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What did the disciples see after Jesus’ death and what could their experiences mean? Keith Ward interprets the biblical accounts
Every year around Easter someone from the media rings me up and asks, “Do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?” When I say, “It all depends what you mean by physical”, they usually reply, “Can you recommend anyone else we can talk to?”
It is not always easy for the media to deal with complexity. But the question of the resurrection of Jesus is complex. Even if you take the New Testament accounts of the resurrection as literally as possible, you will not read about a physical body walking out of the tomb, hiding somewhere in Jerusalem for six weeks, presumably in borrowed clothes, and then shooting up into the sky.
If you pay any attention to the critical work of New Testament scholars you will get a number of varying interpretations of the resurrection. I think one should pay attention to such work, but that will not be the focus of my discussion. I wish to see how we could interpret the accounts if they are taken as reliable in their main claims.
I should begin by saying that the fact of Jesus’ death on the cross seems to me one of the most certain facts of history. The claim that the apostles believed they had seen Jesus alive after the crucifixion seems just about equally certain. The question is, what did this “seeing” consist of?
The New Testament accounts do not state that the apostles saw an ordinary physical body. Jesus appeared in a locked room; he did not knock on the door. He walked with two disciples for seven miles to Emmaus, without being recognised. He did not live with the apostles, but appeared to them for fairly short periods of time, and disappeared as suddenly as he appeared. Paul claims that Jesus appeared to him as a blinding light. Moreover, Matthew claims that Jesus’ body disappeared from the tomb before the stone was rolled away from the entrance; he did not simply walk out.
visions
These were clearly visions, temporary appearances to the senses of a reality that was no longer in our space and time at all. Luke reports that Jesus ate bread and fish. If you accept that, and of course not all competent scholars would, you will have to say that these visions were pretty physical. That is, there was not just a visual appearance. There was a physical form that had causal interactions with its physical environment.
Nevertheless, Luke reports that Jesus “vanished” and suddenly appeared again. The implication is that this was a fully physical manifestation, but still a temporary and discontinuous one. Presumably it is no harder for God to produce a physical manifestation than to produce a purely visual one.
The resurrected body of Jesus was not, then, an ordinary physical body. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul makes a point of saying that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom”, and that the resurrected body is as unlike the physical body as wheat is from the seed from which it springs.
What, then, happened to the physical body of Jesus? The implication is that it was transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a spiritual body – a form of existence outside our space altogether. It did not decay or just spontaneously combust. It did what all human bodies are destined to do eventually. It was transformed from a physical into a spiritual body, glorious, incorruptible, and immortal.
What was unusual about Jesus was that his spiritual form was able to manifest, for short periods, in a fully physical form, so that he could be seen, heard, and even touched by other humans. This would indeed be a miracle, an extraordinary event of profound spiritual significance, the manifestation of a spiritual reality in finite physical form. But the spiritual reality, Paul implies, is beyond human imagination. When we eventually see it as it truly is, we shall see (if “see” is even the right word) something quite different from the physical body of Jesus.
It is possible that the disciples had some sort of visionary experience that was solely a product of their own imaginations, and was not an appearance of Jesus at all. But it is equally possible that Jesus appeared to them for short periods of time in the physical form they knew and could recognise, though that was no longer his true spiritual form.
spiritual reality
The latter possibility becomes much more plausible if you have a firm belief that there is a God, a spiritual reality of supreme power and perfection, who has created the physical universe for the sake of the distinctive sorts of goodness it could generate. For then it would be highly probable that God would disclose something of the divine nature and purpose in the finite world. Christian faith rests on the claim that God has actually become incarnate in the finite world. That is, the infinite and invisible God has taken a finite visible form in order to reveal the divine purpose for humanity (and perhaps more broadly for the whole of the cosmos). In the life and words of Jesus, it is possible to discern the love, compassion, forgiveness, and self-giving of the creator of the universe.
If there were such a revelation, it could not end in death and defeat. God does not only manifest in finite human form. God wills to take all finite human forms into the eternal life, where they will be transformed by the glory of the divine presence. The appropriate expression of this would be the transformation of the physical form of the divine incarnation into a spiritual form that fully shares in the divine nature. The disappearance of the physical body of Jesus, and the resurrection appearances, could then be seen as the confirmation that this had indeed occurred.
If you have a generally materialist view of life, and think that spiritual realities do not exist, the resurrection is not going to convince you, since it will be interpreted as an illusion. But if you are open to the fundamental spiritual reality of God, then what the resurrection would show is that God shares in finite human life, in order that such life should be taken to share in the life of God. The resurrection of Jesus then becomes fully intelligible and plausible, as a revelation of the destiny of all human (and perhaps all sentient) life in God.
viewing the cosmos
It is, I think, very important that we do not see the resurrection of Jesus as a totally incredible event, in which one man breaks all the laws of physics, and goes off to some quasi-physical heaven where he still eats and sleeps. Rather, the resurrection should lead us to see the whole cosmos differently, as a finite physical manifestation of a deeper spiritual reality. The resurrection does not break the laws of physics. It discloses the deeper reality that underlies those laws and shows what their purpose really is – to generate conscious human lives that will be fulfilled in a wider-than-physical reality.
Just as the life of Jesus is a finite image of the nature and love of the infinite God, so the resurrection of Jesus is a finite expression of the destiny of all conscious lives – their fulfilment in God. The resurrection is the breaking-through of the eternal into the temporal, and the confirmation of God’s will to transform finite persons into pure spiritual images of the divine.
I therefore commend a strongly supernatural interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus. But we should not see the supernatural as something odd that intrudes occasionally into the natural. We should see the whole natural world as a manifestation of that which is supernatural – beyond and greater than the physical in value, in beauty, in creativity, in goodness, and in power.
The supernatural is God, the most real of all things. The resurrection of Jesus is a disclosure, at one time and in one space, of the real nature of all things and of the spiritual world for which we are all destined by God’s grace. It is a supernatural event. But, seen from the perspective of eternity, it is the most natural of all events; the disclosure of what things truly are and of what God wills them to become.
The Revd Professor Keith Ward is a fellow of the British Academy, Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Oxford and the author of over 20 theological books.
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