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(i) Messiahship in Early Christianity

The argument at this point proceeds in three stages, (i) Early Christianity was thoroughly messianic, shaping itself around the belief that Jesus was God’s Messiah, Israel’s Messiah, (ii) But Messiahship in Judaism, such as it was, never envisaged someone doing the sort of things Jesus had done, let alone suffering the fate he suffered, (iii) The historian must therefore ask why the early Christians made this claim about Jesus, and why they reordered their lives accordingly.

The claim that early Christianity was thoroughly messianic is of course controversial. Those who assiduously promote ‘Q’ and Thomas (or some cleverly shortened versions of them) as the earliest Christian sources conclude from this that there were indeed early Christians who were not interested in Jesus’ Messiahship—though whether this is a conclusion from evidence, or the invention of evidence to produce this conclusion, remains a matter of debate. ‘Q’ itself gives clear signs of messianic belief, as we can see from Matthew 11:2–6 and Luke 7:18–23.³ But even if we were to allow at least a non-messianic early form of ‘Q’, we would have to comment that such a strand was quickly swallowed up in the thoroughly messianic movement that emerged almost at once; Messiahship is already so embedded in the thinking of the early Christians that it is taken for granted. Already in Paul the word Christos seems to be on its way to becoming simply a proper name, with denotation (referring to Jesus of Nazareth) but no longer with any particular connotation (indicating that he is Israel’s Messiah).

Some, indeed, think it has reached that point already. In a famous article Martin Hengel states that the word has become, in Paul, almost entirely a proper name, with only ‘a glimmer of its titular use’ in a few texts.⁴ I have argued exactly the opposite in various places: that Jesus’ Messiahship remained central and vital for Paul, closely integrated with the other major themes of his theology.⁵ Among other historical and exegetical advantages, this brings Paul into line with the Septuagint evidence.⁶ But this is not my present point. Even if Hengel is right, and the entire fabric of Paul’s messianic belief (which seems to me so clear) is an illusion, that only makes the question more acute: what was it that made early, pre-Pauline Christianity so solidly messianic that within twenty years the word Christos had become so familiar as to lose its titular significance and become a name, now with specific denotation but no longer with connotation?

Jesus’ Messiahship is not, of course, reduced to the status of a proper name in the multiple traditions represented in the gospels. I have explored the synoptic evidence reasonably fully in chapter 11 of Jesus and the Victory of God. Though my main point there was to uncover what Jesus himself believed about his own (often largely hidden) vocation, the range of texts, from different levels within normal synoptic stratigraphy, indicates that Jesus’ Messiahship continued to be the central topic in a large number of early Christian traditions.

The same is true in Acts. The early reference in 2:36, which emerges from a long and explicitly Davidic exegesis of Psalm 16, is thematic for the whole book. Just as in Luke 24:26, 46 (see below), the word Christos in passages like Acts 3:18, 20 must mean ‘Messiah’.⁷ The first half of Acts (up to chapter 12) has Herod hovering in the background, eventually dying through divine punishment for pagan-style hubris; part of the point, at the structural level, is that Jesus is the true king of the Jews. The second half of Acts (chapters 13 to the end), as we might expect granted the logic of the Psalms and prophecies which shaped later messianic belief, concentrates on showing how Jesus, now established as king of the Jews, is in fact the true lord of the world. There is indeed ‘another king, namely Jesus’ (17:7). Acts ends with Paul in Rome, announcing the kingdom of god (the fulfilment of the Jewish hope for the true god to be king, rather than the normal human kings), and teaching about Jesus as lord and Messiah, openly and unhindered (28:31).

Jesus’ Messiahship is also a major theme in John. However much John’s obviously high Christology dominates the overall movement of the book, Jesus as Christos remains a major preoccupation. The first time Jesus is recognized as such, indeed, the word is given in Aramaic: ‘We have found the Messiah,’ says Andrew to Simon. The evangelist, carefully providing a translation into Greek, indicates that he intends Christos to continue to carry this meaning throughout.⁸ This is reinforced in the discussion with the woman in Samaria (4:25, 29), the debates among the Jerusalem crowds (7:26f, 31, 41f; 10:24; 12:34), the decree of the Judaean rulers (9:22), and Martha’s statement of faith (11:27). On the two occasions where Iesous Christos occurs, looking (to the modern eye) like a double name, it is undoubtedly to be read with these messianic overtones (1:17; 17:3). In what was probably the originally intended ending of the gospel, following Jesus’ resurrection and Thomas’ confession of faith, the writer declares that his purpose in setting all this out is to create and sustain the faith that ‘the Messiah, the son of God, is Jesus’.⁹ This list of actual occurrences of the word Christos hardly does justice to the full range of messianic themes in the gospel; we may note, as one example, the way in which the ‘good shepherd’ discourse in chapter 10 evokes strongly (among other things) the biblical picture of the king as shepherd.¹⁰

The Messiahship of Jesus is thus a major theme in the gospels and Acts, and, on one reading at least, in Paul as well (and, on the alternative reading, it is such a major theme prior to Paul’s writings that familiarity has flattened the word into a proper name). It continues to be important not only in the rest of the New Testament but also in some other traditions, for instance in the story of the blood-relatives of Jesus who were brought before Domitian on suspicion of being members of a would-be royal family.¹¹ Among the next generation of writers, Ignatius, the Didache and Barnabas are all comfortable with the notion of Jesus’ Messiahship.¹²

We should therefore not be surprised to find that the early church, as well as being known as followers of ‘the Way’, were from quite early on known also as ‘Christians’.¹³ This emerges also from the (admittedly ambiguous) evidence in Suetonius and Tacitus.¹⁴ Josephus, too, in describing Jesus, declares that ‘ “the Messiah” was this man’, and, when speaking of the death of James, describes him as ‘the brother of the so-called “Messiah” ’.¹⁵ The evidence is quite overwhelming: Jesus was firmly known as ‘Messiah’, right across the board in early Christianity. In view of this it is, of course, far easier to accept that this was true for Paul as well than to have him use the word so frequently and yet not understand it as a title. But, as I say, even if this is not so, it merely tightens the screw of the argument even tighter, because clearly it would mean that the very early Christians used the word so frequently for Jesus that it had worn smooth. This in turn prevents any counter-argument to the effect that the evidence of the gospel traditions and Acts is all later. The idea that Christianity began as a non-messianic movement and then, when it went out into the wider world, suddenly developed all kinds of traditions about Jesus as Messiah, ought to be counter-intuitive to anyone thinking historically.

A similar result is reached if we consider one possible reason why Jesus was regarded as Messiah throughout early Christianity: that he had regarded himself in this way, and had said and done things which pointed towards his belief that he had such a vocation. I have argued at some length in the previous volume that this was indeed the case.¹⁶ However, any effect this teaching might have had in convincing his followers during his public career would have been completely undone by his shameful death at the hands of the Roman authorities, for reasons that will shortly become apparent. And, since in any case not everyone will be convinced by my argument about Jesus’ understanding of his own vocation, it is important to notice that if Jesus did not, in any way, give the impression that he thought he was Israel’s Messiah, that merely increases the puzzle still further. Where did this sudden burst of Messiah-belief come from?

