Archives: Book Chapters

Selected Bibliography (These are arranged in chronological order or appearance)

J. A. SCHEP, The Nature of the Resurrection Body, 1964.

C. F. EVANS, Resurrection and the New Testament, 1970.

Our final task is to discuss what we mean when, as Christians, we affirm that God raised Jesus from the dead. In Chapter 1 it was pointed out that the meaning of the idiom of resurrection is much less clear and unambiguous than is often imagined. Many assume that it received its definitive meaning from a series of post-crucifixion events, as recorded in the Lucan tradition. But the idiom has bad a much longer and more varied history and it is in the light of this that we now attempt to outline what we mean in our time when we affirm the ‘resurrection of Jesus’.

This affirmation expresses in words something that lies near the Center of Christian faith. It is a confession of faith, which is made, and can only be made, by Christian believers. This immediately removes the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ from the class of events which are properly called historical and which are open to historical investigation. If the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ were an historically verifiable event, it would mean that the Easter element of the Christian’s faith depended, not upon a response of faith and obedience, but upon one’s competence as an historian. All competent historians of first-century Palestine should end up as Christians, leaving only the incompetent historian to remain an unbeliever. This absurdity is avoided when we acknowledge that the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ is part of the Christian’s confession of faith concerning Jesus, and, as such, lies outside the scope of historical enquiry. We must agree with Bultmann when he says, ‘The resurrection itself is not an event of past history. All that historical criticism can establish is the fact that the first disciples came to believe in the resurrection.’¹

When a man confesses his faith in God through Jesus Christ he is proclaiming something about himself, as well as something about Christ. This may be illustrated by the fact that the Creeds commence with the words, ‘I believe . . .’ This is not the way an historian commences his book. What does the Christian reveal about himself when he confesses ‘I believe that God raised Jesus from the dead’? We must take this question into account as we discuss the meaning of the ‘resurrection of Jesus’, just because the latter belongs to the faith of the Christian, and is not an empirical fact that can be studied objectively by Christian and non-Christian alike.

In Chapter 10 we discussed the origin of this confession of faith. There we saw that the Easter message came to be expressed in the idiom of resurrection, partly, at least, because this idiom was an important element in one of the widespread Jewish beliefs of the day. To this extent it may be said that the particular idiom that has long been used for the Easter message was, in part, an accident of language and of history. The affirmations which the Easter message makes about Jesus are no more dependent upon the exclusive use of one particular idiom than they are upon the exclusive use of one particular language.

Christianity does not consist in the undying attachment to certain words, idioms, or even credal forms. It consists in faith in him of whom the words, idioms and creeds speak. The history of Christian thought shows many examples of terms and concepts which have enjoyed great popularity for a time before disappearing from common use. There have been times when resurrection-talk was not nearly so prominent in Christian circles as it was in the first two centuries, or as it is in the present. From time to time through Christian history it has become necessary to use fresh concepts and verbal forms that the Christian may confess his faith in a meaningful way.

We must therefore raise the question of whether it is absolutely necessary to use the idiom of resurrection in order to confess our faith concerning Jesus. Those who maintain that the idiom of resurrection is to be understood only in the traditional (or Lucan) sense² would, if correct, leave us with no alternative but to abandon the idiom as a valid way of professing our Christian faith, if we are among the growing number of Christians for whom that tradition is neither historically founded nor even very meaningful.

Our study of the path followed by the idiom, however, has made it abundantly clear that while the Lucan tradition has been dominant throughout most of Christian history, it is by no means the only view that has been held by Christians, particularly in the first and twentieth centuries. The fact that the idiom has had a much longer and more varied history should make it possible for it to be rescued from bondage to a narrow usage which not only turns out to be unwarranted, but which is in actual danger of obscuring, even obliterating, an important value of the idiom. One of the virtues of the idiom is that it takes a realistic view of death and hence allows for discontinuity, as well as for continuity at that point. This is lost sight of when the idiom is interpreted as meaning that which is more appropriately referred to as ‘resuscitation’ or ‘revivification’.³

Our study has shown, in addition, that not only do the New Testament writers show some diversity in the way in which they talk about the resurrection of Jesus, but they are not all equally dependent upon the use of the idiom for the proclamation of the Christian message. The author of Hebrews ignored the idiom almost completely and the Fourth Evangelist developed his own way of using it.⁴ If, in the present, or in the future, Christians wish to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, without resorting to the idiom of resurrection, then we must acknowledge that there may be valid reasons for doing so.⁵

Nevertheless there are at least three good reasons why Christians may continue to use the idiom of resurrection to confess their faith concerning Jesus. The first is this. The more basic any term has been in the proclamation of the Christian Gospel, the more reluctant we should be to dispense with it, for, by its very use, it serves to demonstrate the continuity of Christianity from age to age. This is one of the great values in the continued use of the ancient creeds. (It must be acknowledged, of course, that few, if any, when they recite the creeds today, mean exactly the same as their fourth-century Christian forbears did.) Basic words and concepts, even when the changes of cultural milieu necessitate some re-interpretation, help to preserve the essential continuity of the living stream of Christian tradition. No-one could deny that the resurrection idiom has appeared to play a basic, and almost indispensable, role in Christian proclamation.

The second reason is that this idiom is peculiarly apt and forceful in communicating the particular truth about Jesus which Christians wish to confess. There are other words and concepts which could replace it in certain areas of its usage, such as ‘vindication’, ‘exaltation’, ‘ascension’, etc., but because the Easter message is essentially concerned with the death of Jesus, we would be hard pressed to find another idiom which acknowledges the significance of his death equally as well.

The third reason is that though the idiom of resurrection has pursued a long and varied path, in all cases it has been used as an expression of hope, enabling an otherwise closed future to be regarded as open-ended. All who confess the Christian faith do so because, in one way or another, Jesus Christ has led them to an attitude of hope, both for themselves and for the world. It is appropriate that Jesus Christ should be confessed in terms of this ancient and suggestive idiom of hope. It may be regarded as altogether fitting that we find the Johannine Christ proclaiming, ‘I am the resurrection’,⁶ for there is a sense in which, for Christians, Jesus has actually embodied in himself all the hope that man has ever associated with this idiom.

If, for reasons such as these, Christians choose to continue to confess their faith in Jesus by affirming that God raised him from the dead, they must be prepared to explain in a clear and convincing way just what they mean by ‘raising from the dead’. To this task we now turn.

True understanding of the idiom of resurrection starts from the true understanding of the nature of death. We have seen that it was because of the recognition of the real and all-embracing character of death that the hope of a general resurrection took such firm root in later Judaism. There is need to speak of resurrection only when it is recognized that man, as a whole conscious being, does not survive death. Resurrection, however, should not be thought of as reversing that which took place in death, so that death is cancelled out and the original condition restored. The idiom of resurrection can be genuinely used as an expression of hope for man only at the same time as one recognizes the finality of the phenomenon of death.

In the same way, any adequate understanding of the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ starts from the true understanding of the nature and significance of the death of Jesus. The first thing to be said is that Jesus was truly human. He died the same kind of death that, as human creatures, we all must die. As G. W. H. Lampe said in an Easter sermon, ‘As far as our human nature is concerned, when you’re dead you’re dead; and so was Jesus.’⁷ The phenomenon of death marks the end of the historical existence of a conscious living being. It is an historical event which no such subsequent event can cancel out. Where a person appears miraculously to revive after his apparent death, he cannot be said to have truly died in the first place. Jesus truly died. He remains dead for all time. When we speak of the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ we do not mean that his death was cancelled out and he became again, and continues to be, a conscious historical human being. In so far as the resurrection narratives are expressed in such a way as to imply that this is just what happened, they mislead us. Resurrection is something different from this; it speaks of victory over death, but not of the abolition of death.

Not only did Jesus truly die. His death became the focal point of Christianity. Because Jesus died by crucifixion, the cross became the chief symbol of Christianity, and the heart of Christian proclamation. It lies at the center of the Pauline Gospel, ‘But God forbid that I should boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and Ito the world!’⁸ The amount of space which the four Gospels devote to the suffering and death of Jesus shows clearly where the heart of primitive Christian preaching was to be found.

The ‘resurrection of Jesus’ must not be understood as something which lessens the significance of the death of Jesus, and any interpretation which implies that the death of Jesus was unreal, or only temporary, does just this. The Easter message must never be allowed to cancel out the cross; it belongs rather to the interpretation of the cross. In some theological circles there has been much criticism, and even consternation, occasioned by the now famous dictum of Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Indeed, faith in the resurrection is really the same thing as faith in the saving efficacy of the cross.’⁹ There may be more that we can say about the resurrection of Jesus than this, but this is certainly where it starts. The meaning of the resurrection springs from the significance of the death of Jesus, and is inseparable from it.

We must now try to see why, through Christian history from the apostles onward, the death of Jesus has been judged to possess unique and cosmic significance, bringing new life and hope to men. The New Testament nowhere clearly explains why the death of Jesus on the cross should have power to attract men and change the direction of their lives. It uses a variety of ways in order simply to describe the significance of the death of Jesus. The author of Hebrews speaks of it as the sacrifice for sin which Christ offered up once for all time in order to open up a new and living way to God.¹⁰Paul speaks of it as the means of reconciling the rebellious and estranged human race with their God.¹¹ But the New Testament does not present us with one explicit and uniform explanation of why the death of this man should have achieved these things.

Christian thinkers through the ages have attempted to spell out in the various theories of the atonement what they thought actually happened in the death of Jesus in order to make it instrumental for men’s salvation. These theories were usually mutually exclusive. They all claimed New Testament warrant, but none of them, however popular for a time, ever became universally accepted by all Christians. Each of the theories reflected the dominant needs of the age in which it came to expression.

In what has been called the Classic Idea of the atonement,¹² the cross is seen as the last, decisive battle-ground between God and all the spiritual powers of evil, a conflict in which God, through his Son Jesus Christ, won a final and eternal victory against all the evil that threatens and plagues men. Within a world-view where Spiritual powers and principalities were freely accepted, this view of the cross had the power to win conviction.

In the medieval world men felt burdened with a sense of guilt and sin. The theory of penal satisfaction met this pressing need. It recognized on the one hand that God is just and cannot ignore man s sin, but it showed on the other hand how God, in his Son Jesus Christ, had himself borne the penalty of man’s sin by dying on the cross, thereby making it possible for God in his justice to offer his forgiveness freely to penitent men.

It belongs to the very nature of the power of the cross of Jesus Christ to attract men, that it rises above all our human theories and continues to speak to men of various ages. In each age men must express afresh for themselves, and in the circumstances of their own time, just what particular significance the death of Jesus holds for them. This will depend upon the way in which an individual, or a particular generation, has come to formulate its chief problem in life.

The problem of modern man is not that of finding deliverance from the unseen powers of evil, or from the burden of guilt, but is the search for meaning in human existence. The meaning of the life of any individual is chiefly threatened by the phenomenon of death. In the context of created life as a whole, and in the continuance of the human species, we can see that death has a positive role to play. But when the individual man contemplates the death that will eventually bring his own historical existence to an end, it threatens him with the annihilation of what he is and what he has been. Man is the only living creature known to us who has to live his life in the face of the foreknowledge that he is going to die. This must necessarily affect his attitude to everything he does, the more he looks into the future. Why should one attempt anything at all, if it is going to be obliterated and end in nothingness in the course of time?

From primeval man onwards, so far as we can ascertain, man has imagined that death was followed by some form of afterlife in a spirit-world, or by a re-incarnation in this world. In this way man has cushioned himself against the sharpness of death by refusing to accept it as final. It is not the purpose of Christianity to provide a more sophisticated and viable belief in such an after-life even though, in popular thought, it has often appeared to do so.

It is no accident that Christianity arose from a people who were rather unique in the ancient world for the following two reasons among others. First, they pioneered a concern for the meaning of history. They saw that if life had any meaning it had to be sought within the intricate web of history being spun by men in the world of here and now. Secondly, and partly as a result of the first, they were led virtually to abandon any interest in an after-life.¹³ The significance which came to be attached to the death of Jesus, and the resurrection-talk associated with it, need to be understood in the light of this heritage of Israel which preceded it.

Man finds the phenomenon of death a threat to the meaning of his existence not simply because it is part of the natural order of creation, for when a man is spared to live a long, fruitful and satisfying life, his aging and worn-out body causes him to find the indefinite prolongation of life a source of pain and suffering which could become increasingly intolerable. When death brings the cessation of consciousness and feeling, this in itself may be a welcome form of rest and peace. The sting of death is more to be found in the fact that it appears to obliterate all that a man has been and has achieved before his death. For this reason death threatens man as an evil enemy to be fought and kept at bay.

The evil element in death is further to be seen in the fact that it stands over man as a threat from the time of his birth. Some men die, long before they expect to, because of famine, disease, war, accident and so on. Some of the evil associated with death is directly traceable to the evil to be discerned in man himself. The death of half a million people in East Pakistan by a tidal wave shakes us and wins our immediate sympathy. But the deliberate and carefully planned extermination of six million Jews in Europe moves us to anger, for it strikes us as an evil which is quite literally demonic, just because the responsibility for it lies in the will of man himself. But not all the evil in the world is directly, or even indirectly, traceable to man, and that is why the origin and presence of evil in the world remain perennial problems to baffle the mind of man.

Although this is not the place to discuss at greater length the nature of evil, human sin, suffering, death and the relationship between them, they must find mention here for they constitute the chief problems which continually confront man and make him question whether there is any justice or meaning to be found in life. In this complex of problems it may have been possible for man to expect a satisfying solution ultimately to be revealed if only he waited long enough. Often he has been sustained by some such hope. But the phenomenon of death not only cuts off the individual from conscious existence, but also cuts him off from any such ultimate solution. In some respects, then, death becomes the ultimate enemy, ‘the last enemy to be abolished’,¹⁴ in that it becomes for man the symbol of all which threatens his life with defeat and meaninglessness. It becomes the symbol of the deep sense of tragedy that can lead man to despair. Although Paul was thinking of his own particular experience of frustration, he spoke also for modern man, when he cried out, ‘Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death?’¹⁵

In what way does the death of Jesus on the cross answer man’s cry to be delivered from meaninglessness and despair? Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, ‘the ending of our life would not threaten us if we had not falsely made ourselves the center of life’s meaning.’¹⁶ These words point back to the way in which Jesus began to answer man’s basic cry by what he taught during his earthly ministry. This teaching has been preserved for us in the language and thought-forms of the later Evangelists, and is written in the light of the death of Jesus on the cross. But there seems little doubt that the Gospels here reflect the genuine teaching of Jesus and his concern to turn men’s attention away from self-interest. The Synoptic Gospels put it this way, ‘Anyone who wishes to be a follower of mine must leave self behind; he must take up his cross, and come with me. Whoever cares for his own safety is lost; but if a man will let himself be lost for my sake and for the Gospel, that man is safe. What does a man gain by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self?’¹⁷ The same teaching is expressed by the Fourth Evangelist as, ‘The man who loves himself is lost, but he who hates himself in this world will be kept safe for eternal life.’¹⁸ We may confidently conclude that Jesus taught that, in order to live the true life, self-centeredness has to be abandoned.

Jesus not only taught men to live for others and not for themselves. Jesus himself lived out what he taught. He lived to serve. He not only lived for others, but he died for others. The whole life of Jesus was a demonstration in flesh and blood of what it means to empty out one’s self, to make oneself nothing, to assume the nature of a slave.¹⁹ This culminated in a most telling form in the sufferings and death which he willingly accepted. The death of Jesus on the cross consequently became the most powerful manifestation of the self-giving of Jesus. So Paul wrote, ‘His purpose in dying for all was that men, while still in life, should cease to live for themselves, and should live for him who for their sake died and was raised to life.’²⁰

Paul recognized that when the Christian responds to the challenge to abandon all concern for self he is identifying with Jesus in his death. So he wrote, ‘We know that the man we once were has been crucified with Christ for the destruction of the sinful self…’²¹ He likened the Christian’s immersion under the water at his baptism to the death and burial of Jesus.²² The self must die before a man can rise to new life. One can speak genuinely of resurrection only when it has been preceded by a real death. When we come to a full appreciation of the significance of the death of Jesus we are already on the verge of what is meant by his resurrection.

Ernst Käsemann concluded an article on The Pauline Theology of the Cross as follows: ‘For Paul the glory of Jesus consists in the fact that he makes his disciples on earth willing and capable to bear the cross after him, and the glory of the church and of Christian life consists in the fact that they have the honor of glorifying the crucified Christ as the wisdom and power of God, to seek salvation in him alone, and to let their lives become a service to God under the sign of Golgotha. The theology of the resurrection is at this point a chapter in the theology of the cross, not its supersession.’²³

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the way to understand the resurrection of Jesus is first of all to become convinced of the unique significance of his death. Those who defend the view that the resurrection of Jesus was an historical event in the physical world unintentionally detract from the significance of the death of Jesus, the real center of Christian proclamation, by making it dependent upon a subsequent event. Bultmann is right when he says, ‘You cannot prove the redemptive efficacy of the cross by invoking the resurrection.’²⁴ This reversal of order -- resurrection first, and then the unveiling of the significance of his death -- is not Biblical. Paul wrote, ‘Bearing the human likeness, revealed in human shape, he humbled himself, and in obedience accepted even death -- death on a cross. Therefore God raised him to the heights and bestowed on him the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow . . . and every tongue confess, "Jesus Christ is Lord"…’²⁵

Hugh Anderson has pointed out that James Denney, the well-known Scottish scholar of the beginning of the century, saw clearly that ‘what Easter revealed was the Cross standing at the heart of everything’ and because of this may be said to have pre-figured ‘certain emphases that have appeared in Bultmann’. He went on to say, ‘if the proof of a theology is in its preaching, Bultmann’s understanding of the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen as a summons to men to die to the world with Christ in order to live unto God is near the heart of the true evangel. The essence of the message is that in and through the Cross, where all human hope is silenced and all human dreams are vanquished, God speaks the Word of life in death.’²⁶

As we have seen in Chapter 10 we can no longer recover the actual historical development by which the apostles came to see the significance of the death of Jesus. They must have wrestled with the ‘offence’ of the cross, in the light of the teaching of Jesus and of their memory of all that he had been. It was in this development, now lost to us, that they heard the Easter message which was God’s answer to their problem. They recognized that the death of Jesus was not the destruction of all they had begun to hope for in Jesus their Master. It was not an embarrassing set-back which had to be explained away. It was not a hopeless defeat. The death of Jesus was the way to a new beginning. It was the first step in a new message of hope for mankind. It was the foundation of good news for men. This was the seed of the Easter message. In the eyes of God the death of Jesus had been fully vindicated. This man, though dead, was one worth living for and dying for. God had made him the Lord of men. The apostles went out and proclaimed, ‘Let all Israel then accept as certain that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.’²⁷

The New Testament preserves for us many and various expressions of the Easter faith from men of the first century. But faith involves a person in personal conviction, trust and commitment, and it consequently cannot be transmitted like an object to be given away and received. The Easter faith is no exception. Each man, in each generation, must come to a fresh and first-hand experience of what Easter faith means. To achieve this it is not sufficient to go back to the empty tomb. We must go back to the life and death of Jesus. That is where Easter faith begins.

It is a tragic paradox, and indeed a travesty, of Christianity that it has so often been proclaimed to men as a way to save themselves and to reach a haven of eternal security. This is to mistake the significance of the death of Jesus and indeed often to ignore it altogether. It is impossible to understand Christianity as a whole, or the resurrection of Jesus in particular, until we have come to terms with what the crucifixion did to Jesus, and what it challenges us to do. The confession of Jesus as Lord begins with the understanding of the cross, and the understanding of the cross begins with the readiness to empty oneself of all concern for oneself here or hereafter.

It is in coming to terms with the death of Jesus that we find an answer to our search for meaning, in face of the complex nature of finite existence and the problems raised by evil, suffering and death. What Jesus has done for us in our day, by his teaching, his living and his dying on the cross, is to take the sting out of death. For those who respond to him in faith he has ‘broken the power of death’²⁸ The response of faith involves one in taking up the cross and sharing in the death of Christ. To the extent to which we learn how to abandon self-interest and to die daily²⁹, death loses its power to threaten us in any terrifying or disillusioning way, for there is nothing further it can take away from us. We too can say that there is ‘nothing in death or life . . . that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.³⁰

Yet the very taking up of the cross can be a hard and painful business. The Christian life is no bed of roses. The Christian, by his very allegiance to Christ, is not delivered out of the evil and suffering in the world, but is led to become increasingly involved with them. He is continually learning more of what it means to ‘share in Christ’s sufferings’.³¹ This loving concern, by which he is prepared to lose himself for Christ in the tragic side of life, constitutes a more than adequate reason for living. It enables him to find in life a meaning which transcends death and which death can no longer destroy.

In the last chapter we explained that the ‘resurrection of the dead’ expresses the hope that the whole of a man’s life from beginning to end will be raised before the divine Judgment Seat and be accepted by God as possessing something of value which will give it an eternal meaning. When the life and death of Jesus are viewed against the background of this hope (and this is part, at least, of what the apostles did after the death of Jesus) those who have felt the attraction of what Jesus said and did are led to the conviction that the judgment of God is already clear. The life and death of Jesus are such that he is to be acclaimed worthy of all the allegiance that men can offer to him. Jesus is to be confessed as Lord. The writer of the Apocalypse put it this way, ‘Worthy is the Lamb, the Lamb that was slain, to receive all power and wealth, wisdom and might, honor and glory and praise !’ ³²

The first affirmation we are making when we confess that God raised Jesus from the dead is that the resurrection hope which we hold for all men has already become for us a living reality in the case of this man Jesus. We are saying that Jesus has been raised before the divine judge and finally vindicated. His death was not a defeat but a victory. The death of Jesus did not bring to an end his power to attract men and to lead them to new life; on the contrary, because of his very death his power and influence have been experienced by men more fully and more widely. When we say ‘Jesus is risen’ we are attempting to express what we believe to be the divine judgment concerning him, namely, that he has been exalted to the highest possible role, Son of God and Lord of men. This was expressed in the imagery of myth by saying he is ‘seated at the right hand of God’.³³

Here we pause to make a little clearer what we mean by the word ‘Jesus’ in this Easter message of exaltation. We do not mean a contemporary human being of flesh and blood in either earth or heaven. There is none such to be found. We mean the historical Jesus who lived and died at the beginning of the Christian era. We do not mean a ghostly or immortal part of that Jesus which has survived death. We mean all that Jesus was and did during the length of his whole life through his teaching, his ministering, his self-giving and his death.

One way for allowing for both the continuity and the discontinuity which need to be understood between the earthly Jesus and the risen Christ is to say, ‘In the body he was put to death; in the spirit he was brought to life.’³⁴ But this leads us to two further difficulties. It is probable that ancient men used the word ‘spirit’ rather differently from us, for an unseen spiritual world was an accepted part of their world-view. Even among ourselves it is not at all clear if we mean the same thing when we say, for example, that God is spirit. In the second place, ever since the Lucan chronology (placing the resurrection of Christ on the third day and the pouring Out of the Holy Spirit on the fiftieth day) became the accepted tradition, and this led to the hypostatizing of the Holy Spirit as the third Person of the Trinity, we have been accustomed to making a fairly rigid separation between the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit.

But there is widespread agreement among New Testament scholars that in the apostolic period there was no such clear distinction between the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit. G. H. C. Macgregor wrote, ‘The real significance of the Resurrection for Paul is seen in the fact that time and again he practically identifies the Risen Lord, at least in His activity, with the Holy Spirit.’³⁵ By way of example let us note how Paul wrote to the Romans, ‘You are on a spiritual level, if only God’s Spirit dwells within you; and if a man does not possess the Spirit of Christ, he is no Christian. But if Christ is dwelling within you…’³⁶ Here it is clear that ‘Paul can speak of the Spirit’s indwelling as the presence of the risen Christ in the Christian.’ Indeed there is one place where, as D. M. Stanley further remarks, ‘With somewhat disconcerting brevity Paul can assert that "The Lord is the Spirit".’³⁷

If the Lucan tradition had not established the pattern for later understanding both of the risen Christ and of the Holy Spirit, the category of spirit may have continued to be the natural language in which to speak of the risen Christ. In any case it is only by using this category that we can understand the great variety of ways in which Paul felt free to speak of the risen Lord. There are places where he resorts to the imagery of myth and speaks of Christ as if he were living an unseen life with God in a heavenly realm above, from which he would descend to appear on the earth at the imminent end-time.³⁸ At other times Paul could speak of the church as the body of Christ, of which the Christian believers formed ‘the limbs and organs’.³⁹ He exhorted the Galatians to ‘put on Christ as a garment’,⁴⁰ he said to the Romans, ‘Let Christ Jesus himself be the armor that you wear’,⁴¹ and he told the Galatians how he was in travail until they ‘took the shape of Christ’.⁴² In various ways Paul spoke of the risen Christ as an indwelling presence in the believer, the most moving passage being his own testimony, I have been crucified with Christ; the life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me; and my present bodily life is lived by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.’⁴³

Just as in so much of Paul’s language the Jesus who was raised from the dead must be understood in terms of spirit, so also this remains the most satisfactory, if not indeed the only, category in which to understand the nature of the risen Christ. If the Christian is to experience any kind of encounter or personal relationship with the risen Christ then it must be in the realm of the spirit. It is important to note that, in the last resort, the truth of the claim that Jesus is risen is to be tested primarily by the examination of contemporary Christian experience rather than by research in ancient documents. Unless there is some way in which contemporary Christians can show the significance of confessing that Jesus is risen now, whatever may have happened to originate the Easter faith in the first-century Palestine becomes largely irrelevant. Since no one can point to Jesus today in bodily or physical form, we arc forced to resort to the category of spirit in which to speak about him.

