Gregory J. Riley,
Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Controversy.
Fortress, 1995.
Reviewed by Robert M.
Price.
I
think those biblical scholars serve us best who cause us, like an
unpredictable old Zen master, to view familiar things in a different
way. Gregory J. Riley does the trick pretty well in Resurrection
Reconsidered. He tries to demonstrate the dialogical relationship of
the gospels of John and Thomas, reflecting the disputations of the
communities supposed to have produced the two documents. Riley reminds
us of the Fourth Gospel's cooptative use of John the Baptist, to make a
rival sect's figurehead seem to espouse the Christian view instead.
Shouldn't it be just as obvious that John's pointed use of Thomas as a
doubter of correct belief, lately converted to the same, is of a piece
with the polemical rewriting of the Baptist? Just as John the Baptist
symbolizes the Baptist sect, Doubting Thomas stands for Thomasine
Christianity. And the chief points of Thomasine "heresy" are targeted in
the scenes in which John features Thomas.
Chief
among the points over which they differed was the fleshly reality of the
resurrection of Jesus. Riley provides an interesting survey of ancient
Israelite, Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian belief about the fate of
the dead. From these data emerge the assessment that the notion of
fleshly resurrection emerged late and piecemeal within some strands of
Judaism, was unheard of everywhere else, and dominant in no form of
Judaism or Christianity we know of until formative Catholic Orthodoxy
mainstreamed the belief in the second century and later. Riley shows
that those polemicists who did accept the doctrine had fellow
Christians, not just outsiders, to argue with. Many converts to the
Christian faith naturally interpreted their belief according to their
inherited assumptions and thus believed Jesus had risen in spiritual
form. (1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Peter 3:18 certainly seem to presuppose
the spiritual body version of resurrection.) Riley shows how such
traditional belief in soul survival was easily compatible with belief in
postmortem apparitions in which the dead might be identified by the
death wounds they still visibly bore--even though they lacked physical
substance. One recurring theme (not without occasional qualification)
was that the dead, however lifelike they might appear, could not be
touched or embraced. When the mourners tried to touch their loved one,
they found themselves clasping empty air.
Riley
argues plausibly that Thomas Christians believed Jesus was spiritually
resurrected (sayings 28-29, 71). This, we are told, John rejected, as he
did the Thomasine preference for saving gnosis that made the illuminatus
the equal/twin of the Living Jesus, and their consequent lack of any
demand for saving faith. Whereas Jesus tells the Thomas of the Fifth
Gospel he must no longer call him Master, having attained unto the same
plateau of spiritual enlightenment (saying ), in the Fourth Gospel
Thomas is patted on the head for worshipping Jesus as "My Lord and my
God." (20:28).
All this
makes good sense to me. But let me now propose a few "friendly
amendments" to Riley's reconstruction. I wonder if the issue separating
the Johannine and Thomasine traditions was really that of the fleshly
resurrection of Jesus. My hesitations begin with the resurrection
appearance scene in John 20. Riley reads the passage as affirming the
fleshly resurrection of Jesus, over against the supposedly Thomasine
notion of a spiritual resurrection. Why does he see it so? Because of
the business about Thomas vowing he will not believe unless allowed to
probe the open wounds of Jesus for himself. This element of tangibility
seems to Riley to push the issue beyond what might otherwise look like a
postmortem apparition. But is this issue really broached in the passage?
I think not. What is it that Thomas swears he will not accept till he
can touch the wounds? Thomas is skeptical of the claim of his fellow
disciples to "have seen the Lord." No one is said to be debating the
Pauline question, "But how are the dead raised? With what sort of body
do they come?" We do not read that the other disciples told Thomas, "The
Lord is physically raised! It wasn't some ghost, you can count on that!"
Neither do we hear that Thomas replied, "Okay, a ghost I could accept!
See 'em all the time. No big deal there. But fleshly resurrection?
You're going to have to do better than that!" The story doesn't get into
that sort of detail. I suspect Riley is reading in, from Luke 24:37, the
disciples' initial fear that they were seeing a ghost. But nothing of
the kind figures in John 20. The issue there is simply whether it was
really Jesus the disciples saw. "We have seen the Lord!" "I will not
believe." He will not believe that they really saw Jesus. What the
telltale wounds will convince Thomas of is that the dead Jesus has
manifested himself, period.
