Confessions x: Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.

Just for Easter, number x in my series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
2. Try reading the verse before your favorite verse.
3. Then I read the verses before the prophecies
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Confession #n: Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.
1. I grew up with two beliefs that I never really tried to fit together. The first was that, when you die, you go to heaven or hell. The second was that the dead would rise from their graves when Jesus came back to earth.

Later on, I tried to make them fit. When you die, you are in some sort of intermediate state. Perhaps your soul is in "Abraham's Bosom" (Luke 16) or Paradise (Luke 23:43). On the other hand, you may find yourself in torment (Luke 16 again).

Then when Christ returns, your soul is reunited with your body, like Iron Man calling his suit from afar. The soul of the Christian is reunited with an upgraded body. And, on the Day of Judgment, the damned are also reunited with their bodies before going to eternal torment.

2. There are many Christians who, perhaps without even realizing it, simply do away with the resurrection part. A few years ago, when an ossuary with the name James on it was discovered, there was speculation about what would happen if the bones of Jesus were found. A colleague of mine -- teaching at a Christian college, no less -- didn't think it would make any difference if they found the bones of Jesus. Apparently, he thought the afterlife was purely spiritual. Our physical bodies didn't matter, as far as he was concerned.

Some of us were stunned. Admittedly, the person didn't teach in the religion department. They taught in a completely different field and really didn't know any better. They didn't realize that resurrection in the Bible is an embodied resurrection. Jesus' tomb is empty -- and that matters.

When I was growing up, I didn't realize how important our bodies are in the Bible for eternity. But 1 Corinthians 15 makes it very clear. When Paul talks about resurrection, he isn’t imagining a disembodied existence. He can’t even conceive of an afterlife without a body (cf. 1 Cor. 15:35). For Paul, salvation isn’t escape from the body. It’s the transformation of it. 

For Paul, the alternative to resurrection isn’t “your soul goes to heaven.” It's no future at all.

3. Come to find out, our popular notions of the immortality of the soul are more Greek than biblical. It's not that we can't make them fit. There are several hints of something similar. "Into your hands, I put forth my spirit" (Luke 23:46). There are martyred "souls" under the altar in Revelation 6:9.

But Jesus' resurrection is a bodily resurrection. Luke and John make a big deal of this fact. In Luke, the risen Jesus asks for fish to show he is not a ghost (Luke 24:39-43). In John, he offers the marks in his hands, feet, and side for Thomas to touch to know it is him (John 20:27).

And I've already mentioned the apostle Paul, who apparently can't understand what the Corinthians are thinking about resurrection. He doesn't understand how they can believe Jesus is alive and yet not believe in resurrection. As a former Pharisee, resurrection for him obviously means that our corpses rise from the dead. [1] "Someone will say, 'How will the corpses be raised?' and 'With what sort of body are they coming?' (15:35). 

He just assumes everyone knows that resurrection involves our bodies. It doesn't even occur to him there might be another view like, "You die your soul is freed." In this part of his ministry, he even talks about the time between death and resurrection as "sleep" (1 Thess. 4:13; 1 Cor. 15:51).

Resurrection of the dead is the rising of dead corpses. The Greek story said, "Your soul escapes your body." The biblical story says, "God raises your body."

4. But the biggest shift came when I realized that this embodied eternity in the New Testament is almost certainly on earth. The kingdom of God in the Bible is God's kingdom come to earth.

This seemed heretical to me as a young man studying for ministry. And I know I wasn't the only one. I know a church leader who was shocked to hear a professor at my seminary point out that this is exactly what Revelation 21 describes. Somehow, while we took all the rest of Revelation literally -- the parts that probably weren't meant to be taken literally -- we took this part figuratively. We took the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem as a poetic expression of the future rather than something that might literally happen.

Yet, when I became a professor, my theology colleagues would assure me that historic Christianity has always believed that eternity is on a new earth, the redeemed earth of Romans 8:18-23. That was news to me. "Orthodoxy" in my low church background meant an eternity in heaven.

But it's all there in the New Testament. I just mentioned Romans 8 and Revelation 21. But Jesus too talks of people coming from north, south, east, and west to feast with him in the kingdom of God (Luke 13:29). I had just always ignored the clear implication that this was on earth somehow. But it's strange verses like that one that lead to paradigm shifts.

I still believe we are conscious between death and resurrection, somewhere, in some form. The details are above my pay grade. I believe in spending eternity with Jesus.

But I now believe it will be in a glorified body. And I believe the kingdom of God will be right here, on a new earth. Christianity isn’t about leaving earth for heaven. It’s about heaven coming to earth.

[1] N.T. Wright emphasized this fact in his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

4.2 A Body and Soul? (philosophy series)

My spring philosophy class has been going now for almost eight weeks, so my live sessions have resumed. The idea of this series was to slowly fill in a rough sense of the journey through philosophy that I take semester after of semester. These posts of course go well beyond what we have time to talk about in our live sessions. For example, I am being more forthright here in what I actually think.

This post is in the section on what a human being is. My last post in this stretch was here. See the bottom for the overall shape.
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1. I think it's clear that we human types have a body. I've never met a person yet who didn't. (At least not that I know of.)

I seem to remember my mother resisting the notion that we are animals. I wasn't saying that we are only animals. But this seems difficult to deny short of some grunt of irrationality. I am much more than a mammal, but by every defining characteristic of a mammal, I am one.

My observation of human behavior is that we behave far more like animals than we would like to admit. I have noted that the roosters in my yard seem preoccupied with fighting each other and mounting hens. So it would seem with a quite large portion of the human men in the world. Very little going on upstairs. A lot of fighting and mounting.

When I'm having this train of thought, I sometimes think of the 1968 movie, The Planet of the Apes. Interestingly, that was a time of American history not unlike our own. The movie is of course a parable of humanity. The sentient apes of the movie mirror human society. There are virtuous apes. There are intelligent apes. But they had better watch out because there are militant, violent apes too.

2. As I observe humanity, the difficulty is not seeing that we are animal as well as human. Strictly from observation, the difficulty is in seeing how we are more than animal. So few humans seem self-reflective. Rather, we seem driven and tossed by our urges.

B. F. Skinner long ago demonstrated that we can be manipulated using behavior modification, just like animals. In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon humorously trains Penny to stop talking when he offers her a chocolate. Most of us are just as easily manipulated.

What might be defining characteristics of humans that rise above other animals? Is it our self-consciousness? The majority of humans are barely self-aware, it seems to me. We are elephants that go where we want, with our riders rationalizing our actions after the fact. [1]

We are herd animals. We do whatever our tribe does, and say what our tribe says. Nowhere is this clearer at the moment than in politics, where the official line of the government is so obviously false it is excruciatingly painful. And yet a third of the population mindlessly parrots insanities. Ironically (or perhaps revealingly), a predominant part of that third are evangelicals.

Is it our ability to tell the difference between right and wrong? I have long been disabused of any sense that humans come with a universal conscience. I have never found C. S. Lewis' moral argument persuasive. Our consciences seem in large part culturally conditioned and psychologically formed, apart from some basic instincts.

Theologians call what I am describing "Sin." If you were beginning to get nervous, I am simply describing what we Christians call "fallennesss." Our failure was to think that we were somehow immune. Yes, the other side is fallen, but we have our act together. No, we are all human, all too human.

2. Do we have a soul? Is there a spiritual dimension to us as well? From a Christian perspective, we are image-bearers regardless. We are intrinsically valuable one way or another because God says so. [2]

There is a stream of Christian thought that might be described as "non-reductive physicalist." It does not believe in a detachable soul or a true spiritual ontology, but does not believe that humans can merely be described in terms of our bodies. Our minds may be based in our brains, but it would not be adequate merely to equate them with our brains. The mind is "more than" our brains in some sense.

I would put Joel Green in this category. [3] I'm not sure that N. T. Wright exactly fits this category but his work on the resurrection has emphasized that resurrection in Scripture is an embodied existence. [4] These books, which came out around the same time, were pushing back on the popular Christian narrative that "you die and go to heaven or hell" and that's it.

Rather, resurrection in the New Testament is overwhelmingly physical. It involves a body. The tomb is empty because Jesus' resurrection self is in continuity with his body. It was not a merely spiritual resurrection, as so many in the church seem to imagine the afterlife. 1 Corinthians 15 is emphatic about the corporeal nature of resurrection, as we would expect from an ex-Pharisee.

