Peter Kirby

Has anyone else got a copy of this book? Paul Baxter was urging us to read it a while back. Toto said that he might read it and, if it's good enough, convert to Christianity. I know Steven Carr has a copy.

Respects are often paid to Wright as an academic, so I thought I should read the third volume of his "Christian Origins" series, seeing as I've read the first two and as it has high relevance to my studies.

Wright begins the first chapter by outlining a view against which he reacts:

"Though my approach throughout the book will be positive and expository, it is worth noting from the outset that I intend to challenge this dominant paradigm in each of its main constituent parts. In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context proves only a fuzzy setting, in which 'resurrection could mean a variety of things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodilyresurrection, 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 ealy Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whathever 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." (The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 7)

It's interesting to know that this is the "dominant paradigm," but I wonder whether Wright is inflating its "dominance" so as to make his work more significant and to redirect the complaint (too feckless to be called an argument or criticism) that Wright is "just an apologist for the status quo." W. L. Craig takes the exact opposite tact in his own work, saying in paraphrase, "almost every scholar accepts the empty tomb, and that number grows day by day." The reality as I discern it is that the academy of NT scholarship is split on the issues of the empty tomb (Craig) and physical resurrection (Wright), with significant opposition but a majority in favor of both.

Wright claims to work backwards by mapping out the afterlife beliefs of the pagans, then the Jews, and then the early Christians. He says, "Among the more striking aspects of the mutation is the fact that nowhere within Judaism, let alone paganism, is a sustained claim advanced that resurrection has actually happened to a particular individual." Immediately "one or two possible exceptions" are noted, Alcestis and John the Baptist.

Comments?

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Ben C Smith

I do not own a copy, but have read it twice or thrice.

If the relevance to your studies is specifically the events of Easter Sunday, you will probably not be very impressed with this book. IMHO Wright is strongest with the general Jewish background, weakest with the specific argument for a resurrection.

He mounts an argument that does require an answer (namely that appearances alone do not explain a belief in a resurrection event; Crossan makes a similar point, but takes off in a different direction), but his argument from that basis for the whole enchilada of bodily resurrection is not likely to persuade the as yet unpersuaded.

This is indeed a puzzling feature in his argument, one (with respect to the baptist) to which Wright can only (weakly?) reply that we should not regard the views of the syncretist (I cannot remember if he actually uses that term for him) Herod as normative for mainstream Judaism.

I think it pretty clear, however, that there were (at least) two different kinds of resurrection envisioned in ancient Judaism. The first is sometimes called resuscitation, and involves a dead corpse coming back to this life (only to die again later on). Examples would include those raised by Elijah and Elisha and those raised during the ministry of Jesus, such as the fellow at Nain and Lazarus. The second is what we think of as the general resurrection, in which dead corpses are raised to that life, eternal life, never to die again. The resurrection of Jesus, of course, is supposed to have been of this type. That seems like a rarer sort of claim, that the general (eschatological) resurrection had already begun.

I would be interested to find out what you think, after considering the texts that Wright discusses, of his claim that resurrection in ancient Judaism always consisted of the raising of an actual corpse, never a mere soul-flight or spiritual event.

Happy reading.

Ben.

Steven Carr

Does Wright think that Moses was resurrected in time to appear at the Transfiguration, or resuscitated, or was Moses still dead?

Toto

:rolling:

I did say I would try to read it, but I haven't so far found the time. And I seriously doubt either that it is that good or that it would convert me back to Christianity.

The current issue of Michael Shermer's Skeptic Magazine contains a review by Carl Stecher of NT Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God (I assume this is the book under discussion.) The review is quite thorough, and shows how Wright fails to demonstrate his thesis. It does not leave me with the feeling that I am missing anything.

Stecher starts out his review by noting that Wright claims that resurrection would be totally unexpected in the first century, and then immediately provides an example that disproves this - that of Nero. He then notes that it seems strange to conclude that the disciples could not have anticipated Jesus' resurrection when Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels as telling them that he would be resurrected. He goes on in this vein.

Is this another example of Christians getting a pass for writing illogical nonsense?

CJD

I think Wright makes the best headway against 1, 2, and 3 above. The others lack to varying degrees. That said, however, his is the book with which to argue. I will be interested to hear your thoughts as you go on with this, Peter.

CJD

p.s. A resounding NO to Toto's last question …

Steven Carr

Stecher is very good on Wright's stout defense of the view that the following words were incomprehensible to the closest followers of Jesus 'The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.'

On Page 410, Wright guesses that the disciples thought 'on the third day' was a metaphor, although they did not know what it was a metaphor for.

The passage is so blindingly clear that Luke 18:34 has to resort to supernatural means to explain how they could not understand the plainest of words . Wright, of course, has no problem with Luke's explanation that it was hidden from them. After all, it's in the Bible.

Of course, the enemies of Jesus were supposed to know exactly what Jesus meant by this saying, but not the people who had been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, and who had told each other in John 1 - 'We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."

Just 3 years after declaring that Jesus was the one the prophets wrote about, the disciples were baffled by - 'We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. He will be handed over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him. On the third day he will rise again.'

Wright explains that the disciples would have had absolutely no idea that Jesus was likely to be arrested and killed, even though some had been followers of John the Baptist who had been arrested and killed.


After all, Jesus had already been threatened with death in Luke 13.

Ben C Smith

Loren Rosson III notes on his weblog that the new book on the resurrection by Dale Allison is already available. It supposedly argues in a more balanced way than Wright that the empty tomb is not fiction.

Toto

Resurrecting Jesus: Earliest Christian Tradition And Its Interpreters on Amazon is still listed as not yet released.

Rosson summarizes the conclusion as the balance of evidence favoring the empty tomb. But it seems to assume the basics of the story from the gospels.

Mark Goodacre's blog lists the table of comments and some links, including Chapter 1 on Allison's website.

Vinnie

Why?

The reality then, is probably that they are all grasping at straws. Somebody needs to write a historical Jesus book entitled:

Non Liquet.

with a subheading

What to Do With a Paucity of Data....

It was created because, it was historical because....

Both scenarios I have seen seem logical in and of themselves. Jesus may have been buried by a sympathetic well to do follower (though the details of the Gospel account cannot be taken at face value) or Jesus may have been left for carion. We can "rationalize" both of them as being historically possible and at least plausible and we don't have a hell of objective or independent info as to what happened to Jesus' body. When in an absence of evidence you do not say "an event happened" or that "th event did not happen." You say, "non liquet".

Its just not even possible to habe evidence regarding Jesus' body. We've seen all the sources, we've all seen the background info on practices at the time. Has nyone come up with anything new or is the merry-go-round going to just keep going?

Vinnie