The Dubious Disciples

Doubt and Disbelief in the Post-Resurrection Scenes of the Four Gospels

J. David Woodington

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110691825
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

The Dubious Disciples provides a literary examination of the four scenes of the disciples doubting the appearance of the resurrected Jesus in the canonical Gospels. Each Gospel offers a unique account of this episode, and the differences between them dramatically affect how readers evaluate the disciples' actions and perceive the role of doubt in the Christian experience.

1 Introduction

This project is motivated by a simple question: Why do the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, as well as the Longer Ending of the Gospel of Mark, include moments of doubt in the disciples after the resurrection of Jesus? At first glance, this would seem an unlikely element to appear in these accounts. It is one thing for the disciples to struggle with doubts as they learn what it means to be a true follower of Jesus; it is quite another for these key figures to falter so dramatically at the moment of their Lord’s triumphant return. Within the New Testament itself, it is clear that some Christians had a negative view of doubt. The Epistle of James, for instance, does not mince its words when labeling the doubter “like a wave of the sea, being driven and tossed by the wind” (Jas 1:6) and “double-minded, unstable in all his ways” (Jas 1:8).

Even more, the disciples’ mistakes are not only present but highlighted in the post-resurrection scenes. In their canonical forms, the Gospels place an apparent emphasis on this reaction by the disciples and elaborate upon the matter in detail. Despite Jesus’s statements concerning his return after death (e. g., Mark 8:31; Matt 17:22; Luke 9:22; John 2:19 – 21), they distrust fellow followers who report his resurrection (Mark 16:11 – 13; Luke 24:11; John 20:25), cannot believe the sight of the risen Lord before them (Matt 28:17; Luke 24:37, 41), and are directly confronted by Jesus about their failure to believe, occasionally in quite harsh terms (Mark 16:14; Luke 24:25 – 26, 38 – 39; John 20:27 – 29). One might expect this to be just a momentary stumble, but often the disciples’ doubt is never clearly resolved. Only John 20:28 – 29 depicts a definite overcoming of this problem by Thomas. One can assume that the same is implied by the disciples worshiping (Matt 28:17; Luke 24:52 – 53) or spreading the good news (Mark 16:20), but this is never made explicit in the other three Gospels. Especially conspicuous in this regard is Matthew, where doubting is the last act of the disciples in the entire book (Matt 28:17).

Beyond the mere presence of such scenes, the diversity among the four accounts is striking. Although they share some similarities with one another, each Gospel has an entirely unique post-resurrection narrative with various elements not found in any of the other three. Not surprisingly, this is particularly true of John and his story of Thomas, but the Synoptic Gospels all differ from one another in noteworthy ways as well. For instance, only the Longer Ending of Mark has the disciples reject two separate instances of testimony to Jesus’s resurrection (Mark 16:14), and only Luke mentions the issue of Jesus being perceived as a ghost (Luke 24:37, 39). When explaining the presence of these accounts, this diversity must be taken into consideration.

Variations appear even at the most basic level of vocabulary as a range of words are used in the Gospels to depict the responses of the disciples. The most common choices are ἀπιστέω and its related roots ἄπιστος and ἀπιστία, which appear multiple times in both Mark (Mark 16:11, 14 16) and Luke (Luke 24:11, 41) and once in John (John 20:27). As their etymology suggests, these terms imply a lack of belief, but their precise meaning depends upon context, including possibilities such as a temporary sense of shock in reaction to something utterly unexpected (“disbelief,” “incredulity,” “astonishment”), a lingering sense of unsureness or inability to fully believe something (“doubt,” “skepticism,” “distrust,” “dubiousness”), or a complete lack of belief altogether (“unbelief,” “faithlessness”). The importance of context in deciding the correct meaning in each instance cannot be overstated. Mark’s Jesus harshly rebuking the disciples for their ἀπιστία while equating it to hard-heartedness (Mark 16:14) and saying that those who do this will be condemned (Mark 16:16) is clearly something very different from Luke’s report that the disciples felt this way on account of joy (Luke 24:41).

