EASTER

Thomas Sheehan
Department of Religious Studies
Stanford University
April 18, 2005

All rights reserved.

The Word Alone Network Annual Convention

St. Andrews Lutheran Church
Mahtomedi, Minnesota

Awake, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and the Christ will enlighten you.
Ephesians 5:14
 EASTER
Thomas Sheehan

INTRODUCTION
The task.
Distinguishing Gods Word and ours.
A common faith, different dialects.

PART ONE: PRESUPPOSITIONS

FIRST PRESUPPOSITION: THE N.T. THEOLOGIZES HISTORY

The historical-hermeneutical method: both history and faith.
The challenge: not reading theology back into history
Summary and corollaries: Matthew 27:51-54, Acts 1:9

SECOND PRESUPPOSITION: FAITH AS INTERPRETATION

Ordinary knowledge as an interpretation of historical experience.
Faith as a God-inspired interpretation of historical experience.
Even Easter faith (John 20: estraph. tina zteis; strapheisa)
Gods revelation our response; Gods apocalypse our acceptance

Conclusion to Part One.

 PART TWO: PAUL AND EASTER

HISTORICAL RESEARCH ON YESHUA

John Meier, A Marginal Jew .
Eschatological prophet, charismatic healer, teacher of the Law
The power of God: already arriving, soon to be manifest
Prophet and martyr

EASTER IN THE EARLY YESHUA-MOVEMENT

Historical experiences of revelation
Easter faith: from revelation, not sight or reason.
The three moments: the Easter factum; revelation of it; faith in it.
Earliest articulations of the Easter factum
exaltation (Phil 2:9) hyper-hypssis
justified in the Spirit (I Tim 3:16) edikaith
Other articulations
being awakened (I Cor 15:4) egersis
being made to stand up (Rom 1:4) anastasis

PAUL AND EASTER

On rightly dividing Paul from the Gospels
proclamation and narrative; kerygma and story
Specifically: the Easter factum and Gods revelation of it.
Yeshua made manifest by God (phth) as the Christ : I Cor 15:5.
Gods revelation (apokalypsis) of Yeshua as Son of God Gal 1:12
Damascus revelation: visible? vision? trance? (Acts 22:17-18)
Same Easter factum, different theologies

CLOSING

A thought experiment: Caesarea Maritima, A.D. 59

On letting Gods Word-Act be the Word Alone
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EASTER

Thomas Sheehan

Thanks. My special thanks to Pastor Mark Chavez for his generous

welcome, to Ms. Anne Gleason and the staff of St. Andrews for their hospitality,
and to all of you of Word Alone for your willingness to hear out a Roman Catholic
and a member of the Jesus Seminar.

Opening prayer. In the Catholic tradition, before speaking we are

accustomed to pray for wisdom and humility. And so:

By the grace of God, source of all blessing, may we

embrace the divine Word,
understand our human words,
and have the wisdom to know the difference,
so that we may both believe and understand
Gods awakening of Jesus from the dead.

We pray
In the Body of Christ and in Gods Holy Spirit.
Amen.

***
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INTRODUCTION

The task. Today we are trying to understand the relation between Scripture
and Easter faith. But faith in Easter preceded the Christian Scriptures by two
decades, and helped to form them. So more precisely our task is to understand how
Easter faith got expressed in human language. I will focus specifically on Pauls
expression of Easter. My purpose is not to tell you what Easter means so much as
to make some crucial distinctions, so that in this afternoons meeting we might
work together to understand the meaning of Easter.1

A necessary distinction. The most important distinction to make is between

Gods Word and mans word: between Gods creative, efficacious Word on the one
hand, and human words and interpretations on the other. We must understand the
validity of both and see how the two work together. It is easy to confuse Gods
Word and mans word. You may have heard of Governor Miriam Amanda (Ma)
Ferguson of Texas (1875-1961), who back in the 1920s opposed the use of the
Spanish language in Texas kindergartens. She gave her reason based on the New
Testament: If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, its good enough for
Texas school children. So, yes, we will have to make a few distinctions.

Diffferent Christian dialects. Within Christian faith, any human language is

a finite effort to understand Gods Word. And within the languages of Christian
faith there are different dialects, each with its own grammar, intonation, and
rhetoric. None of these religious dialects is entirely adequate to Gods Word, and
yet Christians believe that these dialects as a whole are united by Gods Word,
which transcends all of them and yet resounds in each of them. Today you have
invited Craig Koester and me to talk about the resurrection. He and I share a
common Christian language but speak slightly different dialects: his Lutheran,
mine Roman Catholic. And we share a common idiom in our scholarship while
speaking slightly different dialects. He uses the work of Raymond E. Brown and
others to understand the Gospel of John. I use the work of John P. Meier and
Joseph A. Fitzmyer to understand Jesus and Paul.

Historical-hermeneutical method. But scholarly dialects aside, we both use

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the historical-critical method in studying the New Testament. However, I usually

avoid the term historical-critical, because the latter word could be misunderstood
a negative attitude regarding Scripture. I prefer to call my work historical-
hermeneutical scholarship. It makes use of scientific history on the one hand and a
variety of interpretations on the other in order to understand first-century Christian
faith. What, then, do I mean by historical-hermeneutical method? Let us find out by
watching it at work. I divide this talk into two parts. Part One discusses two
presuppositions that I bring to scholarship on Easter. Part Two presents some
distinctions relevant to understanding Easter in Paul.

PART ONE: TWO PRESUPPOSITIONS

FIRST PRESUPPOSITION

First presupposition stated. My first presupposition is that the New

Testament is a theologization of history. It contains both history and theology; and
it uses the theology to understand the history. Let me begin by once again
distinguishing between Gods creative Word and our discursive words.

Gods Word. Christian faith holds that Gods creative Word is God himself,
acting efficaciously outside of himself and revealing himself in that efficacious act.
Gods Word is one, instantaneous, and eternal. It is also transitive and effective: it
brings about what it is about. Gods Word is not verbal but a silent divine act from
all eternity. Let us call it Gods Word-Act, as in the Hebrew ha dabar. On the
side of believers, Gods Word-Act effects deeds such as the cross, spoken words
such as the parables, and written words such as the New Testament. Those forms
and modalities that Gods Word-Act brings about are also Gods Word but, as Karl
Barth points out, they are Gods Word only in an extended and analogous sense.2
The distinction here is between (1) Gods one, instantaneous, and efficacious
Word-Act of creation and revelation and (2) the plural words and forms that Gods
Word-Act takes on in human history.
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Human words. By contrast, human discursive words are the finite way of
making sense of Gods Word-Act and of responding to it. Just as Gods Word-Act
is a single silent deed, so likewise human words, before they become articulate
sounds or written letters, are silent acts of synthesizing and understanding.
Examples would include Pauls inner thoughts before he dictated his Letter to the
Romans; or Martin Luthers quiet insights before he composed his 1515-16
commentary on Romans; or your own silent faith in the Word-Act revealed in that
epistle. Because God is first in everything, no human words whether Pauls
dictated words, or Luthers written commentary, or your faith stand outside the
power of Gods Word-Act. Rather, Pauls and Luthers and your human words are
all, in different ways, the effects of Gods creative and revealing Word-Act.

Using the historical-hermeneutical method. In turning to biblical exegesis,

we see that the historical-hermeneutical method is a scholarly way of
understanding Gods Word-Act (e.g., Easter) by understanding the New
Testaments faith-testimonies to it, When scholars, whether believers or not,
employ the method, they presuppose the obvious: that Scripture is history
understood through a faith-hermeneutic. So we need to distinguish between history
and the faith-interpretations of history in the Christian Scriptures.

