Let’s start at the very beginning, says a familiar song from a classic musical, it’s a very good place to start.. And start at the beginning N. T. Wright does in Chapter 3 of Surprised by Hope. In fact, Wright is in a supremely-qualified position to start at “the beginning” given his preeminence as a New Testament scholar. Wright’s question for chapter three is this: how did the early church talk about the resurrection? What was their view? The answers provide some keen insights into truths about the resurrection of Jesus.
In the ancient Jewish tradition, Wright says, they did have a concept of resurrection. But their view of resurrection wasn’t some vague concept of “life after death”. Instead, what they looked forward to was a bodily resurrection of the righteous at the end of time. When Jesus tells Martha that she will see her brother Lazarus again, and she replies “I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”, that’s what they’re talking about. So when the early Jewish writers then spoke of Jesus resurrection and being bodily alive right now, they understood that they were describing something that had never happened before. The resurrection was the thing that set Jesus apart.
Wright then discusses seven ways in which the Christian view of resurrection soon mutated from the traditional Jewish view of resurrection:
It is important here, Wright says, to see this key development of a very early belief that “Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar is not.” This, says Wright,
…is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. … Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that. It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did.
So, Wright says, there was a definite shift in the religious views as Jews became Christians following Easter. So what happened, really, on that historical Easter? That’s the question Wright will address in Chapter 4.
Also in this series: