Q&A: Objections to My Views On Resurrection

This is more from the archive on The Resurrection.

A friend and interlocutor writes this in response to some of my views: in an upcoming post I hope to look at what I think of as the stronger (though not really conclusive) case for Christianity. But in the meantime, I think this business of arguments-for-historicity have got to go away.

But the average follower actually believed [in the Resurrection]. He didn't know for a fact it was all a lie and choose to die anyway.

Yes, probably.  But I'm not sure that "lie" and "truth" are that easily distinguished when it comes to things like an anti-Roman, nationalistic, spiritualistic movement like Jesus' "Kingdom of God."

I mean, "The spirit of the movement" is embodied by the leader in such moments, so much so that I once stayed in a country cottage in Wales where a prayer for King Arthur was inscribed on the wall. (This is in the 20th century, mind you, 1400 years after the historical Arthur died! You'd think the emotion would have died down!)

You bet they'd die for the belief that "Jesus Lives!" as much as any partisan would.

Keep in mind you're not dealing with a literalistic culture, or at least not a culture addicted to literalism as we are: for them to say "Jesus lives" might very easily be understood at the level of metaphor of some sort, or parable.

That's not to say it would have to be. But the metaphor doesn't work quite so dramatically if there's a body you can point to.

So I think the analogy holds pretty nicely at that level.

As it happens, I do happen to think that if they didn't believe in the literal factual resurrection, they conspired (perhaps subconsciously) to insist upon it for the good of the movement (with the exception of Mark, whose Resurrection account is pretty unsatisfying).

My understanding is that the Israelites, including Jesus' disciples, were expecting the Messiah to be someone who was going to physically overthrow Rome and then become Israel's king. There were other people around the time of Jesus who claimed to be the Messiah. They were obviously proven wrong so it wouldn't have been that big of a deal if Jesus' claims had gone the same way.

It would have been catastrophic. You're talking about guys who had gone all in with a guy just executed for sedition!

Personally, I find it impossible to believe that a group of men who were expecting a physical kingdom would suddenly change their mind and focus on a spiritual one instead (note that the followers of the other claimants didn't do this)

Pause over that for a second... you're assuming a major distinction between these two things (spiritual and physical kingdoms), and you're thinking like a modern Westerner, not like a 1st century peasant. Until you CAN overcome that distinction, you won't be able to believe it.

- then go on to steal the body of their leader, proclaim that he had risen from the dead, and eventually suffer horrible deaths without ever recanting the story that they knew for a fact was a lie. Sorry. I just don't see human nature working that way.

They believed in the Kingdom, there's no argument from me. But you're presupposing an awful lot here about their psychology that strikes me as distinctly like us.  Most significantly, you assume that the thing that is not a fact is a lie.

I'm sorry, I'm still not buying the idea that a group of men previously dedicated to the return of a physical kingdom suddenly decided a spiritual one was the way to go after all. For them to decide that after having a face-to-face talk with a risen Jesus makes sense; but for them to come to that conclusion totally on their own just doesn't - none of the other groups did (Jesus was neither the first nor the last to claim to be the Messiah). Their leaders died and that was it.

That's actually not true. The Sicarii (the Zealots) fought on after their leaders were killed; and Menachem ben Judah's followers kept up the good fight after the Sicarii killed him. Isḥaḳ ben Ya'ḳub Obadiah Abu 'Isa al-Isfahani of Ispahan (I know, I know) perished (I think in Jerusalem) and left behind his disciple (more reasonably named Al-Rai) to carry on the movement.

Also, keep in mind Jesus said explicitly that he would be crucified, and that the movement would go on: "You will be dragged before kings," he tells his disciples to prepare them. The movement does NOT end. "Anyone who puts his hand to the plow and turns back isn't fit for the kingdom," he continues. It goes on and on! How you could miss this aspect of the gospel (live or die, this thing goes on) would have been staggering.

Putting it another way, Jesus (unlike the other messiahs? We don't have enough information) had actually primed his followers for what came after his death.

