The only real justification for the Christian Easter is the proposition that the resurrection of Christ actually took place—not as a symbol, a myth, a hope, a tradition, or a dream, but as a real event. The Lord himself after the resurrection took the greatest care to impress the literalness of the event on the minds of all his followers. Having risen from the dead, Christ came to his disciples and found them confused, perplexed, incredulous. He “upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen” (Mark 16:14 [Mark 8:6]), and showed them in detail how the ancient prophets had actually predicted what had happened. He ordered them to feel him and see for themselves that he was not a spirit, but that the flesh had been resurrected; he ordered food to be brought and ate it in their presence, inviting them to dine with him. He told them that whenever they met after his departure they should continue to eat real bread and drink real wine to remind them that he had been with them in the flesh.
The Empty Tomb
Before it is light, women come to finish a burial and find the stone moved, the body gone, and someone waiting who tells them to stop looking for a living man among the dead. Two of the disciples run to see for themselves, look at the folded grave clothes, and go home.
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Note. This is the most heavily revised passage of the resurrection narrative, and every change runs one way. Where the King James has one angel, a young man, or two men, the Joseph Smith Translation has two angels (sitting on the stone, outside the tomb, before anyone has gone in) in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John alike.
? How to read this edition
The reading is the Joseph Smith Translation, in the text of the Covenant Christian Edition, carried beside each Gospel and set against the King James baseline. Headers give both numbering systems: the CCE chapter and verse, and the traditional KJV reference.
1In the end of the Sabbath day, as it began to dawn towards the first day of the week, early in the morning came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulcher. 2And behold, there was had been a great earthquake, for the angel two angels of the Lord descended from Heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. 3And his their countenance was like lightning, and his their raiment white as snow. 4And for fear of him them, the keepers did shake and became as though they were dead. 5And the angel angels answered and said unto the women, Fear not, for I we know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here, for he is risen as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 7And go quickly and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead. And behold, he goes before you into Galilee; there shall you see him. Behold, I have told you.
8And they departed quickly from the sepulcher with fear and great joy, and did run to bring his disciples word.
1And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Salome, bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. 2And very early in the morning, the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulcher at the rising of the sun. 3And they said among themselves, Who shall roll away the stone from the door of the sepulcher for us?
4But when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away (for it was very great) and entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment5and two angels sitting thereon, clothed in long white garments. And they were frightened, 6but the he saith angels said unto them, Be not afraid. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen; he is not here. Behold the place where they laid him, 7and go your way. Tell his disciples, and Peter, that he goes before you into Galilee. There shall you see him, as he said unto you.
And they, entering into the sepulcher, saw the place where they laid Jesus.
8And they went out quickly and fled from the sepulcher, for they trembled and were amazed. Neither said they anything to any man, for they were afraid.
1Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they the women came unto the sepulcher, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. 2And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulcher, and two angels standing by it in shining garments. 3And they entered into the sepulcher and, not finding the body of the Lord Jesus, and it came to pass, as 4they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments. 5and were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth. They But behold, the angels said unto them, Why do you seek the living among the dead? 6He is not here, but is risen. Remember how he spoke unto you when he was yet in Galilee, 7saying, The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again? 8And they remembered his words, 9and returned from the sepulcher, and told all these things unto the eleven and to all the rest. 10It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women who were with them, who told these things unto the apostles. 11And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not. 12Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulcher, and stooping down, he beheld and went in. And he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves. And he departed, wondering in himself at that which had come to pass.
1The first day of the week, Mary Magdalene comes early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulcher, and saw the stone taken away from the sepulcher and two angels sitting thereon. 2Then she runs and comes to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and says unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulcher and we know not where they have laid him. 3Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulcher. 4So they ran both together, and the other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulcher. 5And he, stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying there, yet went he not in. 6Then comes Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulcher, and sees the linen clothes lying there, 7and the napkin that was about his head not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. 8Then went in also that other disciple who came first to the sepulcher, and he saw and believed — 9for as yet they knew not the scripture that he must rise again from the dead. 10Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.
I Saw the Graves Open
The Vision of the Resurrection
On a Sunday morning in April 1843, at the unfinished temple in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith preached the funeral sermon of Lorenzo Barnes, who had died in England. What began as a plea that the Saints be buried among their own turned into the plainest account he ever gave of what he had been shown of the resurrection morning, not as doctrine but as a scene, with hands taken hold of before the bodies are fully out of the ground. Five people wrote it down. Switch to “Scribal accounts” to read them.
