Martin Hengel of Tübingen and the Resurrection

Martin Hengel's new historical Jesus book, Jesus und das Judentum, concludes with a discussion of the witnesses to the resurrection (He wrote the work with his longtime colleague, Anna Maria Schwemer). This chapter and discussion comes at the end of a book where Hengel is stressing the self-conscious messianic nature of Jesus' ministry and actions. He begins his final content chapter with a careful walk through 1 Cor 15:3-8. He sees this confession Paul passed on as coming from the Jerusalem community, pointing to the eyewitness roots of the tradition. He defends the confession as not being about a pure spiritual body, but involving a transfomation of a real body into a spiritual body. He argues that the appeareences to the women are omitted because they do not have a credible witness role in the culture. The resurrection leads to real appearances, and are not visions. This was for Paul and those of the confession a real event in space and time. It is not simply a "word event" as many critics claim. It is presented as an historical account. It has historical intent, and is not just "gospel".

As such, Hengel is making a important claim, for a historical Jesus work, namely, that the resurrection is an event rooted in both history and the preaching of the church about such history. All this comes from one of the leading NT and Second Temple Jewish scholars of our time.