The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (27 page)

LUKE’S LOOSE ENDS

Luke used most of this material, but he planned on including some resurrection appearances, so he arbitrarily had the women relay the message (this time received from
two
men) to the disciples. They will eventually see the Risen One in Luke 24:34-43, though the women do not. For his raw material, Luke has borrowed familiar legends of the epiphany of a divine savior. The story of the disciples meeting Christ on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) closely matches a story we read from a source already three or four centuries older than Luke in which the Savior Asclepius, incognito, joins a couple returning home disappointed after a pilgrimage to his holy shrine. There they had hoped to gain relief from a much-delayed pregnancy, but the god had been of no help. To remedy their despair and faithlessness, he heals her on the spot (from what is revealed as a false pregnancy), makes his identity known, and vanishes from their sight.

To this Luke adds a rather incoherent episode in which Jesus suddenly pops into the midst of his disciples and demonstrates what he has just belied: his corporeal solidity! It is distinctly parallel to an episode preserved in Philostratus’s
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
, wherein his disciples have given the sage up for dead, having abandoned him before his trial before a Roman tyrant. But here he is, all of a sudden in their midst! Is he a ghost? No, he assures them, extending his meaty hands for them to touch, just as Jesus does in Luke 24:36-43. His ascension into heaven from the Mount of Olives is clearly borrowed from Josephus’s account of Moses’s assumption into heaven. So Luke has supplemented Mark in the same way Mark supplemented the version of the story he had inherited: Just as Mark borrowed the form of the standard exaltation story, so Luke added some typical epiphany and ascension stories. Luke has changed the role of Mary Magdelene only enough to facilitate the (fictive) continuation of the story: She hears the angelic tidings and does obey the command to convey them.

MATTHEW’S MOSAIC

Matthew faced the same challenge Luke did. He had Mark in front of him and didn’t like the way it ended. He, too, wanted to present resurrection appearances, but where was he going to get them? He did not think of borrowing legendary prototypes from rival gods. He expanded Mark’s narrative as he had so many times at earlier points in the story, by fudging it from scripture. He created a half-baked version of an appearance (Matt. 28:16-20) upon a Galilean mountain he says, by way of afterthought, that Jesus had directed them to, though we had heard nothing about it. The speech (vv. 18-20) about receiving universal authority over all nations and so on comes, as Randel Helms shows,
¹⁶
right out of two contemporary Greek translations of Daniel 7:14, the vision of one like a son of man receiving sovereignty over all peoples, tongues, and nations. This is scarcely an appearance story at all: all summary, no scene.

But what of Mary’s role? Matthew has embellished the scene elaborately in order to parody an anti-Christian slur to the effect that Jesus’s body was gone from the tomb (“if you say so!”) only because his wily disciples had made away with it. Matthew swallows and digests this polemic, turning it into a piece of comedy, based, again, on Daniel: Just as the Babylonian guards who cast Shadrach, Meschach, and Abed-Nego into the incinerator keeled over from the terrible heat (3:22), so did analogous Roman sentries collapse (Matt. 28:3-4) before the radiance of a mighty angel. Where did
he
come from? He is Mark’s humble “young man” reinterpreted as the “fourth man” present in the furnace with the three Hebrew youths, one “like a son of God” (Daniel 3:25).

But Matthew seemingly was not quite sure he had gotten Mark’s “young man” right—suppose it was
not
an angel, but rather the Risen Jesus himself? So Matthew, who adds a second Gadarene demoniac to Mark’s solo madman (Matt. 8:28 vs. Mark 5:1), a second blind man to the lone Bar-Timaeus (Matt. 20:30 vs. Mark 10:46), a second donkey to Mark’s single beast (Matt. 21:1-7 vs. Mark 11:1-7), now adds a second version of Mark’s young man, the Risen Christ (28:9-10). That he is merely a literary doublet, though, is obvious from the fact Matthew invents no new lines for the character, having him merely reiterate the command of the angel! This detail is of the utmost importance for our inquiry; it means that
the appearance of the Risen Christ to address Mary Magdalene is a literary product created as a kind of harmonization by Matthew
.

