even more emphatic:
Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of Joseph . . . saw where he was laid.174
Mary of Magdala was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the grave.175
The women . . . took note of the tomb and observed how his body was laid.176
A hostile version, namely that the disciples deliberately removed the body of Jesus, is recorded by Matthew. To neutralize this accusation, he introduces the story of the guards placed by the Sanhedrin near the tomb who fainted when the angel descended in the middle of the earthquake to remove the stone, but later spread the news – after a substantial bribe from the chief priests – that while they slept his followers had come by night and stolen the body.177
The Fourth Gospel preserves a tradition to the effect that the body was taken out of its original burial place and interred somewhere else by people unconnected with Jesus’ party. Mistaking Jesus for ‘the gardener’, Mary of Magdala is supposed to have asked:
‘If it is you, sir, who removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’178
From these various records two reasonably convincing points emerge, one positive and the other negative. First, the women belonging to the entourage of Jesus discovered an empty tomb and were definite that it was the tomb. Second, the rumour that the apostles stole that body is most improbable. From the psychological point of view, they would have been too depressed and shaken to be capable of such a dangerous undertaking. But above all, since neither they nor anyone else expected a resurrection, there would have been no purpose in faking one.
It is preferable not to speculate on the disappearance of the body of Jesus during the earthquake mentioned in Matthew for it may have been more imaginary than real, a literary cliché indicating the presence of the supernatural. It is equally pointless to conjecture what part an uninvolved or hostile outsider such as ‘the gardener’ might have played.
The corollary must be, curious though this may sound, that for the historian it is Mark’s evidence, the weakest of all, that possesses the best claim for authenticity, the story brought by two women which – to quote Luke – the apostles themselves thought such ‘nonsense’ that they would not believe it.179
Christian tradition has tried to improve the argument. Luke and John introduce two male witnesses to check the women’s report,180 but this is still not enough. The closest approach to first-hand evidence is the testimony of several trustworthy men who assert that Jesus appeared to them – to the Twelve, to all the apostles, and to over five hundred brethren, in addition to the leaders of the Church, Peter and James.181 It is their collective conviction of having seen their dead teacher alive, combined with the initial discovery of the empty tomb, that provides the substance for faith in Jesus’ rising from the dead.
A final comment, as it were in parenthesis. In addition to the usual concept of resurrection, another notion appears to have existed in Galilee in New Testament times. Already in the Bible, Elisha is said to have inherited a double share of the spirit of Elijah.182 In the Gospels, John the Baptist and Jesus are both described as Elijah redivivus, and Jesus is believed by some to be the risen John the Baptist, or the reincarnation of Jeremiah or one of the old prophets.183
It is conceivable that a belief of this sort prevailing among those who continued Jesus’ ministry, including healing and exorcism, had a retroactive effect on the formation of the resurrection preaching, and liberal historians have long since seen the ‘real Easter miracle’, not in a changed Jesus, but in metamorphosed disciples.184
But in the end, when every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathizer and the critical agnostic alike – and even perhaps of the disciples themselves – are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb.
2
Jesus and Galilee
It is generally agreed that, whilst maintaining a definite interest in time, space and circumstance, the Synoptists did not aim to write history proper. Although they adopted the biographical literary form, their life of Jesus was intended principally as a vehicle for the preaching of the early Church. In consequence, however brilliantly analysed, the Gospels cannot be expected to provide more than a skeletal outline of Jesus of Nazareth as he really was.
Is it nevertheless possible to add a little flesh to these bare bones? The answer is that it may be done if, as has been remarked in the Introduction, the Jewish parallel material is used in the right manner and spirit. Instead of treating Jewish literature as an ancillary to the New Testament, the present approach will attempt the contrary, namely to fit Jesus and his movement into the greater context of first-century AD Palestine. If such an immersion in historical reality confers credibility on the Gospel picture, and the patchy portrait drawn by the evangelists begins suddenly to look, sound and feel true, this enquiry will have attained its primary objective.1
Within such a plan of reintegration and the corresponding work of detection that it entails, which aspects of Palestinian history and religion are most relevant? First, to reanimate Jesus, his natural background, first-century Galilee, must be filled in. Second, to perceive the truth and purpose of his mission as an exorcist and healer, it must be reinstated in the place to which it belongs: that is, in the charismatic stream of post-biblical Judaism.
At first sight the reinsertion of Jesus into the Galilean Judaism of his day would appear to be not only reasonable and necessary, but also easy, since it is justifiable to suppose that the subject must be familiar to scholars versed in post-biblical Jewish literature. Galilee, after all, produced from the second century AD onwards all the essentials of rabbinic religion: the Mishnah, which is the fundamental code of Jewish laws and customs, its extensive commentary, the Palestinian Talmud, and the earliest interpretative works on the Pentateuch. Nevertheless, an indiscriminate use of these writings for the reconstruction of the atmosphere in which Jesus lived would be mistaken and create utter confusion. For although it was formulated in the province, the real inspiration of rabbinic Judaism was of Judean provenance. More precisely, its source was Jerusalem. Galilee’s regional identity was deeply affected by the influx of leading Judean rabbis who managed to survive the Bar Kosiba rebellion against the Roman empire of Hadrian (AD 132–5) and its aftermath, and were compelled by imperial legislation to settle in the North. When the academy of Jamnia (Yavneh) – established by Yohanan ben Zakkai after the Temple was destroyed – was moved around AD 140 to the small town of Usha, about ten miles from Haifa, the place became another Jerusalem; but the Torah propagated from this new Zion under the supervision of the Patriarch, the officially recognized head of all the Jews resident in the Roman empire, was Galilean only by accident.
The History of Galilee
A much more reliable picture of the Galilee of Jesus is reflected in the writings of Flavius Josephus who, as rebel commander-in-chief of the Northern region during the first Jewish War (AD 66–70), possessed a first-hand knowledge of it. Clearly, it was a territory sui generis. Not only did it have its own peculiar past, but its political, social and economic organization also contributed to distinguish it from the rest of Palestine. The conflict between Jesus and the religious and secular authority outside Galilee was at least in part due to the fact that he was, and was known to have been, a Galilean.
Geographically this northernmost district of Palestine was a little island in the midst of unfriendly seas. Westwards it was
