The Orthodox Corruption Of Scripture by Bart D. Ehrman

Author:Bart D. Ehrman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1993-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Jesus, the Christ Raised from the Dead

We have seen that orthodox Christians of the second and third centuries opposed separationist Christologies by emphasizing that Christ himself suffered and died. They also emphasized that the one raised from the dead was Christ, a doctrine that seemed to them the natural corollary. The point was not to be taken for granted, however, given the Gnostic claim that the Christ had departed from Jesus before his passion, so that it was only Jesus who died and was raised from the dead. A concise statement of the separationist view is found in Irenaeus’s summary at the end of Book I of his Adversus Haereses in which an unnamed group of Gnostics claimed that the divine Christ “departed from him [Jesus] into the state of an incorruptible Aeon, while Jesus was crucified. Christ however, was not forgetful of his Jesus, but sent down a certain energy into him from above, which raised him up again in the body” (Adv. Haer. I, 30, 13). For Irenaeus and his orthodox associates, however, it was the unified Jesus Christ who died on the cross, and the unified Jesus Christ who rose from the dead: “Do not err. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is one and the same, who did by suffering reconcile us to God, and rose from the dead” (Adv. Haer. Ill, 16, 9).165

Given the orthodox view of Christ’s resurrection, one can fairly well anticipate the ways orthodox scribes might change their texts of the New Testament.166 Likely candidates for such changes would be passages that could be taken to say that it was only the man Jesus, not the one Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead. Moreover, since even the Gnostics could claim that “Christ was raised” (meaning that he was exalted to heaven before the death of Jesus, not that he was raised “from the dead”),167 we might expect alterations of passages whose ambiguity could be taken to support such a view—passages that indicate that “Christ” was raised without stating that he was raised “from the dead.” Obviously, changes of this kind will be slight—the addition of a word or phrase here or there—and there is little reason to expect them to occur with any greater consistency or rigor than any of the other orthodox corruptions considered so far. Rather than citing every instance of the phenomenon, I will again be selective and simply establish the dominant pattern. The changes typically appear exactly where one might expect them, in the Gospels, Paul, and the speeches of Acts that mention Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

We begin with the speeches of Acts. An example occurs already in chapter 3, where Peter alludes to Isaiah 52:13 to show that after the crucifixion God “glorified his servant Jesus” by raising him from the dead (Acts 3:13). The statement would not be objectionable, of course, to Gnostics who affirmed just this point, that it was precisely the man Jesus who was raised from the dead (not the Christ, who never died).

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