The newest quest for the historical Jesus has ushered in a strong wave of apologetic writings defending the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. The main evidence considered usually consists of the post-mortem appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the earliest disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. For the most part, skeptics of Christianity have taken these reported facts seriously and try to account for them in purely naturalistic terms.Footnote 1
Another salient component of earliest Christianity is the church's worship and devotional life. This phenomenon has been outlined and explained by brilliant scholars such as Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, and James Dunn. And yet, most apologists in the newest quest have neglected to interact with the pioneering work being researched in this area. What is equally surprising is the general silence of Hurtado and his collaborators to spell out the apologetic potential of their own published works.Footnote 2 I submit that earliest Christian worship and devotion should be used by apologists to lend additional credibility to Jesus’ resurrection. Scholars working in early Christian worship rarely mention the antecedent causes that were responsible for bringing these practices into being, and their work has profound implications for historical apologetics.
This essay will outline the apologetic work of N.T. Wright, Gerald O’Collins, Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, and Richard Swinburne. These scholars have not seriously entertained the most noteworthy features of liturgical worship as evidence for the resurrection. On a more positive note, I will explain how early Christian worship should be utilized by them.
I. Apologists in Defense of the Resurrection
Apologists play a significant role in helping unbelievers to overcome intellectual obstacles set in the path of faith. I. Howard Marshall recognizes the need of historical apologetics: ‘Why, then, should it be thought odd to offer to twentieth century audiences the historical backing that they need in order to know whether they should commit themselves in faith to the Jesus who is subject of Christian preaching? Modern people want to know if Jesus really existed. They want to know if he was the kind of person that the Gospels make him out to be. They want to know if he died and rose from the dead. They want to know whether his general manner of life supports the claims made on his behalf by Christians. And they are entitled to receive answers to these questions’.Footnote 3 Let us now turn to the work of some prominent apologists and discuss their contributions to resurrection studies. None of these scholars have seriously taken earliest Christian worship as evidence in support of Jesus’ resurrection.
(1) N.T. Wright's first major contribution consists in his discussion of the historical and religious backgrounds of pagan and Jewish thought during the time of Jesus.Footnote 4 Jews at the time held that (1) all people, or a least a large group of the Jewish nation, would be raised from the dead together (not one individual apart from the rest); (2) the resurrection would occur at the eschaton, never in the middle of history (as in the case of Jesus); (3) none of the risen would play a role in the divine judgment (according to the Christians, however, the Risen One was the judge of all humankind); (4) the Messiah would not die, much less rise from the dead. Nor did they think that (5) God, or YHWH, would be raised from the dead in human form (cf. 2 Clement 1:1).
Conversely, the first Christians proclaimed very specific things about Christ's resurrection which was absent in Second Temple Judaism. The Christians: (1) believed in a resurrected and crucified rabbi, which was seen by Jews as a curse from God (cf. Deut 21:23); (2) they claimed that the general resurrection had somehow already begun (1 Cor. 15:20–23); (3) they unanimously placed the resurrection at the center of their message, excluding all other views of the afterlife (unlike the Jews, whose resurrection doctrine was peripheral and even debatable among other eschatological beliefs); (4) they argued that the resurrected body was ‘incorruptible’ and ‘imperishable’ (unlike the Jews, who never commented on the nature of the risen body); (5) they spoke of God's Kingdom as having come—and still having to come—a very nuanced position to be in; (6) and they propagated the good news to all people, regardless of race, gender, or social status—something the Jews did not feel the need to do, either before or during the rise of Christianity. All of these modifications prompt Wright to ask: what could have caused these modifications?
