This is the third work in N.T. Wright’s series on Christian Origins and the Question of God. It starts with investigations into the understanding of death and the afterlife in paganism and Judaism. It then examines belief in (the) resurrection in Paul and in the early church in the first and second centuries. Finally it looks at the Easter stories in the gospels. Because the book covers a lot of history-of-religions ground and has a lot more exegetical material than the previous two books, I have made greater use of Wright’s own conclusions in constructing this synopsis.
We gain an initial impression of the scope of this book from Wright’s sketch of the ‘paradigm for understanding Jesus’ resurrection’ that he believes has dominated scholarship in recent years:
In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘more spiritual’ view; (3) that the earliest Christians believed, not in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his ‘going to heaven’ in some kind of special capacity, and that they came to use ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty tomb or of ‘seeing’ the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such ‘seeings’ of Jesus as may have taken place are best understood in terms of Paul’s conversion experience, which itself is to be explained as a ‘religious’ experience, internal to the subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus’ body (opinions differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not ‘resuscitated’, and was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.” (7)
Wright intends to argue that there are sound historical grounds for rejecting this position and for replacing it with an alternative paradigm:
The positive thrust, naturally, is to establish (1) a different view of the Jewish context and materials, (2) a fresh understanding of Paul and (3) all the other early Christians, and (4) a new reading of the gospel stories; and to argue (5) that the only possible reason why early Christianity began and took the shape it did is that the tomb really was empty and thatbbbb people really did meet Jesus, alive again, and (6) that, though admitting it involves accepting a challenge at the level of worldview itself, the best historical explanation for all these phenomena is that Jesus was indeed bodily raised from the dead. (8)
The main part of this introductory chapter is an examination and rebuttal of six objections to a historical study of the resurrection: i) we have no access to the resurrection as an event in history (Marxsen); ii) historians cannot write about events for which there is no historical analogy (Troeltsch); iii) there is no real textual evidence for the resurrection (Lüdemann, Crossan); iv) the resurrection cannot be investigated historically but it is the fundamental ground or presupposition of Christian epistemology (Frei); v) the resurrection is a demonstration of Jesus’ divinity and therefore beyond historical investigation; and similarly vi) the resurrection is an eschatological event and therefore beyond historical investigation (15-28).
The necessary starting point for this study is the attempt to locate the claims about Jesus’ resurrection within the thought-worlds of paganism, second-temple Judaism, and early Christianity.
It will become clear – and this is among the first major conclusions of our historical study – that the early Christian worldview is, at this point at least, best understood as a startling, fresh mutation within second-Temple Judaism. This then raises the question: what caused this mutation? (28)
A general observation is also made at this point: resurrection was understood by both pagans and Jews not as ‘life after death’ but as ‘life after life after death’ – as a two-stage process involving death, a period of ‘death-as-a-state’, and a re-embodiment (31).
Chapters two and three provide extensive surveys of beliefs about life after death in paganism and post-biblical Judaism. Both chapters have good concluding sections which can be useful summarized here.
In paganism ‘the road to the underworld ran only one way’ (81). Attempts to return were invariably prohibited or punished. The dead were thought of as disembodied souls or shades who, for the most part, inhabited Hades, the Isles of the Blessed, or Tartarus. Death was all-powerful: ‘One could neither escape it in the first place nor break its power once it had come.’ Resurrection, as a re-embodiment, was regarded as both impossible and undesirable. It would have been seen not as a form of life after death but as a step beyond life after death.
This has three major implications for this book. i) The resurrection of Jesus would have been seen by the ancient pagan world as an unprecedented event, not merely as a variation on beliefs about the afterlife. ii) Belief in the resurrection of Jesus could not have been based on belief in his divinity: divinization did not require resurrection. iii) Some writers within second century Christianity reinterpreted the notion of resurrection as a ‘state of blissful disembodied immortality’ (83).
Wright repeats the point that resurrection was a ‘life after “life after death”’ (201).
‘Resurrection’, with the various words that were used for it and the various stories that were told about it, was never simply a way of speaking about ‘life after death’. It was one particular story that was told about the dead: a story in which the present state of those who had died would be replaced by a future state in which they would be alive once more.
‘Resurrection’ in the Old Testament has a primary metaphorical meaning, for which Ezekiel’s allegory of the dry bones is the supreme example: resurrection is a figure for the restoration of Israel. It was, therefore, a revolutionary doctrine because it ‘spoke of the concrete hope of national freedom’ (202). An earlier passage is worth quoting at length:
The real problem was that resurrection was from the beginning a revolutionary doctrine. For Daniel 12, resurrection belief went with dogged resistance and martyrdom. For Isaiah and Ezekiel, it was about YHWH restoring the fortunes of his people. It had to do with the coming new age, when the life-giving god would act once more to turn everything upside down – or perhaps, as they might have said, right way up. It was the sort of belief that encouraged young hotheads to attack Roman symbols placed on the Temple, and that, indeed, led the first-century Jews into the most disastrous war they had experienced. It was not simply, even, that they thought such beliefs might lead the nation into a clash with Rome, though that will certainly have been the case. It was that they realized that such beliefs threatened their own position. People who believe that their god is about to make a new world, and that those who die in loyalty to him in the meantime will rise again to share gloriously in it, are far more likely to lose respect for a wealthy aristocracy than people who think that this life, this world and this age are the only ones there ever will be. (138)
From the 3rd century BC the metaphor of resurrection took on a new meaning, largely through ‘reflection on the suffering of those who withstood the pagans in the hope of national redemption’. This develops as a reaffirmation of the Jewish belief in the ‘goodness and god-givenness of the created world and of bodily human life with it’ (202). By the time of 2 Maccabees the metaphor has become quite literal, expressing the hope of a return to physical wholeness, though still within the frame of the wider hope for national restoration.
