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1. Introduction: The Target

The pilgrim who visits the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem faces several puzzles. Is this after all the place where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and buried? Why is it inside the city walls, not outside as one had supposed? How does the present building relate to the original site? How did the place come to be so different from what the New Testament leads us to expect (a garden with a tomb in it, close to a hill called Golgotha)? And, even supposing this is roughly the right place, is this the right spot? Is this rocky outcrop, now enclosed within an upstairs chapel, actually the top of Golgotha? Is this marble slab really where the dead Jesus was laid? Is this highly ornate shrine really the site of the tomb? And—a different sort of question, but a pressing one for many visitors—why are different groups of Christians still squabbling about who owns the place? These puzzles, though, do not noticeably affect the appeal of the place. Despite archaeological, historical and ecclesiastical squabbles, the church retains its evocative and spiritual power. Pilgrims still flock to it in their hundreds of thousands.¹

Some of them still question whether it all really happened. Did Jesus of Nazareth, they ask, really rise from the dead? Whether or not they realize it, they join a different throng on a different pilgrimage: the jostling, overheated crowd of historians investigating the strange reports of events at the tomb of Jesus on the third day following his execution. Here they are confronted with a similar set of problems. The story of Easter, like the church at its supposed location, has been demolished and reconstructed again and again over the years. The tantalizing narratives in the gospels are as puzzling to the reader as the building is to the visitor. How do they fit together, if at all? What precisely happened? Which school of thought today, if any, is telling the story truly? Many have despaired of discovering what, if anything, happened on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion. Yet, despite perplexity and scepticism, billions of Christians around the world regularly repeat the original confession of Easter faith: on the third day after his execution, Jesus rose again.

So what did happen on Easter morning? This historical question, which is the central theme of the present book, is closely related to the question of why Christianity began, and why it took the shape it did.² This in turn is the fourth of five questions I set out in Jesus and the Victory of God, which proposed answers to the first three (where does Jesus belong within Judaism? what were Jesus’ aims? and why did Jesus die?). (I hope to address the fifth question, why the gospels are what they are, in a subsequent volume.) The question of Christian origins is inevitably a question about Jesus himself as well as about the early church. Whatever else the early Christians said about themselves, they regularly explained their own existence and characteristic activities by speaking of Jesus.

It is remarkable but true that in order to determine what happened on one particular day nearly two thousand years ago we find ourselves obliged to call and cross-examine a wide variety of witnesses, some of whom are simultaneously being questioned by advocates of other answers to the question. The debate has frequently been bedevilled by oversimplifications, and to avoid this we shall have to set things out reasonably fully. Even so, there is no space for a full-scale history of research on the subject. I have chosen certain conversation partners, and regret that there was no room for more. My impression from reading the literature is that the primary sources themselves are not well enough known, or carefully enough studied. This book seeks to remedy that, without always noting the scholars who either agree or disagree.³

As the overall title of the project indicates, and as Part I of the first volume explained, my intention is to write both about the historical beginnings of Christianity and about the question of god. I am, of course, aware that for over two hundred years scholars have laboured to keep history and theology, or history and faith, at arm’s length from one another. There is a good intention behind this move: each of these disciplines has its own proper shape and logic, and cannot simply be turned into a branch of the other. Yet here of all places—with Christian origins in general, and the resurrection in particular—they are inevitably intertwined. Not to recognize this, in fact, is often to decide tacitly in favour of a particular type of theology, perhaps a form of Deism, whose absentee-landlord god keeps clear of historical involvement. Preserving this position by appeal to divine ‘transcendence’ is a way of restating the problem, not of settling it.⁴ The mirror-image of this is the assumption of a rank supernaturalism whose miracle-working god routinely bypasses historical causation. Elsewhere on the map are various forms of pantheism, panentheism and process theology in which ‘god’ is part of, or closely related to, the space-time world and the historical process. To recognize the link between history and theology, therefore, is not to decide questions of history or theology in advance, but to give notice of the necessary many-sidedness of the topic.

This is near the heart of the multiple disagreements I find between myself and one of the major writers on the subject in the last twenty years, Archbishop Peter Carnley.⁵ There seems to be an implicit argument in his work (and in that of some others) according to which (a) historical-critical scholarship has thoroughly deconstructed the events of the first Easter but (b) anyone attempting to engage with this scholarship on its own terms is told that to do so is to cut the resurrection down to size, to reduce it to a merely mundane level. Historical work, it seems, is fine, necessary even, as long as it comes up with sceptical results, but dangerous and damaging—to genuine faith!—if it tries to do anything else.⁶ Heads I lose; tails you win. While not wishing to embrace the older historical-critical methods uncritically, we must insist that the appeal to history still matters and can still be made, without prejudging theological questions at this stage. We can be content neither with ‘an apologetic colonizing of historical study’ nor with ‘a theologically dictated indifference to history’.⁷ I agree with Carnley (345, 365) that we must not be lured into a one-sided preoccupation with the attempt to establish factual propositions about Jesus; but he uses that warning as a way of allowing demonstrably spurious historical reconstructions to remain unchallenged. As Moule insisted, taking history seriously does not constitute a vote for liberal Protestantism.⁸ Nor did the question of ‘what actually happened’ only begin to be felt important with John Locke.⁹

For much of the present investigation, the ‘question of god’ introduces itself in the form: what did the early Christians believe about the god of whom they spoke? What account of this god’s being and action did they give in their earliest days, and how did this express and undergird their reasons for continuing to exist as a group at all, after the death of their leader? In other words, for Parts II, III and IV we shall be concerned with the historical reconstruction of what the early Christians believed about themselves, about Jesus and about their god. It will become clear that they believed in the god of the Israelite patriarchs and prophets, who had made promises in the past and had now, surprisingly but powerfully, fulfilled them in and through Jesus. Only in the final part must we open up the far harder issue: in reaching historical conclusions about what happened at Easter, we cannot avoid the question of the historian’s own worldview and theology. Here, once again, not to do so is usually tacitly to decide in favour of a particular worldview, often that of post-Enlightenment scepticism.