We are now ready to discuss the second affirmation we are making when we say Jesus was raised from the dead. At the very point where the significance of the cross takes hold of us, we become involved in what may be called a personal encounter. When we find ourselves attracted and challenged by the cross, this is more than just an idea of our own that has happened to strike us. It is truer to say that we find ourselves addressed by a living Word, which calls us, makes demands upon us and forces us to a decision. This Word emanates from God. But it comes to us through the life and death of Jesus. We may say that it is Jesus himself who encounters us in the proclamation of his life and death. Such a statement need not be interpreted in any mystical sense, though those who wish are free to do so. The Jesus who lived and died speaks to us and calls to us through the medium of the Christian proclamation. When Christ is truly proclaimed⁴⁴ or ‘set forth’,⁴⁵ it is Jesus who encounters us.

This encounter caused the first apostles to say Jesus had ‘appeared’ to them and to proclaim that God had raised him from the dead. It caused Paul to say that he had been blinded by a light, and had heard the voice of the risen and exalted Christ. Because this is a personal encounter, various men will describe it in quite different ways. But in every genuine confession of the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ there must be some element of personal testimony. As we warned in the beginning, in making this confession the Christian is saying something about himself as well as about Jesus. The grounds upon which the contemporary Christian makes this confession must differ in some respects from those of the first apostles. They had known Jesus in the flesh. We have known him only as he has been remembered and proclaimed by the church. Our grounds for making this confession may arise from the Christ-like qualities of love, gentleness or selflessness, which we have encountered in certain Christians. In the quality of the lives of such men Jesus has ‘appeared’ to us. This enables us to join the community of witnesses who confess with joy that God raised Jesus from the dead. The second thing we are affirming in this confession is the presence of Jesus in our world; we testify to his livingness or what we may call his eternal contemporaneity.

The third affirmation has to do with the new strength of willpower which comes to those who respond in faith to the encounter. The paradox of Christian living is that the more one submits in obedience to Christ as Lord, the more one becomes a free man. The more one is prepared to abandon self-interest and to die to the world, the more one experiences new life. The readiness to die releases a new and unexpected source of power. There are many ways, both religious and psychological, of explaining this liberating experience. The Christian traces it back to the Word Christ addresses to him through the cross. It led Paul to speak of ‘the power of the resurrection’,⁴⁶ and to refer to ‘all the power and energy of Christ at work’⁴⁷ in him.

When the Christian confesses that God raised Jesus from the dead he is testifying to the source of spiritual strength which enables him to overcome lethargy and temptation, to continue in the bearing of the cross, and to become involved in the pain and suffering of the world with an attitude of hope. The amazing vigor, enthusiasm, joy and energy which burst out among Christians in the apostolic period constitute an essential part of the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, even though such gifts have been traditionally attributed to the Holy Spirit. The seed falls into the ground and dies, yet rises to new life in the harvest which follows. Jesus ‘in obedience accepted even death’,⁴⁸ yet rose again to new life in the ‘harvest of the Spirit’.⁴⁹ Wherever Christians meet in the name of Jesus, his risen presence is there.⁵⁰ Wherever Christians are inspired and strengthened for acts of mercy, love, goodwill in the promotion of social harmony and human welfare, the presence of the risen Christ is to be hailed.

There is always the danger that, when once the joy of the Easter message has been heard, the cross will be forgotten or gilded over. This can lead only to disillusionment. Our final word on the meaning of the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ must be a return to the cross. It is the crucified Jesus who is exalted as Son of God and Lord of men. It is the Jesus who truly died who has been raised to spiritual life in a new form in the community which bears his name. It is the man who is willing to bear the cross to the end of his days who knows the meaning of resurrection and the secret of eternal life. For eternal life does not mean the endless prolongation of a conscious self but a life of such quality that, having no further concern for self-interest, can transcend death and rise to a fresh mode of manifestation in the lives of men who follow. It is in this sense that Christians use the idiom of resurrection to confess their faith in Jesus and say that God raised him from the dead. Those who share his sufferings and die with him will also rise with him in the ‘resurrection of the dead’. In the idiom of resurrection this is the Christian hope.

Notes:

1. Kerygma and Myth, Ed. by H. W. Bartsch, p. 42. To the extent to which Paul, in Cor. 15, leaves us with the impression that the resurrection can be substantiated on historical grounds, he leads us astray. Barth denies that Paul attempts any such apologetic demonstration here. See Church Dogmatics, IV:2, p. 143. Bultmann thinks that Paul does here attempt, though mistakenly, ‘to guarantee the resurrection of Christ as an objective fact’. See Theology of the New Testament, Vol. I, p. 295.

2. See pp. 16-19 above.

3. It is interesting to note that in books by more conservative theologians, e.g. Jean Dani6lou, one sometimes finds the terms ‘resurrection’ and ‘resuscitation’ being used synonymously.

4. See C. F. Evans, op. cit., pp. 135-7.

5. Marxsen touches upon this issue in The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, pp. 32, 42-4.

6. John 11:25.

7. op. cit., p. 10.

8. Gal. 6:14. See also I Cor. 1:18, 23, 2:2.

9. Kerygma and Myth, ed. H. W. Bartsch, Vol. I, p. 41.

10. Hebrews 10:12, 19, 20.

11. Col. 1:21-2. See also Rom. 5:6-21.

12. See Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor, for a study of the three main theories of the atonement.

13. See God in the New World, Chaps. 9 and 11.

14. I Cor. 15:26.

15. Rom. 7:24.

16. op. cit., Vol. II, p. 303.

17. Mark 8:34-6. See also Matt. 10:39, 16:24-6, Luke 9:23-5.

18. John 12:25.

19. Phil. 27.

20. 2 Cor. 5:15.

21. Rom. 6:6.

22. Rom. 6:4.

23. Interpretation, Vol. XXIV, 2, p. 177 (italics mine). The articles in this issue were prepared for a theological committee of the Evangelische Kirche der Union in northern Germany and constitute a companion volume to those which were published as The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ.

24. Kerygma and Myth, p. 40.

25. Phil. 2:8-11.

26. op. cit., pp. 206-7.

27. Acts 2:36.

28. 2 Tim. 1:10.

29. 1 Cor. 15:31. See also Rom. 6:5,6, 8, 7:6,8:13,2 Cor. 4:10-Il, Gal. 2:20, 6:14, 2 Tim. 2:11, I Peter 4:13.

30. Rom. 8:38-9.

31. I Peter 4:13.

32. Rev. 5:12. See also 5:9-10. Note also that in Mark’s view it was when the centurion witnessed the crucifixion that he confessed ‘Truly this man was a son of God’. (Mark 15:39)

33. Col. 3:2. See also Rom. 8:34, Eph. 1:20, Peter 3:22.

34. Peter 3:18.

35. op. cit., p. 218.

36. Rom. 8:9-10.

37. 2 Cor. 3:17. See Christ’s Resurrection in Pauline Soteriology, p. 283.

38. 1 Thess. 4:16-17,2 Thess. 1:7.

39. 1 Cor. 6:15, 52112-13, 27, Eph. 4:16, 5:30, Col. 1:2.

40. Gal. 3:27.

41. Rom. 13:14.

42. Gal. 4:19.

43. Gal. 2:20. But see also Phil. 1:20, Eph. 3:17,2 Cor. 13:5.

44. Phil. 1:15.

45. Phil. 1:18.

46. Phil. 3:10.

47. Col. 1:29.

48. Phil. 2:8.

49. Gal. 5:22.

50. Matt. 18:20.

The path of the idiom of resurrection has led us up to our own time. We must now discuss what meaning or value the idiom of resurrection may have for us if we continue to use it. There are two areas in the creeds and confessions of the church where it has always been found. Since the Jewish belief in the general resurrection was the necessary forerunner for the Christian affirmation of the resurrection of Jesus, we shall turn first to the meaning for our day of the words in the Nicene Creed, ‘I look for the resurrection of the dead’. In the final chapter we shall discuss what it means to affirm the resurrection of Jesus.

Today there is wider diversity of Christian thought on the ‘resurrection of the dead’ than ever before. At one extreme there are many conservative Christians, both in sects and in the major communions, who, because of their belief in the authority and inerrancy of Holy Scripture, still look expectantly to a future point in time when the world will come to a sudden end and when, at the Judgment which follows, there will be a general resurrection of all the dead in some bodily form. At the other extreme there is an even greater number of Christians for whom the traditional picture of the end-time, when taken literally, has lost most, if not all, of its reality. The ‘resurrection of the dead’ has meant for them a way of speaking of personal immortality. Between the extremes there is a wide variety of intermediate interpretations, many of them never very clearly thought out.

It is important to acknowledge, first of all, that the view of the universe which modern knowledge has opened up to us¹ has made impossible any literal acceptance of the New Testament hope of an imminent cataclysmic end-time, just as it has done with the Old Testament account of a six-day creation. Further, astro-physics and radio-astronomy have now opened up to us a universe of such dimensions in space and time that it is no longer clear in what meaningful way we can speak at all of its having either a beginning or an end. The time periods involved have become magnified to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish clearly between the finite and the infinite. To say that the universe will come to an end only after an infinite period of time is identical with saying it will never come to an end. John Macquarrie has rightly said, ‘Eschatology has been existentially neutralized when the end gets removed to the distant future.’²

The traditional expectation of a final ‘resurrection of the dead’ is but one element of this New Testament picture of the end-time. The whole picture has been transmitted to us in the images and symbols of mythology. During the last hundred years it has become increasingly clear that the Biblical accounts both of the beginning, and of the end, of the world are in the form of myths which cannot be accepted in a literal or chronological sense. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, ‘The Biblical symbols cannot be taken literally because it is not possible for finite minds to comprehend that which transcends and fulfils history. The finite mind can only use symbols and pointers of the character of the eternal.’³

Ever since the end of the first century the myth of the end-time has been open to a variety of re-interpretations in Christian thought. Even when the other elements of this eschatological picture were inclined to be abandoned, the element of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ was retained, largely because of the Christian affirmation of the resurrection of Jesus. Once the resurrection of Jesus had come to be understood as a miraculous historical event it was regarded as undergirding and guaranteeing the general resurrection. Now that the traditional view of the resurrection of Jesus has collapsed, as we have shown in Part I, we must reckon with the implications this has for the general resurrection, which Christian believers have long regarded as the Christian hope of personal immortality.

Our study has clearly shown that the expectation of the resurrection of the dead is not a uniquely Christian belief. Not only are some of its roots to be found in ancient Persian religion, but throughout most of the Christian era, the resurrection hope has been shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Marxsen pertinently comments, ‘If someone today wants to come to terms with the question as to what will happen to him after he is dead, he can of course fall back on the idea of the resurrection. But he must be clear about the fact that this would not be a specifically Christian support.’⁴

To concern oneself with the resurrection hope simply for the purpose of grasping hold of what seems to be a viable approach to personal immortality does not, however, do full justice to this first-century doctrine. The resurrection hope originated as part of a much bigger and more complex eschatological picture. To appreciate what relevance resurrection may continue to have for our day, we must go back and look at this picture as a whole.

We have spoken of the first-century verbal picture of the imminent end-time as a myth. It is a great mistake to conclude that we thereby deprive it of all value and meaning.⁵ When man reaches the limits of his empirical knowledge about himself and his world, he confesses his faith, or his response to life, in the form of myth and poetry. Such forms of expression are subject to great variety in the course of history, for they are the product of the fertile human imagination, and their popularity depends upon the prevailing mood of an age, and upon the capacity of their symbolism to communicate with the ‘ring of truth’.

Ancient Israel developed an almost unique concern with the course and significance of human history.⁶ Because they thought of history, not as something which keeps repeating itself in cycles, but as a straight line of unique and unrepeatable events which look back to a beginning and forward to an end, it is only to be expected that their Holy Scriptures should have expressed an interest in both the beginning and the end of history (or what the Germans can so conveniently refer to as the Urzeit and the Endzeit). Yet because the beginning-time and the end-time lie beyond the limits of known history, the only possible way of talking about them was then, and still is, to draw upon the language of myth.

About a century ago it was becoming clear that the opening chapters of Genesis are not to be regarded as history. They deal with the beginning-time, which is pre-history. The story of the garden of Eden can be classed as a myth, but that does not deprive it of meaning. The value of the stories of creation is that they proclaim something about divine creativity, to acknowledge which is a profession of faith on our part. In the creation myths we are confessing that everything which is finite and creaturely, including ourselves, stands in a relationship of dependence upon the Creator. We creatures are not of spontaneous origin and self-sufficient. For our very existence we are dependent upon forces outside of ourselves. We are created: God alone is the Creator.⁷

We have come to recognize that creation is not something that happened exclusively, or even primarily, at some far-off beginning. The view that divine creation all took place at the beginning of time, as Christian tradition has often commonly assumed, is seriously defective. Creation is something that may go on in the universe at any time and all the time. This is especially clear when we think of all that is created, in terms of a relationship of dependence. The creation myths attempt, by using the beginning-time as the reference point, to proclaim a truth about the relationship of dependence, which is not confined to any one point in time, but which pervades all time.

In the same way the myth of the end-time is not a literal prophecy of something which is going to happen chronologically at the end of history. At every moment of time the universe remains related to that which it will become, as it remains related to that from which it emanated. As dependence characterizes the relationship to the Creator, so responsibility characterizes the relationship to the Judge. Naturally enough we look back to the beginning as we think of the former, and forward to the end when we think of the latter.

We must come to acknowledge that judgment is not something to be thought of exclusively, or even primarily, at some far-off end point in the future. Judgment is something that may be going on in the world of men at any time and all the time. The myth of the Last Judgment attempts, by using the end-time as the reference point, to proclaim a truth about human responsibility which is not confined to any point in time, but which pervades all time.

It consequently follows that at any point in our lives both creation and judgment impinge upon us at one and the same time. This is illustrated rather well by the fact that the creation story of the garden of Eden concludes with an act of judgement, while the myth of the Last Judgement, as expressed so vividly in Revelation 20, leads immediately into the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

Let us look at another way of appreciating the value of the myth of the end-time. When we go to the theatre we see the play performed before an elaborate backdrop. We all know this is not the real thing in the way the actors are real people. The value of the backdrop does not depend upon its being real, (for we know it to be the artistic creation of the stage designer) but on whether It helps us to participate in a more real way with the action on the stage, and to discern the significance of the words and actions of the play. The myth of the end-time may be regarded as the backdrop which helps us to understand the meaning of what is happening on the human stage here and now. The judgment which the myth portrays within the context of the end-time is really taking place already in the stream of human history. When Jesus related the parables of judgement, such as the talents, and the sheep and the goats, he was teaching his hearers how to discern the significance of their own actions in the life of each day.

The biblical images and pictures of the end-time must be acknowledged for what they are, not forecasts of either an emendator distant future, but myth, used to portray graphically the meaning of the present. While we have tried to show in this way that their classification as myth does not deprive them of meaning, we would only be deluding ourselves if we concluded that the ancient Jew and Christian also classed them as myth. Because ancient man did not draw such a clear line of distinction between myth and history, it was possible for the myth of the end-time to hold a particular kind of reality for him which it cannot hold for us, and there is no point in attempting to disguise this difference. We live in a vastly different context of thought from that of ancient man. As the first-century Jews and Christians were men of their own time, so are we men of our own time. In using what is now called myth, in the way in which they did, they were making a genuine response; in classing it as myth in the way we do, we are being true to the insights of our time. But this leaves us with a problem. Up until the end of the nineteenth century each generation of Christians read the New Testament as if its writers were speaking directly to them and out of a context identical with that of all their later readers. It was a great shock to liberal Protestant theology of the turn of the century when men like Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) and Johannes Weiss (1863-19I4) drew attention to the eschatological character of the New Testament and made it clear that Jesus, his apostles, and the early churches, all lived and spoke in a thought-world which, in important respects, is completely foreign to us. The recognition of this difference of viewpoint has opened up a widening gulf between us and the men who wrote the New Testament. We are still in the process of adjusting ourselves to it in theological circles. In lay circles this gulf has hardly yet begun to be recognized, and where it has, the result has been mainly one of bewilderment and confusion. The whole program of ‘demythologizing’, initiated in that form by Rudolf Bultmann, has been made necessary by the fact that much of New Testament thought is set within the context of the expectation of an imminent end-time, described in mythical images, which possessed a dimension of reality which they can no longer convey to us. How are we to express in our terms what this myth meant for first-century man?

The first thing worth noting is the cosmic dimension of the myth of the end-time. This was not narrowly confined to the eternal destiny of the individual in the way the hope of personal immortality has so often been. Although the evolution of the myth in Judaism received particular stimulus from the concern for martyrs, it did not confine itself even to the Jewish people. The canvas on which the picture of the end-time was painted was simply breath-taking in its comprehensive scope. It included all nations; it caught up the four corners of the known world; it embraced heaven and earth, the entire universe.

The conception of the end-time has possessed this cosmic character ever since it had begun to take shape in Israelite thought; and that was long before Persian influence came to be felt. The pre-exilic prophets were already speaking of the judgment to fall ‘in the latter days’ as one in which the God of Israel ‘will be judge between nations, arbiter among many peoples’⁸ and where the divine judgment would result in a new kind of world in which ‘the wolf shall live with the sheep, and the leopard lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall grow up together, and a little child shall lead them’.⁹

The significance of the myth of the end-time for us must be no less cosmic than it was for the ancients, whose breadth of vision, when carefully examined, is little short of amazing. But our universe, that is, the universe as we have come to view it, is Immeasurably vaster, one in which the little planet home on which we live pales into an insignificant speck. What is to be the end, the true purpose, of this vast universe? For what purpose, if any, does it exist? No discussion of human destiny is adequate which is content to ignore such questions.

The ancient myth of the end-time, by virtue of its cosmic character, was much broader in its outlook than the eschatological concerns of many later Christians. If we take the trouble to appreciate to the full the nature of this myth in its original context it can force us to stretch our minds more than we are often willing to do. The quest for an adequate Christian eschatology has too often become narrowed down to the concern for personal immortality. This is altogether far too self-centered and myopic. Out of the concern for personal immortality traditional Christian thought proceeded to construct in imagination a spiritual world in which the blessed enjoy their immortal existence. This other-world, however, represents a retreat, or even an escape, from the empirical world, and is not at all what the ancient myth had in mind. The latter was not intent upon finding a way for people to reach the safe haven of a heavenly world, leaving the earthly world to carry on in its own merry way. On the contrary it was concerned with the destiny of the whole of the cosmos as then known, and attempted in the medium of myth, to discern its purpose, or end. For this reason it pictured the Last Judgment as taking place in the earthly world, but at the end-time. Only later eschatological thought gave way to the conviction that the earth is no fit place for the eternal Kingdom of God.

Any adequate understanding of the destiny of the individual person must stem from a concern for the ‘end’ of the whole universe, and not vice-versa. Because of its cosmic breadth, the ancient myth of the end-time still has something to teach us. John Macquarrie has noted that ‘much of the traditional Christian eschatology, whether conceived as the cosmic drama of the indefinite future or as the future bliss of the individual after death, has rightly deserved the censures of Marxists and Freudians who have seen in it the flight from the realities of present existence’.¹⁰

The myth calls us to lift up our eyes to the furthest horizon of our universe. The whole of it is our concern -- not just one’s own self, but one’s neighborhood -- not just one’s neighborhood, but one’s nation -- not just one’s nation, but the whole human race -- not just the human race, but all of created life -- not just this little planet, but the vast space inhabited by innumerable stars and nebulae. As we look out at this world we are to ask, not simply ‘What is the chief end of man?’ but ‘What is the end of the universe?’ for that includes the end of our earth and of man, which in turn includes one’s own end.

This is a suitable point to move on to the next important aspect of the myth of the end-time, namely that it does concern the ‘end’. The fact that our word ‘end’ has two meanings, that of ‘conclusion’ and that of ‘purpose’, is useful in helping us to see how the myth of the end is relevant to what is going on in the present. When a tool has been faithfully used for its proper purpose, its true ‘end’ has been consummated even though, when worn-out, it will end on the scrap-heap. For every created thing and for every living, yet finite, creature, there is an end (or purpose) and there is an end (or conclusion). The judgment to be made at the end (conclusion) is clearly related to whether the end (purpose) has been fulfilled or not. In other words our understanding of the conclusion depends upon the extent to which the raison d’être of the creature or object has been reached. Here we see why the doctrines of creation and eschatology are essentially related. The end (purpose) for which a creature is initially made contributes greatly to the judgment that is to be made at his end (conclusion).

The ancient Israelite myth of creation leaves us in no doubt that in the eyes of God the universe is a very good thing.¹¹ This, incidentally, is where all human hope begins. It rises in the human heart because of the very goodness of the created world in which man finds himself. The seeds of hope are transmitted to man by his Creator through the medium of creation itself. Time would fail to tell of the many occasions in which the contemplation of the created order has brought fresh hope to men.

But this avenue of hope, though basic, does not go long unchallenged. The flower which gives such joy, fades and withers. The life-bringing rain turns into a destructive storm. The joy-bringing harvest season is followed by the cold and static winter. The life that has stimulated so much hope in the human heart turns to decay and death. If hope is to be sustained, or revived, the world must reveal itself to be not only a place which was initially made to be a good thing; it must be a place in which there is revival of life, or resurrection, making it clear that death does not have the last say.

Ancient man recognized that the mystery of resurrection also was built into the world. Life not only concluded in death, but death made way for new life. He recognized it in the changing seasons, and the idiom of resurrection was born to give expression to it in his myths. He recognized it in the successive generations, and because of this, man could contemplate his own coming death and yet continue to look into the future with hope. It is this same principle of the created world which is reflected in the words, ‘A grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.’¹²

This brings us back to the issue we must pursue concerning the purpose of the universe in general and of the human race in particular. It is doubtful if we can give any meaningful answer to the first question. We cannot conceive there not being a universe. We are simply in the situation of finding ourselves existing in a universe which has already long existed, and asking questions about it and ourselves. It is possible, however, to give a meaningful answer to the question, ‘For what purpose does man exist?’ for this can be discussed in relation to the world in which man lives. This does not mean that we shall necessarily give the right answer. Indeed in human history there has been a great variety of answers given.

The answer of the Judeo-Christian tradition is that man has been created to serve God as the highest form of creature, to ‘be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth’.¹³ Furthermore man is created to bear the image of God, and though this may be said to mean that he plays ‘god’ to the rest of living creatures, he himself is still a creature and is responsible to the Creator, who is also Judge.

Man was made to be a creature, even though the highest known form of creature. This means that, like all creatures, he is intended to live for a finite period which is bounded by the limits of birth and death. In the kind of world in which man finds himself a great deal of positive value is dependent upon the phenomenon of death. The whole evolutionary process of development to diverse and higher forms of life would have been impossible if each generation had not been required by death to make way for the next. In the same way the development of human civilization, and the flowering of various human cultures, have been possible only because each generation of men, having transmitted to the next all that it could of its own values and discoveries, has by death made way for its successors. The cynic who referred to the stonewalling tactics of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative by saying, ‘Where there’s death there’s hope’ was putting his finger on a most important positive value of our creatureliness. It is possible to have hope for the world’s future, not in spite of death, but because of death.

The creation myth describes man’s finiteness and creatureliness by saying, ‘Dust you are, to dust you shall return.’¹⁴ Christian exegetes of the creation myth have often interpreted this to mean that human mortality is part of the divine judgment on man’s sin. This is probably incorrect.¹⁵ It was part of the intention in creation. The judgment consisted of the curse, enmity, pain, thorns, sweat, etc., which man would henceforth endure until he returned to the ground from which he was taken.

Of all the views of man and his purpose that were expressed in the ancient world, that of ancient Israel most nearly conforms to the modern knowledge of the human condition. Not only are our physical bodies formed from the physical substance of the earth, but our minds are molded by the particular culture into which we find ourselves born. We are earth-bound creatures and we are history-bound creatures. Just as our physical bodies have evolved to suit the particular conditions on this planet and that of no other known to us, so our minds and spirits have been shaped by our experience to be at home in the particular historical period in which we live. To be suddenly plunged by a science-fiction time-machine into, say, the first century, would be as psychologically traumatic as it would be physiologically fatal to be suddenly landed on the planet Jupiter.

Man has repeatedly rebelled against his creatureliness and sought earnestly for immortality, on the grounds that he thought he was worthy of something better than a finite historical existence. It is remarkable how many theological discussions of the immortality of the human spirit could be boiled down to this argument, ‘I cannot conceive how a loving God can do this to me.’ But this fallacy, however understandable, stems from the misunderstanding of the true purpose of man’s creation. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: ‘All the plausible and implausible proofs for the immortality of the soul are efforts on the part of the human mind to master and to control the consummation of life. They all try to prove in one way or another that an eternal element in the nature of man is worthy and capable of survival beyond death.’¹⁶

From Israel we have learned to see man as a finite creature whose purpose in life is to serve God by the way he lives his life, cares for his fellows, treats all other forms of life and uses the world. In this task he serves not as an individual, but as a member of a community, which, at its greatest extent, is the whole human community. The end of a man’s life can never be divorced from the end of the community. The welfare of the ongoing community, as we have indicated above, depends upon the phenomenon of the death of the individual.

