N.T. Wright's case for the Resurrection

05/29/10 04:41 PM

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All Christians should be confident that God raised His Son Jesus from the dead (Rom 10:9-10)! If you are not confident about this fact, then I would invite you to ask questions and find answers. Enlightenment thinking has had quite a negative impact on our thinking about miracles and the supernatural. If you grew up in western culture, then you have been affected by materialism (and I do not mean wanting to buy lots of things! I mean anti-supernatural presuppositions.) Materialists (athiests/agnostics/humanists) people think it is funny and curious when we tell them that God raised Jesus from the dead. However, we are not appealing to the fancy of our imaginations, we are appealing to the testimony of history. N.T. Wright’s famous quote is ‘the christian has nothing to fear from history’. In this work Wright using ‘historical-critical’ methods analyzes the Case for the resurrection of Jesus. It is a magnum opus, a must read for 21st century dwellers.

N.T. Wright has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Duke, McGill, etc.. He’s published 40 books. Here is a
CV excerpt, all degrees are from Oxford University:

2000 D.D.
1981 D.Phil.
1975 M.A.
1973 B.A.(1st class Honours), Theology; Denyer and Johnson Prize (shared) for top first class of year; College Prize
1971 B.A.(1st class Honours), Literae Humaniores; College Prize

Wright seems to get a lot of respect from skeptics like John Dominic Crossan (their debate is here: book, audio – note: buy the audio, don’t buy the book). I have never heard Crossan concede the empty tomb and the appearances before, but he did against Wright. In his debate (audio, book) against William Lane Craig, he denied all 4 of Craig’s minimal facts.

It is good to know how to argue for the resurrection using the minimal facts approach. The minimal facts are the handful of facts about Jesus that survive the standard historical criteria used in the evaluation of historical biographies. But Wright has a different approach.

Here is a lecture (that link has PDF transcript, audio and movies) that Wright gave on the resurrection.

N.T. Wright’s historical case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus
Wright basically argues that the resurrection could not have been a myth invented by the early Christian community, because the idea of the Messiah dying and being bodily resurrected to eternal life was completely unexpected in Jewish theology, and therefore would not have been fabricated.

In Judaism, when people die, they stay dead. At the most, they might re-appear as apparitions, or be resuscitated to life for a while, but then die again later. There was no concept of the bodily resurrection to eternal life of a single person, especially of the Messiah, prior to the general resurrection of all the righteous dead on judgment day.

Wright’s case for the resurrection has 3 parts:

1. The Jewish theological beliefs of the early Christian community underwent 7 mutations that are inexplicable apart from the bodily resurrection of Jesus
2. The empty tomb
3. The post-mortem appearances of Jesus to individuals and groups, friends and foes

Here’s the outline of Wright’s case:

…the foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that this Jewish hope has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity, which can be plotted consistently right across the first two centuries. And these mutations are so striking, in an area of human experience where societies tend to be very conservative, that they force the historian… to ask, Why did they occur?

The mutations occur within a strictly Jewish context. The early Christians held firmly, like most of their Jewish contemporaries, to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. ‘Resurrection’ is not a fancy word for ‘life after death’; it denotes life after ‘life after death’.

And here are the 7 mutations:

1. Christian theology of the afterlife mutates from multiples views (Judaism) to a single view: resurrection (Christianity). When you die, your soul goes off to wait in Sheol. On judgment day, the righteous dead get new resurrection bodies, identical to Jesus’ resurrection body.

2. The relative importance of the doctrine of resurrection changes from being peripheral (Judaism) to central (Christianity).

3. The idea of what the resurrection would be like goes from multiple views (Judaism) to a single view: an incorruptible, spiritually-oriented body composed of the material of the previous corruptible body (Christianity).

4. The timing of the resurrection changes from judgment day (Judaism) to a split between the resurrection of the Messiah right now and the resurrection of the rest of the righteous on judgment day (Christianity).

5. There is a new view of eschatology as collaboration with God to transform the world.

6. There is a new metaphorical concept of resurrection, referred to as being “born-again”.

7. There is a new association of the concept of resurrection to the Messiah. (The Messiah was not even supposed to die, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to rise again from the dead in a resurrected body!)

There are also other historical puzzles that are solved by postulating a bodily resurrection of Jesus.

1. Jewish people thought that the Messiah was not supposed to die. Although there were lots of (warrior) Messiahs running around at the time, whenever they got killed, their followers would abandon them. Why didn’t Jesus’ followers abandon him when he died?

