An argument about Old Testament theophanies, the Resurrection, and the order of time

The man who ate beneath Abraham’s tree was the man who broke bread at Emmaus. Jacob wrestled the body that would carry the wounds of Calvary. The commander before Jericho and the fourth figure in Babylon’s furnace were Jesus: not the eternal Son wearing a temporary human disguise, but the same human being born from Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised from the dead, and taken into glory.

That is the thesis of this essay.

Christian doctrine already gives us two related claims. The eternal Son existed before Bethlehem and acted throughout the history of Israel. Many early Christians identified the Angel of the Lord and other Old Testament theophanies with that Son. I am arguing something further: after receiving a human nature from Mary and rising bodily from death, the Son makes that glorified humanity present at earlier points in created history.

I will call this retro-presence.

The claim is not that Jesus had several incarnations or a human body before Mary conceived him. It is not that Israel, Melchizedek, or an angel gradually became Jesus. It is not that Christ’s humanity created the world or caused its own existence. There is one Incarnation, one human nature, and one body, all received from Mary. The proposal is that an event later in Christ’s own human history can appear at an earlier date in the world’s history.

The Church has never defined this view, and Scripture never states the numerical identity of an Old Testament body with the body born from Mary. This is a theological argument, not Church teaching. Even so, retro-presence has a substantial biblical and patristic foundation, a basis in Catholic teaching on the risen body, and a close precedent in modern systematic theology. The case is cumulative.

Jesus was already acting in Israel

The New Testament does more than say that Israel predicted Christ. It puts Christ personally inside Israel’s history.

Paul says that the Israelites drank from a spiritual rock and that the rock “was Christ.” A few verses later he warns the Corinthians not to put Christ to the test as some of the Israelites did. The reading “Christ” in that verse is ancient and well attested, although some manuscripts read “Lord” or “God” (1 Corinthians 10:1–10).

Jude gives us an even sharper example. The current critical Greek text says that “Jesus” saved a people from Egypt and afterward destroyed those who refused to believe. “Lord” appears in other manuscripts, but the more difficult reading has strong support. Ancient copyists had an obvious reason to replace “Jesus” with the less startling “Lord” (Jude 5; textual note).

John says that Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory when he saw the Lord enthroned in the temple. Jesus says that Abraham saw his day and rejoiced, then identifies himself with the divine “I AM” who precedes Abraham. Hebrews describes Moses as accepting abuse for the sake of Christ, while Peter says that the Spirit of Christ spoke through the prophets (John 12:37–43, John 8:48–59, Hebrews 11:24–27, 1 Peter 1:10–12).

These texts establish the personal identity on which the bodily argument depends. The one Christians know as Jesus is the divine Son who saved, judged, spoke, and revealed himself within Israel’s history. The question is no longer whether Jesus was there, but how he was there.

The Lord keeps appearing as a man

Several Old Testament encounters are difficult to reduce to prophecy or inward inspiration because the divine visitor acts through a human form.

At Mamre, Abraham sees three men. He runs to meet them, washes their feet, and serves them bread, curds, milk, and a calf. One visitor is repeatedly called the Lord. The other two go down to Sodom as angels while Abraham remains before the Lord, bargaining for the city. The divine visitor sits under a tree and eats Abraham’s food (Genesis 18).

At the Jabbok, Jacob wrestles until dawn with a man who touches his hip, blesses him, and gives him a new name. Jacob says that he has seen God face to face. Hosea retells the encounter by calling Jacob’s opponent both angel and the Lord God of hosts. The figure has a body that Jacob can seize and a hand that can wound him, yet he bears divine authority over Jacob’s identity (Genesis 32:23–33, Hosea 12:4–6).

Before Jericho, Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword who calls himself commander of the Lord’s army. Joshua falls before him and is told to remove his sandals because the ground is holy, repeating the sign of the burning bush (Joshua 5:13–15).

The Angel of the Lord presents the same mystery in another form. “Angel” means messenger; the title does not settle the messenger’s nature. At the bush, the Angel appears in the flame, but the text immediately says that the Lord sees Moses and that God speaks. The speaker names himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and gives the divine name: I AM (Exodus 3).

