What Relevance can Resurrection have today?
You might be asked to comment on the relevance of the Resurrection Narratives for today. Such questions can take various forms, and this section attempts to put forward some responses to typical questions.
Does a corporeal resurrection matter? (or,' If We Found Jesus' Body, Would The Christian Faith Collapse?')
Bultmann, and after him, members of the Jesus Seminar such as Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg etc, would want to say a firm 'NO!' in response to this.
They argue that the evidence of the Empty Tomb is later evidence, and that the main factors that influenced the earliest Christians were the resurrection appearances and the change that they found in their own perceptions of the 'living' nature of Christ. They would suggest that the physical nature of the resurrection implied by the Empty Tomb is therefore secondary, and that if the body of Jesus were to be found, the essential truth of the resurrection would not be altered in any way. So what do these scholars view as the essential truths of the Resurrection?
In 'The Meaning of Jesus', Marcus Borg comments "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 his death." He accepts that some early Christian experiences of the risen Christ took the form of "visions or apparitions" He therefore sees "the post-Easter Jesus as an experiential reality." And it is in these personal experiences not in objective measurable facts, that Borg claims that the truth of the Resurrection is to be found. Borg accepts the Christian truth that 'Jesus is Lord', but feel that the Easter stories sprang from the consciousness of the Church as they experienced Christ as Lord, rather than the claim that 'Jesus is Lord' springs from the experience of the discovery of the empty tomb, and the encounters with the Risen Christ. Borg makes further points about the theological and existential significance of the phrase 'Jesus is Lord', and we will consider these in a later section. Meanwhile, back to the body.
N T (No Truck With this) Wright entitles his section on the resurrection in 'The Meaning of Jesus' "The Transforming Reality of the Bodily Resurrection". He begins by considering what a Jew in the time of Jesus would have meant by 'resurrection' and concludes from a study through Ezekiel to Maccabees and Daniel, that what may have begun as a metaphor for the revival of Israel's fortunes (The valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37), had turned into a literal belief in the resurrection of the body, as exemplified by the Maccabean martyrs who declared under torture that they would received their bodies back from God, whole. The resurrection would be like an awaking from sleep and would be a more wonderful mode of existence than the current one. Wright goes on to claim that this belief in the 'concrete re-embodiment of those who have died" became commonly accepted belief amongst the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. Wright accepts that there were disputes over whether God would give a totally new body, or whether he would reconstitute an old one, but his conclusion is that such disputes would only have relevance "if the concrete physicality of the resurrection of the body were taken absolutely for granted." "There is", he says, "no evidence for Jews of our period using the work resurrection to denote something essentially nonconcrete."
From this point, he goes on to argue at some length that Jesus' disciples would not, therefore, have used a word like resurrection to describe their conviction that Jesus was still alive and with them solely in some spiritual form, or even ghostly form. What Wright does see as odd, is that the early christians believed that the Resurrection awaited by so many religious Jews of the day had happened, not to the whole nation, or world at the end of time, but to one man in the middle of time. This, Wright claims, was a radical departure from the Resurrection belief of the 1st century, and this departure from the norm of interpretation deserves, he says, consideration in and of itself.
Indeed, for Wright, the deepest meaning of the Resurrection requires a physical resurrection. This is because, unlike Borg, who views the resurrection as essentially a metaphor for personal spiritual renewal and liberation, Wright views the meaning of the Resurrection as the firstfruits of a new order of creation. "God's new order had been brought to birth." The evangelists saw all the symbolism and meaning behind the Resurrection and expressed it without wishing to detract from the reality of the historical event. it was "the first day of God's new week, the moment of sunrise after the long night, the time of new meetings, new meals, or reconciliation and new commissioning. It was the beginning of the new creation." The implications of this will be discussed in another section, dears.