Resurrection appearances of Jesus

The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are the earthly appearances of Jesus to his followers after his death, burial and resurrection. They serve as proof of the Resurrection of Jesus and his identity as Messiah, seated in heaven on the right hand of God (the doctrine of the Exaltation of Christ). There is a strong early tradition that the family and immediate followers of Jesus, and the apostle Paul, had visionary and mystical experiences of Jesus after his death. Several decades later, when the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John were being written, the emphasis had shifted to the physical nature of the resurrection, while still overlapping with the earlier concept of a divine exaltation of Jesus' soul. This development can be linked to the changing make-up of the Christian community: Paul and the earliest Christ-followers were Jewish, and Second Temple Judaism emphasised the life of the soul; the gospel-writers, in an overwhelmingly Greco-Roman church, stressed instead the pagan belief in the hero who is immortalised and deified in his physical body.

The resurrection of the flesh was a marginal belief in Second Temple Judaism, i.e., Judaism of the time of Jesus. The idea of any resurrection at all first emerges clearly in the 2nd century Book of Daniel, but as a belief in the resurrection of the soul alone. A few centuries later the Jewish historian Josephus, writing roughly in the same period as Paul and the authors of the gospels, says that the Essenes believed the soul to be immortal, so that while the body would return to dust the soul would go to a place fitting its moral character, righteous or wicked. This, according to the gospels, was the stance of Jesus, who defended it in an exchange with the Sadducees: "Those who are accounted worthy ... to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they ... are equal to the angels and are children of God..." (Mark 12:24-25, Luke 20:34-36).

The Greeks, by contrast, had long held that a meritorious man could be resurrected as a god after his death (the process of apotheosis). The successors of Alexander the Great made this idea very well known throughout the Middle East, in particular through coins bearing his image – a privilege previously reserved for gods – and although originally foreign to the Romans, the doctrine was soon borrowed by the emperors for purposes of political propaganda. According to the theology of Imperial Roman apotheosis, the earthly body of the recently-deceased emperor vanished, he received a new and divine one in its place, and was then seen by credible witnesses; thus, in a story similar to the Gospel appearances of the resurrected Jesus and the commissioning of the disciples, Romulus, the founder of Rome, descended from the sky to command a witness to bear a message to the Romans regarding the city's greatness ("Declare to the Romans the will of Heaven that my Rome shall be the capital of the world...") before being taken up on a cloud.

...
Wikipedia