ ” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, ed. Stephen Barton and Graham Stanton (London: SPCK, 1994), 128–38, at 131–2.

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In my view, whether or not any specific claim about a possible eyewitness is accurate, Bauckham is correct that the Gospels were written during the period in which many eyewitnesses were alive (Mark) or at least when some were still alive (Matthew, Luke, and even John). It therefore makes sense that eyewitnesses would have exercised a significant influence upon the Gospels, both by guiding the formation of a stable core of oral tradition about Jesus and by standing as guarantors of the written accounts. Even after the death of the eyewitnesses—presumably most, though not all, would have died by the midsixties of the first century —there would still have remained many people who had heard their stories. Indebted to Birger Gerhardsson, Bauckham proposes that the Twelve functioned as “an authoritative collegium” and as particularly “authoritative transmitters of the traditions of Jesus.”²² The Twelve spent a lot of time with Jesus, and they would have known his teaching and miracles well. Yet, the Twelve were not the only ones to have been with Jesus from the beginning of his public ministry. This fact is indicated by Acts 1:21–2, where Peter suggests to the brethren (comprised of 120 persons) that they replace Judas Iscariot with one of the brethren who “have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us.” Bauckham points out that John 15:27, too, gives “special importance . . . to the testimony of disciples who had been eyewitnesses of the whole ministry of Jesus.”²³ Given that there were a number of such disciples beyond the Twelve, Luke’s reference to the fact that his Gospel relies upon the testimony of “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses” (Lk 1:2) suggests that he has in view specific people who followed Jesus from the beginning and who may or may not have been members of the Twelve. For Bauckham, Mark’s way of structuring the beginning and ending of his Gospel—beginning in a manner that ensures that the first disciple named is Simon Peter (Mk 1:16), and ending also with the naming of Peter (Mk 16:7)— suggests that, as Papias himself indicates, Mark framed his whole Gospel with Peter as the eyewitness “whose testimony includes the whole” (through the literary device of inclusio).²⁴ In his Gospel, Mark names Peter twenty-six

²² Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 94, citing Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition, 74. ²³ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 116. ²⁴ Ibid., 125. For an extended discussion and defense of Papias’s view (as quoted by Eusebius) that Peter was the source for Mark’s Gospel, see chapter 9 of Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. For a similar reconstruction of Papias’s meaning, see Joanna Dewey, “The Survival of Mark’s Gospel: A Good Story?,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004): 495–507. Could an often negative portrait of Peter, however, be consistent with the notion that Peter’s memories form the core of the Gospel of Mark? For Bauckham, the answer is yes, given “the transformative character of Peter’s experience” (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 179). For a

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times. For his part, Luke ensures that in his Gospel Peter is the first named disciple as well as the last named disciple—thereby perhaps signaling his debt to Mark’s Gospel. In John’s Gospel, Bauckham argues that the key eyewitness is none other than the author of the Gospel, the elder John (whom Bauckham considers to be the “beloved disciple”), although John’s Gospel also encloses “a Petrine inclusio within its inclusio of the Beloved Disciple,” as befits the debt that John’s Gospel has to Mark’s.²⁵ In addition, Bauckham attends to the presence of a number of named women in the Gospel of Luke, at least some of whom appear to have been with Jesus throughout the course of his ministry (see Lk 24:6–7). For Paul’s reception of the testimony to Jesus, Bauckham emphasizes the role of the apostles in Jerusalem, who were eyewitnesses. Bauckham also notes the likely role of Paul’s colleagues Mark, Barnabas, and Silvanus, who would have had more opportunity than did Paul to hear the teachings of the eyewitnesses in Jerusalem. He adds that oral societies carefully distinguish the past from the present in striving to hand on historical accounts faithfully.²⁶ Memorization plays a significant role in oral culture.²⁷ Even in an oral culture, some of the disciples may have been writing down Jesus’ sayings already during his earthly ministry, and Bauckham speculates that “some quite sophisticated scribal activity, in the form of intensive work on expounding the biblical prophecies with reference to Jesus and his followers . . . went on at a very early date, presumably in the Jerusalem church.”²⁸ Throughout his book, Bauckham makes clear that sayings of Jesus could be and were passed on apart

negative answer, see Pheme Perkins, Peter: Apostle for the Whole Church, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), 53. ²⁵ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 129. ²⁶ See ibid., 273. For the argument that even the earliest New Testament texts were written too late for eyewitness testimony still to be a trustworthy source, see Antony Flew’s “Rebuttal,” in Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate, ed. Terry L. Miethe (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 33–7, at 33–4. In his own “Rebuttal,” Habermas responds to Flew by arguing that “[t]he pre-Pauline creed may have been written down for the first time in 1 Corinthians 15, but the creed was an oral confession that dates from a much earlier time” (ibid., 39–47, at 43). ²⁷ See Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 280–7. See also the discussions of this point in Byrskog, Story as History: History as Story; and J. P. Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1997). In Jesus’ day there were few written copies of Israel’s Scriptures, and so most people—including Jesus— learned Israel’s Scriptures in oral contexts and quoted them (insofar as they knew them) from memory. In a certain sense, Michael Satlow is surely right that “[t]he ‘peoples of the book’ did not know their book very well” (Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014], 3). Satlow adds that “for most Jews and Christians in antiquity the Bible had very little normative authority,” in the sense of “authority to dictate our behaviors,” but with regard to Christian texts I certainly think this is not the case (ibid., 4). ²⁸ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 289. With regard to the Jerusalem church, Bauckham cites his Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990).

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from their application or use in the later Church.²⁹ Without denying that the evangelists changed the Jesus traditions through “interpretative alterations or additions,” Bauckham’s point is that the eyewitnesses and those who learned directly from the eyewitnesses had a much more central role than form criticism has supposed, given that “contact with eyewitnesses would not have been unusual.”³⁰ Communities did not simply get to adapt the traditions for their own needs. Bauckham notes that the example of Papias is telling. Papias showed “no interest at all in anonymous community traditions but only in traditions formulated and transmitted by individuals.”³¹ Even if the traditions about Jesus’ sayings and deeds were shaped in the minds of the eyewitnesses by their identity as members of particular communities—and Bauckham affirms “the social dimension of individual recollection”³²—nonetheless we should rethink ²⁹ In the second edition of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Bauckham notes that “One reason the form critics’ understanding of the transmission process has been so widely regarded as obviously plausible may well be that many Gospels scholars have not perceived the distinction between saying that the traditions were preserved for the sake of their use and saying that they were transmitted by their use. But this distinction is vital” (606). For the standard form-critical view (opposed by Bauckham), see Dennis E. Nineham, “Eye-Witness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition, I,” Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1958): 13–25; Nineham, “Eye-Witness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition, II,” Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1958): 243–52; Nineham, “EyeWitness Testimony and the Gospel Tradition, III,” Journal of Theological Studies 11 (1960): 253–64. Against Nineham, see T. Francis Glasson, “The Place of the Anecdote: A Note on Form Criticism,” Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1981): 142–50. For further form-critical analysis of the narratives about the risen Jesus’ appearances, see for example John E. Alsup, The PostResurrection Appearance Stories of the Gospel Tradition (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1975); C. H. Dodd, “The Appearances of the Risen Christ: An Essay in Form-Criticism of the Gospels,” in Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot, ed. D. E. Nineham (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), 102–33; and, classically, Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, trans. B. L. Woolf, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971). ³⁰ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 286, 306. ³¹ Ibid., 294. ³² Ibid., 313. This element is made central in the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s seminal studies, which have influenced both early form criticism and contemporary rethinking of Christian origins: see above all Halbwachs, Le cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Alcan, 1925), translated (from the 1950 edition) as The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). Werner H. Kelber observes that “[s]ince the middle of the twentieth century, in part dependent on Halbwachs and in part quite separately, memory has steadily emerged as a pivotal concept in cultural studies and as a principal topic of research in the humanities and social sciences” (Kelber, “The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as MnemoHistory—A Response,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text, 221–48, at 221). The problem, in Kelber’s view, is not so much that Halbwachs argued that memory fluidly “selects and modifies subjects and figures of the past in order to make them serviceable to the image the community (or individuals) wishes to cultivate of itself,” but rather that Halbwachs “held that the past began to assert itself as historical actuality only after social groups that were thriving on the cultivation of memories had departed from the scene” (ibid., 223). In the end, Kelber stands much closer to Halbwachs than to Bauckham, as for instance in Kelber’s view that the Gospel of Mark’s “deepest compositional motivation was a regressive gesture into the past to recapture Jesus as an Erinnerungsfigur for the benefit of solidifying present group identity,” specifically by redescribing the community’s “memories of Jesus in the wake of an excruciatingly painful Traditionsbruch that compounded the initial

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the idea that communities as such played the leading role in remembering the words and deeds of Jesus. Rather, specific eyewitnesses, and those whom they authorized to convey their memories, would have played a central role. Bauckham argues, “The social dimension of individual remembering . . . does not require us to dissolve the distinctiveness of personal recollection,” no matter how valuable shared memories are and no matter the potential impact of the community’s later preoccupations.³³ In defending this point, Bauckham lists a large number of named eyewitnesses and possible eyewitnesses from the prestigious Jerusalem church.³⁴ He adds that in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul provides a summary of the content of the gospel that he has received from leading eyewitnesses and that carries formal weight. Paul makes clear that these leading eyewitnesses still play an authoritative role. The fact that the Gospels were written as the eyewitnesses were beginning to die out also shows that believers felt a need to preserve the testimony of the eyewitnesses. The early Christian communities were “committed to hearing the past’s own voice, not for the past’s own sake, but in order to understand the relationship of the group’s present to the decisive events that constituted . . . not only the basis of its identity, but also God’s acts for the salvation of the world.”³⁵ Having argued for the centrality of the eyewitnesses in the formation of the Gospels, Bauckham next raises the question of whether their memories should be taken as credible. He admits that memories can be embellished and gravely distorted.³⁶ Thus, he asks whether we have any reason to think that the trauma” (ibid., 244). Identifying “faith of resurrection” as “a modality of overcoming death more than remembering it,” Kelber tellingly ignores Jesus’ Resurrection in his reflections upon how Jesus’ followers dealt with the trauma of his crucifixion (ibid., 245). ³³ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 313. Bauckham rightly warns against the “tendency to absorb memory into its present usefulness to the group” (ibid., 316), which is what Halbwachs’s account of social memory does. In linking this aspect of Halbwachs’s work to early form criticism (Martin Dibelius, Rudolf Bultmann), Bauckham draws upon a critique of Halbwachs’s approach provided by Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Philadelphia, PA: Open University, 2003). In the same vein, Barry Schwartz remarks that “Halbwachs advances a pejorative conception of collective memory, one that distrusts and works to undermine established beliefs” (Schwartz, “Christian Origins: Historical Truth and Social Memory,” 49); and Schwartz also points out that “Halbwachs’s accounts of the Christian memory of Jesus . . . are stunning because they violate common sense, making the past a hallucination pressed ot the service of individual faith and social solidarity” (Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: Memory and History,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz, ed. Tom Thatcher [Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014], 7–37, at 19). ³⁴ See Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 297–8. ³⁵ Ibid., 317. See also Georg Essen, Historische Vernunft und Auferweckung Jesu: Theologie und Historik im Streit um den Begriff geschichtlicher Wirklichkeit (Mainz: Matthias-GrunewaldVerlag, 1995). ³⁶ See for example Deborah Davis and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Internal and External Sources of Misinformation in Adult Witness Memory,” in Memory for Events, vol. 1: Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology, ed. Michael P. Toglia et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007),

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historical memories found in the Gospels are broadly accurate. In light of various studies of recollective memory, he finds that accurate memories are most likely when the event is unusual and consequential.³⁷ When an event is disturbing, we may remember peripheral information about it inaccurately, but an emotional connection generally improves recollective memory. When we recall imagery more vividly, the recollection has more probability of being accurate. Admittedly, our recollections are shaped in part by existing narrative structures in our minds, our personal and cultural ways of selecting what is particularly meaningful in an event. But this does not mean that memory requires forcing an event into a preconceived pattern, since we are open to surprising events. Our memories have a relationship to other people, since we generally remember things in order to tell them to others. We remember things in order to access the real past, but we do so also in order to use the memory for a purpose in the present. Bauckham argues that the events associated with Jesus would have been particularly ripe for reliable remembering, because they often were unusual, consequential, and emotionally charged events. On this point, Bauckham has received pushback. For example, Dale Allison states that “[t]he fallibility of memory should profoundly unsettle us would-be historians of Jesus . . . . Even where the Gospels preserve memories, those memories cannot be miraculously pristine; rather, they must often be dim or muddled or just plain wrong.”³⁸ Allison is not advocating “hyperskepticism,” since like Bauckham he affirms that “memory can be especially reliable when handling atypical events that one personally participated in, found mentally engaging,

195–238; Elizabeth F. Loftus, M. Nucci, and H. Hoffman, “Manufacturing Memory,” American Journal of Forensic Psychology 16 (1998): 63–76; D. G. Payne, et al., “Compelling Memory Illusions: The Qualitative Characteristics of False Memories,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 6 (1997): 56–60; Harald Welzer, Sabine Möller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002). In response to John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 59–68, Markus Bockmuehl points out that “the casework of Loftus and her colleagues is concerned with individual memory in isolation, rather than with the critical interaction of individual and collective memory—an interaction that tends in fact to mutual correction” (Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word, 174). ³⁷ He draws upon William F. Brewer, “What Is Recollective Memory?” in Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory, ed. D. C. Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19–66; and Alan Baddeley, Human Memory: Theory and Practice, rev. ed. (Hove: Psychology, 1997). ³⁸ See Dale C. Allison, Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 8–9. See also Allison’s “Memory, Methodology, and the Historical Jesus: A Response to Richard Bauckham,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 14 (2016): 13–27, which is a response to Bauckham’s “The General and the Particular in Memory” (which in turn is a response to the first chapter of Constructing Jesus).

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experienced as emotionally intense, and then later rehearsed.”³⁹ But for Allison, while the Gospels may often get the big picture right, the Gospels often get the details wrong. Bauckham agrees with Allison that human memory does best when recalling the gist of an event rather than all the specific details. In addition, Bauckham grants that when witnesses are asked in court cases about events that were central to others but that at the time were not important to them, their memories falter.⁴⁰ But Allison’s critique cuts deeper. Allison points to such Gospel stories as Herod’s mass murder of the male infants in the region around Bethlehem (Mt 2:16) and the healing of the Gerasene demoniac (Mk 5:1–20). If the Gospels rest upon reliable eyewitness testimony, then such stories would have been vetted by eyewitnesses or by people who knew the eyewitnesses. The events these stories narrate would have been highly memorable. Should we therefore conclude that such stories are probably historically accurate? Allison argues that, in fact, historians cannot know whether the stories were invented by the evangelist (or by the early Christians) or whether the stories report events that actually happened.⁴¹ Allison’s point is that historical methods generally cannot enable us to know whether specific stories in the Gospels reflect actual events. We can know that Jesus thought of himself as an exorcist or that Jesus was an eschatological prophet, and we can even know some specifics, such as that Jesus was crucified, though even here the details cannot be pinned down.⁴² But almost always, we cannot know on historical grounds “whether something

³⁹ Allison, Constructing Jesus, 9 fn 46. Though distancing himself from some of their conclusions, Allison accepts the validity of the critique of “hyperskepticism” offered by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd in the The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 275–86; see Allison, Constructing Jesus, 9 fn 47. See also the concerns of Judith C. S. Redman, “How Accurate Are the Eyewitnesses?: Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in Light of Psychological Research,” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010): 177–97. ⁴⁰ On memory in court cases, see especially the work of Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues, noted above. For memory of specific events, Bauckham relies upon Baddeley, Human Memory, 222; Craig R. Barclay, “Schematization of Autobiographical Memory,” in Autobiographical Memory, ed. David C. Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 82–99; SvenÅke Christianson, “Emotional Memories in Laboratory Studies versus Real-Life Studies: Do They Compare?” in Theoretical Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory, ed. Martin C. Conway, David C. Rubin, Hans Spinnler, and Willem A. Wagenaar (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992), 339–52; Ronald T. Kellogg, Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2015); Martin A. Conway, “Autobiographical Memory,” in Memory, ed. Elizabeth Ligon Bjork and Robert A. Bjork (San Diego: Academic Press, 1996), 165–94; and Gabriel A. Radvansky and Jeffrey M. Zacha, Event Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ⁴¹ Allison comments that “the differences among the Gospels remain eloquent and very concrete testimony to how much freedom Christians could feel about modifying the tradition” (Constructing Jesus, 29). ⁴² Allison notes that even our memories of specific events tend to be very “general” in the sense that we retain what Bauckham calls the “gist.”

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goes back to Jesus or not.”⁴³ We cannot draw broad conclusions, such as that the Gospel of Mark is trustworthy, that would then enable us to conclude that a specific event narrated by Mark (for example, the theophany at Jesus’ baptism) probably happened. Allison asks rhetorically, “Should I trust, because Mark says so, that a number of demons once jumped from a man into a herd of pigs? Should I trust, because Mark says so, that Jesus fed five thousand people with a handful of provisions? Should I trust, because Mark says so, that Jesus walked on water?”⁴⁴ Allison adds that the atmosphere of early Christianity was so religiously and communally charged that we cannot really understand the eyewitnesses through present-day studies of how individual memory functions.⁴⁵ What we can do, at most, is to arrive at the high probability of certain broad claims about Jesus: he was a teacher and an exorcist, he thought the eschaton was imminent, he was crucified by Roman soldiers at the instigation of the Jewish leaders. Otherwise, it behooves us to accept that both the eyewitnesses and the evangelists were susceptible to “the human proclivity for tall tales.”⁴⁶ By contrast, Bauckham argues that the Gospel of Mark “is generally trustworthy,” and a significant part of Bauckham’s argument consists in emphasizing the regulative presence of living eyewitnesses.⁴⁷ The biblical scholar Robert McIver reaches similar conclusions, though with some additional cautionary notes. He shows that studies of memory indicate that “eyewitnesses, though generally reliable, report up to 20 percent incorrect details about what they have seen” and also exhibit “hindsight bias.”⁴⁸ McIver thinks that eyewitness memory is more malleable than he considers Bauckham to allow. Yet, like Bauckham, he finds that memory is effective “in preserving the meaning and trend of events” and he also makes the important point that social or collective memory tends to remain stable in its core elements.⁴⁹ He ⁴³ Ibid., 15. ⁴⁴ Ibid. ⁴⁵ Allison is indebted here to Zeba R. Crook, “Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 11 (2013): 53–77, as well as to April D. DeConick, “Human Memory and the Sayings of Jesus: Contemporary Experimental Exercises in the Transmission of Jesus Traditions,” in Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond the Oral and Written Gospel, ed. Tom Thatcher (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 135–79. ⁴⁶ Allison, “Memory, Methodology, and the Historical Jesus,” 16. He directs attention in this regard to Alan Kirk, “Cognition, Commemoration, and Tradition: Memory and the Historiography of Jesus Research,” Early Christianity 6 (2015): 285–310. Allison’s view that historical scholarship can assure us regarding some broad statements about Jesus, but can do no more than this, coheres with the view of C. H. Dodd, History and the Gospel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 92–110, and with that of many other historical-critical scholars past and present. ⁴⁷ Bauckham, “The General and the Particular in Memory,” 50. ⁴⁸ Robert K. McIver, Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 185. ⁴⁹ Ibid., 184; cf. 20. Writing prior to Bauckham, Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher caution against “a return to memory understood as an individual faculty of recall that naively captures, stores, and brings forward the past” (Kirk and Thatcher, “Jesus Tradition as Social Memory,” 40). In my

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agrees, too, that there would have been some eyewitnesses alive and active even during the time of the writing of the Gospels. His research enables him to conclude that “the Gospels should be considered to be generally reliable,” especially with regard to the content of Jesus’ teachings.⁵⁰ Neither Bauckham’s position nor McIver’s requires one to believe that Jesus performed this or that miracle or to assume that every event reported by an evangelist occurred. As the sociologist Barry Schwartz says, we should not exaggerate the ability of historical methods to reach certitude about “how information about Jesus found its way to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.”⁵¹ We are dealing with probabilities and “partial knowledge,” even where we can mount good arguments.⁵² But as Schwartz points out with reference to a more recent case, “Abraham Lincoln’s friends did not fall silent when he died; they continued to broadcast his virtues, and they did so convincingly.”⁵³ When we recognize that the eyewitnesses to Jesus were relatively numerous and that in the regions of Jerusalem and Galilee many of them continued to be active for some decades, we gain further reason for affirming that the Gospels’ remembrance faithfully mediates the reality of Jesus in his communion with his disciples/apostles. Allison’s doubts about the demons and the herd of pigs do not get to the heart of Bauckham’s case, since Bauckham allows for the evangelist’s creative editorial hand. Bauckham’s focus is on the reliability view, without jettisoning the best insights into social or collective memory, Bauckham is right to insist that individual memory of eyewitnesses be highlighted, and Bauckham avoids a naïve view of individual memory even while doing his utmost to defend its value. Kirk and Thatcher are right to reject a simplistic understanding memory, either as a simple “replication of the traditional past in the present,” or as a present-focused “reinvention of the past within the present” (ibid., 42). ⁵⁰ McIver, Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels, 187. ⁵¹ Schwartz, “Christian Origins,” 54. I should note that Schwartz, a Jewish scholar, does not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. He holds instead that “[t]he crucifixion stunned and humiliated the early Christians, but they found their bearing by integrating it into Israel’s story, then by commemorating it, reversing its stigma, and assigning culpability to the Jewish elite and Roman oppressors” (Schwartz, “Jesus in First-Century Memory—A Response,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text, 249–61, at 252). Schwartz elsewhere argues that Jesus must have done something highly distinctive in order to be remembered so powerfully; miracle stories, even if not grounded in strictly supernatural events, are ways of reflecting this impactfulness. See Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire,” 30. ⁵² Schwartz, “Christian Origins,” 54. Schwartz concludes, “Witnesses usually get something wrong, but we depend on them to give us a general idea of what happened in situations where we are absent. Social memory is preserved by witnesses, and the content of the tradition they convey is more than a mere reflection of their needs and troubles” (ibid., 55). ⁵³ Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire,” 13. Drawing upon folklore studies, Schwartz shows that “[h]istorical information remains stable when the narrative arising from multiple versions of a famous life story becomes independent of its tellers” (ibid.), and he insists that Jesus was remembered because Jesus himself was profoundly memorable. Less robustly, but still along the same lines, Richard A. Horsley considers that “social memory of events is not stable as accurate historical information” but still can provide us with “the ‘shared meanings’ of his [Jesus’] typical preaching and practice” (Horsley, “Prominent Patterns in the Social Memory of Jesus and Friends,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text, 57–78, at 77–8).

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(rooted in eyewitness testimony) of the core events reported in the Gospels, and he includes among the core events not only that Jesus behaved as an eschatological prophet and healer and was crucified—which Allison thinks we can say with certitude based on the testimony of the Gospels—but also that Jesus rose from the dead. In the final chapters of his book, Bauckham focuses on the one Gospel that explicitly claims to have been written by an eyewitness, namely, the Gospel of John—widely considered the least historical of the Gospels.⁵⁴ John 21:24 states of the beloved disciple, “This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things.” Bauckham acknowledges the debates about whether John 21:24 actually claims eyewitness authorship. Modern scholars have suggested that John 21:24 means merely that the beloved disciple stands behind or spiritually authorizes the Gospel. In Bauckham’s view, however, there is no reason to deny that John 21:24 intends to say that the beloved disciple substantially authored the text, even if there was a later editor or if he received assistance. Admittedly, John 21:24 could be a fictitious claim, advanced by an editor or a pseudepigraphal author.⁵⁵ In favor of this view, many scholars hold that the gospel originally ended in chapter 20, with chapter 21 being tacked on by a later editor.⁵⁶ Bauckham argues to the contrary, showing the deeply embedded correspondences between the Gospel’s prologue and epilogue, the ways in which chapters 20 and 21 are prepared for by earlier chapters, and the internal unity of chapters 20 and 21. He also shows that the John 21:24’s use of “we” belongs to a standard Johannine idiom with regard to authoritative ⁵⁴ Tom Thatcher argues that John’s community held that “every person who possesses the Spirit can claim to be a remembrancer, able to recall Jesus and guided by the Paraclete in her interpretations of that memory” (Thatcher, Why John Wrote a Gospel: Jesus—Memory—History [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006], 146). On this view, John wrote his Gospel in order to nail down certain points that were being challenged by other Spirit-inspired remembrancers of his day, and thereby to reduce the range of acceptable oral teachings (ibid., 165). Thatcher considers that “the Beloved Disciple was responsible for at least the bulk of the Fourth Gospel’s content, and . . . one or several of his followers, whom I here (collectively) call ‘John,’ was/were the person(s) who actually wrote down the Gospel of John and published it among the Johannine churches” (ibid., xvi; cf. 167). See also Tom Thatcher, “The Legend of the Beloved Disciple,” in Jesus in the Johannine Tradition, ed. R. T. Fortna and T. Thatcher (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 91–9; as well as Werner Kelber’s argument, indebted to Jan Assmann, that “[t]he scribalization of tradition is . . . by no means a guarantor of continuity and stability” and often (including in the case of the Gospel of John) entails “a distortion of orality’s fluid memories” and “especially when employed at points of memorial crises, may facilitate a degree of forgetfulness—distortion even—of prior memories, in the interest of retaining/constructing a particular version of them” (Kelber, “The Works of Memory,” 229, 245). ⁵⁵ For Andrew Lincoln, John 21:24 and 19:35 constitute, in Bauckham’s words, “a literary device in the service of the theological agenda of witness, not a serious claim to historiographic status” (Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 386; see Lincoln’s The Gospel According to Saint John [London: Continuum, 2005]). ⁵⁶ For the opposite position, see Dale C. Allison, Jr., Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2005), 254.

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testimony—as for example when Jesus says in John 3:11, “Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen; but you do not receive our testimony.” Additionally, Bauckham observes that the Gospel claims for the beloved disciple special qualifications for bearing witness: the beloved disciple came to know Jesus even before Peter did, and the beloved disciple receives from Jesus a unique mission of ongoing witness. In Graeco-Roman historiography, the heavy interpretative hand that we see in the Gospel of John was considered better practice, which tells in favor of the Gospel of John’s intention to be “historically plausible within the historiographic conventions of the time.”⁵⁷ Bauckham argues both that the Gospel of John does not “assimilate the eyewitness reports beyond recognition into its own elaboration of the story,” and that its heavy interpretive hand fits with the freedom given by eyewitness authorship.⁵⁸ If the true author was not the beloved disciple, Bauckham asks, why would such an author not lay claim to being one of the Twelve, “as the authors of the other pseudepigraphal Gospels did” (such as the Gospel of Thomas)?⁵⁹ If the real author was not the beloved disciple, why then would the pseudepigraphal author have gone to the trouble of hiding behind the elaborately conceived character of the beloved disciple and of justifying this move solely by means of Jesus’ odd saying in John 21:22–3 about the beloved disciple’s mission? Given that the beloved disciple is never named, however, one question is why the Gospel circulated under the name “John.” Bauckham returns to Papias’s testimony that there was an eyewitness “elder John” who was neither John the son of Zebedee nor one of the Twelve. Papias indicates that this “elder John” was a disciple who outlived almost all the other disciples (see John 21:22–3), which fits with the common understanding that the Gospel of John was written later than the other Gospels. It also fits with Irenaeus’s claim that the author of the Gospel of John lived into the reign of Trajan, which began in  98. At times, Papias refers to John as “the Elder,” and the author of 2 John ⁵⁷ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 409. For a more detailed reconstruction of the evangelist’s context and approach, see Jeffrey E. Brickle, “The Memory of the Beloved Disciple: A Poetics of Johannine Memory,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, 187–208. As Brickle remarks, John was “aware that he was contributing to a canon of memory underwritten by authorized and respected tradents. . . . [T]he author of the Fourth Gospel experienced Jesus in a manner that profoundly impacted the constitution of his memory and imagination in a distinctive and lasting way, equipping him to engage a crisis of memory that endangered his community’s very survival” (ibid., 195, 204). See also Bauckham’s The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), as well as his Gospel of Glory: Major Themes in Johannine Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015). ⁵⁸ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 411. Bauckham also remarks that it was an ancient commonplace for an author to refer to himself in the third person when narrating events in which he participated. ⁵⁹ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 409.

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and 3 John identifies himself as “the elder” (2 Jn 1; 3 Jn 1). It is clear on internal grounds that the author of the Johannine epistles also wrote the Gospel of John, which would suggest that John “the Elder” was the author of the Gospel of John. As another piece of evidence, Bauckham cites the late second-century Muratorian Canon, which presents John the evangelist as an eyewitness and disciple of Jesus, but in a manner that distinguishes him from the members of the Twelve (specifically from Andrew—though the Muratorian canon envisions John’s fellow disciples still being alive when the Gospel was written).⁶⁰ The biblical scholar Tom Thatcher has remarked that “the consensus view that Gospels were written primarily to archive their respective authors’ traditions and/or personal memories is persuasive.”⁶¹ Thatcher differs from Bauckham in that he emphasizes that the beloved disciple’s (or John’s) remembering of Jesus goes well beyond simple retelling of the past. But Bauckham’s approach can easily incorporate this dimension. Bauckham would certainly accept Thatcher’s claim that “John does not understand the memory of Jesus to be simple autobiographical ‘recall.’ . . . For John, the disciples’ ‘memory’ of Jesus is a complex combination of witness, recall, faith, and Scripture.”⁶² Like Bauckham, Thatcher thinks that the beloved disciple (or some other anonymous source of the Gospel) claims eyewitness knowledge of the risen Jesus. One may still question whether the Gospel “is an accurate record,” and no one denies that faith strongly shaped the form in which memories are presented, but eyewitness testimony played a decisive role in the formation of the Gospel.⁶³ ⁶⁰ Bauckham also notes the basic concurrence of Polycrates and Irenaeus with the portrait he has sketched. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus in the late second century, wrote in a letter (quoted by Eusebius) that John, the beloved disciple and author of the Gospel of John, died in Ephesus. Bauckham supposes that Polycrates identifies John as a member of the Jewish high priestly family on the basis of a misreading of Acts 4:6, aided by John 18:15. The key point for Bauckham, however, is that in Ephesus, the John who was the beloved disciple and the evangelist was certainly not John the son of Zebedee. In his late second-century work Against the Heresies, Irenaeus also describes the beloved disciple as the author of the Gospel of John and as writing the Gospel while living in Ephesus. Though Irenaeus explicitly refers to John the son of Zebedee five times in his writings, he never identifies him with the beloved disciple or with the evangelist, whereas in speaking of the evangelist John he frequently refers to him as “the disciple of the Lord,” a phrase that he applies only to John. Bauckham observes that although Irenaeus does describe John as an “apostle” at various points, Irenaeus does not limit the apostles to the Twelve; he calls even John the Baptist an “apostle.” ⁶¹ Thatcher, Why John Wrote a Gospel, 23. ⁶² Ibid., 23–4. ⁶³ Ibid., 25. Thatcher goes on to explain—with regard to John 12:12–16—that “John portrays his ‘witness’ to Jesus, or at least the disciples’ ‘memory’ of Jesus, as a complex cognitive interaction between (a) the disciples’ autobiographical recollections of an ambiguous event involving themselves and Jesus, (b) their subsequent awareness of Jesus’ destiny, and (c) a messianic reading of a passage from the Hebrew Bible, in this instance Zechariah 9:9 (loosely quoted in v. 15). Notably, John uses the same Greek verb (μνημονεύω) to describe both the disciples’ recollection of the actual event and the subsequent interpretation of the Scripture that clarified the experience for them” (ibid., 27). Thatcher remains cautious about historicity, always

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As a final step in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Bauckham asks whether, philosophically speaking, we can ever have adequate warrant to believe testimony. Given that the claim that Jesus rose from the dead to glorified life is unique, perhaps we should believe such testimony only if we have seen him ourselves or can test the claim empirically in other ways. On this view, only if eyewitness testimony can be strongly corroborated through other evidence do we have real warrant to believe in Jesus’ Resurrection. In response, Bauckham remarks that the eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid argued persuasively that knowledge always depends upon trusting the word of others.⁶⁴ We are not justified in solely believing what we can corroborate by the power of our solitary mental operations. For our knowledge of most things, we do not undertake an independent corroboration, nor would we have the capacity to do so. The basic point is that “we must understand our epistemic situation in less exclusively individualistic terms and more in communal or inter-subjective terms.”⁶⁵ This does not mean that we need to believe everybody. But it means that we know from within a social matrix that, without being uncritical, requires that we often rely upon testimony. Bauckham offers a balanced view in this regard: “The historian does not put blind faith in testimony, but, as in ordinary life, can think independently only through a more basic dependence on testimony.”⁶⁶ If testimony were not valuable, then no universally significant revelation of God to particular persons in a particular time and place would be possible. Bauckham comments that “revelation is the event that includes testimony as its own reception” and that “testimony is the kind of telling that the disclosure of God in historical signs requires.”⁶⁷ After all, if we tried to know Jesus outside of personal testimony—by bracketing the memories of his friends or demanding insisting that “John portrays Jesus in terms that would both reflect and speak to the needs of his own churches,” but he affirms that John makes certain rhetorical moves not as mere invention but because of Jesus’ own actions: see Thatcher, “The Shape of John’s Story: Memory-Mapping the Fourth Gospel,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, 209–39, at 236. See also Arthur J. Dewey, “The Eyewitness of History: Visionary Consciousness in the Fourth Gospel,” in Jesus in Johannine Tradition, ed. Robert T. Fortna and Tom Thatcher (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 59–70. ⁶⁴ For this point, see also Mats Wahlberg, Revelation as Testimony: A PhilosophicalTheological Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014); as well as Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, §31–32, in The Encyclicals of John Paul II, ed. J. Michael Miller, CSB (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001), 850–913, at 868. In addition, see Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Hermeneutics of I-Witness Testimony: John 21:20–24 and the Death of the Author,” in Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002); C. A. J. Coady, Testimony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” in Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. L. S. Mudge (London: SPCK, 1981). For a critique of part of Coady’s position—a critique to which Bauckham persuasively replies—see R. Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 4. ⁶⁵ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 477. ⁶⁶ Ibid., 485. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 508; emphasis added.

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independent corroboration—we simply could not know the God who revealed himself personally to chosen disciples through Jesus Christ. Again, this does not mean that the evangelists added nothing. On the contrary, according to Bauckham, the genre of ancient historiography included such elements as “chronological compression, displacement and complex reordering; the suppression of the role of a character in the interests of a simpler or more effective narration; the transference of items from one character to another; supplying circumstantial detail to amplify inadequate material; the provision of a suitable narrative context for material that lacked it.”⁶⁸ But the presence of such elements in the Gospels does not thereby prevent them from teaching us much about Jesus as he actually was. Nor is the historical value of the Gospels negated by the presence of miracle stories, whether or not all the stories or details are accurate. God has the power to perform miracles and there is no a priori reason to reject the association of miracles with Jesus Christ. With regard to the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection, Bauckham observes that the Resurrection narratives contain few allusions and little evidence of “literary precedents, and standard narrative motifs.”⁶⁹ The Resurrection narratives “remain strangely sui generis,” as befits an exceptional event that can only be known through insiders’ testimony.⁷⁰ The main point for my purposes is a simple one: when we realize the substantial presence of eyewitness testimony in the New Testament, we can perceive that these texts, without being literalistic in their remembrance, unite us with the unique communion of Jesus and his disciples/apostles. According to the New Testament, this communion is shaped ultimately by the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. The eyewitnesses, and the whole apostolic community, testify to Jesus risen. In a number of details they differ, but in the central points they accord. Through the remembrance carried forward by the New Testament writings, we encounter the risen Lord with the first witnesses.

HISTORICAL MEMORY AND THE EUCHARIST: LITURGICAL REMEMBRANCE For Joseph Ratzinger, as for Bauckham, “we cannot get to know the real Jesus by trimming him to fit our normal standards. Only the Jesus of the witnesses is the real Jesus. There is no better way of learning about him than to listen to the word of those who lived with him, who accompanied him along the paths of ⁶⁸ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed., 595–6. He has Plutarch’s biographies in view. ⁶⁹ Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 505. ⁷⁰ Ibid.

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this earthly life.”⁷¹ Even more than Bauckham, however, Ratzinger emphasizes that the biblical authors (including the evangelists) “are not autonomous writers in the modern sense; they form part of a collective subject, the ‘People of God,’ from within whose heart and to whom they speak.”⁷² Therefore, retrieving Scripture’s historical memory requires for Ratzinger a “collective listening with Jesus’ disciples across the ages” that leads to a “personal encounter” with the risen Jesus.⁷³ This appreciation for the ongoing life of the people of God helps Ratzinger to perceive that Scripture’s historical memory is not the only path by which we enter into communion with the risen Jesus and his earliest disciples. Jesus instituted a second mode for his Church’s remembering. At his Last Supper, according to Luke, Jesus “took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And likewise the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood’” (Lk 22:19–20). This remembrance is accomplished in liturgical worship.⁷⁴ The two modes of the Church’s historical remembering go together. The Eucharistic liturgy combines them in word and sacrament. Ratzinger comments, “The reading of Scripture . . . reaches its highest point when the Church listens to the word of God in common in the sacred liturgy and within this framework itself experiences the active presence of the Logos, the Word in the words.”⁷⁵ Indeed, the Eucharist is a remembrance of Jesus that, like the reading of Scripture in faith, unites us to his Body in a profound sense. ⁷¹ Joseph Ratzinger, God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 28. ⁷² Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), xx–xxi. ⁷³ Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 2: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, trans. Vatican Secretariat of State (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), xvi–xvii. See also William M. Wright IV and Francis Martin, Encountering the Living God in Scripture: Theological and Philosophical Principles for Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), especially 94–104, 191–225. ⁷⁴ As Markus Bockmuehl comments, “Remembrance (anamnēsis; Luke 22:19; 1 Cor. 11:24–25) of Jesus was of course at the heart of corporate Christian worship from the start. And the theological importance of memory first arose in the context of the Old Testament’s foundational command to ‘remember and do not forget’ (Deut. 9:7), the history of the deliverance of God’s people. Still, the story of Christian origins is the more remarkable for attaching its founding memory not only to a saving event but also, explicitly, to a saving person: ‘Do this in memory of me [εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν]’ (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor. 11:24–25). Such original remembering is, at the same time, closely interwoven with the memory of the apostles themselves. The word of Jesus continues in the disciples through their recollection of him, with which they are repeatedly charged” (Seeing the Word, 181–2). ⁷⁵ Joseph Ratzinger, “Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, vol. 3 (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 262–72, at 271. See also the more developed exposition of Temple themes in Steven C. Smith, The House of the Lord: A Catholic Biblical Theology of God’s Temple Presence in the Old and New Testaments (Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University Press, 2017).

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On the unity of Scripture and the Eucharist, Ratzinger takes his cue from Acts 2:42, “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” As this verse suggests, we receive the word of the eyewitnesses, who testify to the crucified and risen Lord; and we receive the Eucharist, the “self-giving presence of the Lord.”⁷⁶ Through the scriptural testimony of the eyewitnesses (whose witness encompasses the whole of Scripture, as Christopher Seitz has shown in a fruitful engagement with Bauckham’s book⁷⁷) and through the Eucharist, the Church’s historical remembrance of Jesus becomes an active participation in and personal union with Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. In this twofold remembrance, believers across the centuries intimately encounter the risen Jesus in union with his friends. Along these lines, Ratzinger remarks that “Supper, Cross, and Resurrection belong together. Jesus’ giving of himself unto death gives the words he speaks at the Supper their realism. On the other hand, his self-giving would be meaningless were death to have the last word . . . . Thus the Day of Resurrection is the new Sabbath. It is the day on which the Lord comes among his own.”⁷⁸ The Eucharist, like the Gospels, brings the risen Jesus to us, under sacred signs mediated by his Church.⁷⁹ In this vein, Thomas Aquinas states ⁷⁶ Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 126. For further discussion see, for example, Joseph Ratzinger, “The Theology of the Liturgy,” trans. Margaret McHugh and John Parsons, in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger: Proceedings of the July 2001 Fontgombault Liturgical Conference, ed. Alcuin Reid, OSB (Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003), 18–31; Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), especially 46–50, 171–4. ⁷⁷ See Christopher Seitz, “Accordance: The Scriptures of Israel as Eyewitness,” Nova et Vetera 6 (2008): 513–22, especially 521–22. See also Richard B. Hays’s exploration of the ways in which the Synoptic Gospels rely upon the Old Testament: Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016). ⁷⁸ Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 95. ⁷⁹ See ibid., 57: “in the Christian liturgy we not only receive something from the past but become contemporaries with what lies at the foundation of that liturgy . . . . In the Eucharist we are caught up and made contemporary with the Paschal Mystery of Christ.” To probe this further, one might examine Alexander Schmemann’s emphasis on the Eucharistic liturgy as eschatological, enabling the whole Church to ascend with the risen Christ to the right hand of the Father, and thereby enabling the Church to preach and live the kingdom of God in and for the world. See Alexander Schmemann, “Liturgy and Eschatology,” in Schmemann, Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann, ed. Thomas Fisch (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 89–100. Or one might examine the relationship of the writing and earliest (oral) reading of the Scriptures to the community’s Eucharistic celebration: see Denis Farkasfalvy, O.Cist., Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010). For the argument that Paul’s letters are rooted in his Christian ritual experience, see Georgia Masters Keightley, “Christian Collective Memory and Paul’s Knowledge of Jesus,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text, 129–50; Margaret McDonald, “Ritual in the Pauline Churches,” in Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation, ed. David G. Horrell (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999), 233–47. See also David C. Duling’s “Social Memory and Commemoration of the Death of ‘the Lord’: Paul’s Response to the Lord’s Supper Factions at Corinth,” in Memory and Identity in

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that “when Christ was going to leave his disciples in his proper species, he left himself with them under the sacramental species”; and Christ did so at the Last Supper “because last words, chiefly such as are spoken by departing friends, are committed most deeply to memory; since then especially affection for friends is more enkindled, and the things which affect us most are impressed the deepest in the soul.”⁸⁰ Christ leaves us with his word and sacrament. As modes of the Church’s remembering of the crucified and risen Jesus, Scripture and the Eucharist are transformative. Henri de Lubac observes, “The Word of God, a living and effective word, acquires true fulfillment and total significance only by the transformation which it effects in the one who receives it.”⁸¹ Let me draw out this point by examining how some contemporary biblical scholars interpret Luke 22:19’s reference to “remembrance.”⁸² In his commentary on Luke 22:19, the biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson states, “The term anamnēsis (‘remembrance’) means ‘to bring to mind’ in something more than a mechanical way; it is a form of presence.”⁸³ In the Greek Septuagint translation of Israel’s Scriptures, the word ἀνάμνησις—which translates the Hebrew word zikron—has to do with the divine and human remembering brought about by a sacrifice. Examples are found in Leviticus 24:7, Numbers 5:15, Numbers 10:9–10, and Psalm 20:3. In addition, ἀνάμνησις expresses a “strong sense of ‘keeping in mind,’” as in Genesis 8:11, Genesis 9:15, Genesis 19:29, Exodus 2:24, Exodus 6:5, Ezekiel 21:23, and elsewhere.⁸⁴ In Deuteronomy 16:3, ἀνάμνησις is applied specifically to the ritual of the Passover meal, by which the Israelites are to remember God’s saving act. God commands the Israelites that after having offered “the Passover sacrifice” Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, 289–310, although Duling’s essay is weakened by his neglect of Jesus’ Resurrection and by his assumption that Paul’s hopes for the Eucharist have not unfulfilled because of the ongoing presence of Christian division—which, I note, Paul fully expected. ⁸⁰ Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 73, a. 5, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981). For Aquinas’s understanding of memory, see Randall B. Smith, Remembering the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2016), 11–19. ⁸¹ Henri de Lubac, SJ, Scripture in the Tradition, trans. Luke O’Neill (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 21. ⁸² The liturgical historian Bryan D. Spinks observes that “most commentators suggest that the Semitic ‘remembrance’ carries with it a sense of making the past present” (Spinks, Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day [London: SCM Press, 2013], 20). See also Brian J. Vickers, “The Lord’s Supper: Celebrating the Past and Future in the Present,” in The Lord’s Supper: Remembering and Proclaiming Christ until He Comes, ed. Thomas R. Schreiner and Matthew R. Crawford (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2010), 313–40; as well as my “The Eucharist, the Risen Lord, and the Road to Emmaus: A Road to Deeper Unity?,” in Come, Let Us Eat Together: Sacraments and Christian Unity, ed. George Kalantzis and Marc Cortez (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 150–69. ⁸³ Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 338. ⁸⁴ Ibid.

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(Deut 16:2) of a lamb, “[y]ou shall eat no leavened bread with it; seven days you shall eat it with unleavened bread, the bread of affliction—for you came out of the land of Egypt in hurried flight—that all the days of your life you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt” (Deut 16:3; emphasis added). Christians will link Israel’s ritual reenactment of Passover (Deut 16:3) with the Christian “remembrance” through the ritual that Jesus commands, a ritual that makes present Jesus’ work of deliverance. Luke 22:19’s “remembrance” appears also in 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul is describing the Eucharistic ritual that he “received from the Lord” (1 Cor 11:23). Commenting on Luke 22:19, Johnson observes that by drinking from the same cup as Jesus, the disciples receive “authority and fellowship” with him, “for such was the status of those who drank from the same cup as the king.”⁸⁵ The ritual is also a sharing in Jesus’ sacrificial suffering for our salvation. Having inaugurated the kingdom by his Cross and Resurrection, Jesus will now “drink of the fruit of the vine” (Lk 22:18) by sharing in the community’s ritual meals. By remembering Jesus through the ritual, believers make him present not as a mere recollected figure of the past but as one who now lives and acts among them. For Johnson, the ritual remembrance has to do with a presence—of the risen Jesus to us and of us to the risen Jesus—that comes about in and through the ritual act. This presence is a fellowship with the crucified and risen one who delivered us from death, just as the Passover bread involved an ongoing bond with the God who delivered Israel from Egyptian slavery. In his Living Jesus, similarly, Johnson emphasizes that “[n]owhere in the New Testament writings . . . is Jesus simply a figure of the past who is remembered because of the things he said and did. Jesus is everywhere a figure whose past words and deeds are remembered because and in light of his present and continuing power.”⁸⁶ The biblical scholar Joel Green likewise pays a good bit of attention to the meaning of ἀνάμνησις. Green explains, “The notion of ‘remembrance’ is pivotal to the celebration of Passover and cannot be limited, as it often is in English usage, to the idea of cognitive recall of a prior occurrence.”⁸⁷ He emphasizes that ἀνάμνησις means remembering something for the purpose of a present response or action, and with the expectation of a present or future benefit. In remembering Jesus in this way in the Lord’s Supper, believers do not simply recall Jesus and what happened to him. Rather, believers recall Jesus’ life and death (in light of his Resurrection), and do so in order to be inspired to act as he did, in loving openness, service, and humility. For Green, therefore, moral response is the key, but it is a moral response that, like ⁸⁵ Ibid., 341. ⁸⁶ Luke Timothy Johnson, Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 199. ⁸⁷ Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 762.