Discourse, 16 April 1843, Nauvoo · Joseph Smith Diary kept by Willard Richards; Wilford Woodruff Journal; William Clayton Diary; Levi Richards Diary · History, 1838–1856, vol. D-1, pp. 1533–1534 (History of the Church 5:360–63; Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 294–97) · Joseph Smith Papers ↗Also recorded in Willard Richards’s report; JS’s journal; the Nauvoo history draft.
I would esteem it one of the greatest blessings, if I am to be afflicted in this world, to have my lot cast where I can find brothers and friends all around me, but this is not the thing I referred to; it is to have the privilege of having our dead buried on the land, where God has appointed to gather his Saints together, and where there will be none but Saints; where they may have the privilege of laying their bodies where the Son of Man will make his appearance, and where they may hear the sound of the trump, that shall call them forth to behold him; that in the morn of the resurrection they may come forth in a body, and come up out of their graves, and strike hands immediately in Eternal glory and felicity, rather that to be scattered thousands of miles apart. …
… “I will tell you what I want, if tomorrow I shall be called to lay in yonder tomb, in the morning of the resurrection, let me strike hands with my Father, and cry my Father, and he will say my Son, my Son, as soon as the rock rends, and before we come out of our graves.
“And may we contemplate these things so? Yes, if we learn how to live and how to die. When we lie down we contemplate how we may rise up in the morning, and it is pleasing for friends to lie down together, locked in the arms of love, to sleep; and awake in each others embrace, and renew their conversation.
“Would you think it strange if I relate what I have seen in vision, in relation to this interesting theme? Those who have died in Jesus Christ, may expect to enter into all that fruition of joy when they come forth, which they have possessed or anticipated here. So plain was the vision, that I actually saw men, before they had ascended from the Tomb, as though they were getting up slowly, they took each other by the hand and said to each other “My Father, my Son; my mother, my daughter; my brother, my sister;” and when the voice calls for the dead to arise, suppose I am laid by the side of my Father, what would be the first joy of my heart? To meet my Father, my Mother, my Brother, my Sister, and when they are by my side, I embrace them, and they me.
“It is my meditation all the day, and more than my meat and drink to know how I shall make the Saints of God comprehend the visions that roll like an overflowing surge before my mind.
A Real Event, or Nothing
Nibley gave this as a radio lecture at Easter 1954. His argument is not that the resurrection is beautiful or consoling but that it is either a fact of the same order as an earthquake or it is worthless, and that the Lord himself, in the days this section opens, took extraordinary trouble to make the literalness unmistakable.
There was need to make this lesson perfectly clear, for men have always been reluctant to believe it. Matthew concludes his gospel with the report that “when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17 [Matt. 13:4]). The Apostles had to rebuke members of the church who simply would not believe in the resurrection, and John noted with alarm that “many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” (2 John 7). “Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead,” writes Paul to the Corinthians, “how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” (1 Corinthians 15:12.)
Next, the writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers, the oldest texts to survive after the time of the Apostles, show the spreading and deepening of the anti-resurrection trend in the church. Two charges are constantly brought against church members by the Apostolic Fathers: 1) that they are ashamed of the crucifixion, and 2) that they deny the resurrection. “I know that Christ had a body after the resurrection,” cried Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, “and I believe that he still has.”8 (We may note in passing that there is no thought here of a “mystic”
The equinoctial rites of the rebirth of nature have been celebrated throughout the world from the remotest antiquity. The rabbits, eggs, lights, and flowers of Easter were no more Christian in origin than Christmas trees and Yule logs. Yet in most parts of the world, these things were retained by Christians because of their extreme popularity and because they actually do express man’s hope for a new and better life. The danger of embracing non-Christian practices was a real one, however, and did not go unnoticed.2 Clement of Alexandria warned the Christians against the marbles and paintings of heathen temples, not, he explained, because they were bad in themselves, but because to the minds of most people they were sure to appear so imposing as to be treasured for their own sakes, living as it were a life of their own and completely eclipsing the things of the spirit.3 When in the fourth century the church started taking over these things, St. Jerome expressed grave concern at what was happening.4 Since the Christmas and Easter rites of the Christians are the most imposing of all artistic and ritual complexes, it would be strange indeed if they did not quite overshadow the doctrinal concepts which first justified their introduction into the churches. Gregory’s hope, as he clearly stated it, was that by making large concession to the popular will, the people might be swung gradually over into the Christian orbit. Yet, bearing in mind that the old customs were being retained precisely because the people were too stubborn to give them up, there certainly was great danger that the opposite would take place, and the established customs of a thousand years would prove of greater mass and charge than the new Christian teaching which, accordingly, would be sucked into the older orbit.
