Jesus was raised from the dead

I want to pick back up on what I said yesterday about how there'd be no reason to invent the idea that Jesus' death had a divine purpose (specifically to atone for sins) unless his followers had some reason to think he was the messiah in spite of having died. Believing that his death atoned for sins wouldn't, but itself, be any reason to think he was the messiah, so it wouldn't have been invented for that purpose. If it was invented at all, it would only have been invented as a way of redeeming the humiliation of the cross in light of the fact that Jesus really is the messiah.

But why think he was the messiah at all after he was killed? I mentioned briefly yesterday that the crucifixion should have convinced his followers that he wasn't the messiah, and they appear to have lost hope immediately after his death. I want to drive that point home, though, by looking at some unambiguous messianic prophecies.

First of all, let me give a little background information what is meant by "messiah." Messiah comes from the Hebrew word for "anointed" or "one who is anointed." Being anointed applied to three different kinds of people in the Old Testament. Primarily, it was used of kings (2 Samuel 2:4), but it was also used of priests (Exodus 30:30). Less frequently, it was used of prophets(1 King 19:16). Christ comes from the Greek word for "anointed," so christ and messiah both mean the same thing.

In the New Testament, Jesus is portrayed as being all three things--king (John 18:37), prophet (Matthew 21:11), and priest (Hebrews 3:1). But when he is called the Christ, this refers primarily to him being a king.

Or rather, I should say the king. After David was anointed king, God made a promise that his throne would be established forever (2 Samuel 7:16, 1 Kings 2:45). He also said that as long as David's descendants are obedient to God that David will never lack a man to sit on the throne of Israel (1 Kings 2:4, 8:25).

But some of them weren't obedient, and as a result, David's dynasty came to an end near the beginning of the Babylonian exile. Still, Israel did not give up on God's promise. The prophets began to say that God would fulfill his promise by raising up a descendent of David who would sit on this throne and rule forever (Isaiah 9:7, Ezekiel 37:25, Jeremiah 33:14-22).

When the New Testament says that Jesus is the Christ, this is what they are referring to. They are saying that Jesus is the fulfillment of God's promise to always have a man on the throne of David. That's why Jesus is called the Christ, the son of David, etc. Even "son of God" was a messianic title, which I won't go into here, but read my post and the subsequent discussion in the comment section of "Response to a Jew with a view about Jesus" on that point.

Old Testament prophecies about the messiah can be identified in a couple of ways. One way is that they often refer explicitly to God's promise to always have a man on the throne of David, like in Jeremiah 33. They can also be identified by their use of messianic titles. Sometimes the messiah is called David, sometimes a son of David, or a descendent of David. Another common and obvious messianic title is "branch of David" or "righteous Branch" or "root of Jesse" or something along those lines. Jesse was David's father, by the way. These are all the unambiguous messianic prophecies. There are passages in the Old Testament that Christians attribute to Jesus but that Jews reject, like Isaiah 53. I'm not going to talk about those here. I'm just going to talk about the unambiguous messianic prophecies.

Some of these are chapter-length, so I'm not going to quote them in full. I'm just going to list them and summarize. This isn't an exhaustive list either, by the way.

Isaiah 11. Here, the messiah is portrayed as judging righteously, righting all wrongs, etc. It also says that his coming will be accompanied by ideal circumstances which are poetically described as the lion lying down with the lamb, etc. These poetic images appear to refer to worldwide peace. It says that all nations will defer to him as if he were a beacon. Then it goes on to say that his coming would be accompanied by gathering of all God's people who had been scattered throughout the nations. Judah and Israel will re-unite.

Jeremiah 23:1-8 says basically the same thing as Isaiah 11. It calls the messiah a righteous branch of David who will do justice and righteousness in the land. His coming is accompanied with the return from exile of all who had been scattered, and it says they will dwell securely.

