From BSA Here. Below is a thread with great insights from Charles Bledsoe, Mike Waddell, and others.
OP – Some Critical Reflections on the Easter Faith of Literalistic Believers by Charles Bledsoe, Apr 13, 2025
Michael Waddell has written a thought-provoking post on the discrepancies between the accounts of the Resurrection of Paul and of the Gospel writers, and other contradictions in the tradition of the Resurrection, that has stimulated the following critical thoughts about the Easter faith of literalistic fundamentalist Christians. Thank you Michael.
To my mind what all of the discrepant bits drive home, quite significantly to put it mildly, is that going all the way back to its beginning there was no consensus, let alone uniform version of the tradition about the Resurrection; and what’s more, there was never a uniform foundational form of Christianity, a so-called pure and primitive form, that might be recovered and restored, contra fundamentalist Christian primitivism. And this appears to be the case not merely because of the difficulty or impossibility of bringing off oral transmission without a tradition undergoing changes and corruptions that cause its aboriginal form to be lost sight of, but because there was no single foundational tradition that was based on and preserved a single account of a veridical experience of the risen Jesus to start with. This is arguably what a naturalistic, historical-critical approach to biblical scholarship has determined beyond a reasonable doubt.
Rather, what likely happened was that rather than having a veridical vision of a supernaturally revivified Jesus, some of Jesus’ disciples, and later on Paul, had some other manner of religious experience (note that I describe their experience as a “religious experience”, not a psychological experience because the latter description can be dismissive, and doesn’t affirm the possible religious value, or existential meaning and benefit of an experience).
Perhaps it was a subjective experience, a religiously meaningful altered state of consciousness induced by the psychic trauma and cognitive dissonance that resulted from the execution of the master to whom the disciples had hitched the wagon of their faith.
Or it might have been something along the lines of the apparitions that those grieving a recently deceased loved one sometimes see, which was given a religious interpretation.
Alternatively, as Hegel might propose, it might have been a watershed moment in the Weltgeist that took place in the consciousness of the disciples; an Aufhebung, a sublation of the perception of finite, corporeal being into a consciousness of the true infinity of the divine. (for Hegel, BTW, the resurrection, rather than the event of Jesus literally rising from the dead, actually takes place in the community of Christ-believers, and ongoingly; it’s an evolution of human consciousness toward reconciliation of the human and divine, an overcoming of their division; it’s Spirit [Hegelian Geist, not the Holy Spirit] reaching a higher level of self-awareness and self-actualization in the faith of believers; its nothing less than the ongoing consummation of Spirit’s career in human consciousness—just thought I’d throw in something different, something that isn’t found in Jesus scholarship).
In any case, the disciples likely then gave the interpretation to their experience that one would expect first-century Jews to give to it, they explained it in terms of their resurrection belief, they interpreted it as an encounter with the risen Jesus. But since it was a religious and not a concrete experience, and personal for each disciple who had it, not everyone was on the same page about it. There was disagreement and not a consensus, right from the very get-go of Christ believers holding a belief in Jesus’ resurrection. And as time went on this disunity of belief regarding the Resurrection persisted in the tradition, and caused discrepancies. Discrepancies then all stem from a lack of an original shared concrete experience, consensus about it, and uniform primitive form of Christian faith.
That is, discrepancies reflect that Christianity was a human creative process; to state what should be obvious, they’re evidence of creative differences between different individuals and factions—as opposed to the core message of Christianity, the kerygma being a divine revelation that there was an original pure version of, and that God guided Christ-followers to a correct belief in.
All of this has been my longwinded way of making the point that the orthodoxy fundamentalists cling to with their biblical literalism, and in particular the orthodox doctrine of the Resurrection that fundamentalists believe in in a literalistic way, is just the version of Christian belief that achieved a dominance that enabled its adherents to thrust it upon the entire family of believers as divinely revealed truth; and that this papers over the human creativity diversity, and fallibility—literalism exploding fallibility—that went into the making of Christian resurrectionism, the Christian New Testament, and the Christian faith as a whole.
The Easter faith of fundamentalists, their literalistic belief in the Resurrection (along with the bulk of their Christology) then is not something that holds up to the scrutiny of historical-critical scholarship, and expresses a dogmatism that does Christianity no credit. In any event, the discrepancies in the New Testament about the Resurrection, something supremely pivotal to Christian faith, drive home that reading the Bible in a literalistic fashion is problematic, to the point that it just plain doesn’t work.
Norm Erlendson, Apr 14 Retired Pastor
You have written a very plausible non supernatural explanation of how the Easter faith of the early church began and evolved into what it came to be.
Norm Erlendson Thank you. And I think that a naturalistic explanation can still affirm it as being in some way existentially, and even theologically meaningful. It needn’t be an intentionally devastating kind of explanation that relishes saying to fundamentalists: “Haw-haw, I’ve removed the keystone card of your Christological house of cards and collapsed Christian faith and spirituality in toto”. One can, as I do, reject the traditional, doctrinal, supernaturalistic explanation of the Resurrection and still find value in it as a metaphor and model for interior resurrection and transformation, and victory over suffering. My own view is that the Resurrection is Jesus coming back to life in the spirituality and lives of Christians, in terms of his undying influence acting as an attractor toward their ideal ethical, existential, and spiritual possibilities. What’s more, I see Jesus and his resurrection as symbolic of, and a guiding star in the process of, claiming ideal existential possibilities even from the destructive and deathly events of the past.
