The resurrection of Jesus and the Gentile mission of the church
Last week I wrote about 4 classic evidences that Jesus rose from the dead. All four are minimal, well-established historical facts:
- Jesus died on the cross and was buried.
- Jesus's tomb was empty and no one produced the body.
- Jesus’s disciples believed that they saw him resurrected from the dead.
- The transformation of these disciples from cowering faint-hearts to bold, fearless announcers of the resurrection is truly remarkable and hard to explain. They said--and often died because they said--that Jesus rose from the dead.
As persuasive as these arguments are, I recently discovered two other, more subtle and more powerful arguments: the Gentile mission of the church and the sudden shift in perception of resurrection by about 50AD. Both of these arguments are matters of well-established history, mostly independent of the New Testament. I'll speak of the first of these today; the second--and more persuasive--I plan to address next week.
The Gentile mission of the church. At its beginning, the Christian church was basically understood by outsiders as a Jewish sect, like the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Pharisees, to name a few. First-century Jews typically had a great antipathy toward associating with Gentiles (non-Jews), so at first the Christian church (the community of Christian believers) was made up almost entirely of Jewish people. The thought of welcoming Gentiles directly into the newly-forming church without them first becoming Jewish was unthinkable.
However, consider a second historical fact. Within the first few years (probably before 50 AD) the church grew explosively among Gentiles, despite the cultural barriers observed by the devout Jews who made up the new Christian church. How was it possible for this Jewish sect to grow explosively among non-Jews?
Luke’s answer in the New Testament book of Acts is that it is a direct result of an appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the devoutly-Jewish, anti-Christian terrorist Saul. The resurrection of Jesus explains Saul's (Saul became the Apostle Paul) complete about-face leadership in the Gentile mission and expresses God’s redemptive plan for both Jews and non-Jews, a working-out of the “all peoples” desire of God’s heart to draw all ethnics to him. Paul eventually persuaded, with difficulty, the entire church to embrace a Gentile mission.
In other words, the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus explains Saul’s and the Church's dramatic conversion and begins to fulfill a significant, unfulfilled theme of the Bible. This explanation appeals to me because it is grounded in two, apparently contradictory historical facts, and because it satisfies what is portrayed as God’s longing to draw “all peoples” to himself.
This argument is articulated eloquently by Daniel P. Fuller in Resurrection Faith: Understanding Luke's History of Jesus, 2016.
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. Currently unpublished; available upon request.
Note: This is the third post in a blog series I’m calling “Faith Matters.” In the Faith Matters series, I intend to look at topics related to Christian evidences, book reviews, and aesthetic evidences that Jesus is real and the Bible is true.
Next post: the sudden shift in Resurrection in the first century world