Jesus Puzzle: Chapter 7

Chapter 7 Critiqued:

Doherty wrote: “Outside the New Testament, several documents judged to be Christian show no sign of a Christ who died and was resurrected. We have already encountered one of these, the Didache. Others include the Shepherd of Hermas and the Odes of Solomon” (TJP:67).

The validity of the Odes of Solomon will be evaluated in the critique of Chapter 13 of The Jesus Puzzle.

Doherty wrote: “Most early Christian thinking seems to have envisioned Jesus as ascending to heaven immediately after his death. The epistle writers show no concept of a bodily resurrection after three days, or of a period during which the risen Christ made appearances to human beings on earth. Such a blind spot would be hard to conceive, if we accepted the orthodox picture of a Christian movement which began in response to a perceived return of Jesus from the grave” (TJP:70).

This is demonstrably false. Paul wrote the following in his epistle to the church in Corinth: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me” (1 Cor. 15:3-9).
Regarding the phrase “on the third day”:

N.T. Wright wrote: “The phrase ‘after three days’, looking back mainly to Hosea 6:2, is frequently referred to in rabbinic mentions of the resurrection. This does not mean that Paul or anyone else in early Christianity supposed that it was a purely metaphorical statement, a vivid way of saying ‘the biblical hope has been fulfilled.’ In fact, the mention of any time-lag at all between Jesus’ death and his resurrection is a further strong indication of what is meant by the latter: not only was Jesus’ resurrection in principle a dateable event for the early Christians, but it was always something that took place, not immediately upon his death, but a short interval thereafter” (RSG: 322).
According to The New International Greek New Testament Commentary: The First Epistle to the Corinthians, “The major and probably most widespread view is that after the death of Jesus it was on the third day that witnesses experienced the first appearances of Christ as raised, or it was on the third day that the first witnesses discovered that the tomb was empty” (TNIGNTC: 1196).

Doherty wrote: “Since his own experience of the risen Christ-even as described in Acts-is a vision from heaven of the disembodied, spiritual Christ, it would seem that they all experienced the same thing” (TJP:71).

It is strange that Doherty bases his argument on Paul’s experience of seeing the risen Jesus in Acts, considering that Doherty argues that Acts is not a trustworthy historical source and that Acts was written in the second century elsewhere in The Jesus Puzzle.

Doherty wrote: “There are some powerful implications to be drawn from this passage (1 Corinthians 15:12-16). Paul expresses himself as though the raising of Christ from the dead is a matter of faith, not of historical record as evidenced by eyewitnesses to a physical, risen Jesus at Easter. He is so adamant about the necessity to believe that the dead will be raised, that he is prepared to state-and he repeats it four times-that if they are not, then Christ himself ‘has not been raised.’ If men he knew had witnessed the actual return of Jesus from the grave, it is unlikely he would have thought to make even a rhetorical denial of it” (TJP:72).

Paul states explicitly that Jesus was buried and that Jesus was raised (1 Cor.15:4), despite Doherty’s questioning that the men Paul knew witnessed the actual return of Jesus from the grave.
The issue of Paul’s belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead is discussed here.
The New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman wrote the following:
- “Sometimes this chapter is misunderstood by modern readers as an attempt to prove that Jesus was raised from the dead, for example, by citing a group of ‘witnesses’ in verses 5-8. In fact, Paul is not trying to demonstrate to the Corinthians something they don’t believe, he is reminding them of something they already know (see vv. 1 and 3), that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead” (TNT:322).