Both history and a theologization of history. On the one hand, the New
Testament certainly contains history. It is about real events: deeds performed by
human beings or actions that happened to them, in the first century A.D. Insofar as
it records those events (whether accurately or not), the New Testament is about
history. On the other hand, the New Testament is about history in a very specific
way. It is concerned chiefly with proclaiming salvation; and it records historical
events not for their own sake but only for the sake of a faith-interpretation of those
events. By a faith-interpretation I mean a theology in the broadest sense. The
New Testament is a theologization of history a reading of history through
theology whether the theology takes the form of proclamation, ethical
exhortation, historicizing narrative, pastoral guidance, imaginative apocalypse, or
proto-systematic doctrine..

Two moments of historical-hermeneutical method. Parallel to the twofold

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nature (historical and theological) of the New Testament, the historical-

hermeneutical method operates both as historical science and as a heremeneutics of
first-century faith. On the one hand, the scholar investigates all the available
historical data on Yeshua and the Yeshua-movement. (And from now on, let us
give Jesus his own historical, Aramaic name, Yeshua, rather than Jesus, our
Anglicization of the Greek word, Isous, which he probably never used.) On the
other hand, the scholar carries out an interpretation of that data, specifically a
second-order hermeneutics of the first-order faith-hermeneutics generated by the
scripture writers. That is: (1) In the first order, the first-century authors of the New
Testament interpreted Yeshua and the Yeshua-movement in terms of their faith in
Gods Word-Act. (2) And today, in the second order the historical-hermeneutical
scholar attempts to understand those first-order interpretations, either for the sake
of secular historical scholarship or perhaps to apply them to our own situation for
the sake of religious instruction. Whether practiced by believers or non-believers,
historical-hermeneutical method maintains a strict distinction between the
historical events and the Scriptures faith-interpretation of those events. Some
scholars (both believers and unbelievers) will be interested only in the historical
events for example, how Yeshua was understood before his death. Others may be
interested only in the New Testaments Jewish-Christian theology. Still others will
try to conjugate the two in order to understand the transitions from Yeshuas own
self-understanding to the disciples understanding of Yeshua after his death. In any
case, only by maintaining the strict distinction between faith and theology can
scholars today if they choose to do so synthesize their understanding of the
history and the theology into either (1) a secular-historical understanding of how
first-century Jews and Gentiles thought God had acted in their lives or (2) a
religious understanding, or even (3) a faith-understanding of that first-century
belief and of how God could continue to act in their own lives.

Can Christians accept history? When it comes to Yeshua and the New
Testament, the entrance-level challenge today is this: Can contemporary Christians
make the necessary distinction between (1) first-century history and (2) the
Scriptures faith-interpretations of that history? That is: Can believers learn to
distinguish not separate, but distinguish (1) the historical Jewish Yeshua, along
with all that he did (and did not) say and do (2) from Pauls or the Synoptics or
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Johns later faith-interpretations of Yeshua? Or are Christians unfortunately

programmed to blur the two, to read the post-mortem theologies about Yeshua
back into the pre-mortem historical life of Yeshua?

Popular piety vs. scholarship. We should be clear: There is nothing terribly

wrong with confusing history and theology that in popular piety. But when it is
done in in Christian scholarship, it is disastrous. Consider an analogy. There is
nothing wrong with making grammatical mistakes when you write a passionate
letter to your beloved. (Luther said that even The Holy Spirit does not always
observe the strict rules of grammar.3) But it would be a problem if you insisted
that everyone else had to write English in your idiosyncratic grammar or otherwise
be excluded from the English-speaking community. In our daily lives of piety and
devotion we may well confuse history and theology. But when professional
Christian theologians and preachers insist on the confusion, or declare that the
Christian message requires such an untutored conflation, they are betraying their
vocations as scholars and preachers. They are failing to rightly divide the word as
II Timothy 2:15 says teachers and pastors should.

Difficult not to read back. To be honest, many Christians find it difficult

not to read later first-century theology back into earlier first-century history. They
find it hard to avoid writing the later theology over the earlier history, like a
palimpsest. Some Christians get defensive when they hear that some liberal
theological grinch has stolen yet another figurine from their Christmas crib. First
the ox and the ass were declared to be unhistorical. Then the three wise men went
out the door. (By the way, you have probably noticed that Matthew never says
there were three wise men there could have been thirty-three).4 Next thing you
know, those liberal theologians will take away the Slaughter of the Innocents and
what fun will Christmas be without those two-year-olds getting cut to pieces?5

Summary. My first presupposition is that the New Testament is a

theologization of history that is, it understands itself as a faith-interpretation of
the historical events surrounding Yeshua of Nazareth. This entails that, as scholars,
preachers, and educated laity, we must respect the distinction between (1) the New
Testament as a set of faith-interpretations, and (2) the historical events that
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preceded such interpretations by several decades and received them only later.

Some corollaries The historical events that transpired with Yeshua were
available to direct empirical observation back then, just as they are available to
indirect historical observation today. Then, as now, they had their own secular,
empirical parameters. Likewise, then as now, they were susceptible of different
interpretations of equal validity, depending on the interpretative framework of the
observer. For example, good and faithful Jews who observed the events
surrounding Yeshua understood them differently and legitimately so. Even the
disciples disagreed among themselves about the meaning of those events. Long
after the fact, Josephus gave those events a valid historical reading. Right in the
midst of the events, Pontius Pilate gave them a valid political reading. And from
his Realpolitik perspective, even Caiaphas gave the Holy Week events a valid
common-sense interpretation when he observed, Firebrands like this Yeshua can
bring Rome down on us with terrible consequences. It might be better for one man
to die than for hundreds of thousands of Jews to be murdered, raped, and enslaved
(cf. John 11:50). Quite a prescient statement. Think ahead four decades to the
Jewish revolt and the fate of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

Respecting history. Respecting history will not save us. But disrespecting
history will not save the faith and it makes for very bad theology. As John L.
McKenzie wisely noted, God is not well served by telling lies on his behalf.6 In
the Roman Catholic tradition it is a matter of principle, based on revelation, that
faith does not and cannot conflict with right reasoning, and that good theology
cannot conflict with good science. The reason is that God is the First Truth, the
author of all truth, whether the truth of faith or reason, of theology or science. The
acceptance or rejection of that principle has a strong impact on how we understand
and articulate Easter.

Matthew 27:51-54. With articles of faith other than the Easter, Christians
have largely succeeded in distinguishing empirical history and faith-interpretations.
For example, not every Christian today will insist that Matthew was recounting
actual historical events when he declared at chapter 27:52-53 that when Yeshua
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died, many Jews were raised from the dead improbably beating Yeshua to the
punch by three days and hid out in their cold tombs until Christs was raised, and
only then felt free to leave those tombs, enter Jerusalem, and scare the socks off
their relatives.

Acts 1:9. Nor will every Christian today insist that Yeshua physically and
spatially ascended through a cloud and into heaven some forty-three days after his
death first of all, because only one of the four Gospels mentions an ascension,
and not necessarily a spatial one (Luke 24:51); second, because we no longer think
of Heaven as spatially up (wherever up might be in todays cosmos); and third,
because if Yeshua had left the Mount of Olives on April 20, A.D. 30 at the speed of
light (186,000 miles per second), today in the year 2005 he would still be caught
within through the Milky Way, whizzing past the 200 billion suns of our one
galaxy without having yet reached one of the 200 billion other galaxies he would
have to get past to reach Heaven. No, both Matthews text and Acts 1:9 are
theologizations. They express Christian faith that the crucified Yeshua is with and
of God.

SECOND PRESUPPOSITION

The first presupposition about the New Testament as a theologization of

history leads us to a second: According to Christian theology, faith is a God-
inspired interpretation of historical human experience.

