The Second Coming of Christ

Contemporary churches, particularly of a conservative disposition, have as a prominent tenet of their faith the belief that Christ will come a "second time" at some point after his crucifixion/resurrection (around 30 CE).

This expression "second coming" appears, so far as I know, only one time in the New Testament:

[H]e has appeared once for all at the climax of history to abolish sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as it is our human lot to die once, with judgment to follow, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of mankind, and will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him. (Heb 9:26–28, Revised English Bible)¹

Here is the same passage in another translation:

[H]e has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes the judgment, so Christ having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. (RSV)

It is interesting to me that the second coming referred to in this passage in Hebrews does not sound as if it is part of the Day of God and the final judgment of the world as it appears in Rev 20:11–15; Matt 25:31–46; 2 Pet 3:10–13. The event in Hebrews (and 1 Thess 4:13–18) seems to be a different kind of event in which Christ returns "to save those eagerly waiting for him," as Hebrews puts it (RSV). This suggests that Christ followers will not face a final judgment at the end of time.

The usual expression in the New Testament for the return of the Lord is parousia. English words used to translate parousia are: "presence, coming, advent."² Only eleven of the twenty-four uses of parousia, however, reference the coming of Jesus/Christ/Lord Jesus Christ/Lord Jesus.³ The other thirteen refer to: the coming of the Son of Man, Stephanas, Fortunatus, Achaicus, Titus, Paul's bodily presence, Paul, the Lawless One, Day of God.⁴

            There are several sayings of Jesus stating that he will come again.⁵ The earliest reference to a return of Jesus, however, is 1 Thess 4:13–18, where it is usually thought to be part of the Hebrew end-time Last Judgment scenario, the Day of God/Lord (see Isaiah 2 and 9, and Amos 2:1–3:21). Second Thessalonians is a disputed Pauline letter and its writer differs from Paul's own view in the undisputed First Thessalonians letter, where Paul held that "the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night" (1 Thess 5:2–3). In 2 Thess 2:1–12, on the other hand, the author writes that certain "signs" must happen before the parousia of the Lord Jesus Christ occurs. When those signs take place, people have fair warning that the parousia is near.

There is also to be considered a different idea about the (final?) Resurrection, a view held by Hymenaeus (who was excommunicated by the "Paul" of 1 Tim 1:19–20, a disputed Epistle attributed to Paul) and Philetus (2 Tim 2:18). Hymeneus believed that "the resurrection is past already." Apparently, these men denied the future resurrection of the physical body and held the resurrection to be a spiritual event in which one has died and risen with Christ, an event depicted in the experience of baptism (Rom 6:3–5). Compare the following statement in the later Gnostic essay, Treatise on Resurrection NHC I, 45.29–46.2:

Now if we are manifest in this world wearing him, we are that one's beams, and we are embraced by him until our setting, that is to say our death in this life. We are drawn to heaven by him, like beams by the sun, not being restrained by anything. This is the spiritual resurrection, which swallows up the psychic in the same way as the fleshly.⁶

The psychē is usually thought of as the soul, or if one prefers, from this contrast, the essential inner you, as opposed to the outer fleshly you. This writer claims that the "spiritual resurrection" incorporates them both. Hence, in the early second century there were two ways of viewing the resurrection of the dead: a completely spiritual experience and the physical events at the last judgment at the end of time. Paul would have agreed in part with Hymeneus (1 Cor 15:35–50).⁷ Paul anticipated a resurrection of believers that was at once bodily and spiritual. This appears to be what he describes in 1 Thess 4:13–18 and refers to in Rom 8:23.

            With respect to end time speculations, it might be wise to recall that toward the end of the first century there was a widespread belief that the Roman emperor Nero (who died 68 CE) would return to the throne of Rome again. It did not happen (or maybe it hasn't happened yet?). Believing a thing to be so, however, doesn't make it so.⁸

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹The date of Hebrews is uncertain. One recent dating (Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews [Hermeneia, 1989], 9]) dates the writing somewhere between 60–80. An earlier dating (Kϋmmel, Introduction to the New Testament [rev. ed.; SCM, 1975), 403] dates the writing between 80–90.

