I concluded my last post by talking about the magnitude of the Easter event. It seems clear that whatever happened, it isn't to be taken lightly; unfortunately, that's exactly what we tend to do. It's very easy for us, as enlightened moderns, to dismiss stories which involve the miraculous- or, if we do profess to believe it, then we don't often feel the full force of what we're being told. In the one case, the problem is scepticism; in the other, the problem is over-familiarity. I think that Williams himself is aware of both these barriers, and seeks to overcome them.

First impressions

The archbishop writes:

This is one of the decisive things that ought to make us take the Gospel accounts of the resurrection with absolute seriousness, as pressed into existence by facts- not literary meditations, not people ten years later trying to make sense of an experience on which they have been reflecting. There is, it has been said, a quality of 'rawness' about these stories, and a quality of mysteriousness: there is the strange but very persistent theme that people do not at first recognise the risen Jesus- the story of the encounter with Mary Magdalene, the story of Emmaus. That is a significant factor once again which no one has ever fully made sense of, and again doesn't fit easily into literary stereotypes. There are cases in the Old Testament when people realise belatedly that they have been to an angel, when the angel suddenly reveals his glory; but that's not quite how it works in the encounter with Mary Magdalene or the Emmaus story. And so, in thinking about the historical basis of the resurrection stories, about the empty tomb and the 'apparitions', it is important to be alert to the way the story is told and to begin to see how much of a shock it actually was- and, of course, still is.

I'll revisit a theme I touched upon previously. It's very tempting to dismiss the Gospels as later inventions. It feels as though one can shirk any responsibility or burden of proof simply by saying "well, it happened a long time ago, and people tend to exaggerate things, and doesn't it all just seem a bit far-fetched?" However, there are problems with this line of thinking. One of them, as Williams illustrates, is that the accounts we read are unpolished, unsanitised, unembroidered. Mysterious characteristics, such as Jesus's concealed identity, jut out from the text like nails from wood. They are never explained; they are subjected to none of the prophetic reflection which we find earlier in the Gospels. I cannot help but find it strange, for example, that we should read about Jesus's resurrected body still bearing the scars of his crucifixion:

So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”
John 20:25-27

This passage feels woefully inadequate for the subject matter it purports to record. You could spend thousands of years asking why the God-man, having transcended death, should still have holes in his hands and a spear wound in his side (and, in a sense, people have). Why has he not become an ethereal spirit? Why is his body not lit up with glory, flawless and blinding? Why is he there at all, and not greeting his disciples in dreams and visions? Any one of these seems a more likely alternative than what we read in the Fourth Gospel. We are talking about the creator of the universe, after all. But we are given what we are given. The text makes no attempt to rationalise what the disciples experienced. It doesn't reach for any high-minded theology; it simply recounts the facts. It is as though it was all John could do, at his advanced age, to say what he remembered of those most unusual days, and leave his audience to draw their own conclusions.

Fishy business

Consider another example. Towards the end of John's Gospel, we find an account of a miraculous catch of fish, in which John gives us a tally of exactly 153:

Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many, the net was not torn.
John 21:10-11

This is odd because as stories grow in the telling, one of the first things you lose is irrelevant detail. In both written and oral accounts, if a detail does not have a particular bearing on why things happened the way they did, it is less and less likely to be preserved by successive narrators. Thus, when we find details in the Gospels which serve no purpose whatsoever to the narrative, we have to wonder if we are not reading something very close to the source. This story serves as a good example. There is no great significance to the number 153. It has no theological import. All John seems to be telling us is that the tally of fish was unusually large.

On the hypothesis that the story is the product of Chinese whispers, this detail is hard to explain, because it is one of the very first things which should have been lost as irrelevant. However, it makes much more sense when you consider that John, if the narrative is to be believed, was originally a fisherman. It is not hard to imagine that it would be this oddly-specific detail which would stick out in his mind all those years later, and ultimately make its way into the Fourth Gospel. This gives a much more satisfying account for the "rawness" which Williams observes in these stories.

