Murder at Golgotha Read online

  If this had been all that anyone experienced, it would of course have been dismissed out of hand as just the unsubstantiated testimony of one lone woman with an already well-established history of mental disturbance. Our investigation would have been equally unbelievable on this point. But now some other, even more astonishing sightings were in store. . . .

  15

  Strange Sightings

  WERE THERE ANY OTHER SIGHTINGS to add credence to the strange story told by Mary of Magdala? According to the John testimony, Mary, after Jesus had appeared to her, "went and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord," i.e., Jesus. She also reported the words that he had spoken to her:

  Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father [i.e. God]. But go to the brothers, and tell them: I am ascending to my Father. (John 20:18)

  John omitted to mention the "brothers' " reaction to Mary's story. But Mark, after briefly reiterating the story of Jesus' appearance to Mary, went on:

  She then went to those who had been his companions, and who were mourning and in tears, and told them. But they did not believe her when they heard her say that he was alive and that she had seen him. (Mark 16:10-11)

  Meanwhile, the Luke testimony had a fresh "sighting" to report. At a point that can only have been shortly before Mary of Magdala had returned with her story of directly encountering Jesus, one of Jesus' followers named Cleopas, together with an unnamed companion, had set off from Jerusalem to walk the seven-mile journey to a village called Emmaus. As this pair walked in dejection and despair, an apparent stranger started walking alongside them, quickly asking them what it was that made them so unhappy. As Luke took up the story:

  Cleopas answered him: "You must be the only person staying in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have been happening there these last few days. He [the stranger] asked "What things?" They answered: "All about Jesus of Nazareth, who showed himself a prophet powerful in action and speech before God and the whole people, and how our chief priests and our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and had him crucified. Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free. And this is not all. Two whole days have now gone by since it all happened, and some women from our group have astounded us. They went to the tomb in the morning, and when they could not find the body, they came back to tell us they had seen a vision of angels/messengers who declared he was alive. Some of our friends went to the tomb and found everything exactly as the women had reported, but of him they saw nothing. (Luke 24:18-24)

  The great value of this reporting of Cleopas' words is that in just a few simple sentences it essentially summarized and corroborated everything that we have so far inferred throughout our crime scene investigation. That is: that it was Jerusalem's chief priests and leaders, not any assembly of the entire Jewish people, who had instigated Jesus' execution by crucifixion. That it was the populace's and indeed Cleopas and his companion's own expectation of Jesus that he was the prophesied Messiah/Christ who would release them from Roman domination. That it was a group of women who had been the first to arrive at Jesus' tomb and discover his body gone, encountering there instead mystery messengers who told them that he was alive again. And that Peter and (probably) John had indeed then gone to the tomb to find everything as the women had reported. All that Cleopas and his companion had not heard of up to that point—presumably because they had left Jerusalem just a little too early—was anything of Mary of Magdala's encounter with that very much alive Jesus himself.

  And obvious though it should have been to Cleopas and to his companion, what they were also failing to be aware of at that particular moment was that they were already in the midst of a very similar experience to that of Mary of Magdala. For this was no ordinary stranger who had taken up to walking beside them. He suddenly began talking to them in a way that, as they later described it, "burned in their hearts":

  You foolish men! So slow to believe all that the prophets have said. Was it not necessary that the Christ/Messiah should suffer before entering into his glory? (Luke 24:25-26)

  As the Luke testimony continued its narrative,

  Then, starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he [the stranger] explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself. When they drew near to the village . . . they pressed him to stay with them. . . . Now, while he was with them at table, he took the bread and said the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him. But he had vanished from their sight. (Luke 24:27-31)

  The investigative mind inevitably floods with questions, many of these no doubt as unanswerable in the minds of the pair who actually underwent the experience as they can ever be in our own minds, two thousand years later. For if this unrecognized stranger was really Jesus, presumably he must have looked quite "normal" to Cleopas and to his companion as he walked along the road with them, then sat down with them for a meal. So, how was he dressed? Why did they not recognize him? What was it that made them recognize him only when they did, when he broke the loaf of bread that they were about to eat? Was it perhaps their first clear sight of his hands, and their suddenly finding themselves looking at nail holes in these? Also, just what sort of "resurrection" was this on Jesus' part, that he could walk, talk, handle bread, and appear totally solid one moment, then vanish into thin air the next?

  Whatever the answers to those questions, the experience so astounded Cleopas and his companion that, as Luke goes on . . .

