Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

But the category in which the immediate Easter experience was received and put into words, the one that dominated the first visionary phenomena, was that of the general resurrection of the dead at the end of time. This is evident from the broad reception as well as the early dating of the texts in question. The oldest Easter creed was: God has raised Jesus from the dead. Certainly the idea of the exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God and thus his affirmation as Messiah and Lord must have been intimately connected from the very beginning to the statement about his resurrection. But the original thought model in which the Easter experience was expressed—in which, indeed, it was “understood”—was that of the general resurrection of the dead.

This fact is of great significance for the description of the dimensions of the Easter events that are accessible to historians, because it makes clear that Peter, the Twelve, and the regathering community of disciples thought and acted within an extreme state of eschatological consciousness. They were deeply convinced that with the resurrection of Jesus the eschatological resurrection of the dead had already begun. But that meant that the end time, the period immediately before the end of the world, had broken upon them. The experience of the Risen One in the Easter visions in Galilee and Jerusalem must have been shocking, deeply moving, and all-shattering: now the dead will rise, the end of the world is near, the great eschatological turning has begun.

The following is important in this context: for Jewish thinking at the time the turn to a new era, to a new creation of the world by God, certainly did not have to take place on a single day. The end-time events could occur during a certain period. It is certainly not out of the question, and indeed it is quite likely, that Jesus’ disciples, while seeing him as the first of those raised from the dead, at the same time expected that the universal resurrection of the dead and the end of the world would follow within days or weeks. This “extension” of the events is still evident in the ancient confessional statement: “Christ [is] the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor 15:20) or “the firstborn from the dead” (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5)—that is, the first, the beginning of the resurrection of the dead that is being introduced in him.

When we read through the Easter stories in the gospels, however, we find scarcely anything left of the eschatological tension and shock of the first Easter days. That could make everything I have said here seem like a construct far removed from reality. But we must consider that the four gospels were written decades after the Easter events. At the time they were composed people had long since begun to translate the expectations of the beginning into statements that projected the intent of the oldest eschatology into a new language horizon. So we cannot expect still to find in the Easter narratives of the gospels the eschatological tension of the earliest time. Nevertheless, there is a series of indicators showing that Jesus’ resurrection was experienced as an end-time event and an immediate prelude to the general resurrection of the dead. I will trace these indicators in the next section.

The Resurrection of Old Testament Saints

In Matthew 27 we find an oddly unwieldy text with which today’s readers for the most part cannot begin to cope. It follows immediately after Matthew’s account of Jesus’ death: “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many” (Matt 27:51-53). It is clear that this text, the second part of which works with a tradition unknown to Mark, is meant to indicate the salvation-historical significance of Jesus’ death. It uses apocalyptic motifs: earthquake, splitting of rocks, graves opening. But that is by no means an adequate explanation of the text. It also reflects the atmosphere of the Easter days. The appearance of dead saints (namely, the righteous of the Old Testament), who can be seen as persons raised from the dead, must rest on visionary experiences in the earliest Jerusalem community. Apparently the Easter experiences were originally much more complex and experienced as far more apocalyptic than we would like to think today. Matthew 27:52-53 represents the highly tense eschatological atmosphere of the first days and weeks after the death of Jesus.

The Return of the Galileans