JOHN’S EASTER EVOLUTION

John uses at least three of the techniques I have described to expand the narratives he had inherited from Matthew and Luke. The analysis of John’s Easter section, chapters 20-21, is especially complex because, as all critical scholars agree, chapter 21 is a supplement to chapter 20, recapping the original ending of the book (20:30-31, “Jesus also performed many additional signs before the eyes of his disciples, which, however, are not included in this book; but these have been included to convince you that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, so that, believing it, you may come alive in his name”) in 21:25, a paraphrase: “And there are many additional feats Jesus performed, which, if one were to record them all, would flood the very world with books!” But that is not all: it appears as well that somewhere along the line someone has beefed up chapter 20 as well, adding the Doubting Thomas episode (20:24-29); all the disciples are assumed present in 20:19-23, but suddenly we read that Thomas was not there! That is a condition of the second story, not the first.

In the same way, John 20:1, 11-18, Mary Magdalene’s exchange with the two angels and with the Risen Jesus, appears to have been shoe-horned into a story in which, as in Luke, the women see the empty tomb and tell the men, without seeing Jesus himself.
¹⁷
Verse 2 has Mary Magdalene run to tell the male disciples that the tomb is empty, whereupon two of them return without her. But she is somehow “back” at the tomb in verse 11! This same verse would open the question of why the two male disciples missed seeing the two angels, since all there was to be seen in the tomb in verses 6-7 were the discarded grave clothes. Did the angels hide at first? Or arrive late? Also, if the story were originally cut from the same cloth as its present context, why is Mary told not to touch Jesus in verse 17, while Thomas is told in verse 27 just the opposite? And in the section 20:2-10, Mary is said to have visited the tomb with the other women (v. 2) as in the other gospels, while in John 20:1, 11-18, she is alone. The most important incongruity is that verse 17, despite its other difficulties, at least means that the ascension is imminent, but, instead of ascending, Jesus goes on to make several other appearances in the next chapter and a half!

In the appearance to Mary, are we dealing with an independent episode preserved and inserted here in John’s Easter complex? It will be easier to make a judgment once we briefly survey the kind of material surrounding it. That may help us to see the sort of thing the evangelist and/or redactor did with his material in general. The report of the women prompting the visit of Peter and his colleague to the empty tomb (John 20:2-10) has Johannine fingerprints (John’s favorite vocabulary and conceptuality) all over it, and it appears to be a Johannine rewrite of Luke 24:9-12 (“the women . . . told this to the apostles, but the report struck them as an empty tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran for the tomb. He stooped to peer inside and saw the linen wrappings lying abandoned. And he returned home, baffled as to what might have happened”). John has added the second disciple on the basis of Luke 24:24, “
Some
of our group went to the tomb.” (Some important manuscripts of Luke lack 24:12, Peter’s inconclusive visit, but it does not matter whether this verse was a subsequent addition; even if it was, John may have read the longer version.)

BARNACLES ON THE JOHANNINE HULL

John 20:19-23 can be naturally understood as John’s rewrite of Luke 24:36-43, the main difference being that Jesus’s
solid
hands and
feet
(Luke) become his
wounded
hands and
side
(John), to adjust the originally Lukan scene to the details of John’s crucifixion account, where, alone of all the gospels, Jesus gets wounded in the
side
.

The Doubting Thomas scene is borrowed from, or at least cut from the same cloth as, contemporary stories such as we read, again, in Philostratus, where, weeks or months after the final ascension of Apollonius to heaven, a group of his devotees are together in one place praying and studying. One of them announces that he just cannot bring himself to believe in immortality, all the more since he has long been beseeching Apollonius for proof, but so far in vain. The others tolerate his unbelief, until one day they hear him exclaiming, to no one visible, “I believe you!” Their flabbergasted gazes tell him they do not share his vision, so he explains that the venerable Apollonius has appeared, just now, to him alone, to convince him to believe in eternal life, much like John 20:30-31, which makes the same point concluding the Doubting Thomas story.

