Risen Indeed!

Every Easter affords fresh opportunities for national news magazines to take up the question of Jesus’s resurrection. It’s difficult to point with any firmness to a “consensus” in Jesus scholarship any more than in other studies. Nevertheless, even liberals recognize (and lament) a trend in New Testament scholarship away from many of the “assured results” assumed by their predecessors only a generation ago.

Many factors have contributed to this more conservative trend, but two are worth mentioning. First, there has been a trend toward earlier dating of the Gospel accounts, which undermines the critical presupposition that the most obvious reports of Jesus’s bodily resurrection and deity are later interpolations. Second, especially since the last 40 years or so, there has been a trend toward placing Jesus in his Jewish milieu and this has led—generally speaking—to greater suspicion of the quite Gentile (Greek) biases that have dominated higher-critical (i.e., liberal) scholarship.

It’s helpful for us to return to the “facts of the case.” Here, speculation is useless. It does not matter what we thought reality was like: whether we believed in thirty gods or none. It doesn’t matter what we find helpful, meaningful, or fulfilling. This is not about spirituality or moral uplift. Something has happened in history and we cannot wish it away. It either happened or it didn’t happen, but the claim itself is hardly meaningless or beyond investigation.

The Facts of the Case

The earliest Christians testified to the following elements of the resurrection claim, even to the point of martyrdom:

1. Jesus Christ lived, died, and was buried.

Even Marcus Borg, co-founder of the sceptical “Jesus Seminar,” concedes that Christ’s death by Roman crucifixion is “the most certain fact about the historical Jesus.” There are numerous attestations to these facts from ancient Jewish and Roman sources. According to the Babylonian Talmud, “Yeshua” was a false prophet hanged on Passover eve for sorcery and blasphemy. No less a towering Jewish scholar than Joseph Klausner identifies the following references to Jesus in the Talmud: Jesus was a rabbi whose mother, Mary (Miriam), was married to a carpenter who was nevertheless not the natural father of Jesus. Jesus went with his family to Egypt, returned to Judea and made disciples, performed miraculous signs by sorcery, led Israel astray, and was deserted at his trial without any defenders. On Passover eve he was crucified.

Suetonius (75-130 AD), a Roman official and historian, recorded the explusion of Jews from Rome in 48 AD because of controversy erupting over “a certain Chrestus” (Claudius 25.4). Late in the first century, Tacitus—the greatest Roman historian—referred to the crucifixion of Jesus under Pontius Pilate (Annals 15.44). In a letter to the Emperor Trajan around the year 110, Pliny the Younger, imperial governor of what is now Turkey, reported that Christians gathered on Sunday to pray to Jesus “as to a god,” to hear the letters of his appointed officers read and expounded, and to receive a meal at which they believed Christ himself presided (Epistle 10.96).

We know also from ancient sources how successful the Romans were at crucifixions. The description in the Gospels of the spear thrust into Christ’s side and the ensuing flow of blood and water fit with both routine accounts of crucifixion from Roman military historians as well as with modern medical examinations of the report. The so-called “swoon theory” speculates that Jesus did not really die, but was nursed back to health to live out his days and die a natural death. Yet, as Doug Powell observes, in addition to surviving the spear piercing his heart and one of his lungs, Jesus “would have had to control how much blood flowed out of the wound by sheer willpower.”

In Surah 4:157, Islam’s Qur’an teaches that the Romans “never killed him,” but “were made to think that they did.” No supporting argument for this conjecture is offered and the obvious question arises: Are we really to believe that the Roman government and military officers as well as the Jewish leaders and the people of Jerusalem “were made to think that” they had crucified Jesus when in fact they did not do so? Furthermore, why should a document written six centuries after the events in question have any credence when we have first-century Christian, Jewish, and Roman documents that attest to Christ’s death and burial? Roman officers in charge of crucifixions knew when their victims were dead. Even the liberal New Testament scholar John A. T. Robinson concluded that the burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and best attested facts about Jesus.”

The burial of Jesus in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned in all four Gospels (Mt 27:57; Mk 15:43; Lk 23:50; Jn 19:38-39). This is a specific detail that lends credibility to the account. Furthermore, it’s an embarasssing detail that the disciples would not likely have forged. After all, according to the Gospels, the disciples fled and Peter had even denied knowing Jesus. Yet here is a wealthy and powerful member of the ruling Jewish Council (Sanhedrin), coming to Pilate to ask for permission to bury Jesus in his own tomb. Adding to the embarassment, according to John 19:38-42, Joseph was assisted in the burial by another leader of the Pharisees, Nicodemus (who met with Jesus secretly in John 3). Joseph was of such a stature that Pilate conceded to deliver the body over to him, but only after confirming with the centurion that Jesus was in fact dead (Mk 15:44-45).