²W. Bauer and F. W. Danker, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. (3^rd ed.; University of Chicago, 2000).

³1 Cor 15:23; 1 Thess 2:19, 3:3, 4:15, 5:23; Jas 5:7, 8; 2 Pet 1:16, 3:4; 1 John 2:28; Matt 24:1.

⁴Matt 24:27, 37, 39; 1 Cor 16:17; 2 Cor 7:6, 7; 10:10; Phil 1:26, 2:12; 2 Thess 2:1, 8, 9; 2 Pet 3:12.

⁵For example, John 24:2–3, 18. I do not include the Son of Man sayings (Matt:24:27–30; Rev 16:15; 22:7, 12, 20) as the Son of Man may be a different figure.

⁶Malcolm Peel, Treatise on the Resurrection, vol. I, 123–57 in H. Attridge, ed. Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex) (NHS 22; 2 vols.; Brill, 1985).

⁷1 Cor 15:51–55 is likely a reference to the "Second" coming (and not the Hebrew expectation of Judgment Day). at which time dead followers of Christ will "meet the Lord in the air" to forever be with him (1 Thess 4:13–18), the moment when the believer is changed in the "twinkling of an eye," receiving their "spiritual bodies" (Rom 8:23).

⁸http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Redivivus

Do Deceased Believers Sleep until the Resurrection?

To judge from 1 Cor 7:1-40 Paul believed in the imminent appearing of the Lord and that the final resurrection would occur within his own lifetime. Otherwise he likely would not have made such unreasonable demands on believers.¹ Paul seemed to think that believers alive in his day would live to see the final resurrection (1 Thess 4:13-18).² But what of those who had died earlier? It is a question that still plagues pious believers and systematic theologians.

If one thinks that Paul and other early believers had some insight into answering this question, one might be led to believe that the soul of a believer who dies is immediately translated into the presence of the Lord (2 Cor 5:6-10; Phil 1:21-23; Luke 23:39-43; Rev 6:9-11, 7:13-17). But Paul’s comments in 1 Thess 4:13-18 suggest that such may not be the case. Paul’s final words in this passage (i.e., “and so we shall always be with the Lord”) raise the question of where dead believers were before they were resurrected if they were not at that moment with the Lord? Shouldn’t deceased Christians have gone to be with the Lord as soon as they died? If Paul was right in 2 Cor 5:6-9 dead believers should have been accompanying the Lord on his return. As Paul said to living believers in 1 Thess 3:13: may the Lord establish your hearts unblameable in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. Paul’s statement in 1 Thess 3:13 seems to be in direct contradiction to 1 Thess 4:13-17. Apparently one can make either argument from the Bible: the souls of believers sleep till the resurrection or they go directly to be with the Lord.

            This kind of dissonance in the New Testament has led some to project an intermediate state between a believer’s death and the resurrection, which some refer to as “soul sleeping.”³ In other words when believers die, their bodies decay but their souls sleep (1 Thess 4:14) until they are awakened at the resurrection by the Lord’s cry of command, the archangel’s call and the sounding of God’s trumpet (1 Thess 4:16).

The theory of soul sleeping may have evolved out of the similarity that biblical writers find between sleep and death. For example when Stephen was killed, he is quoted as saying: “Lord do not hold this sin against them.” And the author of Acts adds: “And when he had said this he fell asleep. And Saul was consenting to his death” (Acts 7:59-8:1; see also, Mark 5:39-40; John 11:11-15; Dan 12:2; 1 Cor 11:30; 15:6, 20; Jer 51:39, 57: Ps 13:3). Indeed, the states of sleep and death resemble one another so closely that at a certain point even today one cannot immediately tell one state from the other.⁴

The truth of the matter is, however, that no one, not even the biblical writers, knows for certain what happens when life leaves the body. What we think we know is based on our faith or lack of it. At least one author of a biblical book apparently agrees that knowledge of what happens when we die is known to no one. The author of Ecclesiastes writes: “All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all return to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth” (Eccl 3:20-21 RSV; compare 9:10).⁵

How do you see it?

