Revisiting the Empty Tomb: The Early History of Easter

1. When the Dead and/or Gone Appear to the Living

14 Revisiting the Empty Tomb in the following chapter, but for now we simply note that Paul includes himself among those to whom the risen Jesus appeared, and that he does not see any distinction between his own experience and those of others (such as Cephas/Peter and James). Paul says that he saw the risen Jesus, although it is not entirely clear what he meant by that. Importantly, neither Paul nor the traditional kerygmatic formula he cites in 1 Corinthians 15:3b-7 refers to the empty tomb, that is, the “disappearance” tradition (as I will be calling it). His interest is entirely in the “appearance” tradition. Some scholars take this as an indication that the empty tomb tradition had not yet originated,2 but this is to conclude too much from Paul’s silence. At the very least, the writings of Paul provide evidence of a religious context in which the empty tomb tradition was not found to be useful. As we will see in the next chapter, while one might think that the empty tomb story would have been a useful ingredient in Paul’s argument for the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:12-58), the difficulty the Corinthians had with resurrection may have been precisely the kind of view of embodied immortality that disappearance stories normally would imply. For the present, however, our concern is what “he appeared” could have meant to Paul and to the other followers of Jesus who used this kind of language, as well as to the members of Paul’s group in Corinth. Here we do well to distance ourselves as readers of Paul from our knowledge of the Easter narratives in the canonical Gospels. There Jesus “appears” because he is not in the tomb and is alive again outside of it. This naturally implies that there is a one-to-one correspondence, a direct continuity, between the body that was buried and the embodied form that appears, despite the obvious distinctions the narratives make between the body of the risen Jesus and human bodies as normally experienced. On the one hand, the risen Jesus does things that human beings normally do with their bodies: he can occupy space physically , walk, talk, eat, and touch and be touched. But he also suddenly appears or disappears, goes about unrecognized, and raises questions and doubts in those who see him.3 In contrast with the Gospels, what Paul has to say about the resurrection appearances does not really clarify what the risen Jesus was like, although Paul would affirm that his experience was of a risen Jesus who was “bodily,” at least in some sense. Therefore, we cannot simply assume that Paul has in mind the same kind of physical correspondence or continuity the Gospel narratives describe, although he would say that the risen Jesus in his spiritual body corresponded in some respects to the premortem Jesus in his natural body (1 Cor. 15:42-49). Nor can we assume that the unusual embodiedness of the risen Jesus in the Gospels is essentially a narrative expression of what Paul meant when he wrote about the resurrection body as “spiritual” (Gk., pneumatikon) in 1 Corinthians 15. In fact, Luke has the risen Jesus explicitly deny that he is a “spirit” (Luke 24:39). What Paul meant by “spiritual body” will be investigated in the following chapter; for now, we look at Paul’s language about the “appearances” of Jesus to see what it could be taken to mean. While Galatians 1:16 suggests a personal, even internal, revelatory experience , in 1 Corinthians 9:1 Paul says simply, “Have I not seen (ouchi . . . heoraka) When the Dead and/or Gone Appear to the Living 15 our Lord Jesus?” and in 1 Corinthians 15:8 he says that “last of all, he appeared (ōphthē) also to me.” We should not be misled by our English translations here. The connotations of “I have seen him” and “he appeared” are potentially somewhat different: the former stresses Paul as the percipient, and the latter, Christ as the active party; the former could connote “normal” seeing, and the latter could connote “visionary” seeing. However, Paul uses different forms of the same verb, horaō, in 1 Corinthians 9:1 as in 1 Corinthians 15:8: in the former, he uses the perfect active, “I have seen,” and in the latter, the aorist passive, “he was seen [by...