Wright therefore starts from the fact of the earliest disciples’belief in the Risen Jesus. He then argues for the historicity of the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances on the basis of this first fact.Footnote 5 The evidence, in his words, may be ‘in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70’. For him ‘the evidence is as watertight as one is likely to find’.Footnote 6 Throughout his writing career, Wright has held that Jesus’ resurrection is also the best explanation of the reported facts.Footnote 7 Because of the influence of dialectical and existential theology, many theologians explain the resurrection in mere eschatological terms. But Wright has again reminded us of the physical nature of the resurrection body.Footnote 8 This counts as his second contribution. Wright's point is confirmed by the Jewish scholar, Pinchas Lapide.Footnote 9
Through it all, however, Wright has not exploited the fact of earliest Christian worship. Relevant are Hurtado's comments on his argument: ‘the most remarkable innovation in first-century Christian circles was the inclusion of the risen/exalted Jesus as recipient of cultic devotion. For historical analysis, this is perhaps the most puzzling and most notable feature of the earliest Christian treatment of the figure of Jesus. Yet Wright has scarcely anything to say about this, and I find that curious’.Footnote 10
(2) Gerald O’Collins provides a comprehensive defense of the resurrection by presenting both historical evidence and human experience.Footnote 11 Unlike their Protestant counterparts, O’Collins and Catholic theologians stress the need to develop one's interior dispositions to adequately assess the biblical evidence. Avery Dulles, for instance, stressed the importance of hope in resurrection apologetics.Footnote 12 Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that a healthy and virtuous person will attain the correct biblical hermeneutic on the resurrection.Footnote 13 This would include theological virtues such as faith and love. O’Collins himself urges: ‘Love, for instance, facilitates knowledge, just as knowing makes it possible to love someone or something already known. This holds true also of historical knowledge’.Footnote 14
Like the other apologists surveyed here, O’Collins defends the appearances of Jesus and the empty tomb. He also appeals to the rapid rise of the Christianity.Footnote 15 If it could be shown that the Gospels are primarily legendary, then the apologists’ task would be severely undercut. By contrast, O’Collins insists that ‘When… Jesus [becomes] the object of critical historical research, the Synoptic Gospels, it can be argued, are reasonably reliable in allowing us to reconstruct historically something about Jesus’.Footnote 16 That the Gospel writers describe, unwittingly in kaleidoscopic fashion, what they think really happened to Jesus cannot be denied.Footnote 17 The fact of the empty tomb, along with the post-mortem appearances, developed as separate traditions in the earliest communities; therefore, they should be independently analyzed. Further, there is sleight historical evidence in favor of skeptical positions.Footnote 18 The biblical evidence is sufficient to confound the idea the disciples ‘more-or-less-thought-their-way-through-this-to-come-up-with-the-Resurrection’.Footnote 19
O’Collins undoubtedly takes human experience into account. This emphasis counts as his major contribution to the literature. If God created persons with the cognitive faculties necessary for believing in Christ, then there must be carved out space, as it were, in human minds for such a belief. In O’Collins’ words:
Only those who have experienced death in some form can know what resurrection means. Loved ones may die. Episodes of sorrow, guilt, tragedy or separation may occur which seem far worse than physical death itself. Not only individuals but also racial and religious groups and even whole nations know only too often in human oppression, fearful social and political convulsions, systematic terror and catastrophic defeat in war. When human beings are “raised” from such deadly episodes, their situation can allow them to discern what it means to say Jesus was raised from the dead. The apostolic testimony to the resurrection will then be heard in a personal context of life after death, joy after sorrow, freedom after slavery, forgiveness after guilt, safety after terrifying danger, reunion after separation or whatever form this reversal takes.
Our appreciation of the resurrection message may be rooted in a sense of the discrepancy which exists between what we expect as valuable for ourselves and what we actually experience. After events characterized by unhappiness, deprivation of personal freedom and failure, we can meet positive, if partial, experiences of happiness, freedom and success. Can we retain, repeat and above all enlarge these experiences? This quest for wholeness both illuminates and facilitates belief in Christ's victory over death. Faith in his resurrection entails expectations of our final happiness, complete success, and ultimate freedom to be found with him.Footnote 20
Christianity is the religion that every person is designed to believe in. Though human experience is included by O’Collins, the earliest manifestations of Christian worship are not taken into consideration and then approached as an historical phenomenon per se. Rather, experience is utilized to help Christians (and unbelievers) to understand the continuity and plausibility of God's original revelation and its relevance in the here-and-now.Footnote 21
(3) Gary Habermas has developed what is called the ‘minimal facts approach’Footnote 22 to defending the resurrection. In this view there are twelve widely accepted facts furnished by the majority of New Testament scholars:
(1) Jesus died due to the rigors of crucifixion and (2) was buried. (3) Jesus’ death caused the disciples to despair and lose hope. (4) Although not as frequently recognized, many scholars hold that Jesus was buried in a tomb that was discovered to be empty just a few days later.
Critical scholars even agree that (5) at this time the disciples had real experiences that they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus. Because of these experiences, (6) the disciples were transformed from doubters who were afraid to identify themselves with Jesus to bold proclaimers of his death and resurrection, even being willing to die for this belief. (7) This message was central in the early church preaching and (8) was especially proclaimed in Jerusalem, where Jesus had died shortly before.
As a result of this message, (9) the church was born and grew, (10) with Sunday as the primary day of worship. (11) James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic, was converted to the faith when he also believed he saw the resurrected Jesus. (12) A few years later Paul the persecutor of Christians was also converted by an experience that he, similarly, believed to be an appearance of the risen Jesus.Footnote 23
Habermas wants apologists to begin with the conclusions set by the scholarly consensus: ‘one of my interests is to ascertain if we can detect some widespread directions in the contemporary discussions—where are most recent scholars heading on these issues? Of course, the best way to do this is to comb through the literature and attempt to provide an accurate assessment’.Footnote 24
The consensus is known from the conclusions set by most scholars who study the subject, regardless if they are conservatives or liberals. He explains how he is able to determine what counts as the consensus in his ambitious article: ‘Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What are Critical Scholars Saying?’ Says Habermas: ‘Since 1975, more than 1400 scholarly publications on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus have appeared. Over the last five years, I have tracked these texts, which were written in German, French, and English. Well over 100 subtopics are addressed in the literature, almost all of which I have examined in detail’.Footnote 25 By cataloguing the major trends in the field, Habermas wants everyone in the dialogue and/or debate to begin with the same basic evidence. Habermas is exceptionally skilled at classifying scholarly viewpoints and showing where they fall in proximity to other positions on the spectrum of resurrection research.
