[209]

Resurrecting Old Arguments: Responding to Four Essays

(Originally published in Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 2005, 3.2, 187–209. Original pagination is retained in bold italicized numbers. Reproduced by permission of the author.)

N.T. Wright

Bishop of Durham

Durham, UK

ABSTRACT

The author is grateful for the attention given to his book The Resurrection of the Son of God by the four reviewers. David Bryan is right to highlight the Enoch literature as a more fertile source of resurrection ideas than the book allowed for; but he has overstated his objection. Granted that the stream of thought represented by resurrection is more diverse even than RSG allowed, the book’s argument did not hinge on the wide spread of resurrection belief at the time but on the meaning of ‘resurrection’, i.e. a two-stage post-mortem existence, the second stage being a new embodiment. Bryan’s suggested elevation of Enoch, Elijah and others as pre-cursors of the exaltation of Jesus fails in that these figures neither die nor are resurrected. James Crossley’s counter-proposal—resurrection stories grew from ‘visions’ which gave rise to the idea of an empty tomb as an attempt to ‘vindicate’ the ‘ideas and beliefs of Jesus’—fails on several counts, not least because it ignores Jesus’ kingdom-proclamation which was not the promulgation of ideas and beliefs but the announcement that Israel’s God was going to do something that would claim his sovereignty over the world. Michael Goulder revives the highly contentious hypothesis that the early Church was polarized between the Jerusalem apostles, who believed in a non-bodily resurrection, and Pauline Christians for whom the resurrection was bodily. The claim that Mark 16.1-8 is full of contradictions and impossibilities is rejected. Larry Hurtado warns against downplaying the role of experience both in the Christian life and in describing the devotion and liturgy of the early Church. While cautioning against the use of the word ‘metaphor’ to mean ‘less than fully real’, I acknowledge the force of the argument, and suggest the cognitive processes I propose and the devotional life sketched by Hurtado are complementary.

It was Pontius Pilate who declared, ‘What I have written, I have written’. The implied reader of the gospels may like Pilate’s challengers even less than [210] they like the cynical procurator, but the remark still carries a sense of begging the question, of shrugging the shoulders and walking away. That is, I think, part of the reason why I have always cringed a little at responses to reviews, especially at those that consist mostly of pointing out that if Professor Haupt-Kritik had bothered to read page 397 he could not possibly have accused the injured but innocent author of folly. So, having been pressed for a written response (in addition to the aural response I made at the time) to the four essays presented at the British Society of New Testament Studies meeting in 2004, I register my reluctance and offer an advance apology for the fact that I shall inevitably lapse from time to time into a genre I find somewhat distasteful.

I am, of course, grateful both for the attention which has been showered on The Resurrection of the Son of God and for the many kind words which these essayists and others have said and written about it. (I am still somewhat dazed at the glowing presentation on the book which the novelist P.D. James made at the awards ceremony for the Michael Ramsey Prize.) One would rather have the critics lining up to take pot shots than to have the book ignored. But I confess that I am slightly disturbed to discover that nobody reading these four essays would get any idea of the actual shape of the book’s argument, or the differing weight given to the several parts, some of which are here analysed in great detail but most of which are passed over in silence. The book is, I think, more than simply a string of discussions of regular topoi on the subject of resurrection in general and that of Jesus in particular, with a historical argument for Jesus’ bodily resurrection somehow emerging out of the mound of footnotes. I still believe, and nothing in these four essays remotely challenges this, that the best historical explanation for the rise of the multi-faceted phenomenon we know as early Christianity is the combination of an empty tomb and the sightings of Jesus himself bodily alive (though in a transformed, not merely resuscitated, body) for a month or so after his crucifixion; and that the best explanation for the empty tomb and the sightings is the proposal that Jesus was indeed fully alive again and that his body had been transformed into what I have called a ‘transphysical’ state.