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

¹That he recognized the demands to be unreasonable is suggested by 1 Cor 7:20-21, where he was willing to suspend his rule in all the churches of remaining as you are and allowed slaves to gain their freedom.

²As he put it to his readers: “The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive…”(1 Thess 4:17).

³See the discussion in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_mortalism

⁴https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK252967/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death

⁵In the epilogue Eccl 12:7 must be read in the light of Eccl 3:19-21 and 9:10.

Posthumous Appearances of Jesus

Over the past year or so I have received numerous queries about 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, specifically as to the statement in 1 Cor15:6 where Paul reports that Jesus had “appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive though some have fallen asleep.” The issue seems to be that appearances to single individuals (like Cephas, James, Mary, Paul, etc.) might seem less convincing than appearances to groups since one person is more prone to hallucinations, or simply being mistaken (as Mary initially was, John 20:14-15). The appearance to multiple individuals at one and the same time, my questioners felt, increased the probability that there was actually something out there to be seen because groups of people would be less subject to the charge of hallucination (“perceptions of objects with no reality”). As one person put it: an appearance by Jesus “to groups of people at once makes it more real, since hallucination is a private event.”¹

This raises the question of what exactly was seen by those who claimed to have seen the resurrected Jesus—if anything. An appearance of Jesus is not unique; for example, through the years many have also claimed to have seen an “apparition” (appearance) of Mary, Jesus’ Mother.² One reasonable way to think about these posthumous appearances is as follows. If something registers upon the retina of the eye then one is seeing something “physical.” Hence, it is not a hallucination. There was something “there.” It would have been something like what occurred in Matt 28:9, where the women took hold of Jesus’ feet—they not only saw but they physically grasped his feet.

If there is no impression on the retina of the eye at the moment of the putative “seeing,” then it is a hallucination. One might argue, however, that it was a “spirit body” (whatever that might be; see 1 Cor 15:44, 50). If it was a “spirit,” however, then there was no actual “thing” out there to be seen, since spirits are invisible (God is spirit [John 4:24] and is represented as an invisible deity in the Christian Scriptures [Col 1:15; 1 Tim 1:17; Heb 11:27]). Yet if there was no actual physical “thing” out there, how does that differ from a hallucination? In that case it must be a mental event. I suppose one might think of it as a vision (something seen in a dream, trance, or experienced during ecstasy), but that is also a mental event. I personally would say the same thing about ghosts or phantoms, which at the very least are not physical, and since they do not physically exist how could they register on the retina?

Ophthalmologists recognize two kinds of afterimages. “An afterimage is an image that continues to appear in one’s vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased.”³ The two types are: physiological, or pathological. A physiological afterimage refers to an afterimage that continues after exposure to the original physical image has ceased. Pathological afterimages are of two types: illusory and hallucinatory. An illusory afterimage is “the distorted perception of a real external stimulus.”⁴ A hallucinatory afterimage is “the projection of an already-encoded visual memory and is similar to a complex visual hallucination: the creation of a formed visual image where none exists.”⁵

The difficulty with thinking that groups are not subject to the charge of “hallucination” is that hallucinations are also group events. Such an event is called “mass hysteria.”⁶

So what can reasonably be said about the posthumous resurrection appearances of Jesus: Depending on your point of view, they are as likely or unlikely as the reported apparitions of Mary.

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

¹For reported group appearances see: Matt 28:16-20; Luke 24:13-53; John 20:19-23, 26-29; 21:1-14; Acts 1:6-11.

²https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/world-map-marian-apparitions?rebelltitem=20#rebelltitem20

³https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage

⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_palinopsia

⁵https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinatory_palinopsia

⁶For past events that are referred to as “mass hysteria” see: https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/5-strange-cases-mass-hysteria; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases; https://www.csicop.org/si/show/mass_delusions_and_hysterias_highlights_from_the_past_millennium

What happened to the Body of Jesus?

Like everything else in religion the answer depends on who you ask.

