The Resurrection of the Son of God

1130 Pages·2003·5.14 MB·English

by  N. T. Wright

CONTENTS

PREFACE. 13

Part One. 18

Chapter One- THE TARGET AND THE ARROWS. 19

1. Introduction: The Target. 19

2. The Arrows. 26

3. The Historical Starting-Point. 40

Chapter Two- SHADOWS, SOULS AND WHERE THEY GO: LIFE
BEYOND DEATH IN ANCIENT PAGANISM.. 44

1. Introduction. 44

2. Shadows, Souls or Potential Gods?. 50

3. Further Life from Within the World of the Dead?. 70

Chapter Three- TIME TO WAKE UP (1): DEATH AND BEYOND IN THE
OLD TESTAMENT. 93

1. Introduction. 93

2. Asleep with the Ancestors. 95

3. And Afterwards?. 109

4. Awakening the Sleepers. 114

5. Conclusion. 131

Chapter Four- TIME TO WAKE UP (2): HOPE BEYOND DEATH IN
POST-BIBLICAL JUDAISM.. 132

1. Introduction: The Spectrum.. 132

2. No Future Life, or None to Speak of: The Sadducees. 133

3. Blessed (and Disembodied) Immortality. 141

4. Resurrection in Second-Temple Judaism.. 147

5. Resurrection in Ancient Judaism: Conclusion. 196

Part Two- Resurrection in Paul 201
Chapter Five- RESURRECTION IN PAUL. 202

1. Introduction: The Early Christian Hope. 202

2. 1 and 2 Thessalonians. 205

3. Galatians. 210

4. Philippians. 215

5. Ephesians and Colossians. 224

6. Philemon. 228

7. Romans. 228

8. Interlude: The Pastoral Epistles. 249

9. Paul (outside the Corinthian Correspondence): Conclusion. 252

Chapter Six- RESURRECTION IN CORINTH (1): INTRODUCTION.. 257

1. Introduction: The Problem.. 257

2. Resurrection in 1 Corinthians (apart from Chapter 15). 258

3. Resurrection in 2 Corinthians (apart from 4:7–5:11). 273

4. Conclusion: Resurrection at Corinth. 282

Chapter Seven- RESURRECTION IN CORINTH (2): THE KEY
PASSAGES. 284

1. 1 Corinthians 15. 284

2. 2 Corinthians 4:7–5:10. 326

Chapter Eight- WHEN PAUL SAW JESUS. 338

1. Introduction. 338

2. Paul’s Own Accounts. 341

3. Paul’s Conversion/Call in Acts. 349

4. Conversion and Christology. 354

5. Conclusion. 358

Part Three Resurrection in Early Christianity (Apart from Paul). 359

Chapter Nine HOPE REFOCUSED (1): GOSPEL TRADITIONS OUTSIDE
THE EASTER NARRATIVES. 360

1. Introduction. 360

2. Resurrection in Mark and its Parallels. 362
3. Resurrection in the Matthew/Luke Material (Sometimes Known as
‘Q’). 384