Jeremiah 33:14-26 repeats the prophecy, tying it explicitly to God's promise that David will never lack a man to sit on the throne of Israel. It also lumps that promise in with other promises God made to Israel and Judah, assuring the reader that God will never break his promises nor reject his people.

Ezekiel 34:11-31 says that God will judge between sheep (i.e. people), and he will gather all his flock who have been scattered so that they can dwell in safety with plenty to eat, and the other nations will no longer oppress them or prey on them. It says that "my servant David" will be their prince and their shepherd.

Ezekiel 37 is the vision of the valley of dry bones that all come to life. The interpretation of the vision is that the bones refer to the whole house of Israel and how God will open their graves and place them in their own land. The prophecy continues to explain how Judah and Israel will be reunited and how they will be gathered from all the nations in which they had been scattered. God will cleanse them of all sin, causing them to walk in his statutes. He will make an everlasting covenant of peace with them, and God will dwell with them forever. David will be their king and shepherd forever.

Even before Jesus started making overt claims about being the messiah, there are things he did that raised suspicions. Matthew reports that one of the first things out of Jesus' mouth when he started his ministry was, "Repent for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). Nearly all of Jesus' parables were about the kingdom of God. The fact that he named specifically twelve people to be apostles alludes to the reunion of the twelves tribes of Israel, which in turn alludes to the restoration of the whole house of Israel, part of what the prophets associated with the coming of the messiah. So people had reason to suspect Jesus was making a messianic claim even before he started being explicit about it.

With all of these things in mind, it should be no surprise that "Christ crucified" would be a "stumbling block to Jews" (1 Corinthians 1:23). In fact, one of the primary reasons Jews today reject Jesus as the messiah is because he was crucified without having fulfilled all of these promises.

Messianic expectation was high in Judea from 6 CE on into the first war with Rome that began in 66 CE. Before then, Judea wasn't ruled directly by Rome. It was ruled through satellite kings of the Hasmonean dynasty. King Herod ruled until his death in 4 BCE at which time his son, Archelaus, was made ethnarch of Judea. Archelaus was deposed in 6 CE at which time Judea was placed under direct Roman rule under prefects (or procurators). Pontius Pilate was one of them.

While Herod defended the right of the Jewish people to practice their religion freely while he was king, these rights were threatened under Roman rule, and there was constant tension between the Jewish people and the Roman occupiers. This tension eventually erupted in war in 66 CE.

During that time, several people rose up and made messianic or quasi-messianic claims about themselves. The most famous were made during the war itself. It should be perfectly understandable why Roman occupation would increase messianic hope and expectation. It's because the hope was that the coming of the messiah would free the Jewish people from Roman oppression. So when some would-be messiah came along, gathered followers, and got people's hopes up, those hopes were always dashed when that would-be messiah's movement ended in his death, which was always the case. Once the would-be messiah died, their followers scattered. Sometimes they'd go back to living their ordinary lives. Sometimes they'd find another messiah to follow. But nobody ever continued to think somebody was the messiah after they had been killed because their death proved that they were not the messiah.

The only exception is in the case of Jesus. But even in the case of Jesus, his followers initially scattered and lost hope in him. Their hope was restored when they saw him alive, or so they say.

The appearance traditions go back to that early oral tradition Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:1ff. Paul says that after the resurrection, Jesus "appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also." Paul had actually met Peter, James (the brother of Jesus), and John in Jerusalem on a couple of occasions (Galatians 1:18-19, 2:1-10). He also ran into Peter once in Antioch (Galatians 2:11). Some scholars think his first trip to Jerusalem is where he received this oral tradition, including the appearances to Cephas (i.e. Peter), James, the twelves, and all the apostles. It's hard to say where he learned about the appearance to the 500 or how he knew how many of them were still living.

The fact that the appearances actually happened is pretty widely accepted among New Testament historians because of their early origin, how close these accounts are to the actual eye-witnesses (since Paul was personally acquainted with Peter, James, and possibly some of the other apostles), the fact that they are multiply attested, and the fact that it provides a powerful explanation for why Jesus' movement survived his death. In fact, it's nearly impossible to account for the survival of Christianity apart from these appearances.

