George Albert Wells

Non-Christian evidence is too late to give any independent support to the gospels.  When Tacitus wrote (about AD 120) that Christ was executed under Pontius Pilate, he was merely repeating what Chris­tians were by then saying (HEJ, pp. 1617; France, pp. 21-23).  The other pagan writer commonly adduced is Suetonius who wrote, also around AD 120, that Claudius (who reigned AD 41-54) expelled Jews from Rome because they constantly made disturbances at the in­stigation of Chrestus.  Many commentators think that, by Chrestus, Suetonius really meant Christus (the Messiah); and Watson has con­vincingly argued that the disorders to which Suetonius here refers were caused by controversy between orthodox Jews and Jewish Christians at Rome about the truth or falsehood of Christianity.³⁰ No more about the historical Jesus need have been included in this Christianity of Claudiuss day than what extant Christian writers (Paul and others) were saying on the subject before the gospels became established much later in the first century; and that, as we saw (above, pp. 6f) does not confirm the gospels portraits of Jesus. Suetonius also mentions Neros persecution of Christians at Rome, but, as France notes, tells us nothing more than what we already know about this from Tacitus, and nothing about Jesus himself (p. 42).  Pliny, as I have noted elsewhere (HEJ, p. 16), is equally unhelpful in the latter regard, as France (p. 43) agrees.

Rabbinic references to Jesus are entirely dependent on Christian claims, as both Christian and Jewish scholars have conceded.  I quote Sandmel and Bornkamm, among others, to this effect in DiE, p. 12.  France, who gives no indication that this is the view of reputable scholars, regards what I say there as dogmatic scepticism (p. 39).  Catchpole, however, in a thorough survey, gives the arguments of seven Jewish scholars who, between 1929 and 1963, totally dis­missed, with varying degrees of firmness, the Talmudic evidence on Jesus.³ I note in DJE (pp. 12, 16) that even Goldstein, who accepts as authentic five passages about Jesus in the vast rabbinic literature of the first two and a quarter centuries AD, admits that they do not conclusively establish even that he existed at all, as none of them can be shown to be sufficiently early.

Appeal is still commonly made to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, in whose Antiquities of the Jews it is suggested that Jesus was more than human, and where he is said to have been the Christ, a doer of marvellous deeds condemned to crucifixion by Pilate upon an indictment brought by the principal men among us.  But a Pharisee such as Josephus would not have written so admiring­ly of him, nor have dropped the subject abruptly had he believed all this of him.  The passage as it stands was obviously interpolated by a Christian writer there are only three manuscripts of the chapter in which it occurs, none of them earlier than the eleventh century and the only remaining question is whether the whole is an interpolation, or whether Josephus at this point made some mention of Jesus which was later reworked by a Christian hand.  Conzelmann, in a standard religious encyclopaedia, says that the whole is an interpolation; and Paul Winter; in the recent revision of Schurers book (p. 433), names other scholars of established reputation who likewise consider the passage a complete fabrication.  Even if, as Winter himself and many others suppose, part of the passage was written by Josephus, its date (about AD 93) makes it too late to be of decisive importance, for the gospel account was already in written form by then, and Josephus could, like Tacitus, have taken his information from what Christians were by then saying.³³

           Winter allows that, even though the passage includes what he regards as certain terms of speech, however fragmentary that can be ascribed to Josephus, it is not possible to reconstruct what Josephus may originally have written at this point (pp. 434, 438).  The Josephan terms of speech may, as Herrmann holds, be there because the passage was added by someone who knew Josephuss style and made a pastiche from it.³⁴   France (p. 28) distorts the case I have made elsewhere for excising the whole passage when he says that my argu­ment implies that all Josephuss stories about Pilate must occur together, in unbroken sequence, so that everything after the Jesus passage but in the same chapter will also have to go, as Josephus returns to Pilate only at the beginning of the next chapter. In fact my argument (in JEC, pp. 19192 and DJE, p. 10) was that the Jesus passage occurs in a context which deals exclusively with the misfortunes of the Jews (only some of which are attributed to Pilate) and that Jesuss condemnation by Pilate at the behest of the Jewish leaders has no connection with such misfortunes except from the standpoint a Christian, who would naturally regard this crime as the greatest misfortune ever to have befallen the Jews.  If the whole passage is removed, there remains a coherent account of a series of their misfortunesfirst, two instigated by Pilate, then (after the passage about Jesus) another sad calamity which put the Jews into disorder, followed by yet another (4,000 Jews banished from Rome for the wickedness of four).³⁵

Josephuss only other mention of Jesus occurs in a statement about the killing of James, the brother of Jesus, him called Christ.  This, if genuine and not a Christian interpolation, does nothing to confirm the gospel accounts of Jesus, and its late date makes it only marginally relevant to the question of his historicity.  France, like many others, has pleaded (p. 27) that no Christian interpolator would have been content to designate Jesus as him called Christ.  In fact, however, Matthew, in a passage where he introduces Jesus to his readers, refers to him with these very words (1:16); and at John 4:25-26 Jesus claims to be the person who has just been referred to as him called Christ, so that Christian use of the phrase is well at­tested.  Indeed, it would be remarkable from an orthodox Jew such as Josephus, who might be expected to have qualified it with something like called Christ by some.  (Cf. Herrmann, pp. 10102 for this and further evidence for interpolation).  Also, Origens comments on Josephuss mention of James do not really square with this passage (see JEC, pp. 193-94 and Frances concession, p. 172 n.14).  It is readi­ly understood as a marginal gloss, from a Christian hand, incor­porated innocently into the text by a later copyist (see DJE, p. 11).