2. Jesus Christ’s tomb was empty after three days.

Not even this claim should be controversial today, since it was acknowledged by Romans and Jews as well as by the first Christians. Of course, there were widely divergent explanations, but there was a remarkable consensus on this point. The Jewish leaders claimed that the body was stolen by the disciples (Matthew 28:11-15). The very fact that they sought alternative explanations for the resurrection demonstrates that the empty tomb was a historical fact.

Looking for the Best Explanation

Now we finally reach the point at which the gospel provokes debate, scandal, belief and unbelief. An empty tomb is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a resurrection. Nevertheless, the following arguments are crucial.

1. The Disciples Stole His Body and Jesus Died a Natural Death Sometime Later

The Gospels themselves reveal an unflattering portrait of the disciples. They flee the scene after Jesus’s arrest, Peter even denying Jesus three times. It is the women who were the first eye-witnesses of the resurrected Lord and even then the men responded with incredulity. Nor were they in any position to steal the body of the most famous (or infamous) figure in Jerusalem. Luke reports that the Jewish leaders gathered before Pilate. Informing him of Jesus’s claim that he would rise again after three days, they warned that his disciples might steal his body to stage a resurrection. Therefore, Pilate sent a Roman guard (the temple security force) to secure the tomb (Mat 27:62-66).

Even more implausible is the idea that Jesus did not in fact die (as observed above, victims did not survive Roman crucifixions) or that he could have been nursed back to health, lived, and died a natural death without any notice. Jesus was charged by the Jewish Council with blasphemy and was intent on maintaining his equality with God to the end. It is unlikely that such a person would have changed course after a failed crucifixion. Nor could he have kept his whereabouts unknown to friends, neighbors, and former followers as well as enemies. Would Peter, who repeatedly denied knowing Jesus, have committed his life to the cause of proclaiming his resurrection—even to the point of martyrdom—if he knew all along that Jesus was living out (or had lived out) his days somewhere in Palestine or beyond? Would the other apostles have done so, as well as the thousands who formed the nucleus of the mother church in Jerusalem? What about the 500 eye-witnesses Paul mentions, many of whom were still living? It is one thing to give your life for a cause that you believe in, but would so many embrace persecution and death for a hoax? What could they possibly have gained? Even if the disciples could have found sufficient motivation to remove the body and claim he had been raised, they did not have the means or the opportunity.

2. The “Easter Experience” was a spiritual vision, not a literal appearance of Jesus bodily raised.

Basically, when liberals use the language of faith but empty it of its content, the resurrection turns out to be little more than mass hallucination. Of course, it’s not usually put that baldly, at least when they are engaged in their public ministry. Rather, they typically speak of the impact that the “Easter experience” had on their lives—just as it continues to have on us today if we will open ourselves to its beauty. Years after Jesus’s crucifixion, it is suggested (with no explanation of the empty tomb), the disciples got together and recalled their sojourn with Jesus. In the process, they experienced again—in a very real way—the God of love they had encountered in Jesus. As a result, they could speak of his appearances to them in vivid terms. Regardless of how pious this may sound, it is just another way of saying—with many critics throughout the ages—that the disciples experienced a mass hallucination.

Does this really work as a plausible explanation?

First, hallucination or wish-fulfillment may explain one person’s experience of a resurrected friend. Perhaps Peter, still remorseful over his cowardly disavowal of Jesus, conjured a vision of what he thought was his risen Lord. But does this explain the thousands of eye-witnesses, the tumult throughout Jerusalem, and the willingness of so many to give their lives for the claim? Not all of the witnesses saw Jesus at the same time or in the same place, so it was not a phenomenon of crowd psychology.

Second, regardless of what contemporary scholars think happened, it is indisputable that the first Christians testified to a physical resurrection. The myriad details, especially in the Gospel reports, are unmistakably historical. The circumstances and references to specific times, places, and inviduals are too specific to imagine that the writer was merely conveying timeless eternal truths or expressing existential truths in mythological or allegorical language.

Neither for Jews nor for Christians did “raised from the dead” mean anything other than coming to physical life in the age to come. It is not a claim that Jesus was merely resuscitated; rather, he was raised by the Father, in the power of the Spirit, as the beginning of the new creation. Nor is it a claim that Jesus lived on in the hearts and experience of his followers. His post-resurrection appearances cannot be construed as psychological projections by grieving disciples. Thomas only believed after he inspected Jesus’ hands and side, but there was a Jesus to inspect before Thomas believed! His faith clearly did not create the experience of the risen Christ, but vice versa. Paul emphasized that Christ’s resurrection now past, like ours in the future, is bodily. It is not mere resuscitation, but a glorified body, and yet it is the same body that is transformed. “This mortal flesh must put on immortality” in the resurrection, he says, rather than, in the words of Shakespeare, “Let us slough off this mortal coil” at death.

