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The Resurrection of the Son of God
(Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3)
N. T. Wright
Fortress, 817 pages, $49

N. T. Wright wrote his most recent book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, while canon theologian at Westminster Abbey. He is now the bishop-elect of Durham, a providential irony, given that in the 1980s newspapers trumpeted (inaccurately, it turns out) that his predecessor David Jenkins had called the resurrection a conjuring trick with bones.

Unlike Jenkins, Wright takes the bodily resurrection of Jesus literally, though he is not woodenly literal-minded. He could never be mistaken for a "fundamentalist" (with all the connotations of unimaginative flatness carried by that f-word).

Resurrection language is used metaphorically in the Bible, but Wright is eager to point out that those biblical metaphors are grounded in concrete historical referents. For example, Ezekiel's vision of the valley of the dry bones is, in Wright's view, a metaphor for God's restoration of Israel as a nation. But to recognize it as a metaphor for a concrete historical hope is not to regard it as a symbol for some hazy religious experience. Likewise, the rich interplay of resurrection language with the church's rite of baptism and the believer's entrance into the life of the age to come is not a free-floating metaphor for just any religious thrill. It has a concrete referent in a particular kind of new life imbued with the power of a specific Spirit, bringing with it new ethical demands for life in this world.

Wright argues that all of this metaphorical richness can only make sense if we understand the Bible writers to mean what they say when they write about the bodily resurrection of Jesus on Easter and of believers at the last day. The resurrection is rich with overtones, he says, but one only hears overtones when one strikes a fundamental.

Wright devotes most of The Resurrection of the Son of God to repeatedly striking the fundamental. His target is the liberal scholar who reads wooly-headed modernist notions of Jesus' resurrection back into Paul. (Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan show up occasionally in the footnotes, but he doesn't flog them in his text.) Wright wants to show that anything other than an honest-to-goodness resurrection body just wouldn't have been thinkable to a first-century Pharisee like Paul. And if Jesus had experienced some other kind of life after death, there was plentiful vocabulary for that in the ancient world. Indeed, if the early Christians had merely thought that Jesus had "died and gone to heaven" or that his message had taken on renewed life in their midst, such beliefs would not explain either their testimony or the shape and growth of the early church.

The book's (admittedly crooked) trajectory zigzags through Homer (the "Old Testament" of "the ancient non-Jewish world") and Plato to the Hebrew Bible to the intertestamental literature to the epistles of Paul to the Apostolic Fathers to the Gospels. At each point along the way, Wright shows how the spectrum of pagan beliefs about the afterlife simply did not include resurrection. Indeed, within the Platonic tradition, there would have been hostility to the idea. He also shows how within Judaism, belief in bodily resurrection developed naturally as part of its fundamental affirmation of the goodness of creation and the justice of Israel's covenant God. If the body is a prison (as Plato and others taught) and death is a welcome release, resurrection (a re-embodied life after life after death) would be a bad idea. Conversely, if embodiment is "very good" (as Moses and others taught), any other kind of life after death would be second-rate.

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April (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47