Knowledge. Let us begin with ordinary experience with human

knowledge. Knowing does not mean mentally photographing something. It consists
not in merely seeing and recording a datum, but in seeing it as something, making
sense of it, taking it as this or that. To know is to attribute a meaning to what we
encounter and thus to understand it. All knowledge is judgment (i.e., attributing a
meaning to something); every judgment is an interpretation; and all interpretations
are open-ended and improvable, because no one gets it all right all the time. As
James G. D. Dunn writes: The facts are not to be identified as data; they are
always an interpretation of the data.7
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Examples. If the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler had succeeded, would his
death have been murder or justifiable homicide? When an Israeli Mossad agent
kills a member of Hamas preemptively and extra-judicially, is that murder or
justifiable homicide? Was Truman a war criminal for bombing Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945? In each case, the answer is a matter of interpretation,
and as Craig Koester points out in his book on Johns Gospel, The interpreters
frame of reference plays a crucial role in the interpretation. . . .8

True and false. To say that human knowledge is always an interpretation

does not mean that it is never true. It can be true, and it can be false. Gods
knowledge, on the other hand, is always true, because it is never an interpretation
of data but always a creation of data. That why we may not confuse our temporal
words with Gods eternal Word-Act. Nor should we confuse the inspired words of
Scripture with the divine Word-Act that those words reveal. Gods Word-Act is not
subject to interpretation, but the words of Scripture certainly are. In fact they do not
become an efficacious revelation until, under grace, someone sees those words as
communicating Gods Word-Act.

Faith as interpretation. We move now from knowledge to faith. Faith,

according to Christian theology, is a God-inspired interpretation of historical
human experience. Here, most emphatically, seeing is not believing. The wondrous
deeds that God did through Yeshua (Acts 2:22) were not always seen as miracles.
even by Yeshuas own disciples. And the people who saw those deeds were right to
be cautious. There were many charismatic healers in Yeshuas time, and many false
Christs, some quite possibly from Beelzebub. The people certainly saw Yeshuas
deeds, but they did not always see those deeds as the work of God.

Faith in Easter: John 20. Even Easter, the Word-Act that God did in
Yeshua, was not immediately understood by Yeshuas most devoted followers.
Note that in John 20, when Mary Magdalene stands outside the empty tomb on the
first day of the week, she has to turn around twice, once in order to see a man, and a
second time, under Gods power, in order to see the man as the Christ , i.e., to
believe. After looking into the empty tomb, Mary turns around (verse 14: estraph
eis ta opis) and sees only a gardener He asks her, Why are you crying? Whom do
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you seek? (tina zteis;). She responds to his question with her own: Where have
you laid him? (pou ethkas auton;) Finally, and only when the man calls her by
her own name Miriam does she turn a second time (verse 16: strapheisa) and
see the man as the Christ of God.

Compare John 1. Compare this Easter scene in the garden (John 20) with
the parallel scene at the River Jordan (John 1). There is it is Yeshua who turns
(verse 38: strapheis) to find Andrew and another disciple following him. He asks
them not Whom do you seek? but What do you seek?(ti zteite;). They see only
a man, and do not yet see him as the Christ, much less as divine; but like Mary
Magdalene in chapter 20, they too address him as Rabbi. And like herthey respond
to his question with their own: Where do you dwell? (pou meneis;). Yeshua
invites them to come and see (erchesthe kai opsesthe).They do, and they believe,
that is, they see him as the Christ.

A parallel. The parallel between the two texts is as unmistakable as is their

difference. On the one hand John chapter 1: strapheis, then ti zteite; and then,
after seeing where he dwells, understanding Yeshua as the Christ. On the other
hand John chapter 20: estraph, then tina ztei; and then strapheisa again and
Marys seeing of the Christ. The scene at the River Jordan is already the beginning
of Easter faith. Chapter twenty confirms and fulfills that faith by making explicit,
in Marys double turn, that believing is not merely seeing but, under the power of
grace, seein as. (The point is reinforced at 20:29, the scend with doubting
Thomas.). Only under the power of Gods Word-Act is faith in that Word-act
possible.

Revelation of Word-Act meaning. The point is this: In order to happen at

all, faith requires that God reveal the meaning of the historical data. Only then can
one take that data as meaning Gods Word-Act. (If Christians could see and
understand the divine meaning of historical data on their own, without Gods
revelation of that meaning, their act would not be faith but a human work.) The
Greek word for revelation is apokalypsis; and so we may say that faith means
accepting Gods apocalypse, or responding to Gods revelation, i.e., embracing
Gods Word-Act when it is made manifest. But first the revelation, then the
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response; first the apocalypse, and then, empowered by that apocalypse, the
acceptance of it, which we call faith.

A concluding example. The destruction of the Second Temple on the 7th of

August (the 10th of Ab), A.D. 70, is a firm datum of history. And by our human
lights and reason, we can arrive at various meanings of it the geopolitical, the
ethnographic, the historical meanings, for example . But Mark, Matthew, and Luke
interpreted it in another light, in terms of what they understood as Gods revelation
of his Word-Act in history. Their faith in that revelation led them to interpret the
destruction of the Temple as a sign of the coming Parousia of the Christ. The
challenge today is: Can Christians hold to both sets of meanings without confusing
them, the empirically based meaning and the faith-based meaning? Can Christians
believe that God, as the First Truth is the final source of both historical science and
theology? and that we need not twist science to fit revelation? that God is not a
God of double truth?9

PART TWO: PAUL AND EASTER

Divisio. This second part unfolds in three sections: First and briefly, the
historical Yeshua of Nazareth, apart from Easter. Second, Easter in the early
Yeshua movement. And third, Easter in Paul. My goal is to continue making
distinctions so that this afternoon we can bring those issues together into a common
understanding of Easter.

1. THE HISTORICAL YESHUA APART FROM EASTER

John Meiers A Marginal Jew. For the historical data about Yeshua I draw
only upon Christian scholars; and by virtually universal consensus, the best
historical work on Yeshua is Father John Meiers massive treatise A Marginal Jew.
three volumes already, and soon to become four. That is the work I will briefly
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summarize now. It is clear from what he has written that John Meier, a Catholic
priest teaching at Notre Dame University, believes that Yeshua is Christ, Lord, and
the Son of God, the divine and incarnate savior of humankind. But Meier is also a
historical scholar, and that is why he has written these superb volumes.

Prophet, healer, teacher. History shows Yeshua to have been understood by

others and to have understood himself as three things: a prophet, a healer, and a
teacher, indeed probably as Gods final prophet whose role was to prepare for the
definitive appearance of God. Yeshua had one overriding message: the Power of
God, which we usually call the Kingdom of God. In Yeshuas preaching, Gods
Power, his Word-Act, is entirely for empowering human beings; and it has already
arrived in a hidden but real way for those who accept it in trust, and will soon
arrive fully when God appears in glory to judge the wicked and bless the faithful.
As the final prophet (like the hoped-for new Elijah), Yeshua declares the definitive
or eschatological message of Gods in-breaking Power. As a charismatic healer
(like the historical Elijah and Elisha), Yeshua gives evidence of Gods in-breaking
power by the mighty deeds God works through him. And as an authoritative
teacher (like Moses), Yeshua interprets Halakah in a much more user-friendly way
than did some Pharisees of the time.

