Summary Notes on Ch. 7 N.T. Wright
The Transforming Reality of The Bodily Resurrection

The question is: "Why did Christianity arise and why did it take the shape it did?". There was an astonishing transformation of the followers of Jesus after his death. They said God raised Jesus from the dead.

MEANINGS OF RESURRECTION TO JEWS OF THE TIME. Jewish belief at the time was diverse. It was more a statement of restoration of Israel to power than a statement of life after death. Gradually under the pharisees and then the rabbinic movement, it changed from one to the other. It changed also from life returning to "dry bones" to a new body made by God at the end of time. The interim situation of the dead was variously understood generally as a spirit or angel.

MEANINGS OF RESURRECTION TO FIRST CHRISTIANS. Jesus changed the "going on" to a "coming back". It led them to believe God's new age had begun. Paradoxically the "age to come" had been inaugurated in the "present age" which was continuing. Things had taken a course no one had imagined before. This was not just a wisdom movement, nor a political one.

MEANINGS OF RESURRECTION TO PAUL. Ref 1 Cor 15.
1. Christianity was not ethic, but announcement.
2. Paul's "seeing" of Jesus was the last.
3. The world is in its end days.
4. Resurrection means a transformed new body, seeded from the old. With soul.
5. Means hope for the future and purpose to the present.

THE GOSPELS. Notoriouusly difficult to harmonize. Witnesses not in collusion. Not just history, but "pregnant with layers of mataphorical meaning..."

MEANINGS OF EASTER. Stories not "explicable as subtle scribes ... transforming a non-resurrection ... Christianity into a community that told its own stories in terms of the myth of Jesus' resurrection." "Once you allow that something remarkable happened to his body that morning, all the other data fall into place with astonishing ease." Begins with the validation of Jesus as messiah. "If the stories are metaphors for anything, they are metaphors for the belief that God's new world had been brought to birth. ... the sign of hope for the future, not only for individuals but for the whole world."

notes by jmct

October 30, 2000