RESURRECTION: WHAT HAPPENED TO JESUS?

EASTER 2007

As you know, I’ll be starting a sermon series called “Conversation with an Atheist” next week.  In light of that, I want to do something I’ve never done on Easter.  I want to talk about the resurrection as a historian.  I’m drawing on NT Wright here in what he lays out in his book “The Resurrection of the Son of God.” 

What did Early Christians believe about what happened after death?  Where does resurrection fit in and how does this work?  People often think believing in heaven and hell as a key shibboleth to being a Christian.  Heaven and hell is just a way of saying something more complex and interesting.  Early Christians don’t talk about what will happen after they die.  They talk about a new world that God will recreate at the end of time.  When Jesus says, “Today you will be with me in paradise” – Jesus is raised from the dead in three days and doesn’t stay in that holding place.  That holding place, paradise, is only temporary.  Christians believed in a life after death and then a renewed bodily life recreated by God.  Pagans had no belief like this.

There as several key modifications to early Jewish beliefs about life-after-death made by early Christians.  In these ways, Christian belief in the resurrection is quite new.

CHRISTIAN MODIFICATIONS TO JEWISH EXPECTATIONS

1. Within Judaism of Jesus’ day, there were differences of opinion on resurrection.  Sadducees didn’t believe in it, Pharisees did.  Christianity looks like Pharisaic Judaism.  Lots of Christian debates on all sorts of topics, but unanimity on resurrection.  Jesus was resurrected indeed.
2. In Second Temple Judaism, resurrection is important but not all that important.  Lots of lengthy works hardly mention it – DSS for instance has little mention of resurrection.  But in early Christianity, resurrection has moved to the very center of their thought.  Galen (2^nd Century Roman doctor) knew two things about Christians – they believed in resurrection and their remarkable sexual restraint.
3. Third mutation – deals with what resurrection means.  In Judaism, there is no precision on exactly what kind of body the resurrection will be.  From the start in Christianity is the belief that the new body will be a transformed body with material recreated from the old material with new properties – incorruptible.
4. Resurrection is now split into two.  Jews of Jesus day believed that resurrection would happen at the end of time for all the faithful of Israel.  Christians also accept this, but also believe that this resurrection happened to one person, Jesus, as a precursor and harbinger of what would happen to us all.  This happens in the middle of time and points to the end of time.
5. Christians believed that if the resurrection has happened in Jesus physical body as a precursor to the final resurrection, Christians must therefore work towards God’s final resurrection as an anticipation of it.  To do this work in personal and political life in mission and holiness – we collaborate in bringing God’s world forward and implement the spirit of resurrection in anticipation of the resurrection of the last day.
6. Nobody in Judaism expected the Messiah to die so nobody expected the Messiah to rise from the dead.  Resurrection was not associated with Messiahship before Jesus.  Christians later found texts which made this association but this was not a part of Jewish expectation. 
• Messiah was not expected to die or be resurrected.  No Jew could have imagined after the crucifixion that Jesus was Messiah.  The cross proved Jesus was not.  But Christians, because of the resurrection, now claimed that Jesus was indeed Messiah.
• Other messianic figures before and after Jesus ended with the death – sometimes crucifixion – of the death of their messianic leader.  After their death, the followers have to give up their hopes or find another leader.

Christian belief in resurrection is on the map of Jewish belief but a whole new way of seeing everything.  This demands a whole new explanation.  Why did they modify Jewish belief in such ways?  They would say, “Because of what we’ve experience in Jesus how he was resurrected from the dead.”

INTERESTING FEATURES OF THE STORIES

The stories of the resurrection do not fit snuggly.  Read resurrection stories carefully and you will find discrepancies.  Who got to the tomb first?  Were there angels there?  How many?  But this is exactly what you would expect of stories which were written in absolute thrill and amazement with no attempt to scrunch them down together into one coherent tale.  Noone ever said, “Ok, we’ve got to make the story fit.  This is what happened.”