Developmental issues

As an aside: while we're on this topic, I want to suggest another point against the developmental hypothesis. Even in John's Gospel, which is alleged to be the most developed of the four, the account of the resurrection is prosaic to the point of blandness. John, who starts his Gospel with such beautiful poetry about the logos, and throughout it makes frequent asides to explain what Jesus meant by some particular allusion, ends it with the kind of rapid-fire, nothing-but-the-facts narrative that one would expect from Mark (allegedly, the least developed of the four). If you want theological reflection on the Easter event, the Gospels offer you none, not even at their latest stage of "development".

If you want theological reflection, then you will have to turn to the works of Paul, especially to passages such as 1 Cor. 15. This is a subject I hope to treat in much fuller detail in the future; suffice it to say for now that Paul's consideration of the resurrection is endlessly interesting, tying together as it does disparate elements of Greco-Roman philosophy, Second Temple Jewish hopes of final judgement and the destruction of sin, and the overwhelming mysteriousness of the Easter event. It is clear that Paul's theology of the resurrection is very highly developed indeed: one in which God Himself becomes incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, bears upon Himself the weight of all sin, descends into death, and then returns bodily to life, breaking forever the power of death over those who follow Him.¹

What is the point of all this? Paul's letters predate the Gospels. This breaks the developmental paradigm. It is in the earliest New Testament writings, not the latest, that we find the most sophisticated treatment of the resurrection. The person of Christ, far from metamorphosing over decades into divinity, is equated ab initio with God, the creator of the universe. The significance of the resurrection- that event which the Gospels describe in such plain terms- has already been recognised. This is all to say that we should be very sceptical of anyone who wants to draw comparisons between two passages of different Gospels and say they can see development; it is not clear, given the Pauline corpus, that any development of theological import took place at all.

Lost perspectives

Williams continues:

The story is told in a new way because nothing like this has ever happened before; and we are still finding it difficult because nothing like that has ever happened again. But (to go right back to where I began) that is what you might expect in retrospect; what you might expect if what you're dealing with is an event that inaugurates a new phase in human history, not just another episode in the continuing story, but something that reshapes the whole way in which we talk about God, and about God's world.

I talked in my last post about how, if you are familiar with the Gospels, the story of the resurrection seems to lose some of its potency. With each successive reading, the story becomes less of a shock. I also mentioned how, if this is the case, it helps to become more familiar with what the world looked like at that time. We are quite far removed from the world in which the disciples lived, and our culture has been shaped by the Christian story in ways we don't notice. For me, the study of history is at its most rewarding when it gives you insight into a lost worldview. As interesting as it is to learn how differently people lived back then, I have always been more interested in how differently they thought.

To this point: the story of the resurrection was a profound and radical intrusion into the cultural and religious landscape of the first-century Mediterranean. The Jews did not expect a resurrection in the middle of history; neither the Greeks nor the Romans expected a resurrection at all.² When the first Christians went out into the provinces of the Roman Empire, preaching Christ crucified and resurrected, they were preaching a message which was ridiculous at best, and abhorrent at worst. It is hard to imagine circumstances more adversarial than those facing the likes of Peter and Paul on their first missions; they were proclaiming the universal reign of a god who had forsaken his heavenly throne to put on human flesh (a laughable thought to the Greeks, and a blasphemous one to the Jews), died a humiliating death on a cross, and returned from death into the same body in which he had been killed. For a good example of how this would have been received by many of their hearers, see the link below to the Alexamenos graffito (this is a fascinating piece of history which deserves more attention than I can give it here). There was scarcely a group of people in the whole Roman world who would not have been scandalised by this preaching; and yet, somehow, in one of history's most inexplicable plot twists, it worked.

Fording the river

After this, the archbishop writes:

To claim then that Jesus is 'risen indeed' is to claim that we are never going to be able to speak completely adequately about Jesus as risen; we are in this sense out of our depth. And that is quite a good place to be in gospel terms. When Jesus encourages his disciples to 'Put out into deep water' (Luke 5.4), that's not just a word for the first century but a word for now.