Without in any way wishing to ignore what has been called the ‘tragic sense of life’, let us at this point affirm the positive values of human existence, finite though it is. From Israel we have learned to see it as an opportunity for making a worthwhile contribution to the human community in which we live. We have also learned from them that life is intended to be enjoyed. Enjoyment which is selfishly grasped for its own sake may turn out to be short-lived. The more satisfying enjoyment of life depends upon making the right responses to the needs of the community around us, in short, of offering the contribution to the world, for which we have the potential and which may be said to be the end, or purpose, for which we exist.

It is within a man’s lifetime that he either fulfils, or fails to fulfil, the purpose of his life. Sometimes this can be clearly seen as he reaches the peak of a very fruitful career, but often the question of whether a man has fulfilled his potential is much more problematical. The question itself is one of judgment. This is a convenient place, therefore, to move on to the next important truth expressed in the ancient myth of the end-time. It consistently described how, at the end of time, men would appear before the Judgment Seat of God to give an account of their lives, to hear the sentence of judgment passed, and to receive the due reward or punishment.

It has already been pointed out that the judgment described in the myth is a projection on to the backdrop of the judgment already taking place in daily life. Throughout quite a long period of ancient Israel it was readily recognized that judgment is experienced in the present life. There was a strong conviction, to be found clearly in Deuteronomy, in many of the Psalms, and in the mouth of Job’s comforters, that a man receives the due rewards and punishments for his deeds during the course of his own lifetime. The author of Job effectively showed that this interpretation of judgment is too simple to be viable. Life is much more complex than that. Many a man, at least in the eyes of his fellows, seems to end his life either with a credit-balance of meritorious deeds for which he has never received adequate recognition, or, more likely, with a debit-balance of evil deeds for which he has apparently suffered no adequate penalty.

It was the dubious issue of whether one can actually be sure that there is true judgment in the on-going scene that led to the evolution of the myth of the Last Judgment. No one has expressed the cry for final vindication better than the author of Job:

It is most important to recognize that the myth of the Last Judgment took root in Judaism to satisfy, not a longing for personal immortality, but a longing to be assured that this is not a meaningless topsy-turvy world, but one in which righteousness and justice are ultimately victorious. In the above words, Job is seeking not immortality, but vindication. The myth of the Last Judgment was originally not concerned with what happened after the judgment had been passed. It was natural, however, that in the course of time the description of the judgment should be followed by references to eternal bliss, or eternal punishment.

When, in the second century BC., the Jews experienced an increasing amount of persecution and martyrdom on account of their religious faith, the myth of the end-time received a sudden boost. The Jews were concerned for the injustice which they felt the martyrs had suffered. They sought assurance that the death of these men would be vindicated. The myth gave that assurance. But we must not overlook the point that their sense of assurance also implied that they believed that they could already see how the divine sentence would he uttered. If there had been any real doubt about this, the myth of a final judgment would not have helped in the situation one little bit.

The myth of the Last Judgment enabled the Jews, and later the Christians, to believe already that the martyrs had not died in vain, for God would be certain to vindicate their faith and loyalty by his divine pronouncement. The imaginative pictures of the myth provided an expression of their faith that the divine judgment was already certain even in their own time though it was not yet clearly to be seen. The death of the martyrs, in other words, was believed already to contain, in their act of self-denial and sacrifice, the certainty of divine vindication. We may say, in theory of course, that the heart of the myth of the Last Judgment sought primarily an assurance that justice would be done, irrespective of whether the final sentence would be either for or against those who were pinning their faith upon it. Only the maturest of human souls, however, are prepared to continue to long for the judgment under these conditions.

It is salutary to remember that in the course of Christian history those who have been most adamant in proclaiming the reality of the Last Judgment have displayed rather too much assurance that they themselves would be among the ones to hear ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’, while their enemies would be among those to be cast into outer darkness.

The more the myth of the end-time became elaborated, and thought of as a future event, even though imminent, the more it necessitated imagery appropriate to the future. This is the reason why resurrection became a necessary element in the myth -- the resurrection, first of the martyrs, then of the worst offenders, then of all the Jews, and finally of all men. It is important to see that only now, after we have discussed the implications for us of the whole myth of the end-time, are we really ready to discuss the meaning of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ which formed a part of it.

The resurrection of the dead was not so much the heart of the myth of the end-time as a necessary implication of it, once judgment became focussed on the end-time as the reference point. The use of the idiom of resurrection in the myth enabled the myth to possess an air of reality or ‘the ring of truth’. For in the thought-world of Judaism where death had long been acknowledged as the end of personal existence, a Judgment scene at the end of the world would have been devoid of reality if those to be judged could not be considered present.

The first thing to be emphasized here is that the very use of the idiom of resurrection implies that the phenomenon of death is real for the whole person and not just for his physical body. It rules out any view of man which suggests that, in whole or in part, the individual survives death and continues to live a conscious existence. The widespread belief which has existed in many forms and is commonly referred to as ‘life after death’, and of which modern spiritualism is but one example, is eliminated at the outset by the use of the idiom of resurrection. One needs to speak of resurrection only when all forms of belief in personal survival of death have been abandoned.

Here we may pause to reflect on the fact that in human experience it is much easier to believe in human survival than it is in the finiteness of human existence.¹⁸ The almost universal belief in an ‘after-life’ which developed from primitive man onwards was only to be expected. A belief in a personal preexistence has never been as widespread as the belief in personal survival, even though it did contribute to the well known doctrine of reincarnation. Perhaps the reason is that we can ourselves observe the development of a person from a helpless newly-born infant (which we still sometimes catch ourselves calling an ‘it’) to the years of adulthood. But when death cuts us off from a mature person whom we respect and love, it is a different matter. The invisible relationship which has grown up in the course of a long experience is so strong and real that it does survive the phenomenon of death, for a longer or shorter period, and continues to bring to us a sense of the ‘livingness’ of the deceased. If death were always preceded, however, as unfortunately on rare occasions it sometimes is, by a period of slow decay, as long in years as the original period of growth to physical maturity, until any kind of personal communion had been rendered virtually impossible, then we would not only welcome death, as a merciful release, but be less inclined to assume the survival of the deceased in an ‘after-life’. The belief in survival often arises spontaneously in our minds to cushion us against the shock of death and enable us to become adjusted to the new situation.

The completeness of the phenomenon of death is something that it is not at all easy for us to accept. Yet from all sides today modern knowledge of the human creature and his world is forcing us to face up to the finiteness of human existence, to which, in so many ways, Israel pioneered the road. It is a mistake to think that this represents a loss. The tragic aspect of our finiteness is more to be felt when a person dies before his time. This tragic sense of life will be discussed in the last chapter. The life that reaches to ‘threescore years and ten’ or even ‘eighty if our strength holds’¹⁹ can be very good and satisfying, even though it is known from the beginning that it will be ended by death.

The hope of a long and satisfying life is both understandable and fully justified, for it is in accordance with the purpose for which man was made. But the desire for personal survival after death is quite a different matter. The person, whether Christian or not, who feels let down if his expectation of a life after death is shown to have no substance, stands under the rebuke of J.B.S. Haldane when he says, ‘The belief in my own eternity seems to me indeed to be a piece of unwarranted self-glorification, and the desire for it a gross concession to selfishness.’²⁰ John Macquarrie would evidently agree, and on Christian grounds, for he writes, ‘any worthy conception of the ultimate destiny of the individual must be purged from every trace of egocentricity. Often one has the impression that arguments for immortality or for the continued existence of the individual are infected by a wrong kind of self-regard. If the fulfillment of individual existence is to be somehow like God, then this means learning the love that loses itself by pouring itself out; and this might mean that the individual existent must be prepared to vanish utterly into the whole, and for the sake of the whole.’²¹

It has been common for Christians to appeal to the dictum of St. Paul, ‘If it is for this life only that Christ has given us hope, we of all men are most to be pitied.’²² It is not at all certain, however, that Paul intended to convey the particular implication that has so often been taken out of this verse, which the New English Bible renders alternatively, and perhaps more correctly, as, ‘If it is only an uncertain hope that our life in Christ has given us, we of all men are most to be pitied.’

The idiom of resurrection is an expression of hope, but it is one which first of all acknowledges the reality and finality of death. Man was created to be a physical creature (dust of the earth), and an historical creature (shaped by human history, past and present). His existence as a conscious, living being is subject to the limits of birth and death, The book of his life may be said to be opened at birth and closed at death. The idiom of resurrection recognizes this, and it is opposed to alternative views of man, either that a part of man survives death or that death is unreal, an illusion, simply being the name for the veil through which a man passes into a fuller life in another world from which we are ourselves cut off. Resurrection recognizes that death is real and that no part of man survives death. The book of a man’s life is closed. But the closure of the book is not to be confused with the destruction of the book. That is why the comparison of death with the snuffing Out of a candle is a misleading half-truth. The death of a man brings his life to a close, but it does not thereby eliminate what his historical existence has been, as would be the case if he had never lived at all. It is because his book of life is dosed, but not destroyed, that it is possible to go on and speak of resurrection.

The next important thing to recognize about resurrection is that it is not to be confused with resuscitation. Resuscitation is a process by which the near-death or temporary death is reversed and the former life restored. Resurrection has unfortunately all too often been confused with this process of reversal. We have seen this to be largely the case with the Lucan version of the resurrection of Jesus which became the standard tradition through most of Christian history. For this reason it was necessary at the very outset to raise the question of the meaning we attach to the idiom of resurrection. It could be argued that tradition has orientated the term resurrection so much in the direction of resuscitation that it is no longer possible to undo the damage. If Christians wish to continue to use the idiom of resurrection as an expression of hope, then there is no alternative but to keep on attempting to make clear what it means and does not mean.

Whereas resuscitation refers to the elimination or reversal of death, resurrection acknowledges the phenomenon of death in all its completeness and then goes on to become the idiom of hope, not so much by ignoring death as by accepting it. Consequently, it is legitimate to speak of resurrection in terms of ‘victory over death’, but not in terms of the ‘abolition of death’. Resurrection does not abolish death for it does not mean the literal restoration of a person to his former conscious existence, any more than the resurrection of life from the dying seed means the literal restoration of the original seed. The seed dies and remains dead. The new harvest that has drawn its life from the dying seed is essentially another collection of seeds. In the human scene the real parallel to the seed is of course the birth of the new infant, drawing its life from its parents, and receiving much of its personal characteristics from the genes they have transmitted. The generation of new human life in this way has sometimes been regarded as a form of immortality. Though, by itself procreation must be counted as inadequate as an expression of human hope, it must nevertheless be regarded as an important part of the total picture of hope that we are trying to unfold through the idiom of resurrection. There is a sense in which men ‘rise’ to new life in those whom they have procreated and/or influenced.

Resurrection is an idiom which acknowledges the fact of death but does not allow death to have the last word, for it is pointing to the way in which, even in the natural world, death is being followed again and again by a fresh manifestation of life, which has been possible only because of the phenomenon of death. To revert to the earlier metaphor, we may say that resurrection does not mean the re-opening of the book of life so that further chapters may be added, but rather the preservation of the book so that it may be read, and, being read, bring joy, satisfaction and inspiration.

The next important element in the idiom of resurrection is that it is concerned with the destiny of the whole man, soul and body, spirit and flesh. It rejects the implication that man can be divided, into his higher or lower parts, his immortal and his mortal parts. This is why the human concern for the whole person is more carefully safeguarded by this idiom than by any belief in a life after death in which some bodiless spiritual part is thought to survive. It is at this point that we realize there is a great deal to be thankful for in the completeness of death and the implication that it almost certainly means the cessation of the stream of consciousness. This aspect of death is not to be feared, but something to be devoutly hoped for. The thought of being eternally conscious, yet without body, should such a state be even conceivable any more, must be the very worst kind of hell that one could imagine.

The early church fathers, such as Tertullian, who insisted that the resurrection of the dead entailed not only the body but the flesh with all its parts entire, were prompted by the right motives, even if they expressed them with words and in a thought-world which we can no longer share. If there is going to be any way at all of expressing some form of ultimate hope for man, then it must be for the whole person. The restoration of his spirit is, in the end, no more satisfying than the restoration of only one leg. The idiom of resurrection was used to express hope for the whole man.

But what kind of hope can there be for the whole man beyond the point of death, if death is to be understood in the way we have described? At this stage we part company with all traditional expressions of hope which have been based on the continuation of the conscious personal self. Such egocentricity leads to a form of hope which ends only in vanity. If man is to have any hope which may be said to partake of the quality of eternity, it must be one which can be related to the much grander vision of God’s purpose for his universe as a whole.

Man was not created in the first place for his own sake or for his own aggrandizement. Man was created for the glory of God, and he glorifies God by doing the work for which he was created and sent.²³ We have been taught in the Lord’s prayer to pray not ‘That will be glory for me’, but ‘Thine is the glory for ever’. Our chief concern as Christians is to pray ‘Thy kingdom come’. The hope that continues beyond the point of death is that one’s life will be accepted by God as having fulfilled some part, at least, of the purpose for which one was created.

We now see the reason why ‘the resurrection of the dead’ was essentially related to the myth of judgment and must never be divorced from it. The judgment itself is all part of man’s eternal hope. It is sometimes pointed out that ancient man sought deliverance from the wrath to come, medieval man sought deliverance from guilt and modern man seeks deliverance from meaninglessness. These are all facets of judgment. In a world which bewilders us by its complexity and contradictions, our hope is that there is meaning both in the universe and in human existence. In other words, we hope there is a real and continuing form of judgment, which does not cease at the point of our death, but is eternal, moving to an end of completeness. So far as the finite lives of men are concerned, our hope is that our own life and those of others will be accepted by God as having contributed to his purpose for the world. In this way they will have been vindicated, they will have been judged worthwhile and meaningful, and they will not have been lived in vain.

Here we begin to see some meaning for our time in the term ‘the resurrection of the dead’. We are expressing our hope that there is meaning in the life of every man, and because there is meaning, all that we think and say and do is of some importance to the total future of this world. Moreover, the meaning is to be found in the sum total of a man’s life, whether it be long or short. Judgment is not confined to the circumstances of a man just prior to his death. It is the whole life of a man from beginning to end, as written in the book of his life, which rises to God for judgment. A man’s earlier mistakes are considered in the light of his repentance and moral amendment. A man’s moral failures are considered in the light of the environmental handicaps by which his earlier years were shaped. The idiom of resurrection emphasizes that it is not a part, but the whole of a man’s historical existence which is raised before the Judgment seat of God.

The finality of death also means that the opportunity for repentance and amendment comes to an end. The abolition of the doctrine of purgatory was justified not only on biblical grounds, but also because it did not take judgment seriously enough. The call of God to obedient service is always one which must be hearkened to today. Tomorrow may be too late.

Whenever we confess the traditional words of the creed ‘I look for the resurrection of the dead’, we are not comforting ourselves with the hope of personal immortality; we are making a very solemn confession about the serious purpose of life. We are saying that even when death has brought an end to our conscious existence, our whole historical life remains as part of the history of the universe, and, as such, it continues to influence others for better or for worse. That is how the judgment of God manifests itself in the continuing life of the world.

The term ‘resurrection of the dead’ should not be interpreted as a hope for the prolongation or restoration of our own conscious existence. It is a hope for the world in which we live, a hope for the meaning of human life, and a hope that when our conscious existence is ended, the historical life we have lived may be raised before the eternal Judge, and may be vindicated, as being of some value for that Kingdom which is eternal and for whose fuller manifestation on earth we ever pray.

Notes:

1. See Part I of God in the New World.

2. Principles of Christian Theology, p. 316.

3. op. cit., p. 299.

4. The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 178.

5. See Chap. 16 of God in the New World for a discussion of ‘Myth as the Language of Faith’.

6. See Chap. 9 of God in the New World.

7. See J. Macquarrie, op. cit., pp. 194-200.

8. Isaiah 2:4.

9. Isaiah rx:6.

10. op. cit., p. 316.

11. Gen. 1:31.

12. John 12:24.

13. Gen. 1:28.

14. Gen. 3:19.

15. See von Rad, Genesis, p. 92.

16. op. cit., p. 3o5f.

17. Job 19:23-7. The reader should be warned that some of the original Hebrew text is regarded as obscure and unintelligible. See p. 103.

18. The reader is referred to the discussion in The Living God and the Modern World, pp. 108-41 where Peter Hamilton outlines the problem of the traditional doctrine of the after-life more fully than we have room for here.

19. Psalm 90:10.

20. Possible Worlds and Other Essays, p. 210.

21. op. cit., p. 321.

22. 5 Cor. 15:19.

23. Cf. John 17:4.

Because the proclamation of the Easter message came to be made almost exclusively in terms of the resurrection idiom, we have had to spend the last three chapters dealing with that development in some detail. We must now retrace our steps. It was possible for the Easter message to be expressed in the idiom of resurrection because the latter formed part of the eschatological hope already widely held by Jews at the time of Jesus, and shared, it appears, by both Jesus and his disciples. What happened to the Jewish belief that there would be a general resurrection at the end-time?

First of all let us turn our inquiries to the faith of Judaism itself Although in the lifetime of Jesus the resurrection hope had not yet become universal in Judaism, it soon established itself as a fundamental doctrine in the rabbinical Judaism which survived the rise of Christianity. The belief is explicitly affirmed in the second paragraph of the Shemoneh Esreh, or Eighteen Benedictions, a Jewish liturgy which has been traced back to the first century.

But Judaism, as we have seen, had already begun to be influenced by the Greek doctrine of an immortal soul even though this was foreign to the heritage of ancient Israel found in the Hebrew Bible. Some Jewish thinkers became so Hellenised that they came to regard the heavenly bliss of a spiritual soul as a much more worthy expression of human destiny than the thought of an endless life in a material body. This led to tension with those who regarded with alarm any departure from what had by then become fairly standard belief.²

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the most famous Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, included the doctrine of the resurrection as the last of his Thirteen Principles of Faith -- ‘I believe with perfect faith that there will be a resurrection of the dead at the time when it shall please the Creator.’ Yet some thought that even Maimonides was in danger of identifying resurrection with the immortality of the soul. So he was led to write a treatise in which he Set out to show that a spiritual view of immortality was not in conflict with the doctrine of the return of the soul to the body.

The tension between these two modes of expressing the hope of immortality is still to be found in contemporary Judaism. Orthodox Jewish thinkers look for a future resurrection in a literal sense, though they are not unanimous as to whether this will include only the righteous, or all the Jewish people, or will embrace all of mankind. Conservative Judaism tends to identify resurrection with the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Reform Judaism has rejected the doctrine of resurrection, particularly in any literal form, pointing out that its Persian origin shows it to be a foreign import into Jewish thought.³

The belief in a future resurrection was borrowed from Judaism by Muhammed and became a permanent part of the faith of Islam. The Koran has much to say about the future Judgment, the bliss to be enjoyed by the faithful and the eternal fire to be endured by the unbelievers. Much of the language and imagery has been taken over from both Jewish and Christian thought and is not always used in exactly the same way. ‘The Day of Resurrection’ is treated largely as a synonym for ‘The Day of Judgment’ and the resurrection idiom seems to have been used mainly because it was part of the Jewish and Christian eschatology from which it was borrowed. Nevertheless the idiom is there, as the following excerpts from the Koran clearly show.

In rabbinical Judaism, and even more so in Islam, the hope of a future resurrection became quite divorced from the context of an imminent end-time to which it belonged in the late post-exilic Jewish thought. It had become one standard idiom among others for the description of the hope of personal immortality. As we shall see, something similar happened in Christianity.

We shall now trace the path taken in Christian thought by the hope of a general resurrection, a doctrine, which, far from being unique to Christianity, has been shared by Jew and Muslim, and which, in the first place, as we have seen, was partly borrowed from Persian Zoroastrianism.

For the first twenty years after the death of Jesus it was believed by many Jews and by most Christians, so far as we are able to ascertain, that the end-time was very near and this would usher in the New Age, to the accompaniment of the resurrection of those who had died before its arrival. A fairly clear picture of this has been provided for us by Paul. ‘We who are left alive until the Lord comes shall not forestall those who have died; because at the word of command, at the sound of the archangel’s voice and God’s trumpet-call, the Lord himself will descend from heaven; first the Christian dead will rise, then we who are left alive shall join them, caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.’⁷

The belief in a general resurrection at the end-time proved no problem at all so long as Christianity was spreading amongst Jews, to whom it was already familiar and acceptable. But difficulties arose as soon as the Gospel spread to the Gentile, Hellenistic world, where it was unknown and sounded strangely primitive. Since the Greeks (as indeed most of the ancient world though often in vague and undefined ways) were accustomed to think of death in terms of the survival of an immaterial soul, the Jewish emphasis on the resurrection of the fleshly body seemed not only unnecessary, but unspiritual and even repellent.

This is largely the problem that arose in the Corinthian Church, for whom Paul embarked on the fullest explanation of resurrection that the New Testament contains. Paul, it should be noticed, never charged them with doubting the Easter faith concerning Jesus Christ. He simply States that some Corinthian Christians were saying, ‘There is no resurrection of the dead.’⁸ In becoming Christians they had accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and they could regard themselves as called by God ‘to share in the life of his Son Jesus Christ’, as they waited ‘expectantly for our Lord Jesus Christ to reveal himself’.⁹

Paul set out to convince them of the resurrection of the dead by reminding them of the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus, which was central to the Gospel they had already received, and which they do not seem to have doubted. His argument, even when his premises about the resurrection of Christ are accepted, does not prove that there will be a future resurrection of the dead, but simply establishes the fact that the categorical denial of the possibility of resurrection was inconsistent with their faith in the risen Christ.

It is possible that Paul, because of his own Jewish background, did not fully appreciate the difficulties faced by the Gentile Christians. They were not denying a doctrine of immortality for the Christian, but they simply did not want to think of it in terms of ‘resurrection of the body’. The fact that they were practicing baptism on behalf of the dead¹⁰ illustrates their belief in some kind of immortality, but in a form different from that which Paul expected them to share. Probably they thought of the risen Christ as the unseen living Lord in whose life and spirit they shared (for the Lucan interpretation of the resurrection of Christ in physical form had not yet developed). Even Paul did not interpret the resurrection of the dead in crudely physical terms, insisting that ‘flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God’,¹¹ and speaking consistently in terms of ‘heavenly’ or ‘spiritual’ bodies. It is not clear how far the difference between Paul and his Corinthian readers was due simply to the differences in terminology and idiom which stemmed from their respective cultural backgrounds.

In spite of Paul’s quite full treatment it did not put an end to the matter. As Christianity became more divorced from her Jewish origins and more immersed in the Hellenistic culture of the Gentile world, the Jewish-cum-Christian eschatology, involving a future resurrection of the dead, was bound to be severely challenged -- and this for two reasons. First, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead seemed unnecessary to a people who already believed, in varying measure, in the immortality of the soul. Secondly, the belief in the imminent coming of the day of the Lord, so strong in the thought of Paul, and presumably in that of the early church, was bound to wane in intensity by the time two generations of Christians had passed away and the expected end-time had not yet come.

We get some idea of what was happening towards the end of the first century, at least in some quarters, by examining the new way in which the Fourth Evangelist speaks about resurrection. As C. H. Dodd points out, ‘In the dialogue preceding the Raising of Lazarus the evangelist appears to be explicitly contrasting the popular eschatology of Judaism and primitive Christianity with the doctrine which he wishes to propound.^’12 The primitive view of resurrection, both Jewish and Christian, is placed in the mouth of Martha. The reply given by the Johannine Jesus appears at first to confirm this by saying, ‘If a man has faith in me, even though he die, he shall come to life’, but then proceeds to add quite a new interpretation of the resurrection power of Christ in the words, ‘and no one who is alive and has faith shall ever die’.¹³ C. H. Dodd concludes that ‘the "resurrection" of which Jesus has spoken is something which may take place before bodily death, and has for its result the possession of eternal life here and now . . . The evangelist agrees with popular Christianity that the believer will enter into eternal life at the general resurrection, but for him this is a truth of less importance than the fact that the believer already enjoys eternal life and the former is a consequence of the latter.’¹⁴

The raising of Lazarus is thus not a sign of the coming resurrection at the end-time, but a symbolic and dramatic description of Christian experience, in which Christ, by his life-giving word, delivers a man from an existence which is virtual death, and raises him to a quality of living which can properly be called ‘eternal life’. For this reason the Evangelist can put into the mouth of Jesus words which give quite a new -- turn to the resurrection idiom, ‘I am the resurrection and I am the life.^’15 Here resurrection has become a synonym for life, or more specifically, for the entrance to a new quality of life, ‘eternal life’.

