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2. Acts

Acts offers a rich variety of material on the resurrection.¹ There is never any question what the author believes about the final destiny of God’s people: there will be a great day of judgment, at which Jesus, having himself been raised from the dead, will be the judge. At that time, all those who have believed in Jesus will be vindicated:

^10:40 God raised him on the third day, and permitted him to appear, ⁴¹ not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen beforehand by God, namely ourselves, who ate and drank with him after he had been raised from the dead (meta to anastenai auton ek nekron). ⁴² He commanded us to announce to the people, and bear witness, that he is the one marked out by God as judge of the living and the dead. ⁴³ All the prophets bear witness to him, that through his name all who believe in him will receive forgiveness of sins.

^17:30 God overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he commands everyone ever-where to repent, ³¹ because he has established a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has designated; and he has provided assurance of this to everyone, by raising him from the dead.

This ‘designation’, this ‘marking out’ of Jesus as the coming judge, is close to what Paul says in Romans 1:4: Jesus is ‘marked out’ as ‘son of God’ (i.e. as Messiah, which includes his role of judgment) by the resurrection from the dead.² And the judgment which lies in the future is anticipated in the present when people believe in Jesus and so receive, at long last, the promised ‘forgiveness of sins’. This, in the following contexts, clearly carries the ‘new covenant’ overtones we have seen in earlier passages. The ‘forgiveness’ in question is not just the quieting of individual troubled consciences, but the large-scale ‘forgiveness’ which Israel had been promised, the moment when the sins which caused the long punishment of exile would be done away:³

^5:31 God exalted him to his right hand as leader and saviour, so that he might give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.

^13:30 But God raised him from the dead, ³¹ and he was seen (ophthe) for many days by those who had gone up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem. They are now his witnesses to the people. ³² And we bring you the good news of the promise made to the ancestors, ³³ that God has fulfilled it for us, their children, in raising Jesus …

… ³⁸ Let it be known to you, men and brethren, that through this man forgiveness of sins is announced to you, and that from everything from which you could not be justified in the law of Moses, ³⁹ in him everyone who believes is justified.

A new moment has opened in the divine plan for Israel and the world, because the long-promised, long-awaited event has occurred: ‘the resurrection of the dead’ has in a sense already happened with the resurrection of Jesus. This is the meaning of the otherwise puzzling passage which speaks of the apostles incurring the wrath of the temple officials and the Sadducees:

^4:1 While they [i.e. Peter and John] were speaking to the people, the priests and the commander of the Temple and the Sadducees came up to them. ² They were very angry because they were teaching the people and announcing, in Jesus, ‘the resurrection from the dead’.

This does not mean simply that they were teaching a particular doctrine (one with which, as we know, the Sadducees disagreed strongly in any case), and doing so on the authority of Jesus, or even with him as an example.⁴ It goes further than that. It means that they were announcing (the very word katangellein carries the force of an announcement of something that has happened, not simply teaching about a doctrine) that ‘the resurrection from the dead’ had happened, with this case as its prototype. The Greek is not simply anastasis nekron, the resurrection of the dead, the great moment which was still awaited when all the dead (or at least all the righteous dead) would be raised. They are teaching ten anastasin ek nekron, ‘the resurrection “out from among” the dead’. This was, clearly, the dawn of the new day; but it was so in the single, individual case of Jesus himself. He had come ‘out from among’ the dead bodies. But both halves of this mattered. It was not just that the disciples were saying something outrageous about Jesus. They were saying that in and through him a new era in Israel’s history, in world history, had dawned:

^3:24 All the prophets, from Samuel and those who followed him, all the ones who spoke, also announced these days.

And the resurrection of Jesus had thus opened up the new chance for Israel to find forgiveness at last:

^3:26 It was to you first that God sent his child, when he raised him up, to bless you, by turning each of you from your wickedness.

If ‘the resurrection from the dead’ had thus already occurred in Jesus, it would surely occur for all God’s people in the future. So central was the resurrection to Paul’s preaching among the Gentiles (this is, of course, strongly confirmed from the letters) that the Athenians even misheard Paul and imagined that he was preaching two new divinities, Jesus and ‘Anastasis’. The Greek word for ‘resurrection’ was so frequently on his lips that they thought she was Jesus’ consort, a kind of Isis to his Osiris.⁵ When Paul makes his defence in Jerusalem and Caesarea, the theme of resurrection is regularly on his lips, beginning with a passage we have already noted:⁶

[before the Jewish council] ^23:6 When Paul noticed that some of the council were Sadducees and others were Pharisees, he shouted out in the council, ‘Brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees! I am on trial here concerning the hope, and the resurrection of the dead (anastasis nekron)!’

[before Felix] ^24:14 I confess to you that by the ‘way’ they refer to as heresy, so I worship the God of my ancestors, believing in all things according to the law and the things written in the prophets, ¹⁵ having a hope toward God which these men themselves are awaiting, that there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous. ¹⁶ So I do my best always to maintain a clear conscience before God and all people …⁷

… ²⁰ Or let them say themselves what crime they found in me when I was standing before the council, ²¹ except concerning this one thing which I shouted out when I was standing there, that ‘I am on trial before you today concerning the resurrection of the dead (anastasis nekron)!’

[Felix reporting to Agrippa] ^25:18 When the accusers stood up to make their case, they brought none of the charges of evildoing that I had been expecting; ¹⁹ it had to do with disputes about their own systems of piety, and about a dead person called Jesus, whom Paul asserted to be alive.

[Before Agrippa] ^26:6 And now I stand here on trial for the hope of the promise which came from God to our ancestors,⁷ a promise to which our twelve tribes hope to attain as they worship earnestly day and night; and it is because of this hope that I am called to account by the Jews, O King! ⁸Why should it be judged incredible by you that God should raise the dead (ei ho theos nekrous egeirei)?

… ²² To this day I have received help from God, and so I stand bearing witness to small and great alike, of nothing other than what the prophets—yes, and Moses too!—said would happen: ²³ that the Messiah would suffer, and that he would be the first out of the resurrection of the dead (protos ex anastaseos nekron) and would announce light to the people and to the nations.

A solid block of evidence thus demonstrates that Acts, whatever earlier traditions it has incorporated, places the resurrection of Jesus at centre stage in its theology. Jesus’ own resurrection from the dead is the beginning of ‘the resurrection of the dead’. As in 1 Corinthians 15, ‘resurrection’ has been divided into two distinct moments. The interval of time thus created is to be understood as the moment for prophecy to be fulfilled, for Israel’s consolation to come at last, and for the Gentiles to be brought in:

[Peter’s speech] ^3:19 Repent then, and turn back to God, so that your sins may be wiped away, ²⁰ and so that times of refreshment may come from the face of the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah he has appointed for you, Jesus. ²¹ Heaven must receive him until the time of restoration (apokatastasis) of all things, which God spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets of old. ²² Moses said that ‘The Lord your God will raise up (anastesei) a prophet for you …

We note here in passing the use of a text from Deuteronomy (18:15) which, containing the word anastesei in the LXX, lent itself easily to being a proof of the special resurrection of the prophet-Messiah Jesus.⁸ This too appears as an innovation from within the Jewish tradition: the explanation of what had happened to Jesus, and what it all meant, is only comprehensible within Judaism, but nobody had thought of it like this before the early Christians did. And, within the interval between Jesus’ resurrection and the apokatastasis, a new life was available, with new possibilities of healing, for those who would believe.⁹ God’s raising of Jesus from the dead is the sign that salvation is found in him alone, which in turn is the explanation for the remarkable healing performed by Peter and John (4:5–12). The whole early Christian message can be summed up in the phrase ‘this life’ (5:20). When we find, in this context, that Peter raises a widow from the dead, and that Paul likewise restores to life an apparently dead boy, the reader of Acts is bound to feel that such incidents cohere with the underlying theological message—and with events reported in the gospels.¹⁰ This is a time of life, of restoration, of resurrection.

