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In this episode, we look at the little-known story of the “Corinthian Creed” and its implications. So what is the Corinthian Creed, just how old is it, and what does it tell us about the case for the Resurrection?
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I’m doing a little bit of a theme during Easter where I just unpack particular arguments for the resurrection. Rather than looking at the whole case, it’s going piece by piece.
So two weeks ago, it was a simple case for the resurrection, which I looked at, what are the alternatives to the resurrection? Last week, I looked at just one piece, St. Peter’s testimony about the empty tomb in Acts two, with the argument that Peter is saying this only 50 days after Easter, and it’s accounted in a pretty early document, the Acts of the Apostles. It’d be hard to imagine this simply being made up either by Peter on Pentecost or by St. Luke when he is writing Acts. If you want the details of that, you’ll have to watch that episode, but I want to look at a different argument today.
Instead of focusing on Peter, focusing on Paul, and particularly not just the empty tomb, but the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and pivotal to this is what’s sometimes called the Corinthian creed, and the Corinthian creed, as the name suggests, is this passage in first Corinthians where St. Paul seems to be quoting something. It’s now lost to us, but it was apparently a creed used by the early Christians. Now when I say it’s now lost to us, I mean we only know it now from Paul, but he’s treating it as something his readers are familiar with.
So it is one of the oldest texts in the New Testament, first Corinthians is, and the Corinthian creed being this preexisting, apparently, part is one of the oldest documented testimonies about the Christian claim. Hopefully that makes sense. First Corinthians itself is very, very old, maybe 51 AD, but the Corinthian creed, as we’re going to see, even skeptics tend to say, “This is probably within weeks, months, maybe a couple of years of Jesus’s death on the cross,” that we’re looking at the early 30s AD, and we’ll get into why it’s dated this early. So that’s really critical, because this makes it one of the earliest bits of evidence.
So what is the Corinthians creed? Well, it’s in first Corinthians 15. It begins in verse three and goes to verse nine. Now, I will tell you at the outset that two things are very clearly happening in the text. Number one, St. Paul is clearly alluding to or quoting a preexisting creed, and number two, Paul is also adding his own commentary on it. He mentions himself in the midst of it. So that’s what makes this complicated, because without having the original creed in front of us, there’s going to be a little bit of a debate about when is Paul commenting on the creed or adding to it? But here’s the creed and then we’ll unpack it.
He says, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.” Now let’s pause with that, “What I also received.” When did he receive that? He’s saying when he became a Christian, this is what he was taught. What did he receive? “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 into the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time,” and then he says, “most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.” That seems to be a comment on the prior passage. “Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,” and then Paul says, “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me, for I’m the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”
So hopefully even when you hear that or when you’re reading that, it’s clear that part of this is what he’s received, but obviously, Paul is not claiming that he was taught a creed that includes the line, “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” Paul is adding his own commentary. He’s reflecting on the creed. He’s describing this resurrection appearance of Jesus to him, and so we can separate the parts that are the preexisting creed from the parts Paul is commenting on.
There’s a controversy particularly in verse seven with the line, “Then he appeared to James and to all the apostles,” whether that’s part of the Corinthian creed or whether that’s something Paul is adding, but either way, at least, though, the first part from verse three to the first half of verse six, almost everybody agrees this is a creed that he is quoting, he’s reciting. It doesn’t sound like Paul, it reads like a preexisting creed, and he’s presenting it as something he’s both taught them and something he was himself taught, rather than something he’s just now inventing for the sake of the letter or something like that. So it has the form and structure of the creed.
Okay, so we’ll get into why this is so important, but before we do that, let’s just talk about why it’s so old. So why do scholars believe that this creed is old? Now you might hear that and imagine I’m going to just say, “Look at all of these really faithful Catholic and Protestant scholars who are just convinced that this is the slam dunk case for the resurrection because it’s so old,” and to be sure, there are plenty of those, but what’s really striking is the number of atheists, the number of non-believers, who also look at this evidence and say, “Well, this has to be extremely old. This has to be from the thirties. This has to be from a very short time after the death of Jesus.”
