Jesus cannot, in fact, be construed as such by virtue of any known Jewish law, biblical or post-biblical. According to the Mishnah, only the misuse of the Tetragram, the sacrosanct name of God, constitutes blasphemy,152 and no accusation is levelled against Jesus in this respect. Also, even if it could be ascertained that he claimed to be the Messiah or the son of God, there are no grounds for seeing blasphemy in this, or any other capital crime.153
There is little doubt that the Pharisees disliked his nonconformity and would have preferred him to have abstained from healing on the Sabbath where life was not in danger.154 They obviously enjoyed embarrassing him with testing questions, such as whether tax should be paid to Rome.155 An affirmative answer would have outraged Jewish patriots, and a denial would have been synonymous with preaching rebellion.156 But Jesus himself was not above employing the same methods:157 indeed, they were an integral part of polemical argument at that time. There is no evidence, however, of an active and organized participation on the part of the Pharisees in the planning and achievement of Jesus’ downfall.
Arrest and Execution of Jesus
The Synoptic Gospels know of two main plots to put an end to Jesus’ activities: one in Galilee, which failed, and one in Jerusalem, which resulted in the cross. Probably, some individual Pharisees bore a measure of responsibility for this, but in both cases the principal, and certainly the ultimate, guilt lay with the representatives of the political establishment – Herod Antipas and his supporters in Galilee, and the chief priests and Pilate in the capital.158
Whether there was a trial of Jesus by the supreme Jewish court of Judea in Jerusalem on a religious charge, and a subsequent capital sentence pronounced and forwarded for confirmation and execution by the secular arm, remains historically more than dubious, as Paul Winter has shown in his magisterial study of the subject.159 If such a trial did take place, and if it were possible to reconstruct its proceedings from the discrepant, and often contradictory reports of the Gospels, the only justifiable conclusion would be that in a single session the Sanhedrin managed to break every rule in the book: it would, in other words, have been an illegal trial. Yet even those who are able to believe that a real trial occurred are compelled to admit that when the chief priests transferred the case from their court to Pontius Pilate’s tribunal, they did not ask for their findings to be confirmed, but laid a fresh charge before the prefect of Judea, namely that Jesus was a political agitator with pretensions to being the king of the Jews.160 It was not on a Jewish religious indictment, but on a secular accusation that he was condemned by the emperor’s delegate to die shamefully on the Roman cross.
The Resurrection of Jesus
Although founded on evidence which can only be described as confused and fragile, belief in the resurrection of Jesus became an increasingly important, and finally central, issue in the post-Synoptic and especially post-Marcan stage of doctrinal evolution. This development is all the more astonishing since the idea of bodily resurrection played no part of any significance in the preaching of Jesus. Moreover, his disciples did not expect him to arise from the dead any more than their contemporaries expected the Messiah to do so.161
All in all, taking into account the disciples’ despair after the tragedy in Jerusalem, and their startled incredulity on hearing from their women of the empty tomb, the historian is bound to query whether Jesus in fact prepared them for this extraordinary happening by repeatedly foretelling that he would rise again precisely on the third day. Admittedly, Mark and Matthew make room for five separate announcements by Jesus of his suffering, death and resurrection, but it is generally held even by academic orthodoxy that the references to the resurrection at least constitute prophecy after the event.162
It is probably to reconcile this inconsistency between lack of expectation and clear prediction that the evangelists clumsily remark that the apostles could not understand Jesus. Peter rebukes him and is called Satan; they argue about the sense of ‘rising from the dead’; they do not grasp what he says and are too frightened to ask; they are filled with grief or utterly bewildered.163 However, the illogicality disappears if the announcement of the passion alone, without the resurrection, is considered authentic, i.e. the form of the saying preserved in Luke 9: 44:
‘The son of man is to be given up into the power of men.’
A frightening statement such as this might well provoke an instinctive rebuke from Peter and explain the bewilderment and sorrow of the disciples.
A further point to take into consideration is that despite Luke and Paul, and the Creed, the resurrection of Jesus ‘according to the Scriptures’ cannot be seen as a logical necessity within the framework of Israel’s prophetic heritage because, as has been indicated, neither the suffering of the Messiah, nor his death and resurrection, appear to have been part of the faith of first-century Judaism.
Following these somewhat disconcerting preliminaries, what exactly do the Gospels yield by way of factual evidence? What light do they throw on how the earliest traditions developed?
The main Gospel narrative reports seven events subsequent to the death of Jesus.
(1) Joseph of Arimathea deposits the body of Jesus in a rock tomb, which he closes with a rolling stone.164
(2) On the third day, at dawn, two, three, or several women, find the stone rolled back.165
(3) They enter and see a young man (Mark), or two men (Luke), wearing white garments, or an angel (Matthew), sitting (Mark, Matthew), or standing (Luke), in the tomb.166
(4) According to Matthew and Luke, but not Mark, they are frightened.167
(5) The women are told that Jesus has been raised from the dead and they are shown where his body has rested.168
(6) They are further instructed to convey a message to the disciples that Jesus is on his way to Galilee where he will be seen as already arranged. According to Luke, the women are reminded of a prediction made by Jesus in Galilee concerning his passion and suddenly remember.169
(7) Their reactions are described differently in each Gospel. They return and report the news (Luke); they run with awe and joy to make their announcement (Matthew); they rush away from the tomb, beside themselves with terror, saying nothing to anybody (Mark).170
The oldest manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel end at this point, but Matthew and Luke go on to record several appearances made by Jesus to the women, to two disciples travelling to Emmaus, to Peter and the company in Jerusalem, and to the eleven apostles on a Galilean mountain.171 It is in these stories that modern New Testament scholars, relying on Matthew and Luke, and especially on the tradition handed down by Paul,172 find the primary source of faith in the resurrection of Jesus; in their opinion, the narrative concerning the empty tomb is ‘completely secondary’, an ‘apologetic legend’ intended to ‘prove the reality of the resurrection of Jesus’.173 This explanation is nevertheless open to serious criticism. Mark, which besides being the most ancient of the Synoptic Gospels is also doctrinally the least developed, alludes to no actual apparition, but is content to present as the somewhat embarrassing basis for belief in the resurrection the evidence of three women that they heard from a white-robed youth that the body was missing from the tomb because Jesus had been raised from the dead.
There is one point in this episode on which Mark and the other Synoptists insist, namely that the tomb found empty on that Sunday morning was the one in which the body of Jesus had been placed on the previous Friday. The women did not go to the wrong grave because having followed Joseph of Arimathea they knew the site of the burial place.
Mark