 

These guys were ready for it.

But primed or not, lots of Jews of Jesus' period were inclined towards being rowdy against the Romans, whether they had a resurrection myth or not.

They didn't decide to spiritualize their stories and carry on. So why in the world would Jesus' disciples have decided to handle it differently - and so drastically differently at that - totally on their own?

The answer to that is in the character of Jesus, of course: he hammered the eternal nature of this operation ("Nobody knows the day or the hour, not even me"; "It will come like a thief in the night"). He was persistent that pistis (faith or fidelity) in this kingdom was essential and would be rewarded, and that a failure of faith rendered one unfit for the kingdom.

It's not precisely "spiritualizing" it (read any modern political concession speech!  The dream lives on!), but don't miss what the disciples themselves heard in Jesus' words.

 

If you want a profound analogy for this, look at the anti-U.S. movements in the Middle East. Strike the head of the serpent, kill the leaders of insurgencies, and... well, the movement goes on. 

People saying: I not only saw the man and walked with him, but I also touched him and ate with him after he rose from the dead would have been giving off a metaphor or a parable vibe? I know that the culture of first-century Palestine was not identical to mine, but that's a bit more than my brain can wrap itself around.

Well, you admit you don't quite grok it, and that's honest. But you or I, with our televisions, computers, credit cards, local groceries, freedom of the vote and of religion and conscience, white heritage (I'll assume) and cars are simply not equipped to easily grok the mindset of 1st century Jewish peasants living under Roman rule.  If you experienced it for two weeks, you'd feel you were losing your mind.  A lifetime?  You'd be a totally different person.

[W]hy didn't the followers of the other Messiah-claimants do the same thing? Why didn't they spiritualize their claims and carry on?

 Two things: one is that I'm increasingly uncomfortable with your term "spiritualizing" here.

The Jews have rarely, at least since the Captivity, made a distinction between the political and the spiritual as you see it here. When you read what they've got to say for themselves (Dead Sea Scrolls; Josephus; Book of Maccabees), the political struggle is almost always seen in apocalyptic, cosmic, spiritual terms. Very recognizable language for a Christian, in a lot of cases: they had read the same texts as Jesus, they knew the same poetry, they harbored the same beliefs about the Son of Man... and Jesus was by no means the first rabbi to offer the interpretation of scripture that the Messiah would suffer and die: the Suffering Servant passage from Isaiah 52-53 and Zechariah 12:10 were long considered a reference to the fact that the Messiah would die. It is also true that in the Talmud we have at least one specific case where these suffering passages are applied to a specific Messiah who had died. I'm afraid I can't remember who, but I'll try to scare it up if you want. My point is that I think you're greatly oversimplifying the Jewish understanding of the Messiah's mission. It was spiritual from the first; it was understood as nothing less than an end to history in which Israel is vindicated before her enemies: Jesus' actions at the Last Supper put the exclamation mark on this understanding, as do his words at the trial, and after Jesus died [and rose] Paul and Peter are still believing in this apocalyptic understanding of Jesus. This runs all the way through the gospels.The Kingdom of God, Jesus called it. There was no confusion here. When he laid the Sermon on the Mount on the disciples (and crowds) there was no misunderstanding that this was going to be a military victory over the Romans by conventional means. They were looking for the Kingdom of God to descend, and were still looking for it to descend when they died. It's not "spiritualizing" in any sense that I recognize. But it's the nature of all movements of this kind to mythologize the origins, sooner or later it they don't just die. And of course you really could say that the whole Jewish struggle against Rome and towards Zionist independence throughout the post-Roman period are exactly that: dedications to a movement that has failed and failed and failed and failed.

One of the themes I use in my classes to hold the study of the Bible together is the theme of hope deferred and how it crystalizes in apocalyptic visions. The disciples had been conditioned for maybe three years (probably much more) that the moment of hope was now. Being Jews, they knew it was now or never. Jesus explicitly drilled them in this belief.

