Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright

Chapter Three

1.  Wright begins with the famous encounter between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.  Various accounts emerged describing the details of their encounter.  How does this event and the subsequent recollections of it allow us to better grasp the complexities of piecing together the actual events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection?

2.  As Wright puts it, “What should we believe about Jesus’s resurrection, and why?”  How do you respond?

                                                                

3.  Next, Wright provides a masterful description of the historical context of Jewish theology as it pertains to their belief in resurrection.  What was unique about it at the time?  How did it differ from other comparative beliefs of that broader culture?

4.  “In terms of the discussion in the previous chapter, the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. There is nothing remotely like this in paganism. This belief is as Jewish as you can get. But within this Jewish belief, early Christians made seven modifications…” This is highly significant because what people believe about life beyond death tends to be very conservative. Faced with bereavement, people lurch back to the safety of what they heard or learned before. But the early Christians all articulate a belief that is in these seven ways quite new, and the historian has to ask, why?   Here’s a summary of each for review & discussion:

1. The first of these modifications is that within early Christianity there is virtually no spectrum of belief about life beyond death.

2. In second-Temple Judaism, resurrection is important but not that important. But in early Christianity resurrection moved from the circumference to the center. You can’t imagine Paul’s thought without it.
These first two mutations have to do with the new position that resurrection assumed within early Christianity, as opposed to the place it held within its native
Judaism.” 

3.In Judaism it is almost always left quite vague as to what sort of a body the resurrected will possess. But from the start within early Christianity it was built in as part of the belief in resurrection that the new body, though it will certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object occupying space and time, will be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, will have new properties. There has been a dramatic sharpening up of what resurrection itself actually entailed.

4. The fourth surprising mutation evidenced by the early Christian resurrection belief is that the resurrection, as an event, has split into two. Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble postmortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.

5. Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be
 completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.

6. The sixth remarkable mutation within the Jewish belief is the quite different metaphorical use of resurrection. This, then, is the sixth modification of the Jewish belief: resurrection, while still being embraced as literal language about a future embodied existence, has shed its powerful earlier meaning as a metaphor for the renewal of ethnic Israel and has acquired a new one, about the renewal of human beings in general.

7. The seventh and last mutation of the Jewish resurrection belief was its association with messiahship. Nobody in Judaism had expected the Messiah to die, and therefore naturally nobody had imagined the Messiah rising from the dead. This leads to a remarkable modification not just of resurrection belief but of messianic belief itself.

“Why did the early Christians modify the Jewish resurrection language in these seven ways, and do it with such consistency?”