The shape of the book is thus determined by the two main sub-questions into which the principal question divides: what did the early Christians think had happened to Jesus, and what can we say about the plausibility of those beliefs? The first of these is the subject of Parts II, III and IV, and the second is addressed in Part V. The two obviously overlap, since part of the reason for the conclusion of Part V is the striking beliefs discovered in Parts II–IV, and the difficulty of accounting for those beliefs except on the hypothesis that they were true. But in theory the questions are separable. It is perfectly possible for a scholar to conclude (a) that the early Christians thought Jesus had been bodily raised and (b) that they were wrong.¹⁰ Many have taken that view. It is incumbent on anyone who does, however, to provide an alternative account of why (a) came to be the case; and one of the interesting features of the history of research is the range of quite different answers that continue to be given to that question.

As the present book, and the research leading to it, have grown over the last few years, I have become conscious that there is at the moment a broadly dominant paradigm for understanding Jesus’ resurrection, a paradigm which, despite numerous dissenting voices, is widely accepted in the worlds both of scholarship and of many mainline churches. Though my approach throughout the book will be positive and expository, it is worth noting from the outset that I intend to challenge this dominant paradigm in each of its main constituent parts. In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘more spiritual’ view; (3) that the earliest Christians believed, not in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his ‘going to heaven’ in some kind of special capacity, and that they came to use ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty tomb or of ‘seeing’ the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such ‘seeings’ of Jesus as may have taken place are best understood in terms of Paul’s conversion experience, which itself is to be explained as a ‘religious’ experience, internal to the subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus’ body (opinions differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not ‘resuscitated’, and was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.¹¹ Of course, different elements in this package are stressed differently by different scholars; but the picture will be familiar to anyone who has even dabbled in the subject, or who has listened to a few mainstream Easter sermons, or indeed funeral sermons, in recent decades. The negative burden of the present book is that there are excellent, well-founded and secure historical arguments against each of these positions.

The positive thrust, naturally, is to establish (1) a different view of the Jewish context and materials, (2) a fresh understanding of Paul and (3) all the other early Christians, and (4) a new reading of the gospel stories; and to argue (5) that the only possible reason why early Christianity began and took the shape it did is that the tomb really was empty and that people really did meet Jesus, alive again, and (6) that, though admitting it involves accepting a challenge at the level of worldview itself, the best historical explanation for all these phenomena is that Jesus was indeed bodily raised from the dead. (The numbering of these arguments corresponds to the Parts of the present volume, except that (5) and (6) correspond to the two chapters (18 and 19) of Part V.)

Debate has focused on a dozen or so key points within these topics. Just as day trippers to the English Lake District make for the main towns (Windermere, Ambleside, Keswick) and remain within a few miles of them, so those who write articles and monographs on the resurrection come back, again and again, to the same key points (Jewish ideas about life after death, Paul’s ‘spiritual body’, the empty tomb, the ‘sightings’ of Jesus, and so on). The day tripper, however, does not get the best out of the Lakes; does not, perhaps, really understand the area at all. In this book I propose to head for the hills and the narrow country lanes as well as the more populated areas. As an obvious example (but it is remarkable how many seem to ignore it), to write about Paul’s view of the resurrection without mentioning 2 Corinthians 5 or Romans 8—which many have done—is like saying you ‘know’ the Lake District when you have never climbed Scafell Pike or Helvellyn (England’s highest mountains). One of the reasons this book is longer than I expected is that I was determined to include all the evidence.

Two preliminary subjects, both themselves controversial, must be examined before we can get to the heart of the question. First, what sort of historical task are we undertaking in talking about the resurrection at all? This introductory chapter attempts to clear the necessary ground on this point. Without it, some readers would object that I was begging the question of whether it is even possible to write historically about the resurrection.

Second, how did people in Jesus’ day, both Gentiles and Jews, think and speak about the dead and their future destiny? In particular, what if anything did the word ‘resurrection’ (anastasis and its cognates, and the verb egeiro and its cognates, in Greek, and qum and its cognates in Hebrew) mean within that spectrum of belief?¹² Chapters 2 and 3 address this question, clarifying in particular—a vital move, as we shall see—what the early Christians meant, and were heard to mean, when they spoke and wrote about Jesus’ resurrection. As George Caird once pointed out, when a speaker declares ‘I’m mad about my flat’ it helps to know whether they are American (in which case they are angry about their puncture) or British (in which case they are enthusiastic about their living quarters).¹³ When the early Christians said ‘The Messiah was raised from the dead on the third day’, what might they have been heard to be saying? This may seem obvious to some readers, but it was by no means obvious, according to the evangelists, when Jesus said similar things to his followers, and a glance at contemporary literature will show that it remains far from obvious to many scholars today.¹⁴ As well as the question of meaning (what did this kind of talk mean at the time?) we must consider the question of derivation: what, if anything, did the Christian shaping of ideas and language about Easter owe to the wider context, both Jewish and non-Jewish? Chapter 2 examines the non-Jewish world of the first century with these two questions in mind; chapters 3 and 4, developing the brief discussion in the first volume of this series, the Jewish world.¹⁵

Let me then spell out somewhat more fully the brief, almost formulaic account given a moment ago of how the argument develops from there. I shall come at the main question of Parts II–IV by asking: granted the wide range of views about life after death in general and resurrection in particular, what did the early Christians believe on these topics, and how can we account for their beliefs? We shall discover that, although the early Christians remained, in one sense, within the Jewish spectrum of opinion, their views on the subject had clarified and indeed crystallized to a degree unparalleled elsewhere in Judaism. The explanation they gave, for this and much besides, was the equally unparalleled claim that Jesus of Nazareth had himself been bodily raised from the dead. Parts II, III and IV will show that this belief about resurrection in general, and about Jesus in particular, presses the historian to account for such a sudden and dramatic mutation from within the Jewish worldview.

In exploring these issues, I shall follow a non-traditional route. Most discussions have begun with the resurrection stories contained in the final chapters of the four canonical gospels, and moved outwards from there. Since those chapters are among the most difficult parts of the material before us, and since they were by common consent written down later than our primary literary witness, namely Paul, I propose to leave them until last, preparing the way by looking at Paul himself (Part II) and the other early Christian writers, both canonical and non-canonical (Part III). Despite what is sometimes suggested, we shall discover substantial unanimity on the basic point: virtually all the early Christians for whom we have solid evidence affirmed that Jesus of Nazareth had been bodily raised from the dead. When they said ‘he was raised on the third day’, they meant this literally. Only when we have seen how strong this case is can we do justice to the resurrection stories in the gospels, which will occupy us in Part IV.