E.P. Sanders said, "That Jesus' followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know" (The Historical Jesus, p. 280). And there's lots of speculation among scholars about what the nature of those experiences were. Some, like Sanders, just shrug their shoulders and say, "I dunno." Others, like Gerd Ludemann, say it must've been some kind of vision or hallucination. There are a handful of conservative scholars, like N.T. Wright, who think Jesus actually did appear to the apostles. Most scholars seem to agree that the appearances are the explanation for why Jesus' followers continued to believe in him in spite of his crucifixion.

If that's the case, though, then what kind of experiences must they have been? Were they individual experiences or did they happen in groups? Were they dreams, visions, or hallucinations, or was there a tangible Jesus before them who they could touch? I wrote a blog post called "The Hallucination Hypothesis" where I went into some detail about my thoughts on these subjects, so I won't go into the same detail here. But as a summary, I'll say that I don't think anything like a dream, vision, or hallucination is sufficient to explain why they thought Jesus was still alive. One of the most common defenses of the hallucination hypothesis is the fact that grief hallucinations are common when people die. But grief hallucinations don't explain why the apostles all came to believe Jesus had risen from the dead.

While grief hallucination may be common, they never lead to the belief that a loved one has risen from the dead. My grandmother had one and thought she experienced my grandfather's ghost. The gospels even report that their initial impression upon seeing Jesus was that he was a ghost (Luke 24:37). With that option available, and with people just dismissing hallucinations as "seeing things," it doesn't seem like a vision or hallucination would've lead to the belief that Jesus had risen from the dead.

But a real flesh and blood Jesus who they could touch and who could actually eat tangible food in front of them can explain belief in the resurrection. And that's what the gospels say happened. They all report skepticism in the beginning. First, there was skepticism when the women who visited the tomb said they saw Jesus. Then there was skepticism on the part of Thomas that the other apostles had seen Jesus. During the last appearance recorded in Matthew, it says that some were doubtful (Matthew 28:17). But what apparently persuaded them was that Jesus ate in front of them and they could touch him. And it's hard to think of anything short of that that would've convinced them that Jesus had risen from the dead and was the messiah in spite of him being crucified before ushering in the kingdom of God, establishing worldwide peace, and ending the Roman occupation.

In the case of James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul, the appearances explain their conversions. According to both John's gospel and Mark's gospel, James didn't believe in Jesus prior to the crucifixion (John 7:5, Mark 3:21). But then Paul records that Jesus appeared to James, and according to Acts, James was leading the church in Jerusalem. By his own account, Paul tried to destroy the Christian church but then he was converted as a result of Jesus appearing to him. These appearances had to have been of such a quality as to explain the conversions. Paul thought Jesus really did rise from the dead. He places such importance on it that he said, "if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised" (1 Corinthians 15:14-15). A mere vision or hallucination would not have convinced anybody that Jesus had risen from the dead, and it's an inadequate explanation for the conversation of James and Paul.

And you can just imagine what you would think if somebody you knew to be dead appeared in front of you. You might think you were going crazy, seeing things, or having a hallucination. You might think, like my grandmother, that it was a ghost. Or maybe you'd even think you were having a really lucid dream, but the last thing you'd think was that your dead loved one had risen from the dead. A mere vision or hallucination wouldn't lead you to believe that.

Besides having actually touched Jesus and eaten with him, I suppose the inference to the real resurrection of Jesus was heightened by the fact that his tomb was found empty, and something had to have happened to his body. I'm not going to go into that here, though. I will say that the real resurrection of Jesus explains in a powerful way why his movement--a messianic movement--survived his death. With that in mind, I'll end this post by saying: He is risen.

Happy Easter!

PS) This is my 600th post. Wahoo!