The Resurrection of Jesus

Apologetics, Polemics, History

Dale C. Allison, Jr.

• Éditeur: T&T Clark
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567697585
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Biblical Studies

The earliest traditions around the narrative of Jesus' resurrection are considered in this landmark work by Dale C. Allison, Jr, drawing together the fruits of his decades of research into this issue at the very core of Christian identity. Allison returns to the ancient sources and earliest traditions, charting them alongside the development of faith in the resurrection in the early church and throughout Christian history. Beginning with historical-critical methodology that examines the empty tomb narratives and early confessions, Allison moves on to consider the resurrection in parallel with other traditions and stories, including Tibetan accounts of saintly figures being assumed into the light, in the chapter "Rainbow Body". Finally, Allison considers what might be said by way of results or conclusions on the topic of resurrection, offering perspectives from both apologetic and sceptical viewpoints. In his final section of "modest results" he considers scholarly approaches to the resurrection in light of human experience, adding fresh nuance to a debate that has often been characterised in overly simplistic terms of "it happened" or "it didn't".

PART I

Setting the Stage

Chapter 1

Overture

When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty, as Apollo made clear enough to us by his speaking (as always) ambiguously, obscurely and obliquely, not glutting us but keeping us wondering and occupied.

—Montaigne

Authors of books on Jesus’ resurrection often set for themselves one of two tasks. Either they seek to establish, with some assurance, or even beyond a reasonable doubt, that God raised Jesus from the dead, or they seek to establish, with some assurance, or beyond a reasonable doubt, that God did no such thing. The arguments of the former serve to defend deeply held religious convictions. The arguments of the latter aim to dismantle a faith the writers reject or perhaps even loathe. The present volume, which is an exercise in the limits of historical criticism, has a less assertive, more humble agenda. This is not because I am, in my religious sympathies, equidistant from the two entrenched camps—I believe that the disciples saw Jesus and that he saw them, and next Easter will find me in church—but because I am persuaded that neither side can do what it claims to have done.

The following chapters offer nothing sensationalistic. They collect data, make observations, pose questions, develop arguments, and offer suggestions and speculations about this and that. I have no missionary spirit and so no inclination to advise readers as to what religious beliefs they should or should not hold. I am neither belligerent Bible smasher nor enthusiastic evangelist, neither full-fledged skeptic nor gung-ho defender of the faith. I am not assailing the Christian citadel from without, nor am I manning the apologetical barricades under the banner of resurrection. I am rather an embedded reporter, making observations on the unending battle and proffering some provisional judgments, hoping along the way to learn some things and to raise issues others might find worth pursuing.

Probably most readers will close this book with the same beliefs they held when they opened it. It is truly hard to change one’s mind about emotionally charged subjects. We may profess to love the truth, but none of us doggedly wants the truth in the way that a drowning person desperately, unrelentingly struggles for air. What we really long for, if we are candid, is justification of what we already believe. Julian Baggini has observed:

When…an atheist comes across a clever new version of an argument for the existence of God which she cannot refute, she does not say “Ah! So now I must believe in God!” Rather, she says, “That’s clever. There must be something wrong with it. Give me time and I’ll find out what that is.” Similarly, a theist will not lose her belief just because she cannot refute an argument for atheism. Rather, that argument will simply become a challenge to be met in due course.¹

Because the point holds equally for believers and unbelievers in Jesus’ resurrection, I have, while writing this book, more than once recalled John Locke’s famous words: “It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.”² Locke’s modest aim is my aspiration.

Many, wanting more from a book on the resurrection than this, and craving some grand, integrating explanation of everything rather than a dispatch from a halfway house on an unfinished journey, will be disappointed. Still others may be frustrated, as were some who, after reading an earlier work of mine on this subject, contacted me in order to ask, But what do you really think? The question presupposes that I have a candid, crystal-clear answer. I do not. This is in part because my religious convictions, which continue to evolve with time, are idiosyncratic and elude the usual theological cartography. I am a Christian whose favorite spiritual writer is Aldous Huxley in his Neo-Vedanta stage. I am a Protestant whose favorite theologians—Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, Gregory Palamas—are not Protestant. And I am a Presbyterian, teaching at a Presbyterian Seminary, who feels more intellectual affinity with Pascal and William James than with John Calvin or any of his Reformed followers. I am, furthermore, not consistently “liberal” or “conservative” but sometimes the one, sometimes the other, and just as often neither.

I am, more significantly, a multiple personality. One self is pious. He says his prayers, goes to church, and tries to think theologically. His conscience is the New Testament. He venerates the great mystics, is at home in the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, and writes books such as The Luminous Dusk and Night Comes. This character, however, lives alongside a critical, hard-hearted historian who knows how tough it is to apprehend the past, and how easy it is for one’s theological patriotism to get in the way. He knows that the fear of self-deception is the beginning of wisdom, and that “Abandon all certainty, ye who enter here” is the sign over the door to history. This character, an advocate of fallibilism, is not ashamed to confess ignorance more than now and then; and he can applaud when Gerd Lüdemann, a professed atheist, complains that religious prejudice has led this or that Christian historian astray. This subpersonality, who frets that this book is, at multiple points, not skeptical enough, frequently recalls the words of the wonderful Origen: “The endeavor to show, with regard to almost any history, however true, that it actually occurred…is one of the most difficult undertakings that can be attempted, and is in some instances an impossibility.”³