(ii) Messiahship in Judaism

The problem is, of course, that the varied pictures of a coming Anointed One in the varied Judaisms of the time do not conform to what Jesus did and said, still less to what happened to him. I have, again, set these out elsewhere and can here simply summarize.¹⁷ In so far as we can generalize about such complex things, three interrelated themes emerge, stressed variously in different sources: the Messiah was supposed to win the decisive victory over the pagans, to rebuild or cleanse the Temple, and in some way or other to bring true, god-given justice and peace to the whole world. What nobody expected the Messiah to do was to die at the hands of the pagans instead of defeating them; to mount a symbolic attack on the Temple, warning it of imminent judgment, instead of rebuilding or cleansing it; and to suffer unjust violence at the hands of the pagans instead of bringing them justice and peace. The crucifixion of Jesus, understood from the point of view of any onlooker, whether sympathetic or not, was bound to have appeared as the complete destruction of any messianic pretensions or possibilities he or his followers might have hinted at. The violent execution of a prophet (which, uncontroversially, was how Jesus was regarded by many), still more of a would-be Messiah, did not say to any Jewish onlooker that he really was the Messiah after all, or that YHWH’s kingdom had come through his work. It said, powerfully and irresistibly, that he wasn’t and that it hadn’t.

We can see this clearly enough if we imagine for a moment the situation after the death of two of the most famous would-be Messiahs of the period, Simon bar-Giora during the first revolt (AD 66–70) and Simeon ben Kosiba (i.e. Bar-Kochba) during the second (AD 132–5).¹⁸ Simon was killed at the climax of Vespasian’s triumph in Rome; Simeon, we assume, died as the Romans crushed his movement and with it all prospect of Jewish liberation. We only have to exercise appropriate historical imagination, thinking into the situation a few days after their deaths, to see how it would look.

Take Simon, for example. The year is AD 70. Vespasian has become emperor. Titus, his son and heir, has obliterated the Jewish rebellion, destroying Jerusalem in the process. He returns to Rome to celebrate a magnificent triumph, pictured in stone to this day on Titus’ Arch at the east end of the Forum. The bedraggled Jewish prisoners are displayed within the pageant telling the story of the war; the spoils, particularly those from the Temple, are carried through the city. Finally there come the conquering heroes: Vespasian himself, followed by Titus, with Titus’ younger brother Domitian riding beside them. But there remains one ceremony:

The triumphal procession stopped in front of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus … it was an ancient custom to wait there until it was announced that the enemy general had been put to death. This was Simon son of Gioras, who had featured in the pageant among the prisoners, and then, with a halter thrown around him, was dragged to the spot beside the Forum where Roman law requires that criminals under sentence of death should be killed. The people leading him there scourged him as they went. After the announcement of his death, and the universal shouts of rejoicing that followed, the princes began the sacrifices; when they had been duly offered, they went back to the palace … The city of Rome held a celebration that day for its victory in the war against its enemies, for the stopping of civil disturbances, and for the beginning of hopes of prosperity.

When the triumphal ceremonies were over, and the empire of the Romans had been established on the firmest possible foundation, Vespasian decided to set up a temple of Peace …¹⁹

Roman victory; Roman justice; Roman empire; Roman peace; all because the Jewish leader had been killed. An interesting parallel to the Christian claim, that salvation had come to the world because of the death of the Messiah; but we will let that pass for the moment. Instead, as our immediate task, imagine two or three of Simon’s supporters—if there were any of them left, hiding in caves or secret cellars—a few days later. Supposing one said to another, ‘Actually, I think Simon really was the Messiah.’ The kindest view the others might take would be that the speaker had gone mad. Alternatively, the statement might be understood as heavily ironic: he really was our Messiah—in other words, our god has forgotten us, this is the best we can expect, we may as well admit there is no more hope! But if the case were pressed: Simon really was the Messiah, so we should now launch a movement which hails him as such, which declares to our fellow Jews that YHWH’S anointed has been in their midst and has established the kingdom (at the very moment when Caesar’s kingdom seems more firmly established than ever!), and which may then go out into the world to declare that Simon, as the king of the Jews, is really the lord of the whole world … then the verdict of madness, of a kind of criminal lunacy which turns reality upside down and inside out, seems inevitable. And if (to anticipate the sort of theory we shall discuss later) the speaker, realizing his companions’ horror at his proposal, were to explain it all by saying that he had received a vision of Simon being with him; that he had a strong sense that Israel’s god had forgiven them for their failure to support him properly; that he had enjoyed a wonderful and heartwarming spiritual experience as he thought about the death of Simon; then his companions would have shaken their heads sorrowfully. None of this would remotely mean that Simon was the Messiah after all. None of it would mean that the long-awaited kingdom of Israel’s god had come. None of it would mean, either, that Simon had been ‘raised from the dead’.²⁰

A moment’s disciplined historical imagination, then (something ‘historical criticism’ has often been unwilling to employ), is enough to make the point. Jewish beliefs about a coming Messiah, and about the deeds such a figure would be expected to accomplish, came in various shapes and sizes, but they did not include a shameful death which left the Roman empire celebrating its usual victory. This leads to the third point, the historian’s necessary question.

(iii) Why Then Call Jesus Messiah?

Why then did the early Christians acclaim Jesus as Messiah, when he obviously wasn’t? He too had been scourged, dragged through the streets and executed. Indeed, his execution was in public, increasing the shame and the sense of utter and devastating victory for the pagans. Faced with his death, why would any of his followers have dreamed of saying that he was Messiah—and, moreover, as we shall see, of reordering their worldview around this belief, so that Christianity was launched precisely as a messianic movement, albeit with significant differences?

The options before them were clear. If their would-be Messiah had been killed, they could have crept back home, thankful to escape with their lives. They could have done what the post-135 rabbis did, and declared that they were finished with dreams of revolution, and that from henceforth they would find a different way of being loyal to Israel’s god. Or they could, of course, have found another Messiah.

This was a serious option. That much is clear from several movements in the first century which are linked through a family dynasty. Although not all the details are clear, it seems that for nearly a hundred years, right through the period of Jesus’ public career and Paul’s travels, a sequence of leaders emerged from within a single family, ending with the Eleazar who led the final, fatal stand on Masada.²¹ Since Jesus of Nazareth had blood relatives who were known as such two generations after his death, there would have been no problem in finding some relation on whose shoulders a revived hope might be placed.