For the Evangelist resurrection has become only one idiom among several which could be used to describe the life-giving power of Jesus. In the story of Nicodemus the idiom of re-birth is used to proclaim substantially the same thing. ‘Life’ or ‘eternal life’ is a constant theme in the Johannine writings. Although this theme has by no means eliminated resurrection talk,¹⁶ it has displaced it as the focal point of attention, and given it a new interpretation. C. H. Dodd contends that the thought of the Evangelist has some affinity with that of Philo, the Jewish philosopher (c. 20 BC. -- c. AD. 50) who took over Plato’s concept of eternity in which there is neither past nor future but only present. If this is so, the Evangelist meant by ‘eternal life’ not a temporal existence but ‘a life which has properly speaking neither past nor future, but is lived in God’s eternal Today. To think of any end to such life would be a contradiction in terms.’¹⁷

In this ‘realized eschatology’, as it has been called, we have moved a long way from Paul’s hope of an imminent coming of the day of resurrection. Yet it could be said that the seeds of it are to be found in such words of Paul as: ‘All I care for is to know Christ, to experience the power of his resurrection, and to share his sufferings …’¹⁸ ‘For in dying as he died, he died to sin, once for all, and in living as he lives, he lives to God. In the same way you must regard yourselves as dead to sin and alive to God, in union with Christ Jesus.’¹⁹ But whereas for Paul the resurrection of the dead was still something he hoped to share in at the end-time, it has been relegated to the background in Johannine thought. As C. H. Dodd remarks, ‘For John this present enjoyment of eternal life has become the controlling and all-important conception.’²⁰

The ‘realized eschatology’ of John represents only one of the attempts being made by Christians at the end of the first century to wrestle in a new setting with the heritage of the primitive Jewish hope in the imminent resurrection of the dead. There were others who had to be refuted as false teachers for saying that the resurrection had already taken place.²¹ The New Testament Apocalypse represented still another kind of development, though one more in keeping with the earlier Jewish eschatology. This book was almost certainly written during or after a period of severe persecution for the Christians, perhaps that carried out under the Emperor Domitian (AD. 81-96). It was written by one who was thoroughly familiar with Jewish apocalyptic imagery, and it shows a particular concern for the martyrs.

We have seen that one of the chief factors which fostered the development of the resurrection belief in the pre-Christian period was the concern to see the Jewish martyrs vindicated. Since, in Christianity, resurrection had become the hope of all Christians, the Apocalypse singles out the martyrs for special honor by speaking of two resurrections. In the first resurrection only the martyrs will participate. They will come to life again and reign with Christ for a thousand years. Then comes the final cataclysm when all Hell will be let loose before being vanquished for ever in the utter destruction of the present world. Only then comes the second resurrection, in which the underworld and the sea yield up their dead for the final judgment. Those who shared in the first resurrection are exempted from the second death.²²

Thus the New Testament itself presents us with a variety of ways of understanding the belief in the resurrection of the dead, and shows that by the end of the first century it had become necessary to seek a re-interpretation of the earlier eschatology. The question was therefore far from settled; indeed the controversy was only at the beginning. W. C. van Unnik has said of the second century, ‘It would not be unfair to say that at no time in the long history of Christianity has the resurrection of the dead been so much debated as during that period.’²³

The chief new factor which had to be reckoned with was the dualistic view of man so prominent in Greek thought, and associated particularly with Platonism. Man was thought to consist of two component parts, body and soul. Death entailed the decay and dissolution of the physical body: the soul, being a spiritual invisible entity, was not subject to death but was in fact immortal. The soul not only survived the death of the body but also existed before the birth of the historical person. The body was sometimes regarded as a prison-house of the soul, so that death could even be welcomed for the much needed relief that it brought to the soul. The subject of the immortality of the soul is fully discussed in Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates says, ‘if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.’²⁴

This view of man was very different from that which obtained in ancient Israel. There, as we have seen, man was regarded as an indissoluble unity, created by God from the dust of the ground, and returning to dust at death. It was just because of this view that the doctrine of resurrection had come to the fore in later Jewish thought when men yearned for the vindication of their martyrs.

But some time before this hope of a general resurrection had become widespread in Judaism, Greek thought stemming from Plato had wrestled with a similar problem and resolved it by quite a different method because of a differing conception of man. Since the spiritual entity or soul of a man was thought to survive death anyway and go to live in another world, the vindication of the martyr was amply provided for. Plato interprets Socrates as saying, ‘When death comes to a man, the mortal part of him dies, but the immortal part retires at the approach of death and escapes unharmed and indestructible . . . Since the soul is clearly immortal, it can have no escape or security from evil except by becoming as good and wise as it possibly can. For it takes nothing with it to the next world except its education and training; and these . . . are of supreme importance in helping or harming the newly dead at the very beginning of his journey there.’ ‘And when the newly dead reach the place to which each is conducted by his guardian spirit, first they submit to judgment; both those who have lived well and holily and those who have not.’²⁵

It could be argued that the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul was simply a refined and highly sophisticated version of that belief in an after-life which had been widespread in the ancient world in one form or another, and which Israel had come almost completely to abandon because of her psychosomatic view of the unity of the human individual.

We must remember that by the beginning of the second century a wide rift had opened up between Jew and Christian, and Christianity was primarily spreading among the Gentiles, to whom the traditions of ancient Israel were foreign, and who, on the other hand, were mostly Greek-speaking and immersed in Hellenistic culture. The Greek term psyche (soul), which Christians naturally found themselves using in order to describe the spiritual aspect of a man, already implied the dualistic approach to human nature and introduced a concept for which there had been no verbal equivalent in the language of ancient Israel.²⁶

The second century witnessed the chief period of conflict between the Jewish ‘resurrection of the body’ and the Platonic ‘immortality of the soul’ in the developing thought of Christians. It is clear that to some Gentile Christians the latter doctrine was more acceptable. There was a very real possibility that it could have come to replace the Jewish doctrine of resurrection completely as the idiom of Christian hope. There are several good reasons why it did not do so.

First, the Christian faith would have been seriously undermined if its doctrine of man’s destiny was no more than what Platonism had already long proclaimed. The doctrine of resurrection became one of the characteristics which highlighted the uniqueness of Christianity. Some even went so far as to claim that it was the most unique contribution of the teaching of Jesus.

Secondly, the doctrine of resurrection had always had a close association with martyrdom, and consequently held a strong attraction for a struggling, persecuted community. We are told by Eusebius (c. 260 - c. 340), the ‘Father of Church History’, that in the persecution in Lyons the bodies of the martyrs were deliberately burned, reduced to ashes and finally cast into the Rhone so that they would be deprived of all hope of rising again.²⁷

The third and most important reason was that the Resurrection of Jesus, so central to the Christian faith, had now come to be understood in such physical, fleshly terms, that it was naturally taken to be the model of the destiny that awaited his followers. Ignatius, martyred c. AD. 115, wrote to the church at Smyrna, ‘For I know and believe that even after his resurrection he [Jesus] was in a physical body; and when he came to Peter and his companions he said, "Take hold and feel me, and see that I am not a bodiless phantom." And immediately they touched him and believed, when they had had contact with his flesh and blood. Therefore also they despised death and proved superior to death.’²⁸

Let us look at some typical samples of the second century Christian debate on the resurrection. In The Epistle to Diognetus, often dated about the middle of the second century, we find the following affirmations about the human soul being used to describe the relationship of Christians to the world. ‘Christians are in the world what the soul is in the body . . . The soul inhabits the body, but does not belong to the body . . . The soul is invisible and is kept in custody in the visible body . . . The soul is locked up by the body, but it sustains the body . . . The immortal soul inhabits a mortal tenement.’²⁹ One could hardly expect to find anything closer to Platonic thought than that.

Where such a view of the soul was commonly held, one would expect men to regard resurrection as unnecessary. So we find repeated warnings like the following which Justin Martyr (c. 100 - c. 165) an early Christian apologist, delivered to Trypho, ‘For if you have fallen in with some who are called Christians, but who . . . say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven; do not imagine that they are Christians . . . But I and others, who are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned and enlarged.’³⁰

Earlier in his Dialogue, Justin had discussed the Platonic view of the soul and rejected it, maintaining that the soul should not be called immortal, for that would imply it had not been begotten. Yet, though Justin rejected any kind of eternal preexistence for the soul, he did not conclude that the soul died with the body, but said, ‘The souls of the pious remain in a better place, where those of the unjust and wicked are in a worse, waiting for the time of judgment. Thus some which have appeared worthy of God never die; but others are punished so long as God wills them to exist and to be punished.’³¹ Such a view was fairly close to some of the pre-Christian Jewish interpretations already described in Chapter 8.

Athenagoras of Athens, one of the ablest of the early Christian apologists, set out to prove the doctrine of the resurrection on rational and philosophical grounds in his treatise, On the Resurrection of the Dead. He delved into questions of physiology and diet in order to refute those who maintained that it was a sheer impossibility for any who had been eaten by wild beasts to be raised again in the same flesh. While recognizing that a man could be conceived as being composed of two parts, an immortal soul and a fleshly body, he insisted that God is concerned with the whole man, and the whole man cannot be identified with, or limited to, the soul. Resurrection is made logically necessary, for judgment must refer to the whole man, both body and soul. ‘There must by all means be a resurrection of the bodies which are dead, or even entirely dissolved, and the same men must be formed anew . . . it is impossible for the same men to be reconstituted unless the same bodies are restored to the same souls.’³²

At the end of the century Tertullian (c. 160 - c. 220), the first of the Latin Fathers, wrote a vigorous defense of a future resurrection which was to be completely physical, in his On the Resurrection of the Flesh. This rests upon his understanding of the soul which he had set out in his earlier work On the Soul. There he refuted the Platonic doctrine of an immortal soul, maintaining that while man is to be understood as the conjunction of two entities, body and soul, these both came into existence simultaneously at the moment of conception. Like Athenagoras, he was quite properly concerned with the destiny of the whole man, and the soul could not in any sense be regarded as the whole man. He questioned whether a soul, divorced from the flesh, could possess anything like real life.

Tertullian drew upon the Stoic view of a material soul, declaring the soul to be ‘corporal, having its own particular kind of substance and solidity by which it is capable both of perception and suffering.’³³ Consequently Tertullian’s understanding of man stood somewhere between the classical Israelite view of man as an animated body and the Platonic dualism of body and soul. The whole man exists only as long as the two substances of body and soul are in a living conjunction. ‘Now the soul by itself is not man, for the thing formed (by God) was already called "man" before the soul was threaded into it: nor is flesh without soul man, for after the soul’s exile it is enregistered as "corpse". Thus the term "man" is so to speak a pin joining together two inter-threaded substances, and they cannot be described by this term except when they cohere.’³⁴

Tertullian’s anthropology, like that of ancient Israel, led to the idiom of resurrection as the only satisfying way of expressing any ultimate hope for the whole man. He was strongly opposed to the teaching of some of his Christian contemporaries who wished to interpret the idiom of resurrection as an allegorical description of that Christian experience by which ‘a man, having come to the truth, has been reanimated and revivified to God, and, the death of ignorance being dispelled, has as it were burst forth from the tomb of the old man’.³⁵ Tertullian was adamant that the resurrection was in the future and to be understood in physical, fleshly terms (‘I pronounce that the flesh will certainly rise again’).³⁶ In order to forestall those who could contend the impossibility of such a hope on the grounds that the decayed corpse would have long since wasted away to nothing, he pointed out that quite recently, in his city, skeletons some five hundred years old had been unearthed in a remarkable state of preservation.

Tertullian regarded Lazarus as a model of the resurrection. ‘For in Lazarus, the pre-eminent instance of resurrection, it was the flesh which lay down in weakness, the flesh which all but decayed into dishonor, the flesh which meanwhile stank to corruption; and yet as flesh Lazarus rose again.’ ³⁷ Because his arguments were frequently based on Holy Scripture, he was a little embarrassed by Paul’s words which declared that ‘flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God’. But here he appealed to what had become by his time the traditional view of the resurrection of Jesus, a physical resuscitation leading to the Ascension. In the light of this Tertullian could confidently declare, ‘Have no fear, flesh and blood: you have already in Christ taken seizin of heaven and of the kingdom of God. Else if they deny that you are in Christ, let them, as they have denied heaven to you, deny also that Christ is in heaven.’³⁸

After his long and many-sided argument, Tertullian leaves us in no doubt that the general resurrection is to be understood in terms of flesh and blood. Although he allows some element of change, it is not such that provides for the destruction or loss of any part of the present body. Even though the organs of the body will no longer be required to perform their present functions after the resurrection, they will nevertheless all be there, intestines, reproductive organs -- the lot! ‘So then the flesh will rise again, all of it indeed, itself; entire.’ ³⁹

Although the soul was not the whole man, it was regarded by Tertullian as having some independent existence between death and the future resurrection. All the souls of the dead, he taught, are preserved in an underworld except those of the martyrs to whom heaven was opened immediately. The heroism of Christian martyrs had been an important factor in converting Tertullian to Christianity. His belief that they had a special destiny was confirmed by the vision attributed to Perpetua at her martyrdom in which she saw only her fellow-martyrs in Paradise. The souls preserved in the underworld were already experiencing either punishment or consolation, as in their time of waiting, they anticipated the certain judgment yet to come.

The interval between death and the future resurrection became more and more of a problem and an area for speculation, once the idea of the soul as an independent entity became firmly established in Christian thought. Irenaeus (c. 130 - c. 200) concluded from the widely accepted tradition that Jesus himself had descended into the underworld of the dead before rising bodily on the third day, that ‘the souls of his disciples, for whom the Lord performed this, will depart into an unseen region, set apart for them by God, and they will dwell there until the resurrection which they await. Then they will receive their bodies and arise entire, that is, in bodily form as the Lord arose, and thus will come into the presence of God.’ ⁴⁰

There were other Christians who could not go as far as Tertullian. Origen (c. 185-c. 254) thought it absurd to maintain that the resurrection body would be involved in the passions of flesh and blood, and developed a view much closer to the Pauline teaching of the ‘spiritual body’. ‘By the command of God the body which was earthly and animal will be replaced by a spiritual body, such as may be able to dwell in heaven . . . even for those destined for eternal fire or for punishment there will be an incorruptible body through the change of the resurrection.’⁴¹

Origen recognized that eschatology is a subject on which one cannot become dogmatic. ‘We speak on this subject very cautiously and diffidently,’ he writes, ‘rather by way of discussion than coming to definite conclusions . . . We suppose that the goodness of God will restore the whole creation to unity in the end . . . If anyone thinks that matter will be utterly destroyed, it passes my comprehension how all these substances can live and exist without material bodies, since to live without material substance is the privilege of God alone . . . Another perhaps may say that in the consummation all matter will be so purified that it may be thought of as a kind of ethereal substance . . . But only God knows.’⁴²

In spite of his caution, Origen entered into a good deal of speculation on both the origin and destiny of the world of men. He was considerably influenced by Platonism, and envisaged not only pre-existent souls but a succession of worlds, before and after this one. He believed that all things would finally be wholly restored to their original, spiritual state. J. N. D. Kelly has described his contribution as ‘the twofold one of expounding the truth against (a) the crude literalism which pictured the body as being reconstituted, with all its physical functions, at the last day, and (b) the perverse spiritualism of the Gnostics and Manichees, who proposed to exclude the body from salvation’.⁴³

Over the next two centuries there was considerable opposition to Origen’s Platonism and spiritualizing tendencies, and some claimed that he had virtually denied the doctrine of resurrection. Methodius of Olympus (died c. 311) refuted Origen’s ideas about pre-existent souls and the nature of the world. Man was created by God originally to be immortal in both body and soul, but because of his sin he was declared mortal.⁴⁴ It was necessary for God to decree the dissolution of the body so that ‘sin might be altogether destroyed from the very roots’.⁴⁵ God’s plan of the redemption of man involved a complete remodeling, so that what had been handed over to death should be rescued for eternity. God achieved this by the incarnation and the resurrection of Christ. ‘For if He bore flesh for any other reason than that of setting the flesh free, and raising it up, why did he bear flesh superfluously, as He purposed neither to save it nor to raise it up? But the Son of God does nothing superfluously . . . For he truly was made man, and died, and not in mere appearance, but that He might truly be shown to be the first begotten from the dead, changing the earthy into the heavenly, and the mortal into the immortal.’⁴⁶

Jerome (342-420) is said to have been an ardent supporter of Origen’s ideas until 394, but then ‘made a complete voile-face, and began to stress, with crudely literalistic elaboration, the physical identity of the resurrection body with the earthly body’.⁴⁷ There is a very full discussion in the treatise he addressed to Pammachius. Jerome insisted that it was not sufficient to speak of the resurrection of the body, as Origen did; it was necessary to affirm the resurrection of the flesh (as Tertullian had done). He asserted that Enoch, Elijah and Jesus were all carried up to heaven in the flesh, to be inhabitants of Paradise. ‘The reality of a resurrection without flesh and bones, without blood and members, is unintelligible.’ ⁴⁸

Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315-86) thought of resurrection in terms of the resuscitation of the physical body, followed by a spiritual transformation. ‘It is this very body which is raised, but it does not remain such as it is. The bodies of the righteous, for example, will assume supernatural qualities, while those of the wicked will become capable of burning eternally.’⁴⁹

By the end of the fifth century the belief in a future resurrection of the flesh had not only become permanently entrenched in Christian doctrine, but it had successfully withstood the danger of its being replaced by a Platonic doctrine of immortality. The belief that Christ’s resurrection had been a physical one undoubtedly had been an important factor, for most writers appealed to it for support. Men like Tertullian and Methodius had also rightly maintained that the body is essential for the life of the whole man and any doctrine of immortality which dispenses with it must be inadequate. Increasingly more appeal was being made to Holy Scripture, and the unified view of man found there provided a strong counter to the Platonic one. There continued to be some diversity of opinion on the exact nature of the resurrection body, and although all wanted to affirm the essential continuity of the person, by referring to the ‘same body’, some allowed more room than others for some kind of spiritual transformation of the body.

The Greek view of the soul nevertheless left its mark firmly upon Christian doctrine. This was almost inevitable when the sense of an imminent end-time and accompanying resurrection receded into the distant future. Those who died could be regarded as having fallen asleep. But the Greek notion of a spiritual psyche, capable of having an existence independent of the body (whether or not it was to be regarded as equivalent to the whole man), quite naturally led to speculation about its state and spiritual progress in the interim before the resurrection. Kelly remarks that concerning the soul’s lot immediately after death ‘great uncertainty, not to say confusion, seems to have prevailed among the Greek fathers’.⁵⁰

As time went on, men speculated on this issue in a more detailed and confident manner. The souls were regarded as waiting in storehouses for the final judgment to be pronounced. Many saw the future judgment already beginning to take effect before the day of judgment arrived. Augustine (354-430) taught ‘that in the intermediary period between laying aside the body and later resuming it human souls either undergo torture or enjoy repose, according to their previous conduct in this world’.⁵¹ The result was that the two ways of expressing man’s ultimate hope, which had originally been mutually exclusive, became welded together in the Christian eschatology which finally emerged. These were ‘the resurrection of the flesh’ and ‘the immortality of the soul’ and they stemmed from two different views of man.

In the following centuries there was very little change in the Christian doctrine of Last Things except the emergence of the concept of Purgatory, an intermediate place where souls were thought to undergo suffering for a cleansing or atoning purpose. The seeds of this are to be found at least as early as the thought of Augustine,

At the Reformation Christian doctrine, as inherited from the medieval church, was revised in the light of the new emphasis on Holy Scripture. The doctrine of Purgatory was eliminated, but Biblical warrant was claimed for the rest of the traditional eschatological picture. The following extract from the Westminster Confession (1647) not only presents what had long been accepted as the orthodox Christian view ‘Of the State of Men after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead’, but it also clearly illustrates for our purposes how the two differing views which had struggled with each other for supremacy in the second century had finally been reconciled with each other.

After acknowledging that this traditional Christian eschatology had arisen from ‘the simple juxta-position of two originally distinct, not to say mutually exclusive, views’, John Dickie declared ‘no open-minded person can read through the passages of Scripture which our Confession and Catechisms adduce in support of this scheme as a whole, without feeling that a very slender foundation is made to sustain the weight of a most elaborate super-structure. Nor is it easy to see what purpose is served in the eternal economy of things by this two-fold determination of our individual destinies. But perhaps it is more interesting and significant to note that this double eschatology no longer seems to function in the ordinary consciousness, even of convinced evangelical believers.’⁵⁴

From the Reformation onwards there has been a tendency for the two ‘mutually exclusive’ views of human destiny to come apart at the very seams where they had remained welded together in Christian thought for more than a thousand years. The second-century debate on resurrection was re-opened, though, in the circumstances, it took a different form. Since that time Christians have tended to found their personal hope either on the ‘immortality of the soul’, or on a fleshly resurrection of the dead at the end-time.

The renewed study of the Bible initiated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to the discovery that many elements of the traditional Christian eschatology were not clearly to be found there. Many were not content simply to eliminate the unbiblical Purgatory. They realized that the Bible had little to say about the immortality of the soul, or of the destiny of the dead during the interim between death and the general resurrection. Such well-known Reformers as William Tyndale (1494-1536) and Martin Luther (1483-1546) denied that the souls of the dead departed to heaven, hell or purgatory, maintaining that death is a deep, sound, sweet sleep in which the dead will remain until the day of resurrection.

Luther dispensed with the traditional Christian teaching about the destiny of the bodiless soul after death, and spoke consistently of the dead as sleeping. ‘We are to sleep’, he said, ‘until he comes and knocks on the grave and says, "Dr Martin, get up." Then I will arise in a moment and will be eternally happy with him.’⁵⁵ Luther could also on occasions speak of the Last Judgment coming immediately after the moment of death for the simple reason that the sleeping dead were quite unconscious of the passing of time.

Luther’s teaching on the sleep of the soul represented a genuine recovery of some elements of the first-century resurrection hope. But it did not win the day. By the following century Lutheran theology had returned to the medieval tradition in which it was thought that the souls of the departed already live in blessedness with Christ in a bodiless condition, and where, for this reason, the significance of the general resurrection was considerably lessened.⁵⁶ It was left to extremist Christian groups, such as the Anabaptists, to affirm the doctrine of soul-sleep and to describe human destiny solely in terms of a fleshly resurrection at the end-time. This doctrine is still explicitly taught today by such groups as Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.⁵⁷

Not all the Reformers espoused the doctrine of soul-sleep. John Calvin (1509-64) wrote a vigorous refutation of this view entitled Psychopannychia, in which he said, ‘Our controversy, then, relates to the HUMAN SOUL. Some, while admitting it to have a real existence, imagine that it sleeps in a state of insensibility from Death to the Judgment-day, when it will awake from its sleep; while others will sooner admit anything than its real existence, maintaining that it is merely a vital power which is derived from arterial spirit on the action of the lungs, and being unable to exist without body, perishes along with the body, and vanishes away and becomes evanescent till the period when the whole man shall be raised again. We, on the other hand, maintain both that it is a substance, and after the death of the body truly lives, being endued both with sense and understanding.’ ⁵⁸

Joseph Priestly observed in 1782 in his widely read History of the Corruptions of Christianity, ‘Had it not been for the authority of Calvin, who wrote expressly against it, the doctrine of an intermediate conscious state would, in all probability, have been as effectively exploded as the doctrine of purgatory itself.’⁵⁹ Be that as it may, the fact remains that in all the major communions of the western church the traditional eschatology (as outlined by the Westminster Confession quoted above) was retained. This seems to have been largely due to the fact that the Platonic doctrine of an immortal human soul had become deeply entrenched in Christian thought. The Lateran Council of 1512 went so far as to declare this doctrine ‘to be a dogma, to contradict which was a heresy’ ⁶⁰

In the next three centuries the horizon of man’s view of the world expanded so tremendously both in time and in space that it became gradually clearer that the traditional eschatological picture could no longer be accepted in any literal or chronological way. Under these circumstances theologians and philosophers of the western cultural tradition leaned more and more on the doctrine of an immortal soul as an expression of the Christian hope. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1939, ‘The idea of the resurrection of the body is a Biblical symbol in which modern minds find the greatest offence and which has long since been displaced in most modern versions of the Christian faith by the idea of the immortality of the soul.⁶¹

In John Baillie’s widely acclaimed modern classic, And the Life Everlasting, the biblical doctrine of the resurrection has almost moved out of sight, being replaced by an emphasis on eternal life as a quality of life which transcends death. Shrinking from the idea of an entirely disembodied spirit, Baillie thought of death as a transition to another kind of life, of which we have no knowledge, but which is nevertheless to be conceived as ‘embodied life’.⁶² Yet he makes little or no use of the idiom of resurrection to describe it. His book may be taken as an example of liberal Protestant thought in which the biblical doctrine of resurrection has reached the end of its course, and been superseded by a doctrine of personal immortality which drew its inspiration ultimately from Plato and St John. The same may be said of the earlier standard work on The Christian Doctrine of Immortality by S. D. F. Salmond who, in 1895, concluded that ‘Christianity has found a new basis of immortality in the fact of Christ’s resurrection’,⁶³ but rarely referred to the general resurrection as the Christian’s hope today.

The twentieth century was destined, however, to witness a resurgence of interest in biblical eschatology, and this we shall deal with in the next chapter. There are two final observations to be made. The first is this. The Jewish doctrine of resurrection had not only preceded the rise of Christianity, but was also the necessary background for the expression of the Easter faith in terms of the resurrection of Jesus. In the course of time the relationship of these two became reversed. At least from the end of the first century, it has been the traditional understanding of the nature of Jesus’ resurrection which has been the chief single factor in keeping the expectation of a general resurrection at the end-time permanently anchored in Christian thought. The resurrection of Jesus remained the model on which the Christian fastened his hope for his own eternal destiny.

The second observation is this. The doctrine of a general resurrection was originally of cosmic dimensions. It was concerned with the end of the whole created universe and a Last Judgment which was intended to form the grand finale, comparable to the original event of creation. In the course of time resurrection was increasingly orientated to the interests of the individual person, so that it became the Christian form of the hope of personal immortality, guaranteed by the affirmation of the Easter proclamation. The idiom had been retained; but the purpose it served had undergone a gradual transformation until the point was reached where even the idiom itself could be dispensed with.

Notes:

1. Quoted from Ancient Judaism and the New Testament, by F. C. Grant, p.46.

2. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Religion, pp. 199, 331.

3. ibid., p. 331.

