April 14, 2003
New book highlights an Easter revolution
___By Cecile Holmes
___Religion News Service
___COLUMBIA, S.C. (RNS)--On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Jesus.
___The women--never identified by name--learn first of Jesus' resurrection in the biblical Gospel of Luke. In Matthew, it is Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" who are told by the angel: "He is not here; he has risen, just as he said." Mark's Gospel ends
abruptly, making no references to the Resurrection. In John, the risen Jesus again appears first to Mary Magdalene.
___Yet those Palestinian Jews who became the world's first Christians were not, by nature or culture, inclined to believe in some sort of magical return to life by a crucified man, said Tom Wright, an author, scholar and bishop-elect of the Church of England's Diocese of Durham.
___Instead, they were a practical people eager to free themselves from the Romans occupying the land promised to their ancestor Abraham, Wright said.
___The critical question Christians must ask about the Resurrection is not whether it occurred, said Wright, who indeed believes it did. The question is what first century Jews would have thought about a Messiah or a prophet.
___Such a query is the first step in developing a true comprehension of the Resurrection's meaning and significance, said Wright, author of the long-awaited "The Resurrection of the Son of God."
___After Jesus' death, the people who were his followers--products of their particular era, culture and religion--would not have said Jesus was the Messiah, Wright said. He discuss
ed his new book and his views on the Resurrection in a phone interview from Hendersonville, N.C., where he was speaking at an Episcopal Church conference center.
___"They would not have dreamed of any such thing as a 'resurrection,'" Wright said. "If they wanted to continue with the Messiah, they would have found another candidate.
___"They had James, the brother of Jesus, who was the great leader of the early church. This they might have done had not Jesus risen from the dead. Something must have happened."
___Wright, a leading New Testament scholar and church leader, explores why Christianity began, why it took the shape it did and why such questions are important in the new 800-page book. In this, the third in a three-volume series on Christian origins, Wright brings a fresh perspective to such age-old questions as:
___ What precisely happed at Easter?
___ What did the early Christians mean when they said that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead?
___ What can be said today about this belief?
___In "The Resurrection of the Son of God," Wright outlines the complex backdrop of early Christianity, mapping ancient beliefs about death in pagan and Jewish worlds. He goes on to explain the additions and subtractions subsequently made to those beliefs.
___As a result, the scholar or historian must read the Easter stories of the four canonical Gospels not as highlighting some late-term development in Christianity but as accounts of two actual events--the empty tomb of Easter morning and the subsequent appearances of Jesus to his followers.
___"The future hope of the early Christians is focused, in a thoroughly Jewish way, on resurrection; but it has been redefined beyond anything that Judaism had said, or indeed would say later," Wright writes about two-thirds of the way into his book.
___In a later chapter, he notes virtually all early Christians believed Jesus of Nazareth was "bodily raised from the dead."
___That belief, he said, was at the center of "their characteristic (practice), narrative, symbol and belief; it was the basis of their recognition of Jesus as Messiah and Lord, their insistence that the creator God had inaugurated the long-awaited new age, and above all their hope for their own future bodily resurrection."
___The core nature of this belief is clear in the Gospels and in the writings of the Apostle Paul, Wright said in the interview. But many Christians misunderstand, misinterpret and misappropriate its meaning for individual believers and for the church at large.
___"The resurrected Jesus could not have been a resuscitated corpse," Wright said. "People often say that and then they deduce from that we don't have to worry about the empty tomb."
___But the body of Jesus was not simply left in the tomb. "The early Christians envisaged resurrection as transformation, as a new sort of life that was a new sort of bodily life," Wright said. "That's why I call it transphysicality. It certainly was bodily. More solid. More real. Just as we are more substantial than a ghost or a spirit."
___In Wright's view, the Resurrection is the "reaffirmation of the goodness of creation. This reaffirmation takes places after evil has been dealt with. This is so central to a Christian worldview.
___"People tend to think Christians are against the world. But what the Resurrection says is that God intends to remake the world. Others such as the New Age say the world is divine. Christianity, through the death and Resurrection of Jesus, says: 'No, there is such thing as evil and corruption and death. The point of the Resurrection is that God has defeated that and makes resurrection available to Christians and ultimately to the whole world.
___"If you take the bodily Resurrection away, then you've actually undercut the serious Christian valuation of the whole creation," he said.
___On that first Easter, the women who, according to the Gospel of Luke, found the empty tomb seemed to understand. They seemed to know the belief underscored in Wright's exhaustive study: He is not here; he is risen.
The Baptist Standard
News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Texas Baptist churches, in the BGCT, the Southern Baptist Convention ( SBC ) and around the world.
Contents/ Masthead / Why We're Here / Links / Archive / E-mail us/ SUBSCRIBE!/ Signup for FirstLook
|