In the preaching that we find in the Book of Acts, the resurrection of Jesus is a central feature of the doctrinal convictions of the early Church. With this article we commence a four-part series on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus with the aim of stirring up both thought and preaching about this central feature of Christianity.
The Ancient World was just as worldly-wise as our modern world when it came to death. The majority of people in the Ancient World believed in some form of life after death, but once death had occurred, that person’s unique bodily existence was forever gone. It was thus a given for the Ancients that the idea of the resurrection of the body was something patently false. Aeschylus (c.525bc–c.455bc), the Greek playwright, expressed it this way in his Eumenides: “when once a man has died and the dust has drunk his blood, there is no resurrection (anastasis).” Surely it was a similar conviction that informed the mockery of some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers when they heard Paul mention the resurrection in his Mars Hill sermon (Acts 17:32) and that underlay the statement of some of the Corinthians that “there is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:12).
In complete contrast and in glorious isolation when it comes to this subject of resurrection, there is Judaism and Christianity, both of which affirmed that dead bodies can and would indeed live again. The author of Hebrews, for example, reckons that the doctrine of the “resurrection of the dead” is part of the basics of the Christian faith (6:2). And further on in the book, he commends to his hearers the faith of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham, who, when asked by God to sacrifice Isaac, was prepared to obey, for “he reckoned that God was able to indeed raise him from the dead” (11:19).
Central to Christianity’s conviction that God can raise dead bodies to life, of course, is the historical fact that God “brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep” as Hebrews puts it in its sole reference to the resurrection of Jesus (13:20). In fact, this historical event of the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely vital to the Christian faith. As Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:14 and 17, “if Christ has not been raised, then…[Christian] preaching is in vain” and the Christian “faith is futile.”
Now given the intellectual climate of the world in which the good news of Christianity was first proclaimed, a world that knew dead bodies do not come back to life, it was vital for the church to produce clear historical evidence that Jesus had in fact been raised from the dead in space and time. To assert, as some twentieth-century scholars have done, men like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, that the resurrection of Jesus was not an actual physical event, but was a metaphor for the fact that he was now living in the hearts and minds of his disciples, was not good news for nor startling to the Ancient World. In this sense, Plato and Aristotle, to name but two of the most influential thinkers of that world, were still living in the minds and hearts of those who followed their teachings. No, what was different about the Christian message, and what caused so much opposition to it, was the fundamental claim that Jesus had been crucified to death and buried, but also he had been raised from the dead physically.
To be continued.
