rise again, found in passion summaries such as Mark 8:31 and 9:31.11 It is generally regarded as older than the narrative tradition. Examples of it such as Acts 2:32 indicate that the belief that God raised Jesus from the dead probably formed the center of the earliest Christian faith and preaching.
The narrative tradition includes accounts of the empty tomb and appearances of the risen Jesus that conclude the Gospels, and accounts of Paul’s conversion in Acts. These typically present dramatic descriptions of the basic message found in the formula tradition. They can be subdivided into narratives of appearances focusing on the risen Jesus giving a command or instruction (Matt 28:9–10), narratives in which the risen Jesus appears incognito and then is recognized (Luke 24:13–35), and narratives about the empty tomb (Mark 16:1–8).
Various degrees of commonality exist among these summary and narrative traditions. All describe Jesus’ existence as being transformed through his being raised from the dead. Apart from the brief summary statements (Rom 10:9; Mark 9:31), most describe Jesus as appearing to some of his followers after his death.12 Those that give a time frame to these appearances locate the first as happening on “the third day” following his death, though Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15:5–8 indicates that appearances of the risen Jesus may have continued for several years.13 Traditions describing appearances typically portray Jesus as revealing himself to those to whom he appeared and as appearing in a transformed existence continuous with and yet different from his human form before death. His appearances frequently involve a commissioning to some task, usually connected with his resurrection. Finally, all accounts are embedded in discourses in which Jesus’ resurrection is seen to have saving significance for others.
There are irreconcilable differences among these accounts. To whom did Jesus appear? Paul speaks of Jesus appearing first to Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred “of the brothers,” then to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all to himself (1 Cor 15:5–8). This list includes appearances that the narrative accounts lack (those to the five hundred, to James and to Paul), and omits appearances to Mary Magdalene (John 20:14–17), to the women (Matt 28:9), and “to seven disciples by the Lake of Galilee” (John 21: 2) that the narrative traditions include. Paul’s account does not mention the empty tomb or the body-like form of the risen Christ, which some narrative accounts stress. The narrative traditions also differ among themselves as to which women went to the tomb, when they went, what they saw, what they found and were told there, what they did next, where the risen Jesus appeared (Jerusalem or Galilee), and who saw him first.14 These differences are such that the various accounts of Jesus’ resurrection cannot be harmonized with each other. This has been seen as evidence against their historical reliability.
Some of these differences can be attributed to these accounts being written so as to establish the authority of specific people in the early church and to express the theology of an early church community or New Testament author. Raymond Brown argues that as the narrative accounts convey both a report of an occurrence and an interpretation of this, the differences between these accounts should be seen as expressing different interpretations of the underlying occurrence and not as evidence against its historicity.15 But the question then arises, where do the underlying events end and interpretations begin? The question “Did something happen?” becomes “What happened?”
The accounts of Jesus’ resurrection do not point to any one event as the source of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Instead they describe or mention a number of appearances, in which the form of the risen Jesus may not always have been the same. Also, these accounts are too fragmentary, contradictory, and bear evidence of too much reshaping to enable one to construct a coherent account of the events lying behind them. Attempting to determine the historicity of details in the narrative accounts of Jesus’ resurrection does not yield much in the way of firm results. For example, the empty tomb is only explicitly mentioned in narrative traditions concluding the Gospels. This suggests that it is a late development, probably an interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection originating in the early church.16 But why would anyone invent a story in which women were the chief witnesses in a patriarchal culture where their testimony was disvalued? This suggests that these accounts may have a historical basis. Also, it is unlikely that the message of Jesus’ resurrection could have survived in Jerusalem if his body could be shown to still be in the tomb or a grave.17 This also suggests that the empty tomb is historical. All three arguments are insightful but none can be conclusive. The accounts of the empty tomb have a symbolic character. They “dramatize” the faith of the early church in Jesus’ resurrection.18 But historical inquiry cannot determine the historicity of what they relate.
One can gather that a few days after Jesus’ death some of his followers, and later others who had not been followers, like James and Paul, had experiences leading them to believe that God had raised Jesus to new life. The appearance of the risen Christ to the disciples or the Twelve is implied in Mark 16:7 and narrated in Matthew 28:16–20; Luke 24:36–49; and John 20:19–23. These accounts of this appearance, though similar in many respects, do not seem to be dependent on each other. Paul also gives what appears to be an independent version of the same appearance in 1 Corinthians 15:5, 7.19 The relative independence of different accounts of the same appearance, combined with the agreements between them, is sufficient to infer that a real event lies behind them.20 There is also Paul’s testimony that the risen Christ appeared to him, one of several appearances that he speaks of in addition to this to the Twelve. Thus, while one cannot claim to know much in the way of details about Jesus’ resurrection, one can conclude that his disciples and others did have experiences in which they believed Jesus had appeared to them after his death, in a transformed existence, and that they concluded from this that he had been resurrected from the dead by God.
Modern historiography has typically used two criteria to assess the historicity of reported events like this. One is critical and the other constructive. The critical criterion requires that past events be similar to the historian’s own experience.21 For an event to be accepted as historical it “must be analogous to other events within the human world.”22 By this criterion it is difficult to accept the resurrection of Jesus as historical even though there is sufficient evidence to claim that the appearance of the risen Christ to the Twelve did happen. What the resurrection accounts describe is too unique, too unlike what is generally experienced by most people, to be “integrated into the world of modern convictions.”23 Yet in the clash between this criterion and the New Testament there is also agreement. The New Testament also characterizes the resurrection of Jesus as utterly unique and without analogy in history. The uniqueness of this event is part of the proclamation of it. The resurrection of Jesus was a scandal to the expectations and experiences of Paul’s time (1 Cor 1:23) as well as being a scandal to the expectations of the present.
This criterion that only events similar to present experience can be accepted as historical has been questioned. To do justice to an event like the Holocaust one must speak of it as incomparable,24 as lacking analogy in important respects to present experience. If the criterion of analogy is pressed too far it can become imperialistic towards others and make one’s own experience a confining prison. Yet even if there can be incomparable events in history, Jesus’ resurrection still remains contradictory in significant