VATICAN CITY – Ephesus, spring of the year 57. In the city where Heraclitus, the philosopher of the Logos, flourished more than five centuries earlier, an Jew from the diaspora has arrived, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, who bears the name of the first king of Israel, Saul, and also the Roman citizen’s name of Paul, a man immersed in Hellenistic culture and capable of writing in extraordinary, rare Greek.
The Core of Christianity: The Kérygma
Just over twenty years earlier, between 33 and 35, it was on the road to Damascus that he recounted, “katelémphthen,” “I was seized” or “conquered” by Christ, the moment narrated by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And now, in that city of Asia Minor overlooking the Aegean, Paul of Tarsus writes a long letter to the Christian community of Corinth, divided and quarrelsome.
It is a very long text of capital importance from a historical, religious, and cultural point of view. Because that writing, which in the canon of the New Testament will be recorded as the First Letter to the Corinthians, contains the oldest profession of Christian faith: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve…”
This is the kérygma, the “proclamation” that encapsulates the heart of Christianity, precisely that event that the faithful celebrate on Easter Day: the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
The First Letter to the Corinthians, from a historiographical point of view, shows us how from the beginning Christians believed that Jesus had risen: there were no mythologizing or elaborations in subsequent centuries. All the more so since Paul himself specifies: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.” Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, in his Jesus of Nazareth, noted that these are not Paul’s words but “all this is part of the first catechesis that he, as a convert, perhaps still received in Damascus, a catechesis, however, which in its nucleus had undoubtedly started from Jerusalem and therefore dated back to the thirties,” shortly after the crucifixion, “a true testimony of the origins.” But what had happened, for them to believe such an unheard-of thing?
The Women at the Tomb
The story of the resurrection is contained in the four Gospels. The oldest is Mark’s, composed between 65 and 70. The most accredited theory among scholars is the so-called “two-source” theory: originally there would have been a written collection of loghia or “sayings” of Jesus and a primitive text of Mark, from which Matthew and Luke would have drawn. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called “synoptic” because they are so similar that they can be embraced “together” (syn) with a single “gaze” (opsis). John’s Gospel would have been written at the end of the 1st century, last in chronological order, but it shows independent sources and, according to some scholars, dates back to an even older tradition.
All four texts, however, state that it was women who found the empty tomb. And this in itself is extraordinary, as Cardinal-biblical scholar Gianfranco Ravasi explained in his Biography of Jesus: “Women, according to Semitic law, were not legally qualified to testify.”
The fact that the evangelists attribute the discovery of the empty tomb to women, in short, seems to corroborate the historicity of their account: had they invented it, they would have chosen other witnesses.
After Passover: The Chronology of Events
Jesus died crucified on April 7 of the year 30, a Friday. For the Synoptic Gospels, the Last Supper, on Thursday evening, corresponded to the Passover meal: on Thursday evening, Pesach, the Jewish Passover that would last all Friday until sunset, began.
The chronology of John’s Gospel, however, shifts everything by one day – Passover corresponds to Saturday – and is considered more reliable by scholars. The American biblical scholar John P. Meier, in his monograph on Jesus A Marginal Jew, meticulously reconstructed the matter.
Before the actual trial before Pontius Pilate, in the Roman praetorium, that Friday Jesus had been interrogated in the house of the high priest Caiaphas, before the Sanhedrin. And it is historically difficult, not to say impossible, that this could have happened on a feast day. In John’s Gospel, moreover, it is written that the Jewish authorities did not enter the praetorium “so as not to defile themselves and be able to eat the Passover.” This means that Pesach had not yet begun and that year corresponded to Shabbat: from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, as can be seen from John.
The women go to the tomb the next day.
April 9, Year 30: The Discovery
The women or the woman, according to the versions. It is the dawn of April 9 of the year 30. Mark writes that, after the Sabbath, it was “Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome” who “bought aromatic oils to go and embalm Jesus” and found the stone that closed the tomb rolled away. Matthew speaks of “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.” Luke writes of “women” in general and then names “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James.” John writes only of Mary Magdalene.
She will be the first to see him and exclaim in Hebrew, in John’s account: “Rabbunì!”, or “Teacher!” However it may be, the discovery of dawn after the Sabbath – what centuries later would be called the Lord’s Day: Sunday – is marked by two moments: the overturned stone and, inside the empty tomb, the angel announcing the resurrection.
In Mark’s account, the “young man dressed in a white robe” utters that fateful verb: egérte, “he has risen.”
The image of Christ rising from the tomb, as in Piero della Francesca’s famous fresco, is actually apocryphal: the Gospels are silent about the moment of the resurrection. How could it have been described, moreover? The most important question, however, is another: but what does “resurrected” really mean?
Reanimated Corpse or New Life?
It is Joseph Ratzinger again who clearly explains what it is, from a theological point of view, for a Christian. It is not about a return to biological life to then die again, like Lazarus, “if in the resurrection of Jesus it had only been about the miracle of a reanimated corpse, it would not interest us at all.”
Here there is something completely different: “The escape towards a totally new kind of life, towards a life no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but placed beyond this – a life that has inaugurated a new dimension of being human.” This is the “qualitative leap”: it concerns everyone, “either it is a universal event or it is not.”
Easter celebrates the essential event of Christianity, the one without which everything collapses, said Saint Paul: “But if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”
Benedict XVI wrote: “Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ has risen from the dead. If this is removed, Christian faith is dead.”