The manner in which apologists exaggerate the significance of non-Christian evidence which they take as pertaining to the events recorded in the gospels is well illustrated by Habermass statement that within 100 to 150 years after the birth of Christ approximately eighteen non-Christian . . . sources from secular history mention . . . almost every major detail of Jesus life, including Resurrection, and his claim to be deity.³⁶ It is all the more striking that so many of the earliest Christian documents do not do the same, but say nothing of any item in his biography except his crucifixion and resurrection (both in unspecified circumstances). And contrary to Habermass suggestion, there is no early non-Christian evidence concerning the Resurrection.  As the theologian Ulrich Wilckens has noted, for the first century we are, without exception, forced to rely on the testimony of the Christians on this matter: There are no non-Christian witnesses of any sort who could give us information about the resurrection of Jesus and his appearances, or comment from a non-Christian aspect on the statements made about the resurrection by the early Christians ~ As for Jesuss claims to be deity, these are not merely absent from but even incompatible with the earliest Chris­tian documents, where he figures as a supernatural personage higher in status than the angels, yet subordinate to the Father, to whom he will finally deliver up the kingdom (1 Corinthians 15:24 and 28), and himself then be merely the first-born among many brothers (Romans 8:29).38

      One of Habermass 18 secular sources on the life of Jesus is Thallus, who, he claims, mentioned the darkness and the events sur­rounding the Crucifixion. . . about AD 52 (p. 106).  Thalluss History has not survived, and only a few references to it in Christian writers are extant.  Of these the one that Habermas has in mind is Julius Africanuss statement in the third century, apropos of the three-hour darkness from noon which covered the earth at Jesuss crucifixion (Mark 15:33): Thallus sayswrongly it seems to methat this darkness was an eclipse of the sun.  Jacoby, who prints Africanuss quotation and who comments on it in a companion volume, notes that Thallus may in fact have made no mention at all of Jesus or Jewish history, but simply have recorded (as other chroniclers did) the eclipse in the reign of Tiberius for which astronomers have calculated the date 24 November AD.  It may have been Africanus who introduced Jesus in retorting that this was no eclipse but a super­natural event.  If, however, Thallus did mention the death of Jesus, then his testimony would be important if it antedated the gospel traditions.  But all we in fact know of him is that he wrote later than the eclipse he mentions and probably before Phlegon, the freedman of Hadrian (if Eusebius is right in asserting that Phlegon drew his in­formation about the same eclipse from Thallus).  Jacoby says that Christian writers were drawn to Thalluss History because it was the latest thing and appeared only in the second century.  Thus if he mentioned the crucifixion at all, he probably derived his information from what Christians were already saying, and is therefore not an in­dependent witness.  Conzelmanns article on Jesus in a standard religious encyclopaedia notes curtly that Thallus cannot be con­sidered as witnessing to events in the life of Jesus.⁴⁰

The three-hour darkness at Jesuss death cannot, in the passover context in which it is set in the gospels, have been a solar eclipse, as the Passover is celebrated about the time of the full moon, and solar eclipses can occur only at the time of the new moon.  The evangelists of course do not intend to represent the darkness as naturally caused, but as a miraculous portent, no doubt signifying the judgment of heaven on what was taking place (Nineham, p. 426).  Nineham adds that similar portents are said to have marked the deaths of Julius Caesar and other pagan figures, and also of some of the great rabbis.

THE RESURRECTION

i. THE GOSPEL ACCOUNTS

According to Karl Barth, we rightly turn up our nose at the many inconsistencies in the attempts of liberal theologians to explain belief in the resurrection naturalistically¹ If inconsistencies are a ground for scornful rejection, then it will fare ill with the New Testament ac­counts of the Resurrection.  A. E. Harvey notes in his The New English Bible Companion to the New Testament (Oxford and Cam­bridge University Presses, 1970, p. 297)--hardly a sceptical work that all the gospels, after having run closely together in their accounts of the trial and execution, diverge markedly when they come to the circumstances of the resurrection, and it is impossible to fit their accounts together into a single coherent scheme.  Fuller gives a brief summary of what he calls the palpable inconsistencies (pp. 25), and early this century they were set out in detail by the Zurich theologian P. W. Schmiedel, who gives ample evidence that on this matter the canonical gospels are at irreconcilable variance with each other and that the non-canonical notices serve to show how busily and in how reckless a manner the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus continued to be handed on.² Karl Barths way out of all this is that we ought not to ask for evidence for the Resurrection, but should believe on faith alone; to which another theologian, Paul Badham, has appositely replied: A faith which claims something which happened in the past is important cannot evade historical scrutiny of that claim.³

       Strauss emphasized how glaring the contradictions are when he declared, of the Resurrection; Rarely has an incredible fact been worse attested, and never has a badly attested one been intrinsically less credible.⁴  Matthew makes Jesuss appearances to his disciples oc­cur exclusively in Galilee, while Luke sites them exclusively 80 miles away at Jerusalem.  (The final redactor of the fourth gospel tries to harmonize such discrepant traditions by appending a chapter of Galilean appearances, John 21, to a chapter of Jerusalem ap­pearances.) I know that witnesses of an event can give discrepant ac­counts of it, but one would not expect the discrepancies to extend to

essentials.  If one witness of a street accident affirmed that it took place in London, we should not expect another to site it in Birm­ingham.  If we were faced with such discrepant reports, and also had no other evidence that there had been any accident, we should dismiss the whole thing.  But this is our position in regard to the Resurrection.  As Elliott has said: There is no independent witness to the Easter events outside the New Testament (p. 84).

The documents make it clear that the Christophanies were not vouchsafed to enemies, only to those who either already believed or subsequently became believers.  As Elliott puts it: Jesus in his resur­rected state is visible only to those who have faith (p. 86); or, in the wording of the New Testament itself, only to witnesses who were chosen before of God (Acts 10:40-41).  According to Acts, the ap­pearances of the risen Jesus went on for 40 days.  This feature con­tradicts even Luke (by the same author), which ends with Jesus leading his disciples on Easter day, after numerous appearances to them, from Jerusalem to the neighbouring locality of Bethany, where he solemnly blesses them with uplifted hands before he parted from them and was carried up into heavenon that same day.  Some manuscripts have only he parted from them, but Fuller concedes, after discussing the manuscript evidence, that the words reporting the ascension are textually Lucan and integral to the narrative (p. 122).  Evidently some copyists deleted them in order to represent the parting as only temporary and thus avoid contradicting Acts where the author seems to be drawing on a tradition not available when he wrote his gospel, and one on which he gladly seized because, while occasional appearances of the risen one might be dismissed by scep­tics as hallucinations, a sojourn of forty days, during which he presented many proofs (Acts 1:3), was more substantial.

