Hi Ahanu —
And Moses was "buried" (Deut. 34.6), yet he "appeared" to Christ and his disciples (Mark 9.4). I think Moses appeared because the same attributes of Moses appeared in another person that got the scriptures the way Christ understood them.
Interesting.
St Maximos sees Moses as signifying the Law, and Elijah the Prophets, so between them the totality of the Divine Revelation to Israel.
Suppose nonbelievers were present with the disciples. Mark informs us nonbelievers "may indeed see but not perceive" What would they "see" but "not perceive" if they were present?
They’d see what Christ revealed to them. In Luke 24 we have Christ walking with the disciples who do not recognise Him, until He reveals Himself. The same with Mary Magdalene, who spoke to the Risen Christ thinking He was the gardener, until He said her name … so we see what the Holy Spirit reveals in us, to us, through us … it’s an internal thing. It’s quite possible spectators nearby would have seen nothing at all.
It’s axiomatic in the NT that to see Christ is not simply a case of physically seeing. ‘Christ asks, who do men say that I am?’ and when Peter answers, Christ says he could only say that because it was revealed to him.
So in the ancient Traditions East and West, it’s the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul that reveals Christ to use. Seeing Christ as the Son of God is a Trinitarian thing, a Trinitarian process. Without the Holy Spirit, we just see the man; human nature does not possess the faculties with which to ‘see’ the Transcendent.
Perhaps this is one reason why they were told to keep what they saw a secret.
Well in those days Christianity was very much a ‘Mystery’ practiced within a Jewish context. Also Jesus was telling His people to keep quiet about what He was teaching them, until the prophetic aspect had been fulfilled, because it was such a contentious message.
These ‘secret’ teachings were oral teaching to the Catechumen — regarding the Person of Christ and the Three Persons of the Trinity, the Sacraments, etc. They’re not stated explicitly in the texts because the texts were written to provide background information and support for the oral teaching.
According to Courage, the disciples witnessed Christ's resurrection.
They witness the Risen Christ
after the Resurrection. The first inkling they had was the empty tomb, at which point only Mary Magdalene believed He had risen.
Hard to see how witnessing a resurrection is possible if they didn't understand Christ's doctrine of resurrection.
Harder to see how they could believe in bodily resurrection prior to the event. It’s evident that the disciples were often mystified by what Christ said. Easy to see how that would be interpreted as ‘I will die, but the spirit of my mission will live on’, but He was saying more than that.
John is quite honest. They never got it, until it happened, and even then it was difficult to get their heads round it …
Christ appears to the disciples who are in hiding. Understandable. The Boss has just been arrested, tortured and killed, and there’s little doubt that had they started preaching, they’d have been rounded up and arrested too. So they go into hiding. Then He appears … but they remain in hiding, because days later Thomas turns up and they tell him, but they’re still not out there.
John 20 has Christ appear 8 days after His first appearance to the disciples, to show Himself to Thomas.
John 21 opens some time later. The disciples are no longer in Jerusalem. Peter has gone home, and resumed his occupation, a fisherman. Some of the disciples are with him. What were they waiting for? Then Christ appears on the shore …
John is usually dated between AD 90-110, which was decades after the disciples passed away.
That’s the latest dating for John, up to 125AD. That’s the date of a written text which is the transmission of an oral teaching. The text could have been written in his lifetime. We know the disciples of John had no issue with the Gospel attributed to him, so we can take it at face value — his account of what happened.
Peter supposedly died in the late 60s.
And we reckon that Mark’s gospel is based on the catechetical teachings of Peter to his followers when he was under house arrest prior to his execution.
I've missed this!