So yeah, in a race of people that produced suicide terrorism against Rome, that believed passionately in the Son of David, that was utterly hot for apocalypse... Yes. I'm there. 

Weren't they in positions that were just as desperate as the position Jesus' disciples were in? I think the reason they didn't was because it's a crazy transition to make when you're making decisions based totally on your own emotions and logic.

 Sure, there's a self-preservation aspect to it, so it's going to take the intersection of some special psychological ripples, historical circumstances, or just bare charisma in Jesus to make it go. But study the history of the Jews, and this isn't unthinkable. I mean, look at the Macabees and the Sicarii. These guys are flammable people!

There are some facets of human nature that I believe are global and cross all times and cultures - things like greed, a desire to protect your children, a sense of self-preservation. Not being willing to suffer untold amounts of pain and ultimately dealth for something you absolutely know beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt is a lie, is one of them. You'll have a hard time convincing me that even in the first century people were willing to be brutally murdered for something they knew to be a lie. The sense of self-preservation just runs too deep.

 Well, as I suggest above, they didn't think it was a lie. They thought it was true. But the factual condition of the dead Jesus may well have been something a little more complicated than you seem to think. I mean, we more or less began this conversation with some assertions that "it all hangs on the resurrection," but for the purposes of 1st century Jewish apocalypse, that's not precisely the case. The Resurrection, the belief that the King was still (metaphorically) reigning would have had far different implications for them.

 You and I can't imagine easily thinking that way. But it's the mode of thought of the ancient world... I mean, heck, the buzz after the death of Nero among the lower classes (especially in the Eastern provinces) was, "Relax. The Empire is in a bad state, but Nero is coming back soon. He'll set all to rights." Never mind that they actually did know that Nero was dead and buried in the mausoleum of Domitii Ahenobarbi.

The sole difference between the movement of Jesus and the movements that came before, so far as I can see, is that something catalyzed permanence in the Christian community. Whether this was a matter of mass psychology, the peculiarity of the teachings, the peculiarity of the time and place, the intensity of the charisma, post-crucifixion openness to the Gentiles, the mixture of teachings, the Holy Spirit, the Resurrection... all those things together... None of them... Well, that's not a matter that this kind of argument can settle. But if the gospels and epistles are to be believed, there never was a moment when the kingdom was understood to be "temporal" as opposed to "spiritual," and that was typical rather than otherwise.Rather, if anyone were to ask me, I'd steer the question away from a division between "temporal" and "spiritual" and towards what I think is the clear actual psychological state of both Jesus and the other messiahs, the state they traded in and used to draw followers: Apocalyptic. It's the brain-food of Jesus' world, and it's in almost every utterance he gives in the NT. Furthermore, it doesn't much change its shape from the gospels to the epistles.

But they were initially expecting a physical overthrow of Rome and a physical Israelite king. You don't go from expecting and wanting that type of kingdom to docilely accepting a spiritual, non-temporal one - not without something major occuring to change your mind.

You don't? Who doesn't? You don't? Your kids do: watch 'em next time you lay a major heavy disappointment on them.

And a final note: I know it seems that I'm going after the factuality of the Resurrection here.  But actually, I'm not.  It might well be factual.  I'm simply saying that the contention that that factuality is demonstrable from the objective evidence is seriously flawed: there isn't any evidence of the sort we use to establish a historical fact.

I don't deny the "factuality" of the resurrection, I just don't think it ever comes up. For me to deny it would be for me to try to take your story away, but then, in some ways, for you (or Lee Strobel or Josh McDowell) to try to factualize the story is just asking for it.

Comments

[Sandra]

Otter,

I like this series on the irrelevance of the historicity of the Resurrection. You are saying so many things so well that I have tried to say without being nearly so articulate (though, I suspect, you get as much dogmatic emotional resistance as I ever did, regardless of how well you lay out your thesis). This question--does it matter whether the Resurrection was a physical, literal, temporal event--was one of the first clearly heretical ideas I had as a teen in the third generation of fundamentalists. It was so blatant to me that the literal temporality was really beside the point. Even if one accepts the Crucifixion as Substitutionary Atonement, which I was also questioning (yeah, that didn't win me any favors as the preacher's daughter), the Resurrection is more functional as a metaphor than historical event.