As in the case with O’Collins and Wright, Habermas shows no concern to use early Christian worship as evidence for Christ's resurrection. When evidence outside of the empty tomb and appearances is actually invoked, he would rather stress the disciples’ cognitive beliefs about the Risen Jesus rather than consult liturgical practices and other forms of devotion.
(4) William Lane Craig has included conclusions reached in the philosophy of history and historiography. Similar to Habermas, he argues that the majority of scholars who study the subject argue that four facts need to be accounted for: (1) the burial of Jesus; (2) the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb by a group of his women followers; (3) the post-mortem appearances; and (4), the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection despite their predisposition to the contrary.Footnote 26 Craig not only posits these four reported facts, but he also gives arguments in support of them.
Craig then argues that, after various naturalistic hypotheses have been tried and found wanting by filtering them through standard historiographical principles, the resurrection hypothesis remains the best explanation of the reported facts. In order for him to make such a claim, he utilizes the work of C. Behan McCullagh—a professional philosopher of history who has no specific concerns about the historical credibility of Jesus’ resurrection.Footnote 27 McCullagh's has explained and justified the traditional criteria that professional historians outside the guild of biblical scholars have used to assess the strength of competing causal theories in history: explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, whether the theory is ad hoc, and whether it is consonant with other acceptable beliefs. With these principles in mind, Craig has consistently and convincingly demonstrated the inadequacies of naturalistic explanations of the data.
Craig has also written the best defense of the empty tomb in recent times.Footnote 28 His talent of debating the resurrection with hard-headed skeptics on college campuses in North America and Europe has withstood the test of time, and it testifies to the strength of the rational apologist's case.Footnote 29 Michael Licona's published works show the influence of Craig and Habermas.Footnote 30 Not to be overlooked, Licona shows even more familiarity with the philosophy of history and historiography than his two mentors.
Like Habermas, O’Collins and Wright, Craig appeals to the origin of the disciples’ belief in the risen Christ, but again this does not necessarily include the Christians’ earliest practices. Cognitive beliefs are used to demonstrate that it would not make sense for these beliefs to originate in either a Jewish or Greco-Roman religious matrix. Only the resurrection hypothesis can satisfactorily account for the very fact of the disciples’ belief in it. By including the work of Bauckham, Hurtado and Dunn, however, Craig's case can only be strengthened and made more persuasive to unbelievers and others opponents of Christian faith.
(5) Richard Swinburne's first prong in the overall argument for the resurrection consists of the pertinent reasons that can be utilized apart from the influence of God's revelation to show that God is the kind of God who would want to become a human and do the types of things that Jesus Christ would do.Footnote 31 Swinburne's contribution therefore consists of those ‘a priori reasons’ for expecting God to become incarnate (and be raised from the dead) in human history. A priori reasons arise ‘from the very nature of God and from the general condition of the human race why we should expect them to be true’.Footnote 32 While it was not necessary for God to become human and be raised from the dead, there are nevertheless good reasons to think God would do such a thing. ‘I have argued that, if there is such a God, there are a priori reasons… for supposing that he… would act in history to do the things which Christianity claims that he has done’.Footnote 33
One would be hard-pressed to establish anything about Jesus or his resurrection without first establishing these a priori reasons for expecting God to make a personal entry into human history. To be sure, there is no contradiction in proposing an intellectually satisfying alternative to the resurrection hypothesis on historical grounds and maintaining the truth of theism. Thus Swinburne's work is hugely important. Apologists must pay attention to these a priori reasons, laying out a refurbished case for Easter Faith. The traditional case for Christian theism must become more forceful: If God were so cold and detached from humanity, it is difficult to conceive why he would have created the universe in the first place.
After Swinburne's a priori reasons have been outlined and explained, the discussion turns to what Swinburne dubs the ‘a posteriori evidence’ for Christian faith. The a posteriori evidence consists of the traditional historical evidences for the resurrection: the empty tomb and appearances. He concludes that the a posteriori evidence for Jesus’ resurrection fits in with the a priori reasons better than any other evidences: ‘Alternative hypotheses have always seemed to me to give far less satisfactory accounts of the historical evidence than does the traditional account’.Footnote 34
Swinburne has indeed appealed to the origins of the Eucharist and the shift from celebrating the Sabbath on Saturday to the ‘first day of the week’,Footnote 35 but these two features remain shortsighted in light of the holistic picture painted by Bauckham, Hurtado, and Dunn. To these scholars we must now turn. The point in summarizing the work of these apologists is to highlight their contributions and show that they have not considered early Christian worship as evidence.
II. Worship and Earliest Devotion to Jesus
Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham and James Dunn are some of the most prominent scholars of early Christian worship. Many significant modifications from Second Temple Judaism to earliest Christianity are seen in the early patterns and various expressions of worship. One might ask what is responsible for bringing about these huge shifts.
