Disbelieving Disciples: Doubt in the Post-Resurrection Scenes of the Four Gospels

This dissertation explores the doubts of the disciples in the post-resurrection scenes of the four canonical Gospels contained in the New Testament. It is striking that the Gospels all include this ostensibly negative moment in their texts but differ in the precise details of what happened. Previous scholarship has tended to gloss over these divergences and explain the presence of the disciples’ doubts as the result of either historical verisimilitude or traditional necessity. Both explanations, however, fail to account for the remarkable diversity of the four scenes, each of which has been crafted by its respective evangelist with his own considerations in mind. In order to understand why this doubt is present in each Gospel, it must be treated on its own terms. A narrative-critical methodology is utilized to analyze the canonical Gospels as literature, with one chapter devoted to each of the four texts. For each narrative, the characterization of the disciples (or in the case of the Gospel of John, one particular disciple) is reviewed and then taken into consideration during an interpretation of its post-resurrection events. By examining the rhetorical choices of the author, one can discern the response that he intended his implied readers to have to the disciples and their uncertainty. The Gospel of Mark uses the disciples as a negative foil and describes their doubt as completely unacceptable, whereas the Gospel of Matthew is less harsh and acknowledges the inevitably of doubt in the Christian life. The Gospel of Luke depicts doubts about the resurrection as a relic of the past, and the Gospel of John simultaneously mitigates any blameworthiness Thomas has for his skepticism and urges its readers to have none of their own. Lastly, a final chapter looks at the comments that early Christians made about these biblical passages, ultimately discovering that the thoughts of these later writers about the disciples are just as diverse as what was found in the Gospels.