spin

You are quibbling on "mention". I meant showing of your supposed first appearance of the risen Jesus. It's not there. You have it making a surreptitious intrusion into the Emmaus story. The event itself is simply not there.

You can happily invalidate the impact of the Emmaus story with an undercutting aside. Well done.

You are unable to explain why Cephas is seen as separate from the twelve, so you are still in the same quagmire as when I started the thread to try to work out what was going on in 24:33-34.


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Ben C Smith

Nobody is quibbling about anything. You said what you said, and I am not responsible for your wording.

I agree that a narration of the event is not there. I also gave a plausible reason why it is not. That you do not accept it is fine; but returning over and over again to points already made (it is simply not there!) is not going to help much... is it?

Thank you.

I do not have to explain this for the connections to work. In fact, Cephas and Simon Peter do not even have to be the same person for the connections to work. All that is necessary is for the author of Luke to have thought they were the same person, whether correctly or incorrectly.

(This makes me wonder what other things you may be assuming my argument depends upon that it really does not.)

Ben.

spin

If you weren't just quibbling, then you're not being a good ambassador for your thinking abilities.

Your plausible reason is "look at this Emmaus story, and by the way it's not the first event 'cos Peter's already seen him, but I'm too out of it to include the first (because writing is not my speciality)."

And I'm amused that you took this opportunity!

It gets worse when you can't see the quagmire you're in. I'm sure that's why many people are still religious.

You've invented another appearance for Jesus when the text itself expressly says that those who went to the tomb didn't see Jesus (24:24). That appearance you imagine, according to the chronology available to us, happened between the time that the two went off to Emmaus to talk with Jesus and when they returned. This is yet another miracle I guess, because you would have Jesus in two places at the same time.

There is plainly more to this textual problem than you are willing to look at. As it is, your reading simply doesn't make sense. You're dangling on a vowel.


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Amaleq13

It only fails to make sense if one insists that the author had to explicitly depict the appearance to Simon but there does not appear to be any good reason for that requirement. The author claims to be relying on others for his information so why isn't it possible that he simply did not describe a scene for which he had no information beyond the bare fact of an initial appearance to Simon?

spin

When could it have happened on the author's timeline when a tomb sighting was specifically excluded in Lk 24:24?


spin

Ben C Smith

How much time does the text say has elapsed between the dawn events of verses 1-12 and the trip to Emmaus?

Ben.

spin

It doesn't say. But I can see you are now looking for wiggle room at the cost of the writer's narrative abilities. We might make an apologist out of you yet.


spin

neilgodfrey

The online article I cited earlier prompted me to rethink the ending of Luke and the Emmaus story in particular. I ended up taking a fresh look at that episode through the sorts of endings and resolutions commonly found in ancient popular fiction. The result is that I've completely backflipped on my original position about the point of the Emmaus narrative, at least in theory (for now).

My working out of the where it fits in relation to popular novelist devices took me about 7 pages (posted here), but I summarized the conclusions here.

The problems we see in the text may be the consequence of losing sight of the wider literary context of the gospel. Perhaps it was not long after it was written that serious minded clerics in their quest for theological facts and dogma also lost sight of the original playfulness the Emmaus episode. It has been this far too serious approach that has raised the interpretative and textual problems. Those problems largely disappear when the ending is read as being constructed with the tools of ancient popular fiction, maybe.

In my earlier 7 page long post I argue that the author of our canonical Luke-Acts knew how to please an audience and hold them in suspense. Acts in particular is one long series of adventures and narrow escapes. The conclusion of Luke demonstrates a mastery of popular technique resolving the narrative plot with a suspenseful graduated series of recognition scenes. The author has primed his audience to anticipate a resolution that involves not only the resurrection of Jesus but in particular a resolution with Simon Peter.

This is a plot development that is new and original to this gospel. His audience knew of the earlier gospel stories where the hoped for meeting between the resurrected Jesus and Peter either never happened or was blurred out by his being included unnamed in the ranks of the rest of the apostles. The author of Luke-Acts also wanted to wrap narrative flesh around the doctrinal "fact" that the very first appearance of the resurrected Jesus was to Peter (1 Cor.15:5).