First, various designations are given to the Risen Christ, which is intermixed in different ways:Footnote 36 Christ Jesus, Jesus Christ, God and Savior, etc. Further, many terms in early Christianity are taken from pagan socio-religious contexts and assigned with a new depth of meaning: lord, church, and baptism would count as examples.Footnote 37 The infusion of new meaning provided an inner-rationale and reminder for the Christians of the importance of their gatherings.
Another reason to believe Christians worshiped the Risen Christ is seen by the doxologies used in reference to him.Footnote 38 Their worship drove the earliest believers to search the Hebrew Scriptures to find new insights and other answers in light of their newfound faith.Footnote 39 This was known as charismatic exegesis, and it usually did not occur unless they experienced something profound.
The New Testament writers presupposed Jewish monotheism (Rom. 3:28–30; 1 Cor. 8:1–6; John 10:30), but they infused belief in one God with a definitive, new meaning at an exceptionally early date. Says Bauckham: ‘With the inclusion of Jesus in the unique identity of YHWH, the faith of the Shema is affirmed and maintained, but everything the Shema requires of God's people is now focused on Jesus. Exclusive devotion is now given to Jesus, but Jesus does not thereby replace or compete with God the Father, since he himself belongs to the unique divine identity’.Footnote 40 Moreover, the highest Christology was accompanied by a particular pattern of liturgical worship.Footnote 41
As Christian worship spread across the Mediterranean, the earliest believers may have borrowed from pagan thought in certain ways because of its linguistic utility to articulate specific theological concepts, but the essence of their devotion was fundamentally different from that of pagan religion. According to Bauckham, Hellenistic Christians were not as concerned to develop this Christology as much as they sought to ‘transpose it into a conceptual framework more concerned with the Greek philosophical categories of essence and nature’.Footnote 42 This is exhibited by the earliest evidence (Paul's writings) which emphatically rejects pagan religion along with the corresponding exclusive worship of the one, true God.Footnote 43
Unlike Judaism, Christians held that redemption was not found through obedience to Torah. Rather, all people, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity, could find salvation by accepting Jesus. ‘The Torah is thereby shown not to be the basis of redemption, and so it cannot be made obligatory for Gentile Christians’.Footnote 44 Likewise, Hurtado lists six cultic actions in earliest Christian worship that distinguish it from Second-Temple Jewish worship. Although there is some precedent and analogy between the two, the earliest believers took worship one step further by giving Jesus cultic devotion—the best indication that Jesus was attributed with divinity. These mutations, Hurtado's words, are ‘a direct outgrowth from, and indeed a variety of, the ancient Jewish tradition. But an earlier stage it exhibited a sudden and significant difference in character from Jewish devotion’.Footnote 45
These practices include the following: (1) Prayer was offered to God through Jesus Christ (e.g., Rom 1:8); (2) In the Church's rituals, Jesus was invoked and confessed (this implies that Jesus was given a divine status); (3) Jesus’ name was invoked in the ritual of baptism; (4) The association of Jesus with the Lord's Supper connotes that he was a living divine power who own the meal and presides over it. This means that he was seen a as Lord of the entire Christian congregation. This was striking at the time, especially considering that it was celebrated in contradistinction to the cult meals of the pagan gods in Roman religion; (5) In the early church's hymns, the Christians literally sang to Jesus by using Old Testament Psalms, interpreted Christologically; (6) The use of prophetic speech in the context of Christian worship was seen and experienced as the voice of the risen Jesus.Footnote 46
Noting that there is nothing compelling in Second Temple Judaism to compel the first Christians to fabricate these cultic actions (though Hurtado argues that the Jewish veneration of the patriarchs, heroic figures, principal angels, and personified attributes of God assisted the first believers with the conceptual categories needed to verbally articulate what happened to Jesus),Footnote 47 Hurtado says early devotion was characteristically expressed in terms of Jesus’ special relationship to God, and in conjunction with God's action in the world.Footnote 48 In the earliest evidence we have (Paul's letters), Jesus holds a status of divinity, or at least participating in divinity.Footnote 49 This is attested by the belief in Jesus’ pre-existence, which denotes the fact that Jesus’ origin and meaning lie exclusively in God, and that his appearance in history corresponds to his role in the redemption of the human race.Footnote 50
Contending that there are two ways to interpret the pertinent evidence from the Second Temple Jewish era, Bauckham argues that the Christians’ earliest beliefs about Jesus were not possible by ‘applying to Jesus a Jewish category of semi-divine intermediary status, but by identifying Jesus directly with the one God of Israel, including Jesus in the unique identity of this one God’.Footnote 51 He analyzes biblical passages such as Deuteronomy 6:4–6 and the Decalogue. Second Temple Jews were strictly monotheistic well before the origins of the Christian movement. Thus, the inclusion of Jesus along with God cries out for some sort of extraordinary explanation.
