This book started life as the final chapter of Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), the second volume in the series Christian Origins and the Question of God, of which the first volume is The New Testament and the People of God (1992). The present work now forms the third volume in the series. This is a departure from the original plan, and since people often ask me what is going on some explanation may be appreciated.
A few months before I finished work on Jesus and the Victory of God (hereafter JVG), Simon Kingston of SPCK came to see me to say that, since the covers for the book had already been printed, I had an absolute maximum number of pages available, and what did I propose to do? Had the work run its intended course, with the material in what is now the present book compressed (as I had foolishly thought I could compress it) into seventy pages or so, JVG would have been at least 800 pages long, and would have burst out of its own new covers, not a sight a middle-aged scholar wishes to see.
As providence would have it, I was at the same time turning over in my mind the choice of topic for the Shaffer Lectures at Yale Divinity School, which I was due to give in the Fall of 1996, shortly after the publication date for JVG. The topic was supposed to be something to do with Jesus. I had puzzled over how I might either compress material from the big book which would just have been published, or try to lecture on some aspect of Jesus I had not covered in the book (which I had hoped would be reasonably exhaustive; certainly I did not intend to leave out three lectures’ worth of original material). The two problems solved each other: miss out the resurrection chapter from JVG, lecture on the resurrection in Yale, and turn the three lectures into a small book to join the present series, in between JVG and the originally projected third volume on Paul, which would now become Volume IV. (This had the unexpected result that some reviewers of JVG accused me of not being interested in, or not believing in, Jesus’ resurrection. I trust that this accusation may now be laid gently to rest.)
The Shaffer lectures were exciting, for me at any rate. My hosts at Yale were warm in their hospitality to my wife and myself, and encouraging in their response, on top of the honour they had shown me by their invitation. But it was clear that each lecture needed expanding considerably. So, to help me towards what I still hoped would be a short book, I frequently chose the same topic when lecturing elsewhere in the next three years: the Drumwright Lectures at South-Western Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, the Bishop’s Lectures at Winchester, the Hoon-Bullock Lectures at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, the DuBose Lectures at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, the Kenneth W. Clark Lectures at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina, and the Sprunt Lectures in Union Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. (The Sewanee version was published in the Sewanee Theological Review 41:2, 1998, 107–56; I have published other lectures and essays on the subject from time to time, details of which are in the Bibliography.) I gave similar lectures to the Princeton Theological Seminary Summer School at St Andrews; and I compressed the argument into a single lecture for various establishments, including St Michael’s Seminary, Baltimore, the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and Truett Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. I have grateful memories of all these institutions. Their hospitality was uniformly magnificent.
But the highlight, enabling me to lay out the material in much more detail and giving me space and time to ferret around and fill in lots of gaps, came when I was appointed to the MacDonald Visiting Chair at Harvard Divinity School for the Fall Semester of 1999. Suddenly, instead of three or four lectures, I had the chance to give more than twenty on the topic, to a large, intelligent and, in the best sense, critical student audience. Of course, I emerged from each lecture realizing that the material still deserved much more expansion. My initial dream of writing up this book as I went along (and my initial expectation that it would be a small book) was unrealizable. But I was able to lay the foundation for the present work far more deeply than before, in a wonderfully congenial setting. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues and friends in Harvard, and to Al MacDonald, the founder of the Chair, whose personal support and enthusiasm for my work has been a great encouragement. Thus, though the book has changed its shape considerably since late 1999, the seeds sown in Yale bore fruit in Harvard, fruit which in this book is brought at last to harvest. I trust my friends in both august establishments will not object to finding themselves thus associated with one another.
The book has reached its present length partly because, as I have worked over the material and read as much as I could of the voluminous secondary literature, it has seemed to me that all kinds of misconceptions about both the key ideas and the key texts have over the years become widely accepted. As with certain types of garden weed, there are occasions when the only thing to be done is to dig deeper to get right under the roots. In particular, it has become accepted within much New Testament scholarship that the earliest Christians did not think of Jesus as having been bodily raised from the dead; Paul is regularly cited as the chief witness for what people routinely call a more ‘spiritual’ point of view. This is so misleading (scholars do not like to say that their colleagues are plain wrong, but ‘misleading’ is of course our code for the same thing) and yet so widespread that it has taken quite a lot of digging to uproot the weed, and quite a lot of careful sowing to plant the seeds of what, I hope, is the historically grounded alternative. Readers may be glad that I have not had space to highlight more than a few examples here and there of what I take to be misleading views both of Judaism and of the New Testament. I have preferred to expound the primary sources, and to let them shape the book, rather than to offer a lengthy ‘state of the question’ and to allow that to dominate the horizon. (The first part of Jesus and the Victory of God provides a general background to the discussion.)
