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But there they are in all four Gospel stories, front and center: the first apostles, the first people to tell others that Jesus was raised from the dead. In concert with what is noted earlier in this book, it is simply incredible to suppose that the tradition began with the male-only form that we find in the tradition Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians, and then developed, in significantly different ways, into the four female-first stories we find in the Gospels. Here again, the stories really do look as if they are very, very early.

The third strange feature, which goes with the third modification of the Jewish resurrection belief, is the portrait of Jesus himself. Many people have tried to make out over the last century that the Gospel stories developed in the following manner. First, people after Jesus' death were so overcome with grief that they really did not know what they were thinking. Second, they gradually acquired a new spiritual consciousness, a new belief that Jesus' cause continued. Third, from this new religious experience, they gradually started to explore the Scriptures. Fourth, from this they then (and only then) started to use the language of resurrection to articulate their experience. Finally, toward the end of the first century, some people began to invent stories about an actual resurrection, which the early church had never envisaged.

Capping this proposed progression of thought is the idea that, in Luke and John (which are supposed on this theory to be the last Gospels to be written, perhaps toward the end of the first century), people were so concerned to stress that Jesus really was a real physical being, a real embodied being, that they invented stories about him eating broiled fish, cooking breakfast by the shore, being able to be touched, and so on.

The problem is that this proposed development is very strange, even in Jewish terms. If the early Christians had gone this route, searching the Scriptures and inventing stories on that basis, you would have expected them to envisage the risen Jesus shining like a star. That, after all, is what the popular text in Daniel 12 says about people being raised from the dead. They do not. They describe him like that in the Transfiguration, for whatever reason, but none of the Resurrection stories even hint at that. Indeed, Jesus appears as a human being with a body that is like any other body; he can be mistaken for a gardener, or a fellow traveler on the road.

In addition, the stories also contain definite signs that the body has been transformed. Nobody, I suggest, would have invented them just like this. The body is clearly physical. It has, so to speak, used up the matter of the crucified body — hence the empty tomb. But, equally, it comes and goes through locked doors; it is not always recognized; and eventually it disappears altogether into God's space (which is how we ought to think of "heaven").

This kind of account is without precedent. No biblical text predicts that the Resurrection will involve this kind of body. No speculative theology laid this trail for the evangelists to follow, and to follow in such interestingly different ways.

In particular, this should put a stop to the old nonsense that suggests that Luke's and John's accounts, which are the most apparently physical, were written late in the first century in an attempt to combat docetism — the view that Jesus was not a real human being but only seemed to be.

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April (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53