2. If the early Christian church wanted to communicate that Jesus was special, despite his shameful death on the cross, they would have made up a story using the existing Jewish concept of exaltation. Applying the concept of bodily resurrection to a dead Messiah would be a radical departure from Jewish theology, when an invented exaltation was already available to do the job.

3. The early church became extremely reckless about sickness and death, taking care of people with communicable diseases and testifying about their faith in the face of torture and execution. Why did they scorn sickness and death?

4. The gospels, especially Mark, do not contain any embellishments and “theology historicized”. If they were made-up, there would have been events that had some connection to theological concepts. But the narratives are instead bare-bones: “Guy dies public death. People encounter same guy alive later.” Plain vanilla narrative.

5. The story of the women who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb cannot have been invented, because the testimony of women was inadmissable under almost all circumstances at that time. If the story were invented, they would have invented male discoverers of the tomb. Female discovers would have hampered conversion efforts.

6. There are almost no legendary embellishments in the gospels, while there are plenty in the later gnostic forgeries. No crowds of singing angels, no talking crosses, and no booming voices from the clouds.

7. There is no mention of the future hope of the general resurrection, which I guess they thought was imminent anyway.
To conclude, Wright makes the argument that the best explanation of all of these changes in theology and practice is that God raised Jesus (bodily) from the dead. There is simply no way that this community would have made up the single resurrection of the Messiah – who wasn’t even supposed to die – and then put themselves on the line for that belief.

And remember, the belief in a resurrected Jesus was not a belief in a flying spaceship that was going to come and pick them up if they drank the kool-aid. This was a belief they held based on personal experiences. They were able to confirm or deny their belief in the resurrection of Jesus based on their own personal experiences with the object of those beliefs.

Additional resources

For more debates on the resurrection, see here for William Lane Craig, herefor Mike Licona, and here for Gary Habermas. I am a big fan of all these guys, but Craig hasn’t lost any resurrection debates, while Licona tied against Richard Carrier and Habermas lost against Arif Ahmed. In particular, I recommend these 3 debates:

William Lane Craig (Biola) vs Roy Hoover (Whitman College)
Mike Licona (Independent) vs Bart Ehrman (UNC Chapel Hill)
Gary Habermas (Liberty) vs Joel Marcus (Duke) – Part1, Part2, Part3

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Willliam Lane Craig on the 'New Atheism'

05/13/10 08:29 PM

Part 1 of 5

Part 2 of 5

Part 3 of 5

Part 4 of 5

Part 5 of 5

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N.T. Wright on the Resurrection

03/10/10 08:54 PM

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Craig Evans

03/09/10 07:18 PM

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I have been following Craig Evans recently and have been encouraged by His scholarship, writing, and the scores of interviews He has done with media in regards to the historical Jesus. You should check out His website and consider grabbing the book ‘The Last days of Jesus’ He co-authored with Bishop Tom Wright. A book I recently just finished by Evans is ‘Fabricating Jesus: How modern scholars distort the gospels.’ It was superb scholarship! In a day where academia continues to fabricate a new Jesus, we should feel very blessed by the true Jesus to have Dr. Evans still being true to Jesus of Nazareth. I uploaded some videos of Evans discussing His recent book with Wright, and the dead sea scrolls on my video page.
http://www.craigaevans.com/

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Fight satan. Study the resurrection of Jesus.

01/27/10 05:15 PM

N.T. Wright makes the simple point that no Jew would have called Jesus of Nazareth Messiah if He had only been crucified. Jews would have been prone to see Jesus as one cursed by God as He hung on the tree. Read More...

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Antony Flew

01/06/10 07:34 PM

Antony Flew, British philosopher, Oxford professor, and leading champion of atheism for more than fifty years, honestly followed the evidence and renounced his naturalistic faith in 2004. Read More...

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Michael Behe on Intelligent Design

08/31/09 09:26 AM

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...

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Postmodernism?