In addition to the immediate surroundings of the individual verses, how these terms have been used previously in each Gospel will necessarily impact their interpretation in these final episodes. Beyond the cluster of ἀπιστ- vocabulary, the evangelists utilize two other words in reference to the disciples’ post-resurrection disposition: διστάζω (Matt 28:17) and διαλογισμός (Luke 24:38). Both can mean “doubt” in the sense listed above, but they can also refer to a momentary sense of mental debate as one chooses between multiple options (“uncertainty,” “hesitation,” “deliberation”) or, in the case of διαλογισμός, simply “thoughts” in general. One must play close attention to these distinctions and be careful in how the disciples’ reactions are described in each case.¹

1.1 A Brief History of Scholarship

There is a prodigious amount of scholarship devoted to the topic of the resurrection, but relatively little attention has been paid to the doubt of the disciples specifically. In works on the resurrection, their skepticism is typically mentioned only briefly and with little consideration for the rhetorical role it might play in each Gospel. Understandably, authors have generally chosen to focus on other issues such as the historicity (or lack thereof) of the resurrection, phenomenological precedents for bodily resurrection in Greco-Roman and Jewish sources, and the monumental effect of the resurrection on Christian life, both ancient and modern. These topics are well deserving of discussion, but a suitable analysis of doubt in the post-resurrection pericopae has often been left aside amidst everything else.

The question of why such scenes might have been included in the first place has rarely been addressed in these works. When it has been, scholars have provided two major answers. The first is a straightforward one: The disciples really did doubt when Jesus was resurrected, so the Gospels testify to the historical fact of their doubt. The disciples are only human, and it would be natural to respond to the shocking nature of the resurrection in this kind of way. Representative in this regard are the comments of Grant Osborne, who remarks that “it should not be difficult […] to understand how men of that era would experience doubt and fear in the midst of such an event.”² While Osborne does note the redactional development of the theme of doubt by Luke and John, he nevertheless asserts regarding Jesus’s physical demonstration of his body before the disciples that “the origin of this in the event itself is more plausible than theories demanding a later creation by the church.”³ As one might expect, this point appears most frequently in scholarship focused on determining the authenticity of the resurrection accounts.⁴

More often, however, a second answer is provided. Instead of verifying the historical nature of the disciples and their skepticism, commentators assert that this element was a traditional part of the resurrection account. Early Christians were familiar with doubting disciples as part of the report of Jesus’s resurrection and would have expected this to be present in any depiction of the Lord's return. Because of this, the evangelists were forced to include this detail, regardless of their feelings on the matter. Buttressed by form-critical arguments, this tradition-historical claim has more support than its purely historical counterpart. But while it puts the question of historicity aside as a separate or even unknowable issue, the effect is largely the same: The ancient writers depicted doubting disciples because they and their readers accepted them as an inherent part of the resurrection account.⁵

Two authors are most cited in this regard. The first is C. H. Dodd, who provided a detailed form-critical treatment of the post-resurrection accounts and identified five constituent elements that formed the basis of the earliest “concise” narratives of the resurrected Jesus’s appearances (a category in which he includes Matt 28:8 – 10, Matt 28:16 – 20, and John 20:19 – 21): 1) the disciples’ lonely situation with Jesus gone; 2) Jesus’s appearance before the disciples; 3) Jesus’s greeting to the disciples; 4) the disciples’ recognition of Jesus; and 5) a word of command given by Jesus to the disciples.⁶ These stories contain, at the very least, “a hint of an element of doubt or fear” because they involve “as an integral element, a suggestion that the appearance of the Lord does not bring full or immediate conviction to the beholders, who require some form of assurance: the sight of His wounds, contact with His body, or His word of authority.”⁷ In Dodd’s view, a defining characteristic of these accounts is “the recognition of the Lord by His disciples, almost always with the implication that such recognition was neither immediate nor inevitable.”⁸ This remains true of later pericopae like Luke 24:36 – 49 and John 20:24 – 29 that have added additional proofs in order to develop this point even further.⁹