At the time of Jesus, Jews understood God as the exclusive Creator and Ruler of the universe. Thus, Bauckham: ‘To our question, “In what did Second Temple Judaism consider the uniqueness of the one God to consist, what distinguished God as unique from all other reality, including beings worshipped as gods by Gentiles?”, the answer given again and again, in a wide variety of Second Temple Jewish literature, is that the only true God, YHWH, the God of Israel, is the sole Creator of all things and sole Ruler of all things’.Footnote 52 As in the case of Hurtado, Jesus is suddenly seen as the creator along with God.Footnote 53 Bauckham insists:
if we attend carefully and accurately, on the one hand, to the ways in which Second Temple Judaism characterized the unique identity of the one and only God and, on the other hand, to what New Testament writers say about Jesus, it becomes abundantly clear that New Testament writers include Jesus in the unique identity of the one God. They do so carefully, deliberately, consistently and comprehensively, by including Jesus in precisely those divine characteristics which for Second Temple Judaism distinguished the one God as unique. All New Testament Christology is, in this sense, very high Christology, stated in the highest terms available in first-century Jewish theology.Footnote 54
On the one hand, Second Temple Jews viewed YHWH as the only sovereign being. On the other hand, Christians saw the Exalted Jesus as sovereign.Footnote 55 While Jews held that YHWH was higher than all angelic beings, the earliest Christians affirmed that Jesus was higher than all angels.Footnote 56 While YHWH has a unique divine name in the Old Testament, so Christians also give Jesus the same unique name. Lastly, Jews held that God was to receive exclusive worship, not worship alongside of other pagan deities.Footnote 57 The first Christians exclusively worshipped Jesus. No other gods in the Greco-Roman world deserved honorable worship alongside of him.
But James Dunn is quick to add that the Scriptural witness in support of worshipping Jesus is unable to point us in any conclusive direction: ‘the use of proskynein in the sense of offering worship to Jesus seems to be rather limited’.Footnote 58 With respect to the early church's prayer, hymns, sacred times, places, meals, and people, ‘the data is more complex and the implications not so clearly drawn’.Footnote 59 For him the whole notion of worshipping Jesus is misleading. The question is not so much ‘Did the first Christians worship Jesus?’ as much as it should be ‘Was early worship possible without Jesus?’ Worship, therefore, was not possible without including Jesus and God in the power of the Spirit: ‘Worship of Jesus that is not worship of God through Jesus, or, more completely, worship of God through Jesus and in the Spirit, is not Christian worship’.Footnote 60 In Dunn's reading, then, the worship of Christ at the expense of including God the Father and the Holy Spirit is tantamount to committing Jesus-olatry. Although the first believers did not explicitly formulate a doctrine of the Trinity, it was this novel understanding that was hugely significant and complements the other modifications mentioned by Bauckham and Hurtado.
Hence, the single biggest distinction in earliest Christianity was its insistence on worshipping a person who once walked the earth. This in itself was a huge mutation and also has no parallel, let alone linguistic parallel, in Judaism. They included the teachings of his earthly ministry. This was probably based on their innovative theology of Jesus’ resurrection body (i.e., the same body that died was the same body that rose from the grave). The risen Jesus is the same Jesus that the disciples knew during his life: ‘in what became the dominant view, Jesus’ real human and historical reality remained as crucial as the heavenly glory that he was believed to share’.Footnote 61 Moreover, there is hardly any indication that there was ‘any controversy or serious variance about this exalted place of Jesus among the various other Christian circles with which he was acquainted’.Footnote 62 The variation in expression still assumed that there were basics.Footnote 63
Indeed, Judaism forbade the apotheosis or the divinization of human persons. This makes Christian devotion all the more remarkable given that Christianity was seen as an early sect of Judaism.Footnote 64 Bauckham complements Hurtado: ‘When New Testament Christology is read with this Jewish theological context in mind [i.e. a strictly monotheistic context], it becomes clear that, from the earliest post-Easter beginnings of Christology onwards, early Christians included Jesus, precisely and unambiguously, within the unique identity of the one true God of Israel. They did so by including Jesus in the unique, defining characteristics by which Jewish monotheism identified God as unique’.Footnote 65 According to Bauckham, we can safely surmise that the Christology of the first Christians was already the highest Christology. Indeed, ‘one should note the most significant difference between earliest Christianity and other contemporary religious groups: the place of the exalted Jesus in the religious life, devotion, or piety of its adherents’.Footnote 66
Worship of Jesus was not in competition for the devotion given to God, but both were included by believers.Footnote 67 Although the first Christians considered themselves strict monotheists, what made them so different from the Jews was that they introduced a binitarian devotional pattern directed to God and Christ alone. This was heretical in Judaism because it contravened the prayers, hymns, and devotion reserved for the God of biblical tradition. There is simply no analogy in the Second-Temple period to accommodate this binitarian pattern of worship. This innovation is another significant innovation in earliest Christianity. In a similar vein, Christian devotion also placed strict demands on converts to renounce all forms of pagan worship, demanding an exclusivist devotion to Christ and God.Footnote 68 Thus Hurtado: ‘We cannot appreciate early Christian worship, unless we keep before our eyes the fact that for Gentile Christians it represented a replacement cultus. It was at one and the same time both a religious commitment and a renunciation, a stark and demanding devotional stance with profound repercussions’.Footnote 69 This exclusivist approach obligated converts to abandon certain aspects of common life, and in some cases this created tensions within their family life.Footnote 70
The sustenance of the Christian understanding monotheism in the face of the Roman religions was another striking feature. The worship of one God was at clearly at odds with the polytheistic belief that the gods could be worshipped in any combination. Pagans could not understand why they could not add worship to Jesus alongside the worship of other gods.Footnote 71 Since Christianity was one religion competing in a marketplace of religions, and considering it had an exclusivist stance, there must have been some other feature that made it powerfully attractive to outsiders.Footnote 72 Early worship attracted outsiders because of the way in which it changed its adherents. Another reason why it spread so quickly had to do with the adversarial encounter of other religions which drove and shaped the movement.Footnote 73 Martyrdom was ‘the most vivid form in which devotion to Jesus was expressed in the earliest centuries’.Footnote 74 Dying for one's beliefs indicated to the public on a large scale that some Christians were willing to go to any length of penalty to remain faithful followers of Jesus. Of course, this made outsiders curious and attracted them to investigate the new Christian heresy.
