The Future
Disguises Itself as the Past:
The Origin of the
Resurrection
It is a
commonplace in New Testament scholarship that the Messiahship of Jesus
is strongly and clearly tied to his resurrection. Early preaching
formulas preserved in Acts 2:36 and 13:33 as well as in Romans 1:3-4 are
actually adoptionistic, having Jesus gain his Messiahship only as of the
resurrection event. Even where NT writers see Jesus as the Messiah
already during his life, they preserve the resurrection-messiahship link
by their frequent citation of Psalm 110, an enthronement psalm. Equally
clear is that Acts 3:19-21 preserves a tradition according to which the
exalted Jesus was not yet the Messiah but only the Messiah-designate and
would enter upon the Messianic office only at the Parousia (=
apocalyptic Second Coming).
Waiting in the Wings
When we try to
make sense of both of these early Christologies, here is what I think
emerges: in view of the strong link between resurrection and Messianic
enthronement, if Jesus was viewed as not yet the Messiah until the
Parousia, then he equally must have been viewed as not yet
resurrected until the Parousia! His resurrection was yet future and
would coincide with that of all believers (as is said of the Messiah in
2 Esdras 7:29-32).
I suspect that the
earliest Christians venerated Jesus as a martyr whose soul was exalted
to heaven after his death, who would someday rise, at the general
resurrection, to return as the Messiah. Until then he stood before or
beside the throne of God, even as Judas Maccabeus had glimpsed the
martyred high priest Onias III and Jeremiah pleading for Israel before
God's throne (2 Maccabees 15:12-14). No doubt there were similar visions
of the beatified martyr Jesus shortly after his death. At this stage of
primitive Christian belief, Jesus was viewed as not yet enthroned as the
Messiah, but only designated to be such at his return at the
(soon-coming) end of the age. (So argued J.A.T. Robinson in his essay
"The Most Primitive Christology of All?" in his collection Twelve New
Testament Essays) See Acts 3:19-21. Thus Stephen sees him
standing before God as an exalted martyr, not sitting as the
enthroned Messiah (Acts 7:55). These are fragments of early tradition
preserved by Luke in new contexts.
It is from this
period that the image of Jesus interceding for his own before God
(Hebrews 7:25; 1 John 2:1; Romans 8:34) dates, as well as the cry
Maranatha ("Our Lord, come!"), which implies the plaintive longing
for an absent Lord, not fellowship with a present, Risen One.
Likewise, here we have the lifesetting of Mark 2:20, a period of
mourning for the absence of Jesus, instead of joyful celebration of his
resurrection.
How did they move
to the subsequent Christology whereby Jesus was already the resurrected
Messiah? It is a case of Realized Eschatology (coping with the delay of
the Parousia by reinterpreting it as somehow already having happened
here and now). Many NT scholars believe that the Messianic
interpretation of Jesus' earthly life and ministry was a
reinterpretation prompted by the delay of the Parousia. As time went on,
and there was no Messianic Coming of Jesus to experience, the gap was in
some measure filled by the belief that he had already come as the
Messiah. So the events of his earthly life were now in hindsight given
new messianic significance. E.g., miracle-working became a messianic
work, though this is unprecedented in Judaism. His death became the
preordained death of the Messiah, though no Jew had ever heard of such a
thing, including Jesus.
I would carry this
logic a significant step further. I suggest that the resurrection of
Jesus itself was the first attempt to claim for the present (and recent
past) a bit of the anticipated but ever-delayed Messianic glory. It was
first believed that Jesus' resurrection, i.e., his return as the
Messiah, would begin the general resurrection of the End. To close the
widening gap in some measure, Christians came to believe that he had
already risen as the avant garde of the resurrection, and that
finally the End was close at hand for sure. It was a prop for failing,
increasingly disillusioned faith.
Here is where I
think the language of his resurrection as the "first-fruits" of the
eschatological (end-time) resurrection comes in. The idea was to forge a
link between Jesus' resurrection as an event of the recent past and the
general resurrection to come, so that one must shortly follow the other.