To insist on temporal fact limits how one can interpret the purpose of Jesus. Why do we, anyone who lives/lived after Jesus did, care about Jesus? If we care only because he "rose again on the third day", what do we do with all the life he lived before his death? In the physical resurrection crowd, it seems that Jesus' only purpose was to hang around advertising his future Resurrection so that someone would be there to notice that it happened. And that, I think, seriously discredits Jesus as a teacher, leader, holy man (no matter what one believes about his deity).

[Otter]

Sandra,

I'm gonna stop short of saying "It doesn't matter." I do agree with you though about the consequences of _insisting_ on that factual historicity.

And I think that's a really important distinction: to believe in a story is, I think, to intentionally cloud one's own depth-perception in order to better live. To insist on its factuality is to submit one's story to inspection, like a man in love who invites all the boys at the pub to come around and verify that his love is the best fuck in the universe.

[Susan R]

The historicity of the resurrection matters very deeply—essentially--for those of us who are sacramentalists (and I’d argue that all Christian are sacramental to some degree). The story of Christ (of all of scripture) is the story of God acting in history, and it is by no means limited to the resurrection. Take, for example, the incarnation. The idea that God, a spiritual entity, became a man with flesh like mine speaks volumes about how and why this material world matters. The ministry of Jesus matters for the same reason. What Jesus touched was changed in physical, tangible ways—the lame walk, the water turns to wine, the fig tree withers, the blind see, the dead are raised. Similarly, the Old Testament is a record of the intervention of God in time and space, from creation onward. The resurrection is part and parcel of all of that. An allegorical resurrection has meaning for our imaginations (which are, of course, extremely important) and maybe to our minds, but it has no significance for our bodily lives and our physical world. It’s a really big deal to say that God has had no part of our flesh and blood, to imply that the holy and the good are “spiritual” and not material.

It also matters to those of us who claim to be disciples of Jesus (rather than admirers of his teaching and the narrative arc of the gospels), who expect to follow him through death. Perhaps one can argue that I ought to be up for any degree of self-sacrifice on the basis of a beautiful story, but if that’s the case, I ought to be willing to die as a martyr as a disciple of Gandalf and I’m just not.

If the above makes anyone feel I am “insisting” on “factual” resurrection, I’m totally fine if you consider it simply as story: the story is that God became a man with a physical body, that he used that physical body in his ministry, that his physical body was put to death, and that he returned to life in a physical body that could be touched and handled. That’s the story. It includes a physical resurrection, and when you swap a physical resurrection for a metaphorical one, you change the story.

[Sandra]

Susan--I agree that if you accept that the Christian story is that spiritual God became physical Man, then it pretty much follows that the story continues through a physical Resurrection. Such a story, IMO, still doesn't necessitate a physical Resurrection, but it's a much more coherent story if a physical Resurrection is included. I disagree that the story you describe has to be the only way the Christian story reads. You start by presupposing a meta-narrative of a God who interferes with his creation that I don't think is a "must believe" piece of Christianity--an extremely common one, though. I think I can call myself a disciple of Christ and not merely a respectful admirer without accepting that common version of the story. Admittedly, I am a heretical Christian, but Christian nonetheless. So, I get that a physical Resurrection CAN matter to some people, even most people, but I don't think it HAS to matter to be a meaningful part of how and why I love God and my fellow man.

Otter--I don't think I said that a historical physical Resurrection "doesn't matter" (although, obviously, I do think it ultimately doesn't matter) but you could certainly think so from what I wrote. What I meant was more the direction you went in your comment: that questioning whether it matters allows one to explore other angles of perception from which a deeper and broader understanding becomes possible. Demanding that it matters and must matter to everyone limits discussion to the mere historicity, the one-dimensional view, derailing focus from the broader themes of Christianity: Love God and love your neighbor. Much like your guy in the bar whose experience of his relationship can only be discussed through the sex angle when hopefully, though we can never know since he never lets us forget the sex, his relationship is so much more than the sex that his physical relationship with his beloved becomes practically irrelevant.

