March 31, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
I hope that all of you listening to this message today are having and will have a very happy Easter holiday and I hope that your family and friends have been able to gather around for a splendid dinner together. Whether you have young children who have had a smaller “second Christmas” with new clothes and a chocolate filled Easter basket or if you went to church today to hear, once again, that infamous Easter sermon that my preaching professor, David Buttrick, always ridiculed as the annual, “Yippee! We’re all going to live forever!” sermon, I would like to take this time to give a rather more sober and yet, I hope, more meaningful and at least a more believable account of the Easter event.
This is an extra “out of sequence” video that is not a sermon. This is a Bible lecture which, I’m afraid, may be offensive to traditional Christians but I hope that it will be reassuring and instructive for all of you who just can’t buy into the “yippee, we’re gonna live forever” sermons anymore.
Religious people often believe a lot of things that don’t stand up to intellectual interrogation, some absurd and embarrassing things, but they defend those beliefs by calling it “faith,” which, I am convinced, is unfair. The meaning of the word “faith” has a lot more to do with courage than it does with assassinating your brains. “Accepting something on faith” should not be a pass for believing things for which there is no evidence or, even worse, are clearly not true.
So, to begin, let’s just remember that historically, no one in the bible, none of the apostles nor anyone in the first century church celebrated a holiday called “Easter.” Easter was an invention of the second century church; I will not belabor the roots of the word or the correspondence that we have from the second century about it. I’m just saying, it was not an original fundamental of the earliest Christians.
A religion is like a language, it is always evolving. That should not be an embarrassment, nor should it be seen as a criticism. It is just a fact. Let me remind you that the Canterbury Tales, written by Chaucer, is one of the first works written in English but English as it existed 600 years ago. It begins this way:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
There is hardly a word of Middle English that is recognizable to the untrained ear, just as Chaucer would be totally lost if he could have somehow heard modern English being spoken. Languages evolve.
Christianity as it existed in the 5th century, once the New Testament had been formulated and the Catholic Church had begun to take a preliminary shape had very little in common with the faith articulated by Paul and the rest of the New Testament and much less to do with the historical teachings of Jesus. Jesus wouldn’t recognize modern Christianity and modern Christians would not think of the religion of Jesus and his apostles as being recognizable. Religions evolve.
Again, that is not a good or bad judgement, that’s just how history unfolds but let’s not kid ourselves; the religion we were taught as children, what was handed down to us from authority figures like our parents, Sunday School teachers, ministers, and community leaders was and is a modern invention. It is not the creation of God but rather it is the creation of an ever-changing culture. I am going to drill down on that more next week but today let’s focus on the Easter event.
The four canonical gospels in our New Testament were not the earliest writings of the New Testament. All four were written decades after Paul had written his letters which we also know from the New Testament. All four gospel writers were familiar with and had some or a lot of respect for the letters of Paul and it is impossible to think that Paul’s letters did not influence the content of those gospels, although he clearly did not have any editorial control of them.
It needs to also be said that none of those four gospels, as they exist in print in our Bibles, are in their original form. All four of them underwent revisions and updates, possibly within the lifetimes of their original authors, though the process continued for as much as 900 years after they were first written.
For example, the birth of Jesus is recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but the vocabulary and style of the birth narratives were clearly not written by the same person who wrote the body of those works. Again, if you want to know more about that, write to me and I’ll schedule a time to talk about it.
But for our purposes today, it serves to specifically note that Mark, the oldest of the gospels, has an empty tomb narrative but it does not have any accounts of resurrection appearances. If you are aware of the Gospel of Thomas, a possibly earlier first century work, you know that it also does not have resurrection appearances, nor does it mention an empty tomb.
Matthew and Luke have accounts of resurrection appearances, but they do not agree with one another. Both form resurrection stories to serve their theological needs and purposes, neither is attempting to record history. John is an early second century work with an entirely different theological agenda and we should not take any part of it as being historical, or even based on history. John is an early second century sermon with an elevated Christology. Again, a huge topic for another day.
We have no written accounts of eyewitnesses. The earliest Christian source we have are the authentic letters of Paul. We have several letters in the New Testament that make the claim of having been written by Paul but what scholars agree on as being the authentic letters of Paul are: Romans, I and II Corinthians, I Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon. The pseudo-Pauline letters are 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, Titus, and 1 and 2nd Timothy. In the New Testament, Paul’s letters are arrange, not in the order in which they are written but rather they are arranged by length, from the longest to the shortest. Romans was probably Paul’s last letter but because of its length, it appears first in the New Testament.