Yet simply fabricating a dramatic scene at this point of the Christian community's growth, one that no-one had ever heard before, would scarcely win easy acceptance. The story had to be low key enough to explain why it had not been common public knowledge before. At the same time it had to be rich enough in associations and meaning to be worthy of a genuine appearance to the leader of the Twelve. Embedding in the narrative the motifs of travel, evening hospitality towards unrecognized divine messengers, and the place identified as where Jacob was visited by God, achieved this. (Jewish legends further added elaborated the significance of the rock Jacob used for his pillow, possibly further playing with word associations and their relation to the names of Cephas and Peter.)

The author found the solution to both problems by turning one part of the classic recognition scenes into a double dialogue with his audience: at the same time he was taking them through the suspense of how the characters came to recognize the resurrected Jesus, he was playing with them to give them a chance to recognize for themselves how Simon Peter became the first to see the resurrected Jesus. He repeated his known trick of saving the key identity of the character until the critical point in the narrative.

The final resolution of the status of Simon Peter, as well as that of the mystery of the anonymity and strange new name in the Emmaus road narrative, comes when the pair announce to the audience even more than to the eleven that Jesus has just appeared to Simon!

The nature of this revelation, as mysterious and ephemeral but nonetheless as real as the recognition scene in the story of how Manoah and his wife belatedly recognized the heavenly nature of their guest, and it's immediate overshadowing by Jesus' dramatic open appearance in the midst of them all, complete with his proofs that he was real, facilitated the noncontroversial introduction of the new narrative of how Jesus appeared first to Peter.

Unfortunately for later more literal minded audiences and for subsequent ecclesiastical mythmakers who began to create a genealogy and entirely new identity for Cleophas, an understanding of the playfulness and novelistic art of the author was lost, along with the true meaning of the narrative.

Neil

http://vridar.wordpress.com

Pataphysician

Neil, I find that theory intriguing, the name Cleopas then might be used, more of a play on words as it means "Glory of his father", as another way of describing the resurrected "Son of Man". Which would be a hint to 9:26 of Luke, which the angel and the women in chapter 24 had also just referenced chapter 9:22.

neilgodfrey

Woke up this morning with another clue on my mind (I know, I really do have to get more of a life!) and dashed off another blog post to discuss it at some length -- but in summary here it is:

Some scholars do find support in textual analysis that Luke knew and used John. -- And others do find reasons to believe that our canonical Luke-Acts was was written late and after the other gospels.

If we go along with that for a moment, and look at John again, then the possibility that Luke was in fact in dialogue with John over the first resurrection appearance emerges fairly strongly, I think.

John's gospel has Simon Peter and an unnamed disciple running to the tomb, finding it as they had been told, and then said to be walking off to their homes.

So John has Simon Peter + an unnamed disciple walking off to their homes.

Now thinking how an original audience would be reacting as they heard Luke's Emmaus story. When Luke introduces 2 disciples walking along the road, presumably to their home(s) -- and we learn in the course of the story that they definitely were going to the home of at least one of them -- and when they hear that one of them is left unnamed, but that the name of the other is suspiciously a bit like Cephas, -- Would not they be thinking, "Hey, what's going on? Where is this leading us? We know about Simon Peter and the unnamed disciple traveling along home . . ." (I discuss in more detail this literary audience-grabbing trick that the author of Luke uses when he retells the Markan story of the anointing of Jesus. It's the same game he's playing with his audience -- and coincidentally he saves the Simon identity till the critical moment of the story.)

The author of the Emmaus story is grabbing his audience by picking up where John left Simon and his unnamed companion traveling back to their home. He's playing with them. Like an entertainer having a little tease before finally relieving the tension and declaring unambiguously, yup, this is how Jesus appeared to Simon!

The problem we have with this explanation, I suggest, is that we are reading Luke for historical reconstruction, for traditions, for sources, --- way too seriously in other words. If we read it like a novel, like a good story, then I suggest many of our problems fade away.

Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com

P.S. If there is this dialogue thing happening, it would also explain why Cleophas speaks of events that are not found in Luke at all, but only in John's gospel -- that is, the running of the two disciples to the tomb to find it empty.