Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§18.4 Et Resurrexit
is given pride of place in the tradition received by Paul (1 Cor. 15.5), and its priority
is echoed in Luke 24.34. If there was any appearance for which an account
might have been expected, it is this one. And yet, such an account is completely
lacking (apart from/prior to John 21.15-23). 170 Why? The same question can be
asked regarding the appearance to James. 171
The deduction cannot surely be that such stories would have been unimportant
for the first believers. The confession of 1 Cor. 15.5 gives almost as much
prominence to the appearance to the twelve as to the appearance to Peter, and we
have seen that stories of the appearance to the twelve abound. So why not stories
which spell out in narrative form the claim that the first appearance was to Peter
— and that it was an appearance which (presumably) brought James into the
movement? 172
The hypothesis developed in this volume points to a different answer. According
to the hypothesis, the Jesus tradition has taken the shape still evident in
the Synoptic Gospels by virtue of being community tradition, tradition told and
retold again and again and again in the first and spreading communities of believers
in Jesus. The more likely conclusion to draw from the character of the appearance
traditions, therefore, is that the appearance traditions did not function in that
way in the early churches. They were not church tradition. Rather, they were regarded
more as personal testimony, and they functioned in that way. The appearances
could be confessed by the churches and their teachers. But they were not
(could not be) elaborated as stories by elders and teachers, because as stories
they belonged first and foremost to the one(s) who witnessed the appearance.
This suggestion seems to be borne out by the very personal character of so
many of the appearance stories: to Mary, to Cleopas, to Thomas, to Peter (John
21), to Paul. Paul seems to imply as much when he notes that most of the 500plus
were still alive (1 Cor. 15.6), with the implied invitation that his auditors
170. Of all the Gospels, the absence of such an appearance to Peter story is most surprising
in Matthew, given Matthew's distinctive interest in Peter (especially Matt. 14.28-32; 16.16-
19).
171. Gospel of the Hebrews 7 contains an account of the appearance to James (which
may well be based on 1 Cor. 15.7). The account adds: 'He took bread and blessed and broke it
and gave to James the Just and said to him, "My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man is
risen from those who sleep"' (Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament 9-10, who numbers the fragment
as 4).
172. Jeremias suggests that 'the radical groups in Palestinian Jewish Christianity . . .
took offence at the universalism of Peter (Gal. 2.12b; Acts 11.2) and therefore displaced him
from the role of having been first to experience an appearance of the Risen Lord' (Proclamation
307); but even so, that would still leave unexplained the silence of the tradition which has come
down to us. Equally implausible is the older view of Harnack, that the appearance to Peter was
suppressed (outlined and approved by Lüdemann, Resurrection 85); Marxsen is more plausible
at this point (see n. 77 above).
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