And does
John really mean to picture the manifested Jesus as appearing in the
flesh? As Riley admits, even many in the early church did not read the
passage so. After all, John makes a point of saying the doors were
closed and locked (20:19-26), surely pointless unless to highlight the
ghostly passage of Jesus through them, like Jacob Marley in Dickens's
A Christmas Carol. What about the tangibility factor? Note that the
point of Thomas' exasperated vow is that he must see for himself. Actual
touching proves unnecessary once Jesus appears and simply shows him the
identifying marks. Thomas recoils abashed like Job: "I have uttered what
I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see thee;
therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:3b,
5-6). Literal touching must not have been the issue.
Riley
too quickly couples John 20 and Luke 24. Both have reworked a common
reappearance tradition, but the point in Luke 24 seems to me quite
different. There Jesus does specifically call attention to his fleshly
corporeality. "No spirit has flesh and bones as you see me having." (As
Riley points out, Ignatius had independent access to the same tradition:
"Take hold of me and see, I am no bodiless demon.") But there is a
form-critical point to be remembered here. Such scenes as Luke depicts
(and Ignatius alludes to) appear elsewhere in the neighborhood. They are
typically reunion scenes between friends or lovers, or master and
disciples. In all such cases the point is that the unexpected return of
the one feared lost does not mark a return from the dead, i.e., the
apparition of a ghost, but rather denotes unexpected survival, escape
from death. The parallel between Luke 24: and Philostratus' Life of
Apollonius of Tyana is especially close. Apollonius' disciples,
having fled the scene of his trial before Domitian, are gathered
mourning their master who can scarcely have escaped the tyrant's ire.
But lo and behold, Apollonius himself suddenly appears in their midst.
He is no ghost as they first suspect, but has simply teleported
miraculously from Rome, just as Philip does from Gaza to Ashdod in Acts
8:39-40). He invited them to handle and prove to themselves it is really
he, and no ghost. In other words, they should thus satisfy themselves
that he is not back from the dead but has instead cheated death. Luke 24
and Ignatius seem to rely upon a version of the Passion in which the
suffering righteous one, Jesus, was delivered out of the hand of his
enemies by premature removal from the cross, another standard feature of
Hellenistic romances, whose heroes rather frequently get themselves
sentenced to the cross or actually crucified, and then escape. Note how
often Lukan redactional material has Jesus "suffering" or being
"delivered into the hands of men," instead of actually and explicitly
dying. Jane Schaberg (The Illegitimacy of Jesus) raises the
possibility that the virginal conception of Jesus is not a New Testament
doctrine/myth at all, but has been read into the texts of Matthew and
Luke through the conventions of second-century patristic theology. In
the same way, I wonder if it is really John and Luke, as Riley thinks,
who argued for a fleshly resurrection of Jesus, or rather perhaps Riley
is still too willing to take the second-century Christians' word for
what Luke and John meant.
At any
rate, it seems clear that John has reworked the Luke/Ignatius tradition.
The original form of the story stressed tangibility so as to prove Jesus
had not actually died. John clearly supposes Jesus had died. The
Johannine Jesus does not stress fleshly corporeality but rather
identifying marks. Luke's closed doors provided the occasion for the
flabbergasted disciples to erroneously suspect him a ghost. John's
closed doors denote that the postmortem Jesus is a ghost, back from a
genuine death. The point is quite different.