4. God is the speaker.

5. The Koran, Sura 75, trans. by N. J. Dawood.

6. ibid., Sura 22.

7. 1 Thess. 4:15-17.

8. Cor. 15:12.

9. Sect Cor. 1:7-9. Although these are Paul’s words, there is no indication that he is trying to convince them of something they do not already accept.

10. 1 Cor. 15:29.

11. 1 Cor. 15:50.

12. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, p. 147.

13. John 11:25-6.

14. Op. cit., p. 148.

15. John 11:25.

16. e.g. see John 5:28-9, 6:39-40,44,54,12:48.

17. op. cit., p. 150.

18. Phil. 3:10.

19. Rom. 6:10-11.

20. Op. cit., p. 149.

21. 2 Tim. 2:18, and perhaps 2 Thess. 2:2-3.

22. Rev. 20:4-15.

23. ‘The Newly Discovered Gnostic "Epistle to Rheginos" on the Resurrection’, in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. XV (1964), p. 156.

24. The Last Days of Socrates, trans. by H. Tredennick, p. 111.

25. ibid., pp. 169, 170, 177.

26. The Hebrew nephesh has sometimes been translated as ‘soul’, but it must be clearly understood that it described the whole living breathing being and was not a spiritual entity which survived a person’s death.

27. Ecclesiastical History, Book V, Chap. i.

28. The Early Christian Fathers, Ed. by H. Bettenson, p. 48.

29. ibid., p. 54.

30. Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vol. II, pp. 199-200. Dialogue with Trypho, Chap. lxxx.

31. ibid., Chap. v.

32. On the Resurrection of the Dead, Chap. xxv. Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vol. II, p. 455.

33. Tertullian’s Treatise on the Resurrection, trans. by E. Evans, p. 45.

34. ibid., p. 111.

35. ibid., p. 53.

36. ibid., p. 117.

37. ibid., p. 157.

38. ibid., p. 149.

39. ibid., p. 183.

40. The Early Christian Fathers, ed. by H. Bettenson, p. 98 (Adversus Haereses, V.xxxi.2).

41. ibid., p. 255 (De Principiis, II. x. 3).

42. ibid., pp. 256-7 (De Principiis, I. vi. 1-4).

43. Early Christian Doctrines, p. 471. Jerome confirms that Origen attempted to avoid the errors of both extremes in his Letter to Pammachius against John of Jerusalem, § 25.

44. Methodius interpreted the ‘tunics of skins’ (Gen. 3:25) with which God clothed man after the Fall as meaning he ‘clothed him with mortality’.

45. Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vol. XIV, p. 140.

46. ibid., p. 149.

47. Kelly, op. cit., p. 476.

48. To Pammachius against John of Jerusalem, §§ 23-36, trans. by XV. H. Fremantle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. VI, pp. 435-43.

49. Kelly, op. cit., p. 477.

50. op. cit., p. 482.

51. Kelly, op. cit., p. 483.

52. Enchiridion, trans. by A. C. Outler, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. VII, p. 405.

53. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chap. xxxii.

54. The Organism of Christian Truth, p. 393.

55. Quoted by Paul Althaus in The Theology of Martin Luther, p. 415.

56. ibid., p. 417.

57. In Seventh-Day Adventists Answer Questions on Doctrine, pp. 567-609, is found an impressive, documented list of Christians of many communions from the Reformation onwards who, in their writings, have given complete or qualified support for this view.

58. Calvin’s Tracts, Vol. III, trans. by H. Beveridge, pp. 419f.

59. Works of Joseph Priestly, Vol. 5, p. 229.

60. Thus writes Brunner, Eternal Hope, p. 100.

61. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. II, p. 304.

62. op. cit., pp. 251-5.

63. op. cit., p. 585.

‘The Easter message awakened Easter faith, and this expressed itself in the Easter narratives’, writes Gerhard Gloege.¹ Having discussed the rise and nature of the Easter message, and the Easter faith which it awakened in the earliest Christian community, we now turn to the Easter narratives with which all four Gospels conclude, and which are widely recognized to be a later development.

The New Testament references to the appearances of the risen Christ fall into two groups. The first group simply testify to the fact that Jesus ‘appeared’, and we dealt with these in the last chapter. The second group consists of the Easter narratives, stories describing the context of an appearance and the nature of it. W Marxsen declares, ‘Now scholars have no doubt at all that the first group is older in terms of the history of the tradition than the second one . . . The second group . . . represents a literary development of the first group.’²

We have already noted that the New Testament has nowhere preserved for us any narrative describing the appearance of Jesus to Peter. ‘By the time of the writing of the gospels,’ notes C. F. Evans, ‘it had disappeared, leaving behind no more than an echo, and that not in narrative but in credal form ("The Lord is risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon"), which Luke has some difficulty in attaching as an awkward pendant to his Emmaus story.’³ This in itself is an indication of the lapse of time that had occurred between the rise of the Easter faith and the stage of development reached by the Easter narratives at the time they were recorded.

The Easter narratives can in no way be reconciled with the list of appearances of Jesus recorded by Paul in I Corinthians 15,⁴ nor can they be harmonized with each other. During the long period when these narratives were regarded as historically accurate, based, as it was thought, on the memories of the apostles, all kinds of ingenious explanations were offered in an attempt to fit all the stories into one composite and complete picture. This was always difficult. It has now become clear that it is completely impossible.

Each of these narratives is to be regarded as complete in itself. Its purpose was to proclaim in story form the Easter message that Jesus is the exalted Lord, and each achieved this without dependence upon any other resurrection narrative. Unlike the Passion narrative, which is a continuous story from start to finish, and which is unfolded in fundamentally the same way in all the four Gospels, the resurrection of Jesus came to be proclaimed in a group of independent stories. In so far as these have been transmitted to us in some connected form, we are dependent upon the Evangelist in each case, for in no two Gospels are they linked together in the same way.

To appreciate the Easter narratives we must understand them for what they are and not force them to be what they are not. They are not historical accounts of how the Easter faith arose. When these stories were first told the Easter message was already being proclaimed and believed. The Easter narratives represented the attempt to proclaim the Easter message in another medium, the medium of a descriptive narrative set within an historical context. Such a move could not help but lead to contradictions in the end. One of the chief aspects of the first century interest in the resurrection idiom had been its eschatological character, and this meant that it was to take place at the end of history and not within it. The development of the Easter narratives meant that the resurrection of Jesus came more and more to be regarded as an event within history. As this aspect increased, the eschatological aspect decreased. This was the situation by the end of the first century. But initially these narratives were simply expressions of faith in story form. This form of proclamation came naturally to Jewish minds accustomed to the free development of midrash haggadah. Thus G. Bornkamm writes, ‘we are to understand the Easter stories too as testimonies of faith, and not as records and chronicles, and that it is the message of Easter we must seek in the Easter stories.’⁵

Apart from the possibility that the Transfiguration story may have originated as an early resurrection narrative, the earliest Easter narrative is that of the empty tomb, for it is the only one included in Mark’s Gospel. We have already seen in Chapter 3 that there are grounds for thinking that the burial pericope was originally transmitted as an independent piece of tradition, and that the account of the women’s discovery of the empty tomb was added to the burial story at a later stage, around about the time of the writing of the Gospel of Mark. Many are confident that Paul reflects no knowledge of the story when he was writing in the previous decade. The fact that Matthew and Luke, writing some fifteen to twenty years after Mark, used Mark’s empty tomb story as the basis of their own⁶ suggests that there was no other account of the story (even in oral tradition) upon which these two later Evangelists could draw. The version found in the fourth Gospel may indicate that by that later stage oral tradition was now adding its own embellishments to the story.

We have already discussed in Chapter 3 the stages in which the Marcan tradition developed. What needs to be repeated and emphasized at this point is the fact that the focal point of the empty tomb story is the Easter message proclaimed by the unknown young man, ‘Fear nothing; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised again; he is not here; look, there is the place where they laid him.’⁷ Without the Easter message the discovery of the empty tomb was of no significance. The Easter message was not a deduction made by the women, but an announcement, a divine announcement, communicated through an unknown messenger. Thus the Marcan version of the empty tomb story testifies to the primacy of the Easter message. It further indicates that the Easter message was itself an announcement concerning the crucified Jesus delivered by God to those willing to hear it. The form of the story is thus consistent with the development of the rise of the Easter message as discussed in the last chapter.

The next paint to note is that this Marcan story nowhere implies that the body of Jesus came to life and walked out of the tomb. It points simply to the absence of the body. The absence of the body was not an observation which led to the belief in the resurrection, but a corollary drawn from the Easter message that the crucified Jesus had been raised to heaven in exaltation. The Marcan story implies simply that the crucified Jesus had been raised direct to heaven. ‘The absence of a story of Jesus coming out of the tomb is not due to accident or design, but to the fact that the earliest conception of resurrection did not admit of such a happening.’⁸ The view of exaltation reflected here is not unlike the traditions concerning Elijah and Moses, except that this one took fully into account the death of Jesus on the cross, and hence exaltation implied resurrection from the dead.⁹

The story placed the discovery of the empty tomb on the first day of the week almost certainly because of the tradition that Jesus ‘was raised to life on the third day’.¹⁰ In Chapter 2 it has been argued that the phrase arose from theological traditions and not from an historical dating. As the rising of Jesus from the grave was not an observed event, it could not be so dated in any case. But once the phrase came to be part of the tradition, it naturally played a part in shaping the developing narratives. Thus the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, along with the first proclamation of the Easter message, were set down on the first day of the week to be consistent with the tradition of ‘the third day’.

Once the resurrection of Jesus came to be proclaimed by way of a narrative set within an historical context, it is not surprising that, after the death of the apostles, Christians of the latter part of the first century expanded this tradition and produced others. While the original apostles were alive, their own Easter faith, and their testimony that Jesus had appeared to them, were sufficient for the spread of the Easter faith. But when the apostles were dead, men felt need for the Easter faith to be substantiated by more tangible evidence.

One can agree with von Campenhausen that the apologetic motive is almost entirely absent in the Marcan story¹¹ But in the other three Gospels and the later apocryphal Gospels apologetic interests became more and more prominent. On the one hand Christian preachers used all possible means to win conviction from their hearers and, on the other hand, evidential material was sought in order to withstand the attacks of the Jews and other enemies of Christianity. Von Campenhausen himself affirms that ‘the disputes of the Christians with their opponents . . . show themselves as a factor at work on all sides, forming the old tradition and refraining it more and more.’¹²

It is widely recognized that Matthew has followed Mark’s Passion narrative and tomb story very closely. C. F. Evans comments, ‘It is a surprising fact, to which perhaps insufficient attention has been given, that Matthew has so little to add to the framework supplied to him by Mark when he comes to the Passion and Resurrection.’¹³ The additions, however, are very instructive.

First, at the very moment of the death of Jesus ‘there was an earthquake, the rocks split and the graves opened, and many of God’s saints were raised from sleep; and coming out of their graves after his resurrection they entered the Holy City, where many saw them.’¹⁴ Here in extravagantly supernatural terms the death of Jesus is linked with the general resurrection. It may reflect a comparatively early tradition which developed when it was thought that crucifixion led immediately to exaltation. It conflicts with the tradition of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day in that it makes the resurrection of the saints precede that of Jesus. Matthew attempted to resolve that conflict by distinguishing between the waking of the dead from sleep (which took place at the earthquake), and the coming forth from their graves (which took place ‘after his resurrection’). This rather clumsy attempt at harmonization was not successful however, for Matthew went on to appeal to ‘all that was happening’ as the evidence which brought forth from the centurion his spontaneous confession of faith. It is important to see how this apparently early and independent element of tradition linked the death of Jesus with the general resurrection.¹⁵

The next addition concerns the posting of a guard of soldiers at the tomb. Behind this tradition lies an apologetic motive. Once the empty tomb story began to circulate (from at least the late sixties) Jewish opponents countered it by saying that the tomb could have been empty because the disciples stole the body before proclaiming the resurrection. Christian imagination was not slow to provide the counter to this charge by claiming that the tomb was securely guarded. The Jews retaliated with a story that the body was stolen while the guards were asleep, said by Matthew to be current in his own day. Christians in turn maintained that the guards had been bribed to make this admission of neglect of duty. Thus Matthew’s Gospel preserves a skeleton outline of the continuing controversy between Jew and Christian concerning the Gospel proclamation from AD. 70 onwards. Original witnesses could no longer be appealed to on either side, but imagination could provide stories which served a similar purpose.

Matthew’s additional material concerning the guards served the further purpose of providing independent public witnesses to the resurrection event, but Matthew interrupted Mark’s story only to note that at the sight of the angel, ‘the guards shook with fear and lay like the dead’.¹⁶ This meant that when the ‘guard went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened’¹⁷ the Jewish authorities were left without excuse in their attitude of unbelief. Enemies of Christianity were already pointing out that there were no independent witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. This tradition enabled Matthew to say that the Jewish guards did give such independent testimony, but it was deliberately suppressed by the Jewish authorities.

Matthew had already drawn attention to the cosmic significance of the death of Jesus by his description of the earthquake with supernatural accompaniments. He introduced a similar earthquake to mark the opening of the tomb by a supernatural visitor. This happened in the presence not only of the guards but also of the women (whereas in Mark they arrived to find the stone had already been rolled away). This earthquake and the opening of the tomb are almost certainly intended to mark the event of the resurrection of Jesus. C. F. Evans comments, ‘He comes as near as he can to describing the indescribable, the divine act of Resurrection itself.’¹⁸

Whereas in Mark the discovery of the empty tomb is simply a sign of the fact that Jesus had already been raised to heaven, Matthew’s additions to the story now moved in the direction of turning it into a description of the resurrection as an historical event, a process which did not become explicit until the apocryphal Gospel of Peter.

This process was advanced by the further addition made by Matthew in referring to an appearance of Jesus some little distance from the tomb. In Matthew, unlike Mark and Luke, Jesus is said to have appeared to the group of women who visited the tomb, now reduced to two. We must agree with C. F. Evans when he says, ‘it is difficult to resist the view that this owes its origin to the necessity of connecting the two traditions of the empty tomb and of the appearances . . . and Matthew does not become a witness to Jerusalem appearances.’¹⁹

Matthew closed his Gospel with an impressive little passage which is quite independent of the tomb story. It is not so much a ‘resurrection appearance’ as a Christophany, which presents Jesus as the universal ruler of the world, commissioning his disciples to take his teaching to all nations. The marks of lateness are clearly to be seen in the proclamation of the universal mission (which is certainly post-Pauline), and in the Trinitarian formula (the only occurrence in the New Testament).²⁰

C. F. Evans sums up by saying, ‘It is plain that Matthew’s final chapter furnishes neither reliable historical information nor early Christian tradition about the resurrection, but only an example of later christological belief as it had developed in one area of the church, and of the apologetic which had been conducted in that area in the face of Jewish attacks.’²¹ Matthew’s Gospel, nevertheless, much more than Mark’s, leaves the reader with the general impression that the resurrection of Jesus, though undescribed, took place on the third day and was witnessed by Jewish guards and two women.

Luke, like Matthew, used Mark’s tomb story as the basis of his own, but made fewer changes than Matthew, and different ones. Since he omitted all references to appearances of Jesus in Galilee, it was necessary for him to change the message of the angelic visitors (now increased to two) so that instead of instructing the women to direct the disciples to Galilee, they reminded them that Jesus, while in Galilee, had foretold that he would be crucified and rise on the third day. Whereas Mark’s story made no attempt to date the resurrection, Matthew implied by his reference to an earthquake that it occurred on the third day, and Luke implied it by incorporating the traditional credal formula of the ‘third day’ into the message of the angels.

Luke replaced Mark’s insistence on the women’s silence by narrating that the women reported their experience to the disciples, who regarded it, however, as nonsense. At some later stage a verse²² was added which told how Peter ran to the tomb, saw the wrappings and went home amazed. It appears that someone tried to reconcile Luke’s narrative with that of John, but since this addition is not in the oldest manuscripts, modern English translations omit it. This addition, along with the two later endings of Mark’s Gospel, show how Christians continued the attempt of the Evangelists to reconcile the Easter narratives wherever they conflicted.

The most detailed Easter narrative in Luke is that of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and all the more interesting because it is referred to nowhere else. It is now interwoven with the empty tomb story but the seams are quite visible²³ and were added by Luke. The story was originally related in independence of the tomb pericope, and may even be an earlier tradition.²⁴ It is typical of the haggadic stories, and is likely to have been frequently narrated at the celebration of the eucharistic meal. After rehearsing the ministry of Jesus, his death on the cross, the biblical interpretation of his death, the story moved to a climax when the stranger ‘sat down with them at table, took the bread and said the blessing; broke the bread, and offered it to them’.²⁵ Whatever the origin of the story, the main point of narrating it was to foster in those who shared in the eucharistic ‘breaking of the bread’ the sense of the unseen presence of the risen Christ. This is possibly the reason why it differs from all other stories of appearances in that the departure of Jesus is described as ‘vanishing from sight’. Further, Jesus is described as appearing to the two disciples very much as he might have done during his earthly ministry. C. F. Evans notes that ‘The story is the furthest possible remove from the category of heavenly vision of the Lord in glory’ ²⁶

By the time Luke was writing, the story of the empty tomb had come to be regarded as an established fact, and this is the reason why he felt free to describe the risen Jesus in clearly physical terms when he came to report a tradition that Jesus had appeared to the eleven in Jerusalem. This is Luke’s counterpart to Matthew’s account of the divine commissioning on the mountain in Galilee, and is quite at variance with it. It is the only Easter narrative in which the narrator went so far as to say that the risen Jesus ate food himself. The pre-crucified Jesus was completely restored, the only difference being that he could now appear and disappear at will.

Luke’s Gospel ends with a very brief account of the ascension. Luke had woven his Easter narratives together, placing them all within the context of the one day on which the empty tomb had been discovered. But whereas in the original Easter message no clear distinction was drawn between exaltation and resurrection, for Luke the Easter message was the report of a series of events stretching out through a whole day. Resurrection was now the event in which Jesus left the tomb to show himself to his disciples and the Easter complex now had to be completed with an act of ascension to heaven.

For Luke, more than the other three Evangelists, the resurrection of Jesus had virtually become the resuscitation of the physical body, an historical event of which ample proof had been provided for the apostles by Jesus himself. Though they were slow to be convinced at first, it was only because ‘it seemed too good to be true’.²⁷ In Luke’s view there was no room for the ambiguity about the Easter event which allowed for the doubt expressed in Matthew 28:17 and John 20:24-5.

There is widespread agreement that John’s Gospel is the latest of the four. While it is true that John’s Easter narratives exhibit an advanced form of the evolution of the Easter tradition, it is a mistake to think that John simply took a stage further the developments found in Matthew and Luke. It was Luke’s emphasis on the historicity of the resurrection event, and on the physical nature of Christ’s risen form, which, coupled with the traditions of ascension and Pentecost in Acts, were destined to set the pattern for the traditional view of Christ’s resurrection. In this respect Luke and Acts together form the end of the road so far as the New Testament witness is concerned.

John’s Easter narratives point back to an earlier stage in the formation of the Easter tradition. We have seen that at the first no clear distinction was made between exaltation and resurrection. In John the theme of exaltation has remained dominant and points to that which happened at the moment of death on the cross. Thus C. H. Dodd writes, ‘for John the crucifixion itself is so truly Christ’s exaltation and glory (in its meaning, that is to say), that the resurrection can hardly have for him precisely the same significance that it has for some other writers’.²⁸

The earlier Gospels had begun to paint the picture of the Galilean Jesus in the colors which belonged to the risen Christ. In John it is the risen Christ who speaks and acts almost throughout the Gospel, though of course within the context proper to the earthly Jesus. The theme of the exaltation or ‘being lifted up’ of Jesus is introduced early in John, ‘No one ever went up into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man whose home is in heaven.’²⁹ The Evangelist employed a word-play between the ‘lifting up on the cross’ and the ‘lifting up to heaven from earth’, as he himself explained in 12:33. When the reader reaches the story of the cross he already knows how to interpret it.

Thus, as C. F. Evans points out, ‘the evangelist indicates that this spiritual ascent takes place at the cross and by means of it, and through the love and obedience which lie within it. Strictly speaking, there is no place in the fourth Gospel for resurrection stories, since the ascent or exaltation has already taken place. Nevertheless, and doubtless in deference to Christian tradition, the evangelist supplies three, to which a fourth has been added.’³⁰

First comes the empty tomb story. The original three women have now been reduced to one, Mary Magdalene, always the first to be mentioned in the other Gospels. The heavenly visitor, whose message formed the focal point of Mark’s original story, has now disappeared altogether. His place has been taken by the appearance to Mary of the risen Christ himself. C. H. Dodd has called this encounter ‘the most humanly moving of all the stories of the risen Christ’.³¹ It has certainly caused John’s version of the tomb story to be easily the most popular in Christian devotion down the ages. For this as well as for other reasons C. F. Evans is justified in saying that John’s version ‘would seem to represent an end-product of the development of the story of the empty tomb’.³²

John’s inclusion of the tomb story meant that the exaltation of Jesus associated with the cross was subjected to a slight delay in time. Mary encountered Jesus just before the process of exaltation was completed, for Jesus said to her, ‘Do not cling to me, for I have not ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers, and tell them I am now ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.’³³ Whereas in the earlier Gospels the angelic visitor(s) announced the resurrection of Jesus, in John the exaltation of Jesus is announced by himself. It is altogether consistent with John’s emphasis on exaltation that ‘resurrection’ is referred to only once in Chapter 20, and that in an element which marks a further development of the tomb story.³⁴

John’s version is the first in which the disciples pay a visit to the empty tomb. Goguel is probably correct when along with others he maintains that ‘the fragment concerning Peter and the anonymous disciple has been . . clumsily inserted into the Mary Magdalene story’ probably out of ‘a desire to make the apostles as well as a woman witness of the empty tomb’.³⁵ But the emphasis is now no longer on the emptiness of the tomb but on the way the linen cloths have been left lying. As usually interpreted, it means that they were still in the formation they assumed as they clothed the dead body. The dead body however was gone, and the formation of the cloths precluded any simple act of resuscitation. They further showed that the body could not have been stolen. (Since Jesus was presumably clothed when he appeared to Mary outside of the tomb, this vision, too, precluded the possibility that Jesus had simply walked forth from the tomb as a resuscitated physical form). It was when the unknown disciple saw this that he believed.

John’s version does not point back to that of Luke or even that of Matthew, but rather to that of Mark, of which it is an understandable development. For in Mark we simply learn that the body was gone. It was a sign (interpreted by the angel) but not a proof, of the Easter message of the exaltation of Jesus. In the same way, but with more imaginative detail, the empty tomb has become in John a ‘sign’ of the Johannine type, pointing to the heavenly exaltation of the crucified Jesus.³⁶

Then comes the story of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples when they were gathered behind locked doors. For John this was the occasion on which Jesus delivered to his disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit. The fact that a Gospel as late as that of John could narrate such a different account of the coming of the Holy Spirit shows that the Pentecostal story in Acts was far from being universally known and accepted at the end of the first century. The tradition here recorded by John not only places the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Easter day, but associated it with the first appearance of the exalted Jesus to his disciples. It is of some value to remember here the point made in Chapter 9 in which Elisha’s reception of the spirit of Elijah depended upon his seeing the ascending Elijah.

To this is appended the incidents concerning Thomas, by means of which the Evangelist dealt with one of the common problems of his own day. We have already noted above that Luke’s increased concern for historical evidence and a physical resurrection were due to the quest for certainty at a time when the initial burst of life was over and the first apostles gone. Thomas represents the sincere and devout inquirer who seeks certain proof before he can believe. As Goguel puts it, ‘The thought behind the story is that proofs exist, which, however, only a man of little faith can need.’³⁷ This incident becomes the most fitting conclusion to the Gospel, for as C. H. Dodd has so well said, ‘From this moment the company no longer consists solely of the eleven disciples gathered at that particular time and place; every reader of the gospel who has faith, to the end of time, is included in Christ’s final beatitude.’³⁸

The last chapter of the Fourth Gospel is commonly regarded as an appendix, added to John’s work at a later stage. The story it contains of the risen Jesus and his disciples beside the sea of Galilee may also stem from a quite early tradition, which took shape before the period when Easter stories came to be confined to Jerusalem. It reflects what must have been the primitive conditions in which the disciples fled back to Galilee on the death of Jesus. But whatever its origin, the story now shows an advanced stage of development and constitutes the Johannine version of the call of the church to universal mission. The draught of fishes, by virtue of the significance of the number 153,³⁹ is probably a symbol of the mission to which the church was called. It illustrates the process by which Easter stories continued to develop within the life of the church to meet new needs.

Although no more Easter narratives were accepted into the authoritative canon of the New Testament which eventuated, such stories continued to appear in the next century, and probably far outnumbered the canonical ones, even though most of them have not survived except in fragments. They serve to illustrate, however, that they were but the continuation of a process which began in the last forty years of the first century, the process of expressing in story form the reality of the risen Christ in the life of the church.

It is of value to include here one example of those later developments. The following is recognized as a fragment of the Gospel of Peter, written perhaps about AD. 150, and was included in a manuscript found in an Egyptian cave in 1884. We quote the beginning of the account of Easter day:

The Gospel of Peter then goes on to describe the arrival of the angel from heaven, the departure of the guards to inform Pilate, and the arrival of Mary Magdalene and her women friends, who, on hearing the Easter message from the angel, turned and fled. This version seems clearly based on those of Mark and Matthew but shows no obvious influence from Luke or John.

