Resurrection defined

One of the best works on the resurrection is Tom Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (SPCK, 2003). N.T. Wright has surveyed the Classical views of life after death and resurrection, and found that:

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The great majority of the ancients believed in life after death…but, other than within Judaism and Christianity, they did not believe in resurrection. ‘Resurrection’ denoted a new embodied life which would follow whatever ‘life after death’ might be. (Wright, Resurrection p. 82-83.)

Wright quotes Aeschylus to the effect that, “Once a man has died, and the dust has soaked up his blood, there is no resurrection.” (Wright, Resurrection p. 32.)

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Judaism understood ‘resurrection’ not as a synonym for spiritual life after death, but following the Old Testament held that God would finally raise up the bodies of the dead. A particularly literalistic understanding of this view is exemplified by the actions of Razis as described in 2 Maccabees. Rather than succumb to the threats of his Greek persecutors in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, Razis disembowelled himself. He flung his bowels at the watching crowds and died “calling upon Him who is the lord of life and spirit to restore them to him again” (2 Macabees 14:46.)

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According to Wright, it was only toward the end of the second century AD that resurrection is given a generalised meaning of “life after death”. In Gnostic writings Wright detects a radical shift in meaning of resurrection language (see Wright Resurrection p. 534-552 for full survey). The Gnostics denied the value of the physical world and from very early on in their thinking had problems with the incarnation let alone the resurrection of Christ. Modern-day Liberals have more in common with 2nd Century Gnostics that 1st Century New Testament Christianity. Wright concludes that:

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It is impossible to conceive that talk about a ‘resurrection’, in the sense used by Rheginos [a Nag Hammadi text] and the others, should be anything other than a late and drastic modification of Christian language. (Wright Resurrection p. 550.)

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Yet this is exactly what Marcus Borg does when he says,

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Thus, as a Christian, I am very comfortable not knowing whether or not the tomb [of Jesus] was empty. Indeed, the discovery of Jesus’ skeletal remains would not be a problem.
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According to Borg, .
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resurrection could involve something happening to a corpse, namely the transformation of a corpse; but it need not. (Wright & Borg, The Meaning of Jesus, SPCK 1999, p.131)

On this Basis, borg writes,

For me, the historical ground of Easter is very simple: the followers of Jesus, both then and now, continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after death. In the early Christian community, these experiences included visions or apparitions of Jesus. (Wright & Borg, Meaning , p. 135.)

Borg's notion that resurrection need not mean the raising to life of a body does not appear until after the New Testament era in 2nd Century Gnostic texts. Even then it was a decidedly minority view. Speaking of Paul, Wright sums up the point well when he says that:

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It is vital to grasp that for a Pharisee of Paul’s background and training resurrection meant, inalienably, and incontestably, the bodily resurrection…If you had suggested to him that ‘the resurrection’ might have occurred while the tomb of Jesus was still occupied, he wouldn’t just have disagreed; he would have suggested you didn’t understand what the relevant words meant. (Wright, What St. Paul Really Said, Lion 1977, p. 50.)

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Resurrection in the New Testament means the raising of the body to new life and the transformation of bodily existence. To suggest otherwise is to resort to an irresponsible anachronism in order to justify modern-day scepticism.