Perhaps I should say before proceeding further that though I do indeed conceive of this book in terms of a historical argument (and thus as coming into the first of the three categories which Larry Hurtado presents, following Peter Carnley), I am well aware, perhaps more than most readers of the book picked up (for which I must take responsibility), that people are unlikely to come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily alive in a new way some three days after his execution on the basis of historical argument alone. As Wittgenstein put it, ‘it is love that believes the resurrection’.[1]

However, as I say in the book, what historical argument is rather good at doing is clearing away the undergrowth [211] behind which sceptics of various sorts have been hiding, demonstrating that they are not, as they so often claim, mere neutral observers (while Christians, supposedly, are parti pris and so their testimony can be discounted), but rather equally influenced by judgments of probability which come, not from looking at the evidence, but from an a priori position. One of the reasons the book is so long (not long enough for some; I am always amused when critics tell me off for missing out a proper discussion of some text or issue, a point to which I shall return) is that in reading the secondary literature I became acutely aware that many of those who blithely dismissed the possibility of Jesus’ bodily resurrection were resting the force of their argument on a particular point (say, a particular reading of certain key texts) which historical study can show conclusively to be wrong. Since many of these arguments are then repeated ad nauseam in other writings, I thought it would be something of a public service to show just how specious they are.

But this, as it were, simply reduces the deficit to zero. While I think I have made a strong historical case for my point, I am well aware that anyone reading my book can come, without any failure of logic or historical insight, to the conclusion of saying, ‘I can see that the historical arguments normally advanced against believing in Jesus’ bodily resurrection are flawed, and that the historical arguments for saying that he must have been raised from the dead are remarkably good; but I choose to believe, as my starting point, that bodily resurrection has never occurred, and must therefore conclude that, even though I cannot give a historical explanation for the rise of early Christianity and the shape of its central belief, there must in fact be some such explanation which does not involve Jesus’ resurrection.’ That is the point at which it becomes clear that on this, as on many ‘ subjects, one does not believe something on evidence alone, and that the cheerful old Enlightenment lie to the contrary needs to be faced down and replaced with a fuller and more many-sided account of how and why humans come to think and believe—and even, we would say, to ‘know’—all kinds of things.

More particularly, I conceive the task of the book on the analogy with Jesus’ response to Thomas in John 20. Thomas begins with the standard skeptical viewpoint common to most non-Jewish thinkers, and many Jewish ones, in the ancient as in the modern world (one of the popular ideas that needs debunking is the belief that people in the ancient world didn’t know the laws of nature and so were liable to believe in things like resurrection, whereas we with the benefit of modem science and technology have discovered that dead people don’t rise and so must resist any attempt to push us back into the ‘ancient worldview’ within which such things might occur). Thomas wants solid evidence. Jesus, and John in writing the gospel, make it clear that faith is more than that kind of thing; but also that it is not less. Jesus invites Thomas to reach out and touch him; that is, he accepts the terms of his question even while leading him beyond it. The Resurrection of the Son of God is an attempt to do, in relation to the long-standing and [212] multifaceted historical arguments normally advanced format Thomas-like scepticism which still prevails in many quarters, what Jesus did to and for Thomas: to answer the question in the terms in which it has been put, that is, by means of historical argument, while pointing on to the fact that full Christian faith is not a matter of history alone.

The title of this response is deliberately ambiguous. At one level, I am aware that what I mostly have to do in responding to the essays is to resurrect arguments which I deployed in the book, and hope to breathe new life into them once more. At another level (and this applies to some of the essays more than others) my counter-charge is that the writers are themselves attempting to revive arguments which ought to be considered dead beyond the hope of resurrection. (I envisage some of my adversaries’ arguments taking personified form and asking them, as Samuel asked Saul, ‘Why have you disturbed me, by calling me up?’) No doubt opinions will vary on which arguments deserve resurrection and which do not. I can but try to make my point.

2. James Crossley: History and the Empty Tomb

If Bryan has probed some of the preliminary, and very important, stages in my overall argument, Crossley has taken me on much nearer its heart. He argues first that the rise of belief in Jesus as Messiah did not, after all, require his resurrection, as I suggest; second, that non-bodily ‘visions’ of Jesus would have been sufficient to generate belief in an empty tomb; third, that the main gospel narratives of the resurrection are much more likely to be inventions than based on accurate memory; and fourth, that the arguments I make for seeing the resurrection narratives as based on early oral tradition are not convincing. For these reasons, he concludes that the stories of Jesus’ bodily resurrection grow, not from a [217] historical event as such, but from the need of the disciples to vindicate Jesus’ beliefs and ideas and to ground their own beliefs in him.

It is this latter point which, I suggest, undermines Crossley’s attempt at every stage He never addresses the nature of the Jewish hope within which Jesus’ proclamation was heard, and which the earliest Christians declared had been fulfilled Hence he can reduce Jesus’ message to a set of ‘beliefs and ideas’ which needed to be ‘vindicated’. The basic claim of Jesus of Nazareth, however, was not that he was offering a collection of beliefs and ideas which (perhaps in contra-distinction to those of his contemporaries)

might eventually be shown to be true, but that God’s kingdom was arriving in and through his own presence and work. That is the backdrop against which all theories about the rise of Christianity must be set.