Hold out just a little longer!
Such a step is not
only required to move my theory along toward its desired conclusion; it
is quite possible and natural in the nature of the case. It is precisely
the sort of thing that happens in moments of sectarian apocalyptic
disappointment, as witness Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, When
Prophecy Fails, as in the cases of the Seventh Day Adventists and
Jehovah's Witnesses. When each staked all on an apocalyptic deadline,
and that deadline passed, they had to reduce cognitive dissonance by
reinterpreting the great event along private or invisible or
spiritualized lines --in short, some manner in which it might be said to
have happened, yet without upheaving the external world (since in fact,
alas, it didn't upheave the external world). What was to have
been a matter of sight was now converted into a matter of faith.
And it (must have)
happened in the recent past -- it was not noticed at the time, not until
a vision or a reexamination (reinterpretation) of scripture suggested to
disciples who were slow of heart to believe, that they had missed it
while it was happening in a way they did not expect.
If You Blink, You Might Miss It
For narrative
purposes, the only way to present the spiritualization of the desired
fulfillment, to have it occur in a way no one would notice but for the
eye of faith, is to have it so occur and be missed. Logically,
the moment one conceives the idea of an invisible fulfillment, the only
way it can be realized is by the assumption that it has happened
already; otherwise, if it only might happen invisibly, in
the future, how will you ever know when it happens? In the nature
of the case there can be no visible sign! So to bring the notion from
the realm of speculative possibility to that of faith appropriation, you
have no other option than to take it as having happened already. This is
the only available, viable form of "facticity."
In precisely this
way, I am suggesting, the disillusioned early Christians at some point
comforted themselves with the "realization" that while they were waiting
for Jesus to rise at the End-time resurrection as glorious Messiah, he
had already done so! He already reigned (albeit from heaven, where he
remained) as Messiah! Any further delay, then, was not a matter of such
urgent concern. The main thing was already done.
We have at least
one actual historical example of such a transformation of future
expectation into legendary past. In 1919, a Papua, New Guinea prophet
named Evara came forward with the prophecy that very soon tribal
ancestors would return aboard a ghostly freighter, the steamer of the
dead. They would bring to their living descendants great troves of
Western goods like those enjoyed by the European colonizers and
missionaries. It was the beginning of the Vailala Madness, as it came to
be called, one of the most important of the famous Cargo Cults of
Melanesia studied by Peter Worsley in his The Trumpet Shall Sound.
After numerous false alarms and disappointments, the movement petered
out in 1931.
But the effects of
the Vailala Madness did not cease with the end of organized activity.
The memory lived on in the minds of the villagers, and, as time passed,
legends grew up… In 1934, people still firmly maintained the ‘belief
that those first years of the Vailala Madness constituted a brief age of
miracles.’ [F.E. Williams, “The Vailala Madness in Retrospect,” in
Essays Presented to C.G. Seligman. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1934, p. 373.] The things which had been prophesied in 1919 were
believed in 1934 to have actually taken place. It was recounted how, in
that wonder time, ‘the ground shook and the trees swayed… flowers sprang
up in a day, and the air was filled with their fragrance. The spirits of
the dead came and went by night.’ [ibid.]… The steamer of the dead,
moreover, actually had appeared. People had seen the vessel’s
wash, heard the noise of her engines, the rattle of the anchor-chain,
and the splashing of her dinghy being lowered into the water and of the
oars; similar noises were heard as it disappeared without ever having
actually been seen. Others remembered obscurely seeing her large red
funnel and three masts, and many saw her lights… Clouds often obscured a
proper view of the vessel, though the inhabitants of villages unaffected
by the Madness had greater difficulty in seeing the vessel than the
faithful. [Worsley, pp. 90-91].
I think it not
unlikely that the repeated frustrations of the early Christians led to a
similar retrojection of their resurrection hope into the recent past.
But then how did they determine precisely when in the recent past the
resurrection (must have) occurred? By seeking a scriptural prophesy (1
Corinthians 15:4). They hit upon Hosea 6:2, "After two days he will
revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before
him."
