I recently had the pleasure of reading a book (God with Us) by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It was an elegantly-written treatment of some deep theological issues; towards the end I came across a long section which dealt with the foundational claim of the Christian story, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As I read, I found myself reflecting on the bizarre character of the Gospel accounts, and how they tend to be misread and misunderstood by modern readers. I thought I would put down some of my thoughts for consideration. For readability's sake, I will split my treatment of the book into two parts.

Did anyone bother to edit this?

Considering the theory that the story of the resurrection developed over time, the archbishop says:

...I would expect the texts deriving from that story to be very polished, carefully crafted products: the result of a long period of reflection, using literary allusions and weaving together a complicated picture. Yet what we have is a series of resurrection stories that are abrupt, confused, vivid and unpolished. I don't think one can overemphasise that oddity about the resurrection stories. It was once fashionable to sneer at the fact that there are four not-easily-compatible versions of what happened on Easter Sunday and afterwards, as if that were a sign of their untruth. But when you think a bit more about it, the very untidiness of the resurrection stories is one of the main reasons for taking them seriously as historical reportage. What's going on is clearly people struggling to find words for something they had not expected.

I ran into this exact phenomenon when I first began looking into the events of the Gospels. I thought it was rather strange that they should disagree with each other. Hadn't they been edited? Wasn't that the kind of thing at which religious authorities excelled- carefully massaging the facts, rearranging the details, obscuring those things which were inconvenient to the narrative?

Considering this, it seemed very odd that these stories, which were supposed to have been fabricated, should show such basic discrepancies with each other. Hadn't the scribes double-checked before putting pen to papyrus? If they were mistakes, then they were elementary mistakes, things which would be so easy to correct that there is no conceivable excuse for not doing so. Consider the different renderings of the sign placed over Jesus's head on the cross:

And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”
Matthew 27:37

And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.”
Mark 15:26

There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
Luke 23:38

Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”
John 19:19

If you were concocting some kind of cult-like scheme to get people to believe in a crucified Messiah, then this would be unforgivable. All four accounts disagree with each other. Where was the editor? Was it his day off? Surely it couldn't have been that hard to decide what the sign said. Is this not the very first thing on which your detractors would fix?

It was points like these that made it very hard for me to believe that the Gospels were entirely, or even mostly, fabricated. The assumption which I have heard most commonly brought to bear against the origins of Christianity- that of a controlling religious elite, using their influence to coerce their gullible followers- simply did not fit the facts. However hard you tried to make it click, there would be some inconvenient protrusion from the text which just kept it from slotting into place.

A brief cameo by the author of Mark

The archbishop continues:

This comes over most clearly in a very interesting way, which I don't think has been discussed all that much in the literature. Read Mark's Gospel and you will find a long, involved and slightly ritualised account of the Passion of Jesus: a story much polished in the telling- a story which, some scholars say, probably has its origins in disciples literally 'walking the way of the cross' around Jerusalem. You'll notice how place after place is identified, as if you're being given a kind of route map of Jerusalem. In each place, allusions are made to prophecies in the Old Testament. This is a story that has drawn into itself the whole penumbra of allusions, echoes, people recognising patterns, sayings, metaphors, images from the Old Testament. Even the little incident of the young man running away naked from the Garden of Gethsemane resonates with a line in the prophecy of Amos: 'the strong in heart shall flee away naked on that day' (2.16). This is not to say that these details are unhistorical. But they are thought through: 'as the Scriptures say', 'as it is written', 'as it was prophesied'.

The issue of prophecy is a fascinating one, and not one into which I wish to delve here. I want to pick up on that incident of the fleeing naked man:

And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.
Mark 14:51-52

As a literary feature, this is pointless in the extreme. It adds nothing to the text. It intrudes upon the narrative of Jesus's arrest to provide us with information nobody asked for and which will never be needed again. None of the other Gospels record it. I gather that many Bible scholars believe, owing to its sole appearance in Mark's Gospel, that this man is John Mark himself, the author; whether or not that is the case, I am inclined to take this passage as a further strike against the idea that these stories were invented. All things considered, it simply does not need to be there.

Lenses, and superstition

Leading on from this, Williams writes:

But then Mark turns to the resurrection, giving his account in those abrupt, extraordinary sentences in the last chapter of his Gospel, as if it's still fresh and if nobody has quite told the story before. Something has happened that left people dumbstruck. Think of the famous short ending of Mark- "They said nothing to anybody because they were afraid"- where we are left in mid-air. Even in literary style, the abruptness is very clear: ephobounto gar in the Greek (16.8), "they were afraid, you see." It's a very odd way of ending a book. Ever since, people have been wondering what was going on. But, likewise, even in the much more elaborated stories of the resurrection appearances in Matthew, Luke, and John, what's missing is that self-conscious literary element that we find in the Passion stories. You don't have clear allusions to the Old Testament, you don't have literary models in which people are working. You have stories that seem to be squeezed, forced into being by the sheer pressure of events.

