The Evangelical Universalist Forum

The Resurrection Debate

Theology Biblical Theology
#1

I’m wondering what your thoughts are on “The Resurrection Debate”. When Reza Aslan’s book “Zealot” had a lot of buzz, I decided I ought to educate myself on the topic of the “historical Jesus”. I decided I wanted to read Aslan’s book, but I also wanted to read some other perspectives first. I still haven’t gotten around to Aslan’s book (it’s sitting in my Kindle queue). But the first book I read was “The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions” by N.T. Wright and Marcus Borg. I found this book to be very interesting, and very refreshing, as Borg and Wright share a friendship and are very respectful of each other despite some key differences in their views. I wish more Christians would learn from their example. But this brings me to the topic of this post:

Where do you stand on “The Resurrection Debate” and why?

I am going to try to summarize Wright’s and Borg’s views, though I do not feel qualified to do so (they are both at a level far above me). Basically, Wright believes in a bodily resurrection. He does point out the mystery of the fact that Jesus’ body, after resurrection, seems to have properties which normal bodies do not have, such as:

  • On the road to Emmaus, the disciples who walked with Jesus did not recognize him even though they spent quite a bit of time with him. After they do recognize him, he disappears.
  • Jesus is able to enter a closed room without opening a door when he appears to the disciples.

So Wright talks about how Jesus’ body will be unlike our bodies, but insists that it was, in fact, a physical body, as the material of the body in the tomb disappeared and Thomas was able to touch Jesus.

Borg believes that many disciples saw Jesus after his death. But he basically states that he would bet what they saw could not have been recorded with a video camera (if there had been such things in the day). He believes the empty tomb was a parable of sorts.

Right now, a debate is going on about this topic on Patheos. First, Tony Jones stated his disagreement of Borg’s view. Then, Borg responded and stated that Jones misrepresented his view. Next, Jones came back with his own clarification and defense. Borg responded to this. Then, David Hayward (“naked pastor”) chimed in. And finally, David R. Henson defended a “sacramental view” of the resurrection.

It’s an interesting debate to me. I’m honestly not sure what to make of it. The merits I see in the view that Jones and Wright present, of a physical body, are that physicality is not devalued - if the resurrection does not involve a physical body, then what’s the point of physicality? Why don’t we just “drink the kool-aid” and be done with it? Leave this earthly plane as soon as we can? Because of these questions, I am highly drawn to Wright’s and Jones’ view of the resurrection.

The merits I see in Borg’s view is that Jesus’ resurrection ceases to be this magical thing that only happened once in history (so far), and can become something that we can watch for in every day life - something that is more of a “real” hope. We are able to embrace everyday life more fully, in a sense.

I don’t know - I struggle with the issue and am still trying to form an understanding that takes the best of both worlds, in a sense. I’m not sure if I summarized the two sides in a way that does them justice, but what are your thoughts?

#2

Bodily resurrection. Which incidentally has some important connections to Christian universalism (as patristic universalists also often noted. :slight_smile: )

Even if I didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection, I’d still believe on the evidence that the body went missing. I assess one corner of the evidence from a purely sceptical direction in this 10 part series on the Cadre, although a summary of the developed points can also be found in a follow-up article addressing the question of “Why Didn’t The Sandhedrin Produce A (Fake) Body Of Jesus Christ?”

The metaphorical “real” (?) hope position of Borg and others is nice and all, but those concepts aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive to a bodily resurrection. I can haz both. :mrgreen:

One of our original members here (Total Victory?) knows Gregory Boyd personally, and his mammoth Cynic Sage or Son of God puts two of the more popular revisionist theories of the mid 90s (from Crossan and Mack) very fully and fairly and in much detail: easily a third, maybe even half that book could be lifted out straight and republished as something from the (now defunct) Jesus Seminar. It’s a little out of date, almost 20 years later (Burton Mack and his thesis have pretty much dropped off the face of public debate for example), but it’s hugely researched (with tons of helpful footnotes for further reference) and well worth looking up as a detailed account and comparison of arguments from several sceptical directions (not merely C&M). GB is respectful to both other scholars, and openly admires and promotes some parts of Crossan’s work.

The best recent scholarly overall assessment I’ve read (on the side of bodily resurrection but respectfully and soberly surveying a mountain of scholarship on all sides of the topic) is Mike Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus. It isn’t as topically focused on representing two particular sceptical theories as Boyd’s book, of course, which is why I prefer to point people that way first, but its topical width is wider so overall I regard it as the better book.