4. Resurrection in Matthew.. 388

5. Resurrection in Luke. 389

6. Resurrection in John. 392

7. Resurrection in the Gospels: Conclusion. 399

Chapter Ten HOPE REFOCUSED (2): OTHER NEW TESTAMENT
WRITINGS. 401

1. Introduction. 401

2. Acts. 401

3. Hebrews. 407

4. The General Letters. 410

5. Revelation. 417

6. Conclusion: Resurrection in the New Testament. 423

Chapter Eleven HOPE REFOCUSED (3): NON-CANONICAL EARLY
CHRISTIAN TEXTS. 427

1. Introduction. 427

2. Apostolic Fathers. 428

3. Early Christian Apocrypha. 440

4. The Apologists. 444

5. The Great Early Theologians. 452

6. Early Syriac Christianity. 468

7. ‘Resurrection’ as Spirituality? Texts from Nag Hammadi and
Elsewhere. 474

Chapter Twelve HOPE IN PERSON: JESUS AS MESSIAH AND LORD..
491

1. Introduction. 491

2. Jesus as Messiah. 491

3. Jesus, the Messiah, is Lord. 500

Part Four The Story of Easter. 518

Chapter Thirteen GENERAL ISSUES IN THE EASTER STORIES. 519
1. Introduction. 519

2. The Origin of the Resurrection Narratives. 521

3. The Surprise of the Resurrection Narratives. 529

4. The Historical Options. 537

Chapter Fourteen FEAR AND TREMBLING: MARK. 543

1. Introduction. 543

2. The Ending. 544

3. From Story to History. 550

4. Easter Day from Mark’s Point of View.. 553

Chapter Fifteen EARTHQUAKES AND ANGELS: MATTHEW... 556

1. Introduction. 556

2. Ruptured Earth and Rising Corpses. 556

3. The Priests, the Guards and the Bribe. 559

4. Tomb, Angels, First Appearance (28:1–10). 563

5. On the Mountain in Galilee (28:16–20). 564

Chapter Sixteen BURNING HEARTS AND BROKEN BREAD: LUKE. 569

1. Introduction. 569

2. Luke 24 and Acts 1 within Luke’s Work as a Whole. 571

3. The Unique Event. 576

4. Easter and the Life of the Church. 579

5. Luke and the Resurrection: Conclusion. 580

Chapter Seventeen NEW DAY, NEW TASKS: JOHN.. 581

1. Introduction. 581

2. John 20 within the Gospel as a Whole. 585

3. The Contribution of John 21. 592

4. The Gospel Easter Stories: Conclusion. 595

Part Five Belief, Event and Meaning. 598

Chapter Eighteen EASTER AND HISTORY. 599

1. Introduction. 599

2. The Tomb and the Meetings. 600
3. Two Rival Theories. 609

Chapter Nineteen THE RISEN JESUS AS THE SON OF GOD.. 629

1. Worldview, Meaning and Theology. 629

2. The Meanings of ‘Son of God’ 632

3. Shooting at the Sun?. 643

Bibliography. 645

Abbreviations. 645

A Primary Sources. 649

B Secondary Literature. 656

Indexes INDEX OF ANCIENT SOURCES. 688

1. Old Testament. 688

2. Apocrypha. 703

3. Pseudepigrapha. 707

4. Qumran. 710

5. Josephus. 711

6. Philo. 712

7. Rabbinic Works. 713

8. New Testament. 716

9. Christian and/or Gnostic Works. 753

10. Greco-Roman Texts. 764

11. Persian Texts. 777

12. Egyptian Texts. 777

INDEX OF MODERN AUTHORS. 778

INDEX OF SELECTED TOPICS. 792
PREFACE

I
This book started life as the final chapter of Jesus and the Victory of God
(1996), the second volume in the series Christian Origins and the Question of
God, of which the first volume is The New Testament and the People of God
(1992). The present work now forms the third volume in the series. This is a
departure from the original plan, and since people often ask me what is going on
some explanation may be appreciated.
A few months before I finished work on Jesus and the Victory of God
(hereafter JVG), Simon Kingston of SPCK came to see me to say that, since the
covers for the book had already been printed, I had an absolute maximum
number of pages available, and what did I propose to do? Had the work run its
intended course, with the material in what is now the present book compressed
(as I had foolishly thought I could compress it) into seventy pages or so, JVG
would have been at least 800 pages long, and would have burst out of its own
new covers, not a sight a middle-aged scholar wishes to see.
As providence would have it, I was at the same time turning over in my mind
the choice of topic for the Shaffer Lectures at Yale Divinity School, which I was
due to give in the Fall of 1996, shortly after the publication date for JVG. The
topic was supposed to be something to do with Jesus. I had puzzled over how I
might either compress material from the big book which would just have been
published, or try to lecture on some aspect of Jesus I had not covered in the book
(which I had hoped would be reasonably exhaustive; certainly I did not intend to
leave out three lectures’ worth of original material). The two problems solved
each other: miss out the resurrection chapter from JVG, lecture on the
resurrection in Yale, and turn the three lectures into a small book to join the
present series, in between JVG and the originally projected third volume on Paul,
which would now become Volume IV. (This had the unexpected result that some
reviewers of JVG accused me of not being interested in, or not believing in,
Jesus’ resurrection. I trust that this accusation may now be laid gently to rest.)
The Shaffer lectures were exciting, for me at any rate. My hosts at Yale were
warm in their hospitality to my wife and myself, and encouraging in their
response, on top of the honour they had shown me by their invitation. But it was
clear that each lecture needed expanding considerably. So, to help me towards
what I still hoped would be a short book, I frequently chose the same topic when
lecturing elsewhere in the next three years: the Drumwright Lectures at South-
Western Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, the Bishop’s Lectures at
Winchester, the Hoon-Bullock Lectures at Trinity University in San Antonio,
Texas, the DuBose Lectures at the University of the South in Sewanee,
Tennessee, the Kenneth W. Clark Lectures at Duke Divinity School, Durham,
North Carolina, and the Sprunt Lectures in Union Seminary, Richmond,
Virginia. (The Sewanee version was published in the Sewanee Theological
Review 41:2, 1998, 107–56; I have published other lectures and essays on the
subject from time to time, details of which are in the Bibliography.) I gave
similar lectures to the Princeton Theological Seminary Summer School at St
Andrews; and I compressed the argument into a single lecture for various
establishments, including St Michael’s Seminary, Baltimore, the Pontifical
Gregorian University in Rome, and Truett Seminary, Baylor University, Waco,
Texas. I have grateful memories of all these institutions. Their hospitality was
uniformly magnificent.
But the highlight, enabling me to lay out the material in much more detail and
giving me space and time to ferret around and fill in lots of gaps, came when I
was appointed to the MacDonald Visiting Chair at Harvard Divinity School for
the Fall Semester of 1999. Suddenly, instead of three or four lectures, I had the
chance to give more than twenty on the topic, to a large, intelligent and, in the
