The Resurrection of History. David Prewer Bruce
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are relative amateurs, who pursue historical investigations with all the passion of a hobbyist. All historians work within the parameters of their own worldviews, but worldviews are never totally fixed, and I should declare my admiration for those historians who are willing to leave their worldviews open to modification based on the results of historical investigations—their own or those of others.
What Is “Resurrection”?
“Resurrection” is a term packed with theological meaning, and a great deal of what follows in subsequent chapters has to do with unpacking that meaning, in light of what historians can and cannot do within the scope of their historical investigations. At this point, it is important to establish that the Christian tradition sets forth a particular historical claim regarding the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, using the term “resurrection.” To understand this claim—suspending, for the moment, any judgment on whether or not we should deem this purported occurrence to be historical in the sense of having in fact happened—we should explore what Christians have meant by “resurrection.”
It is vital to remember that Jesus was Jewish, his inner circle was Jewish, and before his death and for several years afterwards virtually all of his followers were Jewish. While Jewish thinking at the time of Jesus was not monolithic, the centrality of the reading and interpretation of their scriptures for their religious life is unquestionable. While temple life and sacrificial worship were important in Jerusalem and surrounding areas, the vast majority of Jews lived dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, largely out of touch with the temple and its priesthood. Rather, it was the weekly reading and interpretation of the scriptures in the life of the local synagogue developed centuries before during the Babylonian captivity (a practice Jesus himself regularly participated in) that bound Jews together in their religious and ethnic identity. The Sadducees ruled the temple priesthood, and there were various movements of political revolution (known as Zealots) or communal isolation (e.g., the Essenes), but the vast majority of Jews in Jesus’ day were influenced by the Pharisaic movement, who excelled in scriptural interpretation and its ethical implications. The Pharisees regarded the collection of ancient psalms and the writings of certain prophetic figures as sacred scripture alongside the Torah, the law of Moses. This was the tradition that Jesus participated in when, in his hometown of Nazareth, he read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah (Luke 4:16–30). This was also the tradition that the highly influential Saul of Tarsus / Apostle Paul was trained in, something that he boasted about rather than concealed (Phil 3:5).
The Pharisees firmly believed in the resurrection, an idea that had gradually evolved in Hebrew/Jewish theology. According to Jewish prophets, priests, and poets, God had proved to be a God of justice, as demonstrated above all in providing for their exodus from slavery in Egypt, and in giving them the law through Moses as a means by which they might live in just relationships among themselves. As a tiny nation among more powerful neighbors, their belief in God’s merciful justice served as the explanation of their fortune, both in good times and in bad: when times were bad, they got what they deserved, but God’s covenantal love for them meant that God would always provide opportunities for repentance, and a restoration of the relationship of the nation with God. As their understanding of God expanded beyond that of a partial, tribal deity to a cosmic creator, God was seen to be not only the God of the nation but of heaven and earth. Their understanding of God’s merciful justice became universalized and was converted into a metaphysical concept: not only would God rescue their national existence from its “death” at the hands of more powerful nations (Isa 26, Ezek 37), but each individual life would stand to be redeemed from the grave at the end of time, to receive the rewards and punishment dictated by divine justice (Dan 12).
The emergence of this concept might have been partly due to a gradual acceptance of Plato’s ideas about the distinction of body and soul. While Roman military might dominated the Western world, including the Holy Land, for the century and a half before the birth of Jesus, Greek philosophy in its various forms served as the common intellectual touchstones among the educated. With several centuries of growing influence, it is probable that popular versions of Greek philosophy were accessible to most people in first-century Palestine. The Platonic distinction of body and soul, with the body being regarded as corruptible and dispensable and the soul being regarded as eternal and indispensable, fed a growing individualism: one might belong to a nation or a people by virtue of one’s bodily existence, but a person should be essentially identified with his or her soul, whose fate was ultimately beyond all earthly attachments. In some ways this thinking was an extension of the sensibilities of the exilic and post-exilic Hebrew prophets: “The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own” (Ezek 18:20).
The idea of resurrection might also have been partly the product of martyrdom. In the final stages of the Greek Empire, and the early days of the Roman Empire, the remnant of Jews that had returned from their exile in Babylon to rebuild the second temple under Ezra faced constant military threats, not only to their peace but to their very existence. Vastly outnumbered, they fought courageously against their would-be oppressors, and many of them died heroically. How could a God of justice permit their deaths? How could God abandon to oblivion those who were willing to give their lives for the honor of God’s name?3 With some basis in their scriptures, and some exposure to the ideas of immortality in other traditions, the Jews began to clarify how the individual’s hope, and not simply the nation’s hope, was in God: “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself” (Wis 3:1–5).
Distinguishing itself from Greek ideas of immortality, however, the Jewish understanding of resurrection was unabashedly corporeal. Rather than a doctrine of an immortal soul being released from its destructible body, Jewish thinking about resurrection included the reconstitution of the complete person, body and soul, at the end of time. While there were vague ideas about a spiritual existence between historical death and ultimate resurrection (see Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31), resurrection was a holistic idea that included the body. The bodily conditions would be somewhat altered, though, with the body being imbued with the same kind of immortality that the soul might be thought to have. Jesus is reported to have said, countering the Sadducee’s doubt in the resurrection, that in the resurrection we “neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:18–27), and Paul states that the dead “will be raised imperishable” (1 Cor 15:50–58).
The bodily nature of the resurrection in Jewish and early Christian theology is important in establishing what those authors whose works are included in the New Testament believed they were referring to when they talked about the resurrection of Jesus. Paul, whose writings predate the Gospels by several decades, talks about the “appearances” of the resurrected Jesus, but always in a fashion that differentiates these from either a ghostly presence (as in the case of the postmortem appearance of Samuel, conjured for Saul: see 1 Sam 28:7–20) or a revivification of someone recently deceased (as in the case of the widow’s son: see Luke 7:11–17). Paul maintains “a firm and sharply delineated belief in a past event, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”4 The Gospels of course depict the resurrection of Jesus as an event in time, a couple of days after the crucifixion of Jesus. The resurrected Jesus spoke with his disciples (Matt 28:16–20), ate with his disciples (Luke 24:36–42), and even bore the wounds of his crucifixion (John 20:24–29). There would be some justification for saying that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus’ resurrection that was so shocking to the disciples—after all, if Jesus was a righteous person, God would raise him in vindication with all the martyrs and righteous dead—as the timing of it. Jesus’ end-of-time resurrection, the early Christians said, happened during the course of time, in history, as if to mark out the beginning of the end time.
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