Vanishing bodies, Ascending gods

A Famous Parallel to the Empty Tomb

In the Graeco-Roman world, there were many tales of vanishing heroes – myths of great men who disappeared suddenly, sometimes from their place of death or burial. Today, these stories are often called ‘translation fables,’ because they signalled that the missing person had ascended into heaven and was to be considered divine.¹

The second-century biographer Plutarch gives us a flavour of these stories in his Life of Romulus: Aristeas died in a Fuller’s shop and his body vanished; Cleomedes disappeared from the chest in which he had taken refuge; Alcyme’s body was replaced by a stone on her burial plynth; and Romulus himself disappeared, having ascended to heaven – an event that was celebrated annually on the Nones of July.

This is the literary and symbolic world in which the Gospels were written. It is thus no surprise that the Gospels’ resurrection accounts are sometimes seen as a species of ‘translation fable.’ When Jesus’ body goes missing from this tomb, ancient readers would know that he had ascended into heaven and was to be worshipped as a god.²

To appreciate this comparison, I want to cite a passage from the popular Greek novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe, which plays on the conventions of a translation fable. Since this novel is often dated to the first or second century CE, I place it alongside the Gospel of John, written around the same time. Compare the following texts:

Chaereas and Callirhoe, 3.3.3-5 (LCL Translation)

‘Then Chaereas himself decided to go in, eager to see Callirhoe once more even though she was dead, but on searching the tomb he could find nothing. Many others entered incredulously after him. All were baffled, and one of those inside said, ‘The funeral offerings have been stolen! This is the work of tomb robbers. But where is the corpse?’ Many different speculations were entertained by the crowd. But Chaereas, looking up to heaven, stretched forth his hands and said, ‘Which of the gods has become my rival and carried off Callirhoe and now keeps her with him, against her will but compelled by a mightier fate? ... Or can it be that I had a goddess as my wife and did not know it, and she was above our human lot?’

The Gospel of John:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.'

How should parallels with a text like Callirhoe inform our understanding of the Gospels’ resurrection accounts? Below I want to discuss three possibilities.

Denying the Comparisons

First of all, we could deny any significance to these comparisons, either by emphasising their differences or pointing to the Gospels’ distinctive Jewish flavour.

Ascending into heaven was not confined to pagan culture. There were stories in Judaism of figures, such as Enoch, Elijah and Moses, who were believed to have ascended too. On this view, it is unnecessary to see the Gospel stories as engaging in a form of creative myth-making, even if there are some similarities with pagan stories.

Moreover, we might question to what extent the Gospels as a whole fit the category of a ‘translation’.³ The word for an elevation or ascension (anabasis) is noticeably missing from the Gospels. Instead, we are told that he ‘rose’ (egeirō), which could be understood as a more visceral, physical resurrection.⁴ In Mark, for instance, Jesus does not merely ‘ascend’; he resurrects, and is said to have gone ahead to Galilee (16:7).

New Testament scholar, Michael Licona, further appeals to the nature of first-century Judaism as a further barrier to the invention of the Resurrection:

‘Given Paul’s reports of early disputes in the church concerning whether Christians should be permitted to eat meat sacrificed to idols, whether Christians were required to observe certain religious days and be circumcised, and even whether Jewish believers were allowed to eat with Gentile believers, it seems unlikely that these same Christians would borrow from Greco-Roman and Semitic traditions to create the event of Jesus’ resurrection, an event on which Paul and the Evangelists would go on to state the truth of Christianity rested.’⁵

The Resurrection Stories as Fiction

Yet not all will be persuaded by Licona’s account. While it is true that some Jewish followers of Jesus were protecting their coveted boundary markers (food laws, circumcision), it remains true that Jewish literature was, in many ways, heavily Hellenised. This is illustrated by the fact that the Gospels were written in the Greek genre of biography, even if the way they engage this genre was rather Jewish.⁶

For those who see the Gospels as thoroughly Greek in their literary form, the likeness of the resurrection stories translation fables may signal their fictional nature. On this view, Mark may have been the first to craft a ‘translation fable’ to explain what happened to Jesus’ shamefully buried corpse.

