I’ve been promising for a while now to upload my rewrite on what I’ve been learning about the resurrection of Jesus. For better or worse it just keeps growing. I was going to wait until I covered all the topics on the page that is now up, but that might take a while to finish.
Instead I am going to blog what I’ve been writing one section at a time as I near a final draft of each section. This will give those of you who are interested a preview and a chance to comment on it before I replace the page I have up now. When I am finished it will be more than one page–I think there will be at least four of them.
I will be posting about Paul’s list of appearances of Jesus in 1 Corinthians in a couple days, but to start off here is the opening section for the whole topic. Comments are welcome, and if you spot any typos please let me know.
3. The resurrection of Jesus
In the first century C.E. (Common Era, often referred to as A.D.) some people in the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea were claiming publicly that a person named Jesus had died and was raised from the dead. These claims helped spread a growing movement which heralded Jesus not only as the Christ (the Greek term for the Jewish Messiah, or “anointed one”), but as the first of those to be resurrected at the end of this age of human history, and ultimately as equal to God.
The idea of a general resurrection of all people (or, alternatively, a select group of them) at the end of this age had spread among the Jewish people in the centuries preceding the Christian movement. Jewish author Jon Levenson (2006), in his study of the development of this idea, found it to be an outgrowth of early Jewish traditions such as the goodness of God’s creation, God’s intention to do justice to humanity, and God’s saving power. But as Christian Biblical scholar N.T. Wright (2003) points out, before the Christian movement there was no expectation that a single person would be resurrected before everyone else, nor that the Messiah would be such a person.
Trying to discern what actually happened to generate the claims about Jesus is one of the great puzzles of history. Even so, I think it is an apt place to begin in sorting out what happened at the outset of the Christian religion. We might question everything that’s been written about Jesus, but we know with certainty that his early followers talked about his resurrection from the dead. And because that belief had an influence on almost everything else they said about him, it needs to be taken into account in assessing our sources when they recount his life and teachings.
The earliest Christian sources we have present three types of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. First, the Christian missionary Paul wrote a letter recounting a tradition that Jesus appeared to several of his disciples after his death. Second, four “gospels” recounting events of Jesus’ life and death say that a few of his women followers discovered that the tomb he had been buried in was empty two days after his body had been laid there. And third, three of those gospels and one other early Christian scripture, the Acts of the Apostles, describe several of the appearances of the resurrected Jesus.
On the following pages I will examine and interpret this evidence from a historical perspective.
Jesus Reconstructed 