Following in Dodd’s footsteps was John Alsup, who also put forward a form-critical analysis of the post-resurrection accounts. Alsup’s ultimate thesis was that these gospel narratives derive their Gattung from the “anthropomorphic theophany stories” of the Hebrew Bible, but he briefly remarks upon the presence of doubt in these scenes as well.¹⁰ Much like Dodd, he concludes that one of the “common elements” shared by all of these stories is the way that “the disciples’ reaction is recorded: partially acceptance, partially scepticism.”¹¹ In his view, the fact that the doubt of the disciples makes its way into Matthew despite the author’s apparent disinterest in this theme “suggests that this aspect of the disciples’ reaction was basic to the whole group context,” although “he and the others were free to develop the idea in a way that best suited their own goals.”¹² The evangelists could utilize the disciples’ doubt to make whatever point they desired, but as a fundamental and traditional part of the resurrection story, they had to incorporate it somehow.

These comments of Alsup are indicative of a larger trend in scholarship, one shared by all three of the aforementioned authors as well as many others. Many modern commentators have maintained that both Luke and John purposefully edited their post-resurrection accounts. Because of their length and intricacy, the pericopae in these two Gospels are regularly regarded as the handiwork of their respective evangelists, taking the basic structure of older traditions and redacting them to suit their own theological needs.¹³ Due to the apparent proofs of physicality supplied by Jesus (Luke 24:39 – 43), Luke is said to mount an apologetic in defense of the true nature of Jesus’s resurrection, although the identity of the opponent and/or line of thinking against which Luke argues is debated. The depth of such analyses vary considerably, with some recent scholars rightly taking others to task for oversimplifying both the complex nature of Jesus’s body on display in Luke 24 and ancient viewpoints on ghosts, physicality, and the like.¹⁴ As for John, most commentators agree that the evangelist opts to take the doubt normally ascribed to all of the disciples and attribute this to Thomas alone, thereby crafting the entire scene of John 20:24 – 29 in order to teach a lesson about faith to his contemporary readers.¹⁵ Thomas is usually seen as a negative figure whose stubbornness provides an example of what not to do, although some have begun to question how harshly the reader is meant to judge Thomas in the end.¹⁶

Such consideration of the rhetorical impact of doubt, however, does not extend beyond Luke and John; the same kind of authorial intent is rarely recognized in either Mark or Matthew.¹⁷ Because of its debated authenticity, Mark 16:9 – 20 is often ignored altogether, and when it is addressed, the doubt therein is regarded as little more than a traditional carryover cribbed from earlier sources.¹⁸ Similarly, the terse note of doubt in Matt 28:17 receives little to no comment, with the vast majority of the attention being placed on the following commission to the disciples (Matt 28:18 – 20) instead. The marginalization of the role of doubt in Mark and Matthew persists even in works that eschew making any broader claims about the resurrection and instead choose to interpret each of the post-resurrection accounts in the four Gospels separately.¹⁹ Broadly speaking, much the same can also be said of commentaries.²⁰

In the case of Matthew, this gap is somewhat addressed by another section of scholarly literature, namely, works on discipleship and the characterization of the disciples in the Gospel. There is a robust discussion concerning the portrayal of the disciples in Matthew as commentators have attempted to weigh the repeated assertions of their “little faith” (Matt 6:30; 8:26; 14:31; 16:8; 17:20) and their continued struggles at the conclusion of the Gospel with the apparent redactional improvement of their understanding of Jesus and his teachings. As the final and decidedly mixed act of the disciples, their doubt in Matt 28:17 plays a critical role in the debate.²¹ The same cannot be said of Mark. While the depiction of the Markan disciples, including their many strugg...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Gospel Of Mark
• 3 The Gospel Of Matthew
• 4 The Gospel Of Luke
• 5 The Gospel Of John
• Conclusion
• Index