We have already studied two passages in Acts which speak revealingly about the possible intermediate state between bodily death and bodily resurrection.¹¹ Luke does not give full endorsement to the views of the Pharisees, that people in the intermediate state could be spoken of as either ‘angel’ or ‘spirit’, but his almost throwaway mention of their views indicates the world of thought with which the early Christians were engaging, and within which their claims were perceived to make sense.

This entire theology, in which ‘the resurrection of the dead’ is announced as having already begun in the case of Jesus, is constructed, in Acts, on an extremely important foundation. This foundation consists of a very detailed exposition of Jesus’ own resurrection, of the biblical context within which it means what it means, and of the implications that are to be drawn from it. As we would have expected from all the second-Temple and early Christian material surveyed so far, there is no question of ‘resurrection’ at any point in Acts referring to anything other than a bodily rising from the dead. If this is clear in relation to the future resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked, it is doubly clear when Peter provides, on the day of Pentecost, a scriptural matrix for understanding what has happened in terms of a Psalm which speaks of God not allowing the Messiah to ‘see corruption’:

^2:22 Jesus of Nazareth, a man marked out from God to you in powerful deeds, wonders, and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know, ²³ this man, delivered up by the designated plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed through the hands of wicked men. ²⁴ God raised him up, having loosed the pains of death; it wasn’t possible for him to be kept in their power.

²⁵ For David says concerning him, ‘I saw the Lord always before me; for he is at my right hand, so that I shall not be shaken. ²⁶ Therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced, and my flesh too shall dwell in hope; ²⁷ for you will not leave my soul in Hades, nor will you give your holy one to see corruption. ²⁸ You will make known to me the paths of life, you will fill me with gladness by your face.’

²⁹ Fellow-Israelites, I can speak to you freely about the patriarch David, that he died and was buried, and his tomb is among us to this day. ³⁰ Being then a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn a solemn oath that he would place on his throne one from the fruit of his body, ³¹ he saw in advance and spoke about the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. ³² This Jesus God raised up, and all of us are witnesses of it. ³³ He has been exalted to God’s right hand, and, having received the promise of the Holy Spirit from the father, he has poured it out, as you see and hear.

³⁴ For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, ³⁵ until I place your enemies under your feet.’ ³⁶ So let the house of Israel know for certain that God has made him Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.

This long speech is full of interest, but for our present purposes we confine our comments to this: that the only reason for choosing Psalm 16 (LXX 15) as the key text to interpret the extraordinary events of Easter is that Luke at least believed, and the early sources he drew on seem to have believed, that the resurrection of Jesus involved not the corruption of his physical body in the tomb (and his elevation to some non-physical sphere of dignity or Lordship), but its incorruption.¹² The ‘exaltation’ spoken of in verse 33 is not an alternative interpretation of Easter, but (not least in the light of Acts 1) a reference to a further event. Whoever originally quoted Psalm 16 of Jesus, or edited the source, or put it in its present context, the whole passage only makes the sense it was intended to make if the resurrection is thought of as a bodily event in which Jesus’ physical body did not decay as those of the patriarchs had done, but received new life.¹³ And from this new life, as we shall see later, solid conclusions were drawn at once about what God was thereby saying of Jesus.

The same position about Jesus’ own resurrection is developed in several subsequent passages, already quoted. Each makes its own contribution to a fuller picture of the early Christian understanding of his resurrection. The summary in 4:33 draws together the impression of the early chapters as a whole: ‘With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.’ Thus, when we come to Paul’s great speeches, we are not surprised (either from what we know of Paul or from what we know of Acts) that the resurrection is prominent and climactic. In Acts 13:30–39, quoted in part above, Paul draws on Psalms 2 and 16 to emphasize that the resurrection declares Jesus to be the Messiah, stressing again the point made in Acts 2 about his body not decomposing. And in Acts 17, at the climax of the speech on the Areopagus, Paul explicitly takes on the whole Homeric and classical tradition we studied in chapter 2:

^17:31 God has fixed a day on which he will cause the world to be judged by a human being whom he has appointed; and he has given assurance of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.

Not surprisingly, granted their traditions and standard beliefs, some mocked (17:32). But Acts is undeterred, standing foursquare with Paul himself and the other early Christian writers. The resurrection, as an event within recent history, means that the judgment of the world, long awaited within Judaism, is now announced to all. The risen one himself, being thereby marked out as Messiah, will take the role of judge.¹⁴

The resurrection was thus clearly central to all the strands of early Christianity represented by the traditions in Acts, as well as the viewpoint of the author who drew them together. When we place the resurrection in Acts against the spectrum of views in the ancient world, it belongs, of course, within Judaism, and alongside Pharisaism; but, as in other parts of early Christian thought, it has been drastically modified within that framework. Resurrection is something that has already happened to one man, demonstrating that he is ‘prophet’, ‘lord’ and ‘Messiah’. But his resurrection from the dead is the start of the single event still known as ‘the resurrection of the dead’ or ‘out from among the dead’. It reinforces belief in that future hope, so that announcing Jesus can be presented as loyalty to Judaism’s cherished expectation. The new interval of time created by one man rising in advance of the rest can be interpreted as the time for prophecy to be fulfilled, for Israel’s long-awaited rescue by God. This itself, though, is also reinterpreted. It is no longer read as political liberation, but as ‘forgiveness of sins’, not least in the sense of forgiveness for having rejected God’s Messiah. And, though the bodiliness of Jesus’ resurrection is affirmed and underlined, he was clearly not simply resuscitated into a life exactly like the present one, since his body seems to have new properties. His body is presently ‘in heaven‘, but will return from there at the time when he appears as judge of all the world, the time when everything will be restored (apokatastasis).

Two further interim conclusions may be drawn from this material. First, there are several overlaps between this picture and that of Paul, but Acts does not look like a slavish imitation of Paul on this topic. The closest it comes, interestingly, is the point at which it uses, of God’s raising of Jesus, language reminiscent of Romans 1:4. Second, this picture is, as we should expect, fully consonant with what we found in Luke’s gospel, but, granted that the same person wrote them both, we must note the commendable restraint in the gospel, in that the author has not introduced, at several points where it would have been possible to do so, the fuller exposition of the meaning of resurrection which is then offered in Acts by Peter and Paul in particular. It is, of course, quite conceivable that this reflects the genuine historical memory of the very early church (Jesus said little on the topic, Peter and Paul said a lot), but it is no part of my present purpose to argue that that is so. What is more important is to note the way in which ‘resurrection’ was understood, in relation to the future human hope and to Jesus himself, and to observe the way in which, through the various forms of description appearing in the different documents, a many-sided, composite but thoroughly coherent picture emerges which can be placed on the map of first-century views, and which robustly answers our main question: why did they come to hold that kind of hope in that kind of way? Acts, like Paul and the synoptic gospels, answers: because of what happened to Jesus.