Prophet and Martyr. As a prophet, Yeshua is also a martyr. A prophet

does not predict the future so much as speak for God in the present, as Yeshua did.
And that makes him a martyr (Greek martys), not someone who dies for what he
professes so much as one who lives what he professes and bears witness to it
even unto death if necessary. Yeshua was a prophet-martyr who, as far as we can
tell, trusted entirely in the in-breaking Power of God, right up to the end, even to
the point of being tortured to death for that belief. This is what Yeshuas early
followers called the faith of Yeshua.10

Yeshuas purpose. The available historical data shows that Yeshuas

purpose was to gather faithful Jews together in preparation for the full in-break of
Gods Power. He manifested no intention of founding any religion that would
supercede Judaism (much less the papacy and episcopal order that is so dear to my
own tradition). History gives no evidence that Yeshua intended to die a death of
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substitutionary atonement for the sins of humankind. His one and only concern was
the Power of God, already arriving and soon to be gloriously manifest.

Disturbing news. This brief report on the historical Yeshua which

represents the consensus of virtually all leading scholars in this field may be
disturbing to Christians who are unfamiliar with the results of historical research on
Yeshua. But if Christians learn to distinguish and refuse to conflate historical
data and the faith-interpretation of that data, they can easily see that faith is in no
way imperiled by such a historical report. I am reminded of the old priest in Ireland
who was required to take a brush-up course in current Scripture scholarship. He
was, of course, shocked by what he learned. He returned from the course to his
small parish and the next Sunday mounted the pulpit. Ach, says he, Im afraid
Ive got very bad news for you. Last week I learned that our Lord Jesus Christ
who I always thought was a good Catholic was in fact a Jew! (Groans of
disbelief from the parishioners.) Well, Jesus, maybe. But not his Sacred Mother!

2. EASTER IN THE EARLY YESHUA-MOVEMENT

Claims of historical experiences. The New Testament is utterly clear in its

historical claims that soon after the murder of Yeshua which occurred
presumably on the 7th of April (or 16th of Nisan), A.D. 30 God manifested
Yeshua to well over five hundred Jews in various revelations (in the Greek plural,
apokalypseis). In each such revelational moment, God showed Yeshua as: the
exalted one, whom God had rescued from the dead, and who would soon bring
Gods powerful reign visibly to earth Yeshua as exalted, alive, and to come.11 The
record is clear: the early adherents of the Yeshua-movement declared that they had
had real experiences at specific moments in time. They understood these
experiences not as hallucinations or ghostly apparitions or cases of mass hysteria,
but as historical, personal experiences which they understood as Gods revelation
of Yeshua as the living Messiah to come.12

The three moments of Easter. Faith, we said, is the acceptance of Gods

apokalypsis, the response of personal trust in Gods revelation. First the revelation,
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then the response. First the apokalypsis, then ones acceptance of it. But prior to
the revelation, there must be something to reveal and that something is the
prior factum, the divine fact of Gods Word-Act. Easter, therefore, is comprised of
three distinct moments, which we must not confuse. (1) Before everything, there is
Gods supernatural, eternal factum, his Word-Act. (2) Then, within time, there is
Gods revelation of that factum. (3) Finally, also within time, there is the human
response to Gods revelation of the factum. Easter is comprised of all three
moments: (1) Gods Word-Act; (2) Gods apokalysis of that Word-Act; and (3) the
human acceptance of it. The first moment, of course, lies outside space and time.
The second and third moments occur within this world and its history.

The appearances. What are usually called the Easter appearances are
better understood as Gods manifestations of Yeshua as the living Christ, within
history and to specific people for example, Cephas, James, and Paul.13 Those
divine manifestations occurred within the disciples historical experience and are
inseparable from those experiences. Cephas, James, and Paul understood those
historical experiences as Gods definitive revelation of the Easter factum, of what
Gods Word-Act had effected in Yeshua. And faith was their response to Gods
revelation of that factum. Under the power of those apocalypses, they accepted the
historical Yeshua as what God showed him to be, the one in whom the fullness of
God dwells (Col. 1:19).

Faith is from revelation, not sight or reason. The disciples could not have
seen the Easter factum on their own. If it were not for Gods apocalyptic revelation,
they could have neither known nor accepted Yeshua as the living Messiah. Or to
reverse the point, if they had seen Yeshua as the living Christ, with their own eyes
and by their own natural lights, if they had seen natural evidence of the Easter
factum empirical sight, physical touch it would not have been an act of faith but
a work of reason, and therefore not salvific. And of course the various Easter texts
never claim such empirical evidence, no matter how rich and elaborate the later
Gospel stories might become. Those imaginative stories always show the disciples
as doubting and struggling and not getting it until God enlightens them. Those
texts teach us that faith is faith, not sight, that seeing is not believing.
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What and does not count. The Anglican scholar N.T. Wright correctly
distinguishes between the theological meaning of Easter and various theological
references of Easter. He shows the theological meaning of Easter to be that God
has appointed Yeshua Lord and Christ for all.14 That is the bottom line, the Easter
factum revealed to the earliest disciples. It is the content of their Easter faith and of
ours. That is all that God revealed, and it alone saves. We may well get it wrong
about how many women visited the tomb on the first day of the week and how
many messengers met them there. We may believe or not that Yeshua walked to
Emmaus, ate fish before his disciples eyes, or let Thomas touch his wounds. None
of that matters, none of it is part of Gods Word-Act in Yeshua, none of it was
revealed to Cephas, James, and Paul. Believing that those things happened or did
not happen has nothing to do with faith in the revealed Easter factum. None of
them is salvific, none of them was a concern to Cephas or Paul, none of them
matters for faith,

The three core moments. Instead, believers are saved because of the three
moments of Gods Word-Act. First: that God has appointed the crucified Yeshua
the living Messiah in whom Gods fullness dwells. That is the Easter factum
period. Second: that God revealed that supernatural factum directly to the disciples
and indirectly to believers through the Scriptures. Third: that by Gods grace,
Christians have accepted that factum as the meaning of Yeshua and of their own
lives.

Earliest articulations of the Easter factum. Although Gods Easter Word-

Act lies outside space and time, the New Testament preserves the historical record
of the earliest terms believers used to name that transcendent supernatural factum.
In this regard we must note two important things: (1) that the earliest term for the
Easter factum was not resurrection from the dead but exaltation from the cross;
and (2) that the English word resurrection is not only a metaphoric term for
Easter but also an inaccurate and misleading conflation of two other very distinct
Greek metaphoric terms that the New Testament uses to articulate Easter. We take
each point in turn.

First: hyper-hypssis. Pauline scholar Father Joseph Fitzmyer, articulating

 16

the consensus of mainstream Christian scholarship, writes that the earliest levels of
the New Testament tradition speak of Gods exaltation of Yeshua to glory
directly from the cross, without any reference to resurrection.15 The classic text,
of course, is the early hymn that Paul quotes in Philippians 2, which is probably of
Aramaic origin16 and which proclaims that God exalted Yeshua that is, lifted
him up on high (hyper-hypssen) and named him the Messiah (2:9; cf. Acts
5:31). In this hymn, which is one of the earliest proclamations of the Easter fact,
the language of resurrection is entirely absent. The Greek verb used here hyper-
hypso echoes Psalm 96:9 in the Septuagint (= 97:9), where Elohim is the most
highly exalted (ho hypsistos) above all the earth.17

