Historicity, Christ, and Faith II

Some Further Thoughts

I. HOWEVER long the previous post may have been, there was much left unsaid. After all, there I spoke only about the function I believe we should acknowledge Christian faith to take, and not very much either about a) why the gospel accounts are not historically infallible, or b) what Christians of different stripes have historically meant by their ‘faith’. I think already I must defer the first of these to another time, because it’s not pressingly relevant to my theses, and I had wanted to make space to expand on the second.

I promised to address what might seem like Paul’s catch-all Scriptural rebuttal to my first article: his assertion that ‘if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain’ (1 Cor. 15:14). Let’s start there. The problem with reading this passage, and all of Paul’s other relevant passages, in plain modern English is that we assume a secure, univocal, and incontrovertible meaning for the ‘resurrection’ in question. Having now established the ‘fleshly’ resurrection—that is, that Jesus’ tangible, material corpse got up and walked out of the tomb and interacted with people—as orthodoxy, we read this doctrinal position back into the text in presumption that Paul would have meant exactly the same thing. And yet, of course, he did not.

Keep in mind that Paul is far and away our best source on the resurrection. He writes at least more than a decade nearer to Jesus’ life than even the earliest gospel, he is definitely the author of many epistles which discuss the resurrection (including, vitally, 1 Corinthians), and he is also a claimed eye-witness of the resurrected Jesus, with his ‘Road to Damascus’ experience. The gospels, on the other hand, are all penned later and anonymously, only ascribed to Jesus’ disciples and other authoritative figures in the tradition after a couple of centuries in order to strengthen their credibility. Even irrespective of historical study, Christians in general look to Paul to provide a lot of explanation as to what the resurrection was, what it meant, and what it foreboded, given the best we get in the gospels is a set of mysterious narratives depicting an array of remarkable and novel characteristics present in the risen Jesus, seemingly not there in his ‘flesh and blood’ previously.

What, then, does Paul say? Well, if those who quote 1 Cor. 15:14 were to continue their reading of that chapter, they would stumble across something of a clue regarding the meaning of that ‘resurrection’. Paul is resolute that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God’ (15:50), and that in resurrection ‘this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality’ (15:53). This cannot be overstated. There are important scholarly debates about what Paul means here, to be sure,¹ but crucially all occur because they seek to discover the generally complicated and perhaps even impenetrable meanings of the attitude of this 1st century Hellenistic Jew.

What is the narrative we normally tell ourselves as modern Christians? That Jesus died on the cross, was buried in a tomb at Golgotha, that he rose physically on the third day after his death, and then appeared to his disciples and many more. However, the question of how much of this we can piece together from Paul’s account is dubious. One very important omission from any of the Pauline epistles (which is curious, given it seems like it would surely be mentioned) is that of an empty tomb. When Christians usually consider the resurrection, they conceive of it as localised to a specific historical occurrence: the third day after the crucifixion, an emergence from the cave at Calvary in 30/33 AD. However, the depiction from Paul is that the resurrection was not quite so geographically fixed. As Paula Fredriksen makes clear,

these experiences [of the risen Jesus] were visual: Christ “was seen” (ōphthē), he says, first by Peter (“Cephas”), then by “the twelve” (the inner group of Jesus’s followers). Then he “was seen” (same verb again, ōphthē) by almost 500 followers; thereafter by James (Jesus’s brother); and then finally “by all the apostles” (1 Cor 15.5–7). “Last of all,” Paul concludes this passage, Christ appeared to him (ōphthē again, v. 8; cf. 9.1: “Have I not seen Jesus our lord?”).

But here’s the kicker:

What did they [the post-resurrection witnesses] see? Christ in a spiritual body, Paul insists, and definitely not in a body of flesh and blood (1 Cor 15.44, 50).

Paul describes Christ being resurrected and then seen by numerous people, including himself, yet at no point does he describe this resurrection as the process of Jesus’ corpse leaving the tomb. When he lists all the people to whom Jesus appears, he appends his own name without qualification, using the same verb in all cases, giving no indication to suggest that the kind of appearance (that is, in a vision or in ‘person’) was any different to the other apostles. There is no distinguishment between one who touches versus one who merely sees; all are spoken of in the same terms, and given Paul (who, if we’re honest, seems to think of himself and his relation to Jesus fairly highly) is speaking, we can probably assume that he considers his own (visual) experience first and then extrapolates to others. Moreover, if we tot up all the accounts of the resurrection in Paul’s epistles, we have, as Fredriksen notes, a set of visions on the part of various Christians at various points in the years after the crucifixion. All in all, that is, we ultimately have little substance to argue that the resurrection for Paul actually referred to the body leaving its tomb at a certain place and point in history, rather than something—to be necessarily vague—distinctly more ‘spiritual’ in nature, something more resembling mystical or ecstatic visions than the physical appearance of a reanimated corpse.