Part V will then close in on the question: what can historians in the twenty-first century say about Easter on the basis of the historical evidence? I shall argue that far and away the best explanation of the early Christian mutation within Jewish resurrection-belief is that two things had happened. First, Jesus’ tomb was found to be empty. Second, several people, including at least one, and perhaps more, who had not previously been followers of Jesus, claimed to have seen him alive in a way for which the readily available language of ghosts, spirits and the like was inappropriate, and for which their previous beliefs about life after death, and resurrection in particular, had not prepared them. Take away either of these historical conclusions, and the belief of the early church becomes itself inexplicable.

The further question then is, why was the tomb empty, and what account can be given of the sightings of the apparently risen Jesus? I shall argue that the best historical explanation is the one which inevitably raises all kinds of theological questions: the tomb was indeed empty, and Jesus was indeed seen alive, because he was truly raised from the dead.

Proposing that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead was just as controversial nineteen hundred years ago as it is today. The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The historian who wishes to make such a proposal is therefore compelled to challenge a basic and fundamental assumption—not only, as is sometimes suggested, the position of eighteenth-century scepticism, or of the ‘scientific worldview’ as opposed to a ‘pre-scientific worldview’, but also of almost all ancient and modern peoples outside the Jewish and Christian traditions.¹⁶ I shall advance both historical and theological arguments in favour of making this quite drastic move, drawing as I do so on the early Christian theological reflections which followed from the belief in Jesus’ resurrection—the reflections which, from very early indeed, came to the conclusion that the resurrection demonstrated that Jesus was God’s son, and that, equally importantly, the one true God was now to be known most truly as the father of Jesus. The circle of the book will thus be complete.

Before we can even take aim at the targets, however, we must ask: is such a task even possible?

(a) The Senses of ‘History’

It has frequently been argued, indeed insisted upon, that, whatever we mean by the resurrection of Jesus, it is not accessible to historical investigation. Some have even suggested that it is not to be thought of in any meaningful sense as ‘an event within history’ at all. The archers cannot see the target properly; some doubt if it even exists. Over against this, I shall argue that the resurrection of Jesus, whatever it was, can and must be seen as at least a historical problem.

What, though, do we mean by ‘historical’?²⁰ ‘History’ and its cognates have been used, within debates about Jesus and the resurrection, in at least five significantly different ways.

First, there is history as event. If we say something is ‘historical’ in this sense, it happened, whether or not we can know or prove that it happened. The death of the last pterodactyl is in that sense a historical event, even though no human witnessed it or wrote about it at the time, and we are very unlikely ever to discover when and where it took place. Similarly, we use the word ‘historical’ of persons or things, to indicate simply and solely that they existed.²¹

Second, there is history as significant event. Not all events are significant; history, it is often assumed, consists of the ones that are. The adjective that tends to go with this is ‘historic’; ‘a historic event’ is not simply an event that took place, but one whose occurrence carried momentous consequences. Likewise, a ‘historic’ person, building or object is one perceived to have had particular significance, not merely existence. Rudolf Bultmann, himself arguably a historic figure within the discipline of New Testament studies, famously used the adjective geschichtlich to convey this sense, over against historisch (sense 1).

Third, there is history as provable event. To say that something is ‘historical’ in this sense is to say not only that it happened but that we can demonstrate that it happened, on the analogy of mathematics or the so-called hard sciences. This is somewhat more controversial. To say ‘x may have happened, but we can’t prove it, so it isn’t really historical’ may not be self-contradictory, but is clearly operating with a more restricted sense of ‘history’ than some of the others.

Fourth, and quite different from the previous three, there is history as writing-about-events-in-the-past. To say that something is ‘historical’ in this sense is to say that it was written about, or perhaps could in principle have been written about. (This might even include ‘historical’ novels.) A variant on this, though an important one, is oral history; at a time when many regarded the spoken word as carrying more authority than the written, history as speaking-about-events-in-the-past is not to be sneezed at.²²

Fifth and finally, a combination of (3) and (4) is often found precisely in discussions of Jesus: history as what modern historians can say about a topic. By ‘modern’ I mean ‘post-Enlightenment’, the period in which people have imagined some kind of analogy, even correlation, between history and the hard sciences. In this sense, ‘historical’ means not only that which can be demonstrated and written, but that which can be demonstrated and written within the post-Enlightenment worldview. This is what people have often had in mind when they have rejected ‘the historical Jesus’ (which hereby, of course, comes to mean ‘the Jesus that fits the Procrustean bed of a reductionist worldview’) in favour of ‘the Christ of faith’.²³

Confusion between these senses has of course bedevilled this very debate about the so-called ‘historical Jesus’, the phrase being used by some to mean Jesus as he actually was (sense 1), by others to mean what was significant about Jesus (sense 2), by others to mean that which we can prove about Jesus, as opposed to that which we must either doubt or take on faith alone (sense 3); by others again to mean what people have written about Jesus (sense 4). Those who, as I mentioned, have taken the phrase in sense 5 have often rejected the Jesus not only of that sense but, apparently, of the previous four as well.²⁴ Jesus and the Victory of God constitutes, in part, a response to this position. But we must now face one very specific, particular and in some senses peculiar case of the problem. In what sense, if any, can Jesus’ resurrection be spoken of as ‘historical’?

Ever since the time of Paul, people have tried to write about Jesus’ resurrection (whatever they meant by that). The question, of course, rebounds: were they thereby writing about an event in the past? Were they writing ‘history’? Or was it all actually the projection of their own faith-experience? When they said ‘Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day’, were they intending to make some kind of historical claim about Jesus, or did they themselves know that this was a metaphor for their own remarkable new religious experience, the rise of their faith, and so on? This pushes us back to sense 1, which is the question at stake throughout much of this book: was the resurrection something that actually happened, and if so what precisely was it that happened? We do not seem to have had much polemic against ‘the historical resurrection’ in the same way that there has been angry rejection of ‘the historical Jesus’.²⁵

There is no problem about predicating sense 2 of Jesus’ resurrection. Virtually everyone will agree that whatever-it-was-that-happened was extremely significant. Indeed, some recent writers agree that it was very significant while continuing to argue that we cannot know what ‘it’ is. There are enormous problems about sense 3: it all depends on what you mean by ‘proof’, and we shall return to that question in due course. Sense 4 is unproblematic: the ‘event’ has been written about, even if it was all made up. But it is sense 5 that has caused the real headache: what can historians in today’s world say on the subject? Unless we keep these distinctions clear in our minds as we proceed, we shall not just have enormous problems; we shall go round in ever-decreasing circles.

