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Notes from this session can be downloaded as a .pdf or rtf file. A list of all available downloadable files can found on the download page. These are notes from the video series: Jesus' Resurrection. Then and Now. N. T. Wright. Tabgha Foundation, Minneapolis. Available from CARES (Center for Advanced Religious External Studies), P.O. Box 863, Forest, VA, 24551. 800-665-2149.
1.1. Resurrection Means More Than Just Life After Death 1.2. Jewish Views on Life After Death 1.3. The Scriptural Basis for the First Century Jewish Belief in Resurrection 1.4. The Pharisees’ (and later the Rabbis’) Belief in Bodily Resurrection 1.5. The Shocking Claim of First Century Christians 2.1. A New Heaven and a New Earth, Not Just “Going to Heaven” 2.2. Resurrection and the new Temple 2.3. Resurrection and the Kingdom of God 2.4. The Symbolic Rhythm of Feasting and Fasting in Christian Life 2.6. The Holocaust and the Promise of Resurrection 2.7. The First Century as the “Right Time”
1.1. Resurrection Means More Than Just Life After Death “Resurrection” today is often used loosely as a reference to life after death. But for first century Jews, it had a very specific meaning: the “concrete reembodiment of those who have died.”
1.2. Jewish Views on Life After Death There was a range of first century Jewish beliefs on life after death:
1.3. The Scriptural Basis for the First Century Jewish Belief in Resurrection Passages in the Prophetic Literature:
Stories of the Maccabean martyrs. (Here, “Resurrection” clearly used as a concrete word for re-embodiment.) A quote:
1.4. The Pharisees’ (and later the Rabbis’) Belief in Bodily Resurrection It was not a belief in the raising to life of a particular individual, but a belief in the raising of all the righteous to a New World where God would rule. It was “part of the larger package in which Israel’s God would create a new state of affairs in the space-time world, bringing about justice and people, overthrowing oppression and wickedness – and raising to life, in order to enjoy this new day, all the righteous dead. . . Resurrection, for the Pharisees, was thus part of their belief both in the goodness of the created, physical world and in the ultimate triumph of the justice of God.” [Ref 1, p. 112]. The Rabbis, the successors to the Pharisees, even debated how God would re-create the new physical body.
1.5. The Shocking Claim of First Century Christians Early Christians made the shocking claim: the Resurrection had, in some sense, already happened.
2. Discussion 2.1. A New Heaven and a New Earth, Not Just “Going to Heaven” Resurrection involved not just redemption for individuals, but a new nation; a new creation. The Bible talks primarily about a new heaven and new earth and a reembodiment in that new heaven and new earth, not about “going to heaven.” The Lord’s Prayer: “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”
In Revelations the church comes down to the earth to a shining new Jerusalem. It is a “downward movement, not an upper.”
2.2. Resurrection and the new Temple When Jews spoke of the New Creation, they spoke of a new temple in the middle of it (as in the book of Ezekiel) In John’s gospel, Jesus said: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will build it again.” John suggests Jesus was referring to the temple of His body.
2.3. Resurrection and the Kingdom of God For God to be king of a new creation, God must defeat those things that deface the destroy the creation, in particular human lives. This includes decay, corruption, and death. “Resurrection is the gift of God in the New World, which is the sign that God really is ruling the World in the way that He always intended, so that the Kingdom of God entails the Resurrection.” When God is truly king, death will be defeated.
2.4. The Symbolic Rhythm of Feasting and Fasting in Christian Life Celtic saints:
Pharisees had a symbolic rhythm of feasting and fasting. Christianity at its best shares this same rhythm:
For Christians, the greatest feast of all is the Resurrection Feast – Easter “We live as feasting people who sometimes fast because we know there is more to come.”
Modern culture often suppresses, hides the reality of death -- analogous to Christians who try to ignore Good Friday.
In first century, death, often horrible, was a daily reality. For a Jew in the first century, who believed that humans beings were made in God’s image, that human life was good, God-given, wonderful, death of a loved one was not only horrible, but was a theological affront.
2.6. The Holocaust and the Promise of Resurrection Where was God in the holocaust? God’s presence in suffering, God’s suffering with people, is a modern insight into God. (although some first century Jews may have been prepared to say a little bit of it), an insight that both Jews and Christians can share. It also offers a way we can dialog with the Jews about Resurrection.
2.7. The First Century as the “Right Time” Jesus came in the fullness of time. Paul, in Galatians 4:4-5: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.” (NRSV) “The history of God and world, the history of God and Israel, had strangely been moving towards this point.” Perhaps the Jews “needed to go through the experience of exile in order then to know that there was a new life on the other side, that there was something out beyond that was different.”
3. Summary In the first century Jewish world, Resurrection was not a loose way of talking about life after death. “It was about God remaking, re-embodying human beings to a new sort of life to live in the new world that God was going to make.”
Primary Reference
Further Reading
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