Conservative apologists admit what they call apparent dis­crepancies in the evidence for the Resurrection, but point out that certain cardinal facts are independent of them: all the accounts agree, for instance, that Jesus was crucified and subsequently raised.  But this amount of agreement is frequently found in stories admittedly mythical.  Historians agree that Wilhelm Tell is a legendary figure, but there are chronicles enough telling discrepant stories of how he founded the Swiss Confederation.  Reverting to my example of a street accident, I would note that the conservative position implies that, although those who claim to be witnesses disagree even as to where it happened, and although there are no injured people, damaged vehicles or indeed any evidence apart from their discordant testimony, we are nevertheless to believe that an accident did occur.  Scholars who today still defend Jesuss virgin birth as historical fact are obliged to resort to this manner of arguing: as we shall see, the event is documented only in the two nativity stories of Matthew and Luke (not elsewhere in the New Testament), and each of these stories is incompatible with the other, as well as being full of its own dif­ficulties.  But they agree in alleging that Jesus was virgin born.  Such minimal agreement between narratives with.  no historical basis is, however, what one would expect if for some reason certain beliefs about Jesus and about Tell had come to be accepted and if believers then, independently of each other, tried to envisage historical circumstances which would justify these beliefs.

The discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the Resurrection events are not mere muddle but arise because one evangelist pursues theological purposes alien to another.  For Luke, Jerusalem is of great theological importance,⁵ and in order to place the appearances there he amends the Marcan narrative at two points.  First he omits the record at Mark 14:28 of Jesuss prediction (during the walk to Gethsemane after the Last Supper) that after his Resurrection he would go before his disciples into Galilee.  Then he rewords what Mark had recorded as the instruction to the women at the empty tomb.  Mark has:

Go, tell his disciples and Peter, He goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him, as he said unto you (16:7).

In Luke this appears as:

Remember how he spake unto you, when he was yet in Galilee, saying that the Son of man must be . . . crucified, and the third day rise again (24:6-7).

Having thus eliminated the instruction that the disciples should go to Galilee, Luke goes on to make the risen Jesus tell them to remain in Jerusalem until ye be clothed with power from on high (24:49), which he represents (at Acts 2:14) as happening at Pentecost, that is, some fifty days later.

          Theologians speak in this connection of Lukes editing of Mark; but we can hardly feel confidence in a writer whose theological pur­pose leads him to adapt a source so as to obliterate its plain meaning.  As Evans has said, it is not natural confusion but rather the lack of it, and the influence of rational reflection and apologetic which have given rise to such contradictions (p. 129).

The best manuscripts of Mark end at 16:8.  The remainder of chapter 16 is an appendix (distinguished as such in the RV, the RSV, and the NEB) which makes the risen Jesus promise (among other things) that believers will be able to handle snakes and drink deadly poison without coming to harm.  Up to 16:8, there have been no ap­pearances of the risen one.  The women visitors to the tomb have discovered it to be empty, and have been instructed there by a young man arrayed in a white robe to tell the disciples to go to Galilee to experience an appearance.  In Luke, the young man becomes two men in dazzling apparel, and in Matthew he is called an angel.  Commentators point out that this is the meaning in all three gospels, as young man sometimes designates an angel in an­cient Jewish literature, and in the New Testament men in white and/or radiant clothes are always heavenly beings. In John (20:12) there are two angels.  Commentators are apt to say that we have here various accounts, the exact details of which are not important.  Of course the details are unimportant if the important fact is admitted that Jesus had risen from the dead and that real angels stood by his tomb and spoke to the women.  If we accept all this, it does not mat­ter whether there was one angel or two, whether they were outside the tomb or within.

Mark continues by representing the women as too afraid to deliver the young mans message to the disciples, so that they said nothing to anyone.  Fuller, like many others, thinks that the empty tomb story is no part of the early tradition, but a later legend, in­troduced by Mark for the first time into the narrative (p. 52).  And it has often been suggested that Marks motive for making the women keep silent was to account for the fact that, as he well knew, there was no already existing tradition about an empty tomb when he wrote.  As Lampe says: The fact that the women do not pass the message on may suggest that the evangelist, or his source, knew that the story of the tomb and the angel was not part of the original Easter proclamation and had only developed at a relatively late stage in the tradition (p. 48).

Whatever Marks motive may have been, Luke reworded this passage so as to make it lead in to the Jerusalem appearances he has added to Mark:

Mark 16:8

And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and aston­ishment had come upon them: and they said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid.

Luke 24:9

And they returned from the tomb and told all these things to the elev­en, and to all the rest.

         1 do not mean to suggest that Luke is here concocting a narrative he knew to be false. As he was convinced that it was beginning from Jerusalem that the Christian mission went forward to all the nations (Luke 24:47), he will naturally have supposed that his predecessor had got his facts a bit wrong, and so will have amended the Marcan narrative in perfectly good faith.  One thing that this kind of editing clearly indicates is that Marks gospel was not regarded as authoritatively based on reliable eyewitness information.

If we turn from Luke to Matthew, we find similarly a narrative shaped by conscious purpose.  Matthew has decided to have the sepulchre guarded by Jewish (or Roman) soldiers so as to prevent the Jews from alleging, when it is later seen to be empty, that disciples stole their masters body and merely pretended that he had risen from the dead (Matthew 27:6266).  In consequence, Matthew cannot ac­cept Marks statement that the women expected to enter the tomb (to anoint the body) and has to represent them as intending merely to visit it (28:1).  Before they can look inside it, the guard has to be put out of action; hence the need for the great earthquake of the next verse caused not by any natural seismic conditions, but by the de­scent from heaven of an angel of the Lord who both rolls away the stone sealing the tomb and pet rifies the guards with fear.  But why did not these soldiers, once they had recovered, tell of what they had seen and thus make it difficult for the Jews to deny the fact of the Resurrection?  To provide a plausible answer to this question, Mat­thew has it that the chief priests persuaded the guards with bribes to pretend that they had slept on duty and thus given Jesuss disciples a chance to steal the body.  The guards took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying was spread abroad among the Jews and continueth until this day (28:15).  This is psychologically quite incredible. Whoever has seen an angel descending from heaven, with an appearance like lightning (28:3), is not going to sayeven for a Considerable sum of money that he was asleep and saw nothing (Haenchen, pp. 549-550). The phrase until this day betrays the whole narrative as late apologetic, accounting, to both Jews and Christians, for the silence of alleged Jewish witnesses. Lampe has noted that what he calls Matthews legend of the guard has no historical value, is very much in the manner of the later apocryphal gospels, and reflects controversy with the Jews (p. 51).

