“…as of first importance…”

An event in human history 2,000 years ago, with two thousand years more of history predating the event: the resurrection of the son of Mary, the Son of God born into our world of sin and sorrow to die our death and be buried in a borrowed tomb, resurrected to new life as the King of kings in God’s New Creation.

Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) was a highly influential Scottish theology and Presbyterian minister. He had been born to missionary parents in China, educated at the University of Edinburgh, and was Moderator of the Church of Scotland. One of his classic works is his reflections on Jesus’ resurrection: Space, Time and Resurrection.1

He wrote: “In the New Testament the resurrection is altogether a dominant concept. Basically it is the resurrection of the Shepherd Son of David and therefore of his people for whom he stands in as Redeemer and Advocate…. Resurrection…is the mighty act of God within our humanity and its sin, corruption and death, shattering the powers of evil in an utterly decisive way.”23

To continue: “He died and rose again in such a way as never to die again, for his resurrection involved a radical change, not only in a triumph over death and corruption but in a transforming recreation of the humanity which he had assumed from Mary in his incarnation. The risen Jesus was the same as he who was born of Mary and crucified under Pontius Pilate, yet he was not the same, for with his resurrection from the grave something had taken place akin to the original creation, and indeed transcending it.”

N. T. Wright is unarguably our contemporary evangelical world’s most important New Testament scholar and teacher. He has written two masterfully argued books that speak powerfully to the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb: The Resurrection of the Son of God,4 and History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology.5

 

In the former Wright argues that historically, the empty tomb and the meetings with different disciples, both men and women, provide what the necessary and sufficient conditions to accept an event as historical. Wright outlines seven steps in his argument:

1. To sum up where we have got to so far: the world of second-Temple Judaism supplied the concept of resurrection, but the striking and consistent Christian mutations within Jewish resurrection belief rule out any possibility that the belief could have generated spontaneously from within its Jewish context. When we ask the early Christians themselves what had occasioned this belief, their answers home in on two things: stories about Jesus’ tomb being empty, and stories about him appearing to people, alive again.

2. Neither the empty tomb by itself, however, nor the appearances by themselves, could have generated the early Christian belief. The empty tomb alone would be a puzzle and a tragedy. Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world.

3. However, an empty tomb and appearances of a living Jesus, taken together, would have presented a powerful reason for the emergence of the belief.

4. The meaning of resurrection within second-Temple Judaism makes it impossible to conceive of this reshaped resurrection belief emerging without it being known that a body had disappeared, and that the person had been discovered to be thoroughly alive again.

5. The other explanations sometimes offered for the emergence of the belief do not possess the same explanatory power.

6. It is therefore historically highly probable that Jesus’ tomb was indeed empty on the third day after his execution, and that the disciples did indeed encounter him giving every appearance of being well and truly alive.

7. This leaves us with the last and most important question: what explanation can be given for these two phenomena? Is there an alternative to the explanation given by the early Christians themselves?6

Writing in History and Eschatology, Wright states that…

The resurrection of Jesus is presented in the New Testament as…an event which brings its own ontology and epistemology with it—which regenerates and redirects the ancient Jewish cosmology, eschatology and anthropology…. ‘It is love that believes the resurrection’, I shall argue, because love is the most complete form of knowledge, including not bypassing historical knowledge in particular; and the resurrection is the most complete form of event, not simply a random ‘fact’ but an event which conveys both meaning and power.7

This is our faith. It is rooted in fact. The stone was not rolled away by the angels to let Jesus out. The stone was rolled away to let the women in! Easter is the touchstone of history. Have a joy-filled and blessed Easter!