Is it, then, possible to speak of the resurrection of Jesus as an event within history? In his rightly famous book The Historical Jesus, J. D. Crossan says, of the Quest for Jesus as a whole, that there were some scholars who said it couldn’t be done, and some who said it shouldn’t be done; and that there were some who said the former when they meant the latter.²⁶ This is equally true, if not more so, when it comes to the resurrection. Since I believe we can and must discuss the resurrection as a historical problem, it is important that we address these questions head on. There are six objections; I shall divide them into two broad groups, beginning with those who say that such historical study of the resurrection cannot be undertaken, and going on to those who suggest that it should not be. The parable of the archers and the sun applies more to the latter than to the former group. A little modification of the parable will give us a double picture. Those who think we cannot study the resurrection historically suppose either that there is no target at all or that, if there is, the archers cannot see it. Those who think we should not study the resurrection historically suppose that the target lies outside the gravitational range of their arrows. The first group of objectors, assuming the target to be an ordinary terrestrial one, protest that the archers cannot aim at something they cannot see; the second declare that no arrow can reach ever the sun, so that the quest is doomed, and guilty of a kind of hubris, from the very start.

The second objection is associated, famously, with Ernst Troeltsch. He argued that we can only speak or write as historians about things which have some analogy in our own experience; resurrections do not occur in our experience; therefore we cannot, as historians, speak of the resurrection.³¹ We haven’t ever hit at a target like this before, so there’s no point shooting at this one now. This does not necessarily mean that it did not in some sense occur (‘history’ sense 1) or that people have written things purporting to be about it (sense 4); only that it is illegitimate to try to write about it as history today (sense 5), let alone to try to prove it (sense 3). This is sometimes understood as a nuanced restatement of Hume’s famous objection to miracles in general.³² But I think it is, in principle at least, more subtle than that: Jesus’ resurrection might have occurred, but we simply cannot say anything about it.

Pannenberg, equally famously, has proposed an answer to Troeltsch on this point. He suggests that the ultimate verification of the resurrection of Jesus Christ (sense 3) will eventually be provided through the final resurrection of those in Christ, which will constitute the required analogy. There will, in other words, come a time when we shall all shoot at the target and not miss. This, in effect, concedes Troeltsch’s point, but pleads for a stay of verdict pending eschatological verification.³³ But I wonder if Pannenberg has not given too much away here?

At the comparatively trivial level, we can easily conceive of an event in which something quite new occurs. We did not have to wait for the second space flight before being able to talk, as historians, about the first one. True, space flight might be thought to have partial analogies in the flight of aeroplanes, not to say birds (or even arrows). But part of the point of the resurrection, within the Jewish worldview, was (as we shall see) that it would be in line with, though going significantly beyond, the great liberating acts of God on behalf of Israel in the past—not to mention the partial analogies with the resuscitations of people in the Old Testament, and indeed with remarkable healings.³⁴ There were partial anticipations and analogies, even though the event itself was significantly new.

It is important to note what would follow if we took Troeltsch’s point seriously: we would be able to say nothing about the rise of the early church as a whole.³⁵ Never before had there been a movement which began as a quasi-messianic group within Judaism and was transformed into the sort of movement which Christianity quickly became. Nor has any similar phenomenon ever occurred again. (The common post-Enlightenment perception of Christianity as simply ‘a religion’ masks the huge differences, at the point of origin, between this movement and, say, the rise of Islam or of Buddhism.) Both pagan and Jewish observers of this new movement found it highly anomalous: it was not like a club, not even like a religion (no sacrifices, no images, no oracles, no garlanded priests), certainly not like a racially based cult. How, in Troeltsch’s scheme, might we speak of such a thing, which had not been seen before and has never been seen since? Only at best by partial analogy, by saying both what it was like and what it was not like. To squash the movement into already existing categories, or to deny its existence on the grounds that it was unprecedented, would be the work, not of a historian, but of a Procrustean philosopher.

The rise of the early church thus constitutes in itself a counter-example to Troeltsch’s general point. If we are to speak truly about the early church, we must describe something for which there was no precedent and of which there remains no subsequent example. In addition, as we shall see, the early church by its very existence forces upon us the question which we, as historians, must ask: what precisely happened after Jesus’ crucifixion that caused early Christianity to come into being? Ironically, then, it is precisely the uniqueness of the rise of the early church that forces us to say: never mind analogies, what happened?³⁶

(d) No Real Evidence?

The third objection to treating the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event is more varied. Here I draw together various disparate aspects of recent research and writing on the subject. The basic point is that the apparent evidence for the resurrection (i.e. the gospel accounts and the testimony of Paul) can be explained away. I shall return to some of these discussions later; here I want simply to clear another potential ‘Road Closed’ sign out of the way.

There have been two different, though related, ‘Road Closed’ signs under this heading. The first, common throughout post-Bultmannian New Testament studies, has been the attempt to analyze the material according to its hypothetical tradition-history. What naive readers think of as a target at which to aim the arrow of history is in fact a trick of light and shade, somewhere between the observer and what appears to be a target, which has created instead nothing more than a target-shaped mirage.

It has proved difficult to subject the resurrection stories to form-critical analysis, though this has not stopped intrepid souls from making the attempt.³⁷ But the range of suggestions about which group in the early church wanted to add which pebble to the growing pile of stones in the tradition, and then about what the different evangelists or their sources intended to convey to their readers in their turn, has grown enormous of late, as one can see from the bewildering range surveyed by Gerd Lüdemann.³⁸ And the problem with all such theories is that they are themselves based on nothing more than elaborate guesswork. We simply do not know very much about the early church, and certainly not enough to make the kind of guesses that are on offer in this area. When traditio-historical study (the examination of hypothetical stages by which the written gospels came into existence) builds castles in the air, the ordinary historian need not feel a second-class citizen for refusing to rent space in them.³⁹

The second way of explaining away the evidence, notable especially in the work of Crossan, is to apply to the texts a ruthless hermeneutic of suspicion.⁴⁰ This too results in a form of tradition-history. Now, however, instead of offering suggestions as to which theological or pastoral point the tradition might be making, we are offered political ones: power-plays in which the accreditation of different apostles or would-be apostles is fought out on the battleground of (fictitious) resurrection narratives. Crossan declares that the resurrection narratives trivialize Christianity, turning it away from its origins as an aphoristic alternative-lifestyle movement and into a collection of power-seeking factions. What looks like a target is the cunning work of power-brokers trying to get people to shoot arrows in the wrong direction.

