Interesting

Miracles and Apotheosis in the Ancient Mediterranean World

It should first be noted that miracle stories are not uncommon in the literature of this period. Ancient people believed in a world permeated by the supernatural and readily accepted stories of miracles and believed in stories of visions and visitors from the world of the divine all the time. Even very sober and sometimes sceptical historians like Tacitus will pass on accounts of miracles that he clearly accepts and expects his audience to believe as historical.

So when we read stories of how the emperor Augustus was miraculously conceived by the god Apollo, or how his birth was presaged by a new star in the heavens, or how Julius Caesar was seen ascending into the heaven after his death or how Vespasian healed lame and blind people who asked him for a miracle, we accept that these stories represent the kinds of things ancient people genuinely believed about great men. Or we accept that they are at least told to indicate that the man in question was great. What we don't do is accept that simply because people believed these stories they must mean that they really happened.

And this is even when the stories are presented to us by a very careful historian and given to us as verified fact. Take Tacitus' account of the miracles of the emperor Vespasian:

"In the months during which Vespasian was waiting at Alexandria for the  periodical return of the summer gales and settled weather at sea, many  wonders occurred which seemed to point him out as the object of the  favour of heaven and of the partiality of the Gods. One of the common  people of Alexandria, well known for his blindness, threw himself at the  Emperor's knees, and implored him with groans to heal his infirmity.  This he did by the advice of the God Serapis, whom this nation, devoted  as it is to many superstitions, worships more than any other divinity.  .... And so Vespasian, supposing that all things were possible to his good  fortune, and that nothing was any longer past belief, with a joyful  countenance, amid the intense expectation of the multitude of  bystanders, accomplished what was required. The hand was instantly  restored to its use, and the light of day again shone upon the blind.  Persons actually present attest both facts, even now when nothing is to  be gained by falsehood." (Histories, IV, 81)

Tacitus was closely connected to the court of Vespasian's sons and successors, Titus and Domitian, and so in a position to know the "persons actually present" and to consult them long after Vespasian's death "when nothing is to be gained by falsehood". He was also a very careful historian who scorned those who took rumour and stories as fact without checking them against sources and eye witnesses and who condemned those who "catch eagerly at wild and improbable rumours in preference to genuine history" (Annals, IV,11).

Despite this, I don't know anyone who would read the account above and conclude that the emperor really had magical healing powers and genuinely used his supernatural abilities to heal people. The fact that even a judicious and often sceptical analyst like Tacitus accepted this story shows us just how readily people in the ancient world accepted claims of the miraculous.

One form of miracle that was widely believed in was the idea of apotheosis, where a great man is physically taken up in to the heavens and raised to divine status. It was claimed that Romulus, the founder of Rome, underwent this process and later appeared to his friend Julius Proculus to declare his new celestial status. The same claim was made about Julius Caesar and Augustus, with supposed witnesses observing their ascent into the heavenly realm. Lucian's satire The Passing of Peregrinus includes his scorn for the claim that the philosopher was taken up into the celestial realm and was later seen walking around on earth after his death. The Chariton novel Callirhoe has its hero Chaereas visiting the tomb of his recently dead wife, saying he "arrived at the tomb at daybreak" where he "found the stones removed and the entrance open. At that he took fright." Others are afraid to enter the tomb, but Chaereas goes in and finds his wife's body missing and concludes she has been taken up by the gods.

An even closer parallel to the stories of Jesus' resurrection can be found in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana. The teacher and miracle worker Apollonius speaks in advance of his coming life after death and even tells his followers where he will meet them after he dies - the town of Dicaiarchia, near Naples. After meeting them there he continues to appear to them and teach them for forty days. At one point one of his followers, Demetrios, doubts that it is really Apollonius back from the dead speaking to them so the teacher encourages him to put out his hand and touch him to prove he is not a phantom. Apollonius later ascends into heaven, though he does later appear again in a dream vision to convince a doubter. The parallels between these stories and those of Jesus are obvious, though it is not certain if Philostratus may have been influenced by the Jesus stories, so it is hard to know how significant the parallels with Apollonius are. Details aside, what is clear is the idea of a great man being taken up into heaven and appearing after his death was commonplace in the ancient world.

The Nature and Date of the Sources

Firstly, it should be noted that only one of the references to or accounts of the resurrection appearances is first hand. The earliest account, in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, says he saw the risen Jesus in a vision, which seems to be a reference to his vision of Jesus that he he also refers to in Galatians 1:11 and which is described by a later writer in more (though differing) detail in Acts 9, 22 and 26. All other references to or accounts of people seeing the risen Jesus are at least second hand: Paul talks about others seeing Jesus in 1Corinthians 15 (James, Peter, "the Twelve", "all the apostles" and "more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time" ). Then there are the stories of appearances in the gospels of Mark (Mark 16), Matthew (Matt 28), Luke (Luke 24) and John (John 20).

Despite attempts by conservative scholars and fundamentalist apologists to argue otherwise, most scholars agree that none of the gospel accounts were written by anyone who actually knew and followed Jesus in his lifetime and that all were written a generation or more after his execution and at one or more removes from any eye-witnesses. gMark is generally dated to after 70 AD, gMatt and gLuke to the 80s AD and gJohn to sometime after 90 AD or as late as 120 AD. Jesus was executed in the early 30s AD and the idea that he had "risen" arose very soon afterwards.

So what we have here are five accounts of people seeing the "risen Jesus" after his death, the earliest written about 20 years later and the others written at a distance of 40-90 years after the supposed event. Only one is by an eye-witness and he makes it clear that what he saw was a vision, with later accounts of this vision talking about a heavenly light and a disembodied voice. The other accounts are very different to this and substantially different to each other, as we will see. They are also at least second hand in nature and at increasing distances in time from the supposed events.