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To put those liberal critics in place, Wright needs to establish the fundamental Jewishness of resurrection teaching. Thus he gives readers a Rick Steves tour of the biblical and Second Temple literature as it relates to resurrection. Not all Jews believed in the resurrection. The Gospels report the recalcitrance of the Sadducee party on this point. But resurrection was definitely a point on the Jewish spectrum of belief, and by the time of Jesus it had become a dominant one. Paul and other early Christian writers then transformed the idea of resurrection in four ways: (1) they move it "from the circumference of belief to the center"; (2) they treat it "no longer as a single event" but split it "chronologically into two, the first part of which has already happened"; (3) they teach that "resurrection involves transformation, not mere resuscitation"; and (4) when they use resurrection language metaphorically, "it no longer refers to the national restoration of Israel, but to baptism and holiness."

Many readers will find The Resurrection of the Son of God daunting in its length, its detail, and its scope. Fortunately, they will not find it off-putting in its prose. Wright is always clear (though he occasionally uses technical language that those who haven't been to seminary will have to look up). But his prose is winsome and colorful as well. For example, in commenting on how each Gospel's resurrection narrative suits that particular evangelist's message and purpose, he says: "You could not take Luke's ending and substitute it for John's or John's for Matthew's, without creating an absurdity, like the picture books for children in which heads, bodies, and legs are swapped around between characters with ludicrous results."

Wright's overarching purpose in this book is historical. He calls it a "ground-clearing exercise" designed to remove the historiographical obstacles to study of Jesus' resurrection. Wright is more concerned with the failures of historians than he is with the long list of skeptics' objections to the resurrection. For rebuttal of those arguments, Wright gladly refers readers to the apologetic works of Gary Habermas. As for the failures of historians, Wright successfully shows how many have ignored the evidence, confused categories, and marshaled silly arguments. ("The fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Christian belief," he writes emphatically, "not an objection to it. The fact that Jesus' resurrection was, and remains, without analogy is not an objection to the early Christian claim. It is part of the claim itself.")

Many scholars have misapplied the historian's tools by ruling out a priori the possibility of a one-off event like Jesus' resurrection. As a result, they have engaged in fanciful reconstructions that have far less explanatory power than does traditional Christian teaching. This bad historiography stems from an Enlightenment desire to keep God out of human affairs.

But can such a methodological atheism survive in a perspectivalist postmodern era? As Wright points out, statements about Jesus' resurrection are self-involving. You cannot affirm his resurrection without saying something about yourself and your future. But it is precisely because of the self-involving nature of the material that Wright's challenge is so important. Will his fellow scholars overcome their methodological malaise and treat the evidence for Jesus' resurrection the same as they would the evidence for the fall of Jerusalem or the death of Augustus? If they don't, they have a lot of explaining to do.

Next month: Chuck Colson and Ellen Vaughn update their call for church-centered Christianity.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright is this month's selection for the Christianity Today Editor's Bookshelf. Other sites of interest include:

Buy the book online

Buy other books of N.T. Wright

Read our extended interview with author N.T. Wright

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April (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47