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The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Resurrection of Jesus, edited by Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O'Collins (Oxford University Press, 368 pp; $35, hardcover). Reviewed by D.A. Carson, research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Books on the resurrection of Jesus are many. What makes this one distinctive is its scope. Its chapters include contributions from biblical studies, systematic theology, the philosophy of religion, homiletics, liturgy, fundamental theology (in the Catholic definition), the study of religious art, and literary criticism. Theologically, the contributors range from confessional conservatives such as William Craig to a variety of liberals (though in the current mix of outlooks these categories are inadequate and leave me uneasy).

The sheer diversity makes the book as interesting as it is difficult to review. The contribution of some of the essays is primarily to the history of thought about the Resurrection. Thus, after sketching the history of biblical expressions for resurrection, Alan Segal argues that second-temple Jews were divided: on the one side were "millenarian" movements that lionized the Jewish martyrs who lost their lives in the expectation of bodily resurrection at the end of time; on the other were those intellectuals who embraced some form of the Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul, emphasizing continuity of consciousness beyond death. Segal argues that the martyrdom context influenced Christians living in the shadow of the Cross. Eventually immortality was subsumed under resurrection in both Judaism and Christianity, though in characteristically different forms.

No less interested in historical development is Marguerite Shuster, who demonstrates how central the resurrection of Jesus is in the line of preacher-theologians that runs from Paul through Augustine, Luther, Barth, and Thielicke. In each instance, these Christian thinkers understood the resurrection of Jesus to be a bodily resurrection, however transformed his body was, and tied Jesus' resurrection to our resurrection at the End. Moreover, they defended this confession against major currents of intellectual thought in their own day that took contrary positions.

Another group of essays belongs to the stream of classical apologetics: they focus on the historical reality and credibility of the Resurrection. William Craig's essay is a critique of the work of John Dominic Crossan, whose reconstruction of Jesus' resurrection, Craig charges, is based on idiosyncratic methods and presuppositions embraced by no major New Testament scholar.

William Alston argues for the substantial historical credibility of the New Testament Resurrection accounts. His procedure is primarily to refute suggestions that this or that detail is not historical. In particular, he interacts with the work of Reginald Fuller.

Stephen Davis asks what it is the first witnesses "saw." He refutes theories that argue their "seeing" was some kind of visualization, "grace-assisted seeing." On the axis from "sight" to "insight," Davis situates the "seeing" of the first witnesses at the "sight" end. Even when the two disciples on the road to Emmaus failed to recognize Jesus, it was not because they required some special grace to make the connection, but because their eyes were withheld from "seeing" Jesus: in other words, the actual textual evidence suggests that normal vision would have enabled them to see the resurrected Jesus had their powers not somehow been restrained.

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July 13 1998, Vol. 42, No. 8