There was one relative in particular who might have seemed an ideal candidate. James, ‘the brother of the lord’, had probably not followed Jesus throughout his public career, but according to the very early tradition he, like the Eleven, had seen the risen Jesus.²² He had then quickly become one of the central leaders in the Jerusalem church. When Paul first went to Jerusalem after his meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus, this James was the only one of the ‘apostles’, other than Peter, whom he met.²³ Acts portrays him as the one who sums up the debate about the conditions for admitting Gentiles to full membership in the community.²⁴ He was clearly regarded as the, or at least a, central point of authority in the Jerusalem church, and hence in the worldwide church, even though people claiming his authority might be opposed by Paul.²⁵ Whether or not the letter ascribed to him in the New Testament is actually his work (this used to be ruled out automatically in scholarship, but is now much more widely recognized as a distinct possibility), the fact of its being ascribed to him shows something of the status he enjoyed in early Christianity as a wise and reputed teacher.²⁶ And the account of his death in Hegesippus (preserved in Eusebius) portrays him as James the Just—dikaios in Greek, presumably tzaddik in Hebrew—on account of his lifelong ascetic piety, constant prayer and effective witness.²⁷ According to this (seemingly garbled) account of Hegesippus, the Jewish leaders called on James to quell the growing belief in his brother Jesus as Messiah:

We beseech you to restrain the people since they are straying after Jesus as though he were the Messiah. We beseech you to persuade concerning Jesus all who come for the day of the Passover, for all obey you. For we and the whole people testify to you that you are righteous and do not respect persons. So do you persuade the crowd not to err concerning Jesus, for the whole people and we all obey you.²⁸

James, however, did the opposite, proclaiming Jesus as the messianic son of man, and evoking from the crowd shouts of ‘Hosanna to the son of David.’²⁹ The authorities therefore threw him down, stoned him, and finally had him clubbed to death:

And they buried him on the spot by the temple, and his gravestone still remains by the temple. He became a true witness both to Jews and to Greeks that Jesus is the Messiah. Immediately Vespasian began to besiege them.³⁰

The parallel report in Josephus confirms the basic truth: that James was highly regarded by loyal and strict Jews, and that he was known as ‘the brother of Jesus the so-called Messiah’ (ton adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou).³¹ James was, in other words, a prime candidate to be considered a messianic figure in his own right.

Again, even a small amount of disciplined historical imagination will paint the scene. Jesus of Nazareth had been a great leader. Most considered him a prophet, many the Messiah. But the Romans caught him and killed him, the way they did with so many would-be prophets and Messiahs. Just as John the Baptist’s movement faded into comparative obscurity with John’s imprisonment and death, with the speculation about John’s role within various eschatological scenarios being transferred to his slightly younger cousin, so one can easily imagine Jesus’ movement fading into comparative obscurity after his execution, with the spotlight now turning on his somewhat younger brother.³² The younger brother turns out to be a great leader: devout, a fine teacher, well respected by other devout Jews. What more could one want? But nobody ever dreamed of saying that James was the Messiah. He was simply known as the brother of ‘Jesus the Messiah’. At this point the argument runs in parallel with the famous Sherlock Holmes story that hinges on the dog doing something remarkable in the night—or rather on the fact that the dog did not do anything in the night, though it had every reason to do so, thus revealing the fact that the dog must have recognized the intruder.³³ If we suppose that Jesus of Nazareth had simply been executed as a messianic pretender, and that his younger brother had become a strong and powerful leader among his former followers over the next thirty years, someone would have been bound, given the climate of the times, to suggest that James himself was the Messiah. But nobody ever did.

The historian is therefore faced with the same kind of puzzle as is posed by the striking adoption, but also transformation, of the Jewish belief in resurrection. We are forced to postulate something which will account for the fact that a group of first-century Jews, who had cherished messianic hopes and centred them on Jesus of Nazareth, claimed after his death that he really was the Messiah despite the crushing evidence to the contrary.³⁴ They did not even consider the possibility that, after his apparent failure, they might find another Messiah from among his own family, even when there was one very obvious candidate.

This historical question is further sharpened by what happened to the portrait of ‘Messiah’ in early Christianity.³⁵ Despite what scholars have often said, it was not abandoned, but nor was it simply adopted wholesale from existing Jewish models. It was transformed, redrawn, around Jesus himself. The early Christians maintained, on the one hand, the basic shape of Jewish messianic belief. They reaffirmed its biblical roots in the Psalms, the prophets and the biblical royal narratives; they developed it in biblical ways (such as the belief that Israel’s Messiah was the world’s true lord; see below). At the same time, on the other hand, they quickly allowed this belief to be transformed in four ways. It lost its ethnic specificity: the Messiah did not belong only to the Jews. The ‘messianic battle’ changed its character: the Messiah would not fight a military campaign, but would confront evil itself. The rebuilt Temple would not be a bricks-and-mortar construction in Jerusalem, but the community of Jesus’ followers. The justice, peace and salvation which the Messiah would bring to the world would not be a Jewish version of the imperial dream of Rome, but would be God’s dikaiosune, God’s eirene, God’s soteria, poured out upon the world through the renewal of the whole creation. All this is visible in some of the primary documents of early Christianity, such as Romans, 1 Corinthians, Acts and Revelation. Something has happened to belief in a coming Messiah, something which reminds us of what happened to the Jewish belief in a future resurrection. It has neither been abandoned, nor simply reaffirmed wholesale. It has been redefined around Jesus. Why?

To this question, of course, the early Christians reply with one voice: we believe that Jesus was and is the Messiah because he was raised bodily from the dead. Nothing else will do. And to this the historian has to say: yes, this belief would produce that result. If the early Christians believed that Israel’s god had raised Jesus from the dead, they would believe that he had been vindicated as Messiah despite his shameful death. But this argument simply takes us to the belief itself. How and why the early Christians arrived at this belief is a further question which we must pursue in due course.

First, though, we must look at the other remarkable thing the early Christians said about Jesus: that he was the kyrios, both in the sense of being the world’s true lord and in the sense of somehow being identified with the kyrios of the Septuagint, where the translators used this word to denote YHWH himself.

(i) Introduction

If Jesus was the Messiah, he was also the lord of the whole world. This early Christian belief is rooted firmly in the Psalms, and cannot be cut off from those roots without losing its particular force. That, of course, is what has happened in a great deal of New Testament scholarship over the last century. The train of thought in scholarly argument seems to have proceeded something like this: (a) Messiahship is of course a Jewish category, so when the gospel went out to the Gentile world it would be meaningless; (b) at that point the early evangelists, particularly Paul, exchanged it for a different category altogether, namely kyrios, ‘lord’, which was already well known in Gentile circles as a title for cultic deities; (c) the ‘Lordship’ of Jesus in early Christianity is therefore to be understood in terms of hellenistic religion rather than Jewish expectation, and is based on his assumed exaltation to heaven, and on early Christian ‘religious experience’ of him, rather than on his resurrection from the dead; (d) Jesus’ ‘Lordship’ therefore has little to do with socio-political reality, even less to do with Jewish kingdom-of-god expectation, and nothing whatever to do with anything that might have happened to Jesus immediately after his death.³⁶

This analysis of ‘Lordship’ in early Christianity has been attacked from many sides over recent decades. But even those who have objected to various of its features have regularly missed the point that must be made here: that, from Paul onwards, belief in Jesus as lord was (among other things) a function of belief in him as Messiah, not a move away from that belief. It was grounded, in fact, in the classic biblical portraits of the Messiah:

I will tell of YHWH’S decree:

he said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you.

Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your heritage,

the ends of the earth as your possession.

You shall break them with a rod of iron,

and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

Now therefore, O kings, be wise;

be warned, you rulers of the earth.

Serve YHWH with fear, rejoice with trembling;

kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way …³⁷

Give the king your judgments, O God;

and your righteousness to the king’s son.

He shall judge your people with righteousness,

and your poor with judgment …

He shall have dominion also from one sea to the other,

from the River [Euphrates] to the ends of the earth.

Those who dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him,

and his enemies shall lick the dust.

The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents,

the kings of Sheba and Seba offer gifts.

