A.J.M. Wedderburn’s
Beyond Resurrection,
Hendrikson Publishers, 1999
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
Back
of Beyond
A.J.M.
Wedderburn has nothing but credibility among mainstream biblical
scholars. He serves on the Protestant Faculty of University of Munich,
and his well-received books including Reasons for Romans and
Theology of the Later Pauline Letters were not particularly liable
to ruffle anyone’s feathers. The same, fortunately or unfortunately,
cannot be said of his Beyond Resurrection. This one is sure to
have pious heads shaking and praying for the author. In a sense,
though, the newly radical character of Wedderburn’s take on the gospel
narratives of the resurrection should not be surprising. The issues in
the study of the gospels are rather different from those at stake in
the epistles. It s a commonplace that evangelical scholars sometimes
go into “safe” fields of biblical study such as textual criticism
(“Lower Criticism”) because there they are liable to find little that
will upset their own faith or that of their public. Truly scholarly,
truly important, but not very controversial. The same is true of
Pauline studies. There one may play the theologian more than the
critic. I always wondered how brilliant evangelical theologian Clark
H. Pinnock could say the things he said against New Testament critics
and in favor of biblical infallibility since he himself had earned a
PhD degree in New Testament. The answer, as I later discovered, was
that he had studied the Pauline epistles under F.F. Bruce. Thus, for
example, he never had occasion to read D.F. Strauss. If he had, I
suspect he would have seen matters much differently. Well,
A.J.M.Wedderburn here emerges from the safety zone of Pauline
literature into the battlefield of gospel studies. And doubters will
be as delighted as believers will be shocked to read Wedderburn’s
views on the gospel Easter materials, for they are anything but
conservative. In this book we are witnessing a milepost along the way
that has led so many of us, as thoughtful Bible readers, from
uncritical fideism to a critical standpoint that becomes inevitable as
soon as one begins engaging the text on a technical level.
This
book has a title that might be taken two ways: does he mean to take
the resurrection of Jesus as an established point of departure and
then ascend to ever higher realms? Or does he mean the resurrection
somehow fails to pass muster and must be discarded in favor of
something else? The latter, perhaps surprisingly, is closer to the
truth, and as he anticipates, some colleagues will not much relish
what they read here. Wedderburn writes as a scholar who has quietly
taken seriously the professed zeal of his fellow New Testament
historians and found himself passing beyond the rest, in the process
charting the sandbars and rocks where each of his fellows has run
aground. For instance, he writes knowingly and well of intellectual
stratagems nearly ubiquitous in the world of "maximal conservative"
evangelical scholarship, including the idea that any viable
reconstruction of Christian origins must be theologically adequate,
must meet the needs of preaching. This bizarre and arbitrary axiom is
precisely why anyone refers to "evangelical scholarship" at
all--tweedy rationalization at the service of teary-eyed revivalism.
But Wedderburn will have none of it. Not that he is unsympathetic to
the concerns of the pious pew-potatoes; he has simply come to the
realization that the scholar’s role cannot be that of the Grand
Inquisitor, shielding people from the uncomfortable truths they fear.
(And in the last few chapters he strives manfully to reconstruct some
sort of theological stance that will not fake the biblical evidence
nor that of the senses. The result is inevitably pretty modest.)
In the
same way, Wedderburn commendably repudiates the controlling axiom of
all evangelical scholarship: if there remains any open space for
doubting that the traditional view (of Petrine authorship, gospel
accuracy, literal resurrection) has been refuted, then the believer
need not yield to the critic. Now if one were honest about it and
admitted one’s convictions were held by simple will power (C.S.
Lewis’s old friend "obstinacy in belief"), this might fly. But to shut
one’s eyes and chant "innocent until proven guilty," while pretending
to be a historian is the very height of hypocritical posturing. And to
his great credit, Wedderburn has had enough of it. One of the
surprising cases he discusses of such will-to-believe masquerading as
historical judgment is Pannenberg. He once enumerated a list of
criteria that would serve to debunk the resurrection as history: "(a)
if the Easter traditions were demonstrable as literarily secondary
constructions in analogy to common comparative religious models not
only in details, but also in their kernel, (b) the Easter appearances
were to correspond completely to the model of self-produced
hallucinations.... (c) the tradition of the empty tomb of Jesus were
to be evaluated as a late (Hellenistic) legend" (p. 18). Pannenberg
seems to think he has erected a strong fortress around his faith, like
Warfield’s series of hurdles the denier of inerrancy must leap. But in
fact he was crouching within a melting igloo and trying not to get
wet. What was he waiting for? Have not all the criteria been long ago
met? Pannenberg’s inability to see the obvious can only be compared to
the supernatural blindness of the Emmaus disciples.