What is more, Crossan traces the origins of resurrection stories themselves to an educated, middle-class scribal movement which developed away from the pure, early peasant roots of Jesus himself, and of the early ‘Q’ people, into a more bourgeois and establishment-minded organization. The resurrection narratives are thus declared worthless as history: they are projected politics, and the politics (what is more) of the wrong sort of people, the wicked educated scribes instead of the noble virtuous peasants.

With Lüdemann and Crossan, and the dozens of scholars who offer similar accounts, it would of course be easy to offer a kind of ad hominem rebuttal. Lüdemann himself stands within a highly developed tradition-history, in which the post-Bultmannian world has gone on adding hypothetical stones to a pile which itself originated in guesswork. Crossan himself uses his historical hypotheses, sometimes in a none-too-subtle manner, as scribal political ploys against groups in today’s church and society—often non-scribal groups!—that he regards as dangerous.⁴¹ In his own terms, quoted earlier, it looks as though Crossan is saying it can’t be done when he means that it shouldn’t be.

Such replies do not, of course, advance the argument. But they alert us to a phenomenon not sufficiently remarked upon. A hermeneutic of suspicion in one area is routinely balanced by a hermeneutic of credulity in another.⁴² Neither Lüdemann’s alternative scenario of Easter, in which Peter and Paul experience fantasies brought on by grief and guilt respectively, nor Crossan’s, in which a group of scribal Christians begin, years after the crucifixion, to study the scriptures and to speculate about Jesus’ fate, is based on any evidence whatsoever. Those who feel the force of Marxsen’s doubts over evidence for Jesus’ resurrection ought to be even more anxious about these reconstructions. In particular, the common traditio-historical scenarios owe a good deal more to nineteenth-and twentieth-century theories about how early Christians ‘must’ have preached and lived than to any sustained attempt to reconstruct the worldviews and mindsets of actual communities in the first century.⁴³ The suggestions on offer as to what the evangelists, their sources and earlier redactors or handers-on of tradition were wanting to convey to their communities are usually remarkably trite, and have more in common with the piety of post-reformation (and often post-Enlightenment) Europe than with early Judaism or Christianity. When all is said and done, the historian is still bound to address the question: how did Christianity actually start, and why did it take the shape it did? Despite their ingenuity, the very different solutions of Lüdemann and Crossan are not, as we shall see, capable of answering that question in terms which make sense within actual first-century history. This objection to the study of Easter as a historical phenomenon, like the first two, will not hold water. Those who say the target cannot be seen do not seem to be looking in the right direction.

(a) No Other Starting-Point?

This brings me to the second set of arguments which might preclude such historical study: those which say not that it can’t be done but that it shouldn’t be. These objections are more overtly theological in character. The target, say the objectors, is not just difficult to see or to shoot at; it is in principle unreachable.

We begin with the argument which I find in various writers, and trace back to Hans Frei among others.⁴⁴ If I have understood Frei, he was arguing that we should not try to investigate the resurrection historically because the resurrection is itself the ground of a Christian epistemology. Everything that Christians know, they know because of the resurrection and for no other reason. There can therefore be no other starting-point, no neutral ground on which one might stand, from which one might observe the resurrection itself. Even to try to find one constitutes a kind of epistemological blasphemy. You must not try to shoot arrows at this target, because the only appropriate place from which to shoot at anything is where the target itself is standing.

This, in my view, simply begs the question. There is no reason in principle why the question, what precisely happened at Easter, cannot be raised by any historian of any persuasion. Even if some Christians might wish to rule it off limits, they have (presumably) no a priori right to tell other historians, whether Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, gnostics, agnostics, or anyone else, what they may and may not study. It might of course be the case that, in the last analysis, what Christians mean by the resurrection of Jesus would turn out to be so large and all-embracing a fact, or concept, that it would, if accepted, illuminate all other areas of thought and practice.⁴⁵ But we cannot decide that question in advance. Certainly it is not true that what most twentieth-century New Testament scholars have thought ‘happened at Easter’ is incapable of being researched historically. Bultmann thought that what happened at Easter was the rise of Christian faith, and he wrote quite a lot of history (sense 4) about it. Lüdemann thinks that Peter and Paul had major internal, psychologically explicable experiences, and has written quite a lot of history (also sense 4) about them. And so on.

Frei’s proposal, in the last analysis, is always in danger of describing a closed epistemological circle, a fideism from within which everything can be seen clearly but which remains necessarily opaque to those outside. However much this happens to accord with that branch of contemporary literary theory in which the discovery of extra-textual reality is ruled out from the start, and however much this also accords, whether by coincidence or the happy confluence of different streams of thought in Yale University at a certain period, with an insistence on the biblical canon as the epistemological starting-point for Christian reflection (and with a sense of despair over the present state of historical biblical scholarship), this position seems to me profoundly untrue to the worldview of the early Christians. Even if it were true that a fully Christian epistemology would want to begin all its knowing with Jesus, confessed as the crucified and risen Messiah, that does not mean that there is no access to Jesus and his death and resurrection in the public world. Peter did not need to appeal to Christian writings when reminding the crowd of what they already knew about Jesus.⁴⁶

A further obvious point could be made, on the analogy of other well-known arguments. (Think, for instance, of the standard reply to the logical positivists’ principle that we can only count as ‘knowledge’ that which could in principle be falsified: how might that principle itself be falsified?) If Frei were right, how could we know that the resurrection was the only valid epistemological starting-point? If the answer is, because only that will work, how do we respond to those who say that other starting-points work just as well?