  They set out that instant and returned to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven [i.e., the twelve disciples minus Judas] assembled together with their companions, who said to them, "The Lord has indeed risen and has appeared to Simon." (Luke 24:33-34)

  So, sometime earlier that same day, though inevitably sometime after Simon Peter and "John" had left the tomb, Jesus had made an additional "live" appearance to Simon Peter. Presumably it was one of much the same variety as that to Mary of Magdala, though it has gone otherwise unrecorded, except for a glancing, later mention in a letter of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:5). Paul, who believed women needed to be kept in their place, notably omitted to take any account of Mary of Magdala's story, just as in Luke's version. But having been duly told of this particular sighting of Jesus, Cleopas and his companion now related their experience:

  They told their story of what had happened on the road and how they had recognized him at the breaking of bread. (Luke 24:35)

  Further corroborative evidence for our investigation was about to be added by other events of that extraordinary Sunday. For, any doubts still nurtured by those disciples who had not yet had any such direct experiences of an alive-and-well Jesus were about to be allayed that very same evening. As the Luke testimony continues:

  They were still talking about all this when he [Jesus] himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you!" In a state of alarm and fright, they thought they were seeing a ghost. But he said "Why are you so agitated, and why are these doubts stirring in your hearts? See my hands and my feet that it is I myself. Touch me and see for yourselves. A ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have." And as he said this he showed them his hands and his feet. Their joy was so great that they still could not believe it, as they were dumbfounded. So he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat? And they offered him a piece of grilled fish which he took and ate before their eyes." (Luke 24:36-43)

  The John testimony not only describes, and accordingly corroborates, exactly this same incident, it adds to the general bewilderment. For it states that the doors to the room in which the disciples were gathered "were closed ... for fear of the Jews" (John 20:19). Indicating thereby that Jesus' body had mysteriously passed through these doors. It also mentions that Jesus showed the assembly his side as well as his hands and feet, a description that seems to indicate his flesh-and-bones body still bore the visible penetrations caused by the crucifixion nails and the lance.

  Additionally and uniquel
y, John told of a later, second appearance by Jesus to this collective assembly of the disciples. At this second sighting the disciple Thomas was present. Thomas had been absent on the previous Sunday, and had been expressing his disbelief of what the others had told him:

  "Unless I can see the holes that the nails made in his hands and can put my finger into the holes they made, and unless I can put my hand into his side, I refused to believe." (John 24:25)

  Now, eight days after the first incident, the doors of the room in which the disciples were gathered were again closed, when Jesus

  came in and stood among them. "Peace be with you," he said. Then he spoke to Thomas "Put your finger here. Look, here are my hands. Give me your hand. Put it into my side. Do not be unbelieving any more, but believe." Thomas replied, "My Lord and my God!" (John 24:26-28)

  In any normal, rational terms, all these testimonies are obviously extraordinary and extremely difficult to believe. Quite definitely not the usual stuff of any crime scene investigation. Yet, what is impressive about them is the very calm, matter-of-fact way everything is recounted, and the ready acknowledgment that even those undergoing the experiences were as disbelieving of their own senses as we can very legitimately be from our reading and listening to their story.

  For, how could anyone, either in Jesus' time or now, comprehend how a man who had been so publicly and so cruelly put to death have become so palpably alive again? Self-evidently this "resurrected" Jesus was not a man still weak and full of pain, as we could only expect if he had somehow been physically resuscitated from that tortured, bloody death forty-eight hours earlier. Rather, he was an individual who was obviously taking some care to demonstrate that he was not in any way impaired by the ordeal. Also, that he could seem physically solid and even be eating food one moment, then ghost-like pass through closed doors and/or vanish into thin air the next. All this those who set down these events in writing, and in particular John, seem to have felt obliged to tell as honestly as they possibly could, with all the many paradoxes and perplexities. To them, they had no alternative. It was simply how it was.

  And, however much the cynical, modern mind may try to dismiss the sightings—and the auditory and tactile experiences that accompanied them—as collective hallucinations on the part of a few simple fishermen, history does not allow any such simple verdict. As we have already seen, before Jesus' crucifixion his disciples had not been anything remotely of heroic disposition. At the time of the arrest in Gethsemane most of them had run away. At Caiaphas's house Simon Peter had lied three times, rather than admit to his being one of Jesus's followers, let alone being their Jesus-appointed leader. During the crucifixion on Golgotha, only John had dared show his face anywhere near the cross. And not one of these individuals, even though Jesus had handpicked them as his key disciples, had offered to take charge of his body as it hung dead and useless, after crucifixion and the centurion's lance had done their worst.

  Yet, the lesson of history is that there was something so indescribably real about the way that the resurrected Jesus presented himself to this altogether unlikely bunch of individuals that their whole personalities became radically and irrevocably transformed, quite literally from the moment of those sightings on. At the very next, major Jewish celebration, Pentecost, a feast that occurs just fifty days after the Passover, the previously timid and backsliding Simon Peter told a huge Jerusalem crowd about what he and his companions had experienced with such spirit and conviction that that very same day three thousand people reportedly became "Christians" (Acts 2:41).