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reading or hearing Scripture, should effect a deep personal unity with Jesus. As a fellowship meal, the historical memory fostered by the Lord’s Supper shapes a Christ-like community.⁸⁸ The biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer has this to say about Luke 22:19’s ἀνάμνησις: “Just as the Passover meal was for Palestinian Jews a yearly anamnēsis, so too Jesus now gives a directive to repeat such a meal with bread and wine as a mode of re-presenting to themselves their experience of him.”⁸⁹ For Fitzmyer, Luke 22:19 describes Jesus giving the disciples a new mode of making him present, a mode in which he will be present as risen, and not only as risen but as the one whose (crucified) body and blood signify the eschatological inauguration of God’s kingdom. He is thus known and encountered in the ritual as the risen deliverer. The ritual’s mode of historical memory makes present the risen Jesus, in a way that serves the transformation of his disciples into people who embody his kingdom practices. Note that Israel’s annual remembrance of the Passover ensures that it is an event that in some sense occurs for the Israelites today: “Not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive this day” (Deut 5:3; cf. Deut 6:20–4). In his Jesus and the Last Supper, the biblical scholar Brant Pitre argues with regard to Luke 22:19 that “Jesus’ act of interpreting the bread of the Last Supper is a kind of prophetic sign of his own personal fate, by means of which he is declaring: ‘I am the eschatological Passover lamb whose death initiates the time of salvation.’”⁹⁰ Jesus’ words point toward his sacrificial death and also anticipate the communion in his body that his followers will share. He is the eschatological Passover lamb whose blood inaugurates the New Exodus to the true Promised Land (the New Jerusalem). Pitre supports this proposal in great detail, but let me focus on his interpretation of the use of the word ἀνάμνησις in Luke 22:19. Commenting on this verse, Pitre sets the scene by observing that the command “Do this” evokes, in Old Testament and Second Temple context, a ritual or cultic act. Pitre cites various Old Testament and Second Temple texts that command the remembrance of the Passover meal. He quotes the Evangelical biblical scholar Craig Keener: “Mention of ‘memory’ in a Passover context involved not mere recollection but more of a participatory commemoration.”⁹¹

⁸⁸ Along similar lines, see also John Koenig, The Feast of the World’s Redemption: Eucharistic Origins and Christian Mission (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 75; J. I. H. McDonald, The Resurrection: Narrative and Belief (London: SPCK, 1989), 106; Jerome Kodell, OSB, The Eucharist in the New Testament (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988), 115–16. ⁸⁹ Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke (X–XXIV) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 1391. ⁹⁰ Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 411. ⁹¹ Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 296; cited in Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 420.

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Pitre concludes that Jesus is reconfiguring Israel’s Passover “around his own impending sacrificial death,” through a ritual by which “the disciples will both recall and make present the saving effects of Jesus’ sacrificial death, above all through the cultic repetition of his actions over the Passover bread and wine.”⁹² The effects that the ritual makes present are transformative. Pitre thinks that the risen Jesus is indeed present, because he is the new Passover lamb whose body and blood are consumed in the ritual.⁹³ Just as the lamb is present in the original Passover, so is Jesus present in the reconfigured Passover—but now it is the risen Jesus who is present and whose risen presence makes clear that the eschatological New Exodus has already attained its goal in him. In the Gospel of Luke, then, Jesus gives us reason to hold that the Church’s remembrance of the risen Jesus is twofold. In scriptural word and Eucharistic sacrament, the Church’s remembrance makes the living Jesus—who has risen from the dead and reigns at the right hand of the Father—known and active in our midst. In his apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini, Pope Benedict XVI describes the conjunction of these two modes: “Word and Eucharist are so deeply bound together that we cannot understand one without the other: the word of God sacramentally takes flesh in the event of the Eucharist. The Eucharist opens us to an understanding of Scripture, just as Scripture for its part illumines and explains the mystery of the Eucharist.”⁹⁴

CO NCLUSION The memories, cultural assumptions, and living presence of people who lived in the first century  are constantly receding into the past, but Jesus has given his people scriptural and sacramental modes of communing in his risen presence. In her Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, however, Margaret MacMillan has challenged the value of oral history and historical memory. She argues, “Being there does not necessarily give greater insight into events; indeed, sometimes the opposite is true.”⁹⁵ Although her examples generally have to do with events in which the tradents played a small part, she also casts doubt upon the value of our memory of events in which we played an active part. She notes that our memory is both selective and changeable. We edit and “polish our memories in the recounting,” and ⁹² Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 420–1. ⁹³ See ibid., 442–3. ⁹⁴ Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, Vatican trans. (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2010), §55. ⁹⁵ Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: The Modern Library, 2010), 44.

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especially when we are not directly involved in an event, we may think that we remember more than we actually do.⁹⁶ Bauckham recognizes the weaknesses of eyewitness memory, even while he defends its value. In his article published a few years after his book, he notes emphatically that he has never affirmed “the reliability of all eyewitness memory” and he appreciatively cites Daniel Schacter to the effect that, in gauging the value of eyewitness memory, “the challenge is to specify the conditions under which accuracy and distortion are most likely to be observed.”⁹⁷ Bauckham points out that neither daily life nor the writing of history could proceed at all, if we lacked an underlying appreciation for “the general reliability of memory,” as distinct from “trust[ing] memory uncritically.”⁹⁸ In the case of the main events associated with Jesus, Margaret MacMillan’s view of historical memory is too negative. Eyewitnesses to events generally remember a great deal that is otherwise unrecoverable and that is broadly accurate. Allison himself grants that from a historical-critical perspective, much in the Gospels reflects the truth about Jesus and his environment. Although Allison is loath to make judgments about specific stories or details, he accepts the main lines of the Synoptic Gospels as historically credible, even while he remains agnostic (in his role as historian) regarding whether the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened. As shown by her own

⁹⁶ Ibid., 47. Oddly, the example she gives is the repressed-memory craze of the 1990s, in which painful repressed memories were supposedly retrieved. Once that craze was revealed to be based on fraudulent psychology, it became clear that in fact, painful memories are not repressed, but actually “remain particularly vivid” in our minds (ibid., 46). For a significantly further step along this path, see Julia Shaw, The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory (London: Random House, 2016). See also Israel Rosenfield, The Invention of Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Daniel L. Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1–45. For a critique of Schacter’s approach as “symptomatic of century-old disciplinary cultures plagued by excessive, sometimes pathological and often paralyzing cynicism,” see Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire,” 22. ⁹⁷ Bauckham, “The General and the Particular in Memory,” 41; quoting Schacter, “Memory Distortion,” 25. In his article, Bauckham engages critically with Schacter’s How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory (London: Souvenir, 2001). See also Schacter, “The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience,” in Human Memory, vol. 4: Memory in Everyday Life, ed. Chris J. A. Moulin (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 279–322. Schwartz notes that in contemporary scholarship, “[b]ooks and journals typically show memory at its worst because few editors and readers are interested in cases of accurate remembering. Accordingly, investigators tend to design their research with a view to identifying memory’s fickleness” (“Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire,” 22). ⁹⁸ Richard Bauckham, “Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory,” in Christ and the Created Order: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science, vol. 2, ed. Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 111–27, at 127. This essay is a shortened version of Bauckham’s “The General and the Particular in Memory.”

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historiographical practice, MacMillan likewise recognizes that interviews with people who were actually present at events are crucial for the writing of accurate history, despite the fact that interviewees will edit or polish some things and will misremember some (or even many) details. In my view, the central point is that in the region of Jerusalem and Galilee, there were a large number of eyewitnesses who would inevitably have been telling their stories and exerting pressure upon the content of the Gospels, as well as upon Paul’s preaching. Bauckham’s critique of form criticism’s lengthy chain of tradition is the prime take-away from his research. The presence of eyewitness testimony contributes to accurate, stable communal memory. At the very least, this means that the Gospels are more credible than if they had been written at a time when no living eyewitnesses were present and active. But more than this, Bauckham is correct that “[u]nique and unusual events are remembered better than others; consequential or salient events are remembered better than less significant ones; events in which the eyewitness is emotionally involved are remembered better than others.”⁹⁹ There is good reason to suppose that Jesus was remembered well by a number of eyewitnesses, in the religiously charged environment of his day, due to his impactful words and deeds. Although the evangelists were rhetorically and theologically sophisticated authors who added their own materials, we have good reason for affirming the truth of the gist of what we find in the Gospels. Here Bauckham and Allison agree, if the “gist” is limited to certain broad aspects of Jesus’ ministry and death. Bauckham goes further, however, by arguing that the ongoing presence of eyewitnesses provides a reason for not being skeptical about the major events of Jesus’ life as reported by the Gospels, including his Resurrection. I think that Bauckham is right. Yet, even if one supposes, with Bauckham, that the elder John was the “beloved disciple” who wrote the Gospel of John—and who witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion and entered the empty tomb—it still remains the case that one is not compelled to believe the Gospels’ testimony to Jesus risen, just as one is not compelled to believe that the liturgy of the Eucharist unites us with the risen Jesus. Testimony does not generally provide the kind of demonstrative knowledge that forces us to accept it as true. Moreover, the Gospels indicate that Jesus limited the number of eyewitnesses to his risen body, since he rose to glorified life not to be a spectacle for human curiosity but to reveal the fullness of the path of the Cross. As Alexander Schmemann remarks, therefore, “The

⁹⁹ Bauckham, “The General and the Particular in Memory,” 42. See also, in this regard, his extensive and appreciative engagement with Daniel B. Pillemer, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), as well as his briefer discussion of Stephen R. Schmidt, Extraordinary Memories for Exceptional Events (New York: Psychology Press, 2012).

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Lord’s glorification does not have the compelling, objective evidence of His humiliation and cross.”¹⁰⁰ Thus, the Church’s two modes of historical remembrance do not overthrow the fact that faith in the risen Jesus is God’s gift, without this implying that faith is blind or unreasonable. Luke Timothy Johnson remarks that “Christianity has never been able to ‘prove’ its claims except by appeal to the experiences and convictions of those already convinced,” including those whom the crucified and risen Jesus himself convinced (as recorded in the Gospels).¹⁰¹ Johnson is correct that “[t]he claims of the gospel cannot be demonstrated logically” or “proved historically,” although the Church’s historical memory can show itself to be worthy of belief.¹⁰² As Michael Licona, who defends the basic historicity of the narratives of Jesus’ Resurrection, points out, “Jesus’ resurrection will never be established via historical method with the degree of certainty desired by many of the faithful.”¹⁰³ Why did Jesus not make his Resurrection demonstrably evident to each and every human being? The answer requires attending to the significance of remembrance. Jesus willed that the historical remembrance of his Resurrection be an ecclesial reality, a scriptural and liturgical reality of the inaugurated kingdom that has received the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. To remember him rightly cannot be separated from heeding his call to “come, follow me” (Mt 19:21). It cannot be separated from the historical memory of the people of Israel, from their remembrance of God’s saving deeds or from the prophecies that fueled the hope that God would send his Messiah and inaugurate his kingdom by pouring out his Spirit, forgiving sin, restoring his people, renewing his Temple, and joining the nations to Israel. Remembrance of Jesus risen cannot be separated from Jesus’ work of constituting an apostolic people to worship him and spread the divine name throughout the world. Eyewitness testimony to Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels (and, with respect to the risen Jesus, in Paul’s letters), means that we have access to him through his disciples and apostles, chosen from among the people of Israel. In keeping with Jesus’ mission to build up God’s people in worship, it is in the liturgy that the two modes of the Church’s remembrance of the risen Jesus come together, as the Scriptures are proclaimed and the Eucharist is celebrated on the Sabbath day of Resurrection.

¹⁰⁰ Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 28. ¹⁰¹ Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 168. ¹⁰² Ibid. ¹⁰³ Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), 587.

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3 The Old Testament Witness In contemporary biblical scholarship that investigates the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead, scholars generally pay some attention to the Old Testament, on the grounds that the Old Testament provides background that helps in the evaluation of the historical likelihood of the Resurrection of Jesus.¹ In the present chapter, I hope to shed light on the role of the Old Testament in aiding the discernment of the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection.² I begin with the New Testament scholars Dale Allison and N. T. Wright and the Hebrew Bible scholar Jon Levenson. As we saw in Chapter 1, Wright argues that historical inquiry can show that the most plausible way of accounting for the available evidence is to affirm that Jesus truly rose bodily from the dead, whereas Allison reaches an agnostic position. Levenson defends the doctrine of bodily resurrection at the end of time, as part of Jewish eschatology. I examine the use that these scholars make of the Old Testament in reaching their conclusions. As a second step, I explore St. Thomas Aquinas’s use of the Old Testament in commenting on John 20–1, the chapters of John’s Gospel that treat Jesus’ Resurrection appearances.³ Commenting on John 20–1, Aquinas includes 139 quotations from the Old Testament. I contend that the verses selected by Aquinas play a cumulative role in supporting the truth of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead. As I have argued elsewhere, Aquinas’s biblical quotations often have a cumulative effect that goes beyond the specific

¹ See Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 41. ² For the growing and highly deleterious impact of lack of Old Testament literacy, a lack felt both among Christians and among the broader culture, see Brent A. Strawn, The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommendation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017). ³ In his commentary, of course, Aquinas is not attempting to investigate the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. Although in his Summa theologiae he takes up the question of whether Christ sufficiently manifested the truth of his Resurrection (III, q. 55, a. 6), he assumes that Jesus’ Resurrection is historically knowable but not logically demonstrable. If Jesus’ Resurrection were logically demonstrable in the strict sense, this would undermine the “merit of faith”; but in any case logical demonstration is impossible in historical matters: see III, q. 55, a. 5, ad 2.

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contribution that each quotation makes.⁴ From Aquinas’s weaving of Old Testament quotations into his commentary on John 20–1, we learn a number of things that support the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, including: God is the all-powerful Creator of humans; God has made covenant with Israel for the salvation of the world; God will satisfy his people’s desire for life and blessing; God has promised that his eschatological judgment will end in glorious restoration; and Jesus possesses the characteristics of the man whom God promises to reward and exalt. I highlight these Old Testament teachings because the plausibility of Jesus’ Resurrection depends, in part, upon placing his Resurrection within the context of God’s preparation of his people Israel. As the biblical scholar Rebekah Eklund says, “it is not finally possible to tell the story of Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection without the pattern of Israel’s lament”—or indeed without the manifold witness of the Old Testament as a whole.⁵ Importantly for my purposes in this chapter, in the Summa theologiae Aquinas includes “the testimony of the Scriptures” among the “proofs” of Christ’s Resurrection.⁶ We might think that this crucial “testimony of the Scriptures” is found in the New Testament, but in fact Aquinas means the testimony of the Old Testament. Here he is following the lead of the risen Jesus, who, while still unrecognized on the Emmaus road, “interpreted to them [Cleopas and his companion] in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Lk 24:27). It is significant for Aquinas that the risen Jesus not only manifested the truth of his Resurrection with respect to the senses (by showing his disciples that he saw and heard them) but also with respect to the intellect (by “discoursing on the Scriptures,” namely, on the Old Testament).⁷ As Jesus says in a parable in the Gospel of Luke, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead” (Lk 16:31). The Scriptures of Israel (“Moses and the prophets”) are pertinent to the plausibility of Jesus’ Resurrection. In The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright surveys the development of resurrection belief in the Old Testament, focusing on the Old Testament’s unfolding portrait of God as the Creator on whom Israel can depend to be the Redeemer.⁸ For his part, Allison emphasizes the Old Testament pattern of ⁴ See my Paul in the Summa Theologiae (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014); as well as my “A Note on Scripture in the Summa Theologiae,” New Blackfriars 90 (2009): 652–8. ⁵ Rebekah Eklund, Jesus Wept: The Significance of Jesus’ Laments in the New Testament (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 25. ⁶ III, q. 55, a. 6. ⁷ Ibid. ⁸ See N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003). Wright thereby is able to show how different New Testament resurrection belief is from other Second-Temple Jewish perspectives. I focus in this essay on Wright’s use of the Old Testament in The Resurrection of the Son of God, since in this book he includes what he considers necessary to support the claim that Jesus was truly resurrected. I should also note, however, that Wright makes extensive use of the Old Testament and Second-Temple Jewish texts in his The

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exile and restoration as an important context for Resurrection faith. Even if Allison remains historically skeptical, he is deeply aware that it is ultimately the Old Testament that makes Jesus’ Resurrection intelligible. Levenson, though not believing in Jesus’ Resurrection, also directs attention to the Old Testament pattern of exile and redemption, in his defense of the Jewish doctrine of bodily resurrection. Aquinas offers an intriguing complement to these contemporary approaches. He interprets Jesus’ Resurrection by assuming that the God who reveals himself to Israel prepares his people through the inspired texts of Scripture for the realities of the New Testament. Part of coming to know the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection involves hearing the Old Testament’s multiple voices when we read about Jesus risen. Aquinas’s commentary on John 20–1, through its Old Testament quotations, helps us to see how this is so.

DALE ALLISON, JON L EVENSON, AND N . T. WRIGHT: THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS

Dale Allison and Jon Levenson: The Eschatological Pattern Dale Allison comments, “Surely C. D. Broad was right: ‘Something very queer must have happened soon after the crucifixion, which led certain of the disciples and St. Paul to believe that Jesus had survived in some supernatural way.’ But what? The question holds its proud place as the prize puzzle of New Testament research.”⁹ As noted in Chapter 1, Allison’s efforts to resolve this puzzle end up, historically speaking, in an agnostic stance, leaning toward skepticism.¹⁰ He dismisses the notion that the disciples were simply liars, but he does not endorse with any certitude the claim that the tomb was empty, because he considers that scholars have mounted “a respectable case against it.”¹¹ As we saw, he considers that even if the tomb was empty, it is quite possible that “someone, for reasons New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), Part III: First Century Judaism within the Greco-Roman World. Furthermore, the Old Testament—and especially the prophetic literature—appears frequently and in important ways in Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996). ⁹ Dale C. Allison, Jr., Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2005), citing C. D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research: Selected Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 230. ¹⁰ See also Dale C. Allison, Jr., “It Don’t Come Easy: A History of Disillusionment,” in Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne (London: T. & T. Clark International, 2012), 186–99. ¹¹ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 331. He states rather tepidly that “of our two options—that a tomb was in fact unoccupied or that belief in the resurrection imagined it unoccupied—the former, as I read the evidence, is the slightly stronger possibility” (ibid., 331–2).

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unknown, removed the body”; and he contends that, historically speaking, hallucinatory visions may be the most probable explanation—even though he thinks it best to remain historically agnostic.¹² Be that as it may, Allison draws a crucial connection between Jesus’ Resurrection and the Old Testament: “The eschatological pattern of humiliation and suffering followed by vindication.”¹³ This eschatological pattern suffuses the Old Testament. The prophets repeatedly allude to it, not least in the best-known example, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52–3. In accord with the pattern of suffering followed by vindication, Abraham and Sarah are barren, but God makes good on his promise that they will have a son and will have many descendants. Abraham prepares to sacrifice his only son Isaac at God’s command, but God spares Isaac and assures Abraham of God’s covenantal fidelity. Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt, but Joseph ends up as the second-most powerful man in the land and the savior of his family. The people of Israel become slaves in Egypt, but God delivers them with great power. The prophets warn the rulers of Israel and suffer for it, but the exile and the destruction of the Temple vindicate their warnings. Job suffers profoundly, but at the end of the book God restores his health and vindicates him. When Allison describes this eschatological pattern, its provenance in the Scriptures of Israel is clear, since he describes the vindication in the terms employed by the prophets: “The hungry become filled. Mourners are comforted. The humble are exalted.”¹⁴ The truth of Jesus’ teachings and of his Resurrection depends in part upon whether we have reason to believe in the truth of this eschatological pattern. Allison points out that “Jesus’ sometimes otherworldly, sometimes ascetical, often eschatological, often counterintuitive teachings—‘Love your enemies,’ do not be ‘angry,’ do not divorce and remarry—are not self-validating.”¹⁵ They only make sense in a world where God really does vindicate and exalt those who suffer. Allison argues that “the crucifixion and Jesus’ cry of dereliction require a sequel. If they do not receive one, most of Jesus’ speech loses much of its plausibility, and he becomes just another futile dreamer, a messianic pretender.”¹⁶ Similarly, in his Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (a book published the year after Allison’s), the Jewish theologian Jon Levenson describes the promised final “restoration of the ever-dying, ever-reviving people who are the Jews.”¹⁷ Levenson shows that the God who reveals himself in the Torah, and throughout the Hebrew Bible, is a God who promises to vindicate his suffering people and who does (or will) vindicate them, because God loves them and he has the power to vindicate them. Levenson notes that for the rabbinic ¹² Ibid., 334. ¹³ Ibid., 214. ¹⁴ Ibid. ¹⁵ Ibid., 215. ¹⁶ Ibid. ¹⁷ Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 229.

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tradition, it was axiomatic that “the ground cannot simply reabsorb one who has obeyed [God’s] instruction and tried his best to live the life of Torah.”¹⁸ He highlights the Old Testament’s redemptive pattern of “a miraculous birth by an infertile mother, the wondrous return of the lost children, joy replacing grief, all of them brought about by the intervention of the indomitable divine warrior to rescue and restore the people with whom he has mysteriously fallen in love.”¹⁹ This redemptive pattern is, in an intensified form, the eschatological pattern that stands at the center of Jesus’ preaching and of his expectations for his destiny and that of his followers. Allison expresses his own commitment to, or at least deep desire for, the truth of this pattern. For Allison, death cannot be the last word for individual existence. If death were the last word, then the suffering victims would forever be victims. Such a scenario rules out the existence of a good God, since (as Allison argues) “God cannot be thought good in any authentic sense of that word if the world as it is, this desert in which so many briefly live, suffer, die, and are forgotten, is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.”²⁰ Even if Allison is historically agnostic about the actuality of Jesus’ Resurrection, his deep yearning for the truth of the eschatological pattern that runs through the Old Testament (and that belongs to the heart of the New Testament) stands out.²¹

N. T. Wright: The Work of God as Creator and Redeemer of Israel As we saw in Chapter 1, Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God argues for the likelihood, as a matter of history, of Jesus’ Resurrection. Specifically, Wright seeks “to establish . . . that the only possible reason why early ¹⁸ Ibid., 33. See also Hayim Halevy Donin, To Pray as a Jew: A Guide to the Prayer Book and the Synagogue Service (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 224. ¹⁹ Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, 155. See also C. D. Elledge, “Resurrection of the Dead: Exploring Our Earliest Evidence Today,” in Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine, ed. James H. Charlesworth et al. (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2006), 22–52; and, in the same volume, James L. Crenshaw, “Love Is Stronger Than Death: Intimations of Life beyond the Grave,” 53–78 and Elledge, “The Resurrection Passages in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: Hope for Israel in Early Judaism and Christianity,” 79–103. For further discussion see Murray J. Harris, “Resurrection and Immortality in the Pauline Corpus,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 147–70, at 150–1. ²⁰ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 218. On the eschatological pattern, see also Dale C. Allison, Jr., Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 119. ²¹ He reasons that the disciples surely felt the same yearning, and this yearning might have helped to stimulate the visionary “reappearance of a messianic figure whose followers are living within an eschatological scenario that features the resurrection of the dead” (Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 284).

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Christianity began and took the shape it did is that the tomb really was empty and that people really did meet Jesus, alive again.”²² For Wright, “far and away the best explanation of the early Christian mutation within Jewish resurrection-belief ” is the actual bodily Resurrection of Jesus.²³ Recall that among the first Jewish Christians, by contrast to other SecondTemple Jews who believed in resurrection, two eschatological modifications dominated from the outset: first, “[t]he resurrection, as the eschatological event, has split into two (first Jesus, then, at his return, all his people . . . )”; and second, “[t]he nature of the future resurrection body is further clarified: it will be incapable of dying or decaying, thus requiring a transformation not only for those already dead but for those still alive.”²⁴ Wright’s reflections on the Old Testament aim to highlight the radical nature of these eschatological modifications by showing that they are not anticipated or accounted for by the Old Testament. Wright’s treatment of the Old Testament in The Resurrection of the Son of God begins with Paul’s statement that Jesus Christ “was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:4). Rather than suggesting that Paul is here referring to the “sign of Jonah” (Lk 11:29), as Brant Pitre does,²⁵ Wright argues that Paul’s phrase “κατὰ τὰς γραφὰς” means to indicate more broadly that there is a notable continuity between the Old Testament and the Christian belief in Jesus’ Resurrection.²⁶ But if so, why does much of the Old Testament not mention resurrection at all?²⁷ ²² Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 8. ²³ Ibid., 10. ²⁴ Ibid., 477. For criticism of Wright’s position that for Jews of Jesus’ day (and for the first Christians) “resurrection [in its literal rather than metaphorical sense] would always have meant a new embodied life after a period of being dead,” see Outi Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 26. With regard to Jewish views of resurrection, she argues that Daniel 12:2–3, insofar as it refers to the bodiliness realm of Sheol, “says nothing about the resurrection of buried bodies: it is the spirits of the dead that are awakened and brought out of Sheol” (ibid., 33). I side with Wright on these questions. ²⁵ See Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (New York: Random House, 2016), 185–91. Pitre highlights the centrality here of the “sign of Jonah” (Lk 11:29), in which the rescue of Jonah from death, followed by the repentance of the Ninevites, is paralleled by the rescue of Jesus from death, followed by the repentance of the Gentiles: see The Case for Jesus, 185–91. On the sign of Jonah, see also Nicholas Lombardo, OP, The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 104–5, drawing especially upon Simon Chow, The Sign of Jonah Reconsidered: A Study of Its Meaning in the Gospel Traditions (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksel International, 1995); as well as Hans F. Bayer, Jesus’ Predictions of Vindication and Resurrection: The Provenance, Meaning, and Correlation of the Synoptic Traditions (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986). Against the line taken by Pitre, Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that the publicly given “sign of Jonah” is Jonah’s death (and thus Christ’s death out of supreme love): see You Have Words of Eternal Life: Scripture Meditations, trans. Dennis Martin (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 21. ²⁶ See also Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 402. ²⁷ Wright grants that within the Old Testament itself, “the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal” (Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 85).

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In response, Wright states that although the Old Testament is not concerned with “life after death” per se, the Old Testament is consistently concerned with the work of God as the Creator and Redeemer of Israel. He cites a number of Old Testament passages that convey that when humans die and their corpses decay, they are no longer able to praise God and are nothing other than dust forevermore. Thus, in such passages as Psalm 6:5, Psalm 115:17, Genesis 3:19, Psalm 30:9, Psalm 88:3–12,²⁸ Isaiah 38, 2 Samuel 14:14, Ecclesiastes 9:5–10, and Job 3:13–19, the realm of the dead “[i]s not another form of real life”; rather, the realm of the dead is dirt, maggots, and profound darkness, even if the dead can be described as “shades” and (in some texts at least) are “not completely non-existent.”²⁹ The Books of Job and Ecclesiastes confirm that death is the absolute end, just as it is for animals: we turn to dust. At the same time, however, the deaths of Israel’s patriarchs tend to be described with equanimity rather than with great sadness. Wright focuses upon the connection found in Deuteronomy 28–30 between obeying God’s law and receiving “life” (the status of living in the promised land), and disobeying God’s law and receiving “death” (exile from the promised land). As Wright notes, Deuteronomy 30 promises that such “death” need not be permanent, since if the people repent during their exile, God will restore them to the promised land. Death is exile, but God can overcome it; God can restore his people. For the dying Israelite, therefore, hope was vested in the people (especially one’s family line) and in the land, in accord with God’s promises. The prophets focused on the hope for the flourishing of the people in the promised land, with a particular emphasis upon Jerusalem, the Temple, and the Davidic king. Wright admits that in some parts of the Old Testament, there is a real possibility of calling up the spirits of the dead, though such an action is condemned as a renouncing of trust in God. In addition, some rare people, notably Enoch and Elijah, pass from this life in a manner that leads to speculation about whether they really died. Elijah and his disciple Elisha also perform miraculous resuscitations upon people who have died. But these outliers do not affect the Old Testament’s basic perspective on death, in which hope for the future is vested in God’s power to restore the people to the land and to enable them to flourish in the land under the Davidic king. The hope of the dying Israelite was that the faithful Creator God, having made covenant with Israel, “would be true to his word both to Israel and to the whole creation.”³⁰ ²⁸ See Bernd Janowski, “Die Toten loben JHWH nicht. Psalm 88 und das alttestamentliche Todesverständnis,” in Auferstehung—Resurrection, ed. Friedrich Avemarie and Hermann Lichtenberger (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 3–45. Regarding Psalm 88, Janowski concludes after an extensive investigation: “This theology of the eschatological kingdom of God belongs to the prehistory of the early Christian belief in the resurrection” (ibid., 45). ²⁹ Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 89–90. ³⁰ Ibid., 102.

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Wright points out, however, that especially in the Psalms it becomes clear how profoundly the Israelites knew the love of YHWH “in vivid personal experience.”³¹ He considers that in certain Psalms, the Scriptures of Israel are moving toward a new dimension of hope in the God who will restore his (exiled) people Israel. Namely, if people experience God as faithful and loving in this life, why would such a God not be faithful and loving after death? At first, as in Psalm 16:8–11, Psalm 22, Psalm 104:29–30, and Job 33:15–30, the issue seems to have posed itself as one of deliverance from Sheol. In these texts, it remains unclear whether being delivered from Sheol means being delivered from the state of death, or (more likely) being delivered from the approach of death and thereby receiving a prolonged life. But Psalm 73 offers a clearer connection between a person’s faithfulness and love of God in this life and God’s faithfulness after death. The Psalmist expresses confidence that God, whom he trusts in this life, will “receive” (Ps 73:24) him after death. As the Psalmist says, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever” (Ps 73:26). A similar hope of God receiving the dead person who has loved God arguably appears in Psalm 49:15. The point is that the God who can restore his people from the death of exile and can bring them again to dwell with God in the land, can also receive and dwell with his people who have died. God has the power to overcome death. Wright next examines the instances in the Scriptures of Israel that express explicit hope for the resurrection of the dead.³² According to the Old Testament texts discussed above, the state of the dead either was utter non-being (dust to dust), the status of an unconscious “shade,” or in some personal way dwelling consciously with God. Resurrection, however, changes the state of the dead not only by assuring their ongoing consciousness but also by restoring their bodies. Texts about resurrection appear late in the history of the development of Israel’s Scriptures, but Wright emphasizes that these texts flow from the earliest strand of hope, namely that the God of the covenant would rescue his people from exile and restore them to the land. Wright begins with the chronologically latest text about resurrection, Daniel 12:2–3, on the grounds that scholars agree that it speaks about bodily resurrection and also on the grounds that it deeply influenced the Jewish worldview during the time of Jesus. Daniel 12:2–3 states that “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” As Wright points out, this passage ³¹ Ibid., 103. ³² For a succinct discussion of Israel’s hope that is similar to Wright’s account, see Richard Bauckham, “Life, Death, and the Afterlife in Second Temple Judaism,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, 80–95.

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describes the resurrection of the righteous and their oppressors, not the resurrection of all humans. In some detail, he shows that the passage does not mean that resurrected humans become stars, an interpretation found in the work of Martin Hengel, Pheme Perkins, and others.³³ Unlike in Plato’s Timaeus, the resurrected righteous will not actually become the “firmament” (the sky) or the stars, though the bodies of the resurrected will shine. Wright explores parallel texts in Second-Temple literature, concluding that the closest Jewish parallel to the Timaeus’s astral immortality can be found in 1 Enoch. In Daniel 12, the imagery of light pertains to the royal rule of God’s resurrected saints, who will “receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever” (Dan 7:18), thereby fulfilling the role in the (new) creation that Adam and Eve were intended to exercise. As Wright observes, Daniel 12’s prophecy of resurrection arises historically within the context of “the martyrdom of faithful Israelites under the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes.”³⁴ Thus, resurrection is not merely a doctrine arrived at abstractly or logically; rather, the prophecy of the resurrection of the martyrs testifies to God’s fidelity to those who love him, and to God’s power to restore them to the land, where they will finally exercise the role for which God created humans. According to Wright, Daniel 12:2–3’s main source is the Book of Isaiah. Wright begins by drawing a connection between Daniel 12:2–3 and the death and vindication of the suffering servant (a personification of Israel, even if perhaps secondarily also a specific person) in Isaiah 53:7–12. This connection underscores that Daniel 12 has in view God’s fidelity to his people, God’s commitment to the restoration of Israel, rather than being simply about the resurrection of individuals (though individuals certainly are resurrected). Even more important than Isaiah 53 is Isaiah 26, which scholars agree influenced Daniel 12. In the context of the punishment of the wicked angels and the kings of the nations along with the restoration of Israel, Isaiah proclaims to Israel, “Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise, O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For thy dew is a dew of light, and on the land of the shades thou wilt let it fall” (Is 26:19). By contrast, those who have rejected YHWH and have oppressed Israel will not experience resurrection, but will be utterly destroyed by God: “They are dead, they will not live; they are shades, they will not arise; to that end thou hast visited them with destruction and wiped out all remembrance of them” (Is 26:14). Wright grants that the bodily resurrection promised to Israel in Isaiah 26:19 might mean simply the metaphorical sense of resurrection, namely, national

³³ Wright cites Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (London: SCM Press, 1974), 196; Pheme Perkins, Resurrection: New Testament Witness and Contemporary Reflection (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1984), 38. See Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 110 fn 111. ³⁴ Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 113.

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restoration. But he observes that the Hebrew text and the LXX are explicit in depicting a bodily resurrection, and the whole context of Isaiah 24–7, in his view, leads to the likelihood that actual bodily resurrection is intended for the righteous Israelites who have died under the hand of Israel’s oppressors. He points especially to Isaiah 26:6–8, which envisions the eschatological banquet, the restoration of Israel, and the enlightenment of the nations, and which also envisions God’s conquering death and removing sorrow once and for all. He argues that the awakening of the “dwellers in the dust,” due to God’s power to give light and life to “the land of the shades,” means national restoration, certainly, but a national restoration that includes those Israelites who have died under oppression and whom God will raise from the dead at the cosmic judgment so that they, too, can partake in the eschatological banquet in the restored nation. Just as Isaiah 26:19 stands behind Daniel 12:2–3, Hosea 13:14 may stand behind Isaiah 26:19. Wright draws this insight from John Day.³⁵ Hosea 13:14 reads, “Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I ransom them from Death? O Death, where are [LXX: I will be] your plagues? O Sheol, where is [LXX: I will be] your destruction? Compassion is hid from my eyes.” In the Hebrew text, God is warning that he will not ransom Israel from death. But in the LXX, and in the New Testament as well—and plausibly (as Day shows) also for the author of Isaiah 26:19—the passage is understood to mean that God will ransom Israel from death. Wright also mentions Hosea 6:1–2, “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.” This passage too, in its original context, does not promise resurrection, but rather expresses a presumptuous prayer, mouthed by God’s people only when their sins have gotten them into trouble and they are trying to escape through appeal to God’s power rather than through the interior path of repentance and “steadfast love” (Hos 6:6). Again, however, this passage may have influenced Daniel in the direction of hope for bodily resurrection. The Lord raising up Israel on the third day certainly seems to have connections with Christian proclamation that Christ “was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:4). Ezekiel 37 also influenced later Jewish thinking about resurrection, but Wright recognizes that of the resurrection passages found in the prophets,

³⁵ See, however, Wright’s persuasive refutation of John Day’s hypothesis (which others hold as well) that Israel’s resurrection belief emerges from “a process of imitation from the dying and rising deity (Baal) of Canaanite mythology” (ibid., 126). Even if Day were correct with regard to Hosea—which, as Wright notes, rejects appeal to resurrection—the hypothesis does not explain Daniel or Isaiah, and it does not apply to the Canaanites either (who did not apply the dying and rising of Baal to themselves).

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“it is the most obviously allegorical or metaphorical.”³⁶ Its context is the Babylonian exile. The motivating question is whether the people of Israel will ever live again. At present they are “dry bones” (Ezek 37:4), lifeless, in exile from the promised land, their temple defiled and destroyed, their Davidic kingship ruined. A field of unburied bones is about as ritually impure as can be. In his love for Israel, however, God promises that he will restore these bones to life, by creating them anew. God will restore their flesh and their breath, and they will stand once more “upon their feet” (Ezek 37:10). Wright recognizes that this is not a promise of “actual bodily resurrection,” but rather is simply a metaphor for national restoration.³⁷ But the promise of return from exile and new creation, hearkening back to Genesis 2 and Deuteronomy 30, naturally lead one to contemplate God’s power to heal and bring to life. Although Ezekiel 37 does not appear to be connected with the line of texts from Daniel, Isaiah, and Hosea, and thus does not represent the heart of Old Testament thinking about bodily resurrection, Ezekiel 37 does connect with the earliest element of Israel’s hope, namely God’s power to restore his people to life in the land. This earliest element, as Wright says, is present in the later two elements of Israel’s hope: God’s presence to the just in Sheol, and God’s promise of bodily resurrection for his people. Wright remarks that “the solid hope of the earlier period (hope for nation, family and land) joins up with the emerging belief in the creator’s faithfulness even beyond the grave.”³⁸ The path traced by Wright, therefore, begins with the Torah—especially the choice between “life” and “death” that God offers to his people in Deuteronomy 28–30—and moves from there to the Psalms, in which hope for ongoing personal communion with God after death appears, and then to the prophets, in which restoration in the sense of bodily resurrection becomes a possibility. The common thread is trust in the God who has the power to restore his people from exile and to enable them to dwell triumphantly in the land. Wright comments, “Each of the passages we have studied is set in the context of the continuing affirmation of the Jewish hope for restoration, for liberation from exile, persecution and suffering.”³⁹ The hope for bodily resurrection, found most clearly in Daniel 12:2–3, belongs to the Jewish hope for national restoration, and is based upon the power and fidelity of the God whom the people of Israel have come to know. Hope for bodily resurrection is here not a mere hope for an ongoing life along the lines of the present life. On the contrary, resurrected life means the restoration of God’s people in the land.

³⁶ Ibid., 119. ³⁷ Ibid., 120. ³⁸ Ibid., 121. See also, for Ezekiel 37, Isaiah 25–26, Hosea 6 and 13, and Daniel 12, Andrew Chester’s “Resurrection and Transformation,” in Auferstehung—Resurrection, 47–77. Chester’s list of conclusions on the final page of his essay concurs with Wright’s conclusions in The Resurrection of the Son of God with respect to the teaching of the Old Testament. ³⁹ Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 121.

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Thus, bodily resurrection belongs to the end of exile—the end of the people being under the oppressive power of foreign nations—for which Daniel hoped. Wright argues that the hope for bodily resurrection actually extends, rather than contradicts, the hopes expressed by Old Testament texts that show no belief in any kind of life after death. The exile of death will not be God’s last word for his beloved people. In Isaiah 53, this restoration from death will happen to the nation’s representative (and to the nation itself); in Daniel 12, this restoration from death will happen for all the righteous Israelite martyrs. Wright concludes that for the prophets, “YHWH’s answer to his people’s exile would be, metaphorically, life from the dead (Isaiah 26, Ezekiel 37); YHWH’s answer to his people’s martyrdom would be, literally, life from the dead (Daniel 12). This was a bold step indeed, but it was the last step in a comprehensible line of thought going back to the earliest roots of Israelite belief.”⁴⁰ Still, none of this prepared Israel for the resurrection of one man prior to the resurrection of the dead at the final judgment.

THOMAS AQUINAS ’ S USE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT I N C O M M E N T IN G O N J E SU S’ RE S U RRE C TI ON A P P E A R A N CE S I N J OHN 20– 1 Wright explores the Old Testament context for belief in resurrection as part of his effort to show the historical likelihood of Christ’s Resurrection. The Old Testament context has importance here because it shows the development of the line of Israelite thought according to which God will bring back his people from exile and restore them fully to dwelling with him in the land (the eschatological pattern that is likewise discerned by Allison). In the Old Testament, the latest step in this development is the belief that God’s power to restore his people will extend to raising his martyrs from the grave. Death will not be the last word for them, since God can restore them even from the grave. Their restoration is never a matter simply of individual resurrection, let ⁴⁰ Ibid., 127. See also the emphasis on “accordance with the [Old Testament] Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:4) in Frank Crüsemann, “Scripture and Resurrection,” trans. Clarke Seha, in Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments, ed. Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 89–102; as well as the positive conclusions of Michael Wyschogrod and Peter von der Osten-Sacken, “Auferstehung Jesu im jüdischchristlichen Dialog: Ein Briefwechsel,” Evangelische Theologie 57 (1997): 196–209. Crüsemann holds that “Scripture is necessary even to be able to perceive the resurrection of Jesus appropriately. That is valid for the moment of appearance; that is most surely valid for the transmission of the experience” (“Scripture and Resurrection,” 101). I do not hold, however, that someone not versed in Scripture could not have perceived the risen Jesus when he made himself manifest after his Resurrection.

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alone of living with God in heaven; rather, what is envisioned is the eschatological new creation in which God’s people will reign. There are significant continuities between this Old Testament conception of resurrection and the earlier Old Testament understandings of God’s power to give his people “life.” In Christian understanding, we find continuities with the Old Testament but also marked discontinuities, above all the central place that resurrection has in Christian understanding and the shift to a two-stage understanding of the resurrection. Thomas Aquinas, too, is committed to thinking about Christ’s Resurrection in the context of the Old Testament. He agrees with Wright and Allison that the intelligibility of Christ’s Resurrection becomes clear within the context of the Scriptures of Israel. For Aquinas, the Old Testament provides us with the whole story within which Christ’s Resurrection is plausible—and it is not simply a “story,” but a set of testimonies to God’s creative and redemptive power as understood by the Israelites and put into writing in the books of inspired Scripture. In The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright finds that the main lines of the scriptural context of resurrection belief include the following: “YHWH’s creation and covenant; his promises and his faithfulness to them; his purposes for Israel, not least his gift of the land; his power over all opposing forces, including finally death itself; his love for the world, for his human creatures, for Israel in particular and especially for those who served him and followed in his way; his justice, because of which evil would eventually be condemned and righteousness upheld.”⁴¹ Without these aspects, Christ’s Resurrection could not be historically plausible; it would lack the context that God has given it. This context makes clear by whom, for whom, and for what purpose Christ is raised from the dead. Thomas Aquinas amplifies this context. As mentioned above, Aquinas quotes the Old Testament 139 times in commenting on the fifty-five verses of John 20–1. He does not string these quotations together in order to present a case for the historicity of Christ’s Resurrection. But when we appreciate the 139 quotations as a whole, we discover the powerful scriptural context that Aquinas puts in place, a context that strengthens the historical plausibility of John 20–1’s testimony to Christ’s Resurrection by drawing us into Israel’s own testimony to God’s relationship with Israel and with the world. Perhaps surprisingly, of all the verses that Wright highlights in his discussion of the theme of resurrection in the Old Testament, the only one that Aquinas quotes is Psalm 104:30. Despite John 20–1’s focus on Christ’s Resurrection, Aquinas does not quote Daniel 12, Isaiah 26, Hosea 13, Psalm 73, or Psalm 49; and although he quotes Ezekiel 37 and Hosea 6, he does not quote

⁴¹ Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 127.

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the verses that Wright mentions as possibly having to do with resurrection. What Old Testament texts, then, does Aquinas actually provide by way of illuminating Christ’s Resurrection? I will focus largely on the Old Testament books that Aquinas quotes most frequently in commenting on John 20–1: Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, Proverbs, and Sirach. Forgive the lists of verses that follow; although somewhat dull to read, this is the easiest and quickest way to expose the cumulative power of the Old Testament in Aquinas’s commentary on Jesus’ Resurrection appearances. What appears is a powerful testimony to creation, covenant, blessing, salvation, judgment, restoration, the reward of the just, wisdom, royal power and service, and priesthood. Let me begin with Genesis, which Aquinas quotes ten times in his commentary on John 20–1. I will list the verses that Aquinas quotes not in the order in which Aquinas quotes them, but in their order within the biblical text itself. Genesis 1:5 belongs to the very outset of God’s creative work, when God has separated light and darkness. Genesis 2:3 describes God’s blessing of the seventh day and his resting from the work of creation. Genesis 2:7 describes God forming “man of dust from the ground” and breathing life into him, so that “man became a living being.” If God were not Creator, capable of making life, he could not raise anyone to life. After these first three quotations about God the Creator of light, Sabbath, and human life, the scene shifts to God’s covenantal people and to the blessing that will come to the whole world through this people. Genesis 12:1 (quoted twice by Aquinas) consists in God’s command to Abraham to leave Haran and go to the promised land. Genesis 15:5 contains God’s description to Abraham of the people who will arise from the union of Abraham and Sarah; like the stars in the night sky, the people will be innumerable. Genesis 22:17 reiterates this promise about the number of Abraham’s descendents, but now in the context of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, which shows that Abraham trusts fully in God rather than in any human resource to achieve the promised ends of the covenant. (Recall the argument of Hebrews 11:19 that Abraham’s nearsacrifice of Isaac—which prefigures Christ’s sacrificial death—was possible because Abraham believed “that God was able to raise men even from the dead.”) Genesis 22:18 contains the promise that “all the nations of the earth” will bless themselves by Abraham’s descendents. Genesis 28:17 belongs to Jacob’s dream vision of the ladder between heaven and earth, a ladder that Aquinas (following the Gospel of John) understood to symbolize Jesus as the one Mediator. Lastly, in Genesis 32:30, Jacob has spent the whole night wrestling with the angel of God, from whom he receives the name “Israel.” These quotations from Genesis lay an extraordinary foundation for understanding the plausibility of Christ’s Resurrection. God, the Creator of the world and the Creator of human beings, wishes to draw near to all nations and to bless all nations. God commands Abraham to go to the promised land. God connects the blessing of all nations with the descendents of Abraham and

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with the near-sacrifice of Isaac, and God shows Jacob/Israel the ladder between heaven and earth. In short, God, our Creator, wills to bless us and to offer us a path to dwelling with and seeing God, and God wills to accomplish this for all nations through his covenantal people and in a manner that cannot be separated from the (near-)sacrifice of the beloved son. The impact of the ten quotations from Genesis, then, is large indeed. The needed foundations for believing in Christ’s Resurrection are here. We must believe that God is the Creator; that God loves humans into existence; that God wishes to draw near to his fallen human creatures; that God wills to establish a “ladder” between his dwelling and ours; that God will restore his fallen creatures through the sacrifice of the beloved son. I turn now to Aquinas’s 46 quotations of the Psalms. Since the Psalms are not a narrative, we cannot expect the same kind of narrative cohesion from the Psalms that we found in Aquinas’s quotations of Genesis. But patterns and foundations that support belief in Christ’s Resurrection can be observed, even if at first the verses seem to be unrelated.⁴² Psalm 2:8 records God’s promise to his son Israel (or to his son Christ), “I will make the nations your heritage.”⁴³ Psalm 6:6 describes the weeping of the suffering Psalmist, who begs for and confidently anticipates God’s assistance in overcoming his oppressors. Psalm 7:7 calls upon the Lord to judge the nations. Psalm 30:5 proclaims that “God’s anger is but for a moment” and “joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 31:20 states that God protects those who love him from evildoers; those who love the Lord will be saved. Psalm 37:24 states that the Lord will protect the steps of those whom he loves. Psalm 40:5 rejoices in the good deeds of the incomparably good God toward Israel. Psalm 40:7 contains the promise of the just man, whose name is written in God’s book, to come and do God’s will. Psalm 42:7 says that “deep calls to deep,” and it is written from the perspective of a just man whom God seems to have abandoned to unjust suffering, but who remains confident in and desirous for God. Psalm 43:3 calls upon God to send forth his light, so as to guide and restore the person who is now unjustly suffering. Psalm 43:4 proclaims the desire of the person who is now unjustly suffering to be led joyfully back to the praise-filled worship of God at God’s altar. Psalm 46:1 observes that “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble.” Psalm 63:5 presents the situation of a person who thirsts and faints for God, for whom the very thought of God ⁴² Aquinas quotes a few verses from the Psalms more than once, and very occasionally he quotes a text from a Psalm whose words in his Latin edition have no parallel in the Psalm as found in contemporary translations. For background to Aquinas’s broader use of the Psalms, see my introduction to Carlos Casanova’s forthcoming Spanish translation of Aquinas’s unfinished Postilla super Psalmos; and especially Thomas F. Ryan, Thomas Aquinas as Reader of the Psalms (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). ⁴³ See Susan Gillingham, A Journey of Two Psalms: The Reception of Psalms 1 and 2 in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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produces joyful praise and interior feasting. Psalm 73:25–6 describes God as the sole desire and strength of the Psalmist’s heart, and indeed as the Psalmist’s “portion for ever.” These quotations from the Psalms contextualize Jesus’ Resurrection by their affirmation of God’s goodness, God’s judgment, and God’s power to save those who love him from the bonds of death. Further important themes for contextualizing Jesus’ Resurrection emerge from the remainder of Aquinas’s Psalm quotations. Psalm 82:5 warns, in the context of divine judgment, that oppressors “have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.” Psalm 87:1 describes the holy mountain of Zion, the city that God loves. Psalm 89:9 proclaims God’s mighty power and God’s rule over the sea (symbol of chaos).⁴⁴ Psalm 94:18 thanks God for his steadfast love and support, in the context of calling for divine judgment of oppressors. Psalm 94:19, in the same context, thanks God for the interior “consolations” that ensure that the sorrows and cares of the world are not overwhelming. Psalm 102:27 states that by contrast to things that pass away (including the world), God remains the same and will never pass away. Psalm 104:30 praises God for sending forth his Spirit to create and renew the earth. Psalm 105:4 urges us constantly to seek God’s strength and presence. These verses urge us to recognize that God is living, loving, all-powerful, unchanging, everlasting, source of all good, and present to us. Psalm 110:1 contains a command from the Lord to “my lord” to sit at his right hand; Jesus and the first Christians applied this verse to Christ (and to his ascension to the right hand of the Father).⁴⁵ Psalm 114:4 describes God’s power over the earth by using the imagery of the mountains skipping like rams. Psalm 118:16 proclaims joyfully that “the right hand of the Lord is exalted,” because God has saved his people from death. Psalm 118:24 exults in the same context of divine triumph, “[t]his is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 119:32 states, “I will run in the way of thy commandments when thou enlargest my understanding!” With a similar appreciation for God’s law, Psalm 119:165 observes that those who love God’s law have “great peace” and do not stumble. Psalm 122:2 praises God’s Temple and God’s city, Jerusalem. Psalm 126:6 promises that God’s restoration of Israel, “[h]e that goes forth weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.” Psalm 133:1 depicts the goodness of brothers dwelling in unity. Psalm 135:6 affirms joyfully that God, who has chosen Israel, does precisely what he ⁴⁴ See Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 14–25. ⁴⁵ See M. Gourgues, À la droite de Dieu. Résurrection de Jésus et actualization du Psaume 110:1 dans Nouveau Testament (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1978); Martin Hengel, “ ‘Sit at My Right Hand!’ The Enthronement of Christ at the Right Hand of God and Psalm 110:1,” in Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995), 119–225.