While the Gospel of Peter ventures further than the canonical Gospels in attempting to describe the resurrection, it is very instructive to note carefully how this was done. This is no resuscitation of the physical body, such as we find implied in Luke, but an attempt to describe the ascension or glorification of Jesus. Jesus, in a form which defies description for it was higher than the heavens, is literally carried into heaven by two heavenly messengers. This is a highly imaginative elaboration of the simple Marcan announcement that the body was gone, and one in which exaltation to heaven is still the dominant note. The versions of Luke, John and Peter all stem from that of Mark but they have moved in different directions. In John and Peter the empty tomb still points to heavenly exaltation; it is Luke, who, even more than Matthew, has taken the development in the direction of an historical resuscitation of the crucified body of Jesus.

We see the end result of this in the beginning of Acts. Whether Acts was written by Luke (as most still maintain), or by a later anonymous writer, there is no denying the fact that its opening story of the Ascension is inconsistent with the closing chapter of Luke. In Luke the ascension apparently took place on the day of resurrection, but in Acts it was forty days later.

The Easter message originally proclaimed the vindication and exaltation of the crucified Jesus. Jesus was believed to have been raised to heaven by God, and in so far as this was spoken of in terms of resurrection no distinction was made between resurrection and ascension. Mark’s tomb story introduced no distinction. Luke and John both drew some distinction between resurrection and ascension, but only as two elements of a more complex Easter day.

But Luke’s greater emphasis on the physical form of the risen Jesus and on the number of the appearances of Jesus, led to the traditional chronology found in Acts. By the end of the first century men were looking for proofs of the resurrection and that is just what the author of Acts believed had been supplied by Jesus himself. ‘He showed himself to these men after his death, and gave ample proof that he was alive.’⁴¹ Stories which originated as signs, or confessions of faith, now came to be regarded as historical testimonies. Luke had been at pains to make clear that the risen Jesus was no otherworldly spirit but a physical form with flesh and bones,⁴² who consequently presented his disciples with infallible proofs.⁴¹ The risen Christ came to be regarded as having conducted a fresh ministry with his disciples, and in these forty days he ‘taught them about the kingdom of God’.⁴¹ But since the experience of the risen Christ was not of this character at the end of the century when Acts was written, it had to be made clear that this kind of experience was brought to an end by a new event, the Ascension. What had once been an affirmation about the divine vindication of the crucified Christ expressed in diverse forms and stories now became a sequence of historical events in chronological order -- resurrection, appearances, call to mission, ascension. Whereas resurrection had originally been almost synonymous with exaltation, it had now become only the first act of the sequence. The sequence is reflected in the Apostles’ creed, ‘The third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.’

That was not all. It is commonly pointed out that in Pauline thought there is no clear distinction made between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of the risen Christ.⁴³ Even in the Johannine tradition, as we have seen, the Holy Spirit was received by the disciples from the risen Jesus on Easter day. Only in Acts, of all the New Testament, is the gift of the Holy Spirit related to a festival seven weeks after Easter. This completed the chronology of the rise of the Easter faith and the birth of the Christian church. It is significant that according to this interpretation of the beginnings there was no proclamation of the Gospel until the day of Pentecost; the event of Easter day, the appearances, and the ascension, were not sufficient in themselves to send the disciples out to proclaim the Christian message.

The Luke-Acts reconstruction of the origin of the church became the authoritative one in all later tradition. The Easter narratives from the other Gospels were in practice fitted into the Luke-Acts framework, which also set the pattern for the Christian year. This is why, as it was pointed out earlier, Luke-Acts constituted the final development of the Easter narratives among the writings finally accepted by the church as authoritative. More than any other New Testament writing Luke-Acts left the impression with the reader that the resurrection was an historical event, that it attributed to the risen Jesus a physical form, and that the vindication and exaltation of Jesus consisted of a seven-week process, of which the resurrection was the beginning. Resurrection had become a historical event of the same character as the crucifixion. This view of the resurrection, reached by the end of the first century, remained fundamentally unchanged, until it finally collapsed within the last hundred years. This collapse was accompanied, however, by the discovery that the New Testament is much richer and more diverse in its witness than tradition has allowed, and this has enabled us to come to a fresh appreciation of the Easter message, as we shall later show.

Notes:

1. The Day of His Coming, p. 278.

2. op. cit., p. 26.

3. op. cit., p. 53.

4. See C. F. Evans, op. cit., p. 52-3.

5. Jesus of Nazareth, p. 183.

6. See C. F. Evans, op. cit., pp. 82, 92.

7. Mark 16:6.

8. Goguel, op. cit., p. 40.

9. Goguel, op. cit., p. 39, notes that it has been shown ‘that the idea of a body laid in a tomb being taken up into heaven is to be found in several Christian legends and had its origin in Hellenism’.

10. I Cor. 15:4.

II. op. cit., p. 69-77.

12. op. cit., p. 65.

13. op. cit., pp. 81-2.

14. Matt. 27:51-3.

15. Thus Goguel commented, ‘We can see the resurrection of the saints to be both a result of the victory gained by Jesus over death, not on the morning of the third day but at the very moment when he expired and an anticipation of the general resurrection. Such an idea could well ignore any thought of the third day and the empty tomb.’ op. cit., p. 41.

16. Matt. 28:4.

17. Matt. 28:11.

18. op. cit., p. 82.

19. op. cit., p. 83.

20. C. F. Evans notes: ‘As in this Gospel particularly the body of disciples begins to appear as a church under the discipline of the apostles, and the material is arranged for church use, so now the resurrection commission is in terms of church order -- to make disciples, to baptize and to instruct.’ op. cit., p. 84.

21. op. cit., p. 85. See pp. 81-91 for fuller discussion by C. F. Evans.

22. Luke 24:12.

23. Luke 24:21b-4, 34. When these linking verses are removed the theme of the original narrative flows more logically.

24. Goguel sees several features in it which point to its being a relatively primitive tradition. op. cit., p. 49.

25. Luke 24:30.

26. op. cit., p. 105. For an excellent study of the Emmaus story, see "The Origin and Nature of Christian Faith According to the Emmaus Legend" by H. D. Betz, Interpretation, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, pp. 32-65.

27. Luke 24:41.

28. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, p. 440.

29. John 3:13. See also vv. 14-15, 8:28, 12:32-4.

30. op. cit., p. 116.

31. op. cit., p. 441.

32. op. cit., p. 120.

33. John 20:17.

34. John 20:9.

35. op. cit., p. 54.

36. See C. F. Evans, op. cit., p. 121.

37. op. cit., p. 50.

38. op. cit., p. 443.

39. Various explanations of the number 153 have been offered. The suggestion made by Jerome is as good as any, namely, that it was commonly thought that there were 153 known species of fish. Thus it symbolized the universality of the Christian mission.

40. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 92-3.

41. Acts 1:3.

42. Luke 24:39-43.

43. e.g., 2 Cor. 3:17-18. See also Chap. 14 below.

What happened to the disciples after the death of Jesus? There is an early tradition that ‘the disciples all deserted him and ran away’.¹ This is probably a reliable pointer to what actually happened, for a story with such cowardly implications is not likely to have been invented by later imagination if in fact some or all of the disciples actually stayed within the precincts of Jerusalem. Further, it is widely recognized that the earliest references to appearances of the risen Christ are located in Galilee rather than in Jerusalem. Such clues suggest that on the capture and crucifixion of Jesus the disciples fled from Jerusalem, and before very long returned to their home territory of Galilee.

It is common to assume that the crucifixion of their Master left the disciples bewildered, depressed and utterly disillusioned. This may well be correct for the short initial period. But what then? Is it reasonable to maintain that, in the absence of any further dramatic event, they would then have returned to their original homes and individual callings as if nothing had happened to them at all during the period of their discipleship? Such a thought does no justice to the character of the man with whom they had recently spent so much of their time. However much the Gospel portraits may have to be scaled down to enable us to see the historical figure of Jesus, they still show us a man who made an impact of such magnitude on those who knew him best and who had left all to follow him, that no unexpected calamity, such as the crucifixion, could have erased this from their thoughts and their experience. Goguel pertinently remarks, ‘The first germ of the idea of resurrection must be found in the thoughts of Jesus’ disciples before their master’s death. The faith which possessed their hearts after the crisis of the passion was not new but was transfigured and transposed.’²

Jesus, by his teaching, his bearing, his faith, his magnetic personality, and indeed everything about him, must already have influenced his disciples to such an extent that it was impossible for them simply to accept his crucifixion as an unfortunate event. The death of such a man as this, and particularly by a method implying the curse of divine rejection, must have been an ‘offense’³ to them, an enigma which would not let their minds rest until they found the answer. But where was an answer to be found? To whom or what could they turn to find a solution to the ‘scandal’ of Jesus’ death?

Perhaps the disciples turned to the teaching of Jesus himself. If we had access to all that they had been taught by Jesus, we would perhaps find there some very important clues which could help to explain the rise of the Easter faith. If, for example, Jesus had clearly informed his disciples in the few months prior to his death that he was to fall into the power of his enemies and be killed, and then rise again after three days,⁴ as the Gospels report, they could hardly help but be in some state of expectation after the crucifixion, even if we allow that ‘they did not understand what he said, and were afraid to ask’.⁵ But such prior intimations as these are frequently regarded by scholars today as prophecies after the event, these utterances being placed in the mouth of Jesus by later Christian tradition. While we must reckon with the possibility that Jesus sowed the seeds of the Easter faith in the minds of his disciples before he died, we are not in a position to substantiate this, partly because much of his teaching has not survived, and partly because that which has survived can not be clearly isolated from the form and expression given to it by the early church some time after the Easter faith had already taken root.

Let us turn next to something we do possess, namely, the Jewish Holy scriptures. The New Testament makes it clear that the early Christians studied the scriptures in the belief that they held many clues to the identity and work of Christ. It is possible therefore that the disciples themselves searched the Scriptures to find the answer to the problem posed by the death of Jesus. The later Easter narratives still contain hints suggesting that this was in fact the case.

When the two despondent disciples on the road to Emmaus expressed to the stranger their bewilderment that such a powerful prophet as Jesus should have been condemned to death and be crucified, we are told that the risen Christ ‘began with Moses and all the prophets, and explained to them the passages which referred to himself in every part of the scriptures’.⁶ The story implies that the Scriptures, when properly interpreted, made it clear that the Messiah was ‘bound to suffer thus before entering upon his glory’⁷ When finally they recognized the identity of this stranger as they shared the evening meal before he vanished from their sight, they said to each other, ‘Did we not feel our hearts on fire as he talked with us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?’⁸ Later in the story we are told how they shared their experience with the rest of the disciples. Once again they became aware of Jesus in their midst.

This Easter story comes to us in a late form, as the reference to the universal mission indicates; it consequently illustrates that late in the first century, when one might have thought that apostolic testimony to the appearances of the risen Christ would have been sufficient evidence to support the Easter faith, references were still being made to the connection between Scripture and the rise of the Easter faith. In the same way the comment of John the Evangelist, ‘until then they had not understood the scriptures, which showed that he must rise from the dead’,¹⁰ implies that a right understanding of scripture was an important step in leading men to the Easter faith.

When we turn from these late narratives to the earliest testimony to the Easter faith which we possess, we find the same insistent appeal to scripture. It is widely recognized that when Paul wrote to the Corinthians on this subject about the middle of the first century, he was quoting a well-established credal formula which he had received from early Christian tradition and which ran, ‘Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures; he was buried; he was raised to life on the third day, according to the scriptures.’¹¹

The early Christians evidently believed that there were Scripture passages, which, when rightly interpreted, made it clear why a servant of God, of the caliber they had recognized in Jesus of Nazareth, should have ended his life in a criminal’s death. They believed that Scripture further indicated that, far from being a final disaster, the sufferings and death of Jesus were the prelude to his entering into glory. What were those -- passages?

The most obvious passage which could be interpreted as a forecast of the death of Jesus is what is now commonly called the Fourth Servant Song, Isaiah 52:13-53:12. This not only paints a vivid picture of a righteous man being unjustly put to death, but it declares it to be all part of a divine plan, for the man suffers vicariously for the sins of others.

Once this passage is applied to the crucified Jesus, we need search no further, for this in itself would have been quite sufficient Scriptural warrant for that element of the Easter message which proclaimed ‘Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures.’¹¹ To those who understood the ‘Christian’ meaning of this prophecy (and such other passages as were so used), the cross of Jesus ceased to be an ‘offence’ and became part of the message of Easter joy. The Easter message began with the right understanding of the crucifixion. It continued to be the main plank of the Christian proclamation, so that Paul could write: ‘But God forbid that I should boast of anything but the cross of’ our Lord Jesus Christ.’¹³‘I resolved that while I was with you I would think of nothing but Jesus Christ -- Christ nailed to the cross.^’14 In Paul’s letters the references to the death of Christ are about half as many again as the references to his resurrection.

However, if the Fourth Servant Song was really to be understood as a prophecy of the crucifixion of Jesus, and if this meant that by means of this scripture God was declaring that his death was not a miserable failure but a victory, in that it was becoming a source of blessing to men, then the rest of the Song had some suggestive things to say about this same Jesus.

The same Song which helped to solve the stumbling block of the crucifixion also suggested the continuing role of Jesus after his death, as one who was ‘fully vindicated’ in order that he might ‘vindicate many’. We see here the seeds of the double proclamation which formed the heart of the Christian Gospel, death and exaltation. Paul put it this way, ‘He was given up to death for our misdeeds, and raised to life to justify us.’¹⁶

The Fourth Servant Song was not the only passage in scripture where Christians found what was to them a clear reference to Christ. We have already pointed out that biblical interpreters in the first century used very different methods from ours and some of the interpretations which men of those days found very convincing may no longer seem valid to us. The author of Acts makes it clear in the speech he attributes to Peter on the day of Pentecost that first-century Christians believed the ultimate destiny of Jesus was explicitly revealed in the following quotations from the Psalms:

The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool."¹⁸

These are probably only a few of the passages which could have helped the early followers of Jesus if they searched the scriptures to find the meaning of his death. What biblical passage lay behind the words of the credal formula quoted by Paul, ‘He was raised to life on the third day, according to the scriptures’? There is only one passage in the Old Testament where resurrection language is linked with ‘the third day’ and that is Hosea 6:2, which we have already recognized as constituting a quite fascinating milestone in the path of the idiom of resurrection, in that it links Israelite thought with that of ancient Canaan.

Gerhard Gloege, along with some other New Testament scholars, believes that ‘the early dating of the resurrection on the "third day" was certainly influenced by Hos. 6:2’.²⁰ It is true that the New Testament nowhere refers to this passage. But Gloege points out that there is evidence in the Jewish Targum,²¹ which ‘shows that Jesus’ resurrection "on the third day" was regarded as the fulfillment of Hosea’s prophecy by Christians at a very early date; it erased the precise chronological reference "after two days" and "on the third day" and replaced them by the more general phrases "in the days of consolation" and "on the day of resurrection", in order to exclude the Christian interpretation.’²²

Before going further we must examine more closely the kind of convictions which were likely to emerge if the bewildered disciples had searched the Bible to find an answer to the crucifixion. We have seen clearly enough how they could have been led to the conviction that Jesus died for the sins of men. If they were trying to understand the ultimate destiny of the crucified Jesus, then such passages as lent themselves to relevant reinterpretation might have led to a conviction in the divine vindication and heavenly exaltation of the crucified Jesus. But since we have seen in earlier chapters that the Old Testament had only a little to say directly on the subject of resurrection, how did the exaltation of Jesus come to be proclaimed as resurrection?

At this point we must take into account the conclusions of a growing number of New Testament scholars to the effect that in the earliest Christian traditions the resurrection of Christ was in any case actually understood in terms of exaltation. R. Bultmann wrote, ‘according to the oldest view, Christ’s resurrection coincides with his exaltation to heavenly glory’.²³ G. Bornkamm agrees, saying, ‘What is certainly the oldest view held by the Church made no distinction between the resurrection of Christ and his elevation to the right hand of the Father, while only later was there developed, in addition, the theory of the resurrected Christ walking the earth for a time and only subsequently ascending into heaven.’²⁴ E. Schweizer writes, ‘that the exaltation really dominated the thought of the early church is also shown by the fact that the oldest tradition barely distinguished between Easter and Ascension. . . It may well be asked if the reports of the first appearances (I Cor. 15:5) have been lost because they told of Jesus’ exaltation to God and on account of that were not sufficiently realistic in the eyes of a later generation . . . The view that the event of Easter was the appointment to heavenly glory can still be traced behind the Synoptic tradition of the resurrection.’²⁵

Paul spoke in terms of exaltation when writing to the Philippians (and these words are often regarded as pointing to an earlier credal form), ‘Bearing the human likeness, revealed in human shape, he humbled himself, and in obedience accepted even death -- death on a cross. Therefore God raised him to the heights and bestowed the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow -- in heaven, on earth, and in the depths -- and every tongue confess, "Jesus Christ is Lord", to the glory of God the Father.’²⁶ We should note here how death is followed immediately by exaltation and how this leads to the earliest and simplest Christian creed, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’.

The speeches attributed to Peter by the author of Acts contain the same emphasis on exaltation. ‘The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you have done to death by hanging him on a gibbet. He it is whom God has exalted with his own right hand as leader and savior, to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to all this, and so is the Holy Spirit given by God to those who are obedient to him.’²⁷

The letter to the Hebrews is noteworthy for the fact that it makes only one reference to resurrection, ‘the God of peace who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus’.²⁸ It elsewhere speaks of Jesus after his death only in terms of exaltation. ‘When he had brought about the purgation of sins, he took his seat at the right hand of Majesty on high, raised as far above the angels, as the title he has inherited is superior to theirs . . . and he has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of Majesty in the heavens, a ministrant in the real sanctuary, the tent pitched by the Lord and not by man.’²⁹

These are some of the indications that in the earliest expressions of Christian belief still preserved in the New Testament there was no clear distinction between exaltation (being raised to the right hand of God) and resurrection (being raised from the dead). C. F. Evans has pointed out that ‘it may be too easily assumed that exaltation to share the authority of God in the last things was a corollary, or extension of resurrection, whereas what may have been prior as a . . . concept was "seeing Jesus our Lord" as the exalted and coming One, and resurrection a corollary or extension of that.’³⁰

In trying to trace the rise of the Easter faith, we must reckon with the real possibility that at the very beginning it was not expressed explicitly in terms of resurrection, but in terms of the divine exaltation of the crucified Jesus. The Easter faith began to take shape as the response to the ‘offence’ of the cross. It saw the death of Jesus as a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of men, and because Jesus had submitted to the way of the cross even though he had done nothing to deserve it, he was vindicated by God, and ‘allotted a portion with the great’.¹⁵

And who were the great? The two figures who stood out most prominently in the current Jewish traditions were Moses and Elijah. At this point we must examine how these traditions may have contributed to the rise of the Easter faith. The more the disciples had become impressed by the unique caliber of Jesus during his ministry, and the more their study of the scriptures may have led them to believe that Jesus had been ‘allotted a portion with the great’,¹⁵ the more they would have made comparisons between Jesus and such men as Moses and Elijah.

The New Testament reflects such comparisons. John the Evangelist wrote, ‘for while the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’³¹ The author of Hebrews wrote. ‘Moses also was faithful in God’s household; and Jesus, of whom I speak, has been deemed worthy of greater honor than Moses.’³² If Jewish tradition, as we have earlier seen, could reach the point of elevating Moses to a place in heaven even though the scriptures clearly referred to his death and burial, then the disciples had only to com, to the conviction that Jesus was at least on a par with Moses in order to draw the conclusion that the crucified Jesus too had been exalted to heaven.

In the last chapter we discussed the parallels between Jesus and Elijah. The current tradition of Elijah’s presence in heaven meant that as soon as the disciples reached the conclusion that, because of his sacrificial death, Jesus was deserving of an even higher honor than Elijah, it was but a logical step to conclude that God had exalted the crucified Jesus and raised him to heaven to join Elijah and Moses.

The association of Jesus with Moses and Elijah is exactly what the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus proclaims. Here the three disciples were given a pre-view of the exaltation of Jesus which was to eventuate after his crucifixion. It is significant that Mark tells the story (and Matthew and Luke follow suit) immediately after Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, and Jesus’ own forecast of the coming crucifixion.

If the story of the Transfiguration stems from an historical experience within the ministry of Jesus, then the disciples had already learned to associate Jesus with Moses and Elijah before the crucifixion. Meyer and Harnack regarded the Transfiguration as the experience which later prompted the rise of the Easter faith and caused the disciples to see the risen and exalted Jesus.³³

On the other hand, it has become increasingly difficult to interpret the Transfiguration, even if of a visionary nature, as an historical experience within the life time of Jesus, for if the unique character of Jesus had been thus revealed to these three disciples, it makes their later behavior rather inconsistent. Many scholars have consequently interpreted it as a resurrection narrative which has been read back into the earthly life of Jesus.³⁴ Whether it stems from an actual experience of the disciples, or whether it is a symbolic account of the much more complex spiritual experience of the disciples after the crucifixion, it is very difficult to determine. But it does seem more probable that the disciples came to the conviction of Jesus’ Messiahship only when they came to understand the significance and meaning of his death. It seems possible therefore that the Transfiguration story is a witness to the fact that, as the disciples were led to understand the positive significance that Christians have seen in the death of Jesus, they were prompted at the same time to recognize that Jesus ranked with Moses and Elijah. In taking the sins of men upon himself, Jesus, however, had done more than Moses and Elijah. He had opened up a new and living way into the Kingdom of God, and, in doing, so had become the Lord and Savior of men. Since Elijah and Moses had been exalted to heaven, then Jesus too had been vindicated, raised from death and exalted to heaven.

This, of course, was the Easter message and nothing less than this could have constituted the Easter message, and initiated in men the Easter faith. Goguel rightly points out that if ‘the resurrection was only the reversal of the undeserved fate to which Jesus had submitted and nothing more than his rehabilitation . . . it would not have created a new order of things. It might have saved Jesus, perhaps; it would not have saved mankind.’³⁵ The Easter message was nothing less than the assertion that the crucified Jesus had been exalted to the right hand of God to become the Lord and Savior of men. But such an assertion, though it may be confessed by faith, is of such a character that it does not admit of tangible and visible demonstration. Thus C. F. Evans notes the possibility that ‘the concept of exaltation to the right hand of God . . . was prior to the idea of resurrection in establishing belief in Jesus’ lordship and messiahship, for it leads directly to it, while resurrection from the dead, as such, does not’.³⁶

If the Easter faith is understood primarily as the conviction of the exaltation of the crucified Jesus to be Lord and Savior, it is possible to understand how it could have arisen among the dispirited disciples as their response to the ‘offence’ of the crucifixion of their Master, while they wrestled with that problem in the light of the impact made on them by the life and teaching of Jesus, and in the light of their study of the scriptures, of their current convictions about similar figures and of their belief about God. Because the exaltation of Jesus to be the Lord of men is a conviction which can be apprehended only by faith, it is hard to see how such a conviction could have grown in their minds except in the same way as similar convictions about God had always emerged in the past. Faith in God and in God’s actions throughout the history of Israel had come to birth as men reflected on their experience in the light of inherited traditions. The convictions that came to them were often so strong, (as in the case of the prophets) that they interpreted them as having been revealed or proclaimed to them by God himself.

The Easter message took shape as the disciples wrestled with the ‘offence’ of the cross through the various channels open to them. In these ways they came to hear from God the message of the vindication of Jesus, which was simply that ‘God had made this Jesus, whom men crucified, both Lord and Messiah’³⁷, as Peter is said to have proclaimed. If the Easter message developed in this way, then it is unlikely to have become clearly understood all at once, nor in such a way as to leave no room for doubt or uncertainty.

There is a good deal of evidence, still continuing in the later and more developed narratives, which suggests that the Easter faith did not come to birth within the disciples as a result of one, sudden, epoch-making and fully convincing disclosure. There is much which points to the fact that even when the exaltation of Jesus came to be spoken of in terms of resurrection, the grounds for this conviction were still of an ambiguous character, and open to more than one interpretation.

Mark’s story of the empty tomb, without the message sent by God, was certainly inconclusive, and even the stories of the appearances contained an element of doubt and uncertainty. In Matthew’s story of how the eleven disciples went to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them, he tells us that ‘When they saw him, they fell prostrate before him, though some were doubtful’.³⁸ The experiences commonly referred to as the appearances of the risen Christ did not occur all at one time. Moreover, the fact that, with the exception of Paul, only those who had already been followers of the earthly Jesus are reported to have seen the risen Christ appear to them, suggests that the Easter message was not something which could be pressed home by means of any objective proofs. Rather it was a conviction which finally came to possess the group of men who had been most closely associated with Jesus, and it came to possess them not all at one time, but slowly and spasmodically over a period of time.

