Notions of Resurrection

Here are three more specific and notably unprecedented notions about the concept of resurrection that appear for the first time in early Christianity:

First, Jews who believed in resurrection generally fell into two groups. Some said it would produce a physical body exactly like this one all over again, while others said it would be a luminous body, one shining like a star. But the early Christians didn’t say either of those things. They talked about a new kind of physicality, a new type of body that, although still solid and substantial, is transformed and not susceptible to pain or suffering or death. This is new thinking. Thinking that can only be explained by the fact that eyewitness had seen firsthand this new type of body in the resurrected Jesus.

Second, Christians believed that the Messiah himself had been raised from the dead, which no Jew believed because, according to Judaism, the Messiah was never going to be killed. So, that was also novel.

Third, in early Christianity “resurrection” has moved from being one doctrine among many others —important, but not that important —to become the center of everything. Take it away from Paul, or 1 Peter, Revelation, or the great second-century fathers, and you destroy their whole framework of thought. The only rational conclusion is that something remarkable happened to bring the notion of “resurrection” from the periphery of religious thought to the very center of Christian understanding.

All this is summed up in this critical question: Why did all the early Christians, from the earliest times, have this very new, but remarkably unanimous, view of resurrection?