This might explain why other elements of his story lack verisimilitude, such as the disciples’ incentive to go to a tomb they know they can’t enter (a set-up for the stone to be rolled away), or why they ‘told no one’ – because this is the first time we are hearing of the tale!⁷

Between Fact and Fiction

Yet a middle way is possible. Just because we find these stories in fiction and fable, does not preclude the possibility that there the Gospels’ account has an underlying historical kernel which has been shaped, literarily, with translation fables in mind. On this view, the evangelists are acting much like a modern preacher, casting the ‘old truths’ in the language of popular culture to convey their meaning.

Michael Licona cautions against over-interpreting parallels. He gives the case of the Titan and the Titanic.⁸ Fourteen years before the Titanic sank, a novel called Futility described a large passenger ship – the Titan – which sank after it hit an iceberg in the Atlantic, leading to the deaths of over half of its passengers.

The chances of these parallels occurring without design is minuscule – and yet it would be laughable to conclude that the Titanic itself did not sink, but was actually a fiction, based on the novel. In the same way, just because we find stories of translations in fable does not mean that real events could not inspire a translation story. We know that tombs really were sometimes emptied in the ancient world!

Yet of course, the reason we can distinguish between the Titan and the Titanic is because we know that Futility was a novel, and we still have the remains of the Titanic. This is in sharp contrast to the Gospels, which form part of a genre, biography, in which the lines between fact and fiction were often blurred.⁹ It is therefore more difficult to know what to do with legendary parallels in the context of biography.

Myth and Fact

Ultimately, to what extent one sees history in the Gospel resurrection accounts – and how one judges the likeness between the Gospels and translation fables – will depend on one’s overall picture of the Gospels. Are these independent accounts, sourced more or less directly by eyewitnesses, which are consistent in providing a reliable window onto the historical Jesus? Or are they an admixture of history and fiction, which sometimes express the theological significance of their hero using myth?

I personally lean towards the latter, but do not confuse myth with falsehood. What is important to bear in mind is the distinction between the reality of the Resurrection and the literary representations of that event. To me, it seems plausible that the evangelists’ presentations of the resurrection were shaped with ‘translation fables’ in mind. But as I have just suggested, to acknowledge license in the accounts of the resurrection is not to deny the Resurrection itself. To confuse these phenomena would be unwarranted.

---

Hello! If you enjoyed this post, you might like some of my related pieces:

• Women Witnesses: Proof of an Empty Tomb?

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial?

• Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb

• Seven Evidences for the Resurrection

Some of these pieces are behind a paywall to support my work as a writer. To receive an annual membership at 25% off, please use the special offer below.

Further Reading

Richard C. Miller, “Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity,” JBL 129 n.4 (2010): 759-776.

Helen K. Bond, “‘Seated at the Right Hand of the Father’: The Meaning of the Empty Tomb Narrative in Mark,” Modern Believing 64 n.2 (2023): 122-131

1. See Richard C. Miller, “Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity,” JBL 129 n.4 (2010): 759-776.

2. See Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity. RSR 44 (London: Routledge, 2015), 150-96; Cf. Helen K. Bond, “‘Seated at the Right Hand of the Father’: The Meaning of the Empty Tomb Narrative in Mark,” Modern Believing 64 n.2 (2023): 122-131; Adela Yarbro Collins, “Apotheosis and Resurrection,” in The New Testament and Hellenistic Judaism, eds. Peter Borgen and Søren Giversen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995), 8-100; Adela Yarbro Collins, “Ancient Notions of Transferal and Apotheosis in Relation to the Empty Tomb Story in Mark,” in Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body, and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, eds. Turid Karlsen Seim, Jorunn Økland (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 41-58.

3. See Peter G. Bolt, “Mark 16:1-8: The Empty Tomb of a Hero?” Tyndale Bulletin 47 n.1 (1996): 27-37.

4. Yet, on the diversity of views about the nature of the resurrected body in second-Temple Judaism, see C.D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism 200 BCE-CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

5. Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Apollos: Nottingham, 2010), 149.

6. On the different ways ancient Jewish authors, including the evangelists, negotiated Greek literary culture, see Sean A. Adams, Greek Genres and Jewish Authors: Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2020).

7. This scenario was suggested to me by subscriber, Ed Atkinson.

8. Licona, Resurrection, 148.

9. On fictionalisation in ancient biography, see Koen De Temmemerman, Kristoffel Demoen, Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).