Crossan and Crossan, “Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision” (reviewed by Harlow Clark)

Review

Title: Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision
Authors: John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crosson
Publisher: HarperOne
Genre: Scripture Scholarship, Art History, Comparative Religion
Year Published: 2018
Number of Pages: 213
ISBN: 978-0-06-243418-0
Binding: Hardbound
Price: $39.99

Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

Prologue: Good Friday, March 30, 2018

Of course they witnessed the Resurrection–the soldiers guarding the tomb. It’s obvious once someone points it out.

“behold, some of the watch came into the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.”
Matthew 28:11

But who points it out?

When was the last time you heard the soldiers’ report discussed in a Gospel Doctrine class or an Easter sermon? I suspect most Mormons don’t think about it because we have ideas about worthiness, and wouldn’t consider the people who killed Jesus worthy to witness his resurrection. But non-Mormons don’t talk about it either. Willis Barnstone’s perceptive commentary on The New Covenant only includes one note for Mattai 28, pointing up Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the last phrase as an alternative to his own.

Similarly, Aaron Gale’s commentary for The Jewish Annotated New Testament ignores verse 11, concentrating on verses 13 and 15:

12 And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers,
13 Saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.

Gale’s comment:
“the story remained in circulation (Justin Dial. 102.8). Matthew’s account is unlikely: Roman Guards would not claim that we were asleep.”

Gale’s comment is enigmatic. If “the story remained in circulation,” is Gale telling us Matthew’s account of its origin is unlikely, or is he preparing us for verses 14-15, giving us the reason for the elders’ next words?

14 And if this come to the governor’s ears, we will persuade him, and secure you.
15 So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.

Or is he suggesting that the original version of the story was simply, “the guards fell asleep and Jesus’s disciples came and stole the body,” and that Matthew is trying to discredit that version?

But Gale’s comment ignores the question raised by verse 11, what exactly did the soldiers show and tell the elders? If the story that they fell asleep is a lie and they had to be bribed to tell it, what was the true story they told the chief priests? What did they show that had happened?

This is an expanded version of the answer John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan raise on page 39 of their book Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision: Why, for hundreds of years, do Easter images, carvings and paintings, portray the guards, usually two, one usually awake the other asleep? The iconography points to both the lie about the Resurrection, and the truth.

The Crossans pose certain questions at the end of each chapter to be answered in the next chapter. The book is part travelog, so the questions are questions they were trying to answer in their travels to monasteries and museums, which suggests that they didn’t focus on verse 11 either before they started researching Easter iconography, before seeing hundreds of years of the soldiers depicted in Anastasis art.

Two Traditions: April 20, 2018

So if you are a monk illuminating a manuscript, or an artisan carving a decoration on a tomb, or someone painting a chapel fresco or creating a mosaic of the Resurrection, where do you turn for details. The Crossans point to two textual traditions. One is the story in Matthew of the garden tomb. Another is found in I Peter 3 and 4, which mention Jesus preaching the gospel to those who are dead.

The western tradition draws upon Matthew and Luke (which includes the women at the tomb and post-Resurrection appearances, but not the guarded tomb) while the Eastern tradition draws upon Peter for details.

The Western tradition appears first, particularly on stone crosses, sarcophagi and tomb decorations, but they don’t show Jesus present except symbolically as the Xi-Rho cross, usually with one soldier asleep on one side and the other awake and cowering or watching on the other side. The symbolic depiction lasts about 400 years before we see Jesus emerging bodily, first sitting up in the tomb, then with one leg outside the tomb, and finally hovering above the tomb.

Why the 400 years of symbolic depictions? Part of it involves the discovery of the tomb in Jerusalem. The Crossans suggest that the focus of the symbolic tradition is the tomb, that the artists were depicting the tomb as they knew it, not just a generic image of a tomb. In the same way. later depictions of a church are meant to depict a particular church in Jerusalem.

So the Western tradition shows Jesus as the only one resurrected. In the Eastern tradition, which starts about 200 years later, instead of seeing Jesus gradually emerging from the tomb as the tradition develops, we see Jesus fully emerged, pulling Adam and (usually) Eve (i.e., all humanity) from their graves.

The image on the dust jacket (https://www.harperone.com/resurrectingeaster/) is a fine example, including the mandorla, the almond-shaped radiance around Jesus. (Mandorla is almond in Italian.)

However, the dust jacket crops two important elements from the image, At the top is the title: HANACTIC (Anastasis). Anastasis means up-rising or rising up, but because it appears as a title or label in so many images of Jesus pulling all of us from the grave, the Crossans use it to denote the tradition that depicts the universal resurrection.

The dust jacket also crops out the bottom curve of the image, which shows a consistent element from the beginning of the Anastasis depictions to the latest image, dated 1938. It shows Jesus trampling on the gates of hell, consistently cruciform, with its nuts and bolts and keys flying.

That is, it shows the gates of hell not prevailing against Jesus. The Crossans don’t call out Matthew 16:18, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” as a textual source for details, and I might not have made the connection myself but I picked up Edwin Brown Firmage’s Paul and the Expansion of the Church Today several years ago, and he starts out by examining this verse as a reference to salvation for the dead.

Maybe it’s his legal training that caused Firmage to read it differently than most people. The side that prevails in court is the side that receives the favorable judgment. That is, prevail doesn’t imply attack. It implies a favorable judgment or victory granted by a higher authority than either of the parties at court. If you approach the word prevail that way, Jesus is saying the gates of hell will not be able to withstand the Church.

