early layer of sources that is already connected to developed reflection. His existential experience of encountering Jesus as the living Christ (Messiah) is the beginning of faith for Paul and the source of confidence in Jesus’s new presence. In 1 Corinthians 15:8, Paul considers himself to be the last of those who believed in Jesus’s unique mission by virtue of a direct encounter without human testimony. He thereby demarcates the group of the first witnesses—among whom he includes himself even though he was not one of Jesus’s disciples.17 He asks: “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Cor 9:1).
When interpreting the formula about the good news of the resurrection in 1 Thessalonians 5:9–10, I previously called attention to the fact that the term “resurrection” was associated with apocalyptic images that the apostle Paul invariably had in view, especially in his earliest letters. It follows from this that Jesus’s resurrection was originally viewed as the beginning and the basis of the universal resurrection at the end of “the age”—today, we would say “our history”—and later, when the universal resurrection had not happened, as its guarantee. “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor 15:20). About a generation later, we read: “He is the beginning, the first born from the dead” (Col 1:18b). Thus, Jesus’s resurrection is not an isolated wonder—a miracle—but an event that concerns everyone. As a suggestion about this fundamental interpretation, we could now say that the resurrected Jesus is not only a guarantee that true humanity will ultimately prevail in history; his resurrection also confirms that every individual human life is personally related to this destiny, as the apocalyptic vision of the resurrection and the last judgement of many or all people at the end of the ages concretely conveys. This is the conclusion that the apostle Paul drew from the Easter proclamation; this was the oral gospel.
In 1 Corinthians 15:35–50, it is said that the bodies of resurrected people will have a “spiritual” nature. This does not mean that a resurrected person will turn into an aura. In this case, the phrase “heavenly” or “spiritual body” means that, first and foremost, it will be a body ruled by the Holy Spirit. Paul assumes that in an eschatological sense—as rising to eternal life—resurrection entails a transformation of the perishable body, not an unembodied existence (1 Cor 15:51–53). That is, the body (the face, the extended hand) is the bearer of relationships. That is precisely why the apostle Paul—and all good Christians to this very day—believe in “the resurrection of the body
17 The requirement for being an apostle that is stipulated in Acts 1:21–22 is virtually unrealizable from the perspective of the extant texts. The witness of an encounter with the resurrected Jesus had to be Jesus‘s disciple from the time of his baptism by John the Baptist, but according to the Gospels, Jesus did not call his first disciples until after that. Either information about the time of the mutual beginnings of Jesus and John is preserved here, or it is simply the case that the witness had to be Jesus’s disciple during his earthly ministry.
from the dead.”18 It is not a matter of liberation from the body; rather, the transformation of the whole human being is at stake.19 The fact that the event of resurrection is not described does not mean that we could not—or even did not need to—envisage it.
However, we must start from Jesus’s new impact, which differs from the posthumous influence of other great historical figures in its universal breadth, intensity, new stimuli, and especially, in its personal character, which generates new social relationships.20 Out of the whole course of events that we call (Jesus’s) “resurrection,” this is what can be grasped historically; this is its consequence and its impact. The fact that a specific concrete event to which we do not have direct access must be the source of these consequences is a secondary, but inevitable, conclusion. The appearance of the resurrected Jesus not only took the form of a personal encounter where, according to the witnesses, a salutation or a gesture of sharing revealed Jesus’s identity; nor did it only involve the mission that the first witnesses accepted and attempted to carry out. It also had to do with their testimony being received and embraced. Thus, Paul says, “you are the seal of my apostleship [in that you believe] in the Lord” (1 Cor 9:2b).21 This clearly is in accord with the experience of the witnesses mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:5–8.