  And it was a process that quickly became unstoppable. A few years later Peter had developed the confidence to address even a Roman centurion and an entirely non-Jewish gathering with these forceful words:

  You must have heard about the recent happenings in Judaea, about Jesus of Nazareth and how he . . .

  went about doing good and curing. . . . Now, I and those with me can witness to everything he did throughout the countryside of Judaea and in Jerusalem itself; and also to the fact that they killed him by hanging him on a tree. Yet three days afterwards God raised him to life and allowed him to be seen, not by the whole people, but only by certain witnesses. Now we are those witnesses. We have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the dead. He has ordered us to proclaim this to his people . . . that all who believe in Jesus will have their sins forgiven through his name. (Acts 10:37-43)

  Simon Peter and the other followers, now clearly convinced that death was never the end of their lives, went out and about, fearlessly preaching what Jesus had taught them, and describing the events of Golgotha in this way. In this same cause they not only declared their preparedness to risk a fate every bit as dire as Jesus'—they positively demonstrated this preparedness by accepting whatever fate came their way with an equanimity that won them and their cause more and more converts. Peter himself was crucified, reputedly asking to undergo this upside down. And in the course of the next three centuries thousands of Christians similarly died as martyrs in Roman arenas, only for still more to come forward, seemingly out of nowhere, to take their place. It was a process that against all odds established the world religion that is Christianity today.

  Even so, there can be no absolute certainties about those strange sightings associated with a Jesus who had seemed so very dead when crucified on Golgotha and who was buried just a stone's throw away. This is not, however, to excuse some of the more unworthy speculations that have arisen, particularly in our own proof-demanding era. For some decades now there has been a highly popular vogue to explain away Jesus' "resurrection" as simply a physical resuscitation following which Jesus slipped away to southern France to live happily ever after with Mary of Magdala. Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code are but two examples. "Late and quite unfounded" are the words which the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church used as long ago as 1957 to dismiss the flimsy ninth-century legend upon which some beguiling modern-day variants of this story have been based. If the southern France legend were true, then the testimonies of sightings discussed in this chapter, all well documented from at least as early as the second century, would need to be dismissed as so much wastepaper. It is the southern France legend, not the four testimonies, that is unfounded. And the very idea that Jesus should have wandered off to a Provencal retirement, cynically letting his followers die for him in their thousands back in the rest of the Roman world is an affront both to the basic integrity of our four testimony writers, and to all that can be understood of the human Jesus himself.

  But of course, even after all the investigative approaches that we have tried in this book, there can still be no scientific proof that the circumstances of Jesus' death and return to life really were as our testimony writers have described. Even so, as we are just about to see, there are some interesting ways by which our Golgotha crime investigation file can and should remain ever active.

  *—Where hundreds of followers of Jesus died for their beliefs. The famous Colosseum of Rome, just one of the many Roman entertainment centers where Christians might be mauled by lions or set alight as spectacles for public amusement. As the Roman historian Tacitus described the emperor Nero's persecution of Christians living within a generation of Jesus' lifetime: "Their deaths were made farcical. Dressed in wild animal skins, they were torn to pieces like dogs, or crucified, or made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight." Nero presented such spectacles in Rome's Gardens shortly before a later emperor built the Colosseum. The inset is from a relief on a Roman terracotta lamp of the first century a.d. showing a hapless victim being mauled by lions.

  16

  Can We Ever Close the File?

  Throughout this crime scene investigation we have needed to draw much information from the four testimonies witnessing to the events of Golgotha. Yet, we have also found them in certain details to be flawed by differences between one version and another. So why should we take any of them seriously?

  As we all know, gold
rarely exists as pure nuggets. It needs to be painstakingly extracted from baser materials. In much the same way, probably not one of our four testimonies consists of pure eyewitness testimony from start to finish. Instead, each testimony has some pure material as from someone who may well have been a direct eyewitness. But this material has sometimes been edited, and mixed together with material of lower-grade value, by slightly later individuals who were writing at secondhand, and were each trying to provide a more comprehensive account for their own local communities of recent converts.

  A typical case in point is the Matthew testimony. As theologians of all denominations have long agreed, this cannot have been written in its entirety by the Matthew referred to in the testimonies as a tax-collector disciple of Jesus (Matthew 9:9). This is because the Matthew testimony shows a lot of influence from that of Mark, of whose author there has never been any tradition identifying him as an immediate disciple of Jesus. So why should one of the "Twelve," who had traveled around with Jesus repeatedly, have deferred to an individual of lesser direct experience? As we have already seen, the Matthew testimony reported earthquakes at the moment of Jesus' death on Golgotha and at the time of his resurrection in the tomb. The fact that no one else reported such unmissable happenings gives us cause for considerable skepticism towards at least this part of the Matthew testimony.