The Resurrection of the Son of God!

Christians, by definition, believe that God raised Jesus from the dead! That claim constitutes the very center of Christianity. Disprove the resurrection, and as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, everything else crumbles to pieces and when the dust settles you will find the sorry remains of a church whose hope and very raison d'être has been taken away. The resurrection in central. Therefore, surely it is necessary to know why we believe it! 

In his epic volume The Resurrection of the Son of God, the prolific New Testament scholar N. T. Wright (Tom Wright) provides the most in depth and thorough defense of the historical physical resurrection of Jesus to date. In fact, so in depth that 99% of the world are never going to read this book. It is over 800 pages along and is written with an academic audience in mind. That being said, I read it over the summer of 2010 and thought it was absolutely brilliant. For those of you who don't fancy trawling through the unending chapters, here is a summary of the books argument:

N. T. Wright divides his work into 5 sections, each of which constitutes an essential building block to his overall argument. 

In part I (pp.1-206), Wright surveys texts from the pagan background (from Homer to Plato and beyond) and concludes that Greeks simply do not believe that people are raised from the dead. Whether death is a one-way street (as in Homer's Illiad and Odyssey) or an opportunity for blissful disembodied existence (Plato and others), the pagans at the time of Jesus simply did not believe resurrection happened. Once you were dead, you were dead and that was it.

The situation is different when one considers Jewish writtings. Wright argues that the only explicit mention of resurrection in the Hebrew Bible is Daniel 12, but that many passages (such as Ezek 37) could have given way to the belief that God would raise his people from the dead on the last day. In second temple Jewish sources (between the Old and New Testaments), there are varied beliefs. Some, such as the Sadducees, did not believe in resurrection, whereas others, like the Pharisees believed that there would be a day when all the dead were raised to life. There was no uniform Jewish belief at the time of Jesus, however, the word resurrection (anastasis in Greek) was always used to speak about bodily resurrection or of the restoration of Israel, but never to refer to a bodiless "spiritual" existence.

In Part II (pp.209-398), Wright deals with Paul's writings. He argues that since Paul was a pharisee, he would have believed in physical resurrection of the saints at the end of time. This was a belief that he kept after his conversion, but with a major twist. A belief which was important to pharisees, but not central suddenly became a major and central belief to Paul: one day the dead would be raised. Another twist which Wright detects in Paul is that the pharisaic belief in the resurrection had been split in half. In other words, God had done for Jesus, what he said he would do for all his people in advance. The new age had already started through Jesus' resurrection.


In part III (pp.399-583), Wright considers the rest of the early Christian literature outside of the Gospel resurrection narratives. He concludes that with the exception of a very select few 2nd and 3rd century sources, the New Testament and the early Christian writings expressed a hope in physical resurrection on the final day. Resurrection was (with a couple of possible exceptions) always a reference to a physical resurrection, not a bodiless existence or a resuscitation of a dead corpse Moreover, their belief in the resurrection of Christ is what enabled the early Christians to call him Messiah and Lord.


Part IV (pp.585-682) deals with the resurrection narratives in the Gospels. Drawing on the seeming discrepancies between the four accounts (the accounts need a bit of imagination to fit in nicely with each other), Wright suggests that this shows that the stories (or at least the disciples experience of the stories) were not fabricated - they are not the work of later theological reflexion. Wright concludes: From the details of the four easter accounts in the Gospels, it is historically probable that the disciples truly believed that they had seen Jesus raised from the dead and that the tomb was empty. The question is: does that mean that what the disciples believed happened actually did?


Wright answers this question in Part V (pp.683-738). He claims that the best explanation of the data (an almost universal belief in resurrection in early Christianity, the disciples belief that they had encountered Jesus raised, the empty tomb...) is that what the disciples claimed was true actually happened, that is Jesus of Nazareth was actually bodily raised from the dead! For Wright, the idea of subjective visions and experiences doesn't work (they are insufficient to explain that the disciples believed that a crucified man was actually the Messiah), neither does cognitive dissonance (the idea that when you want something to happen you believe it has) because the disciples had no category in their mind for someone to be raised to eternal life before the final judgement. The only plausible explanation is that what the disciples and early Christians claimed happened was actually true: Jesus rose from the dead!


Although his work is a scholarly and academic juggernaut, Wright does not leave this conclusion at an academic level. He appeals to his scholarly brothers and claims that if this conclusion is true, then it cannot leave us indifferent. I leave you with a citation from his conclusion on the matter and hope that it will encourage you to think through the implications of the claim "But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead" (1 Corinthians 15:20):

We cannot simply arrive at a topic and make grand declarations, as in Francis Drakes celebrated annexation of California, and suppose that all the local inhabitants will take them as binding. Saying that 'Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead' is not only a self-involving statement; it is a self-committing  statement, going beyond a reordering of one's private world into various levels of commitment to work out the implications. We cannot simply leave a flag stuck on a hill somewhere and sail back home to safety. (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, p.717)

Amen to that!