That’s a very different reading than I usually hear, which imagines the gates of hell as some kind of siege engine coming up to battle against the Church. Perhaps because of that word hell, which has developed a connotation much different than the place where the dead go, and the word against, which connotes offense, not defense, the usual purpose of a gate.

But whatever our connotations of the word hell, the Anastasis tradition shows visually something Mormons hold dear: the gates of the underworld are not sufficient to keep people there. They will hear the gospel preached and be liberated.

But while the Crossans don’t cite Matthew 16:18 as a source for the idea that Hell has gates that Jesus must trample down to liberate the inhabitants thereof, they do cite I Peter as a source for why Jesus trampled the gates of Hell:

18 For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:

19 By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;

20 Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. –I Peter 3:18-20

6 For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit. –I Peter 4:6

The Mormon affinity for these verses places us firmly in the universal resurrection tradition, but here’s a paradox: our institutional imagery comes from the single or lone resurrection tradition. Keeping in mind that all the imagery the Crossans are exploring are institutional, created for liturgical purposes or to decorate churches or graves, I searched LDS.org’s image library. I’m not aware of any institutional images of Jesus preaching the gospel to the dead, and there aren’t a lot of images of the resurrection itself. There’s an image of Jesus coming out from the tomb about halfway out, one leg and half his body still in the tomb. I was not able to find that in the Church’s collection of imagery although I did find one image that looks like he’s coming out of a cave https://www.lds.org/media-library/images/resurrected-christ-wilson-ong-212048?lang=eng, and a striking image of Mary Magdalene inside the tomb talking to Jesus outside the tomb. https://www.lds.org/media-library/images/easter-pictures-resurrection-mary-magdalene-1242543?lang=eng

Images of Mary talking to Jesus are probably the most common resurrection images we have. There are a few or several of Jesus showing his wounds and talking to disciples on the road to Emmaus and a few other things, but multiple images of Jesus and Mary conversing. This may be a new tradition, not of including Mary Magdalene, but of featuring her. I wonder how much of it comes from a belief common among Mormons but not officially taught that Mary was Jesus’s wife?

So again the paradox: our teachings reflect a commitment to the universal resurrection, but if we want a visual tradition reflecting that commitment we won’t find it in the western Christianity familiar to so many of us, and so many early church members.

Clearly, imagery is not the same as doctrinal commitments. Or maybe it’s not so clear. The dust jacket tells us about the two iconographic traditions, and for about the first 70 pages I kept wondering what was at stake, what would account for the Los Angeles Times blurb, “A renowned, if controversial scholar of Christianity [whose] interpretation is not exactly conventional.”

At the same time, I was listening to Joel Hoffman’s The Bible’s Cutting Room Floor. Dr. Hoffman says that some of the stories that got left out were left out because the writers could assume the readers knew the stories and could fill in the gaps. So what were Dominic and Sarah Crossan assuming their audience knew, that I didn’t know?

Implications for Doctrinal Dogma: May 17, 2018

Then on page 70, discussing changes between the Greek and two Latin editions of The Gospel of Nicodemus, which does portray the Resurrection, Crossan says, “What is at stake here for Christianity’s doctrinal dogma is this. If Christ took ‘all’ out of Hades once, why not again? Especially if Hades is read as Hell, and was once emptied of ‘all’ its inhabitants, why not again at the Last Judgment? Is Hell a permanent prison or a transient hotel? Those text changes show an intent to exorcize completely the specter of universal salvation.”

So does that mean other western Christians don’t read I Corintinans 15:22, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” as a statement of universal resurrection, as a statement that whatever happens to us after the resurrection will happen to us in our resurrected bodies?

But why should Western Christianity be concerned that if hell is emptied once it could be emptied again? Does it raise the question of what use the church is if people are going to be saved anyway? The question of why people should observe the rites and rituals of the church if they’ll be resurrected in the end anyway?

That is, does western Christianity see Resurrection and Salvation as the same thing? If so, the idea that everyone will be resurrected, the wicked as well as the righteous, undercuts the idea that we have to do something–even if that something is only calling upon the name of the Lord–to be saved.

If resurrection is the same thing as salvation, a universal resurrection can call into question the need for any number, two or three or more, to gather together in the Lord’s name. Unless the role of a church is to minister and administer, to echo the Savior’s act of doing for us what we can’t do for ourselves, by doing for each other what we can’t do for ourselves.

We don’t birth ourselves, or baptize or marry ourselves, or bury ourselves. Our temporal salvation is tied up with the presence of other people.

Or at least that’s the answer I surmise to the question, “What is it the Crossans assume their audience knows that I don’t know?”

But if parts of the book leave me wondering what nuances I’m missing because I was raised in a universal resurrection tradition, other things resonate very well. Crossan’s discussion of the changes in the Gospel of Nicodemus document an example of Joseph Smith’s statement that “ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors” upon scriptural texts–a comment Joseph understood from his own experience with people who wanted to alter scripture for their own purposes.

Resurrecting Easter is a thought-provoking book that will have a lot of resonance for Mormon readers, especially those who want to think about the pictorial tradition of Jesus and Mary Magdalene which seems to me a new tradition in Resurrection iconography and well worth some further exploration.

One thought

  1. This is an excellent review, Harlow Clark. It shows a close and careful reading of the book, and of the related scriptures. I find your questions in the first section, about what the soldiers told the priests, to be especially thought-provoking. The translation you quote, the KJV, says that the soldiers “shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.” Is “shewed” used in a sense other than “showed” — or did the soldiers present some evidence, like the shroud, or the broken seal, or a weapon that Jesus might have pushed aside, leaving a mark on it? Now I’m going to have to do some serious research.

    Thanks for the impetus.

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