Paul and Jesus

Since the text is pre-Christian, the parallels with Jesus are all the more amazing. Not only do we have reference here to a “slain” Messiah, an idea many have argued originated only with the unexpected crucifixion of Jesus, but also the reference to Simon being raised from the dead after three days. Since Paul is our earliest source for the tradition that Jesus was raised “on the third day,” one has to ask whether this tradition of a slain Messiah being raised after three days was one that he appropriated and applied to Jesus.

What is all the more striking about this text is that it affirms Simon’s resurrection from the dead even though his mutilated body had turned to “dung” in the hot Jordanian desert. Clearly the person composing the text, who surely believed that Gabriel’s divine decree had been fulfilled, was not concerned with the decaying remains of Simon’s beheaded body. Whoever wrote this text, most likely a follower of Simon, believed that God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. Unfortunately, other than this text and Josephus’s account of Simon’s death, we have no way of knowing anything about the followers of Simon and what they might have done after his death. Simon apparently had no “Peter” or “Paul” to carry on his messianic mission, but nonetheless the faith his followers had in his death and resurrection after three days was written down in a text. It provides us with significant new evidence about how the concept of resurrection of the dead was understood among Jewish messianic groups precisely from Jesus’ time. It is our closest contemporary parallel to the resurrection faith.

By taking our clues from Paul’s reports of “seeing” Jesus, and factoring in Paul’s understanding of resurrection of the dead as a contemporary Jew of that time, we are now in a position to understand and interpret the gospel accounts in their proper historical contexts. What emerges is a consistent and coherent story of how Christian faith in Jesus’ resurrection developed before it changed over time, allowing us to reconstruct what Jesus’ earliest followers likely believed versus the later understanding of the resurrection that came from Paul.

THREE

READING THE GOSPELS IN

THE LIGHT OF PAUL

It makes perfect sense to read the New Testament in its current order. The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, introduce us to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The book of Acts gives us the early history of Christianity, ending with the career of Paul. The letters of Paul and the other apostles, Peter, John, James, and Jude, come next, and the mysterious book of Revelation provides a climactic finale to the whole. It all makes perfect sense—unless one is a historian.

Historians read the New Testament backward. Over the last hundred and fifty years they have made a significant discovery. If the New Testament writings are ordered chronologically, according to the dates the various books were written, a wholly different picture emerges, with radical and far-reaching implications. Historians disassemble these various sources in an attempt to understand them in chronological order. They focus on a precise set of questions: Where do we find our oldest and most authentic materials? How and when were they passed along, edited, and embellished? Who was involved in this process and what theological motivations were operating? As it turns out, this seemingly destructive process of “disassembly” yields positive and fascinating results.

I want to return to the question of what happened following the death of Jesus. Now that we have Paul as our master key, when we attempt to analyze the four New Testament gospels with their narratives of the empty tomb, an entirely different perspective opens up. Understanding Paul turns out to be fundamental to understanding what the earliest followers of Jesus most likely experienced, and the central affirmation of Paul’s message and apostleship—that he had “seen” Jesus raised from the dead—can be placed in its proper historical light.

In looking at the gospels, chronology turns out to be a remarkably fruitful starting point. There is no absolute guarantee that what is early is more accurate than what came after, but unless we begin the process of disassembly and comparison we have no way of even approaching our questions.

Evangelical Christian scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, believe that the only possible explanation for the empty tomb is that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead and that he emerged from the tomb fully and miraculously restored to health. They maintain that there is no other logical explanation for all the facts as reported and are quite keen to uphold Jesus’ resurrection as the solid, demonstrable bedrock of Christian faith.¹ Their thinking runs something like the following.