A brand new resurrection

So far in Faith Matters I've presented 5 reasons, each a matter of historical record, to believe that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is a matter of historical fact, rather than an imagined, subjective experience advocated by religious enthusiasts:

1. Jesus died on the cross and was buried.
2. Jesus's tomb was empty and no one ever produced the body.
3. Jesus's disciples believed that they saw him resurrected from the dead. 
4. The disciples suddenly transformed from terrified to bold.
5. The church quickly transformed from a Jewish sect to a cross-cultural fellowship. 

Now I'd like to point my readers to a final reason, in my mind the most subtle and persuasive one yet: the revolutionary change in perception of what resurrection was among the followers of Jesus. The argument is in N. T. Wright's article that forms part of the appendix to Antony Flew’s There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007, pp. 195-213). At that point in time, Flew had begun believing that a deist god existed, but not a supernatural God, like the God of the Bible, who revealed himself to humanity. Wright's argument, though, according to Flew, convinced him to consider "Is it possible that there has been or can be divine revelation?" 

According to Wright, this historical shift in what resurrection could be was established, no later than 50AD, according to any documents of which we have records.

People other than Christians in the first-century world believed the following about resurrection:

A. The non-Jewish world and some Jews simply did not believe that resurrection is possible. Everyone knows when you die, you stay dead, right?

B. Many Jews believed in a resurrection of the entire group of righteous Jews (as portrayed in Daniel 12:1-2)

C. This group resurrection was of a physical body just like the one that died, and would die again

D. Alternately, the group resurrection was to a luminous body, shining like a star (think Obi Wan Kenobi after his death in Star Wars)

None of these views is like the Christian view unanimously held, very early, no later than 50 AD. Unlike views A-D above, the earliest Christians of whom we have record believed that Jesus's resurrection was the "first fruits" of all of the faithful (1 Corinthians 15:20). The Christian view is “a new type of embodiedness that is definitely bodily in the sense of being solid and substantial, but seems to have been transformed so that it is now not susceptible to pain or suffering or death.  And this is quite new.  That picture of resurrection is not in Judaism.” Wright traces six other significant innovations in Christian belief about resurrection, the last of which is the remarkable unity of belief among the earliest Christians as regards resurrection. 

Wright continues: "All this forces us as historians to ask a very simple question: why did all the early Christians known to us from the earliest times for which we have evidence, have this very new, but remarkably unanimous, view of resurrection? That is a genuinely interesting historical question in its own right. Of course, all the early Christians known to us would say, 'We have this view of Resurrection because of what we believe about Jesus.'”

These two historical facts just lie there, begging for explanation: the very early shift in the view of resurrection, and the unanimous view held by all Christians. It was not a new view, gained gradually over decades of casting about; it appeared all at once and very early. Something clearly happened in the 30s and 40s.

The evidence that supports the reality of Jesus’s resurrection leads us to the most reasonable inference based on the historical facts, namely that Jesus rose from the dead and then appeared to some of his followers. 

This blog article was based in part on my book: Five Languages of Evidence: How to Speak about Reasons for Christianity in a Post-truth World.  Not yet published; available upon request. 

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