Yes, all kings shall fall down before him,

all nations serve him,

For he shall deliver the needy when they cry,

and the poor, those who have no one to help them …

His name shall endure for ever;

his name shall be continued as long as the sun;

And people will be blessed by him;

all nations shall call him blessed.³⁸

I have found David my servant; with my holy oil have I anointed him …

The enemy shall not harm him; the son of wickedness will not hurt him.

I will strike down his enemies before him, and smite those who hate him …

I will set his hand also on the sea, and his right hand on the rivers.

He shall cry to me, You are my father, my God and the rock of my salvation;

And I will make him my firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.³⁹

There shall come forth a shoot from the stock of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots …

With righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked …

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal for the peoples;

The nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.⁴⁰

Behold my servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my spirit upon him; he shall bring forth justice to the Gentiles …

He shall not fail, nor be dismayed, until he has established justice in the earth;

And the isles shall wait for his law …

I, YHWH, have called you in righteousness,

and will hold your hand, and will keep you;

I will give you for a covenant to the peoples, for a light to the Gentiles …⁴¹

As I watched in the night visions,

I saw one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven.

He came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.

To him was given glory and kingship,

so that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him.

His dominion is an everlasting dominion,

and his kingship one that shall never be destroyed.⁴²

These passages are all well known, and they need to be read in their larger contexts for their complete impact to be felt. The controversies that surround them, their reuse in second-Temple Judaism, and their fresh use within early Christianity, are too numerous to list, let alone to discuss.⁴³ But that is not necessary within the present argument. My point is simple, and can be stated in three propositions: (1) these texts all bear witness to a biblically rooted belief in a coming king who would be master not only of Israel but also of the whole world; (2) these are the passages drawn on by the early Christians to speak about Jesus not only as Israel’s Messiah (albeit in a redefined sense) but also as the world’s true lord, again in a sense which was redefined but never abandoned; (3) we must therefore understand the early Christian belief in Jesus as lord, not as part of an abandonment of Jewish categories and an embracing of Greek ones, nor as part of an abandonment of the hope for god’s kingdom and a turning instead to ‘religious experience’, nor yet as an abandonment of the political meaning of this universal sovereignty and a re-expression of it in terms of ‘religious’ loyalty, but as a fresh statement of the Jewish hope that the one true god, the creator, would become lord of the whole world. The word ‘lord’, it is true, does not occur in this sense in the passages quoted, but in the first century it was the obvious word to use for one to whom was given sovereignty, mastery, of the kingdoms of the world.

The question of Jesus’ Lordship thus opens up into three more specific enquiries: about the inauguration of the ‘kingdom of god’; about Jesus as the present world ruler; and about the relationship (a horribly slippery word) between Jesus and YHWH. These are vast topics. For our present purpose we skate lightly over their surface, aware of much cold critical water beneath the ice, but confident that it will bear the weight of the argument.

(iii) Jesus and Caesar

The same conclusion is reached if we consider, even briefly, one of the primary early Christian meanings of Jesus as kyrios: the implicit contrast with Caesar. Precisely on the basis of the key texts from the Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel and elsewhere, the early Christians declared that Jesus was lord in such a way as to imply, over and over again, that Caesar was not. I have written about this elsewhere, and here simply summarize what is becoming a major strand in New Testament scholarship.⁵⁰

The theme is strong, though until recently largely unnoticed, in Paul. Romans 1:3–5 declares the ‘gospel’ that Jesus is the royal and powerful ‘son of god’ to whom the world owes loyal allegiance; Romans 1:16–17 declares that in this ‘gospel’ are to be found soteria and dikaiosune. Every element in this double formulation echoes, and parodies, things that were said in the imperial ideology, and the emerging imperial cult, at the time. At the other end of the letter’s theological exposition (15:12), Paul quotes Isaiah 11:10: the Davidic Messiah is the world’s true lord, and in him the nations will hope. And in the opening and closing passages this belief in Jesus as the royal Messiah, the world’s true lord, is founded on the resurrection.⁵¹ Similarly, in Philippians 2:6–11, what is said of Jesus echoes remarkably what was being said, in the imperial ideology of the time, about Caesar.⁵² Philippians 3:19–21, in a sudden blaze of christological colour, then builds on this to declare that Jesus is Messiah, saviour and lord; that he now has the power to bring everything in subjection to himself, including the very composition and nature of present human bodies; and that his people are now a ‘colony of heaven’, an advance guard of the project to bring the whole world under the sovereign and saving rule of Israel’s god. First Corinthians 15:20–28 (a central and vital passage for many Pauline themes, not least resurrection itself) speaks of Jesus as Messiah in an explicitly royal sense, with all enemies put under his feet. First Thessalonians 4:15–17 speaks of the ‘arrival’ of Jesus in language which deliberately echoes the talk of the ‘arrival’ of the emperor, with his subjects going out to meet him as the citizens would go out to meet Caesar and escort him back into a city. The next chapter then warns (5:3) that those who spoke of ‘peace and security’—in other words, the Roman imperial ideology that regularly boasted of just that—would face sudden destruction.

Nor is this confined to Paul. Matthew’s risen Jesus declares that all authority in heaven and on earth is now given to him.⁵³ When the disciples at the start of Acts ask Jesus if this is the time for him to restore the kingdom to Israel, he tells them that they will receive power, and will be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. The answer to their question, in other words, is, ‘Yes, but in a redefined sense; and you are to be its agents as well as its beneficiaries.’⁵⁴ The gospel of Jesus as king of the Jews is then placed, by implication, in tension with the rule of Herod as king of the Jews, until the latter’s sudden death in chapter 12; whereupon the gospel of Jesus as lord of the world is placed in tension with the rule of Caesar as lord of the world, a tension which comes to the surface in 17:7 and smoulders on through to the pregnant but powerful statement of the closing passage, with Paul in Rome speaking of the kingdom of the true god and the Lordship of Jesus himself. Revelation, of course, highlights Jesus as ‘the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth’, and as ‘king of kings and lord of lords’, and in several passages makes it clear that this is not simply a ‘spiritual’ or ‘heavenly’ Lordship, but one which is designed to take effect within the created world itself, and ultimately in its great renewal.⁵⁵ This entire strand of thought, of the kingdom of Israel’s god inaugurated through the Lordship of Jesus and now confronting the kingdoms of the world with a rival call for loyalty, finds classic expression, a century after Paul, in the famous and deliberately subversive statement of Polycarp: ‘How can I blaspheme my king who saved me?’⁵⁶ Caesar was the king, the saviour, and demanded an oath by his ‘genius’; Polycarp declared that to call Caesar these things would be to commit blasphemy against the true, divine king and saviour.

It is important to stress that this does not mean that the early Christians were not prepared to respect legal authorities as constituted by the one true god. The very documents that announce the subversive gospel of Jesus often urge such respect and obedience; a good example is the Martyrdom of Polycarp, which in the same short passage, almost the same breath, makes it clear both that Christians owe allegiance to Christ, not Caesar, and that they have been taught to render due honour to the authorities whom God has appointed.⁵⁷ Our particular modern and western way of formulating these matters, implying that one must either be a revolutionary or a compromised conservative, has made it harder, not easier, for us to arrive at a historical grasp of how the early Christians saw the matter.⁵⁸ The command to respect authorities does not cut the nerve of the gospel’s political challenge. It does not mean that the ‘Lordship’ of Jesus is reduced to a purely ‘spiritual’ matter. Had that been so, the great persecutions of the first three centuries could largely have been avoided. That, as we saw in the previous chapter, was the road taken by gnosticism.

