- Serendipitous coincidence: I was just listening to Jim Stump and N.T. Wright’s Biologos Interview yesterday [N.T. Wright | The Point of Resurrection]
- Stump: …
- What are the other kinds of options scholars have given for this scandalous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, dead and buried, and then on the third day rose again from the dead?
- How do scholars understand the kinds of accounts that we have that seem to testify to this but give differing explanations?
- Give us a little survey of what those options are, and at least the short versions of what’s wrong with those and why the better option is that Jesus really did rise.
- Wright:
- Until the rise of what we now call historical criticism in the 18th century, there had always been skeptics, of course, but skeptics outside Christianity.
- But then from the 18th century onwards, there were skeptics who came up from within a broadly Christian tradition, particularly interestingly, because within the Lutheran world, there was so much emphasis on the redeeming power of the cross, that often the resurrection didn’t seem to have much work to do.
- It’s almost as though the Easter story is just a kind of a nice addendum, and then oh, by the way, you know, he rose again, and he ascended to heaven, that’s the end of the story sort of thing.
- Any sense that the resurrection was actually the launching of new creation on Earth, as in Heaven, just had disappeared from the theological tradition.
- Then, when skeptics from within Western scholarship came up and said, well, actually, he never really did rise.
- Then people started to say, well, look, Paul says it was a spiritual body and so that presumably means that Paul didn’t think it was a physical body.
- Paul was the earliest writer we’ve got, so all these stories in the gospels were obviously written down later on, because the gospels were probably written in the 60s, or 70s, or 80s, or 90s, so clearly, people started to make up stories a long time after the event.
- The original idea was simply that after Jesus’s death, his followers had this strong sense that God loved them anyway, or that Jesus’s project was still continuing, or that there really was some sort of a life after death.
- That then got downgraded into what a great many people in churches were taught through the 18th 19th and 20th century, so that the people who had swapped the biblical gospel of new creation for the Platonic gospel that the real aim is for us to go and live with God in a non physical, non spatio-temporal place called heaven. Once you’ve got that, then what’s the point of resurrection? So many people grew up saying, I believe in the resurrection of the body, in the Creed, but actually meaning I believe in the immortality of the soul, which is, of course, a very different thing. But once you’ve got a lot of would be Christian people believing that actually what matters is the immortal soul going off to heaven, then what’s the point of having a bodily resurrection? Then the skeptical scholarship comes along and says, well, there you are. When they said he was raised on the third day, what they actually meant was that God’s Kingdom continues, and that we will one day go and be with him, which is, of course, not what the language of resurrection meant at all. So there’s been an odd confusion between skeptical scholarship and muddled believers, who will say, well, clearly Jesus is alive because when we say our prayers, we have a sense of his presence. But obviously, he’s alive in a spiritual way, because he went to heaven, so he’s no longer around. The amount of sheer muddle and misinformation, both among Christians and among non-Christians has been such that it took me a lot of unpicking in the big book, and in the smaller book, Surprised by Hope, to try even to lay out what the options were. Of course, then you get skeptics who come along and say, well, if he didn’t actually rise from the dead, then, in what sense was there anything achieved at all by his life? Was he not simply whistling in the dark? Or was he not simply suggesting that there might be new ways of ordering your life which will be less unpleasant than other ways? And so the whole thing gets downgraded. To try to come back from that, and to say, no, let’s actually read the texts which are about new creation being launched in the very physical body of Jesus. This has been and for many people continues to be quite a shock. This is not what they expect to hear on Easter morning.
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