I would be remiss to suggest that this was absolute consensus, of course. Alongside the Pauline tradition stood the Lukan and Johannine, which both presented ‘Christ in a flesh-and-blood body, no less strongly’.² The point is, as is usually the conclusion in historical study, that it’s not as simple as we might think. There was never, from the origins of the faith, a complete agreement about the style or manner of Jesus’ resurrection, about how he appeared or what his form was in those appearances. Whether Jesus’ resurrection to his followers was a that of cadaver that now spoke and moved, or whether it was a spiritual vision (in the same manner as, say, Our Lady of Guadalupe, or Ramakrishna’s sighting of Muhammad and Jesus) is debated even within the New Testament itself.

II. If this isn’t confusing enough, the subject becomes considerably more difficult when we begin to acknowledge not just difference in opinion between the early Christians, but the chasm in perspective between these believers of antiquity and us believers of modernity. It is here where the most pressing problems lie. If you had to ask a modern Christian what Jesus ‘was’ after the resurrection, you would likely receive differing responses. Again, the gospel accounts are elusive, lending themselves to ambiguity, with Jesus apparently tangible (Lk 24:37-39, Jn. 20:27) and yet also capable of moving through walls and vanishing into thin air (Lk. 24:31, 36), and—most importantly for showing that a real change has occurred—failing to be recognised by devoted followers (Lk. 24:16, Jn. 20:14).

However, again, we are guilty of projecting our orthodoxies back onto the text without critically examining what the authors might have intended to mean themselves. We Christians tend to talk about the life and resurrection of Jesus as a uniquely timeless events, and yet they were surely anything but that. They were occurrences received, witnessed, understood, and then shaped by the people who lived in the many eras it affected, most of all its contemporaries. In the case of the epistles, when we try to pluck our doctrines from its pages we cannot avoid the fact that Paul’s conception of the resurrection is irretrievably bound up with his 1st century Jewish-Stoic cosmology.

We’ve already clarified that Paul was opposed to the notion of a fleshly resurrection, but we should note also that the alternative spiritual (‘pneumatic’) resurrection is one where, in accordance with common cosmological beliefs of the time, Jesus’ body literally assumes the same substance as stars. Plato’s totemic influence meant that the Hellenistic world generally believed that ‘“up” was “good” and “down” was “bad” (or at least less good)’.³ ‘Paul’s fundamentally Stoic conception… envisions salvation as a heavenly ascent to astral immortality, but an ascent not made of the soul but of the body, which is transformed into ethereally material pneuma’.⁴ We moderns make all kinds of (important) distinctions between metaphysics and physics, but often forget that where we draw the boundary was not the same as our ancestors—if they drew boundaries at all. In Paul’s case, he did not.

Above the moon, in ranks of ascending perfection and goodness, came the spheres of the sun and of the five planets known to antiquity. More perfect and more “good” still was the outermost visible cosmic sphere, the realm of the fixed stars and the cosmic wheel of the Zodiac, their astral luminosity and their very fixity, thus stability, indicating their moral and material superiority. And beyond this sphere, particularly for those of Platonic persuasion, lay the realm of immateriality, the realm of invisible “spirit,” and thus the realm of the high god.⁵

Hence why, if you’ve ever wondered, in the Ascension (Lk. 24:51, Acts 1:1-9), Jesus literally flies up into the sky. The author of Luke-Acts is depicting him ascending to an astral realm, beyond the lower, sublunar stratum. This upward trajectory is tied intimately to the author’s desired portrayal. After all,

the strongest indication of deification in the ancient world was ascent. As we have seen, corporeal immortalizations in Mediterranean mythology often include an ascent. Heracles, for instance, flew to heaven on a chariot, and Romulus was taken up in the midst of a storm. In Christian stories, ascent and resurrection are also linked. Psalm 110:1 (“Sit at my right hand!”), read christologically, implied a heavenly ascent for Jesus. Accordingly, in early Christian texts we read that after Jesus’s death, God “highly exalted” him (Phil. 2:8-9), and seated him “in the heavenly places” (Eph 1:20) at the “right hand of God” (1 Pet. 3:21-22). In his monograph on Jesus’s ascent, A.W. Zwiep comments that “the general conviction in the earliest Christian preaching” is that “as of the day of his resurrection Jesus was in heaven, seated at the right hand of God.” This is assumed, notably, in Luke 23:43, where Jesus says to the thief: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” Indeed, says Zwiep, resurrection and exaltation were regarded as two sides of the same coin; resurrection meant “resurrection to heaven.” The link between ascent and deification is widely acknowledged in scholarship. In the words of Gerhard Lohfink: “The one who goes up to heaven is made a divine being or a new god.”’⁶