This is not a new observation although popular Christianity is often disconnected from common scholarly knowledge. Oscar Cullmann, while no doubt oversimplifying the categories, pointed out in 1955 that the notion of the immortality of the soul was far more Greek than biblical. [5]

Nevertheless, I believe these scholars have created too sharp a distinction. There are places in the New Testament that use imagery of the soul or spirit as a detachable part of our identity, not least the pre-resurrected souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9. Paul speaks of the "unclothed" dead (2 Cor. 5:3) and to be absent from the body (2 Cor. 5:8). In what way might the thief be with Jesus in Paradise before the resurrection (Luke 23:43)?

It would thus seem easily that many biblical authors had some notion of a disembodied intermediate state between death and resurrection. Despite what we are often told, embodied resurrection was not the only Jewish tradition around the time of Christ. I and others have argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which reflect one stream of Jewish thought in the century before Christ, would far more accurately be characterized as looking to a disembodied future existence in the afterlife even if you can find a few fragments that assume a different position. [6]

3. I should emphasize that these are pictures. The Bible gives us incarnated revelation, revelation that comes to us in the clothing of ancient paradigms. It is the reality to which these images point that we are to look. The clothing is ancient, reflective of the categories of the day. The clothing can change even withinn the pages of the Bible itself. 

So, the point is that we survive death. We survive death not only when God resurrects us in the future. We survive death immediately. In my opinion, the form of that survival is above our paygrade. The Bible uses ancient images drawn from its world to picture that survival. But those images are not the point. Paul can express these uncertainties: "Whether in the body or out of the body, God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2).

4. Even from an empirical perspective, I do believe it is plausible that humans have a spiritual dimension to their identity that "goes beyond" what we can see. Let me use a modern image that is also an attempt to give clothing to a timeless truth.

Science fiction has given us a sense that there may be other "dimensions" to existence beyond the three (or four) that are most obvious to us. In 1884, Edwin Abbott published his novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In it, a three dimensional creature terrifies a two dimensional one. He seems to be able to walk through walls by simply stepping in and out of the third dimension.

It seems to me that there have been countless instances of events that seem to go beyond what can be observed physically. Someone wakes up in the night with an urge to pray for someone who, at exactly that moment, is undergoing some kind of a crisis. [7] A person seems to effect spiritual power both good and evil.

As a Christian, we nest these sorts of events within a larger spiritual framework--a personal one at that. God and the Devil are personal agents, as are angels and demons.

5. The ontological existence of the soul would be incredibly convenient philosophically. Here are just a few examples:

• It would account for continuity of identity between this life and the next. If God merely recreates us in the resurrection, how is that anything more than cloning some version of our bodies and giving that new person our memories?
• It could anchor human identity at the moment of conception.
• It could ground a notion of human free will outside the cause-effect flow of the material world.
• It might account for human identity beyond the memory and personality functions of the brain.

This last possibility is fascinating. What if, for example, Alzheimer's was an interface problem? What if, the person is in there but unable to connect with us through the brain, like a defunct computer screen on a computer that still works? You can't see what the computer is doing because the screen isn't working, but all the functions are still being performed.

Of course, the advantages of a concept are not in themselves an argument for the truth of the concept. That would be the fallacy of subjectivism--wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. Nevertheless, faith in the existence of a detachable soul would seem to cohere well with Christian faith and biblical faith.

6. The brain does correlate well to many functions we like to attribute to our identity. When a rod blew through Phineas Gage's frontal lobe, his personality changed. The same is of course true for those in the past who were forced to undergo a frontal lobotomy. Alzheimer's involves the tangling of physical neurons in our brains, leading to a loss of memory and self. Biochemistry clearly affects our moods and behavior.

Years ago, a colleague at Indiana Wesleyan University (Michael Boivin) presented a paper showing that certain parts of our brains "light up" when we are undergoing a spiritual experience. That is to say, it is at least theoretically possible that someone could counterfeit religious experiences by targeting those parts of our cerebral cortex.

However, these data points are not proofs that the brain is all there is to human identity. They merely indicate that the brain is significantly involved in human identity. They do not disprove the existence of a soul. 

[1] An image from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012).

[2] I realize my statement borders on incoherence. I am using "intrinsically" in a questionable way. What I am trying to say is that our value cannot be detached or dislodged from us. Yet all created value is derivative. It derives from God. I do not see it as "ontological" in the sense that it inheres in us in some metaphysical way. It is ascribed value--undetachable, inalienable--but solely based on God's assignment. "Good is good because God says so." It is permanent and thus "essential," but it is not truly intrinsic.

[3] Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker, 2008).

[4] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

[5] Oscar Cullmann, The Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead (Epworth, 1958).

[6] See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: Death and Afterlife in the Second Temple Period and in several other works.

[7] It is tempting to invoke some sense of quantum entanglement here, although any literal reference would no doubt expose a quantum incompetence on my part. I am simply wondering if there is such a thing as a "spiritual" quantum entanglement.

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated?

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 How to Structure Government
6.2 Christ and Culture

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics 

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism 

Explanatory Notes: Matthew 28:1-10

I am working toward self-publishing Explanatory Notes on the Resurrection by the week of Easter this year. Here is an excerpt from Matthew 28.

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At the Tomb

1. And when on the dawn of [the] week toward the first [day] of the week, Mary the Magdalene and the other Mary came to behold the tomb.

It is generally agreed that Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as its primary source. We can thus see how Matthew has edited Mark, which potentially gives us insight into Matthew’s emphases and perspectives. Interestingly, Matthew often prunes down some of Mark’s concrete details. In this case, Matthew removes mention of Salome and does not repeat that Mary was the mother of James. Matthew adds that they are planning to anoint Jesus’ body with spices.

2. And behold, a great earthquake came, for an angel of the Lord, having descended from heaven and having approached, rolled away the stone and sat on it. 3. And his appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow.

Matthew uniquely mentions an earthquake on Easter morning. This is not the only earthquake Matthew has mentioned. Matthew 27:51-53 also uniquely mentioned an earthquake resulting in resurrection after Jesus dies on the cross. The earthquake indicates the momentousness of the event that is happening, indicating that the creation is in tune with the magnitude of the spiritual event.

If we infer that the young man in Mark 16 is an angel, Matthew is explicit about it. This is an angel of the Lord. This is an angel who has descended from the sky, from heaven. This angel rolls the stone away from in front of the tomb. Mark perhaps implies that the angel rolled it away, but Matthew again is explicit.

Mark tells us that the young man is wearing a white robe. Matthew’s description is more spectacular. The white clothing is white as snow. It is white like lightning.

4. And from fear of him, the ones guarding shook and became as dead.

The sight of the angel is so awesome that the guards become paralyzed with fear. Like possum, they seem to appear dead. They seem to observe the interaction between the angel and the women at the tomb, but they are unable to participate.

5. And, answering, the angel said to the women, “You, do not fear! For I know that you seek Jesus, the one having been crucified. 6. He is not here, for he was raised just as he said. Come see the place where he was laying.”

The two Marys are also afraid. It is typical when an angel appears to someone in the Bible for the angel to tell them not to fear. We can imagine that seeing and angel is a fearsome sight! Such is also the case here.

Matthew removes Mark’s added description of Jesus as “the Nazarene,” another typical removal of a detail. The angel knows why the women are there. He also wants them to witness that Jesus is not there. The tomb is empty. They will be a major witness to the resurrection, beginning with their witness of the empty tomb.

If an ancient were to invent the resurrection story, it is doubtful that one would begin with women finding the empty tomb. Women were not considered as reliable a testimony. We have every reason to believe that the women were the ones first to discover that Jesus’ body was missing from the tomb. And we have every reason to believe that they were terrified.

7. “And, quickly, going, tell his disciples that he was raised from the dead and, behold, he goes before you into the Galilee. There you (pl) will see him. Behold, I have told you.”

As in Mark, the angel tells the women to go announce to the disciples that Jesus was raised from the dead. Note that God the Father is the one implied to have raised Jesus. Matthew removes the added detail, “and Peter.” Also, if all we had were Matthew and Mark, we would assume that Jesus’ resurrection appearances to the disciples all appeared in Galilee.

8. And, having gone away quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, they ran to tell his disciples.

At this point Matthew diverges from Mark. Mark as we have it ends with the women telling no one because they are afraid (16:8). Of course, they must eventually have told someone or else we would not have the account of Mark 16:1-8. We do not know the time gap between their silence and their report, but there presumably was one.

Matthew does not report the gap in time. Matthew only tells us that the women do indeed go to tell the disciples. Matthew also adds a sense that they have joy in addition to Mark’s fear and amazement. We remember that Mark emphasizes the disciples’ lack of understanding, and the women here are also followers of Jesus. Matthew is not nearly as hard on the disciples as Mark is.

9. And, behold, Jesus met them, saying, “Greetings!” And having approached, they took hold of his feet and they worshiped him.