These are, again, people who don’t believe in the resurrection. So Gerd Lüdemann who has multiple books in which he argues against the resurrection, and one of them the resurrection of Jesus, he says, “We can assume that all the elements in the tradition,” this is again, first Corinthians 15, the Corinthian creed, “are to be dated to the first two years after the crucifixion of Jesus.” So to your window. At any rate, this thesis is probable for first Corinthians 15 verses three to five. That’s, remember, the first half. It is also likely for first Corinthians 15, the first half of verse six, and then verse seven. Remember the part where the 500 appearance, that’s verse six, and then the appearance to James and the apostles.
He says, “Since the conversion of Paul lies at the chronological end of the appearances cited and is probably to be thought as not later than three years after the death of Jesus.” In other words, if you go back to the creed, you’ll see these happen in chronological order, that they aren’t just randomly assembled events. That you have Jesus’ death, his burial, his resurrection, and then the resurrection appearances seem to be in chronological order, and St. Paul is very explicit about his own conversion, his own appearance, the appearance of Jesus to him, as last of all. So Paul is presenting this as ancient, and if it was in a different order, it’d be a very different thing.
So Gerd Lüdemann, it would be forgivable if you don’t know who that is. Bart Ehrman, who many of you will know, the skeptic New Testament scholar, and I think he’s sold six New York Times bestsellers. Very smart guy, not a believer. In fact, really strongly not a believer. He says Gerd Lüdemann is an important and interesting scholar, and what makes him important is that he’s a major figure in scholarship and is noteworthy for not being a Christian.
So he was in [inaudible 00:07:50] Goodin in Germany and at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, and Bart Ehrman points out he does not believe Jesus was literally physically raised from the dead, and he thinks that apart from belief in Jesus’s physical resurrection, it is not possible for a person to be a Christian.
So Lüdemann is notable in this area for being someone who’s really interested in the New Testament, but does not believe any of that stuff, doesn’t think the resurrection really happened. Nevertheless, he still has to concede first Corinthians 15 appears to be as old as Paul has presented it, that it appears to be from the thirties. We’ll get into why, but I want to look at some other more fringe skeptics and critics.
So Lüdemann is fairly mainstream. He’s a well respected professor, even if he’s wrong on a lot of stuff, but then you’ve got the so-called Jesus seminar, so Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar, and the Acts of Jesus, the book they put out where they argued that 5% of the things Jesus said were actually said by Jesus. It’s radical kind of scholarship.
They claim the appearance tradition is reflected in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in the early fifties. Remember, first Corinthians is from the early fifties. The appearance reports may well have originated a few days or weeks or months after Jesus’ death. The conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead had already taken root by the time Paul was converted around the year 33. On the assumption that Jesus died about the year 30, the time for development was us two or three years at most.
So how old is the Corinthian creed? Well, the youngest it could be would be before Paul’s conversion, around the year 33. The oldest it could be is days after Jesus’ death. They have a formulaic way of saying it. So that’s kind of the window of time we’re dealing with.
That’s pretty clear, right? But I’m going to take an even more radical figure, Richard Carrier, who… He’s like a mythicist, he pretty much denies any of this ever happened at all, but nevertheless, he has an article called Dating the Corinthian Creed, in which he argues, I’m going to quote him here, “Paul cannot have reminded the Corinthians of a creed claiming origination with Peter, and hence long predating Paul, without the Corinthians who’d met Peter knowing he made it up.”