Second: egersis/anastasis. Regarding the second point, it is important to

realize(1) that the single English word resurrection is used to translate two very
distinct terms that the Greek New Testament uses to name Easter egersis and
anastasis; (2) that both of those Greek terms are metaphoric, just as the word
resurrection is; and (3) that conflating those two distinct terms into the totum-
coverum word resurrection is both inaccurate and misleading inaccurate
because it is a conflation; and misleading because it leads to false literalizations of
Easter. The Greek noun egersis (verb egeir) means to wake someone up. Such
awakening is entirely different from the meaning of the Greek noun anastasis
(verb anistmi), to stand someone up in the sense of putting him back on his feet
after a fall. When used to articulate the Easter factum, the two expressions God
has awoken Yeshua from sleep and God has made Yeshua stand up from the
dead like the earliest term exaltation (God has lifted Yeshua on high) are
meant not literally but metaphorically. They are the sacred writers attempts to
articulate the ultimately inexpressible fact of Gods transcendent Word-Act in
Yeshua. But the rich expressiveness of these two distinct terms gets lost and
falsely literalized when they are crunched together into the single Latinate noun
resurrection, which many Christians think means: to rise from a horizontal to a
vertical position so as to be able to exit physically from a tomb as in the famous
dictum of William Lane Craig of the Talbot School of Theology: He [Yeshua]
probably literally got up and walked out of the tomb."18

Resurrection not normative. While it is likely that the Jewish metaphors

 17

of God awakening and making Yeshua stand up again were not the first
expressions believers used for Easter, they were certainly optional and legitimate
ways of expressing that trans-historical factum. However, we note four negatives:
the language of egersis and anastasis (1) were not the first ways that believers
expressed Easter, (2) nor necessary for naming it, (3) nor the only ways of referring
to it, (4) nor the normative way, to the exclusion of other metaphors for that
transcendent factum. As names for Easter, the awakening or standing up of
Yeshua were neither first, always, only, or alone. Another early Christian hymn (I
Timothy 3:16) also names Easter without mentioning resurrection. The hymn
speaks of Yeshua being vindicated or justified (edikaith) by God, and being
made manifest (phth) to angels. Likewise both the Gospel of Luke and The
Epistle to the Hebrews use the Greek verb eiserchomai, to enter into as a way of
expressing the Easter factum. Hebrews 6:19 speaks of Yeshua entering the inner
sanctum; and Luke 24:26 speaks of him entering into glory (eis-elthein eis tn
doxan). Here as in many other texts, the language of resurrection is entirely
absent and optional. It is not the original, necessary, exclusive, or normative
name for Easter.

Literal and metaphoric usage. The New Testament is careful to distinguish

between the literal meanings of egersis and anastasis, when those words have
nothing to do with Easter, and the metaphoric meanings when they do. Mark, for
example, uses the Greek word egeir in a literal sense at 4:38 when he describes
the disciples, in the storm-tossed boat on the Sea of Galilee, waking up Yeshua to
warn him they are in trouble. Mark uses the verb-form egeirousin (Latin excitant):
the disciples do not resurrect Yeshua; they literally shake him awake. However,
Mark uses the same verb in its metaphoric sense at 16:6 when the angel in the
empty tomb proclaims: gerth Yeshua has been awakened from the sleep of
death into the new Day of the Lord. He is no longer here in space and time!
Similarly, Lukes Gospel uses the Greek word anastasis in its literal sense at 2:34
where, in contrast to the noun ptsis, taking a fall, it means the act of putting
someone back on his feet. However, Luke uses the word metaphorically to
proclaim Easter: God made Yeshua stand up again (anastnai, 24:7) after the
downfall of crucifixion. (Cf. also Acts 3:22, 26.)
 18

Various names for the same fact. My point is not to derogate the language
of resurrection as a way of naming Easter far from it but rather to relativize it
the way the New Testament itself does. We need to understand resurrection as
one possible way not the normative way of naming Gods Word-Act in Yeshua.
And out of respect for the sacred authors believers should distinguish which of the
two metaphors they have in mind when they speak of resurrection whether God
waking Yeshua from sleep or putting him back on his feet. Likewise they
should be able to distinguish when the New Testament uses those words literally
and when it uses them metaphorically. For example, Luke uses egeir literally at
Acts 12:7 to say that an angel woke up Peter in jail (geiren); but he employs it
metaphorically at Acts 3:15 to proclaim that God awoke Yeshua from the sleep of
death (geiren). Likewise, Luke uses anistmi in its literal sense at Acts 9:6 and
26:16, when Yeshua tells Saul Stand up! (anastthi Acts 22:10, anastas in
contrast to with katapipt, to fall to the ground). However, at Acts 4:33 he uses the
word metaphorically to express the standing up of Yeshua by God (anastasis).19

3. THE EASTER FACT IN PAUL

I now turn to the third and last section of this second part: how Paul
expressed Easter. Of course that is way too much to cover, so I will simply
continue making distinctions and leave the faith-interpretation to this afternoon.

Rightly dividing Paul from the Gospels. It is imperative that we rightly

divide Paul from the Gospels, i.e., distinguish and even separate Pauls
proclamations of Easter, which pre-date the Jewish revolt, from the Gospel
narratives of Easter, which post-date that revolt. Why this strict separation?
Because A.D. 70, the fall of Jerusalem, is the dividing line in the first century. It
changes virtually everything in the Yeshua-movement, including the way believers
express the Easter factum.

Kerygma and narrative. Earlier we saw the danger of reading the later
theology of the New Testament back into the earlier history of Yeshua. But now we
must guard against an equally serious danger: reading the later narratives of Easter
that are found in the Gospels back into the earlier proclamations of Easter that are
 19

found in Paul. We must rigorously distinguish the Gospels rich and late narrative
stories (written between ca. A.D. 70 and 100) from Pauls brief and early
kerygmatic proclamations (dating to the 50s and often expressing the faith-
hermeneutics of the 30s and 40s). These are two very different ways of announcing
the Easter fact.

Scholarship vs. popular piety. In popular piety, to be sure, we may well

mix up Gospel stories for Pauline kerygma. But for scholarship and preaching it is
disastrous when one confuses the elaborate Easter narratives in Matthew, Luke, or
John (or the less elaborate one in Mark) with Pauls almost telegraphic
proclamations. For this principled point I again draw on the distinction that the
N.T. Wright makes between the meaning of Easter and the various imaginative
ways of referring to Easter. Pauls kerygma and the Gospels narratives mean the
same Easter factum but they refer to it in entirely different (but equally legitimate)
ways. Paul proclaims Easter in the language of apocalyptic urgency, whereas the
Gospels convey Easter by imaginative stories that presume the delay of the
parousia.

Some dates. To begin with, let us establish some dates within the first
century A. D.
A.D. 30
The murder of Yeshua took place most likely on April 14, A.D. 30.
The Easter factum has no date. It is Gods extra-temporal Word-Act.
We deduce that shortly after the crucifixion, Cephas, James, and
others were claiming to have had revelations of the Easter factum.
Pauls kerygma
The earliest recorded mention of the Easter factum goes back to A.D.
51 (I Thessalonians 1:10).
The earliest recorded mention of an apocalyptic revelation of that
Easter factum goes back to A.D. 54 (Galatians 1:12, 16): Pauls claim
that God revealed that factum to him ca. A.D. 33/34.
The earliest recorded mention of an apocalyptic revelation to
someone other than Paul goes back to ca. A.D. 57 (I Corinthians 15:5-
7).
 20

The Gospels stories

The first story about the tomb being empty on the first day of the week
goes back to ca. A.D. 70 (Mark 16:1-8). No appearances of Yeshua are
narrated in Mark.
The next stories about the empty tomb and the first day of the week go
back to ca. A.D. 85 (Matthew 28; Luke 24; Acts 1). Several
appearances of Yeshua are recounted in these texts..
John 20 and 21 (ca. A.D. 95) provide very different stories about the
first day of the week and the weeks following. Various different
appearances of Yeshua are narrated.

Divisio. We must guard against confusing Pauls proclamations and the

Gospels narratives on two issues: the Easter factum, and the revelation of the
Easter factum.