This subversive belief in Jesus’ Lordship, over against that of Caesar, was held in the teeth of the fact that Caesar had demonstrated his superior power in the obvious way, by having Jesus crucified. But the truly extra-ordinary thing is that this belief was held by a tiny group who, for the first two or three generations at least, could hardly have mounted a riot in a village, let alone a revolution in an empire. And yet they persisted against all the odds, attracting the unwelcome notice of the authorities because of the power of the message and the worldview and lifestyle it generated and sustained. And whenever we go back to the key texts for evidence of why they persisted in such an improbable and dangerous belief they answer: it is because Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. And this provokes us to ask once more: why did they make this claim?

(iv) Jesus and YHWH

The third aspect of Jesus’ ‘Lordship’ is closely integrated with both the others, and is not to be separated off as a different subject altogether. It is probably the largest single topic in the study of early Christianity, and yet we cannot devote more than a short sub-section to it as part of our larger argument. It boils down to this: that when the early Christians called Jesus kyrios, one of the overtones that word quickly acquired, astonishing and even shocking though this must have been, was that texts in the Greek Bible which used kyrios to translate the divine name YHWH were now used to denote Jesus himself, with a subtlety and theological sophistication that seems to go back to the earliest days of the Christian movement. It is already firmly embedded in some of our earliest evidence, looking in some cases as though even there it was already part of traditional formulations. What caused this particular revolution, and how does it relate to the other redefinitions we have been studying?

As usual the primary evidence is in Paul. I have set out the material elsewhere and here simply summarize.⁵⁹ In Philippians 2:10 Paul quotes Isaiah 45:23, a fiercely monotheistic text which declares that to YHWH and YHWH only (the Septuagint of course having kyrios for YHWH) every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear; and Paul declares that this will come true when every knee and tongue do homage to Jesus. ‘Jesus, Messiah, is kyrios’, they will declare—to the glory of God the father. In 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul takes the Shema itself, the central Jewish daily prayer and confession of monotheistic faith (‘YHWH our God, YHWH is one’), and gives the two words YHWH (kyrios) and ‘God’ (theos) different referents, so that theos refers to ‘the father, from whom are all things and we to him’ and kyrios refers to ‘Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things and we through him’. In Colossians 1:15–20 the same differentiation is expressed in alternative language, but with the same import. I have attempted a brief explanation of how and why Paul came to this position in chapter 8 above.

What is more, Paul elsewhere takes particular texts which refer to YHWH and uses them, without apology or even much explanation, as texts about Jesus. This occurs in contexts where he clearly has the entire passage in mind; he is not simply grabbing a few words at random without being aware of their full meaning. A good example is Romans 10:13, where Paul quotes Joel 2:32 to the effect that ‘all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved’. He is clearly aware that by ‘the Lord’ (kyrios) Joel refers to YHWH; he is, equally clearly, intending kyrios to refer to Jesus.⁶⁰ Significantly, this passage is part of a sequence of thought in which we also find the resurrection and Lordship of Jesus as the centre of Christian faith and confession (10:9), and the worldwide spread of the gospel message as the immediate consequence (10:14–19). Likewise, the whole theme of ‘the day of YHWH’ in the Old Testament has been transposed, in Paul and elsewhere in early Christianity, into ‘the day of the kyrios’, i.e. of Jesus, or into ‘the day of the Messiah’.⁶¹

We do not have to look far in other strands of early Christianity to find similar phenomena. Thomas’ great confession of faith in John 20 brings together kyrios and theos, applying both to Jesus. The evangelist’s comment is that the aim of his writing is to produce, or perhaps to sustain, faith that the Messiah is Jesus.⁶² The first letter of Peter (2:3) speaks of ‘tasting that the Lord is good’, quoting, in relation to Jesus, what Psalm 34 had said about YHWH.⁶³ In 1 Peter 3:15 we find a quotation from Isaiah 8:13 in which ‘the Messiah’ has been added to ‘Lord’ to make it clear that what was spoken of YHWH in this Old Testament passage is now to be understood of Jesus the Messiah.⁶⁴ This is of course only the tip of the iceberg of the New Testament’s remarkably high, early and Jewish Christology, but it is enough to make our present point.

So why did the early Christians not only come to regard Jesus as kyrios in the sense of ‘the world’s true lord, of whom Caesar is a parody’, but as somehow identified with, or as, YHWH himself, YHWH in person? Does this, too, have something to do with the resurrection?

Some obvious texts point in this direction. When Thomas bursts through initial doubt to sudden faith in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, he exclaims, ‘My lord and my God’; and the evangelist clearly intends this as a climactic and decisive concluding statement of what was said in the gospel’s prologue.⁶⁵ So, too, Paul’s statement in Romans 1:4 (if he is quoting an earlier formula, he does so because it says what he wants to say in this highly programmatic opening) is often taken in this sense: Jesus was marked out as ‘son of god’ as a result of the resurrection of the dead. I have argued elsewhere that ‘son of god’ in this passage must be taken primarily as meaning ‘Messiah’, not least because of the explicit Davidic reference in the previous verse.⁶⁶ But by Romans 5:10 and 8:3 it is clear that Paul is able to use this messianic title as a way of (so to speak) placing Jesus on the divine side of the equation as well as the human one. Precisely because Romans 1:3–4 is so clearly programmatic this cannot be ruled out here as well.

We must be careful at this point not to short-circuit the developing understanding that seems to have taken place. The story of Thomas is unique in this respect, as in some others: there is no suggestion in the other resurrection stories, or in the stories of Paul’s conversion, that there was an instant deduction that ran ‘risen from the dead, therefore in some sense divine’. Hardly surprisingly, there is no sign in second-Temple Judaism of any such link; since no second-Temple Jews known to us were expecting the one god to appear in human form, let alone to suffer physical death, nobody would have thought of resurrection as demonstrating someone’s divinity. Equally, such second-Temple Jews as were expecting resurrection were expecting it to happen to everyone—certainly to all the righteous among God’s people, and perhaps to all the wicked as well. When the New Testament predicts the resurrection of all who belong to Jesus, there is no suggestion that they will thereby become, or be shown to be, divine. Clearly, therefore, resurrection by itself could not be taken to ‘prove’ the ‘divinity’ of Jesus; if it did, it would prove far too much. The over-simple apologetic strategy one sometimes encounters (‘he was raised from the dead, therefore he is the second person of the Trinity’) makes no sense, from either end, within the historical world of the first century.