C. H. Dodd refers to two passages in Matthews account (28:8-10 and 16-20) which, he says, represent the formed tradition, stereotyped through relatively long transmission within a communi­ty, and express the corporate oral tradition of the primitive Church.⁶  In the first, the women have just been told at the tomb (as in Mark) that the risen one will appear in Galilee, whereupon (diverging from Marks account) they run to bring his disciples word, but are intercepted by the risen Jesus. Matthew may have ad­ded this detail because he feared that the testimony of the angel at the tomb, which is all that Mark offered, could be dismissed as hallucina­tion. It is hard to see any other reason for this added episode, for in it Jesus effects no more than to repeat the angels message that he will appear in Galilee. The women, however, introduce something novel in that at this point they took hold of his feet and worshipped him. [This and other passages are given in support of the doctrine of resurrection of the bodyJK.]   This kind of physical contact with the risen one is characteristic of the stage of tradition represented by the gospels, but excluded, as we shall see, by Paul, who also knows nothing of appearances to women. These, by the way, are also unknown to Luke. He records the womens visit to the tomb and their encounter there with two men in dazzling apparel (24:110), but says nothing of any ap­pearance to the women, and goes on to imply at 24:22-24 that, up to that point, no one had seen Jesus.

In Dodds second Matthaean passage the risen Jesus instructs the eleven on a Galilean mountain to make disciples of all the nations. Such words could have been put into his mouth only when the fierce Controversy about the gentile mission that dominates the earliest Christian literature was not only over and done with, but even barely remembered. The eleven are here further instructed to baptise all the nations into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. This again can only be late, for there is no suggestion in fhe early literature not even in Acts account of the Churchs early historythat this formula was used. At Acts 2:38 Peter urges poten­tial converts simply to be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ.

      Matthews risen Lord also instructs the eleven to teach converts to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you. This rep­resents a special theological interest of Matthew, who presents his gospel, with its five carefully constructed Jesuine discourses, as the new Torah; and all that I commanded you is meant to refer back to these (cf. Fuller, pp. 8889). It is with such facts in mind that Evans has said (p. 67) that, not only does the risen Lord not say the same things in any two gospels, but also it is hardly the same Lord speak­ing: In Matthew it is evidently a Matthaean Lord who speaks, in Luke a Lukan Lord and in John a Johannine Lord. Each gospel was written for a different Christian community, and as Fuller puts it (p. 172) the words spoken by the Risen One are not to be taken as recordings of what was actually spoken by him, but as verbalizations of the communitys understanding of the import of the resurrection.

       This second Matthaean passage also represents the risen Jesus as declaring that all authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Dodd allows that the intention here is clearly to introduce the risen Christ as King of the World. He suggests that the passage nevertheless has a ring of authenticity because it is notably sober and almost matter-of-fact in tone, entirely lacking the conventional symbolism of apocalypse (pp. 11617). He also hints that, apart from these two passages in Matthews chapter 28, even the remaining accounts of the Resurrection events merit careful attention because they lack the mythical tendencies of much ancient literature this when, in one of these remaining accounts, an angel is said to descend from heaven, roll away the stone sealing the tomb and sit on it (Mat­thew 28:1-3). Although Dodd is certainly concerned to represent these narratives in the best possible light, in his 1971 book on Jesus widely hailed on its appearance as the distillation of a life­time of study he concedes that whether Jesus had in some way left his tomb is a question on which the historian may properly suspend judgment.~ If we are to accept the miracle of the Resurrection, we need grounds more positive than this.

      If Jesuss tomb was empty, he did not leave his flesh and bones in his grave; and so either they had been transformed into something different, or else he rose in physical body. Paul (as we shall see) takes the former view, and the gospels (other than Marks, which gives no evidence either way) the latter. They refer to the flesh and bones of the risen Jesus (Luke 24:39), who eats and drinks with his disciples (Acts 10:41) and invites Thomas to touch him (John 20:27; cf. Luke 24:39 where he invites the eleven to handle him). It is on the basis of such evidence that the fourth of the Church of Englands 39 articles affirms that he ascended into heaven (where he now sitteth) with flesh and bones. His risen body also has to be solid enough to sup­port clothes, as no one supposes that the gospels would have us believe that he manifested himself naked. Yet, as the Bishops of the General Synod of the same Church of England have recently noted, this risen body must have been of a very unusual kind; for ac­cording to these same gospels, it enabled him to arrive within closed doors and vanish at will.8 Badham has stressed what he calls the in­ternal incoherence of the narratives here (p. 37): the body is represented as solid for some purposes but not for others.

ii. PAULS ACCOUNT

Pauls detailed statement on the Resurrection events is as follows (1 Corinthians 15:38):

(3) For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;

(4) and that he was buried; and that he hath been raised on the third day according to the scriptures;

(5) and that he appeared to Cephas; then to the twelve;

(6)  then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep;

(7) then he appeared to James; then to all the apostles;

(8) and last of all, as to one born out of due time, he appeared to me also.

The passage does not locate the crucifixion in time. It places the Resurrection three days after the death, but does not say when the death occurred. The appearances are said to have been vouchsafed to Paul and to his contemporaries, but it is not said how near in time they are to the death and the Resurrection. Someone who claims to see a ghost does not necessarily suppose that it is the wraith of a recently deceased person. The reference to Jesuss burial (verse 4) need not be taken to imply knowledge of a tomb, still less of a post-Resurrection empty tomb. Paul may simply be emphasizing the reali­ty of Jesuss death, as when we say someone is dead and buried (cf. Evans, p. 75 and note). That he was actually buried is important theologically for Paul, who regarded the death, burial, and Resurrec­tion as reflected symbolically in Christian baptism of total immer­sion: into the water constitutes death; under the water, burial; and out of the water, resurrection (Romans 6:34 and Colossians 2:12 where references to Jesuss burial are explicit).  [This passage is likely an interprolation because of (a) it supports the later-written gospels; (b) because it found no where else in the Epistles (Pauls and others); and (c) is contains so much more knowledge of what happened in a work so lacking knowledge (inconsistent with Pauls admitted and demonstrated lack of knowledge, see Cor. 1:18-23)--JK]. 

