Saturday, December 24, 2016

Bodily Resurrection? No Way!

Still considering the cultural context of Resurrection: for non-Jews, Greco-Roman thinking held that the soul or spirit was good and the physical and material world was weak, corrupt, and defiling. The physical, by definition, was always falling apart and therefore salvation was seen as liberation from the corruptible body. In this worldview resurrection was not simply impossible it was repulsive. No soul, once free of the body, would want to return to it. Even those who believed in reincarnation understood that returning to embodied life meant that the soul was not yet out of its prison. The ultimate goal was to be free of the confining body forever.

Also of note, historians find that in all the societies studied in this respect, beliefs about life after death are very conservative.  Faced with the drama of death, people tend to build upon beliefs and practices they know, and are familiar and comfortable with; where they came from; how their tradition, their family, their village, has always performed burial customs. Communities or groups of people are highly unlikely to come up with inventive understandings about the nature of death.

Consequently, it is remarkable that all the early Christians believed in a future bodily resurrection, even though most came from the pagan world. A world, a culture, where this was regarded as complete and utter rubbish.The Christian view of resurrection is unprecedented in history, and sprang up full-blown immediately after the death of Jesus. There was no development of thought here. It was not merely a subtle new twist that evolved out of any thinking prevalent at the time. 


Saturday, December 17, 2016

Skeptical Now, Skeptical Then.

The theory that the disciples stole the body and claimed Jesus had risen assumes that the disciples expected their fellow Jews to be open to the belief that an individual could be raised from the dead. Yet the people of that time considered a bodily resurrection to be impossible just as the people of our own time.  It is hard to imagine, without fully grasping the cultural environment of the time, just how bizarre and unbelievable the Resurrection would have seemed to the people of the time.  To us it is an almost too familiar story.  To them it was unheard of and far more unimaginable. Jesus’ miracles of bringing people back to life were attention raising events. Events that others could conceivably explain away. However, Christ’s death on the cross was unassailable evidence of his being categorically dead.

It is absurd to think that only relatively recently did people discover - through the benefit of science - that dead people don’t rise.  And that people “back then” were unenlightened and gullible; that they were naturally inclined to believe in all sorts of absurd miracles. That is simply false.

A charming quote by C. S. Lewis relates to this.  In discussing the virginal conception of Jesus Lewis states that the reason Joseph was worried about Mary’s pregnancy was not because he was ignorant and didn’t know where babies come from, but because he did.

It’s the same with the resurrection of Jesus. People in the ancient world were incredulous when faced with the Christian claim, because they knew empirically that when people die they stay dead.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Joseph; Cultural Context

We also have Joseph of Arimathea, described as "a respected member of the council,” a “rich man” and someone who can approach Pilate to ask for the body of Jesus. Clearly, Joseph is a person of prominence, who would be known to many, and could readily confirm whether his own tomb was still occupied or not. The facts challenge thinking the resurrection accounts were merely fabricated years later. It seems clear that the tomb of Jesus was indeed empty and that hundreds of witnesses claimed to have seen him alive.

Let’s now consider the cultural context of the Resurrection.  While it is the more complex of the three columns, it is also the most compelling. 

Efforts to account for the sudden appearance of Christianity apart from the actual resurrection of Jesus runs counter to what is known about first-century history and culture. A close examination of the prevailing understanding of resurrection demonstrates that the Christian understanding was radically different from anything that predates it.  C. S. Lewis called it “chronological snobbery” to claim that as modern people we are far more skeptical of claims of a bodily resurrection, while the ancients, were gullible about matters supernatural and would have readily accepted it. That is just not the case. N. T. Wright conducted an extensive survey of the thought of the first-century Mediterranean world, both east and west, and demonstrated that the universal view of the people of that time was that a bodily resurrection was impossible. As impossible to them as it is to skeptics today.