Did the Apostle's Invent the Resurrection?

In exploring Jesus’s resurrection, the first article in this series addressed the question: “Did later pagan influence add a resurrection story to the Jesus tradition?” We have seen that this hypothesis lacks support, and evidence strongly suggests that belief in Jesus’s resurrection was a very early phenomenon. So we now shift our attention back in time, to consider the role of Jesus’s first disciples.

If Jesus’s first disciples were responsible for a fake resurrection account, then it was either a deliberate hoax or a sad misunderstanding on their part. We will explore both possibilities by considering four questions:

Question 1: What were the relevant Jewish beliefs and expectations of the time?

Question 2: Were the disciples in Palestine influenced by pagan beliefs?

Question 3: Does a false resurrection claim seem likely?

Question 4: Could the disciples have experienced hallucinations of a risen Jesus?

What were the relevant Jewish beliefs and expectations of the time?

If Jesus’s first disciples invented the dramatic resurrection story, we would expect to find some reason for their decision. In particular, did Jewish expectations and traditions of the time lead them to claim that their leader had conquered death and ascended to heaven?

Second Temple Judaism did include a mystical tradition in which biblical figures such as Job and Moses were said to be translated to heaven after their death. [1] And there was great reverence for transcendent figures such as archangels and the eternal priest Melchizedek. So if Jesus’s disciples had wanted to exalt their dead leader, they could certainly have done so by drawing from a wide range of Jewish traditions.

However, it is important to note that their claim about Jesus’s resurrection and exaltation did not reflect Judaic teachings and beliefs: Jesus’s exaltation to God’s right hand of power was directly linked to themes of humiliation, sacrifice and atonement. But these were not features of Jewish exaltation mysticism.

Exalted figures in Second Temple Judaism were not given equal status alongside God,

and Jewish culture did not worship any angelic figure or revered hero.[2] So why was Jesus worshiped soon after his death by his Jewish disciples? Far from reflecting contemporary beliefs, the claim that Jesus was enthroned as an equal with God was unacceptable to monotheistic Judaism.

In particular, Judaism never exalted any contemporary man. In considering the Apostle Paul’s exalted description of Jesus, Andrew Chester remarks, “What should still strike us as astounding is the fact that Paul can apply these terms and traditions to a human figure not from the remote past (or biblical tradition) but from contemporary history and experience. This is something that is unique to the New Testament, in the context of Jewish usage” (Messiah and Exaltation, 393).

Jesus’s resurrection was different from the raising of the dead in biblical traditions (such as in 1 Kgs 17:22; 2 Kgs 4:35) because those people still died, but the risen Jesus was said to have conquered death.

Messianic expectations of the time also do not explain why Jesus’s disciples would have concocted a story about him rising from the dead. Second Temple messianism was a complex and fluid set of beliefs, but there is no evidence of a dying-rising messiah in the Jewish Bible or the Qumran Scrolls.[3] Even skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman makes this strong statement: “In no surviving Jewish text—whether in the Hebrew Bible or later, up to the time of Christianity—is the Messiah said to die and be raised” (Apocalyptic Prophet, 218).

Biblical scholar Martin Hengel agrees:

“In the light of all our present knowledge, the suffering and dying Messiah was not yet a familiar traditional figure in the Judaism of the first century AD” (Atonement, 40). It was unheard of for any group of Jewish disciples to assert that their leader had risen from death; as N. T. Wright points out, there were many failed messianic figures in Judaism, but “in not one case do we hear of any group, after the death of its leader, claiming that he was in any sense alive again” (Victory, 110).

The Messiah was also not expected to be a divinity alongside God.[4] As Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner observed: “Of the divine nature of the Messiah, there are perhaps certain indications in the later Midrashim; in the authentic writings of the Tannaitic period [first two centuries AD] there is not a trace” (Messianic Idea, 466). And no other Jewish messianic movement ever worshiped their leader as equivalent to God.

In addition, Jesus’s death by crucifixion would have placed him under the Old Testament curse on a hanged person (Deut 21:23), which the Apostle Paul admitted was a “stumbling block” to the Jews accepting him as the promised Messiah (1 Cor 1:23; Gal 3:13). As Martin Hengel has pointed out, a crucified son of God would have been an unacceptable contradiction in both Hellenic and Judaic cultures of the time (Crucifixion, 10).

While Bart Ehrman accepts that Jesus was worshiped soon after his death by his followers in Jerusalem, he claims that Jesus’s first disciples must have deified their teacher because as ancient Jews they believed that human beings could become divine (How Jesus Became God, 5). However, the above facts do not support this argument, and other scholars instead conclude that the early veneration of the crucified Jesus as the risen Messiah was completely without precedent.[5]

Were the disciples in Palestine influenced by pagan beliefs?

The ancient Enochian texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain the relevant Parables section (1 Enoch 37–71), and Hengel comments about the Parables that “even its Palestinian origin is not certain” (“History of Isaiah 53,” 99).

We have seen that first-century Jewish beliefs did not include expectations of a semi-divine messianic figure that would rise from death, but could Jesus’s early followers have been influenced by pagan concepts? This seems highly improbable, because historians have concluded that Hellenization was on the whole a superficial influence, which is unlikely to have affected the monotheistic beliefs of Jesus’s disciples in Palestine.[6]

Apart from Judas, Jesus’s chosen apostles were Galilean, and archaeologists have found widespread evidence of Torah-observant Judaism in first-century Galilee.[7] Mark Chancey’s archaeological work in that region has also revealed “impressive amounts of evidence for Judaism and very meagre evidence for paganism” (Myth of Gentile Galilee, vii). Judaism continued to be strongly separatist, and the first-century Roman Tacitus complained that Jews “sit apart at meals, they sleep apart, and though, as a nation, they are singularly prone to lust, they abstain from intercourse with foreign women . . . They therefore do not allow any images to stand in their cities, much less in their temples. This flattery is not paid to their kings, nor this

honor to our Emperors” (History 5.5).

