N. T. Wright's book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is an argument for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. Wright goes about his argument mainly through surveying ancient beliefs about resurrection in general and Judaism/Christianity in particular by looking at pagan writings (ch. 2), Jewish writings both from the Old Testament (ch. 3) and the intertestamental period (ch. 4; i.e. after Malachi but before Matthew; 450/400 BC to 4/6 BC), Christian writings from both the New Testament (chs. 5-10), the early church fathers (100-300 AD), and apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Thomas (ch. 11 for both the fathers and the apocrypha). Wright's conclusion for each group is as follows:
1. Paganism: "'Resurrection' was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could (as it were) work backwards. Not even in myth was it permitted." (pg. 33)
"The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believe that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection." (pg. 35)
Pagans didn't believe anyone could be resurrected in the sense of new bodily life. While opinions varied, generally, pagans thought the dead went to a disembodied existence in the underworld or, very rarely, divinization by "the gods", whichever gods that might be. For us, as Christian apologists, this has implications. A common objection to Jesus' resurrection is that he was just a copycat savior in the pattern of other ancient mythical dying and rising gods. In other words, his resurrection was not a unique event. What Wright demonstrates, in a lot more detail than this post I might add, is that even if there were myths of "corn kings" as Wright calls them, and there weren't, wherein the hero savior died and came back to life, it meant nothing anywhere close to what Christianity means when it says Christ was resurrected into new bodily life; i.e. something like the life we live now, but different as well.
2. Judaism: "It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert allusions which earlier readers had not seen - a skill shared, according to the gospels, by Jesus himself - there is general agreement that for much of the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later times and texts." (pg. 85)
One of the more interesting points Wright makes about the concept of resurrection in Judaism concerns the Sadducees. They do not believe in the resurrection as evidenced by Matthew 22:23 and Acts 23:6-8. But many Christians, myself included, assume this is because they are the "liberals" of ancient Judaism. In fact, it is just the opposite. They are the "literalists", the "fundamentatlists", the "conservatives". It was actually the Pharisees that held the "radical" position of an end of the age resurrection for all the faithful. When the Sadducees read Job 7:9, they took that literally and inferred there was no resurrection. Of course, they were wrong, but this was interesting to me. As Wright surveys the Biblical and post-Biblical literature of the Jews he establishes that when the Jews spoke of resurrection, it could only have meant a bodily resurrection. It was the reversal of death. Not simply "life after death" where we all float on clouds in heaven playing harps, but life after "life after death". From an apologetic standpoint, currently, the most common objection to Christs' resurrection is that it was not a newly embodied Jesus that the disciples saw, but a vision, hallucination, or spiritual experience. So when the early church talks about resurrection and the life that flows from it, they just mean that in some kind of nebulous, esoteric way; not in a concrete actual event way. Wright has demonstrated this to be demonstrably false: the Jews and subsequently, the early church could only have been speaking about a bodily resurrection. That is what resurrection meant and nothing else.
3. Christianity: "It is, then, remarkable that Christianity, apart from the texts studied in section 7, never seems to have developed even the beginnings of a spectrum of belief, either of the pagan variety or of the Jewish variety, but always stuck to one point on the Jewish scale." (pg. 552)
Here is where it gets interesting. Christianity, in terms of its' beliefs about resurrection, is a sect of Pharisaic Judaism that gained a fuller understanding of that resurrection because of Christ's example and the guidance of the Holy Spirit through the apostles and leaders of the early church. While the Jews always talked about a resurrection of the faithful at the end of the age and used texts like Ezekiel 37 which talked about a born again Israel from bones as analogical references to the literal bodily resurrection, the Christians reinterpreted this around Christ's resurrection. Jesus' resurrection was the inauguration of the new age, and the death knell for the old age, but, with the consummation and the full inculcation of that age yet to come when all the faithful, both Jew and Gentile, would be raised to new bodily life in a remade heaven and earth. Wright terms this new body "transphysical" for transformed physicality. Much like the life we have now, but different as distinguished by Christ walking through walls and disappearing. Christians also always spoke about the resurrection in terms of new creation. While we can't live in this transphysical body until Jesus' second coming, we can live the abundant, resurrection power life marked by holiness, discipline, love, and hope until our time is up or Jesus returns. Again, when considering objections to the faith, we see that there was not a wide array of beliefs about either Christ's resurrection being an actual event or about what that meant for the community of believers. It was not the case that orthodoxy "won" and was put into creeds. It was the case that orthodoxy was true and Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).
Overall, this book was fantastic. I am not doing Bishop Wright's argument any justice in this short blog post. Although the book was 738 pages, it did not read like a dry, academic book and was very easy to follow from one point to the next. If you are looking for a deeper look, both historically and theologically, at the resurrection of Jesus, I would encourage you to give this book a try.
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