This is the first resurrection appearance that has survived in a Gospel. I have a hunch that there was an original ending of Mark and that it did in fact narrate a resurrection appearance. But among the evidence that has survived, this is the first Gospel resurrection appearance.

Note that the first appearance is to women, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. In the next verse, Jesus will send them as witnesses of his resurrection. That fact makes these women the very first apostles. An apostle was someone to whom the risen Christ had appeared and whom Christ had sent as a witness to the resurrection. There are no more apostles of this sort today. Paul was the last (1 Cor. 15:8).

Jesus says, “Hello.” “Greetings” here is the standard word that one would use to begin a letter (chairein) or, apparently, to say “Hello” when encountering someone. It is as if he is simply meeting a friend like any other day.

They have faith. In Matthew 28, these women do not hesitate about who Jesus is. They immediately know. They immediately believe. They immediately worship. They grab hold of his feet, a sign of submission to his authority.

The word worship is proskyneō. It can refer to the kind of worship we give God, but it also can be used of the reverence given to a king. It has a sense of bowing before someone, as the women do. Scholars debate how soon the earliest Christians recognized Jesus as fully divine. Certainly, we would not be too surprised if it took some time for God to lead them to see Jesus full divine nature. On the other hand, many scholars believe they came to this recognition very quickly.

Either way, they bow before Jesus, like the wise men had in Matthew 2:11. At the very least, this is the appropriate response in front of your king, the Son of God. You bow before his majesty. You “bent the knee” to him.

10. Then Jesus says to them, “Do not be afraid. Depart. Announce to my brothers that they might go away to Galilee, and there they will see me.”

As the angel told them not to fear, Jesus also tells them not to fear. In his glorified body, perhaps his visage is also fearsome. He commissions them to take the good news to the other disciples. The two Marys are “apostles to the disciples.”

Like Mark, Matthew not only implies but will soon narrate the first resurrection appearance as an event that took place in Galilee. Matthew, the second oldest Gospel, does not narrate any resurrection appearances to the disciples in Jerusalem. Ironically, Luke 24 will do the exact opposite. It narrates no appearances in Galilee, only appearances in Jerusalem and Judea.

Twelve Days of Jimmy!

1. Yesterday, Professor James D. G. Dunn shuffled off this mortal coil. He was my doctoral advisor at the University of Durham from 1993-96. Those were the great years of my late twenties. Although I was on a budget, trying to say something intelligent in a dissertation, wrestling with issues of my faith, and longing for a life-long partner, they were great years. :-)

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a little about my England days, so you can find some memories of my interactions with "Jimmy" there. He and his wife Meta treated his former doctoral students a little like their own children and he followed our families as they grew. Many years at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting there was a Dunn Reunion where we all got back together.

In my first years at Indiana Wesleyan, Jimmy connected me to adjunct some for Notre Dame. In those days I would occasionally send a hail Mary of an application to a research institution, and he and Loren Stuckenbruck were always willing to brush off the old reference for me. Jimmy was instrumental in getting me my first sabbatical in Tübingen in 2004, and of course it was he who connected me with St. John's College in Durham at the very beginning.

He once said that he and I had a similar faith pilgrimage. I took him to mean that he started out with a somewhat fundamentalist background and wrestled through its inadequacies toward a more historically grounded faith. He was very much a "modernist," although perhaps not quite as "chastened" a modernist as I like to think I am. He began in the more mathematically oriented field of economics and statistics, as I started off with chemistry. He thus had a quasi-scientific approach to interpretation, which is what attracted me to him as a scholar.

2. For the next 12 days, I thought I would pick a book a day of the great Jimmy Dunn and feature it. He had a way of approaching a question that I found deeply attractive. He truly tried to be objective. Of course none of us are completely, but some of us do much better job than others. He did better than most. You almost could not predict where he would come down on a question until after he had studied it and come to a conclusion in the light of the current evidence. I certainly don't feel that way about a whole lot of scholars today.

In light of the hope of resurrection, I want to start with The Evidence for Jesus. It was one of the first of his works that I encountered. In the early 90s, I was looking for historical arguments for the resurrection. I had come to the conclusion at Asbury that the resurrection was the cornerstone on which Christian faith rested. Perhaps I might nuance that today and say that the resurrection is the key historical datum in relation to Christian faith.

For example, you cannot prove the incarnation by way of history. Even if you could prove the virgin birth, that would not necessitate incarnation. Matthew and Luke do not mention the incarnation, and John does not mention the virgin birth. I do not think you can demonstrate the divinity of Christ by way of history. Even C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, Lunatic" argument may come up just a little short of fully persuasive for reasons that may be clear by the twelfth day.

But you can show the historical plausibility of the resurrection. It still requires faith, to be sure--if you don't believe resurrections happen you will come up with a different explanation. But there is significant historical evidence in its favor. If you allow for the real possibility of resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus is very likely. And if the resurrection of Jesus happened, then it is very easy to believe that we shall also bear the image of that heavenly man (1 Cor. 15:49)!

3. The book, The Evidence for Jesus, came out in 1985. It illustrated Dunn's canny to ride the wave of educated popular interest. His books were more advanced than your average popular Christian book, but they appealed greatly to a certain educated, faith-filled, non-fundamentalist audience. Actually, it was always interesting to me how his work remained of great interest to "conservatives" even though it usually seemed to stand just across the border. Most of his doctoral students were people like me, coming from a conservative background. I should make clear that, when you take into account the full spectrum of scholarship, his actually is more on the "conservative" side.

I remember the Evangelical Theological Society asking him to speak once. I don't remember the subject. Perhaps it was on the new perspective on Paul. You had to sign a belief in inerrancy to participate, I guess. I remember him saying he just didn't look down while he was signing. But it showed that his voice was in demand even in circles a little more conservative than he was.

In 1984, there had been a series on British tele called Jesus: The Evidence. Apparently, they had some crazies on. For example, one of them argued that Jesus wasn't even a real person. That's not liberal. It's incompetent scholarship.

As I look over his response, I see comments that have been evident in my own teaching. For example, he quickly dispatches the idea that several decades between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels would automatically imply inaccuracy. "In societies where the spoken word was the chief means of communication... memories were better trained and almost certainly a good deal more retentive" (2).

However, his chapter on the historicity of the Gospels does not simply reinforce tradition. He also concludes--after very detailed comparisons of the Gospels--that the Gospels do not present the words of Jesus with "pedantic precision" (27). I will return to some of his later work in relation to the "historical Jesus" during these twelve days of Jimmy.

4. I must have read this book before I went to Durham, for my notes are in pen in cursive. I started taking notes in pencil in my books after a snide remark from fellow John's tutor Helen Fox. :-) I found the book persuasive on the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection.

I'm pretty sure that it was from this book that I took the arguments I have given ever sense when I get to 1 Corinthians 15 in any New Testament Survey or when I am presenting arguments for the existence of God in an introductory philosophy class. It is a two pronged argument.

First, there is the empty tomb. Dunn goes through the accounts. He puts them side by side and shows their tensions. He does not shrink back from showing what is there. But in looking at the report of the guards in Matthew 28, he concludes, "the emptiness of the tomb was not a point of controversy, only the explanation of why it was empty" (67). I have made this point as well. The only evidence we have of disagreement on the resurrection from that period assumes that the tomb was empty.

Similarly, Dunn notes that "women were probably regarded as unreliable witnesses in first-century Judaism, simply because they were women" (65). Another point I have regularly made. If you were going to make up an empty tomb, would you have women as your first and key witnesses?

The second prong in the argument are the eyewitness accounts. People would not normally conclude that someone has risen from the dead when they find an empty tomb. Such a conclusion, Dunn suggests "is without any real precedent" (73).

He does, however, draw a debated conclusion on the nature of Jesus' resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15. "Paul's understanding of the resurrection body as a spiritual body strictly speaking does not require an empty grave" (75). I'm not sure I find that conclusion the most natural way of reading Paul.

The number of separate resurrection appearances is quite remarkable. If this were a trial, "the counsel for Christianity would want to argue that such a sequence requires a starting event of sufficient significance to explain what followed" (60). We might add here that our traditions suggest that many of these witnesses were willing to die for what they believed they had seen. The core of these traditions seem very likely (e.g., the martyrdoms of Stephen, James, Paul, and Peter).

5. And so we look for the hope of resurrection, including the resurrection of Jimmy Dunn. We want to know "the power of Christ's resurrection, becoming like him in his death, if somehow we might attain to the resurrection of the dead" (Philippians 3:10-11).

S9. The dead in Christ will rise.

This is the ninth post in a unit on salvation in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first section had to do with God and Creation, and I have also finished units on Christology and Atonement.
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The dead in Christ will rise.

