Resurrection? Nah! Look for Another.

Now, if the idea that Jesus had been raised from the dead only started to crop up after twenty or thirty years of Christianity, as many skeptical scholars have supposed, those who understand the evolution of human thinking  would expect to find various strands of early Christianity in which there wasn’t much place for resurrection - or, if you did find resurrection, it should traceable back to some aspect of Judaism or pagan thinking. The wide extent and unanimity of early Christian belief in resurrection clearly point to something definitive happening, at the start, which inspired an unprecedented perspective in this amazingly unique Christian movement.

Let’s turn to the Jewish understanding of the Messiah.  In the first century, there were many other messianic movements whose would-be messiahs were executed. 

Why, in not one single case, don’t we hear any mention of disappointed followers claiming their hero had been raised from the dead?  Because… they knew better.

Resurrection was not a private event.  Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest themselves, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option; there was no rationale for it.  Nobody said that about Judas the Galilean after his revolt ended in failure in AD 6.  Nobody said it of Simon bar-Giora after his death in AD 70. Nobody said it about Shimon bar-Kochbar after his defeat and death in 135.

Where messianic movements tried to carry on after the death of their would-be Messiah, their most important task was to find another Messiah.

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?

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.