In particular, a historical scheme is sometimes proposed which seems to me to get things exactly the wrong way round.⁶⁷ According to this view, the first thing the disciples came to believe about Jesus after his death was that he had been exalted to heaven, quite possibly in a sort of apotheosis or divinization; then they came to express that belief in terms of his being alive again after his death; then they came to use the language of resurrection to describe this new aliveness; then they made up stories about an empty tomb; and then, finally, they made up further stories about Jesus eating and drinking and inviting them to touch him. The first move in this sequence is striking in that, if true, it would correspond to what was regularly said about greco-roman heroes, especially kings, and particularly the Roman rulers and emperors from Julius Caesar onwards: that they had ‘gone to heaven’ after their deaths, not in the sense commonly meant today (post-mortem disembodied bliss, or at least rest), but in the sense of joining the pantheon of the gods.⁶⁸

This is where it is vital to keep our feet firmly on the ground of second-Temple Judaism. There is no evidence that Jews in this period would have imagined that any figure of the immediate past could be ‘divinized’ in this regular pagan fashion. (Of course, this was part of the point within the old history-of-religions model, which argued that at this point Christianity broke away from Judaism and borrowed Gentile ideas; the nemesis of this is when Jewish and agnostic writers criticize the early Christians, not least Paul, for abandoning their Jewish heritage for a mess of pagan speculation.⁶⁹) The story of Jesus’ ascension in Acts 1 has some affinities with tales of imperial apotheosis. That, indeed, may be part of the point of it.⁷⁰ But it is hard to see what sort of an event could have convinced second-Temple Jews that someone who had been cruelly executed by the pagan authorities had now been ‘exalted to heaven’ in the sense of ‘divinization’ which would be required for this whole train of thought to work. The closest parallels would have to be the deaths of the martyrs, not least the Maccabaean heroes. But, though the martyrs in 2 Maccabees went to their death predicting their future resurrection, there is no suggestion that they had been exalted or glorified, or indeed raised from the dead, still less divinized.

Even if we suppose the very unlikely hypothesis that the early disciples, all of them of course Jewish monotheists, had come to be convinced of Jesus’ divinity without any bodily resurrection having taken place, there is no reason to suppose that they would then have begun to think or talk about resurrection itself. If, somehow, they had come to believe that a person like Jesus had been exalted to heaven, that would be quite enough; why add extraneous ideas? What, from the point of view we are hypothesizing, could resurrection have added to exaltation or even divinization? Why would anyone work back by that route, to end up predicating something which nobody was expecting and which everybody knew had not happened? Even supposing that, having come to believe in Jesus’ divinity (by what route it is not clear), they then began to pore over the scriptures to find back-up material for the belief to which they had come, and even supposing they pondered Daniel 12, Isaiah 26 or Ezekiel 37 in this context, there is still no reason to suppose that they would have read any of these texts as predicting the resurrection of one person out of all Israel, all the righteous—let alone of one who was somehow also the embodiment of Israel’s god. Nor is there any reason to suppose that, if they did, they would connect that with the belief in Jesus’ divinity to which, on this theory, they had somehow already come. Paul could challenge Agrippa to say whether or not it was incredible that Israel’s god would raise the dead. Nobody ever challenged anyone to contemplate the possibility that Israel’s god might himself rise from the dead.

What alternative sequence of thought, then, can we propose?

We must begin by distinguishing at least four things: (1) the sequence of thought, starting with Easter, by which the first disciples came to their full view of Jesus’ identity; (2) the sequence of thought, following his unique ‘seeing’ of Jesus, by which Paul came to his full view; (3) the arguments Paul then used to persuade others of his view or to support them in holding it; (4) other early Christian arguments to the same end.⁷¹ And we must frame our thinking, if we are to work historically at all, with the worldviews, and networks of aims and beliefs, which we can deduce to have been held by the first disciples, and by Paul, in what we might call Holy Saturday mode, that is, after the crucifixion of Jesus and before any suggestion of Easter. For Paul, this mode lasted longer, of course, and everything we know about him suggests that his head was remarkably well stocked with biblical material and theological understanding long before he rethought it all around Jesus. But we must also suppose that the other disciples knew at least some basic and well-known scriptural texts, and connected them at least loosely with the theological ideas, not least speculations about prophets, Messiahs and the kingdom of god, as would have been readily current at the time.

The account I propose is the mirror-image of the one I have criticized above, and goes in a different direction to those of Kim and Newman which I discussed in chapter 8. It offers a sequence of moves, each step of which is comprehensible within second-Temple Judaism. And, like the other elements of the present chapter, it leaves us once more with the question: what caused the earliest disciples, and then Paul, to hold so clearly the belief which formed the first step in the sequence?

The first disciples had believed Jesus of Nazareth to be ‘a prophet mighty in word and deed’.⁷² They had come, somewhat more gradually but in the end decisively, to believe that he was Israel’s Messiah, the Lord’s anointed, the promised redeemer.⁷³ As I argued at length in Jesus and the Victory of God, this was the principal charge against Jesus at his hearings before both the Jewish and the Roman authorities; at least, it was the form in which the Jewish authorities transmitted their charge to the Roman governor, knowing that a would-be rebel king would be of more interest to Pilate than a Jewish blasphemer.⁷⁴ The accusatory title on the cross, portraying Jesus as the king of the Jews, drew together several strands of thought, including Jesus’ subversive act of prophetic symbolism against the Temple, and his use of cryptic ‘royal’, i.e. messianic, arguments and texts such as Psalm 110 and Daniel 7.⁷⁵ As I argued in the earlier volume, it may well be that Jesus intended these to be a pointer to a deeper vocation and identity than anything previously ascribed to a would-be Messiah, but there is no suggestion that the disciples had picked up this point, or anything like it.⁷⁶

Each step needs to be examined carefully, not taken for granted or short-circuited. Resurrection by itself would not mean that the person who had been raised was Israel’s Messiah. Just as there is nothing in pre-Christian Jewish literature to suggest that anyone would connect the fact of someone rising from the dead with their being ‘divine’, whatever that might mean, so of course there is nothing (or nothing that had been thought of this way before) to connect such an event with that person being Israel’s Messiah.⁷⁷ The martyrs promise their torturers that they will rise from the dead, but they will not thereby all become Messiahs, any more than they will become ‘divine’. Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter, and the son of the widow at Nain, were all in a sense ‘raised’, but nobody imagined that this meant they were messianic figures, let alone ‘divine’. If one of the two brigands crucified alongside Jesus had been raised from the dead three days later it would have caused quite a stir, but there is no reason to suppose that people would have concluded that he was Israel’s Messiah, the Lord’s anointed.

The first and most obvious conclusion which the disciples would have drawn, as soon as they came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth had been bodily raised from the dead, was that he was indeed the prophet mighty in word and deed, and that he was, more particularly, Israel’s Messiah. This would not be because they had already believed that the Messiah, when he came, would be raised from the dead, but because the Jesus they knew had been tried and executed as Messiah, and this extraordinary and unexpected event (as it seemed to them) had apparently reversed the verdicts of both the Jewish and the Roman courts. We can see at several points in the New Testament, not least in Paul and Acts, the way in which the church scrambled to pull together biblical texts to make the connection between Messiah and resurrection, a connection which nobody had thought necessary before but which suddenly became the key move in early Christology.⁷⁸ The texts strongly suggest both that this was a new connection and that it was the first vital link in the chain.

