My encouragement to all Christian preachers is to not get too fancy on Easter. It is the day we want to be incredibly clear about the death of Jesus for our sins and the resurrection of Jesus for our salvation. We do not need to be clever.

We need to be clear.

And we need to add to that clarity a fitting and authentic excitement for the victory of Jesus Christ over Satan, sin, death, hell, and the wrath of God while calling sinners to be saved.

For those preachers wanting to do a good job this Sunday, I felt compelled to share with you bits from a summary of N.T. Wright’s amazing tome on the resurrection, as they could be most helpful. I also want to thank my researchers at the Docent Group for doing the summary on which this blog is based. I would encourage all pastors who can afford it to consider their services. I would encourage every preacher to go out and buy this unprecedented book. Despite his views on justification, which I disagree with, this book is so outstanding that it has to be read, as even Tim Keller evidenced by making his chapter on the resurrection in A Reason for God basically a series of summaries and quotes from Wright’s book. N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God looks at why Christianity began and why it took the shape it did. N.T. Wright (a renowned New Testament scholar) answers these questions:

What precisely happened at Easter? What did the early Christians mean when they said that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead? What can be said today about this belief?

This book is third in Wright's series Christian Origins and the Question of God, and it sketches a map of ancient beliefs about life after death in both the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds. It then highlights the fact that the early Christians’ belief about the afterlife belonged firmly on the Jewish spectrum, while introducing several new mutations and sharper definitions. This, together with other features of early Christianity, forces the historian to read the Easter narratives in the gospels, not simply as late rationalizations of early Christian spirituality, but as accounts of two actual events: the empty tomb of Jesus and his appearances.

How do we explain these phenomena?

The early Christians' answer was that Jesus had indeed been bodily raised from the dead; that was why they hailed him as the messianic son of God. No modern historian has come up with a more convincing explanation. Facing this question, we are confronted to this day with the most central issues of worldview and theology.

A brief five-point summary of Wright’s book-length argument would be as follows:

1. Resurrection and its cognates mean “life after ‘life after death.’”
2. Ancient paganism strenuously denied the possibility of resurrection.
3. A strong belief in the hope of future resurrection existed only within the bounds of certain sects of Judaism.
4. The only possible reason why early Christianity began and took the shape it did is that the tomb really was empty and that people really did meet Jesus, alive again.
5. Though admitting it involves accepting a challenge at the level of worldview itself, the best historical explanation for all these phenomena is that Jesus was indeed bodily raised from the dead.

Wright proposes that in the first century, “resurrection” did not mean “life after death” in the sense of “the life that follows immediately after bodily death.” [1] According to Wright, “Here there is no difference between pagans, Jews and Christians…Pagans denied this possibility; some Jews affirmed it as a long-term future hope; virtually all Christians claimed that is had happened to Jesus and would happen to them in the future.” [2] In other words, “resurrection” was a way of “speaking of a new life after ‘life after death’ in the popular sense, a fresh living embodiment following a period of death-as-a-state.” [3]

Life After Death

According to Wright, the meaning of resurrection as “life after ‘life after death’” cannot be overemphasized. This is due in large part because much modern writing continues to use “resurrection” as a synonym for “life after death.” Belief in “resurrection” meant belief in what Wright calls a “two-step story.” Resurrection itself is preceded by an interim period of death-as-a-state. “Where we find a single-step story—death-as-event being followed at once by a final state, for instance of disembodied bliss—the texts are not talking about resurrection. Resurrection involves a definite content (some sort of re-embodiment) and a definite narrative shape (a two-step story, not a single-step one). This meaning is constant throughout the ancient world.”[4] Most books on the resurrection of Jesus begin by studying the gospel narratives and then work outwardly from this vantage point to an analysis of the appropriate pagan and Jewish sources found in antiquity. Wright takes the exact opposite approach. He begins with a study on resurrection (or, better, the lack thereof) in ancient paganism and then narrows the scope of his investigation tighter and tighter, concluding with a study of the resurrection as recorded by the writers of the canonical gospels.

"The idea of resurrection is denied in ancient paganism"

“In so far as the ancient non-Jewish world had a Bible, its Old Testament was Homer. And in so far as Homer has anything to say about resurrection, he is quite blunt: it doesn’t happen.” [5] The idea of resurrection is denied in ancient paganism from Homer all the way to the Athenian dramatist Aeschylus who wrote, “Once a man has died, and the dust has soaked up his blood, there is no resurrection.” [6] Wright provides a helpful summary: “Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believed that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed resurrection.” [7] One of the most influential writers in antiquity was Plato. According to Wright, “neither in Plato nor in the major alternatives just mentioned (i.e. Aristotle) do we find any suggestion that resurrection, the return to bodily life of the dead person, was either desirable or possible.” [8] This view is also evident in the writings of Cicero. “Cicero is quite clear, and completely in the mainstream of Greco-roman thought: the body is a prison-house. A necessary one for the moment; but nobody in their right mind, having got rid of it, would want it or something like it back again…Resurrection was not an option. Those who followed Plato or Cicero did not want a body again; those who followed Homer knew they would not get one.” [9] After surveying several other ancient pagan writers and philosophers Wright concludes: “Nobody in the pagan world of Jesus’ day and thereafter actually claimed that somebody had been truly dead and had then come to be truly, and bodily, alive once more.” [10] Death, in ancient paganism, was a one-way street. According to Wright, “the road to the underworld ran only one way. Throughout the ancient world, from its ‘bible’ of Homer and Plato, through its practices (funerals, memorial feasts), its stories (plays, novels, legends), its symbols (graves, amulets, grave-goods) and its grand theories, we can trace a good deal of variety about the road to Hades, and about what one might find upon arrival. As with all one-way streets, there is bound to be someone who attempts to drive in the opposite direction. One hears of a Protesilaus, an Alcestis or a Nero redivivus, once or twice in a thousand years. But the road was well policed. Would-be traffic violators (Sisyphus, Eurydice and the like) were turned back or punished. And even they occurred in what everybody knew to be myth.” [11] Wright notes: “We cannot stress too strongly that from Homer onwards the language of ‘resurrection’ was not used to denote ‘life after death’ in general, or any of the phenomena supposed to occur within such a life. The great majority of the ancients believed in life after death; many of them developed… complex and fascinating beliefs about it and practices in relation to it; but, other than within Judaism and Christianity, they did not believe in resurrection.” [12] This evidence confirms that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is unique in all of history and worthy of our full throated conviction on Sunday.

[1] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31. [2] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31. [3] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31. [4] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31. [5] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 32. [6] Quoted in N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 32. [7] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 35. [8] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 53. [9] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 60. [10] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 76. [11] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 81-2. [12] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 82-3.