from its destructible body, Jewish thinking about resurrection included the reconstitution of the complete person, body and soul, at the end of time. While there were vague ideas about a spiritual existence between historical death and ultimate resurrection (see Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31), resurrection was a holistic idea that included the body. The bodily conditions would be somewhat altered, though, with the body being imbued with the same kind of immortality that the soul might be thought to have. Jesus is reported to have said, countering the Sadducee’s doubt in the resurrection, that in the resurrection we “neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:18–27), and Paul states that the dead “will be raised imperishable” (1 Cor 15:50–58).
The bodily nature of the resurrection in Jewish and early Christian theology is important in establishing what those authors whose works are included in the New Testament believed they were referring to when they talked about the resurrection of Jesus. Paul, whose writings predate the Gospels by several decades, talks about the “appearances” of the resurrected Jesus, but always in a fashion that differentiates these from either a ghostly presence (as in the case of the postmortem appearance of Samuel, conjured for Saul: see 1 Sam 28:7–20) or a revivification of someone recently deceased (as in the case of the widow’s son: see Luke 7:11–17). Paul maintains “a firm and sharply delineated belief in a past event, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”4 The Gospels of course depict the resurrection of Jesus as an event in time, a couple of days after the crucifixion of Jesus. The resurrected Jesus spoke with his disciples (Matt 28:16–20), ate with his disciples (Luke 24:36–42), and even bore the wounds of his crucifixion (John 20:24–29). There would be some justification for saying that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus’ resurrection that was so shocking to the disciples—after all, if Jesus was a righteous person, God would raise him in vindication with all the martyrs and righteous dead—as the timing of it. Jesus’ end-of-time resurrection, the early Christians said, happened during the course of time, in history, as if to mark out the beginning of the end time.
At least as far as the New Testament documents depict it, the announcement of the resurrection of Jesus was at the very heart of the early Christians’ proclamation. The resurrection of Jesus is the climax of all four canonical Gospels (Matt 28:5; Mark 16:6; Luke 25:5; John 20:18), and Jesus’ own predictions of the resurrection are a recurring motif within each Gospel (Matt 12:40; 16:21; 17:22; 19:17; 26:32; Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; 14:28; Luke 9:22; 18:33; John 10:17; 14:19; 16:16). The apostolic proclamation identified in the Acts of the Apostles is the vindication of Jesus’ ministry by means of God raising Jesus to new life (Acts 2:32–36; 10:34–43; 17:16–31). The dependence of the believers’ new life “in Christ” on the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus is a central theme in most of Paul’s letters (2 Cor 4:13–17; Eph 1:3–14; Phil 2:5–13; Col 3:1–4; 2 Tim 2:8–13). Even the Apocalypse repeatedly identifies “the Lamb who was slain” with “the Living One,” the one “who was, and is, and is to come” (Rev 4:1–11). Throughout the New Testament, the death of Jesus is portrayed as an ordinarily shameful end to Jesus’ life—except for the extraordinary raising of Jesus to new life. The resurrection of Jesus was taken to be God’s seal of approval on Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign, and God’s own proclamation concerning human destiny (Rom 1:1–6; Acts 4:1–12; 1 Pet 1:3–9). Once again, the historical claim that Jesus was raised from the dead can be disputed by historians, but we should from the outset recognize that the canonical Christian scriptures are unanimous in ascribing central theological significance to that claim.
While it can be argued that the Christian tradition has changed in many respects over its twenty centuries, the historical eventfulness of the resurrection of Jesus has been consistently affirmed, and this has been directly connected to the understanding of the resurrection as a bodily event. There is certainly little doubt that the Christian authors of the first and second centuries CE affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus against the Docetic view that the Son of God never actually took human form. It is clear that by the beginning of the second century, leading figures such as Ignatius declared belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as absolutely essential to Christian faith.5 Later in the second century, it is still apparent that the church understood the term “resurrection” as bodily. Tertullian argued that since we are told by the apostles that Jesus experienced resurrection, it must have been bodily; therefore, he goes on to say, our future resurrection will be bodily as well, although our bodies will be animated not by natural principles but by “spiritual” principles, through the agency of the Holy Spirit.6
In the early third century, Origen defended the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb. Origen argued that Christianity is a faith founded on the acts of God in history, every bit as much as Judaism. For Origen, the New Testament reports of Jesus’ bodily resurrection are historical accounts that can be examined and critiqued. Because they all report, in their various ways, the same event, Origen tends to regard them as comprising a single historical record, standing or falling together. Origen, while confident of the historical value of the Gospel accounts, struggles with questions regarding the nature of what they report, and feels compelled to qualify his claim to Jesus’ bodily resurrection in order to maintain its historicity.7
In the fourth century, living in the newly powerful and newly privileged post-Constantine church, Athanasius engaged in a very different kind of historical reasoning. He assumed that since God was sovereign, there must be some sort of ultimate morality to the march of history. His understanding of what constituted historical evidence for the resurrection included the miracles wrought by the apostles in Jesus’ name, the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem, the diminishing of pagan religions, the fulfillment of prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures, the past courage of martyrs, the chastity of virgins, the consistency of the resurrection with Greek metaphysical categories, and the widespread acceptance of Christian faith:
For although the Greeks have told all manner of false tales, yet they were not able to feign a Resurrection of their idols—for it never crossed their mind, whether it be at all possible for the body again to exist after death.8
In the early fifth century, Augustine labored long over the concept of resurrection, dealing with questions such as the possibility of the reconstitution of the parts of a disintegrated human body for its future resurrection. His assumption seems to be that if intellectual objections to the bodily nature of resurrection can be met, people will happily embrace the historical resurrection of Jesus: “But if they do not believe that these miracles were wrought by Christ’s apostles to gain credence to their preaching of His resurrection and ascension, this one grand miracle suffices for us, that the whole world has believed without any miracles.”9 Both Athanasius and Augustine inferred the historical dimension of the resurrection from its historic dimension, entering into evidence for the historical eventfulness of the resurrection the fact that something so initially incredible had come to be believed so widely. While this is certainly something that would be considered out-of-bounds by present-day historians, it is important for the present discussion to note that it is still the historical nature of the resurrection that is being talked about here.
By the thirteenth century, various conflicts including the Crusades had brought Christians into large-scale engagement with the Muslim world. This brought the historical claims for the Christian faith, and the resurrection in particular, into significant doubt for the first time in eight hundred years. These developments may have prompted some of the detailed reflections of Thomas Aquinas, who once again approached the question of the nature of the event that is testified to by the Gospels. Thomas asserts that Jesus rose in a state of glory with specific properties that were attributable from both theological considerations and analysis of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. There is something new developing here: whereas in most previous analyses