Another analogy may help here. Ed Sanders, in his well-known reading of Paul, argues that Paul did not start off with a problem and then discover that Jesus was the solution; he discovered Jesus, found him to be God’s solution, and then figured out that there must have been some kind of problem.⁴⁷ This can be shown to be, not exactly mistaken, but misleading. There was an earlier stage involved as well: Paul’s thought moved from his Jewish perception of ‘the plight’ to the solution offered in Christ and thence to a fresh analysis of the problem.⁴⁸ The ‘problem’ he eventually described was a rethought version of the ‘problem’ he had before he began. He moved from an initial epistemological starting-point to (what he came to see as) fresh knowledge; then, reflecting on what had happened, concluded that there was actually a better starting-point from which he could see things clearly.

In the same way, I suggest, historical knowledge about the resurrection, of a sort that can be discussed without presupposing Christian faith, cannot be ruled out a priori, even if the resurrection, if acknowledged, would then turn out to offer a differently grounded epistemology. Some such movement takes place in the story of Thomas in John 20. He begins by insisting on the sense of touch as the only foolproof epistemology. He is confronted by the risen Jesus. He then discovers that visibility is enough (he abandons his intention of touching), only to be told ‘blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe’. His original epistemology led him in the right direction, even though, when faced with the risen Jesus, he abandoned it in favour of a better one, and was pointed towards a better one still.⁴⁹

I suspect that we are faced here with one of the long-range outworkings of Barth’s rejection of natural theology, and of the various counter-proposals that have been and can be made to his position.⁵⁰ (Equally, one still meets the proposal that one should not engage in historical study of Jesus for fear of turning one’s faith into a work.⁵¹) New Testament scholars have long avoided grasping nettles in this area, and I am not going to pursue the point further at this stage. I simply suggest that Frei’s objection, though offering important reminders at one level, should not prevent us from continuing to investigate the resurrection from a historical point of view. As Moule put it at the conclusion of his important little monograph:

A Gospel which cares only for the apostolic proclamation and denies that it either can or should be tested for its historical antecedents, is really only a thinly veiled gnosticism or docetism and, however much it may continue to move by a borrowed momentum, will prove ultimately to be no Gospel.⁵²

Or, if you prefer: all earthly activity takes place within the sun’s gravitational field; but this doesn’t mean that we cannot act within the earth’s own gravity. Or that the historical arrow can never reach the sun’s true image.

(b) Resurrection and Christology

This brings us to the second more theological objection. One of the reasons Frei and others have taken the line they have is because, in a good deal of Christian theology, the resurrection has been seen as the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity. Some, indeed, may understand the title of the present book in that sense. This is where the parable of the king’s archers comes fully into its own.

Resurrection and incarnation are often muddled up. Theologians often speak of the resurrection as if it directly and necessarily connotes Jesus’ divinity, and indeed as though it connotes little else besides. The objection to a historical investigation of the resurrection is then obvious: the arrows will simply not reach the sun. You cannot mount a historical argument and end up proving ‘god’, or proving that Jesus was the incarnation of the One True God.⁵³ The historian ought not even to attempt to pronounce on a topic which would lead so directly to the question of whether this god was in Christ. Even Pannenberg, who of course does think we can speak historically of the resurrection, seems to me to go too far in the direction of a direct link between resurrection and incarnational Christology.⁵⁴

Part of the problem here—and to this we shall return—lies in the confusion that still occurs about the meaning of Messiahship.⁵⁵ To say that Jesus is ‘the Christ’ is, in first-century terms, to say first and foremost that he is Israel’s Messiah, not to say that he is the incarnate Logos, the second person of the Trinity, the only-begotten son of the father. Even the phrase ‘son of god’, during Jesus’ ministry and in very early Christianity, does not mean what it came to mean in later theology, though already by the time of Paul a widening of its meaning can be observed.⁵⁶ But even when we have reminded ourselves of all this it is still not the case that resurrection necessarily entails Messiahship. If one of the two brigands crucified alongside Jesus had been found to be alive three days later, or if one of the Maccabaean martyrs (who were reported to have died with the promise of resurrection on their lips) had been raised from the dead a few days afterwards, it would have delighted their families and astonished their friends; a large hole would have been made in the second-Temple Jewish expectation, not to mention non-Jewish worldviews; but no one would have concluded that such a person was the Messiah, far less that he (or she, for at least one notable Maccabaean martyr was a woman) was in any sense an incarnate divine being.⁵⁷

We can make a similar point in relation to Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15, that all Christians will be raised as Jesus was raised. This does not turn all Christians into Messiahs; nor does it mean that they will thereby share (let alone that they already share!) the unique divine sonship which, in the same letter (15:28; cf. 8:6), Paul attributes to Jesus. Already in Paul, in fact, we see the clear distinction between resurrection (a newly embodied life after death) and exaltation or enthronement, a distinction which some scholars have suggested only enters the tradition with Luke.⁵⁸ Resurrection does not of itself connote cosmic Lordship, or divinity. This brings us to the important point: the theological conclusions that the early Christians drew from the resurrection of Jesus had far more to do with what they knew of Jesus prior to his crucifixion, and with what they knew of the crucifixion itself, and with what they believed about Israel’s god and his purposes for Israel and the world, than with the bare fact (granted we could ever speak of such a thing) of the resurrection itself. For the moment we may simply note that whatever we think about Jesus’ divinity, that cannot have been, in the first century, the primary meaning of his resurrection—even if, as we shall see, the train of thought which began with belief in Jesus’ resurrection led the early Christians towards such a belief.

The converse is also important. Let us suppose for a moment that the disciples had become convinced, on other grounds, that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah. (A contemporary analogy suggests itself: the Hasidic Jews of the Lubavitcher movement believe that their Rebbe was indeed the Messiah, and they do not regard his death in 1994 as evidence to the contrary.⁵⁹) This would not have led the early disciples to say that he had been raised from the dead. A change in the meaning of ‘Messiah’, yes (since nobody in the first century supposed that the Messiah would die at the hands of the pagans); but not an assertion of his resurrection. No second-Temple Jewish texts speak of the Messiah being raised from the dead. Nobody would have thought of saying, ‘I believe that so-and-so really was the Messiah; therefore he must have been raised from the dead.’