Swatting the Plague of Flies
In a
number of specific cases Wedderburn has seen how the Risen Lord is
wearing no clothes. He is quick to point out the unfalsifiable game of
"heads I win, tales you lose" as applied to the gospel resurrection
accounts. Which is it? Are these stories more credible because their
contradictions show there was no collusion between their authors? (Of
course there was, in the sense that one may easily demonstrate how one
has embellished and rewritten the other.) Or are the stories powerful
evidence because they do not contradict one another? (The latter is a
barely disguised instance of the absurd claim that an "apparent
contradiction" may be treated as no contradiction at all so long as
one can devise some contrived harmonization. In fact, the need to
harmonize must itself count, and would in any other field, as a
disqualification of the texts as evidence.) One cannot have it both
ways (And I am saying one cannot have it either way!)
Wedderburn offers several other helpful refutations of the bombast of
conservative apologists. Contra William Lane Craig and others, he
shows that the Acts 13:29 tradition of Jesus’ burial by his enemies
is more widely attested, occurring also in Justin Martyr, Dialogue
with Trypho 97:1 and the Gospel of Peter 6:21. Again, he
explodes the claim of apologists that Paul knew of the empty tomb
"tradition" because he says Jesus "was buried" in 1 Corinthians 15:4.
Surely, Wedderburn points out, the "was buried" is intended to cap
what precedes it, "Christ died," i.e., "dead and buried," not what
comes after, "he rose." Indeed the situation is precisely parallel to
the futile Protestant argument against the perpetual virginity of Mary
(itself, of course, a legend). Protestants think that the fact that
Joseph "knew her not until she had borne a son" (Matthew 1:25) implies
they went at it afterward, when the point is not what followed Jesus’
birth but what preceded it: nothing! So the baby cannot have been
Joseph’s. Does Luke 2:7 ("She gave birth to her first-born son") imply
anything afterward, i.e., more children? No, surely the point is to
underline her previous virginity.
James
D.G. Dunn (who once seemingly strove for critical scholarship, but has
seemed sorrier and sorrier to have hewn himself from the
fundamentalist rock), Craig, and a multitude of others maintain that
the lack of a known veneration of a tomb for Jesus attests the
resurrection. The point seems to be that if there had ever been a time
when a Jesus movement had not believed in the resurrection of Jesus
(e.g., the Q community as envisioned by Burton Mack), we would hear of
a pilgrimage site to where Jesus was buried. But I wonder: once the
resurrection creed became ascendant, any such site might have been
expunged with the ferocity of a King Josiah closing down the high
places. That is, if anyone had regarded tomb-veneration as
incompatible with belief in the resurrection in the first place. And
Wedderburn astutely observes that no one would have seen any
incompatibility. They never have since Constantine "discovered" the
tourist-trap tomb site in the fourth century. Surely the best
commemoration of the resurrection would be to visit the empty tomb!
And yet, as Dunn and Craig and their fellows contend, there is no
early tomb-veneration! Might this lack be construed as evidence that
there was no dominant early belief in an empty one?
Texts
Not Facts
Wedderburn shows how the Easter tales of Matthew and Luke stem from
their rewriting of Mark, and to show this is to show the purely
literary character of at least Matthew and Luke. The problem with the
contradictions between the gospel Easter stories is not that they are
goofs casting doubt on the details of stories we might otherwise be
inclined to take seriously. No, the point is that the contradictions
are keys enabling us to trace the purely literary history of the
narratives. (Think of the case Bart Ehrman makes in The Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture: textual variants can often be shown not
to be mere slips of the pen but rather possessing a redactional
Tendenz). And Wedderburn pursues the point. It is not only glitches
between gospels but also within them that betray a literary rather
than historical origin. For example, it is simply by crude authorial
fiat that Luke 24:16, John 20:14, and the longer ending of Mark
(16:12) make the resurrected Jesus unrecognizable to the mourning
disciples. Try to picture the scene (as Strauss bade us try to
envision Jesus multiplying loaves of bread by stretching them out like
sponges!) and you wind up with absurdities. Was Jesus heavily robed?