Again it is worth pointing out that only Gentiles could find something salvagable in a non-literal, non-physical resurrection. Visions of loved ones are always proof that they are dead—communicating to us from another realm. However, this is far from what Jews meant by the resurrection of the dead—and far from the references in the Gospels to encountering the risen Christ in this world, even eating and drinking with his disciples.

In Jewish eschatology, the resurrection of the dead was the great sign that the age to come had in fact arrived. In this widely held view, there is no trace of any allegorical, spiritual, or psychological interpretation: the resurrection meant nothing less than the raising of bodies in indestructible life. One might have expected Greek Gentiles to have spiritualized the resurrection (as indeed the Gnostics did), but for Jews there was either a literal, bodily resurrection (according to the Pharisees) or no resurrection at all (according to the Sadducees). Harvard University’s distinguished professor of Judaism, Jon D. Levenson, marshalls overwhelming evidence that belief in the soul’s re-embodiment in the resurrection of the dead was a widely and deeply held Jewish hope. This is one of the reasons that Jewish scholars like Pinchas Lapide conclude that Jesus rose from the dead. Quite apart from the question as to whether Jesus rose from the dead, his resurrection is consistent with first-century Jewish expectations; it is not imported from a Gentile (specifically Greek) milieu.

In 1982, noted Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide surprised many (especially liberal Protestants) with his book, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective, in which, after careful evaluation, he concludes that Jesus was raised by God from the dead after three days. Unsatisfied by alternative explanations (mass halucination, a mere vision of a spiritually risen Christ, the disciples’ theft of the body from the tomb, etc.), Lapide challenges liberal theologians:

I cannot rid myself of the impression that some modern Christian theologians are ashamed of the material facticity of the resurrection. Their varying attempts at dehistoricizing the Easter experience which give the lie to all four evangelists are simply not understandable to me in any other way. Indeed, the four authors of the Gospels definitely compete with one another in illustrating the tangible, substantial dimension of this resurrection explicitly.

For Jews, as well as for Christians, Lapide argues, God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises is inextricable from history. One has to read Gentile philosophical categories (spirit versus matter, symbolic or existential truth versus historical fact) into Jewish texts like the Gospels in order to make them say what liberals require. “However, for the first Christians who though, believed, and hoped in a Jewish manner, the immediate historicity was not only a part of that happening but the indispensable precondition for the recognition of its significance for salvation.”

Therefore, belief in a “resurrection” that is short of literal and physical was not even an option for Jewish disciples of Jesus. In fact, a mystical, symbolic, or allegorical interpretation would have been a dead give-away that the claim was influenced by Greek thought. Therefore, it is not the early Christians, but liberal Protestants, who turn the deeply Jewish understanding of resurrection on its head. The spiritualization of the resurrection evidently arose in a Gentile Christian milieu and it is this interpretation, indistinguishable from the liberal view, that Paul refutes with the earliest Christian confession.

There is no consolation prize if Jesus was not raised bodily, no symbolic “Easter experience.” Paul was unwilling to entertain the possibility that a subjective interpretation could count as faith in the resurrected Lord. He would not have sung, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.” Rather, Paul says in a rather straightforward way,

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised…And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all pepole most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:12-19).

For the rest of the article…

Kevin DeYoung on Maundy Thursday

by KEVIN DEYOUNG

Maundy Thursday

Like millions of Christians around the world, we will have a Maundy Thursday service tonight. If you’ve never heard the term, it’s not Monday-Thursday (which always confused me as a kid), but Maundy Thursday, as in Mandatum Thursday. Mandatum is the Latin word for “command” or “mandate”, and the day is called Maundy Thursday because on the night before his death Jesus gave his disciples a new command. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34).

At first it seems strange that Christ would call this a new command. After all, the Old Testament instructed God’s people to love their neighbors and Christ himself summarized the law as love for God and love for others. So what’s new about love? What makes the command new is that because of Jesus’ passion there is a new standard, a new example of love.

There was never any love like the dying love of Jesus. It is tender and sweet (13:33). It serves (13:2-17). It loves even unto death (13:1). Jesus had nothing to gain from us by loving us. There was nothing in us to draw us to him. But he loved us still, while we were yet sinners. At the Last Supper, in the garden, at his betrayal, facing the Jewish leaders, before Pontius Pilate, being scourged, carrying his cross, being nailed to the wood, breathing his dying breath, forsaken by God-he loved us.

To the end.

To death.

Love shone best and brightest at Calvary.

For the rest of the post…