1 CORINTHIANS 15:3B-6A, 7 AND THE BODILY RESURRECTION OF JESUS

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2006 by MacGregor, Kirk R

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One of the most recurring claims leveled by modern exegetes against the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus has been that the pre-Pauline creed in 1 Cor 15:3-7, at best, implies that Jesus' earliest disciples believed in a spiritual resurrection which did not necessarily vacate his tomb.1 Two lines of argument are normally given in support of this premise. (1) Since Paul employs the same Greek verb as the tradition, ... ("he was seen"), to describe his visionary experience of the risen Christ, Paul's experience was the same in character as that of the preceding disciples.2 (2) The formula contains no mention of the empty tomb, thereby suggesting that the corpse of Jesus was irrelevant to the concept of his resurrection held by the Jerusalem church.3 Such an understanding of the resurrection was shared by Paul, as displayed in his contrast between the physical and spiritual bodies (1 Cor 15:44). However, this understanding evolved during the second Christian generation into the doctrine of physical resurrection featured in the Gospel appearance narratives.4 The purpose of this essay will be to challenge (1) and (2) on form-critical grounds and to reveal in the process that the earliest followers of Jesus both believed in his physical resurrection and recounted resurrection appearances qualitatively different from that of Paul.

I. PROLEGOMENA

Form criticism has established that within 1 Cor 15:3-7 Paul quotes a primitive Christian creed originally formulated during the earliest years of the Jesus movement.5 Although scholars differ concerning its precise length, there has emerged a consensus that at least verses 3b-5 belong to the ancient tradition based on the following linguistic data. First, Paul prefaces the creed by reminding the Corinthians, "For I delivered (...) to you as of first importance what I also received (...)" (v. 3a), where ... and ... are technical terms used by Jewish rabbis for the transmission of sacred tradition. Therefore, Paul admits that the creed is not his own, but that he received it from an earlier source who handed it down to him.6 Second, several words in the creed are found almost nowhere else in Paul's writings, which indicates that Paul is quoting an earlier source. Such non-Pauline phrases include ... ("for our sins"), ... ("according to the Scriptures"), ... ("he has been raised"), ... ("on the third day"), ... ("he was seen"), and ... ("by the Twelve").7 Finally, there are indications that the creed has a Semitic source, including the use of the transliterated Aramaic ... ("Cephas") for Peter, the threefold ... ("and that") characteristic of Aramaic and Mishnaic Hebrew narration, and the faithfulness to the Hebrew Bible reflected in the qualification of both Jesus' death and resurrection with the parallel ....8

Concerning the date of the creed, virtually all critical scholars agree that Paul received the tradition no later than five years after the crucifixion, with a majority holding that the material was passed on to him when he visited Jerusalem three years after his conversion (Gal 1:18-19), and a minority maintaining that the material was conveyed to him in Damascus via the community in Antioch immediately upon his conversion.9 The former group points to Paul's description of his visit with Peter and James by the participle ... (Gal 1:18), which literally means "to visit and get information" and refers to an investigative mission where he carefully examined these apostles to discover facts.10 Since the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus would in all probability have been the primary subject of discussion, a Jerusalem reception of the creed from Peter and James, both of whom were recipients of postmortem appearances, seems preferable.11 Hence, the terminus ante quern for the origin of the creed is AD 35, assuming the truth of the majority view that Jesus' crucifixion occurred in AD 30 and Paul's conversion in AD 32. Remarkably, however, form-critical analysis reveals the existence of two earlier stages in the development of this tradition. Since the creed would have been formulated before Paul received it, the creed in its final form should be dated even earlier than AD 35. For this reason, even the radical Jesus Seminar, in its book The Acts of Jesus, dates the tradition no later than AD 33.12 Moreover, Gary Habermas observes that "the independent beliefs themselves, which later composed the formalized creed, would then date back to the actual historical events."13 Taken together, these considerations have led a broad spectrum of scholars from widely divergent schools of thought to identify this creed as eyewitness testimony of those who believed they saw literal appearances of Jesus alive after his death. As the Jewish NT scholar Pinchas Lapide concludes, "[T]his unified piece of tradition which soon was solidified into a formula of faith may be considered as a statement of eyewitnesses for whom the experience of the resurrection became the turning point of their lives."14