Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

The principle of the doctrine of grace, that God’s action does not suppress human action but instead frees it, must be applied to the inner structure of the Easter appearances. This means that the disciples’ Easter experiences can be regarded theologically as really and truly appearances of the Risen One in which God revealed his Son in power and in all his glory (Gal 1:16) but psychologically at the same time as visions in which the disciples’ power of imagination constructed the appearance of the Risen One. By no means does the one exclude the other.

Only if we understand the Easter appearances as thus described do we take them seriously, both theologically and anthropologically. Then we need no longer shrink from the idea that visionary phenomena spread, after Good Friday, in a kind of chain reaction, and that they were altogether inculturated in the respective visual and linguistic abilities of the recipients. We can then understand, for example, how the disciples could “see” and “hear” the Risen One and even “touch” him.

The considerations presented in this section are important because they put interpreters in a position to look without historical prejudice at visionary, pneumatic, and ecstatic phenomena in the earliest community and not, out of pure fear of what is unusual, to turn immediately to magical words such as “legend” or “community construct.” The Easter appearance phenomena really happened. That can be determined by purely historical means.

“Resurrection” as an Imaginative Model

In our inquiry into the structure of the Easter experience we have left one question open: namely, the problem of the imaginative model within which the Easter experience took place. That model must have been present already in the disciples’ unconscious. It must have been available as an existing form, an imaginative and linguistic possibility. Otherwise there could have been no perception of Christ at all, and it would have remained unutterable. But what was available in the Judaism of the time with which one could grasp such a profound reality? There were three possibilities:

The idea of the “exaltation” by God of a person humiliated by suffering and death. This model is found, for example, in Isaiah 52:13-15: the “servant of God,” crushed and pierced, is heard and exalted by God. But Psalm 110 was also an important background: this was about the true king of Israel, who is permitted to sit at God’s right hand as God’s throne companion and is thus exalted over all his foes.

Likewise available was a notion according to which an individual who stood out above others would be swept away from earth by God at the end of his or her life. The history of religions has adopted the concept of “rapture” or “translation” for this. The category of “rapture” also existed in the Old Testament: it is said of Enoch that God took him (Gen 5:24), and there is even a long narrative about Elijah’s translation (2 Kgs 2:1-18).

Finally, there existed the idea of the general “resurrection of the dead” at the end of time. It is attested only marginally in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2, but it began to play a larger role in the intertestamental literature. At the time of Jesus it had made its way into the thinking of large parts of the population. In contrast to the notions of exaltation and rapture, and also contrary to certain statements of hope in the psalms,⁷ this is not about the fate of an individual but about the destiny of the many. And, also in contrast to the ideas of exaltation and rapture, the concept of the resurrection of the dead applied to an eschatological event. That is, the place assigned to the resurrection of the dead was the end of history, or the end of the world.

In which of these three categories did the primitive church articulate its Easter faith? In fact, it employed all three categories. It said: God has exalted Jesus to his right hand;⁸ it said: God has taken Jesus away into heaven;⁹ but above all it said: God has raised Jesus from the dead.¹⁰ It is highly revealing, however, that the idea of rapture is not present at the beginning of the history of tradition. It was introduced at a relatively late period, above all by Luke. It is only he who tells of a visible ascension into heaven, which is nothing but a kind of “rapture.” His intention is thus to give a visible form to Jesus’ exaltation and at the same time to set an end to the Easter appearances.