This means that, even though Jesus of Nazareth was indeed a very different figure to the two characters, Simon bar Giora and Simeon ben Kosiba, with whom I draw a partial parallel, the parallel holds precisely to this extent: Jesus, like Simon and Simeon, was interested in (and his hearers rightly took him to be interested in) events that actually happen, things that actually come to pass. Granted he was not leading a violent revolution (though of course some have tried to suggest that he was), but this does not mean that all that Jesus was expecting was that he would die quite soon (after giving utterance to some important ‘ideas’ and ‘beliefs’). It is interesting that Crossley is prepared to allow the historicity of Jesus’ predictions of his death, but it is surprising that, having done this, he makes no mention of the simultaneous and repeated prediction of Jesus’ resurrection. Of course, were he to do so he might well go on to say that the disciples were simply trying to ‘vindicate’ this particular ‘idea’ when they said that he had indeed been raised; but this would lay him open in turn to the counter-charge that the stories of Jesus’ death were hardly made up to ‘vindicate’ those particular predictions. That is, we all agree that Jesus really was crucified, even though the stories of that event might look as though they were invented simply to ‘vindicate’ Jesus’ prophecy of the event; in other words, the fact that a narrative has the capacity to demonstrate the truth of a previous prediction does not automatically render it historically worthless. My basic point is that Jesus did not simply teach certain ideas, but rather launched a kingdom-movement, albeit of a particular type; and that if after his violent death nothing had happened it is simply impossible, as a matter of history, to explain why his followers should continue not a movement devoted to teaching a set of ideas, but the same kingdom-movement, with Jesus (not, say, his brother James or some other suitable candidate) as its king.

This brings Crossley to a long, and to my mind very confused, discussion of ‘visions’. There are several oddities in this account; for instance, he suggests that I have allowed my argument to become skewed because, in controverting Crossan’s vision-arguments, I am basically dealing with ‘Hellenistic’ visions [218] rather than the different kind of phenomena which (he says) were experienced by the early Christians. What he seems to mean by this is that (a) when people have visions, the content of the vision is determined by the cultural context they are already in; (b) thus, when the early Christians had visions, they interpreted them in terms of resurrection because they were first-century Jews and because they were followers of Jesus, whose ‘beliefs’ required vindication; (c) that these visions, and this context, were very different to the supposedly ‘Hellenistic’ visions which I have rejected as an explanatory grid. I am not sure how secure (a) is; there are many accounts of people from utterly non-Christian contexts experiencing visions of Jesus; and there may well be, for all I know, similarly cross-cultural phenomena in quite other traditions. This calls into question, too, the absolute disjunction postulated by (c). But, as to (b), I was at pains to show that one simply cannot argue that because the disciples were first-century Jews they interpreted their particular visions as an indication that Jesus had been raised from the dead. I cannot stress too strongly that people in Jesus’ world were well used to reports of visions, and indeed ghosts; when the disciples saw Jesus walking on the water in Mark 6, and were unsure whether he was a ghost or a real living person, this was not an indication, as Crossley seems to suppose, that people in that culture could not easily, under normal conditions, tell the difference between the two, but rather that the conditions were abnormal. Again, Crossley concludes his key discussion by saying that a (presumably non-bodily) vision ‘would strongly imply that Jesus’ message had been vindicated’. To this we must reply, first, that if Jesus’ message was about God’s sovereign rule breaking in upon Israel and the world, a non-bodily vision would imply no such thing; second, that whether we are talking about first-century Jewish culture or the wider Hellenistic world a non-bodily vision of someone recently dead would certainly indicate, not that they had been raised from the dead, but that they had not; and third, that a non-bodily vision of someone recently dead would prove nothing about the ‘validity’ or ‘vindication’ of the ideas they had held and taught during their lifetime. One might imagine a friend and follower of Hitler seeing a vision of the Fuhrer shortly after his death, and concluding that his death, as confirmed by the vision, meant that he had been wrong all along.