Belief in a future resurrection led naturally to the development of beliefs about an intermediate state between death and resurrection, which could sometimes have a hellenistic or Platonic character. The dead ‘are, at present, souls, spirits or angel-like beings, held in that state of being not because they were naturally immortal but by the creative power of YHWH’. Where are they? ‘They are in the hand of the creator god; or in paradise; or in some kind of Sheol, understood now not as a final but as a temporary resting-place’ (203). In conclusion:
Resurrection… seems to possess two basic meanings in the second-Temple period, with considerable fluidity between them. In each case the referent is concrete: restoration of Israel (‘resurrection’ as metaphorical, denoting socio-political events and investing them with the significance that this will be an act of new creation, of covenant restoration); of human bodies (‘resurrection’ as literal, denoting actual re-embodiment)…. ‘Resurrection’ in its literal sense belongs at one point on the much larger spectrum of Jewish beliefs about life after death; in its political, metaphorical sense it belongs on a spectrum of views about the future which YHWH was promising to Israel. Both senses generated and sustained nationalist revolution. The hope that YHWH would restore Israel provided the goal; the hope that he would restore human bodies (especially of those who died in the cause) removed the fear that might have undermined zeal. No wonder the aristocratic Sadducees rejected resurrection. Anyone who used the normal words for ‘resurrection’ within second-Temple Judaism would have been heard to be speaking within this strictly limited range of meaning. (204)
Again the findings of this chapter are conveniently summarized at the end (271-276).
1. Paul’s ‘richly variegated, but fluently integrated’ understanding of resurrection comprised three basic moments: ‘the bodily resurrection of Jesus the Messiah; the future bodily resurrection of those who belong to the Messiah (along with the transformation of the living); and ‘the anticipation of the second, on the basis of the first, in terms of present Christian living, to which “resurrection” language applies as a powerful metaphor in line with the metaphorical usage available, alongside the literal use, in Judaism’ (271-272). He also adumbrates in different ways an intermediate state: those who die go to be ‘with the Messiah’ or they are ‘asleep in the Messiah’.
2. The main development in Paul’s writings is from an early conviction that he would be among those who are alive when the Messiah returned to the later view that he would probably die before the end.
3. Paul’s understanding of resurrection remained grounded in Judaism but is a development of Jewish belief in seven respects: i) he believed that the ‘age to come’ had already begun; ii) his understanding is much more sharply defined than anything in Judaism, particularly with regard to the emphasis on transformation; iii) there is a subtle rethinking of the tradition from within (eg. a reapplication of the language of Dan.12:1-3 to describe Christian witness); iv) Paul grounds his belief in the resurrection as the work of the creator God in the actual resurrection of Jesus; v) he developed a new terminology to articulate his distinctive beliefs, most notably the distinction between ‘flesh’ and ‘body’; vi) he developed a modified two-stage doctrine of final judgment, parallel to the two-stage doctrine of resurrection, according to which condemnation had already taken place on the cross; and vii) perhaps most striking the idea of resurrection pervades Paul’s writings in a way that is quite unprecedented in Jewish thought. ‘In all these ways, Paul kept both feet firmly on the soil of his own Jewish tradition, while making significant developments and modifications, not at all in the direction of a paganization of the concepts and beliefs, but by rethinking them in the light of the Messiah’ (274).
4. Likewise Paul’s entire worldview remained firmly grounded in Judaism but was rethought around Jesus and his resurrection. i) He used the foundation stories of creation and exodus to speak of the new creation and new exodus. ii) The various aspects of his apostolic praxis (Gentile mission, prayer, vocation to suffering, collection from the Gentile churches) arise out of a Jewish, Pharisaic worldview but have been reordered by the gospel and especially the resurrection. iii) The symbols of his work (proclamation of the gospel, baptism) are closely tied to the death and resurrection of Jesus. iv) Paul would answer the worldview questions as follows: we are ‘in the Messiah’; we are in the ‘good creation of the good God’, which is still subject to decay but is already under the lordship of the Messiah; what is wrong is that the world is still under the control of sinful and idolatrous forces; the solution is resurrection in the metaphorical sense in the short term and in the literal sense in the long term; the ‘age to come’ has been inaugurated but the ‘present age’ still continues.
5. Finally, there is an urgent historical question: ‘If Paul was indeed drawing so thoroughly upon the Jewish beliefs and hopes about resurrection, what could have caused him to speak of it in this way?’ Resurrection as envisaged in the prophets and later Jewish traditions had not happened: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, et al., had not been raised to bodily life; Israel had not been ‘resurrected’ metaphorically from oppression. So why did he make resurrection as a past event so central to his theology? The answer is simply that he believed that it had happened.
This chapter examines passages in 1 and 2 Corinthians that touch on the theme of resurrection apart from the two key passages in 1 Cor.15 and 2 Cor.4:7-5:10. Wright concludes:
These two letters, omitting for the moment their most important sections, have returned the same answer to our questions as the rest of the Pauline corpus:
(1) In terms of the ancient spectrums of belief about life after death, Paul is with the Jews against the pagans, and with the Pharisees (and the majority of other Jews) against the Sadducees and against any who looked for a disembodied immortality.
(1a) He saw the Spirit in the present as the guarantee of the resurrection to come, in which believers would have new bodies.