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pleases. Psalm 145:16 affirms that God, in his bounty, satisfies “the desire of every living thing.” Psalm 147:4 depicts the good order established by God, who “determines the number of the stars” and “gives to all of them their names.” Psalm 147:14 credits the Lord for making peace within Israel and filling the people “with the finest of wheat.” Lastly, Psalm 147:20 observes that God has blessed Israel with his law. These verses from the Psalms express the victory, peace, joy, order, bounty, and law given by God to Israel and indeed to the whole world and the cosmos. God will satisfy the yearnings of his people and give them bountiful life. To sum up the import of Aquinas’s quotations from the Psalms in his commentary on John 20–1, we find God’s power to judge and to save, God’s status as the source of all creation and the giver of all blessing, the goodness of God, the desire of God’s people for life with God, and the peace and joy won for us by God. God will restore and exalt those who love him, thwarting the efforts of evildoers and healing the pain of unjust suffering. Israel will shout for joy at the restoration that God brings. It is already evident from the writings of Allison and Wright how such texts serve to ground Christ’s Resurrection. A similar meaning is evident in Aquinas’s sixteen quotations from Isaiah. Isaiah 1:14 contains YHWH’s complaint that Israel’s liturgical feasts, like Israel’s sacrifices, “have become a burden to me”; God rejects the worship that sinful Israel offers. Isaiah 6:1 initiates Isaiah’s prophetic call: the prophet sees “the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple.” Isaiah 8:1 belongs to the beginning of the prophet’s announcement of the oncoming terrible judgment of sinful Israel. Isaiah 9:7 describes the divine promise of the emergence, after the judgment, of a new Davidic king and a perfected kingdom: “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.” Thus far we see the eschatological pattern of a terrifying divine judgment followed by a wondrous, everlasting restoration.⁴⁶ Isaiah 10:21 depicts the beginning of the restoration, when a “remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God.” Isaiah 11:2 amplifies this depiction of restoration by adding that from the line of David (which seemingly had been cut off) shall emerge a new Davidic king: “And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” Isaiah 21:10 imagines the moment when the people receive the news that Babylon ⁴⁶ For background to Christian reading of Isaiah, see J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul in Concert in the Letter to the Romans (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Brevard S. Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

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has fallen and that the Lord has conquered Babylon’s false gods. This news will come to God’s “threshed and winnowed” people, and the prophet announces this good news to the people. Isaiah 30:21 promises that although a terrible judgment is coming, Israel’s divine teacher will show his sinful people the way of life: “your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.” Isaiah 30:23 offers a portrait of a restored land, complementing the restored people. All of these verses focus on the good news of restoration. Isaiah 44:8 teaches about God, the one who promised “from of old” to restore his people, and the one who rightly asks: “Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any.” Isaiah 45:15, in the context of affirming that God is Creator and that he will restore his people, compares God to the visible (and false) idols: “Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” Isaiah 56:10 warns, however, that the “watchmen” of Israel “are blind, they are all without knowledge.” Isaiah 64:4, calling upon the God of Israel to save his sinful and desolated people, underscores the truth of Israel’s God: “From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides thee, who works for those who wait for him.” These verses from Isaiah underscore the living reality of the true God. Isaiah 66:14 teaches that God will restore his people: “You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice; your bones shall flourish like the grass; and it shall be known that the hand of the Lord is with his servants.” Isaiah 66:20 is an announcement of the complete restoration of Israel, in which the nations themselves will carry the scattered Jewish people to God’s “holy mountain Jerusalem” in worship and rejoicing. Lastly, in the context of the proclamation of the everlasting new creation, Isaiah 66:23 contains God’s promise that “all flesh shall come to worship before me.” These promises indicate that God will do a great thing that will utterly change the nations’ view of him and will vindicate the trust of his people Israel. In Aquinas’s quotations from Isaiah, therefore, we learn to perceive Christ’s Resurrection—the theme of John 20–1—in light of the pattern of eschatological judgment and restoration, with an emphasis on the latter. The living God, in the midst of his people and his city Jerusalem, will manifest himself to the whole world, causing all flesh to come to worship him. Aquinas understands this to be what the Resurrection of Christ has accomplished. Aquinas quotes Proverbs fifteen times in his commentary on John 20–1. Beyond the themes of creation, covenant, blessing, and judgment followed by restoration, Proverbs prepares us to understand the distinctive qualities of the man whom God will love and reward. Proverbs 3:16 says in praise of wisdom, “Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor.” Proverbs 4:18, similarly, connects “the path of the righteous” with the “the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.” Proverbs 4:27 urges

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us not to “swerve to the right or to the left” in our obedience to the path of wise and righteous living. Proverbs 8:7 states that we must solely speak truth, avoiding crafty and lying words. Proverbs 8:17, in the voice of personified Wisdom, proclaims that “I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.” These quotations indicate that those who proceed along the path of wisdom will be worthy of praise and honor. In this regard, the Resurrection of Christ is plausible because he exhibited righteousness and wisdom in his words and deeds; had he done otherwise, we could not have believed in his Resurrection. Proverbs 10:12 observes that while “[h]atred stirs up strife,” fortunately “love covers all offenses.” Proverbs 13:12 observes that while our heart is made “sick” by “hope deferred,” “a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 14:35 notes that servants who act “shamefully” receive “wrath,” but servants who act “wisely” receive “the king’s favor.” Proverbs 16:2 warns that “[a]ll the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the spirit.” Proverbs 18:19 warns against “quarreling,” because it debars us from our neighbor. Proverbs 21:28 warns that “a false witness will perish.” By contrast to the doubtful fate of arrogant, quarrelsome, and lying persons, Proverbs 22:11 promises that “[h]e who loves purity of heart, and whose speech is gracious, will have the king as his friend.” Proverbs 25:22 urges that we should be kind and solicitous to our enemies, both because our enemies will then feel ashamed about their enmity for us, and because God will reward our generosity. Proverbs 25:27 compares “complimentary words” to honey, and points out that we should be sparing with both. These verses show that the person who acts with wisdom, love for neighbor (including enemies), truthfulness, humility, purity of heart, and gracious speech will have God “as his friend” and will be rewarded and praised. Christ’s Resurrection demonstrates that God the Father has rewarded Christ for these things and that we should praise Christ. The last biblical book that Aquinas cites extensively in his commentary on John 20-1 is Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, which appears eleven times. Like Proverbs, Sirach teaches about the qualities of the man whom God will reward. Sirach 2:1 contains the warning that those who “come forward to serve the Lord” must be prepared to undergo “temptation.” Sirach 3:22 encourages a student not to focus on “what is hidden” and not to go beyond “what has been assigned.” Sirach 15:3 promises that personified Wisdom, in welcoming the person who fears the Lord, “will feed him with the bread of understanding, and give him the water of wisdom to drink.” Sirach 19:4 warns against trusting others too quickly and also warns that when we sin, we commit a wrong against our own selves. Sirach 24:31 adopts the voice of personified Wisdom, and proclaims that the channel of wisdom will grow exponentially. Sirach 32:1 urges the “master of the feast” not to exalt himself with self-centered pride, but rather to seek to be of service.

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Christ underwent temptation, taught with parables that people could apprehend, bestowed upon his listeners the nourishing wisdom that spreads expansively, committed no sin despite often being persecuted or betrayed by others, and lived a life of self-giving service. Sirach 38:24 reminds us that “[t]he wisdom of the scribe depends on the opportunity of leisure.” Sirach 43:32, in the context of a depiction of the amazing marvels of the cosmos created by God, observes that “[m]any things greater than these lie hidden, for we have seen but few of his works.” Sirach 44:3 belongs to a lengthy discourse in praise of those who have achieved great things in the past. The verse specifically praises “those who ruled in their kingdoms, and were men renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and proclaiming prophecies.” Sirach 50:12 praises a high priest who “was like a young cedar on Lebanon” with respect to the dignity with which he stood at the altar surrounded by his brethren. Christ’s wisdom is far greater than that of the scribe; Christ’s greatness is far greater than even the marvels of the created cosmos; Christ’s power and understanding are far greater than any king’s; and Christ’s dignity as the true high priest is far greater than that of any high priest. That it is Christ who is resurrected, therefore, is fitting and intelligible in a way that would not be the case were Christ lesser than others. In sum, the five most-quoted Old Testament books in Aquinas’s commentary on John 20–1 put into place a strong framework for believing in Christ’s Resurrection. We find the framework of God’s creation and covenant (Genesis); the all-powerful Giver of blessing who can be relied upon to save his people (Psalms); and God’s terrifying judgment and everlasting restoration of his people (Isaiah). We also find the attributes of a person who will merit God’s favor and receive God’s reward (Proverbs); and we learn that human greatness consists in wisdom, royal power, service, and priesthood (Sirach). These lists of cited verses from Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, Proverbs, and Sirach could be filled out by going to the Old Testament books themselves and exploring the contexts and full meaning of the verses. But the key point is that in assessing Jesus’ Resurrection, it helps to be aware that his Resurrection is prepared for, in Scripture, by the revelation of creation and covenant, of the God who will save and bless his people, of God’s coming judgment and restoration of his people, of the reward of the just man, and of the characteristics of true human greatness. In Aquinas’s commentary on John 20–1, he also quotes (less often) such books as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Job, among others. Many of these quotations will be familiar to Christians. Jeremiah 3:15 contains God’s promise to Israel that “I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding.” Jeremiah 31:14, whose context is the prophesied new covenant, contains God’s promise that “my people shall be satisfied with my goodness.” Jeremiah 31:16 contains God’s assurance that the people’s

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“work shall be rewarded.” These passages point toward the restoration of Israel through a shepherd/king who will nourish Israel with divine wisdom and goodness. Ezekiel 10:2 pertains to the judgment of Israel, as the Lord departs from the Temple. Ezekiel 34:2 speaks of judgment against the wicked shepherds or leaders of Israel. Ezekiel 34:14 conveys God’s promise to feed and to nourish Israel, in the context of his promise to be Israel’s shepherd and to restore the scattered people of Israel. Ezekiel 37:24 contains another prophecy of restoration through the Davidic king: “My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe all my statutes.” Lastly, Aquinas’s three quotations from Job include Job 14:14, “If a man shall die, shall he live again?”; Job 16:19, “my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high”; and Job 26:14, “Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways; and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?” Job’s high estimation of God’s power fits with Christ’s Resurrection, as does Job’s yearning for life (after death) and Job’s appeal to a “witness” in heaven to vouch for him.

CO NCLUSION Dale Allison has argued that even though historical tools do not allow us to assess whether the Resurrection appearances involved a Jesus truly raised from the dead, we can almost certainly still affirm—without committing a “historical sin”—that “the disciples’ experiences, whether hallucinatory or not, were genuine experiences that they at least took to originate outside their subjectivity.”⁴⁷ In this chapter, I have sought to add further reasons for supposing that the Resurrection appearances originated outside the disciples’ subjectivity. These reasons originate from within the Scriptures of Israel. In order to believe that the Resurrection appearances originated outside the disciples’ subjectivity, we need to believe in a Creator God who wishes to enable his rational creatures to dwell intimately with him. Genesis teaches us that the Creator God wills to draw near to his people. If such a God exists, then human history—as the history of God’s creation—involves God’s intimate presence. The Psalms testify to this divine presence, as they implore God to act and praise God for his gifts. In the prophets, the historical engagement of God with his people makes manifest both the dire consequences of sin (judgment)

⁴⁷ Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 298.

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and God’s commitment to restoring his people and reconciling them with each other and with himself (restoration). It would not be plausible that this God would grant resurrection, prior to the final judgment, to someone who was unworthy. Proverbs sketches for us the kind of person who receives God’s favor and God’s rewards. Sirach sketches for us what a royal and priestly life should look like, with its characteristic marks of wisdom and self-giving service. This Old Testament context makes it plausible that Jesus of Nazareth, who embodies these characteristics, should have been and was raised from the dead. N. T. Wright argues that one key to assessing the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection is to track the change in worldview between Second-Temple Judaism(s) up to and including Jesus’ time, on the one hand, and early Christianity on the other. Wright also argues that the Old Testament provides helpful context by means of its teaching about resurrection, which is not a mere add-on to earlier strands of Old Testament thinking about death, but rather arises out of the consistent affirmation of God’s power to save his people from the death of exile. Resurrection, restoration, and new creation are connected. By means of his quotations from the Old Testament in commenting on John 20–1, Aquinas deepens our appreciation for the breadth of the Old Testament context that grounds the plausibility of Jesus’ Resurrection. To apprehend Jesus risen, it is helpful to begin with Genesis and to enter into the worship and wisdom of God’s people (including their prophetic testimony to God’s promises of judgment and restoration) in the centuries prior to Jesus. It is here, precisely in the scriptural history that the Creator God has guided, that we come to know that given such a God and such a history, Jesus’ Resurrection is believable. The biblical scholar Francis Moloney comments, “From the very beginnings the resurrection accounts have been part of the Church’s ‘proclamation.’ They were never an attempt to found the Church upon scientifically controlled historical data.”⁴⁸ Without question, the Resurrection accounts have their plausibility most clearly within the “data” that we find set forth in the Scriptures of Israel concerning God’s creative power and redemptive purposes. Aquinas’s exegetical practice helps to reacquaint us with this scriptural reason for the historical likelihood of Jesus’ Resurrection. Like Allison and Wright, Aquinas directs us to the pattern of judgment and restoration; but his extensive Old Testament quotations place that pattern within its full setting, beginning with the God of creation and covenant. The theologian Richard R. Niebuhr has rightly noted that “[i]n facing the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are confronted with an anomaly. The resurrection of Jesus is unique, ⁴⁸ Francis J. Moloney, SDB, The Resurrection of the Messiah: A Narrative Commentary on the Resurrection Accounts in the Four Gospels (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), 139.

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having no parallel.”⁴⁹ Fortunately, although Jesus’ Resurrection has no parallel, it does not lack an intelligible and illuminating background: not only Jesus’ own life and death, but the entire Old Testament. As a historical reality, the Scriptures of Israel can be accounted for in various ways. But the testimony of these historically textured writings pertains to, and favors, the credibility of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.

⁴⁹ Richard R. Niebuhr, Resurrection and Historical Reason: A Study of Theological Method (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 162.

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4 The Strangeness of Jesus’ Resurrection With his aptitude for going to the heart of the matter, the theologian Robert Barron has remarked, “The risen Christ was—as all of the accounts attest— strange.”¹ Both today and in the early Christian centuries, the strangeness of the New Testament testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection has led people to seek alternative explanations for this testimony than the explanation offered by the New Testament. In the patristic period, popular Gnostic explanations often sought to spiritualize Jesus’ Resurrection by suggesting that it actually was not bodily. Our cultural milieu also seeks explanations that spiritualize Jesus’ Resurrection, but in our case this is done by arguing that Paul and the first Christians experienced hallucinatory visions that can be squared with our culture’s materialist worldview. It is easy for us to believe that Jesus’ bereaved disciples and Paul experienced a vision of Jesus or a sense of his presence, even though his corpse remained dead. Wolfhart Pannenberg observes that given Western intellectual culture’s widespread presupposition that God does not exist, “any claim affirming the occurrence of such an event will be judged impossible by many people, and they will be inclined to accept almost any alternative explanation of the course of events, no matter what the historical evidence might be.”² In this chapter, I emphasize that it is significant, for the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection, that the authors of the New Testament insisted upon the strangest and least likely claim, namely, Jesus’ bodily Resurrection to glorious life. The chapter has three main sections. First, I discuss contemporary ways of explaining away the New Testament’s claims that Jesus’ corpse was raised to glorified life and that he concretely manifested himself in his risen flesh to his disciples. Specifically, I set forth the proposals of four Christian scholars (John M. G. Barclay, Gerhard Lohfink, Peter Carnley, and Gerd Lüdemann) and one ¹ Robert Barron, Eucharist (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 49. Barron explains, “On the one hand, he was the same Jesus with whom they had eaten and drunk and to whom they had listened, but on the other hand, he was different, in fact so changed that frequently they didn’t immediately recognize him or acknowledge him” (ibid.). ² Wolfhart Pannenberg, “History and the Reality of the Resurrection,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 62–72, at 63.

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Jewish scholar (Geza Vermes). Second, I examine the intrinsic strangeness of the New Testament testimony that Jesus’ corpse was raised from the dead to glorified life. I argue in this section that Paul and the evangelists knew that they were mounting a very strange claim, and that the strangeness is intrinsic to their proclamation. An important aspect of the credibility or beliefworthiness of the Resurrection of Jesus consists in the fact that the first persons who proclaimed it knew well how strange was the claim for which they were willing to give their lives, beginning with the deacon Stephen, the first martyr. Third, I briefly engage Thomas Aquinas’s theology of the Resurrection of Jesus. When Aquinas treats the Resurrection, he rejects any spiritualizing of the raising of Jesus’ corpse to glorified life. His discussion draws upon John of Damascus’s On the Orthodox Faith as a particularly important patristic witness to the bodiliness of the Resurrection of Jesus. Damascene is aware of alternative Gnostic and Muslim perspectives that spiritualized Jesus’ death and Resurrection, and I survey a number of these perspectives here. Despite the fact that in the culture of his day such spiritualizing possessed an inherent credibility, Damascene refuses to go in this direction. Thus, drawing upon Damascene strengthens Aquinas’s continuity with the New Testament’s maximally strange witness.³ Both Aquinas and Damascene help us to perceive the importance of this aspect of the testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection. In my view, the perennial interest in explanations that spiritualize the claim that Jesus rose from the dead points to a neglected clue to the credibility of the Resurrection: its bodily strangeness. The first Christians knew that they were proclaiming something difficult to accept, both in the context of SecondTemple Judaism and in the context of the broader Hellenistic culture. But rather than adjusting their proclamation to suit the prejudices of the age, they retained its profound strangeness as a fully bodily mystery. In their choice to take the much more difficult path, they strengthened the likelihood that their claim is true.

CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALIZATIONS O F J E S U S’ R I S E N BO D Y In contemporary scholarship, the spiritualizing of Jesus’ risen body takes a wide variety of forms. Some of these forms are presented by Christian scholars ³ For a valuable survey of Aquinas’s indebtedness to John of Damascus—although missing Aquinas’s use of Damascene in his treatise on Christ’s Resurrection—see Leo J. Elders, SVD, Thomas Aquinas and His Predecessors: The Philosophers and the Church Fathers in His Works (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 262–74.

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who distinguish sharply between what can be known by historical-critical scholarship and what can be known by faith. In this regard, the position of the Christian biblical scholar John M. G. Barclay is perhaps representative. As a historian, Barclay does not commit himself to any particular position on Jesus’ Resurrection. He does, however, urge that scholars not hastily dismiss the view that an original spiritualized “Resurrection” or exaltation of Jesus later morphed into the concretely bodily accounts that we find in the Gospels. As he points out, some scholars argue that 1 Corinthians 15:4, which affirms that Christ “was buried,” means that Paul believed in the raising of Jesus’ corpse to glorified life and in the empty tomb. But in response to this viewpoint, Barclay cautions against supposing “that a first-century Pharisee like Paul must have regarded resurrection as (at least) the re-use of the body laid in the tomb.”⁴ The problem, he thinks, consists in the variety and creativity of first-century Jewish theological positions. We cannot be sure that Paul meant by “resurrection” what, drawing upon Jewish sources, we mean by “bodily resurrection.” In this light, describing Paul’s account of the “spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:44), Barclay notes that its “[i]nterpretation depends on the sense of the term sōma, which normally has physical connotations but could be used in this context in a weaker sense.”⁵ Certainly Paul thinks that Jesus has been raised; but the debated question, as Barclay says, is whether this implies any continuity between Jesus’ dead body and his risen body. Perhaps Paul thinks that Jesus ⁴ John M. G. Barclay, “The Resurrection in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa, 13–30, at 16. For the same viewpoint, see J. I. H. McDonald, The Resurrection: Narrative and Belief (London: SPCK, 1989), 141. It seems to me, however, not only that the New Testament does not present Jesus as simply another “translated or elevated” person, but also that the New Testament insists that we need to know that Jesus’ corpse has been raised to glorified life. For an exegetical defense of the empty tomb, see J. C. O’Neill, “On the Resurrection as an Historical Question,” in Christ, Faith and History, ed. S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 205–19. ⁵ Barclay, “The Resurrection in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” 17. Here Barclay cites, as advocates of opposite positions, Robert H. Gundry, Sōma in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and P. W. Gooch, Partial Knowledge: Philosophical Studies in Paul (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). On this point see N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 348–55, especially 351; Murray J. Harris, “Resurrection and Immortality in the Pauline Corpus,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 147–70, at 153–4; Andrew T. Lincoln, Paradise Now and Not Yet: Studies in the Role of the Heavenly Dimension in Paul’s Thought with Special Reference to His Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 42; Peter Lampe, “Paul’s Concept of a Spiritual Body,” in Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments, ed. Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 103–14. For a different view, see Outi Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 53–61, emphasizing that Paul is likely indebted to “Stoic ideas that understood both psuchē and pneuma as material” (ibid., 56). Lehtipuu directs attention to Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 3–15.

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has simply been “further clothed” so that what was mortal in Jesus has now been “swallowed up by life” (2 Cor 5:4), which might imply a heavenly exaltation of Jesus rather than a change in his corpse. After all, Paul “talks of the resurrection of the dead ([1 Cor] 15:42) not the resurrection of the body, and leaves indeterminate what is the ‘it’ (simply the person?) which is sown perishable, but raised imperishable (15:42–4; cf. Phil. 1:21–4; 2 Cor. 5:8).”⁶ Jesus’ body was certainly “sown perishable,” but what if Paul saw the Lord in a manner that revealed him to be resurrected in the sense of exalted to glorious life (“raised imperishable”) without thereby undoing the corruption of his corpse?⁷ Barclay concludes that we cannot know precisely what Paul meant. He might have meant a concrete bodily resurrection of Jesus’ corpse to glorious life, but, then again, he might have meant something more spiritualized.⁸ If Paul could change Jewish eschatology radically with regard to a “resurrection” of the Messiah prior to the consummation and general resurrection, then (so Barclay argues) Paul could have changed other aspects of Jewish eschatology, including by spiritualizing the meaning of “resurrection” if he considered this to be mandated by his vision of the exalted Jesus.⁹

⁶ Barclay, “The Resurrection in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” 18. See also Murray Harris, “Resurrection and Immortality in the Pauline Corpus,” 149. James D. G. Dunn discerns a three-stage development of early Christian understanding of Jesus’ Resurrection: first, as a physical resurrection to unending life (as required by the meaning of “resurrection hope” among Jews in “Herodian Palestine” who believed in an eschatological resurrection of the dead); second, Paul’s more spiritualized, but nonetheless still bodily, view (here Dunn notes that Paul received a kerygma in which the term “resurrection,” with its physical import, was already firmly in place); and third, a reaction, found “in Luke’s strong emphasis on the physicality of Jesus’ resurrected body,” against spiritualized views (Dunn, Christianity in the Making, vol. 1: Jesus Remembered [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003], 870–1). In his The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 71, Dunn notes that for Paul, sōma (body) can be raised again, whereas when Paul wishes to speak about the body’s fallenness (which will not be raised from the dead) he uses the term sarx. ⁷ This appears to be the viewpoint of Yung Suk Kim, Resurrecting Jesus: The Renewal of New Testament Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 105. N. T. Wright frequently and correctly warns against this Platonizing (if that is the right word) of Pauline anthropology. ⁸ See Barclay, “The Resurrection in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” 18. Barclay carefully avoids “narrowing the options” with regard to the question of the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection; he suggests that historical arguments can cut either way and the determination is ultimately made by faith (or lack thereof). Having set forth the arguments for and against the historicity of the empty tomb, he argues that theological factors will inevitably shape the conclusions that we draw: ibid., 22–3. ⁹ Barclay is well aware of the argument that the Resurrection appearances, when viewed as hallucinatory visions, contain highly “surprising features,” such as the first Christians interpreting “their visions as of a resurrected Jesus, although they could have considered him simply translated to heaven” and also the fact that “[t]he notion of an individual resurrection before the general resurrection was unparalleled in Judaism, so far as we know” (ibid., 25–6). We should also notice, with J. I. H. McDonald, “the way Paul distinguishes his fundamental experience of the risen Lord from other ‘visions and revelations’ ” (McDonald, The Resurrection, 143fn4).

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For Barclay, the result is that the appearances of Jesus enumerated in 1 Corinthians 15 may be referring to appearances of Jesus in his concrete risen flesh (as in Luke and John) or may simply be visions of the exalted Jesus that inspired Paul and the disciples to proclaim that the eschatological “resurrection” has already begun in Jesus, no matter what the condition of Jesus’ corpse. Barclay holds that historians must proceed as though either option were possible. In my view, however, Paul is clearly teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus’ corpse is no longer in the grave, because it has been raised to glorified life. I do not see how Paul’s insistence that “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:20) can be understood other than in reference to something that has happened to Jesus’ dead corpse. Another Christian biblical scholar, Gerhard Lohfink, argues that spiritualizing Jesus’ Resurrection appearances need not be a bad thing for Christian faith. Lohfink’s main point is that even if the Resurrection appearances were simply hallucinatory visions, this may have been the way that God willed to reveal that Jesus had truly been resurrected from the dead to glorious life. Note that Lohfink firmly believes that Jesus did indeed rise bodily from the dead. Against skeptical biblical scholarship, Lohfink observes that “when biblical critics measure Jesus only by their own prior understanding, deciding ahead of time what is ‘historically possible’ and what is ‘historically impossible,’ they exceed their own limitations.”¹⁰ He bemoans the resulting “reductionism, which goes contrary to the perceptions of the first witnesses and those who handed on the tradition”; and he deems that in such reductionist work “[t]he real claim of what is shown and expressed in Jesus is set aside.”¹¹ For his part, he “refuses to join in such reductionism.”¹² He proposes, however, that “reductionism” can be fought on the very ground of the reductionists. He suggests that with regard to hallucinatory visions of the risen Jesus, “God does not eliminate the structures, laws, frameworks, and potentials of the world but acts with the aid of these and in common with them. Therefore a real vision is both entirely a human production and entirely a work of God.”¹³ Why would Lohfink hold that God chose the path of hallucinatory visions as the mode by which to reveal the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection? Like Reginald Fuller in his influential The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives (and like many other scholars), Lohfink supposes that this path is more credible.¹⁴ It is ¹⁰ Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), xi. ¹¹ Ibid. ¹² Ibid. ¹³ Ibid., 294. ¹⁴ Reginald H. Fuller, The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). For Fuller, the Resurrection appearances were “revelatory encounters” involving “the self-disclosure of the Risen One,” but their form (for both Paul and the first witnesses) was likely that of “a vision of light” (ibid., 47). For a critical response to Fuller, see Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Interpreting the Resurrection: Examining the Major Problems in the Stories

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more credible not least because scientifically, we know that hallucinatory visions occur frequently. Many people have had a hallucinatory vision of a dead loved one. Since hallucinatory visions are commonplace, they are “a genuine divine possibility, a way of speaking to human beings with the structures of humanity.”¹⁵ In a nutshell, they are less strange and more believable than is the claim that Jesus, in his glorified flesh, walked, talked, and ate after having died. Lohfink encourages us to recognize that God can use “the productive imaginative power of the human in order to reveal God’s self in the midst of history.”¹⁶ Lohfink sums up his position as follows: “the disciples’ Easter experiences can be regarded theologically as really and truly appearances of the Risen One in which God revealed his Son in power and in all his glory (Gal 1:16) but psychologically at the same time as visions in which the disciples’ power of imagination constructed the appearance of the Risen One.”¹⁷ He adds as a cautionary notice: “By no means does the one exclude the other.”¹⁸ Lohfink thinks that his position enhances the credibility of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead. He reasons that “we need no longer shrink from the idea that visionary phenomena spread, after Good Friday, in a kind of chain reaction, and that they were altogether inculturated in the respective visual and linguistic abilities of the recipients. We can then understand, for example, how the disciples could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the Risen One and even ‘touch’ him.”¹⁹ I note, however, that it is all too evident why “see,” “hear,” and “touch”— which refer to bodily exchange—are put in scare quotes here. Hallucinatory visions, no matter how corporeal-seeming, do not involve encountering or seeing anyone’s real raised corpse. If God worked simply through hallucinatory visions, then God could not have credibly manifested Jesus’ bodily Resurrection from the dead. Hallucinatory visions are simply not sufficient evidence of a real bodily resurrection to glorified life. Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley advocates a position similar to Lohfink’s in his 1987 book The Structure of Resurrection Belief. Against the view of Edward Schillebeeckx, Carnley insists that there must have been Easter appearances; faith in Jesus’ Resurrection cannot have been generated simply by the disciples’ graced reflection on the entirety of Jesus’ life and death. The question then is what kind of appearances these were, and how the disciples knew that the appearances were genuinely of Jesus risen. Carnley begins with the experience of Paul on the Damascus Road. He argues that Paul’s efforts in of Jesus’ Resurrection (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 5–11. O’Collins broadly approves the position taken by Hans Kessler, Sucht den Lebenden nicht bei den Toten: Die Auferstehung Jesu Christi in biblischer, fundamentaltheologischer und systematischer Sicht (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1985). Kessler eschews interpreting the appearances as visions of light or as ecstatic, mystical experiences, even while arguing that we cannot know much for certain about the disciples’ eschatological, revelatory encounters. ¹⁵ Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth, 294. ¹⁶ Ibid. ¹⁷ Ibid. ¹⁸ Ibid. ¹⁹ Ibid.

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1 Corinthians 15 to explain the nature of the risen body indicate that its nature was amorphous in Paul’s mind, and therefore also indicate “that his initial experiential encounter with the raised Christ was in the nature of some kind of ‘heavenly vision’.”²⁰ If Paul’s initial encounter was a vision, were all the Resurrection appearances visions? Carnley observes that “Luke and John, particularly, tend to emphasize the very concrete, physical nature of the body of the Jesus who allegedly appeared or was seen.”²¹ Asking whether we should accept their testimony, Carnley turns the Gospel of Matthew, which affirms that even when the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, “some doubted” (Mt 28:17). If some could doubt, then it must be that the risen Jesus’ appearances were not as concrete as Luke and John suggest. Indeed, Carnley holds that Matthew is actually reporting a “heavenly vision” of Jesus similar to what Carnley found in Paul (as reported by Acts). In Carnley’s view, even the evidence in the Gospel of Luke suggests that Paul’s heavenly vision “reflected the true nature of all the original experiences at least in so far as even the appearances to the first believers were ‘visionary’ rather than ‘visual’, or appearances ‘from heaven’ rather than being more like the observation of an object of the natural world.”²² For Carnley, the visions of the risen Jesus were not simply subjective, given that in his view Jesus truly is risen. Here Carnley differentiates his position from that of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars such as David Strauss, Ernst Renan, Rudolf Bultmann, Willi Marxsen, and Don Cupitt. Carnley insists that even if the visions were merely subjective “psychological phenomena, this would not in itself necessarily dispossess us of belief in the ²⁰ Peter Carnley, The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 233. For reflection on Carnley’s book, see Robert Morgan, “Flesh Is Precious: The Significance of Luke 24.36–43,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, ed. Stephen Barton and Graham Stanton (London: SPCK, 1994), 8–20, at 8–9. ²¹ Carnley, The Structure of Resurrection Belief, 235. ²² Ibid., 239. Carnley sums up his position: “It seems clear enough that the more heavenly and revelatory Christophany is to be given priority. The more material and anthropomorphic Christepiphanies may be seen as alternative developments of the tradition” (ibid., 241). By contrast, Christopher Bryan points out that Paul strongly rejected the view of some Corinthian Christians who held to a “notion of a purely ‘spiritual’ immortality that had nothing to do with the crudities of flesh and blood” (Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 46–7). See also the extensive discussion in N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 207–398. Wright holds that Paul “believed that he had seen the risen Jesus in person” and that Paul’s “understanding of who this Jesus was included the firm belief that he possessed a transformed by still physical body. Attempts to undermine this conclusion by appeal to ‘what really happened’ at Paul’s conversion, or on the basis either of Acts or of other passages in Paul, carry no conviction” (ibid., 398). For theological analysis, emphasizing that “Paul envisions the preservation and transformation of the whole human person, including the physical body,” see Brian D. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 150–9.

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reality and objectivity of the Easter event.”²³ But he suggests that they probably were objective visions, even if ambiguous ones. Asking why the disciples “interpreted the Easter visions or appearances as signs of the heavenly presence of Christ,” he proposes that the disciples were experiencing the ongoing presence of Christ through the Spirit.²⁴ It was the Spirit that enabled them to have certitude that the appearances (that is, the objective heavenly visions) were indeed visions of Jesus truly risen. In this regard, Carnley gives extensive attention to 2 Corinthians 3:17, “the Lord is the Spirit.”²⁵ For my purposes here, the significance of Carnley’s work consists in his conclusion. He believes that Jesus rose from the dead, but he does not hold that there were any Resurrection appearances where the risen Jesus, having been dead, showed his disciples his glorified body and made clear in a bodily way that he was risen in the flesh. Instead, there were heavenly visions, visions of an exalted Jesus that, while leaving room for doubt, were supported by the disciples’ experience of the Spirit. The disciples saw objective heavenly visions of an exalted Jesus. This position avoids the difficulty of holding that Jesus, after having been buried, literally interacted with his disciples in his risen flesh. Unfortunately, however, it spiritualizes the Resurrection of Jesus in a way that rather severely (and in my view quite unnecessarily) weakens the credibility of the actual bodily Resurrection of Jesus. Gerd Lüdemann goes much further in spiritualizing the Resurrection narratives; indeed, he spiritualizes them away. Unlike Barclay, Lohfink, and Carnley, he argues that we must hold that Jesus’ corpse decayed and turned to dust: we can be certain that there was no Resurrection of Jesus that gloriously reversed the corruption of his corpse.²⁶ For Lüdemann, however, ²³ Carnley, The Structure of Resurrection Belief, 245. Here he draws heavily on Carl Jung’s psychological theories. ²⁴ Ibid., 246. On the distinction between “subjective visions” and “objective visions,” with the latter being truly revelatory, see Hans Grass, Ostergeschehen und Osterberichte, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), 248 fn 41. ²⁵ See Carnley, The Structure of Resurrection Belief, 251–9. His conclusion is that “the Spirit is the reality of the raised Christ in so far as the raised Christ is experienced. Or, to put it another way, the exalted Christ is the hidden source of the Spirit, which is experienced and apprehended in faith” (ibid., 256). For historical-critical discussion of the meaning of 2 Corinthians 3:17, see Jan Lambrecht, SJ, Second Corinthians (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 54–5; Lambrecht’s position is that “Christ is experienced in the new covenant through the Spirit, i.e., through what the Spirit of Christ realizes in Christians” (ibid., 54). By contrast, Ernest Best holds that the “Lord” here means “God,” since “[t]hough Paul equates the activity of Christ and of the Spirit in the lives of Christians, he does not actually identify them (he distinguishes them in 13:14)” (Best, Second Corinthians [Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1987], 34). ²⁶ See Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 180. See the assessment by Martin Rese, “Exegetische Anmerkungen zu G. Lüdemanns Deutung der Auferstehung Jesu,” in Resurrection in the New Testament: Festschrift J. Lambrecht, ed. R. Bieringer, V. Koperski, and B. Lataire (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 55–71. Rese concludes that “whatever one thinks of Lüdemann’s dogmatic interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus, it has been shown that his exegetical

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this does not mean that we need to give up being Christians. On the contrary, even though Jesus was not raised (and even if the whole notion of eternal life is doubtful), we can still find in the human, historical Jesus the key to “communion with God” here and now, which should suffice for the Christian.²⁷ For Lüdemann, the true explanation of the Resurrection appearances will produce no difficulty for the modern mind. The disciples first believed that God had spiritually exalted or taken to himself the crucified Jesus. They then experienced a sense of forgiveness of their guilt for abandoning Jesus. This life-giving experience was identified as Spirit and was subjectively “seen as present in a vision.”²⁸ Lüdemann interprets Paul’s beliefs along these spiritual lines, although he adds that Paul, on the basis of a visionary ecstatic experience in the Spirit, believed that Jesus possessed a “heavenly body.”²⁹ As a final example, this time from a Jewish perspective, the lack of credibility of the New Testament’s Resurrection narratives, and therefore the need to reconstruct them in a spiritualized way, is a main theme of Geza Vermes’s The Resurrection: History and Myth. Vermes states categorically that “not even a credulous nonbeliever is likely to be persuaded by the various reports of the Resurrection; they convince only the already converted. The same must be said about the visions [of Jesus risen]. None of them satisfies the minimum requirements of a legal or scientific inquiry.”³⁰ For Vermes, the origin of the Resurrection stories is not the first disciples’ sense (accompanied by ecstatic visions) that Jesus had been spiritually exalted or spiritually raised after his death.³¹ Rather, much like Lüdemann and Schillebeeckx, Vermes holds that the guilt-ridden disciples experienced the Spirit and felt that Jesus was with them. On this basis, the disciples concluded that Jesus must still be alive. Their sense of his living presence might have gone nowhere, Vermes thinks, but Paul’s extraordinary organizational ability and passionate preaching ensured that Christianity spread. In Vermes’s view, it is not surprising that people were inspired by Jesus and felt his inspiring presence after his death. A “[r]esurrection in the hearts of men” is perfectly believable and to be expected, given the noble teaching and example of life that Jesus gave.³² In this sense, many other analyses in more than one passage are to be seriously criticized” (ibid., 71). See also I. U. Dalferth, “Volles Grab, leerer Glaube? Zum Streit um die Auferweckung des Gekreuzigten,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 95 (1998): 379–409; Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), 495–519. ²⁷ Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus, 183. For a similar view of the sufficiency of communion with God here-and-now, see Timothy P. Jackson, Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a critique of Jackson’s position, see my The Betrayal of Charity: The Sins that Sabotage Divine Love (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), chapter 3; as well as David Elliot, Hope and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 75–85. ²⁸ Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus, 176. ²⁹ Ibid., 177. ³⁰ Geza Vermes, The Resurrection: History and Myth (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 141. ³¹ See ibid., 146–8. ³² Ibid., 152.

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great leaders and holy people have remained alive and present in the hearts of their countrymen. Thus, Vermes finds a way of believing, in a metaphorical sense, what he perceives to be intrinsically unbelievable narratives.³³

NEW TESTATMENT CREDIBILITY: AN ALTERNATIVE P ATH The above scholars differ on various points—the positions of Barclay, Lohfink, and Carnley obviously stand at quite a distance from that of Vermes—but they agree in affirming that visions or other non-tangible phenomena are the most credible historical explanation available for the apostles’ experience of Jesus as risen. This explanation has the significant benefit of fitting with normal patterns of human life. Most of us have known people who have had hallucinatory visions of dead persons or who have sensed the inspiring presence of dead people. Prima facie, one can understand how the disciples of Jesus, after his death, would “see” or experience Jesus and thereby come to think that God had spiritually exalted Jesus.³⁴ Further reflection, however, makes such ³³ As Robert Morgan (an Anglican priest and Oxford theologian) remarks, “Historians are naturally more likely to explain the disciples’ convictions in terms of visions than of physical appearances because these do not require belief in a miracle” (Morgan, “Flesh Is Precious,” 12). Morgan’s own position is ambiguous. He wishes to affirm the Resurrection while distancing himself from claims about its physicality, which he regards as “unhistorical” but as nonetheless having a valid theological point, namely “that God really vindicated Jesus, and that it really was Jesus that God vindicated” (ibid., 18). In certain ways, Morgan builds upon the preference for ambiguity and mystery found in Leslie Houlden’s comparative study of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark: Backward into the Light (London: SCM Press, 1987). For critical discussion of Houlden’s approach, see Stephen Barton, “The Hermeneutics of the Gospel Resurrection Narratives,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, 45–57, at 51–4. See also Stephen Barton, “The Transfiguration of Christ according to Mark and Matthew: Christology and Anthropology,” in Auferstehung—Resurrection, ed. Friedrich Avemarie and Hermann Lichtenberger (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 231–46, at 231–34, especially 232: “historical questions of a modernist kind can give only historical answers, and the whole story of Jesus opens up an eschatological reality to which historical method as conventionally practised is incapable of doing justice.” ³⁴ Anthony Harvey summarizes this position: “Jesus had died; but his followers believed in him. What did they believe? They certainly believed that his life, his authority, his teaching, were evidence that God was ‘with him’ (Acts 10.38); his execution could not represent God’s final judgement on him. He was, in some sense at least, a ‘Son of God’; this meant that God must rectify the human misjudgement in the next world, in heaven. He must vindicate Jesus. The more profoundly one believed in Jesus, the more firmly one would believe that this vindication had taken place. No ‘resurrection’ (outside heaven) would be necessary . . . . Presented in this way, the gospel does not require faith in the resurrection as such, but only in the vindication and exaltation of Jesus in heaven and the prospect of his return” (Harvey, “ ‘They discussed among themselves what this “rising from the dead” could mean’ (Mark 9.10),” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, 69–78, at 72–3). But Harvey pushes back against this position, arguing that the terms used for describing resurrection (anastēnai and egeiresthai) were employed by the

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explanations implausible, as I have already argued in Chapter 1. I will expand upon this point here. Descriptions of the heavenly ascents of great figures of Israel were relatively common in Second Temple Judaism.³⁵ As James D. G. Dunn states, “There were precedents for visions of a dead hero, now seen exalted to heaven,” and the first Christians could have fit the martyr Jesus into this paradigm.³⁶ But in fact, as Dunn points out, “it is the unexpectedness of the interpretation put upon the resurrection appearances which is so striking . . . . Appearances of Jesus which impacted on the witnesses as resurrection appearances did not conform to any known or current paradigm. Instead, they created their own.”³⁷ It needs to be emphasized, then, that according to the New Testament, something happened to the dead Jesus that had never happened to anyone else and that could not be expected to happen to Jesus’ followers prior to the final judgment. Why would the first Christians have believed this, if what had happened was merely a vision or a sense that Jesus had been exalted? At issue is not only why, if they saw visions of Jesus, they termed this “resurrection.” At issue is also why they did not assume that all the followers of Jesus would immediately receive the same kind of “resurrection” when they died. Paul emphasizes the uniqueness of what has happened to Jesus Christ.³⁸ After stating that Christ had been crucified and buried, he proclaims that

evangelists because of the need to describe not only “the faith of all his followers that the victim of a criminal condemnation and execution had been vindicated by God and given a place in heaven” but also “the immediate personal experience of the ‘witnesses’ that Jesus had returned to life” (ibid., 77). ³⁵ See for example Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 1998), chapter 3; Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Heavenly Ascent or Incarnational Presence? A Revisionist Reading of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice,” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers 37 (1998): 367–99; Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 129–38. See such texts as Assumption of Moses, Testament of Levi, 1 Enoch, Ascension of Isaiah, and the Testament of Abraham. See also Carey C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill, 1991), and Wright’s response to Newman in Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 394–98. For the view that Mark 16 merely depicts a heavenly ascent or assumption of a hero-martyr (or an apotheosis), see Daniel A. Smith, Revisiting the Empty Tomb: The Early History of Easter (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010). See the response to Smith in Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 90–3, especially his point that “the central statement in the Easter chapter of Mark is ‘he was raised’ from the dead (along with ‘he is going before you into Galilee and there you will see him’), not ‘he has been taken up into heaven’ (and ‘you will see him again at the Parousia’)” (ibid., 93). ³⁶ Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 874. ³⁷ Ibid., 874–5; cf, 876–7. For examination of the inconsistencies in the Resurrection narratives, see Grass, Ostergeschehen und Osterberichte, 15–53. ³⁸ For the view that Paul remains at the level of heavenly-traveler “merkabah mysticism,” see Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven,

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“Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:20).³⁹ All others remain in the state of death, but Christ does not; he alone has been raised to glorified life. According to Paul, “For as by a man [Adam] came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor 15:21). Paul does not indicate that others will join Jesus in this resurrected state prior to “the end” (1 Cor 15:24), although he does not deny that such a privilege could be given (as Catholics believe it has been to the Virgin Mary). Paul’s point is that something utterly new—radically different from a rapture or heavenly ascent that could have been experienced by Israel’s heroes or martyrs—has happened to Jesus. Jesus has been raised from the dead, and this eschatological event is the “first fruits” of the final eschatological consummation. Note that if Paul believed that what happened to Jesus was essentially a heavenly ascent or exaltation (i.e. not the actual raising of Jesus’ corpse from the tomb), then there is clear evidence that Paul must have believed that he too would soon experience the same thing prior to the general resurrection. In 2 Corinthians 5:8, Paul indicates that he will ascend spiritually after death to be “at home with the Lord,” while his body will corrupt in the grave until the general resurrection. If the Lord Jesus simply ascended spiritually after death, then Paul’s spiritual ascent will be the same as the Lord’s. Paul, however, makes clear that what happened to Jesus is profoundly different from what Paul will enjoy when his spirit is, after his death, “at home with the Lord.” In Jesus, “what is mortal” has already been fully “swallowed up by life” (2 Cor 5:4). Jesus was dead and “buried” (1 Cor 15:4), but Jesus has risen from the dead. According to Paul, Jesus has demonstrated his resurrection to his apostles by showing himself not merely to have been exalted to the heavenly realms (which is possible even in this life, as in 2 Cor 12:2–4) but to have been “raised from the dead” (1 Cor 15:4). When Paul dies, he will in spirit be “at home with the Lord” but he will not be risen from the dead. The latter will take place only at the final judgment. Paul understands his own spiritual arrival to be “at home with the Lord” to be completely different from the bodily resurrection of Jesus. As a Pharisee, Paul believed in “the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 23:6), and other Pharisees supported him in this regard. Therefore, had Paul preached that Jesus had been exalted to heaven as a martyr and that Jesus would reign in Jerusalem on the day of the resurrection of the dead (including CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 35. For the opposite view, see Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 373–440. ³⁹ Murray Harris comments helpfully that the “twin ideas of similarity and difference are implied in the metaphor of ‘firstfruits’ (aparchē)” (Harris, “Resurrection and Immortality in the Pauline Corpus,” 157)—pace scholars who argue that Jesus’ Resurrection, due to its uniqueness (e.g., his body does not corrupt and he rises to glorious life prior to the general resurrection), cannot really be related to ours.