Scholars have tried to argue that resurrection stories are late and made-up to try to prop up the movement now that the Romans crucified their leader.  These are points of evidence that the stories are in fact very early and bear eye-witness testimony.

There are four very interesting features of resurrection stories.

1. There is an absolute silence of the Old Testament in relation to the resurrection.  If you search the NT resurrection accounts, there is virtually no citation of any Old Testament text.  It wasn’t like the OT necessarily was driving the story – like Christians were simply making up the resurrection to fit OT expectations.  The gospels (all four evangelists) are full of OT allusions or citations up to this point – saying Jesus death was according to the scriptures.  But the resurrection narratives have little OT reference and echos.  There are one or two small exceptions.  The resurrection of the Messiah was not part of Jewish expectation at all!  It was very alien to it because Messiah isn’t supposed to die!  That wasn’t in the Jewish expectation of the period.  You could argue that someone went through the stories and removed all OT allusions – something like a person removing evidence from a crime scene.  But normal assumption among scholars – that the gospel accounts of the resurrection are very late and fabricated – would require lots of biblical reflection and allusion.  This is evidence that the stories are very very early – not later fabrications.
2. The women are the first witnesses to the resurrection.  In all gospel stories, women are the first witnesses to the resurrection.  This is simply unacceptable in terms of apologetics.  Woman are not reliable witnesses to the 1^st century mind.  Their testimony is not allowed in a court of law.  In fact, later accounts of the resurrection even in the NT itself airbrushes the women out of the story.  But in the gospel narratives, women are there first.  No one would have made this up to give the story credibility.
3. None of the gospels refer to Jesus as having an illuminated body – that he shined like a star.  This is what one would expect from the book of Daniel.  This is also what one would expect of a hallucination.  Jesus appears as a human being that can be mistaken for a gardener or a fellow traveler on the road.  Jesus body is clearly physical – hence eating breakfast by the shore of Galilee and the disciples come to shore.  When the disciples come John says, “None of them dared ‘who are you’ because they knew who he was.”  This is very odd.  Why couldn’t they recognize him?  He was the same but different.  Yet he was totally human and physical but could come and go.  This is a complete innovation.  There is nothing in the OT to make this what one would expect.  Why?
4. The gospel resurrection accounts never mention the future Christian hope.  Everywhere else in the NT, the resurrection is mentioned in connection with the added note, that we shall also share in his resurrection and now live by resurrected power in baptism and holiness.  Lots of preachers say, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is a heaven and hell.”  There is no talk like this in the NT gospel narratives.  Paul often says, “Jesus is raised, therefore we’ve got a resurrection hope and resurrection power to do the job God has given us.”  But none of this in the gospels themselves.

These stories are very early, earlier to Paul’s writings, and bear eyewitness testimony.  Not because of a new private religious experience or insight, but because of something that happened to the body of Jesus.  This resurrection Christians interpreted as meaning that Jesus was indeed the Messiah which reaffirmed the Jewish belief in the resurrection but introduced distinctive elements to the belief about Jesus.  It means that God has resurrection power by which we live our lives in this world – by baptism and holiness – to usher in God’s future restoration of all things where even our physical bodies will be transformed like Jesus’ body was.

What are the fixed historical points of the story?

• Jesus tomb really was empty.
• The disciples really did encounter him in ways that convinced them that Jesus was not just a ghost or hallucination.

Without an empty tomb, the story would have meant little.  People encountered ghosts all the time soon after they have died.  People had all kinds of stories about visions, ghosts, dreams, in the context of bereavement and grief.  But the language for these was not that of resurrection, it was ghost language.  But Jesus was buried according to a particular Jewish tradition in two stages.

1. first you wrap the body in spices and linen for a period of six months to two years.
2. Later you come back, collect the bones, and store them in a bone box – an ossuary.  If Jesus had not been raised, his bones would have had to have been collected up and stored in an ossuary.  Doing this would prove that whatever meetings someone would have had would have been, it was only a vision.

Had not these both been in place (empty tomb and appearances) we cannot explain all these mutations in Jewish belief in resurrection.  Both of these are required to explain the historical data.  Together they provide a complete and coherent explanation of the provenance of early Christian belief.  There are no other explanations that work.