In this development the evidence nearly all points to the primacy of Peter. He is named first in Paul’s list of witnesses, and he is given special mention in the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John.³⁹ The fact that Peter seems to have played a leading role in the primitive church could have been due to the fact that he was the first to ‘see’ the exalted Jesus. Yet the New Testament has nowhere preserved any account of the circumstances of this first ‘appearance’ to Peter.⁴⁰ B. W. Bacon hinted that the oldest tradition simply described how Peter recovered after the initial shock and assumed leadership, and traces of this are to be found in Luke 22:32, ‘but for you I have prayed that your faith may not fail; and when you have come to yourself, you must lend strength to your brothers.’⁴¹

We must now turn our attention to the New Testament witness concerning the appearances of the exalted Christ, for most scholars agree that they constitute the oldest element in the New Testament tradition of the rise of the Easter faith. If there is one thing more than anything else which could be referred to as the catalyst which enabled the Easter faith to become a reality, it would be the experiences of those apostles, beginning with Peter, which made them convinced that Jesus had appeared to them. But even the ‘appearances’ came only to men who had close association with Jesus during his ministry, and who, since his crucifixion, had had time to wrestle with the shock of his death in the various ways we have outlined. The memory of Jesus, the scriptures, and the Jewish traditions of Elijah and Moses, all contributed to the seeds of the Easter message, and were making their contribution even before the appearances. The appearances brought the seeds to life. They enabled the Easter message to be heard in such a way that the Easter faith burst into life.

We must remember that in Israelite tradition there was a long history of visionary experiences, commencing with the ancient theophanies in which God was thought to have ‘appeared’ to men in human form. Later such experiences were openly acknowledged to be subjective visions, though none the less real for that. Theophanies and visions were normally associated with times of crisis and stress, and they enabled those who received them to reach a new conviction, or to make a necessary decision.

The same language was used of the appearances of Jesus as of the earlier theophanies. That is, we are simply told he ‘appeared’ (lit., ‘was seen’). But whereas the stories of theophanies and visions referred to in the Old Testament may in some cases be legendary in character, we have the best possible historical evidence concerning at least some of the appearances of Jesus. This is because of the first-hand witness of Paul, who, in his own words, writes, ‘In the end he appeared even to me.’⁴² In addition, he not only transmits to us the early tradition that Christ ‘appeared to Cephas’, but tells us elsewhere that some time after his own conversion he went ‘up to Jerusalem to get to know Cephas’⁴³ and ‘stayed with him for a fortnight’.⁴³ Since Paul and Peter are likely to have discussed all the important aspects of the Christian Gospel together, we can take Paul’s testimony as the equivalent of first-hand testimony by Peter that Jesus had appeared to him. We are bound to accept as historically substantiated that Paul and Peter both believed that Jesus had appeared to them. This apostolic testimony to the appearances of Jesus remains an irreducible datum of the Easter faith.

But this most important yet simple statement almost exhausts the firsthand evidence of the appearances of Jesus. We possess no firsthand description of the nature of what they saw, or the circumstances of their experiences. We are left with many important questions unanswered. Was it a wholly subjective vision, intensely real, but taking place within Peter’s own mind? Was it an objective vision, which others too would have witnessed had they been there? Did Peter see Jesus just as he had known him during his earthly ministry or did he see a glorified Jesus? Did Jesus appear as if he were standing in front of Peter? Or was it a vision of Jesus at the right hand of God? We do not know, and we must resist the temptation to assume that the vision must be interpreted in the light of any of the later resurrection narratives. Von Campenhausen thinks that ‘there is a distinct probability that the first appearance of the risen Christ to Peter was at the fish haul on the lake of Gennesaret in Galilee’.⁴⁴ Many have regarded the Transfiguration as an early resurrection story, and if, as Bultmann suggests, it was originally told only of Peter, it may contain some clues pointing to Peter’s initial experience.⁴⁵

We do not learn much more about the real nature of the appearances of Jesus when we turn to Paul, for he nowhere spells out for us the nature of the experience in which he saw Jesus. The author of Acts has given us three accounts of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, and in not one of them does he say that Paul saw Jesus, but rather that Paul was blinded by a light and heard the voice of Jesus. In the Lucan chronology, however, the appearances all took place in the forty days before the Ascension, and this put them in a different category from the experience of Paul. Yet the sources used by the author of Acts did not observe this distinction, for each of them in an indirect way testified to the belief that Paul saw Jesus.⁴⁶ This too was Paul’s own testimony. Moreover, since his vision of Jesus is one of the grounds on which he defended his apostleship, he evidently did not recognize any difference between his experience and that of Peter as regards the appearance of the exalted Jesus.

Although we have only a few clues about the nature of the appearance of Jesus to Paul, we must not assume that it was necessarily a vision of the historical Jesus standing before him. The traditions of it reported by the author of Acts all speak of a great light flashing from heaven. These suggest a vision which revealed Jesus in his heavenly glory at the right hand of the divine throne, not unlike that seen by the martyr Stephen when he looked up to heaven and ‘saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at God’s right hand’.⁴⁷ So Goguel comments, ‘When we consider the part played by the faith in the resurrection in Paul’s religious life and thought as a result of Christ’s appearance to him, we see that most essential to his faith was not the feeling that Jesus had returned to the environment of his life on earth preceding his passion but a belief in his glorification, i.e. in his transition to life in heaven where death has no more dominion over him.’⁴⁸

Whatever the nature of the appearances of Jesus to Peter and Paul, they did not so much initiate the Easter message as confirm it, and thus cause the Easter message to bring forth the response of Easter faith. Even visions must be interpreted. Vital to the experience of Paul were the words with which he found himself addressed by the Jesus he saw. In the same way a simple vision, however real and vivid, of Jesus subsequent to his death would not have led to the Easter faith unless it had been preceded or accompanied by the Easter message that God had vindicated the crucified one and made him Lord. But if, for the reasons outlined earlier in this chapter, the Easter message was already beginning to take shape in the minds of the disciples, of Peter in particular, the experience of seeing Jesus in his glorified state would have the effect of authenticating the Easter message and of causing the Easter faith to take possession of whoever heard it, and of those, in turn, who were convinced by the apostolic testimony.

We have spoken of the Easter message in terms of the glorification or exaltation of the crucified Jesus, a divine act by which God was believed to have made Jesus both Lord and Messiah.³⁷ In the New Testament the resurrection of Jesus is primarily to be understood not as an act of Jesus (he rose) but as an act of God (he was raised by God). The Easter message does not describe an historical event, but proclaims a divine act. An act of God is beyond historical investigation and can be confessed by faith alone. Yet this proclamation was related to an event which was certainly historical, namely the crucifixion. Because the death of Jesus on the cross was the very fact that sparked off the development which led to the Easter message, it came to determine the more precise meaning of the exaltation of Jesus in a way that had no parallel in the tradition of Elijah, for he was thought never to have died.

The exaltation of Jesus implied the victory of Jesus over death, from the time it was first proclaimed. ‘To exalt the crucified Jesus to the right hand of God’ was a statement which implied another, namely, ‘to raise from the dead’, and the two seem to have been used almost synonymously at first.⁴⁹ At this point we must take note of the widespread belief in the resurrection of the dead at the end-time, already described in the previous two chapters. For two centuries this conviction had been bringing comfort and hope to some sections of Jews when they saw loyal and saintly men succumbing to a cruel death at the hands of their enemies. This belief, shared, it appears, by Jesus and his disciples, would have led the disciples in any case to the conviction that Jesus, as a martyr, would be among the first to be raised at the end-time.

However, we have seen that there was no one definitive form of understanding the nature of the future resurrection. In view of the fluid nature of this belief, and since, for the reasons outlined above, the disciples had been led to believe the Easter message that Jesus had been exalted to heaven, the divine raising of Jesus from the dead was not only a synonymous way of proclaiming the exaltation of Jesus, but the most natural way of doing full justice to the two foci of the Easter message, death and exaltation.

We must also remember the widespread conviction of the time that the end of the age was near at hand. The ministry of Jesus did not usher in the new age in the way the disciples may have been led to expect it. The unexpected death of Jesus, however, did nothing to lessen the conviction of the disciples that the end had all but come. It must have seemed to them in the first days after that shattering blow that the end had come. The emergence of the Easter message, expressed in terms of the raising of Jesus from the dead, meant that in Jesus, at least, the new age had already broken into the old age. The exaltation of Jesus was the prelude to the coming of the new age in all its fullness. There seems little doubt that, when Paul was writing, Christians were still expecting the exalted Jesus to descend from heaven within the imminent future. The new age would then be ushered in in its fullness and be accompanied by the general resurrection. The victory over death granted to Jesus by God constituted the earnest of the resurrection to come. For all these reasons the language of the current eschatological hope of resurrection was used from near the beginning in order to express the Easter message.

In this chapter we have tried to sketch the rise of the Easter faith by taking into account the factors present at the time of the death of Jesus. But it is not a history of what happened to the disciples, or of the reasoning that went on in their minds, for we have not sufficient data to write such a history. It has become clear, however, how the factors present at the time of the crucifixion could have contributed to the message that the crucified Jesus was vindicated and exalted. And the New Testament writings point to this as the earliest form of the Easter message.

The Easter message proclaimed that the crucified Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God. This by its very nature is beyond historical enquiry and rational demonstration. It was a message which could be accepted by faith, if believed to have come from God. This Easter message, accompanied by and confirmed by the apostolic experiences of ‘seeing’ the exalted Jesus, produced the Easter faith.

The Easter message could be expressed without drawing upon resurrection language, as, for example, in Philippians 2:5 - 11, and in what maybe another early credal form, I Timothy 3:16.

Yet, for reasons outlined above, the language of the current eschatological hope of resurrection was used from near the beginning in order to express the Easter message. Thus a fresh use was found for the idiom of resurrection. It was now employed to describe the exaltation to heaven of a particular person, because his exaltation included the victory over his death. The resurrection of Jesus could thus be proclaimed as something which had already occurred; at the same time it was the earnest of the general resurrection which would accompany the new age shortly to appear.

In this new use to which the idiom of resurrection was being put, hope was still a basic element. But, whereas resurrection had been a hope associated with the end-time, the hope of the first Christians now became rooted in the crucified and exalted Jesus. Christians could now speak of the crucified, and risen one, as ‘Christ Jesus our hope’.⁵⁰

Notes:

1. Mark 14:50. See also Mark 14:27, 16:7, John 16:32.

2. op. cit., p. 73.

3. Cf. I Cor. 1:23, Gal. 5:11.

4. See Mark 8:31, 9:;9, 31, 10:34.

5. Mark 9:32.

6. Luke 24:27.

7. Luke 24:26.

8. Luke 24:32.

9. Luke 24:44-7.

10. John 20:9.

11. Cor. 15:3-4.

12. Isaiah 53:4-9.

13. Gal. 6:14.

14. I Cor. 2:2.

15. Isaiah 53:10-12.

16. Rom. 4:25.

17. Acts 2:26-8, quoting Ps. 16:9-11.

18. Acts 2:34-5, quoting Ps. 110:1.

19. Hosea 6:2.

20. The Day of His Coming, p. 283.

21. The Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible stemming from the early Christian era.

22. op. cit., p. 283.

23. Theology of the New Testament, p. 82. Cf. also A. M. Ramsay, What was the Ascension?, an essay in Historicity and Chronology in the New Testament, S.P.C.K.

24. Jesus of Nazareth, p. 183.

25. Lordship and Discipleship, pp. 38-9.

26. Phil. 2:8-11.

27. Acts 5:30-2. See also 2:23, 32-3, 36.

28. Hebrews 13:20. The Greek verb used here means ‘to lead up’ and is not used in the New Testament elsewhere in connection with resurrection except in Rom. 10:7.

29. Hebrews 1:3-4, 8:1-2.

30. op. cit., p. 141. See also ibid., p. 137.

31. John 1:17.

32. Hebrews 3:2-3.

33. See V. Taylor, The Gospel according to St Mark, pp. 386-7.

34. e.g. Wellhausen, Loisy, Goguel, Bultmann. See V. Taylor, op. cit., p. 387.

35. op. cit., 68.

36. op. cit., p. 137.

37. Acts 2:36, and reading ‘men’ for ‘you’.

38. Matt. 28:17.

39. I Cor. 15:5, Mark 16:7, Luke 24:34, John 20:2-9, 21:1-18.

40. See C. F. Evans, op. cit., p. 53 for fuller discussion.

41. The Beginnings of Gospel Story, p. 226.

42. 1 Cor. 15:8.

43. Gal. 1:18.

44. op. cit., p. 51.

45. History of the Synoptic Tradition, pp. 259-60.

46. Acts 9:17, 27; 22:14; 26:16.

47. Acts 7:55

48. op. cit., p. 46.

49. See Phil. 2:9, Acts 2:32-3.

50. 1 Tim. 1:1. Cf. Col. 1:27.

With the advent of Christianity the idiom of resurrection, whose path we have been following, assumed a new mode of expression and this transformation was comparatively sudden and dramatic. We may isolate three particular features of this change, which were substantially new to the idiom. First, it moved right into the center of the picture, so far as the Christians saw it, and this was in contrast with the secondary role that it had played in Judaism hitherto. Secondly, it was applied to a particular historical person, whereas within Israelite thought it had been used only of the whole community or of a class of people within it. Thirdly, it became proclaimed as a present fact whereas up until now it had been looked forward to only as a future hope. All three features are contained in the affirmation which is generally agreed to have been fundamental to Christianity from the beginning, namely, that God raised Jesus from the dead.

This raises for us two crucial questions. What gave rise to the Christian proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus? What exactly did they mean by this proclamation? Ever since the end of the first century the traditional view of the resurrection appeared to embody reasonably clear and final answers to these questions and it was supported by the New Testament records, which quickly came to be regarded as historical evidence written by eye-witnesses. Owing to the modern collapse of this tradition, already traced in Part I above, we now find ourselves faced with a question to which it is impossible to give a detailed answer. What was the course of events which gave rise to the Christian faith in the period of approximately twenty years between the death of Jesus and the writing of the earliest New Testament documents, the letters of Paul?

This difficulty is part of a larger one. Many New Testament scholars have now reached the conclusion that we do not possess sufficient data to write a history of the life of Jesus. G. Bornkamm begins his Jesus of Nazareth with the words, ‘No one is any longer in the position to write a life of Jesus. This is the scarcely questioned and surprising result today of an enquiry which for almost two hundred years has devoted prodigious and by no means fruitless effort to regain and expound the life of the historical Jesus, freed from all embellishment by dogma and doctrine.’¹

How much more difficult it is to write the history of the rise of Christianity in the first twenty years! We have no contemporary documents from this period relevant to our quest. When the New Testament documents came to be written, the Christian movement had already become firmly established and was in the process of moving rapidly afield. The New Testament everywhere affirmed the resurrection of Jesus, or what is commonly called today the Easter faith, and none of it would have been written if it had not been for this faith. But the account of how the Easter faith originated is recorded in traditions most of which were written within the last twenty years of the first century AD.

These traditions, such as the resurrection narratives and the opening chapters of Acts, certainly give us some very valuable clues concerning the rise of the Easter faith, but each of these has to be examined and evaluated before it can be used in constructing even a skeleton history in the events immediately following the death of Jesus. There is a similar problem in the Old Testament. The faith of ancient Israel was founded upon the tradition that Moses led the Hebrew tribes out from slavery in Egypt into the promised land and that their journey was made possible by the intervention of their God YHWH at certain strategic points. Nearly all of the Old Testament is written in the light of this tradition, but our only evidence for this migration is now embedded in traditions which were not committed to writing until some three hundred years later.

For lack of the necessary historical evidence it is no longer possible to write historical accounts of either the Mosaic migration upon which the faith of Israel was founded, or the rise of the Easter faith on which Christianity is founded. In discussing the impact of modern historical enquiry upon theological study, W. Nicholls writes: ‘The aim of the historian is to reconstruct a situation which could have left just these traces and no other, but the aim is almost unattainable. Only if we knew that every significant aspect of the past situation had left a commensurate trace could we be assured that our reconstruction was authentic, given a perfect technique of assessment of the evidence and deduction from it. In practice, the traces are always incomplete and doubtless disproportionate to the structure of the situation that produced them. It is always possible that several different situations could have left the traces we have, and we have very few objective criteria for distinguishing between their relative probability.’²

It has sometimes been claimed by the defenders of the traditional view of the resurrection, that such was the nature of the Easter faith, that only that series of events to which it refers (from the discovery of the empty tomb to the Ascension forty days later) could adequately explain the rise of Christianity. While it is no longer possible to give an historical account of the rise of the Easter faith, it is possible to show that there are ways of understanding its origin other than the old tradition which has now collapsed. This we propose to do. First we shall turn to the most important relevant factors which existed in the situation at the death of Jesus. In the next chapter we shall show how they could have contributed to the rise of the Easter faith. Later we shall indicate how the Easter faith could have led to the New Testament traditions.

At the beginning of this book it was pointed out that it is fatal to assume that the word ‘resurrection’ can mean only one thing. In our study of the resurrection idiom we have now reached a point that is of vital importance. We cannot adequately approach the question, ‘What gave rise to the Easter faith?’ unless we also ask the question, ‘What exactly was meant when the affirmation that God had raised Jesus from the dead was first made?’

It is this question which leads us to the first important factor in the situation. Resurrection-talk was not new. No Easter faith would have arisen if there had not been already to hand the resurrection language in which it came to be expressed. The resurrection idiom in its eschatological form was a lively element in Jewish thought, and an essential pre-requisite for the rise of the Easter proclamation. Resurrection belonged to the end-time. It was to be one of God’s final and mighty acts before the great judgment. Resurrection was believed to have cosmic significance. It was in a different class altogether from such miracles as told of the restoration of a dead man to life.³

Further, resurrection was regarded as a future divine act which had special reference to those who had died a martyr’s death. Concern for the ultimate vindication of the martyr had been a prominent factor within Jewish thought in promoting the hope for a final resurrection. Even if no others were to be raised from the dead at the last day, the martyrs certainly would be. There was even the hint from time to time that some element of divine rule would be delegated to them in the New Age. We must not overlook this close association between martyrdom and resurrection. It was already present in Jewish thought and it continued to play a prominent part in Christian thought, so much so that martyrdom came to be regarded as the quickest and surest way to the heavenly realm.⁴

Resurrection was an eschatological hope, and this usually meant that it was a divine action which was to take place at the end-time. But we have also seen in the previous chapter that there were various ways of understanding this event. In some of the more spiritual versions of the resurrection hope, those destined for the resurrection life could be thought of as entering into that promise at the point of death. It was this stream of thought that came to expression in the Passion narrative where Luke recorded Jesus as saying to the penitent thief; ‘today you shall be with me in Paradise’.⁵ We must be careful to do justice to the fluid nature of the forms in which the resurrection hope was expressed, and to recognize that they were alternatives which could not be easily reconciled with each other.

The final aspect of this factor that we must remember is that the political and religious situation was such that many thought the end-time was very near and about to break in upon them ‘like a thief in the night’.⁶ For a section of the Jews, as for the early Christians, there was an air of expectancy. The end of the present age was imminent. If the end was near, the resurrection was near. One important aspect of the Easter proclamation was the conviction that the New Age had already broken into the remaining short period of the Old Age.

The second factor (and one that is often not given sufficient attention) was the central place already given in Jewish thought to Holy Scripture. Christianity, in its origins, was closely associated with the synagogue, and it was not until thirty or forty years later that the growing rift became final and the two movements became mutually exclusive. The life of the synagogue centered round the reading, study and expounding of Holy Scripture.

The Jewish methods of studying and interpreting their Bible were very different from those we employ today. We find ourselves quite unconvinced by much of the ancient rabbinical reasoning, a little of which is reflected in the letters of Paul.⁷ Nevertheless the Jews spent much time trying to learn how the Scriptures they had inherited from a former period were to be seen as relevant to their own day. New and striking events were linked with ancient prophecies. Men turned back to the Scriptures to see what light they shed on the events of their own time. The first Christians inherited this concern with the Bible from their Jewish origin, and they used similar methods of interpretation. These had their origin in the post-exilic period, even though most of the material to which they gave rise was not written in its final form until the first few centuries of the Christian era.

Any exposition which intended to penetrate beneath the simple straightforward meaning of the text and gain from it all that it might be regarded as saying by implication was called a midrash.⁸ There were two types of midrash. That type which led to a clear and more precise understanding of the law as it was to be observed in one’s own daily life was called midrash halachah (lit, ‘walking’, because it showed the mode of behavior in which one should walk). That type which was more homiletical and devotional, intended to strengthen conviction, and to aid the understanding of the Jewish heritage, was called midrash haggadah (lit. ‘narration’, for it achieved its aim very often by telling a story).⁹ Since the Semitic mind was quite unaccustomed to our kind of philosophical and abstract thought, midrash haggadah fulfilled a very important function in Jewish education. Haggadah included ‘often by way of biblical exegesis, ethical and moral teaching, theological speculation, legends, folklore . . . and expressions of messianic faith and longing’.¹⁰ It elaborated ‘the stories of Scripture so as to draw from them the maximum of moral instruction’¹⁰ but it also made use of ‘the free individual creation of every generation’.¹⁰ It eventually abounded in stories and anecdotes bearing upon the lives of biblical characters and post-biblical Jewish saints and heroes.

The book of Jonah is sometimes regarded as an early midrashic writing, stemming from the study of 2 Kings 14:25, but with its own distinctive message to proclaim. The story of the flight into Egypt by Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus may have originated as a midrash inspired from the text by Hosea, ‘1 called my son out of Egypt’.¹¹ If the story of the burial by Joseph of Arimathea owes anything at all to the influence of such a verse as Isaiah 53:9, then it would be a further example of the midrashic study of the Bible as a method of answering current problems. As the disciples and their friends lived through the first weeks and months after the crucifixion of Jesus it is most unlikely that they abandoned the Bible, and if; from it, they sought illumination for their perplexity, then the methods of interpretation¹² we have here briefly outlined throw some light on how they would have gone about it.

Thirdly, we turn to some Jewish beliefs of the first century which could have a bearing on the rise of the Easter faith. There were some very important antecedents. Jesus was not the first person who was believed to be still alive after his earthly life had come to an end.

We need not dwell on the mythical Enoch, for although his name was being used by apocalyptic writers as an obvious person through whom divine revelations might be thought to be made, he contributes little to our enquiry at this point. It is quite otherwise, however, with Elijah, the ninth century prophet, who, according to the Biblical tradition, had been carried up to heaven in a whirlwind riding in a chariot of fire, drawn by horses of fire.¹³ Elijah had made such an impression on the men of his own generation as a man of vitality and divine power that he continued to be a living legend. The story of his ascension to heaven evidently arose from the fact that such a man of God could not be conceived as having died like other men.

In first-century Judaism Elijah was universally accepted as being still alive. The very last verse of the biblical books of the prophets reads, ‘Look, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will reconcile fathers to sons and sons to fathers, lest I come and put the land under a ban to destroy it.’¹⁴ In popular Jewish thought Elijah came to be regarded as ‘the ever-present prophet, wandering incognito over the earth, sometimes in the garb of a nomad, to aid in moments of distress and danger, appearing to mystics and scholars to teach them hidden truths, and acting as celestial messenger’.¹⁵ He was thought to be present at every ceremony of circumcision as the guardian spirit and witness, and on such occasions a special chair was reserved for him. There was a strong expectation that Elijah would come down to earth from heaven just prior to the end-time, and it was said that all doubtful interpretations of the law would be resolved ‘when Elijah comes’. At the annual celebration of the Passover festival it was the custom to set aside a cup of wine in readiness for the prophet.

In the period we are studying, Elijah had become an eschatological figure and was becoming increasingly prominent in Jewish thought and imagination. The New Testament gives ample evidence that the expectation of the return of Elijah was a very live issue in the first century. The Gospels report that some wondered if Jesus was the returned Elijah, and that Jesus, in turn, identified him with John the Baptist.

The first point to note about the Elijah tradition is that in the first century AD. the Jews were already well acquainted with the idea that a man from past history was still alive, and though he was usually hidden from sight by being present in heaven, he could influence men by giving them understanding for their minds and courage for their distress. He could even appear among men from time to time but only the very discerning would recognize him. In periods of crisis the expectation of an imminent appearance grew stronger.

The second point to note is that when the biblical legends stemming from the historical Elijah were taking shape, there was no current belief at all in resurrection. If, however, there had been, then it is possible that resurrection stories might have grown up about Elijah instead, or alongside, of the ascension story. As it happened, the belief that Elijah was still alive was expressed in another and simpler way. There is a common Hebrew word, usually translated as ‘take’ or ‘receive’, which was used to signify the divine act by which, it was believed, God sometimes delivered men from the extinction of life entailed by death. Pre-historic tradition stated that ‘Having walked with God, Enoch was seen no more, because God had taken him away.’¹⁷ The word is used five times in the legend which tells how ‘The time came when the Loan would take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind.^’18 We find the Psalmists using it when they expressed their ultimate hope as follows:

Thirdly we must note that there are some quite striking parallels between the traditions of Elijah current in first century Judaism, and the convictions which the infant Christian church came to entertain about their crucified Lord. Both Elijah and Jesus were regarded as prophets, of both it was said that they restored the dead to life, both were believed to have ascended heaven, of both it was claimed that they had passed on their spirit or power to others, and both were expected to return in person at the end-time. Elisha had been told by Elijah in response to his request for a double share of Elijah’s spirit, that if he saw Elijah as he was taken up into heaven, the wish would be granted.²¹ The apostles were the witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus, and the Spirit was given to them on the day of Pentecost (according to Acts) or on Easter day (according to John).

Such parallels as these are hardly all accidental. It seems quite possible that the Elijah tradition exerted some influence on the shape the stories of Jesus began to assume in the early period after his death. There were of course some very important differences between the two men, and one of these was that whereas no one knew what happened to Elijah at the end of his earthly life, it was an established fact that Jesus had been crucified by the Roman authorities. If the followers of Jesus, for any particular reasons, were to regard Jesus as at least the equal of Elijah, then the knowledge of the way their master had died called for something more specific than the simple claim that God had ‘taken’ him. The language of the current resurrection hope met that need.

