Wright - Christian origins and the question of god, volume 3: Resurrection Son of God

THE RESURRECTION

OF THE SON OF GOD

A monumental achievement in its scope, depth, and execution a landmark in scholarly studies of the resurrection.

Gerald OCollins, The Tablet

The most monumental defence of the Easter heritage in decades The Resurrection of the Son of God marches through a clearly organized case that confronts every major doubt about Easter, ancient and modern.

Richard N. Ostling, Associated Press

First published in Great Britain in 2003

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

36 Causton Street

London SW1P 4ST

Copyright Nicholas Thomas Wright 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Unless otherwise stated, biblical quotations are either the authors own translation or are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-0-281-05551-7; ISBN-10: 0-281-05551-3 (cased edition)

ISBN-13: 978-0-281-05550-0; ISBN-10: 0-281-05550-5 (paperback edition)

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Seven Stanzas at Easter, from Telephone Poles and Other Poems, by John Updike, copyright 1959 by John Updike.

Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. The publisher apologizes for any omissions that may remain and, if notified, will ensure that full acknowledgements are made in a subsequent edition.

for Oliver ODonovan and Rowan Williams

CONTENTS

PART III Resurrection in Early Christianity
(Apart from Paul)

I

This book started life as the final chapter of Jesus and the Victory of God (1996) , the second volume in the series Christian Origins and the Question of God, of which the first volume is The New Testament and the People of God (1992) . The present work now forms the third volume in the series. This is a departure from the original plan, and since people often ask me what is going on some explanation may be appreciated.

A few months before I finished work on Jesus and the Victory of God (hereafter JVG ), Simon Kingston of SPCK came to see me to say that, since the covers for the book had already been printed, I had an absolute maximum number of pages available, and what did I propose to do? Had the work run its intended course, with the material in what is now the present book compressed (as I had foolishly thought I could compress it) into seventy pages or so, JVG would have been at least 800 pages long, and would have burst out of its own new covers, not a sight a middle-aged scholar wishes to see.

As providence would have it, I was at the same time turning over in my mind the choice of topic for the Shaffer Lectures at Yale Divinity School, which I was due to give in the Fall of 1996, shortly after the publication date for JVG . The topic was supposed to be something to do with Jesus. I had puzzled over how I might either compress material from the big book which would just have been published, or try to lecture on some aspect of Jesus I had not covered in the book (which I had hoped would be reasonably exhaustive; certainly I did not intend to leave out three lectures worth of original material). The two problems solved each other: miss out the resurrection chapter from JVG , lecture on the resurrection in Yale, and turn the three lectures into a small book to join the present series, in between JVG and the originally projected third volume on Paul, which would now become Volume IV. (This had the unexpected result that some reviewers of JVG accused me of not being interested in, or not believing in, Jesus resurrection. I trust that this accusation may now be laid gently to rest.)

The Shaffer lectures were exciting, for me at any rate. My hosts at Yale were warm in their hospitality to my wife and myself, and encouraging in their response, on top of the honour they had shown me by their invitation. But it was clear that each lecture needed expanding considerably. So, to help me towards what I still hoped would be a short book, I frequently chose the same topic when lecturing elsewhere in the next three years: the Drumwright Lectures at South-Western Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, the Bishops Lectures at Winchester, the Hoon-Bullock Lectures at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, the DuBose Lectures at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, the Kenneth W. Clark Lectures at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina, and the Sprunt Lectures in Union Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. (The Sewanee version was published in the Sewanee Theological Review 41:2, 1998, 10756 ; I have published other lectures and essays on the subject from time to time, details of which are in the Bibliography.) I gave similar lectures to the Princeton Theological Seminary Summer School at St Andrews; and I compressed the argument into a single lecture for various establishments, including St Michaels Seminary, Baltimore, the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and Truett Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. I have grateful memories of all these institutions. Their hospitality was uniformly magnificent.

But the highlight, enabling me to lay out the material in much more detail and giving me space and time to ferret around and fill in lots of gaps, came when I was appointed to the MacDonald Visiting Chair at Harvard Divinity School for the Fall Semester of 1999. Suddenly, instead of three or four lectures, I had the chance to give more than twenty on the topic, to a large, intelligent and, in the best sense, critical student audience. Of course, I emerged from each lecture realizing that the material still deserved much more expansion. My initial dream of writing up this book as I went along (and my initial expectation that it would be a small book) was unrealizable. But I was able to lay the foundation for the present work far more deeply than before, in a wonderfully congenial setting. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues and friends in Harvard, and to Al MacDonald, the founder of the Chair, whose personal support and enthusiasm for my work has been a great encouragement. Thus, though the book has changed its shape considerably since late 1999, the seeds sown in Yale bore fruit in Harvard, fruit which in this book is brought at last to harvest. I trust my friends in both august establishments will not object to finding themselves thus associated with one another.