3. Hebrews

Hebrews stands out from the rest of the New Testament in many ways, but one of the most obvious is this: it is among the more substantial of the longer early Christian books, yet it hardly mentions the resurrection.¹⁵

The writer assumes that ‘the resurrection of the dead’ is among the basic doctrines that new converts would be taught (6:2, along with other things assumed to be rudimentary).¹⁶ But he does not make it a topic of discussion until he produces the long list of the heroes of faith in chapter 11. There we find, as in Paul, Abraham’s faith that God could and would give him a child even though he was ‘as good as dead’ (11:11–12); and, more explicitly than in Paul, the use of the story of Abraham and Isaac to show that genuine faith is resurrection faith:

¹⁷ By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac; he had received the promises, but was ready to sacrifice his only child, ¹⁸ about whom it had been said that ‘in Isaac shall your seed be called.’ ¹⁹ He reckoned that God was able (dynatos) to raise him even from the dead; and thence, in a manner of speaking, he did receive him back.

The parallels to Romans 4 are obvious, and indicate that at this point the writer of Hebrews is thinking in the same framework as Paul, and indeed as much first-century Judaism.¹⁷ But if this is so, we should probably take most of chapter 11 as pointing in the same direction. The main point of ‘faith’ in this chapter, as has often been emphasized, is that it looks forward to what has been promised but not yet granted. Noah was warned about things yet to come. Abraham set out for a place he had been promised but had not yet seen. The main antithesis the writer is making is not between an ‘upstairs’ or ‘spiritual’ world in the hellenistic sense and a ‘downstairs’ or ‘material’ world, but between the present world and the future one, the promised new world which will be God’s gift from heaven:

¹³ These all died in faith. They had not received the promises, but they had seen them some distance off, and greeted them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. ¹⁴ For people who say that sort of thing make it clear that they are seeking a homeland, ¹⁵ If they were remembering the country from which they had gone out, they would have had an opportunity to return to it. ¹⁶ But now they are aspiring towards a better one, that is a heavenly one (epouranios). That is why God is not ashamed to be called ‘their God’; for he has prepared a city for them.

But what does this mean? Have we after all stumbled upon an early Christian text which straightforwardly affirms what so many others do not, that the point of faith and hope is, at the end, to ‘go to heaven when you die’?

Things are not so simple. If they were, the writer would scarcely have gone on to speak of Abraham’s resurrection faith; nor yet of those who looked for ‘a better resurrection’ than simple resuscitation:

³⁵ Women received their dead by resurrection (ex anastaseos). Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might obtain a better resurrection (hina kreittonos anastaseos tychosin).

This seems to be an allusion, on the one hand, to the Sidonian widow whose son Elijah restored and the Shunammite woman whose son Elisha restored; and, on the other, to the martyrs in 2 Maccabees.¹⁸ The text thus uses the word ‘resurrection’ in the two senses of ‘resuscitation of the very recently dead’ and ‘resurrection to new bodily life at some stage in the future’. Both are clearly bodily; the reason for distinguishing them, and calling the latter one ‘better’, is presumably because the writer is aware that in 2 Maccabees the mother was looking not for a short-term resuscitation but a new creation, part of the great new work, ushering in the age of cosmic justice, that the creator god would one day perform.

The ‘heavenly country’ of which the writer speaks is further identified in chapter 12. This is the heavenly Jerusalem:

²² You have come to Mount Sion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to millions of angels gathered in celebration, ²³ and to the assembly of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, ²⁴ and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood which speaks better things than the blood of Abel.

This, again, looks like a ‘spiritual’, ‘heavenly’ and entirely ‘other-worldly’ goal. So, indeed, it is. The ‘spirits of the righteous made perfect’ are presumably the saints and martyrs of old awaiting their new bodies in the new creation.¹⁹ Even this, it seems, is an intermediate stage on the way to that new creation, in which both heaven and earth are to be ‘shaken’, so that what God intends to last for ever may do so:

²⁶ Now he has promised, ‘Yet once more, I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven’ [Haggai 2:6, 21]. ²⁷ This mention of ‘once more’ indicates the removal of what can be shaken—in other words, things that have been made—so that what cannot be shaken may remain. ²⁸ Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful …

And this future hope, for the world that will last, a world more solid, more real than the present one, is reaffirmed in the final chapter: here we have no lasting city, but we seek that which is to come (13:14), referring to the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’ of 11:16 and 12:22.²⁰

The future hope, which thus emerges at the climax of the book, appears to draw together the belief that God’s future world is ready and waiting in heaven and the belief that it will involve the resurrection of the dead. As in the Corinthian correspondence, the two images work together: that which is ‘waiting in heaven’ is that which is secure in the plan and intention of the creator. And all this is based, throughout the book to this point, on the victory over death that has been won by Jesus, leading him to be installed, in accordance with Psalms 8 and 110, as the Messiah who rules the world in obedience to God. These texts, intriguingly the same ones as we find in 1 Corinthians 15:25–8 and Philippians 3:20–21, are not here explicitly linked to an affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection and its results, but rather to Jesus’ superiority over the angels (1:13) and his enthronement over ‘all things’ (2:5–9).

All this does, of course, depend for its logical force on the resurrection. It is hard to see how anyone could have spoken of Jesus ‘destroying the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and freeing those who spent their lives in slavery to the fear of death’ (2:14) unless it was presupposed that Jesus has now defeated death through resurrection. The poignant passage about Jesus offering up loud cries and tears to the father who was able to save him from death (5:7) appears at first sight to suggest (as with the Gethsemane narratives in the gospels) that the father did not save him; but when the verse continues that ‘he was heard because of his reverent submission’, one likely meaning is that the father gave him a life beyond death, a salvation from death which did not consist in avoiding it but in going through it and out into a new, imperishable life beyond. This then becomes the foundation for the superior priesthood which Jesus holds (7:23–5); he has become a priest not through physical descent ‘but by the power of an indestructible life’ (7:16). It is true that Hebrews focuses its main attention not on the resurrection itself but on the effective sacrifice of the cross which preceded it and the ascension and enthronement which followed.²¹ But, as we would guess from chapter 11 in particular, the resurrection is never far away, and becomes explicit in the benediction at the very end of the letter:

Now may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will …²²

The idea of Jesus, the shepherd, being ‘brought up’ from the dead echoes Isaiah 63:11–14, where YHWH ‘brings up’ the shepherd, Moses, from Egypt.²³ Moses ‘was “led forth”, not as an isolated individual, but as the shepherd of the flock’; this is true of Jesus as well, the first to rise, anticipating the resurrection of all at the end (6:2).²⁴

Here at last the resurrection of both Jesus and his people comes out into the open. For the rest of the book, though, the main emphasis is on Jesus having suffered and having then been exalted into the heavenly realm, whence he will return (as in Philippians 3:20–21) to save those who are waiting for him.²⁵ The climactic statement of this theme comes in 12:1–2, where the readers are encouraged to keep their eyes on Jesus as they press forward, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses from past generations. They must continually remind themselves how Jesus ‘endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God’. The enthronement of Jesus as Messiah and lord is of course integrated, by Paul in particular, with his resurrection. Indeed, for Paul, enthronement presupposes resurrection. But in Hebrews the connection is not made explicit. I am inclined to say, with Lane, Koester and some other commentators, that this is because it is everywhere presupposed; but I recognize that such claims are hard to substantiate, and nothing much in my present argument depends on it. Hebrews cannot be used as a central witness for a redefinition of resurrection, though as we have seen it contains some hints in that direction. It explores one particular vision both of Jesus and of the Christian pilgrimage, which depends on belief both in Jesus’ own resurrection and in the future resurrection of believers. But it does not make this in any way a major theme.

4. The General Letters

It is perhaps less surprising that the letter of James has little to say about the resurrection. The closest it comes is in the promise that the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will ‘raise him up’ (egerei auton), forgiving him his sins.²⁶ This combination of prayer, sickness, ‘raising up’ and forgiveness is familiar from several of the texts we have studied, but the letter of James says nothing more explicit than this about resurrection. It never refers either to the future post-mortem existence of believers, or of all humanity, or to the past event of Jesus’ resurrection. As with many other topics, it would be rash to conclude that James did not believe in all this just because the book does not mention it.²⁷ That is as far as we need to go for our present purposes.

The same is true for 2 Peter and Jude. This is somewhat more surprising, because with their apocalyptic cast one might have expected some kind of end-time scenario. We do find, in 2 Peter, talk of escaping from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and of becoming partakers of the divine nature (1:4), but from this passage alone it is not clear what is involved in this ‘escaping corruption’. Likewise, the book envisages the goal of Christian living to be ‘entry into the eternal kingdom of our lord and saviour Jesus the Messiah’ (1:11), but the aionios basileia (which might remind us of 1 Corinthians 15:24–8) is not further defined.²⁸ Though the writer speaks of his forthcoming death, contrasting it as does Paul in Philippians 1 or 2 Corinthians 5 with remaining in the present body as in a ‘tent’ (skenoma), he does not develop a detailed anthropology of what will happen to the present body or its ‘inhabitant’.

We do, however, find in 2 Peter a reference to the ‘new heavens and new earth’ promised by Isaiah.²⁹ This coheres both with the close of Revelation (see below) and also with Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15, which envision a world finally set free from corruption and decay and renewed by the divine power.³⁰ Though the resurrection itself is not mentioned within this dramatic scenario, the appeal to the creative divine power, and the promise of global renewal, are the same here as in other texts where resurrection is the specifically human hope within this cosmic drama:

^3:5 They deliberately ignore this, that the heavens existed long ago by God’s word, and an earth was made from water and through water, ⁶ through which the world of those days was destroyed by being flooded with water. ⁷ The present heavens and earth are being stored up for fire by the same word, for the day of judgment and destruction of wicked people. ⁸ Do not ignore this one thing, my beloved ones: that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. ⁹ The Lord is not being slow about his promise, as some think slowness to be, but is patient to you, not wanting anyone to perish, but that all should come to repentance.

¹⁰ But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, the day in which the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will be dissolved by burning, and the earth and the works in it will be found out. ¹¹ Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of people ought you to be, in holy pursuits and godliness, ¹² as you wait and long for the presence of the day of God, through which the heavens will be dissolved in fire, and the elements will melt with burning? ¹³ But we wait for new heavens and a new earth, according to the promise, and justice will live there.

The critical moment here, upon which seems to hinge the worldview of the whole, is verse 10. Is the writer saying that creation as a whole is to be thrown away and a new one, freshly made, to take its place? So it would seem if the verse were to end ‘will be burned up’, as in the AV and RSV. That could imply a dualistic worldview in which creation itself was irremediably evil, which seems ruled out by the insistence on its being divinely made, or a Stoic worldview in which the present world would dissolve into fire and be reborn, phoenix-like, from the ashes,³¹ which seems ruled out by the fact that the underlying story is not one of an endless cycle, as in Stoicism, but of a linear movement of history, as in Judaism, moving forward towards judgment and new creation.³² What is going on in this text, and what view of the future world, and humans within it, does it offer?

The translation ‘will be burned up’ depends in fact on the variant readings of a few manuscripts.³³ Most of the best witnesses have heurethesetai, ‘will be found’. Until recently it was thought that this was quite unintelligible, but more recently commentators have pointed out the use of ‘find’ in the sense of ‘being found out’, in a setting of eschatological judgment, in Jewish texts and elsewhere in the New Testament, including Paul and the gospels.³⁴ Various possible nuances of meaning emerge from this, of which one in particular stands out: that the writer wishes to stress continuity within discontinuity, a continuity in which the new world, and the new people who are to inhabit it, emerge tested, tried and purified from the crucible of suffering.³⁵ If something like this is plausible (it is a difficult and obscure text, and likely to remain so) then the worldview we find is not that of the dualist who hopes for creation to be abolished, but of one who, while continuing to believe in the goodness of creation, sees that the only way to the fulfilment of the creator’s longing for a justice and goodness which will replace the present evil is for a process of fire, not simply to consume, but also to purge.

The second letter of Peter may thus offer oblique witness to an early Christian eschatology not far removed from that of Paul in 1 Corinthians. The letter of Jude concentrates mostly on fearful warnings of judgment, with a solitary mention, near the close, of the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ which leads to eternal life (verse 21). The concluding benediction speaks of God ‘making you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing’ (verse 24). These, again, are too small to build anything upon, but are quite consonant with the larger picture we have observed above.

The letters of John are similarly sparse in mention of the ultimate post-mortem future, or of the resurrection of Jesus as its basis. The opening of the first letter, echoing the gospel prologue, is of course all about ‘life’—the life that was made manifest in Jesus, the ‘eternal life’ (1:2) that was with the father and was revealed to us—but the emphasis of the letter is not only on the future meaning of that phrase, but, as in the gospel, on its present connotations. There are pointers to the future: while the world and its lust are passing away, anyone who does God’s will ‘abides for ever’ (2:17).

The main mention of the ultimate future, however, is clear, and corresponds quite closely to passages like Colossians 3:1–4. The writer warns that it is the ‘last hour’, and looks forward to the day when Jesus, at present hidden from sight, is ‘revealed’. When that happens, his people will be revealed as well:

^2:28 And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he is revealed (ean phanerothe) we may have confidence and not be put to shame before him at his presence (parousia). ²⁹ If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does righteousness has been born from him.

^3:1 See what great love the father has given us, that we should be called God’s children; and that is what we are. That is why the world does not know us, because it did not know him. ² Beloved, we are now God’s children, and it is not yet revealed (oupo phanerothe) what we shall be. We know that when he appears (ean phanerothe), we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. ³ And all who have this hope within them purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Here the sequence of thought is very close to several passages in Paul. Jesus is at the moment beyond our sight, and our present lives are bound up with his, in a way invisible to the world around. But one day Jesus will be revealed.³⁶ At that time, the life believers already possess will be revealed. When it happens, we shall be ‘like him’, as in Philippians 3:20–21. The ‘royal presence’ of Jesus (parousia) will be the signal for the great transformation in which the hidden reality of present Christian experience will become the public reality of God’s new world, and his renewed people. As in Paul, this hope gives impetus to the ethical demands made in the present.