07/27/09 05:12 PM

pomdsm

Sean Mcdowell wrote a great article on “Is Postmodernism a myth?” On what Sean says, I heartily agree. I personally think fideism (not postmodernism) is the primary paradigm (when it come to religion) among the emerging generation. Fideism being that “faith is separate from fact” the “faith-fact” dichotomy is an arbitrary part of a 21st century paradigm. Postmodernism is really an objective assertion that objective truth is unknowable. Postmoderns may say so in religious or ethical matters, but they would never say math or science is subjective or relative. I think postmodernism is a demonic smokescreen for those who wish to not intellectually engage in the classical categories of philosophy like metaphysics, and epistemology. So I would definitely recommend that you read Sean’s post! Also I have been reading “Reasonable Faith” by William Lane Craig. This is the best defense of the Christian paradigm, and Jesus the Lord and Christ, I have personally ever read. Lastly, if you are into apologetics and learning about arguments for the existence of God, the reliability of the Old & New Testaments, the Historicity of Jesus life-death-and Resurrection, prophecy, archaeological discoveries, and the like you must watch the flash curriculum videos at this site. They are very concise and informative, I will recommend them to many people for years to come. I have also embedded the page on my site here.

Tags: rants, thinking, upset, stoked, blessed, wierd worldwierd world

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Fideism and the Correspondence theory of truth

06/05/09 11:45 AM

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Fideism is an epistemological theory that maintains that faith is independent and separate from reason. Fideism maintains that one does not need to have reasons for faith. For faith is, according to fideists, irrational. This has created a great divide in the minds of our popular culture. It can be referred to as the FAITH-FACT dichotomy. This faith-fact dichotomy consequentially leads to sentiments among large numbers of people like “Why do people keep saying that one religion is right, and one wrong? This is so dumb! Can’t people see that all this religious intolerance is ruining society and keeping the world from moving towards human progress, peace, and safety for all.” In the mind of the fideist, religion is not something to be argued about, or debated, just individually preferred. The word fideism comes from fides the latin word for faith and literally means faithism. Since faith is not actually factual then faith should not be argued, defended, or debated for, “No religion should say it is right and others are wrong.” This conclusion follows logically from the fideistic premise. It is this premise that must be critiqued. There are different theories of truth. The correspondence theory of truth is truest to reality, though the other theories have strengths as well. The correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world. Correspondence theories claim that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs. This type of theory attempts to posit a relationship between thoughts or statements on the one hand, and things or facts on the other. It is a traditional model which goes back at least to some of the classical Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined solely by how it relates to a reality; that is, by whether it accurately describes that reality. As Aristotle claims in his Metaphysics: "To say that [either] that which is is not or that which is not is, is a falsehood; and to say that that which is is and that which is not is not, is true"

Are you really reading this blog right now? The Correspondence theory of truth would say, “you are really reading this blog this very moment” and that propositional statement would be defined as true since the statement corresponds to reality. If while you are reading this blog, someone was to say, “You are not reading the blog right now,” that propositional statement would be defined as false since it does not correspond to the fact that you really are reading the blog. Therefore, since language has meaning, humans can make propositional statements that correspond to reality as it exists. Therefore, faith that is not based on reality is faith based on fiction. Faith based on fiction is false and therefore should be abandoned. If it is true that there is no facts that establish our faith, than our faith is fact-less and should be abandoned since it does not correspond to reality. If our faith is based on facts that correspond to reality than our faith should be embraced, not because it feels good, but because it is true to reality and to not embrace reality is to embrace fiction. Fiction should be abandoned and reality should be believed.

Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and Joseph smith all made propositional statements. The question that must be asked is, Did any of those men make true statements about reality? This must be investigated, critically.

If Jesus statements about His incarnation, life, death, and resurrection were never stated or are not accurate to reality there is no reason to follow Jesus for He would be a liar, or lunatic and the christian faith would be based on fiction. If Jesus statements about Himself were accurate and correspond to reality as it exists, we have every reason to fall at His feet and worship Him alone, because He has shown us what reality is really like.

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Missing link is found...?

05/21/09 10:18 AM

How could the Associated Press say this? And National Geographic say this?

The AP a more academic scholarly article is more thorough and honest. The NG more mainstream article draws some premature conclusions and builds a naturalistic worldview in its readers rather than just doing science.The NG seems to be piecemealing unknown history according to there evolutionary naturalistic worldview.

K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, an expert not connected with the discovery, said, “I actually don’t think it’s terribly close to the common ancestral line of monkeys, apes, and people. I would say it’s about as far away as you can get from that line and still be a primate.” John Fleagle of the State University of New York at Stony Brook said the scientists' analysis provides only "a pretty weak link" between the new creature and higher primates, called anthropoids, which includes monkeys and man. While this fossil will ultimately reveal very little (or nothing at all) about early primate evolution, it does reveal quite a bit about Americas fascination with Darwinism

Tags: rants, thinking, upset, stoked, blessed, wierd worldupset

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