1. There are many senses in which we can speak of salvation. When Christ died and rose from the dead, he saved the world, even though perhaps most of those saved were not even born. In a sense, we are saved from the power of Sin the moment the Holy Spirit enters our lives. But we will be saved literally from the judgment of God, we will escape his rejection, on the Day when the judgment takes place.

When the Holy Spirit takes hold of our lives in response to our faith, we are sanctified, we are purified of our past sins and set apart as belonging to God, as God's property. Theologically, we say that God continues to "sanctify" any parts of our life that are not fully under his power. "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God" (Rom. 8:8), and we know that there are some who have been initially sanctified to God (1 Cor. 1:2) who still are fleshly (1 Cor. 3:1). [1]

So the Spirit continues to sanctify our lives until, ideally, we come to a place of full surrender. Then we can be entirely his, to the greatest degree we know. We cannot be as empowered as possible until we are as surrendered as possible. [2]

2. John Wesley never imagined that being entirely surrendered and sanctified by God (which he actually called "Christian perfection") would mean that a person stops growing in his or her relationship with God. Nor did he think that a Christian would be unable to sin after that point. There would continue to be what he called "growth in grace" for the rest of our lives on earth, and we would continue to grow for all eternity.

The key here is that there is an infinite amount to know. There is an infinite amount to grow. The person who is fully surrendered to God in every respect they know can still learn more about God. That person can still become better at implementing their love for others. So Wesley did not see Christian perfection as a sinless perfection. Nor did he see it as a return to the perfection that Adam enjoyed before he sinned. He saw it as a certain kind of maturity in faith that was fully surrendered to God and thus fully taken over by God.

3. It is possible that, to some extent, Wesley misread Paul because he was under the influence of Calvin, the Reformation, and ultimately Augustine. Paul did not see Sin as a nature within us. Paul saw Sin as a power over us. In Romans 8, Paul says that the whole creation is currently enslaved to corruption and decay (8:20). Since our human bodies are part of that creation, there is a real sense in which temptation will always be present in our lives.

Much of the Wesleyan tradition has filtered Wesley's teaching in the light of its experiences. We still understand the idea of entire sanctification as full surrender to God. Wesleyan ministers continue to preach full surrender to God with great fervor. We can also preach with great fervor that we will never experience as much of the power of God as he wants to give us if we do not surrender ourselves fully to him. And that final surrender usually takes place in a moment of decision. It is thus often an instantaneous event in which we are filled with the Spirit afresh.

However, as long as we are in our bodies, we will experience temptation. And since the power of sin over the creation is what Augustine took to be a sin nature, there is a metaphorical sense in which even Christians will have the power of Sin as a factor in their lives for as long as they live.

4. Paul does speak of an ultimate redemption from this slavery to corruption, decay, and sin. This is the redemption that will come with resurrection. The resurrection is when the dead in Christ will rise to eternal life. Whatever is left of their mortal bodies will be transformed into a spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:42-44).

Paul teaches that the entire creation will be redeemed. The entire creation will be saved. The entire creation will be transformed.

For those who are alive at Christ's return, their bodies will be transformed to be like Christ's resurrection body (Phil. 3:21). As we have borne the image of the earthly Adam, we will bear the image of the heavenly Adam, the second Adam, Christ (1 Cor. 15:49).

If we should die before Christ returns, then we shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed (1 Cor. 15:51-52). In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will be transformed from the grave and will be glorified.

This classic, historical and biblical belief in resurrection is not exactly the same as the immortality of the soul. It is not incompatible with that Greek belief, but it is very distinct. In particular, Christian resurrection assumes that we will have a body in resurrection. Christians do not believe that the body of Jesus is still in a grave somewhere. We believe that Christ's body was transformed into a glorified body exactly the same as the kind of body we will have in our resurrection.

The Gospel resurrection accounts also speak of Jesus having a resurrection body. He eats in Luke 24:41-43 and shows that he is not a ghost. He offers his hands and feet to touch in both Luke 24:39 and John 20:27. We are resurrected not as spirits but as bodies. [4]

4. Glorification is a term that finds its origins in Romans 8 as well. The background is arguably Psalm 8, which originally pondered the prominence God has given humanity within the creation. However, some early Christians saw in this psalm a glory that God intended humanity to have but that we do not currently experience. "We do not yet see everything in subjection" to humanity (Heb. 2:5). Humanity "is lacking the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). [3] Once we are justified, "we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God" (Rom. 5:2).

This glorification is what Paul was specifically talking about in Romans 8 when he said that God would work everything together for good (8:28). God has a plan in which all those in Christ will eventually "be conformed to the image of his Son" (8:29), namely, when we are transformed either at Christ's return or when we rise from the dead.

5. What happens to us between death and resurrection? The Bible has little to say on this topic. The Bible does not have much to say about what happens to us between death and resurrection. The Old Testament, of course, has very little to say about the afterlife at all. Daniel 12:2-3 does say that those who "sleep" (i.e., the dead) will be raised either to everlasting life or everlasting contempt. Paul also uses the image of sleep (1 Thess. 4:13; 1 Cor. 15:51), leading some traditions to think that we are in a "soul sleep" between death and resurrection in which we know nothing. [5]

However, few though they be, there are some clear hints in the New Testament that the dead will be conscious in the time between death and resurrection. And this is what most Christians have believed also throughout the centuries. In Luke, for example, Jesus tells the thief on the cross that he would be with him that day in Paradise (Luke 23:43). Presumably, Jesus and the thief were not just going to be sleeping next to each other in Paradise! Similarly, Luke tells us a parable about a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus. They both wake up in the afterlife, while the brothers of the rich man are still alive. By contrast, Lazarus wakes up in pleasure, and the rich man wakes up in torment.

There are other hints. Paul in Philippians 1:23 speaks of dying and being with Christ (cf. also 2 Cor. 5:1). 1 Peter speaks of Christ visiting the dead after his death (e.g., 4:6; also 3:19-20). In Revelation 6:9-10, there seem to be martyred souls present in heaven who are able to communicate with God. So while there are some images of sleep in the New Testament, the position of common Christianity is that we will be conscious in some respect after death, even before the resurrection.

It is difficult for us to say exactly what the difference will be between the blessing of our state immediately after death and the blessing of our eternally transformed bodies. We are not in any position to know what a spirit might be, let alone a disembodied spirit. [6] What we do know, as I have heard my colleague Chris Bounds say, is that the dead are precisely that: dead. [7] They are not alive. They are not yet resurrected. Their bliss is not yet as great as it will be. There is a difference between the resurrection and whatever an immortal soul might be.

The dead in Christ will rise. They will be glorified. They will receive a transformed body. Those in Christ who are alive and remain at his coming will be transformed to have a body like Christ's glorious body.

Next Sunday, S10: Christ will come again to save his people and judge the world.

[1] Wesleyans call this point the moment of initial sanctification.

[2] Wesleyans call this possibility the moment of entire sanctification.

[3] My translation.

[4] Although they may not recognize some conflicting imagery in the Bible, two books that present the case that the Bible is overwhelmingly oriented toward bodily resurrection are Joel Green's Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008) and N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).

[5] E.g., Seventh Day Adventists.

[6] Some have proposed that we will have some sort of temporary body between death and resurrection.

[7] Chris Bounds is a theology professor at Indiana Wesleyan University.

Ehrman Chapter 5: The Resurrection - What We Can Know

More of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God. So far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know

Chapter 5 is "The Resurrection - What We Can Know."

In the previous chapter, Ehrman's argument was basically that we can't know what happen to the body of Jesus but it wasn't buried to be sure. I'm being a little sarcastic here. I think that Craig Evans can make just as good a historical case, I suspect better, that Jesus was buried.

1. Let me shift the emphasis of chapter 5 a little. Here's the bottom line: "Some of the disciples wholeheartedly believed that they had seen Jesus after he had died" (202). This claim in this chapter will naturally lead to the next: "belief in the resurrection changed everything Christologically" (204).

How about this quote from Dale Allison, with which Ehrman agrees? "Nothing would prohibit a conscientious historian from... adopting a phenomenological approach to the data [that is, going with how things appear without concluding in relation to what was behind what appears]... Would it be an historical sin to content oneself with observing that the disciples' experiences... were genuine experiences that they at least took to originate outside their subjectivity?" (189).

Did you get that? Ehrman believes that several disciples, he thinks at least four, were completely convinced that they had seen Jesus alive after he had died!