(1b) These letters say nothing much about an intermediate state, but offer nothing to contradict the view we gleaned from the others.
(1c) The continuity and discontinuity between the present Christian life and the future resurrection life is all-important, though in subtly different ways, in both the Corinthian letters. It is the point on which many of his arguments in the first letter rest, and the point which enables him, in the second letter, to interpret his apostolic ministry as one of paradoxical glory.
(1d) Several times he hints at the larger picture (new covenant, new creation) within which what he says about resurrection makes sense.
(2) He develops substantially the ‘present’ meaning of resurrection in both letters, making sustained and subtle metaphorical use of the concept, to denote aspects of present (concrete) Christian living and apostolic work while connoting their rootedness in the (concrete) resurrection of Jesus and their goal in the future (concrete) resurrection of believers, to the last of which the language continues to apply literally.
(3) Paul seldom addresses, in the passages we have studied here, the question of what precisely happened at Easter, of what Jesus’ own resurrection actually consisted in. However, since he uses Jesus’ resurrection again and again as the model both for the ultimate future, and for the present anticipation of that future, we can conclude that, as far as he was concerned, Jesus’ resurrection consisted in a new bodily life which was more than a mere resuscitation. It was a life in which the corruptibility of the flesh had been left behind; a life in which Jesus would now be equally at home in both dimensions of the good creation, in ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’. (310)
1 Corinthians 15 makes it clear that Paul’s understanding of resurrection is grounded in a creation-theology. What this text adds to the other statements is ‘a detailed account, unprecedented in the Judaism of the time, both of the two-stage rising of the dead (the Messiah first, then his people when he returns), and of the mode of discontinuity (focused on the corruption/incorruption distinction and on the two types of humanity with the Spirit as the agent of the new one)’ (360). Both innovations derive from what he believes about the resurrection of Jesus.
The main argument with regard to 2 Cor.4:7-5:10 is that the later passage constitutes a change of perspective rather than a change of mind: Paul simply now recognizes the possibility of his own death before the new age arrived in its complete form.
A number of general concluding remarks are made concerning Paul’s views on resurrection. i) His beliefs are fundamentally Jewish and Pharisaical rather than pagan:
He believed, that is, in the future bodily resurrection of all the true people of the true God, and he cautiously explored, here and there, ways of referring to the intermediate state which was the necessary corollary of such a belief. He believed that Israel’s God, being both the creator of the world and the God of justice, would accomplish this resurrection by his Spirit, who was already at work in the Messiah’s people. (372)
ii) His beliefs are a development of Jewish eschatology in two important respects. First, he believed that resurrection had become a two-stage affair with Jesus’ resurrection preceding that of the people of the Messiah. Secondly, he believed that the resurrection would not only be bodily but would also entail a transformation of the body, understood principally in terms of a new creation:
Though Paul does not refer to the tree of life in Genesis 3, his controlling narrative is constantly pointing to the way in which the creator finally brings his human, image-bearing creatures, and indeed the entire cosmos, through the impasse of the fall, of the thorns and thistles and the whirling, flashing sword, to taste at last the gift of life in all its fullness, a new bodily life in a new world where the rule of heaven is brought at last to earth. (373)
iii) Paul uses the language of resurrection in a metaphorical sense to denote ‘the concrete, bodily events of Christian living, especially baptism and holiness’. This was a development of the metaphorical use of resurrection language in Judaism to speak of the coming restoration of Israel and return from exile.
iv) ‘The question any historian must ask, discovering such a nest of intricate ideas, at once so Jewish and so unlike anything any Jew had said before, is obvious: what caused these developments-from-within, these newly articulated resurrection-beliefs?’ The only explanation for this mutation is Paul’s belief in Jesus’ own bodily resurrection.
Briefly, Wright argues in this section that for Paul the revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus was proof that YHWH had ‘vindicated Jesus against the charge of false messianism’ (394). From this certain things follow:
He is to be seen as Israel’s true representative; the great turn-around of the eras has already begun; ‘the resurrection’ has split into two, with Jesus the Messiah as the first-fruits and the Messiah’s people following later, when he returns. And if he is Messiah, then it must follow, from those biblical roots we set out earlier (Psalm 2, Daniel 7 and so on), which are reaffirmed in the New Testament as central to the church’s developing view of Jesus, that he is the world’s true lord. He is the kyrios at whose name every knee shall bow. He is the ‘son of man’ exalted over the beasts, Israel’s king rising to rule the nations. But every step down this road… takes us closer to saying that if Jesus is the kyrios now exalted over the world – a deduction, we repeat, from his Messiahship – then the biblical texts which speak in this way are harder and harder to separate from the texts which, when they say kyrios, refer to Israel’s god, YHWH himself. Jesus, the Messiah, is kyrios. (395)
Luke’s telling of the event is designed to evoke Old Testament theophany scenes: the vision of Daniel 10, the revelation on Mount Sinai, and the opening vision of Ezekiel. The primary meaning of the vision is that Jesus has been designated ‘son of God’ in the messianic sense. But the setting of the vision within a prophetic framework suggests that there is more to it than this:
Since prophetic calls were perceived as coming from Israel’s god, albeit sometimes through intermediaries as in Daniel 10, the revelation of Jesus as the messianic ‘son of god’ hovers precariously on the edge of the new, previously unthinkable belief: that this messianic title might contain much more than anyone had previously imagined from reading either Psalm 2 or 2 Samuel 7. Paul’s own use of Psalm 110 echoes its use in the synoptic tradition: he discovered that David’s son was also David’s lord.