best sense, critical student audience. Of course, I emerged from each lecture
realizing that the material still deserved much more expansion. My initial dream
of writing up this book as I went along (and my initial expectation that it would
be a small book) was unrealizable. But I was able to lay the foundation for the
present work far more deeply than before, in a wonderfully congenial setting. I
am extremely grateful to my colleagues and friends in Harvard, and to Al
MacDonald, the founder of the Chair, whose personal support and enthusiasm
for my work has been a great encouragement. Thus, though the book has
changed its shape considerably since late 1999, the seeds sown in Yale bore fruit
in Harvard, fruit which in this book is brought at last to harvest. I trust my
friends in both august establishments will not object to finding themselves thus
associated with one another.
II
The book has reached its present length partly because, as I have worked
over the material and read as much as I could of the voluminous secondary
literature, it has seemed to me that all kinds of misconceptions about both the
key ideas and the key texts have over the years become widely accepted. As with
certain types of garden weed, there are occasions when the only thing to be done
is to dig deeper to get right under the roots. In particular, it has become accepted
within much New Testament scholarship that the earliest Christians did not think
of Jesus as having been bodily raised from the dead; Paul is regularly cited as the
chief witness for what people routinely call a more ‘spiritual’ point of view. This
is so misleading (scholars do not like to say that their colleagues are plain
wrong, but ‘misleading’ is of course our code for the same thing) and yet so
widespread that it has taken quite a lot of digging to uproot the weed, and quite a
lot of careful sowing to plant the seeds of what, I hope, is the historically
grounded alternative. Readers may be glad that I have not had space to highlight
more than a few examples here and there of what I take to be misleading views
both of Judaism and of the New Testament. I have preferred to expound the
primary sources, and to let them shape the book, rather than to offer a lengthy
‘state of the question’ and to allow that to dominate the horizon. (The first part
of Jesus and the Victory of God provides a general background to the
discussion.)
Just as the book could have grown considerably if I had entered into debate
with, or even simply cited, all the writers from whom I have learned, whether in
agreement or disagreement, it could easily have doubled in length if I had
explored all the interesting-looking secondary roads that lead off this particular
highway. There are lots of side-issues that get a cursory mention, if that. Those
who continue to work on the Turin Shroud, for instance, may be disappointed to
find no further mention of it here.1 I am aware that I have annotated some
discussions much more fully than others, and that in some cases a bare statement
of my own view has had to stand in for the detailed debate with colleagues and
friends that should ideally have taken place. This is so particularly in Part II, on
Paul, for which I hope to make amends, to some extent at least, in the next
volume in the series. My main concern here has been to lay out the large-scale
argument which seems to me in urgent need of clear statement. I envisage the
present book, unlike either of its predecessors, as essentially a simple
monograph with a single line of thought, of which I provide an advance map in
the first chapter. The shape of the argument is hardly novel, but the particular
point of entry, namely, the study of the way in which ‘resurrection’, denied by
pagans but affirmed by a good many Jews, was both reaffirmed and redefined by
the early Christians, has not, I think, been followed like this before. Nor has a
similar range of material, some of it inaccessible to many readers, been made
available in this way. I hope the book will contribute to the clarity of future
discussions as well as to historical understanding and responsible faith.
Several introductory matters about style and indeed content are dealt with in
the prefaces to The New Testament and the People of God (hereafter NTPG) and
JVG. One fresh comment is called forth by questions I sometimes receive. I refer
to the non-Jewish and non-Christian inhabitants of the ancient world as ‘pagans’
for the same reason as most ancient historians do: not intending it as in any way
a term of abuse, but finding it the most convenient way to designate a large
number of otherwise disparate peoples. The term is of course etic rather than
emic (i.e. it was not, in our period at any rate, a term used by anyone to describe
themselves, but reflects rather the perspective of others, in this case Jews and
Christians, on the people in question). It has here a purely heuristic value.
Despite the anxiety of some, I have continued for the most part to write ‘god’
with a small ‘g’. This is not an irreverence. It is to remind myself, as well as the
reader, that in the first century, as increasingly in the twenty-first, the question is
not whether we believe in ‘God’ (with it being assumed that we all know who or
what that word refers to), but rather to wonder which god, out of the many
available candidates, we might be talking about. When first-century Jews, and
early Christians, spoke of ‘the god who raises the dead’, they were implicitly
making a case that this god, the creator god, the covenant god of Israel, was in
fact God, the one and only being to whom the word appropriately refers. Most of
their contemporaries did not see it like that; not for nothing were the early
Christians known as ‘atheists’.2 Even New Testament scholars, seeing the word
‘God’, can easily be tricked into making unwarranted assumptions about the
identity of the being thus referred to—precisely the sort of assumptions that an
investigation like the present one is meant to challenge. However, when I lay out
the views of the early Christians, and quote from their writings, I shall often use
the capital to indicate that the authors were making just this point, that the god
they worshipped and invoked was in fact God. In the concluding chapters I shall
begin to use the capital myself, as I did at the equivalent points in JVG, for
reasons that I hope will become apparent. I hope this is not too confusing. The
alternative is to adopt the standard usage and thus fail, for most readers most of
the time, to alert them to the most important question which underlies this entire
series.
One other vital matter must be mentioned at this point, since space has
precluded fuller treatment in the body of the text.3 I constantly run into loose talk
about a ‘literal’ resurrection as opposed to a ‘metaphorical’ one. I know what