56 cf. e.g. Jn. 7:2–5. On the question about whether, and if so at what stage, James and the other brothers joined the wider group of Jesus’ followers see above, 325, 560f. referring also to those who have recently suggested that James did after all follow Jesus during his lifetime.
57 Schillebeeckx 387.
58 Schillebeeckx 391f.
59 Jn. 21:15–19. Perhaps this was an attempt to head off Vatican displeasure at his theories. If so, it failed.
60 Schillebeeckx 639.
61 For a survey of ‘naturalistic’ theories, and a response, cf. e.g. Habermas 2001.
62 Goulder 1996 combines a Festinger-like theory about the maintenance of ‘collective delusions’ with a Schillebeeckx-like theory about the ‘conversion visions’ of Peter and Paul. Both are thoroughly unconvincing. Davis 1997, 146 puts the point well: ‘What they saw was Jesus, not an impostor or a hallucination or a mass of ectoplasm or a sort of interactive hologram.’
63 Goulder 1996, 54f. is a good example of this tendency. ‘We should’, he writes, ‘always prefer the natural hypothesis [as opposed to the supernatural one], or we shall fall into supersitition.’ The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of ‘supernatural’ with ‘superstition’, are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads. It is high time the birds learned to take no notice. A further example is provided by Williams 1998.
64 Full details are helpfully available in e.g. Meyers 1971; Longstaff 1981, 279f. The use of stone ossuaries in the Jerusalem area reached a peak in the mid-first century AD.
65 Ac. 2:25–36; see above, 452–6.
66 e.g. Crossan 1998; see Wright, ‘A New Birth?’
67 Barrett 1987 [1956], 15, with other refs.; see too the discussion in Evans 2001, 533.
68 cf. JVG 131–3.
70 e.g. Lüdemann 1994. One recent exponent of the idea is Thiering 1992, chs. 25–7, answered in Wright, Who Was Jesus?, ch. 2. See too those listed in Theissen and Merz 1998, 476, noting other unlikely theories as well. Moule 1967, 6f. gives a more than adequate response. The only other thing to be said about this theory is its remarkable self-reference: though frequently given the coup de grâce, it keeps reviving itself—carrying about as much conviction as a battered but revived Jesus would himself have done.
71 Crossan 1994 ch. 6.
72 It will not do to say, with Carnley 1987, 145, that this kind of historical investigation tends to ‘naturalize the resurrection’ and so approximate it to ‘little else than a mundane restoration of a corpse’. Leaving aside the comment that even resuscitation is hardly ‘mundane’, the historical investigation we have carried out leads us to postulate precisely something which is neither ‘naturalizable’ nor ‘mundane’.
73 See the extraordinary suggestions in Holt 1999, 11. This is perhaps the logical extension of the famous thesis of de Chardin 1965, seeing Christ as the ‘omega-point’ in human and cosmic development.
74 As Crossan frequently hints would follow from resurrection belief: e.g. 1998, 549.
76 See the critiques of Sawicki 1994, 92f.; Riley 1995; Crossan 1995, 202–08; 1998, 550–68; and the way in which e.g. Schillebeeckx’s reconstruction is vulnerable to the latter. See also the contrasting ‘endings to the story’ offered by Macquarrie 1990, 403–14: the ‘happy ending’ of traditional affirmation contrasted with the ‘austere ending’ of a post-Kantian Bultmannian viewpoint. See above, 616f.
77 For an intriguing recent philosophical approach to the problem of how to address the issue, see Gibson 1999.
78 At this point I am in full agreement, at the general level, with Schillebeeckx’s proposal: ‘we cannot re-adopt into the present the whole Enlightenment (any more than the larger past). We should update and implement its critical impulse while setting a veto on its uncritical presuppositions’ (594). Unfortunately, I do not think Schillebeeckx has carried out this agenda. Morgan 1994, 12f. seems to me to have capitulated rather obviously to the Enlightenment’s agenda: ‘A physical resurrection,’ he says, ‘looks dangerously like resuscitation, and invites the rationalist explanation that Jesus did not really die on the cross. It is better avoided.’ Rationalists, eh? ‘There is a lion in the street!’ (Prov. 26:13).
79 For a recent cultural critique along these lines, see e.g. Boyle 1998. Morgan 1994, just referred to, is a good example of the tone of voice I have in mind. Avis 1993b repeats a standard, and very misleading, line: resurrection made sense in the first century because people held an ancient worldview, whereas we hold a modern one. The real distinction is between one kind of Jewish worldview (which then mutated into the Christian worldview) and virtually all other worldviews, ancient and modern alike.
80 See e.g. the powerful and pertinent remarks of Rowland 1993, 76–9. Rowland is followed and amplified helpfully by Soskice 1997. Williams 1998, 235 is right to say that Jesus’ resurrection broke the moulds of our habitual thinking, but his own argument, in which bodily resurrection remains firmly ruled out, carefully protects the most important mould of all from attack.
81 cf. Bauckham 1993c, 153: the resurrection ‘appears an unacceptable breach of the created order only if creation is deistically left to its own immanent possibilities’.
83 I proceed in parallel, to some extent, to the very stimulating essay of Watson 1994; and, with some important differences, to Coakley 2002 ch. 8.
84 Coakley 2002, 134 is misleading to suggest that this artistic tradition stems from ‘the already modern Caravaggio’; many medieval icons and wall paintings, including one in the south transept of Westminster Abbey, have Thomas touching the risen Jesus.
87 cf. e.g. Patterson 1998, 238f.