Wright then tentatively sketches a process by which this discovery might have come about. Paul came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah as a result of an experience that seemed to him very much like the biblical theophanies: perhaps he discovered that the figure on Ezekiel’s ‘throne-chariot’ was Jesus. As he prayed to Israel’s God, he found that the phrase ‘son of God’ took on a new meaning. running parallel to ‘the other notions in which Jews had invoked the presence and activity of the transcendent, hidden God’ (397). As the memory of the Damascus Road vision and the practice of prayer interacted in Paul’s mind, he
had an increasingly clear sense that this God was to be known as the one who sent the son and the Spirit of the son (Galatians 4.4-6); the one who shared his unshareable glory with this new Lord of the world (Philippians 2.9-11); the one in whom the invisible God was reflected (Colossians 1.15); the one whose very Lordship provided, through the multiple possibilities of the word kyrios, a way of distinguishing between ‘one God, the father’ and ‘one lord, Jesus Christ’, while simultaneously, and with the same words, affirming Jewish monotheism over against pagan polytheism (1 Corinthians 8:6). (398)
On the basis of a survey of a number of more or less overt references to resurrection in the Gospels in advance of the Easter stories themselves Wright draws certain general conclusions. The tradition that emerges belongs with Pharisaic Judaism over against both other Jewish positions and paganism: passages that speak of the disciples losing their lives in order to gain them, for example, are very much like the exhortations of the Maccabean leaders: ‘The implication is that the kingdom of god, or of the son of man, will involve the same kind of world as at present, but with god’s true people vindicated’ (407). But there are also differences. The theme is more pervasive than in second-temple writings and, as in Paul, it has undergone some redefinition.
i) ‘Resurrection’ is still ‘god’s gift of new bodily life to all his people at the end’. But ‘it can also be used, in a manner cognate with the development of metaphorical uses in Judaism, to denote the restoration of god’s people in the present time, as for instance in the dramatic double summary of the prodigal son’s being “dead and alive again” in Luke 15’ (448).
The examination of Jesus’ dispute with the Sadducees about marriage and the resurrection is of particular importance here, not least because Wright uses it to oppose the traditional view that ‘resurrection’ is equivalent to, and indeed means, ‘life after death’ or ‘going to heaven’, where the dead will have an angelic form of existence (415-429). He stresses that resurrection is a political theme in the context of the gospels and that Jesus’ response to the Sadducees had profound political implications – that ‘Israel’s god was at work in a new way, turning the world upside down, going (perhaps) to the present Jewish rulers what Jesus had done in the Temple’ (427).
In Luke’s gospel the metaphorical use of ‘resurrection’ has a clear concrete referent: ‘Jesus is receiving sinners and eating with them, and, as far as these sinners go, this is a dramatic and vivid form of “life from the dead”, a real return from exile, in the here and now’ (437).
ii) There is the idea that the singular event of Jewish expectation has been split into two resurrections: first Jesus, then those who follow him. It is this development that the disciples found so hard to grasp at the time.
iii) The notion of resurrection is stretched beyond the conventional thought of a ‘return to the same kind of bodily life that people have had up to now’. It was not a ‘resuscitation into the same kind of life but rather a going through death and out into a new sort of life beyond, into a body that was no longer susceptible to decay and death’ (450).
This chapter covers Acts, Hebrews, the general letters, and Revelation. For the most part the analysis emphasizes the continuity between these texts and the rest of the New Testament. Two particular areas stand out, however. i) There is an extended examination of certain difficult texts in the letters of Peter: the description of the ‘day of the Lord’ as an event of apparent cosmic destruction in 2 Peter 3:5-13 (462-463); the common misreading of ‘salvation’ in 1 Peter 1:3-9 as the departure of the soul to heaven (464-467); and the puzzling statement about the ‘spirits in prison’ in 1 Peter 3:18-22 (467-469). ii) The view of resurrection in Revelation presupposes the ‘worldview of second-Temple Judaism, and in particular of that end of the spectrum which, longing for the coming kingdom, saw judgment on the wicked nations and the vindication of God’s suffering people as the moment to be longed, prayed and worked for’. But we also find a Christian innovation in the distinction between a first and second death and between a first and second resurrection. For the beheaded martyrs the post-mortem experience has three stages (20:4-6): ‘first, a state of being “dead souls”; second, whatever is meant by the “first resurrection”; third, the implied “second” or “final” resurrection described… in chapters 21 and 22’ (475).
The chapter closes with a set of general conclusions about resurrection (476-479):
All the major books and strands, with the single exception of Hebrews, make resurrection a central and important topic, and set it within a framework of Jewish thought about the one god as creator and judge. This resurrection belief stands firmly over against the entire world of paganism on the one hand. Its reshaping, around the resurrection of Jesus himself, locates it as a dramatic modification within Judaism on the other.
There are five remarkable aspects to this statement which require historical explanation. i) In Judaism resurrection remained on the periphery of thought; in early Christianity it has moved to the centre. ii) There is not the diversity of beliefs about life after death in early Christianity that we find in Judaism and paganism: ‘from this point of view, Christianity appears as a united sub-branch of Pharisaic Judaism’. iii) The Pharisaic view, however, has been modified in two important respects: a split between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all his people; and the resurrection body is defined specifically as transformed, for which Wright coins the term ‘transphysical’. iv) Early Christianity was selective in its use of Old Testament texts to explain resurrection: surprisingly, for example, very little use is made of Daniel 12:1-3. v) The use of resurrection as a metaphor for ‘the concrete events of the expected return from exile’ (as in Ezekiel 37) is ‘totally absent in early Christianity’. Instead resurrection is used metaphorically to describe certain aspects of the Christian life: ‘baptism, holiness of bodily life, and Christian witness’.