As we have seen, in the gospels Jesuss tomb is said to be empty because he rose in physical body. Paul, however, has a quite dif­ferent view of rising from the dead and roundly declares in the same chapter of the epistle where he writes of Jesuss Resurrection and subsequent appearances that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 15:50). It is clear enough, says Bishop Carnley, that in verses 38, Paul understands Jesuss Resur­rection as a truly representative sample of the resurrection of all believers, to which he makes reference in this later verse.⁹ In the same context (verse 43) he writes of the dead being raised in glory; and at Philippians 3:21 he argues directly from the Resurrection body of Christ to the future resurrection body of believers: Christ will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body. As Fuller has noted (p. 20), if Paul believed that Christs physical body had been transformed he could not have accepted any tradition that Jesus rose in physical body and ate and drank.

Of course, if Jesus rose, he will have left his tomb empty even if his body had been transformed into something quite different. But whether Paul had any actual knowledge of an empty tomb is another matter. In 1 Corinthians he is writing to men who were denying that there was a resurrection of the dead, and had he known of an empty tomb, he would surely have been glad to adduce this as evidence of resurrection, instead of merely saying, as he does, that Jesus was buried and then raised [the empty tomb is given as proof of resurrection of the boyJK].  As Conzelmann notes in a standard religious encyclopaedia, Paul seems to suppose that Jesus ascended to heaven at once on being resurrected, and with a body of heavenly radiance, so that his subsequent appearances were made from heaven.¹⁰   So much is implied even in Acts version of Jesuss appearance to Paul, who sees a light out of heaven (Acts 9:3ff) and hears a voice, which his companions also hear, although they see no one. Later, at Acts 22:9, his companions are said to have seen the light, but not to have heard the voice. The implication of both passages may be that all saw the 

light, but only Paul saw the figure of Jesus in it. However construed, all this is quite different from the physical appearances recorded in the gospels.

Paul would surely have rejected as blasphemous any claim to have eaten and drunk with the exalted one. Lukes story of the risen Christ consuming broiled fish (Luke 24:4143) represents later apologetic, relevant to a situation where Christians were replying to Jewish and gentile incredulity with a narrative which established the physical reality of his Resurrection, but which today can only strike many readers as more than slightly ridiculous.¹¹

One important factor which helps to account for Pauls testimony is that, when he wrote, Christian leaders established their authority by claiming to have seen the risen Lord.¹²   For Paul, an apostle was precisely a person who had had such a vision and been called to the lords service in consequence of it, for it is on this basis that he declares himself to be as much an apostle as were rival Christian teachers: Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (1 Corinthians 9:1). The psychological predisposition to such visions can hardly have been absent if there was such a strong motive for claiming them.¹³   One reason why this is not known to the general reader is that the word apostle puts him in mind of the twelve apostles and so makes him think that only someone who had been a Jose disciple of Jesus during his lifetime could be an apostle.  In fact the first author who uses the term fairly consistently in this sense is Luke (both in his gospel and in Acts), his purpose being thereby to resist heresy by limiting true doctrine to what had allegedly been pro­claimed by men who had kept Jesuss company from his baptism to his ascension. For earlier Christian writers, and for those of about the same date as Luke but ignorant of the gospel traditions, the term had no such implication. For instance, at Revelation 2:2 the Church of Ephesus is congratulated for having tested them which call themselves apostles and . . . are not. If apostles here meant (twelve) companions of Jesus, they could have been identified without being put to the test and found false.¹⁴  

      As, according to Paul, Jesus sometimes appeared to more than one person on a given occasion, some apologists hold that there real­ly must have been some external reality to be perceived. It still would not follow that what was there was interpreted correctly. There are examples enough of collective perception of what were taken for ghosts.  The evidence offered by sworn eyewitnesses at witchcraft trials likewise suggests that what people observe depends at least as much on their habits of thought as on what is actually there. A firm belief in the miraculous and in the ceaseless efforts of the Devil was presupposed in the observations and reasonings of witnesses and judges alike at these trials, and, as Huxley noted (see above, p. 16), the number of witnesses counts for very little when all are affected by the same underlying beliefs. More recently, at the battle of Mons (1914), angels, varying in number from two to a platoon were wide­ly believed to have fought on the British side.¹⁶   The virgin Mary is alleged to have been seen by two children at La Salette (France) in 1846 and by three children at Fatima (Portugal) in 1917, complaining in both cases of neglect of sacred rites. A standard religious en­cyclopaedia regards these as instances of the type of popular piety that in Romance-speaking areas was linked with nineteenth-century revivalist movements.⁷ At Fatima the initial appearances were followed by an awed crowd of 30,000 seeing first Our Lady of Sor­rows, followed by Our Lady of Carmel, then Saint Joseph holding the Holy Child in his arms, and lastly the Lord Jesus. A solar prodigy on the same occasion (13 October, 1917) was witnessed by thousands of people within a twenty-five mile radius: the sun spun three times, then moved away from its natural axis, and falling from side to side plunged down towards the earth at tremendous speed, zigzagging wildly as it came.¹⁸
     It is of course true that hallucinations, even when induced by some common physical means, will not be the same for different peo­ple, since they depend not only on the present physiological state but on the stock of memories in the mind of each individual. But inasmuch as the Appearances of Jesus were vouchsafed to groups such as the 500 and more of 1 Corinthians 15:6, who may, like Paul, never have known Jesus personally, the agreement between what each per­son experienced could have been minimal yet sufficient for all to say that they had seen a vaguely-conceived risen Jesus. Furthermore, the nonconformist is mistrusted, and so every individual, whatever he may inwardly feel and believe, may try to give the impression that he believes what those around him seem to believe a phenomenon made familiar by Hans Andersens story of the emperors new clothes. These conditions prevail not only in crowds  where every member is ready to sink his private view in deference to what he takes to be the general opinion, as soon as he thinks he has ascer­tained it-- but wherever people feel that their actions may be subjected to public scrutiny. And with early Christianity we are dealing with a social phenomenon where unbelief is a cardinal crime (John 3:18 and 36) for which whole communities are to be most frightfully punished (Matthew 10:1415). He that doubteth is like the surge of the sea driven by the wind and tossed (James 1:6).

What is striking about the whole passage I have quoted from 1 Corinthians 15 is, as Elliott says (p. 83), that Paul does no more than provide a list. There are no details of how, where or when the Easter encounters took place or what happened. And the items in his list correlate very poorly with the record of appearances in the gospels. Beare even says that Pauls account of the appearances has no rela­tionship with any of the accounts in the gospels and is not reflected in them in any shape or form (pp. 54142). Let us study the details.

