The Resurrection of History. David Prewer Bruce
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very heart of the early Christians’ proclamation. The resurrection of Jesus is the climax of all four canonical Gospels (Matt 28:5; Mark 16:6; Luke 25:5; John 20:18), and Jesus’ own predictions of the resurrection are a recurring motif within each Gospel (Matt 12:40; 16:21; 17:22; 19:17; 26:32; Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; 14:28; Luke 9:22; 18:33; John 10:17; 14:19; 16:16). The apostolic proclamation identified in the Acts of the Apostles is the vindication of Jesus’ ministry by means of God raising Jesus to new life (Acts 2:32–36; 10:34–43; 17:16–31). The dependence of the believers’ new life “in Christ” on the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus is a central theme in most of Paul’s letters (2 Cor 4:13–17; Eph 1:3–14; Phil 2:5–13; Col 3:1–4; 2 Tim 2:8–13). Even the Apocalypse repeatedly identifies “the Lamb who was slain” with “the Living One,” the one “who was, and is, and is to come” (Rev 4:1–11). Throughout the New Testament, the death of Jesus is portrayed as an ordinarily shameful end to Jesus’ life—except for the extraordinary raising of Jesus to new life. The resurrection of Jesus was taken to be God’s seal of approval on Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign, and God’s own proclamation concerning human destiny (Rom 1:1–6; Acts 4:1–12; 1 Pet 1:3–9). Once again, the historical claim that Jesus was raised from the dead can be disputed by historians, but we should from the outset recognize that the canonical Christian scriptures are unanimous in ascribing central theological significance to that claim.
While it can be argued that the Christian tradition has changed in many respects over its twenty centuries, the historical eventfulness of the resurrection of Jesus has been consistently affirmed, and this has been directly connected to the understanding of the resurrection as a bodily event. There is certainly little doubt that the Christian authors of the first and second centuries CE affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus against the Docetic view that the Son of God never actually took human form. It is clear that by the beginning of the second century, leading figures such as Ignatius declared belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as absolutely essential to Christian faith.5 Later in the second century, it is still apparent that the church understood the term “resurrection” as bodily. Tertullian argued that since we are told by the apostles that Jesus experienced resurrection, it must have been bodily; therefore, he goes on to say, our future resurrection will be bodily as well, although our bodies will be animated not by natural principles but by “spiritual” principles, through the agency of the Holy Spirit.6
In the early third century, Origen defended the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb. Origen argued that Christianity is a faith founded on the acts of God in history, every bit as much as Judaism. For Origen, the New Testament reports of Jesus’ bodily resurrection are historical accounts that can be examined and critiqued. Because they all report, in their various ways, the same event, Origen tends to regard them as comprising a single historical record, standing or falling together. Origen, while confident of the historical value of the Gospel accounts, struggles with questions regarding the nature of what they report, and feels compelled to qualify his claim to Jesus’ bodily resurrection in order to maintain its historicity.7
In the fourth century, living in the newly powerful and newly privileged post-Constantine church, Athanasius engaged in a very different kind of historical reasoning. He assumed that since God was sovereign, there must be some sort of ultimate morality to the march of history. His understanding of what constituted historical evidence for the resurrection included the miracles wrought by the apostles in Jesus’ name, the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem, the diminishing of pagan religions, the fulfillment of prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures, the past courage of martyrs, the chastity of virgins, the consistency of the resurrection with Greek metaphysical categories, and the widespread acceptance of Christian faith:
For although the Greeks have told all manner of false tales, yet they were not able to feign a Resurrection of their idols—for it never crossed their mind, whether it be at all possible for the body again to exist after death.8
In the early fifth century, Augustine labored long over the concept of resurrection, dealing with questions such as the possibility of the reconstitution of the parts of a disintegrated human body for its future resurrection. His assumption seems to be that if intellectual objections to the bodily nature of resurrection can be met, people will happily embrace the historical resurrection of Jesus: “But if they do not believe that these miracles were wrought by Christ’s apostles to gain credence to their preaching of His resurrection and ascension, this one grand miracle suffices for us, that the whole world has believed without any miracles.”9 Both Athanasius and Augustine inferred the historical dimension of the resurrection from its historic dimension, entering into evidence for the historical eventfulness of the resurrection the fact that something so initially incredible had come to be believed so widely. While this is certainly something that would be considered out-of-bounds by present-day historians, it is important for the present discussion to note that it is still the historical nature of the resurrection that is being talked about here.
By the thirteenth century, various conflicts including the Crusades had brought Christians into large-scale engagement with the Muslim world. This brought the historical claims for the Christian faith, and the resurrection in particular, into significant doubt for the first time in eight hundred years. These developments may have prompted some of the detailed reflections of Thomas Aquinas, who once again approached the question of the nature of the event that is testified to by the Gospels. Thomas asserts that Jesus rose in a state of glory with specific properties that were attributable from both theological considerations and analysis of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. There is something new developing here: whereas in most previous analyses the bodily nature of the resurrection supports an argument for its historical nature, here the historical nature of the resurrection, firmly assumed, is used to support the argument as to its bodily nature. For Thomas, there is a full complementarity of the bodily dimension of the resurrection and the historicity of the resurrection, each helping to explain the other. Using great subtlety, Thomas says, “The individual arguments taken alone are not sufficient proof of Christ’s resurrection but taken together, in a cumulative way, they manifest it perfectly.”10 The Protestant Reformers, for all their distaste for the scholastics, share with Thomas a high regard for Augustine’s certainty as to the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Calvin says, “But it is to be observed, in passing, that when he is said to have ‘risen from the dead,’ these terms express the reality both of his death and resurrection, as if it had been said, that he died the same death as other men naturally die, and received immortality in the same mortal flesh which he had assumed.”11
It is unquestionable that the majority of Christians through the centuries have believed that the resurrection of Jesus involved the transformation of his body, and it is almost as safe to say that the majority of New Testament scholars today, whatever their personal beliefs, will agree that the New Testament depicts some kind of bodily resurrection of Jesus. Thomas F. Torrance sums up the larger historical Christian tradition on the proclamation of the bodily nature of the resurrection when he says. “Everything depends on the resurrection of the body, otherwise all we have is a Ghost for a Saviour.”12
Can a Christian Doubt the Resurrection?
There is an old philosophical riddle that goes like this. A wooden ship sails the seas for several years, and one of its boards needs replacing. The board is replaced and the ship sails on. A while later, another board is replaced for reasons of wear and tear, and then another, and another, until, after many years, every board on the ship has been replaced. The riddle is, when is the ship a new ship? When the first board is replaced? When half the boards have been replaced? When the last board has been replaced? Never?
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