I. Introduction

In The Historical Figure of Jesus, E. P. Sanders interprets Jesus’s selection of the Twelve as significant for the anticipated restoration of Israel.¹ Israel had once been made up of twelve tribes, but ten of them were lost after the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in the eighth century BCE. By choosing twelve disciples, Jesus appears to have signaled that God would soon gather all Israel once again. This symbolism becomes clearer when viewed in the context of Israel’s history of foreign domination, beginning with the Babylonian conquest and continuing through periods of Greek and Roman rule. Jesus’s proclamation of the coming kingdom of God suggests an expectation of divine intervention, one that appears particularly urgent in passages such as Mark 13:30, where Jesus is portrayed as declaring that these events would occur within his generation. This raises a central question: After Jesus was executed, how did his followers make sense of his death, and what did it mean for their hope that God would restore Israel?

Given this symbolism and the sayings attributed to Jesus, what did Jesus and his followers believe about the restoration of Israel? In other words, how would this restoration come about? It is plausible that Jesus and his disciples anticipated a restoration involving both political and religious transformation. In Matthew 19:28 (cf. Luke 22:28–30), Jesus promises his disciples they will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. This passage suggests the Twelve expected to participate in governing or judging a restored Israel under God’s reign.

In this article, I suggest that Jesus’s followers came to terms with his death through two closely related developments: experiences they understood as appearances of the risen Jesus, and a renewed reading of Jewish scripture. Together, these allowed them to interpret his resurrection as the beginning of the end-time resurrection of the dead. His death, in turn, could be understood not as the failure of the restoration they had expected, but as its first stage.

II. Historical Background

Several sayings attributed to Jesus suggest that he anticipated God’s intervention within the lifetime of his followers. In The Historical Figure of Jesus, Sanders argues that Jesus expected God to bring about the kingdom and fulfill God’s will on earth. Sanders also suggests that the disciples anticipated a real kingdom in which positions of authority and prominence would matter.² This interpretation indicates that Jesus and his followers expected a transformation initiated by God, rather than one achieved solely through conventional political or military action.

The Temple incident provides another indication of Jesus’s expectations concerning Israel’s restoration. In Mark 11:15–19 (see also Matthew 21:12–17 and Luke 19:45–48), Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers and invokes the prophetic description of the Temple as a house of prayer for all nations, contrasting it with a den of robbers (Mark 11:17). The incident occurred during the Passover festival, when large numbers of Jewish pilgrims traveled to Jerusalem to observe this important religious occasion. Passover commemorated Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt, and the city was crowded with pilgrims under the watch of Roman soldiers. Given the religious significance of the Temple and the politically sensitive atmosphere surrounding Passover, Jesus’s actions would likely have attracted the attention of the Temple authorities.

According to Mark 14:58, witnesses accused Jesus of claiming that he would destroy the Temple and build another not made with human hands. Although Mark characterizes this testimony as unreliable, the accusation suggests that claims concerning the Temple’s destruction formed part of the traditions surrounding Jesus’s arrest and trial. In Jesus and Judaism, Sanders argues that the Temple incident may have been a symbolic prophetic action announcing the anticipated destruction and replacement of the existing Temple.³ The Temple incident may have attracted the attention of the religious authorities and contributed to the events that ultimately led to Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion.

Jesus’s execution was not simply the loss of a leader; it also posed a serious theological problem. Jewish expectations concerning a messiah, or “anointed one,” varied, but many centered on a royal descendant of David who would free Israel from foreign rule. The Psalms of Solomon, written in the first century BCE, express the hope for a son of David who would destroy unrighteous rulers and cleanse Jerusalem of the gentile nations that had trampled it (Psalms of Solomon 17:21–25). A messiah executed by the Romans contradicted these hopes. Crucifixion was also a shameful death, used by Rome for slaves, rebels, and others it wished to make an example of. Deuteronomy 21:23 declares that “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse,” a verse Paul himself later applies to Jesus’s death (Galatians 3:13).⁴ Paul acknowledges the difficulty directly when he describes “Christ crucified” as “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). If Jesus and his followers anticipated the imminent restoration of Israel through divine intervention, his execution raises the historical problem this article addresses: how his followers made sense of his death in light of their expectations of God’s coming kingdom.

III. Evidence and Analysis

The Gospel narratives portray Jesus’s followers as struggling to understand his arrest and death. Yet the earliest surviving Christian writings reveal a movement that proclaimed Jesus had been raised from the dead. The task, then, is to explain how a movement confronted by the death of its central figure came to interpret that death as part of God’s plan.