The gospels know nothing of the appearance to above 500 simultaneously. Again, Paul places an appearance to Peter (alias Cephas, verse 5) as the first in time of all those which he records, whereas in the gospels Peter plays only a very minor role in the ap­pearances. They contain no account of an appearance to him. At Mark 16:7 an appearance to the disciples and Peter is promised by the angel in the empty tomb; and Luke 24:34 mentions, in a surpris­ingly casual manner, that an appearance to Peter had occurred without making it clear whether this was the first the risen Jesus made. The eleven disciples and others with them in Jerusalem are there reported as saying: The Lord is risen indeed and hath appeared to Simon. This, says Eduard Schweizer, sounds like a set formula and shows by its brevity that this is all Luke knew about an ap­pearance to Peter.¹⁹   The other two gospels are completely silent on the subject of an appearance specifically to Peter.

Paul also records in verse 5 an appearance to the twelve. Critical theologians have given weighty reasons for doubting whether this means the twelve who, according to the gospels, accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry. One of their arguments is that it is univer­sally agreed that Pauls words here are not his own composition, but that he is quoting an already existing creed about the Resurrection events, for the passage is full of un-Pauline words and phrases.²⁰   [An interpolation would beas I argued abovea more reasonable analysis--JK].  He never mentions the twelve elsewhere-- only in this one passage which, for him, was a quotation-- but could hardly have avoided do­ing so had he known them as the companions of Jesuss ministry. He knows nothing of twelve as leaders of Jerusalem Christians, whom he names as Cephas, James and John.21 For him, then, the twelve

could only have been personages named in a creed which specified witnesses of the appearances. And the Christian community which formulated this pre-Pauline creed would have known these twelve not as companions of Jesus, but as a group of enthusiasts who, hav­ing heard of the appearance to Peter, thought that it presaged a general resurrection of the dead (cf. below, pp. 40f). In the exalted state of mind which went with such expectation, the group would have become convinced that Jesus had appeared also to them, but have fallen apart when the hope that had led to its inception was not fulfilled. If it had persisted as an important group, Paul would surely have mentioned it again, and not merely named it once in a creed he quoted. Such considerations convinced Schneemelcher that the twelve are a phenomenon of the post-Easter community, which in­deed soon disappeared again; and he refers his readers to Vielhauers conclusive proof of this.²²   That Pauls mention of the group he calls the twelve is not dependent on knowledge of the traditions which were later recorded in the gospels is also apparent from the fact that, according to the evangelists, the risen Jesus did not appear to his twelve disciples, but to eleven of them, Judas (whom Paul never mentions) having defected. Mark 16:14 and Matthew 28:16 are quite specific on the matter, and record appearances not to the disciples but to the eleven.

As already noted, the gospels themselves completely contradict each other on where the appearances to the disciples occurred. There was, then, little uniformity in the traditions concerning a matter of the greatest importance to Christianity. It looks as though there was initially simply a belief that the risen one had appeared, and that, as this lacked any true historical basis, discrepant accounts of the rele­vant localities came in time to be composed.

The apologists case is not helped by the fact that Paul, in his statement about the appearances, is reciting an early Christian creed. That the earliest extant mention of the Resurrection occurs in a for­mula handed down from even earlier Christians is readily explicable if the event is in fact unhistorical. The earliest Christians will simply have asserted that Christ died and was raised, and will have em­bodied these convictions in the kind of preaching formula that Paul here quotes. The next stage in the development will have been to of­fer supporting evidence by listing recipients of appearances, and this stage is represented in the Pauline passage. Such visions are quite in accordance with religious psychology,²³ and Paul himself records that he and others were prone to supernatural visions (Colossians 2:18; 2 Corinthians 12:14). The next stage in the developing tradi­tion was to give actual descriptions (not mere listings) of the ap­pearances, as in the canonical gospels. Finally, in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, there is a description of the Resurrection itself. These stages are summarized by Fuller (pp. 28-29, 66-67) who shows that, in the course of the development, the claims about the Resurrection become different sorts of claims. The theologian John Hick admits that the earliest references to the Resurrection simply allege Jesus to be risen, and that the gospels elaborate this message into a catena of incompatible stories characterized by progressive degeneration  from history to legend, so that we cannot tell whether he did actually emerge from his grave, or whether this was merely an idea based on a series of visions of him as a glorified figure of exalted majesty.²⁴   In other words, the stories of the appearances (the stage represented in the gospels) do not record events on which the Resurrection faith was based, but are clumsy attempts to justify this faith by allegations of underlying events. That such divergent accounts could be written by authors who had already come to believe (for reasons that need to be investigated) that Jesus rose from the dead is perfectly plausible:

that their narratives provide any basis for such belief is not.

111. THE ORIGIN OF THE RESURRECTION FAITH

Defenders of the miracle of the Resurrection take comfort, with Pan­nenberg, in the thought that the legends created by excessive criticism have been less credible than the biblical reports themselves 25 He is here alluding to the theory that Jesus did not die but merely swooned on the cross, recovered consciousness in the cool tomb, crept out unnoticed when the earthquake rolled the stone away, and showed himself from time to time to his followers. Such nonsense is not the result of excessive criticism, but of yielding up only some of the traditional assumptions while clinging obstinately to others. In this example, belief in miracles has been surrendered, but the view that the gospels are based on eyewitness reports is re­tained, so that the miracle of Resurrection is cpnstrued as a mis­understanding on the part of Jesuss entourage.

