3a In accordance with the scriptures
4a And he was buried.
1b Christ was raised
2b On the third day
3b In accordance with the scriptures
4b And he appeared to Cephas.
The first section is all about Jesus’s death, and the second is all about his resurrection. The parallel statements work like this: first there is a statement of “fact” (1a: Christ died; 1b: Christ was raised); then there is a theological interpretation of the fact (2a: he died for our sins; 2b: he was raised on the third day), followed by a statement, in each section, that it was “in accordance with the scriptures” (3a and 3b, worded identically in the Greek); and finally a kind of proof is given by means of the physical evidence for the claim (4a: he was buried—showing that he really was dead; 4b: he appeared to Cephas [that is, the disciple Peter]—showing that he really was raised).
This then was the very ancient pre-Pauline tradition that Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15 and that he expands, at the end, by giving even more “witnesses” to the resurrection—including himself, the last to see Jesus alive afterward (some two or three years after Jesus’s death). Some scholars have argued that this terse statement of faith originated in Aramaic, meaning that it might go all the way back to the Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Palestine during the early years after his death; other scholars are not so sure about this. In either case, it is a powerful, concise, and cleverly constructed creedal statement.
If this reconstruction of the original form of this statement is correct, several interesting and important observations can be made. First, if it is right that the second statement of each section is a “theological interpretation” of the statement of “fact” that precedes it, then the idea that Jesus was raised on the third day is not necessarily a historical recollection of when the resurrection happened, but a theological claim of its significance. I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day Jesus was raised. The women go to the tomb on the third day, and they find it empty. But none of the Gospels indicates that Jesus arose that morning before the women showed up. He could just as well have arisen the day before or even the day before that—just an hour, say, after he had been buried. The Gospels simply don’t say.
If Paul’s statement is indeed a theological interpretation rather than a historical claim, one needs to figure out what it means. It is important to stress that this “third day” is said to have been in accordance with the testimony of scripture, which for any early Christian author would not have been the New Testament (which had not yet been written) but the Hebrew Bible. There is a widespread view among scholars that the author of this statement is indicating that in his resurrection on the third day Jesus is thought to have fulfilled the saying of the Hebrew prophet Hosea: “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (Hos. 6:2). Other scholars—a minority of them, although I find myself attracted to this view—think that the reference is to the book of Jonah, where Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights before being released and, in a kind of symbolic sense, brought back from the dead (see Jonah 2). Jesus himself is recorded in the Gospels as likening his upcoming death and resurrection to “the sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:39–41). Whether the reference is to Hosea or Jonah, why would it be necessary to say that the resurrection happened on the third day? Because that is what was predicted in scripture. This is a theological claim that Jesus’s death and resurrection happened according to plan. This will be an important point for us later when we consider what we can say about when the earliest followers of Jesus first came to think he was raised from the dead—and on what grounds.
Second, it is important to realize that all the statements of the two sections of the creed are tightly parallel to one another in every respect—except one. The second section contains a name as part of the tangible proof for the statement that Jesus was raised: “He appeared to [literally: “he was seen by”] Cephas.” The fourth statement of the first section does not name any authorizing party. There we are told simply that “he was buried”—not that he was buried by anyone in particular. Given the effort that the author of this creed has taken to make every statement of the first section correspond to the parallel statement of the second section, and vice versa, this should give us pause. It would have been very easy indeed to make the parallel precise, simply by saying “he was buried by Joseph [of Arimathea].” Why didn’t the author make this precise parallel? My hunch is that it is because he knew nothing about a burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. I should point out that nowhere else does Paul ever say anything about Joseph of Arimathea, or the way in which Jesus was buried—not in this creed, not in the rest of 1 Corinthians, and not in any of his other letters. The tradition that there was a specific, known person who buried Jesus appears to have been a later one. Below, I will show why there are reasons to doubt that the tradition is historically accurate.
One other frequently noted feature of this creed—and its expansion by Paul in vv. 5–8—is that Paul seems to be giving an exhaustive account of the people to whom Jesus appeared after being raised. The reason for thinking this is that after listing all the others who saw Jesus, Paul indicates that he was the “last of all.” This is frequently understood, rightly I think, to mean that he is giving the fullest list he can. But then the list is striking indeed, in no small measure because Paul doesn’t mention any women. In the Gospels it is women who discover the empty tomb, and in two of the Gospels—Matthew and John—it is women who first see Jesus alive afterward. But Paul never says anything about anyone discovering an empty tomb, and he doesn’t mention any resurrection appearances to women—either here or in any other passage of his writings.
On the first point, for many years scholars have considered it highly significant that Paul, our earliest “witness” to the resurrection, says nothing about the discovery of an empty tomb. Our earliest account of Jesus’s resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–5) discusses the appearances without mentioning an empty tomb, while our earliest Gospel, Mark, narrates the discovery of the empty tomb without discussing any of the appearances (Mark 16:1–8). This has led some scholars, such as New Testament expert Daniel Smith, to suggest that these two sets of tradition—the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after his death—probably originated independently of one another and were put together as a single tradition only later—for example, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.5 If this is the case, then the stories of Jesus’s resurrection were indeed being expanded, embellished, modified, and possibly even invented in the long process of their being told and retold over the years.
But what lies at the foundation of these stories? What, if anything, can we say historically about the resurrection event? At this point I need to pause to explain why historians—insofar as and as long as they are working as historians—are unable to use knowledge derived from the historical disciplines to affirm that Jesus really was, physically, raised from the dead, even if they personally believe it happened. The view I stake out here is that if historians, or anyone else, do believe this, it is because of their faith, not because of their historical inquiry. I should stress that unbelievers (like me) cannot disprove the resurrection either, on historical grounds. This is because belief or unbelief in Jesus’s resurrection is a matter of faith, not of historical knowledge.
The Resurrection and the Historian