First, Easter in Paul: the third day. To take two texts: I Corinthians 15
and Luke 24 both mean the same Easter fact, but they refer to it in radically
different ways. When Paul proclaims that Christ was awakened by God on the
third day (egrgetai ti hmerai ti triti: I Cor. 15:4), he is not talking about the
third day after his crucifixion. Pauls third day is not the Gospels first day of
the week, i.e., Sunday the 9th of April (or 18th of Nisan), A.D. 30. Paul is careful
to specify: on the third day according to the Scriptures, and the reference is most
likely to Hosea 6:2: He will revive us after two days; on the third day that is,
after a very brief lapse of time he will stand us up to live in his presence. First
Corinthians 15 is not saying that Easter occurred at Joseph of Arimatheas new
tomb just outside Jerusalems Chain Gate on the third day after Good Friday. Gods
Word-Act in Yeshua is extra-spatial and trans-historical. It did not take place in
space and time any more than did your great-grandmothers entrance into Heaven.
Nor is it a datable event, but rather a divine Word-Act known only by faith. Paul
most likely knew nothing about Yeshuas tomb or the alleged events surrounding
it. And apparently he could not have cared less about either. From all we know,
during his first visit to Jerusalem as a Christian, he did not even bother walking the
500 meters outside the Chain Gate to make a pilgrimage to Yeshuas tomb
(Galatians 1:15-20). If perchance Paul had heard about that tomb and visited it, his
 21

faith in Easter would nor shaken by finding Yeshuas bones still in the tomb nor
fortified by finding it empty .

Second, the revelation of Easter in Paul. We must also guard against

conflating Paul and the Gospels on what we usually call the Easter appearances,
i.e., Gods revelation of Yeshua as the living Christ, The Gospel narratives first
show up in Scripture only fifty to seventy years after Yeshuas death. And the
much earlier kerygma at I Corinthians 15:5 that God manifested the Christ to the
certain disciples is not Pauls shorthand way of alluding to the dramatic accounts
of Yeshuas appearances in the Gospels. Pauls two words phth and apokalysai
are not meant as condensation of the later stories about appearances to two
disciples at Emmaus, or to the Eleven in the upper room, or to Cephas and six
others at the Sea of Tiberius. By his two simple words Paul means only what he
says: In an apocalyptic revelation, God showed Yeshua as the Christ.

Made manifest, revealed. In I Corinthians Paul proclaims quite simply

that God manifested the living Christ on five historical occasions: first to Cephas,
second to the Twelve, third to over 500 believers, fourth to James, fifth to all the
missionaries, and sixth to Paul himself. The Greek middle voice phth
indicates that he understood the source of the manifestation to be God or his Christ,
not subjective human experience, or hallucination, or hysteria. In Galatians, where
Paul again mentions the manifestation to himself, he uses apokalypsis (1:12) and
repeats it as a verb: God was pleased to reveal (apokalypsai) his son in me (1:15-
16). He offers no dramatic or descriptive details just manifestation, revelation
(cf. also Galatians 2:2; II Cor. 12:1).

How did such a revelation happen to Paul? In I Corinthians Paul mentions

six historical revelations, but he does not say how they happened whether
visually, or in dreams, or by a divine voice, or by some other means. In his account
of his own revelatory experience in Galatians 1, he simply says God revealed his
messianic son in me (en emoi). Period. By contrast, thirty years later (A.D. 85)
Luke claims that Paul was knocked to the ground in a blaze of light. But even in
Lukes imaginative account Paul sees nothing with his eyes (he is blind), and does
not even have an inner vision. He merely hears Yeshua speaking to him in
 22

Hebrew, in fact.20 All of this is from Luke, none of it from Paul: no fall to the
ground, no blinding light. just apokalypsis, a revelation from God. period.
Moreover, in Acts Luke provides three divergent accounts of Pauls conversion,
and in the third of them Yeshua even quotes Paul a line in Greek, from Euripides
racy feminist play The Bacchae21 (Its hard for you to kick against the spur, a
statement that Dionysus makes to Pentheus in Euripides play. That is a bit like
Jesus appearing to Jerry Falwell and quoting a line from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in
a Virginia drawl, no less.).

Contrast Paul and the Gospels. When it comes to the Easter appearances,
we must separate Paul from Luke, and Galatians from Acts. If Pauls revelation
could have occurred in any number of ways either visually or in a dream or in a
trance (cf. Acts 22:17-18) or by hearing words then the same could apply to
Cephas, the Twelve, James, and so on. The Gospels invent imaginative forms for
these revelations, but the revelations need not have occurred and most likely did
not occur in the form of the dramatic appearances that Matthew, Luke, and John
recount. Paul does insist that he and the disciples knew the Easter fact only through
a revelation from God. But he gives us no reason to think that Gods revelations of
Yeshua as the living Christ were anything but that revelations. They could have
occurred in prayer, or in meditation, or in a religious vision, or in a dream, or in a
trance, whether in the body or out of the body (I Corinthians 2:12). The Word-Act
of Easter lies beyond space and time, but Paul believes that God has revealed it
within space and time on those six historical occasions. Overwhelming occasions,
yes; transformative moments, certainly; but not necessarily the dramatic scenarios
that the Gospel writers depicted. Paul the apocalyptic prophet was more restrained
in his kerygma than the Gospel writers were in their stories. They both express
Easter, but they refer to it in different languages and with different images.
Believers should distinguish, and never conflate, the distinct genres; and they
should never take the images and symbols whether Pauls or the Gospels either
with Easter or with the revelation of it.

CONCLUSION

A thought experiment. I will close by inviting you to join me in a thought

 23

experiment. Imagine for a moment that, as Paul had fondly hoped, the Parousia did
indeed occur within his lifetime. Imagine that the end came in the year A.D. 59,
while Paul was still in prison in Caesarea Maritima, after completing his Letter to
the Romans and before starting his voyage to Rome. And imagine too that some
months before the Parousia occurred, you and I not yet Christians but perhaps
God-fearing Gentiles or observant Jews visit Paul in prison and listen to his
proclamation of what God has done in Yeshua. And imagine that, thanks to God
making his Word-Act known to us through Paul, you and I come to believe, and are
baptized, and receive Gods holy Spirit just weeks before the end comes.22 Notice
that we would havee heard nothing of the Gospel narratives about the first day of
the week. Those Gospels do not exist and never will, because the Parousia occurred
before they got written, and Paul told us nothing about those stories.

What have we missed? Now as we gaze up at Gods Christ returning in

glory to judge the living and the dead, ask yourself: What did we miss? Did Paul
omit anything about Gods trans-temporal Word-Act in Yeshua? Did we get only a
truncated version of Easter? Were we somehow cheated of the full story with all
the details? And not just us later-comers, who met Paul only in A.D. 59, but
likewise all those Christians of Asia Minor and Greece whom Paul evangelized
over the last twenty years since his conversion without ever mentioning the first
day of the week. What did we miss?

What we would have missed. I can tell you what I would miss. It would be
very sad not to have read the most beautiful prose ever written about the Easter
fact. You can make your own pick among the four evangelists, but for me it would
be Johns twentieth chapter, one of the most transcendentally beautiful texts I
know: Mariam Rabbouni. Yes, that would be a shame, but what can one do?
God has his own time-table. As predicted in Matthew (16:28, 24:34), the Parousia
had to happen before the generation that listened to Yeshua had passed away.
Besides, nothing essential about the Easter factum would have been lost. And
missing out on Johns Gospel would be negligible compared to the immense joys
of the Parousia and the realization of a New Heaven and New Earth.

