do far better to interpret the death and “resurrection” of Jesus within what we know of the unalterable laws of biology, namely that dead people do not spontaneously reanimate. Any other position is a retreat from the advance of scientific knowledge, and represents a break with the fundamental dictum that truth is truth no matter where we find it. A symbolic or subjective renewal of appreciation of what Jesus taught and stood for would be in keeping with our contemporary worldviews, and be salvageable for the inspiration of humanity in the third millennium. The narratives of Jesus’ death and resurrection don’t record a single historical event, but rather they represent an enduring appreciation of what has always been true, that the ongoing power of life conquers the ongoing power of death over the course of cosmological history just as surely as hope conquers despair within the smaller parameters of human history.
Can We Dismiss the Question?
On the one hand, most discussion of key points of doctrine should probably be considered as sincere attempts to find new ways to express agreement with the historic Christian faith; rushing to judgment and pronouncing those who would challenge long-held beliefs as heretics or standing outside the circle of faith does nothing to encourage us to understand those who hold contrary opinions, and closes off conversation before it can even begin. On the other hand, it would seem strange to declare once and for all that all Christian beliefs are negotiable, and that there is no need on our part in the present to identify with the faith of the church as it existed in the first century, and that there is no “deposit of faith” to be treasured for all time. While someone might want to defend this position, it would require an extraordinarily thorough reconceptualization of religion, tradition, and community, not only for Christians but for our understanding of other religions as well. Not all advocates of this newer understanding of the resurrection of Jesus would claim this radical step is implied in what they affirm; in fact, many would claim that revisiting the resurrection of Jesus in the manner they are suggesting would help the church to reclaim the original dynamics of faith lost when the church committed to analyzing and concretizing its faith in the language of Greek metaphysics.
Sincere and thoughtful people do sometimes differ, and that has to be acknowledged and truly owned by those who want to think through the question of Jesus’ resurrection with any measure of seriousness. It is important to note that both points of view take the question of what kind of event the resurrection of Jesus is to be a relevant question. If the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event like other historical events, it potentially has different implications than if that is not the case. The resurrection of Jesus is the perfect test-case for studying the intersection of theology and history.
Some might want to dismiss the question and claim that it doesn’t matter whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event. It might be ventured that what really matters is that people believed that the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event, and that’s all that really matters. Such an attempt to shelve the question has its own implications, however. It suggests that those who presented the resurrection of Jesus to the world as a historical event—at least by the time the Gospel narratives were written—were self-deceived or intellectually limited, which would have to cast doubt on the intelligibility of their representation of Jesus’ vision and ministry. It also suggests that those who lived—and in many instances, sacrificed—their lives for the integrity of the church in subsequent centuries were misguided, and perhaps to a large extent distracted from the real existential and ethical issues at hand. It further suggests that theologians, clergy, and dedicated lay persons have wasted enormous time, energy, and resources presenting, explicating, and defending something inconsequential, possibly indicating a deep-seated pathology on the part of the entire Christian movement.
An analogy might be that of the original moon landing. Some conspiracy-theorists claim that the moon landing was faked, with footage of the “lunar” event actually shot in a television studio to spare the American government the embarrassment that they had failed in their promise to put a man on the moon and thereby demonstrate global technological supremacy. In some respects, it might be true that if the moon landing was faked, it had much the same consequences as a successful mission: the expansion of funding to the space program and the inspiration of the American people. In other respects, the consequences of pronouncing the original moon landing to have been faked are enormous in terms of what that says about the relationship of the American government to the American people, in terms of social spending priorities, and in terms of the positioning of the United States in the global community. Beyond the emotional distress of having “lived a lie,” any American citizen has to consider the opportunity-cost of those funds going to the space program that might have gone to improving health and education or other social infrastructure, or the impact of an unearned reputation for America’s role as technologically dominant on its self-appointed role in policing global conflicts.
Even if the consequences of misconstruing the resurrection of Jesus to be a historical event were not so dire, to take the position that the historical question doesn’t matter is in effect to have already taken up the revisionist point of view. In saying that the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was an historical event doesn’t matter is to say that the real event was the psychological conversion of the disciples of Jesus to declare him as alive in their own faith and witness to his life and teaching.
What This Book Discusses
The question of the nature of the event of the resurrection of Jesus is not an easy one to discuss, as it involves questions of metaphysics, epistemology, systematic and pastoral theology, and the faith of real women and men all around the world. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the editorial comment that “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” about Jesus (John 21:25) follows that Gospel’s resurrection narratives. There has been an enormous amount of ink spilled over the subject of Jesus’ resurrection, and what you are reading is just a little more.
Most of what has been written about the resurrection has been devotional and inspirational literature in which the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event isn’t raised, either because the authors hadn’t thought much about these questions, or assumed (perhaps rightly) that this wasn’t a question their readers were prepared to pursue. It may be safe to say that for most Christians through most centuries of the church’s existence, the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event was something only examined by professional theologians and more thoughtful clergy.
More recently, in the last couple of centuries, the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event has reemerged among scholarly theologians in response to shifting worldviews. Many of these scholars ventured that the resurrection of Jesus was not a historical event, at least not in the sense that other chronicled events are considered historical, and were quite inventive in offering new categories of language, writing, and community tradition to help others grapple with their insights. Many of them tried to preserve the fundamental meaningfulness of the resurrection of Jesus as an element of Christian faith without committing themselves to declaring it to be a historical event, at least not along the lines of the traditional view. Other authors, especially among American evangelicals in the last century, offered vigorous defenses of the resurrection as a historical event, but often did so without much regard to either the profundity of their opponents’ arguments or attention to the theoretical question of what makes any event a historical event. Some of those writings, despite their shortcomings, are encyclopedic in their amassing of details, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for their efforts to uncover the truth.
This book is unique (or at least very rare) in its focus on issues that should be examined before anyone plunges into weighing and judging the evidence on the resurrection of Jesus. Just as courts are guided by rules of law, historians are guided by certain methodological rules. However, just as the law evolves, slowly and carefully, so the rules of historical method evolve, slowly and carefully. There is no one body of historians who make up the rules that historians have to use when engaged in their craft, and there are differing opinions about the how to prioritize recognized