In other words, someone could hear the Jesus seminar or Gerd Lüdemann or any of these people saying this is from the early thirties. How do we know that? Couldn’t Paul have just made it up in his letter to the Corinthians? The answer is no, because the Corinthians knew about Christianity prior to Paul. They knew St. Peter personally, and so he can’t just say, “Oh yeah, Jesus appeared to Peter. It’s part of this creed,” without the Corinthians saying, “You are making that up, because we know Peter and he doesn’t claim that.” This is something that’s attested to. Hopefully that’s clear, that he is reminding them of the creed. He is not teaching it to them, and he’s representing this thing that he takes as a given that they already know in some way.
So he says, ergo, the Corinthian creed must predate Paul, and Paul was converted within a few years of the [inaudible 00:11:06] origin. This is implied even by his own wording in several passages, but it’s also what we find stated everywhere else, that we have this pretty obvious moment in the timeline where St. Paul, who’d been a very vocal, very prominent opponent of Christianity and persecutor of Christians, he has, you might call it a road to Damascus moment, that’s a joke, where he converts to Christianity, and so even if you are a radical skeptic and said, “I think Paul is making this up,” or, “I think he’s hallucinating,” or, “I don’t think that he’s really experiencing Jesus,” or, “It’s just some emotional thing,” or whatever, however you want to explain away Paul’s conversion, the fact that Paul converts is indisputable, because Paul is too prominent. When he switches sides, it is a very notable event and it’s something that is reported on multiple times, both by Paul and by others. That’s a big deal, right?
He is the student of the most famous rabbi living at the time, and so all that’s to say when Paul converts, that gives us a fixed point, because when he says, “This is what I converted to, this is what I was told was true when I converted,” okay, this is not some later development, and the Corinthians also can attest to this, because as I said, the Corinthian church already had Christianity. They already knew the Christian teaching before St. Paul writes to them around 50, 51, whenever it is.
So Richard Carrier, going back to him. He says the Corinthian creed, at least versus three to five, the first part of it, again, definitely existed, and was the central gospel Christians were preaching in the early thirties ad. That’s definitely no later than a few years after the purported death of Jesus, and since the [inaudible 00:12:59] formation only makes sense in light of this being its seminal and distinguishing message, it must have been formulated in the very first weeks of the movement.
I think there’s fantastic evidence, because he’s pointing out something that’s really important. You’ve got two things. First, as I said, you have to treat the historic event of St. Paul’s conversion as critical for making sense of this story. Paul can’t be inventing this later on, for a couple reasons. Number one, because his conversion was very public. Number two, because he converted to something, and if there’s no belief that Jesus froze from the dead, what is it he’s converting to? What is it he’s claiming… In other words, hopefully that makes sense, that Christianity is distinct. It’s a distinct movement from the very beginning, because it claims that Jesus, the Messiah, rose from the dead. This is its distinguishing feature as far back as we find it, and there’s really no way to explain how it emerges as something distinct from Judaism without making sense of that fact. Again, that’s true whether you believe in the resurrection, whether you don’t believe in the resurrection. You just can’t explain the rise of Christianity without that fact.
So people are fond of saying St. Paul is the originator of Christianity or St. Paul, father of Christianity, I believe that’s the title of another Gerd Lüdemann book, and yet it is not true that Paul is converting to a Christianity that already exists. It doesn’t have written records yet, but it clearly has distinguishing beliefs. So much so that as a faithful devoted Jew, Paul felt it necessary to persecute that distinct movement. That it wasn’t just viewed as another part of Judaism, but as something heretical, something radical, something new, and then he becomes convinced of its truth, and he has a story for why he becomes convinced of its truth, but we won’t even talk about that.
That’s one of the things that you have to keep in mind. Paul’s conversion, very central. Second, the emergence of Christianity, and you can’t explain it any other way. So the conclusion there is the first Corinthian 15 passage, the so-called Corinthian creed, is extremely early. Somewhere between weeks of good Friday to maybe two years. So prior to Paul’s conversion, super early on.
