The text handed down in the First Letter to the Corinthians has been extended by Paul, inasmuch as he has added, among others, his own encounter with the risen Lord. For Saint Paul’s self-understanding and for the faith of the early Church I find it significant that Paul felt entitled to add on to the original confession, with equally binding character, the risen Lord’s appearance to him and the apostolic mission that came with it. He was evidently convinced that this revelation of the risen Lord to him was still a central part of the emerging creedal formula, that it belonged to the faith of the universal Church as an essential element intended for all.
Let us listen now to the whole text, as Paul presents it:
“That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive. . . . Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me” (1 Cor 15:3-8).
In the view of most exegetes, the original confession ends with verse 5, that is, with the appearance to Cephas and the Twelve. From further traditions, Paul added James, the group of over five hundred brethren, and “all” the Apostles—here he is evidently applying an understanding of “apostles” that extends beyond the circle of the Twelve. James is important because with him, Jesus’ family, who had previously been decidedly ambivalent (cf. Mk 3:20-21, 31-35; Jn 7:5), enter the circle of believers and also because James is the one who assumed the leadership of the Mother Church in the Holy City after Peter’s flight from Jerusalem.
Jesus’ death
Let us turn now to the confession itself, which demands more detailed consideration. It begins with the phrase: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” The fact of his death is qualified by two additional expressions: “for our sins” and “in accordance with the Scriptures”.
Let us begin with the second expression. It is important for the whole approach taken by the early Church toward the facts of Jesus’ life. What the risen Lord taught the disciples on the road to Emmaus now becomes the basic method for understanding the figure of Jesus: everything that happened to him is fulfillment of the “Scriptures”. Only on the basis of the “Scriptures”, the Old Testament, can he be understood at all. With reference to Jesus’ death on the Cross, this means that his death is no coincidence. It belongs in the context of God’s ongoing relationship with his people, from which it receives its inner logic and its meaning. It is an event in which the words of Scripture are fulfilled; it bears within itself Logos, or logic; it proceeds from the word and returns to the word; it surrounds the word and fulfills it.
A pointer toward a deeper understanding of this fundamental relationship with the word is given by the earlier qualification: Christ died “for our sins”. Because his death has to do with the word of God, it has to do with us, it is a dying “for”. In the chapter on Jesus’ death on the Cross, we saw what an enormous wealth of tradition in the form of scriptural allusions feeds into the background here, chief among them the fourth Suffering Servant Song (Is 53). Insofar as Jesus’ death can be located within this context of God’s word and God’s love, it is differentiated from the kind of death resulting from man’s original sin as a consequence of his presumption in seeking to be like God, a presumption that could only lead to man’s plunge into wretchedness, into the destiny of death.
Jesus’ death is of another kind: it is occasioned, not by the presumption of men, but by the humility of God. It is not the inevitable consequence of a false hubris, but the fulfillment of a love in which God himself comes down to us, so as to draw us back up to himself. Jesus’ death is rooted, not in the sentence of expulsion from Paradise, but in the Suffering Servant Songs. It is a death in the context of his service of expiation—a death that achieves reconciliation and becomes a light for the nations. Thus it is that the twofold qualification that Paul adds, when handing on this creedal formula, to the expression “he died” opens up the path from the Cross to the Resurrection.
The question of the empty tomb
Next in the confession of faith, abruptly and without commentary, comes the statement “he was buried.” This makes it clear that Jesus really was dead, that he fully participated in the human destiny of death. Jesus traveled the path of death right to the bitter and seemingly hopeless end in the tomb. Jesus’ tomb was evidently known. And here the question naturally arises: Did he remain in the tomb? Or was it empty after he had risen?
In modern theology this question has been extensively debated. Most commentators come to the conclusion that an empty tomb would not be enough to prove the Resurrection. If the tomb were indeed empty, there could be some other explanation for it. On this basis, the commentators conclude that the question of the empty tomb is immaterial and can therefore be ignored, which tends also to mean that it probably was not empty anyway, so at least a dispute with modern science over the possibility of bodily resurrection can be avoided. But at the basis of all this lies a distorted way of posing the question.
Naturally, the empty tomb as such does not prove the Resurrection. Mary Magdalene, in John’s account, found it empty and assumed that someone must have taken Jesus’ body away. The empty tomb is no proof of the Resurrection, that much is undeniable. Conversely, though, one might ask: Is the Resurrection compatible with the body remaining in the tomb? Can Jesus be risen if he is still lying in the tomb? What kind of resurrection would that be? Today, notions of resurrection have been developed for which the fate of the corpse is of no consequence. Yet the content of the Resurrection becomes so vague in the process that one must ask with what kind of reality we are dealing in this form of Christianity.
