Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity: and the Making of the New Testament

283 Pages·2011·2.42 MB·English

by  Markus Vinzent

Christ’s resurreCtion
in early Christianity
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Christ’s resurrection in
early Christianity
and the Making of the new testament
Markus Vinzent
King’s College London UK
© Markus Vinzent 2011
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Markus Vinzent has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Vinzent, Markus.
Christ’s resurrection in early Christianity and the Making of the new testament.
1. Jesus Christ – resurrection – history of doctrines – early church, ca. 30–600.
2. Jesus Christ – resurrection – Biblical teaching. 3. Paul, the apostle, saint –
teachings. 4. Messianic era (Judaism) 5. Bible. n.t. – Criticism, interpretation, etc.
i. title
232.5–dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vinzent, Markus.
Christ’s resurrection in early Christianity: and the Making of the new testament /
Markus Vinzent.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Jesus Christ – resurrection – history of doctrines – early church, ca. 30–600.
i. title.
Bt482.V56 2011
232.9’709015–dc22 2011008611
isBn 9781409417910 (hbk)
isBn 9781409417927 (pbk)
isBn 9781409417934 (ebk)
V
Contents
Introduction: A Rise of the Risen Christ? 1
A Second-Century Easter Homily 5
‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is useless’ (1Cor. 15:17) 10
1 The Beginnings of the End 27
Jewish Beginnings 27
Jesus’ Death and Resurrection – In the Eyes of Jews
and Samaritans 30
Resurrection: Lost in Tradition? 44
Sacrifice and Eternal Life in non-Pauline Writings 70
2 Paul and the Resurrection Rediscovered 77
The Making of the New Testament 84
The Resurrection ‘Mania’ 111
Paul’s Belief in the Resurrection after Marcion 125
The Resurrection in Fellow Teachers of Marcion 169
The Rule of Faith and the Resurrection 181
3 Celebrating Life and Death 193
Sabbath and Sunday 198
The Day on which ‘Christ, our Passover lamb, has been
sacrificed’ (1Cor. 5:7) 202
The So-Called ‘Sunday’ 206
Barnabas and Ignatius on Celebrating Christ’s Resurrection 212
Pascha – ‘Commemorate my Death!’ 213
Bibliography 227
Index 249
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Introduction
A Rise of the Risen Christ?
What role did Christ’s Resurrection play in early Christianity? Instead of
addressing the historical question of whether or not Jesus rose from the dead, we
ask: When, to whom and why was it important to confess the Risen Christ? How
did this tenet impact on Christian writings, on the New Testament and the creed,
not as a marginal note like Pontius Pilate or as a point of controversy as with the
virgin Mary, but as one of the most central and foundational beliefs on which
Christianity and all its churches rest? ‘The belief that Jesus did in fact rise from
death is the basis of the faith of the Christian community’.1
Our thesis evolved from years of study and resulted in the following observation:
a prior ‘fall’2 or rather a decline in interest triggered the rise of the Risen Christ.
Although a strong belief in Paul, the Resurrection was of little importance to most
early Christians. Because of the close link between Paul and the Resurrection, the
waning of Paul’s theological popularity after his death and his sudden comeback
towards the middle of the second century steered Christian thinking about the
Resurrection of Christ.3 Christians ‘did not adopt, probably no longer understood,
the radicalism of Paul’.4 Over a hundred years later, we can sense the ‘somewhat
defensive manner’ with which Irenaeus handles Paul. Paul, together with his
belief in the Resurrection, had been rediscovered only a few decades earlier by
an outstanding Christian teacher at Rome, Marcion of Sinope. Irenaeus maintains
Paul’s integrity, but critically states:5
It is necessary … to examine the opinion of Paul, to explain what has received
an interpretation from heretics, who have altogether misunderstood what
Paul has spoken, and to point out the folly of their mad opinions; and to
demonstrate from that same Paul, from whose (writings) they press questions
upon us, that they are indeed utterers of falsehood, but that the apostle was a
preacher of the truth.6
1 A.D. Nock, ‘Resurrection’ (1928), 47.
2 See K. Aland, ‘Bemerkungen’ (1979), 46.
3 A. Harnack, Marcion (1923. 21924 = 1960), 12; A. Lindemann, Paulus (1999),
280; J. Carleton Paget, ‘Paul’ (1996); A.E. Barnett, Paul (1941), 186.
4 C.K. Barrett, ‘Controversies’ (1974), 235.
5 Ibid., 235; see R. Noormann, Irenäus (1994).
6 Iren., Adv. haer. IV 41, 4; trans. ANFa (here and later with alterations).
2 Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity
A position harsher than that of Irenaeus is taken a few years later by Tertullian
in his work against Marcion. Tertullian takes as his benchmark the Gospel, and
correctly notes that there is no trace of Paul in its ‘list of apostles’; therefore,
Marcion’s claim that Paul derives his authority from the Risen suggests that Christ
lacked foresight and ‘did not know beforehand that he would have need of him’:
Shipmaster out of Pontus [Marcion] … will you please tell us under what bill
of lading you accepted Paul as apostle, who had stamped him with that mark