The ending of Mark is a topic I don't intend to touch. For anybody who would like to know more about it, I've included a link below to a video by a textual scholar which I found enlightening. However, whether you read the long or the short ending, the subject matter is certainly strange. It concerns a man dead by crucifixion and entombed, who then rises again. It isn't an idle tale. It's written as something to be taken with the utmost seriousness, by both its first readers and all future generations. We tend to gloss over the profound weirdness of the assertion because we read it through lenses- of familiarity, of scepticism, of indifference. Somehow we are able to read this historical document and not be stunned when it tells us, in all seriousness, that the man who was nailed to a cross on Friday had left his tomb on Sunday.

I have heard it said, and said injudiciously, that people back then were more superstitious; thus we shouldn't be at all surprised to hear that they told stories about men rising from the dead. The sheer degree to which this is wrong is hard to convey. It will require a much fuller treatment elsewhere. Suffice it to say that superstition has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you believe a man can return bodily from death. "Superstition" describes a trait of character, one which inclines a person to believe in bad luck, and jinxes, and taboos. It is not some kind of stand-in for scientific ignorance, as though somehow the men and women of first-century Judea, lacking our modern understanding of biology, didn't understand that dead people aren't supposed to come back to life. All such an assertion says to me is that the one who has made it does not really understand the issue. I know many people who are profoundly religious, and yet not superstitious in the slightest; by contrast, the most superstitious person I have ever met was a committed atheist.

Fording the river

Williams continues:

There have been studies by distinguished scholars that have sought to argue for literary analogues to the resurrection stories in some Old Testament tales; yet for all the immense learning that has gone into such argument, at the end of the day we are left with a small handful of impossible echoes. Again and again, people have come up against a brick wall on this issue. Whereas elsewhere in the Gospels (in the nativity stories, in parts of the body of the story of Jesus' ministry, in the story of the Passion) people are aware somehow of fulfilment, balance, echo and pattern, so that they use the Old Testament freely to interpret the tradition of what happened, where the resurrection stories are in question you don't have that; it's as if the fact of the new age, the new phase of history, has created a new form of storytelling, as if you had to make up your way of telling this story because there were no precedents, because quite literally nothing like this had ever happened. And that, of course, despite the statements by Paul and others that Christ was raised from the dead 'according to the Scriptures'. There is strikingly little elaboration of this alleged fulfilment of Scripture. Even granted that sense that in some way this is a fulfilment of earlier Scripture, nonetheless, when it comes to it, the story doesn't fit neatly into any pre-existing pattern.

This passage in particular succeeds in conveying that sense which I think should be more present to us as readers: that of bewildering novelty, and profound import, and "where on Earth are we meant to go from here?". All of a sudden we have found ourselves on the shores of a new and unfamiliar land, one in which the universal reign of death has been challenged, perhaps one day to be overthrown entirely. It is without precedent in all history. The morning it happened, the world shook, and the course of the future was changed forever.

I think, as readers of the Gospels, we could do much worse than try to recapture the otherworldly character of the stories we are being told. Naturally, there are obstacles to this. For a devoted believer, I think the main such obstacle is familiarity. A story you have read and reread eventually loses its power to shock. This does not necessarily make it dull or uninteresting, but it doesn't seem to have quite the same punch. I have found that a good antidote to this has been to learn about the historical context of the times. As people who have lived with Christianity for two thousand years, we cannot help but find it hard to imagine a world without it; however, when you begin to better situate yourself in the world of the first century, you gain a much keener appreciation for how outrageous the Gospels much have seemed to their first readers.

To the decided unbeliever, then, the main obstacle is of course the subject matter. Whoever heard of dead bodies getting out of their tombs? That's the stuff of horror films, and unfit for serious consideration. For the stories to be true, they would require miracles, and no self-respecting sceptic believes in those. Now, to unpack this would take much more than a paragraph. It would involve complicated questions about metaphysical presuppositions and the like. While I find that topic very interesting, it will have to be addressed elsewhere. All I can offer is a preliminary observation: surely, whatever happened on Easter morning was an event of incalculable power. A wandering rabbi found himself on the wrong side of the religious authorities, and, after a public, painful, and humiliating death, seemed to have been snuffed out forever. Two thousand years later, his name lives on, and carries with it still a mysterious, magnetic draw. This radical shift in the course of history all happened- so his earliest followers tell- because though he was killed, yet he rose. There are no competing claims and no ambiguities. At ground zero of Christianity is a solid iron core- the claim that Jesus of Nazareth died and returned to life. If you will not accept a miracle as fact, then at the very least I invite you to dwell on the magnitude of it all. Whatever happened, it was profoundly significant, and very profoundly strange.

Resources

God with Us, by Rowan Williams: SPCK Publishing
The man himself: Wikipedia | Rowan Williams
Wesley Huff on the ending of Mark: YouTube | The Gospel of Mark is missing its ending? Let me explain...

All excerpts from Rowan Williams, God with Us, London: SPCK, 2017, pp. 76-79
All Bible citations are from the English Standard Version unless specified otherwise.