The rest of the letter emphasizes what the fourth gospel had stressed: that there is a passing over from death to life which can occur in the present time, and that Christians must allow that transition, or transformation, to have its effect in their thoughts and actions. ‘We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love one another.’³⁷ This in turn is based on the incarnation of the divine love in the person of Jesus, now made known through the Spirit (4:1–5:5). And, as in the gospel, the phrase which carries the continuity from present Christian experience to future Christian hope is ‘eternal life’, zoe aionios.³⁸

This brings us to the first letter of Peter, which contains a couple of sections of more than passing interest. After the initial greeting, the letter opens with a passage which has regularly been taken to indicate that ‘salvation’ consists in leaving the present world and going at last to ‘heaven’:

^1:3 Blessed be God, the father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah! According to his great mercy he has caused us to be born again to a living hope, through the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah from the dead, ⁴ to an inheritance which is incorruptible and undefiled and unfading, that is kept in heaven for you, ⁵ who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. ⁶ In this you rejoice, though for a while you may have to suffer various kinds of testing, ⁷ so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which, albeit perishable, is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus the Messiah. ⁸ You have not seen him, but you love him; even though you do not see him now you believe in him and you rejoice with an inexpressible and glorified joy, ⁹ as you receive the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls (psychon).

This, to a modern western reader, seems straightforward enough. The soul (psyche, verse 9) is what is saved, and this salvation will take place in heaven (verse 4). But there are three signs that this, though ‘obvious’ to many today, is not at all what the author intended.

First, the ‘salvation’ is ‘to be revealed in the last time’ (verse 5). This sounds more like the picture in Colossians 3 or 1 John 3: at present, the heavenly dimension is unseen, but one day it will be unveiled.³⁹ If salvation consisted simply of going off to the heavenly dimension and staying there while earth went on its way to destruction, the writer could not have put it like this. The reward of faith and perseverance will be unveiled, not when the recently departed arrive in a disembodied heaven, but ‘at the revelation of Jesus the Messiah’ (verse 7). This language belongs much more naturally with the idea of ‘heaven’ as the place where the creator’s future purposes are stored up, ‘kept safe’ (verse 4) until they can be unveiled in the promised new world, than with the dualism which seeks to escape from earth and to arrive, safely disembodied, in ‘heaven’.⁴⁰

Second, the salvation in question is spoken of in terms strongly reminiscent of Paul’s resurrection-based soteriology. It will be an ‘inheritance’ (kleronomia), using the regular word for the promised land within the exodus-narrative, as in Romans 8 and Galatians 3–4. This inheritance will be ‘incorruptible’ (aphtharton, verse 4). ‘Praise and glory and honour’ (verse 7) is more or less exactly what Paul promised in Romans.⁴¹ The fact that the writer is drawing, here and elsewhere, on the Pauline tradition is a strong hint that we should take the language in the same way as in Paul.⁴²

Third, the salvation is based on the resurrection of Jesus himself (verse 3). This statement, which takes centre stage in the opening prayer of blessing, must be allowed the full force it would have had in a world innocent of the redefinitions that have gone on in the long tradition of western dualism. If the new birth and new life that belong to the Messiah’s people through his resurrection is simply about their leaving their bodies and departing to a non-earthly, non-bodily sphere, is not the resurrection itself a category mistake? We cannot get off this hook by appealing to verse 11 (which speaks of the Spirit of Christ testifying in the prophets ‘to the sufferings of the Messiah and the subsequent glory’): this is exactly the language used in Luke 24:26, and the non-mention of resurrection in that specific verse, passing directly from suffering to glory, can hardly be taken as an indication that the writer is downplaying the bodily significance of Easter. In any case, the same passage speaks ten verses later of the one god ‘raising him from the dead and giving him glory’. It is always risky to assume that, when writers tell an abbreviated version of a story, they are deliberately intending to downplay, or even deny, the elements that (for the moment) they omit. A comparison of Philippians 2:9–11 and 3:20–21 makes the same point.

Indeed, the new birth spoken of in 1:3, so far from implying that the ‘spiritual’ life is what really counts, is picked up at the end of the chapter and explained as the birth within the believer of the life which is then ‘imperishable’, aphthartos, the same word that was used of the ‘inheritance’ in 1:4. ‘The living and abiding word of God’, as in Isaiah’s prophecy of Israel’s great restoration (40:6–7), will do its work through the preaching of the gospel, producing the life which will last into the age to come (1 Peter 1:23–5). Though Paul does not use the language of ‘new birth’ as such, this sequence of thought—the word of the gospel doing its secret work in believers, resulting in their final renewal and resurrection—is very close to his understanding of how people come to faith.

This explains, I think, the use of psyche, normally translated ‘soul’, in 1:9. It is in any case, as we have seen, a multivalent term in the Judaism of the period, and within early Christianity. It cannot be pressed for a Platonic meaning, certainly not when the rest of the passage speaks strongly in the other direction.⁴³ The most we might say is that it here serves to denote, not indeed an ‘immortal’ element which all human beings automatically possess, a ‘soul’ which looks forward to the great day when it will be freed from physicality, but that aspect of the human being, renewed secretly and inwardly (rather like the ‘inner human’ in 2 Corinthians 4:16), which carries the promise that is to be worked out in the entire human person. This, I suggest, is what the writer means by ‘the hope that is in you’ (3:15). And this, too, is what gives a cross-and-resurrection shape to the frequently repeated appeal, as in Paul, that the readers ought to share the sufferings of the Messiah in order thereby to share his glory.⁴⁴ This is all very Pauline.

What then are we to say about the puzzling passage in the middle of the letter? As part of a long exhortation about standing firm under persecution, the author, not for the first time, refers to the example of Jesus. But this time, unlike 2:21–4, he expands the story of Jesus, to include in it a statement of what Jesus did in the time following his death:

^3:18 For the Messiah suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring you to God. He was put to death in/by flesh (sarki), but made alive in/by spirit (pneumati), ¹⁹ in which also he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, ²⁰ who once were disobedient, when God waited with great patience in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared in which a few, namely eight persons, were saved through water. ²¹ Baptism now saves you on this pattern: not as a putting off of dirt from the body, but as an appeal of a good conscience to God, through the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, ²² who has gone into heaven at God’s right hand, with all angels, authorities and powers subject to him.

The writer returns to his theme of suffering, explaining that ‘the Gentiles’ will find it inexplicable and offensive that Christians refuse to join them in their lives of dissipation. But, he says, there will come a day of reckoning:

^4:5 They will have to render an account to the one who is ready to judge the living and the dead. ⁶ For this reason the gospel was preached to the dead as well, so that, though judged in/by flesh (sarki) as humans are, they may live in the spirit as God does.

The two passages are clearly linked, though not necessarily identical in referent. Following the pattern of our enquiry so far, we must ask what is being said, first about human judgment and salvation, and second about Jesus himself.⁴⁵

The writer is quite clear, of course, about final judgment, and about Jesus as its agent (4:5). This is common coin throughout early Christianity. There will come a day when all alike will be judged by the Messiah, and it is important to live in the present in the light of that future (4:1–2). This seems to be the point of the reference to baptism in 3:21–2: baptism, as the symbolic beginning of the Christian life, unites the believer to the risen Messiah where he now is, at the right hand of God, in authority over the world (we may again compare 1 Corinthians 15:25–8 and Philippians 3:20–21). The believer is thus presented before God (3:18), and can stand there with a good conscience (3:21) because of the vindication of the Messiah who has suffered for his sins (3:18). This is dependent, of course, on maintaining that position, which demands moral effort in the present (4:1–2) to resist the lure of the old life (4:3–4). The overall point of the passage seems to be that as God’s judgment comes on the world, so the righteous are brought safely through it. In the case of Christians, baptism functions as a parallel both to the waters which judged the world in the days of Noah and to the death of the Messiah, suffering on behalf of sinners. They must now follow the same pattern through the necessary suffering both of persecution and of vilification for their moral stand. They will thereby maintain their good conscience before God, based on what God himself has done in and through Jesus, and made explicit in the powerful symbolic action of baptism.