This chapter surveys early Christian thinking about resurrection from the apostolic fathers through to Origen, with a look also at the writings of early Syriac Christianity and the Nag Hammadi texts. The conclusions are straightforward. As distinct from paganism early Christianity affirmed the ‘future bodily resurrection of all god’s people’ and differed from developed Jewish views in that the raised body would be incorruptible, the messiah had been raised in advance of the whole people, an intermediate had been introduced conceived ‘in terms of the departed person being with the Lord until the resurrection’ (551).
Like the Jews, the Christians based themselves on the doctrines of creation and judgment, and they rooted themselves in a rereading of Jewish scriptures, not simply as prophecies of one-off events but as providing a foundation narrative which they believed had reached its climax in Jesus. They nevertheless developed the notion of resurrection in such a way that, without leaving its literal use and concrete referent, it abandoned the regular Jewish metaphorical use (referring to the concrete events of Israel’s national redemption), and they developed instead a different metaphorical use, referring to the concrete events of baptism and holiness of body and behaviour. (552)
It is remarkable that Christianity did not develop a spectrum of beliefs about resurrection but more so that within this quite narrow framework it developed ‘new ways of speaking about what resurrection involved and how it would come about which could not have been predicted from the Jewish sources’. These two observations raise the important historical question: ‘what caused this remarkable development, which brought resurrection not only from the circumference of belief to the very centre, but also from a semi-formed belief into a very sharply focused one?’
This chapter examines two beliefs of early Christianity, both of which are surprising in view of Jesus’ recent execution by the Romans: that Jesus was the messiah and that he was the true ‘lord’ of the world.
i) Jesus as messiah
The argument that early Christianity was thoroughly messianic is directed principally against those scholars who argue that Q and the Gospel of Thomas are evidence for an very early strata of Christian belief that was not interested in Jesus’ messiahship (554-557).
Judaism did not envisage a messiah who would suffer a shameful death at the hands of Israel’s enemies.
…the Messiah was supposed to win the decisive victory over the pagans, to rebuild or cleanse the Temple, and in some way or other to bring true, god-given justice and peace to the whole world. What nobody expected the Messiah to do was to die at the hands of the pagans instead of defeating them; to mount a symbolic attack on the Temple, warning it of imminent judgment, instead of rebuilding or cleansing it; and to suffer unjust violence at the hands of the pagans instead of bringing them justice and peace. The crucifixion of Jesus, understood from the point of view of any onlooker, whether sympathetic or not, was bound to have appeared as the complete destruction of any messianic pretensions or possibilities he or his followers might have hinted at. The violent execution of a prophet (which, uncontroversially, was how Jesus was regarded by many), still more of a would-be Messiah, did not say to any Jewish onlooker that he really was the Messiah after all, or that YHWH’s kingdom had come through his work. It said, powerfully and irresistibly, that he wasn’t and that it hadn’t. (557-558)
‘Why then did the early Christians acclaim Jesus as Messiah, when he obviously wasn’t?’ Why did his followers not give up their ‘dreams of revolution’? Or why didn’t they look for another messiah – James, the brother of Jesus, for example? They preserved the basic shape of Jewish messianic belief but also transformed it: the messiah did not belong only to the Jews; the ‘messianic battle’ was not a military campaign but a fight against evil itself; the temple would be rebuilt in the community of believers; and the ‘justice, peace and salvation which the Messiah would bring to the world would not be a Jewish version of the imperial dream of Rome, but would be God’s dikaiosune, God’s eirene, God’s soteria, poured out upon the world through the renewal of the whole creation’ (563). Why was the messianic hope redefined around Jesus in this way?
ii) Jesus, the messiah, is Lord
The belief in Jesus as lord was ‘a function of belief in him as Messiah, not a move away from that belief’ (564). It is grounded in classic biblical portraits of the Messiah found especially in the Psalms, Isaiah and Daniel. On the basis of these texts Wright sets out three propositions:
(1) these texts all bear witness to a biblically rooted belief in a coming king who would be master not only of Israel but also of the whole world; (2) these are the passages drawn on by the early Christians to speak about Jesus not only as Israel’s Messiah (albeit in a redefined sense) but also as the world’s true lord, again in a sense which was redefined but never abandoned; (3) we must therefore understand the early Christian belief in Jesus as lord, not as part of an abandonment of Jewish categories and an embracing of Greek ones, nor as part of an abandonment of the hope for god’s kingdom and a turning instead to ‘religious experience’, nor yet as an abandonment of the political meaning of this universal sovereignty and a re-expression of it in terms of ‘religious’ loyalty, but as a fresh statement of the Jewish hope that the one true god, the creator, would become lord of the whole world. (565-566)
1. Jesus and the kingdom: just as Jesus was raised in advance of the resurrection of the people of God, so the kingdom of God has also been anticipated in the ‘reign of Christ’. The early Christians reused Jewish kingdom motifs in a transferred sense but not in such a way as to reduce to a private religious experience. ‘The transferred sense remained a public, this-worldly sense, a sense of the creator god doing something new within creation, not of a god acting to rescue people from creation’ (567).
2. Jesus and Caesar: if Jesus was lord, then Caesar was not. This does not mean that the early Christians were not prepared to ‘respect legal authorities as constituted by the one true god’. The remarkable thing is that the early Christians persisted in this belief for two or three generations at least despite the overwhelming superiority of Rome. The only explanation is that they believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead.