It is very informative to read all of the New Testament in the order in which it was written. And, you are in luck because one of the best New Testament scholars of modern times, the late Marcus Borg, published the New Testament in chronological order in his book, Evolution of the Word. You can get it on Amazon for $15 or download it on your kindle for $2.
So, for our purposes, we believe that Paul’s first letters are: Thessalonians, Galatians, 1st Corinthians. And we are in luck because the first written account of the Easter event is found in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Now, bear in mind, Paul never met Jesus when he was alive. He wasn’t around on the first Easter.
Much later, he did meet with Peter, James, and John, but he emphatically states that they did not teach him anything and that everything he knows about Jesus he knows by direct revelation. Again, he talks about this in his own hand in Galatians. So, he is not an eyewitness, but he was at least a contemporary of Jesus and the followers of Jesus.
And though he claims to not be in any way inferior to the apostles that Jesus actually chose, it is also clear that Paul did inherit some early traditions from the churches he was associated with…. Their stories, in some cases, their hymns, and their practices. We sometimes have to look past Paul’s arrogance, which verges on narcissism, and try to glean what we can from his accidental historical references.
Again, I need to offer this warning, a lot of what church folk think they know about Paul is from the book of Acts. Acts was written by a Paul apologist long after Paul was dead, and most scholars insist that the author of Acts never met Paul and was largely inaccurate in his accounts. For our purposes, let’s allow Paul to speak for himself and consider Acts to be fan-boy literature from a generation after Paul had been murdered by Rome.
So, that being said, what is it that Paul says about the Easter event in Corinthians?
In 1st Corinthians 15, we read:
3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures4 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
We learn a lot from this short paragraph. From this we know that by the second half of the first century that a shared experience of a post crucifixion Jesus was foundational to the early church and that several people, if not hundreds, had an experience of Jesus after his death. Also, we see here Paul’s belief that Jesus “died for our sins, according to the scriptures.” A historian would probably say that Jesus was executed by the Roman government for insurrection. We get an echo of that in all four canonical gospels when Pilate asks Jesus if he is the King of the Jews and that is the charge that was nailed to the cross.
How do we get from insurrection against Rome to “dying for our sins”? The key is in the phrase, “according to the scriptures.” The early church looked to the writing of Isaiah, primarily, to interpret the life and death of Jesus. Because of his brutal, state sponsored, murder, he is seen as being the “suffering servant” described five hundred years earlier in the poetry of Isaiah. That’s obviously an absurdly labored reading of an ancient text; Isaiah was no more writing about Jesus than Chaucer was writing about me, unless you are determined to read Chaucer that way but, trust me, Chaucer wouldn’t be proud of you if you do.
But Paul accounting for the death of Jesus as having been in God’s plan is how religious people often interpret history as if God is a puppet master in the clouds, controlling human events. I don’t think many of us really think that way, but we sometimes talk that way. We will say that God healed a particular child of cancer without regard for how many children die of cancer, or even that God saved you a great parking place at the mall while allowing tens of thousands to die in the Gaza Strip . . . if it were true, God would surely be a monster, but we say these things out of what the Germans called, “heilsgeschichte” or “salvation history,” seeing everything that happens through a lens of faith.
It is helpful to remember that none of the biblical authors were intending to write a history or a science textbook, they were, essentially, writing sermons and sermons are almost always intended to persuade and to teach faith, not science or history. I personally try to be very careful with facts, but you should assume that most preachers have more in common with fishermen than they do with historians or scientists.
Not in this text nor in any other part of Paul’s writing does he speak of an empty tomb on Easter. It would be very unlikely that Paul would have thought that the tomb was empty. What he describes is a visionary experience. And what is more, he says that Peter, then the twelve, then James and 500 others had the same experience that Paul had, a vision or an experience of Jesus after his death. What was that experience?
Again, if you can chase the dramatic gospel accounts out of your head, let’s let Paul speak for himself. I hate to sound like a broken record, but most of us have carried around images of Paul’s Damascus Road encounter with Jesus in our memories but Paul never mentions this experience. This is a literary creation of the author of Acts who is trying to describe Paul’s experience in concrete terms, but you have to wonder, how does Paul describe his experience of Jesus?
Again, we do not have to leave this up to conjecture. In Paul’s 2nd letter to the church in Corinth, in chapter 12, Paul says:
If It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. 2 I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. 3 And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— 4 was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. 5 On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. 6 But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth.
What kind of image do you get in your mind from that bit of prose? Nothing, nothing at all, right? Paul is describing what mystics have described in every century in every religion. Somehow, whether physically or just in his mind, he was taken away from normal life up into the presence of God, and Paul says that he saw things that can’t be described and heard things that cannot be repeated. That is how Paul describes his conversion experience in his own words. The way Paul describes his mystical experience is similar to ecstatic experiences described by Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.