There was another figure in Jewish tradition to be coupled with Elijah and that is Moses. In the intertestamental period Moses came to be regarded as easily the most significant person in all Jewish history, being the human vehicle through whom was conveyed from God not only the written law, but also the oral tradition which had come to accompany it. In the Bible the humanity and fallibility of Moses were strictly maintained. Moreover his death was reported there, though in a curious way. ‘There in the land of Moab Moses the servant of the Loan died . . . He was buried in a valley in Moab . . . but to this day no one knows his burial-place.’²²

In spite of this biblical report of his death, various haggadic stories grew up about his ultimate destiny and they fastened on the odd way in which his burial was reported. When Jesus son of Sirach came to sing the praises of ‘Moses of blessed memory’, he said that ‘The Loan made him equal in glory to the angels’,²³ and this suggests that he was destined for an honored place with Elijah in the heavenly realm.

In the first century there was a widespread legend that Moses had not really died but had been taken bodily into heaven. Josephus describes it as follows:

Acquaintance with this legend formed part of the necessary background to the Gospel account of the transfiguration of Jesus in which it is reported that three of the disciples were led by Jesus up a high mountain where he conversed with Elijah and Moses as they appeared to him. The same legend prompted the writing of a book entitled ‘The Ascension of Moses’, which was probably familiar, to the author of Jude²⁵ and was known to Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

Besides these widespread beliefs concerning Elijah and Moses there is one further story worth mentioning, for it illustrates how easily the memory of a highly honored figure could give rise to a belief in his exaltation following his death. It also shows what comfort and inspiration men received from such a story in a time of stress and crisis. This story revolves round Onias, a high priest in Jerusalem in the second century BC., reputed to be a holy and righteous man, who was believed by some to have been martyred for his faith.²⁶

The author of 2 Maccabees tells us how Judas Maccabaeus encouraged his soldiers by relating an experience he had had.

This account of a ‘trustworthy dream’ or ‘waking vision’, attributed to Judas Maccabaeus, did not develop into a belief about the continuing influence of Onias. But it is a relevant illustration of how readily the believed martyrdom of a saintly and venerated figure could not only bring encouragement but originate convictions about his ultimate destiny. The greater the impression such a man made upon his fellows, the more likely it would be that in the event of his martyrdom they would be stimulated to affirm his heavenly exaltation.

At the time of the death of Jesus the last and most important factor in the situation, which could have led to the rise of the Easter faith, was the impression that had already been made by the person of Jesus himself. Those who maintain that only a miraculous and supernatural event could have led the disciples from despair to the Easter faith, unwittingly belittle the impact that Jesus had made in the course of his short ministry. It is a travesty of the Easter faith to think of it as arising because at last a man had given to his friends unmistakable evidence that he had conquered death, and that this man happened to be called Jesus, and that because of this they began to take a fresh interest in what he had said and done. The truth rather is that Jesus had left with his disciples such a vivid impression of the quality of life to be found in him, that when they were confronted with his death on the cross, they came to believe that death could not overpower a life of this quality. It is Jesus himself who is the key to the Easter faith. Since men had already been ready to believe that Moses and Elijah had been raised to heaven, how much more should those who had been Jesus’ intimate disciples, and who had recognized in him one greater than Moses, come to the conviction that God had raised him from the dead! The early Christians did not believe in the resurrection, as such, but in the risen Christ. The Easter faith was not an affirmation of the resurrection hope, but an affirmation about Jesus himself; expressed in terms of the idiom of resurrection.

Notes:

1. p. 13.

2. Systematic and Philosophical Theology, pp. 55-6

3. The title Man Alive which Michael Green chose for his popular study of the resurrection of Jesus misses the eschatological significance of the Easter proclamation and puts the emphasis in quite the wrong place.

4. e.g. Rev. 20:4-6.

5. Luke 23:43. It has often been noted that these words are inconsistent with the common tradition that Jesus rose on the third day.

6. Thess. 5:2.

7. e.g. Gal. 3:16.

8. We first meet this term in 2 Chron. 13:22, 24:27.

9. Sometimes the term is written as Aggadah.

10. The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, p. 15.

11. Hosea 11:1.

12. In Acts (e.g. 2:16, ‘this is what the prophet spoke of’) we have examples of the method of interpretation used in the Dead Sea Scrolls and known as pesher (‘interpretation’ or ‘explanation’).

13. 2 Kings 2:11.

14. Malachi 4:6.

15. The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, pp. 126-7.

16. Matt. 17:10-13.

17. Gen. 5:24.

18. 2 Kings 2:1.

19. Ps. 49:15.

20. Ps. 73:24.

21. 2 Klrigs 2:9-1O.

22. Deut. 34:5-6.

23. Ecclesiasticus 45:1-2.

24. Antiquities of the Jews, IV:VIII:46.

25. See Jude 9.

26. Scholars disagree as to whether the account of his martyrdom is historical.

27. 2 Maccabees 15:11-16.

We have now reached the most vital period for the proper understanding of our subject. The three centuries from 200 BC. to AD. 100 form the immediate background of Christianity and the context in which it came to birth. The fact that only the Rabbinic form of Judaism and the Catholic form of Christianity eventually survived can easily blind us to the complex, and at times chaotic, nature of the religious beliefs held within the Judaeo-Christian stream during this critical period. It was a time of increasing political tension and international upheaval, which in turn caused the more rapid spread of previously foreign beliefs, destined to influence both Jews and, later, Christians.

The Jews were caught up in the cultural ferment which unsettled the Eastern Mediterranean world of the time. Jewish thought was stimulated to explore new, and sometimes conflicting, avenues of thought and this led to the formation of parties or sects within Judaism. Even the New Testament tells us of the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, Zealots, Galileans, Samaritans and the disciples of John the Baptist. From other sources we know of the Essenes, the Ebionites and the Qumran community. It is most likely that there were others which have left no trace. Modern studies have helped us to realize more clearly than before, that, for the first thirty years of its existence, Christianity itself was one of the many sects or movements which existed within Judaism, and that when Christianity finally became divorced from the Jewish community, it too was already branching out into some diverse forms. R. H. Pfeiffer has summed up the period by saying, ‘These Palestinian sects, parties, schools, and movements flourishing during the centuries about the beginning of our era attest, by their contrasting aspirations and tenets, the vitality of Judaism and its manifold variety.’¹

Nowhere was this diversity more obvious than in the subject of eschatology. We have already pointed to the earlier beginnings of that concern with the end-time at which, it was believed, both nations and individuals would come up for final judgment. The political tensions and cultural confusion now served only to increase the conviction that the end-time was rapidly drawing nearer. A cosmic catastrophe, involving a great conflict, was expected to precede the end of the present age. Then, after the process of divine judgment, a new and quite different age would commence. Some saw it all as the restoration of the former Davidic kingdom: some saw it on an international scale. Some associated it with a Messiah, and others did not. Mythological ideas were being freely drawn from various sources, particularly Persian, in an attempt to describe the end-time in more detail, but no standard picture was produced.

It was in this eschatological context, as we have seen, that the idiom of resurrection had finally taken root in Jewish thought. We are now to examine the various ways in which this idiom came to be understood. Some rejected it altogether, some looked for the resurrection of the few, some looked for the resurrection of all, some saw it in spiritual terms, some in physical terms, some saw it as taking place on earth, some referred it to Sheol, some pictured it in a heavenly sphere. This diversity will now be illustrated from the extant writings of the period, commonly called the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha.²

First, there were those who steadfastly supported what had eventually become the traditional Israelite view of human destiny. They regarded man as a mortal creature, whose life ends in death, and whose death must therefore be in some sense final. They rejected any notion of a general resurrection and showed no interest in the mythological concepts with which the apocalyptic writers were inclined to describe their eschatological convictions. This section included the Sadducees, and perhaps quite a considerable proportion of Jews, for theirs was the dominant view reflected in the books of the Apocrypha.

This point of view is well expressed by that great scholar of Jewish wisdom called Jesus, son of Sirach, who compiled his impressive work, commonly known as Ecclesiasticus, about 80 BC. He taught that death must be accepted as part of human nature; the important thing was to leave behind a good name.

Next we turn to those who spoke in terms of a future resurrection. The only book of the Apocrypha where such ideas are to be found is 2 Maccabees. The compiler of this book informed his Jewish kinsmen in Egypt in an opening letter, written in 124 BC., that for their entertainment and profit he had undertaken to summarize five books on the history of Judas Maccabaeus, which had been written by Jason of Cyrene. The passages we are about to quote indicate the direction in which some Jews were turning their thoughts in the second century BC.

To illustrate the cruel persecution of the Jews undertaken by the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes, 2 Maccabees related a story of the torture and ultimate martyrdom of seven sons. As each died in turn, proudly defying the king in the worst that he could do, they expressed their confidence in their ultimate vindication with such words as: ‘Fiend though you are, you are setting us free from this present life, and, since we die for his laws, the King of the universe will raise us up to a life everlastingly made new.’⁴ ‘Better to be killed by men and cherish God’s promise to raise us again. There will be no resurrection to life for you!’⁵

As the mother watched her seven sons all die in one day she encouraged each of them in their heroic stand with the words, ‘You appeared in my womb, I know not how; it was not I who gave you life and breath and set in order your bodily frames. It is the Creator of the universe who moulds man at his birth and plans the origin of all things. Therefore he, in his mercy, will give you back life and breath again, since now you put his laws above all thought of self.’⁶

Later in 2 Maccabees we learn that some of the Jewish soldiers fallen in battle were discovered to have been wearing pagan amulets under their tunics. Consequently it was concluded that their death had resulted from their breaking of the Jewish law. The narrator uses this occasion to point out that Judas Maccabaeus believed in a future resurrection, for he ‘levied a contribution from each man, and sent the total of two thousand drachmas to Jerusalem for a sin-offering -- a fit and proper act in which he took due account of the resurrection. For if he had not been expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been foolish and superfluous to pray for the dead. But since he had in view the wonderful reward reserved for those who die a godly death, his purpose was a holy and a pious one. And this was why he offered an atoning sacrifice to free the dead from their sin.’⁷

2 Maccabees clearly portrays a resurrection after death and one which probably implies a physical fleshly form.⁸ But it is certainly not a general resurrection of all men that is contemplated, and perhaps not the resurrection of even all pious Jews. Resurrection is here closely associated with martyrdom; it is a ‘wonderful reward reserved for those who die a godly death’.⁷ This kind of resurrection hope arose spontaneously, but perhaps irrationally, from those who, observing martyrdom, had no other way of expressing their conviction that the martyr had not died in vain. Although not inconsistent with the growing eschatological concern at that time, the hope of resurrection for the martyrs was not wholly dependent upon it in the way the apocalyptic visions and the idea of general resurrection were.

It is not surprising that 2 Maccabees later became popular among Christians. In many ways it constituted the prototype for the books of Christian martyrs, and Origen regarded the story of the seven brothers as a wonderful pattern for Christians to follow. In our present study it is important to note that it preceded the rise of Christianity. However true it was that the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church, the readiness to die for one’s faith in the hope of a vindicating resurrection was not unique to Christianity, but was already part of the Jewish faith out of which Christianity sprang.⁹

In the Old Testament and the Apocrypha the hope of a resurrection from the dead has been expressed in a clear but restrained way. In the non-biblical writings we find that the writers have often allowed their imaginations much greater freedom to speculate. One is inclined to agree with Martin-Achard when he suggests that these writers were ‘motivated perhaps rather by a desire to penetrate into the mystery of the Beyond than by a real devotion to the Living God’¹⁰ and consequently their answers to the destiny of the departed ‘were as varied as they were confused’¹⁰ In most societies there are some who feel a peculiar attraction to the occult. The period we are studying offered ample opportunity for this, and there is an element of it in the apocalyptic writing that became so popular. One can well imagine a wisdom teacher like Jesus, son of Sirach, having much the same attitude towards those of his fellow Jews who were fascinated by apocalyptic, as an orthodox churchman today may feel towards some of the stranger Christian sects.

The mysterious Enoch of Genesis 5:21-4, since he had never died but had been taken to be with God, was an obvious figure to become the subject of creative legend by the imaginative mind. The book of Enoch, which became popular among Jews and later among Christians, is believed to have been written at various times between 150-80 BC. It presents a variety of views on the resurrection, illustrating to us how some Jews of this period were delving into speculations about life after death.

The book describes how Enoch visited the underworld of Sheol, and after observing the prison for fallen angels in which a great fire blazed, he was led by the angel Raphael to a high mountain. There he saw four hollow places ‘created for this very purpose, that the spirits of the souls of the dead should assemble therein, yea that all the souls of the children of men should assemble here. And these places have been made to receive them till the day of judgment and till their appointed period.’¹¹

When Enoch asked why the hollow places were separated from each other, he was told, ‘These three have been made that the spirits of the dead might be separated. And this division has been made for the spirits of the righteous, in which there is the bright spring of water. And this has been made for sinners when they die and are buried in the earth and judgment has not been executed upon them in their lifetime. Here their spirits shall be set apart in this great pain, till the great day of judgment, scourgings, and torments of the accursed for ever, so that there might be retribution for their spirits. There he shall bind them forever. And this division has been made for the spirits of those who make their suit, who make disclosures concerning their destruction, when they were slain in the days of the sinners. And this has been made for the spirits of men who shall not be righteous but sinners, who are godless, and of the lawless they shall be companions; but their spirits shall not be punished in the day of judgment nor shall they be raised from thence.’¹²

These four divisions show that some Jews wanted to be assured that the difference between the righteous faithful and the ungodly sinners would be given due recognition and would be of permanent significance; this desire was met by the first and last divisions. Then they sought assurance that those sinners who seem to go through life without ever suffering at all for their misdeeds would eventually receive their due punishment, and that those, on the other hand, who had been martyred unjustly, would be given the opportunity to present their case before a higher court; these interests led to the second and third divisions. There is a sense in which the divisions themselves already constitute some kind of judgment after death, but a final judgment was still awaited, presumably at the end of time when all the human race have been assigned to their places in one or other of the four hollow places. This picture of the final destiny of man did not resort to resurrection language, but attempted to meet the moral issues by transforming the ancient notion of Sheol.

When we turn to a later section of the book of Enoch, known as the Parables, we find quite a different point of view. There the theme of a final resurrection has become dominant and is described as follows:

Later we find the description of the state of the risen elect:

Still a third point of view is expressed in Enoch 91-104, which deals with the persecuted and their oppressors. Here there is no mention of a resurrection or of a coming kingdom on the earth. There is a hereafter of a more spiritual kind, in which the spirits of the dead are conceived in a more living and personal way than had been traditional in Israelite thought. Instead of the four divisions of Shed that we met earlier in Enoch, Sheol is now regarded (though not always consistently) as the place of eternal torment, and the spirits of the righteous enter with joy into a spiritual heaven.

A similar point of view is found in the Psalms of Solomon, often dated between 70-40 BC. and believed by some to have been written by Pharisees. Here we learn that death brings final destruction for the wicked, but the righteous rise to eternal life in the glorious presence of God.

R. H. Charles believed that the physical view of the resurrection belonged more to the Jewish thought of the second century BC., where the coming kingdom was expected to be established on the present earth. This, in a sense, was what the Maccabeans were striving for. ‘But in the next century’, he wrote, ‘where this specific doctrine of the kingdom is abandoned, and the righteous are regarded as rising either to heaven itself or to the eternal Messianic kingdom in a new heaven and a new earth, the nature of this resurrection is, of necessity, differently conceived. To such spiritual final abodes of the blessed there could not be a mere bodily resurrection. Hence two views arose as to the nature of the resurrection. Whilst some taught, as the writers of Enoch 91-104 and Psalms of Solomon, that there would be no resurrection of the body at all but only of the spirit, others, as the writer of the Parables, said there would be a resurrection of the body, but this body would consist of garments of glory and light and that the risen righteous would be of an angelic nature. Thus we find that the doctrine of the resurrection which was current amongst the cultured Pharisees in the century immediately preceding the Christian era was of a truly nature.’¹⁷

A doctrine of resurrection, involving a spiritual transformation, is found in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a work coming largely from the second century BC., but now known to have some later Christian interpolations in it. The Testament of Benjamin reads,

Josephus, too, described the Pharisaic doctrine of resurrection as one which involved the abandonment of the earthly body. He claimed that the Pharisees held that ‘Every soul is incorruptible, but only the souls of good men pass into other bodies, the souls of bad men being subjected to eternal punishment.’¹⁹

These expressions of a spiritual resurrection, as held by the Pharisees, are all consistent with the view of general resurrection held by Paul, the first century AD. Pharisee, later turned Christian. Paul speaks of the general resurrection of the dead as one which involves both the dead and the living in a transformation into what he called ‘a spiritual body’. ‘Listen! I will unfold a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet-call. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise immortal, and we shall be changed. This perishable being must be clothed with the imperishable, and what is mortal must be clothed with immortality.’²⁰ ‘We, by contrast, are citizens of heaven, and from heaven we expect our deliverer to come, the Loan Jesus Christ. He will transfigure the body belonging to our humble state, and give it a form like that of his own resplendent body, by the very power which enables him to make all things subject to himselt.’²¹ It seems most Likely that Paul received his ideas of the general resurrection from his Pharisaic heritage, and that they were part of his convictions before he became a Christian.

R. H. Charles was right when he drew our attention to the great difference between the fleshly and the spiritual views of the resurrection, both of which were held by Jews of this period. It may also be true, as he claimed, that the cultured Pharisees of the first century BC. had abandoned the fleshly view in favor of a spiritual interpretation of resurrection. But this does not mean that a belief in physical resurrection ceased to be held after the second century BC. We have good evidence that it was still being taught in the first century AD.

The Apocalypse of Baruch is a completely Jewish work which was written probably between AD. 70-100, and this means that it was more or less contemporary with the Gospels. The author pictures the end-time as follows:

Later in the book, Baruch asked about the exact nature of the resurrection body at the consummation, and he was told by God that the dead would rise exactly as they were at the moment of death, and after they had been given an opportunity to recognize one another, they would then undergo a spiritual transformation.

A similar view of resurrection is reflected in the Apocalypse of Ezra. This is a composite work which now includes later Christian additions. it is worth noticing because it illustrates the kind of Jewish work which some Christians of the late first and second centuries AD. found attractive, and by which, presumably, they were also being influenced. Among the sections believed to have been written by a Pharisaic Jew before AD. 70, we read an account of a Messianic kingdom lasting for four hundred years prior to the general resurrection and final judgment.

Now we must turn to another section of the pre-Christian Jewish literature. Here we find that all talk of resurrection, even in a spiritual form, has been abandoned, and we have a doctrine of hope much closer to the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul. Some of these books undoubtedly show the influence of Greek thought. The earliest instance is in the book of Jubilees; this purports to be a further revelation of God to Moses, and was probably written between 153-105 BC. A life of bliss in some undefined state is promised for the righteous ones, but this is independent of the former earthly body, and hence the resurrection idiom is irrelevant.

The tenets of Greek thought are even more to be seen in the Wisdom of Solomon, which was probably composed in the middle of the first century BC. for the Greek-educated Jewish community of Alexandria. The author reflects the Platonic view of the human soul as that entity which pre-exists before coming to dwell for a time within an earthly body, as in a prison, and which later survives the death of the body, thus regaining its freedom. He said ‘a perishable body weighs down the soul, and its frame of clay burdens the mind so full of thoughts’.²⁶ Since the soul was thus thought to be eternal, immortal and indestructible, there was no need to resort to a doctrine of resurrection; on the contrary, the latter was deliberately avoided because no earthly and material things could compare with spiritual realities.

The first five chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon deal with the promise of immortality for those who are just, and the author attacked the view of those who, seeing no permanent meaning in life, decided to enjoy the good things of life while they could, no matter what suffering their self-centered actions might bring to others. It is because he believed in immortality that he saw the other attitude to be both blind and wrong. For him there was an ultimate judgment beyond death and he spoke of ‘the great assize of souls’. In his view the only ones who really die are the wicked, but the good suffer no loss by the death of the earthly body, but continue to live in the presence of God.

A similar view is found in 4 Maccabees, which was probably written by a Hellenistic Jew in Alexandria, in the first century, and some time before AD. 70. To illustrate his philosophical theme of the supremacy of Inspired Reason, the author used the story of the martyrdom of the seven sons and their mother found in 2 Maccabees. But he removed the resurrection hope which this story originally contained (as we have seen) and replaced it with a doctrine of immortal souls. He interpreted the martyrs as saying, ‘Let us not fear him who thinks he kills; . . . After this our passion, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall receive us, and all our forefathers shall praise us.’²⁸ He concluded his book with the words, ‘But the sons of Abraham, with their victorious mother, are gathered together unto the place of their ancestors, having received pure and immortal souls from God, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.’²⁹

It is this same stream of thought which appears in the Gospel records of the teaching of Jesus where we read, ‘Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Fear him rather who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell’.³⁰ The parable of the rich man and the begging Lazarus reflects a similar view of immortality. ‘One day the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up; and there, far away, was Abraham with Lazarus close beside him.’³¹ In these examples there is no reference to a resurrection, for it has become irrelevant when the human soul or personality is thought in some way to survive the death of the body. Such a view of man is of course not inconsistent with the spiritual version of resurrection, even though it makes resurrection talk unnecessary. Consequently we find it being used to support the resurrection hope in the story of the encounter with the Sadducees. The reconciliation of the two views is most fully expressed in the Lucan version. ‘The men and women of this world marry; but those who have been judged worthy of a place in the other world and of the resurrection from the dead, do not marry, for they are not subject to death any longer. They are like angels; they are sons of God, because they share in the resurrection. That the dead are raised to life again is shown by Moses himself in the story of the burning bush, when he calls the Lord, "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob". God is not God of the dead but of the living; for him all are alive.’³² It was thus implied that all faithful Israelites of the past, though dead, were still living. And it was further implied that since their tombs still contained their mortal remains, it was their souls that were alive; it was their souls which had attained to the resurrection from the dead.

We have now demonstrated from the writings of 200 BC. -AD. 100 that Jewish thoughts about the resurrection hope ran through a wide range of meanings. Some rejected all forms of life after death, including the possibility of resurrection; some recognized man’s mortality but looked for a physical resurrection as man’s only hope, and then only for some; for some the resurrection hope was to be understood more universally and in varying spiritual forms; some thought in terms of the immortality of the soul and then could dispense with resurrection talk altogether. We have already begun to see how these parallel streams of thought continued to show up in the New Testament.

All this diversity formed the immediate background and the living context for the rise of Christianity. When the idiom of resurrection came to be used in an eschatological form to express man’s ultimate hope, there was no one clear and unmistakable interpretation of it. The various interpretations shaded into one another as in the colors of the spectrum. These variations are clearly to be recognized in the New Testament, though the spectrum represented there is perhaps not quite so broad. It must further be said that on the subject of the general resurrection to come there is no fundamental break between Jewish thought and Christian thought. The Christians simply inherited this form of their future hope from their Jewish heritage, and reflected some of its diversity. It could be said that on this subject Paul still had more in common with the Jewish Pharisees than he had with the Corinthian Christians who were saying ‘there is no resurrection of the dead’.³³

The Jewish belief in an eschatological resurrection thus became part of the Christian expression of hope and we shall, in Chapter 13, trace its development. It was also the necessary background for a new and sudden turn in the long path being followed by the idiom of resurrection. This is the specifically Christian affirmation that Jesus is risen from the dead. To understand adequately all that originated that joyful proclamation, we must keep steadily in mind what this chapter has demonstrated about the fluid nature of resurrection language. But in the first century setting there were also other important factors which contributed to this new use of the idiom of resurrection and to these we must now turn.

Notes:

1. History of New Testament Times, p. 59.

2. The quotations from the Apocrypha are taken from the New English Bible, and those from the Pseudepigrapha are taken from the translation supplied by R. H. Charles in The Apocrypha and Pseudspigrapha of the Old Testament in English, Vol. II.

3. Ecclesiasticus ₄t:I-₄, 10-13. See also Ecclesiastes 12:5, 7, and Tobit 3:6.

4. 2 Maccabees 7:9.

6. ibid., 7:22-3. See also 7:11, 29, 36.

7. ibid., 12:43-5.

8. Consider the implications of 2 Maccabees 7:11, 14:46.

9. For further discussion see R. H. Pfeiffer, Op. Cit., pp. 514-16.

10. Op. cit., p. 225.

31. Enoch 223-4.

12. ibid., 229-13.

14. Enoch 62:1₃-16.

15. ibid., 103:3-4.

IS. Psalms of Solomon 3:13-16. See also 13:9-li.

17. Eschatology, p. 295. R. H. Pfeiffer also says, ‘the Pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection is expounded in Vs. of Sol. 3:1 r-x6; 13:9-I 1.’ op. cit., p. 54.

18. Testament of Benjamin 10:6-8.

19. The Jewish War, trans. by G. A. Williamson, p. 375.

20. I Cor. 15:51-4.

21. Phil. 3:20-I.

22. 2 Baruch 30.

23. ibid., 49:2, 50:1-51:3.

24. 2 Esdras 7:28-37. (R.S.V.)

25. Jubilees 23:30-I.

26. Wisdom of Solomon, ~

27. ibid., 2:23-3:5, 5:15-16.

28. 4 Maccabees 13:15, 17.

29. ibid., 18:24.

30. Matt. 10:28. See also Luke 52:4-5.

31. Luke 16:22-3.

32. Luke 20:34-8.

33. I Car. 15:12.