3. Jesus and YHWH: ‘when the early Christians called Jesus kyrios, one of the overtones that word quickly acquired, astonishing and even shocking though this must have been, was that texts in the Greek Bible which used kyrios to translate the divine name YHWH were now used to denote Jesus himself, with a subtlety and sophistication that seems to go back to the earliest days of the Christian movement’ (571).
Wright cites the quotation of the ‘fiercely monotheistic’ Isaiah 45:23 in Philippians 2:10, the inclusion of Jesus in the frame of the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6, the description of Jesus as the one through whom all things were created in Colossians 1:15-20, the quotation of Joel 2:32 in Romans 10:13, of Psalm 34:8 in 1 Peter 2:3 and Isaiah 8:13 in 1 Peter 3:15, and Thomas’ confession in John 20:28. He asks whether this identification has anything to do with the resurrection and concludes that with the exception of Thomas’ confession the resurrection was not interpreted as a straightforward argument for Jesus’ divinity.
Wright puts forward, however, a more complex ‘sequence of moves, each step of which is comprehensible within second-Temple Judaism’ (575). The first conclusion that the disciples would have drawn from the resurrection ‘was that he was indeed the prophet mighty in word and deed, and that he was, more particularly, Israel’s Messiah’. Paul came to understand that through Jesus ‘Israel’s one true god had been not merely speaking, as though through an intermediary, but personally present’. Wright stresses that the early Christians ‘determinedly spoke of Jesus, alongside the creator god and as his personal self-expression, within categories familiar from the dynamic monotheism of second-Temple Judaism’.
…within second-Temple Judaism there were various strategies for speaking of how Israel’s god was God, the one, true and only divine being, who remained the creator, distinct from the world and responsible for it, could nevertheless be present and active within the world. Various writers spoke of God’s word, God’s wisdom, God’s law, God’s tabernacling presence (shekinah), and God’s Spirit, as though these were at one and the same time independent beings and yet were ways in which the one true God could be with his people, with the world, healing, guiding, judging and saving. At a different linguistic level, they spoke of God’s glory and God’s love, God’s wrath and God’s power, not least in the eschatological sense that all these would be revealed in the great coming day. The New Testament writers draw on all these to express the point that, I suggest, they had reached by other means: that Jesus was the Messiah; that he was therefore the world’s true lord; that the creator God had exalted him as such, sharing with him his own throne and unique sovereignty; and that he was therefore to be seen as kyrios. And kyrios meant not only ‘lord of the world’, in the sense that he was the human being now at the helm of the universe, the one to whom every knee, including that of Caesar, must bow, but also ‘the one who makes present and visible what the Old Testament said about YHWH himself. That was why the early Christians ransacked texts about God’s presence and activity in the world in order to find appropriate categories to speak of Jesus (and of the Spirit, though that is of course another topic). The high Christology to which they were committed from extremely early on - a belief in Jesus as somehow divine, but firmly within the framework of Jewish monotheism - was not a paganization of Jewish life and thought, but, at least in intention, an exploration of its inner heart. (577)
The starting-point for all this is the belief that Jesus was the messiah, ‘son of god’ in the sense of Psalm 2; 89; 2 Samuel 7:14, because God had raised him bodily from the dead.
The chapter concludes with a summary of resurrection belief within the early Christian worldview. i) Praxis: the early Christians behaved as though in some sense they were already living in the new creation, the belief may have been reflected in burial practice, and the first day of the week replaced the sabbath. ii) The symbolic world of early Christianity focused on Jesus himself: baptism, eucharist, the cross, the fish. iii) Stories about the resurrection ‘can be plotted on a grid of Jewish-style stories of the vindication of the covenant people after suffering’. iv) The worldview questions also ‘elicit a set of resurrection-shaped answers’.
This worldview finds expression in early Christian beliefs, hopes and aims. The early Christian view of god and the world is, at one level, substantially the same as the second-Temple Jewish view: there is one god, who has made the world, and who remains in an active and powerful relationship with the world, and whose primary response to the problem of evil in the world is the call of Israel, which itself generates a second-order set of problems and questions (why has Israel herself apparently failed? what is the solution to Israel’s own problems, and hence to the world’s problems?). But the resurrection of Jesus, and the powerful work of the Spirit which the early Christians saw in that event and in their own lives, has reshaped this view of the one god and the world, by providing the answer, simultaneously, to the problems of Israel and the world: Jesus is shown to be Israel’s representative Messiah, and his death and resurrection is the proleptic achievement of Israel’s restoration and hence of the world’s restoration. The first Christians, despite what used to be said in the heyday of existentialist theology, were thereby committed to living and working within history, not to living in a fantasy-world where history had in principle already come to a stop and all that remained was for this to be worked out through the imminent end of the space-time universe. The promised future, both for themselves and for the whole cosmos, gave meaning and validity to the present embodied life. (581-582)
Chapter 13 addresses a number of general issues relating to the resurrection narratives in the Gospels. Wright dismisses Crossan’s argument that the resurrection story in the Gospel of Peter constitutes a source for the canonical accounts and is generally sceptical of form-critical and redaction-critical attempts to explain their literary history.
He then lists a number of surprise elements in the Gospel stories: i) the lack of embellishment from the biblical tradition; ii) the absence of personal hope regarding life after death; iii) the strange mix of mundaneity and mystery in the descriptions of the risen Jesus; and iv) the emphasis on the presence of women at the tomb (599-608).