The canonical gospels are unanimous that after his death the body of Jesus was buried in a tomb (Mark 15:42-47; Matt 27:57-61; Luke 23:50-56; John 19:38-42). Mark says that later the tomb was found to be empty and the body gone. A young man sitting in the tomb said Jesus had risen and the disciples would find him in Galilee (16:5-7). Matthew says the tomb was empty and the body gone. An angel told those who came to the tomb that Jesus had risen and the disciples could find him in Galilee (28:5-7). Matthew adds that the women met Jesus on the way and took hold of his feet (28:9), so the “body” was in a state that could be grasped physically. John says that the tomb was empty (20:1-9). Jesus was present on four occasions afterward (20:11-18, 19-23, 26-29; 21:1-23). His “body” appears to have been capable of being touched physically, as John describes the encounters (20:24-27). Luke says that the tomb was empty (24:3). Two men by the tomb reminded the women that he had said he would rise (24:6-8, 24-23). Jesus was present on two occasions after the tomb had been found empty (24:13-31, 33-49); he was described as being physically present on those occasions (24:39-43). Matthew, Mark, and John raise the question: So what ultimately happened to Jesus’ body? These gospels never say. In Luke’s second volume (Acts), however, there is a hint that the body may not have been simply physical, for Jesus ascends to heaven (Acts 1:9-11), something that a physical body could not do (1 Cor 15:50).

There is, however, a suggestion in the Gospel of Matthew that the body could have been stolen (Matt 27:62-66), and a hint in John that his body might have been taken away and disposed of by the authorities (John 20:13).

            Paul simply rules out that the risen body of Jesus was physical when he says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God for the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable (1 Cor 15:50). Hence, Jesus’ perishable physical body was placed in the tomb, but raised an imperishable spiritual body (1 Cor 15:42-57), as all believers likewise will “be changed” (1 Cor 15:51-52).

            John Dominick Crossan has a different take on the body of Jesus. Here are two brief quotations from his book:

With regard to the body of Jesus, by Easter Sunday morning those who cared did not know where it was, and those who knew did not care. Why should even the soldiers themselves remember the death and disposal of a nobody? (p. 158).

Roman crucifixion was state terrorism; that its function was to deter resistance or revolt, especially among the lower classes; and that the body was usually left on the cross to be consumed eventually by the wild beasts. No wonder we have found only one body from all those thousands crucified around Jerusalem in that single century. Remember those dogs. And if you seek the heart of darkness, follow the dogs (p. 127).

In other words, his body, if not eaten by wild beasts, simply decomposed.

This is similar to what Albert Schweitzer wrote:

In the knowledge that he is the coming Son of Man [Jesus] lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign (pp. 370-71).

In the Catholic tradition today the elements of the Mass (bread and wine) metamorphose into the “body of Christ” and Jesus is risen into the Mass; bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ.

            The eminent New Testament scholar and German Lutheran had this to say about the body of Jesus: Jesus has risen into the preaching of the church:

Christ meets us in the preaching as one crucified and risen. He meets us in the word of preaching and nowhere else. The faith of Easter is just this—faith in the word of preaching (p. 41).

Were you to ask me to answer the question, as a twenty-first century human being I might say: Today Jesus exists in time and space as a body of literature, art, music, church buildings, and religious communities. With that statement I find myself in good company: The early Christian apostle, Paul, thought of a gathering (ecclesia) of Jesus’ followers as the “body” of Christ (1 Cor 12:27).

How do you answer the question: what happened to Jesus’ body?

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

Bultmann, Rudolf, “New Testament and Mythology,” pp. 1-44 in Kerygma and Myth (edited by Hans Werner Bartsch; New York: Harper and Row, 1953/1961).

Crossan, Dominick, Jesus. A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994).

Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (New York: Macmillan, 1968 [German original 1906]).