Hagar’s visitor promises descendants in his own voice, and she calls him the God who sees her. At Moriah, the Angel says that Abraham did not withhold Isaac “from me” and then swears by himself. Gideon speaks to the Angel while the narrator says that the Lord turns toward him. Manoah hears that the Angel’s name is beyond understanding, watches him rise in the sacrificial flame, and concludes that he has seen God (Genesis 16, Genesis 22, Judges 6, Judges 13).

In Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar sees a fourth figure walking unharmed in the furnace. He first calls the figure a divine being and then God’s angel. The pagan king’s words cannot settle the identity, but the scene belongs to the same pattern: God saves his people through a human figure who stands inside the fire (Daniel 3).

The individual cases differ in strength. Taken together, they present a sent figure who speaks as God, bears the divine name, receives prostration, commands armies, eats, touches, wounds, and walks in fire. The New Testament identifies the Lord of this history with Jesus.

The remaining question concerns the body that people saw.

The early Christians saw Christ in these encounters

Reading these passages as appearances of the Son is an ancient Christian practice.

Justin Martyr calls the visitor to Abraham and the speaker from the bush “Angel, and God, and Lord, and man.” He argues that this figure is the Son, distinct from the Father, who announces and carries out the Father’s will (Dialogue with Trypho 55–60).

Irenaeus says that the Son is “implanted everywhere” in the books of Moses: speaking with Abraham before eating with him, directing Noah, questioning Adam, judging Sodom, appearing to Jacob, and speaking from the bush. Elsewhere he says that it was the Word who spoke “in human shape” to Abraham (Against Heresies IV.10, IV.7).

Tertullian goes further. He says that Christ appeared to Abraham “in the flesh” before being born and was already rehearsing his dealings with humanity “in the habit of a flesh which as yet was not born” (On the Flesh of Christ 6). Novatian identifies the Angel who met Hagar and Jacob as Christ and describes Jacob as wrestling with one who was both God and man (On the Trinity 18–19).

This tradition gives the proposal real historical roots. Major early theologians believed that the Son appeared in Israel, and some described his manifestation as human and corporeal.

They did not, however, teach retro-presence. Tertullian distinguishes the flesh at Abraham’s tent from the flesh Christ later received by birth. Novatian treats Jacob’s wrestling as a figure fulfilled in the Gospel. Irenaeus says that the Son became visible and passible “in the last times” and that the prophets saw dispensations through which humanity would afterward see God (Against Heresies IV.20).

The Fathers bring us to the edge of the thesis. They identify the Person as Christ and take the bodily form seriously. They usually stop at temporary, anticipatory flesh.

Must the earlier bodies be temporary?

Augustine supplies the most influential alternative. God produced the Old Testament appearances through creatures and angelic ministry. A body could be formed for an encounter and cease when the sign was complete. At Mamre, Augustine sees three angels who may symbolize the Trinity rather than one bodily appearance of the Son (On the Trinity II–IV, III, City of God XVI.29).

There is no discarded “pre-Jesus” in this account. The temporary form has no human soul and is not personally united to the Word as Christ’s humanity is. It is a created sign. Its disappearance is no more the death of a person than the disappearance of the dove at Christ’s baptism.

This explanation is coherent and orthodox. It also divides the visible history of the Son into a series of temporary media. One body eats with Abraham, another wrestles Jacob, and another stands before Joshua. They resemble the humanity the Son will later receive forever, but none is his own.

Retro-presence offers a stronger continuity. The Son does not repeatedly approximate the Incarnation through disposable forms. Once risen, he stands within earlier history in the single humanity that is permanently his. Abraham’s guest is the fruit of Mary’s consent. Jacob holds the Lord who passed through death. The body in the furnace is the body over which death no longer has dominion.

Continuity alone does not make a theory true. The traditional account has the advantage of ordinary chronology. Retro-presence must explain how Mary’s body can act at a date before Mary gives it.

Mary remains the beginning of Jesus’ humanity

John writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Chalcedon confesses one and the same Son, eternally begotten from the Father according to divinity and born in the last days from Mary according to humanity. Any acceptable form of this thesis must keep that sequence and that dependence (John 1:1–18, Catechism 464–469).

Jesus’ human body and soul are not eternal. They do not wait in heaven for a suitable womb. Mary does not clothe a pre-existing human Jesus. The Holy Spirit causes the Son’s human conception from her substance, and that conception is the real beginning of his human life.