There are two options for explaining these oddities. Either the evangelists took a theology of resurrection such as Paul’s which described the peculiar ‘transphysicality’ of the resurrection body and from it developed ‘significantly different narratives about Jesus’. Or we must suppose that Paul provided ‘a theoretical, theological and biblical framework for stories which were already well known’. Then, to pick up on an earlier point, the reason that there is no evocation of Daniel 12:1-3 in the resurrection stories is that the risen body of Jesus had not shone like a star.
I find this second option enormously more probable at the level of sheer history. I can understand, as a historian, how stories like this (and perhaps other similar ones which we do not have) would create a puzzle which the best brains of the next generations would wrestle with, using all their biblical and theological resources. I cannot understand, however, either why any one would develop that theology and exegesis unless there were stories like this to generate the puzzle, or how that theology and exegesis, formed thus (one would have to suppose) by a kind of intellectual parthenogenesis, would then generate three independent stories from which, in each case, all those developed elements had been carefully removed. The very strong historical probability is that, when Matthew, Luke and John describe the risen Jesus, they are writing down very early oral tradition, representing three different ways in which the original astonished participants told the stories. These traditions have received only minimal development, and most of that probably at the final editorial stage, for the very good reason that stories as earth-shattering as this, stories as community-forming as this, once told, are not easily modified. Too much depends on them. (611)
Wright argues, first, largely on internal literary grounds, that Mark originally had a fuller ending that has been lost (he discounts verses 9-20 as a later addition). Secondly, he counters the view of Bultmann and others that the story of the empty tomb is an ‘apologetic legend’. He then highlights a number of features which ‘indicate what sort of a story Mark thinks it is’. i) The story is told from the perspective of the women. ii) There is a repeated emphasis on the unexpectedness of the events. iii) The ‘discovery of the empty tomb is not presented as the historicizing “explanation” of a belief in Jesus’ resurrection, but as itself a puzzle in search of a solution’. iv) Mark casts the angelic interpreter of apocalyptic visions as a real figure – the young man sitting beside the tomb. v) Although the story is truncated, it is implied in the promise of 16:7 that the disciples will see Jesus, thus providing part of the ‘non-negotiable bedrock’ of Christian belief about the resurrection. vi) The narrative grammar of 16:1-8 suggests an alternative explanation of the abrupt ending. If, as Luke suggests, the disciples did not begin to proclaim the resurrection until a month or two later, it may be that Mark’s emphasis on the women’s fear functioned as an apologetic: if the women really had seen the empty tomb, why did they not immediately tell the whole city? Mark’s answer is that they were afraid (630).
Matthew’s extraordinary account of the earthquake and the raising of the dead (27:51-54) has a number of biblical echoes: Ezekiel 37:12-13; Isaiah 26:19; and Daniel 12:2. Wright considers a number of ways of accounting for the story and the allusions; he is reluctant to pass judgment on the question of the historicity of the event but inclines towards the view that
Matthew knows a story of strange goings-on around the time of the crucifixion, and is struggling to tell it so that (1) it includes the desired biblical allusions, (2) it makes at least some minimal historical sense (the earthquake explains the tearing of the Temple veil, the opening of tombs, and particularly the centurion’s comment), and (3) it at least points towards, even if it does not exactly express, the theological meaning Matthew is working towards: that with the combined events of Jesus’ death and resurrection the new age, for which Israel had been longing, has begun. (635)
Apart from this, Wright’s broad conclusion is that Matthew’s exposition has many points of contact with early Christian traditions while retaining a distinctive literary character.
There are some interesting thoughts here regarding the place of the resurrection narratives within Luke’s work as a whole. In particular, Wright points to a number of parallels between Luke 24 and Luke 1-2. He also suggests that the opening of the eyes of Cleopas and his wife (?) on the road to Emmaus echoes the opening of the eyes of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:7. The correspondence with Luke 1-2 also brings into view the political implications of the resurrection:
When the message goes out to ‘all nations’, it offers more than just a new way of being religious. As Acts makes clear, the message is that Jesus is the world’s true lord. The creator god is bypassing the networks of imperial power and communication. One central meaning of Easter, as far as Luke is concerned, is that Jesus and his followers are now to confront the kingdoms of the world. (653)
The proper biblical background to Luke’s account of the ascension in Acts is Daniel 7. The ascension is:
the vindication of Jesus as Israel’s representative, and the divine giving of judgment, at least implicitly, in his favour and against the pagan nations who have oppressed Israel and the current rulers who have corrupted her. It is, in other words, the direct answer to the disciples’ question of 1.6. This is how the kingdom is being restored to Israel: by its representative Messiah being enthroned as the world’s true lord. (655)
Two important conclusions are drawn here (674-675). First, the resurrection narrative in chapter 20 is closely integrated with the rest of the book, ‘several of whose main themes can only be understood when they are seen to lead the eye not just towards Jesus’ crucifixion but also towards his resurrection’. Attention is drawn in particular to the structural parallels between chapter 20 and the prologue to the Gospel. Secondly, the ‘new creation’ theology that underlies the whole book indicates that John intended the resurrection story to be interpreted literally and realistically. ‘Precisely because he is an incarnational theologian, committed to recognizing, and helping others to recognize, the living god in the human flesh of Jesus, it is vital and non-negotiable for him that when Thomas makes his confession he should be looking at the living god in human form, not simply with the eye of faith…, but with ordinary humansight, which could be backed up by ordinfary human touch…’ (668).
A final section summarizes the analysis of the Gospel resurrection narratives.
