“I do not think anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life,” said John Dominic Crossan, now retired from the Roman Catholic DePaul University in Chicago.
“The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivaled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity,” said N.T. Wright, a Church of England bishop who has taught at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford universities.
There you have it, the old yet ever-new Easter debate as represented by two current New Testament experts. Both use resurrection language, but they are saying very different things.
The New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary decided a Crossan-Wright face-off about Jesus’ resurrection was the perfect starter for a series of annual debates. Last year’s is recorded in “The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue” (Fortress), which includes papers from other participants.
Wright, first up, crisply defends the traditional Christian belief, using material from his Fortress book, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” this generation’s most important orthodox treatment.
Some of his reasoning:
* We must explain why the earliest Christians believed in Jesus Christ’s bodily resurrection and risked hostility and danger to rapidly spread the message.
* Pagan Roman culture didn’t anticipate such a miracle. Neither did Judaism, which believed in bodily resurrection as a communal experience at the end of days. Nor did the Jews make resurrection part of their definition for the Messiah, yet that’s what the earliest Jewish Christians said regarding Jesus.
* In the New Testament Gospels’ depiction, the risen Jesus was no ghost, disembodied spirit or vision. Jesus did not have a merely resuscitated corpse but a physical body with uncanny new properties.
Wright says only one explanation suffices and it’s “rock solid”: The discovery that Jesus’ tomb was empty, plus his various physical appearances, provide the only plausible explanation for the rise of the early Christian faith as we know it.
He dismisses one by one alternate explanations: that the ancients were naive and didn’t realize the dead don’t normally rise, that believers had a group hallucination, or that they experienced Jesus’ living presence individually through contemplating his death.
Since no other alternative is adequate, Wright concludes, the traditional Christian belief remains the truth, “however unlikely.”
Crossan’s response is that even if the empty tomb and appearances occurred as the New Testament reports (which he doubts in other writings), this would merely mean Jesus arose in the sense that God exalted him, not that his body was resurrected. What’s important isn’t whether something literally happened, he thinks, but rather the spiritual meaning of Jesus’ ongoing presence.
Crossan asks whether those early Christians took the Resurrection literally or, as he sees it, as a spiritual metaphor. “The honest answer must be, I do not have the faintest idea, nor does anyone else.”
Christian intellectuals have been debating this for the past 200 years, Crossan says, “and we have reached an impasse; nobody is persuading anyone else.” It’s a perfectly nice debate, but, as he sees it, the thing that matters is the message that God has begun a new kingdom and people can participate in a new creation.
In the back-and-forth that follows, Wright makes the helpful suggestion that the difference between them is not “literal” versus “metaphorical” resurrection but the New Testament’s “concrete” or bodily concept versus Crossan’s “abstract” understanding.
Crossan thinks the empty tomb is historically questionable and thus that Mark simply “made up” this report and later Gospels picked up the claim.
Wright’s ready response: “I don’t think anyone could have made up these stories, actually.”
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