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the resurrection of Jesus himself), Paul could have spared himself much suffering. But he preached nothing of the sort, because he believed Jesus to be uniquely, and bodily, risen from the dead. Paul knows that his preaching about Jesus, both as the crucified Christ and as risen from the dead, is received by Jews and Gentiles as a “stumbling block” and “foolishness” (1 Cor 1:23, 25). Paul knows that he is proclaiming something stranger than the thencommonplace stories of resuscitations or heavenly journeys, or the equally commonplace stories of visions of recently deceased persons. After all, if the Book of Acts is correct, Paul himself received a “heavenly vision” of the risen and ascended Jesus (Acts 26:19), in which he saw a blinding light and heard Jesus’ voice.⁴⁰ Paul could have proclaimed that Jesus had been heavenly exalted, as shown by the blinding light and the voice. Instead, Paul preached that Jesus rose bodily from the dead, thereby causing his preaching to be mocked. If what he was proclaiming was simply an experience of a heavenly vision that persuaded him that Jesus is alive with God (as other heroes and martyrs of Israel were thought to be), then Paul could have easily avoided mockery. The Book of Acts reports about Paul’s visit to Athens: “Some also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers met him . . . . And they took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, ‘May we know what this new teaching is which you present?’” (Acts 17:18–19). They expected that his teaching was going to be about “strange things” (Acts 17:20), and they were right. In answer to their query, Paul in Acts 17 begins by proclaiming the one true God, the Creator, who cannot be worshipped through idolatrous images. The philosophers listen patiently, but then Paul adds that God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). When he mentions Jesus’ Resurrection, they laugh at him, just as Festus considered him “mad” (Acts 26:24). The teaching is obviously a very strange one: why believe that one man, no matter how important, has been raised from the dead to glorious life in the very midst of history? A vision of an exalted person’s spirit in heavenly realms is one thing; and, indeed, such a vision, if sufficiently elaborate, could have sufficed to establish Jesus’ unique place. But asserting the resurrection to glorified life of that person’s body makes things much stranger and more difficult, because while one can understand how a person’s spirit survives the grave and ascends to heavenly glory, it is more difficult to perceive how or why a unique bodily resurrection to glorified life, prior to the general resurrection, would be needed or credible (if it were not true).

⁴⁰ See Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 382–3. On Acts 26, see also Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, vol. 4: 24:1–28:31 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 3534–8.

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The strangeness of Paul’s claim that Jesus “was raised from the dead” is at least threefold. First, there is the fact that Paul proclaims Jesus to have been the Messiah of Israel. This is already odd, since Jesus seems to have contributed no positive change to the condition of the people of Israel. Even if Jesus rose from the dead, it remains the case that the Messiah—as the eschatological Davidic King—was expected to have an immediate powerful impact upon the earthly condition of his people.⁴¹ Jesus entered Jerusalem to an ecstatic messianic greeting (see Mt 21:7–9), but he died an ignominious death on a Roman cross shortly thereafter.⁴² Israel’s condition had not improved by the time that Paul’s letters were written. Second, Paul’s claim is strange because (as already noted) he proclaims not a resuscitation or resurrection to further earthly life—such things had been heard of by pagans, and were among Jesus’ own miracles—but a unique resurrection of one person to glorious life prior to the eschatological consummation, so that Jesus’ corpse “has been raised from the dead” and Jesus now has a body fit for eternal life, a transphysical “σϖμα πνευματικόν” that is “imperishable” (1 Cor 15:20, 44, 50).⁴³ All this is very strange, both in itself and because Jewish eschatology had no place for a glorious individual resurrection prior to the general resurrection at the final judgment. Third, Paul’s claim is strange because, although the risen Jesus demonstrated his resurrection by appearing in some way to Peter, to the other disciples, to James, to Paul, and to “more than five hundred brethren at one time” (1 Cor 15:6), nonetheless Paul cannot show the risen Jesus to anyone. In Paul’s preaching, he never can bring forth the risen Jesus as evidence. Had the risen Jesus left some utterly indisputable evidence of his Resurrection, or had the risen Jesus continued to manifest himself every few months, Paul’s claim would have seemed more plausible. Paul ups the ante even further by teaching that Jesus has been “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:4). A heavenly exaltation would have served the purpose of such a glorious designation, without appeal to Jesus’ “resurrection from the dead” being required. But Jesus’ bodily resurrection to glorified life is consistently at the center of all Paul’s preaching.

⁴¹ This is a point on which Michael F. Bird and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, whose interpretations otherwise diverge, can agree. See Fitzmyer, The One Who Is to Come (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 182; Bird, Are You the One Who Is to Come?: The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 47–62. ⁴² See Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 320. ⁴³ On the combination of ordinariness and glory that accentuates the strangeness of Jesus’ risen body, see Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 174–5. See also the insightful discussion of resurrected bodiliness in O’Collins, Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ, 80–9.

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On the surface of things, spiritualizing the claim that Jesus rose gloriously from the dead would turn a very strange claim into something more credible. It is plausible that Jews, during a time of great eschatological fervor and in their grief over the crucifixion of Jesus, could have experienced hallucinatory visions of Jesus. Yet, by attempting in this way to increase the credibility of the New Testament texts, one has to drain them of the real strangeness that characterizes all that Paul and the Gospels proclaim about Jesus’ Resurrection. Paul and the Gospels proclaim something utterly unique, something whose power (and even madness!) consists precisely in its bodily uniqueness, beyond commonplace visions of the dead, marvelous heavenly ascents, or bodily resuscitations. Once the strangeness is gone, the New Testament’s own specific proclamation too is gone. Why did the first Christians not take another path and try to reduce the strangeness of their testimony? Again, I think that their very insistence on its irreducible strangeness is a sign of credibility to which we need to pay attention.

TH OMAS AQUINAS AND JOHN O F DAMASCUS : C R E D I B I L I T Y AN D S T R A N G E N E S S

Thomas Aquinas Aquinas accepts the biblical testimony that at least a handful of resurrections occurred in Israel’s history and during Christ’s public ministry. Thus Aquinas recalls that when a dead “man was cast into the grave of Elisha,” it happened that “as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood on his feet” (2 Kgs 13:21). Similarly, Elisha raised the recently dead child of a wealthy woman of Shunem (see 2 Kgs 4:32–6).⁴⁴ Jesus himself raised Lazarus and a few others. One of the first questions that Aquinas asks, therefore, is whether Jesus’ Resurrection is actually so strange after all. In reply, he distinguishes between being restored to further earthly life and being “not only rescued from death, but from the necessity, nay more, from the possibility of dying again.”⁴⁵ The latter kind of resurrection is utterly distinct, because it absolutely frees the person from the dominion of death. Jesus was the first to undergo such a resurrection, in which his corpse became not only alive but gloriously alive, able to function in time and space and able ⁴⁴ In III, q. 53, a. 3, obj. 1, Aquinas cites Hebrews 11:35’s statement that in Israel’s history some “[w]omen received their dead by resurrection,” and he gives the deeds of Elisha as an example. ⁴⁵ III, q. 53, a. 3.

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to transcend the spatio-temporal realm by sitting at the right hand of the Father. Aquinas insists upon this uniqueness as part of its credibility, since “it behooved all things appertaining to glory . . . to be first in Christ as the author of glory.”⁴⁶ The strangeness of Jesus’ Resurrection appears also in Aquinas’s contention that Jesus, as the Son incarnate, raised himself by the power of his divinity. In other words, Aquinas does not think simply that God raised a man, Jesus. Rather, the raising of this particular man is credible in part because this particular man was the incarnate Son. Aquinas states that since the hypostatic union was not severed by death, it follows that “according to the virtue [i.e. power] of the Godhead united to it, the body took back again the soul which it had laid aside, and the soul took back again the body which it had abandoned: and thus Christ rose by his own power.”⁴⁷ This does not mean that the Father did not raise the Son; of course he did, but he raised the Son by the divine power, in which the Son fully shares. The unique Resurrection of Jesus accords with the unique incarnation of God, who in his supreme love willed to dwell among his people. Aquinas thinks it is important that the risen Jesus had a body that was “of the same nature as it was before” but nonetheless could enter “in among the disciples while the door was shut.”⁴⁸ The body of the risen Jesus remains an instance of human nature, but obviously his risen body has been profoundly transformed. With regard to passing through a closed door, Aquinas remarks that “a true body cannot be in the same place at the same time with another body.”⁴⁹ But Jesus’ body is the body of the Son, and it is united with the power of the divine nature so that it can operate miraculously. The strangeness of Jesus’ risen body is here again connected with the incarnation. The uniqueness of his risen body also pertains to its glorified state: if one’s will governs one’s body absolutely (as the state of glory requires, due to the perfection of the soul’s governance over bodily action and passion),⁵⁰ then one can govern whether or not one is going to be seen, since visibility arguably has its primary source not in the eye but in the object that is seen. The links between Jesus’ strange risen body and his unique incarnation underscore that for Aquinas, proclaiming Jesus’ Resurrection means proclaiming the Resurrection of “the one Lord . . . through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6). This reality about who Jesus is belongs to the strangeness—and the credibility—of the proclamation that we find in Paul

⁴⁶ III, q. 53, a. 3, ad 3. ⁴⁷ III, q. 53, a. 4. ⁴⁸ III, q. 54, a. 1 and ad 1. ⁴⁹ III, q. 54, a. 1, obj. 1. ⁵⁰ For background in Aquinas’s anthropology, see Gilles Emery, OP, “The Unity of Man, Body and Soul, in St. Thomas Aquinas,” trans. Therese Scarpelli, in Emery, Trinity, Church, and the Human Person: Thomistic Essays (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007), 209–35.

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and in the Gospels. Aquinas reminds us that this strangeness is exactly what we should expect if it is Jesus, the divine Creator, who is being raised.⁵¹ Aquinas also thinks that the strangeness of Jesus’ Resurrection fits with the strangeness of his crucifixion. Jesus, an innocent man, freely went to the Cross out of supreme love for sinners. As Paul says, such love is unusual: “Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man—that perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:7–8).⁵² Furthermore, the incarnate Son chose for himself the utter humiliation of dying on a Cross, which involves unfathomable humility on his part. Paul proclaims that Jesus was “highly exalted” (in his Resurrection and Ascension) because even though as Son “he was in the form of God,” he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men”; and he “humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–9).⁵³ The uniqueness of this humility—the humility of the divine Son—is matched by the uniqueness of his Resurrection. Thus, the credibility of the Resurrection is inseparable from the strangeness of the whole. Aquinas explains that “because Christ humbled himself even to the death of the Cross, from love and obedience to God, it behooved him to be uplifted by God to a glorious resurrection.”⁵⁴ For Aquinas, then, the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection requires its strangeness; otherwise it would neither be Jesus’ nor Resurrection. If we were to attempt to drain the New Testament testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection of its bodily strangeness, we would end up draining away the power of the Cross, the Lordship and humility of Jesus, the glory and truth of Jesus’ risen body, and the marvelous fulfillment of God’s whole plan of salvation.⁵⁵ ⁵¹ See III, q. 53, a. 1. See Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 606. Note that Jesus’ glorious Resurrection is strange because it is in the midst of history; it is not strange because the resurrection of the body is something utterly alien to human nature, as it might be if human nature did not possess an immortal soul: see Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 455. ⁵² For helpful historical-critical discussion of this passage, see Brendan Byrne, SJ, Romans (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 171. ⁵³ For reflection on the phrase “form of God,” noting the interest that the Dead Sea Scrolls have for the “form” of the divine throne chariot and in the form of the angelic ministers in the heavenly tabernacle, see Markus Bockmuehl, The Epistle to the Philippians (London: A. & C. Black, 1998), 128. Bockmuehl argues that the phrase here likely “means simply the visual characteristics of his heavenly being” (ibid., 129). For a different approach, see N. T. Wright, “Jesus Christ is Lord: Philippians 2:5–11,” in his The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), 56–98; Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Book II (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 689. ⁵⁴ III, q. 53, a. 1. On Christ’s kenosis according to Aquinas, see Gilles Emery, OP’s forthcoming essay in Nova et Vetera. ⁵⁵ See also Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., “La causalité salvifique de la resurrection du Christ selon saint Thomas,” Revue Thomiste 96 (1996): 179–208; as well as Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP,

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John of Damascus In the Summa theologiae’s four questions on the Resurrection of Christ, Aquinas quotes St. John of Damascus five times. Since these citations suggest that Aquinas finds an important ally in John of Damascus, I explore these citations here. In the first objection of the first article that he devotes to Jesus’ Resurrection, Aquinas quotes Book IV of Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith, where Damascene states (as quoted by Aquinas) that “[r]esurrection is the rising again of an animate being, which was disintegrated and fallen.”⁵⁶ In other words, resurrection is the “rising again” of a corpse. For a resurrection to occur, the corpse of a human being must rise from the dead, so that the corpse is no longer a corpse—no longer corrupted or disintegrated or dead in any way. Damascene here provides Aquinas with a way of emphasizing the bodiliness of resurrection. The second quotation from John of Damascus also comes in an objection, this time in the fourth article of question 53. In the third objection of this article, Aquinas cites Book IV of On the Orthodox Faith in support of the view that it is “not the soul that rises again, but the body, which is stricken by death.”⁵⁷ When our bodies die, they remain dead; whereas the soul is immaterial and survives death.⁵⁸ Aquinas’s quotation of Damascene here seeks to thwart spiritualizing views that in some way give primacy to the soul in the resurrection of Christ’s body. He uses Damascene to insist that the cause of Christ’s Resurrection is the Godhead of Christ working through his body, even if the soul is also involved in the reunion of soul and body. He thereby corrects the spiritualizing desire to focus on the soul, even with regard to bodily resurrection. A similar anti-spiritualizing emphasis appears in the citation of Damascene that anchors the respondeo of the first article of question 54. Aquinas cites Book IV of On the Orthodox Faith to insist that the same body of Christ that was dead is risen from the grave, and that his risen body is a true human body, his own true body. Damascene helps Aquinas to show that Jesus only is risen if his same body, which died, rose again. In this way, Damascene also helps Aquinas to ward off objections that contend that because the risen Jesus could Christ the Savior: A Commentary on the Third Part of St. Thomas’ Theological Summa, trans. Dom Bede Rose, OSB (Ex Fontibus, 2015), 652. For further discussion see Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 73. ⁵⁶ III, q. 53, a. 1, obj. 1. ⁵⁷ III, q. 53, a. 4, obj. 3. ⁵⁸ For arguments for the immateriality of the soul that engage contemporary science, see David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), chapter 4. For discussion of biblical and Thomistic teaching on the spiritual soul, see my Jesus and the Demise of Death: Resurrection, Afterlife, and the Fate of the Christian (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), chapter 6.

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disappear and could enter through closed doors, the risen Jesus no longer has a true human body but instead has taken on a spiritualized form in which he only seems to have a body. The same pattern occurs in a citation from Book IV of On the Orthodox Faith in the third objection of article four of question 54. Recall that the Gospel of John indicates that Jesus rises with his scars. The risen Jesus tells his doubting disciple, Thomas: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing” (Jn 20:27).⁵⁹ It would seem that accepting the truth of this verse confirms the risen Jesus’ bodiliness, but a question arises in the Christian tradition: why would a risen body contain disfiguring scars? It may seem that the risen Jesus’ scars actually show that his risen body is unfitting and thus false, because God does not do unfitting things.⁶⁰ In response, Aquinas quotes Damascene’s observation that Jesus rose with his scars to show “that it was the body which had suffered that rose again.”⁶¹ The point here again is that it is the very body that had suffered and died so cruelly, the very body that had lain in the tomb in a disfigured state, that rose from the grave. The final citation of Book IV of On the Orthodox Faith comes in the second objection of article one of question 56. Here Aquinas cites Damascene in describing God’s justice as applying not only to the reward or punishment of the soul, but also to the reward or punishment of the body. In accord with Damascene, Aquinas notes that the bodily resurrection of all humans, and preeminently that of Jesus, has as a central purpose the accomplishment of divine justice, which would be radically incomplete if only the soul received reward or punishment. Again, no spiritualizing of the meaning of Resurrection is allowed here. There is no divine justice that could be adequately manifested if Jesus rose only spiritually. ⁵⁹ N. T. Wright points out that the Gospel of John does not present us with a simple version of Jesus’ risen bodiliness: “The same Johannine text that tells us that Jesus invited Thomas to touch him, indeed, to put his finger and hand into the marks of the nails and the spear, is the text that has Jesus twice entering through locked doors, speaking of a ‘going up to the father’ which he must yet accomplish, and being only half recognized even when in the familiar act of serving food” (Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 605). See also Jeffrey Paul Garcia, “See My Hands and My Feet: Fresh Light on a Johannine Midrash,” in John, Jesus, and History, vol. 2: Aspects of Historicity in the Fourth Gospel, ed. Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just, SJ, and Tom Thatcher (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 325–33. For the genre of the Gospel of John, see Richard Bauckham, “Historiographical Characteristics of the Gospel of John,” in Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 93–112. ⁶⁰ See Gilbert Narcisse, OP, Les raisons de Dieu. Argument de convenance et esthétique théologique selon saint Thomas d’Aquin et Hans Urs von Balthasar (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1997); Narcisse, “Les enjeux épistémologiques de l’argument de convenance selon saint Thomas d’Aquin,” in Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris, ed. C.-J. Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1993), 143–67. ⁶¹ III, q. 54, a. 4, obj. 3. I cite the quotation as it is found in the Summa rather than as it is found in On the Orthodox Faith.

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In sum, Damascene assists Aquinas in refusing to spiritualize the Resurrection of Jesus by making it less than the raising of Jesus’ corpse to glorious life. Damascene affirms that for the divine Word, union with the flesh is a taking on of what is (infinitely) less noble, and so “we speak of the ‘Incarnation’ of God the Word, His ‘being made man,’ ‘emptying Himself out,’ ‘poverty,’ ‘abasement.’ ”⁶² This kenosis is a sublime mystery, an extraordinary act of the divine Son. But for the human nature of the Word, there is an equally important and wondrous mystery. In terms of the privilege given to the human nature, says Damascene, “we speak of ‘deification of the flesh,’ ‘becoming the Word,’ ‘exaltation,’ and the like.”⁶³ This describes the theandric unity of Christ.⁶⁴ No wonder, then, that the corpse itself—the Resurrection of the body— matters so much to Damascene, who has perceived the biblical mystery of Jesus’ Resurrection in its fullness, in accord with the truth that “[i]n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:1, 14).⁶⁵ Consistently, John of Damascus emphasizes the unity of Christ. He states that “although divinity and humanity are not identical in their natural quality, there is definitely one Son and Christ and Lord.”⁶⁶ John of Damascus takes great joy in what Christ has accomplished for us. When we were fallen, “given over to evil and stripped of the divine communion” and enslaved “to the destruction of death,” the Son of God took to himself a human nature.⁶⁷ Damascene proclaims that in so doing, Christ willed that “through Himself and in Himself He may restore what was to His image and what to His likeness . . . and that, having become the first fruits of our resurrection, He may by the communication of life free us from death and restore the useless and worn-out vessel,” namely our corruptible body.⁶⁸ Christ gives us hope where there was none. We were chained to sin and death, ⁶² John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 18, in Saint John of Damascus, Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), 378. ⁶³ Ibid. ⁶⁴ For discussion of John of Damascus on Christ’s human nature, see Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 169–72. For background (not specific to Damascene) in the earlier patristic era with respect to the connections between resurrection faith and Christian anthropology, see Brian E. Daley, SJ, “A Hope for Worms: Early Christian Hope,” in Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments, ed. Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 136–64. ⁶⁵ See also John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 29–30, 34–7, 43, 71–2. ⁶⁶ John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 18, p. 383. See the discussion of John of Damascus in Aaron Riches’s Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016). ⁶⁷ John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 4, p. 338. ⁶⁸ Ibid.

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and we could grope toward God but not know or worship him properly. Through Christ, “Knowledge of God has been implanted. The consubstantial Trinity, the uncreated Godhead is worshiped, one true God, Creator and Lord of all. Virtue is practiced. Hope of the resurrection has been granted through the resurrection of Christ.”⁶⁹ Yet, Damascene is deeply cognizant that Christ’s human nature, and thus the reality of his corpse, is in doubt for some thinkers. In Hellenistic philosophical culture, such spiritualization was popular. For example, Damascene warns that “it is impious to say with the insane Julian and Gaianus that before the resurrection the Lord’s body was indestructible.”⁷⁰ For Julian (of Halicarnassus) and Gaianus (of Alexandria), it was impossible for Christ’s body, as the body of the Word, to endure anything corruptive—let alone to die from loss of blood and from hanging on a cross. In accord with the biases of the then-prevalent philosophical culture, Julian and Gaianus hold that it is better to say that the “death which the Gospel says happened did not really happen, but only seemed to.”⁷¹ Obviously, if there was no death, no corpse, then there was no real Resurrection of Jesus either. For his part, Damascene thinks it ludicrous to deny “the most wonderful” of all Christ’s mysteries, the Cross.⁷² As he says in praise of the Cross, “For by nothing else except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ has death been brought low, the sin of our first parent destroyed, hell plundered, resurrection bestowed.”⁷³ Damascene bemoans the denial that Christ had a real body.⁷⁴ In his On Heresies, four-fifths of which is drawn from Epiphanius of Salamis (c.315–403)’s Panarion,⁷⁵ Damascene describes numerous further ways of spiritualizing Christ’s Resurrection. For example, speaking of the Gnostics, he notes that “[t]he Valentinians reject the resurrection of the flesh” and hold that Christ had a spiritualized “body” from the outset, since Christ “brought His body from heaven and passed through Mary as through a channel.”⁷⁶ ⁶⁹ Ibid. ⁷⁰ John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, Book III, ch. 28, p. 333. ⁷¹ Ibid. ⁷² John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 11, p. 350. ⁷³ Ibid. ⁷⁴ John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 13, p. 356. ⁷⁵ See Adelbert Davids and Pim Valkenberg, “John of Damascus: The Heresy of the Ishmaelites,” in The Three Rings: Textual Studies in the Historical Trialogue of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. Barbara Roggema, Marcel Poorthuis, and Pim Valkenberg (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 71–90, at 73. ⁷⁶ John of Damascus, On Heresies, no. 31, in Saint John of Damascus, Writings, 111–63, at 119. Note that many historians today hold that there never was any Christian “orthodoxy,” but rather that various Christian groups competed from the outset. For versions of this view see Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead, 9–10; Judith M. Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Denise K. Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperCollins, 2014); Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 2nd ed. (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1996). Certainly there were powerful disputes, as is evident in the New Testament itself. But the notion that there was no true teaching and

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A somewhat later group called the Hieracites similarly “deny the resurrection of the flesh,” and they reject marriage entirely.⁷⁷ Among the Apollinarists (originating in the fourth century), there were some who “denied that He [the Word] took His body from a created body, that is to say, from Mary.”⁷⁸ They believed that he had a body, but a body whose form was the Word rather than a human soul, and therefore a body whose form had attained to the height of spiritualization. Others, called the Massalians, believed that it is necessary for salvation “for the soul to feel such communion with the heavenly bridegroom as the wife feels while having relations with her husband.”⁷⁹ The Massalians supposed that “a man must have two souls: the one common to men and the other heavenly.”⁸⁰ Some Massalians, Damascene reports, cut off their genitals so as to rid themselves of bodily desire as much as possible. Such spiritualizing has little appeal today, indeed we think it rather fanatical. But in the cultural milieu of the first Christian centuries, spiritualizing along these lines was clearly thought to make Christianity more credible. Given that Damascene lived under Muslim rule during the late seventh and eighth centuries (recall that Muhammad died in the year 630), he also devotes a relatively lengthy treatment to Islam.⁸¹ He states that in the Qur’an, we find that Jesus’ persecutors “seized His shadow and crucified this. But the Christ Himself was not crucified . . . nor did He die, for God out of His love for Him took Him to Himself into heaven.”⁸² Indeed, Sura 4 of the Qur’an states that the Jewish people are guilty “for their saying, ‘Verily we have slain the Messiah,

practice, no apostolic community carrying forward the true teaching and will of the living Christ, but instead that there were only competing sects, is rooted in an rejection (implicit or explicit) of Jesus’ Resurrection and ability to guide his people. See also Claudia Setzer’s Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition (Leiden: Brill, 2004). For analysis of the Nag Hammadi text The Treatise on the Resurrection (vis-à-vis Tertullian’s concerns), concluding that this Gnostic text exemplifies “the error of isolating Paul from the other apostolic witnesses, and then pressing his ambiguous language toward radical and heterodox conclusions,” see Francis Watson, “Resurrection and the Limits of Paulinism,” in The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays, ed. J. Ross Wagner, C. Kavin Rowe, and A. Katherine Grieb (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 452–71, at 465. ⁷⁷ John of Damascus, On Heresies, no. 67, p. 127. ⁷⁸ Ibid., no. 77, p. 131. ⁷⁹ Ibid., no. 80, p. 132. ⁸⁰ Ibid., no. 80, p. 133. ⁸¹ For a fuller portrait, see Jean Damascène, Écrits sur l’Islam, ed. and trans. Raymond Le Coz, vol. 338 of Sources Chrétiennes (Paris: Cerf, 1992). See also the discussion in Davids and Valkenberg, “John of Damascus: The Heresy of the Ishmaelites”; Paul Khoury, Jean Damascène et l’Islam (Altenberge: Oros Verlag, 1994); D. Sahas, “John of Damascus on Islam: Revisited,” Ancient Near Eastern Studies 23 (1984–1985): 104–18; Sahas, “The Arab Character of the Christian Disputation with Islam: The Case of John of Damascus (ca 655–ca 749),” in Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter, ed. Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 185–205. ⁸² John of Damascus, On Heresies, no. 101, p. 154. For a comparison of Damascene with the Nestorian Catholicos Timothy I with regard to their interaction with Islam, see Neal Robinson, Christ in Islam and Christianity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 107.

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Jesus the son of Mary, an Apostle of God.’ Yet they slew him not, and they crucified him not, but they had only his likeness . . . . [T]hey did not really slay him, but God took him up to Himself.”⁸³ If he did not die and was never a corpse, then he could not have risen from the dead. Instead, on this view, he ascended to God by God’s power, in a manner that we can recognize as more believable to many people in this cultural milieu than was the New Testament testimony to Jesus’ bodily crucifixion, death, and Resurrection from the dead. Consider, too, The Revelation of Paul, which was composed in the second century in a Christian Gnostic community (perhaps Egyptian and Valentinian).⁸⁴ Building upon the approach found in Jewish texts such as the Ascension of Isaiah, 1 and 2 Enoch, and the Testament of Abraham, The Revelation of Paul describes the heavenly journey or heavenly ascent of Paul. In the eighth heaven, Paul meets the twelve apostles, who are spirits. Similarly, in The First Revelation of James, another Gnostic (and probably Valentinian) text, we find Jesus explaining the real meaning of the crucifixion. Jesus explains that he did not actually suffer; those who meant to be crucifying him only destroyed a figure of him. Again, in The Paraphrase of Shem, probably a Valentinian text from third-century Syria, Jesus reveals that he will put off his bodily garments and, covered in Light, will ascend perfectly and immediately to heaven. No bodily resurrection is needed.⁸⁵ Damascene, as noted above, was familiar with Valentinian Gnosticism. My overall point is that, in the first centuries after Christ, much like today, an actual resurrection of a bodily corpse struck many people as not credible.

⁸³ The Koran, trans. J. M. Rodwell (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), Sura 4, p. 65. Neal Robinson argues, “The attempt of some Christian apologists to circumvent the Qur’anic denial of the crucifixion is disingenuous in the extreme” (Christ in Islam and Christianity, 115). Specifically, Robinson cites E. E. Elder, “The Crucifixion in the Qur’ān,” Muslim World 13 (1923): 242–58; Geoffrey Parrinder, Jesus in the Qurān (London: Faber & Faber, 1965); Kenneth Cragg, Jesus and the Muslim (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985); Charles-J. Ledit, Mahomet, Israel et le Christ (Paris: La Colombe, 1956); and R. C. Zaehner, At Sundry Times: An Essay in Comparative Religions (London: Faber & Faber, 1958). As Davids and Valkenberg point out, though, it is worth noting that the Qur’an’s denial of the crucifixion is aimed polemically against Jews, not against Christians; see “John of Damascus: The Heresy of the Ishmaelites,” 84–5. See also David Marshall, “The Resurrection of Jesus and the Qur’an,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 168–83, at 171–2, 181. ⁸⁴ Robinson notes that “the Qur’ān agrees with Gnostic teaching in three respects: it denies that the Jews killed Christ, it acknowledges that it appeared to them that they did kill him and it asserts that he ascended into God’s presence” (Christ in Islam and Christianity, 116). ⁸⁵ For the texts cited in this paragraph, see The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition, ed. Marvin Meyer (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). See also the instructive discussion of “ ‘Resurrection’ as Spirituality? Texts from Nag Hammadi and Elsewhere,” in Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 534–51. Outi Lehtipuu treats the Nag Hammadi texts in her Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead, chapter 3. For further background, see David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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Such a resurrection, however, is the strange truth that the New Testament— joined by Aquinas and John of Damascus (among many others)—persistently proclaims.

CO NCLUSION In the Apocalypse of Abraham, composed probably in the late first or second century AD—and composed by a Jewish author (though apparently with a Christian interpolation in chapter 29)—Abraham ascends to God’s presence, to the divine throne of fire and pure light, where he learns the divine secrets of the world.⁸⁶ As noted above, examples of such spiritual ascents abound, both before and after the time of Jesus. In the cultural milieu of the first Christian centuries, the body was seen as an impediment to the ascent of the spirit. In Gnostic literature and in the Qur’an, we find the insistence that Jesus did not really die on the Cross and thus was not really raised either, since he simply went to heaven. Given the broad cultural milieu that privileged spirit or soul over body, many people found it more credible to think that Jesus had ascended spiritually than that he had died and rose again bodily. In Paul’s time, at least according to the Book of Acts, Paul’s proclamation of the bodily resurrection of Jesus’ corpse produced the response of mockery, though some listened. Indeed, in Paul’s Jewish context, the resurrection of one crucified man, while the world went on as before under Roman rule and without a renewed Temple, was a severe “stumbling block” (1 Cor 1:23). The response that Paul received in many of the synagogues that he visited, as well as in Jerusalem itself, was often unfavorable. Had Paul preached a spiritual ascent of a martyr to the throne of Light, he might well have gained more adherents at the outset. Later Gnostic Christians tried to rectify his mistake and, in their fashion (an extraordinarily odd one from today’s vantage point), to make the proclamation of Jesus’ Resurrection more believable. In all times and places, many people have believed in the possibility of seeing or experiencing the presence of the recent dead. Hallucinatory visions of the recent dead are relatively common and can be explained in terms of psychological states and brain functions. Not least because hallucinatory visions can fit with our empiricist-materialist cultural milieu—and because they can also be explained in other ways by people with a proclivity toward spirituality—they are often identified today as the most credible explanation of Jesus’ Resurrection. As we have seen, many biblical scholars think that the disciples, in the eschatological excitement and emotional crucible of the days ⁸⁶ See The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2011).

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after Jesus’ death, experienced spiritual visions and emotions that led them to believe and proclaim (and, in at least some cases, give their lives for) the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In the opening pages of this chapter, I offered various examples of such views, often advocated by Christian scholars seeking to make the proclamation of Jesus’ Resurrection more credible today. These scholars include some who believe in spiritual realities and some who doubt the existence of such realities. Lohfink and Carnley appeal to visions as an explanation that is credible today and that Christians can put to good use. Such a viewpoint satisfies the materialist-empiricist assumptions without barring the possibility that the visions (which Carnley deems “objective”) reflect a real bodily resurrection of Jesus. In today’s popular explanations and in those of the early Christian centuries, I find the same basic interest in mitigating the scandal caused by the proclamation of Jesus’ bodily Resurrection. Although the ancient spiritfocused worldview contrasts with today’s materialist and empiricist worldview, in both cases the actual flesh—the corpse of Jesus as well as his glorified body—is marginalized and avoided in accounting for the claim that he was raised from the dead. Both in the ancient world and today, people seek to get around the claim that Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead means the rising to glorified life of a man’s corpse, in a manner that involved concrete bodily manifestations of the risen Jesus. Having bracketed the risen Jesus’ body as displayed tangibly to his disciples, spiritualized explanations take its place in order to make the Christian claim more credible. Paul and the Gospels depict the risen Jesus’ body and his interactions with the disciples in a manner that maximizes the strangeness of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead. Not only does no one in the New Testament actually see the transcendent event of Jesus’ Resurrection, but also the risen Jesus, in the Gospels, does very strange things such as enter through closed doors, disappear suddenly, and not be immediately recognizable. The Gospels of Luke and John include stories of the risen Jesus eating and drinking, as well as his displaying his wounds after his Resurrection. When efforts are made to reduce the strangeness of the risen Jesus, it turns out that strangeness stands at the very core of the proclamation. The New Testament authors were aware of the profound and troubling strangeness of what they were proclaiming. They had numerous available options for proclaiming Jesus’ ongoing significance in less strange ways, but they insisted upon his bodily resurrection to glorious life. Indebted to John of Damascus, Aquinas treats the Resurrection in ways that refuse to minimize its strangeness. His choice to cite John of Damascus is apropos, given Damascene’s awareness of the Gnostic and Muslim tradition of spiritualizing away the strangeness of Jesus’ bodily Resurrection. It may seem more credible to hold in a spirit-focused culture that Jesus spiritually

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ascended, and it may seem more credible to hold in a materialist and empiricist culture that Jesus rose in the minds of his grieving and hallucinating disciples or at least that he manifested his Resurrection solely through heavenly visions. But when we grasp the strangeness of the event as proclaimed by the first Christians, we discover that its strangeness should not be covered up, but rather should be insisted upon as a crucial sign of its credibility. This strangeness, which the first Christians could easily have avoided, stands as another piece of historical evidence in favor of the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection.

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5 Jesus’ Resurrection and Catholic Apologetics In an essay on Vatican II and ecumenism, the theologian Otto Hermann Pesch observes, “It is not an exaggeration to say that without [Cardinal Augustine] Bea, John XXIII would not have gotten the Council he wanted. Bea ‘educated’ the pope to ecumenism.”¹ In a somewhat similar fashion, the present chapter suggests that Christian theology today can be “educated” toward understanding the importance of theologically defending the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection, by returning to a mid-twentieth century Catholic debate over apologetics and taking the best from each side. Specifically, I engage the work of Joseph Fenton, Pierre Rousselot, and Bernard Lonergan. Fenton, an American theologian whose dissertation director was Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange and whose approach to apologetics was influenced by Garrigou-Lagrange and by Ambroise Gardeil, highlights the importance of cogent arguments for the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. My first section explores Fenton’s approach and suggests that his excellent apologetic goal of showing the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection was marred by an exaggeration of the demonstrative power of his proof. My second section examines the contribution of Pierre Rousselot, a theologian who died in World War I. I argue that he was right in seeking to underscore that the affective context, the context of love, is profoundly present in our intellective judgments and has an impact upon them. In my view, this context helps to show why a strict proof is not necessary for a prudent person to go forward with the assent of faith, since the affective context strengthens and supports our reasonable grounds for believing that something is true. But I suggest that Rousselot goes too far when he argues that whenever persons arrive at the judgment that the content of faith (including the Resurrection of Jesus) is rationally worthy of belief, this means that at the very same instant such persons have necessarily made a supernatural assent of faith. It seems to ¹ Otto Hermann Pesch, The Ecumenical Potential of the Second Vatican Council (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006), 23.

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me that it is possible for people to conclude rationally on the basis of historical evidence that (for example) Jesus’ Resurrection actually occurred, without thereby assenting in faith to the risen Lord’s revelation of himself through the Spirit. As Walter Moberly points out, “Even in the case of the resurrection of Jesus, accepting that the tomb was empty and that Jesus was raised to life does not necessarily lead to Christian faith.”² Lastly, my third section shows that Bernard Lonergan’s philosophical theology appreciates natural reason’s work of understanding and judging, and thus allows for an apologetics rooted in natural reason rather than in supernatural faith. Lonergan does this while appreciating the significance of what he calls “the eye of love,” as well as the place of love in religious consciousness.³ I credit Lonergan for defending the quest to know concrete historical particulars in all their messy particularity, not least as found in inspired Scripture. At the same time, Lonergan’s appreciation for historical particulars does not guide his own theological apologetics, which focuses instead on the universal dynamism of human nature toward maximal selftranscendence. Therefore, I argue that just as Fenton’s approach to Jesus’ Resurrection could learn from Lonergan, so also Lonergan’s approach to theological apologetics could learn from Fenton’s insistence upon explicitly defending the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. The goal of this chapter is to argue for the importance of historical arguments for the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, but without exaggerating the demonstrative power of particular historical arguments or suggesting that the prudence of the assent of faith depends on finding a demonstration that does not rely upon cumulative probable arguments.⁴ Before proceeding, let me note that although Lonergan’s approach to apologetics does not focus on establishing the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection, Lonergan has a highly sophisticated account of historical knowledge in theology.⁵ What he calls the “mediating phase” of functional specialization includes four tasks: experience is specified as “research,” understanding ² R. W. L. Moberly, The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 5. This is so because faith entails assenting to Christ’s self-revelation through the Spirit, not merely assenting to elements of the praeambula fidei (such as the historical evidence that Jesus rose gloriously from the dead). ³ Bernard Lonergan, SJ, “The Future of Christianity,” in Lonergan, A Second Collection, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 127–39, at 131. ⁴ For a position that is the opposite of Fenton’s, and that also differs from mine, see Gerard Loughlin’s “Living in Christ: Story, Resurrection and Salvation,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 118–34. My position relies heavily upon the work of John Henry Newman, which I discuss in the Conclusion of my book. ⁵ Thomas J. McPartland, Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of History (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010) for a general account of Lonergan’s philosophy of historical knowledge. See also Frederick E. Crowe, Christ and History: The Christology of Bernard Lonergan from 1935 to 1982 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

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as “interpretation,” judging as “history,” and deciding as “dialectic.” Research reconstructs the ancient witness, looks at manuscript variations, compares competing accounts, and so forth, while interpretation tries to understand the meaning immanent to those reconstructions, variations, and testimonies. On this basis, history judges what is the case about our understanding of the past. But since there are always multiple and competing histories, dialectic seeks to advance what is true and reverse what is false in contradictory histories by examining the intellectual, moral, and religious orientation or worldview from within which each historian makes determinations. Through dialectic, the intellectual, moral, and religious aberrations in competing histories are identified, and this invites the reversals, the transformations of horizon, that Lonergan calls intellectual, moral, and religious conversions. Dialectic therefore assists the theologian in making a decision regarding the truth claims of competing histories.⁶ N. T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, which lays out the methodological principles of the historiography he employs in The Resurrection of the Son of God, is largely dependent upon the biblical scholar Ben Meyer’s appropriation of Lonergan’s account of critical history and conversion.⁷

JOSEPH FENTO N: P ROVING JESUS’ RE S U RRE C TI ON SO AS TO GROUND THE ASSENT OF F AITH In his 1942 We Stand with Christ: An Essay in Catholic Apologetics, Joseph Fenton devotes a chapter to arguing for the credibility of the Resurrection of Jesus. He notes that the Resurrection of Jesus “constitutes the outstanding seal of God’s approval for the claim that the message of Jesus was actually divine revelation.”⁸ For this reason, he suggests, it is important to be able to show on ⁶ For the material in this paragraph, see Bernard Lonergan, SJ, Method in Theology, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). See David Tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970) for an account of Lonergan’s development from his early Thomist studies to his elaboration of functional specialization. ⁷ See Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1979); N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 31–120. ⁸ Joseph Clifford Fenton, Laying the Foundation: A Handbook of Catholic Apologetics and Fundamental Theology (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2016), 343. For background and critique see W. Waite Willis, Jr. “A Theology of Resurrection: Its Meaning for Jesus, Us, and God,” in Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine, ed. James H. Charlesworth et al. (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2006), 187–217, at 191–3. Although I disagree with Willis’s view that the only way we can judge the narratives’ claim to be true is by reading the narratives with the eyes of faith, I gladly grant that faith and love are the best paths for knowing the risen Jesus, and I appreciate Willis’s insight into the significance of Jesus’ self-sacrificial life and death for appreciating the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. See also Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 364; Norman Perrin, The Resurrection Narratives: A New Approach (London: SCM Press, 1977), 82.

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historical grounds that the Resurrection of Jesus occurred, or, to put it another way, is “rationally credible.”⁹ He distinguishes, of course, between offering “a demonstration of the rational credibility of Catholic dogma” on the one hand, and obtaining “out of the proofs of apologetics a grasp of the motive of the faith itself” on the other.¹⁰ Divine faith is caused by supernatural grace; no natural proofs can provide faith’s motive, because faith arises not from the person’s own intellectual resources but from the gift of God, elevating the mind. But the proofs of “the rational credibility of Catholic dogma” can remove impediments to belief, and, by showing that faith is not unreasonable, can free a person to make the assent of faith. Fenton states, “The divine works which are motives of credibility can show us that the naturally knowable Creator of the universe has attested the validity of a claim put forward that this message is divinely revealed. The man who is cognizant of that proof and of its force can reasonably accept the revelation which is presented to him as the teaching of God.”¹¹ In the assent of faith, this acceptance of God’s teaching will not be due to its reasonableness—because faith involves God enlightening the mind and moving the will to assent to truths beyond reason’s powers—but it nonetheless will be an assent that is not a mere blind leap, but rather can be shown to be reasonable. Fenton proposes that “the central function of apologetics is to ascertain whether or not we have any naturally attainable evidence to the effect that this Person whom we know as Jesus of Nazareth really claimed to have a divine message and actually demonstrated the credibility of this teaching.”¹² As Fenton says, apologetics has sought to demonstrate the credibility of Jesus’ teaching in diverse ways. He cites works on apologetics and revelation by Gardeil and Garrigou-Lagrange that aim to organize the method of apologetics and to show the credibility of Catholic doctrine “as it is accepted here and now” rather than simply as credible past words and deeds.¹³ Although the assent of faith is a supernatural gift, apologetics attempts to show that particular doctrines have “naturally ascertainable evidence of having been ⁹ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 99. ¹⁰ Ibid., 98. ¹¹ Ibid. See the challenge laid down by David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1977), 88. ¹² Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 100. ¹³ Ibid., 101. See Ambroise Gardeil, OP, La crédibilité et l’apologétique, 4th ed. (Paris: Gabalda, 1928); Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, De revelatione per Ecclesiam catholicam proposita, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (Rome: F. Ferrari, 1929). These two works are richer and more complex than Fenton’s shorter and more derivative book is able to be, but they follow the same basic line. For further background see Avery Dulles, SJ, A History of Apologetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 280; Aidan Nichols, OP, Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2008), 17–45. As Nichols says, Garrigou-Lagrange’s key point, with which I firmly agree, is that “[t]he neglect of external grounds of credibility” inevitably results, sooner or later, in “[t]he identification of faith with religious experience,” so that the “grounds of credibility” are rendered “essentially internal in character” (ibid., 29)—with the result that theological liberalism is at hand.

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communicated by God,” with the result that it becomes clear that these doctrines are ones that “men can accept prudently and rationally with the assent of divine faith.”¹⁴ In this way, apologetics offers assurance that Catholic dogma is “intellectually acceptable.”¹⁵ Fenton notes that this does not mean, of course, that apologetics can show that Catholic dogma is “evidently true” in the strict sense of demonstrative knowledge.¹⁶ But he thinks that apologetics can show—or demonstrate with certitude—that there are “evident and certain guarantees” of the divine origin of Catholic dogma.¹⁷ Indeed, he thinks that without such demonstration, faith would be against reason and therefore would not be suited to human beings. He states, “Rather than honoring God, a man would commit an offense against Him were he to believe without reason that some statement had been communicated by the Creator.”¹⁸ If we had evidence that Jesus did not really live or did not really rise from the dead, it would be imprudent and irrational to believe in faith that Jesus in fact rose from the dead. For Fenton, prudent acceptance of Catholic doctrine requires that we have “naturally ascertainable evidence” that solidly supports the Catholic claim that God has revealed himself in Jesus, even if people normally do not seek such evidence prior to coming to faith.¹⁹ In Fenton’s view, although supernatural mysteries can only be assented to with the certitude of faith through a divine elevation of the mind and will, it is still important that “the evidence of credibility is attainable by any individual who will examine the realities in which the divine testimony is made manifest.”²⁰ Fenton adds that such evidence, no matter how strong, cannot compel the mind to accept Catholic dogma in faith.²¹ We remain free to reject what God has revealed. But apologetics can demonstrate that Catholic dogma has been ¹⁴ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 3. ¹⁵ Ibid., 4. Note that apologetics is theological science insofar as it defends its principles to reason; hence, it is theology directing reason to argue on behalf of supernatural truths. ¹⁶ Ibid. ¹⁷ Ibid., 5. ¹⁸ Ibid. ¹⁹ Ibid., 7. ²⁰ Ibid. Drawing upon Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, Eduardo J. Echeverria has put the matter well: “[T]o judge rationally that the historical events are credibly to be seen as signs of God’s revelatory acts in history is ‘not yet to make the act of supernatural faith.’ . . . The judgment of credibility regarding the external signs of revelation history belongs to the praeambula fidei. We may speak here of a ‘historical faith’ but not yet of ‘saving faith’ ” (Echeverria, In Oceans Deep: Redemptive Suffering and the Crucified God [Hope Sound, FL: Lectio Publishing, 2018], 29–30, citing Dei Filius, ch. 3 and canon 3, available at www.vatican.va, as well as Aidan Nichols, OP, From Hermes to Benedict XVI: Faith and Reason in Modern Catholic Thought [Leominster: Gracewing, 2009], 183). Echeverria responds to G. C. Berkouwer, “Sacrificium Intellectus?,” Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 68 (1968): 177–200, at 195–7. The key point is that the motives of credibility are such “not just as things that merely happened—though one must not underestimate the value of this historical evidence” but precisely as “signs” (In Oceans Deep, 33). ²¹ See also Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 96. Fenton emphasizes that because faith requires the movement of the will by grace (overcoming our hardness of heart by which we would choose to refuse to believe), “the knowledge of divine revelation which enters into the act of faith is

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revealed by God. Such a demonstration is important because “[a] message which God sends to man, and which man cannot reject without a serious moral fault would necessarily be one which carried objective and certain indications in favor of its own claims.”²² Fenton insists that we must be able to demonstrate rationally that God has revealed the Church’s doctrine: “since it is proposed as an actual message communicated by God to man, there must be some incontestable evidence that God is really its Author.”²³ The greatest such evidence involves miracles, which by definition only God can cause. Prophecy, too, constitutes such evidence, because it is “a clear and certain foretelling of some event which could not possibly be known through the light of any created intelligence.”²⁴ Fenton adds that there are also “social miracles,” such as the Church, which “exhibits characteristics which never could have been brought about other than through the action of God Himself, carried on independently and outside of the laws which govern the ordinary and natural procedure of human societies.”²⁵ The central point, however, is that whatever evidence we bring to bear for the existence of a divine revelation must establish “real certitude in the judgment of credibility”; probability is not enough to ground a prudent act of belief that a divine revelation has occurred.²⁶ Fenton reiterates, “If there were any fear or danger that the doctrine had not been revealed by God, then a man would have no sufficient reason to alter the course of his whole life in accepting it firmly on divine authority.”²⁷ He directs attention in this regard to the 1907 anti-modernist decree Lamentabili Sane and to the anti-modernist oath, both of which affirm the existence of clear and evident signs that Catholic dogma has been revealed by God. Likely with John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent in view, he insists that “a prudent act of faith could not follow upon a mere grouping of probabilities.”²⁸ In the case of the Resurrection of Jesus, we are dealing with a historical event to which many people bore witness. Those who witnessed the risen Jesus had “physical” certitude that he was risen because they saw him with their bodily eyes; and this sight gave them certainty that God was the origin of all that Jesus revealed. Since we are not eyewitnesses, the best that we can do is to attain to a “moral” certitude. Fenton defines moral certitude as “a real and objective firmness of assent to a proposition, an assent which is faced neither with the fear nor the danger of error.”²⁹ In this regard, Fenton defends the something of a different order from that knowledge of revelation which proceeds from the inspection of naturally observable criteria” (ibid., 97). ²² Ibid., 9. ²³ Ibid., 76. ²⁴ Ibid., 87. ²⁵ Ibid., 90. In De Revelatione, Garrigou-Lagrange highlights the Church as an important “external motive” for belief in the truth of Christian claims. ²⁶ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 92. ²⁷ Ibid. ²⁸ Ibid. ²⁹ Ibid., 93. Garrigou-Lagrange, too, holds that “moral certitude” is necessary. He notes that moral certitude can be built upon “internal motives” (which arise when we find our human aspirations fulfilled in Christ) when strengthened by “external motives” such as the sanctity of

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testimony of witnesses as a sufficient warrant for belief in historical matters. He notes that we can test such testimony by observing whether the witnesses are reliable, know what they are talking about, and offer testimony in harmony with each other. As far as the testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection is concerned, we also have the “social miracle” of the ongoing existence of the Church to support the reliability of the witnesses. Fenton briefly reviews various textbooks in fundamental theology and apologetics that defend the credibility of Catholicism first by demonstrating that the doctrine taught by Jesus is divinely revealed, and second by demonstrating that the Catholic Church is divinely established as the essential bearer and true interpreter of that divine revelation. In Fenton’s view, it is better to proceed by refusing to separate the two: the doctrine taught by Jesus is Catholic doctrine, and it is not possible to separate it from the Church. Fenton also observes that there are two ways of looking at the credibility of the teaching of Jesus and the Church: progressively, by beginning with Adam and moving through the various covenantal stages of revelation, fulfilled by Jesus’ teaching; or regressively, beginning with Jesus and the Church. The latter works better, Fenton argues, because we simply have more historical evidence for the divine origin of the teachings of Jesus and the Church. His approach is first to show historically that Jesus taught “a body of doctrine” and then to examine the credibility of the miracles—above all, the miracle of Jesus’ Resurrection—that demonstrate that “this teaching really was from God.”³⁰ Fenton begins by arguing for the reliability of the Gospels and the other New Testament texts about Jesus. He gives the evidence of pagan sources that confirm that Jesus actually lived, as well as the famous text from Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (a text that Fenton denies was a Christian interpolation). He follows Papias in arguing that the four Gospels were written by the authors to whom they are ascribed. Against the views of David Strauss, F. C. Baur, Albrecht Ritschl, and Adolph von Harnack, he rejects theories that suggest that the Gospels were written to cover over the truth of the matter—for example, to conceal Jesus’ status as a failed eschatological prophet. Much like Bauckham, he observes that if this were so, the Gospels would have been rejected at the outset, since their original audience still possessed real memories of Jesus: “The very men who had known Jesus of Nazareth most intimately were the ones who received these gospels as statements of the truth about Him. They were in a position to know.”³¹ Fenton treats a number of other themes, including whether Jesus claimed to possess a divine message or revelation, what titles or offices he claimed for the apostles and martyrs or the fecundity and stability of the Catholic Church. I affirm that “moral certitude” can be attained, though I hold that it requires cumulative probabilities along Newman’s lines. ³⁰ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 106. ³¹ Ibid., 135.