     It is equally unsatisfactory to trace the gospel Resurrection nar­ratives to deliberate lies by eyewitnesses of the crucifixion who con­cocted Resurrection stories they knew to be false. Schmiedel shows how such stories as the sepulchre guard (unique to Matthew) and the empty tomb could have arisen in stages in perfectly good faith.26 He imagines a Christian confronted with the charge that the disciples had stolen the body. The obvious retort would be: The Jews, we may be quite certain, saw to the watching of the sepulchre; they could very well have known that Jesus had predicted his rising again on the third day. Another Christian, hearing this, might take it not for conjecture, but for a statement of fact, and pass it on as such. But~ if Roman soldiers guarded the tomb they must have witnessed the Resurrection. What, then, did they see of it? The attempt to answer this would give rise to the story of the angel coming down from heaven and rolling away the stone. This again might well have originated as conjecture, but have been passed on as fact. And in order to explain why the soldiers did not tell of their experiences, it would be said that the Jewish authorities bribed them to suppress the truth and circulate instead the rumour that the disciples had stolen the body. A similar series of processes could have led to the story of the empty tomb. If Jesus was risen, his grave must have been empty. Therefore no hesitation was felt in declaring that, according to all reasonable conjecture, the women who had witnessed Jesuss death had wished to anoint his body and thus had come to know of the emptiness of the grave. But why should not the disciples have gone to the sepulchre?  Schmiedel answers: The earlier narratives repre­sent them as fleeing and deserting Jesus at Gethsemane (Mark 14:50, Matthew 26:56), and remaining in concealment while they were in Jerusalem. Lukes narrative changes this by very significantly omit­ting Marks statement that they dispersed at Jesuss arrest, and by saying that certain disciples (24:24) did in fact go to the sepulchre. John expands this, naming the visitors as Peter and the beloved disci­ple, and reporting on their rivalry. It is clear that if, for some reason the belief that Jesus was risen was once established, all these other traditions could have arisen in the way indicated.

What, then, occasioned this belief in the first place? Our psychologists are not very successful in explaining even ordinary mental phenomena, so one must not expect too much by way of ex­planation of apparitions. Furthermore, it is almost universally be­lieved that Jesus was crucified ca. AD 30, and that the gospel account that persons who became convinced of his Resurrection included some who had known him before his death is not to be challenged. I do not myself believe that the earliest (pre-gospel) Christian literature 

{40}

supports either of these premisses. I have argued elsewhere that the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as a supernatural personage who had come down to Earth in human form long (one or two centuries) ago, had lived quite obscurely, been crucified in circumstances about which nothing was any longer known, and had risen from the dead. However, I do not wish to make my account here dependent on these views; so I shall try first to specify what might account for the ap­pearances whether or not Paul or the other early apostles had known Jesus personally, and second to inquire how belief in these ap­pearances might have arisen among disciples who had so known him.

Every careful reader of the New Testament must notice how its authors twist and torture the most unpromising passages from the Jewish Scriptures into meaning something about Jesus. But the resur­rection seems to have baffled them, and no adequate Old Testament quotation is ever produced (Elliott, p. 82).  Nevertheless, the Jewish Wisdom literature does seem to have influenced the earliest Christian thinking on the Resurrection. Proverbs 3:19 and 8:2236 represent Wisdom as a supernatural personage, created by God before he created Heaven and Earth, mediating in this creation and leading man into the path of truth. In the Wisdom of Solomon (from the Old Testament Apocrypha), Wisdom is the sustainer and governor of the universe who comes to dwell among men and bestows her gifts on them, although most of them reject her. 1 Enoch tells that, after being humiliated on Earth, Wisdom returned to Heaven. It is thus obvious that the humiliation on Earth and exaltation to Heaven of a super­natural personage, as preached by Paul and other early Christian writers, was well represented in the Jewish background. And it is not just that such ideas could have influenced Paul; they obviously did, for statements made about Wisdom in Jewish literature are made of Jesus in the Pauline letters. 1 Corinthians 1:2325 comes very near to expressly calling the supernatural personage that had become man in Jesus Wisdom.

There is another factor. Paul uses the phrase first fruits apropos of Christs Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20) and also of the gift of the spirit to the Christian community (Romans 8:23). Both Jews and early Christians expected the end of the world to come quickly, and thought it would be presaged by a general resurrection and by the gift of the spirit. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that some persons should, as Paul records, come forward with gifts of the spirit and make ecstatic utterances. But if the presence of the spirit was a sign that the first fruits of the harvest of the end-time had already been gathered, then the resurrection must also be nigh. It may have been partly on this basis that early Christians came to believe that Christ was risen, that resurrection had, to this extent, already begun; and that a pledge had thus been given that a general resurrection of mankind would shortly follow.

In this connection I may mention Goguels discussion of Talmudic evidence for the belief that the general resurrection will occur three days after the end of the world. Early Christians affirmed a close and direct relation between the Resurrection of Jesus and this general resurrection, and so, he says, it is natural that the resurrection of the Christ was placed in a chronological rapport with his death similar to that which was thought would occur between the end of the world and the general resurrection.²⁷   Fuller notes that this implies that Pauls reference to Jesuss Resurrection on the third day is not a chronological datum, but a dogmatic assertion: Christs resurrection marked the dawn of the end-time, the beginning of the cosmic eschatological process of resurrection (p. 27).

It is in any case clear that the earliest Christian thinking on the Resurrection occurred within the context of Jewish apocalyptic thought: soon the end would come, the dead would be resurrected and judged, the righteous would then enjoy eternal blessedness, and the wicked would be punished. As the theologian J. L. Houlden says, in its origins the resurrection faith was part and parcel of a convic­tion that the last days, as foreseen in apocalyptic, were in process of realization and soon to be consummated. In its totality that convic­tion was not borne out by events.²⁸   Elliott suggests how this apocalyptic framework facilitated belief in Jesuss Resurrection among disciples who, after his death, felt that he was still guiding them:

Resurrection was the natural first-century Jewish way of describing this continuing influence. . . . Some people thought that John the Baptist had been raised from the dead (Mark 6:l4ff), and that Elijahs spirit lived on in Elisha (2 Kings 2:15) and legends exist in the New Testament telling of people who were raised from the dead by Jesus and, later, by Peter and Paul. All these provide the environment in which belief in Jesus resurrection took shape and flourished. These Jewish ideas would and did find favour in the Hellenistic world outside, where stories of dying and rising gods were part of the native folk myths. Thus to talk of the resurrection of Jesus would not have seemed so strange. (p. 90)

Elliott adds that the earliest impression of Jesuss abiding power after his death may well have been felt at his disciples communal meals. It is significant how many of the Easter Narratives have a eucharistic setting.  Many theologians understandably find this kind of explana­tion more acceptable than believing the muddled evidence for a supernatural event.

