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A Cross That Walks Out of the Tomb and Speaks

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A Cross That Walks Out of the Tomb and Speaks

The fragment begins in the middle of a sentence, with the observation that none of the Jews washed their hands, and that Herod and the judges refused to do so. Pilate has already withdrawn. The trial is not narrated; what survives opens after responsibility has been transferred. Herod Antipas, not Pilate, gives the order for execution, and the crucifixion is carried out by "the people" rather than by Roman soldiers.

Two details in the crucifixion account drew ancient suspicion. Jesus is said to have kept silent, as though feeling no pain, and at the moment of death the text says he was taken up rather than that he died. The cry from the cross is not the Psalm quotation of Mark and Matthew but an address to a departing power. Neither phrase requires a docetic reading, in which Christ only appeared to have a body and only appeared to suffer, but both are easily read that way.

The resurrection is the passage everyone remembers, because it is the only narrated resurrection in early Christian literature. Roman soldiers and Jewish elders keep watch at a tomb sealed with seven seals, with a crowd from Jerusalem come out to look at it. In the night the heavens open, two men descend in great light, the stone rolls aside of its own accord, and three figures come out: two supporting a third, with a cross following behind them. The heads of the two reach to heaven; the head of the one they lead passes beyond the heavens. A voice from the heavens asks whether he has preached to those who sleep, and the answer, given from the cross, is yes.

The remainder has Pilate informed and asked to keep the guards silent, Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb at dawn and finding a young man inside, and finally Peter, Andrew and Levi son of Alphaeus taking their nets down to the sea. There the text stops, mid-sentence, before whatever appearance it was about to relate.

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