What, then, about the spirits in prison? Out of the many interpretations of this passage the overall context seems to me to favour the following train of thought. The writer’s main point is that those he is addressing must be prepared to be brought safely through a time of ordeal and judgment. The analogy with Noah implies that the disobedient spirits, either the ‘watchers’ or simply the careless humans of Noah’s day, had not until then been judged as they deserved, but that now they would be. The one true god had been extremely patient in holding back the much-deserved judgment; now, in the flood, it came at last. But what was the end of the time of patience? Was it the flood itself, judging the wicked? Or was it when the Messiah, having suffered for sins, went to announce what he had done to the still-imprisoned spirits? And was that announcement good news for them (‘At last, redemption has been found’)? Or was it bad news (‘At last, your doom is sealed’)? If 4:6 addresses the same issue, the implication is that the ‘spirits’ seem to be the humans of Noah’s generation, who, having lost their lives in the flood while only eight people survived in the ark, were then to be saved, so many centuries later, through the Messiah’s death. If, however, the ‘spirits’ are the evil powers awaiting their judgment, as the present passage taken by itself would most probably suggest, then the proclamation would concern their final doom—seen as an encouragement to those who presently suffer the effects of evil. The passage remains one of the hardest in all early Christian literature, and we should not suppose that we have hereby solved its mysteries.⁴⁶ If either of the views I have outlined is anything near the truth, however, the passage does not make a substantial contribution to our main enquiry. We do not look here for an early Christian understanding of the afterlife that awaits people in general or Christians in particular.

If one of these options is more or less correct, however, we find ourselves in the same danger of misreading the text as has happened so often with 1 Corinthians 15, especially verse 50. The ‘flesh/spirit’ antithesis of 3:18 and 4:6 sounds to modern western ears as though it stands for our ‘physical/non-physical’ distinction; but this would take us down the wrong path. The writer insists that it is the resurrection of Jesus that has accomplished salvation. There is no hint in this text that resurrection is being understood any differently to its standard use across both the pagan and Jewish world and in the rest of early Christianity. When, then, the writer says that the Messiah was ‘put to death in/by flesh, but made alive in/by spirit’, we should not project on to this text the ‘physical/non-physical’ antithesis that ‘flesh/spirit’ conjures up for us today. It is possible, indeed, and I have reflected this in the translation with its two options, that here as in 1 Timothy 3:16 the word ‘spirit’ should be taken as instrumental, not locative. Perhaps we should understand the word ‘flesh’ in the previous line in the same way: he was put to death by the flesh, and brought to life by the Spirit.⁴⁷ The link to verse 19 would then not be ‘he came to life in the Spirit, and in that mode went to preach to the spirits in prison’, but ‘he was brought to life by the Spirit, and in the power of, or by means of, that Spirit he went …’. Either way, the explicit mention of Jesus’ resurrection in 3:21, picking up 1:3, should be recognized as the anchor of the passage. As in Ephesians 1 and Philippians 3, it is the resurrection that qualifies Jesus now to be the lord of angels, authorities and powers. He sits at the right hand of the one true god, as in Romans 8:34, and nothing shall separate his people from his powerful love.

The smaller, general letters in the New Testament thus yield varied results for our enquiry. They do not address the issue in the detail, or the frequency, that we find in Paul, the gospels and Acts. Nevertheless the hope of resurrection remains constant, and the resurrection of Jesus is its basis. If concentration has shifted away from resurrection as a major concern that needed to be hammered out (always assuming that these letters are later than Paul, the gospel traditions and Acts), the subject has not gone away or been subverted or distorted into something else. Resurrection still means what it meant elsewhere in the first century; the early Christians affirmed it as did the Pharisees; the next two or three generations went on doing so, as we shall see in the next chapter. What we find in these letters is a set of partial redefinitions, which fit into the general pattern we observed in Paul and elsewhere, though with local variations.

We must now turn to the book which, arguably, contains the most powerful statement of Christian future hope ever written: the Revelation of St John the Divine.

5. Revelation

Powerful, perhaps; but of course frequently misunderstood. The picture of the heavenly city in the last two chapters of Revelation has often been interpreted through the lens of later western piety, imagining that this is simply the ‘heaven’ to which Christians will go after their deaths. But that view is not simply somewhat deficient; it is failing to read the text. In Revelation 21 (and elsewhere; this vision dominates the whole book, not just the ending) the heavenly city comes down from heaven to earth. That is what the narrative is all about. As Christopher Rowland has insisted, the end of Revelation offers an ultimate rejection of a detached, other-worldly spirituality in favour of an integrated vision of new creation in which ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, the twin halves of created reality, are at last united. Always intended for one another, they are by this means to be remade, and to become the place where the living god will dwell among his people for ever.⁴⁸

That, however, is simply the end of the book. It is important to keep in mind throughout that that is where the story is going, but we must make our way there by reading the rest of the book while holding in mind the questions we have been examining throughout.

In the vision of Jesus which forms the climax of the opening chapter, the risen lord declares that, because of his own victory over death, he now has the proprietary rights over Death and Hades.⁴⁹ One only needs to reflect for a moment on the material surveyed in chapters 2, 3 and 4 of the present book, and on the lack of parallel to such a claim in the worlds there described, to see the enormity, and the precise focus, of what is said:

^1:17 Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, ¹⁸ and the living one. I was dead, and, look! I am alive to the ages of ages (eis tous aionas ton aionon), and I have the keys of Death and Hades.

This is picked up again in Revelation 2. It clearly forms part of the deliberate framing of the book, since in the penultimate scene Death and Hades themselves give up all their dead and are thrown into the lake of fire.⁵⁰ But before we can see the whole scene we are taken on a circuituous journey around the seven churches of Asia Minor, each of which is given a message containing promise and warning. Many of these echo one of the book’s major themes: the conquest, through suffering, of evil and of the world. This is itself a standard Jewish theme, refined through the Maccabaean period and afterwards, and now given a new focus through the death and resurrection of Jesus. One of the messages in particular, the one to Smyrna, urges the church to be faithful to death, promising that it will be given the crown of life, and that the ‘second death’ will not harm it. This is the first mention of the ‘second death’, an important part of the book’s climax.⁵¹

As the book progresses—there is neither space nor need to go into its labyrinthine details—we are offered a glimpse of yet another way of envisaging those who have died in the struggle and are not yet raised. They are waiting and resting ‘under the altar’, longing for God’s eventual victory over evil. They are told to rest a little longer, until the full number of their fellow-Christians have been killed as they were killed.⁵² This strange little scene only makes sense if we grant the Jewish, more specifically the Pharisaic, viewpoint that those who have died in the righteous cause will be raised in the future, on the day when the creator judges the world at last, but that they have not been raised just yet. This is also the right way to read the description of the martyrs in 7:14–17, unless indeed this is an anticipation of the vision in chapters 21 and 22.⁵³ This, too, is the appropriate explanation for the interjected note in 14:13, where the voice from heaven tells the seer to write this: ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.’ The Spirit, he says, affirms this, ‘because they rest from their labours, and their deeds follow them’. This should not be taken as a statement of their final destiny (some kind of endless ‘rest’), but only of their temporary abode. The same is true for those who are summoned to come up to heaven, and who are taken there on a cloud in full view of their enemies (11:12). We are right to assume that, in the larger drama of the book as a whole, the events of last three chapters will see all these people enter upon a new life.

