Its About Timing

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.  And although early Christians disagreed about a good many things, nonetheless, they are remarkably unanimous in their view of how resurrection plays out and how it works. 

The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the meetings or sightings of the risen Jesus. Jews did not believe in divine men or individual resurrections.  Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion experience would have invented it, no matter how many hours they pored over the scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop examining history and enter into a fantasy world.

Judaism had developed a specific theology about resurrection: that God’s people would be raised bodily from the dead at the end of time. For example, you have Martha telling Jesus: “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” The time element is very important.

Today we generally use the word resurrection to mean a “life after death,” which it never did in the ancient world. At the time "resurrection" was a very specific term for life after life after death. In other words, first you die, you are dead for some period of time - not bodily alive, and then you are subsequently “resurrected,” which means you begin a new bodily life, a new life after whatever “life after death” may consist of.