Chapter 6: The Challenge of Easter
Wright moves on to explore the resurrection from a historian’s point of view. Even before getting to the chapter, I feel somewhat compelled to say a few words about the resurrection from a scientist’s point of view. The reason for this is that this type of discussion is the most potent for out-of-hand dismissal of Christianity, especially from the point of view of those in the natural sciences. The common phrasing used is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence*.” At this, it must simply be recognized that there are some questions that cannot be answered with certain methods. If the claim is that Jesus’ resurrection is a unique historical event, then it simply makes no sense to approach the question from the point of view of “repeatable measurements.” That is, if Jesus’ resurrection actually happened and is unique, then drawing from the pattern that most people are resurrected doesn’t actually form a useful argument, and asking to provide some sort of naturalistic mechanism to explain the resurrection is similarly misguided (since “naturalistic mechanism” is itself a call to some form of repeatability).
* As an aside to the aside, this line turns out to be somewhat impotent when put to scrutiny. It sets up a doubly arbitrary standard, one for “extraordinary claim” and one for “extraordinary evidence.” In my experiences, it is not actually used as an open-minded inquiry, but instead it is being purely dismissive. If you grant that the claim is extraordinary, the person grants himself license to define arbitrarily high standards of proof, which often turn out to be unreachably high (even for demonstrating actual phenomena) and sometimes logically impossible (for example, attempting to disprove materialism using physical measurements).
From this type of backdrop, I found the discussion of Easter (as the phenomenon) interesting, as it draws from a very different form of reasoning. The actual challenge is not to “prove” the resurrection. It is really about understanding early Christianity in light of Easter, and to show that history makes more sense if the early Christians believed Jesus were actually resurrected (which stands opposed to one of many alternate theses, which is that the early Christians knew that Jesus had not been resurrected, but faked it for whatever reasons could be postulated, or that these are traditions that were written into the texts after the fact and did not represent the beliefs of the earliest Christians).
Wright constructs a three stage argument, with each stage requiring four steps. The three stages are to understand Easter from three different perspectives: as a kingdom of God movement, as a resurrection movement, and as a messianic movement. The four steps follow the same pattern:
1) Show that early Christianity was a movement of the given type
2) Understand Judaism’s understanding of that type of movement
3) Show that there is a gap between the Jewish and Christian understandings
4) Explain how that difference can exist
The kingdom of God movement has already been discussed at length, so we’ll jump straight to the resurrection. The concept of resurrection to the first-century Jews is well defined, even though there were still controversies associated to it. There was discussion about what happened to people after death. Some held that there is a state of “nonphysical bliss,” some held that the physical bodies of the righteous would be restored, some believed in a temporary disembodied state that is followed by re-embodiment, and some denied any sense of afterlife at all. However, the term “resurrection” only referred to re-embodiment, and not a general “after-life” concept. Furthermore, there was other language that was used to describe the disembodied state (angles, souls, spirits). Resurrection also had a metaphoric connotation, “the great return from exile, the renewal of the covenant, and to connote the belief that that when this happened it would mean that Israel’s sin and death had been dealt with” (135). The early Christians believed that the resurrection of the dead had already occurred (Acts 4:2), yet there was not a large scale re-embodiment of the righteous. This is the point of discontinuity. But before resolving this in step 4, Wright jumps to the messianic movement.
Many of these points have already been discussed as well. We know that the early Christians viewed Jesus as the messiah, and that Jews were looking for a political messiah, and so there is a gap.
So we finally get to the central question: How can these discontinuities exist? Wright’s answer is that the resurrection actually happened. It is the only thing that can reasonably explain the shift in understanding from the Jewish view to the Christian view. Again, it’s important that this is understood in its appropriate context. This is not a “proof” of the resurrection (from a scientific viewpoint), but it merely asserts that the resurrection is a robust explanation for the documents we have from the early church, and it is a more reasonable explanation than views that have the disciples stealing Jesus’ body, or that the New Testament was actually written much later in history and reflected much later theological developments.
In some ways, I feel a bit let down by this chapter. This is not because I think it’s erroneous somehow, or that it is a weak argument. I think I feel let down because I’m simply unable to appreciate the full force of the argument. Having read the chapter, I do not feel any more convinced or confident that the resurrection actually happened. But I’ve also never really confronted the historical reconstruction of early Christianity, so I’ve never dealt with attempts to understand the Bible as being out of place historically. Nor have I ever been involved in a church community that rejected a historical resurrection of Jesus for a strictly metaphorical one.