Just as the book could have grown considerably if I had entered into debate with, or even simply cited, all the writers from whom I have learned, whether in agreement or disagreement, it could easily have doubled in length if I had explored all the interesting-looking secondary roads that lead off this particular highway. There are lots of side-issues that get a cursory mention, if that. Those who continue to work on the Turin Shroud, for instance, may be disappointed to find no further mention of it here.1 I am aware that I have annotated some discussions much more fully than others, and that in some cases a bare statement of my own view has had to stand in for the detailed debate with colleagues and friends that should ideally have taken place. This is so particularly in Part II, on Paul, for which I hope to make amends, to some extent at least, in the next volume in the series. My main concern here has been to lay out the large-scale argument which seems to me in urgent need of clear statement. I envisage the present book, unlike either of its predecessors, as essentially a simple monograph with a single line of thought, of which I provide an advance map in the first chapter. The shape of the argument is hardly novel, but the particular point of entry, namely, the study of the way in which ‘resurrection’, denied by pagans but affirmed by a good many Jews, was both reaffirmed and redefined by the early Christians, has not, I think, been followed like this before. Nor has a similar range of material, some of it inaccessible to many readers, been made available in this way. I hope the book will contribute to the clarity of future discussions as well as to historical understanding and responsible faith.
Several introductory matters about style and indeed content are dealt with in the prefaces to The New Testament and the People of God (hereafter NTPG) and JVG. One fresh comment is called forth by questions I sometimes receive. I refer to the non-Jewish and non-Christian inhabitants of the ancient world as ‘pagans’ for the same reason as most ancient historians do: not intending it as in any way a term of abuse, but finding it the most convenient way to designate a large number of otherwise disparate peoples. The term is of course etic rather than emic (i.e. it was not, in our period at any rate, a term used by anyone to describe themselves, but reflects rather the perspective of others, in this case Jews and Christians, on the people in question). It has here a purely heuristic value.
Despite the anxiety of some, I have continued for the most part to write ‘god’ with a small ‘g’. This is not an irreverence. It is to remind myself, as well as the reader, that in the first century, as increasingly in the twenty-first, the question is not whether we believe in ‘God’ (with it being assumed that we all know who or what that word refers to), but rather to wonder which god, out of the many available candidates, we might be talking about. When first-century Jews, and early Christians, spoke of ‘the god who raises the dead’, they were implicitly making a case that this god, the creator god, the covenant god of Israel, was in fact God, the one and only being to whom the word appropriately refers. Most of their contemporaries did not see it like that; not for nothing were the early Christians known as ‘atheists’.2 Even New Testament scholars, seeing the word ‘God’, can easily be tricked into making unwarranted assumptions about the identity of the being thus referred to—precisely the sort of assumptions that an investigation like the present one is meant to challenge. However, when I lay out the views of the early Christians, and quote from their writings, I shall often use the capital to indicate that the authors were making just this point, that the god they worshipped and invoked was in fact God. In the concluding chapters I shall begin to use the capital myself, as I did at the equivalent points in JVG, for reasons that I hope will become apparent. I hope this is not too confusing. The alternative is to adopt the standard usage and thus fail, for most readers most of the time, to alert them to the most important question which underlies this entire series.
One other vital matter must be mentioned at this point, since space has precluded fuller treatment in the body of the text.3 I constantly run into loose talk about a ‘literal’ resurrection as opposed to a ‘metaphorical’ one. I know what people mean when they say that, but those words are unhelpful ways of saying it. The terms ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ refer, properly, to the ways words refer to things, not to the things to which the words refer. For the latter task, the appropriate words might be ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’. The phrase ‘Plato’s theory of forms’ literally refers to an abstract entity (in fact, a doubly abstract one). The phrase ‘the greasy spoon’ refers metaphorically, and perhaps also metonymically, to a concrete entity, namely the cheap restaurant down the road. The fact that the language is being used literally or metaphorically tells us nothing, in and of itself, about the sort of entities it is referring to.
