A Spirit Has No Bones

It was entirely fitting that the man who buried the Lord should be singled out in prophecy this way, and from then on be called “happy.” For prophecy does not leave out the devoted service of the women who went to the tomb before daybreak with the spices they had prepared. Hosea says of this very thing: They will keep watch until daylight to seek my face, saying to me, Come, let us return to the Lord. For he has taken away, and he will heal us; he has struck, and he will bind us up. After two days he will bring us back to life; on the third day he will raise us up. For who could refuse to believe that these words turned over and over in those women’s minds — caught as they were between grief at being abandoned, since for the moment they thought the Lord had struck them, and the hope of the resurrection itself, by which they rightly supposed that everything would be given back to them? [a]

But when “they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus,” then “his burial was taken away from among them,” exactly as Isaiah prophesied. “Two angels, however, appeared there.” That was just the number of attendants the word of God required, since it usually calls for “two witnesses.” And the women coming back from the tomb, and from that sight of the angels, were seen in advance by Isaiah, when he says: Come, you women who return from the vision. That is: come and report the resurrection of the Lord.

It was a good thing, though, that the disciples’ unbelief held out so stubbornly, because it lets us consistently maintain, right to the end, that Jesus revealed himself to the disciples as no one other than the Christ of the prophets. Two of them were out walking when the Lord fell in with them without letting on who he was; and while he was still keeping up the pretense of knowing nothing about what had just happened, they said: But we had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel. They meant their own redeemer — that is, the Creator’s Christ. So far was he from announcing himself to them as a different Christ! And they could not have taken him for the Creator’s Christ — or, if they did take him so, he could not have let that opinion of himself stand — unless he really was the one they supposed him to be. Otherwise he would himself be the author of their error and a traitor to the truth, which does not fit the character of the good God. But at no point, not even after his resurrection, did he show himself to them as anything other than what, by their own account, they had always thought him to be.

He reproached them flatly: You fools, slow of heart to believe what he spoke to you. By saying that, he proves that he does not belong to the rival god but to the same God. For the angels said the same thing to the women: Remember how he spoke to you while he was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be handed over and crucified, and on the third day rise again. “Must be handed over” — and why must he, unless God the Creator had written it so? He took them to task, then, because they were tripped up by his suffering and by nothing else, and because they doubted the truth of the resurrection the women had reported to them. By that they showed that they had not believed him to be the very same one they had thought him to be. So, wanting them to believe him on this point, he declared himself to be exactly what they had judged him to be — the Creator’s Christ, the Redeemer of Israel.

As for the reality of his body, what could be plainer? While they were wondering whether he was a phantom — in fact, while they were assuming that he was one — he says to them: Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; for a spirit does not have bones, as you see that I have.

Now Marcion was unwilling to strike out of his Gospel certain statements that told against him. I suspect he left them on purpose, so that from the passages he had not suppressed, when he could easily have suppressed them, he might either deny cutting anything at all or else justify the cuts he did make. But he spares only the passages he can overturn just as well by explaining them away as by deleting them. So it is with the passage in front of us. He would have the words “a spirit does not have bones, as you see that I have” rearranged to mean: “a spirit — which is what you see that I am — does not have bones”; that is to say, it is not the nature of a spirit to have bones. But what need is there of such a twisted construction, when he could simply have said, “A spirit does not have bones, just as you observe that I do not”? And why does he hold out his hands and his feet for them to examine — limbs that are made of bones — if he had no bones? Why, too, does he add, “Know that it is I myself,” when they had already known him to have a body? Or, if he were altogether a phantom, why did he scold them for supposing that he was a phantom? And while they still did not believe, he asked them for something to eat, for the express purpose of showing them that he had teeth.

And now, as I take it, we have finished what we set out to do. We have set out Jesus Christ as no one other than the Christ of the Creator. We have drawn our proofs from his teaching, his sayings, his affections, his feelings, his miracles, his sufferings, and even his resurrection — all of it foretold by the prophets. To the very last he taught us the same thing, when he sent out his apostles to preach his good news “among all the nations”; for in doing that he fulfilled the psalm, “Their sound has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” Marcion, I pity you. Your labor has been wasted. For the Jesus Christ who appears in your Gospel is mine.