From that point on, our best early evidence is Paul. He had, in the senses we have explored, a different kind of meeting with Jesus, but he quickly came to the conclusion which the others, too, had arrived at: that in this Jesus, now demonstrated to have been Israel’s Messiah all along, Israel’s one true god had been not merely speaking, as though through an intermediary, but personally present. I have explored in chapter 8 the way in which I envisage Paul coming to that conclusion. It is harder to plot, independently of Paul, the steps by which the other early Christians came to a similar point of view. The synoptic tradition is not much help in such an investigation, not because it reflects a post-Easter situation with a continuing low or non-existent Christology, but because, in this respect at least, those who handed it on were careful not to read back into it the Christology which they themselves were enthusiastically developing.⁷⁹ In particular, they came to see Jesus, as I argued in Jesus and the Victory of God he saw himself, in terms of new exodus, more particularly, the long-awaited return of YHWH to Zion.⁸⁰

The ways in which Paul explored, developed and explained this new belief would take us a lot longer to unravel, and fortunately there is no need to do so here.⁸¹ The ways in which the other early Christians developed the same insight include the Christology of John, Hebrews and Revelation, for which again there is here neither need nor space. The main point to notice in and through all of this is the way in which the early Christians determinedly spoke of Jesus, alongside the creator god and as his personal self-expression, within categories familiar from the dynamic monotheism of second-Temple Judaism.

As I have shown elsewhere, within second-Temple Judaism there were various strategies for speaking of how Israel’s god was God, the one, true and only divine being, who remained the creator, distinct from the world and responsible for it, could nevertheless be present and active within the world. Various writers spoke of God’s word, God’s wisdom, God’s law, God’s tabernacling presence (shekinah), and God’s Spirit, as though these were at one and the same time independent beings and yet were ways in which the one true God could be with his people, with the world, healing, guiding, judging and saving. At a different linguistic level, they spoke of God’s glory and God’s love, God’s wrath and God’s power, not least in the eschatological sense that all these would be revealed in the great coming day.⁸² The New Testament writers draw on all these to express the point that, I suggest, they had reached by other means: that Jesus was the Messiah; that he was therefore the world’s true lord; that the creator God had exalted him as such, sharing with him his own throne and unique sovereignty; and that he was therefore to be seen as kyrios. And kyrios meant not only ‘lord of the world’, in the sense that he was the human being now at the helm of the universe, the one to whom every knee, including that of Caesar, must bow, but also ‘the one who makes present and visible what the Old Testament said about YHWH himself’. That was why the early Christians ransacked texts about God’s presence and activity in the world in order to find appropriate categories to speak of Jesus (and of the Spirit, though that is of course another topic). The high Christology to which they were committed from extremely early on—a belief in Jesus as somehow divine, but firmly within the framework of Jewish monotheism—was not a paganization of Jewish life and thought, but, at least in intention, an exploration of its inner heart.

It all began—this is the point for our present argument—with the belief that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the ‘son of god’ in the sense of Psalm 2, Psalm 89 and 2 Samuel 7:14, because the creator god, the covenant god, had raised him bodily from the dead, after an apparently messianic career and execution.⁸³ ‘As far back as we can go, belief in Jesus’ resurrection is the foundation for the Church’s speculations and claims about his unique status and role.’⁸⁴ If we are to continue to think historically, we can just about account for this dramatic sequence of thought by postulating such a belief in Jesus’ resurrection; I can see no way to account for it by any other means. So the question for the historian is, once more: what caused the early Christians to believe, against all expectations, that he had been bodily raised from the dead?

4. Conclusion: Resurrection within the Early Christian Worldview

Before we can begin to answer this question, we must draw together the threads of Parts II and III of this book into a summary statement of the early Christian worldview, highlighting the place of resurrection belief within it. I set out a paradigm for worldview-study in The New Testament and the People of God Part II, and (at the conscious risk of over-generalization, which some reviewers were happy to point out) sketched the worldviews of second-Temple Judaism and early Christianity on that template in chapters 8 and 12, with fuller treatments of the early Christian stories in chapters 13 and 14. I then applied the same model to Jesus in Jesus and the Victory of God Part II. I assume those studies here, and simply ask: where does the resurrection of Jesus, and of Christians, belong within that picture?

I begin with praxis. Where did resurrection show up in what the early Christians habitually did?

Briefly and broadly, they behaved as if they were in some important senses already living in God’s new creation. They lived as if the covenant had been renewed, as if the kingdom were in a sense already present, though, to be sure, future as well; often their present-kingdom behaviour (for instance, readiness to forgive persecutors rather than call down curses on them) comes to the fore precisely in contexts where it is all too obvious that the kingdom has not yet been fully realized.⁸⁵ The other elements of early Christian praxis, not least baptism, eucharist and martyrdom, point in the same direction.⁸⁶ If challenged about their lifestyle, or their existence as a community, the early Christians responded by telling stories of Jesus, particularly of his triumph over death.

More specifically, their praxis in relation to Jesus’ death, and to the death of members of their own community, is telling. Jews of the period, and some at least of the early Christians, venerated the tombs of prophets and martyrs. People have sometimes suggested that similar things happened in the case of Jesus’ tomb, and that the Easter stories gradually grew up from that basis; but there is no evidence whatever that anyone ever went back to Jesus’ tomb to pray, to meet friends and family, or to have commemorative meals.⁸⁷ There is, however, evidence that the early Christians continued the first-century Jewish practice of secondary burial in caves and catacombs. This, it will be recalled, involved collecting the bones after the flesh had decomposed, and placing them in careful order in an ossuary, which was then stored in a special compartment in a cave-tomb or near equivalent. The practice is usually thought to reflect a belief in resurrection, in that the bones of the individual person continued to matter.⁸⁸ Unfortunately we have no evidence of how precisely the early Christians conducted funerals; in the fourth century, the first time such evidence occurs, they were considered an occasion of joy, and those attending wore white.⁸⁹ It seems unlikely that this would have been purely a late innovation. The attitude to martyrdom, too, underwent subtle shifts, described in the earlier volume.⁹⁰ So far as we can tell, the early Christian praxis in relation to resurrection can be categorized as belonging firmly on the Jewish map, rather than the pagan one, but with signs that from within the Jewish worldview a new clarity and sharpness of belief had come to birth.

This is especially noticeable in the remarkable transfer of the special day of the week from the last day to the first day. ‘The Lord’s Day’, John the seer called it; and there is very early evidence of the Christians meeting on the first day of the week.⁹¹ This is hardly to be explained simply on the grounds that they wanted to distinguish themselves from their Jewish neighbours, or that they believed the new creation had begun; or at least, if either of those explanations is offered, they press us quickly back to the question of why they wanted to do the former, or why they believed the latter. The early writers face these questions, and give the obvious answers: Ignatius draws attention to the resurrection as the rationale of the new practice, and Justin connects it with the first day of the new creation.⁹² Nor should we minimize the significance of the change. The seventh-day sabbath was so firmly rooted in Judaism as a major social, cultural, religious and political landmark that to make any adjustment in it was not like a modern western person deciding to play tennis on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays, but like persuading the most devout medieval Roman Catholic to fast on Thursdays instead of Fridays, or the most devout member of the Free Church of Scotland to organize worship on Mondays instead of Sundays. It takes a conscious, deliberate and sustained effort to change or adapt one of the most powerful elements of symbolic praxis within a worldview—not least when the sabbath was one of the three things, along with circumcision and the food laws, that marked out Jews from their pagan neighbours.⁹³ By far the easiest explanation for all this is that all the early Christians believed that something had happened on that first Sunday morning.

