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Christianity Today, April (Web-only), 2009 |

Excerpt

Easter, Unedited

N. T. Wright says the Gospels' Resurrection accounts are odd because they are fresh.

Excerpted from Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened, by Craig A. Evans and N. T. Wright. | posted 4/09/2009 09:12AM

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Granted, if all you had was Jesus eating broiled fish and inviting Thomas to touch him, we might have thought that Luke and John were trying to say, "Look! He was really a solid physical person!" However, those very same accounts are the ones in which Jesus appears and disappears, passes through closed doors, and finally ascends into heaven.

These stories are extremely peculiar, and the type of peculiarity they possess is not one that would have been invented. It looks as though the Gospel writers are struggling to describe a reality for which they didn't really have adequate language.

* * *

The fourth and final strange feature of the Resurrection narratives, which may call into question many of the Easter sermons that I and others regularly preach, is the absence of any mention of the future Christian hope.

Almost everywhere else in the New Testament, where you find people talking about Jesus' resurrection, you find them also talking about our own future resurrection, the final hope that one day we will be raised as Jesus has been raised.

But the Gospels never say anything like, "Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death" (not that many first-century Jews doubted that there was); or, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die" (most people believed something like that anyway); or better, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised at the last."

No: insofar as the event is interpreted in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it has a very "this-worldly" meaning, relating to what is happening here and now. "Jesus is raised," they say, "therefore he is the Messiah; he is the true Lord of the whole world; therefore we, his followers, have a job to do: we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world."

It is not, "Jesus is raised, therefore look up into the sky and keep looking because one day you will be going there with him." Many hymns, prayers, and Christian sermons have tried to pull the Easter story in that direction, but the line of thought within the Gospels themselves is, "Jesus is raised, therefore God's new world has begun, and therefore we, you, and everybody else are invited to be not only beneficiaries of that new world but participants in making it happen."

Excerpted with permission from Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened by Craig A. Evans and N. T. Wright, edited by Troy A. Miller, published in 2009 from Westminster John Knox Press.

N. T. Wright goes further into the bodily Resurrection in "Heaven Is Not Our Home."

More articles on the Resurrection are in our Holy Week and Easter section.

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Ephrem Hagos

Posted: April 14, 2009 12:13 PM

It is suffficient to expose the "strange absence of Scripture in the resurrection stories" as A GREAT LIE going hand in hand with the present-day, theological revision and complete misrepresentation of the well- documented "resurrection", as the defining moment and once-and-for-all self-revelation of Jesus Christ, in principle and practice, right in his death on the cross and by his own free will and authority; as well as the confusion created between "resurrection appearances" and "post-resurrection appearances". Anyone interested can check it out!

Herb Skoglund

Posted: April 14, 2009 10:57 AM


In his, The Faith of the Church, 1958, pp.107-8, Karl Barth proposes a similar veiw of the resurrection accounts and concludes that;,The witnesses attended an event that went over their heads,and each one told a bit of it. But these scraps are sufficient to bear witness to us of the magnitude of the event and its historicity."

Tata	Posted: April 09, 2009 6:12 PM

I don't think Dr. Wright is talking about a disinterested reporting of the event of the Easter. What he is saying is that these stories were not "made up" as if they did not happen the way they were reported. When you stress too much the report as reactionary against docetism then you are likely to make yourself believe that MAYBE nothing like that happened after all, and let others see you that way. What you have as a result is a fanciful Christianity with no solid basis. Another way to see what Wright is saying is, let's assume that there was no docetism at all, will these stories still have been told the way they are told? And the answer YES, because those who experienced the crucified Lord knew that the event is worth telling and the transformation of the world impinge upon it! Therefore it is a docetism-free telling of the story.

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