Around the time of Jesus, Judaism was notorious for refusing to worship other gods or human beings, and thousands of Jews in Palestine offered to die rather than allow Emperor Gaius’s statue to be placed in the Jerusalem temple.[8] Even the first-century Jewish writer Philo, who lived in Egypt and was strongly influenced by Greco-Roman culture, strongly condemned the pagan practice of deifying human beings as being “excessive folly” and “preposterous impiety.”

He urged his fellow Jews to “not worship those who are our brothers by nature . . . and let not the polytheistical doctrine ever even touch the ears of any man who is accustomed to seek for the truth.” (See Embassy to Gaius 25 §163; Decalogue 14 § 64.)

As biblical scholar Larry Hurtado remarked, “There is clear indication that devout Jews of the Roman era were characteristically concerned about the uniqueness of their God and held strong scruples about reserving worship for this God alone” (One God, xii). Richard Bauckham agrees that “most Jews of this period were highly self-consciously monotheistic . . . They drew a line of distinction between the one God and all other reality” (Jesus, 3). It is therefore highly unlikely that Jesus’s first disciples in Palestine would have elevated him to divine status under

polytheistic influence.

Conclusion:

Claims of Jesus’s resurrection and his worship by Jewish disciples therefore cannot be accounted for by pagan influence, and it had no precedence in Judaism. After an extensive investigation into afterlife beliefs in the Old Testament, post-biblical Judaism, and pagan texts, N. T. Wright concludes that the claim of Jesus’s physical resurrection would have been just as controversial in Jesus’s time as in ours: “Nothing in Jewish beliefs about the Jewish god, and certainly nothing in non-Jewish beliefs about non-Jewish gods, would suggest to devotees that they should predicate resurrection of their object of worship. Some sort of new life beyond the grave, quite possibly: resurrection, certainly not” (Resurrection, 25).

[1] For example, in the Testament of Job (first century BC or AD), Job’s body is buried but God takes his soul to heaven in a chariot. Philo also wrote about how God transformed the dead Moses, “into a most sun-like mind” (Life of Moses 2.51 §288). [2] See Hurtado, Lord Jesus, 31; Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, 20; Bauckham, Jesus, 14. [3] See, for example, VanderKam and Flint, Dead Sea Scrolls, 345. Eisenman and Wise claimed to find a dying messiah in Qumran scroll 4Q285 frag. 7.4, which they translated as, “they will put to death the Prince of the Congregation, the Branch of David” (Scrolls Uncovered, 29). However, many other scholars translate this as, “the Prince of the Congregation will kill him.” See García Martínez and Tigchelaar, Dead Sea Scrolls, 643. Geza Vermes makes this comment: “The recently and groundlessly advanced theory that ‘the Prince of the Congregation, Branch of David’ of 4Q285 is a suffering and executed Messiah is contradicted both by the immediate context and the broader exegetical framework” (Dead Sea Scrolls, 12). John Collins agrees: “The more sensational claims about fragments, such as the discovery of a dying messiah in a pre-Christian Jewish text . . . turned out to be short-lived” (Scepter, vi). See also Chester, Messiah and Exaltation, 235. [4] The Parables (or Similitudes) of Enoch did depict a future heavenly Son of Man who would sit on a throne of glory and implement final judgment, but this was very rare in messianic expectations of the time, and Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner pointed out that the Parables “add new features to the spiritual aspect of the Messiah” (Messianic Idea, 299). Most scholars date the text to the first century AD, so its influence on or from Christianity is difficult to establish, and James VanderKam notes that “there remains widespread agreement that at least a few significant sections were added to the Similitudes during their textual history” (“Righteous One,” 176). Darryll Hannah agrees that some sections are “best regarded as a later addition to the text of the Parables” (“Elect Son of Man,” 154). Matthew Black even suggests that the uncertain dating leaves the text “open to the suspicion that Enoch as Son of Man was an invention of late esoteric cabbalistic Judaism, as a Jewish rival to the Gospel figure” (“Aramaic Barnāshā,” 201). The ancient Enochian texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain the relevant Parables section (1 Enoch 37–71), and Hengel comments about the Parables that “even its Palestinian origin is not certain” (“History of Isaiah 53,” 99). [5] See Chester, Messiah and Exaltation, 121. Endsjø writes, “Jewish beliefs on the afterlife were never identical with what Christians held to be true” (Greek Resurrection Beliefs, 121). Pannenberg maintained that “the primitive Christian news about the eschatological resurrection of Jesus—with a temporary interval separating it from the universal resurrection of the dead—is, considered from the point of view of the history of religions, something new” (Jesus, 92). [6] According to Bowersock, “There was no more than a superficial Hellenization in much of Asia Minor, the Near East, and Egypt” (Hellenism, 6). Archaeologist Warwick Ball also describes Hellenistic influence as the “gloss of a Macedonian and subsequently Roman veneer” (Rome in the East, 1). [7] Archaeologist Jonathan Reed has found widespread evidence of four Jewish “identity markers” in Galilee: the use of ossuaries (burial chests for bones), stone vessels used for ritual purity, mikveh immersion baths, and the absence of swine bones (Archaeology and Galilean Jesus, 52–53). [8] See Josephus, Ant. 18.8.2; Philo, Embassy to Gaius 31 §207–210.