Be that as it may: Thomas Söding, Ulrich Wilckens, and others rightly point out that in Jerusalem at the time, the proclamation of the Resurrection would have been completely impossible if anyone had been able to point to a body lying in the tomb. To this extent, for the sake of posing the question correctly, we have to say that the empty tomb as such, while it cannot prove the Resurrection, is nevertheless a necessary condition for Resurrection faith, which was specifically concerned with the body and, consequently, with the whole of the person.
In Saint Paul’s confessional statement, it is not explicitly stated that the tomb was empty, but this is clearly presupposed. All four Gospels speak of it extensively in their Resurrection accounts.
For a theological understanding of the empty tomb, a passage from Saint Peter’s Pentecost sermon strikes me as important, when Peter for the first time openly proclaims Jesus’ Resurrection to the assembled crowds. He communicates it, not in his own words, but by quoting Psalm 16:8-10 as follows: “. . . my flesh will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life” (Acts 2:26-28). Peter quotes the psalm text using the version found in the Greek Bible. The Hebrew text is slightly different: “You do not give me up to Sheol, or let your godly one see the Pit. You show me the path of life” (Ps 16:10-11). In the Hebrew version the psalmist speaks in the certainty that God will protect him, even in the threatening situation in which he evidently finds himself, that God will shield him from death and that he may dwell securely: he will not see the grave. The version Peter quotes is different: here the psalmist is confident that he will not remain in the underworld, that he will not see corruption.
Peter takes it for granted that it was David who originally prayed this psalm, and he goes on to state that this hope was not fulfilled in David: “He both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29). The tomb containing his corpse is the proof of his not having risen. Yet the psalm text is still true: it applies to the definitive David. Indeed, Jesus is revealed here as the true David, precisely because in him this promise is fulfilled: “You will not let your Holy One see corruption.”
If in the early creedal formula from Jerusalem, transmitted by Saint Paul, it is stated that Jesus rose according to the Scriptures, then surely Psalm 16 must have been seen as key scriptural evidence for the early Church. Here they found a clear statement that Christ, the definitive David, will not see corruption—that he must truly have risen.
“Not to see corruption”: this is virtually a definition of resurrection. Only with corruption was death regarded as definitive. Once the body had decomposed, once it had broken down into its elements—marking man’s dissolution and return to dust—then death had conquered. From now on this man no longer exists as a man—only a shadow may remain in the underworld. From this point of view, it was fundamental for the early Church that Jesus’ body did not decompose. Only then could it be maintained that he did not remain in death, that in him life truly conquered death.
What the early Church deduced from the Septuagint version of Psalm 16:10 also determined the viewpoint of the entire patristic period. Resurrection essentially implies that Jesus’ body was not subject to corruption. In this sense, the empty tomb is a strongly scriptural element of the Resurrection proclamation. Theological speculations arguing that Jesus’ decomposition and Resurrection could be mutually compatible belong to modern thinking and stand in clear contradiction of the biblical vision. On this basis, too, we have further confirmation that a Resurrection proclamation would have been impossible if Jesus’ body had been lying in the grave.
The third day
Let us return to our creedal formula. The next article states: “He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:4). “In accordance with the Scriptures” applies to the entire phrase, not specifically to the third day, although this is included. The essential point is that the Resurrection itself is in accordance with the Scriptures—that it forms part of the whole promise that in Jesus became, not just word, but reality. So for scriptural background we could certainly look to Psalm 16:10, but also to basic promise texts like Isaiah 53. There is no direct scriptural testimony pointing to the “third day”.
The thesis that the third day may possibly have been derived from Hosea 6:1-2 cannot be sustained, as Hans Conzelmann and likewise Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer have shown. The text reads: “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 text is a penitential prayer on the part of sinful Israel. There is no mention of resurrection from the dead, properly speaking. The text is not quoted in the New Testament or at any point during the second century (cf. Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus und das Judentum, p. 631). It could become an anticipatory pointer toward resurrection on the third day only after the event that took place on the Sunday after the Lord’s crucifixion had given this day a special meaning.
The third day is not a “theological” date, but the day when an event took place that became the decisive turning point for the disciples after the calamity of the Cross. Josef Blank formulated it like this: “The expression ‘on the third day’ is a chronological indication in harmony with the earliest Christian tradition in the Gospels, and it relates to the discovery of the empty tomb” (Paulus und Jesus, p. 156).
I would add: it relates to the first encounter with the risen Lord. The first day of the week—the third after Friday—is attested in the New Testament from a very early stage as a day when the Christian community assembled for worship (cf. 1 Cor 16:2; Acts 20:7; Rev 1:10). Ignatius of Antioch (late first century, early second century), provides evidence, as we saw earlier, that for Christians Sunday had already supplanted the Jewish Sabbath culture: “We have seen how former adherents of the ancient customs have since attained to a new hope; so that they have given up keeping the Sabbath and now order their lives by the Lord’s day instead (the day when life first dawned for us, thanks to him and his death)” (Ad Magn., 9:1).