Retro-presence therefore cannot be a pre-incarnate body moving forward into Bethlehem. Its direction must be the reverse. The humanity begins in Mary, lives a mortal life, dies, rises, ascends, and then appears at an earlier date through divine power.

This preserves the uniqueness of the Incarnation. Mamre is not another Bethlehem. The Word does not assume a second humanity there. If the visitor is the risen Jesus, his presence at Mamre depends entirely on the Incarnation that occurs later on the calendar.

The risen body is not bound to ordinary presence

The Gospels are emphatic about bodily identity after Easter. The tomb is empty. Jesus shows the wounds, invites Thomas to touch him, and eats before the disciples. The one who died is alive in the body that died.

That body now appears with a freedom it did not ordinarily display before the Passion. Jesus enters a locked room, vanishes at Emmaus, and appears in forms his friends do not immediately recognize. Mary sees him and mistakes him for the gardener (Luke 24, John 20).

The Catechism states the point with unusual breadth. Christ’s risen body is the same authentic body that was crucified, but it is “not limited by space and time” and can be present “how and when he wills.” The risen Jesus has passed into a life “beyond time and space” (Catechism 645–646).

The Easter stories do not show Jesus visiting the past. Grief, divine concealment, and miraculous power can explain the delayed recognition and locked doors. Yet the Church’s conclusion is stronger than any one episode: the same body now possesses a mode of presence no longer confined by ordinary terrestrial space and time.

The Ascension completes the transition. The Catechism calls it the irreversible entrance of Christ’s humanity into divine glory. His body is glorified at the Resurrection; at the Ascension, that humanity is enthroned at the Father’s right hand (Catechism 659–660).

Mary Magdalene’s encounter marks one part of this transition. Jesus tells her not to hold him because he has not yet ascended. The verse does not mention the past and cannot bear the argument by itself. It does mark a change from the graspable presence of Easter morning to the ascended humanity’s new mode of manifestation. Mary’s son is not discarded; he carries the humanity she gave him into divine glory.

The ascended Christ is present at later altars and to the Church in every age. Retro-presence extends that Paschal freedom to the earlier history governed by the Son.

Two orders of time

Calling time a spiral hides the crucial distinction. The theory becomes clearer when two sequences are set beside each other.

World history runs in the familiar order:

Creation → Abraham → Moses → Mary → Birth → Passion → Resurrection → Ascension

Christ’s human life also has an irreversible order:

Conception from Mary → mortal life → Passion → Resurrection → Ascension → glorified appearance

Nothing in the second sequence is rearranged. Jesus does not have flesh before Mary gives it to him. He does not rise before he dies or ascend before he rises. The unusual claim is that the final event in his personal sequence can be placed at the date of Abraham in the first sequence.

Philosophers of time travel use a similar distinction between personal time and external time. A traveler’s arrival may be later in his own experienced sequence while occurring earlier on the world’s calendar. David Lewis used this distinction to show that backward time travel involves strange ordering without a formal contradiction (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Time Travel”; Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”).

This is a logical model, not scientific evidence. Relativity has overturned the idea of one universal measure of simultaneity, and some physical theories admit time-symmetric or retrocausal descriptions. None tells us that a risen body appeared to Abraham. Einstein’s importance here is modest: physical time is stranger than common sense once assumed, so common sense cannot settle a Christological question in advance.

The model also avoids a body that creates itself. Mary remains the source of Christ’s flesh. The Holy Spirit causes the conception, and God raises and glorifies the body. A retro-present appearance depends on all of those events. It does not supply their existence.

This creates a loop among secondary historical causes. The Lord who guides Abraham and Israel helps shape the history into which he will be born. The loop is not a bootstrap, because the eternal God supplies its cause and meaning. The theory changes the relation between causal dependence and calendar order; it does not make causation disappear.

Catholic theology already knows backward efficacy

Catholic doctrine gives no example of a body visiting an earlier century. It does teach that the saving power of Christ’s later act reaches earlier persons.

Mary was preserved from original sin at the first instant of her conception “in view of the merits of Jesus Christ.” The Compendium calls this an anticipation of Christ’s merits (Benedict XVI, Compendium 96). The redemption accomplished at Calvary is applied to Mary before Calvary.

Aquinas says that the Passion is a universal cause capable of forgiving sins past, present, and future. Baptism administered before the Passion derived its efficacy from the Passion still to come. The righteous before Christ were justified through faith in the future Christ (Summa Theologiae III, q. 49, a. 1, q. 66, a. 2, q. 61, a. 3).

