For a resurrection cult which came to believe in Jesus' resurrection, Jesus' closest followers seem like the biggest bunch of dimwits about it despite all of Jesus' "predictions" that he would rise on the third day.
One begins in Matthew 12:40 with the prediction that the Son of Man would be "three days and three nights in the heart of the earth".
Then follow all the rising-on-the-third-day predictions in Matthew 16:21, 17:23, 20:19 and 26:32.
Mark has these in 8:31, 9:31, 10:34 and 14:28.
Luke in 9:22, 44, 18:33, and ex post facto 24:6ff., 21, 26, 46.
Yet there is unaccountable bewilderment on the part of the disciples about Jesus' prediction: "what the rising from the dead should mean" (Mark 9:10).
There is even fear to inquire: "But they understood not that saying, and were afraid to ask him" (Mark 9:32).
You have to wonder about such dumbfoundedness given the ubiquity of the topic in the gospels otherwise.
In Matthew 10:8 Jesus sent out these same disciples to "raise the dead"! Well, did they?
Resurrections are proof of Jesus' ministry (Matthew 11:5, Luke 7:14, 22 and 8:54).
And speculation existed that Jesus himself was John the Baptist risen from the dead (Matthew 14:2), or one of the prophets (Luke 9:8, 19). Like they hadn't heard that.
You also have to wonder about other perplexing behavior.
Why would the women followers of Jesus bother to prepare spices for the burial of his body and bring them on the third day if he actually predicted that he would die and rise, and they believed this? (Mark 16:1, Luke 23: 56, Luke 24:1)
Even the authorities knew of this prediction, we are led to understand, and took measures to secure against it. (Matthew 27:63f. "that deceiver said 'After three days I will rise again'") The unbelievers knew, but Jesus' own followers did not? (John 20:9 "For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead")
None of this is satisfactory.
The predictions of Jesus' death and rising on the third day all look to be revisionist history, imported into the narrative from the future when reflection had settled on a narrative.
That narrative was largely Pauline. It made resurrection the centerpiece of the religion, replacing Jesus' original message of the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. As such the narrative was a Christian form of Pharisaism, in which Paul's genius as a theologian invented the new availability of individual holiness apart from the temple cult, secured through the once for all sacrifice of God's own son.
Jesus meanwhile had intended none of this, not to die for the sins of Israel let alone the whole world. If he intended the replacement of the temple cult, it was with individual repentance and mercy, prayer, and delight in the law of the Lord, bringing an end to the shedding of blood in preparation for the descent of the heavenly temple when God himself would establish justice and peace once and for all, and remove everything from Israel which offended. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .."
The historical kernel on which was built a religion wholly different from this was simply Jesus' own conviction that as a prophet he would likely be killed.
Out of the molehill of this sober expectation and its unfortunate realization was made the historical accident, the mountain we call Christianity.
