[Dialogue] Spong Easter Revisited

[KroegerD at aol.com]

May 3, 2006 
Easter  Revisited

The biblical narratives purporting to tell the story of Easter have always  
held a particular fascination for me. As early as the summer of 1959 I gave a  
series of lectures on the gospel accounts of the resurrection at the Kanuga  
Conference Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina. From that starting point  
until today my interest has never subsided. In 1980 I wrote “The Easter Moment,
”  but even after completing that book, now long out of print, my curiosity 
did not  end and I found myself returning to this subject time after time. 
Perhaps I  intuitively knew that I had not yet unlocked the mystery surrounding 
this  central event in the Christian story. As I got more and more deeply into 
the  subject of Easter, it became so obvious that the resurrection texts of the 
 gospels were not written to be read literally. Their language, words and  
concepts are far too fanciful for that level of understanding. Earthquakes, for  
example, have to do with the collision of tectonic plates. They are not sent 
by  a theistic deity to announce earthly events like the dawn of Easter. 
Angels do  not descend out of the sky to roll back a stone securing the tomb, while 
causing  the Temple guards to fall unconscious. In the Emmaus road story in 
Luke, Jesus  is portrayed as having the power to materialize and dematerialize 
at will. In  John’s gospel he is said to be able to walk through the walls 
into a locked and  barred upper room. In the book of Acts he has the power to 
defy gravity to rise  up into the sky to return to God. In our post-Newtonian 
world such descriptions  cannot be literalized without destroying everything we 
know about the natural  laws of our universe. These methods of describing the 
mystery and wonder of the  resurrection must point us to a different dimension 
of reality or they are  nonsensical concepts worthy only of rejection.  
What intrigued me most was that these stories were developed because an  
incredible life-changing power, that was to the writers of the gospels  
indisputable, had to be communicated. It is that experience that needs to be  explored 
far more than the way they tried to explain it. This means we must find  a way 
to get beneath the literal words of the Easter story.  
We are told in Mark that when Jesus was arrested all of his disciples forsook 
 him and fled. This apostolic abandonment was so public that the New 
Testament  felt it essential to provide the disciples with an appropriate rationale 
for  their behavior, so we read that they fled in order to fulfill the 
scriptures.  However, something clearly happened to bring these deserters back that  
transformed them so totally that most of them were willing to die before they  
would deny this life-changing experience.  
Long before the gospels were written, what they said about their  
understanding of “the resurrection” was communicated in two primary ecstatic  
utterances, one negative: “death cannot contain him;” and one positive: “we have  seen 
the Lord.” In time the negative utterance seems to have evolved into  
narratives of a grave, the symbol of death, that was not able to contain him and  so 
we have a spate of late developing empty tomb stories. In a similar manner,  
the positive utterance seems to have evolved into a variety of narratives  
describing his appearances to various people. These descriptive stories,  however, 
are filled with inconsistent and contradictory details.  
It is also a fact that before the gospels were written, some 40-70 years  
after the crucifixion, Jesus had already been interpreted through a wide variety  
of messianic images, so that the Jesus of history had been submerged inside  
these images hiding his humanity from us even to this day. He was called “Son 
of  David,” and “Son of Man.” He was known as the “new Moses” and the “new 
Elijah.”  He was likened to the “suffering servant” of II Isaiah and to the “
shepherd  king” of II Zechariah. He was said to be symbolic of the 
sacrificial lamb of Yom  Kippur that brought atonement and of the paschal lamb of 
Passover that broke the  power of death. Whatever Easter was grew out of an 
experience that was so  profound it made these images seem appropriate. Yet it did not 
hide the memory  people had of the disciples before and after their 
transforming experience. They  remembered that Peter, who confessed Jesus as the Christ 
at Caesarea Philippi,  then argued with him about what that meant and 
received Jesus’ rebuke. They  recalled James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who 
schemed to receive places of  honor in the coming kingdom. They remembered 
apostolic defection, betrayal and  abandonment. Separating the pre-Easter memory of 
the disciples from the  post-Easter leaders they became cries out for an 
explanation. Gospels written  after Easter are clearly filled with pre-Easter 
recollections. Easter also  changed dramatically the way the disciples thought about 
God. After Easter they  saw the human Jesus as part of who God is. The issue 
for the interpreter is how  to get from biblical descriptions of Easter, 
