Resurrection Traditions and Christian Apologetic

RESURRECTION TRADITIONS AND CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC IT IS VERY difficult to account for the origin of the Christian Church unless it is conceded that Jesus's disciples and the apostle Paul really did undergo experiences which convinced them that Jesus himself had been raised from the dead and had personally made an appearance to them. But it is another question entirely when one asks whether their own interpretation of their experiences was the correct one. Not infrequently it has been suggested that the conviction of Jesus's resurrection was simply the product of their own minds.1 It is this suggestion, primarily, that Christian apologetic has to deal with, and it is the contention of the present essay that the apologetic arguments commonly employed are unconvincing. It is a peculiar difficulty of the problem that it arises directly out of New Testament studies and yet leads the inquirer into a field of psychological theory in which the New Testament specialist has no professional competence. This has not, however , deterred New Testament scholars from raising the possibility of psychological explanations and apparently refuting them. It may therefore be worthwhile for a fellow New Testament specialist to point out that, even to the eye of the layman in psychology, there seem to be obvious possibilities which have not been thoroughly considered, and which might prove somewhat difficult to demolish. The purely psychological explanation of belief in the resurrection (as this explanation is commonly understood) is conveniently summarised by C. F. D. Maule as follows : 1 See, e.g., Maurice G-Oguel, La Foi a la Resurrection de Jesus dans le Christianisme Primitif (Paris, 1933), pp. 109-117, 393-396, 4~1-430; also Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos, ET by J. E. Steely (Nashville, 1970), p. 106. 197 198 MARGARET E. THRALL What is more widely believed, so far as I can ascertain, is that the Christian Church took its rise not indeed from a deliberate falsehood but from a sheer, honest misapprehension-assisted, perhaps , by superstitious awe and hallucination. For some reason (which, it is presumed, may be psychologically explained) these men and women became mistakenly convinced that their adored leader was alive again. A hoary old theory such as that the women went to the wrong tomb, or (a theory that was known as long ago as St. Matthew's Gospel) that the body was surreptitiously taken from the tomb, is still sometimes revived. On this showing, some of them genuinely found an empty tomb-emptied by some rationally explicable means unknown to them-which, it is suggested , assisted their belief that Jesus had risen. For, after all (it is urged) the traditions do say that Jesus himself predicted his resurrection; so that, even if the disciples were temporarily shaken by the disastrous death, it is hardly surprising if courage returned into their consciousness and they began to rally: they remembered the predictions; hope reasserted itself; the wish became father to the thought; he must have risen again-he had risen again: Alleluia ! the Lord is risen indeed.2 According to this summary of the psychological argument, the genesis of belief in the resurrection had three elements. Two of these are in fact psychological in character: the disciples' recollection of predictions Jesus himself had made about resurrection; and their swift recovery of hope after his death. The third, the discovery of a grave which was empty for some ordinary, natural reason, served to confirm the belief which had grown out of the first two. What does Christian apologetic have to say in reply? Defenders of the Christian account have had something to say about all three aspects of the explanation. Since it would be helpful to be able to establish some objective historical fact which would count in their favor, over against the more hazardous process of determining the subjective mental state of the recipients of resurrection appearances, a fair amount of attention has been paid to the third aspect, and it has been forcefully argued that the various natural explanations of the • C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament: Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series 1 (London, 1967), p. 9. RESURRECTION TRADITIONS & CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC 199 empty tomb are...