Phantasmagoria Three

The gospels tell of Jesus being crucified and then being raised again.  There are notions of there being sufficient "evidences" of Jesus' resurrection, and then there are notions of such "evidences" being lacking (if not impossible or--which is just as bad--unfalsifiable.)  Many people holding either view think of themselves as reasonable and responsible.

I am not about to make it any easier, and this is bound up with my emphasis on a "phantasmagoria."  One camp may think that the only reasonable explanation for the creation of the New Testament and for the history of the early Church was an actual Resurrection.  The other camp may think that human artifices--from unconscious grief hallucination all the way to deliberate falsification--are sufficient explanations for the Resurrection Myth.

But is it not undeniable that the notion of resurrection (or, more simply, "raising the dead") was commonplace in the New Testament milieu?  I don't mention this to bolster either aforementioned camp, but rather to bring attention to the fact that the camps arguing about the possibility of the resurrection of Jesus are arguing instead about the possibility of the substance or not of the canonical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead.  Rising from the dead means coming out of the grave.  It was virtually a given in the first-century Levant that people rose from the dead.  Jesus distributes the power to raise the dead to his followers, and he displays the power himself.  It was half-expected by some that he would essentially display that power in real time, climbing down from the cross.

When Jesus did die, it was--as we are told continually--a shocking and grief-inducing experience for his followers.  To believers, the despairing responses of the disciples are explained by their woeful incomprehension of Jesus' message--a bit of a stretch, since Jesus did not make his anticipated fate at all unclear.

To many sceptics, the shock and grief experienced by the disciples is enough to explain the disciples' conjuring of visions and messages from their departed leader.  In any event, the shock and grief are taken--by both camps, I will note--in concert with an untroubled acceptance of the supposedly unsurprising paralysis of the disciples.

Why such paralysis?  Weren't the disciples old hands at raising the dead?  If Matthew is to be believed, many tombs were opened at the death of Jesus.  It would seem almost impious for the believers not to have implored their Savior to rise as well.  Or if the disciples had hesitated to impose on their Master directly, would not the same shock-and-grief otherwise described have animated their inner or unconscious thoughts, perhaps to outward effect?

In short, both believers and sceptics have decided that the question at hand is whether Jesus caused his own resurrection.  As an intellectual exercise, of course, that is not the only discussable option.  Did the believers blame themselves for being unable to raise Jesus?  It might be contended that the disciples would think themselves presumptuous if they attempted to raise their Savior, but they were presumptuous enough--sad to say--to entertain the notion that their Savior had been defeated.

I mention these considerations because it seems to me that we are capable of a lamentable tendency to describe in searing terms the emotions of people in this or other similar situations, and simultaneously we are capable of blithely attributing to the participants the assimilation of some quite clear-cut philosophical positions.  Apparently the bereaved disciples had arrived at a compact to the effect that the only resurrection that might apply to Jesus would be a resurrection he himself effected.

This is folly.  The disciples were not merely shocked and grief-stricken.  If they were people at all like us, they were frantic.  They had not experienced merely a tragedy.  The hideously unnecessary sufferings of the two criminals would have been a tragedy.  What the disciples witnessed was a phantasmagoria.