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himself, what the doctrinal content of his message was (such as his teaching on the Trinity or the kingdom), what Jesus’ apostles thought of him and his teachings, the reality of Jesus’ holiness and wisdom, and the reality of his miracles. I will turn, however, to what is central for the purposes of this chapter, namely his view of the evidences for Jesus’ Resurrection in light of his understanding of what is required for moral certitude that a divine revelation has occurred.³² Fenton begins by appealing to the Book of Acts as a source of “the earliest preaching of the Apostles.”³³ This preaching, he argues, “stands as an unshakable evidence for the reality of the Resurrection itself.”³⁴ He quotes a string of passages drawn from the preaching recorded in Acts. For example, in Acts 1:22, Peter states that the Twelve need to replace Judas with another person who followed Jesus during his earthly ministry, so that this person can “become with us a witness to his [Jesus’] resurrection.” In Acts 2:23–4, Peter proclaims to the crowd on the day of Pentecost: “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” Toward the end of the same speech, Peter adds that David, in Psalm 16, prophesied Jesus’ resurrection, and Peter proclaims that he and the other apostles are witnesses that Jesus was indeed raised: “he [David] foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:32). In Acts 3:15, Peter tells his Jewish audience in the Temple that the Jewish people “killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses”; and Peter adds that “God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you [the Jewish people] first, to bless you in turning every one of you from your wickedness” (Acts 3:26). The emphasis that actual eyewitnesses of the risen Jesus are proclaiming his Resurrection continues in Acts 4:33, which describes the situation in the early days in Jerusalem after Jesus’ Resurrection: “And with great power the apostles ³² Bart D. Ehrman, reacting against the “conservative evangelical Christians” (including himself in his youth) who advocate a “modern Christian apologetics,” bemoans the fact that “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” (Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee [New York: HarperCollins, 2014], 172–3). In my view, however, there is plenty of room between “overwhelming proof ” and Ehrman’s own exegesis; the latter fails to engage the best evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection. ³³ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 363. For evidence suggesting the influence of Luke upon the sermons of Acts, see Luke Timothy Johnson, Septuagintal Midrash in the Speeches of Acts (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2002). ³⁴ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 363.

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gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.” Earlier in Acts 4, Peter and the apostles were arrested in the Temple precincts for “teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:2). When the imprisoned apostles receive a hearing from the high priest and the leaders of the Jewish people in Jerusalem, Peter proclaims that the miracle of healing that Peter had worked in Acts 3 came about by the power of the risen Christ. Peter states, “[I]f we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a cripple . . . be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well” (Acts 4:9–10). Similarly, when the Holy Spirit leads Peter to Cornelius the centurion, Peter teaches Cornelius that “God raised him [Jesus] on the third day and made him manifest; not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:40–1). Fenton quotes all these passages, and he concludes that they demonstrate “the certitude which those who knew Jesus possessed about the Resurrection, and the great importance they attached to it.”³⁵ He judges these passages (Peter’s speeches) to be representative of “the habitual mode of teaching employed by the earliest Christian teachers.”³⁶ They proclaimed their certitude about Jesus’ Resurrection on the basis of their personal eyewitness to the risen Jesus and their experience of eating and drinking with him. He observes the same thing about Paul’s speeches in Acts. Paul preaches that “God raised him [Jesus] from the dead; and for many days he appeared to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people. And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus” (Acts 13:30–3). Fenton does not address the possibility that these passages are colored by the characteristic emphases of Luke, the author of Acts.³⁷ To what degree do the speeches recorded in Acts 1-4 accurately present what the apostles said in the days following Jesus’ Resurrection? As a historical matter, one question is whether we can have strong certitude that Acts’s reportage is indeed what the apostles were saying in this earliest period. After discussing the speeches recorded in Acts (as well as the claims made by the Gnostic Gospel of Peter, which he dates to  150), Fenton turns to “the explanations offered by those who sought to discredit and to destroy the teachings of Jesus.”³⁸ He argues that these efforts to discredit Jesus’

³⁵ Ibid., 366. ³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ See the wide range of perspectives on the historiography of Acts surveyed and critically assessed in Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, vol. 1: Introduction and 1:1—2:47 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), chapters 3–9. ³⁸ Fenton, Laying the Foundations, 370.

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Resurrection in fact “constitute a valuable indication of the reality of His Resurrection.”³⁹ In terms of our historical knowledge of the efforts to discredit Jesus’ Resurrection, Fenton assumes that these efforts occurred exactly as the Gospel of Matthew describes them. He does not inquire into whether the evangelist Matthew might have invented these details or added to them in a significant way. Recall that the Gospel of Matthew explains that on the day after Jesus’ death and burial, “the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, ‘Sir, we remember how that imposter said, while he was still alive, “After three days I will rise again.” Therefore order the sepulchre to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away, and tell the people, “he has risen from the dead”’” (Mt 27:62–4). According to the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate agreed to this request. Pilate sent some Roman soldiers to seal the tomb and to guard it. Matthew reports that after Jesus rose from the dead, the Jewish leaders, in a panic, “gave a sum of money to the soldiers and said, ‘Tell people, “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.” And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble’” (Mt 28:12–13).⁴⁰ The soldiers agreed to tell this lie because otherwise, evidently, they feared getting into trouble with Pilate, presumably for improperly sealing the tomb (though one assumes they would also have gotten into trouble for sleeping while they were supposed to be standing guard). According to the Gospel of Matthew, then, Jesus’ enemies had heard that he had promised to rise again on the third day. They first responded by sending soldiers to seal and guard Jesus’ tomb and then (after his Resurrection) by spreading the false rumor that Jesus’ body had been stolen from the grave by his disciples.⁴¹ Fenton accepts that all three elements—Jesus’ enemies’ knowledge of his prophecy, Pilate’s sending of the soldiers, and the spreading of the false rumor—are accurate historical details.⁴² Fenton therefore concludes that, as a historical matter, “these explanations would never have been set forth ³⁹ Ibid. ⁴⁰ For historical-critical investigation of this passage, arguing that at least the story was not “invented from scratch within the Christian community” even if the story is not necessarily “historically true in all respects,” see N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 638. For a more skeptical position, in critical dialogue with H. Reimarus, see Wim J. C. Weren, “ ‘His Disciples Stole Him Away’ (Mt 28,13): A Rival Interpretation of Jesus’ Resurrection,” in Resurrection in the New Testament: Festschrift J. Lambrecht, ed. R. Bieringer, V. Koperski, and B. Lataire (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 147–63. See also Reimarus, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, vol. 2: Neues Testament, ed. G. Alexander (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1972), 188–206. ⁴¹ Note that the Gospel of Matthew also makes clear that Jesus’ disciples did not understand his prophecy of his Resurrection, in part because of its connection with crucifixion (seemingly not a fitting fate for the Christ), and in part because of their expectations regarding the kingdom. See for example Matthew 16:21–3; 17:22–3; 20:17–28. ⁴² For historical-critical doubts about these details, see for example C. F. Evans, Resurrection and the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1970), 85–6.

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unless there had been definite and universally manifest facts which the foes of Christ felt that they must interpret in their own way.”⁴³ These “universally manifest facts” would have caused those who rejected Jesus’ Resurrection to look bad. To make themselves look better, the Jewish leaders bribed the soldiers to lie about what had happened to Jesus’ body. Fenton thinks that the Gospel of Matthew has here provided conclusive evidence for the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection: namely, the Jewish leaders knew that Jesus’ prophecy of his Resurrection was widespread and they also knew that they had sought to seal and guard the tomb, so the fact that they bribed the soldiers to lie about it is clear evidence that they were trying to cover up something big that had happened. As Fenton states, “the body of Jesus left that tomb, and the Jews were driven to assert that the poor frightened and ineffectual disciples had managed to overpower the legionaries.”⁴⁴ Since he does not ask whether the evangelist Matthew might have invented or enhanced any of these elements, Fenton affirms that, historically speaking, “Any denial of the Resurrection is and must be an attempt to explain away obvious facts.”⁴⁵ In his view, he has thereby arrived at a moral certitude, admitting no fear of error, about the historical truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. This moral certitude provides a basis for prudently affirming that a revelation has occurred. Fenton concludes that the Jews “adopted the very course of conduct which rendered the reality of His Resurrection absolutely unmistakable to the men of their generation and for that matter to historians of all times.”⁴⁶ Yet, the fact that Fenton does not address the possibility that the evangelist Matthew could have invented or enhanced these details means that Fenton’s claim that the sending of the soldiers “rendered the reality of His Resurrection absolutely unmistakable . . . to historians of all times” is a significant exaggeration.⁴⁷ The sending of the soldiers is not itself “absolutely unmistakable” as a historical datum. It is not reported in the other Gospels, and the standards of ancient historiography do not rule out the addition of such details by the evangelist.⁴⁸ Fenton argues that it is historically evident that Jesus’ place of burial was well known, because otherwise “there would have been no possible reason for the anxiety of His enemies [the Jewish leaders] to spread the report ⁴³ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 370–1. ⁴⁴ Ibid., 371–2. ⁴⁵ Ibid., 372. ⁴⁶ Ibid. Unfortunately, the attitude that Fenton takes toward the Jews fits with what the Pontifical Biblical Commission has recently cautioned against with respect to apologetics based upon fulfillment of prophecy. See “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible,” §21, in The Church and the Bible: Official Documents of the Catholic Church, ed. Dennis J. Murphy, MSC, 2nd ed. (New York: Alba House, 2007), 832–979, at 860. ⁴⁷ Fenton is by no means alone. See B. F. Westcott, The Gospel of the Resurrection: Thoughts on Its Relation to Reason and History, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1879), 137. ⁴⁸ Richard Swinburne defends the historicity of the sending of the soldiers to guard the tomb, although he notes that most scholars disagree with him. See Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 177–8.

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that the body had been stolen.”⁴⁹ Again, Fenton has not adequately addressed the possibility, from a historical perspective, that the Jewish leaders never spread this intentionally false report. Fenton recognizes that arguments against Jesus’ Resurrection often appeal to hallucinatory visions as the explanation for what caused the grieving disciples to proclaim that they had seen the risen Jesus. He cites Lewis Browne’s view that the grieving disciples felt that they could not go on living if Jesus were not still alive, and so they concluded (and came truly to believe) that Jesus must indeed still be alive and even that they had seen him and eaten with him. This view, variations of which are found in David Strauss, Rudolf Bultmann, and many others (including Schillebeeckx, writing thirty years after Fenton), already appears in the third-century writings of Celsus, who argues (as Fenton notes) that the women at the tomb were victims of self-delusion in their frantic and emotional state, and that the disciples participated in this self-deception or outright deception. For Fenton, objections such as these belong to “the charming never-never land where deniers of the Resurrection dwell” and where there is “no such thing as a plain blunt fact”—in this case, the empty tomb and the fact that the Resurrection accounts clearly distinguish the risen Jesus from a “spirit.”⁵⁰ Furthermore, Fenton points out, “Realistic men know very well that a person who is firmly convinced of the existence of some phantasm is deluded.”⁵¹ With respect to the claim that Jesus repeatedly prophesied his Resurrection (see Mt 12:38–40; 16:21; 17:21–2; and 20:17–19, and parallels) and that this prophecy was well known, Fenton is aware that Celsus had argued that Jesus’ disciples invented this prophecy. But Fenton dismisses this argument as implausible, on the grounds that “the accepted historical facts known to us are such that there would be no reasonable explanation of them at all possible had there been no prophecy about the Resurrection made by Jesus of Nazareth.”⁵² This is a strong way of putting it, and Fenton attempts to justify it by pointing out that “[t]wo of the four accounts we possess about His trial in the court of the high priest tell that He was accused of threatening to destroy the temple.”⁵³ Jesus spoke about the destruction of the temple as a veiled prophecy of his Resurrection: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up . . . . [H]e spoke of the temple of his body” (Jn 2:19, 21). For Fenton, however, the capstone of his view that Jesus’ prophecy was not invented later by the disciples is again the guarding of the tomb. He states, “There would have been no reason for their placing a watch around the tomb of Jesus had they not realized that He had promised to return alive from death itself.”⁵⁴ Again, he assumes that the guarding of the tomb is among the undeniable ⁴⁹ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 373. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 377. Garrigou-Lagrange, too, addresses the view that the appearances of the risen Jesus were actually hallucinatory visions. ⁵¹ Ibid., 378. ⁵² Ibid., 381. ⁵³ Ibid. ⁵⁴ Ibid., 382.

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“accepted historical facts” and renders “the reality of His Resurrection absolutely unmistakable . . . to historians of all times.” In Fenton’s view, the Resurrection of Jesus is “the outstanding and allsufficient motive of credibility” for belief that a divine revelation has occurred: God has provided an evident sign that makes the assent of faith a humanly prudent and rational act.⁵⁵ For Fenton, as we have seen, “If there were any fear or danger that the doctrine had not been revealed by God, then a man would have no sufficient reason to alter the course of his whole life in accepting it firmly on divine authority.”⁵⁶ Yet, Fenton overestimates the degree to which his arguments actually compel historical assent. This poses a significant problem, and so it is no wonder that Catholic apologists in the early twentieth century sought other paths. The most popular apologetic alternative attempted to ground the credibility of divine revelation more interiorly, in part by blending the natural assent with the supernatural assent of faith, so as to allow the latter to carry the weight previously carried by airtight historical arguments. As we will see—and as Fenton, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Gardeil warned—this approach carries its own problems.⁵⁷

P I E R R E R O U S S E L O T’S APPROACH In The Eyes of Faith, originally published in article form in 1910, Pierre Rousselot begins with a claim drawn from Vatican I’s authoritative teaching on faith and reason in Dei Filius (a claim with which Fenton would certainly agree): “Just as faith is reasonable and at the same time supernatural, so, while it is certain, it is nonetheless free.”⁵⁸ As Rousselot points out, the problem consists in how to harmonize these claims: how can the certitude of faith allow for freedom in believing (or not believing), and if faith is reasonable, why must ⁵⁵ Ibid., 383. ⁵⁶ Ibid. ⁵⁷ See also Jean Levie, SJ, Sous les yeux de l’incroyant, 2nd ed. (Paris: Desclée, 1946), to which Avery Dulles directs attention in A History of Apologetics, 290. ⁵⁸ Pierre Rousselot, SJ, The Eyes of Faith, trans. Joseph Donceel, SJ (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 45. For appreciative reflection upon Rousselot’s project, see John M. McDermott, SJ, Love and Understanding: The Relation of Will and Intellect in Pierre Rousselot’s Christological Vision (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1983); McDermott, introduction to The Eyes of Faith, 1–18. See also F. J. Scott, SJ, “Maurice Blondel and Pierre Rousselot,” The New Scholasticism 36 (1962): 330–52; Erhard Kunz, SJ, Glaube—Gnade— Geschichte: Die Glaubenstheologie des Pierre Rousselot, SJ (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1969). For an overview and evaluation of Rousselot’s mode of demonstrating God’s existence, see my Proofs of God: Classical Arguments from Tertullian to Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 159–67, 199–201. For an intervention, influenced by Blondel and Rousselot, against the kind of apologetics practiced by Fenton (and Gardeil and Garrigou-Lagrange), see Henri de Lubac, SJ, “Apologetics and Theology,” in de Lubac, Theological Fragments, trans. Rebecca Howell Balinski (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 91–104.

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it also be said to be a supernatural gift, unattainable by reason? Rousselot observes that “either you see with certitude that God has spoken, or you do not see it with certitude. In the first case, how can the assent be free? And in the second, how can its certitude be legitimate?”⁵⁹ As he says, Christian answers to this dilemma fall into voluntarist and intellectualist camps. He finds neither camp to be particularly satisfying. In this regard he comments, “Some say, Believe blindly first, and afterward you will see. Others say: See clearly first, and afterward you will believe. But while the first group jeopardizes the legitimacy of faith’s certitude, the second group does the same with its freedom.”⁶⁰ Rousselot does not wish to follow the voluntarist position classically represented by Pascal, but he also criticizes the intellectualist position taken by theologians such as Gardeil (and later by Fenton). He states that for the intellectualist position, there are two movements in the journey to a fully claimed personal and supernatural faith. The first movement “culminates in the knowledge of what there is to believe, in the knowledge of the fact of revelation, of the divine origin of the Catholic Church. It has the believer concluding: ‘This is believable.’ A second moment, this one voluntary, has him saying: ‘I believe.’”⁶¹ Rousselot argues that the problem here is that if the person first knows with certitude that divine revelation is credible, and then (as a second step) makes the supernatural assent of faith to God revealing, how could it really be possible for the person (in the supernatural order) to be free to deny the truth of what he or she knows (by assured natural reason) is credible? Rousselot seeks to resolve this quandary by suggesting that, in intellectual acts, there is more of a place for love than has been supposed even by Thomists well aware that the will has a role in knowledge. Certainly, in the act of faith, the will has to be involved, since the intellect cannot be compelled by demonstration to assent to truths that are above human reason (such as the Trinity). In the act of faith, therefore, the will must freely move the intellect to assent with the certitude of faith to God revealing, although it is the intellect (not the will) that assents.⁶² Rousselot takes this role of the will and argues that the following two statements must be “simultaneously true”: “It is because man wills that he sees the truth. It is because man sees the truth that he wills.”⁶³ The notion of “seeing” is crucial here. Even in acts of speculative reason, Rousselot argues, “[a] love, a passion, an appetite may thoroughly impart its own coloration to the whole world of perceived objects, so much so ⁵⁹ Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith, 45. ⁶⁰ Ibid., 46. ⁶¹ Ibid., 46–7. ⁶² See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II, q. 2, a. 1, ad 3: “The intellect of the believer is determined to one object, not by the reason, but by the will, wherefore assent is taken here for an act of the intellect as determined to one object by the will.” See also II–II, q. 2, a. 4, a. 1 and elsewhere. For discussion see Romanus Cessario, OP, Christian Faith and the Theological Life (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), especially 82–3, 98–100; Benoit Duroux, OP’s La psychologie de la Foi chez S. Thomas d’Aquin (Tournai: Desclée, 1963). ⁶³ Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith, 48.

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that it powerfully influences, nay, even transforms, our judgments about ‘things in themselves.’”⁶⁴ Rousselot goes on to spell this out in terms of “connatural” knowing. The intellect, he argues, is connatural to God and to being—by which he means that it is naturally inclined to and in sympathy with reality.⁶⁵ He states that due to our “natural inclination to the First Truth,” “intellection is natural to us, and when truth dawns on us, we experience pleasure.”⁶⁶ In the intellectual act whereby we attain certitude, our affectivity—our will—is involved due to our natural inclination and to the fact that the truth about reality is connatural to our minds. For Rousselot, “an understanding of intelligence as a connatural inclination and sympathy, as a pure love of God and of being, makes the exigencies of a rigorous intellectualism even more inflexible [i.e. increases certitude], while at the same time opening the way to a natural and coherent theory of certitude that is both legitimate and free.”⁶⁷ Love (or affective sympathy), in its freedom, expands the range of intellect. Rousselot observes that his account of the will’s contribution to the act of the intellect does not hold solely for the supernatural order. In everyday life, our moral state affects our intellectual judgments and enhances, or undermines, our ability to attain a proper certitude. Notably, Rousselot insists that the act of faith’s “reasonableness derives from its very supernaturality.”⁶⁸ In his view, when we “see” or know with rational certitude that there has been a divine revelation in Christ Jesus, our seeing or knowing depends upon supernatural love. He states, “In the act of faith love needs knowledge as knowledge needs love. Love, the free homage to the supreme Good, gives us new eyes.”⁶⁹ He underlines, therefore, that “for the proofs of faith” (for example, the claim that it is reasonable to think that Jesus rose from the dead) what is needed for assent is “a supernatural light.”⁷⁰ By contrast to Gardeil (and Fenton), he rejects the position that there can be a “natural faith” that we possess due to rational certitude that there has been a revelation. He argues that “holding fast to the objects of revelation [the truths of faith] under the formal aspect of natural being would implicitly affirm that they belong to the natural order, hence, would fail to understand them correctly.”⁷¹ To know that Jesus rose from the dead would be to know a supernatural truth of faith, which for Rousselot always requires grace. ⁶⁴ Ibid., 49. ⁶⁵ For further discussion of knowledge by connaturality, see for example Jacques Maritain, “On Knowledge through Connaturality,” The Review of Metaphysics 4 (1951): 473–81; R. J. Snell, “Connaturality in Aquinas: The Ground of Wisdom,” Quodlibet 5 (2003): 1–8; Taki Suto, “Virtue and Knowledge: Connatural Knowledge According to Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics 58 (2004): 61–79. ⁶⁶ Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith, 54. ⁶⁷ Ibid. ⁶⁸ Ibid., 45. ⁶⁹ Ibid., 56. ⁷⁰ Ibid., 62. ⁷¹ Ibid., 63, 65. He argues further, “The mere fact . . . that the historical and external proofs of religion can be expressed in language, boiled down to a logically coherent whole, and proposed to everyone in that guise does not authorize the conclusion that a man, without the illumination of

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In my view, one can reasonably assent to the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection without thereby limiting Jesus’ Resurrection to the “natural order,” even though faith alone can give knowledge that Jesus the incarnate Son has been resurrected. Only by faith can a person know fully or properly what Jesus’ Resurrection is (namely, the resurrection of the incarnate Son and Savior); but I think that reason, even outside of faith, can arrive at the rational judgment that Jesus rose from the dead. At the same time, I agree with Rousselot (and with Aquinas) that there are “special ways of knowing that derive from virtuous habits,” that our intelligence has a “gravitational pull of sympathy” toward being and God, that (natural) “love gives us eyes,” and that it is possible to perceive, in the historical evidence to divine revelation, “a clue that unveils at some point the intimate interplay of the natural and supernatural worlds, or, rather, the latter’s interiority to the former.”⁷² It will be clear from previous chapters that I think that persuasive rational arguments for the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection can and have been made. Assenting to such arguments does not strictly require grace or supernatural faith, even though such assent does require the reasonable judgment that God exists.⁷³ But Rousselot’s fundamental aim is to ward off an exaggerated role of historical demonstration in grounding prudent belief that a divine revelation has occurred.⁷⁴ He rightly perceives that there are “harmonious attractions that Christianity awakens in our heart,” and that these attractions are powerful intellectual signs that our mind and heart were created for and by the God revealed in Jesus Christ.⁷⁵ As Kevin O’Reilly points out, for Aquinas in many cases “objectivity in judgments concerning reality and human conduct is directly related to the degree to which a person is animated by the Gift of wisdom,” given the state of human nature after the Fall.⁷⁶ Since human reason and will have been created by God to lead rational creatures to intellectual and affective union with God, O’Reilly further notes that “[t]here can be no such thing as ‘pure’ reason in the sense of reason that grace, can perceive them synthetically as proofs and assent to them with genuine certainty” (ibid., 62–3). ⁷² Ibid., 55–6, 59, 61. See also Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, The Sense of Mystery: Clarity and Obscurity in the Intellectual Life, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic Press, 2017), 40–3. ⁷³ For Rousselot, it is necessary to recognize “the real identity and reciprocal logical priority of the judgment of credentity and the act of faith” (Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith, 98). On this view, there can be no distinction between believing the evidence that a divine revelation has occurred and making the supernatural act of faith. He denies that there is any possibility “of anyone’s perceiving truth or credibility by natural powers alone, so that some subsequent free act would then transform that perception into a supernatural adhesion” (ibid., 66). ⁷⁴ Ibid., 58. See also Charles Journet, Vérité de Pascal. Essai sur la valeur apologétique des Pensées (Saint-Maurice: Editions de l’ouevre St-Augustin, 1951). ⁷⁵ Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith, 58. ⁷⁶ Kevin E. O’Reilly, OP, The Hermeneutics of Knowing and Willing in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 282.

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stands outside reality and judges it from a ‘detached’ and ‘neutral’ perspective.”⁷⁷ Our mind and heart have an innate sympathy to their divine source, a sympathy that makes the manifestation of the love of God attractive, even when the fallen mind and heart resist this attraction. Even though I cannot accept Rousselot’s view that reasoned assent to the historical evidences necessarily requires supernatural faith, I appreciate the value that he gives to Christianity’s attractiveness, its fittingness with respect to our mind and heart, and the role of our desires and our virtues in the act of knowing.⁷⁸ His insistence upon connatural or sympathetic knowledge helps to ensure that we do not exaggerate the efficacy of particular historical demonstrations for apologetical purposes. With N. T. Wright, we may instead hold that Jesus’ Resurrection is the best available historical explanation for the evidence that we find in the lives and writings of the first Christians. In assenting to the reasonableness of Jesus’ Resurrection as the best historical explanation, we find our assent strengthened also by reasons that pertain to connaturality, to the mind and heart’s sympathy with the proclamation of Jesus’ Resurrection in the light of the whole of Jesus’ life and death and in light of the testimony of the Old Testament. When our assent is strengthened in this way, we are either in the realm of faith or well on our way to it. But natural reason can still arrive at cumulative probabilities that together provide a strong basis for believing that God has revealed himself in and through the risen Jesus.

BERNARD L ONERGAN’ S CONTRIBUTION If for Rousselot the ability of reason to affirm arguments of credibility for faith ultimately depends, at the moment when such arguments are affirmed as true, upon the supernatural light of faith, Bernard Lonergan rightly gives a greater place to our rational acts of understanding and judging the credibility of Christian claims.⁷⁹ In his “De ente supernaturali” (1946–7), Lonergan ⁷⁷ O’Reilly, The Hermeneutics of Knowing and Willing in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, 283. See also Tomás-Luis Caldera, Le jugement par inclination chez saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1988). ⁷⁸ For other notable responses to Rousselot, see Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Sense of Mystery, trans. Matthew Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017), 203–4 fn 13; Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 149, 175–7 (and indeed 175–98 more broadly). ⁷⁹ In his Grace and Freedom, which contains four articles published in 1941–2 that were based upon his 1940 doctoral dissertation, Lonergan points out that the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, which he traces to Philip the Chancellor, serves not to defend “the supernatural character of grace” but rather to defend “the validity of a line of reference

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underlines that “[w]e see or know or believe in a natural way a truth the intrinsic evidence of which can be naturally grasped by us.”⁸⁰ It follows logically that when our created intellect perceives that the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is reasonable, we can assent to it even without the grace of supernatural faith. In a 1968 lecture on “Horizons,” Lonergan draws close to Rousselot’s main concerns by observing that “there is a knowledge born of love.”⁸¹ He distinguishes between the natural and supernatural orders, and he indicates that in both cognitional orders we find “a knowledge born of love.” Quoting Pascal’s remark that the heart has reasons unknown to reason, he explains that “reason” here includes experiencing, understanding, and factual judging, and the “heart” has to do with “the dynamic state of being in love.”⁸² Although Pascal does not set forth what he means by the heart’s reasons, Lonergan surmises that he is talking about our affective responses to perceived values, when we are making judgments of worth or value. For Lonergan, this state of being in love is the highest level of our intentional consciousness, and it is ultimately what it means to say that someone is a religious person. He argues that the knowledge that pertains to supernatural faith ultimately belongs to what Pascal means by the “heart.” Philosophy and history belong to the level of what Pascal means by human “reason.” If so, then historical evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection, no matter how strong this evidence may be, cannot yet stand on the level of faith. Faith, Lonergan emphasizes, “is the eye of otherworldly love, and love itself is God’s gift.”⁸³

termed nature”: see Bernard Lonergan, SJ, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 17. ⁸⁰ Bernard Lonergan, SJ, “The Supernatural Order,” in Lonergan, Early Latin Theology, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 53–255, at 121. In the same place he argues that “there is a clear and distinct division between natural and supernatural vision and between natural and supernatural faith.” On this point see the studies by J. Michael Stebbins, The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order, and Human Freedom in the Early Writings of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); and Randall S. Rosenberg, The Givenness of Desire: Concrete Subjectivity and the Natural Desire to See God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017); Joshua R. Brotherton, “The Integrity of Nature in the Grace-Freedom Dynamic: Lonergan’s Critique of Bañezian Thomism,” Theological Studies 75 (2014): 537–63. That Lonergan accepts the theorem of “pure nature”—while combating its function in much neo-scholastic thought—is also evident in his 1949 “The Natural Desire to See God,” in Lonergan, Collection, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 81–91. ⁸¹ Bernard Lonergan, SJ, “Horizons,” in Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 10–29, at 19. ⁸² Ibid., 19–20. ⁸³ Ibid. For faith as rooted in the intellect, see Cessario, Christian Faith and the Theological Life.

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As a response to perceived values and a response to God’s initiative, love is not on the level of mere “reason,” since reason is not existentially engaged in the way that love is and since love opens up deeper levels of reality than mere reason can perceive. But neither does love negate reason or have no use for it. On the contrary, the things known by reason are taken up by faith and by the “heart.” Lonergan points out that “to say that faith subsists and is propagated on a level beyond experience, understanding, and judgment in no way implies that faith is without experience, understanding, and judgment. The higher levels of man’s intentional consciousness do not suppress but presuppose and complement the lower.”⁸⁴ The existential personal relationship with God that is “faith” (and that is a “being-in-love” with the divine Lover) includes the levels of experience, understanding, and judging. All these intentional acts have a part in the act of faith, even though the “being-in-love” that is the act of faith is greater than they. Supernatural faith thus includes or takes up our rational judgments about the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection. Lonergan separates the judgments of credibility from the act or assent of faith, because Lonergan places such judgments on the level of “reason,” below the level of faith. In this way, Lonergan attains to a wider view of faith’s reasons that avoids the pitfall of exaggerating particular historical evidences of credibility. Lonergan does so in a manner that appreciates Rousselot’s insight into love’s expansion of our intellectual vision and that integrates the assent of faith with the judgment of credibility, while at the same time preserving the distinct natural level of the judgment of credibility by emphasizing that the assent of faith is “on a level quite beyond philosophy, or history, or human science.”⁸⁵ Lonergan’s critique of “classicism” also proves helpful in retaining a balanced approach to reasons of credibility and the assent of faith. Lonergan’s definition of “classicism” is in certain ways problematic, but what is important for my purposes is his association of it with an ahistorical mentality, a lack of real appreciation of the significance of historical particularities.⁸⁶ He explains ⁸⁴ Lonergan, “Horizons,” 21–2. ⁸⁵ Ibid., 21. See Jeremy Blackwood, And Hope Does Not Disappoint: Love, Grace, and Subjectivity in the Work of Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2017); Tad Dunne, Lonergan and Spirituality: Towards a Spiritual Integration (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985), 105–50; John D. Dadosky, The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan (New York: SUNY, 2004). ⁸⁶ See Paul St. Amour, “Cultural Pluralism and the Limitations of the Classicist Conception of Culture,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 77 (2004): 259–71; for concerns see John Finnis’s Gilson Lecture “Historical Consciousness” and Theological Foundations (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1992). See also Lonergan, “The Future of Christianity,” 137–8; as well as his corrective in “Theology as Christian Phenomenon,” in Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 244–72, at 266–7. Lonergan also

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in a 1963 lecture on “Exegesis and Doctrine” that for the classicist, “Everything is just an instance of the universal, the ideal, the exemplar, the norm, the law, the model. The classicist has no apparatus for apprehending what it is to go beyond the universal law, ideal, exemplar, into the concrete. He does not really apprehend the concrete, the particular, in its endless detail and variety and difference.”⁸⁷ Lonergan applies this classicist label to John King’s rejection of historical-critical biblical exegesis. According to Lonergan, King held that “if you honestly wish to accept what the [biblical] writers said, you do not need the devices of the exegete; it is only when you want to get around what they said that you appeal to the genera litteraria.”⁸⁸ For King, even taking seriously the question of whether the evangelist could have invented the detail of the Roman guards at the tomb would be to have already gone wrong. But what we know about the genre of the Gospels leads scholars to raise historical-critical possibilities that should not be ruled out a priori.⁸⁹ Lonergan’s point is that historical arguments must proceed via real historical methods, and that an appeal to history—as Fenton rightly judges to be important—has to be undertaken with rigorous attention to historical particulars. With respect to historical-critical biblical scholarship, however, Lonergan also cautions that “while the interpreter can be very critical [in the good sense] in his account of history and in his interpretation of the text, there is a more profound criticism needed of himself. If he does not supply it, it has to be supplied by someone else.”⁹⁰ I note that modern historical-critical exegesis can seek to undermine “classicist” notions of the Bible while itself possessing “classicist” pretensions, as when historical-critical exegesis presents itself as holds that each new stage in the development of theology does not negate earlier stages, but rather draws their perspectives into itself: see “Doctrinal Pluralism,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965–1980, 70–104, at 104. ⁸⁷ Bernard Lonergan, SJ, “Exegesis and Doctrine,” in Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 142–59, at 154. ⁸⁸ Ibid., 156. ⁸⁹ The Gospels fit into the broad genre of Greco-Roman biography, which allows for the creative contributions of the evangelists. See Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). See also the essays in Biographies and Jesus: What Does It Mean for the Gospels to Be Biographies?, ed. Craig S. Keener and Edward T. Wright (Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2016); and Dirk Frickenschmidt, Evangelium als Biographie: Die vier Evangelien im Rahmen antiker Erzählkunst (Tübingen: Francke, 1977). For further background see Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Michael Grant, Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation (London: Routledge, 1995). Nicholas Lombardo, OP sums up the key point for my purposes: “Ancient Greco-Roman biographies are not like modern biographies in their claims to historical precision—still less are they like court transcripts or newspaper reporting—but their authors do intend to make historical claims about the subjects of their biographies” (Lombardo, The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 120). ⁹⁰ Lonergan, “Exegesis and Doctrine,” 159.

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the sole way of understanding the Bible correctly. When this happens, the historical-critical method seeks to function as a universal, beyond which one need know nothing else. In a 1968 lecture on “The Future of Christianity,” Lonergan reflects afresh upon the four levels of intentional consciousness. Recall that the first three levels are experience, understanding through questioning, and making judgments of truth. This cognitional self-transcendence (which achieves transcendence because it affirms truths that would be the case even if the knower did not exist) leads to a “real” self-transcendence in which we acknowledge that which is as good and valuable, and act upon this acknowledgment. Lonergan states in this regard, “Our self-transcendence is not solitary. We fall in love. The love into which we fall is not some single act of loving, not some series of acts, but a dynamic state that prompts and molds all our thoughts and feelings, all our judgments and decisions.”⁹¹ Lonergan distinguishes natural and supernatural love, even while recognizing that supernatural love integrates natural love. He mentions love “of one’s clan or nation, of one’s fellow citizens and countrymen, of mankind”; and he also mentions married love and love “for the common good.”⁹² Such loves are natural, and they are taken up and grounded by the love of God in its supernatural form, which comes to us through “God’s gift of his love to us” in Christ and the Holy Spirit.⁹³ From this perspective, Lonergan turns to the act of faith. Quoting Galatians 5:6, where Paul speaks of “faith working through love,” Lonergan argues that “[b]eing in love with God grounds faith.”⁹⁴ How does this relate to the evidence for the credibility of divine revelation? Like Rousselot, Lonergan suggests that our perspective on the evidence is always colored by what we love. We cannot simply know something objectively, in a manner uninfluenced by what we love. Rather, our natural love or our supernatural charity will affect our knowing, by affecting the context in and through which we view everything. Although our experience, questioning, and judgments of truth are not acts of the will, neither are they unaffected by what we love, by our particular state of being-in-love. As Lonergan says, our love provides the “horizon” for our acts of understanding and judging.⁹⁵ Given this horizon or worldview, things look different. All of us have such a horizon, whether we wish to or not; we therefore respond to evidence in different ways and prioritize our judgments of truth in different ways. This does not mean that our judgments of truth lack objectivity, but it does mean that the way in which we make sense of evidence differs. Turning around Rousselot’s phrase, Lonergan suggests that faith is “the eye of love.”⁹⁶ The person who is filled with supernatural love discerns God’s work ⁹¹ Lonergan, “The Future of Christianity,” 130. ⁹³ Ibid., 131. ⁹⁴ Ibid. ⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹² Ibid. ⁹⁶ Ibid.

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of love everywhere, both in nature and in history. Faith perceives the working of divine love, and it does so within a loving relationship with God, who initiates this relationship. In faith, we perceive that it is Love (God) who “creates and sustains and promotes this seething universe of mass and energy, of chemical process, of endlessly varied plant and animal life, of human intelligence and of human love.”⁹⁷ Although Lonergan emphasizes the horizon of love and its impact upon the whole of our intentional consciousness, he recognizes that each human being seeks truth and seeks a true worldview. He states, “To live intelligently, reasonably, responsibly, an adult has to form some view of the universe, of man’s place in the universe, of his role along with other men.”⁹⁸ Lonergan recognizes that people, as they form their worldview, are not immune to evidence. Far from being impervious to evidence, people seek to account for reality by drawing upon such resources as science, philosophy, and religion. Lonergan puts this quest in existential terms: what can fulfill the human person’s “massive thrust to self-transcendence”?⁹⁹ Lonergan argues that philosophy no longer has the metaphysical range to provide a plausible answer, and science is limited to empirical realities. Myth can persuade “only . . . the immature.”¹⁰⁰ It is only religion, therefore, that can provide selftranscendence by uniting us to the “summit of intelligibility, truth, reality, goodness, love.”¹⁰¹ It might appear that any religion can do this. Quoting C. F. D. Moule, however, Lonergan observes that Christianity is distinguished by its appeal to the event of Jesus’ Resurrection.¹⁰² What Jesus’ Resurrection means is that God’s love and grace are mediated through Jesus Christ. As a result, Christianity is union with a person, Jesus Christ; and it is also our union with all who are his friends. We need good friends, teachers and preachers and moral exemplars, to be able to love and worship God in Christ. In this way, Christianity offers a religious self-transcendence that is rooted in the personal gift of God’s love and “is the very opposite of some introverted and sterile individualism.”¹⁰³ Although he does not spell it out, Lonergan thereby suggests that Jesus’ Resurrection can be seen to be true because it leads to the perfection of the self-transcendence for which we were made. It leads to this by ensuring that God’s love is both personal and mediated, so that we attain to self-transcendence in Christ from within a community that requires that we learn self-transcending habits vis-à-vis both God and neighbor. In the same essay, Lonergan notes that “modern culture conceives of itself empirically and concretely.”¹⁰⁴ As he recognizes, modern intellectual culture

⁹⁷ Ibid. ⁹⁸ Ibid., 132. ⁹⁹ Ibid., 133. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 132. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., 133. ¹⁰² See C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1967), 14. ¹⁰³ Lonergan, “The Future of Christianity,” 135. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 137.

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“attends to men in their concrete living” and focuses not on universal human nature but on “the challenge of knowing people in all their diversity and mutability.”¹⁰⁵ Lonergan makes mention here of the recent expansion of Catholic biblical studies and the enriched “historical dimension of Catholic theology.”¹⁰⁶ Lonergan’s apologetical interests, however, continue to be focused on the universal and timeless question of whether Christianity offers the best possible fulfillment of the human quest for self-transcendence. Along these lines, he argues that love must now be the starting point for apologetics: “Where before knowledge preceded, founded, and justified loving, now falling-in-love and being-in-love culminate and complete the process of selftranscendence, which begins with knowledge but goes beyond it, as Blaise Pascal saw when he remarked that the heart has reasons which reason does not know.”¹⁰⁷ In his view, as we also found in Rousselot, “This change liberates religion and theology from rationalist tendencies, from the need or desire to prove the truths of faith simply from reason and history.”¹⁰⁸ Lonergan emphasizes that “[b]eing in love with God is the existential stance opening on the horizon in which Christian doctrines are intelligible, powerful, meaningful” and that this stance liberates us “from the need or desire to prove the truths of faith simply from reason or history.”¹⁰⁹ Although I share Lonergan’s concern about an exaggerated rational apologetics, I think that Lonergan’s recognition of the empirical and concrete emphasis of modern intellectual culture should allow him to give Fenton his due.¹¹⁰ Indeed, Fenton’s recognition of the importance for modern people of arguments for Jesus’ Resurrection has been amply shown to be correct, not least by the massive loss of Christian faith in cultures for which Jesus’ Resurrection no longer appears to be historically plausible. Lonergan’s assumption that more universal anthropological arguments about selftranscendence can now take center stage in apologetics has proven to be incorrect. The neglect of historical apologetics has exacerbated Christianity’s vulnerability to atheistic arguments. Fortunately, Lonergan fully recognizes that “both reason and history have their contribution to make,” even though he concentrates his own arguments for Christianity’s truth along the line of human self-transcendence.¹¹¹

¹⁰⁵ Ibid. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 138. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid. ¹¹⁰ As Hans Urs von Balthasar remarks, “What convinces man about this objective nature of faith is that God appears to him externally, in history. The believer cannot dissolve this objective form by assimilating it into himself in an interior, existential sense” (von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, 181). ¹¹¹ Lonergan, “The Future of Christianity,” 138.

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CO NCLUSION Lonergan holds that in our intentional consciousness, “reason” pertains to the lower three stages that are taken up (not negated) by love, the “heart.” This emphasis on how love colors our outlook and provides an overarching context for our judgments of truth is salutary. What we judge to be sufficient evidence for a prudent assent will be shaped by what we have found to be valuable and worthwhile, what we love (naturally or by grace). Lonergan does not fall into Rousselot’s mistake of making our assent to the evidences of credibility dependent upon supernatural grace opening our eyes, as though the evidences of credibility could not move human reason on their own.¹¹² Lonergan simply points out that the context in which we judge the truth of the evidences of credibility will have an impact upon what we make of their significance, even if we judge them to be true. Furthermore, Lonergan rightly criticizes lack of sufficient attention to the historical particular. This would seem to be a fault that Fenton steers clear of, but Lonergan points out that for the “classicist,” seriously entertaining difficult historical-critical questions about the biblical texts is already a sign of theological error. In my view, Fenton’s lack of real interest in historical-critical scholarship led him to assert too strongly the power of his proof of the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection. My approach to arguments in favor of Jesus’ Resurrection acknowledges that we cannot achieve the kind of certainty on specific historical points that Fenton thinks we can achieve, but I hold that we can assemble cumulative probabilities that together, without driving out the possibility of doubt, ground a strong rational conviction that Jesus rose from the dead. Although I agree with Lonergan that human nature’s thirst for selftranscendence finds its highest point (though in a manner that also deeply challenges our rational expectations, as befits the radical inbreaking of God) in the communion of divine love mediated by Jesus Christ, I do not think that this emphasis can suffice for an apologetic defense of Christian truth in a culture dominated by focus upon the empirical and concrete. Thus I do not wish to be overly critical of Fenton, whose insistence upon the value of historical apologetics was correct. Tempered by Rousselot’s and Lonergan’s insights into the “horizon” of love and by Lonergan’s criticism of classicism, ¹¹² Admittedly, Lonergan occasionally goes too far in the direction that I am attributing to Rousselot. In Method in Theology, for example, Lonergan remarks: “Without faith, without the eye of love, the world is too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist” (Lonergan, Method in Theology, 117). Lonergan’s point here is valid in the sense that without the healing power of grace, we will be disinclined to affirm what, by means of the capacities of reason, we can indeed know. For discussion of pages 115–19 of Method in Theology see Anthony J. Kelly, CSsR, Upward: Faith, Church, and the Ascension of Christ (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 120–1.

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Fenton could have avoided exaggeration and made a more persuasive case for the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. Explaining the post-Tridentine background to Fenton’s approach, Romanus Cessario notes that for the sixteenth-century theologian Luis de Molina, indebted to John Duns Scotus, “serious reflection on the objective evidence of the Christian religion can itself constitute a motive sufficient for an act of faith.”¹¹³ On this view, rational reflection on the historical evidence grounds supernatural faith. Against the position of Molina, Cessario argues that it is preferable to distinguish (as Fenton does) between the judgment that something is credible and the judgment that something is indeed true, with the latter being what the supernatural assent of faith involves. In accord with the position of all the theologians surveyed in this chapter, Cessario points out that “[n]othing other than what God provides adequately prepares the human person for what faith reveals, and so, strictly speaking, there is no human solution for unbelief.”¹¹⁴ No amount of apologetics can lead a person to faith, given the divine gratuity of the gift of faith. At the same time, as Cessario recognizes, “The Catholic Reform of the sixteenth century developed a line of argumentation aimed at establishing a motive for faith on the basis of what human reason can discover with its own resources.”¹¹⁵ Fenton stands within this tradition. On the assumption that the New Testament strictly “records events as they actually transpired,” the postTridentine tradition of apologetics “argued first that Christ’s miracles and especially his resurrection constituted historical proof of his divine and therefore believable message; second that, following Christ’s explicit instructions, the Church continues to transmit trustworthily what Christ himself taught.”¹¹⁶ According to Cessario, the 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, by giving Catholic historical-critical biblical scholars more room to operate, led to the decline of these kinds of apologetical claims about the New Testament as a source of empirical verification of the credibility of divine revelation. Cessario’s account of the rise and fall of such “empirical verification” is accurate. I consider that the solution today consists in weakening the degree of “empirical verification” sought by historical argumentation, so that we can argue (with N. T. Wright) that the Resurrection of Jesus is probable on historical grounds, as the best possible historical explanation of the evidence,

¹¹³ Cessario, Christian Faith and the Theological Life, 60. Cessario explains the Aristotelian framework of this view. For Aristotle, “[c]ontingent realities . . . are able to generate knowledge in us only in a limited way, through refined opinion, or what Aristotle calls doxa. When this opinion becomes intensified by one factor or another, such as the high credibility that attaches to the person who expresses a certain conviction, then opinion becomes what Aristotle calls pistis, or (human) faith” (ibid., 92). ¹¹⁴ Ibid., 83. ¹¹⁵ Ibid., 60. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., 61. On Rousselot, see also Avery Dulles, SJ, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 110–12.