If we bear in mind the immense importance attached to the Sabbath in the Old Testament tradition on the basis of the Creation account and the Decalogue, then it is clear that only an event of extraordinary impact could have led to the abandonment of the Sabbath and its replacement by the first day of the week. Only an event that marked souls indelibly could bring about such a profound realignment in the religious culture of the week. Mere theological speculations could not have achieved this. For me, the celebration of the Lord’s day, which was characteristic of the Christian community from the outset, is one of the most convincing proofs that something extraordinary happened that day—the discovery of the empty tomb and the encounter with the risen Lord.
The witnesses
While verse 4 of the Pauline confession expounds the fact of the Resurrection, verse 5 introduces the list of witnesses. “He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve”, it states succinctly. If we regard this verse as the conclusion of the original Jerusalem formula, then this indication of names carries particular theological weight: it reveals the very foundation of the Church’s faith.
On the one hand, “the Twelve” remain the actual foundation stone of the Church, the permanent point of reference. On the other hand, the special task given to Peter is underlined here, the commission that was first assigned to him at Caesarea Philippi and then confirmed during the Last Supper (Lk 22:32), when Peter was, as it were, introduced into the Church’s eucharistic structure. Now, after the Resurrection, the Lord appears first to him, before appearing to the Twelve, and thus once again renews Peter’s particular mission.
If being a Christian essentially means believing in the risen Lord, then Peter’s special witnessing role is a confirmation of his commission to be the rock on which the Church is built. John, in his account of the risen Lord’s threefold question to Peter, “Do you love me?” and Peter’s threefold commissioning to feed Christ’s flock, clearly underlined once more Peter’s continuing mission vis-à-vis the faith of the whole Church (Jn 21:15-17). So the Resurrection account flows naturally into ecclesiology; the encounter with the risen Lord is mission, and it shapes the nascent Church.
B. The Narrative Tradition
Let us now move on—having considered the most important element of the confessional tradition—to the narrative tradition. Whereas the former authoritatively condenses the shared faith of Christianity in fixed formulae and insists on their binding character, down to the letter, for the whole believing community, the narrative accounts of the Resurrection appearances reflect different traditions. They are linked to various bearers of tradition, and they can be divided geographically between Jerusalem and Galilee. They are not binding in every detail in the same way as the confessions; but by virtue of being taken up into the Gospels, they are clearly to be regarded as valid testimony, giving content and shape to the faith. The confessions presuppose the narratives and grew out of them. They express in concentrated form the nucleus of the narrative content, and at the same time they point back toward the narratives.
Every reader will be struck immediately by the differences between the Resurrection accounts of the four Gospels. Matthew, apart from the risen Lord’s appearance to the women at the empty tomb, gives only one other appearance—in Galilee to the Eleven. Luke gives only Jerusalem traditions. John tells of appearances in both Jerusalem and Galilee. None of the evangelists recounts Jesus’ Resurrection itself. It is an event taking place within the mystery of God between Jesus and the Father, which for us defies description: by its very nature it lies outside human experience.
The ending of Mark poses a parti
cular problem. According to authoritative manuscripts, the Gospel comes to a close with 16:8—“and they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.” The authentic text of the Gospel as it has come down to us ends with the fear and trembling of the women. Previously the text had spoken of the discovery of the empty tomb by the women who came to anoint the body and of the appearance of angels who announced Jesus’ Resurrection to them and urged them to tell the disciples, “and Peter”, that Jesus would go before them to Galilee as he had promised. It is impossible that the Gospel would have ended with the words that follow concerning the women’s silence: it takes for granted that the news of their encounter was passed on. And it must obviously have known of the appearance to Peter and the Twelve, described in the essentially older account of the First Letter to the Corinthians. For what reason our text breaks off at this point, we do not know. In the second century, a concluding summary was added, bringing together the most important Resurrection traditions and the mission of the disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world (Mk 16:9-20). Whatever the facts of the case, even the short ending of Mark presupposes the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, the message of the Resurrection, and knowledge of the appearances to Peter and to the Twelve. Its enigmatic interruption we must leave unexplained.
The narrative tradition tells of encounters with the risen Lord and the words spoken by him on those occasions; the confessional tradition merely establishes the key facts that serve to confirm the faith: this is another way of describing the essential difference between the two types of tradition. Specific differences ensue from this.
One initial difference is that in the confessional tradition only men are named as witnesses, whereas in the narrative tradition women play a key role, indeed they take precedence over the men. This may be linked to the fact that in the Jewish tradition only men could be admitted as witnesses in court—the testimony of women was considered unreliable. So the “official” tradition, which is, so to speak, addressing the court of Israel and the court of the world, has to observe this norm if it is to prevail in what we might describe as Jesus’ ongoing trial.
Jesus of Nazareth: From His Transfiguration Through His Death and Resurrection Page 22