Resurrection: Eastertide Implications

During this Easter season, I was drawn to consider three very different books regarding the resurrection of Jesus. Each purports to examine (from an historical perspective) Jesus’ death and the claims in the New Testament of his resurrection. Yet importantly, each proceeds further to draw implications from the historical study for life in the present world.

In many church traditions around the world we are now in Eastertide, the period of fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday. Although I am not personally particularly drawn to the observance of the liturgical calendar, I understand its significance as a means of patterning one’s life according to the implications of Jesus’ entrance to history. This can be a significant means of discipleship to Jesus.

In Scot McKnight’s final post last week, he gave a solid summary of the historical Jesus debate, and at one point suggested that “the driving force of the historical Jesus quest is the desire to wedge apart the Church’s beliefs about Jesus (the Gospels, the Creeds) and what ‘disinterested’ scholarship can recover about Jesus on the basis of historical methods.” This is an important observation, especially of extreme approaches. And extreme approaches rarely represent the best of the church nor the best of scholarship. As Scot seems to imply, more nuanced approaches do not bifurcate beliefs and scholarship. Rather than a wedge, nuanced historical Jesus studies attempt to examine beliefs in the light of scholarship, and to examine scholarship in the light of beliefs.

Each of the books to which I alluded above intentionally drew implications that they hoped would unite belief and scholarship, yet they had significantly different conclusions. Today I would like to highlight briefly the first of these three books: Geza Vermes, The Resurrection: History and Myth (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

Geza Vermes is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford. He is one of the most highly respected experts in the world on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and has been at the forefront of the study of the historical Jesus as a first-century Jew. The volume at hand culminates a trilogy that focused on New Testament accounts of Jesus’ birth (The Nativity: History and Legend [Doubleday, 2006]), his crucifixion (The Passion: The True Story of an Event That Changed Human History [New York: Penguin, 2006]) and his resurrection. Vermes has written for laypersons, but he bases this trilogy upon lifelong scholarly research and publication.

As the subtitle to his volume on Jesus’ birth indicates, he believes that legendary elements are mixed with historical fact to lead to the hardly questionable conclusion that Jesus was a Jewish boy born shortly before the death of Herod the Great, who, about thirty years later, had a short public career that culminated in his execution by crucifixion.

As an historian, Vermes likewise attempts to understand the New Testament’s claims of Jesus’ resurrection. He begins so by examining the historical antecedents for death and the afterlife, death and human destiny, and the path to beliefs of some notion of resurrection within Judaism at the time of Jesus. He has spent much of his scholarly career studying these Jewish beliefs, finding in them a mixture of history and myth, and now attempts to pass that on to a general audience.

And as the subtitle to his volume on the resurrection indicates, he believes that in the New Testament records he finds mythical elements mixed with historical reminiscences. Rejecting what he calls the extreme views of, on the one hand, the blind-faith of the fundamentalist believer, or, on the other hand, the out-of-hand rejection of the inveterate skeptic, he evaluates six alternate theories to the New Testament’s claim of the physical resurrection of Jesus.

1. The body was removed by someone unconnected with Jesus.
2. The body of Jesus was stolen by his disciples.
3. The empty tomb was not the tomb of Jesus.
4. Buried alive, Jesus later left the tomb.
5. The migrant Jesus.
6. Do the appearances of Jesus suggest spiritual, not bodily, resurrection?

I find it interesting that the theory of a physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus is not even an option. Apparently, it is to be lumped with the extreme blind-faith of the fundamentalist believer.

There is nothing much new here, and at the end Vermes himself rejects all six theories as not able to stand stringent historical scrutiny. He is left with trying to offer for the rational world of today, “…an explanation, if not for the physical Resurrection of Jesus, at least for the birth and survival of Christianity” (p. 148).

And his explanation? From an existential, historical, and psychological point of view, the followers of Jesus came to the conviction that Jesus’ message and charisma was still with them through the influence of the Spirit, and the spiritual presence of the living Jesus rose in their hearts. This is what accounts for the resurgence of the Jesus movement after the crucifixion. Vermes concludes the volume with the following implications of his historical study:

Resurrection in the hearts of men may strike a note of empathy even among today’s skeptics and cynics. Whether or not they adhere to a formal creed, a good many men and women of the twenty-first century may be moved and inspired by the mesmerizing presence of the teaching and example of the real Jesus alive in their mind (p. 152).

Professor Vermes thus attempts to inform the Church’s belief in the resurrection of Jesus from an historian’s investigation. But at the end of the day it sounds not much different than the preaching I heard as a young boy growing up in a liberal, mainline denominational Protestant church. Jesus’ teaching and example lives on, but his body remains in the tomb. In my view, such a belief does not satisfactorily account for the witness of the New Testament to Jesus’ resurrection, nor for the dramatic development of the Jesus movement in the early church.

It is important for us to see this kind of distillation of a leading figure in the quest for the historical Jesus; but it is far from satisfactory. Later this week we will turn to the two other books that I considered during the Easter season, whose historical investigations lead to far different implications for life in this Eastertide. Importantly, both focus on the implication of hope that the resurrection brings. Next up is N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).