Now does that automatically prove the resurrection? Arguably no, but let’s start with what it disproves. The first thing it disproves is this idea of the slow emergence of Christianity or slow emergence of belief in Jesus’ resurrection, and the slow emergence idea goes something like this. Originally, Jesus’ followers thought he was just a great guy and a good teacher and a moral instructor, and that’s all he was, but then over time, silly, kind of pious devotions make him more like a demigod until people ultimately are claiming he’s God and then he rose from the dead and all of these things.
So if you’ve ever seen or watched or read The Da Vinci Code, there’s an argument like this. It’s like, Jesus originally was just a moral teacher, but by 325 at the Council of Nicaea, the bishops get together and decide that they’re going to call them the son of God instead, and so this idea of Jesus as a divine being who rose from the dead, all of this happens slowly over the course of a few centuries, about 300 years.
It’s a slow evolution or devolution, and in fairness to the theory, there are religious versions of this, and the most famous of these of course, is the Buddha. That Buddha begins by just being a moral teacher. He claims he’s found enlightenment under the bo tree, and then over time, people who are devoted to his way exaggerate his life, and he becomes more like a demigod, and then he ends up becoming like a divine being within some forms of Buddhism, and so you get religious art like the bodhisattva takes seven steps and declares he’s the elder in the world, in which you imagine a newborn Buddha coming forth from his mother’s womb, taking seven steps and declaring this special role for himself, or you have all sorts of religious art about him descending from heaven or being declared a future Buddha by one of the prior Buddhas, and all of these things that are not biographically accurate to the life of the Buddha.
So people outside of Christianity say, “Well, how do we know something like that didn’t happen with Christianity?”, and that’s a great question, and there’s a good answer to it, and the good answer to it is the Corinthian creed. Not the only answer, but if the Corinthian creed, which is very clear that Jesus did rise from the dead, is within a few weeks to maybe a couple of years, and this is not the first time people believed, it’s just the first time they’ve formed it in a creed, and obviously you can believe something before you make a creed out of it, then we have to say belief in the resurrection is part of Christianity from day one, from immediately after the death and resurrection of Jesus. That this is not some later development over the course of a few centuries.
We don’t find anything that points to that. We find instead the exact opposite. We find belief that Jesus rose from the dead as far back as we find Jesus’ death, basically. Within, again, a couple weeks, maybe days, maybe years, very close in time. That’s the first thing.
The second thing it disproves is that Jesus was in the tomb still. In other words, to put it positively, the Corinthian creed is only possible if the tomb is empty. If people, within two years of Jesus’ death on Good Friday, are saying, “Jesus died, he was buried and he rose from the dead and appeared to us,” well, if that isn’t true, if he’s still in the tomb, a lot of people, within two years of Good Friday, are still going to remember where Golgotha is. We know today where Golgotha is, we know where the empty tomb is.
So you could just walk over there and say, “Yeah, this bit in the creed about him rising from the dead and appearing to people isn’t true, because here he is,” and yet that doesn’t happen. The Corinthian creed is proof, seemingly indisputable proof that Jesus’ body is not in the tomb, because it’s very difficult to even imagine a scenario in which Jesus remains in the tomb, and people can say this close to the event that he both rose and was seen by them.
So that’s what it disproves. What does it prove? Well, we can talk about this in a few different ways. First, let’s talk about the 500 witnesses, because I think this is the part that I think is most fascinating, because obviously, it proves that a lot of people claim to have seen him, but who those people were and all of this, some of them were apostles, but then there’s this really cryptic line about, “And then he appeared to 500,” right? So what’s that about?
Well, I mentioned Richard Carrier, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is a part of the Corinthian creed he rejects, he just has a theory that this couldn’t be true. He says, “I suspect verse six originally says something like, ‘Then he appeared to all the brethren together at the Pentecost,’ and not then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at once, and then he also claims in verse seven, the appearance of James and the apostles looks like a post Paul line scrabble addition, as it breaks the logic of the sequence and is too redundant. Just repeating the same information already conveyed in verses five and six, since everyone who saw Jesus was already an apostle, and James the pillar was already one of the 12.”