But that’s not to say it’s just one big metaphor. The point is that Paul and many of his contemporaries really did believe in the physical reality of this ascent. As David Armstrong rather humorously notes, if Paul’s philosophy were accurate, anyone peering through the James Webb telescope could expect to see Jesus’ body hurtling through space like a meteorite, as yet unable to find its appropriate celestial tier.⁷ Importantly, unlike purely metaphysical claims (a ‘purity’ that is distinguished by modernity), Paul’s Stoic astronomy is something that modern physics can incontrovertibly rebut: the stars are not made of an immortal, pneumatic aether. They are large spheres of burning hydrogen and helium, and are all also subject to time just as the rest of the universe. They had a beginning; they will have an end.

With this in mind, the whole spiel of redemptive transitions in 1 Cor. 15 threatens to unravel. If Paul is talking about resurrection as the assumption of a substance that modern physics now proves does not exist in the way he thought it did, what can resurrection actually mean to modern Christians?

III. The answer, as it almost always is: lots of things to lots of people. Indeed, the only reason I bring all this up is to problematise the claim that it can or has meant one thing, and so when Paul (or anyone else for that matter) asserts that Christianity cannot function without belief in the resurrection, he is not confining faith to the blind affirmation of a particular physical-historical occurrence.

Yes, it must be conceded that those very first Christians, caught in the apocalyptic fervour of an imminent eschaton, really took their pistis to be in the conviction ‘that Christ had died, been raised, and was soon coming back’.⁸ This was their conviction, although still one that should be duly seasoned with all the idiosyncrasies of this small Jewish cult of late antiquity. But what they did not believe, and what can concretely be chalked up to a bizarre modern abstraction, is the suggestion that faith was a matter of intellectually affirming a given creed. Our modern conflation was not so apparent to those of antiquity: ‘…propositional belief (secular or religious) is usually marked, in Greek and Latin, by the language of thinking (dokein, nomizein, putare, censere, etc.) rather than that of pistis or fides’.⁹ The moment faith becomes, in fact, the dogmatic clinging to certain contingencies is the moment we move from the water to the container; from a flowing, life-giving substance to a brittle, solid object, always at risk of shattering.

Hence why there is a change in attitude that must be embraced if we are to maintain the legitimacy of the Christian (or indeed any) religion. A change, that is, toward change. My reasoning here follows generally from David Bentley Hart’s thesis in Tradition and Apocalypse, which can be crudely summarised as an argument for the incompleteness of the Christian faith, and so the absurdity of treating tradition as a closed, finalised, lackless reserve of absolute truth.¹⁰ Rather, if we are to reckon seriously with basic facts of doctrinal development (such as that the earliest followers of Jesus probably didn’t see him as Almighty God, and the notion was only ratified three hundred years after his life), we must accept—in order for the tradition to have validity at all—that doctrine is something as yet unfinished, something still open and being revealed to us as we grow in the love of God.

Subsequently, I do not think it is outrageous to suggest that there are certain attitudes absolutely indispensable to the first Christians, or even Christians of the Middle Ages, or even our contemporaries, which need not be binding on modern Christians anymore. To any who find this scandalous, we should observe that they already—in evident practice, if not in conscious belief—almost certainly agree. If the real concern of modern Christians was to emulate the habits, beliefs, and dispositions of the 1st century Jesus Movement, then they would be obliged to establish themselves in a firmly communistic social sphere (Acts 4:35), to really, concretely revoke all possessions (Mt. 19:21), to marry only as a sexual coping mechanism for an inability to hack celibacy (1 Cor. 7:2), and essentially become Jewish—perhaps not in circumcision but certainly in observance of Torah (Mt. 5:18). But this isn’t limited only to radical lifestyles: put simply, there are attitudes in the earliest Christians that would be denounced as faith-shattering heresy were they professed today. For instance, blink and you’ll miss it, but in 1 Cor. 8:5 we have an open confession that Paul is not, by modern standards, actually a monotheist. It would technically be more accurate to label him a ‘henotheist’: he promotes the worship of one God above all (the God of Israel), yet acknowledges the existence of others. It would not be an uneducated guess to presume that most, if not all, early Christians were of the same view. The nature of Mediterranean religion in late antiquity was simply far too syncretistic to allow for the puritan divisions we now like to make.¹¹ Most of the Christian language of Jesus’ lordship was born with a real recognition of the other gods over whom he was designated cosmic ruler.

