Here’s another article to file under contextualizing the Bible with respect to its literary conventions. If you’re like me, you’ve heard Christian apologists say something like “the New Testament resurrection stories are like nothing in the ancient world,” a statement usually made to convince us that the resurrection was a bodily one. Now, I believe the resurrection was a bodily resurrection, but statements like these on the part of well meaning pastors or apologists aren’t really informed. Below are two recent articles on how Mark and Luke use (or violate) literary conventions known throughout the Greco-Roman world for telling ghost stories when they write about Jesus (pre- or post-resurrection). Be advised: Prince’s article may disturb readers whose background is pretty much popular apologetics. But her conclusion makes sense (I have marked some important parts with a red line). Same for the article on Mark, but to a lesser degree (parts marked in red show the payoff for preaching of this literary analysis).
Deborah Thompson Prince, The Ghost of Jesus: Luke 24 in Light of Ancient Narratives
of Post-Mortem Apparitions
Jason Robert Combs, A Ghost on the Water? Understanding an Absurdity in Mark 6:4950
These articles delighted me to no end! I was blown away-for a moment stunned and breathless-at the complexity and grandness Luke was trying to communicate to his audience concerning Jesus’ resurrected body. So much more than I imagined, and that’s by ancient cultural standards! Then, to fully grasp the implications of the disciples hardness of heart based on how absurd their reaction to Jesus’ walking on water would seem to the casual, contemporary reader of Mark…I just can’t think of a more clever way of putting it or a modern way that would rival it (for the moment). I am so blessed by this, thanks Dr. Heiser!
@Jonnathan Molina: glad you liked them.
I read Ghost on the water, I really enjoyed this one. I’ll be reading the other one now.
James reminds us that when the breath leaves the body, the body is dead:
James 2:26 For as the body without the spirit [breath] is dead, so faith without works is dead also.
But what happens to the breath when it leaves the body (since it is the animating principle)? This question troubled the ancients, and had different opinions as we see here:
Ecclesiastes 3:21 Who knoweth the spirit [breath] of man that goeth upward, and the spirit [breath] of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
One theory held that it returned to God:
Ecclesiastes 12:7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit [breath] shall return unto God who gave it.
For those who thought the breath was still alive and returned to God, they reasoned that one might see the disembodied breath on its way to God. This temporary traveling breath was a “ghost” (“ghost” was the Anglo word for “breath”).
Now if Joe died and didn’t tell his wife where he hid the money, one might have someone who could allegedly contact “family breaths” to ask them for the burial spot. Jews were forbidden to do this.
The disciples thought maybe Jesus was the breath of Jesus on its way back to God.
But, there is another issue that we see in the NT. Paul at first speaks of resurrection after the paradigm of Jesus. He says the breath of God will quicken (make faster) their **mortal** bodies. [Just kidding about “quicken” – he means “make alive”]. He expects the dead to pop out of their “burial place” (an above ground tomb??) like Matthew’s zombies.
But later, or at least elsewhere, he says that is nonsense. He says that the body dies and is not resurrected. Rather, God gives it a new body. The believer is reincarnated, possibly into the form of a… well, whatever God wants to give it. You don’t reap what you sow.
And he also speaks about changing, and swallowing up.
And if you ask him about it, he gets very defensive and calls you a fool and stuff.
The concept of resurrection in the NT is very, very ill defined.
https://www.scribd.com/document/314283719/Resurrection-or-Ghost-Story
This is an interesting article. Read it when it came out some time ago. For those interested, the conclusion is that, while the elements of the resurrection story are to be found in classical literature, they are never presented in their completeness — and, more importantly, the fact that they are all massed together in the gospels communicates the idea that the writers were telegraphing the idea that none of the extant ways of describing the body of a divine being did justice to what they had experienced with the resurrection. In other words, they were throwing the kitchen sink into their descriptions to tell people that “this is beyond any conventional mode of description.”