Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and the revelation of the Father’s Word’s filiality in the redeemed human nature of Jesus of Nazareth is an event without any analogy or similar cases.

Natural experience and knowledge have no cognisance of events of this kind; hence the problem of how to transfer this event to the level of the human knowledge and language without a spiritualistic reification or dissolution of Jesus’ resurrection.

The formation of concepts by mankind always depends on his experience of the world mediated by the senses. But the experience of the object presupposes a non-objective framework for the human reason. This transcendentalism of the human mind is the metaphysical assumption for the formation of concepts in general. Therefore, in the concept of a testable body as an object, a transcendental and non-objective experience of being as the horizon of knowledge and origin of all bodies is always also implicitly stated. God’s knowability is founded on His wish to express Himself in the divine Word, made testable through a considerably tangible instrument. The Paschal experience consists in the fact that God communicates within the transcendental horizon of the disciples’ knowledge, through Jesus’ self-testimony, who allows Himself to be seen by the disciples in such a manner that they may accept Him as living in God. The use of the Old Testament theophanic formula (see Es 3,2) clearly allows one to understand that the Paschal apparitions are revealing events.

A cine-camera could not have fixed in images and sounds neither the event of the Resurrection – which in its nucleus represents the fulfilment within the Holy Spirit of the Father’s personal relationship with the Son made man – nor Jesus’ paschal apparitions to the disciples. Technical equipment and animals, unlike the human mind, do not have the possibility of experiencing transcendental events and therefore cannot be questioned by the word of God through phenomena and signs perceivable by the senses. Only the human mind can be rendered capable by God’s Spirit, in an intimate unity made of sectoriality and transcendentalism, of perceiving, in the sensitive cognitive image made possible by the event of the revelation, Jesus’ real personality as the cause of this sensitive-spiritual cognitive image.

These witnesses of the Paschal apparitions do not refer to religious ecstasy or to their creative imagination, subjective visions or to hallucinations. They were not victims of a pre-scientific or mythological image of the world. Nor was the speech of the resurrection the diehe for expressing a general belief according to which a new life continuously arises from death.

The disciples’ testimony must be taken seriously. The doubts related to the resurrection’s reality (S. Reimarus, D. F. Strauss etc.) and its reduction to a particular subjective condition of the disciples, are the result of ideological prejudice. Within the framework of a deist conception of God and a mechanistic image of the world, the facts concerning Jesus’ resurrection from the dead necessarily had to appear as the affirmation of an event of a miraculous nature, contradicting the laws of matter known by natural science.

The refusal of Jesus’ resurrection by the Hellenistic world (see At 17,31) was instead caused by the idea that God is not the creator of matter. Any accomplishment by mankind, also and actually in the corporeity created by God, appears theologically and anthropologically absurd outside the framework of God’s Biblical experience.

For the disciples instead it is the hermeneutic context in which to speak of Jesus’ resurrection and Israel’s experience with God, who is the creator of spirit and matter and who is historically committed for mankind. He is the God "who gives to all of us life and breath" (Acts 17,25). As the creator, from Whom all life comes and according to which mankind was created, "He has fixed a day when He will pronounce just judgement on the whole world, through a man he has appointed for that end he has accredited to all of us, by raising Him up from the dead" (Acts 17,31). This fundamental experience of God’s transcendent reality and of His powerful acts in history, constitutes the framework within which it is possible to understand God’s effective identification with Jesus of Nazareth and His self-revelation in Him as in His own Son (Ga 1,16).

The event of Jesus’ resurrection is therefore transcendent compared to the cognitive and measurable possibilities of the created world. It becomes accessible for mankind through the self-revelation of the Crucified Jesus, Who makes Himself known as the mediator of the redeemed and living basileia in the Father. The Paschal apparitions, having origin in the paschal faith, are the historically provable fact from which the disciples’ Paschal faith arose. The resurrection of Jesus is not however that of a dead person returning to human conditions of existence and mankind’s earthly life, nor consequently can He be seen or known in a natural manner. It is not possible to verify this event from a medical-empirical point of view, nor would this represent suitable criteria for the stated event.

The knowledge of the reality of this transcendent event originated in the Paschal apparitions. The faith of the disciples and the historically verifiable indications are the sign through which the Paschal event becomes accessible.

Just as the Father rises from the dead the Messianic mediator of His glory with the help of the Spirit and thereby reveals His divine Word (meaning His intra-divine Son)in the humanity of Jesus (Rm 1,3; 8,11), so also the unity of Jesus with the Father and His entering the glory of God become knowable in the act of human faith only through the Holy Spirit: "No one can say: "Lord Jesus" save through the Holy Spirit" (l Cor 12,3).

THE EMPTY SEPULCHRE IN THE PASCHAL TRADITION

In the original tradition of the Paschal apparitions the empty sepulchre is not specifically mentioned. At the best it can be considered as implicitly assumed in the pre-Pauline formulas for the confessions of faith (l Cor 15,3-5). They speak of the subject Christ, who died, was buried and rose the third day. The metaphor of the "resurrection" alludes clearly here to the erection of a body and redemption from the sepulchre. The "sepulchre" is in fact the seal placed on the death of Jesus, and the body is the proof that He died. The resurrection therefore did not take place beyond this world, but was related to the history and the Being of Jesus.

In his Paschal sermon the apostle Peter establishes a relation between God’s resurrective act regards to Christ and Jesus’ corporal-spiritual existence, which also includes an act of God on His body: in referring to the future resurrection of Christ, the prophet said: "He will not be left in the place of death, and his body will not see corruption" (Acts 2,31; see Sal 16,10).

In the synoptic gospels for Easter the Paschal apparitions are preceded, unlike what happens according to John, by the discovery of the empty sepulchre. They literarily link the Galilean tradition, with its primacy of stories about the apparitions, with the Jerusalem tales of the empty sepulchre through the assignment entrusted to the women to tell the apostles the news that Jesus would reveal Himself to them in Galilee. But not even for the Synoptics is the empty sepulchre proof of the resurrection. The empty sepulchre is a sign that alerts the disciples and guides them to their encounter with the Risen Christ.

An empty sepulchre is not an event that should per se be necessarily interpreted in the sense of a resurrection accomplished by God. It can also be interpreted in a variety of ways: for example, in the sense of an hypothesis of deception (see Mt 28,11-15) or an hypothesis of apparent death, according to which Jesus, who according to this hypothesis had not really died, awoke in the sepulchre, was cared for by the disciples and then left "another country" (imagination finds fertile ground here in numerous novels about Jesus, involving travels from India to Spain).

While the women’s journey to the sepulchre on Easter morning and the discovery that Jesus’ body was no longer there is a historic event in the manner in which it is told, it is a subject we can skip. This description might also reflect a veneration of the sepulchre by the community in Jerusalem.

In any event God’s powerful act regards to Jesus must also have concerned His dead body. The discovery of Jesus’ body still in the sepulchre would have terribly contradicted the Paschal sermon. In the Bible the "resurrection from the dead" has nothing to do with universal hope for the redemption of the just, of the prophets and the martyrs by God and for their preservation until the end of time. The "resurrection" enters the context of eschatological hope in the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God, which involves the redemption of all of man, and includes the fulfilment of his corporeity (see 2 Mac 7,9; Dn 12,2). Finding the body would have been, for Jesus’ enemies, the pressing proof of the non-identification of God with the eschatological mediator for redemption.