For all these reasons, a historically grounded account of the whole period must reject Crossley’s suggestion that ‘a vision could be interpreted in a bodily sense with the assumption of an empty tomb’ while at the same time the empty tomb was itself historically inaccurate. Crossley has not considered the possibility that people might go to the tomb and see for themselves; but, more particularly, he has not come to terms with the argument I mounted step by step in chapter 18 of RSG. Precisely within the Second Temple Jewish culture in which ‘resurrection’ was about new bodily life, but in which ‘resurrection’ also was seen as a large-scale end-time event, simultaneous with the transformation of the whole cosmos, (a) any suggestion that one person might be raised from the dead all by [219]

himself would be completely unexpected, and (b) any ‘vision’ which appeared to be of someone alive again after a time of being dead would be interpreted, not as ‘he must have been raised, therefore there must be an empty tomb even though nobody has found or mentioned one’, but as ‘this is one of those visions of people recently dead that so many traditions, our own included, have often reported; this means he is well and truly dead, and though he will rise again at the last day, along with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and more recent heroes like the Maccabees, he is at the moment with God awaiting that day of resurrection’. This is the point where the story of Peter in Acts 12 makes its point: the believers praying behind the locked door think that the person standing outside is Peter’s ‘angel’, in other words, that he has been executed in the prison and that they are experiencing some kind of visitation which indicates, not that Peter is alive, but that he is dead. Precisely within the first-century Jewish cultural context which Crossley correctly sees as the right matrix for interpreting his hypothetical non-bodily vision, this is what such an event would have to mean.

Crossley then attempts to show, against my argument that the gospel resurrection narratives reflect very early, and only lightly edited, oral tradition, that on the contrary they belong in the genre of Jewish imaginative fiction about heroes of the past. He does somewhat shoot himself in the foot when he declares that the tales about the patriarchs in Jubilees and similar books ‘could hardly be said to give genuine historical insight as to what really happened millennia ago’; the point is precisely that the gospels purport to tell their readers what happened just a few years ago, at a time when there were plenty of people around who could back them up, or indeed controvert them. How Crossley thinks that the book of Esther and its subsequent traditions provide a ‘particularly relevant’ example is beyond me: traditions developing over three or four centuries can hardly be compared with traditions which, as I have argued, show remarkably little development over three or four decades. To say that stories like the Esther traditions are historically inaccurate ‘and it is hardly going too far to assume something similar was happening in the gospel traditions’ is indeed ‘a point that should not have to be made’, but not in the sense which Crossley intends. One should not make points like that, not because they are obviously correct but because they are clearly nonsense. When Crossley says ‘the correct ideology is what matters’ he means that inconsistencies in the details of the story are irrelevant since Matthew and the others were concerned to propagate their ‘ideology’ irrespective of the facts (a somewhat anachronistic use of ‘ideology’, but we let that pass); but the impression on this reader at least is that it is Crossley who is driven by his ideology to say that, since bodily resurrection cannot have happened, something must be wrong with the argument that says it did, though to date he has not been able to figure out what it is.

Haggadic legends about figures in the distant past, written to justify a belief in the present, are in fact very significantly different to the resurrection narratives. [220] The latter (a) are not primarily about odd things Jesus did or said, but rather about something that happened to him; (b) concern a figure of very recent memory, not Moses or Abraham or someone else from long ago; and (c) are written not to justify or vindicate a particular idea, theory or belief, but to articulate the belief without which there would not have been an early Christianity in the first place, namely the belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead. The resurrection stories are not of the same type as those which seek simply to ‘make heroes greater’. They were written to declare that something had happened. If it had not, they were not simply embroidering a legend a bit further, but, as Paul put it, wasting their time on futile faith.

Crossley ends up, in this section, with fine rhetoric but mere assertion; like Bryan but much more so, when the argument is weak we hear the repeated tell-tale word, ‘Surely’, which means, more or less, ‘I very much want to assert this but I can’t at the moment tell you why’. We hardly need to be informed that one should approach the resurrection narratives with sceptical incredulity; that is how the great majority of readers from the first century to the twenty-first have come to them. The question is, how else do you explain the rise of early Christianity, and the particular shape it took? Matthew, Luke and John may or may not be ‘monumental embellishments’ of Mark, but Crossley has hardly proved the point by asserting it. And the fact that the resurrection narratives ‘ground some of the most important Christian beliefs in the resurrection’ (a rather odd way of putting it; does he mean ‘ground the most important Christian belief, namely, that of Jesus’ resurrection’?) is certainly true, but by itself no more justifies the implicit reductionism (‘they made up these stories to ground beliefs they already had’) than my telling the story of my granddaughter’s birth to ground my belief that she is indeed my granddaughter implies that I have made up the stories because I want to claim grand parentage of this delightful little girl. When the belief in question is that Jesus has been raised from the dead, inventing stories which give an account of this supposed event merely pushes the question one stage further back: why on earth would a group of first-century Jews, soon after the death of their would-be Messiah, come to have this belief in the first place and then want to make up stories to justify it? (Anyone who at this point is tempted to reply ‘cognitive dissonance’ is invited to read RSG 697-701.)