Several are these.

• Cognitive dissonance – what happens when you want strongly something to be true that you simply ignore all contrary evidence.  Perhaps this was a hallucination.
• This lacks explanatory power.  It doesn’t fit the state of affairs at Easter.  The disciples were not expecting the resurrection from the dead.  The Christians radically modified Jewish belief in resurrection.  Jews did not believe resurrection was something connected to Messiah.
• Resurrection stories were originally meant metaphorically – as ways of saying, “God has forgiven me and I feel God’s presence with me always!”
• Jews already had a rich language and practice to handle forgiveness and divine presence.  That was what the temple system was already all about.  Resurrection has nothing to do with these things initially.
• When the women went to the tomb, they met someone else.  Maybe it was James or another brother of Jesus.  They thought it was Jesus.
• Sorry.  Would have figured that one out soon enough.
• Jesus didn’t die, but only was given a drug to make him look like dead.
• Sorry, Romans knew how to kill people quite well.  But no disciple would have been fooled by a half-dead Jesus into thinking that Jesus was resurrected.
• Jesus only appeared to people who already believed in him.
• Paul and Thomas saw Jesus only because they didn’t believe.
• Well, the stories are written by Christians so they are all necessarily biased.  They would say such nonsense, wouldn’t they?
• Answer – so is all other history writing and all journalism.  Every account of any event in human history comes with a perspective or point-of-view.
• Saying that this account is written from a point-of-view is nothing more than saying that it is an account.  Now let’s discuss its viability.

Other factors to consider.

• Jewish tombs often became shrines – people would come and say prayers there.  There is no sign whatsoever, from the early church, that people venerated a tomb.
• The early Christian emphasis on Sunday worship is very striking.  In a Jewish context, Sabbath worship is commanded as absolutely vital.  Yet Christians, from the start, worship on the first, not the last, day of the week.

In combination, historically, the resurrection is the perfect explanation of the facts on the ground.  Jesus of Nazareth, having been thoroughly dead and buried, was physically resurrected.  Not simply a revived corpse, but a resurrected new kind of physical body.  It used up the material of Jesus material body but gave it new properties which no one expected before.  Alternative accounts are thin and often laughable.  But what is the ultimate meaning of resurrection?

THE GOODNESS OF CREATION

If death is the dissolution of this body, never to be reassembled, then death has succeeded in saying that present creation is bad and is going to be abandoned. But resurrection says, No. Present creation is good. It is corruptible and transient, not least because of sin, but God, having dealt with sin in the cross of Jesus Christ, will deal with corruption. And the result therefore must be the reaffirmation of the good creation, including the reaffirmation of human bodies.

The whole Old Testament is concerned with is the God of Israel, as the Creator God who has made a good creation, and that what matters about human life really is that it's meant to be lived within God's good, lovely, created world. But Christians often scrunch together two very different things. One is going to heaven after you die, and the other is the resurrection of the body as the final destination. There's not very much in the New Testament about going to heaven when you die.  Where you do find material in the New Testament about going to heaven when you die, this is a temporary thing. What really matters is resurrection—Life After Life After Death.

In many circles, the word resurrection has come to denote the state upon which the Christian enters immediately after death. That is simply not what the word resurrection means. Actually, if I walk around Westminster Abbey, most of the tombs earlier than the 19th century say, in effect, I am resting at the moment but I shall be raised in the future. That two-stage life after death is the classic Christian position.

The resurrection thus proclaims God’s final statement about the goodness of our bodies, and even our created world.  All shall be redeemed.  God created your body to last for eternity – in a transformed and perfected form.  Death does not mean our bodies turn to dust and that God only cares about the soul.  Resurrection faith says that God values even these physical frames he made and has an eternal plan for them.  Resurrection glorifies our present life by saying that God values our physical bodies and will retro-fit them to dwell with him forever in eternity.  Sometimes we don’t fully appreciate the physicality of the biblical understanding of our future state.