The fourth episode of the third season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (April 24, 2019). You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

SHOW NOTES

This episode is based on Luke 24:13-35 in the New Testament of the Bible. (Click the references to read the original texts). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the episode.

About the resurrection…

I recorded this episode of the podcast just before Easter. I think, for that reason, that it is very important for me to state at the beginning of the show notes that I am a Christian who believes in the resurrection of Jesus.

There was a man from Nazareth who preached in Galilee, who went to Jerusalem at some point and likely attracted the attention of the authorities by causing some disturbances. He was arrested and, no doubt with very few qualms on the part of the authorities, condemned to death on a cross. I have little trouble acknowledging all this as fairly well-established historical fact.

Another historical fact is this: his followers and friends experienced his presence with them alive after his death. These were personal and group experiences that were described in various ways. They were genuine experiences. I base my faith upon those experiences as well as my own personal experiences of the resurrected Jesus.

This episode was not about the question of whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. I believe he did. This episode is about how we deal with the accounts of those first resurrection experiences.

Let’s be honest about the resurrection accounts

I know that we would often like to treat the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as simple journalism or history telling, but they are actually poor examples of both. The accounts are contradictory. There are, for example, four accounts of the experiences of women at the tomb on Easter morning in the four Gospels. These accounts differ in some pretty significant ways:

Who was there and how many were there? (All have different lists of people on the scene.)

Did they encounter the risen Jesus? (Only Matthew and John say yes.)

Did they see angels or simply a man dressed in white? (Matthew: 2 angels, Mark and Luke: 1 man, John: 2 men in white)

Did they tell anyone about what they saw? (Mark says no.)

Did anyone else confirm the empty tomb? (Luke and John say yes but disagree about who it was.)

Was what they experienced a vision? (Luke says yes.)

Such inconsistencies between what are supposed to be four accounts of the same event would, at the very least, raise some questions about the reliability of the account in the mind of any competent journalist or historian. This is an extraordinary thing to say about an event that is so central to the Christian faith.

What’s more, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, the Apostle Paul gives us a list of what he considers to be the authentic appearances of the resurrected Jesus in his day. (This passage was likely written before any of the gospels.) He includes no appearance of Jesus to any women at the tomb.

So I acknowledge that the biblical accounts of the resurrection do not work in the ways that we expect them to work, but perhaps the fault is with our expectations and not the accounts.

If what I believe is true — that the church really did experience something extraordinary after Easter — the resurrection accounts that we have in the Bible are exactly what we should expect. The early Christians had experienced something truly extraordinary and unexpected. The Apostle Paul presents the event of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a world-changing event, a cataclysmic change in people’s understanding of their relationship with God. If people experienced something as extraordinary as that, and I think they did, it would have taken a long time for them to assimilate the meaning of such an experience. The way that human beings assimilate such an event is through storytelling. It is by telling stories that our brains make sense of the world.

So, if various people had various experiences of Jesus after his death, this is what they would have done in the months and years that followed. They would have told those stories over and over again. They would have drawn upon the traditions of their people, particularly the narratives of the Old Testament, to fill in the details of those stories and to make sense of them. They would have made those stories an integral part of their identity as a community.

The early church also would have used the stories the sort out questions of leadership and authority within their community. People who had convincing stories of encounters with the resurrected Jesus would have been able to claim certain authority and leadership. Thus many of the stories are very much concerned with questions of who saw Jesus first and what he said to those people to give them the authority to lead.

Because all of these processes would have been at work, we need to understand that the resurrection stories are not there merely to report what happened but to reflect an ongoing conversation in the life of the early church. Inconsistencies in the stories are not a bug, they are a feature.

The walk to Emmaus

With all of that in mind, we need to recognize that the story of the walk to Emmaus in the Gospel of Luke plays a particular role in the ongoing conversation of the early church about what they had experienced. While it is told as just another resurrection appearance story, it likely functioned differently from some of the others in the early church. It is notable that the participants in the story, Cleopas and the person I’m assuming was his wife, are unknown and don’t seem to have been recognized as early leaders of the church. Even Cleopas’ name is dropped rather randomly as if it really doesn’t matter. What is at stake in this story it’s not a question of leadership or authority in the early church. These two travellers seem to be representatives of ordinary everyday believers.

That is why I think that the best way to approach this story is not as just another account that was told to prove the reality of the resurrection. It is rather an account that invites the readers to experience the resurrection for themselves. The promise of the story is that if you gather together with other believers on Sunday if you discuss the scriptures and how they point to Jesus and if you break bread together, you will be able to experience for yourself the reality that Christ is risen from the dead.

The scriptures that point to Jesus

During the walk to Emmaus, The stranger spends a great deal of time explaining the scriptures. His monologue is described like this: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”

This clearly seems to reflect an attitude that was common in the early church — the idea that the scriptures of the Old Testament were all written about Jesus. For early Christians, one of the key proofs that Jesus was the Messiah was that so many of the events of his life and death had been prophesied in the scripture. The Gospel of Matthew, in particular, makes this a major theme, but all of the gospel writers work under this basic assumption.

We often seem to assume that this happened in a simple and straightforward way. Early Christians saw what Jesus did and said and then, sometime later, they happened to be reading in the Old Testament where they saw but these things had been predicted there. But it seems extremely unlikely that the process was as simple as that.

There seems to be a fair bit of evidence that, on a number of occasions, the early Christians did not know some of the details about what Jesus had done or what had happened to him. For example, despite the fact that we are told that Jesus was put on trial and that his disciples were not present, we are nevertheless told everything that was done and said there with no explanation of where this information came from. Early Christians would have had no problem supplying details to the story of Jesus that did not come to them from first or second-hand eyewitnesses. Having decided that the Old Testament had predicted everything about Jesus, they would have concluded that it was perfectly legitimate to look through the pages of the Old Testament to fill in any details they didn’t know.

I have offered, in my narrative, what I think is one excellent example of such a process at work. The story of the betrayal of Jesus bears striking parallels to the story of the betrayal of the patriarch Joseph which is told in Genesis 37:12-36. In both cases, a man named Judas (Judah and Judas are simply the Hebrew and Aramaic forms of the same name) leaves a meal where 12 have gathered to eat and sells off the betrayed for a number of pieces of silver. In Genesis, the number is 20 and in the Gospels, the number is 30 but that discrepancy is also explained with a simple detour into the Old Testament. In Zechariah 11:12-13, the prophet’s life is valued at 30 pieces of silver.

What are we supposed to do with these strong parallels? There seem to be two possibilities, either the betrayal of Jesus was intricately predicted in the books of Genesis and Zechariah or the story of the betrayal of Jesus was largely constructed out of the stories told in Genesis and Zechariah. In my opinion, the latter seems a bit more likely. I also see this as a perfectly acceptable way for the early Christians to tell the story of Jesus. They weren’t operating under the rules of our modern genres of journalism and history, they were operating under the rules for the literary genre of gospel.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

“AhDah” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Willow and the Light” by Kevin MacLeod (filmmusic.io)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/