The liturgy rests on a related truth. Christ died once, yet the one Paschal mystery is made present in every age because all that he did and suffered participates in divine eternity (Catechism 1085).

These teachings establish retroactive efficacy, not retroactive location. The distinction matters. Calvary can save Abraham without the body of Jesus standing beside Abraham. The Eucharist is a real presence, but Aquinas insists that Christ is not locally present on the altar as a body occupies a place (Summa Theologiae III, q. 76, a. 5).

The Catholic economy nevertheless refuses the simple rule that a historical effect must always occur after its cause on the calendar. The completed act of Christ reaches backward to Mary and the saints of Israel. Bodily retro-presence would be a further mode of that Paschal sovereignty, not an entirely foreign kind of claim.

The closest scholarly precedent

This proposal has a modern theological relative.

In 2018, Sang Hoon Lee published “Toward an understanding of the eschatological presence of the risen Jesus with Robert Jenson” in the Scottish Journal of Theology. Lee interprets Robert Jenson’s account of the Son before his earthly lifetime as “the retroactive presence of the risen Jesus.” He connects that presence with the way Christ’s grace and power reach Israel and with retrocausality in physics. He also separates the proposal from Jenson’s disputed account of divine eternity so that the economic claim can be considered on its own.

Lee’s published abstract does not identify Abraham’s guest or Jacob’s wrestler with the risen body. It does show that retroactive presence of the risen Jesus within Israel has already entered peer-reviewed theological argument. The present essay gives that framework a more specific application to embodied theophanies.

It also departs from Jenson at decisive points. Jenson sometimes treats Israel itself as a mode of Christ’s pre-existence and rejects the idea of an eternal unincarnate Word. Those moves conflict with classical Catholic theology and are unnecessary here. The eternal Word exists before Bethlehem without flesh. Mary remains the unique source of his humanity. Israel is neither a preliminary incarnation nor a physical part of Christ.

Emmitt Cornelius has argued that Jenson blurs the novelty of John 1:14 and weakens the Incarnation as the climax of revelation (“‘Being Going to Be Born to Mary’,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 58.2). Retro-presence can answer that objection. The Word becomes flesh once, from Mary. An appearance at Mamre would depend on that unique event rather than compete with it.

Adam was made after Christ

Genesis says that humanity was made in the image of God. The New Testament gives that Image a name: Christ is “the image of the invisible God.” Christians are predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son, and the resurrection will bring us from the image of the earthly man into the image of the heavenly man (Genesis 1:26–27, Colossians 1:15–20, Romans 8:29, 1 Corinthians 15:45–49).

The Catechism quotes an ancient Christian teaching: “the first Adam was made by the last Adam,” who stamped his image on the first. The last Adam comes later in history and remains the original pattern of the first (Catechism 359).

Tertullian draws out the bodily implication. When God formed Adam’s clay, “Christ was in His thoughts as one day to become man.” Adam’s body was already putting on the image of the Christ who would come in flesh (On the Resurrection of the Flesh 6).

This much is secure: the humanity of Christ is not an afterthought copied from Adam. Adam was formed in view of Christ. Jesus is historically Adam’s descendant and ontologically Adam’s archetype.

Retro-presence completes the pattern. The Image after whom Adam was formed is also the embodied Lord who forms and clothes him. The image texts establish Christ as Adam’s archetype; retro-presence identifies how that archetype stands within Adam’s history. Human form was designed for the Son.

Tabor and the future made visible

At the Transfiguration, the mortal body of Jesus shines with divine glory before the Passion. Moses and Elijah stand within that light and speak with him about the exodus he will accomplish at Jerusalem (Matthew 17:1–13, Luke 9:28–36).

The disciples do not literally see a post-resurrection body transported backward. Aquinas says that the light was truly the clarity of glory but present as a passing miracle, not yet as the permanent quality of a glorified body (Summa Theologiae III, q. 45).

Tabor supplies an important grammar. A future glory becomes truly visible before the historical event that permanently establishes it. The Law and the Prophets appear within the light of Christ’s coming death and Resurrection. Tabor does not identify an Old Testament body, but it makes proleptic manifestation part of the Gospel itself.