Riley
does an admirable bit of detective work matching up clues from the
Gospel of John on the one hand with those from the Thomas canon (Gospel
of Thomas, Book of Thomas the Contender, Acts of Thomas) to indicate
points where the two theologies collided, but I wonder if perhaps we
cannot find a few more and, in the process, hypothetically reconstruct
some theological evolution within Thomas Christianity. I suggest John is
trying to correct Thomas Christians at two stages. First, let us suppose
that the Thomas Christians believed in a "Living Jesus" who had neither
died on the cross (despite being crucified) nor ascended to heaven
shortly thereafter. We are acquainted with similar beliefs among Gnostic
Christians who believed Jesus remained among his disciples for 18 months
to 11 years after his resurrection. Similarly, Matthew's Great
Commission says nothing of any ascension but rather pictures Jesus
accompanying his disciples on their missionary journeys (of course,
harmonizing, we never read it that way). The Ahmadiyya sect and various
others (including, recently, Barbara Thiering) pictured Jesus surviving
or escaping the cross and leaving the Holy Land to continue his teaching
elsewhere. Apart from whether such a thing happened, we may ask whether
there is any textual evidence that any New Testament era Christians
thought it happened. And there is some. As it happens, John, who
habitually places current misunderstandings on the lips of Jesus'
opponents, has someone "mis-"understand Jesus as predicting, not that he
will ascend to heaven, but that he will "go to the Diaspora among the
Greeks and teach the Greeks" (7:35). I submit that this means John knew
some believed this is just what Jesus did. I'm hazarding the guess that
the Thomas Christians believed this. The anti-Thomas polemic Riley sees
John engaged in would include this attempted refutation. And against the
idea of a surviving itinerant Jesus John aims his stress on the genuine
death of Jesus, something not made sufficiently clear in previous
gospels.
Let us
take a look at the same three Johannine references to Thomas that Riley
examines. He sees much. Taking his hint, we may be able to see more.
First there is the Lazarus story in chapter 11. Riley notes that here
Thomas is made implicitly to doubt the resurrection of Lazarus, just as
in chapter 20 he will be made explicitly to doubt the resurrection of
Jesus. How is that? Because, as Riley strikingly points out, Thomas'
fatalistic sigh, "Let us go, too, so we may die with him" refers to
dying not with Jesus (since Jesus has just assured Thomas that he is not
yet in any danger), but to Lazarus. Jesus has announced his intention to
raise Lazarus up (11:11), but all Thomas expects is Lazarus' death (and
their own, in an ambush). On the one hand, we may ask Riley why it is
that Thomas should take Jesus' word that Jesus is in no danger and yet
expect that he and his fellow disciples will die in Bethany. On the
other, we may ask if Riley's argument proves too much. If it is the
fleshly nature of the future resurrection of believers (of whom Lazarus
is an advance specimen) which is at stake here, does John mean that the
dead will be merely resuscitated like Lazarus, whom we must imagine to
have died again some time later, perhaps at the hands of the Sanhedrin
(12:10)?
I
suspect that the point of chapter 11 is to furnish a dress rehearsal for
the death and resurrection of Jesus himself, and that the goal is to
demonstrate the reality of the death of Lazarus explicitly and of Jesus
implicitly. This is why John tells the tale of Lazarus rather than those
of the daughter of Jairus or the son of the widow of Nain. Those did not
pass muster precisely because it was not completely clear that the
patient was really dead. Of Jairus' daughter Jesus actually says "The
child is not dead but sleeping" (Mark 5:39), and in a number of
contemporary stories (featuring Asclepiades the physician, Apollonius of
Tyana, and several others) the point is that someone not yet dead is
rescued at the last possible moment from premature burial by people who
lacked the keen diagnostic eye of the master physician. Form-critically,
then, we ought to expect that any such story in which someone very
recently dead is said merely to sleep is not a resurrection miracle but
rather a rescue from premature burial. So the Jairus and Nain stories
would very likely have been read by the ancients as Scheintod,
apparent death, stories. And this was not good enough for John, who did
not like the fact that some, including Thomas Christians, understood the
crucifixion of Jesus the same way, as only an apparent death. So he
supplies the Lazarus story as a prelude to the Passion of Jesus and as a
guide for interpreting it. His point is to rule out the possibility that
the death was only apparent. He seems first to set up the possibility
("'Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of
sleep'"--11:11), only to knock it down ("Now Jesus had spoken of his
death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus
told them plainly, 'Lazarus is dead'"--11:13). This is obviously why
John has Jesus stay put so that when he finally does arrive, Lazarus has
been moldering in the tomb long enough that he must by now be a rotting
corpse (11:39). The point is not just that Jesus has rescued Lazarus
from the tomb (which would still be the case even if Lazarus had been
prematurely buried as in the other stories), but that Lazarus died and
came back. (Even after all this, it must be pointed out, John has not
completely succeeded, since we only hear that Martha expected there to
be a stench. She assumed her brother was decomposing, but if he lay in a
cataleptic state, he wouldn't have.) Are we to infer, then, that John
also envisioned a grossly physical resuscitation of Jesus, since Lazarus
returns physically? Apparently not, since, again, no one in the early
church wanted Jesus raised in that way. a resurrection unto mere
mortality. So John probably doesn't want Lazarus' resurrection to
anticipate Jesus' in every respect. But he must have the reality of the
death itself in mind, since this is where he goes out of his way to make
that point.