88 See Wright, ‘Dialogue’, 249f.
89 On inference in science, and the parallels and links with theology, cf. e.g. Polkinghorne 1994 ch. 2.
90 Sanford 1995, 407f., summarizing Harman 1965 and similar work. Cf. too e.g. Thagard 1978.
91 Full surveys of regular arguments are offered in the various works of Gary Habermas, e.g. 2001.
92 e.g. Borg, in Borg and Wright 1999, ch. 8.
Chapter Nineteen: The Risen Jesus as the Son of God
1 NTPG 95f., 115–17.
2 Those who want to pursue the multiple complexities of ‘meaning’ might consult e.g. Thiselton 1992, 13 and frequently (the index is helpful in laying out different senses); also e.g. Moore 1993.
3 It is this challenge and reshaping that Carnley (1987, 93–5) seems not to have allowed for in his attempted critique of Westcott and Pannenberg.
4 e.g. Schwankl 1987, 631f.
5 It may well be that the stories of Jesus’ resurrection were, from the beginning, deliberately left open-ended in order to stop them from being taken over by this or that party or interest, however important; this is the main point of Williams 2000 ch. 12.
7 Lapide 1983 [1977].
8 This argument is sometimes presented the other way round: the fact that you can get to know him means that he is alive and was raised. See e. g. Lampe 1977, 150.
9 Holt 1999, 10f. Cf. too Crossan 1998, 549; Wedderburn 1999 chs. 9, 10.
10 Israel: Ex. 4:22; Jer. 31:9; Hos. 11:1; 13:13; Mal. 1:6. The king: 2 Sam. 7:14 (quoted with this sense in 4Q174 10–13; cf. 4Q246 2.1); 1 Chr. 17:13; Pss. 2:7; 89:26f.
12 This is why, as I explained in NTPG xiv–xv, I have regularly used the small ‘g’, to the alarm of some.
13 Obvious examples include Ac. 17:22–31; Rom. 1:3f.; 1 Thess. 1:9f.
14 See the brief treatments in e.g. Merklein 1981; Perkins 1984. On the background see esp. Hengel 1976.
15 On the meanings of ‘eschatology’ cf. JVG 202–09. Perkins 1984, 95 drives a wedge where the early church would not have done when she says that the disciples’ immediate experience of resurrection was ‘not that of a “mighty act of God” in the course of history but of the dawn of the new age’.
16 Rom. 1:3f.; 15:12. See Wright, Romans, 416–19, 748f.; and above, 554.
19 On this as the purpose of the covenant see e.g. NTPG 259–79.
21 See Wright, What St Paul Really Said, ch. 5.
22 See 580 above on the ICHTHYS motif. We may suspect that few of those who today attach the fish-symbol to cars, or use it as a lapel badge, are aware of just how explicitly counter-imperial it originally was.
23 Obvious examples, again from Paul, include Phil. 2:6–11; Col. 1:15–20.
24 Crossan’s attempt (1998, xxvii–xxxi) to retain the words ‘bodily’ and ‘embodied’, but to mean by them not that Jesus’ body was itself raised from the dead but that his life somehow continues in the embodied communities that work for justice in the world, thus leapfrogs to a kind of postmodern Catholic ecclesiology (‘There is only one Jesus, the historical Jesus who incarnated the Jewish God of justice for a believing community committed to continuing such incarnation ever afterward’ (xxx, italics original)), ignoring the fact that, as in the present subsection, the very concerns he is stressing are precisely the ones that the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus will ground and sustain.
26 e.g. Sawicki 1994. For the substantive point see again Rowland 1993, 76–9.
27 Morgan 1994, 18f. attempts to arrive at that result despite having denied its premise, like someone trying to sit on the branch through which they have just sawn—a dangerous move, as Thiselton, quoting Wittgenstein, loves to remind us (e.g. 2000, 1216). A more nuanced approach is found in Selby 1976, though I think my present argument grounds his concerns more securely. The way forward is indicated, once more, by Rowland 1993.
28 e.g. Lk. 24:6; Ac. 4:10; cf. Rom. 4:24f.; 8:11; 10:9. The alternative viewpoint—that Jesus had the power to raise himself—is expressed in Jn. 10:17f.
29 This whole train of thought shows that it is wrong to play off a truly historical understanding of Jesus and his resurrection against a proper appreciation of Christology, as does Carnley 1987, 75–81 in his comments on Westcott.
30 For details, see Wright, Climax, chs. 4, 5 and 6.
31 e.g. Phil. 2:10f., using Isa. 45:23; 1 Cor. 8:6, using Dt. 6:4 (where in the LXX ‘the Lord’ is of course YHWH, translated kyrios, the word Paul then uses for ‘Lord’ in relation to Jesus); 1 Cor. 15:25–8, using Ps. 110:1.
34 Gal. 2:19f.; 4:1f., 4–7.
37 cf. Philo Conf. Ling. 62f., quoting Zech. 6:12, which Philo reads as ‘the man whose name is Rising [anatole]’. ‘Strangest of titles,’ he comments, ‘if you suppose that a being composed of soul and body is here described. But if you suppose that it is that Incorporeal one, who differs not a whit from the divine image, you will agree that the name of “rising” assigned to him quite truly describes him. For that man is the eldest son, whom the Father of all raised up [aneteile], and elsewhere calls him His first-born, and indeed the Son thus begotten followed the ways of his Father …’ (tr. Colson and Whitaker in LCL).
39 Rom. 4:18–22, forming a deliberate contrast with 1:18–23 (see Wright, Romans, 499–501).
40 cf. e.g. Crossan 1998, 575–86; Wedderburn 1999, 128f., 178–219.
41 Torrance 1976, 80 (italics original).
42 Here I am particularly conscious of my debt, implicit throughout the present book, to O’Donovan 1986.