Let’s talk both halves of that. The appearance of James and the others, this is not a reference to the 12. There are a bunch of guys named James, and the apostles is a broader group than the 12. So this is referring to a broader appearance, but nevertheless, that’s not really where my interest is. My interest is in the appearance in verse six about this appearance to the 500. Now, Carrier’s argument is that Paul is rewriting this, and that it originally said that Jesus appeared to all the brethren together at the Pentecost. Now what’s the problem with that?
Christian never claimed Jesus appeared on Pentecost. Think about Peter’s Pentecost sermon. If Jesus was there on Pentecost, you don’t think he’d be like, “And by the way, not only is he risen, he’s right here with us.” That doesn’t happen. The whole claim in Pentecost is not that Jesus appears, it’s that the Holy Spirit descends like tongues of fire on them, gives him a boldness, gives him the ability to speak languages they couldn’t speak natively. All of this. It is not a resurrection appearance, and so it’s a baffling claim for him to just totally make up evidence and say, “Well, maybe he said this other thing that no one’s ever claimed he said.” It just appears that he’s pulling this out of thin air. There’s nothing in the text that points to this originally being about Pentecost, and what it does is it lets him avoid the really uncomfortable fact that there is a mass appearance that cannot be easily explained away. That is an ancient Christian claim.
So if you don’t remember this claim of the 500, it’s very simply this, that after appearing to Cephas, Peter and the 12, “Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time. Most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Now the “most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep,” is almost definitely added by St. Paul. It doesn’t make sense to say that at the time, but this is a reference to the fact that there not only were resurrection appearances, but that even 20 years later, as St. Paul is writing about this a little under 20 years later, most of those eyewitnesses, or many of those eyewitnesses, anyway, are still alive, and if you want to find out, you Christian and Corinth, you can go to Jerusalem and talk to a bunch of people who actually saw the risen Lord.
I don’t know. That feels like great evidence, because it means that you don’t just have to take Paul’s word for it. It’s not just Paul had some experience he interpreted as a resurrection appearance, and therefore we have to just take him at his word. No, there were hundreds of people who saw Jesus risen from the dead, and it’s just beyond reasonable doubt that this was not just mass hallucination, that this was not just a huge number of liars who all happened to live in the same area and formed the weirdest scheme to get tortured and killed. None of that makes sense. The resurrection appearances by themselves are very powerful, but with this resurrection appearance in particular, with an appearance to 500 people, many of whom were still alive when First Corinthians is being written, I don’t know. That strikes me as the smoking gun.
But I still haven’t answered the question I set out to answer, which was, who were these 500 witnesses? Or another way to put that is, when did that happen? Because the gospel accounts don’t explicitly say, “And then Jesus appeared to 500,” which seems like a weird thing for them to omit, especially since Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are often dated after First Corinthians. Now, I don’t want to get into the whole question of which books are dated when, but only to say, why do these gospel accounts not include this seemingly important resurrection appearance? I would argue they actually do record it. They just don’t mention how many people were there, and the reason that I would argue this, and I’m stealing this pretty blatantly from William Lynn Craig, he makes this argument, I find it convincing, that the appearance of the 500 is almost certainly the appearance in Galilee. Now, why do I say that?
In the gospels, Jesus foretells that he’s going to appear in one spot in Galilee, and so when the women go on Easter morning to the tomb and they find it empty, they see these two angels. One of the angels says to them, “Do not be afraid. For I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place relaid, then go quickly and tell his disciples that he’s risen from the dead, and behold, he’s going before you to Galilee. There you will see him.”
Okay, so this is a foretold resurrection appearance. So they depart, and they’re going on their way to encounter the disciples and tell them all this, and then Jesus surprises him. Behold, Jesus met them and said, “hail”, and they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee and there they will see me.”
