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.”
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.
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?”