Parsing the Resurrection of the Christ

Christian communities in the West celebrate Easter this year on Sunday March 27, but the Easter celebration in Orthodox Christianity will not happen until May 1, 2016.  Easter, as virtually everyone in this country knows, celebrates the revivifying of the dead Christ.  At some point between 26 and 36 of the Common Era Jesus was crucified near Jerusalem (Mark 15:22; John 19:17-20) under the administration of the Romans. There are no eyewitness accounts describing either crucifixion or resurrection that are contemporary with the event. The earliest mention of the resurrection is little more than a formulaic confession, which is thought to derive from the early Palestinian Christians, some 20 years or so before Paul; he quoted the brief confession in a letter (ca 50):

 

            I have delivered to you [the Corinthian Christians] as of first importance what I also received,

            That Christ died for our sins

                        according to the scriptures,

            and that he was buried,

            and that he was raised on the third day

                        according to the scriptures,

            and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve (1 Cor 15:3-5 RSV).

 

The confession is frustrating in its lack of detail.  It doesn't describe specifically what the disciples saw; did Christ appear bodily (compare, Matt 27:51-53); did they have a vision (Acts 9:10, 17), or a dream (Matt 1:20-21)?  Did they see a spirit (Luke 24:37) or a phantom (Mark 6:49)?  Perhaps they only saw his "angel" (Acts 12:15)?  The nature of the experience is conditioned by what they saw, or thought they saw.

 

            Paul himself had no personal knowledge of what had occurred earlier except for what he learned through the confessional report.  He himself claimed, however, to have had an experience similar to what is suggested by the Palestinian confession (1 Cor 15:8; Gal 1:15-16), but he does not describe this experience further (but compare another claim, 2 Cor 12:7-9).

 

            Paul's early analysis of the post-crucifixion "sighting" by the Palestinian followers of Christ finds it to be a spiritual experience, which specifically denies that the Christ was seen in some sort of bodily state (1 Cor 15:44, 50).  In short, the physical remains of the Christ had been transformed (1 Cor 15:20, 51-53), and he came forth a "life-giving spirit" (1 Cor 15:21-22, 45).

 

            Some twenty years or so after Paul, the gospel writer we call Mark in describing the origins of the gospel that his church preached (Mark 1:1) reports only that Jesus was raised (16:6); there are no reports of sightings. Only an empty tomb and the promise that he could be seen in Galilee (16:7) greeted the mourners coming to the tomb that first Easter morning; it was a terrifying experience (16:8).  Towards the end of the first century the resurrection state of the Christ has become something more substantial than a vision, dream, or bodiless spirit. In the romantic accounts of the later gospels he was described as being seen in a bodily state (Matt 28:9; Luke 24:36-43; John 20:24-29).  In the early 2nd century such statements suggesting a bodily state were seized upon to argue that "he was in the flesh even after the resurrection" (Ignatius, Smyrnaeans, 3:1-3).

 

Commentary:

 

Is the resurrection of the Christ an historical event?  A reported sighting of a dead person following his burial is not what we usually think of as an historical event—that is, as an event open to verification by a neutral third party.  The witnesses to the resurrection (Peter and the disciples, Paul, and the others he reported having seen him [1 Cor 15:6-8]) all shared faith in Jesus as the Christ, and, hence, are scarcely neutral third parties).  The historical event of Easter is that they claimed to have seen him. That they claimed to have seen him is open to historical verification. What they claimed to have seen is a part of a salvation or theological history (a history that traces out the claims of the perceived acts of God in human history).  It is not a common human experience that people are raised from the dead by the activity of God.  People that die remain dead.  Hence, it is only the claim that God has intervened in human history and performed a miracle by raising Jesus from the dead that is verifiable as historical event.  The resurrection itself is a part of a theological history.  What can be observed by anyone should not be confused with what can be seen only by a few.  In this case what the few saw they saw with the eye of faith (John 20:3-9); the many, however, see with the natural eye.

 

How do you see it?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

"Parsing": to sort into its component parts.

Roy W. Hoover, "Was Jesus' Resurrection an Historical Event? A Debate Statement with Commentary," The Fourth R 23.5 (September-October 2010): 5-12, 24.

Charles W. Hedrick, When History and Faith Collide. Studying Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 1-13.