By the time the
resurrection of Jesus became a Christian belief, the tomb was a moot
point. At first no one denied the tomb was occupied. By this time the
body was gone, lost to decay, and the emptiness of the tomb, entirely
for natural reasons, was given new significance.
Lengthening Shadow of the Cross
What of the
atoning death of Jesus? Following Sam K. Williams (The Death of Jesus
as Saving Event) I think that it was only in connection with the
Gentile Mission that his death was first seen as a sacrifice
inaugurating a new covenant, not to supercede the original one for Jews,
but rather to provide an atonement for Gentiles, a new covenant God was
establishing with them alongside that with Jews.
Just as according
to 4 Maccabees (6:26-30; 17:21-22) God had deigned to accept the
faithful martyr-deaths of Eleazer and the seven brothers as an atonement
for Israel, so he was now imagined to accept the steadfast death of the
martyr Jesus as an atonement for those who had for centuries stood
outside the sacrificial system of Israel and whose sins had been piling
up toward a terrible judgment, now mercifully averted.
For Jewish
believers in Jesus, Jesus was Messiah and soon-coming liberator, but for
Gentiles he was an atoning savior, and by and large, Jewish Christians
would have agreed Jesus was this – for Gentiles.
Note, for
instance, how in Mark and Matthew the words of institution at the Lord's
Supper make the blood of Jesus to be shed "for many," while Paul in 1
Corinthians 11 has it shed "for you." The Synoptics have him speaking to
Jews, so it is not "for you," but rather for many others, i.e.,
for the vast numbers of Gentiles. Paul is speaking to such Gentiles, so
he changes it to "for you." The Synoptics have Jesus speaking to Jews
about Gentiles, whereas Paul uses the same formula speaking to
Gentiles.
The conception
(already in 1 Corinthians) of the eucharist as a sharing in the body and
blood of Christ is a subsequent development in the Gentile Church on
Hellenistic soil. I would further suggest that baptism in Christianity
began not among the earliest Jewish Christians (the fanciful
second-century Book of Acts notwithstanding) but in the Hellenistic
Jewish Christian mission to Gentiles. As it had been in Judaism,
immersion was an initiation for proselytes, period. There was at first
no reference to John the Baptist. In the tradition regarding him, in
fact, we find a contrast between his mere water baptism and the Spirit
baptism of the Coming One. This means that the Christian framers of this
tradition did not baptize in water.
Note that in the
most Jewish of the Gospels, Matthew, the command is to baptize "the
nations," with nothing whatever said of the baptism of the 12 or the
Jewish Christians for whom they stand. All Paul says of baptism is said
to Gentile converts, who of course would have been baptized. (He himself
may have been baptized, but this may be an exceptional case, just
as his disregard of the dietary Laws was a prerogative of his being a
missionary who must adapt himself to the Gentiles. "To those outside
the Law I became as one outside the Law.")
When he says in
Galatians 3:28 that all who have been baptized into Christ have put on
Christ, and that there is now no more distinction between Jew and
Gentile, he needn't mean that both Jews and Gentiles were baptized, but
only that once Gentiles are baptized, Gentiles are no
longer considered different from Jews in the eyes of God. After all,
couldn't the same thing have been said of purely Jewish proselyte
baptism?
On Hellenistic
soil, however, baptism becomes far more than the original Jewish (then
Jewish Christian) proselyte baptism. It rapidly takes on the contours of
a Mystery cult initiation rite that confers salvation and a new nature
by identifying the initiate with the fate of the Redeemed Redeemer, the
dying and rising savior. It is at this point that Pauline
"Christ-Mysticism" becomes possible. My guess is that no Palestinian
Christian ever thought of such a thing.
Even today,
theology changes so rapidly that it is hard to keep up. One of the
reasons it is hard to understand the earliest Christian beliefs, I
think, is that they seemed to have changed even faster back then. We
find them are superimposed upon each other in the earliest documents,
and in very thin layers hard to disengage from one another. But here is
an attempt, however ham-fisted.
Robert M. Price
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