recorded in magical words and  miraculous concepts, to the power of the Easter 
experience that clearly changed  both the disciples’ lives and their understanding 
of God. That was the territory  I needed to explore.  
With these questions still disturbing my mind and demanding the attention of  
my study life, I received in 1992, as if a gift from heaven, news of my 
election  to be the Quatercentenary Scholar at Cambridge University in the United 
Kingdom.  This appointment would give me five months with no interruptions to 
research,  study and write about the resurrection. For those months I lived 
quite literally  in both the University Library and the Theological Library of 
Cambridge. When  that semester was over, my wife and I took a newly composed 
manuscript and spent  two weeks vacationing in Scotland near Balmoral Palace. In 
the long daylight  hours of the Scottish summer we began the process of 
editing this book for  publication. It came out eighteen months later, under the 
title, “Resurrection:  Myth or Reality? A Bishop’s Search for the Origins of 
Christianity.”  
In that book I went into the biblical texts of Easter asking four basic  
questions. Where were the disciples when Easter dawned? In whom did Easter dawn?  
When did Easter dawn? In what context did Easter dawn? By working on these 
four  questions, I hoped, like any competent detective, both to understand and to 
 enter the power of the experience while not being bound to the literalness 
of  the 8th, 9th and 10th decade explanations that are found in the gospels. It 
was  like walking a theological razor’s edge for me, but that is often the 
only means  to establish truth.  
In many ways, the “where” question was the most important and, after  
exhaustive study, I came to the conclusion that it was in Galilee, not  Jerusalem, 
that the meaning of Easter first dawned. By inference that is  certainly the 
witness of Paul, by stated expectation the witness of Mark, and,  by his 
descriptive account, the witness of Matthew. It was Luke who first  shifted the focus 
of Easter away from Galilee and placed it in Jerusalem and we  can document 
just where Luke changed Mark to suit his purposes. John agrees with  Luke and 
makes Jerusalem the major focus of his Easter story in Chapter 20.  However, 
John then adds in Chapter 21 an addendum to his gospel, in which he  records a 
powerful episode that occurs, he says, in Galilee. This Galilean  story, 
however, has a much earlier, original sound to it. The weight of biblical  evidence 
clearly points to Galilee as the primary setting, which immediately  makes the 
Jerusalem traditions later developments in the Easter story. We now  can 
recognize that all of the empty tomb stories, as well as the accounts of a  
resuscitated risen Christ who walks, talks, interprets scripture, eats and  offers 
his flesh for inspection fall into the secondary Jerusalem category. The  
Galilee stories are far more authentic, far less magical and give evidence of  
being primary. That is clue number one.  
In whom did Easter dawn? Through whose eyes was the raised Christ first seen? 
 Again, there is great conflict in the gospel tradition. Was it Peter, the 
women,  Cleopas or Magdalene? Once the location is fixed in Galilee, the women, 
Cleopas  and Magdalene fade for each is connected with the Jerusalem tradition 
and Peter  emerges as the central player in the Easter drama. When that is 
established then  all the Peter stories in the gospels need to be looked at for 
hints of the  resurrection, including the gospel note that Peter was the head 
of the disciple  band, which, I believe, is a direct reflection of his primacy 
in the Easter  experience.  
When did the experience of Easter dawn? The symbol “three days” has bound us 
 for far too long. Once I understood that this time reference was developed  
liturgically to make the Easter celebration occur on the Sabbath immediately  
following the Passover, a whole new vista opened to me. I now believe that a  
significant amount of time separated crucifixion from resurrection, no less 
than  six months and maybe even a year would be my present guess.  
What was the context in which the experience of Easter dawned? That is the  
hardest one to tie down but hints are everywhere that it is related to a  
liturgical happening. The words, recorded in Luke, “He was known to us in the  
breaking of the bread,” became crucial to my detective story. Resurrection and  
Eucharist are somehow clearly linked.  
So I assembled my clues. Whatever Easter was originally, it had considerable  
power. That experience occurred to people in Galilee. Peter seems to stand at 
 its center. The time frame must be stretched from three days to at least six 
 months and perhaps even to a year. Finally, it had something to do with the  
reenactment of the liturgical meal, for as Paul said in his letter to the  
Corinthians long before any gospel was written, “As often as you eat this bread  
and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Next week 
 I will try to put these clues together and build a coherent narrative about  
Easter. Stay tuned.  
John Shelby Spong 
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