A variety of theologies. I will end where I began, by distinguishing eternal

 24

Gods Word-Act from all human words, even the God-inspired human words of
Scripture. The sacred authors not only used different literary forms and rhetoric.
They also used different theologies, based in a variety of faith-hermeneutics, in
order to articulate the transcendent Easter factum. There are different theologies in
Paul and the Gospels, but not just there. Within the four Gospels themselves, we
can distinguish at least two distinct theologies Synoptic and Johannine and
more precisely yet, four different theologies, one per evangelist.

They all point to the Easter fact. God, the author of all truth, graciously
empowers such theological diversity among the sacred authors because of the
diversity of their audiences, whom God wants to reach. And God expects that we
today will not conflate and crush this rich Scriptural diversity into some
cacophonous confabulation. He expects us to sing forth the one Easter factum in
the different keys and various voices of Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John all
those diverse voices finally coming together in a harmonious hymn to his Word-
Act. God wants us to enjoy and profit from those divergent referential
constructions since he inspired them all. Different referential constructions but
the same meaning. They all get you to the Easter though by different routes. And
God expects us as educated laity, pastors, and theologians to understand and
appreciate those different ways.

Word Alone. Gods Word alone yes. But it is interesting that the
etymology of the alone is the Middle English al + one (all one). Despite
their diversity, Paul and the Gospels are all one within Gods one Word-Act.
Lets let Gods Word-Act be the Word alone. And out of respect for God, let us
recognize the all-one-ness the diversity and harmony of the distinct ways Paul
and the Gospels express Easter.

End
 25

NOTES

1. What exactly is the topic of todays lecture? (1) Is it to understand the

relation between Gods Word and Easter? Not exactly, because Gods Word is
Easter. What we mean by Gods Word (ha dabar ) is Gods Act, not God saying
something but God acting ad extra. But whenever God acts outside himself, he
creates. Gods Word-Act in Christ is the new creation. So, are we trying to
understand Gods new creation? the whole order of salvation? In a sense, yes; but
that is too broad. (2) Secondly, it seems our task is to understand the relation
between Gods Word-Act called Easter and our faith in that Word-Act. But that
cannot be the exact topic, because Gods Word-Act of Easter also makes possible
our relation to that Word-Act, i.e., our faith. So are we trying to understand what
makes possible faith in Gods Word-Act? In a sense, yes, but that is too broad as
well. (3) So thirdly, it seems we are trying to understand the relation between our
faith in Gods Word-Act of Easter and the ways in which that faith gets expressed
in human language, whether it be the revealed language of Scripture or the
approved language of preaching or the private language of faith.
In another formulation: There are three distinct issues here. (1) Gods
Word-Act inspires Christian faith; (2) Christian faith finds expression in human
language, including inspired Scripture; and (3) we seek to understand both how
that faith got formulated and expressed in the first century and how we might
formulate and express it today. The first issue is about Gods Word, the other two
issues are about human words.
Further: If, God forbid, you and I disagree on the resurrection, it will not
be a disagreement in our faith (God alone is our judge there) or even in the faith-
language we use to express it, since I take it that we all believe, in the words of
Romans1:4 and Acts 2:32-36, that God made the crucified Yeshua to be both Lord
and Messiah (cf. below). If there were a disagreement, it might be due to the
presuppositions that guide our understanding of that faith-language. However, I
trust that we do agree that first-century theology must not be confused with first-
century empirical data, even when we accept that theology as an interpretation of
the data. And I trust we do agree that faith is a grace-inspired interpretation of
empirical data in the light of Gods revelation of his Word-Act in history.

2. See Karl Barth, Gttingen Dogmatics, ed. Hannelotte Reiffen, trans. Geoffrey
W. Bromiley, vol I (Grand Rapids, Michigan:: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 1991). (This is the text of Barths first lectures on dogmatics, beginning
with the summer semester of 1924. The lectures have been published as
 26

Unterrricht in der christlichen Religion [Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1990].)

Scripture does indeed bear witness to revelation, but it is not revelation itself. The
historical heteronomy points us on to an absolute heteronomy. The supreme proof
of scripture is always that God speaks in it in person. [Barth references Calvin,
Institutes, I, 7, 4.] Thus we again come up against a Deus dixit, against revelation
behind, above, and beyond the Bible, with its center in the fact of Jesus Christ (p.
202, line 12-27). In no way can it be self-evident that there should be a body of
literature which, without itself being revelation, sets us before revelation, points us
to it, and bears witness to it. [. . .] How does it come to be even the reflection or
echo or historical mediation of revelation? [. . .] If, then, God gives himself to be
known by scripture, even if only relatively in the form of an indication or
historical mediation, we can hardly avoid seeing in this mediation Gods own
Word, the logos, even in a special form which is distinct from the incarnation and
stands over against it, not now in the form of Gods direct speaking [i.e., what I
am calling Gods Word-Act], but only indirerctly in the form of human speaking
about God in the face of Gods own speaking, in the form of a Thus saith the
Lord whose content will then be human, earthly, historical words. This
participation of human words in Gods Word is the principial [sic] element in the
scripture principle (p. 212, lines 21ff.)

3.In his commentary on Galatians 2:6, cited in Brian Gerrish, Grace and Reason:
A Study in the Theology of Luther, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), p. 60 (It is a light
fault in the Holy Spirit if he offends a little against the grammar), and note 2 (as
cited above). Gerrish is citing Philip S. Watsons revised edition of Luthers A
Commentary on St. Pauls Epistle to the Galatians, trans. Erasmus Middleton
[orig. 1807], revised ed.: London: James Clarke & Co., 1953), pp. 143 and 102,
respectively.

4. That there were three wise men or astrologers (Greek, magoi) is a deduction
from the three kinds of gifts mentioned in Matthew 2:11: gold, frankincense, and
myrrh. In Herodotus Greek (fifth-century B.C.), a magos was either a member of
a Median tribe (History I, 101) or a Persian priest or savant, associated with
Zoroastrianism, who interpreted dreams (ibid. VII, 37). Christian lore turned these
magoi into kings in the light of Psalm 72:10-11, which expresses the hope that the
kings of Tarshish [Albright: Tartessos, Spain?], Sheba, and Seba will bring gifts
to King Solomon. Cf. also Isaiah 49:7 and 60:10.
 27

