FAITH: What happened on the first Easter?

I grew up as an ardent Baptist. I still am. I am glad that I was raised in a Christian tradition that allowed me to think for myself, even if it resulted in opinions and beliefs that were somewhat out of line with ordinary Christian thinking. I learned early that Baptists were non-creedal and the typical Baptist worship service never called for the repeating of the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed. The Bible was our book and we were urged both to read it and to interpret it. When understood, the Baptist tradition is a wonderful piece of fertile ground for a truly enquiring mind.

In the church of my youth, we read the narratives about the resurrection of Jesus as true history. There are four accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. Each was written by a different author in a different setting. When a careful look is taken, authors wrote in different places, at different times and for different audiences. The four versions disagree with one another, especially about the details of the reported day of resurrection. No one of whom I am aware has ever put together a single narrative of the resurrection day that resolves the conflicts and leaves us with one story that can possibly be called history.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan are two of America’s finest New Testament scholars. Ten years ago they authored a book entitle “The Last Week.” Their greatest challenge was writing about Christ’s day of resurrection. Their conclusion was emphatic. The Bible accounts of the day of resurrection CANNOT BE READ AS HISTORY. What then are the writings that are recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? In the book they examine the possibilities and conclude that the four gospels are in fact properly called “parable” rather than history.

Borg’s and Crossan’s conclusion was simple and reasonable. Parables are stories that are written to make a point, to establish a truth. When reading a parable no one cares if the narrative is history or not. The reader simply asks “What is the point?” Often the point of a parable is a matter of debate. That is acceptable. However, the historicity of the parable is never a concern for debate.

Much earlier in my own intellectual and scholarly development, I took note of the discrepancies and contradictions of the gospel narratives. I did not choose to set the Bible narratives aside. I came to the same conclusion as did Borg and Crossan. The four gospels cannot be read as history. The serious reader can ask historical questions, but in the process, he/she is forced to the same conclusion. The resurrection stories cannot be read as history.

I have chosen to use a different word than parable. The narratives about the resurrection of Jesus are properly called myth. Some avoid the word myth because in common English word usage, a myth is something that is untrue. I choose to use the word myth in the literary sense. A myth is any story in which God or a God is the primary actor. This fits the Jesus resurrection story perfectly. While it was men who killed Jesus, it was God who raised him from the dead to a different kind of life.

The great intellectual scandal of Christianity is the incarnation, the belief that God and man became united in the man we call Jesus from Nazareth. By faith I have come to believe that the resurrection of Jesus is a type of incarnation in which history and myth have become united in the resurrection. The result is that because of mythology, questions of the historicity of the resurrection can never be raised. The resurrection of Jesus is an incarnation report that can be embraced only by faith.

Paul is the first writer of New Testament material. He was not present in Jerusalem during the last week of the life of Jesus from Nazareth. He first met the living Christ on the road to Damascus, some 10-15 years after the death of Jesus, when he was struck down and blinded. According to his own testimony, he met the resurrected Jesus on that occasion. He became the great apostle and witness to the resurrection. According to Paul, resurrected bodies are “spiritual” bodies.

However, before Paul wrote about physical and spiritual bodies, followers of Jesus came to the belief and conviction that Jesus in some form had been raised from the dead. The disciples and other believers and followers scattered. While many variations of the Christian message took root, central to all of them was the conviction and belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead. No one at this point can explain why the message of this peasant teacher from a “nowhere” village took root and spread so rapidly. However, scholars of note believe that without the message of the resurrection, the Christian movement would have quietly died and Jesus would have dropped out of the memory of history, myth and parable.

Here we are almost 2,000 years after the death of Jesus. Worldwide there are about 2 billion Christians who will be confessing “Christ is risen from the dead!” History, myth, legend, or parable matters not. The message will not go away!

The End

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.