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and we can also argue with Richard Bauckham that the New Testament is grounded in eyewitness testimony whose veracity, with regard to the central words and deeds of Jesus (including his Resurrection), is not easily dismissed. We can take account of the ways in which Jesus brings to fulfillment the main lines of Israel’s Scriptures, and we can observe that Paul and the disciples had many easier paths available to them rather than their insistence on Jesus’ “Resurrection.” We can recognize the metaphysical truth of arguments that the Creator God exists, as further background to the historical claims about Jesus. For Fenton, as we saw, Catholic apologetics defends dogma (such as the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection) “by demonstrating clearly and with certitude that it gives evidence of having been revealed by God.”¹¹⁷ Although the existence of God can be metaphysically demonstrated “clearly and with certitude,” historical events, especially ones that occurred in ancient times, cannot be proven to have happened. But cumulative probabilities can establish a strong foundation for the rational conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead. Within the broader horizon of love, these cumulative probabilities suffice for us to be able prudently to make the supernatural assent of faith: faith in Jesus’ Resurrection is not a blind leap.

¹¹⁷ Fenton, Laying the Foundation, 3.

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6 Contemplating Jesus Risen Building upon the previous chapter, I argue in this chapter that a contemplative attitude toward Scripture’s portraits of Jesus helps one appreciate the credibility of the proclamation that Jesus rose from the dead to glorified life. The alternative consists in taking a reductive approach that is inadequate to the testimony as a whole. This reductive approach plagues many books on Jesus today. Reza Aslan’s recent bestselling Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth exemplifies what concerns me in this chapter, as does Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. For Reza Aslan, “the resurrection is not a historical event. It may have had historical ripples, but the event itself falls outside the scope of history and into the realm of faith.”¹ Having consigned Jesus’ Resurrection to an irrational domain, he adds that if one still wishes to claim that Jesus returned to life after three days, then one has to face the fact that such a claim “defies all logic, reason, and sense” and lacks any ground in the Old Testament’s prophecies.² Aslan argues that the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus were written at least six decades after Jesus’ death and were apologetic tracts whose purpose included inventing precisely the needed details to substantiate Christian claims against their critics.³ For his part, Bart Ehrman grants that the “first Christians did think that Jesus was raised,” a fact that “changed everything” with respect to their understanding of Jesus’ identity.⁴ But in Ehrman’s view, Jesus neither rose from the dead, nor was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, nor possessed an

¹ Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013), 176. ² Ibid., 174. Paul taught faith in Jesus’ Resurrection, but Aslan finds Paul’s portrait of Jesus to be tendentious and not historically credible. ³ See ibid., 176. As a sixteen-year-old, Aslan, then a Muslim, became excited about Christianity and came to identify himself enthusiastically as an evangelical Christian. However, when undertaking graduate studies in order to be able to argue against skeptics, he became a skeptic. ⁴ Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 6.

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empty tomb.⁵ He insists that the Gospels are not good sources for anyone who wants “to know what really happened.”⁶ He emphasizes that “the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.”⁷ In his view, the discrepancies are damning; he particularly underlines that “some of these differences can scarcely be reconciled,” seeming to assume (as he once did as an inerrantist evangelical Christian) that differences in the Gospels, if found to be irreconciliable, demonstrate the falsity of the Gospels’ core affirmations.⁸ He adds that “we are not dealing with eyewitnesses. We are dealing with authors living decades later in different lands speaking different languages and basing their tales on stories that had been in oral circulation during all the intervening years.”⁹ The implication is that the evangelists knew no eyewitnesses and knew no one who had heard directly from the eyewitnesses, but instead knew only stories that had been passed down by many tradents over many decades in lands far from Jerusalem. For Ehrman, as for Aslan (both of them indebted to Troeltsch), there can anyway be no historical arguments in favor of Jesus’ Resurrection. This is because “the overarching claim that God has done something miraculous cannot possibly be accepted on the basis of historical evidence (since historical evidence precludes any particular set of religious beliefs).”¹⁰ Evidence for a miracle would require “lots of witnesses, close to the time of the events, who are not biased toward their subject matter and who corroborate one another’s ⁵ See ibid., 7. ⁶ Ibid., 133. It is clear to me that the Gospels’ Resurrection narratives agree on a number of core elements. ⁷ Ibid. ⁸ In 1968, the biblical scholar C. F. D. Moule, himself a believer in Jesus’ Resurrection, commented astutely, “It is usual now to abandon all harmonizing attempts to fit the resurrection stories of the four Gospels . . . into a single, coherent narrative. It is usually assumed, in particular, that—not to mention irreconcilable details as between each of the stories—there is no reconciling even the whole block of Galilean with the block of Jerusalem appearances. The Galilean appearances belong to Mark (by implication at least—see 16.7), Matthew (except for an appearance to women, 28.9) and John 21; the Jerusalem appearances to Luke (and Acts), John 20, Matt. 28.9, and the appendix to Mark (16.9ff., by implication). 1 Cor. 15.1ff names no locality. All these may bear valid witness to the conviction that Jesus was seen alive by his friends; but the topographical discrepancies are generally taken to suggest that the alleged setting of the appearances was something very much at the mercy of developing tradition; or, if Galilee is deemed to be the authentic, original context of these experiences, then the Jerusalem narratives are attributed to a tendentious desire to locate Christian beginnings there” (Moule, “Introduction,” in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, ed. C. F. D. Moule [London: SCM Press, 1968], 1–11, at 4). Moule points out, however, that the assumption is that Jesus’ risen body relates to space–time in the normal way (and so therefore Jesus can only appear in one place at one time), whereas it may well be that this is not the case for a glorified body. ⁹ Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 136. For a critique of Ehrman’s approach, from the perspective of memory studies, see Barry Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: Memory and History,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz, ed. Tom Thatcher (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 7–37, at 12. ¹⁰ Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 147–8.

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points without showing signs of collaboration.”¹¹ Even were such evidence to exist, a historian cannot put forward any conclusion—as a historical conclusion—that involves disputed theological beliefs, such as the activity of God, even if the evidence points in this direction. Ehrman sums up: “What historians cannot conclude, however, as historians, is that the disciples had visions of Jesus after he was really, actually dead and that it was because Jesus really, actually appeared to them alive after God had raised him from the dead. This conclusion would be rooted in theological presuppositions not generally held by all historians.”¹² Something has gone very wrong here, given that Ehrman throughout his book is mounting historical arguments precisely in order to show that something did not happen that, a priori, could not in his view be a historical event anyway. Ehrman’s speculations against the historicity of Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea and of the women witnesses rely upon arguments from silence and upon strained reconstructions of the “oldest” tradition. He posits that although we can have no knowledge whatsoever of what actually happened to Jesus’ body, we can take as probable that Jesus was treated by his followers as though he were an ordinary criminal (whose bodies were left unburied or dumped into common graves) and that, in any case, Pilate would have ensured that Jesus’ followers did not receive his corpse after his death or know where it was placed.¹³ In a similar fashion, because some early Christians could have been motivated to invent women witnesses at the tomb, Ehrman concludes that we have a good case for arguing that there was neither an empty tomb nor women witnesses. Ehrman suggests that a few people (he limits it to Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene) had visions of Jesus after his

¹¹ Ibid., 146. ¹² Ibid., 149. N. T. Wright has been at the forefront of addressing the issue of what “history” and “historical” properly mean in biblical studies. See N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 5–144; Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), especially 11–31, in which Wright identifies different senses of the word “history” and sets forth his historical method. ¹³ See Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 155–7. Lidija Novakovic observes (responding to John Dominic Crossan), “It is questionable, however, whether the Roman practice of denying burial to executed political enemies really applies to Jesus’ case. At the time of Jesus’ crucifixion Judea was not in an open redbellion against Rome. Deuteronomy 21.22–3 discloses a strong Jewish concern for the proper burial of the dead, both righteous and unrighteous, and a desire to avoid defilement of the land. Second Temple literature (11Q19 64.10–13; Philo, Spec. 3.151–2) confirms that Deuteronomy 21.22–3 was the law of the land. Josephus and Philo show that burial of the victims was frequently permitted, especially at festivals (J.W. 4.317; Philo, Flacc. 83–5). The discovery of skeletal remains of a crucified man in a family tomb at Giv’at ha-Mivtar offers additional support to the supposition that burial could be granted to the victims of crucifixion. Even though Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist, he did not lead an armed rebellion against Rome. All first-century sources are unanimous that Jesus was properly, even if hurriedly, buried” (Novakovic, Resurrection: A Guide for the Perplexed [London: Bloomsbury, 2016], 139–40).

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death, and that this produced Christianity.¹⁴ Ehrman manages to be both highly skeptical about the available historical evidence and highly confident about what historical reconstruction (based on this very evidence) can demonstrate. In the end, rather than illuminating the New Testament testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection, Ehrman simply replaces this testimony with an entirely implausible reconstruction. His reconstruction includes the following confident claims, none of which is founded on any real evidence: none of Jesus’ followers observed his crucifixion from afar or cared much about what happened to his corpse; both his empty tomb and the women who visited it were invented; Peter had a vision of the risen Jesus but the other appearances to the disciples were invented; the apostles conceived of the afterlife solely in terms of “resurrection” (despite Paul’s own expectation that he would dwell in a disembodied state prior to the general resurrection); the disciples proclaimed Jesus to be the resurrected Messiah and Lord on the basis of apparitions to Peter and Mary Magdalene; these apparitions, plus Paul’s vision, led these Jews to make radical changes in their eschatology; the evangelists’ writings about Jesus were far downstream from any living eyewitnesses; and we should accept any other historical explanation rather than supposing that the living God can act in human history. In light of the popularity of such reductive approaches today, it is no wonder that the biblical scholar Sandra Schneiders speaks mournfully of Jesus’ “effective disappearance from the horizon of reality for many people, especially the more educated.”¹⁵ Schneiders recognizes that Christianity depends for its vigor upon “the reality and activity of a living Jesus in the daily life and experience of the Christian,” and that without belief in his Resurrection, there can be no belief in “the reality and activity of a living Jesus.”¹⁶ This chapter therefore argues for a return to contemplative engagement, to viewing things in their wholeness, as a path for discerning the credibility of the New Testament testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection. Contemplation has many aspects, and the term can mean the height of contemplative prayer, in which Christians contemplate the triune God in a non-discursive, mystical darkness caused by the interior presence of the divine light.¹⁷ The term can also mean

¹⁴ See Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 197. ¹⁵ Sandra M. Schneiders, Jesus Risen in Our Midst: Essays on the Resurrection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013), 3. ¹⁶ Ibid. Schneiders argues, “Unless a real, living body can be ascribed to Jesus after his death, any talk of actual personal resurrection, his or ours, belongs in the realm of mythology, that is, of likely stories about otherworldly reality” (ibid., 9–10). ¹⁷ See for example Jacques Maritain, Distinguish to Unite, or, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. from the 4th French edition under the supervision of Gerald B. Phelan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 348–9, 360; Donald Haggerty, Contemplative Provocations (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013).

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the contemplation of realities and texts through meditative reflection upon the whole, and this is the sense in which I employ it. Only the contemplative can perceive that Jesus’ “humanity is appropriate to his divinity.”¹⁸ In this chapter, I argue that much is gained by approaching Jesus’ Resurrection with contemplative eyes. I first attend briefly to certain elements of what Thomas Aquinas has to say about contemplating Jesus Christ, by way of providing some background in the Christian tradition. Second, I examine the efforts of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI to perceive the face of Christ through the biblical portraits of Christ. In his Jesus of Nazareth, meditation upon the New Testament narratives about Jesus’ Resurrection provides him with grounds for judging the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. Third, I survey the case for the credibility of Christianity that is offered by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his short book Love Alone Is Credible, originally published in German in 1963.¹⁹ Von Balthasar argues that the truth of Christian claims is best defended apologetically not by appeal to the fulfillment of the dynamisms of history (the patristic approach) or by appeal to the fulfillment of the dynamisms of the human heart (the modern approach), or by appeal to historical data that can be advanced in favor of the credibility of what the Bible records (the neo-scholastic approach). Rather, indebted to Rousselot, von Balthasar holds that the truth of Christian claims will only be perceived when one contemplates in its wholeness the radical divine Love that is revealed in Christ. Although in the previous chapter I noted weaknesses in Rousselot’s approach, and although historical apologetics is still needed (as Ratzinger/Benedict shows), von Balthasar’s insight into the contemplation of Christ as supreme love is correct and makes a valuable contribution to assessing the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection.

THOMAS AQUINAS ON CHRISTIAN CONTEMPLATION Like a number of the Church Fathers, Aquinas holds that Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha, exemplifies the contemplative life.²⁰ In the Gospel of Luke, ¹⁸ David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 329. ¹⁹ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). This short book sums up the central argument made by Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982). ²⁰ See II–II, q. 188, a. 6, sed contra; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John: Chapters 6–12, trans. Fabian Larcher, OP and James A. Weisheipl, OP, ed. Daniel A. Keating and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), §1510, p. 232.

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Jesus praises Mary of Bethany for choosing the one necessary thing, “the good portion” (Lk 10:41). That “good portion” consists in sitting “at the Lord’s feet” and listening to his words (Lk 10:39).²¹ Mary is the model of the contemplative because, by hearing the words of Christ, she contemplates Christ—and thereby contemplates divine truth. In the first chapter of the Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas suggests that in a certain way all humans were created for Mary of Bethany’s work. He notes that truth is “the ultimate end of the whole universe,” since God is infinite intelligence.²² We know truth, says Aquinas, above all through Jesus Christ. In the Gospel of John, “divine Wisdom testifies that He has assumed flesh and come into the world in order to make the truth known: ‘For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth’ (John 18:37).”²³ Indeed, since Christ is the incarnate Word of God, Aquinas emphasizes that “divine truth” has personally revealed himself in Christ: “divine truth . . . is truth in person.”²⁴ When we know divine truth in Christ, this is not the same as knowing a lot of facts, or being filled with abstract knowledge. Rather, the contemplative embodies the unity of faith and charity. To know divine truth in Christ, and to be configured to this truth intellectually and morally, is to be joined “to God in friendship.”²⁵ Aquinas has in view John 15:15. Jesus tells his disciples, “I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”²⁶ In Christ, the triune God has willed to communicate his own beatitude to us and has thereby established a true friendship or fellowship in divine goods with us. Aquinas finds that this is why “Christ’s action is our instruction.”²⁷ Each of Christ’s actions and words instructs us in some way about who God is. Contemplating God’s truth, then, requires above all contemplating Jesus Christ.²⁸ ²¹ See David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), 152–3. ²² Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Book I, ch. 1 (trans. Anton C. Pegis, FRSC; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975). ²³ Ibid. ²⁴ Ibid. ²⁵ SCG Book I, ch. 2. At this juncture in the Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas also cites Wisdom 7:14, which teaches that wisdom “is an unfailing treasure for men; those who get it obtain friendship with God.” See Guy Mansini, OSB, “Aristotle and Aquinas’s Theology of Charity in the Summa Theologiae,” in Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, ed. Gilles Emery, OP and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 121–38; Janet E. Smith, “ ‘Come and See,’ ” in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology, ed. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 194–211. ²⁶ Cited in II–II, q. 23, a. 1, sed contra. See Anthony W. Keaty, “Thomas’s Authority for Identifying Charity as Friendship: Aristotle or John 15?” The Thomist 62 (1998): 581–601. ²⁷ III, q. 40, a. 1, ad 3. See also III, q. 37, a. 1, obj. 2 and elsewhere in the tertia pars. See Richard Schenk, OP, “Omnis Christi Actio Nostra Est Instructio: The Deeds and Sayings of Jesus as Revelation in the View of Thomas Aquinas,” in La doctrine de la revelation divine de saint Thomas d’Aquin, ed. Leo J. Elders, SVD (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990), 104–31. ²⁸ See Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John: Chapters 13–21, trans. Fabian Larcher, OP and James A. Weisheipl, OP, ed. Daniel A. Keating and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC:

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For example, by contemplating Christ in his crucifixion, we learn a great deal about Christ and about how we are called to act. Christ on the Cross “set us an example of obedience, humility, constancy, justice, and the other virtues . . . which are requisite for man’s salvation.”²⁹ We also learn the greatness of God’s love for us, in a manner that makes clear how intensely personal God’s love for us is.³⁰ Likewise, by contemplating Christ’s Resurrection, we learn the truth of the divine justice, “to which it belongs to exalt them who humble themselves for God’s sake, according to Luke i. 52: He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.”³¹ Divine justice exalts the humble, namely, those who are not filled with pride. Christ’s actions of love and obedience are answered by God’s justice in resurrecting Christ. Because the Resurrection is never cut off from the Cross (or from the defeat of sin and death), contemplating the risen Christ also reveals the love of God for sinners: God’s justice is for us. Aquinas draws together the contemplation of Jesus Christ with the contemplation of the truth about God, and he shows that the two cohere. If the contemplation of Christ’s Resurrection made no sense—revealed nothing of God or contradicted what we know of God—then this would be a serious blow to its credibility. In sum, learning to contemplate Christ in his wholeness assists the task of assessing the credibility of the proclamation that he rose from the dead.

JOSEPH RATZINGER ON S EEING THE FACE OF JESUS In the Foreword to the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, Ratzinger notes that due to the findings of much historical-critical research over the past two centuries, the figure of Jesus has become more difficult to contemplate. The Jesus of the Gospels can seem not only an ambiguous figure, but also a figure who the evangelists largely invented, behind which stands a real but largely inaccessible “historical Jesus.” Ratzinger recognizes that faith in Jesus is unlikely to endure if one grants that “the man Jesus was so completely Catholic University of America Press, 2010), §1886. See also Gilles Emery, OP, The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God, trans. Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), especially chapters 1 and 2; Dominic Legge, OP, The Trinitarian Christology of St Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), especially chapters 4–7. ²⁹ III, q. 46, a. 3. ³⁰ See III, q. 46, a. 3. ³¹ III, q. 53, a. 1. For Aquinas on Christ’s Resurrection, see my Jesus and the Demise of Death, chapter 2.

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different from the picture that the Evangelists painted of him and that the Church, on the evidence of the Gospels, takes as the basis of her preaching.”³² In response, Ratzinger advocates trusting the Gospels. He observes that diverse historical-critical reconstructions tend to contradict each other, which suggests that the New Testament’s witness may be more plausible than any reconstruction. He also proposes that historical-critical exegesis should be complemented by canonical exegesis, which, through its focus on Scripture as a unity, helps one to “see that the Old and New Testaments belong together” and to recognize (here moving to the level of faith) that Jesus is “the key to the whole,” without denying the historical diversity of the texts.³³ Once Scripture is recognized for what it is—a coherent whole guided by divine providence—it becomes possible to appreciate how each particular text contributes to a greater work being accomplished by God himself (as we saw in Chapter 3). The Gospels are part of a divinely authored whole, whose full meaning is unlocked by Christ’s life, death, and Resurrection. Ratzinger makes a positive case for the coherence of the New Testament’s portraits of Jesus. He states, “Though the New Testament writings display a many-layered struggle to come to grips with the figure of Jesus, they exhibit a deep harmony despite all their differences.”³⁴ Their harmony consists in their revelation of “a way and a figure that are worthy of belief,” by contrast to the unimpressive figure depicted in modern reconstructions.³⁵ The main lines of the New Testament’s testimony to Jesus reveal a person whose words and deeds provide both a worthy fulfillment to God’s promises to Israel and a worthy revelation of the God of Israel. This worthiness cannot be chalked up to mere successful inventiveness. As Ratzinger says, “Unless there had been something extraordinary in what happened, unless the person and the words of Jesus radically surpassed the hopes and expectations of the time, there is no ³² Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), xi. For discussion of Ratzinger’s exegetical approach, see for example Roland Deines, “Can the ‘Real’ Jesus Be Identified with the Historical Jesus? A Review of the Pope’s Challenge to Biblical Scholarship and the Various Reactions It Provoked,” Didaskalia 39 (2009): 11–46; Matthew J. Ramage, “Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutic of Reform: Towards a Rapprochement of the Magisterium and Modern Biblical Criticism,” Nova et Vetera 14 (2016): 879–917; Pierre Gibert, “Critique, méthodologie et histoire dans l’approche de Jésus,” Recherches de science religieuse 96 (2008): 219–40; Dorothee Kaes, Theologie im Anspruch von Geschichte und Wahrheit: Zur Hermeneutik Joseph Ratzingers (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1997). See also Gespräch über Jesus: Papst Benedikt XVI im Dialog mit Martin Hengel, Peter Stuhlmacher und seinen Schülern in Castelgandolfo 2008, ed. Peter Kuhn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). ³³ Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1, xix. This movement to faith, a movement that is linked to historical investigation, is observed by Christopher S. Collins, SJ: “Ratzinger understands clearly that as the figure of Jesus is historical, he is rightly approached by the method of historical analysis. But a historical approach divorced from the perspective of faith is not sufficient for true knowledge of him” (Collins, The Word Made Love: The Dialogical Theology of Joseph Ratzinger/ Benedict XVI [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013], 59). ³⁴ Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1, xxiii. ³⁵ Ibid.

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way to explain why he was crucified or why he made such an impact”— including, within two decades after his death, being hailed as equal to God and owed all worship (see Phil 2:6–11).³⁶ Ratzinger suggests that only the Jesus of the New Testament writings can account for both the coherence of the biblical texts, viewed as a whole, and the actual impact of Jesus himself. No other version of “Jesus” can do so. It follows that we have good reason to “trust the Gospels,” even as we continue to benefit from historical-critical research.³⁷ By means of these arguments, Ratzinger seeks to reinvigorate contemporary contemplation of Jesus. We can only contemplate him if the Gospels present us with the essential truth about him. In the three volumes of his Jesus of Nazareth, Ratzinger’s goal is to pursue a contemplative “search ‘for the face of the Lord’ (cf. Ps 27:8).”³⁸ He explains that his project is not an attempt to compose a life of Jesus, since “[e]xcellent [historical-critical] studies are already available.”³⁹ Nor is Ratzinger’s project an attempt to write a Christology. Instead, he states that Jesus of Nazareth follows lines closer to “the theological treatise on the mysteries of the life of Jesus, presented in its classic form by Saint Thomas Aquinas.”⁴⁰ At the same time, his project differs from that of Aquinas since he is consciously aiming to show that the New Testament’s Jesus is the real Jesus, a point that Aquinas takes for granted. Ratzinger attempts to combine historical-critical, canonical, and patristic exegetical modes in a manner that fosters a “personal encounter” with the Jesus who fulfilled Israel’s Scriptures.⁴¹ Given his combination of contemplative and historical approaches, what happens when Ratzinger turns his attention to Jesus’ Resurrection? In his discussion of Jesus’ Resurrection in Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two, Ratzinger first makes the obvious point that had Jesus remained dead, Jesus could not have inaugurated the kingdom or fulfilled any promises of the Old Testament.⁴² The New Testament’s claims about Jesus (for example, that he is the Messiah) would fall to the ground if he had not been raised, since there would be no plausible basis for believing Jesus’ claim to unique authority. Like Wright and Allison (and Ehrman), Ratzinger concludes that the first Christians must at least have strongly believed Jesus to have been raised from the dead. He then underlines that the Resurrection of Jesus offers a fulfillment that the Old Testament itself could not anticipate, since in Second-Temple Jewish eschatology “a resurrection into definitive otherness in the midst of the continuing old world was not foreseen.”⁴³ The unexpected newness of the Resurrection of Jesus is linked to the unexpected newness of the crucifixion of the Messiah.

³⁶ Ibid., xxii. ³⁷ Ibid., xxi. ³⁸ Ibid., xxiii. ³⁹ Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two: Holy Week, From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, trans. Vatican Secretariat of State (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), xv. ⁴⁰ Ibid., xvi. ⁴¹ Ibid., xvii. ⁴² See ibid., 241. ⁴³ Ibid., 245.

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Neither event could have been anticipated, even if the Old Testament certainly contained the pattern of judgment/restoration. Ratzinger divides the Resurrection testimony in the New Testament into two kinds: “confessional” and “narrative.” When, as in numerous letters of Paul, the proclamation of Jesus’ Resurrection is found in a confession of faith and linked with reception of salvation, the character of Jesus’ death becomes especially important for understanding the truth of his Resurrection. Specifically, his death was one that supremely revealed God’s humility and love. Rooted in God’s love, Jesus’ death fits with the divine love shown in Jesus’ Resurrection. Had his tomb not been empty, however, Jesus’ death would not have had its impact. Like Wright, Ratzinger argues that no testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection could have been possible in the Jerusalem of Jesus’ day, had his corpse still been present in the tomb or had anyone been able to find it. Ratzinger’s conclusion is that we cannot separate contemplation of God’s love in Jesus crucified and risen, from historical arguments for the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. The “confessional” testimonies to Jesus’ Resurrection condense the elements that appear in more detail in the “narrative” testimonies. The narratives testify that Jesus appeared in his risen flesh in Jerusalem and in Galilee. Just as the women remained at the Cross, so also they were the first to discover that he had been raised. Paul, after Jesus’ Ascension, heard Jesus’ voice and perceived him as a blinding light, but on the Emmaus Road Paul did not see Jesus’ risen flesh. By contrast, in the Gospels, although the risen Jesus often goes unrecognized and is able to enter through closed doors and appear or disappear suddenly, the ongoing physicality of his risen body receives emphasis, since he eats and offers himself to be touched. Indebted to historical-critical exegesis, Ratzinger suggests that the Old Testament theophanies, in particular the appearances of angels who represent God, prefigure the Resurrection appearances of Jesus through their combination of human form and transcendence of the “laws of material existence”; yet they lack, of course, the new and decisive claim that a specific person’s corpse has been gloriously raised.⁴⁴ ⁴⁴ Ibid., 268. Although Ratzinger does not cite him here, the connection with the Old Testament theophanies/angelophanies was made by C. H. Dodd, “The Appearances of the Risen Christ: An Essay in Form-Criticism of the Gospels,” in Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot, ed. D. E. Nineham (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), 9–35, at 34. Repeating the eccentric argument of Susan R. Garrett’s No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), Ehrman contends that in Galatians 4:14—and indeed throughout all his letters—Paul identifies Jesus as God’s highest angel, and indeed as a “divine” angel, an angel who Paul freely called “God” and who was “eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all God’s honor and worship” (How Jesus Became God, 269). For a more persuasive analysis of Paul’s Christology, see Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), chapter 2. Even with respect to Hurtado’s thesis, Richard B. Hays has sounded an important cautionary note: “I am not persuaded by his [Hurtado’s] particular hypothesis about the

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Ratzinger also connects the risen Jesus’ sharing meals with his disciples with the way in which covenants in the Old Testament were sealed and sacrifices were offered. What the disciples discovered in the appearances of the risen Jesus, Ratzinger concludes, was that “the Lord is drawing the disciples into a new covenant-fellowship with him and with the living God,” a new “table fellowship.”⁴⁵ Ratzinger comments upon the combination of the glorious transformation of Jesus’ body and his manifestation of this radical newness to his disciples within history. This combination accords with the disciples’ testimony that his Cross and Resurrection inaugurate the eschatological kingdom without thereby ending history. In addition, as Ratzinger remarks, the evangelizing zeal of his disciples, their willingness to give up their lives for the truth of their testimony despite the fact that regular history was still ongoing, makes sense only in light of their belief in Jesus’ actual Resurrection. After his crucifixion by the Romans, his followers would not have identified him as the Messiah and given their lives for him without “a real encounter, coming to them from outside, with . . . the self-revelation and verbal communication of the risen Christ.”⁴⁶ Lastly, Ratzinger defends the fittingness of the risen Jesus revealing himself to only a few persons. Just as God chose Israel as a small people in order to make himself known to the whole world, the risen Christ makes himself known to a relatively few eyewitnesses in order to spread the good news of intimately personal divine love and mercy as the source of true communion among people. Here Ratzinger’s position accords with Augustine’s view (described above in Chapter 2), and it also fits with the point made in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio: “Human perfection . . . consists not simply in acquiring an abstract knowledge of the truth, but in a dynamic relationship of faithful self-giving with others. . . . [I]n the act of believing, men and women entrust themselves to the truth which the other declares to them.”⁴⁷ In Ratzinger’s view, there could never have been a contemplation of Jesus that saw in him the fulfillment of the Scriptures, had Jesus not actually shown himself to his disciples as risen from the dead. The very fact that we are today able to contemplate Jesus is testimony to the historicity of his Resurrection.

derivation of the confession of Jesus’ divine identity from earlier Jewish models of intermediary figures” (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016], 369n14). For the similarities between the Gospels’ narratives of Jesus’ Resurrection appearances and Old Testament/Second Temple angelophanies, see also Lidija Novakovic, Resurrection, 148–9. I agree with Novakovic’s point (and Ratzinger’s) that “portraying Jesus’ resurrected body with the help of angelomorphic imagery could have been a way of conceptualizing the appearances in eschatological terms” (ibid., 156). ⁴⁵ Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two, 272. ⁴⁶ Ibid., 275. ⁴⁷ Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §32, in The Encyclicals of John Paul II, ed. J. Michael Miller, CSB (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001), 850–913, at 868.

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Put otherwise, the New Testament could not have been written without the disciples’ belief in his Resurrection. This belief required strong evidence. Thus, the very existence of the New Testament’s surprising but coherent fulfillment of the Old Testament not only enables us to contemplate the real Jesus, but also ties our contemplation to the actual historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR: THE APOLOGETICS OF LOV E Through Ratzinger’s work, we have seen that our ability to contemplate the face of Jesus is rooted in Scriptures whose existence and coherence arguably depend upon the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. Contemplation of Jesus, then, immediately draws us toward evidence for the truth of his Resurrection. But now we can make an additional step, guided by Aquinas’s insight that Jesus is “truth in person.” If the face of Jesus were not the face of love, then contemplation of Jesus as risen would be impossible because it would be implausible. Only the image of divine love could be worthy of contemplation and worthy of unique Resurrection in the midst of history. In contemplation, we perceive the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection in light of Jesus’ whole life and of God’s revelation in Israel’s Scriptures. We know the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection in part due to the conformity of his Resurrection with the love that he embodies and reveals; and our contemplation is fueled by this love. As Lonergan puts it, love is the horizon of faith. In Love Alone Is Credible, Hans Urs von Balthasar refers to Augustine’s view that the entire Scripture is about “the reign of charity” and also refers to Pascal’s insistence that Scripture’s object is love.⁴⁸ Von Balthasar’s theme in this short book is what makes Christianity credible. He argues that for the Fathers, Christianity was credible because it fulfilled the Old Testament and fulfilled world history by converting the pagan idolaters. Christianity was the true wisdom, the true Logos of the cosmos. In the Enlightenment, however, the specifically Christian elements of cosmos and history began to be discarded. Christianity then became simply the bearer of philosophical truths to the whole world. The Fathers’ path of verification of the truth of Christianity lost its traction. ⁴⁸ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 5. See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), III.xv.23, p. 93; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Honor Levi, ed. Anthony Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 85, §329. Gerald O’Collins, SJ has emphasized that “Augustine championed the essential role of love towards knowing and believing in Jesus gloriously risen from the dead” (Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, Reception [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 116).

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In the modern period, “the locus of verification” of Christianity shifted “from the increasingly demythologized cosmos . . . to the human being, who recapitulated the entire world in himself.”⁴⁹ Rather than defending the truth of Christianity by contemplating the Logos of cosmos and history, now defenders of Christianity began to contemplate the human being. For instance, Pascal argued for the truthfulness of Christianity on the grounds of Christianity’s profound witness to the human being’s simultaneous greatness and wretchedness. But in Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and others, the truth of Judaism and Christianity came to be determined by the degree to which religious belief conforms with universal ethical norms established by human reason. Philosophers searched in Christianity for a rational religion that accords with the measure of human rationality as they understood it. On this view, Jesus Christ is credible only to the degree that he exemplifies rational religion and rational ethics. Ludwig Feuerbach turned this approach into an awe for the selftranscending capacity of the human mind, and Friedrich Schleiermacher turned it into a consciousness of our absolute dependence. Later thinkers present Christ as the ultimate expression of absolute spirit’s self-manifestation or of detachment from existential anxiety. Others present Christianity as the fulfillment of religious subjectivity in the will’s ascent toward “absolute decision” (Maurice Blondel) or the intellect’s dynamism toward the infinite (Pierre Rousselot).⁵⁰ Still others, including Max Scheler and Martin Buber, point to the I–Thou structure of human rationality, the face-to-face encounter that unveils the “divine” depths of human existence and that Jesus supremely enacts. Von Balthasar credits two modern philosophers with resisting the reduction of revelation to the unfolding of the deepest dynamism of human subjectivity: Johann Georg Hamann, who insists that God’s self-revelation as self-humbling love is so radical that it cannot be anticipated, and Søren Kierkegaard, who argues that Christ can be known only as absolute paradox (a point followed by Léon Bloy and Fyodor Dostoevsky).⁵¹ With Protestant and Catholic theological liberalism in view, von Balthasar argues that “Christianity disappears the moment it allows itself to be dissolved into a transcendental precondition of human self-understanding in thinking or living, knowledge or deed.”⁵² It may therefore seem that the only possible evidence for the truth of Christian claims is an “extrinsicist” one that relies upon proofs from history. But von Balthasar proposes a third way, between immanentism (proofs from subjectivity) and extrinsicism (proofs from

⁴⁹ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 31. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 38, 41. ⁵¹ For discussion see Joshua Furnal, Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). ⁵² Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 51.

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history). This third way involves the entrance of a Thou who remains completely unexpected, an encounter that cannot be anticipated in any way but that possesses “compelling plausibility.”⁵³ The Logos appears as absolutely free and unexpected Love, radiant with divine beauty or glory. We cannot reduce this Logos to the level of human love, but rather we can only “adore it from a reverent distance whenever we perceive it,” since its beauty overwhelms us even while bestowing upon us the gift of “an inconceivable intimacy” with the God who (as Love) is radically other from us.⁵⁴ Since human love is marked by self-interest and by the prospect of death, difference itself inevitably becomes an enemy of love. Christ, through his embrace of radical difference in his selfhumbling, can only be shocking and scandalous, revealing our “creaturely love” to be by comparison “nonlove.”⁵⁵ Von Balthasar makes clear that divine Love, as grace, stirs up and awakens love within us. He insists upon a prior “unilateral” movement of divine Love toward us, a movement that in itself brings about our response, as in Mary’s fiat. In his view, nothing in Scripture can be adequately understood when faith is bracketed, since the Logos (Love) enables the witnesses to know him in faith. Von Balthasar states, “A ‘critical’ study of this Word as a human, historical document will therefore necessarily run up against the reciprocal, nuptial relationship of word and faith in the witness of the Scripture.”⁵⁶ Faith suffuses the biblical testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection, and therefore the testimony, when read by non-believers looking solely for evidence, will be only partially understood at best. Von Balthasar argues that “the site from which love can be observed and generated cannot itself lie outside of love (in the ‘pure logicity’ of so-called science); it can lie only there, where the matter itself lies—namely, in the drama of love.”⁵⁷ ⁵³ Ibid., 53. Thomas F. Torrance comments along the same lines, “In so far as Scripture . . . may prove to be an opaque medium, historico-critical and theologico-critical elucidation may help, as it were, to cleanse the lens, but what really makes Scripture a transparent medium is the divine light that shines through it from the face of Jesus Christ into our hearts” (Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998], 12). See also his insistence that “[i]f we attempt to abstract from the New Testament the dimension of the resurrection, the actual picture of the historical Jesus Christ it presents disintegrates, for not only do we erase the basic clues on which we rely in apprehending Christ in his objective reality, but we remove the dynamic Christological structure which makes it cohere significantly together on its own proper ground” (ibid., 167). ⁵⁴ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 56–7. ⁵⁵ Ibid., 73. ⁵⁶ Ibid., 79. See von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, 31–2, 76–7, 174, 209, 421, 466, 533, 538, 545, 553, 591, 618. For discussion see Benjamin Dahlke, “ ‘Gott ist sein eigener Exeget.’ Hans Urs von Balthasar und die historischkritische Methode,” Theologie und Glaube 96 (2006): 191–202; W. T. Dickens, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics: A Model for Post-Critical Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Edward T. Oakes, S.J., “Balthasar’s Critique of the Historical-Critical Method,” in Glory, Grace, and Culture: The Work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Ed Block, Jr. (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), 150–74. ⁵⁷ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 82. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theological Anthropology (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967), 289. For a cognate view, see Sarah Coakley’s

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According to von Balthasar, therefore, to deem the narratives about Jesus’ Resurrection to be historically credible cannot be separated from entering by grace into the “drama of love” and contemplating the whole revelation of divine Love. Here his position shows his basic accord with Rousselot’s The Eyes of Faith, even as he freely develops Rousselot’s view in his own direction. Von Balthasar encourages those who seek to know the truth of Jesus to possess “a receptive disposition of pure letting-be,” of emptying or surrendering oneself in welcoming the divine Love that manifests itself unmistakably in Jesus.⁵⁸ The divine Word (Love) generates this receptive word (of love) on the part of the believer. If his Cross were merely an unintended death, then his teaching, from the beginning of his public ministry through his Last Supper, would lose its sense. The Logos or logic of his teaching and of his Cross is selfsacrifice in Love, complete powerlessness. This self-sacrifice is the nature of divine power, by contrast to the empty power of those who rely on anything other than self-sacrificial love. Against the view that only a fanatic could choose to undergo such self-sacrifice, von Balthasar argues that Jesus’ words and deeds show “no fanatical Dionysian exaltation” but only perfect obedience to a divine mission of Love.⁵⁹ In his utter kenosis or self-emptying, divine majesty shows itself as Love going to shocking lengths, fully bearing what is opposed to God.⁶⁰ Von Balthasar lays stress not so much upon the Resurrection of Jesus but upon his Ascension, which enables us to participate in a love that does not cling to the other but lets the other go, as befits the self-surrendering divine Love. This experience is never separated from the Cross, because we now participate liturgically in Christ’s Cross in a manner that makes present in our very midst “the living and resurrected Christ” in the Eucharist, as an eschatological sign of the new creation.⁶¹ At the same time, von Balthasar pays extensive attention to the judgment of this world, a judgment caused by human resistance to Love—and a judgment that, von Balthasar argues, Christ

argument that “a form of deepened spiritual perception . . . has to be in play if we are to account for seeing the risen Christ today, a possibility that much modern Western theology has either despaired of completely, or reductively demythologized” (Coakley, “The Resurrection and the ‘Spiritual Senses’: On Wittgenstein, Epistemology and the Risen Christ,” in her Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 130–52, at 130). Coakley draws attention to Wittgenstein’s statement that “Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 2nd ed., ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch [Oxford: Blackwell, 1998], 33e). ⁵⁸ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 83. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, “God Is His Own Exegete,” Communio 13 (1986): 280–7. ⁵⁹ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 86. ⁶⁰ See the forthcoming essays in Nova et Vetera by John Betz and Kenneth Oakes. ⁶¹ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 89.

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bears to the fullest extent, thereby fulfilling all God’s covenantal promises and exposing “the fiery abyss of divine love.”⁶² Von Balthasar holds that only when such self-surrendering Love is recognized does Christianity (including Jesus’ Resurrection) become credible; and when such Love is recognized, we realize that only such Love could be God. As von Balthasar puts it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”⁶³ This God alone, in his “inconceivable and senseless act of love,” is that than which nothing greater can be thought.⁶⁴ We could not have raised our minds to this God, whether through cosmic or anthropological structures, had not this God revealed himself as shocking Love. On this basis, von Balthasar defines the “contemplative life” as the life of complete self-surrender in love to Love, whether this takes shape through active works in the world or solely through study and prayer.⁶⁵ He warns against reducing the contemplative life to one of knowledge, since in fact the contemplation of Love primarily involves self-surrendering love, not any other form of ascent. At the same time, human action never has priority, since only the contemplation of Love can have priority. Von Balthasar observes, “Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognize it in action, even when it reveals itself to him in the face of the oppressed and humiliated.”⁶⁶ In this sense, prayer and the Eucharist—which is a contemplative remembrance, a “contemplation in love and the communion of love with love”—have absolute priority.⁶⁷ In the lives of the saints, von Balthasar finds this grounding in selfsurrendering Love.⁶⁸ He states, “The sole credibility of the Church Christ founded lies, as he [Jesus] himself says, in the saints, as those who sought to set all things on the love of Christ alone.”⁶⁹ In the self-surrendering love of the saints, Jesus’ Resurrection has all the credibility that it needs. Von Balthasar ⁶² Ibid., 93. On this apocalyptic judgment, see Cyril O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity, vol. 1: Hegel (New York: Crossroad, 2014), Part 4. ⁶³ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 101. On the theme of self-surrendering love, see also my The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction to His Trilogy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019). ⁶⁴ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 102. See Anselm’s argument for God’s existence in his Proslogion: Anselm, Monologion and Proslogion, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996). ⁶⁵ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 108. ⁶⁶ Ibid., 109. ⁶⁷ Ibid. See Nicholas Healy and David L. Schindler, “For the Life of the World: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Church as Eucharist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51–63. ⁶⁸ For discussion see Matthew A. Rothaus Moser, Love Itself Is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016). ⁶⁹ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 122.

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observes that the Incarnation is a uniting of God and humanity for the purpose of the Son’s radical self-sacrifice on the Cross. The Resurrection of Jesus, then, is the Son’s reception—and gift to the Father—of his “sacrificed nature (and thus the world) transformed and eternalized.”⁷⁰ The Resurrection of Jesus is the eternalizing of Jesus’ radical self-surrender, his mode of living human existence. To the Father, the risen Christ hands the whole world, now in its eternalized form of self-surrendering love. From von Balthasar’s perspective, then, the search for historical grounds on which to measure or defend the credibility of the Resurrection of Jesus is myopic or, to use von Balthasar’s Blondelian phrase for historical apologetics, “extrinsicist.”⁷¹ The real grounds for the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection can be seen only when we perceive and contemplate the full picture— namely, the manifestation of self-surrendering Love, bringing the whole world to the Father in an eternalized gift of self-surrender, as displayed by the saints. The historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus cannot be separated from the entirety of Love’s manifestation in Christ, and the historical truth of Jesus’ Resurrection will be known only by the person who in (graced) love can see the inbreaking of shocking divine Love in Christ and, derivatively, in his saints. Contemplation of Jesus’ Resurrection, therefore, bears within it a knowledge of the historical truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, when contemplation is truly contemplation in and of Love. While I think von Balthasar’s position is too quick to dismiss the contemplative work of reason unaided by faith, the strengths of his position should be evident. Lacking appreciation for divine self-surrendering love, we are unlikely to be able to perceive the truth of Christ.

CONCLUSION Each of these three perspectives has distinctive strengths. The chapter began with Aquinas, who shows that while the object of contemplation is truth, the motivation of contemplation is love. The truth contemplated by Christians is not merely abstract truth, but “truth in person,” truth revealed in Christ. All Christ’s actions instruct us; we contemplate the divine Father by contemplating Christ’s human words and deeds. If Christ’s words and deeds were unworthy of the Father or did not manifest the love and justice and mercy of the God of Israel, then they could not be true. It is through contemplation of

⁷⁰ Ibid., 127. ⁷¹ See Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).

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the whole of Christ’s life that we come to understand who he truly is—the risen Lord and Savior—in a relationship of friendship. Aquinas’s contemplation of Christ does not ask historical questions about the credibility of the Gospel portraits of Christ. Ratzinger brings such historical questions to the forefront. He recognizes that Christian contemplation and faith are impeded today by doubts about whether the biblical portraits of Jesus are trustworthy. If we cannot trust the biblical portraits of Jesus, how can we contemplate him? Thus, contemplation and historical questioning now have to go together. Ratzinger holds that contemplation of Jesus reveals the wholeness and coherence of the Bible itself, with Jesus as the key to this coherence. When we contemplate Jesus, we see that the New Testament’s testimony could not easily have been invented, and that only the Gospels’ presentations of Jesus enable us to understand the actual impact that he had, including his being worshipped by the early Christians. Had the disciples not firmly believed that Jesus had been raised, they could not have written what they did about Jesus; and the canonical coherence of what they wrote itself bears witness to the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. In Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection, we contemplate the scope of God’s redeeming love, and we see fulfilled the intimacy with God for which Israel yearned. Contemplating Jesus risen, we observe that his risen body displays eschatological glory within history—as befits an inaugurated kingdom that does not end the course of history. We also see that he manifests himself only to a few chosen people, as befits God’s way of teaching about himself in a manner that enters the world in humility and love rather than in power and proof. For his part, von Balthasar argues that contemplation touches upon the historical credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection (and other Christian claims) at an even deeper level, one that requires grace. He proposes that ultimately the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection rests upon whether we contemplatively perceive that this “truth in person” is divine Love, completely outside our human ability to invent, because our fallen and finite love cannot embrace difference and surrender in the supreme way that this divine Love does.⁷² When we see this utterly self-surrendering Love, we enter into the contemplative friendship or fellowship with the “truth in person” that Aquinas describes, and we understand how (as Aquinas says) Christ’s Resurrection reveals perfect goodness and perfect divine justice for our salvation. When we lack the love needed to contemplate this divine Love, the historical arguments in favor of Jesus’ Resurrection will be impeded by our empirical sense of the

⁷² As shown by the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Ratzinger likewise affirms this emphasis. See Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, Vatican trans. (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2006).

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seemingly absolute power of death.⁷³ But when Love incarnate moves us with its beauty and glory, we respond in love and contemplate Jesus’ Resurrection as the truth of Love. With regard to the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection, Ratzinger is right that when we contemplate Jesus as depicted in the Gospels, we see the canonical coherence of this portrait, which is evidence of the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. Contemplating Jesus shows us other evidences of the historicity of his Resurrection, and so supernatural faith and love are not requisite for coming to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead. But von Balthasar is right that it is our graced perception of radical divine Love in Jesus Christ that assures us most decisively that Jesus has indeed risen from the dead and wills to draw all things into his self-surrendering love. Aquinas is right that contemplation is fueled by love and that the contemplation of Jesus Christ is the contemplation of divine “truth in person.” My argument is that we can learn from these masters of contemplation to recover a mode of contemplation suitable for the task of evaluating the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection. As a praeambula fidei, conviction of the reasonableness of belief in Jesus’ Resurrection is not necessary for making the supernatural assent of faith. People come to faith due to encounter with Christ through his Body the Church, and due to the Spirit’s work. But the reductively patchwork mode of reconstructing the New Testament testimony, exemplified by Reza Aslan and Bart Ehrman, has not surprisingly impeded many people over the past two centuries from coming to faith. Rectifying this situation requires reintroducing contemplation—of the whole New Testament witness as it manifests itself to us canonically—as a central mode of understanding and assessing the truth of Jesus risen. Lonergan’s insights into the horizon of love in the previous chapter can be joined to this chapter’s insights into contemplation of Truth and Love in Person. A contemplative approach will enable the historical arguments of the book’s first four chapters to act upon our minds with their full persuasiveness.

⁷³ Von Balthasar similarly holds that the philosophical demonstrations of God’s existence are effective, de facto, only for those whose minds have been freed from rebellion by divine grace. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 322–5.

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7 Why Doesn’t the Risen Jesus Appear to Each Generation? I have reserved a pressing question for this final chapter, although the introduction of Chapter 2 touched upon it. Namely, if Jesus is risen, why does he not manifest his risen flesh to each generation? When the risen Jesus ascends into heaven, it is no wonder that his disciples gawk rather awkwardly at the spot where he disappeared from sight. They seem to be wondering what to do now. Two angels rebuke them: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?” (Acts 1:11).¹ The angels’ contention seems to be that “believers . . . have no need to hanker after the earthly presence of Jesus,” since he “has been exalted and glorified, and is Lord of all time and space.”² But that is easier said than understood, especially when the history of human sin and suffering continues apace.

