In this post I will wonder what the purported witnesses might have seen, and what they might have thought about what they saw. This might be a more fundamental matter than it has been considered over the ages, since so much of the matter has been clouded by contentions about the nature of the Jesus who (supposedly) appeared, when it is the idea of his appearing--in certain ways he ostensibly chose--that is central to the matter of the propagation of his teaching. What exactly the witnesses saw is less important than why they were seeing it.
And what did they see? In the monumental scene from John 19, Pilate has Jesus brought out in the crown of thorns and the purple robe, and Pilate announces, "Behold the man!" (KJV). This, of course, is after "Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him. And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put on him a purple robe. And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands" (19:1-3). By Jew and by Gentile, Jesus was beaten even before he was condemned, and special, hideous attention seems to have been paid to injuring his face and head.
And Pilate has a sign affixed to the cross, as attested in one form or another in all four gospels. Matthew and Mark take it as the accusation against Jesus, that the sign calls him King of the Jews. John is slightly more discerning, and depicts the Jewish authorities protesting that "King of the Jews" is something other than the real accusation--that Jesus presented himself falsely as "King of the Jews." Additionally, Matthew and John have Jesus called "Jesus" on the sign--John even adding "of Nazareth"--though even "Jesus of Nazareth" would not have meant exclusively that "Joshua from the town of Nazareth who was called King."
It is difficult to escape the notion that Pilate, saying both of Jesus, "Behold the man!" and, later, "Behold your King!" was engaged in some measure in merely identifying the victim brought to him. It is sad enough that Christianity has spent two thousand years worshipping a beautiful, Caucasian Jesus; it is doubly regrettable that this fancied beauty is--against all logic--imagined to have survived the tortures. The Jesus of Christianity's messianic contentions, even the messiah of Isaiah 53:14 ("his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men") is bizarrely imagined to be recognizable after all that had been done to him.
Jesus after the crucifixion would have been torn, bloodied, bruised, dirtied with ground-in matter, twisted, swollen, and possibly toothless. And he would have appeared so in an age of great violence and--as so often recounted--myriad disfiguring and medically untreatable diseases. Jesus would neither have been so remarkable for his disfigurement, nor as identifiable as our remote imaginations would have him be. Moreover--and this is absolutely essential to the present argument--in John's account of Doubting Thomas, it is the actual evidence of actual injury that identifies Jesus. Jesus is wounded, not wondrously pristine.
And so our recounting of the gospels post-Resurrection can send us stumbling through stories of encounters with a messiah who could have been unrecognizable--perhaps grotesquely so--in a manner every bit as unsettling as the (truncated?) end of Mark, which presents us with an account of Jesus' triumph--and no Jesus appearances--and perhaps should leave us asking why we would require more.
In John, Mary Magdalene takes Jesus at first to be a gardener, until he speaks to her. That evening his appearance to the disciples commences with proof that his particular injuries were consistent with the crucifixion. The fact that Thomas needed such evidence eight days later does not mean that the same evidence was superfluous for the other disciples. And then of course John tells of still another halting identification of Jesus by the Sea of Tiberias.
Luke tells of the road to Emmaus that very Resurrection Day, and of how two disciples walked and talked at length with the post-trauma Jesus before recognizing him. Only with forewarning from the two--by now probably exhausted--disciples who hastened back to Jerusalem, are the main body of the disciples confronted by Jesus. Curiously (as it would seem) Jesus says to them, "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see" (24:39). The inspection of his feet does not seem so curious if it were possible that they had been spared the worst of the disfigurement.
And then there is Matthew, and Jesus' appearance to "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary" (28:1), who were hurrying from the tomb "in fear and great joy," having just seen a magnificent angel. "Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him" (28:9). Straining at their steps, in the dim light of a first-century Middle Eastern morning, and confronted suddenly by a male figure, it would be no small wonder that the women would see mostly his feet, feet that they had tended and placed themselves before.
Additionally, Matthew gives us perhaps the most puzzling passage of all: "Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted" (28:16-17). Of course, the most reasonable explanation for the doubts among "the eleven" would be if--as would be the general thrust of the collective gospels--the disciples' first encounter with the risen Jesus was on the mountain in Galilee. In that case, a nice handful of "post-Resurrection" gospel appearances would have to be deemed apocryphal.
I would prefer to address the matter in the vein I presented above. As I said of the post-resurrection Jesus, "it is the idea of his appearing--in certain ways he ostensibly chose--that is central to the matter of the propagation of his teaching. What exactly the witnesses saw is less important than why they were seeing it." If, as has been a theme of this blog, the gospels are meant as a winding-up of the Genesis account, then it is possible that the thrust of the gospels is the idealization of humanity as a recapitulation of Adam. I know this is far from a novel idea, but it has been explored far too much as a stepping-stone to organized Christianity, and far too little as an idea in itself.
Jesus said he would be present where two or three were gathered in his name, and Christianity has labored long over arguing about his name and about twos and threes and more. The common humanity involved in our mutual interactions--which I and others have postulated as the true "image of God"--has been less well explored. If Jesus were indeed concerned about the quality of our gatherings large and small--a concern I am not about to deny him--then the particulars of his personality and identification might be less important than his representation of common humanity.
Indeed, that is what we see in his post-resurrection appearances, which I have just attempted to describe. Looming in that description is the notion that the barely-recognizable Jesus was a representation of his barely-recognizable presence in all of humanity. In a terrifying dawn, Mary Magdalene beseeches an unidentified gardener--as she imagines--to act upon a decent urge to help her. It is perhaps the most poignant of the post-resurrection exchanges, but it is not unique in possessing great humanity.
The disciples, in their gladness with or without Thomas, were nonetheless burdened with their fears and doubts, which Jesus set about allaying. None of that meant that Peter--and, by necessary extension, all of us--were to be spared the agony of the interrogation by the Sea of Tiberias--the thrust of which is the duties we owe to all of humanity.
The disciples' positive response to the as-yet-unidentified stranger on the shore of the sea, the two disciples' embrace of the stranger on the road to Emmaus, the mixture of joy and fear and hope and doubt in the male and female followers of Jesus--all of this bespeaks a concern for the welfare of others, typified in light of the gospels by our identification of our collective neighbors with the personality of Jesus.
As horrible as it is to contemplate, all of this comports with a tortured and disfigured Jesus walking among his brother and sister human beings--as indeed, in every prudent implication, we must think of him doing even now.
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