Let us now turn to the gospels and their clear statement that the persons who saw Jesus risen had known him before his death. That they experienced mere subjective visions is often said to be excluded by the fact that they regarded his execution as the end of all their hopes. At his arrest they deserted him and fled (Mark 14:50). Peter, in this gospel the only one with courage enough to follow him as he was led a prisoner to the high priests house, did so only to deny him in the courtyard there. In Mark this is the last we hear of the disciples until the women at the empty tomb are told to announce Jesuss Resurrection to them. Now if they really despaired at his arrest and execution, then it is not possible to believe that, on three separate oc­casions, he had predicted his own Resurrection, telling or teaching them (Mark 8:31, 9:31 and 10:32-34) that the Son of man must be killed and after three days rise again. Morna Hooker says, justly, that it is impossible to believe that the disciples were incapable of. understanding the plain meaning of these words (p. 92). Pannenberg (p.        132) takes the same view, and notes that most scholars share this scepticism concerning the authenticity of these predictions. Perhaps one reason for this is that, if authentic, they would put Jesuss at­titude to his own death in a somewhat questionable light; for can facing death be the same if one knows that three days later one is go­ing to be raised up to share the glory of the Father?²⁹   If then, we set them aside as unhistorical, we are left with disciples despondent at Jesuss death. How could such despondency have been replaced by belief in his triumph over death? Carnley notes in this connection:

Most of those who have argued for the subjective nature of the visions contend that psychological disturbance induced by the guilt of having deserted Jesus sufficiently accounts for them. The presence of the guilt IS hinted at in the New Testament traditions at least in the case of Peter, whose denial of Jesus (Mark 14:66-72) may have had psychological repercussions, and Paul, whose persecution of Christians may have been a contributing factor to his experiences (Acts 26:911). The fact of the temporal dispersion of the experiences might count against the possibility of the visions being caused by brief mass hysteria following close upon Jesus death, but not if, in the passage of time, nagging guilt was a basic contributing factor. (p. 71).

He notes too that this subjective vision hypothesis is by no means implausible, and that today even a relatively conservative scholar such as James Dunn admits that it is a possibility given the evidence we have (p. 244). The late J. A. T. Robinson (author of Honest to God) tentatively held it in 1973 when he hinted that the disciples ex­perienced hallucinations which made them love one another.³⁰

ix. CONCLUSION

I have to agree with Bishop Carnleys remark that:

One of the most conclusive results of contemporary redactional studies of the New Testament traditions of the appearances, no less than of the empty tomb, is that an original nucleus of tradition has been developed during the course of its transmissions and that the resulting diversity can be explained by reference to apologetic motives and concerns along the way; the modification of the tradition is an inevitable by-product of the attempt to communicate and defend resurrection belief in different contexts to different people with different preconceptions and concerns. All this conditions what is said. The diversity of the resulting traditions cannot just be added together to form one synthetic account of what is supposed to have happened at the first Easter. (pp. 67-68)

He also finds that fundamentalist writers and ultra-conservative popularizers of the Easter faith do the Church no lasting service by nervously seeking to defend a superficial harmony of the gospel nar­ratives (p. 27). Bishop Carnleys account of the New Testament evidence, and of what theologians since the end of the eighteenth century have made of it, is both full and fair, and his book, like many of those to which I have made reference, shows how much students outside the faith can learn from the work of serious Christian scholars. Nevertheless, his conviction that our present experience of the spirit of Christ convinces us that the stories of the empty tomb and appearances are substantially true (p. 249n.) supplies no ade­quate basis for such convictions. He states his position more fully as follows:

The tradition of the heavenly visions of the raised Christ did not stand alone in the experience of the first Christians . . . . They had access to a second empirical anchor of their resurrection belief and eschatological hope, [namely] the continuing presence of a reality in the life of the Christian community which is identified as the presence of Christ . . . .  This additional datum is one to which we have direct access in the pre­sent, so that it grounds our continuing Easter faith no less than theirs. (p. 248)

I have suggested (above, p. 40) that in fact the early Christian em­phasis on experience of the spirit of Christ was a potent source of er­roneous belief; and Graham Shaw (until recently Chaplain of Exeter College, Oxford) has found, contrary to Carnley, that precisely this early Christian emphasis destroys the most widespread basis for belief both in the resurrection of Jesus and in our own life after death.³¹   So let us look more closely at the role of the spirit in early Christian communities.

Paul says that a man is no Christian if he does not possess the spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9), and that in the spirit a man can speak mysteries (1 Corinthians 14:2). In this latter context he goes on (verses 26ff) to note that, at Christian worship, some make spirit-inspired utterances, not understanding what they are saying, and others supply an interpretation. This procedure interpretation of unintelligible utterancescould readily lead to the establishment of all manner of ill-founded doctrines. Moreover, at these meetings for worship, those, who considered themselves prophets (and that in­cluded all present, verse 31) could pronounce some revelation (cf. below, pp. 85, 129f, 185, 192). Shaw points out that this kind of thing has been characteristic of many religions and has a social rather than a supernatural origin. The way in which such spirit-inspired pro­nouncements could make the Resurrection of Jesus plausible to early believers is evidenced in chapter 8 of the epistle to the Romans, which is entirely about the role of the spirit in their lives and the associated promise of resurrection: Jesus Spirit speaking in their midst was a sign both of Jesus continuing life, and also of their inclu­sion in that life (p. 166). And the corollary of this position is that the validity of much of Pauls gospel is dependent on the authenticity of the charismatic phenomena to which he appealed in the experience of his hearers (p. 167). Pauls evidence for the Resurrection is a series of immediate revelations, to others and finally to himself, which puts

him in the same position as the charismatics to whom he refers.

         My survey in this chapter reinforces Shaws statement that, when with increasing urgency Christians asked what historical events could vindicate the metaphysical uniqueness of Christ, tending to place ever greater weight on the resurrection, the result was that the poverty of the factual basis for such claims only became more ob­vious (pp. 27374).

       Quite apart from doubts resulting from historical inquiry, it is disconcerting to find Paul putting his arguments for Jesuss Resurrec­tion in the very implausible context of an alleged link between sin and death, with death figuring as Gods punishment for sin: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive all, that is, who belong to Christ (1 Corinthians 15:22-23). At Romans 5:12, 15, and 17, death is expressly said to be a consequence of sin. But this is ridiculous. I again quote Shaw:

Physical death is an integral part of organic life, and long predates the appearance of man. Man did not introduce death into an uncorrupted world; he evolved in an environment in which death was a necessary part of its organic processes. The assertion of a link, therefore, be­tween human sin and actual death cannot be true; and Pauls theology of cross and resurrection, the conquest of sin and death, is thus de­prived of any coherence (p. 280).

     A further weakness is that part of Pauls argument for r