Was he flogged and bruised into hamburger meat and thus
unrecognizable? (Never mind that Jesus should have been recognized
precisely by means of his wounds, as in John 20:25, 27.) In one sense
the literary gimmick here is an excellent one: the element of
uncertainty preserves the supernatural chill of the scene without
resolving it into pat certainty, a technique Tzvetan Todorov explains
in his The Fantastic. But on the other hand, it is done
artlessly: no narrative explanation is given for the uncertainty. The
evangelists just baldly tell us the disciples did not recognize him,
something as abrupt and arbitrary as their incredible failure to grasp
what the passion prediction meant (Mark 9:32). There, Mark was just
trying to account for why the passion and resurrection predictions did
not prepare the disciples, as they are supposed to do for the reader,
for the subsequent events. But all this, both the stories’ skill and
their lack of it, is a matter of literary composition, not of
historical reporting.
Similarly, the question in John and Luke is whether the Risen One is
solid flesh or can pass through locked doors like Jacob Marley. If
what Jesus wanted was to demonstrate was the physical reality of his
body, that he was not a ghost, he certainly had a funny way of showing
it! But the incoherence arises from the literary character of the
story: the evangelists wanted to show two things: that Jesus was
corporeal, and that, as a resurrected being, he could make a heck of a
surprise entrance! The two contradict one another, but that does not
occur to the storyteller as long as both individual goals are met. It
is just like the Transfiguration story in Mark: did Elijah appear
personally in the time of Jesus? Yes he did: you just saw him with
Moses. And no, he didn’t: he appeared only in a manner of speaking, as
John the Baptist. Mark inherited both apologetical arguments and
decided he might as well include both. Never mind that they are
incompatible; he couldn’t bring himself to choose between them. Nor
here; hence a fleshly Jesus who can nonetheless walk through walls!
The only explanation is that we are dealing with fiction, whether well
told or badly, or both.
Blindness and Insight
It is
perhaps surprising to see the limits of Wedderburn’s critical vision,
for he still seems trapped in the clinging Lazarus-bands of
conservatism, more individual assumptions than modes of argument. For
instance, he imagines that "It is an indubitable historical datum that
sometime, somehow the disciples came to believe that they had seen the
risen Jesus" (p. 13)--I should say not! Any more than that we know
about any "changed lives" of these disciples from before to after the
resurrection. As Pannenberg feared and Wedderburn seems to realize,
the gospel resurrection accounts are secondhand or, worse, completely
fictive. And what other evidence do we have about what the first
disciples may or may not have experienced? 1 Corinthians 15:5 and 7
are hardly firsthand evidence. It is after all, a pair of formulas,
standardized, official credential lists that even seem to undercut one
another, one presupposing James as the leader of the apostles, the
other Peter (as Harnack knew and Wedderburn seems aware). We have this
set of formulas from a third party, even if we regard the text in
which it appears as genuinely Pauline. As for Paul’s own vision,
Wedderburn recognizes the difficulties in knowing what Paul may have
experienced and how similar or different it may have been to the
experience (if any!) of the "original disciples." Burton Mack is
right: the empty tomb and appearance stories can simply no longer be
taken as either univocal or equivocal ("it might have been
hallucinations") evidence of a "Big Bang" that started Christianity.
No, these stories are themselves growths from one of the several kinds
of early Christianity, whose origins are unknown. The stories of the
apostles and the dawn of their faith are a product of one particular
"apostolic" Christianity and betray an agenda that makes sense best in
the second century where well-defined sects (including "catholic"
"orthodoxy") vied with one another and made parallel boasts of
"apostolic" succession. In the gospel Easter stories we are seeing not
the root of the plant but the tip of the iceberg.