Another inner voice, near kin to the wary historian, belongs to the I Don’t Know Club. He is relentlessly skeptical about almost everything, including know-it-all skepticism. Solum certum nihil esse certi: The only thing certain is that nothing is certain. Insisting on epistemic humility, he loathes all species of dogmatism. He refuses to cash anyone’s ideological check. He scoffs at the notion that all problems are conveniently mind-sized. He knows that people are always more often in error than they are in doubt, and that he cannot be the exception. He idolizes the wise Socrates, who knew that he knew nothing. And he has never forgotten the haunting entry in Kierkegaard’s Journal: “My doubt is terrible.—Nothing can withstand it—it is a cursed hunger and I can swallow up every argument, every consolation and sedative—I rush at 50,000 miles a second through every obstacle.”⁴ Along with T. H. Huxley, this skeptical chap ranks the invention of doubt beside the invention of fire. He espouses not only an apophatic theology but an all-encompassing apophasis: everything—space, time, gravity, quarks, consciousness, memory, placebos, hypnosis, emergent properties, quantum entanglement, the laws of nature, the fine structure constant, sudden savant syndrome, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, whatever—is, in the last analysis, dark, enigmatic, mysterious. The cloud of unknowing hangs low over the whole world. Neti neti. Our prefrontal cortex may be oversized, and our scientific triumphs may be breath-taking, yet we remain mammals, which means that we own mammalian brains, and all such brains are severely bounded. This voice regularly recites to his alternates the words of William James: “We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”⁵

Yet another inner self is a Fortean. He has little faith in the suffocating citadels of normality. He is incredulous that anybody’s worldview should be the final arbiter of reality. Proselytizing rationalists, who have the explanation for everything in their all-purpose, reductionistic bag of tricks, impress him no more than the magician who pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Rejecting the prevalent materialistic epistocracy, this interior self believes that, to the informed and fair-minded, the parapsychologists made their basic case long ago,⁶ and further that, if we throw away the reducing goggles of this or that dogmatic ideology, human experience is teeming with puzzling anomalies and indeed fantastic absurdities.⁷ He holds that reality, full of magical surprises, does not obediently stay between the lines drawn by the self-appointed gurus of consensus reality. It rather transgresses them regularly, exhibiting, as Chesterton put it, “an exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions.”⁸ This countercultural fellow does not believe that the world is a reasonable place in which everything has a reasonable explanation.

These four characters have been engaged in earnest yet affable debate for decades. Each remains, to the present day, unvanquished, and no single character has become superordinate. On many issues, then, I am not of one mind but several. That is why the present volume sincerely reflects not one mind but several.

I let this book go with a sense of its prodigious inadequacy. Doing serious history is a laborious task ideally undertaken at leisure, with all else to the side. My many academic and personal responsibilities, however, have not permitted such plodding luxury. I have accordingly typed and retyped these pages far too quickly and far less often than prudence advised.

I am, moreover, keenly aware of my multiple limitations in the face of the historically complex, philosophically dense, theologically momentous, and religiously sensitive issues that this book both directly and indirectly confronts. Jesus’ resurrection may be Christianity’s holy of holies, but it is also a maze of haunting conundrums, and I have not found Ariadne’s thread. The book ends with a “Coda” rather than a “Conclusion” because I cannot connect all the dots. I am unable to fit all the facts, likely facts, and possible facts into a single, historically compelling, winner-takes-all hypothesis.

Because this was equally true when I wrote earlier on this subject, I have received, over the years, numerous emails asking for further clarification on this or that aspect of the debate. I have rarely been able to help much, for the writers, although posing questions I know to be large and complex, are seemingly looking for simple, email-sized answers. The naïve impatience unsettles. Part of the problem, of course, is the internet, which has accustomed so many to more than superficial treatments of countless topics. But shallow religion is also to blame. Too many live with the false promise that their faith will deliver them from doubt and conveniently supply all the answers to all their questions. In truth, however, religious beliefs—including belief in Jesus’ resurrection—are like everything else of consequence: complicated, difficult, confusing. And just as there are no shortcuts for the pilgrim’s progress, so there is no easy path to ascertaining and understanding exactly what happened in the days, weeks, and months after the crucifixion. Indeed, my sobering experience has been that the more I have learned, the less, I am sure, I know.

This book is not, I should add, a theological treatise. Those looking for religious bread will find here only a historical-critical stone. It has, of course, been unfeasible to leave God and miracles altogether out of account. They put in appearances at several junctures. My goal, however, has been to adopt, before all else, the role of a historian, and to think, as far as possible, about a circumscribed subject within a limited frame of reference.⁹ I am, without apology, interested in what really happened.

I adopt a historical-critical approach not because I have pledged my troth to pure immanence or care nothing for theology. I am, quite the contrary, vitally interested in theological matters, and I want to do much more than stumble around in the darkness of history. My historical orientation also does not stem from a conviction that theology and history are non-overlapping magisteria, that theology is theology while history is history and never the twain shall meet. There is no safe space where theology can go about its business while ignoring historical criticism.¹⁰

My self-imposed restraint rather has two sources. The first is the practical need to focus and thereby prevent a potentially protean subject from sprawling far and wide. This has entailed, in most chapters, a one-sided pursuit of history. I have, in other words, privileged a method, and in the words of David Bentley Hart,

a method…is a systematic set of limitations and constraints voluntarily assumed by a researcher in order to concentrate his or her investigations upon a strictly defined aspect of or approach to a clearly delineated object. As such, it allows one to see further and more perspicuously in one particular instance and in one particular way, but only because one has first consented to confine oneself to a narrow portion of the visible spectrum, so to speak.¹¹

Second, and to be personal, life is all-too-brief, and enough is enough. This book is overlong already, and I must draw the line somewhere, even if that is precisely where things get most interesting. The following pages are, in my mind, nothing but a collection ...