2. Funny how you can actually turn his Debbie Downer tone into some pretty encouraging stuff. He even has me considering believing that the Virgin Mary has appeared to people. He tells of an incident in Venezuela where, on March 25, 1984, a series of people saw Mary hovering over a waterfall, including doctors, psychologists, engineers, and lawyers picnicking there (198). In another instance, Muslims saw and photographed Mary in an Egyptian suburb.

Let me repeat what I have said before. I see in page after page of this book the inadequacy of fundamentalism and its tendency to deconstruct in the hands of a good thinker. Why does he push the Virgin Mary appearances? In part because he knows that the fundamentalist crowd are anti-Catholic. I use the same tactic with King James only types, pointing out that the man most responsible for the wording of the Greek text behind the KJV was a Roman Catholic who argued against Luther and that the original King James had the Apocrypha.

He also plays on the "evidence that demands a verdict" apologetic zeal of so many fundamentalists. Listen to him here: "When I say that conservative evangelical Christians and fundamentalists are children of the Enlightenment, I mean that more than almost anyone else, thinkers among these groups are committed to 'objective truth'--which was precisely the commitment that led to the demise of Christianity in the modern world in the first place, especially in Europe" (172).

I don't know if he would still have faith if he had grown up Methodist, but it sure looks to me like his life trajectory away from faith was in part a result of the fact that he started out with such an evidentiarily unsustainable version of Christianity in the first place.

3. So what can a more faith-oriented (rather than proof-oriented) form of Christianity do with this chapter? For one, we can side with Allison over Ehrman on what the disciples' reaction to seeing Jesus would have been. Allison believes that, after seeing Jesus, the disciples would have then tried to find Jesus' body to verify that, in fact, he truly was alive again.

Ehrman disagrees (185). He thinks that, because of their apocalyptic worldview, the disciples would have automatically assumed that Jesus had physically risen from the dead and that, in fact, his resurrection indicated the beginning of the resurrection of all the dead.

Frankly, I find this sentiment both a little too simplistic and I'm not sure but that it doesn't contradict other things Ehrman says in the chapter. He even footnotes the fact that Jewish belief on the afterlife was a little more varied than this. He seems to be treating Jesus' apocalypticism as involving something like what you would get from a worldview class.

I presented a paper once to the Historical Jesus section of SBL on Jesus and resurrection and, to be frank, I didn't find that the subject seems to have played much of a role in his earthly teaching. In my opinion (and that of John Collins), resurrection was also not a major category for the Essenes at the Dead Sea. I think Ehrman is a little too confident in what the disciples would have automatically assumed after they saw Jesus alive again.

What is worse, he seems to argue in another thread of this chapter that the resurrection traditions of Jesus started out with him more spirit-bodied and progressed toward him being more physical-physical, with flesh and bones. But which is it? Did they automatically assume a body when they saw him or did they see spirit and the tradition develop toward flesh and bones? There seems to be somewhat of a tension in these two parts of his argument to me.

4. I was also annoyed with his repeated mention of Jesus having to "prove" that he was resurrected to various people in the resurrection stories. For example, the "many proofs" of Acts 1:3 are not for the disciples. They are for Luke's audience. On the basis of this statement, Ehrman acts like Jesus had to prove he was alive to the disciples (191), but the reason Luke speaks of proofs is because he wants Theophilus to be convinced. Luke isn't saying that Jesus needed to convince the disciples. Ehrman annoyingly says stuff like this several times.

5. There are things in this chapter, again, that may be distressing to a fundamentalist. Ehrman is right, IMO, that there is a consistent tradition of some of the disciples doubting. Yet Paul says Jesus appeared to the Twelve (1 Cor. 15:5). At least Ehrman acknowledges that "Paul actually knew Peter" (192), which implies to me that Paul can't be teaching something completely different from what Peter was saying happened to Jesus.

But Christian faith does not rise or fall on every detail being historical, IMO. Even Ehrman believes that several of Jesus' followers were fully convinced they had seen an (at least spiritually) embodied Jesus after his death. And, contrary to Ehrman, there are solid reasons to believe that Jesus' body was missing from the place it was known to have been laid.

This is enough to make orthodox faith reasonable, even if Ehrman can point to discrepancies in the stories here and there.

Ehrman Chapter 4: The Resurrection - What We Cannot Know

The review of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God continues. The posts so far are:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?

Today is chapter 4, "The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know."

Boy, this chapter was a "glass is pretty much empty" downer. If I were to capture his point in this chapter it would be this: From a historical perspective, just about any explanation other than Jesus really rose from the dead is more likely.

On the one hand, I thought his explanation of historical study, while pessimistic, was not far off. He recognizes, for example, that presuppositions are always involved in historical study. And he claims not to have an anti-supernaturalist presupposition. I think it's actually pretty clear that he is biased against supernaturalist explanations, but he gives lip service to the possibility that there may be a supernatural explanation surrounding a historical episode.

The philosophy of history he gives here is not far from my own. Historical inquiry tries to explain events in terms of the normal operations of cause and effect. [1] Theological faith is then an additional layer of interpretation that comes into play 1) when cause and effect seems less than adequate as an explanation, 2) especially when revelation has pointed to a miracle at that point. So, trying to speak objectively in these historical terms I have sometimes said in the past, "If resurrections happen, it is quite likely that Jesus was one of them."

Ehrman would disagree. His chief target in this chapter is the burial of Jesus. "Without an empty tomb, there would be no ground for saying that Jesus was physically raised" (168). In fact, I think he is going to argue that the earliest resurrection versions saw Jesus as spiritually raised and then the versions of the resurrections became more and more physical as time went by.

Interestingly, he does believe that at least one person and possibly more than one person thought they saw the resurrected Jesus after he died. He sees a "vision" of this sort as the seed that would lead to Christians believing that Jesus is God. That's the next chapter. But he does not think it likely that Jesus was ever buried and, thus, does not think it likely that there was ever an empty tomb.

It is a little sad that his sense of things was actually more open to an empty tomb until he started researching this book. And, unfortunately, he seems to have been reading Crossan in his research. Accordingly, all he found were the references where the Romans left people on crosses to make their point emphatically, to let the birds eat their flesh. His references to Pilate are all about his cruelty.

Craig Evans has thoroughly balanced this one set of quotes with another in chapter 4 of How God Became Jesus, including archaeological evidence of buried individuals in Israel who had been crucified. If a person wants to be objective, the bottom line is that you simply cannot say either that Pilate would or would not have let someone take Jesus' body down from the cross. Evans makes a strong case that, since Jewish leaders instigated Jesus' crucifixion, Pilate would also have let them bury the body for reasons of Jewish purity.

I find Evans' argument quite compelling. It seems very plausible historically that Jesus' crucifixion was not, in origination, an instance of Pilate rubbing Roman authority in the noses of the Jews but an example of Jewish leaders getting permission to have someone put to death. It then makes sense that Pilate would give them permission to dispose of him before the Sabbath.

Ehrman is correct that we cannot prove these things historically. But the same chapter could have been written to show that Jesus' burial and empty tomb are perfectly plausible from a historical point of view. His aim is to show both that the evidence can be explained a different way and to argue that, in relation to Jesus' burial, it is more likely that he wasn't.

I don't think he makes his case. I think he only demonstrates that the evidence for Jesus' burial can be explained in other ways. I don't think he demonstrates that it should be explained in other ways. The hints he finds are too vague to have much force. So he argues from the tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 that the burial part was kind of added in. Seems less than obvious to me. He sees a discrepancy between the plural of Acts 13:29 and the singular name of Joseph of Arimathea in Mark 15:43. Since I take the sermons of Acts to be somewhat amplified versions anyway, I don't find this small difference substantial.

And while Paul has almost nothing to say of Jesus' burial, apart from this comment in 1 Corinthians 15:4, his understanding of resurrection in the rest of the chapter assumes that the previous body is the starting point for the transformation of resurrection. "The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable" (15:42). Note well--the earliest source of the resurrection sees resurrection as the transformation of the previous body, not a spiritual resurrection. If anything, Paul's writings become less clearly tied to a corporeal resurrection as time goes by, not more (cf. 2 Cor. 5).

I want to close with a warning. You can once again see the reverse image of the fundamentalism with which Ehrman started here. Those who never read chapters like these--or who are immensely stubborn intellectually--can blissfully argue for "detailed inerrancy" of the sort the Nazarenes voted down last year. But few open-minded fundamentalist souls of this sort will survive his opening assault on page 134.

It is not essential for Christian faith that we be able to historically line up the resurrection accounts in detail, in my opinion. Those who think it is may find themselves eventually like Ehrman. Zealots of this sort are often the first to lose their faith. I personally believe that Luke omits all references to Galilee intentionally so that his account flows more smoothly. The way the fundamentalist is oriented around details hits a snag on this sort of thing. I myself would not call this an error because I think Luke does it intentionally, following a different standard of history writing than we are used to today.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Christian faith rides on these "fundamental" propositions, not on being able to prove the historicity of every part of every story in Scripture, in my opinion. We will keep our smartest children from faith crisis if we keep such things in mind.