John 21:1-19, the miraculous catch of fish, also appears in Luke 5:1-9. In both versions, Peter and company have failed to catch any fish until Jesus bids them cast the net as he directs, whereupon they find their fraying nets strained to the breaking point. Then, he tells Peter to follow him, in Luke as an angler for souls, in John as a shepherd of souls. Luke has plugged the story into Mark 1:16 and 17, to explain why Peter, Andrew, James, and John would have been willing to abandon home and livelihood. John’s version, too, has the disciples at work fishing and does not say they have
returned
to fishing. Maybe the redactor has made it into a resurrection story. In any case, the story originally featured Pythagoras, and in that version the sage did not cause the great catch but rather used his mathematical acumen to “guess” the number of fish just hauled ashore by fishermen. Pythagoras was a vegetarian and made a deal with the salty fellows: If he could tell the correct number of fish, they would set them free. He did, and so did they. This explains why, despite the uncanny presence of the resurrected Son of God, the disciples in John 21 take the time to count the fish! It is a vestige of the Pythagoras tale, where it mattered. This is why the number is provided, 153, to no apparent purpose, at least until one realizes that 153 was one of the sacred “triangular numbers” venerated by the Pythagoreans! Did John derive the story from Luke, or from Pythagoreanism? We don’t know. But John does seem to be either rewriting Luke or borrowing a contemporary miracle story, if not somehow both.

The awkward dialogue between Jesus and Simon Peter in John 21:20-23 (“If I should want him to remain behind till I come, how is that any business of yours?”) is another attempt to domesticate and to defuse a hostile anti-Christian jibe. We find one form of the polemic in 2 Peter 3:4, “What happened to the promise of his coming? Ever since the (church) fathers died off, the world has continued on as it always has since the day it was made!” You see, the early belief that Jesus should return before his generation passed (Mark 13:30) had already shrunk its line of defense, as more early disciples died, down to promising that only
some
should live to see it (Mark 9:1). Finally, it had been reworked as the claim that at least
one
member of that generation should endure to the end (“The saying circulated among the fellowship that the brother in question should not die,” John 21:23a). But he did, and the great weight of vindication that had rested upon his shoulders came crashing down. The only way John’s redactor could think of to get off the hook was to call the whole thing a gross misunderstanding: “But Jesus did not actually tell him he would not die,” only that even if such an enormity were to be true, it would be no concern of Peter’s. What we have here is a move akin to Mark’s statements that this or that report had to be hushed up till an opportune time. It is all disingenuous revisionism.

ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH

This brings us at last to the Magdalene encounter in John 20:1, 11-19. We can deconstruct the passage by marking how John employs three of the standard techniques to construct the passage. First, it surely seems as if he has copied Matthew’s splitting of Mark’s “young man” into an angel
and
the Christ. Only John has also cast Luke’s two men in the scene, making them explicitly angels a la Matthew. Notice that, again, Jesus vouchsafes nothing to the women, or woman, but a verbatim repetition of the words of the angels. And he implicitly negates the item of Mary clasping Jesus’s feet from Matthew 28:9, telling her not to hold onto him (20:17a). So John has rewritten a predecessor, namely, Matthew.

He has also supplemented it with scripture, adapting for Jesus the parting words of the angel Raphael in Tobit 12:18-21, “I came, not as a favor on my part, but as sent by the command of our God. So praise him forever and ever! All this time, I only appeared to you and never ate nor drank, but you were beholding a vision. And now, render thanks to God, for I am ascending to him who sent me.”
¹⁸
Raphael refers, inclusively, to “our God,” a mutual allegiance, just as Jesus speaks of “my Father and your Father, my God and your God” (20:17b). Like Jesus in John 20:17, he says he will momentarily “ascend” to “him who sent me,” a ubiquitous Johannine phrase. The otherwise puzzling command not to touch him, as Helms suggests, recalls the Docetism (see chapter 5, “Constantine’s Christ,” for more on Docetism) of Raphel’s phantom human semblance and probably derives from it. The Risen Jesus is “untouchable.”

And John turns to his own advantage yet another antiresurrection jibe, one familiar from Tertullian and the sources of the Jewish antigospel Toledoth Jeschu (see chapter 7, “Eighty Gospels?”), namely, that, while the disciples might not have maliciously stolen Jesus’s corpse, the caretaker of the garden in which he was buried (John 19:41) must have transferred it from its temporary interment (for the sake of the encroaching Sabbath) to some other location. John has taken a story in which it really
was
the gardener of whom Mary inquired, and substituted Matthew’s resurrected Jesus for him.