The strange events narrated in 11:1–13 have been variously understood, and we need not stop to decide on the best interpretation of them. The two witnesses who, like Elijah, have the power to shut up the sky to prevent it raining, are persecuted and killed, but after three and a half days the creator’s breath of life enters into them and they stand on their feet. The writer clearly intends us to hear echoes of Genesis 2:7 and Ezekiel 37:5–14. The witnesses are then, like Elijah again, or perhaps like the ‘son of man’ figure in Daniel 7, caught up to heaven on a cloud. These events, described with the biblical imagery of resurrection, evoke celebration: ‘the kingdom of God and the Messiah has come at last’ (Revelation 11:15), the nations are to be judged, the servants of the true god are to be vindicated, and, significantly, those who destroy the earth will themselves be destroyed (11:18).

All of this is based, of course, on Jesus himself, and his own achievement in death and resurrection. He is the Lion of Judah who has conquered by being also the sacrificial lamb (Revelation 5:5–6, 9–10). As in Colossians 1, he is ‘the firstborn of the dead’ (Revelation 1:5), who is now ‘the ruler of the kings of the earth’.⁵⁴ As so often in the New Testament, resurrection retains its strong political emphasis: Easter constitutes Jesus as the world’s rightful sovereign in the midst of the warring and raging nations (11:18). The victory which is announced in chapter 11 is then celebrated again in chapter 19, as judgment is proclaimed and executed on Babylon the Whore, the parody of the heavenly city which is the Lamb’s true Bride. The constant theme throughout chapters 18–20 is the judgment which is given against Babylon, the oppressor of God’s people, and for the saints, apostles and prophets.⁵⁵

This leads to a differentiated resurrection, the most complex development of resurrection belief in any Jewish or Christian document of the whole period.⁵⁶ The beheaded martyrs, who had not worshipped the beast or its image, come to life and reign with the Messiah for a thousand years, being assured in advance that they will escape the ‘second death’. The rest of the dead, meanwhile, do not come to life until the thousand years are ended:

^20:4 And I saw thrones, with people sitting on them; and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls (psychas) of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for God’s word, those who did not worship the Beast or his image, and who did not receive the mark on their foreheads or their hands. And they came to life, and reigned with the Messiah for a thousand years. ⁵ The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection (he anastasis he prote). ⁶ Blessed and holy is the one who has a share in the first resurrection. Over them the second death has no authority, but they will be priests of God and of the Messiah, and they will reign with him for the thousand years.

Endless debates have swirled around the question of what exactly is being described here and when exactly it is supposed to take place. Large and influential schemes of thought about the ‘millennium’ have characterized different periods of church history from the second century to our own day.⁵⁷ What matters for our purposes is that we seem to have here a fresh and unique mutation of resurrection language and belief, not this time from within Judaism, but from within Christianity itself.

The mutation is not, however, random. It is in line with, though it goes beyond, one of the key developments we have observed in early Christianity, that ‘the resurrection’ has divided chronologically into two (first Jesus, then all his people).⁵⁸ Now the resurrection of Jesus’ people is itself split into two: first the martyrs, then, later, everyone else. Nothing is ever simple in Revelation, however, and the word ‘resurrection’ itself is not actually used either for the subsequent appearing of all the dead in 20:12–13 or for the final state of the blessed in chapters 21 and 22. It is, however, at least clear that the wicked are raised in order to be judged, as in several of the relevant Jewish texts, and as in John 5:28–9; until then, they have been the property of ‘Death and Hades’, and indeed of the sea (20:13), giving an interesting insight into first-century views of the combined physical and spiritual ‘location’ of the dead.⁵⁹ The wicked, having been raised to hear their own judgment, are then thrown into the lake of fire; so, too, are Death and Hades themselves (20:14–15). The sea is abolished in 21:1, at the same time as the first heaven and earth pass away to make room for the new ones.⁶⁰

The crucial thing for our purposes is the question: what is the first resurrection, spoken of in 20:5–6? It seems to be an initial coming-to-life of some, but not all, the righteous. Not only are martyrs specified rather than ordinary Christians who died in their beds, but one type of martyr is singled out: those who were beheaded.⁶¹ This group appears, then, to be as it were an advance party of the righteous, sharing already in the rule of the Messiah (whether this takes place in a ‘millennium’ more or less coterminous with the time of the church, or in a literal thousand-year period yet to come, does not at present concern us). When the rest of the dead are raised at last (20:12–13), many of them are found to have their names in the book of life (20:12, 15), and they are brought to life in the new Jerusalem (chapter 21) in which ‘death will be no more’ (21:4). What exactly does the writer have in mind?

It is conceivable that he thought of this ‘first resurrection’ in physical terms, locating the righteous in an embodied heavenly world (perhaps in the new Jerusalem which would eventually appear on earth, as in chapter 21), though few modern interpreters have gone this route.⁶² Classic ‘premillennial’ interpretation understands the passage in terms of a future period of a literal thousand years in which some or all of the righteous will rise and rule the world with Christ. In an effort to counteract this, it is often proposed that ‘the first resurrection’ is simply a way of describing the passage through death, into a blessed intermediate state, of all the righteous; but if that was what the writer meant it seems that he has not made it clear (not that that would be unusual in Revelation).⁶³ Perhaps the most damaging objection to this view arises from the meaning of ‘resurrection’ throughout the literature we have studied, pagan, Jewish and Christian: however much death itself is to be re-evaluated in the light of Jesus’ own death and resurrection, to use the word ‘resurrection’ to refer to death in an attempt to invest it with a new meaning seems to me to strain usage well beyond breaking point. In addition, verse 4 seems to envisage two stages; first, the martyrs are killed; then, at a later stage, they come to life. Collapsing these two into one (though, again, all things are possible with the kind of imagery we find in Revelation) seems implausible.

This does not mean, of course, that we are thereby projected into a premillennial literalism. Rather, it seems likely that we are faced here with a radical innovation: a use of the word ‘resurrection’ to mean a coming-to-life in a sense other than, and prior to, that of the final bodily raising.⁶⁴ For reasons that anyone who has read this far will understand, I regard the use of the word ‘spiritual’ to mean ‘non-bodily’ as misleading; and we should note carefully that in 20:4 the souls ‘came to life’. This implies that they were formerly ‘dead souls’ (still existing as souls, but in a state of death), and that they entered a new, second stage of post-mortem existence, a form of new life.⁶⁵ For them, it seems, the journey to the ultimate destination is a three-step progression after death: first, a state of being ‘dead souls’; second, whatever is meant by the ‘first resurrection’; third, the implied ‘second’ or ‘final’ resurrection described (though not with that phrase) in chapters 21 and 22. Since this corresponds to nothing else in either Jewish or early Christian literature, except for writings dependent on the present passage, it is difficult to get any clearer about what is in mind.