In the
Farewell Discourse of John 14:5, John assigns Thomas these lines: "Lord,
we do not know where we are going; how can we know the way?" Of course
Jesus replies that he himself is the way, but this scarcely contains all
of John's answer to the question, an answer he certainly feels (as Riley
says) the Thomas Christians do not know. And that, I suggest, is the way
of the cross. "... if it dies, it bears much fruit... If anyone serves
me, he must follows me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also;
if anyone serves me, the Father will honor him... I, when I am lifted
up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (12:24, 26, 32). It is
perhaps Thomas Christians who are in view at 19:34-35, where the
narrator swears up and down that he saw Jesus' fatally wounded and wants
you to believe. Believe what? Simply that, as in The Wizard of Oz,
Jesus was "morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively,
absolutely, undeniably, and reliably dead."
And, as
we have seen, finally, when the risen Jesus appears to Thomas, the point
is showing the wounds (which conspicuously do not get touched!) is
probably to show at once that Jesus did die but is now back, not in the
first instance, how he is back.
Perhaps
the Thomas Christians pictured Jesus, like Elijah or al-Khadr ("the
evergreen one"), as "with you always, even unto the consummation of the
age" (Matthew 28:20). No ascension rounded off their myth of Jesus such
as wrapped up Luke's. John's emphasis on Jesus' ascension as an item
likely to offend (John 6:61-62) might have been aimed at the Thomas
Christians.
My guess
is that the Thomas Christians first believed that Jesus had survived the
cross and set out to the East to resume his preaching, going as far as
Syria or, as some would later say, Kashmir and India. Against this
belief John aims (or preserves) the polemic that Jesus was "not only
really dead, but most sincerely dead." The Thomas Christians then
accepted this belief from the majority of Christians. But then what of
their belief in the missionary travels of the post-cross Jesus? At this
point they would have believed in the (saving?) death of Jesus, but not
in his resurrection. So the bearer of their faith to the far reaches of
Syria, Edessa, and India must not have been Jesus (martyred and seated
in heaven at the right hand of the Father) but rather someone who might
have been mistaken for Jesus, say, a twin brother of Jesus who carried
on in his name. This stage of the Thomas tradition remains visible in
the Acts of Thomas in the several places where Jesus is said to appear
in the form of his brother Thomas as well as those in which Thomas is
said explicitly to resemble his brother Jesus.
This was
not good enough for the Johannine community, who sought to correct the
belief by means of the Doubting Thomas pericope. As an exegete of an
earlier day (alas, I cannot recall whom) suggested, the reason the risen
Jesus must appear to Thomas in particular is to counteract the belief of
some that the resurrection was a case of mistaken identity, that people
saw Jesus' twin brother Thomas and took him for Jesus himself returned
from the dead. By showing the risen Jesus and Didymus Thomas side by
side, as in a Superman cartoon wherein the Man of Steel contrives to be
seen side by side with Clark Kent (probably a robot double), John means
to show that the two cannot be the same. The subsequent orthodox overlay
on the Acts of Thomas (which Riley discusses) implies that eventually
the Thomas Christians were drawn into the Johannine orbit, and the
theological gaps closed. Part of this redaction was the scene in which
the reader again is shown Jesus side by side with Thomas, as the former
orders the latter to missionize India, making it clear that even though
it was Thomas who had missionized India, he was not replacing a dead
Jesus but acting on behalf of a risen one.
Thomas
the renegade left his mark in the New Testament. Riley notes how only
Judas Thomas and Judas Iscariot are characterized in the New Testament
as "one of the Twelve," and needless to say, both are shown in a dubious
light. I suggest this is because they were originally one and the same
character. From the "Orthodox" side, Thomas' heresy became narratively
transformed/concretized into Judas' betrayal of Jesus, while the
subsequent cooptation of Thomas Christianity created the repentant
Thomas of John 20.