[1] There is perhaps a tinge of the postmodern in his version. He does not reference cause and effect but instead references historical explanations that are "generally held." In this sense he allows for the acceptable interpretations of the past to change over time as the current worldviews of historians change. I do consider his perspective an advance on Ernst Troelstch, whose criterion of analogy held that we cannot accept that things happened in the past that do not happen today.

Going to Heaven

I suspect that most of us grew up talking about dying and going to heaven.  Anyone grow up with the hymn, "When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be"?  If I remember correctly, that's even how Wesley talked about it.

You may have noticed that I try not to talk about "going to heaven" in my language. I talk about "getting into the kingdom." That's because the more historical view of Christianity--and the more prevalent view of the New Testament--is that eternity will be on a renewed earth. N. T. Wright has hammered this point, maybe over-hammered it, in his book Surprised by Hope.

Some thoughts:
1. This is the dominant New Testament view. Matthew 8:11 and its parallels clearly picture the banquet at the commencement of eternity as being on earth. Romans 8:20-21 talks about the restoration of the creation to its original, uncorrupted form. Revelation 21:2 speaks of the heavenly Jerusalem coming down to earth. So it is more biblical to speak of eternity on a renewed earth than going off to heaven forever.

2. The idea that we die and go to heaven forever became dominant, apparently, in the Enlightenment of the 1700s. It was thus a product of a trajectory away from believing that God would transform our bodies. It is a reflection of the faith crisis of that age, of the rise of the idea of a new view of the soul. It was movement away from traditional faith. It was a view that fit the scientific age more comfortably.

Even today, you find some Christians who think the empty tomb a trivial point, perhaps even irrelevant. They confuse resurrection with afterlife. "So you go to heaven when you die," they might say. "Who cares what happens to your body?"  This is a new development in history from the skepticism of the 1700s.

3. Now, I'm not wanting to get too down on "go to heaven" talk.  There is a certain kind of condescending tone the Wrights and such can get on this topic.  "Oh, you don't know that the kingdom will come to the earth."  They dismiss what I believe is evidence for the opposite view in John and Hebrews. And things get really symbolic when you start talking about eternity, so I think we have to be a little tentative about these sorts of things, including the precise nature of hell.

My point here is, if you've never heard of this sort of discussion, to let you in it so some arrogant know-it-all doesn't call you out as stupid or heretical because "you didn't know." But they probably do have the weight more on their side. Both the more historic Christian position and the predominant view of the New Testament is that eternity will be down here on a renewed earth.

I thought you'd like to know, if you hadn't heard :-)

Paul's "Conversion" (part of tonight's presentation)

From my presentation tonight:
________
But while I was on my way to Damascus, Jesus stopped me and tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I had it all wrong.  Everything was exactly the opposite of what I thought it was.  The things I thought were important weren't important, and the things I thought were evil were actually good.  God rocked my world and turned me around 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

This changed everything.  It was going to take some time to work through.  It was going to take some prayer and it was going to take some reflection.  God led me to a man named Ananias in Damascus and he told me everything he knew about what Jesus had did and taught.

But you know, I found out that Jesus' followers were still trying to figure things out too.  Although he had warned them, no one was expecting Jesus to die.  Like me, they thought that messiahs were winners.  Messiahs won and kicked the Romans out of town. They had gone to Jerusalem expecting the heavens to open and for God to crown Jesus king of Israel before the whole world.

Then after he died, they weren't expecting him to rise again.  Of course as a Pharisee, I knew what resurrection meant.  If Jesus had risen from the dead, then the resurrection was beginning, the beginning of the end, the restoration of all things.  If Jesus rose from the dead then he was the last Adam, the one to undo all the problems created by the first Adam.

Of course my thoughts would only develop over time as I thought about such things.  I would more and more come to understand that sin and death had entered the world through the first Adam.  God had made us to be full of glory, but Adam's sin made us lose that glory.  And it wasn't only us humans but the rest of the creation too.  The creation decays and disintegrates because of Adam's sin.

Jesus is the antidote.  Jesus' death sets everything right again.  The cross was God's solution to world's problem.

I hadn't anticipated that.  I thought that what God wanted was for us to keep the Law perfectly.  And I did.  I had lived blamelessly, as far as the righteousness in the Law.  I had kept the works of the Law perfectly, as I understood them as a Pharisee.

But it wasn't what God was looking for.  The cross was the solution.  Therefore, my works of Law were not.  Works of Law must not play any role in being right with God, but rather trusting in the faithful death of Jesus on the cross...

Daniel 12:2-3 and Resurrection

It was 10 years after finishing my doctorate that my dissertation was published.  Trying to beat that pitiful record with the research I did on Jewish traditions about afterlife and resurrection during my 2004 sabbatical. I have a number of "chapters" I've presented here or there already but they need reformulated and edited.

I'm dividing Second Temple Jewish literature on the subject into 4 streams and trying to propose a somewhat developmental hypothesis. But I've decided to complete the writing in part by going source by source. The chapter on the stream that did not accept a meaningful afterlife is largely finished, so I turn here to one of the earliest sources in Jewish literature that holds to a meaningful afterlife, Daniel 12.
______________
Although others have been suggested, Daniel 12:2-3 is the only passage in the Old Testament that all agree points to a meaningful life after death.  The point at which the historical account jumps to resurrection is somewhere in the years 167-164BC, during the Maccabean crisis. Then, like Mark 13:24 or Matthew 24:29, the account seems to jump to the final days of history in its current form. [1]

The conflict reaches a climax.  There is a time of crisis such as the world has never experienced before. [2] Then Israel ("your people") will experience salvation. What follows seems to be a partial rather than general resurrection of the dead. "Many" of those who sleep in the dust arise either to reward or punishment. Some of these rise to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt.

It is tempting, as with 1 Enoch 22, to see the criterion for such resurrection in terms of those who have died without receiving justice in this world.  What determines who is awoken and who is not?  In 1 Enoch 22, it depends on whether the righteous have experienced their deserved reward in this world and similarly whether the wicked have received their just deserts. Daniel, however, does not give a clear rationale for the selection, although 12:3 may point to the basis for the righteous. Those who led many people to righteousness, a group called "wise," will shine like the stars forever.

Again, there is disagreement about whether this is now a third group of resurrected or whether this verse refers to those just mentioned who rise to everlasting life. Does Daniel here give us the criteria that has determined the reason for resurrection? It is tempting to fill in the rationale for resurrection with the rationale in other Jewish literature. In 2 Maccabees, for example, it would seem to be those who are martyred exactly for keeping the covenant who are going to be resurrected. Is that what Daniel means when it speaks of leading others to righteousness?

The text is similarly ambiguous both about the state of the resurrected prior to and after resurrection. Those who rise have been "those who sleep in the dust of the earth" (NRSV), an image of death that Paul also uses in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 and 1 Corinthians 15:18. Does Daniel mean to imply that the dead are not conscious in the time between death and resurrection? Similarly, we are told nothing of the fate of the wicked dead.  They rise to everlasting contempt but nothing is said of what punishment or judgment they face.

Finally, it is uncertain how to take the image of the wise shining like the stars. It is a simile to be sure, they shine "like" the stars.  They do not literally become stars.  But how like the stars do they become?  Do they return to the earth for eternity or do they spend eternity in the heavens, like the stars...

[1] Although in the case of the gospels, N. T. Wright has argued that what follows is a highly poetic prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem.

[2] Imagery that Mark also applies to the time around the destruction of Jerusalem (13:19).

Ascension and Exaltation 6

It seems appropriate to fill in some of the remaining blanks in the story of Jesus, even though it requires us to look beyond the gospels somewhat and into the rest of the New Testament. Both Luke and Acts tells us that Jesus ascended to heaven from the vicinity of Jerusalem. Luke 24:51 says he was taken into heaven, meaning into the skies. Acts 1:9 says that, after he was taken up, a cloud hid him from the eyes of the disciples. Christians refer to this as Jesus' ascension, and many Christian traditions celebrate "Ascension Day" on a Thursday, forty days after Easter.

Based on Psalm 110:1, Christians also speak of the "session" or seating of Jesus on the right side of God's throne: "The Lord said to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet'" (Acts 2:34-35). This verse was probably very important indeed for the earliest Christians as they tried to make sense of Jesus' death and resurrection. Mark 12:35-37 remembers Jesus himself mentioning this verse in his debates with certain teachers of the law.