Early Christian worship did not take place in decorative temples; not did it consist of sacrifices made to God through the intercessions of a hereditary priesthood:Footnote 75‘Along with the lack of temples or cult images,’ Hurtado writes, ‘the earliest Christians offered no sacrifices to their God, and in this as well seemed to their pagan neighbors an odd sort of religious group’. Elsewhere, he says, ‘Their lack of these important “normal” components of religion is part of the reason why some outsiders regarded Christian groups as more like philosophical associations than religious groups’.Footnote 76 Christian worship so unique in the beginning in that it ‘transcended the lines of differentiation and marginalization operative in their life outside of the worship setting’.Footnote 77 The Christians also disputed the Jews’‘inappropriate reverence for God's own heavenly retinue of angels or for other agents of God such as the revered patriarchs (e.g., Moses) or messiahs’.Footnote 78 Unlike some Jews, the Christians did not recognize other beings in corporate worship to God.
Christ's followers made the radical claim that Jesus must be worshipped because he was Messiah—the mediator of cosmic redemption.Footnote 79 This is truly remarkable, in Hurtado's view, given that the Jesus’ messianic titles and the worship given to him occurred only after he was crucified in a Greco-Roman cultural and religious milieu. Crucifixion had a lowly reputation. From ancient letter of Pliny the Younger, we learn that the Christians would rather die than worship and bow down to any of the multitude of gods in the Roman pantheon, or to an image of the emperor himself.Footnote 80 Not to be overlooked, ‘the social and political costs involved make it remarkable that the young faith proved as attractive as it obviously was for some…’Footnote 81 Something powerfully attractive must have resonated with outsiders, making early Christianity attractive, enough to the point where thousands were willing to suffer the negative consequences and sometimes die for the cause of Jesus.Footnote 82
Another important aspect is that the earliest Christian tradition of worship can be traced back to within days or weeks after his execution. This precludes the idea the idea that Christian practices evolved for decades after Christ. ‘This pattern of devotion originated so early that in the Christian movement that evolutionary approaches are simply not appropriate…. I contend that devotion to Jesus as divine was such a novel and significant step, and appeared so early as well, that it can only be accounted for as a response to the strong conviction in early Christian circles that the one God of biblical tradition willed that Jesus be so reverenced. Ancient Jewish scruples about worship were such that we cannot take devotion to Jesus as some sort of accidental development, or as indicative of a readiness of early Christians to engage in liturgical experimentation’.Footnote 83 Early devotion to Jesus cannot be attributed to pagan religious influences on their Jewish-Christian thought, even to Jews who were living in the Diaspora.Footnote 84 The antiquity of the practices reaches too far back in time. Christian worship had therefore developed into a well established devotional pattern within the first few months or years of Christianity.
Further, the earliest believers began to proclaim the Gospel in the Temple in the city of Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem was ‘the key initial venue for the proclamation of the christological claims’ about Jesus.Footnote 85 Jerusalem appears to have been ‘the geographical base of their religious life’. They started to worship there ‘deliberately’ and ‘very promptly’. ‘The obvious reasons have to do with the ancestral significance of Jerusalem as the royal and temple city, the traditional Jewish site of king, worship, and pilgrimage’.Footnote 86 It was also the place where Jesus appeared to his disciples after his crucifixion.