¹ For detailed historical-critical studies of Acts 1:11 (and Luke 24:50–3, with related texts), see Arie W. Zwiep, The Ascension of the Messiah in Lukan Christology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997); Mikeal C. Parsons, The Departure of Jesus in Luke-Acts: The Ascension Narratives in Context (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987); Gerhard Lohfink, Die Himmelfahrt Jesu. Untersuchungen zu den Himmelfahrts- und Erhöhungstexten bei Lukas (Munich: Kösel, 1971); Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, vol. 1: Introduction and 1:1–2:47 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 711–32. See also Zwiep’s “Assumptus est in caelum: Rapture and Heavenly Exaltation in Early Judaism and Luke-Acts,” in Auferstehung—Resurrection, ed. Friedrich Avemarie and Hermann Lichtenberger (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 323–49; as well as his textual arguments in defense of the authenticity of the commonly received text of Luke 24:51–2 in his “The Text of the Ascension Narratives (Luke 24.50–3; Acts 1.1–2, 9–11),” New Testament Studies 42 (1996): 219–44, responding to Parsons, The Departure of Jesus in LukeActs, 29–52. Lohfink considers that the first Christians held that the risen Jesus was immediately (and invisibly) exalted to heaven after his (invisible) Resurrection, but that for theological reasons Luke changes this and delays Jesus’ exaltation by forty days. Zwiep and Parsons hold that Luke, drawing upon the story of the rapture of Elijah into heaven and Second Temple Jewish rapture stories, as well as upon the broader Graeco-Roman rapture tradition, intends the ascension narratives of Luke 24 and Acts 1 to function as descriptions of Jesus’ final Resurrection appearance. ² Anthony J. Kelly, CSsR, Upward: Faith, Church, and the Ascension of Christ (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 3.

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Although prior to his Ascension the risen Jesus refused to foretell when he would “restore the kingdom to Israel,” Jesus at the same time promised his apostles that they would “receive power” through the sending of the Holy Spirit. The purpose of this power is the building up of the inaugurated kingdom by spreading the gospel “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:6–8).³ When the Resurrection appearances were over and the risen Jesus “parted from them and was carried up into heaven” (Lk 24:51), the apostles were joyful.⁴ According to Luke, the apostles “returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God” (Lk 24:52–3). After receiving the promised Spirit at Pentecost, they proclaimed the good news that “God has made him both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36) and they “did great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8).⁵ Yet, around the same time, the apostles were beaten and imprisoned, the community faced internal divisions (see Acts 6:1), and the deacon Stephen became the first martyr. Due to Stephen’s bold preaching, “a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem; and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1). Saul, a leading Pharisee, undertook a search for Christians, punishing them wherever he found them: he “laid waste the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3). In fact, there must have been some believers in Jesus Christ whose faith became a bit wobbly at this stage. Some believers must have hankered greatly after the visible presence of the risen Jesus.⁶ By comparison, when after his Resurrection Jesus appeared to his previously despondent followers, this was a glorious event, changing history forever, and in the hopes of some of his followers bringing history (at least the history of sin and suffering) to an imminent end. In the Gospel of John, the risen Christ stands before doubting ³ For discussion see José Granados, DCJM, “The First Fruits of the Flesh and the First Fruits of the Spirit: The Mystery of the Ascension,” trans. William Hamant, Communio 38 (2011): 6–38, at 11. ⁴ J. I. H. McDonald speculates that “there was an acute sense in the early Christian communities that Jesus had gone away from them,” and he concludes that the Spirit “is the means by which the transcendent Father and Son are brought within our apprehension as accessible living presence” (McDonald, The Resurrection: Narrative and Belief [London: SPCK, 1989], 138–9). See also Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999). ⁵ For Zwiep, Acts 2:36 is important for showing that “[t]he idea that Luke separates exaltation from resurrection and transposes the exaltation of Jesus to the ascension forty days later cannot be sustained from the evidence” (“Assumptus est in caelum,” 345). See also James D. G. Dunn, “The Ascension of Jesus: A Test Case for Hermeneutics,” in Auferstehung—Resurrection, 301–22. Dunn notes that if the Ascension narrative is interpreted as simply the last Resurrection appearance of Jesus (and thus as his departure), this excludes the appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul. ⁶ On such hankering see the poetic depiction by Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, trans. Julian Green (New York: Pantheon, 1950), 52–5; cited in Granados, “The First Fruits of the Flesh and the First Fruits of the Spirit,” 7.

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Thomas and the latter proclaims: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28). In the Gospel of Matthew, the risen Jesus proclaims, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mt 28:18). Things must have seemed grand while the risen Jesus was making himself manifest after his Resurrection. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus seems to promise during his earthly ministry that the definitive consummation of all things will come very soon. He states, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mk 13:30). Admittedly, in the same context, Jesus also says that “of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk 13:32).⁷ The same ambiguity is found in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus observes to his disciples that “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” but also makes clear that prior to his return, the “gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations” (Mt 16:28; 24:14). Preaching to all nations would take some time. Paul reminds the Thessalonian Christians that no one knows “the times and the seasons,” because “the Lord will come like a thief in the night,” suddenly and surprising everyone (1 Thess 5:1–2). But Paul also seems to expect that the risen Jesus will come very soon to consummate his kingdom, since Paul assures the Thessalonians that “the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them” (1 Thess 4:16–17).⁸ The point here is simply that once Jesus had risen from the dead, the natural expectation of his first followers, inspired in part by his own words about the coming kingdom, must have been that he would soon consummate his kingdom, bringing about the full end of exile and the ingathering of the nations in the restored Messianic people of God. When his followers were instead very quickly embroiled in internal strife and external persecution, why did he ⁷ For recent discussion see Peter G. Bolt, Jesus’ Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark’s Early Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 252. On imminent eschatological expectation, see my Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit: Love and Gift in the Trinity and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 216–34. For a survey and critical evaluation of the scholarly discussion since Albert Schweitzer (and prior to 1975), see David E. Aune, “The Significance of the Delay of the Parousia for Early Christianity,” in Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation: Studies in Honor of Merrill C. Tenney Presented by His Former Students, ed. G. Hawthorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), 87–109. ⁸ N. T. Wright comments with regard to 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:11, “we should not be misled by the metaphor of going up on a cloud. The picture evokes Daniel 7.13, which uses this image to speak of the vindication of the covenant people after their suffering. It is, in other words, another way of saying what Paul said in Galatians 5.5: the people who belong to the one God will be vindicated. That vindication will consist, for those already dead, in their resurrection; for those still alive, in their transformation so that their body is no longer of the corruptible sort” (The Resurrection of the Son of God [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003], 215–16). For a much more skeptical view, see Outi Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48.

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remain sitting at the right hand of the Father, wielding divine authority but not healing the internecine conflicts, warfare, poverty, hunger, and disease that his followers experienced?⁹ The theologian Douglas Farrow sums up the difficulty: “The ascension, viewed from below as the incomprehensible absence of Christ—the divergence of his history from ours that leaves us gazing, dumbfounded, into the heavens—creates the eschatological tension that characterizes the present age and makes it a time of testing.”¹⁰ I affirm that Jesus’ Ascension enables believers to be configured to him by eucharistically participating in his self-sacrificial love and by sharing in his eschatological tribulation for the sake of the world. By his Ascension Jesus enables each believer to “cooperate” with him, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, “in uniting men to God, dispositively or ministerially.”¹¹ As the theologian Anthony Kelly observes, Christ’s Ascension is “the movement and horizon in which God’s ingathering action is occurring.”¹² Yet, during many moments in the past two millennia, would it not have been good to have the risen Jesus here? The crises and failures that have plagued the Church, the Holocaust committed by baptized Nazis and their collaborators against God’s Jewish people, and the wars and devastations that have plagued the world—just to name a few things— could surely have been averted or ameliorated by the appearance of the risen Jesus, even if he did not yet wish to consummate his kingdom.¹³ When the risen and ascended Jesus no longer shows himself in his glorified flesh, then the question inevitably becomes whether the disciples were mistaken after all. Why should we believe that, in the middle of history and seemingly without changing history, he was resurrected? What good did his Resurrection do anyone, and why would God have raised him gloriously from the dead if, as may appear, little else has changed for two millennia?¹⁴ Believers ⁹ For this concern as expressed by Origen’s opponent Celsus, see Origen, Against Celsus, II.67, trans. Frederick Crombie and W. H. Cairns, in Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, ed. A. Cleveland Coxe (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 395–669, at 458. See also Graham Stanton, “Early Objections to the Resurrection of Jesus,” in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, ed. Stephen Barton and Graham Stanton (London: SPCK, 1994), 79–94, at 80–4. ¹⁰ Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (London: T. & T. Clark International, 2011), 65. ¹¹ Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 26, a. 1. ¹² Kelly, Upward, 141. He underlines repeatedly that “the ascended Jesus is the realization of a new communication between God and the world. Because he who is most intimate to the Father became accessible in the flesh of this world, believers can now find their way to the Father and to a dwelling in his house (John 14:1–4)” (ibid., 142). ¹³ On the ascended Christ and history, see also the reflections in Peter J. Leithart, Revelation 1–11 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Leithart, Revelation 12–22 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). See also Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI’s discussion of Christ’s temptations in his Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 25–45. ¹⁴ David Bentley Hart addresses this concern in his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), especially Parts Two and Three.

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have asked from the outset why things are still such a mess, why there is “rebellion” and the workings of the “mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess 1:3, 7),¹⁵ along with “wars and rumors of wars,” “famines,” and “earthquakes in various places” (Mt 24:6–7). Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange points out, “In the liturgy, Christ is called King of angels, of apostles, of martyrs; moreover, Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands. In the symbol of faith [the Creed], we chant: ‘Whose reign will never end.’”¹⁶ But is it plausible to believe that his reign has begun? In examining this question in this final chapter, I recognize that Jesus never promised his disciples/apostles an earthly peace, despite the fact that he is now reigning. In revealing his reign of self-sacrificial love, Jesus warns explicitly: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt 10:34). In the Book of Acts, the risen and ascended Jesus, reigning at the right hand of the Father, commissions Ananias to carry this message to the new convert Saul/Paul: “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15–16). Prior to his death and Resurrection, Jesus tells his disciples that oppressors “will lay their hands on you and persecute you” and that there will be “distress of nations” (Lk 21:12, 25). The eschatological tribulation will continue, and believers will share in the path Jesus has trodden. Jesus offers us only his path of self-sacrificial love in the Spirit: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:24–5).¹⁷ The Church is called to bear “eucharistic witness to Jesus” and, incorporated into Christ by his Spirit, to be “with Jesus a community of ascension and oblation, sharing in his heavenly offering to the Father, and manifesting the Spirit who reorganizes created reality around him.”¹⁸ ¹⁵ On the “mystery of lawlessness” as present in fallen human politics, see Farrow, Ascension Theology, 98–120. ¹⁶ Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, Christ the Savior: A Commentary on the Third Part of St. Thomas’ Theological Summa, trans. Dom Bede Rose, OSB (Ex Fontibus, 2015), 677. ¹⁷ For reflection on Jesus’ presence, see Emmanuel Durand, OP, Jésus Contemporain. Christologie brève et actuelle (Paris: Cerf, 2017), 318. See also Kelly’s point, indebted to Farrow, that Jesus’ “risen and ascended body continues in its original connection with the material universe and in primal communication with all embodied persons—in order that they be embodied in the new creation as he himself embodies it . . . . The ascension, then, does not mean a dissolution of the incarnation into the infinite distance separating the divine realm from the human. It is rather an indication of the expansive reality of the incarnation, and of the eternal reconciliation of the divine and the human” (Upward, 50). ¹⁸ Farrow, Ascension Theology, 64, 113. See also Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 99–102. Torrance is fully aware, of course, that the Church also lives in “the time of human failure and sin, the time of dark and tragic history, the time of wrath, the time of crucifixion” (ibid., 101). See also Yves Congar’s observation

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As a Christian, N. T. Wright affirms, “The resurrection constitutes Jesus as the world’s true sovereign, the ‘son of god’ who claims absolute allegiance from everyone and everything within creation. He is the start of the creator’s new world: its pilot project, indeed its pilot.”¹⁹ For Wright, Jesus’ Resurrection launches the Church’s “worldwide mission . . . by inaugurating God’s new age.”²⁰ Here and now, through the Spirit’s outpouring, the ascended Jesus— the King of all creation—has established and continues to build up a community that is a sign of “the arrival of God’s kingdom precisely in the world of space, time and matter, the world of injustice and tyranny, of empire and crucifixion.”²¹ The Christian community is such a sign because its members, when living as they ought, worship God in self-sacrificial love, embody forgiveness, and strive through love to heal a world terribly wounded by sin.²² Note that Wright’s Christian optimism, rooted in the defeat of the powers of evil through the far greater power of Christ, does not imply that he thinks that “the world is basically all right.”²³ As Wright well knows, Jesus foretells that in the time following upon his Resurrection, “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places; all this is but the beginning of the sufferings” (Mt 24:7–8). Regarding the messianic community, Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew prophesies quite a bit of misery: “they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake” (Mt 24:9). Moreover, although the Church will be one and holy in its handing on of the merciful gifts of the Gospel (“the powers of death

regarding the inaugurated kingdom: “there is only one sacred reality, the body of Christ. It exists here below both in a sacramental form and in an ecclesial form, and in both cases it brings along with it a whole cluster of realities related to it which, because of that relationship, are also to some degree signs of our communion with God in Christ and thus become analogously sacred things” (Congar, “Where Does the ‘Sacred’ Fit into a Christian Worldview?,” in Congar, At the Heart of Christian Worship: Liturgical Essays of Yves Congar, trans. and ed. Paul Philibert, OP [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010], 107–32, at 126). ¹⁹ Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 731. ²⁰ Ibid., 734. See also Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 403; Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (New York: HarperCollins, 2012). ²¹ Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 737. See also C. Kavin Rowe, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ²² See N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2006). See also David Tombs, “Oscar Romero and Resurrection Hope,” in Resurrection, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 218–48; as well as David Elliot, Hope and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), especially chapters 6 and 7. ²³ Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, 25. Wright urges believers, through the power of love and forgiveness and by working for justice and peace, to bring “the reign of Jesus to bear in places where up to now the powers have held sway. The powers will not give in without a fight” (Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, 405). Jesus is orchestrating the “fight” (of self-sacrificial love) that we observe wherever his Eucharistic people are.

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shall not prevail against it” [Mt 16:18]), the Church will be also plagued by sinfulness and will endure terrible trials: “many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because wickedness is multiplied, most men’s love will grow cold” (Mt 24:10–12).²⁴ Jesus knew that all the misery that was in store both for the world and for his own Church. Yet, he still ascended to the Father rather than continuing to show us his glorified body. In this chapter, I argue that his purpose in so doing was (and is) to lead us to his Father’s house. We attain to the Father’s house as we ascend, in the Spirit, along Jesus’ path of self-sacrificial love to the eschatological “temple of his body” (Jn 2:23), already inaugurated in the earthly communion of the Church.²⁵ Ultimately, Jesus ascends because we must “go through the unique and final transitus, the one ‘passage’ of Christ through death to life.”²⁶ Jesus ascends—and does not continue his Resurrection appearances in the flesh—because we must “ascend.” The first section of the chapter, drawing upon Hans Urs von Balthasar and various New Testament texts, observes that fallen humans cleave to our lives in this world, as though we could be self-sufficient or as though the pleasures of temporal life were all that we need. We inevitably seek to claim Jesus’ Resurrection as merely another this-worldly reality that secures our thisworldly lives. Since this is so, ascension—Jesus’ and ours—is necessary. As Augustine puts it, we must here and now begin to climb “up from the valley of weeping [i.e., from the effects of human pride], singing our Song of Ascents; and the Lord is guarding our entrance that we may go into it and be safe.”²⁷ ²⁴ See Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012). For historical-critical discussion see W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 3: Commentary on Matthew XIX–XXVIII (London: T. & T. Clark International, 2004), 331. ²⁵ See Kelly, Upward, 26–30. Kelly directs attention to J. McCaffrey, The House with Many Rooms: The Temple Theme of John 14:2–3 (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1988) and Mary L. Coloe, PBVM, God Dwells with Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001). ²⁶ Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1954), 213. Bouyer explains that “this ‘passage,’ this perpetual abandonment of what is behind in order to meet the coming Kingdom and the coming King,” enables us not to “rest in any limited and temporal achievement” but instead to follow the path of “the final Exodus from time to Eternity” (ibid., 214). See also Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 68; as well as Steven C. Smith, The House of the Lord: A Catholic Biblical Theology of God’s Temple Presence in the Old and New Testaments (Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University Press, 2017), 371. ²⁷ Augustine, “Exposition of Psalm 120 [RSV Psalm 121],” in Essential Expositions of the Psalms by Saint Augustine, selected and introduced by Michael Cameron, trans. Maria Boulding, OSB, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2015) 73–91, at 90. Along these lines Farrow remarks, “The ascension of Jesus Christ is an act of saving grace” that “fully establishes the communion between God and man at which God was already aiming in the creation itself . . . . In bearing our humanity home to the Father, Jesus brings human nature as such to its true end and to its fullest potential in the Holy Spirit” (Farrow, Ascension Theology, 122).

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Given our need to “ascend,” the chapter’s second and final section examines the work of the biblical scholars Michael Morales and Brant Pitre, both of whom describe our Eucharistic ascent to the throne of Jesus Christ. Morales’s Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? carefully explores how Jesus fulfills the Temple sacrifices. According to Morales, the Temple sacrifices symbolized the transference of the worshiper to the realm of God, through an “ascent” by which humans would come to dwell perfectly with God.²⁸ As the fulfillment of the Temple sacrifices, the risen and ascended Jesus sends his Holy Spirit to enable us to ascend to him even now, through the liturgy of the Eucharist and by the daily path of self-sacrificial love. In turn, Pitre’s Jesus and the Last Supper describes a New Passover and New Exodus by which the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus seeks to draw Israel and the nations into his transcendent kingdom. Ascending with and toward Jesus in self-sacrificial love, we are sustained eucharistically by Jesus so that our Passover may be complete.²⁹

THE ASCENSION AND THE PATH OF THE CROSS Describing our worldly desire to defeat death by eluding it rather than by passing through it, Hans Urs von Balthasar remarks that “the world wants to live and rise again before it dies, while the love of Christ wants to die in order to rise again in the form of God on the other side of death.”³⁰ In the same vein, von Balthasar adds that the world wants “to eternalize that which is timebound,” and to do so on the world’s own terms, not God’s.³¹ We do not want to give up this earthly life; we do not want to go through the radical stripping and pruning that dying and death involve. We consistently prefer a hope that can “be constructed on the basis of the world.”³² Therefore, we wish for the

²⁸ See also Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73, 129, 136. On the earthly Temple as the realm of God, see Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 140, 142, 177–8. ²⁹ Granados notes that “Ephesians 4:10 (the Ascension as the moment at which Christ fills all things) is the foundation for Ephesians 1:22–3 (the Church as the fullness of Christ, whom the Father has constituted as Head). Because the Body of Christ is in God, because Christ has ascended above the heavens, even unto the very center of divine life, he can now fill all things, through his Body, the Church, including the cosmos itself. Clearly, then, Christ’s ascension into heaven does not make him remote from the world” (Granados, “The First Fruits of the Flesh and the First Fruits of the Spirit,” 26). See also Granados’s Teología de los misterios de la vida de Jesús (Salamanca: Sígueme, 2009). ³⁰ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 139. ³¹ Ibid. ³² Ibid., 140.

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risen Jesus to become a fully this-worldly reality, repeatedly and clearly manifesting himself to us in this world, so as to ground our this-worldly security against suffering and death. Von Balthasar goes on to point out that God’s own solution, which demands our sharing in Christ’s eschatological tribulation, “seems ‘desperate’ to the world-will; because it proposes death to this will, but for that very reason it reveals the world-will itself to be ‘desperate’, insofar as it has no power over death.”³³ In other words, we would like to have control of everything about ourselves and “to incorporate death as an intrinsic moment of life”; any other path seems crazy and utterly desperate, since it seems to give in to the enemy (death) without giving our will any power whatever to ensure that our will conquers.³⁴ Von Balthasar observes that God’s solution, requiring Jesus’ Ascension and ours, strikes a death-blow to our fallen desire for self-sufficiency. In fact, only such a path will save us, since our desire for self-sufficiency is a disordered desire; it contradicts the truth about ourselves and about all created being. The truth is that created being “subsists in no other way than in the ‘refusal-to-cling-to-itself.’ ”³⁵ We can only live insofar as we live in dependence upon God the life-giver. As rational creatures, we fail properly to be creatures when we fail to recognize that everything comes as God’s gift and that we subsist only by cleaving to God, not by cleaving to any creature (including to our own existence).³⁶ As von Balthasar says, therefore, “One’s consciousness, one’s self-possession and possession of being, can grow only and precisely to the extent that one breaks out of being in and for oneself in the act of communication, in exchange, and in human and cosmic sympatheia.”³⁷ This is the movement of self-surrendering love, whose fulfillment requires union with divine self-surrendering love—a movement that is at the heart of Jesus’ Ascension and that guides our ascension along his cruciform path. In this light, it should be clear that our desire to have the risen Jesus regularly manifest himself in his glorified flesh (as distinct from his sacramental body) contradicts what is actually good for us. The risen Jesus wants to give us a share in his eternal life, but this is a destiny to which we can only arrive by giving ourselves away in love. Fortunately, union with Christ’s self-sacrificial Cross is possible for us through the Spirit poured out by the risen and

³³ Ibid. For cognate reflections on death, see Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). ³⁴ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 141. ³⁵ Ibid., 144. See also Erich Przywara, SJ, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014); as well as Hugues Bohineust, Obéissance du Christ, obéissance du chrétien. Christologie et morale chez saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2017), especially chapter 1. ³⁶ See D. C. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 28–95. ³⁷ Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 144.

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ascended Jesus. In sharing in the Eucharistic liturgy, we are incorporated into his sacrificial body, through an eschatologically oriented reception of his risen flesh. Jean Corbon explains that in this sense “his Pasch or Passage is not behind us but within our time; the parousia is likewise not wholly in the future but has begun with the Ascension and is becoming more complete every day.”³⁸ In ascending, Christ works to unite his people, through his Spirit, to his own being “lifted up” (Jn 12:32) in his Passover. In the Gospels, we find Jesus repeatedly commending the path of the Cross. Jesus teaches that “he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me”; and he adds that “[h]e who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 10:38–9 and parallels). According to the Gospel of Matthew, this is the core of Jesus’ instruction to his twelve disciples as he prepares to send them out on mission, tasked with proclaiming the inaugurated kingdom of God. Jesus’ path, which calls sinners like ourselves to be transformed by the grace of the Holy Spirit, requires that we become selfgiving “sheep” rather than self-seeking “wolves” (Mt 10:16). We must learn how to reign eucharistically rather than striving to reign in accord with our fallen libido dominandi. However, this path of ascension is such a sign of contradiction in a world marked by disordered self-love that Jesus tells his disciples that “you will be hated by all for my name’s sake” (Mt 10:22; cf. Lk 2:34). God is trustworthy, and Jesus assures his disciples that “even the hairs on your head are all numbered” (Mt 10:30). We know that God hears the cry of the just, of those who are in any way “persecuted for righteousness’ sake” (Mt 5:10). As Corbon remarks, “The blood of all the oppressed people of history rises like a cry . . . . It is this that echoes unceasingly at the heart of the heavenly liturgy,” where Christ intercedes for his people.³⁹ At the same time, despite this terrible suffering, Jesus also asserts that “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt 11:30). When we lose our life by letting Christ reign within us in selfsacrificial love, we find our true life. Corbon comments that “history has entered into the great sabbath of the Christ, the long Holy Saturday during which the Living One communicates his life to the depths.”⁴⁰ Why is Jesus’ path of self-sacrificial love such a threat to the world (Jn 15:18–20)? Again, the answer is the depth of our worldly desire to be our own masters, to reign on earth in pride, rather than participating in Christ’s heavenly reign of love. The biblical scholars Francis Martin and William ³⁸ Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, 78. Granados directs attention to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 87–90, where von Balthasar argues that in making himself (and thereby all the mysteries of his life) powerfully present in the Church, the risen and ascended Jesus makes “eternity” (Trinitarian love) present in time. ³⁹ Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, 79. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 57, a. 6. ⁴⁰ Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, 82.

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Wright remark cogently, “One reason why it is so difficult to love as Jesus does is that we are sinners, bound up in prideful selfishness.”⁴¹ We cannot ascend when, in Augustine’s words, we act “solely for the sake of gaining some human advantage,” seeking temporal rather than eternal gain.⁴² We can only ascend when God makes “us alive together with Christ,” freeing us by grace from deadly captivity to our sins and enabling us to “sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:5–6). The Letter of James makes a similar point. James asks rhetorically, “What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and you do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war” (Js 4:1–2). Having identified the bitter fruits of our selfish desires, James explains why the path of Christ involves persecution. He observes, “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (Js 4:4).⁴³ The solution, says James, is to mourn our sins and to depend upon God rather than seeking to live “on the earth in luxury and in pleasure” without concern for God or neighbor (Js 5:5). As James states, “Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you” (Js 4:10), and he likewise notes (though without explicit reference to Jesus’ Ascension) that “[e]very good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights . . . . Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (Js 1:17–18).⁴⁴ In his Farewell Discourse, Jesus informs his incredulous disciples that “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you” (Jn 16:7). Jesus promises that his going away will bring about the salvation of the world. He teaches the crowd gathered around him that “when I am lifted up from the earth, [I] will draw all men to myself ” (Jn 12:32).⁴⁵ ⁴¹ Francis Martin and William M. Wright IV, The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 260. See also the constant warnings of Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke, OP (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). ⁴² Augustine, “Exposition of Psalm 120,” 84. ⁴³ See Luke T. Johnson, “Friendship with the World/ Friendship with God: A Study of Discipleship in James,” in Discipleship in the New Testament, ed. Fernando F. Segovia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 166–83, at 173. ⁴⁴ See Kelly Anderson, James, in Kelly Anderson and Daniel A. Keating, James, First, Second, and Third John (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 1–121, at 32. ⁴⁵ After commenting on the Greek verb “hupsoun” that is used in John 12:32, Torrance rightly draws the connections: “The raising up of Christ begins, paradoxically, with his crucifixion, and his ascension begins, paradoxically, with his lifting up on the Cross. . . . [T]he ascension of Christ in this sense is his exaltation to power and glory but through the Cross, certainly an exaltation from humiliation to royal majesty, but through crucifixion and sacrifice, for the power and glory of the Royal Priest are bound up with his self-offering in death and resurrection” (Space, Time and Resurrection, 111). Torrance directs attention here to William Milligan’s The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of Our Lord (London: Macmillan, 1892).

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To the Pharisee Nicomedus, Jesus makes the same point: “[A]s Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (Jn 3:14–15). This “lifting up” includes not only his Cross but also his Resurrection and Ascension. Therefore, believers must not cling to the risen Jesus in opposition to his “[ascending] to the Father” (Jn 20:17). He sustains his followers along his path of ascent by means of his scriptural word and sacraments, through the power of his Spirit. In his Church, through what Corbon calls “the kenosis of the Spirit,” we are united liturgically with the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus as children of his Father.⁴⁶ In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus warns sharply against our fallen tendency to cleave to this world and to our earthly lives above all else. He asks rhetorically, “For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” (Mt 16:25–6). We strive to gain “the whole world”—or at least to gain whatever we can get at the moment—but this is the impossible dream of fallen man, since we are doomed to die and cannot escape suffering. In parables, Jesus therefore calls us to conversion. Luke Timothy Johnson comments that in the parable of the banquet, in which various excuses are given for not attending, Jesus is condemning the “entanglement in one’s own possessions” that prevents a person from attaining the kingdom of God.⁴⁷ In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus warns that “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Lk 12:15). This might appear to be an obvious point, but in our fallen condition, we often cleave to possessions and to anything that makes us feel securely ensconced in the present life. To describe our situation, Jesus tells a parable in which a landowner rejoices to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry” (Lk 12:19). The landowner’s riches have become the basis for self-contented security. In the parable, God requires the life of this landowner that very night. Jesus draws the moral: “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Lk 12:21).⁴⁸ Again stating what should be obvious, Jesus warns against focusing our lives on food, clothing, and other marks of security. He gets to the rooted of our fear-filled self-focus by asking, “which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life?” (Lk 12:25), since we ultimately cannot stop death from coming for us, even if we think we can perhaps keep it at bay for a little bit. ⁴⁶ Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, 84–6. Corbon amplifies his point: “The eternal liturgy, which Jesus celebrates at his Ascension and which takes form in his Church, permeates our world of death and gives it life; but the locus of this encounter and the path its light takes are always the body of Christ” (ibid., 87). ⁴⁷ Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 232. ⁴⁸ See Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Anderson, Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

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The problem is not the material things, which are good and necessary for our life, and which Jesus calls us to share with the poor. Rather, the problem is our desire for self-sufficiency. Jesus urges us to turn freely, in love, to the good God who is the source of all created goods: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk 11:13). After all, God created us in order to give us the greatest possible gift, himself. Thus, the reason that Jesus now reigns at the right hand of the Father, pouring out his gifts (Eph 4:8–10), is to unite us to his path of self-sacrificial love by which we are able to dwell with him in the Father’s presence. As Thomas Torrance says, “Even in ascension the power of Christ is exercised through his sacrifice.”⁴⁹ By his self-sacrificial love on the Cross, to whose redemptive power he unites us through the Spirit, the risen and ascended Jesus enables us to ascend to the Father’s presence.⁵⁰ Rather than desiring that the risen Jesus appear in his glory to confirm us in our worldly security, we must choose to “share Christ’s sufferings” (1 Pet 4:13), having been baptized into his death. We must pray to God “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him” (1 Pet 3:21–2).⁵¹ We must learn what it means for Christ to reign in our lives and for us to reign in Christ. We have no security other than God, who has loved us in Christ and shown us the path of love. In sum, had the risen Jesus continued to manifest his glorified body regularly on earth, we would have assimilated him to our fallen demand for this-worldly security based upon pride and power. But the risen Jesus is not a this-worldly superhero who functions to secure our worldly life. Our true good, our true happiness, is only found when we ascend to our “heavenly Father” in self-sacrificial love as his sons and daughters in Christ, a communion whose perfection will be the consummated “kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:10, 48).⁵² Thus, after instructing Mary Magdalene not to “hold” him, Jesus tells her that “I am ascending to my Father and our Father, to my God and your God” (Jn 20:17).⁵³ When by God’s grace we love the ascended Lord, we ⁴⁹ Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 112. ⁵⁰ Torrance clarifies the crucial point that we do not make “a Pelagian offering of ourselves in addition to the sacrifice of Christ,” even though our salvation hinges upon being united to the sacrifice of Christ by the Spirit sent upon us by the ascended Christ (Space, Time and Resurrection, 117). ⁵¹ For discussion of 1 Peter’s portrait of Christian life in light of Jesus’ Resurrection, see J. I. H. McDonald, The Resurrection, 21. ⁵² See William C. Mattison, The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Servais Pinckaers, OP, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble, OP (Washington, DC.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 22–4. ⁵³ For discussion see Moloney, The Gospel of John, 526–7.

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dwell with him and his Father even now and, in the joy of the kingdom inaugurated by his pouring out of the Spirit, we are enabled in our earthly life “to bear the reproach of Christ, to witness to him as Saviour and Lord, to participate in his ministry of reconciliation and to live in the world the new life in him.”⁵⁴

MICHAEL MORALES AND BRANT PITRE: ASCENSION O FFERING AND NEW E XODUS The theologian Servais Pinckaers has observed that “each time we accept to commit ourselves to the path of one of the beatitudes, the Lord Himself mysteriously accompanies us by the grace of His Spirit, and travels anew, with us, and in us, the road to the Kingdom which He has taught us.”⁵⁵ With regard to this path of self-surrendering love, Scripture provides two central images that I will explore in this section, drawing upon the work of the Old Testament scholar Michael Morales and the New Testament scholar Brant Pitre: the ascent of God’s holy mountain and the New Exodus. These scriptural images shed light upon why Jesus refused to live permanently among us in his risen flesh (as distinct from his Eucharistic body). As Douglas Farrow emphasizes, we are in no case dealing with an “ascension of the mind” or with “an absent Jesus and a present Christ”; instead we have to do with Jesus’ having “gone in the flesh to the Father,” to be presented by the Spirit to the Father as “beloved son and heir” and to be presented by the Spirit to us as “brother and Lord.”⁵⁶

Michael Morales: Jesus the Perfect Ascension Offering In his study of the Book of Leviticus, Morales argues that not only for Leviticus but for the Old Testament as a whole, “The yearned-for goal of Israel’s life, experienced regularly through the cult, is YHWH’s mountain abode . . . . To gaze upon his splendour, upon his face—this one thing is both the end and the

⁵⁴ Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 122. For insight into this reality, mingled with a deep sense of the goodness of election (and of the fruitfulness of contemplative life), see Elizabeth of the Trinity, The Complete Works, vol. 1, trans. Aletheia Kane, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1984). ⁵⁵ Servais Pinckaers, OP, The Pursuit of Happiness—God’s Way: Living the Beatitudes, trans. Mary Thomas Noble, OP (New York: Alba House, 1998), 202. ⁵⁶ Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, 259, 262, 266–7. Farrow is indebted here to Torrance: see for example Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 26.

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fount of Israel’s most profound longings.”⁵⁷ Israel yearns for the union of humans with the covenantal Creator God. Putting this point even more strongly, Morales proposes that “the history of redemption, along with all of its narrative drama, is driven by one theological theme: YHWH’s opening a way for humanity to dwell in the divine Presence.”⁵⁸ Our earthly lives can be rewarding, but they may seem to be conducted solely on an earthly plane and to lead simply to everlasting death. Prompted by God’s revelation of his love for Israel and for his whole creation, Israel desires to dwell with God, no longer separated from him by sin and death. Jesus Christ fulfills this desire. Morales identifies the purpose of Jesus’ Ascension as follows: “How does the Son make possible our entrance into the heavenly abode of God? . . . (1) Christ’s humanity must ascend into the heavenly reality, and (2) Christ’s Spirit must descend to earth, in order to unite us to him in that heavenly reality.”⁵⁹ In Christ, we now have open access to God’s presence. This is why, in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells Philip, “you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (Jn 1:51; cf. Gen 28:12).⁶⁰ This access to God has its perfection in the glorified humanity of the risen Jesus. For this reason, it is the risen Jesus who is the perfection of the Temple. Morales notes that Jesus makes this point in John 2:19, where he refers prophetically to his risen body as the true Temple. In his risen body, Jesus is the way for us “to enter the Presence of the Father, to be reconciled to him, [and] to have union with the Godhead.”⁶¹ Since this is so, then it seems to follow that the risen Jesus should have immediately taken up his abode visibly and triumphantly on earth. In response, Morales draws attention to John 14, where Jesus says that he is going to “prepare a place” for us (Jn 14:3) and promises that “[i]n my Father’s house are many rooms” (Jn 14:2).⁶² Jesus identifies himself as “the way” and states that “no one comes to the Father, but by me” (Jn 14:6). The point of Jesus’ discourse is that Jesus will journey to the Father, and then will assist us in coming to the Father in Jesus, through his Spirit. Morales explains that Jesus’ “sacrifice is the journey as well as the means of ascent,” because Jesus’ sacrifice ⁵⁷ L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 254. ⁵⁸ Ibid., 254–5. ⁵⁹ Ibid., 260. ⁶⁰ For further theological discussion see Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 123, 129–33. ⁶¹ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 263. See also G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 395. Similarly, although Mary Coloe in my view exaggerates the impact of the post- 70 destruction of the Jerusalem Temple for the Gospel of John’s theology, she is quite right that for the Gospel of John, “[a]s once God had dwelt in Irael through her holy places, the Ark, Tabernacle, and Temple, God has given all people a new holy dwelling place in the living flesh of Jesus” (Coloe, God Dwells with Us, 214). ⁶² For discussion of John 14 in light of “[t]his Gospel’s practice of balancing traditional and realized eschatology,” see Moloney, The Gospel of John, 394–5.

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in love bears the penalty of sin and conveys Jesus’ humanity into the “heavenly abode of God.”⁶³ In his Second Coming, Jesus will come in his glorified body “to usher his people into the house of the new heavens and earth, to dwell with the Father in glory for ever.”⁶⁴ Morales places the crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus in the light of the Temple sacrifices. He argues that Jesus’ Resurrection served “to shatter the disciples’ old paradigm,” in which Israel’s cultic worship symbolized the transference of the sanctified people “from the earthly to the heavenly realm.”⁶⁵ Now that this transference has happened in Jesus, it is clear that the transference involves not a glorious continuation of earthly life, but something radically different. Morales comments, “The life of the new Israel is a post-resurrection life; more than this, it is nothing less than ascension life, life in heaven with God.”⁶⁶ Citing Hebrews 10:1–10, Morales states that “Jesus’ whole life was that to which the ascension offering gestured, morning and evening,” and he concludes that “Jesus’ life, death and resurrection ascent are now to Israel what all the Levitical cultus once was—and more.”⁶⁷ Because Morales holds that Jesus’ path (in his humanity) to life with God is best understood as an “ascension offering,” Morales in an earlier part of his book carefully explores the various kinds of sacrificial offerings commanded by the Torah.⁶⁸ He describes the significance of burning the sacrificial animal on the altar: “After the animal’s blood is manipulated, part or the whole of the animal is burned up and turned into smoke on the altar. The Hebrew verb used for this process of buring, hiqt ị̂ r, is a technical term in Scripture for cultic

⁶³ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 266. The key point is well expressed by Torrance: “The withdrawal of Christ from visible and physical contact with us in our spacetime existence on earth and in history means that Jesus Christ insists in making contact with us, not first directly and immediately in his risen humanity, but first and foremost through his historical involvement with us in his incarnation and crucifixion. That is to say, by withdrawing himself from our sight, Christ sends us back to the historical Jesus Christ as the covenanted place on earth and in time which God has appointed for meeting between man and himself ” (Space, Time and Resurrection, 133). ⁶⁴ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 266. ⁶⁵ Ibid., 269. On the “heavenly realm,” see Kelly, Upward, 148–9. Kelly draws attention to the formulation of Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 400–1: “The significance of the Ascension is not exhausted by the glorification of the Lord; for besides the accomplished Ascension there is also the Ascension that is in the process of being accomplished: this is the glorification of the creaturely, not yet glorified, earthly humanity, which, however, is naturally identical to that of Christ. In this sense the Ascension is continuing; it is the beginning and the end, the foundation and the goal: God has ‘raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus’ (Eph. 2:6).” ⁶⁶ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 269. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 270. See also Kelly’s discussion of Hebrews’s depiction of “the activity of the ascended and glorified Jesus in heaven . . . in terms of the high priestly Temple ritual” (Kelly, Upward, 37; cf. 165–6). ⁶⁸ See also the background about the Greek verb “anabainein” summarized in Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 107.

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burning, signifying the transformation of the sacrifice into smoke.”⁶⁹ While all the sacrifices of Israel involved a burning on the altar that transformed the animal’s flesh into smoke that ascends to God, Morales specifies that the “ascension offering” stands as “the hiqt ị̂ r rite par excellence, in which the whole animal was turned into smoke as a pleasing aroma.”⁷⁰ The daily offerings, a lamb in the morning and one in the evening, were both “ascension offerings,” meaning that the whole animal was burnt on the altar. Morales highlights the symbolism of “absolute surrender and total selfdedication” that marks the ascension offering. He also emphasizes the dimension of transformation: the animal becomes an ascending smoke.⁷¹ Most importantly, the ascension offering symbolized the transference of the animal—and thus of the people—“from the ordinary earthly plane to the divine heavenly realm.”⁷² Recall that for Morales the key to the covenant is that “YHWH aims to dwell among his people, who are brought into his Presence to enjoy him.”⁷³ The path to the divine Presence is total self-surrender in love, a “life that must ascend as a pleasing aroma to the heavenly abode of God.”⁷⁴ Christ’s whole life is this path, and it culminates in his Resurrection and Ascension, through which his complete ascent to God—his fulfillment of the ascension offering—is enacted. Christ establishes himself as the true Temple; in his crucifixion, the Temple’s veil is rent in two, and we see the face of God.⁷⁵ Christ has accomplished the perfect ascension offering, and we are called to share in what he has done. He has already entered “the realm of the eschaton” and he pours out the Spirit so as to unite us even now to his eschatological life. Morales comments that “through the outpoured Spirit, believers are united to the ascended Jesus Christ, born from above, and are enabled with all the church to make the heavenly ascent.”⁷⁶ The purpose of the risen and ascended ⁶⁹ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 132. For further details about the various kinds of sacrificial offerings, see Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 21–45. ⁷⁰ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 133. ⁷¹ Ibid., 135. David Augustine has directed my attention in this regard to the Eucharistic theology of Matthias Joseph Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity, trans. Cyril Vollert, SJ (New York: Crossroad, 2006), 506, 510. ⁷² Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 136. ⁷³ Ibid., 139. ⁷⁴ Ibid., 269. See Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ, Abandonment to Divine Providence, ed. H. Ramière, SJ, trans. E. J. Strickland (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011). ⁷⁵ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 282; cf. 304. See also Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 17. ⁷⁶ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 283. See also Andrew T. Lincoln, “ ‘I Am the Resurrection and the Life’: The Resurrection Message of the Fourth Gospel,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 122–44, at 131; as well as Andrew T. Lincoln, Paradise Now and Not Yet: Studies in the Role of the Heavenly Dimension in Paul’s Thought with Special Reference to His Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 192. See also Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 138.

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Jesus is to bring us even now to where he is, dwelling with the Father in the Spirit. According to Morales, this transference happens primarily through the new-Temple liturgy of the Eucharist. He observes that the “heavenly reality is tasted and renewed liturgically, in the corporate Spirit-enabled approach of God’s people, as they ascend with Jesus to the heavenly Mount Zion, Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day, through the new and living way—the veil of Jesus’ flesh.”⁷⁷ The risen Jesus does not need to remain on earth in his visible glorified flesh, because his priestly sacrifice—the perfect ascension offering in which we share liturgically—“usher[s] God’s people into the heavenly Presence of the Father.”⁷⁸ As Douglas Farrow puts it, “the eucharist is left behind as the means of participation in the offering that Christ in his ascension presents to the Father.”⁷⁹ This accentuation of the Eucharist does not mean that the risen and ascended Christ is not present on earth in other ways, such as in the congregation gathered in prayer, in the proclamation of the word, in the other sacraments, and so on.⁸⁰ But the Eucharist is the primary way that the ascended Christ unites us to his ascension offering and ushers us into the Father’s presence, even as we still await “with eager longing” (Rom 8:19) the eschatological consummation when death will be no more and when we will see God “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12).

Brant Pitre: Jesus the New Passover for the New Exodus Although Morales identifies Jesus as the true Passover lamb and observes that Jesus’ “passage from death to life” is the New Exodus,⁸¹ these themes are not central to Morales’s book. By contrast, they are central to Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Last Supper, which includes chapters on “The New Moses,” “The New Manna,” “The New Passover,” and “The Eucharistic Kingdom of God.” Much of Pitre’s work consists in arguing that Jesus himself, at the Last Supper, understood his words and deeds in terms of a New Passover for a New Exodus. Pitre notes that Jesus gathers twelve disciples, symbolizing the twelve tribes. He teaches and feeds the crowds like Moses. In the Gospel of John, he ⁷⁷ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 283. Note that Morales holds to a Reformed account of the Lord’s Supper. ⁷⁸ Ibid., 305. He directs attention to Yves Congar, OP, The Mystery of the Temple, or, the Manner of God’s Presence to His Creatures from Genesis to the Apocalypse (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1962), 230–2. ⁷⁹ Farrow, Ascension Theology, 66. Farrow refers us to Book IV.18 of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies. ⁸⁰ See Avery Dulles, SJ, Church and Society: The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988–2007 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 455–67, at 460–1. ⁸¹ Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 277.

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promises to feed the people with the true manna, “the living bread which came down from heaven” (Jn 6:51)—namely himself. Observing that it was common for prophets to enact symbolic signs, Pitre holds that the Last Supper was just such a sign, indicative of a New Passover (and a New Temple sacrifice) for a New Exodus. As Pitre points out, Jesus’ words of institution constitute evidence that he expected “some kind of interim period in which the new covenant will already be inaugurated but the messianic kingdom will not yet be fully consummated.”⁸² Jesus presented himself as the new Temple and as the source—through his sacrificial act on the Cross—of the definitive new covenant. Commenting on 1 Corinthians 5, Pitre suggests that “Paul’s identification of Christ as the Passover lamb is part of a larger description of the Christian assembly as the true feast of Unleaved Bread,” the true Passover.⁸³ Passover meant escape from Egyptian slavery and the promise of worshiping the living God and dwelling in the Promised Land. Through the blood of the Passover lamb, each Israelite family avoided the plague of the death of the firstborn son, a plague that Pharaoh’s rebellion against God brought upon Pharaoh’s people.⁸⁴ Similarly, through the “new covenant in my blood” (Lk 22:20), Jesus’ followers are able to escape everlasting slavery to sin and death. As the firstborn Son, Jesus takes on himself the punishment due to all humanity. Nourished by Jesus through the Eucharist, his people can endure the tribulations of the present life in following him to (and, in part, already dwelling with him in) the true Promised Land, the kingdom of God. In Pitre’s view, Jesus presents himself at the Last Supper as “the new Passover lamb who will be sacrificed for the redemption of the new Israel in a new exodus.”⁸⁵ A “new exodus” requires the people’s restoration to the land; but in fact the northern tribes of the people of Israel had been irretrievably ⁸² Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 436. ⁸³ Ibid., 440. The liturgical historian Bryan D. Spinks, in his Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (London: SCM Press, 2013), 1–29, surveys a great deal of secondary literature on the New Testament’s descriptions of the Last Supper ritual. Although he avoids any unifying account for understanding the reality depicted by the New Testament, he is willing to affirm that (whether for historical or theological reasons) “the cumulative witness of the New Testament associates the last meal with the time of Passover, even if it was not actually celebrated on the Passover” (ibid., 6). For the view that Jesus was celebrating the Passover meal but was using the pre-exilic calendar in order to underline his claim to being the new Moses, see Colin J. Humphreys, The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ⁸⁴ Whether this story is historical and typological, or primarily typological, in God’s providential plan for Israel is something that Christian theologians can leave open, though without presupposing an unnecessary skepticism. In this regard, see chapter 7 of my Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation: The Mediation of the Gospel Through Church and Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014). For diverse views of the Exodus events, see for example Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2017); Thomas B. Dozeman, Exodus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009). ⁸⁵ Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 442–3.

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scattered among the nations, beginning around 722 . Granted that Jesus expected to gather the scattered people, Pitre asks whether “Jesus expect[ed] a literal, geographical return of the lost tribes to the earthly land of Israel.”⁸⁶ Pitre answers in the negative. He builds a case that the banquet of the kingdom must be thought to take place not in the earthly Jerusalem, but in a heavenly or transcendent Jerusalem. Especially in light of Matthew 8:11 (Lk 13:28), where Jesus foretells that “many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven,” Pitre holds that we are dealing with something that involves the dead, whether in the intermediate state or as resurrected. In some way, the restoration and the banquet have to do with a condition that is “discontinuous with the present world,” rather than being a simple matter of returning to the earthly Jerusalem for a meal.⁸⁷ Pitre also argues that the ingathering or restoration must include Gentiles, who belong to those who “come from east and west”—as logically must be the case given that the exiled ten northern tribes mingled with the Gentiles and lost their distinctive identity.⁸⁸ Pitre therefore endorses the view of Dale Allison that the “kingdom of God” is even now a “heavenly realm over which God already reigns, into which the righteous can enter.”⁸⁹ He pays close attention to Matthew 26:29 (Mk 14:25 and Lk 22:18), where Jesus says to his disciples at the Last Supper, “I tell you I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” In anticipating drinking the “fruit of the vine” again, does Jesus expect to drink it only when God’s kingdom fully arrives in the earthly city of Jerusalem? Or does Jesus have in view his Father’s kingdom in the intermediate state, or perhaps in the radically transformed new heavens and new earth? Pitre accepts that no answer can be gleaned from Jesus’ words at the Last Supper. But on the basis of other texts, he considers it likely that Jesus “expects, after dying and being restored to life, to enter into the eschatological banquet of the heavenly kingdom.”⁹⁰ In Pitre’s view, it is also evident that Jesus anticipates an interim period prior to the general resurrection and that Jesus conceives of a separation between “Gehenna” (the realm of the damned) and the kingdom banquet (the realm of the just) prior to the general resurrection.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 446. The argument that Jesus expected to gather the scattered people is made in detail by Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005). ⁸⁷ Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 474. ⁸⁸ See also N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996); Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2007). ⁸⁹ Ibid., 475. Pitre cites Dale C. Allison, Jr., “The Kingdom of God and the World to Come,” in Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 164–203. ⁹⁰ Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 497.