This post drives home an important point. Sometimes, even when scholars and others reject the fundamentalist, literalist understanding of the resurrection, they still assume that there is “one original understanding” to get back to. When people posit that Jesus’ body was moved, or that the disciples originally thought of Jesus’ appearances as visionary, or any other single explanation, they’re clearly rejecting the fundamentalist conclusion that Jesus was bodily raised and that this is the original understanding of the disciples… but they’re still conceding the fundamentalist perspective that there is one original understanding to get back to. And you’re right, I don’t see any evidence of that. When I read Paul’s views, Mark’s views, the pre-Pauline hymns of Romans 1:3-4 and Philippians 2:6-11, Matthew’s views, Luke’s views, whatever Luke was reacting to, etc., I don’t see a group of understandings that all spring from one original view. I see a lot of different ways of understanding Jesus and his resurrection and its meaning. They all have spiritual meaning, and they’re all Christian.
The fundamentalist, cultish congregation I grew up in talked a lot about getting back to the original form of Christianity, of being as much like the 1st-century church as possible. But they didn’t really want that; they really wanted to imitate their retrospective image of the 1st-century church. The real 1st-century church had no Bibles or orthodoxies or doctrines. There were diverse communities that believed all kinds of things, where the creative impulse to develop new understandings had not yet been overtaken by the conservative impulse to contain this new faith in a limited and comprehensible set of ideas. It was a time when your understanding of Jesus was as valid as mine, whether yours came from memories of Jesus’ teachings or your interpretation of Jewish scripture or a vision you had where Christ told you things directly.
Michael L Waddell Excellent point in your last paragraph. I’m quite sure that if a fundamentalist group did actually revive some form of early Christianity it would be ostracized by the wider fundamentalist community for going lunatic fringe and heretical.
Charles, your description of a Hegelian encounter brings up something I’ve read recently from Jeffrey Russell’s A History of Heaven where he talks about our tendency to “analyze, reduce, and narrow down toward a definition.” He was talking about modern theologians discussing the afterlife, but it seems like a good description of what Christians have tried to do regarding the nature of Christ and the meaning of the resurrection. Russell says:
Moderns are used to dichotomies between true and false, fact and fiction, they are put off by comparative terms such as “more real” or “more perfect,” and they create a dichotomy between “literal” and “metaphorical”… The modern assumption is that the so-called factual statement relates to “outside reality” and that the metaphorical statement is subjective and unrelated to “outside reality.” … [But] God is a poet at least as much as a scientist or a historian.
When Matthew changes Mark’s description of what happened at the tomb, was he altering the historical record, or was he just altering the poetry? Did Matthew draw a clear distinction between the literal and the metaphorical, and if not, why should we?
In Isaiah 6, the prophet describes an encounter with God wherein he was commissioned to speak God’s words, and the encounter was full of supernatural and poetic imagery. Susan Garrett discusses this in No Ordinary Angel:
Here Isaiah uses human words and images — instruments of limited capacity — to describe an encounter so rich with meaning as to defy description. What words could ever suffice to describe an encounter between an infinite God, creator of the universe, and a weak, fallible, fragile human being? … In choosing his words and images, Isaiah was not writing a neutral, objective description of events … Rather, Isaiah was describing an experience of being overwhelmed by God … Inevitably, that experience exceeded the capacity of the words and images that Isaiah chose to convey it. And yet, the prophets words and images are what are left to us.
I think this is the best way to understand the “Easter event”, the experience of the resurrected Christ. A systematic theologian may ask “How can I harmonize the accounts given by these various authors”, but I prefer to ask “What kind of a transformative encounter would lead to accounts like these, even if the descriptions could never be literally accurate or theologically complete?”
Norm Erlendson, Apr 14 Retired Pastor
I see a trajectory in the resurrection narratives that move from no appearances to Jesus appearing as a resuscitated bloody battered corpse. This involves a narrowing down of the Easter event, perhaps to remove any lingering doubts that Jesus’ resurrection was literal and bodily.
Mark is the most expansive. He leaves lots of room for one’s imagination to wonder and wander. Paul’s encounters with the risen Jesus are visionary and bodiless. He equates his experience with the other earlier apostolic witnesses. Matthew’s account of the eleven seeing Jesus in Galilee where some doubted what they saw seems also to be visionary. But Jesus’ appearance to the women fleeing the tomb includes a momentary touching his feet. This is the first suggestion of the risen Jesus as a physical presence. Luke and John have it both ways. Jesus appears as an embodied person but he also disappears at will. Both include demonstrations of normal bodily physicality and appetites. In both Jesus indicates that he’s hungry. John goes so far as to have Jesus show the open wounds in his hands, feet and side. Little is left to the imagination. One presumes the lash marks from the whippings were visible as well. John’s portrayal of the risen Jesus as a resuscitated wounded corpse is a far cry from Paul’s description of the glorious resurrection body with which believers will be clothed in the age to come. The more literal the description of Jesus’ resurrection body, the less appealing it is.
I’d never thought of it that way! Very interesting point.