The clear and programmatic inclusion of Jesus in devotional life was easily identifiable to outsiders.Footnote 87 Paul's letters ‘reflect an already well developed pattern of devotion to Jesus, key features of which likely even predate Paul's own conversion and probably helped to provoke his own prior efforts to stamp out the Jewish Christian movement’.Footnote 88 The similarity and structure in devotion extended down to the second century, and this is even seen in the devotion in heretical groups.Footnote 89 Despite the varied minor expressions of devotion, the church's intense charismatic experiences of God in their worship grew, attracting unbelievers at an alarmingly rapid pace.Footnote 90 The fourfold collection of the Gospels exemplifies what was so characteristic in early Christian devotion in the second half of the first century: ‘a certain readiness to find unity of what they deemed essentials beneath obvious diversity’.Footnote 91
III. Early Christian Worship as Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection
By introducing the multifaceted nature of early devotion and liturgical worship, apologists now might recognize that more evidence can be adduced in support of Jesus’ resurrection. The evidence can be more qualitatively presented instead of merely defending the historicity of the appearances, the empty tomb, and the cognitive beliefs of the first disciples. Furthermore, the evidence of early worship is consistent with the picture already given by Wright, O’Collins, Craig, Habermas, and Swinburne. Early Christian worship fills in the postulate that maintains that the church itself has evidential status.Footnote 92 Another reason to embrace the viewpoint of this essay is that opponents of Easter Faith have not typically focused on worship as evidence either.Footnote 93
Perhaps apologists will resist the conclusions of this essay because the kaleidoscopic picture presented here is entirely too difficult to classify and use in any profitable way. Different strains and expressions of Christian worship appeared at different times and places in the church, and so it is entirely too difficult to neatly categorize which components can be traced back to the earliest days of Christianity. This objection does not undercut the primary thesis of this essay. For one thing, historical Jesus researchers are beginning to draw conclusions about Jesus from the standpoint of the earliest church. As Terrence Tilley observes, a ‘new research program is emerging, one that shifts the focus from the quests for the “historical Jesus,” a person in the past, to recovering the “historic Jesus,” the person remembered by his followers. It finds that Jesus’ historic significance is and should be the center of Jesus research’.Footnote 94 Work on Jesus is shifting from a study of Jesus’ life to the impact he made upon his disciples. ‘Overall,’ says Tilley, ‘the new program shifts from constructing theories about the Historical-Jesus to understanding the practices in which Jesus was remembered’.Footnote 95
Thus the impact Jesus made upon later generations may count as evidence for the resurrection. One way to think of how this is possible is to recognize that personal identity cannot be isolated from social identity. In order to know who a person is (and what they were like and what they actually did), we should not only ask them questions, we should also ask other individuals who knew something about them. These other individuals might catch valuable insights about the person that they themselves did not know.Footnote 96 The interconnectedness of reality and the human race ensures that the teachings and deeds of someone from the past can be known with keener insights than the person knew about themselves. Extended to the case of the early church and Jesus’ resurrection, a reliable testimony can therefore be provided by later generations of people who may have witnessed an appearance of the Risen Christ.
Consequently, the evidence of worship that skeptics discount as too far removed from the resurrection of Jesus might be seen a privileged form of evidence. Later believers may have more well-rounded evidence from various perspectives at their disposal to determine what should be included in the most up-to-date expressions of devotion. Thus historians do not need earlier sources to ensure that the case for Jesus’ resurrection is more trustworthy. Sometimes events of great importance require a considerable span of time to traverse for it to be rightly comprehended and even argued for. Therefore later expressions of early Christian worship should not always be given second priority. Nonetheless, some expressions of Christian worship did not begin decades after Jesus’ death and burial. Many expressions began almost immediately after the appearances. Liturgical worship, moreover, remained tied to the same basic practices in the face of Jewish and pagan religious pressure to the contrary. Outside of the appearances, empty tomb, and disciples’ cognitive beliefs, some of these features can be listed.
A strong case can be made for the early origins of the Eucharist and Christian Baptism. The paradigmatic shift from the Jewish ritual meals to the Christian Eucharist had to do with the change of meaning that the earliest believers poured into their new ritual meal. Celebrating the Eucharist was seen as the culminating expression of the new covenant. Also significant is Christian baptism (and the new meanings poured into these practices by Christians), and the liturgical prayers and hymns directed to Jesus (a strong indication that the first believers saw Jesus as divine). Romans 6:1–6 and Colossians 2:12 demonstrate that the meaning of baptism was intimately linked to Jesus’ death and resurrection. The change in meaning by the church points to the resurrection as a necessary precondition for such a change.
The origins of celebrating the Sabbath on Sunday instead of Saturday is equally noteworthy.Footnote 97 One of the earliest customs was the meetings the earliest believers held on every Sunday (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:2,9; John 20:1,19; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev 1:10). Despite the variation of the liturgical celebration, the basics of meeting on Sunday were generally agreed upon. Since Sunday was the day in which the disciples found the tomb empty (and possibly saw what they believed was the Risen Jesus), Sunday was viewed as a sacred day by the earliest communities.
Worshipping Christ and God together would count as another major significant modification. Similarly, singing hymns and praying to Jesus is a significant feature in earliest Christianity. The use of prophetic speech within their gathered assemblies is equally tantalizing. The fact of Christian martyrdom should also be considered. Unlike the religious martyrs of today, the earliest believers were in a position to know if what they practiced was mistaken. The Christians’ refusal to accommodate the substance of their worship practices in the face of alternative religious pressure, and the rapid rise and success of worshipping a crucified Messiah in the face of secular opposition to their practices should be exploited for apologetic purposes as well.