of distinction, who commended him to you, and who put him in your charge?
Only so may you with confidence disembark him: only so can he avoid being
proved to belong to him who has put in evidence all the documents that attest
his apostleship. He himself, says Marcion, claims to be an apostle, and that not
from men nor through any man, but through Jesus Christ.7 Clearly any man
can make claims for himself: but his claim is confirmed by another person’s
attestation. One person writes the document, another signs it, a third attests
the signature, and a fourth enters it in the records. No man is for himself both
claimant and witness.8
To Tertullian, Paul’s writings and his witness, the Risen Christ, do not carry
sufficient weight. They need the rubberstamp of others, the Gospels and Acts:
‘From Acts I am led even to believe Paul.’9
Had Marcion, who taught after 140 AD at Rome, not picked up Paul’s letters and
put them together with a Gospel,10 the Resurrection of Christ would presumably
never have made its way into the Christian creed.11 The myth of God incarnate
gave way, though only slowly and never fully, to the other myth of Jesus, the Risen
Christ.12 Even two centuries later, when Roman emperors lent their influence to
the promotion of the Resurrection, it did not gain the same symbolic power as
God’s incarnation. So it remained in the West, while Eastern Christianity, fuelled
by Apolinarius of Laodicea, Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, but also by the
Cappadocian fathers, became the Church of Easter and the Risen Christ.13
7 See Gal. 1:1; trans. follows (with alterations) the latest edition of the NET Bible /
New English Translation (NT, 1998; 2005).
8 Tert., Adv. Marc. v 1; trans. Tertullian: Adversus Marcionem, Books I–III, and
Books IV and V. Edited and translated by Ernest Evans (Oxford, 1972) (with alterations).
9 Ibid.
10 See A.E. Barnett, Paul (1941), 222.
11 See P. King, History (51737), 253; M. Vinzent, Ursprung (2006), 70.
12 See J. Hick (ed.), Myth (1977); M. Wiles, ‘Naked Pillar’ (1994), 118f.; I.U.
Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte (1994), 28.
13 K.L. King, Gospel (2003), 163.
Introduction 3
Consequently, it was not from the year of Christ’s Resurrection that countries
around the globe, West and East, began to count the years of a new era; rather it is
the Lord’s birth that is referred to by Anno Domini.14
For those who followed the man of Nazareth, his death was not the devastating
experience that has sometimes been claimed. Although his followers knew of
the death of their master, the one in whom they had placed all their hopes, they
regarded him as a martyr for a right cause or read their experience against the
background of their own upbringings, informed first of all by their Jewish culture,
where belief in the resurrection of the dead was available for Pharisaic or Rabbinic
Jewish Christians.
Trying to understand how the belief in the Resurrection of Christ began and
why it rarely rose to such heights as belief in his incarnation and passion is not
the same as asking whether Christ’s Resurrection did happen, and whether the
encounters with Christ were historical events or narrative fiction, or were visionary
experiences, phantasms, illusions or delusions. The question of its theological
importance would be valid even if the myth had no historical basis whatsoever,
and would be equally vital if a pilgrimage to the empty tomb today or a journey
into the third heaven re-produced certainty of Christ’s presence similar to that of
which early Christian authors later wrote. Eventually, in the twentieth century,
the Resurrection did become, even in Protestant minds – for centuries so fixed
on Christ’s passion – one of the core identifiers of Christianity, and for some, like
Karl Barth, the outstanding marker.15
All the more difficult it is, then, to understand why researching Christ’s
Resurrection in early Christianity is like visiting what not long ago was termed
a ‘virgin territory’.16 While there are books, serious and less serious, popular
and scholarly, in the hundreds and scholarly articles in the thousands that deal
with Christ’s Resurrection in the New Testament, we still lack the first Patristic
monograph to follow the intellectual path of this theological topic through the
first few centuries of Christianity. We embark on an untrodden path, a fascinating
journey through the wilderness of canonical and non-canonical texts, equipped
with orthodox and unorthodox questions, to open up perspectives and seek to
understand the breadth of early Christian thinking, writing and celebrating. That
we can go little beyond the second century here has to do with space restrictions.
It is the hope of the author later to continue the journey into the third, fourth and
fifth centuries, and probably beyond.
The expedition will be an eye-opening experience for believers and non-
believers equally, and is meant to give insights into the creative craftsmanship of
14 Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470–c. 544), when creating the dating system in 525,
deployed it solely to calculate the date of Easter in his Easter table.
15 See G. Koch, Auferstehung (21965), 126f.; I.U. Dalferth, Der auferweckte
Gekreuzigte (1994), 28, 54–7.
16 A. Hamman, ‘Résurrection’ (1975), 292f.