Constantine considered as one of his greatest triumphs the christianizing of the great international festival of Mamre in Palestine. He retained the festival, but he christianized it thoroughly.5 Yet a pious Christian lady who visited the celebration a generation later reported that while the wonderful rites were in full swing, the Christian veneer had worn off, and the whole show had reverted to its primal paganism.6 At the same time, almost in the same year that this observation was made, John Chrysostom, the bishop of what claimed to be the oldest and greatest church in Christendom, that of Antioch, complained that everybody came to church at Easter and at Easter only, simply because it was the thing to do. For the rest of the year, he spoke to empty walls.7 Even at this early date, the formal aspect of Easter had completely overcome the doctrinal.
An Angel at His Feet and the Cloth at His Head
The King James gives the position of everything in the tomb with a precision that reads as merely circumstantial: an angel at the head and another at the feet where the body had lain, and the head cloth folded and set apart from the rest. Barker shows that the earliest Christians did not read it as circumstantial at all. They treated the tomb as the new holy of holies, and the holy of holies had two figures facing each other across the place of the presence, one at either end.
A letter written by two Christian women at approximately the same time as Egeria’s visit treated the tomb as the holy of holies: “The Jews formerly venerated the holy of holies because there were there the cherubim, the mercy seat, the ark of the covenant, the manna, the rod of Aaron and the golden altar. Does not the tomb of the Lord seem more worthy of veneration? Each time we enter, we see the Saviour on his shroud, and if we stop for a moment, we see again the angel sat at his feet and the folded cloth at his head…”
Many of these are stylised depictions of the edicule, closely resembling what appears on Jewish coins issued during the Bar-Kochbar revolt (132–135 CE): a row of four columns in the midst of which the ark can be seen. This image on the coins must have been the holy of holies, not the temple… Since the Jewish representations are older than the Christian, the latter must have been imitations, using the tomb of Christ as the new Christian holy of holies… Egeria described the cave of the tomb and the railed area around it as the sanctuary of the church, the area into which only the bishop and his clergy could go.
There are some problems about how high priest was consecrated. The high priest of the family of Aaron was consecrated with a ritual of oil and blood, but the ritual for a Melchizedek priest was different. It is described in Psalm 110 (109) but unfortunately the Hebrew text is damaged. The Greek is clearer, although that too may have been translated from a damaged text. A man from the house of David went into the holy of holies where he was anointed and declared to be Melchizedek. The Greek text is ‘I have begotten you’, and so the Melchizedek high priest had the title ‘Son of God’. The other Hebrew words seem to say that one of his titles was the Morning Star - a title used by Jesus himself at the end of the Book of Revelation: ‘I Jesus... am the root and offspring of David, the Bright Morning Star’.
The psalm says that the Melchizedek high priest was ‘born’ as the divine Son by means of the dew, a temple term for the perfumed anointing oil. This birth in the holy of holies was how the original temple understood resurrection, the moment when a human being moved from mortal life to eternal life, even though continuing to live in a mortal body. In the New Testament, it is texts about temple resurrection in the holy of holiesthat are quoted of Jesus’s resurrection.
The writer of Hebrews emphasised that the Melchizedek high priest was resurrected, but the Aaronite high priest was not. The high priests of the family of Aaron inherited their role through the death of their predecessors, but the Melchizedek high priest was resurrected, and his role came through eternal life.
Nicodemus represented the second temple teachers who had lost so much of the original temple. He did not understand what Jesus meant when he said: ‘Unless one is born anew [anōthen also means ‘from above’] - he cannot see the Kingdom of God... he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.’ 49 In the holy of holies, the anointed priest-king sat on the throne of the LORD, and his people worshipped him. That is how the Chronicler described the coronation of Solomon. 50 It was temple convention to describe the human who had become divine with a double title: he was ‘the LORD and the king’. The process is not explained, simply stated: this was the mystery of the holy of holies, the divine Unity. St John used the same language, when he saw the throne of God-and-the-Lamb, and the people worshipped him, not them.
The letter Barker quotes is from Paula and Eustochium, writing from Bethlehem in the 380s. Read it beside the Joseph Smith Translation of this section and the coincidence is worth pausing over: the JST puts two angels at the door of the tomb in all four Gospels, and John, alone and unrevised at this point, already had them seated one at the head and one at the feet, which is where the cherubim of the mercy seat stood.