The Story of the Empty Tomb
The Gospels originated fifteen to forty years after Paul wrote his last epistles, in which, as we have seen, he directly or indirectly quoted two or three earlier formulations of the Easter gospel about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.22 These constitute the third layer of our sources. The earliest coherent part of the Gospels is the Passion Narrative which the author of the book of Mark provided with the outline that was handed down. That narrative apparently ended with Jesus’s burial, but stories followed about how some women— Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and others—found his empty tomb (Mk 16:6, par.; cf. Gos. Pet. 50–57). In the Gospel of Mark, we read that in
18 See Franz Mußner, Die Auferstehung Jesu (Munich: Kosel, 1969), 189–95, for example. By comparing non-biblical occurrences of the verbs anistēmi and egeirō, John Granger Cook demonstrates that in Paul’s writings, these words designate a bodily resurrection. See “The Semantics of ἐγείϱω (egeirō) and ἀνίϭτημι (anistēmi),” in Empty Tomb, Apotheosis, Resurrection (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 13–37. The importance of the declaration of faith in bodily resurrection for Christian ethics is exegetically shown by Paul J. Brown in Bodily Resurrection and its Significance for Ethics (Deerfield, IL: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2012), 149, among other places.
19 Brown, Bodily Resurrection, 217.
20 Dunn speaks of “impact” in Jesus Remembered, 879.
21 The bracketed words appear in the ČEP, but are not in the NRSV. Since they are critical to the author’s point, I have used brackets to incorporate them into the NRSV translation.—Trans.
22 Pokorný, From the Gospel to the Gospels, § 2.
the tomb, the women discovered a young man clad in white who asked them if they were looking for the crucified Jesus. He showed them place where Jesus had been laid and told them that Jesus had been raised (ēgerthē). The young man also asked them to tell Jesus’s disciples and Peter that they should go to Galilee, where they would see him. It is significant that according to the synoptic Gospels, the finding of the empty tomb did not itself give rise to belief in the resurrection, it only produced astonishment or the speculation that someone had taken the dead body somewhere.
Only the word of the messenger who announced Jesus’s resurrection unlocked a chain of testimony that later turned into a mission to the nations. Thus, the empty tomb does not lie at the beginning of the post-Easter movement; rather, testimony about the resurrection is foundational. As I have said, this is also the case in formulas about the good news of the resurrection. Mark 16:6–7 dramatically develops the formula about the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:3b–5 in terms of Jesus’s death, burial, resurrection, and appearances to Peter and the Twelve. Because this whole scene is set in the period following Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection, but before his appearances to the disciples, the future tense (ὄψεσθε) is used to speak of manifestations of the resurrected Lord. The empty tomb is the stage, and in the gospel writer’s literary strategy, the young man clad in white assumes the role of interpreter (angelus interpres), who explains what the empty tomb means.23 Thus, in the last section of the original text that Mark called “the beginning of the good news” in 1:1, the gospel writer connects the good news of Jesus’s resurrection to the orally transmitted story about the empty tomb. Thereby, in Mark’s interpretation, the beginning of the good news ends, and the gospel of the resurrection itself begins. However, the statement about Jesus’s resurrection was earlier than the tradition about the empty tomb and was independent of it. The apostle Paul does not quote it anywhere, although from his reasoning in 1 Corinthians 15, it is possible to see that he envisages resurrection as a transformation of the remains of the deceased. This is assumed in most apocalyptic texts. According to the Book of Parables in the apocalypse of 1 Enoch from the first century BCE, “in those days [of judgement], the earth will give back what has been entrusted to it” (1 En 51:1).24 Because, according to the Christians’ belief, Jesus
23 This proposition is contrary to the position of Hans von Campenhausen, Der Ablauf der Osterereignisse und das leere Grab (Heidelberg: Winter, 1977) and Martin Hengel “Das Begräbnis Jesu bei Paulus und die leibliche Auferstehung aus dem Grabe,” in Auferstehung = Resurrection, ed. Friedrich Avemarie and Hermann Lichtenberger (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001), 119–84. Those authors considered the story about the empty tomb to be an eyewitness account and referred to the remark from the oral gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:4 about the fact that Jesus was buried. However, Hengel knew that this is not proof of the resurrection (181).
24 The English translation of 1 Enoch is from George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch, Hermeniea Translation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2012), 65.—Trans.