For the sceptical reader, I would hope that this calls something to mind. "Religious" types (as some may be inclined to think of them) have a habit of taking things which should be profound and awe-inspiring and making them sound entirely flat and wholly uninspiring. There is no shortage of TED-talk sermons, cheesy evangelistic cliches, or cringe-inducing Facebook memes posted by people who are old enough to know better. The individuals responsible could learn a thing from the former archbishop.

I think that where religion is concerned, what really appeals to the open-minded agnostic, and even to the moderate-to-severe atheist, is genuine mystery. When a person who is not a Christian hears believers talking "Christianese" about God, the effect is alienating, and tends to make all subsequent discussion of religious ideas ring slightly hollow.³ However, in my experience, the idea of God becomes both more credible and more intriguing when it is made clear that God is ineffable- that is, not fully knowable by the human mind. I don't think anybody, Christian or atheist or of any other persuasion, is particularly interested in a version of God which simply amounts to a bigger, more powerful, more deep-voiced version of ourselves. This version of God makes frequent appearances in popular satire and mean-spirited comedy; it is also the version which is conveyed by believers in many an earnest conversation with unbelievers. It opens the door to all sorts of problems. both practical and theological. There must remain a place for the apophatic (see below) in all religious discourse and all evangelism; it helps us to remember that whenever we use the word "God", we are swimming in deep waters.

Granted, there is a tightrope to be walked here. For some people (I was one of them) the road to God will start, and likely continue for some distance, in the land of mystery and ineffability. Make God too human, too relatable- a doting father, a loyal friend, a benevolent guardian- and you will make Him unappealing. For some, these qualities have the effect of pushing away the things really sought after: majesty, profundity, gravitas, the sense of deep wells and echoing caverns, the gathering of thunderclouds in distant skies. But this is far from true in all cases. For many others, a God who is too great is unapproachable, sometimes (tragically) an object of fear. Here, the antidote is the selfsame God's humility; the ministry of Christ to the ill and the broken and the desperate, the tender hand of the healer, the leper tightly embraced, the unlovable loved without pretence. Somehow God is both greater than any royalty and yet closer than any friend. That is a mystery; but let us not lose God wholly in mystery.

And, concluding the section of the book which I wished to cover, we read:

The writers of the New Testament are struggling to find a way of speaking adequately concerning something for which there is no precedent, struggling to find a way of making real- for the reader and the hearer- a mystery. Not a mystery in the sense of something that is obscure, something deserving to be clarified; but a mystery in the sense of something too big to be contained. We are, in this context, very much the ant crawling round the foot of the elephant trying to work out what exactly is going on in this enormous reality up above. And even those most eloquent and exciting passages in the New Testament about the resurrection- like 1 Corinthians 15- still have about them that sense of being out of one's depth.

This is a good summary of the passage, and it aptly conveys the sense I wanted to capture. The ant and the elephant, indeed. The authors of the Gospels are in the position of having to try and explain something they didn't really understand. On Easter morning, something very big and very heavy collided with history and knocked it permanently off-course. In the aftermath, it was all the witnesses could do to tell everybody else about it. They did it clumsily, with words that didn't quite suffice for the size of it, and likely very keenly aware that they would never really be able to do it justice. They had seen the very moment at which the world exited one age and entered another, and had broken bread with the man who had ushered it in.

By considering these passages, I am not asking the reader to believe anything, or to accept anything, or to convert to anything. My intent is only to open the door to contemplation, by considering things which we tend to miss when we read the Gospels. I think that Williams does a very good job of teasing out that challenging aspect of strangeness which flies under the radar for so many readers. It's my hope that this leaves the reader with a desire for more, and a richer sense of what the Gospels are trying to tell us when they talk about the risen Christ. The works of the New Testament are the only contemporary witnesses we have to an event which forever altered the course of human history; they are worthy of our very serious consideration.

Resources

God with Us, by Rowan Williams: SPCK Publishing
An overview of Christology: Wikipedia | Christology
A good article about the miraculous catch: GotQuestions | 153 Fish
The donkey-headed god: Wikipedia | Alexamenos graffito
Apophatic theology: Wikipedia | Apophatic theology

All excerpts from Rowan Williams, God with Us, London: SPCK, 2017, pp. 79-81
All Bible citations are from the English Standard Version unless specified otherwise.

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