We can, however, suggest mat there is some analogy in the concept of an anticipated resurrection, as in Romans 6, Colossians 3 and elsewhere. There, as we saw, the baptized believer, whose current life is based on the past event of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and whose body will be raised in the future, is in a sense already ‘raised with the Messiah’. This metaphorical use of ‘resurrection’ language to denote the believer’s present status seems to me a partial parallel at least to the use in Revelation 20:4 of ‘the first resurrection’ to denote a new life that these particular ‘souls’ are given, based on Jesus’ resurrection and anticipating the full bodily resurrection still to come. Thus, though the usage is very strange, it can be understood as a bold extension of categories already being tried out within early Christianity, rather than an abandonment of normal Jewish and Christian language.

The judgment scene of chapter 20 gives way to the majestic and moving vision of the heavenly city, coming down out of heaven as a bride ready for her husband, the Messiah himself. Prominent among the descriptions of the city and its life are these: that death will be no more (21:4), and that everything less than the full, rich human life intended by the creator god is banished, cast into the lake of fire (21:8). These two final chapters are, in fact, full of indications of new creation. The key symbols are taken from biblical images of the renewed Jerusalem, which already carried the ‘new creation’ theme, retaining the outline of earlier pictures though developing many details in fresh ways. The river which flows from the city, like that from Eden only now life-giving in a new sense, supports the tree of life, not now a single tree in the garden, but growing plentifully along both banks of the river.⁶⁶ It bears fruit every month, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. Here and elsewhere we glimpse, not a static picture of bliss, but a new creation bursting with new projects, new goals and new possibilities. The long story of God and the world, of God and Israel, of God and the Messiah, has arrived at its goal. Death always was the ultimate denial of the good creation; now, with its abolition, the creator’s new world can proceed.

There is no need to labour the point. Revelation is as resurrection-soaked as any other book in the New Testament, for all that the key words occur only seldom (Revelation is anyway notoriously full of lexical peculiarities). The whole scenario only makes sense within the worldview of second-Temple Judaism, and in particular of that end of the spectrum which, longing for the coming kingdom, saw judgment on the wicked nations and the vindication of God’s suffering people as the moment to be longed, prayed and worked for. The message of the crucified and risen Messiah, the Lion who is also the Lamb, has reshaped this worldview, producing several new mutations, not least the splitting of death into two (the ‘first death’ and the ‘second death’) and indeed of resurrection itself into three (first the Messiah, then the ‘first resurrection’ of 20:5, then the final resurrection of 20:12). But, whatever we make of the details, there is no doubt that this book emphatically belongs, with Paul, the gospels and Acts, at the Pharisaic end of the first-century Jewish spectrum of belief about life after death; and that mainstream Pharisaic-style belief in resurrection has here been decisively reshaped around the fundamental belief that Israel’s Messiah has himself been raised from the dead, and now has the keys of Death and Hades.

6. Conclusion: Resurrection in the New Testament

The trees are fascinating in themselves, but for my present argument it is the forest that counts. We have not yet examined all the possible early evidence. Our next chapter will look outside the New Testament at several other early texts which indicate a spread of views on our topic. But the New Testament itself speaks, if not with one voice, certainly with a cluster of voices singing in close harmony. All the major books and strands, with the single exception of Hebrews, make resurrection a central and important topic, and set it within a framework of Jewish thought about the one god as creator and judge. This resurrection belief stands firmly over against the entire world of paganism on the one hand. Its reshaping, around the resurrection of Jesus himself, locates it as a dramatic modification within Judaism on the other.⁶⁷

There are five remarkable things about this, each of which calls for historical explanation.

First, even where the resurrection was taught within Judaism, it was seldom the major concern, but in early Christianity it is. It has moved, in Evans’s words, from the circumference to the centre.⁶⁸

Second, the Jewish and pagan worlds of late antiquity were, as we have seen, full of speculations about life after death, covering a wide spectrum of opinion inside Judaism as well as outside. Though the early Christians came from many different backgrounds in both Judaism and paganism (and though beliefs about life after death are among the more tenaciously guarded elements of a culture) there is virtually no such spectrum in the New Testament. One might almost say that, from this point of view, Christianity appears as a united sub-branch of Pharisaic Judaism.

Third, however, the Pharisaic view of resurrection has been clearly and consistently modified, right through the texts we have studied, by two things in particular.⁶⁹ (1) The resurrection, as the eschatological event, has split into two (first Jesus, then, at his return, all his people—the further subdivision of the latter moment by Revelation 20 does not affect the present point).⁷⁰ (2) The nature of the future resurrection body is further clarified: it will be incapable of dying or decaying, thus requiring a transformation not only for those already dead but for those still alive. This new mode of embodiment is hard to describe, but we can at least propose a label for it. The word ‘transphysical’ seems not to exist, surprisingly enough (one might have thought some enterprising ontologist would have employed it long since), and I proffer it for inclusion between transphosphorylation and transpicuous in the Oxford English Dictionary.⁷¹ The ‘trans’ is intended as a shortening of ‘transformed’. ‘Transphysical’ is not meant to describe in detail what sort of a body it was that the early Christians supposed Jesus already had, and believed that they themselves would eventually have. Nor indeed does it claim to explain how such a thing can come to be. It merely, but I hope usefully, puts a label on the demonstrable fact that the early Christians envisaged a body which was still robustly physical but also significantly different from the present one. If anything—since the main difference they seem to have envisaged is that the new body will not be corruptible—we might say not that it will be less physical, as though it were some kind of ghost or apparition, but more. ‘Not unclothed, but more fully clothed.’ As historians we may have difficulty imagining such a thing. But, equally as historians, we should not hold back from affirming that that is what the early Christians were talking about. They were not talking about a non-bodily, ‘spiritual’ survival. Had they wanted to do so, they had plenty of other language available to them, as indeed we do today. We should not project on to others the limitations of our own imagination.⁷²

Fourth, although the early Christians drew on many of the obvious biblical texts to express the meaning of what had happened to Jesus and of what would happen to all Jesus’ people, they consistently highlighted some texts and avoided others. There is, for example, virtually no use of Daniel 12:1–3, congenial though we might have supposed it to have been to the early Christians, not least because of its strong affirmation of the vindication of those who had died for their loyalty to God.⁷³

Fifth, whereas in Judaism the idea of resurrection was used, at least as early as Ezekiel 37, as a metaphor to give meaning to the concrete events of the expected return from exile, this metaphorical use is totally absent in early Christianity. It is replaced with a metaphorical use of resurrection, and indeed of ‘dying and rising’, which has different, though equally concrete, referents: baptism, holiness of bodily life, and Christian witness.

The present chapter, along with the preceding one and the earlier Part on Paul, thus pose an enormous question to the historian. How do we account for the sudden rise of a lively and many-sided movement, growing from within a pluriform Judaism and making substantial inroads into a highly pluriform pagan world, within which one strand of belief about what happens to people after death is affirmed exclusively, is made pivotal for several other aspects of the movement, and yet is significantly but consistently modified in specific directions across a wide range of texts?⁷⁴

The early Christians, of course, had an answer for this. They did not say that they had seen ‘signs of the heavenly presence of Christ’.⁷⁵ They said that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead, and that this event was the necessary and sufficient condition both for their being a ‘resurrection’ movement and for their being a ‘transformed-resurrection’ movement. But before we can examine this claim further we must extend our investigation to texts beyond the New Testament. What happened to this early Christian belief in the course of the second century?