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It follows that the kingdom banquet is ongoing now, with Jesus at its head. Seated at the right hand of the Father, Jesus does not simply watch and wait while his followers partake in the Eucharist. Rather, he partakes in the kingdom banquet prior to the general resurrection and the establishment of the new heavens and new earth.⁹¹ In this regard Pitre attends to Matthew 26:64 (Mk 14:62 and Lk 22:69), where Jesus proclaims that “from now on you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Pitre argues that this Danielic “coming” is not a coming to earth; rather it is an ascending to God’s throne. The New Exodus inaugurated by Jesus has its terminus not in the earthly city of Jerusalem but at the right hand of the Father. Through the New Exodus, we partake in the new Passover lamb and new manna, which is Jesus himself. We are thereby configured to Jesus and strengthened for our task of sharing in his salvific tribulation so as to arrive at his glorious exaltation. Pitre’s work is significant for my purposes because, like Morales, he illuminates the scriptural worldview within which it makes sense that the risen Jesus does not remain on earth. The purpose of the new Passover meal is to gather Israel and the Gentiles in the eschatological kingdom of God. The risen and ascended Jesus is already present in his kingdom, enjoying the “banquet” that is the symbol of eschatological consummation. The goal of the New Exodus is for this consummation to spread to all God’s people. When God wills for this interim period to be over, all the blessed will dwell everlastingly with God in their resurrected flesh in the new heavens and new earth. Since the terminus of the New Exodus is where Christ is now, obviously the risen Christ would mislead us if he stayed on earth. Instead, he must be present to us in ways that spur our journey in and toward him and that already give us a foretaste in the Spirit of the consummation of our journey. This is precisely what the Eucharist does. According to Pitre, therefore, God’s people, even in the midst of terrible sufferings, are already beginning to enjoy the eschatological kingdom, which is present where Jesus is present. Israel and the nations are “already beginning to be gathered into the banquet of the heavenly and eschatological kingdom.”⁹² In sum, the risen Jesus does not need repeatedly and publicly to make visible his glorified body in order to encourage his people. On the New Exodus in Christ and guided by his Spirit, we press forward in joyful anticipation to full union with him where he is. At every moment, we look to the eschatological kingdom that Jesus has “enter[ed] in advance.”⁹³ Pitre thus makes essentially

⁹¹ Pitre’s perspective has affinities with the Eucharistic theology of Alexander Schmemann. See for example Schmemann’s For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, 2nd ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 26–7. ⁹² Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 516. ⁹³ Ibid., 517.

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the same point that we found in Morales, but from a different direction, filling out the biblical portrait of the meaning and purpose of Jesus’ Ascension.

CONCLUSION This chapter began with the predicament of the apostles in the Book of Acts, awkwardly “looking into heaven” (Acts 1:11) as Jesus ascended. The question was why the risen Jesus rose to the right hand of the Father, leaving believers to face the terrible “woes” (Rev 9:12) that continue to devastate human life on earth, given that it seems that many such woes could be avoided if the risen Jesus visibly manifested himself at regular intervals. As Anthony Kelly puts the problem, “So great is the Christian sense of solidarity with suffering others . . . that a celebration of the ascension cannot but appear as a fantastic distraction from the present world of grief.”⁹⁴ In response, I emphasized first that Jesus commands us to take up our cross, to deny ourselves, and to lose our life for his sake in order to find it. We must renounce all that we have, and we must love each other in the way that Jesus loved us. His Cross is the path of ascent. As the theologian Gerrit Scott Dawson comments in his Jesus Ascended: “Following Christ into our place with him in heaven involves ascending in the way of love . . . . The heavenly life of Christ directs us away from pursuing the world, with its goods, its corridors of power and arenas of entertainment, but at the same time sends us right into the world with all the sympathies of our Lord to the least and the lost.”⁹⁵ For fallen humans, admittedly, this can sound disappointing! We dislike the path of the Cross, often because we do not understand (or even wish to understand) how such a path could truly be good for us. At most, the path of the Cross seems likely to make those who follow it into the oppressed and miserable of the world. In a certain way, this is no exaggeration, as when Paul says of himself and the other apostles: “To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless . . . . [W]e have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things” (1 Cor 4:11, 13). Yet, our true happiness consists in giving ourselves in love to God, and this requires loving our neighbor, each of whom bears the imago Dei and is a brother or sister of the Lord. This is why, as Paul goes on to say, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends . . . . Make love your aim” (1 Cor 13:7–8; 14:1). Our instinctive dislike of Jesus’ path of self-sacrificial love might be lessened if the risen Christ regularly and unmistakably manifested his glorified body to ⁹⁴ Kelly, Upward, 11.

⁹⁵ Dawson, Jesus Ascended, 177, 179.

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the world. But, as noted above, we would then cleave to the risen Christ as a sign of our hoped-for security and power in this world. Farrow rightly remarks that the ascension-healing of fallen humans requires “the fitting of the soul to its true centre in the ascended Christ,” since “Christ himself is the one through whom and with whom we make our transition to glory.”⁹⁶ We must become “a new creation” by being “in Christ” (2 Cor 4:17), and we must realize that our “life is hid with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Even now, having “been raised with Christ,” we must “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col 3:1). Morales and Pitre each explore how the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus Christ has opened the path for humans to dwell with God. For both scholars, Scripture teaches that Christ now reigns in the eschaton, the heavenly or transcendent realm that will eventually, at the consummation of all things, become the fullness of the new creation. The human task is to follow Christ’s path of self-sacrificial love so as to ascend, as he did in his humanity, to the presence of the Father in the Holy Spirit. We do this already in faith, hope, and love, as we await the consummation of all things. In the New Exodus, we are nourished and configured to Christ by the Eucharist, which is the new Passover lamb and new manna. By enabling us to share in Christ’s descent, the Eucharist enables us to share in Christ’s ascent, in the eschatological banquet that Christ enjoys already at the right hand of the Father. United to his descent by the self-sacrificial path of love (the New Exodus), we are enabled to join the risen and ascended Jesus, rather than insisting upon pulling him back into this-worldly appearances as security for the maintenance of our earthly lives. Elsewhere, Pitre employs a different biblical image to describe what Jesus has accomplished. He states that Jesus “was the bridegroom God of Israel come in the flesh. As the Bridegroom Messiah, his mission was not just to teach the truth, or proclaim the kingdom, but to forgive the sinful bride of God and unite himself to her in an everlasting covenant of love.”⁹⁷ God chose his people Israel for the purpose of uniting himself intimately, with a love so intimate as to be marital, to the human race. But why, if Jesus is our bridegroom, did he depart from his apostles and ascend to the right hand of the Father? Pitre answers that Jesus did so in order to draw as many people as possible into the completion of “the marriage of God and humanity in the great ‘wedding supper’ at the end of time.”⁹⁸ Referencing John 14:1–3, Pitre explains that “in first-century Judaism, it was the duty of the bridegroom to go and prepare a place for his bride to dwell before he took her to himself.”⁹⁹ We are intended ⁹⁶ Farrow, Ascension Theology, 134–5. ⁹⁷ Brant Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told (New York: Random House, 2014), 4. ⁹⁸ Ibid., 115. ⁹⁹ Ibid., 117.

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to dwell in the heavenly Temple, the new Jerusalem, eschatologically constituted even now by Christ at the right hand of the Father. In this regard John Chrysostom draws a contrast between the Resurrection and the Ascension: “for in the Resurrection they [the apostles] saw the end, but not the beginning, and in the Ascension they saw the beginning, but not the end.”¹⁰⁰ Thus, the glory of the Father is present at the source of the unseen event of raising Christ, and the glory of the Father is also present as the unseen “end” to which Christ ascends. Through the Holy Spirit, we can share even now in this end: as Chrysostom says, “it was fit that our nature should be seen in heaven, and that the reconciliation should be perfected, and then the Spirit should come, and the joy should be unalloyed.”¹⁰¹ In conjunction with the Ascension, the Resurrection confirms to us that the Cross was not the final fate of Jesus. The theologian Graham Cole remarks, stating the obvious, “A dead Christ cannot open the kingdom to anyone.”¹⁰² By manifesting his Resurrection to the apostles, Christ shows that God has vindicated his Son’s self-sacrificial love, thereby demonstrating that he is indeed the Messiah who has conquered the slavery of sin and death and who has inaugurated the promised kingdom. Tracing the biblical pattern of descent and ascent, Farrow concludes that the “true goal” of not only the crucifixion but also the Resurrection “is a homecoming—reception in the Father’s house,” the true Temple.¹⁰³ The meaning of Jesus’ Resurrection, then, is precisely this “upward call” in love, which leads ultimately, at the final consummation, to our resurrected glory in the communion of saints and the new heavens and new earth.¹⁰⁴ In sum, having already borne “our humanity home to the Father,” the risen and ascended Jesus calls us to dwell in the glory of the divine Presence, to which we should respond with “radical joy.”¹⁰⁵ We can do so only if we renounce our cleaving to temporal, worldly things, and if we embrace, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, the path of self-sacrificial love. Had the risen Jesus stayed with us in this earthly life, his presence could only have confused us, because our final destiny is not the present world but the new creation. We need both the ascended Jesus’ presence and his seeming absence, so that by the sacraments and in the Spirit he can draw us onward and upward to dwell with him in the Father’s presence (both now and in the final consummation), along

¹⁰⁰ John Chrysostom, The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Acts of the Apostles, trans. J. Walker, J. Sheppard, and H. Brown, revised by George B. Stevens (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), Homily II, p. 13. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., Homily I, p. 6. ¹⁰² Graham A. Cole, God the Peacemaker: How Atonement Brings Shalom (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 154. ¹⁰³ Farrow, Ascension Theology, 9–10. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 10. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 122. See also Kelly, Upward, 11.

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the royal, priestly, and prophetic path of his saving Cross.¹⁰⁶ Alexander Schmemann comments, “The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended. They realized also that this ascension [in the liturgy] was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world.”¹⁰⁷ United to Christ’s ascension offering, we find the joy of Christ’s Ascension: “Without having seen him you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy.”¹⁰⁸ Here we find the ultimate intelligibility of the Resurrection of Jesus.

¹⁰⁶ See Torrance’s Space, Time and Resurrection, 106–7. ¹⁰⁷ Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 28. See also Joel B. Green, “ ‘Witnesses of His Resurrection’: Resurrection, Salvation, Discipleship, and Mission in the Acts of the Apostles,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, 227–46, at 239. ¹⁰⁸ See Kelly, Upward, 11, 117.

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Conclusion Brian Robinette has pointed out that “without the resurrection, the revelatory process which led Christians to affirm the incarnation would not have occurred; without the incarnation, the resurrection, which led Christians to say that God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world, would be empty of meaning.”¹ Indeed, the Resurrection of Jesus is at the very root of Christian faith. Without belief in Jesus’ Resurrection, Christianity dies.² Indebted to St. Paul, Robert Barron explains in simple terms why a Resurrection-less Christianity has no interest: “If the resurrected Christ were but a projection of the disciples’ desires, a fantasy, a fond memory, a vague ‘sense’ of being forgiven . . . or the content of a spiritual ‘experience,’ we would still be in our sins.”³ Human fantasies or intuitions about divine presence and divine healing are commonplace, but they are not salvific good news for people chained to sin and death. It is only if “something new, unexpected, and objective happened to the Eleven”—namely, if they truly encountered the crucified Jesus in his risen ¹ Brian D. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 345. ² For a recent attempt to conceive of a Resurrection-less Christianity, however, see Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 150–1. They argue that what is in fact meant by “resurrection” is already underway today whenever justice is pursued in the present world (ibid., 153). See also Borg’s claim that “[w]hether Easter involved something remarkable happening to the physical body of Jesus is irrelevant. My argument is not that we know the tomb was not empty or that nothing happened to his body, but simply that it doesn’t matter. The truth of Easter, as I see it, is not at stake in this issue” (Borg, “The Truth of Easter,” in Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions [New York: HarperCollins, 1999], 129–42, at 131). For a similar viewpoint, see Rudolf Bultmann, “The New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1962), 1–44. See also Paul Avis, “The Resurrection of Jesus: Asking the Right Questions,” in The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, ed. Paul Avis (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1993), 1–22, at 18; and see Friedrich Schleiermacher’s proposal that the doctrines of Christ’s Resurrection, Ascension, and Second Coming do not have anything to do with the essential truth of Christianity: Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. J. Y. Campbell et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), 418. ³ Robert Barron, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), 126–7.

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and glorified flesh—that Jesus Christ has actually redeemed us and commissioned us to share his kingdom of mercy and love.⁴

FOUNDATIONS FOR ANCHORING THE TRUTH O F J E S U S ’ RESURRECTION? Since this is so, I want to reflect in conclusion once more upon what I have been attempting in this work of theological apologetics. Let me begin by asking afresh what kind of apologetics is appropriate to the subject matter of Jesus’ Resurrection. Brian Robinette emphasizes that “[t]here is no ‘foundation’”— no “universally shared reason or set of first principles”—“upon which to fix the reality of Jesus’ resurrection.”⁵ Thus, while he affirms that Jesus’ Resurrection “is an ontological reality” that “happened in and for our world,” he insists that we need not and should not try “to provide objective reasons for believing in the resurrection, if by ‘objective’ we mean ‘grounds’ other than what the resurrection itself provides.”⁶ Its truth stands upon “no external ground; it is the condition of its own possibility” and “the ground that grounds our ‘foundations.’”⁷ Similarly, the theologian Jürgen Moltmann emphasizes ⁴ Ibid., 127. See also C. Kavin Rowe, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 121–3. ⁵ Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 56. See also James D. G. Dunn, Christianity in the Making, vol. 1: Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 877–9. Dunn presents “resurrection” as a “metaphor,” by which (if I understand him correctly) he means that “resurrection” is a mystery whose meaning cannot be fully grasped; but I think that “mystery,” not “metaphor,” is the appropriate term. ⁶ Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 22–3. For an effort from a different direction to reconfigure the category of “history,” drawing upon Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics and insisting upon an eschatological understanding of history/anthropology and of Jesus’ Resurrection, see Wolfhart Pannenberg’s defense of the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection in his Jesus— God and Man, trans. L. L. Wilkins and D. A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968). Pannenberg rejects the limitations imposed by Ernst Troeltsch’s influential “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology,” in Troeltsch, Religion in History, trans. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), 11–32. ⁷ Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 23. From a somewhat different perspective, but with the same problematic in view, Thomas F. Torrance advocates interpreting “the resurrection within a framework of thought, of which the resurrection, along with the incarnation, is itself a constitutive determinant” (Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998], 14–15). See also Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Resurrection of Jesus and Roman Catholic Fundamental Theology,” in The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Resurrection of Jesus, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 213–48. Among the Catholic scholars who deny that belief in Jesus’ Resurrection can be shown to be reasonable on historical grounds, Fiorenza cites Rudolf Pesch, Zwischen Karfreitag und Ostern: Die Umkehr der Jünger Jesu (Zurich: Benzinger, 1983), whose work influenced Edward Schillebeeckx. For a Protestant view that accords with the perspective of Robinette, see Richard R. Niebuhr, Resurrection and Historical Reason: A Study of Theological Method (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957).

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that Jesus’ Resurrection radically transforms the category of “history”: “‘The resurrection of Christ’ is a meaningful postulate only if its framework is the history which the resurrection itself throws open: the history of the liberation of human beings and nature from the power of death.”⁸ For Moltmann, it is impossible for a non-believer to affirm the credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection, since affirming the latter means, in Moltmann’s view, already participating in it through faith and the Spirit. By contrast, I have argued in the above chapters that Jesus’ Resurrection, as an event that really happened in time and space, does have “external grounds” for its truth. It can be considered credible even without supernatural faith. Historical evidences of the kind identified by N. T. Wright and Richard Bauckham, among others, are external grounds that enable us to affirm reasonably the truth that Jesus rose from the dead to glorified life. Robinette appreciates and draws upon the work of these scholars. His concern is that studies of Jesus that bracket his Resurrection on the grounds that it is unverifiable and therefore outside the (Troeltschian) bounds of historical knowledge— for example the studies of John Meier and E. P. Sanders—make Jesus inaccessible, since they “dismantle the narrative shape of the gospels into isolated fragments that no longer relate to one another in a coherent manner.”⁹ Without being a non-foundationalist or concurring with Troeltsch’s limits upon the category of history, I agree with Robinette that “Jesus’ identity is only fully disclosed as God raises him from the dead.”¹⁰ In addition, Robinette rightly observes that theologians must go beyond the standard limits of apologetics when dealing with Jesus’ Resurrection.¹¹ The truth of the

⁸ Jürgen Moltmann, “The Resurrection of Christ: Hope for the World,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 73–86, at 79. Insofar as Moltmann is challenging the atheistic presumptions of the modern “paradigm ‘history’ ” (ibid., 82), I agree with him. ⁹ Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 46. The biblical scholar Richard A. Horsley has remarked similarly that “[b]y focusing on individual sayings and narrative episodes extracted from the speeches and overall narrative that formed the units of communication we render them unintelligible” (Horsley, “Prominent Patterns in the Social Memory of Jesus and Friends,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher [Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005], 57–78, at 73). For theological concerns parallel to those of Robinette’s, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 31–2, 174–5; Gerard Loughlin, “Living in Christ: Story, Resurrection and Salvation,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, 118–34, at 123. See John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991); E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). ¹⁰ Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, 48. ¹¹ See ibid., 21. See also Leo Scheffczyk, Auferstehung: Prinzip des christlichen Glaubens (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976), Part 3: “Die Auferstehung als Erklärungsprinzip Christlichen Glaubens” (pp. 172–293); Walter Künneth, The Theology of the Resurrection, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1965); Francis Xavier Durrwell, CSsR, Christ Our Passover: The

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Resurrection of Jesus is most apparent when we contemplate Jesus (and Scripture) as a whole, in love—as von Balthasar and Ratzinger urge. Even if non-believers can reasonably affirm that Jesus’ Resurrection happened, such knowledge becomes truly living and powerful within the whole worldview of faith, what Lonergan calls the “horizon of love.”¹² It is also the case that God’s existence and creative power must be recognized in order for a person to affirm Jesus’ Resurrection. In light of St. Augustine’s apologetic emphasis on the wonder of God’s creative work, Gerald O’Collins comments, “Unless one accepts God as the all-powerful and all-loving Creator, faith in the resurrection remains excluded.”¹³ Likewise, if the Ascension’s fitting connection with Jesus’ Resurrection is not appreciated, it will easily seem that because Jesus has not shown himself over the centuries in his glorified flesh, the apostles’ testimonies to his Resurrection must have been a mistake.¹⁴ Historical reasons for affirming Jesus’ Resurrection do not exclude our need for theological reasons.

NEWMANIAN THEOLOGICAL APOLOGETICS Behind my approach to theological apologetics stands one of John Henry Newman’s masterworks. In his Grammar of Assent, Newman remarks that certitude in historical matters comes from “the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review.”¹⁵ It is historically probable, for Indispensable Role of Resurrection in Our Salvation, trans. John F. Craghan (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 2004). ¹² In supernatural faith, there is indeed—as Thomas Torrance says—a “proper circularity” that is intrinsic to “any coherent system operating with ultimate axioms or beliefs which cannot be derived or justified from any other ground than that which they themselves constitute” (Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 15). Torrance exaggerates when he suggests that the alternative, namely historical investigation of the credibility of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead (by “subjecting it to the same criteria we use in testing other phenomena”), necessarily makes Jesus’ Resurrection “inevitably [appear] self-contradictory and meaningless” (ibid., 25). Nonetheless, Torrance rightly affirms that “[t]he objectivity of the resurrection . . . cannot be detached from the space-time structures of this world, any more than that of the historical Jesus Christ” (ibid., 172). ¹³ Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 116. ¹⁴ See O’Collins’s observation that “[i]n recent times, a widespread lack of attention to the ascension has gone hand in hand with a neglect of Christ’s role as eternal mediator and priest. It is in this area that Augustine’s fully deployed theology of the resurrection maintains its lasting challenge and significance” (ibid., 117). ¹⁵ John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1973), 288. James H. Charlesworth argues somewhat differently that faith in Jesus’ Resurrection—and in our future resurrection—can arise from spiritual experience, from

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example, that Jesus’ disciples would not have changed their eschatology and their conception of the Messiah had they not received strong evidence that Jesus was risen. It is also historically probable that eyewitness testimony shaped the Gospel narratives and that the coherent portrait of divine love offered by the Old and New Testaments could not have been the fruit of mere invention. Again, it is historically probable that the apostles would not have insisted upon the strangest possible proclamation, when more spiritualized alternatives were at hand, unless the strange thing actually happened. More historically probable reasons are provided by the Old Testament testimony that stands in the background of the confession of Jesus risen, including that the Creator God exists, has the power to save, has made covenant with his people, has promised the redemption and restoration of his people, and has promised a coming Messiah. Jesus’ preparations for his people’s New Exodus—including by giving the Eucharist as a liturgical remembrance and new Passover—also strengthen the case for the historical probability that he truly rose from the dead. Jesus’ Resurrection makes sense in the context of his upbuilding of the apostolic community united by charity. In accord with Lonergan’s understanding of horizons, Newman recognizes that each person’s reception of any accumulation of probable reasons will vary “according to the respective dispositions, opinions, and experiences, of those to whom the argument is addressed.”¹⁶ This will be even more the case when it is a matter of historical demonstration. Lacking logically demonstrative evidence, a judgment of historical truth must flow from “accumulated premisses, which all converge to it, and as the result of their combination, approach it more nearly than any assignable difference, yet do not touch it logically . . . on account of the nature of its subject-matter, and the delicate and implicit character of at least part of the reasonings on which it depends.”¹⁷ As noted in Chapter 5 above, the certitude of the act of faith comes from God’s supernatural action and does not depend upon establishing the rational basis of Jesus’ Resurrection. Nonetheless, to suppose that it is historically irrational to affirm that Jesus rose from the dead would be a serious impediment to the act of faith. Such a supposition would also be an affront to reason. We would then have to believe that a number of Jews lightly proclaimed a man crucified by pagan Rome to be the Messiah and the center of all history.¹⁸

a combination of thinking, willing, and feeling that we cannot analyze but whose truth we know. See Charlesworth, “Resurrection: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament,” in Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine, ed. James H. Charlesworth et al. (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2006), 138–86, at 143–4 (but see 175 as well). ¹⁶ Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 310. ¹⁷ Ibid., 321. ¹⁸ See Christopher Bryan, The Resurrection of the Messiah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 159.

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We would have to believe that the disciples and Paul were misled by hallucinatory visions of the dead Jesus, despite the fact that hallucinatory visions are relatively commonplace realities and are consistently interpreted by reasonable people to be at most “communications of comfort about the departed from beyond the grave.”¹⁹ We would have to believe that the first Christians inexplicably chose to use the unnecessary and unexpected “language of resurrection, words such as egeirō and anistēmi.”²⁰ Moreover, as Hans Urs von Balthasar aptly remarks, “If the Resurrection is excised, then not only certain things but simply everything about Jesus’ earthly life becomes incomprehensible.”²¹ Newman refers our ability to make valid inferences in historical matters to what he calls the Illative Sense. As historical beings who regularly make judgments of truth about historical matters, we are suited to this kind of inferential reasoning. Such reasoning inevitably bears the imprint of our personal principles, opinions, and tastes, but a well-functioning Illative Sense is nonetheless able to arrive at historical certitude on the basis of cumulative probabilities.²² Newman comments in this regard, “The fact of revelation is in itself demonstrably true,” via the Illative Sense working upon accumulated probabilities, even if “it is not therefore true irresistibly.”²³ As noted above, lacking belief in the existence of God, no accumulation of probabilities is likely to persuade a person about the reality of miracles such as Jesus’ Resurrection.²⁴ Newman recognizes that if our minds have not been disposed to acknowledge the existence of God, we will not be persuaded by “the Evidences of Christianity.”²⁵ But he argues that our minds should be so disposed. If we actually want to know the self-revealing God, we will persistently seek knowledge of and communion with God, and God will not disappoint us. Unfortunately, says Newman, many people “expect its [revelation’s]

¹⁹ Ibid., 164. ²⁰ Ibid., 169. ²¹ Von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, 467. ²² Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 361. ²³ Ibid., 410. For background see Frederick D. Aquino, Communities of Informed Judgment: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004). ²⁴ This is the main point of Roy W. Hoover, “A Contest Between Orthodoxy and Veracity,” in Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment? A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, ed. Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 124–46. Indebted to Paul Tillich, however, Hoover argues that “the resurrection of Jesus was a religious symbol that came to be spoken about as if it were an historical event” (ibid., 137). See also the work of Pieter Craffert, including his “The Origins of Resurrection Faith: The Challenge of a Social Scientific Approach,” Neotestamentica 23 (1989): 331–48; “ ‘Seeing’ a Body into Being: Reflections on Scholarly Interpretations of the Nature and Reality of Jesus’ Resurrected Body,” Religious Theology 9 (2002): 89–107; and “Jesus’ Resurrection in a Social-Scientific Perspective: Is There Anything New to Be Said?,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 7 (2009): 126–51. Michael R. Licona describes Craffert’s position and responds to it in The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), 557–82. ²⁵ Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 417.

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evidences to come to them without their trouble; they act, not as suppliants, but as judges,” and they “forget that revelation is a boon, not a debt on the part of the Giver.”²⁶ In the same context Newman warns against the misguided notion that “there is no religious love of truth where there is fear of error”; after all, humble people fear to go wrong, and so fear of possible error will always be present.²⁷ Newman also attends to the way in which communities, above all the Church (but also the university), form the Illative Sense in individual persons. As the philosopher Frederick Aquino observes, “Development of the illative sense requires training, education, and experience, in addition to native talent, within a community of informed judgment.”²⁸ With Newman, I hold both that we cannot demonstrate the Resurrection of Jesus with the force of strict logic, and that God gives us plentiful grounds for assessing and confirming with certitude the reasonableness or credibility of Jesus’ Resurrection.²⁹ Again, this does not mean that we can ever reduce the Resurrection of Jesus to “a probative fact . . . tidily located in the apologetic file.”³⁰ The Resurrection is never merely a datum to be proven so that we can get on with worldly things. John Milbank aptly remarks that “the exposition of faith always includes an apologetic dimension” and the “confession [of faith] has to include a reasoned claim.”³¹ Theological apologetics is always both an effort to show the reasonableness of faith, and an effort to exposit the faith for believers, thereby strengthening God’s people on the New Exodus journey in self-sacrificial love. We learn the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection best within a community of believers who are “exemplars of informed judgment.”³² Hearing Jesus’ word, believers ask each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?” We find that, indeed, he has been known to us “in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 24:32, 35). Moved by scriptural and Eucharistic encounters with the risen Jesus in his Church, and in contemplative response to the

²⁶ Ibid., 425–6. For our lack of control over divine revelation, see also Gerard Loughlin, “Living in Christ: Story, Resurrection and Salvation,” in Resurrection Reconsidered, 118–34, at 123. ²⁷ Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 426. See also Hugh Gilbert, OSB, Unfolding the Mystery: Monastic Conferences on the Liturgical Year (Leominster: Gracewing, 2007), 99. ²⁸ Aquino, Communities of Informed Judgment, 95. ²⁹ See Anthony J. Kelly, CSsR, The Resurrection Effect: Transforming Christian Life and Thought (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 4. See also Gustave Martelet, SJ, The Risen Christ and the Eucharistic World, trans. René Hague (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). ³⁰ Kelly, The Resurrection Effect, 3. ³¹ John Milbank, “Foreword: An Apologia for Apologetics,” in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, ed. Andrew Davison (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), xiii–xxiii, at xiii–xiv. See also John Webster, “On the Theology of Providence,” in The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium, ed. Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler (London: T. & T. Clark, 2009), 158–75, at 161. ³² Aquino, Communities of Informed Judgment, 95.

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manifestation of divine Love in Jesus Christ, believers can obey Peter’s injunction to “be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). As Pope Francis puts it in his encyclical Lumen Fidei, divine revelation “touches us at the core of our being and engages our minds, wills, and emotions, opening us to relationships lived in communion.”³³ Instructed by the various ways of knowing Jesus risen, then, let us joyfully proclaim the truth of his Resurrection for all to hear. For, after all, “we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet 1:3). “As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving” (Col 2:6).

³³ Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei, Vatican translation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013), §40. Pope Francis has the sacraments in view in this observation.

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Subject and Person Index Alexander, Loveday 64–5 Alkier, Stefan 5 n.16 Allison, Dale 11–13, 30, 40–7, 49–50, 54, 57–8, 66, 73–4, 76–7, 88–9, 91–5, 102–3, 107, 111–13, 174–5, 204 angels 43 n.68, 58 n.123, 99, 130 n.53 Apollinarianism 134–5 apostles unique value as witnesses of Jesus’s Resurrection 34 apotheosis of a martyr‐hero stories 2–3, 10 n.36, 124 appearances of the risen Jesus 23–4, 29, 30 n.5, 33 n.16, 35–7, 38 n.42, 51–3, 118–24, 127, 168–9, 175–6 ability to appear and disappear 51 n.101, 129, 131–2, 138, 175–6 as eating and drinking in presence of disciples 38 n.42, 51, 118–19, 138, 148, 175–6 for forty days 62–3 touching Jesus’s body 57, 119, 175–6 Aquino, Frederick 215–16 Ascension of Jesus 2, 2 n.6, 16, 28 n.116, 106–7, 175–6, 180–1, 185–9, 191, 193, 195–202, 205–6, 208–9, 212–13 Aslan, Reza 166–8, 184 Augustine 28, 62–3, 176, 191, 212–13 Babylonian exile 100–1 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 1–2, 14–16, 60 n.130, 96 n.25, 162 n.110, 170, 177–84, 191–3, 194 n.38, 212–13, 212 n.9, 214–15 Bauckham, Richard 12, 63–4, 66–82, 88–90, 146, 164–5, 212 Barclay, John M. G. 26 n.105, 114–18, 121–4 Barron, Robert 114, 210–11 Barth, Karl 10 n.40 Barton, John 2 n.4 Barton, Stephen 123 n.33 Benedict XVI, Pope. See Ratzinger, Joseph Best, Ernest 121 n.25 Blondel, Maurice 178 Bockmuehl, Markus 72 n.36, 82 n.74, 130 n.53 body, risen. See risen body body, spiritual. See spiritual body Bolt, Peter G. 10 n.36 Borg, Marcus J. 210 n.2

Bouyer, Louis 191 n.26 Browne, Lewis 151 Brown, Raymond 13–14 Bryan, Christopher 120 n.22, 214 n.18 Bulgakov, Sergius 200 n.65 Bultmann, Rudolf 10 n.40, 31–4, 120–1, 151, 210 n.2 burial of Jesus 20–1, 26, 50–1, 115–16, 166–9 Jesus left to decompose 121–2 Jesus left unburied 51 n.99, 168–9 Carnley, Peter 114–15, 119–24, 138 Celsus 9–10, 40–1, 151–2, 188 n.9 Cessario, Romanus 164–5 Charlesworth, James H. 213 n.15 Coakley, Sarah 58–9, 60 n.127, 179 n.57 Cohen, Jeremy 23 n.93 Cohn‐Sherbok, Dan 19–20 Cole, Graham 208 Collins, Christopher S. 173 n.33 Coloe, Mary 199 n.61 coming of the Son of Man 44–5 Congar, Yves 189 n.18 contemplation as goal of human existence 171 role of in studying Jesus’s Resurrection 14–15, 169–70, 172, 176–7, 181–4 Corbon, Jean 193–6 cosmic order, visible renewal of 2–3 Craffert, Pieter 215 n.24 Crossan, John Dominic 20–1, 51 n.99, 53 n.105, 54 n.112, 168 n.13, 210 n.2 Crüsemann, Frank 102 n.40 cumulative probabilities 141, 145 n.29, 156, 163–5, 213–16 Davison, Andrew 14 n.47 Dawkins, Richard 21–2, 25 Dawson, Gerrit Scott 206 Day, John 100 death of Jesus culpability of Jewish people in 23 n.93 docetic views of 134, 136–7 Dei Filius (Vatican I) 144 n.20, 152–3 delay in Jesus’s coming 27 n.113 Delling, Gerhard 51 n.101 Dewey, Joanna 69 n.24 Divino Afflante Spiritu (Pius XII) 164 Docetism 43 n.68, 51–2

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doubting Thomas. See Thomas (apostle) Dulles, Avery 12 n.41 Dunn, James D. G. 27 n.109, 50–1, 50 n.97, 63–4, 117 n.6, 124, 186 n.5, 211 n.5 Durrwell, F. X. 65 Echeverria, Eduardo J. 144 n.20 Ehrman, Bart D. 147, 166–9, 174–5, 175 n.44, 184 Elijah, assumption of 13–14, 97, 185 n.1 Eklund, Rebekah 91–2 Emmaus Road narrative 68, 175–6, 216–17 empty tomb 18–21, 21 n.85, 23–4, 25 n.104, 26, 30 n.5, 34 n.20, 36, 38 n.42, 41 n.58, 42–3, 45–7, 49, 49 n.93, 50–1, 53 n.106, 57–8, 68, 89–90, 93–6, 115–16, 117 n.8, 151, 166–9, 175, 210 n.2 discovery of by women 26, 45, 53 n.106, 68, 151, 168–9 evidentiary value of 30 n.5, 34 n.20, 93–4, 210 n.2 guard around Jesus’ tomb 149–52, 159–60 unknown location of 20 n.82 veneration of 50 n.98 Enoch, assumption of 97 eschatology, Christian transformation of. See resurrection of the dead, general Eucharist 4–5, 12, 16, 82–7, 89–90, 180–1, 192–4, 202–3, 205, 207, 213–14 Evans, C. F. 22–3 exegesis canonical 173–4 historical‐critical 5–6, 11, 20, 173–4 exile. See ingathering of the exiles, motif of exodus. See New Exodus motif eyes of faith. See faith eyewitness testimony individual vs. social dimension of 71–2, 75–6 as present in the Acts of the Apostles 147–8 as present in the Gospels 63–5, 67–79, 81, 89–90, 213–14 as preserved in oral tradition 69 reliability of 14, 66, 67 n.16, 72–8, 80–1, 87–89, 145–6 faith evidence of Jesus’s Resurrection as foundation for 14, 142–6, 152, 156–8 as necessary for perceiving Jesus’s Resurrection (“eyes of faith”) 32–4, 56, 142 n.8, 154, 179 n.57, 211–12 role of connaturality in 154–8, 160–2 subsumption of judgment of credibility into act of faith 140–1, 154, 155 n.73, 156, 163

as supernatural 14, 140–4, 152–7, 157 n.80, 158, 163–5, 184, 212, 213 n.12, 214–15 faith–reason relationship 4–5, 14, 90, 140–5, 152–4, 156–61, 163, 216 Farkasfalvy, Denis 83 n.79 Farrow, Douglas 187–8, 191 n.27, 198, 202, 206–8 Fenton, Joseph 14, 140–54, 159–60, 162–5 Feuerbach, Ludwig 178 fideism 33–4 fides et ratio (John Paul II) 176 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler 10 n.40, 211 n.7 Fitzmyer, Joseph A. 27 n.113, 86 Flew, Anthony 53 n.104, 70 n.26 form criticism 63 n.4, 63 n.5, 70–1, 89 Francis (Pope) 216–17 Frei, Hans 60 Fuller, Reginald 118–19 Gardeil, Ambrose 140, 143–4, 152–4 Garrigou‐Lagrange, Réginald 140, 143–4, 145 n.29, 151 n.50, 152, 188–9 Gehenna 204 Gerhardsson, Birger 69 Gnosticism 134–9 God existence of as demonstrable 164–5, 184 n.73 Goulder, Michael 20–1, 25 great tribulation. See tribulation, eschatological Green, Joel 85–6 Halbwachs, Maurice 71 n.32 Hamann, Johann Georg 178–9 Harnach, Adolph von 146 Harris, Murray 125 n.39 Harvey, Anthony 123 n.34 Hays, Richard B. 175 n.44 “historical” disputes over meaning of term 59–60, 168 n.12, 212, 212 n.8 historical Jesus. See Jesus of history history‐faith antithesis 7–8, 29–30, 56, 67, 115–16, 166 Holleman, Joost 48 n.90 Hoover, Roy W. 215 n.24 Horsley, Richard A. 212 n.9 Hurtado, Larry 175 n.44 hypostatic union 129, 133 not severed by death 129 Illative Sense. See Newman, John Henry ingathering of the exiles, motif of 19–20, 48–9, 94, 97–8, 100–3, 112, 187–8

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Subject and Person Index intermediate state 203–4 Irenaeus 78–9, 202 n.79 Islam Qu’ranic views on Jesus’s resurrection 135–6, 136 n.84, 137–9 Jesus of history 6 n.19, 67, 172–3 as failed eschatological prophet 146 reliability of attempts to reconstruct 67 John Chrysostom 208 John, Gospel of as composed by eyewitness 77–9 John of Damascus 13–14, 115, 131–9 Johnson, Luke Timothy 5–7, 84–5, 90, 196 John, the elder 69–70, 78–9, 89–90 Jonge, Henk Jan de 23 n.92 Josephus 45 Kant, Immanuel 178 Keener, Craig 86, 148 n.37 Kelber, Werner H. 71 n.32 Kelly, Anthony J. 188, 188 n.12, 189 n.17, 200 n.65, 200 n.67, 206 Kessler, Hans 118 n.14 Kierkegaard, Søren 178 King, John 158–9 Kirk, Alan 36 n.36 Lambrecht, Jan 121 n.25 Lamentabili Sane (Pius X) 145 Last Supper 82–4, 202–4 Lazarus, resurrection of 128 Lehtipuu, Outi 51 n.101, 96 n.24 Levenson, Jon 91–5 liberalism, theological 143 n.13, 178–9 Licona, Michael R. 1 n.3, 55 n.116, 90, 215 n.24 Lindars, Barnabas 18–19 liturgical remembrance. See remembrance, liturgical Locke, John 9–10 clear and distinct ideas 9–10 Lohfink, Gerhard 114–15, 118–19, 121–4, 138, 185 n.1 Loke, Andrew Ter Ern 16–17 Lombardo, Nicholas 55 n.113, 159 n.89 Lonergan, Bernard 14, 140–2, 156–63, 177, 184, 212–14 Lubac, Henri de 83–4 Lüdemann, Gerd 20–1, 25, 114–15, 121–4 Lumen Fidei (Francis) 216–17 MacKinnon, Donald 10–11 MacMillan, Margaret 87–9 Mansini, Guy 4–5 Marcion 3 n.7

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Maritain, Jacques 169 n.17 Martelet, Gustave 33 n.16 Martin, Dale 8, 18–19 Martin, Francis 194–5 Marxsen, Willi 31–3, 120–1 Mary apparitions of 21–2, 25 n.104, 43 n.65 bodily assumption of 25 n.104, 124–5 McDonald, J. I. H. 7 n.24, 186 n.4 McIver, Robert 75–6 Meier, John P. 5 n.17, 6, 212 memory. See remembrance Menken, Maarten J. J. 53 n.104 Messalians 134–5 Messiah crucifixion and resurrection as transforming conceptions of 49, 56, 61, 213–14 Jesus’s failure to fulfill expectations for 48–9 Milbank, John 216 Milgrom, Jacob 201 n.69 Miller, Richard C. 2 n.6 miracles evidentiary value of 59, 145–6, 167–8 possibility of 81, 215–16 Moberly, Walter 6–7, 140–1 Molina, Luis de 164 Moloney, Francis J. 58 n.123, 112 Moltmann, Jürgen 211–12 Morales, Michael 16, 192, 198–202, 205–7 Morgan, Robert 123 n.33 motives of credibility 142–4, 144 n.20 Moule, C. F. D 35 n.25, 161, 166–7 New Atheists 14 n.47 new creation 16, 55–6, 100–3, 108, 112, 189 n.17, 208–9 New Exodus motif 16, 86–7, 192, 198, 202–7, 213–14, 216 Newman, John Henry 141 n.4, 145, 213–16 Illative Sense 215–16 Nichols, Aidan 143 n.13 Niebuhr, Richard R. 112–13, 211 n.7 Nineham, Dennis E. 71 n.29 Nostra Aetate (Vatican II) 23 n.93 Novakovic, Lidija 24 n.97, 59–60, 168 n.13, 175 n.44 O’Collins, Gerald 12 n.42, 23–7, 29–30, 35 n.25, 118 n.14, 177 n.48, 212–13 O’Reilly, Kevin 155–6 Origen of Alexandria 9 n.35 Osborne, Kenan B. 13 n.43 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 26 n.108, 114, 211 n.6 Papias of Hierapolis 67–72, 78–9, 146

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Pascal, Blaise 17–18, 153, 157, 161–2, 177–8 Paul (apostle) encounter of with the risen Jesus 15, 24–5, 35–6, 62–3, 117 n.9, 119–22, 125–6, 169, 175–6, 186 n.5 People of God as collective subject of Scripture 81–2 Perkins, Pheme 30 n.5 Pesch, Otto Hermann 140 Peter (apostle) as eyewitness source behind Mark 69–70 Pharisees belief in the resurrection 125–6 Pinckaers, Servais 198 Pitre, Brant 8–9, 16, 86–7, 96, 192, 198, 202–8 praeambula fidei 10 n.39, 141 n.2, 144 n.20, 184 probabilities. See cumulative probabilities Ramage, Matthew 60 n.130 rapture 50 n.97, 124–5 Ratzinger, Joseph/Pope Benedict XVI 9 n.32, 14–15, 27–8, 60 n.130, 81–4, 87, 170, 172–7, 183–4, 212–13 reasonableness of faith. See faith–reason relationship Reid, Thomas 80–1 remembrance historical memory of Jesus’s Resurrection 62 liturgical 12, 14, 64–5, 82–8, 90 scriptural 63–5, 81–4, 87–8, 90 Rese, Martin 121 n.26 Resurrection narratives Gnostic influences on 13 n.44 as legends 42–3 literary shaping of 27 as sui generis 81 unreliability of 8, 20, 122–4, 166–7 Resurrection of Jesus apostolic witness to 10–11, 18–19, 137 as contextualized by OT narrative 91–3, 96, 102–13, 213–14 as contrary to science 22 as distinct from other forms of resurrection 128–9 ecclesial witness to 10–11, 90 hallucinatory vision accounts of 2, 20–2, 25, 27 n.111, 29–30, 35 n.25, 38 n.42, 40–7, 49–50, 54, 57–8, 61, 93–4, 111, 114, 117 n.9, 118–20, 128, 137–8, 151, 168–9, 214–15 inefficacy of Christianity testifies against 27, 62 limits of historiography for knowing 5–7, 11, 45–7, 59, 111

as meta‐historical or trans‐empirical event 34, 43 n.67, 127, 167 n.8 new mode of glorified, bodily existence 9–10, 13, 51–2, 54–5, 114–15, 116 n.4, 117–19, 127, 176, 183 on the “third day” 38–9, 96 participatory paths for knowing 5–7 as product of disciples’ faith experience 24–5, 29–34, 38–9, 54, 57, 121–4, 151, 210–11 as raising himself 129 as real historical event 1, 6–7, 29–30, 35 n.25, 49, 57–9, 61, 95–6, 118, 169 n.16, 210–12 as seen by five‐hundred witnesses at once 42–3, 127 spiritualization of 10 n.40, 13–14, 18–19, 26 n.108, 41 n.58, 43, 114–18, 121–2, 128, 131–9, 210–11 why the risen Jesus does not continually appear 15, 185, 191, 193–4, 198, 205–9 women as first witnesses of 52–3, 175–6 wounds or scars of risen Jesus 132, 138 resurrection of the dead, general 19–20, 24 n.97, 26, 41–4, 48–9, 59, 91, 102, 117 n.9, 125–7, 169, 204 expectation of resurrection of one man prior to (“two‐stage resurrection”) 24 n.97, 43–4, 48–9, 61, 96, 102–3, 117 n.9, 126–7, 137, 174–5 risen body characteristics of 8, 48–9, 96, 119–20, 129 resurrection into different bodies 46 Ritschl, Albrecht 146 Robinette, Brian 10–11, 210–13 Rodríguez, Rafael 66 Rousselot, Pierre 14, 140–1, 152–8, 160–3, 170, 178, 180 Rowland, Christopher 17–19 sacrifices of the OT fulfilled by Jesus 192, 200–2 significance of OT burning rite 200–2 Sanders, E. P. 212 Satlow, Michael L. 7 n.26, 70 n.27 Scheeben, Matthias Joseph 201 n.71 Schillebeeckx, Edward 11, 13, 30–41, 44–5, 54, 57–8, 119–20, 123–4, 151, 211 n.7 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 40 n.53, 178 Schmemann, Alexander 83 n.79, 89–90, 205 n.91, 208–9 Schneiders, Sandra M. 43 n.67, 51 n.100, 52 n.102, 169 Schwartz, Barry 72 n.33, 76–7, 167 n.9 Second Coming of Jesus 199–200 Seitz, Christopher 82–3

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Subject and Person Index Sheol 96 n.24, 98, 100–1 sign of Jonah 96 Socrates 3–4 soul existence of 46 immateriality of 131 immortality of 131 Spinks, Bryan D. 84 n.82, 203 n.83 Spinoza, Baruch 178 spiritual body 43 n.68, 116–17 stealing of Jesus’s body 45, 149–50 Stephen (deacon) 114–15, 186 Strauss, David Friedrich 40–1, 120–1, 146, 151 suffering and vindication, pattern of 43–4, 94–5, 112–13, 174–5 suffering servant, motif of 99 Swineburne, Richard 4 n.14, 23–4, 27, 150 n.48 Sunday worship, shift to 23–4 Taylor, Charles 22 Thatcher, Tom 77, 79 Thomas (apostle) encounter with risen Jesus 61, 132, 186–7 Thomas Aquinas 12–15, 83–4, 91–2, 103–15, 128–33, 136–9, 153 n.62, 155–6, 170–2, 174, 182–4 Tilley, Terrence W. 65 n.9

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tomb. See empty tomb Torrance, Thomas F. 15 n.49, 56 n.119, 179 n.53, 189 n.18, 195 n.45, 197, 200 n.63, 211 n.7, 213 n.12 tradition 12 n.41 translation to heaven. See rapture tribulation, eschatological 40 n.54, 43–4, 62, 188–9, 193 Troeltsch, Ernst 7–8, 11, 167–8, 212–13 Vermes, Geza 114–15, 122–4 Vinzent, Markus 3 n.7 Ward, Mary 22 Watson, Francis 134 n.76 Wedderburn, A. J. M. 55 n.116 White, Thomas Joseph 1, 16–17 Wiles, Maurice 3 n.8 Williams, Rowan 22–3, 65 Willis, W. Waite, Jr. 142 n.8 Wilson, Edward O. 21–2, 25 Wright, N. T. 4, 11–13, 22 n.91, 30, 38 n.42, 40 n.53, 43 n.67, 47–60, 91–3, 95–104, 107, 112–13, 117 n.7, 120 n.22, 132 n.59, 141–2, 149 n.40, 156, 164–5, 174–5, 187 n.8, 190–1, 212 Wright, William 194–5 Zwiep, Arie W. 185 n.1, 186 n.5