If this is true of Jesus’ Messiahship, it is certainly true a fortiori of any suggestion of his ‘divinity’. For the disciples to become convinced, on other grounds, that Jesus was divine would not of itself have led them to say that he had been raised from the dead. Nothing in Jewish beliefs about the Jewish god, and certainly nothing in non-Jewish beliefs about non-Jewish gods, would suggest to devotees that they should predicate resurrection of their object of worship. Some sort of new life beyond the grave, quite possibly; resurrection, certainly not.⁶⁰

We should not, then, be put off the historical investigation by theological coyness.⁶¹ We must keep our nerve. It should be perfectly possible for historians to study the reports of, and beliefs about, Jesus’ resurrection, just as one should be able to study reports, however startling, of the re-embodiment of any other second-Temple Jew, without supposing that by so doing we are necessarily committed to boldly going where no historian has ever gone before.⁶² What we make of our findings is another question altogether. We cannot, by short-circuiting the theological issue, escape the challenge of history. Reminding the archers about gravity should not put them off their task.

The final problem is a broader version of the question of resurrection and Christology. It has commonly been said that the resurrection is of necessity an eschatological event, and that since, once again, the historian is not equipped to study eschatology, he or she should keep at a safe distance.⁶³ Just because the sun’s heat and light may suddenly penetrate the thick clouds, that doesn’t mean you can shoot at the sun itself. Sometimes, indeed, this is elided into the former objection, since it is sometimes supposed, in a muddled sort of post-Bultmannianism, that talk of ‘eschatology’ means, more or less, talk of God breaking into history, and that talk of God breaking into history means talk of Christology. But if we are to use words with any historically rooted meaning we must be much more precise.

There are at least ten meanings of the word ‘eschatology’ currently being employed within the guild of New Testament Studies.⁶⁴ If we are to keep as strictly as possible to meanings that relate to particular phenomena within the world of second-Temple Judaism, what we ought to mean as historians if we spoke of the resurrection as an eschatological event would be that it was the sort of event that second-Temple Jews would see in terms of the apocalyptic climax of their own history. But saying that an event would be read in those terms by those people would certainly not rule out the study of the same event by historians today. After all, the successful Maccabaean revolt was understood eschatologically by (at least) the author of 1 Maccabees, but nobody has therefore suggested that we should not examine the event as historians.⁶⁵ The fall of Jerusalem in the sixth century BC, and the similar and equally catastrophic events of the first century AD, were understood ‘eschatologically’ by a good many people then and subsequently (this was, after all, ‘the day of YHWH’), but nobody suggests that we therefore cannot investigate or understand those events historically. The tragic poetry of Jeremiah does not bar us from studying the events of 597 and 587 BC. We are not kept from writing history about AD 70 by the apocalyptic nature of the visions in 4 Ezra, and the conviction that an eschatological event had taken place.

It could of course be objected that, if one concluded that the resurrection of Jesus had in fact taken place, it would be necessary to understand it eschatologically, that is, to commit oneself to a worldview in which the god of Israel acted climactically at certain points, including particularly this one. But this is misleading. It arises from the effect of perspective. Those who have written about Jesus and the resurrection in the last two centuries have done so, for the most part, from within either a Christian, a semi-Christian or a sub-Christian worldview, within which such a connection appears very natural. (It is possible, of course, to go so far in the direction of deJudaizing the word ‘eschatological’ that it simply means ‘miraculous’; the objection then collapses into a restatement of Troeltsch, or even Hume.) But within either an ancient pagan worldview or a contemporary non-Christian world-view no such conclusion would be reached. Those Romans who supposed that a ‘Nero redivivus’ was alive and kicking certainly had no thoughts of interpreting this phenomenon within the worldview of second-Temple Jewish eschatology.⁶⁶ Those in our own world (in New Age movements, for instance) who suppose that all human beings are going to be ‘recycled’ sooner or later are often bitterly opposed to a Jewish or Christian view of reality, not least the Christian claim that Jesus himself was, uniquely, raised at Easter. Once again, even if we were to accept the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the decision to interpret that event as connoting anything beyond an exceedingly puzzling and unexpected turn of events depends to begin with at least on the worldview within which we come to it. Why ‘to begin with at least’? Because some events seem to have the power to challenge world-views and generate either new mutations within them or complete transformations; and of such events the resurrection of Jesus, according to the early Christians, was the most obvious. The reason why the early Christians interpreted the resurrection eschatologically was that they were second-Temple Jews who had been either part of, or spectators of, a would-be eschatological movement focused on Jesus himself. They then came to reshape their worldview around the resurrection as the new central point. But that takes us too far towards our later discussions.

This summary of several complex arguments has not, I fear, done full justice either to the positions I have opposed or to the possible counterarguments. To some readers, I will have skated over the key issues; to others, I may have fallen into the traditional theologians’ trap of giving incomprehensible answers to questions nobody was asking. But I hope it is sufficient to show that several reasons frequently advanced for not considering the resurrection as a historical problem are not in themselves cogent. We are left with the positive conclusion: at the end of the day the historian can and must ask why Christianity began, and why it took the shape it did. Since the universal early Christian answer to that question had to do with Jesus and the resurrection, the historian is forced to ask further questions: (a) what the early Christians meant by that, (b) whether and in what sense we could say that they were right, and (c) whether we have any alternative proposals that will stand up to scrutiny. The historian cannot, then, be debarred from asking whether or not it is true that Jesus was raised from the dead.

3. The Historical Starting-Point

What, then, is our target, and what arrows can we use to shoot at it?

Our target is to investigate the claim of the earliest Christians, that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. In order to be sure we are aiming at that target, it is important to locate their claim where it belongs, within the worldview and language of second-Temple Judaism. In addition, since this (still recognizably Jewish) claim was quickly advanced within the wider non-Jewish world of the first century, it is important also to map out where the claim belonged within that larger universe of discourse.

This triple mapping operation will be undertaken in reverse, beginning with the pagan worldview, moving inwards to the Jewish, and thence to early Christianity. It is not a question of describing the entire worldview in each case. That would take many volumes for each segment. We shall focus on those aspects that concern life after death in general and resurrection in particular. It will become clear—and this is among the first major conclusions of our historical study—that the early Christian worldview is, at this point at least, best understood as a startling, fresh mutation within second-Temple Judaism. This then raises the question: what caused this mutation?

Among the more striking aspects of the mutation is the fact that nowhere within Judaism, let alone paganism, is a sustained claim advanced that resurrection has actually happened to a particular individual.⁶⁷ Since this claim has huge effects in other areas of the early Christian worldview, these too must be examined. How, in particular, do we explain the early Christian claim that the crucified Jesus was indeed Israel’s Messiah? How do we explain the belief that ‘god’s kingdom’ though in some senses still future, has become, in a new way, a present reality? Like the mutation within the meaning of ‘resurrection’, these features point towards the central question: what happened at Easter? This is the subject of Part V.