5. In Mission Dolores Grammar School (San Francisco) the Sisters of Notre Dame
de Namur told us that Jesus loved those innocent children above all others (even
though he may have confined them in Limbo) because they had, so to speak, taken
a bullet for him so he could escape unscathed to Egypt. Doctores sciunduntur. (1)
It is theologically possible that Jesus admitted the Innocents to Heaven thirty years
after the slaughter that is, after he redeemed them from original sin on April 14,
A.D. 30 on the theological principle of baptism of blood (baptismus sanguinis;
Tertullian: lavacrum sanguinis: De baptismo 16). [The word baptism in Latin
can be either baptisma, -atis, or baptismus, -i, or as here in Tertullian, baptismum,
-i.). On that view, the Innocents, at their death, would have been admitted to the
temporary limbo of the fathers (limbus patrum, not the eternal limbus puerorum:
cf. infra) where dwelled the souls of the pre-Christian just people, who were
unable to enter Heaven until Christ descended into Hell and subsequently
ascended into Heaven. In Heaven, however, they would not have the character,
or permanent spiritual mark, of the sacrament of baptism, only its other effects (cf.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III, 66, a. 11, ad 2). (2) On the other hand,
the Council of Trent declares that no one can be justified and cleansed of original
sin sine lavacro regenerationis aut eius voto (without the bath of regeneration
or the desire for it): Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et
declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 31st edition, ed. Carolus Rahner (Herder:
Barcelona, Freiburg i. Br., and Rome, 1957), no. 796, p. 285. Since the slaughtered
Innocents had not yet reached the age of reason, it may be doubted that they had
any knowledge of, or desire (votum) for, the baptism of blood. On that premise, it
would be likely that they were confined not to the temporary limbus patrum but to
the eternal limbus puerorum vel infantium, reserved for those who neither attained
the use of reason nor received baptism and who, as a result of the latter, could
never enjoy the beatific vision. The doctrine of the limbus puerorum was
confirmed on August 28, 1794, by Pope Pius VI (1775-1799) in his Auctorem
fidei, which condemned the errors of the Synod of Pistoia (Synodus Pistoriensis
(the Synod held in Pistoia, Tuscany, Italy); cf, no. 26, De poena decedentium
cum solo [peccato] originali in Denzinger no. 1526, p. 422. (3) Then again, in
support of the first option Augustine declares Absit ut, ad liberandos homines
Christus veniens, de illorum praemio qui pro eo interficerentur nihil egerit, qui,
pendens in ligno, pro eis a quibus interficiebatur oravit. [It is inconceivable
that, having come to liberate humankind, the Christ who, hanging on the cross,
prayed for those who were killing him, would do nothing to reward those who
were killed for him. Sermo 373 (in Epiphania), c. 3 (Migne, Patrologia Latina,
XXXIX, 1665). Ludwig Ott, Grunri der katholischen Dogmatik, 6th revised
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edition (Herder: Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, 1963), p. 138, line 12-13, 22-23, also
holds but admittedly without scriptural or theological evidence that the
Innocents were redeemed by baptismus sanguinis: Auf auersakramentale Weise
kann die Wiedergeburt der Unmndigen durch die Bluttaufe erfolgen (vgl. die
Opfer des bethlehemitischen Kindermordes) [. . .] doch ihre Tatschlichkeit aus
der Offenbarung nicht bewiesen werden. (4) That notwithstanding, the
Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1994) offers no
assurance on the fate of the Innocents (cf. no. 530) but simply and sadly declares
that the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God (no. 1261). (5) Of
course, the whole problem would disappear if the Slaughter of the Innocents were
not a historical fact but a theological story.

6. John L. McKenzie, God is not well served by lies, Commonweal, 111

(September 21, 1984), 497.

7. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Willaim B.

Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 102 ad fin.

8.Craig Koester, Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community,

second edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 312. My emphasis.

9. Another example: All of us hold, on scientific grounds, that HIV-AIDS is a

pandemic. Medical science has shown that to be the case. But some people hold,
on religious grounds, that HIV-AIDS is Gods punishment visited upon
homosexuals who practice anal and oral intercourse without benefit of matrimony.
How might those who make such a judgment know it to be the case when the data
itself and our own human lights do not support such a judgment? Presumably their
judgment rests on presuppositions and subsequent interpretations not shared by
medical science. Their judgment seems to rest, directly or indirectly, on what they
take to be Gods Word-Act, his divine revelation received silently in faith and then
inscribed verbally in the Bible. Those biblical words, however, need to be
interpreted in order to show that such a conclusion follows from Gods Word-Act.
Moreover, the interpretation would be made, circularly, on the basis of theological
and hermeneutical presuppositions derived themselves from the Bible taken as the
inscription of Gods Word-Act. Those presuppositions may be held to be
legitimate, but they remain presuppositions nonetheless.

10. Galatians 2:16 (twice; and cf. 2:20) and Romans 3:22: dia pistes Isou
Christou. Philippians 3:9: dia pistin Christou. Romans 3:26: ek pists Isou. Acts
 29

3:16: epi ti pistei tou onomatos autou. Ephesians 3:12: dia ts pistes autou [=
Isou Christou]. I Timothy 3:13: en pistei ti en Christi Isou [= in the pistis
that Christ Yeshua has/had]. Revelation 14:12: tn pistin Isou. James 2:1: tn
pistin tou Kyriou hmn Isou Christou. Cf. Mark 11: 22: Echete pistin theou. See
Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of
Galatians 3:14:11, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002). The
first edition was subtitled An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of
Galatians 3:14:11, and was published in 1983 by the Society of Biblical
Literature as No. 56 in their Dissertation Series.

11. And perhaps as the Son of Man of Daniel: cf. Stephens vision, Acts 7:56.

12. However, the claimants leave open and undefined the place, time, and form of
such revelations.

13.I Corinthians 15:5, Luke 24:34.

14.Acts 2: 36: kyrion auton kai christon epoisen; Rom. 1:4, [to euaggelion] peri
tou hyiou autou . . .tou horisthenthos hyiou theou en dynamei kata pneuma
hagisyns ex anastases nekrn, Isou christou tou kyriou hmn.

15.Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., A Christological Catechism: New Testament Answers,

new revised and expanded edition, p. 89.103.

16.See Pierre Grelot, Deux notes critiques sur Philippiens 2,6-11, Biblica, 54, 2
(1973), 169-186, especially 176-186. The hypothesis of an Aramaic original was
initially posed by Ernst Lohmeyer in his classic Kyris Christos. Eine
Untersuchung zu Phil. 2,5-11 (Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der
Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 1927-28 (Heidelberg 1928;
second. posthumous ed., 1961), 9-10, on the basis of (1) the common participial
style that characterizes the Philippians hymn and Semitic hymns (where participles
do the work of finite verbs, as in Psalm 89) and (2) the easy convertibility of the
Greek hymn back into a hypothetical Aramaic Ur-text. Lohmeyers hypothesis is
taken up by Roger P. Martin, Carmen Christi: Philippians ii.5-11 in Recent
Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967), 38-41. While offering a strophe structure that
differs from Lohmeyers and Martins, Grelot argues, as they do, for an Aarmaic
original, which he projects at p. 186-7.
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17. Hyper-hypso from hypso, to life up, ultimately from hyps high, on
highand hypslos, towering. The noun hypssis is, metaphorically, an exalting
or glorifying (cf. the plural in LXX Psalm 149:6 the praises [or glorifications, or
exaltations: hai hypsseis] of God in their mouth).

18.William Lane Craigs statement is cited in the ABC 20/20 report The
Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Elizabeth Vargas (May 20, 2005). Cf.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/Resurrection/story?id=744818.
The English word resurrection is derived from the Latin verb surgo by way of
re-surgo. (The prefix re- adds the meaning of again.)
(1) Surgo has both (1a) a transitive, active-voice meaning and (1b) a reflexive and
thus a middle-voice meaning.
(1a) transitive, active-voice:
to lift or raise someone/something up
(1b) reflexive and middle-voice meaning:
reflexive: to lift/raise oneself up; and therefore
middle-voice: to rise, get up, stand up.
(2) Resurgo (which underlies the noun resurrectio and the English resurrection)
is never transitive (in Latin God does not resurrect Yeshua) but has only a
reflexive and thus a middle-voice meaning:
(2a) a reflexive meaning
to raise oneself up again or to raise ones self up again in the
sense of to appear again and therefore
(2b) a middle-voice meaning
to rise again.
(3) The Vulgate translates the two Greek verbs inconsistently by surgo, resurgo,
or suscito (from sub + cito), and translates anastasis consistently by resurrectio.

19. Cf. Acts 3:22 and 7:37 (loosely citing Deuteronomy 18:15 and 18), where God
will raise up(anastsei / anasts) a prophet like Moses; and Acts 3:26, where
the Yeshua fulfills that prophesy (anastsas ho Theos ton Paida autou).

20.ti Hebradi: 26:14 (cf. 21:40).

21.Bacchae line 795: Sacrifice to him [to the god] rather than, full of wrath
[thymoumenos] /kicking against the spur [pros kentra laktizoimi, thntos n thei].
Acts 26:14: sklron soi pros kentra laktizein
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22.On the triad of belief, baptism, and reception of the Spirit, cf. Acts 8:12, 15f.,
etc.