In the Gospel of Mark, generally regarded as the earliest surviving Gospel and usually dated to around 70 CE, Peter rebukes Jesus after he predicts his suffering and death (Mark 8:31–33). Later, when Jesus again predicts his death, the disciples are portrayed as failing to understand his words (Mark 9:30–32). When Jesus is arrested, his followers abandon him and flee (Mark 14:43–50). These accounts suggest that, within Mark’s narrative, Jesus’s suffering and death conflicted with his followers’ expectations.

The Gospel of Luke, commonly dated to approximately 80–90 CE, provides another example of this disappointment. In Luke 24:21, two followers express that they had hoped Jesus would redeem Israel. Although these accounts were written decades after the events they describe, they portray Jesus’s followers as struggling to reconcile his execution with their expectations concerning Israel’s restoration.

Although the Gospels appear first in the New Testament, Paul’s letters are older. Written in the 50s CE, they are the earliest surviving Christian writings, composed roughly two decades after Jesus’s crucifixion and well before any of the Gospels. They therefore offer our closest view of the beliefs and traditions circulating within the early Jesus movement. In 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, Paul recounts what is commonly understood as an early Christian tradition, often described as a creed, that is, a short formula of belief that was memorized and passed on. He states that he is passing on what he received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, was buried, and was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. Paul does not say from whom he received this tradition. He goes on to report that Jesus appeared to Cephas (the Aramaic form of Peter’s nickname, meaning “rock”), the Twelve, more than five hundred brothers and sisters, James, all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself.

Although Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that he passed on a tradition he had received, he also maintains that his gospel was not received from a human source but through a revelation of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:11–12). These statements are not necessarily contradictory. Paul may have understood his gospel and apostolic calling as divinely revealed while also receiving traditions concerning Jesus from other followers. It is possible that the other apostles likewise came to believe in Jesus’s resurrection through revelatory experiences of their own, a possibility explored in section IV.

Later, Paul states that he traveled to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him for fifteen days (Galatians 1:18). This shows that Paul had direct contact with individuals who had followed Jesus during his lifetime, and Cephas is a plausible source for at least part of the tradition Paul passed on. Paul also states that God revealed his Son “in me” (Galatians 1:15–16; Greek en emoi, which the NRSV renders “to me”). Although the precise meaning of this expression is debated, it raises questions about the nature of Paul’s experience. His assertion that he received the gospel through revelation also reflects a broader Jewish religious tradition in which divine revelation was understood as a source of knowledge and authority. Larry W. Hurtado has argued that revelatory experiences of this kind were a major catalyst for the earliest devotion to Jesus.⁵ Notably, Paul uses the same Greek term, ōphthē (ὤφθη), meaning “appeared” or “was seen,” when describing Jesus’s appearances to Cephas, the Twelve, James, and himself (1 Corinthians 15:5–8). Although the use of the same terminology does not establish that these experiences were identical, it raises the possibility that some of the earliest resurrection appearances were understood as revelatory experiences.

Paul’s description of God revealing his Son to him (Galatians 1:15–16) can be considered within the broader context of Jewish traditions of divine revelation. Jewish apocalyptic literature (from the Greek apokalypsis, “revelation” or “unveiling”) describes heavenly secrets disclosed through visions, often concerning God’s coming judgment and the end of the present age. The book of Daniel is the best-known example in the Hebrew Bible. These traditions provide a historical context for examining how Paul and other early followers of Jesus may have understood experiences associated with the risen Jesus.

Paul’s statement that Christ died and was raised “in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4) demonstrates that Jewish scripture was central to the early Christian understanding of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Following his crucifixion, his followers appear to have returned to these texts in an attempt to understand what his death meant and how it could be reconciled with their expectations concerning Israel’s restoration.

Several passages illustrate how this may have worked. Although these passages originally addressed different circumstances, they provided language and concepts through which Jesus’s followers could understand his suffering, resurrection, and anticipated vindication. Hosea 6:2, which speaks of God raising up his people “on the third day,” originally referred to the restoration of the nation rather than of an individual, yet its language closely parallels the claim that Jesus was raised “on the third day.” Psalm 16:10, in which the psalmist trusts that God will not “let your faithful one see the Pit,” is applied to Jesus’s resurrection in Acts 2:27–31. Daniel 12:2 is the clearest expression in the Hebrew Bible of a future resurrection of the dead: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” This expectation of a general resurrection at the end of the age becomes important in section V.