So we have two types of resurrection appearances. We’ve got these surprise appearances, where you’re locked in an upper room, you’re on the road to Emmaus, you’re on your way back from the empty tomb, you’re doing something, and then Jesus appears. You didn’t plan for it, you weren’t expecting him, he arrives unannounced and unexpectedly, and it’s all on his schedule, but there’s this other category, which is this Galilee appearance, where he tells them to go to Galilee so he can meet with them there. So the argument Craig makes, and I think the sound one, is this is not secret information. The 12 are being told to go there, but they’re not told they’re not allowed to tell anybody. The women obviously know, they’re hearing it first. They’ve now heard it both from the angel and from Jesus himself. It’s clearly an important thing.
So that’s the kind of thing that’s going to draw a crowd. It’s going to be, obviously, faithful, devoted followers of Jesus, but also just people who are curious. If you’re on the fence about Christianity and the claim is this guy who we all saw get crucified rose from the dead, and he’s going to come here to Galilee… Okay, I mean, that’s worth the road trip to Galilee, and so it explains why 500 people would be assembled there.
It also explains something else. So this is all in Matthew 28. You get the proclamation, he is going to come, you get Jesus’s surprise visit, you get another prophecy that he is going to come, and then you get at the end. “Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.” So even though we only have “go to Galilee”, it was clear that the original instructions were more specific, “and when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted.”
Now the Greek here is ambiguous. Who are these “some”? So it could mean some of the 11 disciples doubt it, but that’s kind of a weird conclusion. As weak as the disciples have been, at this point, we’re at the very end of the gospel. They’ve been with Jesus, they saw him get crucified. They’ve also seen him risen from the dead multiple times now. This is chronologically at the point of the great commission. This is where he gives them the great commission, and it seems to me, anyway, implausible that they’re still doubting. This is after doubting Thomas, this is after all of these things. They’ve now gone to Galilee, and they’ve gone to this mountain, and Jesus appears to them there, and so it makes better sense to say that the some who doubt are other, or amongst those 500. That within the 500 you’ve got people who see Jesus, they worship him, and others who, “This is an optical illusion, or they have some other way of making sense of this, and so they doubt it.
That also makes sense of just a larger group, for two reasons. One, you’re more likely to have doubters, but two, it’s just going to be harder to see and interact with Jesus in a group of 500. In a group of 11 or 12, well, he’s right there, he’s eating with you, he’s doing these things, but if you’re in a giant crowd, the likelihood that you’re going to say, “I didn’t get a good view. I don’t know. I wasn’t that close,” and so you’re going to continue to harbor some doubt. I don’t know. It makes sense.
So all this to say, I think the 500 appearance is the Galilee appearance. This is not something that I can say, “I can prove it,” but it makes the most sense of the evidence.
What we can say is that very, very early on in the life of the church, very, very early on in the life of Christianity, within the first weeks or couple years, you’ve got a very clear proclamation, not just that Jesus rose from the dead, but particular people to whom he presented himself, people to whom he appeared, and this creates a good deal of reliability in this creed. That it’s not just saying once upon a time, these things happened. That the time the Corinthian creed is being proclaimed. The people in it, people like Peter, James, the 12, the apostles, these people are alive, and they could attest to this.
So what this proves is that the Christians immediately believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, and one of the reasons they believed in this is because they saw him, and it wasn’t just like one or two, it was hundreds. So I find that to be very compelling. I find that to be very interesting evidence that points to the resurrection actually being true, and I think it’s something that if you’re a skeptic or a critic, you really have to grapple with and say, “How did this many people get this this wrong this quickly?”, and I don’t know a good answer to that, I have not read a good answer to that that doesn’t come off as kind of special pleading, “Well, maybe it didn’t originally say this, and it said something about Pentecost that it clearly didn’t say.” You’d have to find some way of making sense of what looks like really strong evidence that the resurrection really happened.
For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Please like, comment, share, do all that stuff. God bless you.
Speaker 1:
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