The key is that the earliest Christians saw Jesus' sitting at God's right hand as his enthronement as cosmic king.  Acts 2:32-33 tell about how "God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear."  Acts then quotes Psalm 110:1, making it clear that David did not ascend to heaven--in other words the words are surely about Jesus sitting at God's right hand. Peter's sermon then comes to this conclusion: "Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah" (2:36).

The timing of Jesus becoming Lord and Messiah, royal titles, is thus when Jesus sat at God's right hand, after rising from the dead. He was the "heir apparent" before that time, but fully took on the role as king, as "anointed one," "Messiah," after he rose from the dead.  And a number of passages make it clear that Jesus fully took on the title "Lord" at his resurrection. "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that... every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil. 2:9-11). Similarly Romans 10:9: If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."  To declare Jesus as Lord implies that you believe God raised him from the dead.

"Son of God" is another royal title Jesus fully took on at that point. [1] Romans 1:3 says that Jesus was "appointed Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead."  Acts 13:32-33 again places Jesus' assumption of this title at the point of his resurrection: "What God promised our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. As it is written in the second Psalm: "You are my son; today I have become your father.'"

What is Jesus doing now in heaven as he sits at God's right hand? ...

[1] The phrase "Son of God" is yet another case study in how words and phrases can take on different meanings and connotations in different contexts. In the context of Acts and Paul, the phrase "Son of God" seems to be a royal title that a king assumes upon his ascension to the throne.  In a sense, a king of the Ancient Near East was not Son of God one moment and then became "Son of God" the next moment as he became king. Thus Psalm 2 is often considered an "enthronement psalm" in its original Old Testament context.

However, as Christians we also believe that Jesus was "eternally begotten of the Father" and thus that he was always the Son of God in terms of his being, not only his office.  Scholars like Richard Bauckham have argued that the New Testament already starts to have this sense in passages like Hebrews 1:5 (e.g., ***). Others like James Dunn have argued that in Acts, Paul, and Hebrews, the title is still a matter of Jesus' office as king (e.g., Christology in the Making).

We do not have to pick one or the other option when it comes to the question of truth. As Christians we both believe that Jesus was always the Son of God and that Jesus assumed the role of king of the cosmos more powerfully after he rose from the dead.

Resurrection 5

Mark tells us even less about what the resurrection means than it does about what the death of Jesus meant, although his audience presumably knew exactly what to think.  On the other hand, Matthew implicitly connects both the death and resurrection of Jesus to the future resurrection of the dead. Matthew tells his audience that many holy people from the past were raised to life and emerged from their tombs after Jesus' resurrection (Matt. 27:53).

However, the intriguing thing is that Matthew tells of this event immediately after Jesus' death, along with the curtain of the temple ripping and the ground shaking.  The death thus makes the resurrection possible, but Jesus must rise first.  As in Paul, Jesus' resurrection is the "firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor. 15:20).

The Gospel of John also brings out the connection between Jesus and the future resurrection of the dead. "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die" (John 11:25-26).

What is largely implicit in the gospels is explicit in Paul.  Jesus' resurrection is the ultimate defeat of death, the final enemy to be defeated (1 Cor. 15:26). "Just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man" (15:49). We live out our lives on earth in the human form that Adam had.  But when Christ returns, our bodies will be transformed into a resurrection body like Jesus now has. Christ "will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body"(3:21).

But the benefits of the resurrection do not have to wait until Christ's return.  "Just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life" (Rom. 6:4).  In Romans, the primary benefit of the resurrection in view is not the future resurrection of the dead but the power of God to empower a person to live a righteous life right now through the Holy Spirit. This is likely what Paul means when he says that "if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you." (8:11)...

Resurrection Appearances 4

continued from yesterday.
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The gospels give us several traditions about Jesus' appearances to various individuals after he rose from the dead. Because we do not likely have the original ending of Mark, Mark as we have it does not go on to tell us about any of the resurrection appearances. However, like Matthew, Mark implies that the eleven remaining disciples saw Jesus in Galilee (Mark 16:7; Matt. 28:16-17).

However, in Luke and John, we also hear of an appearance to the disciples in Jerusalem. In Luke, Jesus appears to the eleven the evening of his resurrection (Luke 24:36). In John similarly, Jesus appears to most of the disciples on the evening of his resurrection (John 20:19). Then he appears again a week later, when Thomas is with them (20:26). Then later in John 21 Jesus appears to Peter and several key disciples--including the mysterious "Beloved Disciple"--around the Sea of Galilee.

In Matthew and John, we also hear of Jesus appearing to some of the women who came to the tomb. John 20 tells us of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene by herself (John 20:11-18). Meanwhile, Matthew 28:8-10 tells of Jesus appearing to all the women who came to his tomb before they tell the disciples to go to Galilee.

Any attempt to fit these accounts together is inevitably speculative and creates a narrative that gives a different impression from the gospels themselves in some respect. For whatever reason, Luke seems to compress the time after the resurrection, and he omits any appearances in Galilee.  Matthew and Mark tell of no appearances to the disciples in Jerusalem, while John has a little of both.

Two general scenarios emerge. The one is that Jesus made an initial appearance to the disciples, women, and the men on the way to Emmaus in and around Jerusalem. Then the disciples would have gone to Galilee, received the Great Commission, seen Jesus around the Sea of Galilee, and then returned to Jerusalem before Jesus finally ascended to heaven. This scenario harmonizes all the accounts but is a little strange as a sequence of events. What was the point of going to Galilee if Jesus was already in Jerusalem? Was not Jerusalem where they expected Jesus to become king and thus where they expected the kingdom of God to arrive in full force (e.g., Acts 1:6; cf. Luke 2:25, 36-38)? [1]

The alternative is that the initial resurrection appearances were in Galilee and that the disciples then rushed back to Jerusalem in expectation of the full arrival of the kingdom of God and Jesus' full return as king. Jesus would then have appeared to them further before finally ascending to heaven. While this scenario makes more sense as a sequence of events, it does not fit nearly as well with the way Luke and John present the chronology. And of course the more one deviates from the chronology in the gospels, the more speculative any reconstruction becomes.

So we return to the bedrock of the tradition, what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul does not mention the appearances to the women explicitly but mentions Peter as the first crucial appearance, as Luke 24:34 implies. Then Paul says Jesus appeared to the Twelve, whether this refers to an appearance the night of Easter in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36; John 20:19) or to an appearance in Galilee (Matt. 28:16-17).

He appears to a group of over five hundred at once and to James, the brother of Jesus. James would become the leader of the Jerusalem church. We unfortunately do not know how Jesus appeared to James, but it must have been a very convincing appearance, for Jesus' brothers apparently did not believe in him while he was on earth (e.g., John 7:3-5). It is tempting to think that the appearance to over five hundred was the Great Commission of Matthew 28 or the ascension of Acts 1, but those appearances seem restricted to the eleven. Any further attempt to connect it with the gospels or Acts is quite speculative. [2]

Jesus then appeared to the apostles and lastly to Paul. We do not know many of the names of these apostles but we do likely know a few. Barnabas is one (e.g., Acts 14:14).  Romans 16:7 may give us the names of two more, perhaps a husband and a wife: Andronicus and Junia. An apostle was someone to whom Jesus appeared and whom Jesus commissioned to go as a witness to the resurrection (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1). We thus have evidence of at least one woman who was an apostle.

[1] Of course the most obvious answer is that Jesus and the angels told them to go to Galilee.

[2] E.g., to try to connect it with the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2.

Women at the Tomb 3

... continued from yesterday
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It seems very likely indeed that these women found the tomb empty where Jesus’ body had been laid, as well as that they did not initially tell anyone, as Mark 16:8 says. There is first the fact that such specific names are mentioned. For such specific names to be remembered in places far removed from where they were known, surely the tradition started first in the places where they were known, probably well within their lifetime. [1]

Similarly, the fact that they did not initially tell anyone out of fear is scarcely a comment someone would invent. Indeed, Matthew and Luke chose not to mention this little detail even though they were likely copying Mark at this point. The tradition that Paul passes on about resurrection appearances does not mention these women, unless they are part of the five hundred who saw Jesus risen on one occasion.  Their role in the story seems very likely--surely no one in that day would have invented women discovering the empty tomb if it had not happened that way. [2]

We thus have two very interesting likelihoods. First, Jesus’ tomb was empty on Sunday morning. Second, hundreds of individuals were quite convinced that they had seen Jesus alive after his death. [3] If we add a little faith to these two likelihoods, we have Jesus' resurrection from the dead. Obviously if a person does not believe that resurrections can happen, then he or she will find another explanation. But if you believe resurrections can happen, this is the most likely one of all history.