In fact, however, the resurrection narratives have several features which strongly suggest that they are not simply inventions to support beliefs reached on other grounds. Crossley considers my account of these, but does not to my mind succeed in refuting my points.

First, he admits that his reply to me about the non-appearance of biblical material in the stories is ‘tentative’ and ‘speculative’: his proposal is that the resurrection narratives have carefully avoided biblical exegesis because, like the Areopagus address, they are addressed to pagans not Jews. That has the merit of being ingenious, but is very unconvincing. Why should the evangelists, who [221] have made such dramatic use of scripture throughout the rest of their narratives, suddenly refrain from doing so here? Were Gentiles supposed only to read the final chapter?

Second, Crossley tries to counter my point that the resurrection narratives, unlike virtually every other mention of Jesus’ resurrection in the New Testament, nowhere mention the Christian hope for future resurrection. This remains, in fact, a damaging point against Crossley and Casey, to whom he refers: this was a primary Christian belief, and if the resurrection narratives were written as fictitious vehicles for setting out and vindicating Christian beliefs, it would be bound to come in somewhere. Crossley lamely concludes that the stories are [only?] vindications of Jesus. Well, they certainly are that, but this hardly tallies with the line he has taken up to that point, that they are back-projections of Christian belief.

I pass over the third point, that the portrait of Jesus is precisely not the sort of thing one would have expected if some Second Temple Jews had wanted to produce an account of the resurrection of a recently dead leader. Crossley’s ‘answer’ to this (that the stories ‘simply highlight a belief the early Christians held’) scarcely constitutes a reply. More important is his suggestion about the fourth point, where like many others I highlight the role of the women, and press the point that nobody inventing such stories would give them pride of place in testimony. It simply will not do to suggest, as Crossley does, that their role within Jesus’ ministry ‘may have made their testimony more acceptable for some’. Not only does that contradict his earlier point, that the stories were written for Gentile outsiders, who, as we know from Celsus, were quick to mock such an unlikely story ‘verified’ by such an incredible set of witnesses. It suggests that the implied reader of the narrative is someone who is already within the Christian fold, which John at least explicitly denies (20.31). The key thing to note in all these four points, which Crossley never really begins to come to terms with, is that the normal account of the resurrection narratives within mainstream New Testament scholarship—namely, that after a brief and dubious statement by Mark the other evangelists created their stories out of whole cloth in the post-70 period—is simply incredible. These stories, for all they have been lightly edited by the evangelists, go back to the very early oral period, and were regarded as too important, in this character of primary testimony, to be significantly altered. This does not of course settle all the questions of detail and consistency. But it puts down some markers about the character and origin of the stories which should not be overlooked.

Crossley’s view of Mark is indeed interesting. I have not yet had a chance to read his book and assess the strength of his radical proposal for a very early date for the gospel, and look forward to doing so. But I have to conclude that his attempted rebuttal of my argument does not amount to very much. In particular, he has made no attempt to deal with the actual step by step account I give, in [222] chapter 18, of why a vision by itself would not generate belief in an empty tomb, and for that matter why the discovery of an empty tomb by itself would not generate visions, and why therefore any account of the rise of Christianity must take seriously the strong historical probability that both occurred. Nor does he even begin to examine my subsequent argument, that the main rival accounts for why such stories would come to be written, or why early Christianity got going in the first place, fall by their own weight. But when we consider this area of discussion, our thoughts turn naturally to someone who has written about such things more than once: Michael Goulder.

More… http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Old_Arguments.htm

[1] L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (trans. Peter Winch; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 33 (emphasis original).

[2] Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). The title essay is reprinted from New Testament Studies 45 (1999), pp. 391-412.

[3] See The New Testament and the People of God (London and Minneapolis: SPCK and Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 241-43.

[4] See particularly L. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), which was in the press at the same time as RSG.

[5] Gunther Bornkamm, Early Christian Experience (London: SCM Press, 1969).