The unexpected lends weight to accounts

Are the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection reliable, asks Paul Trebilco.

The Gospels give the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection on the third day after he was crucified and buried. Such a resurrection is completely unprecedented, and so it’s not surprising that many have asked the question: Can we trust these accounts from almost  2000  years ago?

The accounts of Jesus’ resurrection actually modify the general hope for the future found in contemporary Jewish texts. These Jewish texts present the hope for general resurrection — a time when God would raise everyone. 

However, our New Testament texts present the resurrection of one man, Jesus. No one was expecting the resurrection of just one person ahead of the general resurrection. Among Jewish thinkers, "Resurrection" meant "everyone being raised" not "one person being raised alone". 

This partly explains the confusion among the disciples when they first learned of Jesus’ resurrection — they weren’t expecting the resurrection of Jesus alone. But this actually underlines the credibility of the whole story: why make something up that is completely counter to your current expectations? Why modify those expectations (of general resurrection) in a completely unprecedented way? You would only do that if what actually happened was that Jesus had been raised.

Another point in favour of the reliability of the resurrection accounts relates to the cross. Virtually all historians agree that Jesus was crucified by the Romans. The crucifixion was a terribly humiliating event — to proclaim that your religious hero, in fact your Lord, had been crucified is something that would never have been invented by the early Christians. It was a scandal — madness — as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1. So we know its bedrock history.

What were the disciples thinking after Jesus was crucified on what we now call "Good Friday"? In Jewish thought by the first century, crucifixion was associated with Deuteronomy 21:22-23: "When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed, and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you shall bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse."

We know that Jews (at Qumran for example) applied this to Roman crucifixion, and saw a person who was "hung on a tree" as under God’s curse. After the crucifixion, then, the disciples were almost certainly not thinking that Jesus was a great man who had come to a tragic end. A tragic end certainly — but actually a death that was cursed by God. So they had to revise their verdict about Jesus. He was not "a great man", but actually someone who had been terribly wrong, and whose death on a cross had shown that he was actually, somehow, under God’s curse.  What we call Easter Saturday, was then a terrible day for the disciples — believing that everything had completely changed, and Jesus was actually very, very bad. So when, according to the New Testament, God raised Jesus from the dead, they were not thinking "Jesus was a good man" or "We are ho-hum about this man", but rather, "He’s cursed". 

They simply were not in a state to dream up a story about Jesus coming back to life — how could that happen to such a disastrous, cursed person? Something must have happened to change their minds from a rock-bottom view of Jesus, to believing in his resurrection. The New Testament accounts say that "something" was God acting to raise Jesus.

This explains the slowness of the disciples to believe Jesus was raised. The mental transformation involved was vast. They also had to grapple with this idea of the curse. The Gospels explain that Jesus died "for us", "for our sins" — and so Jesus was taking humanity’s place, enduring the effect of our sin. It was "for us" that he died. And Paul explains to the Galatians (3:13) that "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’."

He doesn’t change the view of crucifixion — it’s still an accursed tree — but he comes to a different explanation of why Jesus died in this way.

All the accounts agree that women first discovered the empty tomb, and that the earliest appearances by the risen Jesus were to women. It’s important to know that in a first-century Jewish patriarchal context, the witness of women was not regarded as reliable. 

Why create stories in which your main witnesses were thought to be unreliable? Clearly, women are said to be the key witnesses because that is what happened! Again, it underlines that these are not made-up accounts, as well as showing Jesus’ countercultural view about women. With so many of the specific aspects of the story being so unexpected and countercultural, all this rings true.

- Paul Trebilco is professor of New Testament studies in the department of theology and religion at the University of Otago.