The symbolic world of early Christianity focused upon Jesus himself. The symbolic actions of baptism and eucharist, though of course having Jewish antecedents and pagan analogues, were consciously undertaken with reference to him. His status as Messiah and lord, and the worship accorded him by people determined to remain Jewish-style monotheists rather than pagan polytheists, are everywhere apparent in the early Christian world, generating new symbolic usage; this is particularly noticeable in the case of the cross, which lost its shameful symbolic value as a sign of degrading imperial oppression and became a sign of God’s love.⁹⁴ The well-known symbol of the fish, which declares its faith in a straightforward but powerful Christology, is first noted in the second century. Whether it was first used because of its acrostic reference to Jesus (Iesous CHristos THeou (H) Yios Soter, ‘Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour’, ICHTHYS = ‘fish’), or whether the acrostic meaning was exploited after the symbol was already in use, it is still difficult to say.⁹⁵ Acrostics were widely used in pagan oracles, and the use of the symbol may have been a way of trying to communicate within a world used to that mode, or may have originated as a secret sign.

The stories of the early church focus again and again on Jesus and his death and resurrection. We have now studied all but the most central ones, which we reserve for Part IV below, where we shall see that the stories of Jesus’ resurrection function, in their present literary contexts, as stories about Israel’s and the world’s history reaching its divinely ordained climax and new birth, and as stories of the coming of the long-awaited kingdom of Israel’s god. But resurrection stories are also told, as we have frequently noted, as ways of speaking of the Christian community itself as resurrection people, as beneficiaries of Jesus’ resurrection in both the present and the future. All of these can be plotted on a grid of Jewish-style stories of the vindication of the covenant people after suffering. This itself goes back to the story of the Exodus, and to the many stories, historical and prophetic, of return from exile; and yet the Christian stories have significant differences, characteristics of their own, particularly the suggestion that new creation has already begun. What is more, from Paul onwards Jesus’ resurrection was seen as the work of the divine Spirit, and the early Christians claimed, centrally, that the same Spirit was at work within and among them, and would raise them too.⁹⁶

The worldview questions, when posed to the early Christians, elicit a set of resurrection-shaped answers.⁹⁷ Who are we? Resurrection people: a people, that is, formed within the new world which began at Easter and which has embraced us, in the power of the Spirit, in baptism and faith. Where are we? In God’s good creation, which is to be restored; in bodies that will be redeemed, though at present they are prone to suffering and decay and will one day die. What’s wrong? The work is incomplete: the project which began at Easter (the defeat of sin and death) has not yet been finished. What’s the solution? The full and final redemption of the creation, and ourselves with it; this will be accomplished through a fresh act of creative grace when Jesus reappears, and this in turn is anticipated in the present by the work of the Spirit. What time is it? In the overlap of the ages: the ‘age to come’, longed for by Israel, has already begun, but the ‘present age’ still continues. This correlates, obviously, with the redefinition-from-within of resurrection itself which we have already explored.

This worldview finds expression in early Christian beliefs, hopes and aims. The early Christian view of god and the world is, at one level, substantially the same as the second-Temple Jewish view: there is one god, who has made the world, and who remains in an active and powerful relationship with the world, and whose primary response to the problem of evil in the world is the call of Israel, which itself generates a second-order set of problems and questions (why has Israel herself apparently failed? what is the solution to Israel’s own problems, and hence to the world’s problems?). But the resurrection of Jesus, and the powerful work of the Spirit which the early Christians saw in that event and in their own lives, has reshaped this view of the one god and the world, by providing the answer, simultaneously, to the problems of Israel and the world: Jesus is shown to be Israel’s representative Messiah, and his death and resurrection is the proleptic achievement of Israel’s restoration and hence of the world’s restoration. The first Christians, despite what used to be said in the heyday of existentialist theology, were thereby committed to living and working within history, not to living in a fantasy-world where history had in principle already come to a stop and all that remained was for this to be worked out through the imminent end of the space-time universe.⁹⁸ The promised future, both for themselves and for the whole cosmos, gave meaning and validity to the present embodied life.

This means, I think, that we can identify clearly the flaw at the heart of much mainstream scholarship over the last century. Ever since Albert Schweitzer, most scholars have done their best to come to terms with an ‘eschatological’ perspective. That has meant very different things to different people, but at the heart of it lies the recognition that Christianity was born into a world where people were expecting something to happen. Because it was assumed by many scholars that nothing much had happened in the world of space-time events—because, in other words, it was taken for granted that the bodily resurrection did not happen—all the weight was put at another point, the imminent ‘second coming’. In fact, though the early Christians did indeed hope for a great future event, which might, they thought, happen at any time, they rested the weight of their theology on the event which, they firmly believed, had already happened. It was because of the bodily resurrection that the second coming meant what it did. In that respect, early Christian theology works in the way that a bicycle does: the rear wheel (the past event) supports the rider’s weight, the front wheel (the future hope) points in the direction of travel. To ride on the back wheel alone is difficult. To ride on the front wheel alone is downright impossible.

All this means, of course, that the early Christians embraced a completely different view of the world, and of its creator, from that which we find in the Nag Hammadi documents. And it generated a different set of aims: instead of the cultivation of a private spirituality, the resurrection-shaped worldview of the early Christians gave strong impetus to forming communities across traditional barriers, and to a way of life which, both by example and by spoken word, spread quickly, to the alarm of Roman officials, local magistrates and others.⁹⁹ In particular, contrary to an often-repeated slur, it encouraged, rather than restrained, a definite confrontation with the Roman empire, which made no sense to those who embraced gnosis. If the Christians had believed that Jesus had merely ‘gone to heaven’, in however exalted a capacity, and that their aim should be to join him there in the future, and indeed to experience some anticipations of that blessing in the present, why should the present world be of any concern to them? But if Jesus had been raised from the dead, if the new creation had begun, if they were themselves the citizens of the creator god’s new kingdom, then the claims of Jesus to Lordship on earth as well as heaven would ultimately come into conflict with those of Caesar. When we look for the signs of this conflict, and for ways of coming to terms with it within a Christian integrity, we find ourselves looking at the major exponents of the resurrection: Paul, Revelation, Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian.¹⁰⁰ Just as people used to suppose that the Sadducees were the ‘liberals’, because they disbelieved the resurrection, not realizing that they opposed it because they were the ‘conservatives’ of their day, politically as well as theologically, so it has often been supposed that those who embraced a robustly bodily form of resurrection belief, since they happen to correspond to what is thought of as ‘conservative’ belief today, must have done so in the interests of a ‘conservative’ or ‘status quo’ view of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus’ resurrection, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, vindicated or validated his Messiahship; and if he was Messiah, he was the world’s true lord. Resurrection was every bit as radical a belief for the early Christians as it had been for the Pharisees, in fact more so. The Christians believed that ‘the resurrection’ had already begun, and that the one person to whom it had happened was the lord at whose name every knee would bow.

We have now surveyed the resurrection belief of the early church, including (in the present chapter) the way in which early views of Jesus were themselves shaped by this belief. We are ready at last to embark on the central task of reading the Easter accounts themselves, to see what sense we can make of them as crucial stories told and retold by those who thought and lived in the ways we have described.