We are left with the conclusion that both the evangelists themselves, and the sources to which they had access, whether oral or written, which they have shaped to their own purposes but without destroying the underlying subject-matter, really did intend to refer to actual events which took place on the third day after Jesus’ execution. The main conclusion that emerges from these four studies of the canonical evangelists is that each of them, in their very different ways, believed that they were writing about events that actually took place. Their stories can be used to refer metaphorically or allegorically to all sorts of other things, and they probably (certainly in the case of Luke and John) intended it to be so. But the stories they told, and the way they crafted them (each so differently, yet in this respect the same) as the deliberate and climactic rounding-off of their whole accounts, indicates that for reasons of narrative grammar as well as theology they must have intended to convey to their readers the sense that the Easter events were real, not fantasy; historical as well as historic. They believed, of course, that these events were foundational for the very existence of the church, and they naturally told the stories in such a way as to bring this out. But in the worldview to which they all subscribed, the fresh modification-from-within of the Jewish worldview which we can trace throughout earliest Christianity, the whole point was that the renewed people of Israel’s god, the creator, had been called into being precisely by events that happened in the world of creation, of space, time and matter. (680-681)
The historical datum now before us is a widely held, consistently shaped and highly influential belief: that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead. This belief was held by virtually all the early Christians for whom we have evidence. It was at the centre of their characteristic praxis, narrative, symbol and belief; it was the basis of their recognition of Jesus as Messiah and lord, their insistence that the creator god had inaugurated the long-awaited new age, and above all their hope for their own future bodily resurrection. The question we now face is obvious: what caused this belief in the resurrection of Jesus? (685)
Wright’s aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances constitute together, with qualifications, both sufficient and necessary conditions for the emergence of the early Christian belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. He proceeds by way of a seven step argument.
1. The first step draws together the context of belief about resurrection in second-temple Judaism and the claims of the early Christians that the tomb had been found empty and that Jesus had appeared to his followers after his death.
2. Neither the empty tomb nor the appearances alone is sufficient condition for the rise of the resurrection belief.
3. These two conditions together, however, are sufficient to account for the emergence of the belief within the community of Jesus’ followers.
4. The empty tomb and the appearances also constitute necessary conditions for the rise of early Christian belief. ‘Without these phenomena, we cannot explain why this belief came into existence, and took the shape it did. With them, we can explain it exactly and precisely’ (676).
5. At this point two rival theories of the origins of the resurrection belief are considered: i) a ‘cognitive dissonance’ theory, according to which ‘individuals or groups fail to come to terms with reality, but live instead in a fantasy which corresponds to their own deep longings’ (697-701); and ii) the argument (associated here with Schillebeeckx) that the resurrection stories were a later objectification of an original experience of grace (701-06).
6. ‘It is therefore historically highly probable that Jesus’ tomb was indeed empty on the third day after his execution, and that the disciples did indeed encounter him giving every appearance of being well and truly alive’ (687).
7. Lastly, it is necessary to ask what sort of explanation can be given for these two phenomena. At this point Wright takes on Enlightenment rationalism head on. If the ‘larger dreams’ of the Enlightenment (colonialism, western capitalism, etc.) have been shown to be ‘politically, economically and culturally self-serving on a massive scale’, perhaps the rationalist refusal to take the resurrection seriously may also prove to be ‘part of that intellectual and cultural hegemony against which much of the world is now doing its best to react’.
What if the resurrection, instead of (as is often imagined) legitimating a cosy, comfortable, socially and culturally conservative form of Christianity, should turn out to be, in the twenty-first century as in the first, the most socially, culturally and politically explosive force imaginable, blasting its way through the sealed tombs and locked doors of modernist epistemology and the (now) deeply conservative social and political culture which it sustains? (713)
The last chapter addresses the question of the meaning of the resurrection within the larger Christian narrative and worldview. The starting point is the early Christian belief that the resurrection demonstrated that Jesus was the ‘Son of God’. Wright separates out three layers of meaning.
1. Within the Jewish world the phrase ‘son of God’ referred either to Israel as a whole or to a representative figure such a the king or a messiah. The first level of meaning, therefore, was that in Jesus, as Israel’s messiah, ‘the creator’s covenant plan, to deal with the sin and death that has so radically infected his world, has reached its long-awaited and decisive fulfilment’ (728).
2. In the pagan world the phrase would most naturally have referred to the Roman emperor. The coin that the Pharisees offered to Jesus in Mark 12:13-17 would have borne the inscription AUGUST. TI. CAESAR DIVI AUG. F.: ‘Augustus Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus’. Therefore: ‘The resurrection constitutes Jesus as the world’s true sovereign, the “son of god” who claims absolute allegiance from everyone and everything within creation. He is the start of the creator’s new world: its pilot project, indeed its pilot’ (731).
3. The early Christians took a further step, on the basis of their reflection on Israel’s scriptures and with some tentative precedent in Judaism, and came to see Jesus as ‘the unique “Son” of this God as opposed to any other’. ‘They meant by this not simply that he was Israel’s Messiah, though that remained foundational; nor simply that he was the reality of which Caesar and all other such tyrants were the parodies, though that remained a vital implication. They meant it in the sense that he was the personal embodiment and revelation of the one true god’ (731).
No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including intellectual and cultural tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent. But it is the real world, in Jewish thinking, that the real God made, and still grieves over. It is the real world that, in the earliest stories of Jesus’ resurrection, was decisively and for ever reclaimed by that event, an event which demanded to be understood, not as a bizarre miracle, but as the beginning of the new creation. It is the real world that, however complex this may become, historians are committed to studying. And, however dangerous this may turn out to be, it is the real world in and for which Christians are committed to living and, where necessary, dying. Nothing less is demanded by the God of creation, the God of justice, the God revealed in and as the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. (737)