In sum: Christianity is not what it was, nor what it shall be. It is, as with all the world, changing. As I’ve insisted elsewhere, the metaphysical reality of creation’s becoming does not fail to apply to religion. In arguing for the openness of our dogma toward further future revelation (‘apocalypse’), Hart introduces a way of viewing Augustine’s classic distinction between the nominative fides quae creditur (‘faith which is believed’) and ablative fides qua creditur (‘faith by which it is believed’) that transforms our religion.¹² The literal, propositional surface of dogma—the ‘container’, to resume my analogy—is not a perfect thing from the first; it may well be in need of a few ergonomically-minded tweaks, perhaps so many that by the time it’s truly improved it looks almost nothing like its original form. But we would be in the wrong to presume that our current design is either the only one that’s ever been (forgetting the changes of the past) or the best there ever will be (ignoring the changes of the future). Best, rather, to admit that we now see only ‘in a glass darkly’ (1 Cor. 13:12), and that greater revelation—more efficient ways to hold the water, to prevent it from leaking out through any faulty cracks, to make it easier to pass around for others to drink—is surely to come.

To preveniently dismiss critiques which Hart had to fend off himself, this is not a matter of throwing out all of the ‘propositional’ or ‘literal’ qualities of belief. Ibn ‘Arabi springs to mind, who, in spite of all his characteristically mystical interpretations always kept to the very letter of the Qur’an.¹³ But that is also not to make the error—as these two posts of mine have sought to argue against—of collapsing the ‘qua’ so completely into the ‘quae’ that it subjects the entirety of one’s faith to a set of contingent propositions, enforced and guarded through ignorance and even (often, looking at religious history) the threat of violence. Yes, the letter of the text or dogma of the religion is mightily important, a valuable reflection of the attitudes of one’s ancestors and often a solid and necessary foundation for faith. But that does not make it utterly impervious to critique. And, if data arises which prompts us to reflect upon that literal reading, and, dare we be so bold, to suggest that it might have to change, then that too is part of the spirit of faith: to comport ourselves to the Truth in whatsoever manner it happens to present itself to us, not according to the paranoid, dogmatic, arrogant commands that we put to It.

I cannot reasonably expect to win over many religious people to this view, sadly. Generally, their objections are predicated upon the unspoken assumption that a religion is deprived of its value—its ‘truth’, its deliverance ‘from divinity’—once it relinquishes (the illusion of) enduring perfectly throughout history, a glimmering pearl magically concealed and protected from the realities of conditioned existence. It is that old category error that, to my mind, is nothing short of idolatry: the suggestion that religion has to be a God of its own—has to be immortal, immutable, unconditioned, and so on—in order to be valid. This superstition remains a horrid sickness gnawing at the health of religion. To think that life is a thing to grab and throttle, to strangle into stillness, rather than to let go, let spin in its kaleidoscopic glory. Is this not delusion? Even neurosis? What kind of soul brings the resplendent melody to a screeching halt, just in order to cling to a handful of disparate notes? I promise: to let it play is infinitely more beautiful. Let the boat rock. Have a little faith.

1. See James Ware, ‘Paul’s Understanding of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:36–54’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 133, no. 4 (2014): 809-835.

2. Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 15. I apologise: I am in possession only of a pageless pdf, so I’m at its mercy and am certain these page numbers will be incorrect. Do get your hands on the book, though.

3. Fredriksen, Paul, 50.

4. Ware, ‘Paul’s Understanding’, 815.

5. Fredriksen, Paul, 51.

6. M. David Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 173-174.

7. Do yourself a favour and follow his Substack.

8. Fredriksen, Paul, 129.

9. Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Christian Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 30.

10. See David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).

11. Have a listen to the way Fredriksen describes the cultural milieu in her presentation ‘Judaizing the Gentiles: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel’ here.

12. Augustine, de Trinitate, XIII.2.5.

13. ‘Certain Western scholars have portrayed Ibn al-‘Arabi as a great practitioner of esoteric commentary (ta‘wil), whereby the literal meaning of the text becomes a window through which one looks into the invisible realm. One can agree with this statement, so long as it is understood that no Muslim commentator has been as concerned as the Shaykh to preserve the Book’s literal sense. Ibn al-‘Arabi never denies the literal and apparent meaning. But he frequently adds to the literal sense an interpretation based upon an opening which transcends the cognitive limitations of most mortals. He often tells us that God may unveil meanings of the text to the gnostic which others have never perceived, and these unveilings can be trusted as long as they do not gainsay or contradict the literal meaning’. William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), xvi.