End of Christianity, The by [.]

Author:. [.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2011-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

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As I read John's Easter account in 20:11–15, I do not need to impose some sort of Jesus hating skepticism in order to “escape” the implications of the text. No, I find myself reading along reverently, appreciating the sense of numinous “ozone” in this wonderful story, and I am suddenly taken aback when Mary Magdalene finds no one in the tomb: O God! Is there to be no end to the horrors of this weekend? What now? She asks a man standing nearby, apparently the caretaker of the mausoleum grounds, if he has already transferred the corpse somewhere else. She does not wonder what may have happened to it. It's pretty obvious. As we, too, have been told in 19:41–42, “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.” Jesus’ remains had been deposited in this nearby tomb only as an emergency measure since time was running out. It was not meant to stay there.26 Mary is only concerned that she may be unable to find out the final resting place. This is not some weird speculation by Rationalists. This is the scenario laid out by the Gospel itself. And though the evangelist (obviously) goes on to supply an alternate explanation, that of faith in the resurrection of Jesus, the text itself has already supplied a purely natural explanation for an empty tomb as well as the implication that Christians might not have been privy (or ever become privy) to Jesus’ final resting place.27 John himself tells us that the prima facie explanation was a simple relocation of a corpse hastily stashed there for the moment. Maybe this is what happened. Bingo: Jesus is buried, the empty tomb is discovered, and it is too late to find out where the body has been taken, perhaps because the disciples did not know of the role of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Maybe the custodian Mary asked had replaced the man who had approved the removal of the body on an earlier shift, and he simply did not know what to tell her. (“No, ma'am, I don't know who he is; sorry.”) There is no bafflement here that would have us welcoming supernatural miracles as a better explanation, is there?

If we were not so familiar with the text, it would strike us as quite ludicrous to think one must draw the inference from the empty tomb that Jesus must therefore have been raised from the dead, fully as absurd as the scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian in which Brian's followers momentarily lose track of him in the middle of a crowd and jump to the conclusion, “He's been taken up!” “No, there he is!”28 But the disciples claimed to have seen him! Well, there are ready explanations for that, too….

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