Wedderburn still lingers in the pleasant shade of the historicizing
bias when he arbitrarily retains individual elements of the
resurrection narratives seriously as history. He thinks the women
looked for the body, probably without much luck. Isn’t it obvious by
now that the whole scenario parallels and is derived from ubiquitous
Mystery Religion myths where goddesses (Isis and Nephthys, Ishtar,
Anath, Cybele) seek for the slain god (Osiris, Tammuz/Dumuzi, Baal,
Attis) and anoint him to raise him from the dead? Let Occam’s razor
rip! Granted, women’s testimony may not have been worth much in the
ancient world, so the empty tomb stories wouldn’t have begun as
apologetics--Celsus showed the futility of using them for that. But
surely they began instead not as factual reports but rather as mythic
scripts for women’s mourning rituals such as those long familiar in
Israel for Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14) and Haddad-Rimmon (Zechariah 12:11).
Wedderburn thinks there may be some reliable tradition underlying the
Sea of Tiberias story in John 21, but the whole thing must be based on
the famous tale of Pythagoras, a vegetarian, who came upon a group of
fishermen unloading a huge catch, whereupon he made them an offer. If
he could guess the right number of fish, would the fishermen free
them? He was right, and back they went. The miracle wasn_t the size of
the haul, but rather the Rain Man-like acuity of the sage_s
calculations. The point has been shifted in the Johannine version, but
that it stems from the Pythagorean legend is still apparent from the
fact that the number of fish, one hundred fifty three, not only
presupposes someone counting them (pointless in the Johannine version
we now read) but happens to be one of the holy Pythagorean
"triangular" numbers.
Wedderburn wrestles with the origin of the "third day" motif and
wonders if something did not after all happen that day. Hosea 6:1-2
("on the third day he will raise us up") seems insufficient to have
fixed the day if there had not also been some event that day, even if
that should prove to have been the failure of the women to find the
body! The "earliest Christians were convinced, thanks to their
experiences at Easter and afterwards, that Jesus’ fate was according
to God’s will. Because they also believed that God had revealed that
will in the Old Testament scriptures, they... searched in those
scriptures for the proof that the anointed one of Jewish expectations
had indeed to suffer and die and be raised again, that his fate was
therefore according to the scriptures (plural). As a result of this
basic enquiry which convinced them that Jesus’ fate did correspond to
what the scriptures had foretold, they... sought for the confirmation
of their basic search in as many details of the passion story and its
sequel as they could.. Even when only one passage could support,
rather precariously, a detail like the third day, it confirmed the
general character of the story as scriptural. But this analysis leads
to the conclusion that the [Hosea] passage did not originate the date,
as some have claimed; on the contrary, the date led to the discovery
of the text that showed its basis in scripture" (p. 52).
But
this seems superfluous and unnatural. What would have been the point
if the event of the resurrection, the experience of the risen Jesus,
had first convinced them? Would these Easter morning believers and
their immediate heirs have been dissuaded if they had not been able,
like the Pharisees of John 7:52, to document every detail from
scripture? No, the whole scenario bespeaks a scribal atmosphere like
that of the rabbis or of Qumran, where new secrets are coaxed out of
the sacred page by means of esoteric combinations and out-of-context
exegetical atomism. Surely a more natural picture is the one
hypothesized by Earl Doherty whereby early Christians sought to
historicize their spiritual messiah by filling in details from
scripture peshers. When they said Christ died for sins, was buried,
rose, etc., according to the scriptures, they probably, like Matthew
with the 30 pieces of silver, the two donkeys, etc., derived the
supposed events from reading texts out of context for their secret
predictive value. Thus most likely either Hosea 6 was the origin of
the third day motif, or it was invoked to supply a Jewish, biblical
pedigree for a mytheme derived from a Mystery Religion (Attis, too,
rose on the third day).
Has
Wedderburn abandoned his one-time evangelical compatriots? Or, as I
deem more likely, have they abandoned him? That is, someone here has
taken seriously and consistently the exhortation all evangelicals hear
to love the truth above all, but not everyone has seen that the truth
cannot be identified with a given dogmatic-exegetical party line. I
should say Wedderburn has chosen the better part.