Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

So in Mark we can speak of an accelerating disappearance of the Twelve from the ending of the gospel. How should we interpret their vanishing? Did they simply hide in Jerusalem, so that we may still suppose they were in the city? Or did they leave Judea and flee to their homeland in Galilee? There are two texts that favor flight. The first is Mark 14:27, where Jesus, quoting Zechariah 13:7, says, “You will all become deserters; for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’” This text speaks about the scattering of the disciples in a kind of epic anticipation that, however, is historically retrospective. “Scattering”—that seems meant to say more than merely concealment in the capital city. A second text, John 16:32, says much the same. There Jesus prophesies, “The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his [home], and you will leave me alone.” This text too acquires its historical force only if we see it as retrospective. The translators of the NRSV have expanded the Greek expression “each to his own” to read “each one to his home,” which captures the meaning; an alternate translation would be “each to his private interests.” But that means that the disciples have fled, returned pell-mell to their homeland, and they have resumed their former occupations.²

But at this point we need also to take note of Mark 16:7 (cf. 14:28), where an angel orders the women, “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.” Lived history lies behind these words as well. The disciples—or more precisely the Galileans among them—have gone to Galilee. Why? Evidently because they have fled there. But the angel’s words give their flight a positive meaning: the disciples flee and seem thereby to have abandoned Jesus, but in reality he is with them; he is even ahead of them. Precisely in the place where they appear to have lost him forever they will find him: in their home, in Galilee, when they have taken up their old occupations once more.

So Mark 16:7 in particular seems to presume the flight of the disciples to Galilee, and it is completely plausible. Jesus’ execution would have had a shocking effect on his followers. As we have already seen, on the basis of Deuteronomy 21:23, “being hanged on a tree” would have seemed like God’s judgment on Jesus. From that point of view the confusion of Jesus’ associates and the pell-mell flight of the group of Twelve is easily understood. In addition, it was completely possible at the outset that the inner circle of disciples was threatened with a fate similar to that of Jesus himself. What was more likely than that the Galileans would return to Galilee? There they could feel safe; in Galilee they were far enough from the Sanhedrin’s grasp.

The Beginning of the Appearances

One of the surest indicators of the flight of the Galilean disciples to their home country is, in fact, the phenomenon that the appearances to Peter and the Twelve did not take place in Jerusalem but in Galilee. It is true that the gospels give a contradictory picture in this regard: Mark 16:7 announces that the first appearance will be in Galilee, and Matthew 28:16-20 tells of the first appearance to the Eleven, which for him is a summary of all appearances, and locates it in Galilee. Luke, in contrast, places all the appearances in or near Jerusalem. But in doing so he betrays an obvious theological intention: for Luke, Jerusalem is a symbol of the continuity between the time of Jesus and the time of the church.³ Therefore he omits the angel’s order, according to which the disciples should go to Galilee, even though he read it in Mark, which he was using as a model.⁴ According to Luke the disciples were to remain in the city (Luke 24:49). He thus says nothing about the Galilean appearances, which very certainly played as great a role in the tradition as did the accounts of appearances in Jerusalem.

John also locates the appearances in Jerusalem, but in this he appears to be directly or indirectly dependent on Luke. Finally, we are faced with the striking phenomenon that chapter 21, an addition to John’s gospel, tells of an appearance to seven disciples in Galilee, on the Sea of Gennesareth. It is not introduced as a first appearance, but it might originally have been the story of such an initial encounter. The overall finding thus points clearly to Galilee as the place where appearances to the inner group of disciples began.

Here commenced a series of appearances in which the Risen One was seen. The first of these Galilean appearances apparently came to Simon Peter. Two texts favor this. First there is the very ancient confession of faith retained in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. Paul himself had received it as a faith tradition and handed it on to the congregation in Corinth: