The Resurrection?

Lately I’ve been watch­ing and read­ing about the debate sur­round­ing the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus and the his­toric­ity of such an account. This reminded me of a brief dia­logue Tony Jones pre­sented at the begin­ning of The New Chris­tians. The argu­ment was meant to show the defi­ciency of foun­da­tion­al­ism, how­ever, it con­cerns some­thing that is brought up more often than not in pop­u­lar­ized ‘res­ur­rec­tion dia­logue’. I’m going to mod­ify the dia­logue some­what and then go from there. Thus, begin­ning with Tony Jones mod­i­fied dialogue:

“I believe the res­ur­rec­tion account because of Bib­li­cal tes­ti­mony.”
“Well, how do you know the Bible is true and accu­rate?
“I believe what the Bible says on the res­ur­rec­tion because the Apos­tles were mar­tyred for their belief, and peo­ple don’t know­ingly die for a lie.”
“What about the 9/11 ter­ror­ists?”
“They were deceived. They didn’t know they were dying for a lie. The apos­tles had seen Jesus and lived with him, so they knew he wasn’t a lie.”
“They were deceived. They didn’t know they were dying for a lie. The apos­tles had seen Jesus, lived with him, and saw him raised from the dead. They knew he wasn’t a lie.”
“What about the fol­low­ers of Jim Jones and David Koresh?”
“Then they must have seen a vision, or hal­lu­ci­nat­ing, or they they stole his body and fab­ri­cated the res­ur­rec­tion”[1]

With this dia­logue in mind, lets briefly look at some of the objec­tions and the valid­ity of those objec­tions and then exam­ine — some­what super­fi­cially — the res­ur­rec­tion expla­na­tion the New Tes­ta­ment pro­vides. Are they cogent? Do they really pro­vide a bet­ter alter­na­tive expla­na­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion than the expla­na­tion found within the pages of the New Testament?

Recently I’ve slugged through both N.T. Wrights The Res­ur­rec­tion of the Son of God and William Lane Craig’s Rea­son­able Faith, of which both are enjoy­able reads, if not long on the for­m­ers behalf. Both books dis­cuss at length the post­mortem res­ur­rec­tion appear­ances of Jesus and how this would have greatly influ­enced the early church. The cen­tral claim of Wright and Craig is that the res­ur­rec­tion account in Scrip­ture is com­pletely unac­counted for within Jew­ish and pagan thought at the time and that with­out the res­ur­rec­tion, the early church would have floun­dered. The reli­gion we know as Chris­tian­ity would not have come into exis­tence. This is espe­cially evi­dent when one under­stands the pres­sures of the sur­round­ing Roman cul­ture and threats of death.

The first alter­na­tive expla­na­tion is the the­ory that the dis­ci­ples were expe­ri­enc­ing visions of a risen Christ. Two imme­di­ate thoughts on this. Firstly, the lan­guage we find in describ­ing the res­ur­rected Christ is very unlike the lan­guage used when one expe­ri­ences a vision of Christ, such as Stephen in Acts 7 prior to his ston­ing. Sec­ondly, this the­ory is flatly refused by Paul him­self in 1 Corinthi­ans 15:12–19:

12Now if Christ is preached, that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no res­ur­rec­tion of the dead?
13But if there is no res­ur­rec­tion of the dead, not even Christ has been raised;
14and if Christ has not been raised, then our preach­ing is vain, your faith also is vain.
15More­over we are even found to be false wit­nesses of God, because we tes­ti­fied against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised.
16For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised;
17and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worth­less; you are still in your sins.
18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have per­ished.
19If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.

In addi­tion to this, the vision the­ory fails to account for the real­ity of the empty tomb. I’ll say more on this later, how­ever to say now, the major­ity of the alter­na­tive expla­na­tions pre­sup­poses the tomb was actu­ally empty, thus the accu­sa­tion that the apos­tles had stolen the body of Jesus, as was the con­stant accu­sa­tion of early Jew­ish oppo­nents. Fur­ther objec­tions to the ‘vision the­ory’ are that the visions occurred in an area where one might not expect them to have occurred, Judea rather than Galilee. The visions ended on the day of Ascen­sion, if indeed Jesus appeared in visions, His body not raised, then why have such visions not con­tin­ued? Lastly, it fails to explain the great num­ber of who all saw the same vision, as com­pared with other accounts of visions, such as Stephen in Acts 7.

The sec­ond alter­na­tive expla­na­tion is that the apos­tles were hal­lu­ci­nat­ing. This point does not require full treat­ment as it falls to the same crit­i­cisms of the visions expla­na­tion of Christs res­ur­rec­tion.  Fur­ther­more, again, it is highly unlikely that such an amount of peo­ple could have expe­ri­enced the same hal­lu­ci­na­tion, even more unlikely than a vision.  The hal­lu­ci­na­tion hypoth­e­sis, while pop­u­lar in the past, is sim­ply with­out explana­tory power or merit.

The third alter­na­tive expla­na­tion is that the dis­ci­ples stole Jesus’ body and fab­ri­cated the res­ur­rec­tion, this is a more sub­stan­tial expla­na­tion than the pre­ced­ing — admit­tedly poor — expla­na­tions and is known as the con­spir­acy hypothesis.

The ini­tial objec­tion comes from Matthew 28:11–15

11Now while they were on their way, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had hap­pened.
12And when they had assem­bled with the elders and con­sulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the sol­diers,
13and said, “You are to say, ‘His dis­ci­ples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’
14“And if this should come to the governor’s ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trou­ble.”
15And they took the money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day.

There are a cou­ple things going on here, most impor­tantly that the empty tomb can­not be accounted for and an alter­na­tive expla­na­tion is required, the guards are bribed and told to say, when asked, that Jesus’ body was stolen while they were asleep. This alter­na­tive expla­na­tion is not with­out it’s faults, how­ever. As Craig notes, “the theft of the body from the tomb by the dis­ci­ples would have been impos­si­ble.… The dis­ci­ples could not have stolen the body on account of the armed guard. The alle­ga­tion that the guards had fallen asleep is ridicu­lous, because in that case they could not have known it was the dis­ci­ples who had taken the corpse. Besides.… no one could have bro­ken into the empty tomb with­out wak­ing the guard“[2]. In addi­tion to this it sim­ply does not make sense that the apos­tles, who were in a state of great despair, could have come out of that despair and into a state of great joy if they had stolen the body from the tomb. Fur­ther­more, it does not make sense for the Apos­tles to have died for some­thing they knew to be a lie. As William Paley said, “Would men in such cir­cum­stances pre­tend to have seen what they never saw; assert facts which they had not knowl­edge of, go about lying to teach virtue; and, though not only con­vinced of Christ’s being an impos­tor, but hav­ing seen the suc­cess of his impos­ture in his cru­ci­fix­ion, yet per­sist in car­ry­ing on; and so per­sist, as to bring upon them­selves, for noth­ing, and with full knowl­edge of the con­se­quences, enmity and hatred, dan­ger and death?“[3]

N.T. Wright agrees with Paley, adding, “If their would-be Mes­siah had been killed, they could have crept back home, thank­ful to escape with their lives. They could have done what the post-135 rab­bis did, and declared that they were fin­ished with dreams of rev­o­lu­tion, and that from hence­forth they would find a dif­fer­ent way of being loyal to Israel’s god. Or they could, of course, have found another Mes­siah”.[4] In a recent news­pa­per col­umn, Wright rein­forced the above,  ” First-century Jews who fol­lowed would-be mes­si­ahs knew that if your leader got killed by the author­i­ties, it meant you had backed the wrong man. You then had a choice: give up the rev­o­lu­tion or get your­self a new leader. Going around say­ing that he’d been raised from the dead wasn’t an option”.[5]

Fur­ther­more, this doesn’t account for what would oth­er­wise be odd­i­ties in the account of the dis­cov­ery of the empty tomb. The lack of embell­ish­ment in the dis­cov­ery of the tomb, as well as the dis­cov­ery of the tomb by women is highly incon­sis­tent with the claim that the res­ur­rec­tion was a fab­ri­ca­tion. Craig com­ments, “If the dis­ci­ples stole Jesus’ corpse, then it would be utterly daft to fab­ri­cate a story of women’s find­ing the tomb to be empty. Such a story would not be the sort of tale Jew­ish men would invent. More­over, the sim­plic­ity of the nar­ra­tive is not well explained by the Con­spir­acy Hypothesis–where are the Scrip­ture cita­tions, the evi­dence of ful­filled prophecy? Why isn’t Jesus described as emerg­ing from the tomb, as in later forg­eries like the Gospel of Peter?[6]

The bib­li­cal expla­na­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion event of Jesus is well known. Briefly stated, Jesus is cru­ci­fied, phys­i­cally raised by God on the third day in a res­ur­rec­tion body. Jesus appears to hun­dreds of early believ­ers and then ascends into Heaven. What isn’t well known is the back­drop of these events, sig­nif­i­cantly the role Mes­siah and Res­ur­rec­tion played in first cen­tury Judaism, that these were entirely unpre­dicted events in the first cen­tury, espe­cially within Jew­ish thought.

We first con­cern our­selves with the con­cept of Mes­siah within Judaism. Wright notes that, “the expec­ta­tion, form­ing the con­text for what­ever mes­sianic fig­ure might emerge, that Israel’s long his­tory would at last reach its divinely ordained goal. The long night of exile, the ‘present evil age’, would give way to the dawn of renewal and restora­tion, the new exo­dus, the return from exile, ‘the age to come’. Where royal hopes were cher­ished, it was within this set­ting: the king that would come would be the agent through whom YHWH would accom­plish this great renewal”.[7] Wright then asks, “Jesus of Nazareth did not rebuild or adorn the Tem­ple. He did not lead a suc­cess­ful rev­o­lu­tion against the Romans. He did not, that is, con­form at the level of sym­bolic praxis (never mind that of tex­tual par­a­digm) even to the ill-defined pop­u­lar expec­ta­tion we are able to chart. So why did his fol­low­ers insist that he was, after all, the Mes­siah, the son of the liv­ing god?“[8] Fur­ther­more Wright adds, “why then did the early Chris­tians acclaim Jesus as Mes­siah, when he obvi­ously wasn’t? He too had been scourged, dragged through the streets and exe­cuted. Indeed, his exe­cu­tion was in pub­lic, increas­ing the shame and the sense of utter and dev­as­tat­ing vic­tory for the pagans. Faced with his death, why would any of his fol­low­ers have dreamed of say­ing that he was the messiah?“[9] The only expla­na­tion that would account for this would be, of course, that Jesus really was raised from the dead, “the early Chris­tians reply with one voice: we believe that Jesus was and is the Mes­siah because he was raised bod­ily from the dead”.[10]

We then turn our atten­tion to the con­cept of res­ur­rec­tion in first cen­tury Judaism. Sig­nif­i­cantly, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that for the Jew­ish mind, the res­ur­rec­tion was an event that occurred at the end of his­tory, “for a Jew the res­ur­rec­tion always occurred after the end of history”.[11] Like­wise, no Jew­ish thinker had ever pre­dicted a res­ur­rec­tion dur­ing his­tory like the res­ur­rec­tion we find in the per­son of Jesus. Joachim Jere­mias like­wise states, “Ancient Judaism did not know of an antic­i­pated res­ur­rec­tion as an event of his­tory. Nowhere does one find in the lit­er­a­ture any­thing com­pa­ra­ble to the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus. Cer­tainly res­ur­rec­tions of the dead were known, but these always con­cerned resus­ci­ta­tions, the return to earthly life. In no place in the late Judaic lit­er­a­ture does it con­cern a res­ur­rec­tion to doxa [glory] as an event in history”.[12] Thus we can that the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus was wholly for­eign to Judaism, just as Jesus as Mes­siah was wholly dif­fer­ent than the Mes­siah antic­i­pated by Judaism.

Fur­ther­more, the res­ur­rec­tion we find in Chris­tian­ity is unpar­al­leled in the ancient world, for within Pagan thought, “the dying and ris­ing gods were closely related to the sea­sonal cycle. Their death and return were seen as reflected in the changes of plant life. The death and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus is a one-time event, not repeated, and unre­lated to sea­sonal changes […] There is, as far as I am aware, no prima facie evi­dence that the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus is a mytho­log­i­cal con­struct, draw­ing on the myths and rights of the dying and ris­ing gods of the sur­round­ing world. While stud­ied with profit against the back­ground of Jew­ish res­ur­rec­tion belief, the faith in the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus retains its unique char­ac­ter in the his­tory of reli­gions. The rid­dle remains’.[13]

Although the thought is some­what unfin­ished, I think I’ll end there and pick up another day. That should be a lit­tle bit of an overview of the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus and some of the alter­na­tive expla­na­tions for his res­ur­rec­tion. I’m of the opin­ion that the only coher­ent expla­na­tion is the one we find in Scrip­ture, espe­cially when we under­stand the cul­tural back­drop which we find the res­ur­rec­tion event. In any case, until next time.

[1] Mod­i­fied dia­logue, orig­i­nal dia­logue found in Tony Jones, The New Chris­tians (San Fran­cisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), 19.
[2] William Lane Craig, Rea­son­able Faith (Wheaton: Cross­way, 2008), 341.
[3] William Paley, A view of the Evi­dences of Chris­tian­ity, 2 vols., 5^th ed. (Lon­don: R. Faul­der, 1896; repr. ed.: West­mead, Eng­land: Gregg, 1970), 1:327–28.
[4] N.T. Wright, Chris­t­ian Ori­gins and the Ques­tion of God, vol.3: The Res­ur­rec­tion of the Son of God, (Min­neapo­lis: Fortress Press, 2003), 560.
[5] N.T. Wright, “The Church Must Stop Triv­i­al­is­ing Easter: Chris­tians must keep their nerve: the Res­ur­rec­tion isn’t a metaphor, it’s a phys­i­cal fact, TimesOn­line, April 11^th, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6073347.ece. Accessed August 10, 2009.
[6] Rea­son­able Faith, 371.
[7] N.T. Wright, Chris­tians Ori­gins and the Ques­tion of God, vol.2: Jesus and the Vic­tory of God (Min­neapo­lis, Fortress Press, 1996), 482–3.
[8] Jesus and the Vic­tory of God, 486.
[9] The Res­ur­rec­tion of the Son of God, 559–60.
[10] The Res­ur­rec­tion of the Son of God, 563.
[11] Rea­son­able Faith, 392.
[12] Joachim Jere­mias, “Die älteste Schict der Osteru­ber­liefer­ung,” in Res­ur­rexit, ed. Edouard Dha­nis (Rome: Editrice Libre­ria Vat­i­cana, 1974), 194.
[13] Tryg­gve N.D. Met­tinger, The Rid­dle of Res­ur­rec­tion: “Dying and Ris­ing Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Stock­holm, Swe­den: Almquist & Wiskell Inter­na­tional, 2001), 4, 7.

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