Mystics have life changing, indescribable, profound experiences, and they naturally express them in the language that is available to them. If Paul had this experience in India, he might have said that he encountered Krishna. If he had this experience in China, he might have said that he met Buddha. Just as children in Latin America, when they have an ecstatic experience, describe it as having seen Mary. Everyone uses the language and terminology that they are prepared for by their culture. Again, this is not a good or bad judgement. This is just how human cognition and communication works.
Now, the words of the book of Acts are full of images, even addresses, it happened on this road, he saw Jesus, he had a short conversation with him, he was struck blind, he later had scales fall from his eyes.
You could make a movie script out of Acts, you could paint a picture of it . . . in fact, many movies and many paintings have described this event but what they are describing would not have been familiar to Paul because nothing like that ever happened to Paul . . . if it had, he would never have stopped talking about it!
We let the Acts narrative become so powerful in our minds that we elaborate on it and convince ourselves that it is real. When I was at Harvard, I took a class under the now late Peter Gomes, and he was talking about Paul’s conversion in his typical excited story telling way and he exclaimed that Paul was knocked off his horse and was surrounded by light as he laid on the ground. After class, I mentioned to Dr. Gomes that there is no horse in the Acts account. The text just has Paul walking when he was knocked to the ground. There is, however, a horse in many Renaissance paintings of the Damascus Road event. That was the day that I learned that it was never smart to correct Dr. Gomes.
Still, it is easy to get these details confused. What Paul says that he experienced, was a mystical moment in which he cannot recount what was said nor can he even say if he was in his body or out of it when it happened and that, I contend, is the experience that Paul is saying that Peter, the twelve, and James, and hundreds of church members had the week of Easter, the way a tent revival can crank up hundreds of people into having an ecstatic experience . . . an experience which can be very real and even life changing for them but it is not evidence of a resuscitated dead person, or an empty tomb, nor anything of the kind.
When you read the works of the New Testament in the order in which they were written, you can see how the accounts grew and evolved. Paul’s account of being taking up into third heaven, whether bodily or as a vision, becomes, 40 years later, the rather elaborate Damascus Road event we read about in Acts. The mystical vision of a post crucifixion Jesus that Paul describes in II Corinthians becomes a bodily resurrection in Matthew and Luke.
There are hints of sermonizing even in those resurrection stories in the gospels. I would challenge you to notice that all of them happened on a Sunday. This is, if you miss church, you also don’t ever see Jesus. . . a lesson that Thomas learns all to well, everyone else saw Jesus one Sunday but Thomas went fishing that day and just heard about it. He learned his lesson and went to church the next Sunday and saw Jesus.
In Luke’s Emmaus Road account, disciples are walking to their church gathering and Jesus is somehow walking with him, but outside of community, outside of the gathered church, they don’t recognize him. When do they recognize him? Remember the story, it wasn’t until the community was gathered and he broke bread with them. It was communion, only in the community’s observance of the Lord’s Supper did the fog lift and they saw him in their midst, just before he disappeared.
I’m not trying to disparage these accounts, I’m just pointing out that to understand them you must let go of thinking of them as being historical and think of them in the context in which they were written, as sermons, as teaching tools within the community of faith. They were very important within the early church, but they do not record or convey history.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke were not liars. They were evangelists, just what the church has always called them. They were preachers. They exaggerated the mystical experience of the early saints, making it more concrete and colorfully descriptive for the congregation, but I do not think that they intended these accounts to be solely interpreted as a promise of resurrection for all of us. Paul does articulate that belief among other beliefs but look at how literature treats the dying and rising savior in later centuries.
The resurrection story has power for anyone who is moving from addiction into sober or chemical free living. It has power for anyone who walked up to death’s door with cancer and chemotherapy and has managed to recover health and strength. I can tell you from personal experience, that it has power for someone who has gone through a devastating divorce that felt worse than death but managed, week after week, month after month, year after year, to regain strength and hope for a new life, maybe even a new love.
Resurrection in any of these contexts are not insignificant, in fact, that can be life giving, just not in the “yippee, we’re gonna live forever” mythology.
Again, it is not my intent to offend people of traditional faith. It is my purpose to offer an academic and critical way of seeing the faith we inherited. As Scott Peck has said, “Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.” You may have heard what I said about the first Easter and choose to dismiss my arguments and go on believing what you learned in your youth in church, but I am grateful that you had the courage to examine your faith and test its claims.
Next week I will talk about how the Christian religion of the 20th century was shaped by 19th century revivalism and consider how it might change again into a more progressive faith in the 21st century. And I promise, I will try to make it shorter than this presentation.