I described and defended my preferred historical method in Part II of The New Testament and the People of God, and exemplified it in Parts III and IV of that work, and in Parts II and III of Jesus and the Victory of God. This method recognizes that all knowledge of the past, as indeed of everything else, is mediated not only through sources but also through the perceptions, and hence also the personalities, of the knowers. There is no such thing as detached objectivity. (To say, therefore, that we can investigate other historical claims in a neutral or objective fashion, but that with the resurrection an element of subjectivity inevitably creeps in, is to ignore the fact that all historical work consists of a dialogue between the historian, in community with other historians, and the source materials; and that at every point the historians’ own worldview-perspectives are inevitably involved.) But this does not mean that all knowledge collapses into mere subjectivity. There are ways of moving towards fair and true statements about the past.

Among these is the attempt to plot the worldview of a particular community by studying, not just its ideas (which are often only accessible to us through the writings of an intellectual elite), but the praxis, stories and symbols which constitute the other bottom-line elements of a worldview.⁶⁸ It might be possible in principle to structure the following investigation along those lines, studying each element in turn (as I did in Jesus and the Victory of God Part II), but this would involve a substantial amount of overlap and repetition. The line I have taken draws on all these as need arises, but within a different structure. The central parts of the book are mostly concerned with one particular question, that of beliefs about life after death in general and about what happened to Jesus after his death in particular. But these beliefs are surrounded, at least implicitly, with praxis, stories and symbols which we shall draw on from time to time: burial habits, characteristic stories about life after death, and the symbols associated with death and what lies beyond. Thus, rather than simply attempting an explanation of the rise of the early church in terms of ideas and beliefs alone (‘people who believe/think X will, under certain circumstances, modify that belief/idea in such and such a way’, and so on), we should look as well for wider explanations (‘people who live within the following controlling story-world will, if confronted by certain events, retell their story in the following ways’; ‘when people whose lives are ordered around the following symbols are confronted by certain events they will re-order their lives, and those symbols, in the following ways’; and if people who habitually behave in the following fashion are confronted by certain events, they will alter their behaviour in the following ways’). We wish we knew more about early Christian praxis, stories and symbols; but we know enough to see where help may be found. We must broaden the investigation to include the communities that actually existed within the first-century world, as opposed to those communities that, projected back by modem scholarship, reflect simply the dogma and piety (or, indeed, the impiety) of our own times. These communities—pluriform first-century paganism, Judaism and Christianity—provide our best access to the questions of what the Christian claim meant and how we today can assess it.

Sketching these large entities is of course complex. As is now widely agreed, there are only first-century Judaisms and Christianities, and for that matter paganisms; it is not so frequently noted that there must be something singular in each case of which these pluralities are variant forms.⁶⁹ Equally, despite those who have tried to keep them apart, very early Christianity should itself properly be seen as a sub-branch of first-century Judaism.⁷⁰ Studying these two closely related movements is the place to start. These are the initial targets at which the historical arrows are to be aimed.

The point of this obvious suggestion is its negative corollary. Many studies of the resurrection have begun by examining the accounts of the Easter experiences in Paul and the gospels, subjecting those accounts to detailed traditio-historical analysis. This puts the cart before the horse. Such analysis is always speculative; until we know what resurrection meant in that world, we are unlikely to get it right. This is not just a matter of seeing the big picture ahead of the little details, though that is important too; it is about knowing what we are talking about before we begin to talk about it.⁷¹

Here we need some working definitions. ‘Death’ and its cognates regularly denote: (a) the event of a particular death—of a person, animal, plant or whatever; (b) the state of being dead that results from that initial event; and (c) the phenomenon of death in general, in the abstract, or as a personification (‘Death shall be no more’).⁷² The loose phrase ‘life after death’ can thus denote: (a) the state (whatever it is) that immediately follows the event of bodily death; or (b) the state (if there is one) that follows a period of being bodily dead; or, conceivably—though this is not found frequently—(c) the state of affairs after death in the abstract has been abolished.⁷³ When people speak of ‘life after death’ they usually mean (a), the life that follows immediately after bodily death. People often assume, in fact, that this is among the primary things that Christians believe and that atheists deny.

Sense (a) is not what ‘resurrection’ meant in the first century. Here there is no difference between pagans, Jews and Christians. They all understood the Greek word anastasis and its cognates, and the other related terms we shall meet, to mean (b): new life after a period of being dead. Pagans denied this possibility; some Jews affirmed it as a long-term future hope; virtually all Christians claimed that it had happened to Jesus and would happen to them in the future. All of them were speaking of a new life after ‘life after death’ in the popular sense, a fresh living embodiment following a period of death-as-a-state (during which one might or might not be ‘alive’ in some other, non-bodily fashion). Nobody (except the Christians, in respect of Jesus) thought that this had already happened, even in isolated cases.

Thus, when the ancients spoke of resurrection, whether denying it or affirming it, they were telling a two-step story. Resurrection itself would be preceded (and was preceded even in the case of Jesus) by an interim period of death-as-a-state. Where we find a single-step story—death-as-event being followed at once by a final state, for instance of disembodied bliss—the texts are not talking about resurrection. Resurrection involves a definite content (some sort of re-embodiment) and a definite narrative shape (a two-step story, not a single-step one). This meaning is constant throughout the ancient world, until we come to a new coinage in the second century.⁷⁴

The meaning of ‘resurrection’ as ‘life after “life after death” ’ cannot be overemphasized, not least because much modern writing continues to use ‘resurrection’ as a virtual synonym for ‘life after death’ in the popular sense.⁷⁵ It has sometimes been proposed that this usage was current even for the first century, but the evidence is simply not there.⁷⁶ If we are to engage in history, rather than projecting the accidents of (some) contemporary usage on to the remote past, it is vital to keep these distinctions in mind.

The place to start, then, is the turbulent world of first-century paganism. Without looking ahead to the answer supplied by Acts 17, we must ask: what would someone in Ephesus, Athens or Rome have understood Paul to be talking about when he announced to them that the Messiah had been raised from the dead? And what reaction would their existing framework of beliefs suggest to them?