Isaiah 53:3–12 may provide the clearest insight into how early Christians came to understand Jesus’s death. In its original setting, the “servant” of Isaiah 40–55 is identified in several passages with Israel itself (Isaiah 49:3), suffering in exile and awaiting vindication by God. Isaiah describes this figure as “despised and rejected by others” (Isaiah 53:3). The author goes on to describe him as “wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). In verse 7, the figure is compared to a lamb led to slaughter and a sheep that remains silent before its shearers. Similar imagery appears in the Gospels, where Jesus is described as the Lamb of God (John 1:29) and remains silent before his accusers during his interrogation before Pilate (Mark 15:3–5). These parallels suggest that the suffering servant passage provided early Christians with a framework for interpreting Jesus’s suffering and death as part of God’s purposes rather than as the failure of his mission.

Jesus’s death did not mean that the restoration had failed. His resurrection could instead be understood as its beginning.

IV. Resurrection Appearances and Revelatory Experience

Another factor in the development of early Christianity following Jesus’s death is that some of his followers had experiences that fundamentally changed how they understood the purpose of his death. Paul is the clearest example: something led him to go from persecuting the early Jesus movement (Galatians 1:13–14) to becoming one of its leading missionaries. Paul describes God revealing his Son to him (Galatians 1:15–16). Whatever the nature of this revelation, Paul’s subsequent commitment shows that he regarded it as profoundly significant.

Peter presents a similar case. The Gospels portray him as denying Jesus (Luke 22:54–62; Mark 14:66–72), and the disciples as fleeing following Jesus’s arrest (Matthew 26:56; Mark 14:50). Yet Paul later identifies Peter as one of the recognized pillars of the early Christian movement (Galatians 2:9). Finally, there is James, the brother of Jesus, whose apparent lack of belief during Jesus’s ministry (John 7:5) contrasts with his later position as a recognized leader of the Jerusalem church (Galatians 2:9). Paul also identifies James as a recipient of an appearance of the risen Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:7), while the Jewish historian Josephus records his execution around 62 CE (Jewish Antiquities 20.200). Each of these transformations requires explanation.

It is not clear what Paul meant when he stated that Jesus appeared to them. Were these physical appearances, visionary experiences, or some other form of encounter? Whatever the nature of these appearances, Paul places his own experience alongside those of the earlier apostles and followers of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:5–8). It remains unclear whether Paul understood these experiences as similar in nature or was emphasizing their shared significance as encounters with the risen Jesus.

Scholars remain divided on this question. N. T. Wright argues that, within Second Temple Judaism (the period from the rebuilding of the Temple in the late sixth century BCE to its destruction by Rome in 70 CE), “resurrection” denoted a bodily return to life, and that the early Christian claim therefore referred to bodily appearances rather than to visions alone.⁶ Bart D. Ehrman, by contrast, argues that belief in Jesus’s resurrection arose from visions experienced by some of his followers after his death.⁷ Dale C. Allison Jr. gives serious attention to visionary experiences, comparing the reported appearances with visions of the dead reported in other times and places, while cautioning that such comparisons cannot by themselves settle what the disciples saw.⁸

John J. Collins observes in The Apocalyptic Imagination that “Apocalyptic ideas undeniably played an important role in the early stages of Christianity and more broadly, in the Judaism of the time.”⁹ This provides an important historical context for examining Paul’s description of his encounter with the risen Jesus. Daniel 7 and 10 offer examples of dreams and visions through which divine purposes were revealed. In Daniel 7, Daniel dreams of four beasts and the Ancient of Days, while in Daniel 10 he describes a heavenly vision and subsequently falls “into a trance, face to the ground” (Daniel 10:9). These visions express the expectation that God would ultimately intervene, judge oppressive kingdoms, and vindicate his people. Paul and the earliest followers of Jesus may have drawn upon this same tradition of divine revelation when interpreting their experiences of the risen Jesus.

In 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, Paul describes being caught up to the third heaven. Furthermore, Paul states that he does not know whether this experience occurred in the body or outside the body (v. 2). Although this passage does not describe his encounter with the risen Jesus, it shares similarities with Daniel’s visions in that both accounts describe extraordinary experiences involving access to heavenly realities.

Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus, described in Galatians 1:15–16 and 1 Corinthians 15:5–8, may therefore have been a visionary experience, and Cephas, James, and the Twelve may have undergone similar experiences. Such an explanation is historically plausible when considered within the broader context of Jewish apocalyptic traditions and Paul’s own account of an extraordinary heavenly experience in 2 Corinthians 12:2–4. However, the available evidence does not establish the precise nature of these appearances or whether the experiences of the earliest followers were identical.