Further, many pagan terms were given a new, Christianized meaning to show outsiders the importance of their own meetings and beliefs. Unlike Judaism, all people, regardless of race, gender, religion or cultural background, were called to believe in Messiah Jesus. Unlike the potpourri of Greco-Roman religions, the worship of Christ was constituted by an exclusive form of worship. All other deities had to be renounced by new converts. All of these devotional practices cry out for explanation (or, explanations), and they can all be traced back to an early date, soon after Jesus was crucified and buried.
Now some detractors might note that historical explanations are usually accounted for by many causes, not just one causal theory. Now, it is true that the phenomena of early worship can be said to have more than one cause for its existence, but this would not mean historians cannot posit Jesus’ resurrection as the ultimate cause that set off a chain reaction of additional causal conditions that brought these practices into mature expressions at a later time (say, infusing the Greek word ecclesia with a new meaning for the purposes of evangelical belief and practice). Sometimes religious experiences in corporate worship settings provide an impetus to sustain the movement and keep it going.Footnote 98 Various causes have different values and contribute to forming the phenomena of Christian worship. True, historians rarely affirm that entire movements can be accounted for by a single cause. Many conditions surrounding the primary event under consideration (that is, Jesus’ resurrection), however, might contribute to its ongoing influence and vitality.
But sometimes a single event (Jesus’ resurrection) can have traceable ripples effects that are manifested in the future in different times and places (and sometimes in the distant future in different geographical regions that were not immediately affiliated with either Judaism or Christianity). Each piece of evidence does not have to bear the full weight of the case. Each piece is presented by Hurtado and his colleagues to create a cumulative case argument. While an accumulated amount of evidence, while unable to be persuasive if one takes one piece at a time, becomes much more compelling when qualitatively combined together. What makes early Christian worship such an important resource for apologetics is that there is nothing miraculous about the practices (unlike Jesus’ resurrection, which is a historical miracle).
Perhaps the most important factor to consider when analyzing the origins of Christian worship is to pinpoint the cause (or causes) of what brought these practices into being. For the real challenge in historical understanding is to discover not only what happened, but also why (and how) the event occurred as well. For all of the historical mutations that have been discussed are hugely significant and beg for some sort of explanation. There are a few causes that are able to account for them. The first would be pagan religious influences. Mentioned earlier by Hurtado and Bauckham, pagan influences may be responsible for providing the Christians with the conceptual categories needed for articulating their beliefs and practices, but this is far from affirming that the content of worship is completely pagan. “Both in theology and in practice,” Hurtado responds, “Greco-Roman Jews demonstrate concern for God's supremacy and uniqueness with an intensity and a solidarity that seem to go far beyond anything else previously known in the Greco-Roman world.”Footnote 99 Moreover, the earliest traditions can be traced back to within weeks or months after Jesus’ execution. Thus the antiquity and the general consistency of Christian worship practices, starting from Jerusalem outward, precludes the skeptics’ allegation that worship originated under the influence of pagan mystery religions.
The other causal theory stems directly from Jewish worship. The biggest distinction in earliest Christianity was its insistence on worshipping a person. Although Judaism can account for the background of earliest worship, it cannot account for the earliest expressions of Christian worship as an explanation. Worship of Jesus of Nazareth was not in competition of the worship given to God: rather, Jesus was seen as divine, or, at the very least, as participating in the divine nature. Judaism, moreover, forbade the apotheosis or the divinization of human persons. The Christian innovations would have compromised Judaism's strictly monotheistic stance.
In contrast to these two causal theories, the best explanation of the evidence resonates with the explanation offered by the church itself: the disciples’ experienced what they at least thought were appearances of Jesus risen from the dead. These appearances occurred at different times and places, and to individuals and even groups of people. Sometimes they even occurred to enemies of Christ (Paul, James, etc.), those who did not have faith in Jesus during his earthly ministry. Though more causal theories are needed to account more fully for the phenomenon of early Christian worship, this explanation is the one that is relevant to the apologetic enterprise.
IV. Conclusion
Apologists such as N.T. Wright, Gerald O’Collins, Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, and Gary Habermas have appealed to the post-mortem appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection to lend credibility to Jesus’ resurrection. The earliest and most pertinent evidence concerning the earliest church's worship and devotional life has not been used to defend the resurrection (or to defend the historicity of the evidence itself).
On the other hand, scholars of early worship such as Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, and James Dunn have not seen their work as having apologetic import. This essay has sought to bridge the gap between these research paradigms in earliest Christianity and show that they can only complement each other for the better, especially for the sake of apologetic purposes. By no means would the apologist's arguments be nullified by the facts involved with early Christian worship.
I have shown that early Christian worship can only buttress the apologists’ arguments. The church's beliefs coincided with her practices, and her practices were expressed by what she cognitively believed (Lex orandi, Lex credendi). Apologists can profit from using the evidence of Christian worship, and it heavily qualifies their contention that the church's beliefs in the resurrection have significant evidential import.