When ancient Jews, pagans and Christians used the word ‘sleep’ to denote death, they were using a metaphor to refer to a concrete state of affairs. We sometimes use the same language the other way round: a heavy sleeper is ‘dead to the world’. Sometimes, as in Ezekiel 37, Jewish writers used ‘resurrection’ language as a metaphor for concrete political events, in that case the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon. The metaphor enabled the prophet to denote the concrete event while connoting the idea of a great act of new creation, a new Genesis. As we shall see, the Christians developed their own fresh metaphorical usages, which likewise referred to concrete states of affairs. But most of the time those Jews and pagans who spoke of resurrection, whether they were affirming it (as the Pharisees did) or denying it (as the Sadducees did, along with the entire world of greco-roman paganism), used the word to refer to a hypothetical concrete event that might take place in the future, namely the coming-to-life in a full and bodily sense of those presently dead. Though the words they used (e.g. anastasis in Greek) had broader meaning (anastasis basically denotes the act of making something or someone stand or rise up, or of doing so oneself), they acquired the specially focused meaning of this ‘rising’ from the dead. Thus the normal meaning of this language was to refer, literally, to a concrete state of affairs. One of the main questions of this book is whether the early Christians, who were in so many ways cheerful and eager innovators, used the language of resurrection like that as well.
I am grateful to the many family members, friends, colleagues and lecture-audiences who have discussed this topic with me over the years. I have learnt much from many and hope to continue to do so. I am especially grateful to my beloved wife and children for their encouragement and support, not least to my son Dr Julian Wright for taking time from his own historical research to read right through the text and make dozens of helpful comments. One of the most extraordinary modes of encouragement came out of the blue through the invitation to write the libretto for Paul Spicer’s Easter Oratorio, based on John 20 and 21. The work received its first performance at the Lichfield Festival in July 2000, and has since then been performed on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as being broadcast in part on BBC radio. Paul and I have both written about this experience in Sounding the Depths, edited by Jeremy Begbie (London: SCM Press, 2002). Working with Paul made me think about the resurrection from several new angles, and I cannot now read the Johannine Easter stories without thinking of his music all the time, and without an enormous sense of gratitude and privilege.
Having explained the delay in JVG by reference to a move of house and job, I find myself doing so again; our move to Westminster in 1999–2000 took time and energy, and inevitably slowed things down. That they have now speeded up again is due not least to the support of my new colleagues, particularly the Dean of Westminster, Dr Wesley Carr, and my fellow Canons; and also the cheerful assistance, in matters great and small, of the Canons’ Secretary, Miss Avril Bottoms. On the technical side, Steve Siebert and the manufacturers of Nota Bene software are again to be congratulated on the magnificent product which has helped so many scholars to produce their own camera-ready copy, even for a work of this complexity. I am very grateful to several friends and colleagues who have read some or all of the manuscript and helped me to avoid mistakes; they are not, of course, to be blamed for those that remain. In particular, I thank Professors Joel Marcus, Paul House, Gordon McConville and Scott Hafemann; Drs John Day, Jason König, and Andrew Goddard; and several members of various faculties at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, notably Professors Stephen Evans, David Garland, Carey Newman, Roger Olson, Mikeal Parsons and Charles Talbert, each of whom provided searching critique and detailed comment as the book neared completion. Professor Morna Hooker generously lent me her own copy of a newly-published work so I could take note of it at the last minute. The many mistakes which remain are, of course, all my own work.
Pride of place in acknowledgment, though, goes this time to my publishers, SPCK, themselves. Having challenged me to take on a substantial programme of writing, they have provided excellent support, not only in the editorial department, but particularly in the shape of a research assistant. Dr Nicholas Perrin, himself a published scholar, has filled that role with tireless good cheer for the last two years, putting his own wide-ranging expertise at my disposal, ferreting out sources ancient and modern, providing a one-man equivalent of a university common room where I could try out ideas and get instant quality feedback, and functioning in general as helper, adviser, critic and friend. Working with him on an almost daily basis has been an intellectual and personal delight.
The dedication reflects a long-standing double debt of friendship and scholarship. I met Oliver O’Donovan (in a Hebrew class) on my first day in Oxford; his wise friendship, scholarly example and profound theological and philosophical understanding have been an inspiration ever since. I got to know Rowan Williams when we both returned to Oxford in 1986. Our shared teaching, and the many layers of friendship which surrounded it, are among my happiest memories of that time. Oliver and Rowan have themselves, of course, written distinguished books on the resurrection, and that alone would have justified my offering them this token of affection and respect. But when, on the day I wrote the final section of this book, it was announced that Rowan was to become the new Archbishop of Canterbury, that sense of justification turned to compulsion. Congratulations to him, and gratitude to them both.
N. T. Wright
Westminster Abbey