The experiences reported by early leaders of the Jesus movement shaped and strengthened their beliefs about the risen Jesus. These experiences may have prompted Jesus’s followers to gather and revisit Jewish scripture in an attempt to understand what had occurred. Alternatively, their interpretation of scripture may have influenced how they understood experiences they believed revealed the risen Jesus. It is also possible that these processes reinforced one another, contributing to the development of early Christian beliefs about Jesus’s death and resurrection.

In 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, then, the claim that Christ died and was raised “in accordance with the scriptures” stands side by side with a list of appearances of the risen Jesus. Scriptural interpretation and reported resurrection appearances were both integral to the early Christian proclamation. What the evidence does not allow us to determine is whether experiences understood as appearances of the risen Jesus preceded these scriptural interpretations or whether existing interpretations of scripture influenced how those experiences were understood.

V. The Restoration Reimagined

The question remains how belief in Jesus’s resurrection addressed the expectation with which this article began: the restoration of Israel. Paul provides an important clue. In 1 Corinthians 15:20, he describes the risen Jesus as “the first fruits of those who have died.” The first fruits were the earliest portion of the harvest, offered to God as a sign that the rest of the harvest would follow (Leviticus 23:10). As noted above, Daniel 12:2 expresses the expectation of a general resurrection of the dead at the end of the age, when God would judge the world and vindicate his people. If God had raised Jesus, then that final resurrection had already begun. Paul makes the sequence explicit: “Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:23).

Understood in this way, Jesus’s death did not mean that the restoration had failed. His resurrection could instead be understood as its beginning. The kingdom his followers expected had not yet arrived in full, but its first sign had appeared. Paul’s earliest surviving letter reflects this expectation. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17, written around 50 CE, Paul assures believers that those who have died will be raised when the Lord returns, and he speaks of “we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:15). Paul appears to have expected this return within his own lifetime.

The book of Acts, written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, preserves a similar memory. After the resurrection, the disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). Whatever its historical value, the question shows that the author of Acts understood the hope for Israel’s restoration as having survived the crucifixion. What changed was its timing. Paula Fredriksen’s From Jesus to Christ examines how early Christian communities reinterpreted Jesus’s mission and message as the arrival of the kingdom was delayed.¹⁰ The hope Jesus’s followers had placed in the restoration of Israel was not abandoned. It was carried forward to a future return of Jesus, which the earliest believers continued to expect within their own generation.

VI. Discussion

To return to the central question: How did Jesus’s followers make sense of his death? One possible explanation is that Jesus’s execution created confusion and uncertainty among his followers, which eventually gave way to renewed conviction. His death challenged their expectations concerning the restoration of Israel and the coming kingdom of God. In response, his followers sought explanations for what had occurred and what it meant for their movement. Through the interpretation of Jewish scripture and experiences understood as divine revelations or appearances of the risen Jesus, they came to understand his execution as part of God’s purposes rather than the failure of his mission. Seeing Jesus as the “first fruits” of the resurrection allowed them to reinterpret how God’s promised restoration would unfold and to continue their movement with renewed conviction.

VII. Conclusion

Jesus’s execution challenged his followers’ expectations concerning the restoration of Israel and the coming kingdom of God. Yet by the time of Paul’s earliest surviving letters, approximately two decades after Jesus’s death, the movement was proclaiming that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that his death and resurrection had occurred in accordance with the scriptures. Although some of the traditions preserved in Paul’s writings may be considerably older, the available evidence does not allow us to reconstruct precisely how these beliefs first developed.

The reported appearances of the risen Jesus and the interpretation of Jewish scripture appear to have played important roles in this transformation. Whether these experiences prompted Jesus’s followers to reconsider scripture, whether their understanding of scripture influenced how they interpreted those experiences, or whether both processes reinforced one another remains uncertain.

What seems clear is that Jesus’s death did not bring an end to the movement associated with him. Instead, his followers came to understand his execution within a developing interpretation of God’s purposes. I would suggest that their belief in his resurrection, together with their reinterpretation of Jewish scripture, allowed them to see his death not as the end of Israel’s hoped-for restoration but as its beginning, and provided a foundation for the movement’s continued development.

Notes

1. E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), 209, Kindle. ↩︎
2. Sanders, Historical Figure of Jesus, 209. ↩︎
3. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 61–76. ↩︎
4. Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). ↩︎
5. Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 70. ↩︎
6. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 108. ↩︎
7. Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 184. ↩︎
8. Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 209–22. ↩︎
9. John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 1. ↩︎
10. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 135. ↩︎

---

Bibliography

Allison, Dale C., Jr. The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History. London: T&T Clark, 2021.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016.

Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. New York: HarperOne, 2014.

Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.

Sanders, E. P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. London: Penguin, 1993. Kindle.

Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.