The principal objections

John says the Word became flesh

The objection is sound against any claim that Jesus possessed an eternal human nature or underwent several incarnations. It does not rule out a later state of that one humanity being made present at an earlier date. John 1:14 remains the unique origin of the humanity in either case.

A creature cannot act before it exists

In Christ’s personal sequence, the body does not act before it exists. It is conceived, glorified, and only then manifested at the earlier date. This reply requires the two orders of time described above. Anyone who holds that created time permits only one absolute ordering will reject it.

A glorified body remains a body

Aquinas says that glorification does not make a body naturally omnipresent. A glorified body remains local and moves through time; one body cannot be locally present in several places at once. Even the Eucharistic presence is non-local (Summa Theologiae III, q. 57, Supplement, q. 83–84).

This is the strongest metaphysical objection. The reply cannot be that glory turns humanity into divinity. It does not. The narrower claim is miraculous: the divine Person can locate his body at a point unavailable to it by natural bodily power. The Catechism’s language about presence “how and when he wills” leaves room for that claim, although it never applies the language to dates before the Incarnation.

Thomas would probably reject retro-presence. The proposal therefore departs from his account of bodily location, although not from a defined dogma.

Temporary signs already explain the texts

They do. Augustine’s account explains the visible forms without changing temporal order. Retro-presence is preferable only if the continuity it gains outweighs its metaphysical cost. The recurrence of one human divine visitor and the risen body’s unique freedom provide that motive; they do not compel assent.

Hebrews distinguishes Melchizedek from Jesus

Hebrews says that Melchizedek was made to resemble the Son of God and that another priest arose after his likeness. The natural reading makes Melchizedek a type rather than Jesus under an earlier name (Hebrews 7). I would not use Melchizedek as a primary case. Mamre, the Jabbok, the Angel of the Lord, Joshua’s commander, and the furnace offer stronger evidence because the text itself joins visible human action to divine identity.

The boundary at creation

The title “Christ” names one divine Person. Because actions belong to persons, Christian theology can say that the Lord of glory was crucified and that Jesus created the heavens. The Person born from Mary is the eternal Son through whom all things were made.

The human nature is not therefore a creator. Creation from nothing belongs to the divine power shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Aquinas denies that any creature can serve even as an instrument of creation ex nihilo, and the Catechism says that God creates without help (Summa Theologiae I, q. 45, a. 5, Catechism 290–292, 296–298).

The hands pierced on Calvary belong to the Person who made the stars. Those hands did not create the stars by a human operation. If they touched Adam or Jacob, they touched an already created world as part of that world.

This removes the self-creating circle from the thesis. Genesis does not happen because Christ’s body efficiently produces it. Creation happens through the eternal Son and for the Incarnation. The risen humanity enters that creation at an earlier date, but it never becomes the source of created being.

What can finally be claimed

The argument rests on conclusions with different levels of certainty.

The eternal Son is active throughout Israel’s history. The New Testament sometimes names that activity as the activity of Christ or Jesus. Several Old Testament encounters present the Lord through a tangible human form. Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Novatian identify many of these appearances with the Son. Christ’s risen body is the same body born from Mary and crucified, yet it is no longer limited by ordinary space and time. Catholic theology also recognizes that the saving efficacy of Christ’s historical act reaches backward to those who lived before it.

Taken together, those premises make retro-presence a serious theological conclusion rather than a poetic possibility. No biblical text explicitly says that the flesh at Mamre came from Mary. No Father located in this research says in so many words that Jacob touched Christ’s risen body, and the Church has not defined the identification. That limits the claim’s authority, not its explanatory force. Its closest modern scholarly precedent already argues for the retroactive presence of the risen Jesus in Israel; the embodied theophanies give that framework concrete form.

The conclusion can therefore be stated plainly:

The man at Mamre is the risen Jesus. The man at the Jabbok bears, whether visible or not, the wounds of the Passion. The commander before Jericho is the ascended king. The fourth man in the fire is the one over whom fire and death have no power. The gardener Mary met on Easter morning is the Lord who walked in the first garden.

On this account, the Old Testament does not contain a series of discarded approximations to Jesus. It contains appearances of Jesus himself, given from the far side of Easter. Mary is still the true beginning of his humanity, Bethlehem remains the one entrance of the Word into human life, and the Resurrection remains the turning point. Their fruit is present on both sides of the calendar.

History remains a line for us. For the risen Christ, the line is open at every point.