Paul says that the first resurrection appearance was to Peter. This is more than a little intriguing, since none of the gospels clearly tell about the incident. The most we get is an intriguing and allusive comment in Luke 24:34—"he has appeared to Simon." But the story of that appearance is not told, unless John has moved it to his final chapter (John 21).

The way the gospels present the resurrection appearances in general makes it clear that no one of them gives us the full story.  For example, it is easy to think that the Great Commission of Matthew happened outside of Jerusalem right before Jesus ascended to heaven in Acts 1:9. Then we realize that the Great Commission took place in Galilee (Matt. 28:16), a three days journey away from Bethany where Jesus ascends (Luke 24:50).

In fact, Luke-Acts does not mention any of the appearances in Galilee at all, while Mark and Matthew indicate that Jesus' primary resurrection appearances were there.  It would be easy to conclude that there is some artistry involved in these presentations rather than a completely literal presentation.  For example, one of the features of Luke-Acts is to focus the center of his presentation, especially in Acts, on the city of Jerusalem. He has accordingly omitted the part of the resurrection story that took place in Galilee.

Even a brief comparison of the ending of Luke with the beginning of Acts highlights the artfulness of Luke's presentation. If one looks at the timing of Luke 24, you might easily infer that Jesus rises from the dead and ascends to heaven on the same day.  Jesus appears to the men on their way to Emmaus "that same day" (Luke 24:13). They return to Jerusalem "at once" (24:33). "While they were still talking" (24:36) Jesus appears again, and Jesus leads them out near Bethany, where he ascends to heaven (24:50).

But then, when we turn to Luke's second volume, Acts, there are forty days between Jesus' resurrection and ascension (Acts 1:3). This is scarcely a difference Luke would expect his audience to miss. [4] It must have surely been understood that Luke was not simply presenting a documentary of what happened but also arranging and presenting the material in an artful and meaningful way.

If our reaction is, "Luke messed up because the two don't seem to match," then we are not thinking about Luke-Acts in the right way. We are thinking it's all about history when in fact it's all about truth, using history as the medium. This is an important paradigm shift you must make if you are to have a deep understanding of the message of the gospels...

[1] Books such as James Dunn's Jesus Remembered and Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses remind us that such traditions would have likely circulated while these individuals were still living.  The details of such oral traditions might vary quite a bit, but a core tended to travel intact.

[2] That is, if someone were making the story up from scratch, surely they would have had men find the tomb empty. For example, in John, Peter and the Beloved Disciple corroborate the fact that the tomb is empty.  See also Luke 24:12.

[3] A good book on this topic is James Dunn's The Evidence of Jesus.

[4] Although I am using the name Luke for convenience, the author of Luke-Acts nowhere actually gives his name, assuming it was a man.  Technically, Luke-Acts is anonymous.

Women at the Tomb 2

... continued from yesterday.
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We do not really learn about the empty tomb from Paul. However, he does seem to presume some sort of continuity between the body in which we die and the body in which we rise. "The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable" (1 Cor. 15:42). The body with which we are raised is not made up of flesh and blood (15:50), but it is somehow in continuity with our earthly body. So for Paul to believe that Jesus rose from the dead would seem to imply that Jesus' earthly body would no longer be located in the earth.

But it is in the gospels that we hear explicitly about the empty tomb. Mark is again the earliest gospel account. In the final hours of Friday before sundown, before the beginning of Sabbath, they place Jesus' body fairly quickly in someone else's tomb, someone named Joseph of Arimathea. Then early Sunday morning, after the Sabbath is over, some of the women who followed Jesus want to anoint his body with burial spices. Mark mentions Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and a woman named Salome (16:1). [1]

When the women get there, they find the stone in front of the tomb rolled away and the body is gone.  In Mark's account, two remarkable things then happen. First, they are told by a young man in a white robe to tell the disciples to go to Galilee. There the disciples and Peter will see him again, as he promised them. The second remarkable thing is that the women do not tell the disciples, at least not initially, "because they were afraid" (16:8).

This is where Mark as we have it ends. True, many versions go on to print twelve more verses, but they are not likely the way Mark originally ended. The earliest copies of Mark that have survived--and the earliest statements about the ending of Mark up until the early 300s--do not have these verses. Perhaps even more convincing is that these verses don't fit here. Mark 16:9 seems to start all over again as if the first eight verses didn't even exist. Accordingly, the vast majority of experts on the biblical text do not think Mark 16:9-20 were the way Mark originally read.

[insert text box on textual criticism]

However, it does seem quite reasonable that the original version of Mark did have something here. We do actually find another, shorter ending in some ancient manuscripts (hand written copies). No one thinks it was the original ending either, but it demonstrates the early sense that something was missing from the ending at verse 8. Indeed, Mark 16:8 as it stands ends with the word "for," a strange way to end a book.

I think it is quite possible that the original ending of Mark went on to tell of an appearance to Peter or the disciples in Galilee, perhaps some earlier version of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:16-20. Matthew was based on Mark, so perhaps in Matthew 28 we catch some small glimpse of the original ending of Mark. Some have mistakenly claimed that Mark does not believe Jesus rose from the dead. This is quite incorrect, since Mark 16:6 clearly proclaims that Jesus is risen. Mark as we have it simply doesn't narrate any of the resurrection encounters...

[1] Matthew seems to identify Salome as the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee (27:56). Additionally, the other Mary is said in Matthew to be the mother of James and Joseph. Luke 24:10 additionally mentions a woman named Joanna. John 20 only mentions Mary Magdalene.

Resurrection 1

I start this chapter on Easter morning, 2012. Today I and Christians all over the world will celebrate that Sunday so long ago, perhaps in the year AD30, when Jesus physically emerged from the tomb in which they had buried him. For Christians, every Sunday is a little Easter, a little celebration that Jesus has risen from the dead. [1]

We say it was after three days, because the Jewish day goes from sundown to sundown. Jesus was thus dead from about 3pm to sundown on Friday (day one). He was dead all Saturday (day two). Then he was dead from sundown on Saturday to the time when he rose early Sunday morning (day three). [2]

Most scholars believe he was buried in a vault something like this one, today located in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher not far from the traditional site of Jesus' burial.

There is another site, Gordon's Tomb, which is located in a garden today and has a rock outcropping that looks somewhat like a skull. Many Christian visitors say it gives them a better feel for what they picture when they read John 19:41, even though it is not likely the original location. [3]

The earliest report of Jesus' resurrection comes from Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7. [4] Since Paul wrote this letter around the year AD54, it is a very early report indeed, likely within fifteen years of the event. Paul says that he himself inherited this tradition (15:3), presumably from people like James and Peter in Jerusalem (e.g., Gal. 1:18; 2:9).

It is not at all likely that he is lying, since he has enemies in the church at Corinth and indeed had conflicts with the Jerusalem church. Both groups no doubt would have loved to show him wrong if he was saying false things about such a fundamental tradition. But we have absolutely no evidence that anyone did. It is thus overwhelmingly likely that the tradition Paul passes on here is exactly what everyone in Jerusalem was saying.

Paul doesn't give much detail. He basically gives a list of those to whom Jesus appeared. Jesus rose on the third day (1 Cor. 15:4). He appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve (15:5). [5] There was an appearance to a large group of over 500 people (15:6).  Then there was a second wave of appearances.  Jesus appeared to his brother James and to all the apostles (15:7), ending with his appearance to Paul himself (15:8).

These were all real people, most of whom were still alive at the time Paul was writing. We have good reason to think that many of them suffered considerably in consequence of this belief. The disciple James, Peter, James the brother of Jesus, Paul--all of them were put to death, still firmly believing that they had seen Jesus alive after his death. It is not reasonable to think these individuals were lying...

[1] The Bible nowhere equates Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath.  The Jewish Sabbath was from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. For Christians, Sunday is a celebration of Jesus' resurrection. For this reason, those who choose to give up something for Lent do not have to do so on the Sundays of that period. No Sunday is a day for fasting.

[2] Being dead three days also makes a symbolic connection with the prophet Jonah. Jonah was in the fish for three days and three nights (Matt. 12:40).

[3] Although the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is currently within the walls of Jerusalem, archaeology has confirmed that it was right outside the city at the time of Jesus. The Romans usually crucified right outside city walls on a path where people would walk by.

[4] It would be very common to think that the gospels were written first because they treat Jesus, who came before Paul. But the gospels were not written by Jesus or at the time of Jesus. They were written later in the century, likely after Paul was already dead in fact.

[5] This would not have included Judas Iscariot at this point. Either "the Twelve" is used loosely or Paul has in mind those who would be considered the Twelve after Judas was replaced.