[Otter]

Gotcha, Sandra! Love your blog lately. Good stuff.

[Susan R]

Demanding that it matters and must matter to everyone limits discussion to the mere historicity, the one-dimensional view

Sandra, I totally agree that some fundamentalists are reductionist. (I’m not always sure if I’m using the 50-cent words exactly right: I mean that they reduce the resurrection to the level of scientific fact and are likely to slap me upside the head if I use the a phrase like “creation myth” in front of them, and that they damage the faith because of it.) But I have to say I think some liberals fall into the self-same trap—they just enter by another door. They are hung up on the same questions concerning the “historicity” or “factuality” of the resurrection, but instead of being irrationally certain of it (like the fundies), they seem to be paralyzed by uncertainty, standing in a spot where they can’t say no and they won’t say yes. To my eyes, that is also reductionist, as it regards the resurrection primarily (if not exclusively) at an allegorical/inspirational level and quashes down (if not utterly dismisses) the physicality of it.

I myself think it’s not really an either/or, it’s a both/and—a “true story” with teeth and blood and bones and flesh AND myth and archetypes and parables and poetry.

[Sandra]

Susan,

You are so correct that fundamentalist thinking (as I call it) that reduces everything to a manageable (if cognitively dissonant) simplicity is abundant everywhere--certainly not limited to fundamentalists. During my heathen years (roughly 25-45), I found that same kind of black-and-white, only-one-right-answer thinking in every circle I found myself. Whether it was Zen Buddhists, Pagan Witches, crunchy granola Neo-Hippies, Obama campaign workers, or Waldorf educators, they all had unquestionable dogma spouted by wild-eyed zealots.

What I like about Otter's post is that it questions the unquestionable so that the meaning behind the dogma comes into focus. Why do we care about the Resurrection? Your explanation of why a physical resurrection, and a God who interferes with his Creation is fabulous. You looked beyond the Resurrection itself to see it a part of a larger drama between Divine Creator and Beloved Creation. It gets to the "back story" of spiritual reality--that Love and Grace are the fundamental forces of Life. But by asking the question, there is an assumption that another explanation might be equally as valid a means to Love and Grace.

If people get too invested in their dogma, in this case, the necessity of a physical Resurrection or the insistence that there cannot be a physical Resurrection, they lose sight of the Truths the dogma should be illuminating. I like that here at Riparian Church, we are able to question dogma, not simply for the sake of questioning dogma, but for the ability to help one another see beyond the dogma to the broader/deeper reality.

[Susan R]

You’ve met a huge variety of people, Sandra—sounds like fun!

It is surely a good and useful (and humbling!) practice to examine the unexamined assumptions behind one’s beliefs and dogmas. My point was less about the tendency of groups to run toward dogmatism, though, and more about those unexamined assumptions you mentioned.

Christians (among others) are constantly asked to justify whatever assumptions run contrary to those of the dominant culture. Both fundamentalist and liberal Christians have responded to the challenge by determining that their original assumptions about truth were untenable on their own. Both now hold a core belief more in accordance with the dominant culture—namely, that ultimate truth that can be determined via the scientific method, or the historical-critical method (or other post-Enlightenment tools). Fundamentalists demonstrate that belief by insisting (incorrectly) that science and reason prove and support their other core beliefs (about divine revelation and authority, for instance). Liberals demonstrate that belief by insisting (correctly) that science and reason do not prove or support any other core beliefs at all . . . but then go on to subscribe to other beliefs (in theories of relativism or humanism, for instance) as if they were self-evidently tenable.

I, too, have found Riparian Church to be a great place to examine my assumptions in conversations like this one with you—it’s been really, really helpful. Thanks!