#3

Thank you for your contribution, Jason - you made some great points. To the above - it is my desire to do the same: to form a view that incorporates the best of both worlds. I guess one of the side-effects of becoming a Universalist is that I have taken a gentler approach to views I would have previously considered anathema and refused to even hear out. I don’t know if anyone else around here has experienced this? But I have formed the opinion that everyone’s views - whether I agree with them or not - is based on something that they’ve seen, heard, or experienced. No one is completely lying about beliefs they have. So what I want to do is to examine other people’s beliefs and figure out why they believe those things, and then figure out how to extract the data that they used to form those beliefs, and how to be honest with that data and fit it into my own structure of beliefs in a way that shows integrity. I’ve seen too many people who just think that whenever they meet something they disagree with, they can just sweep those puzzle pieces onto the floor - they’re fine working only with the puzzle pieces they like. So I guess the struggle for me is that, because of this desire to be open and honest and to deal with all the evidence, I often have to wrestle with God like Jacob did, and I have to live with a lot of doubts. But faith does not mean the absence of doubt - it means walking through those doubts to the other side, I think.

That’s kind of a rabbit trail, I suppose, but I wanted to show the kind of mindset that has led me into this admittedly controversial subject.

#4

I think that’s a good way to approach all topics, yep. :slight_smile:

#5

N.T. Wright’s “The Resurrection of the Son of God” is also a huge contribution to this subject. My understanding of the issues has been greatly expanded by this book.

#6

^^ True, but since I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, I can’t make a decision about whether to recommend him or Licona for the most recent one-stop source. (Though Licona’s is more recent, fwiw.)

I’ve read NTW’s previous two books in that series, by the way. Wasn’t overly keen with some moves he made in Jesus and the Victory of God, so I liked that less than The New Testament and the People of God (if I recall the title correctly – I’m too lazy and kind of sick at my stomach this morning to check :wink: ).

#7

I fail to see how the Luke narrative could have been any more clear when it says that after His resurrection Jesus said, “Touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have”

#8

“If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?”

#9

The non-bodily resurrection crew tend to deny any miraculous activity having been objectively real event (at best, sometimes just straight out lies), so regard GosLuke (and GosJohn and GosMatt and even GosMark) as being mythically late constructions. This idea is sometimes (though not always) paired with attempts at arguing that Paul of Tarsus taught a non-bodily resurrection of Jesus; but it always involves the idea that the original experiences were at best only mental visions of a Jesus whose body remained dead somewhere (consumed by dogs and vultures, in Crossan’s pithy way of putting it.) The late Robert Funk underlined this in his inaugural address to the Jesus Seminar (whose group he instrumentally formed) when he said that “we need a new fiction” and he hoped the JSem could help supply this new fiction to replace the old, outdated fiction of the miraculous Jesus (especially including the bodily resurrection). Notably, another key member of the JSem back in the 90s, Burton Mack, vociferously thought we dang well didn’t need a new fiction either because the old fiction had radically damaged human history down to the Reagan administration. :open_mouth:

Without going into the pros and cons of variations of this position, such proponents would simply reply that GosLuke only shows that bodily resurrection had been developed in some Christian communities by the time of its composition: its testimony about what happened to Jesus in this regard (and many others) would be rejected as fictional.

I should add that Marcus Borg is among the relatively more moderate proponents of this idea, and Crossan (who is a pleasantly friendly fellow) has cheerfully accepted some points of correction to his old theories: I don’t think he tries to promote Jesus as a Jewish Cynic sage anymore, and now allows that very early Christians did compete against Imperial power by promoting Jesus as a god more worth believing in than Caesar.

#10

Thanks Jason. I had wrongly assumed that we were referring to people who had faith in the veracity of the gospel narratives. As you have explained that this is not the case then I don’t know why they need to imagine a resurrection of any sort at all - even psychotic delusional. I’ll leave this thread to those with more knowledge of this debate than myself but will continue reading with interest. Once again, thank you.

#11

^^ That’s a good question. :wink: Fortunately, not one we have to worry about! :laughing:

Don’t feel bad, though – it’s hard to keep up with the mental gymnastics (or even the outright mental gaps) required to try to posit a historical account that isn’t traditional belief but still ends up with the actual facts (textual characteristics, organizations, Imperial history, etc.) I’ve made a point in the past when debating people like Richard Carrier and Keith Parsons to insist that leaning on an alternate theory with more holes than the traditional one (granting the traditional one has some problems here and there, too), is not good historical procedure. A historical theory has to work, it has to get to the known results; various sceptical hypotheses tend to cover some details (or they wouldn’t be proposed at all), but inevitably paper over the resultant gaping gaps that don’t lead more cleanly to the known actual results.

I recall Bart Ehrman, who has earned some infamy in recent years mis-explaining textual criticism when he thinks he can attack Christian belief by doing so (he’s usually competent at it otherwise), debating William Lane Craig several years ago on the resurrection; and neither scholar came out of that debate with a flawless victory in my estimation, but BE oddly didn’t want to continue with a proposed book from the debate, treating the offer like it would be some kind of severe threat to his professional career. I didn’t realize why until I followed a transcription of the debate: toward the end, he was so desperate to come up with a missing body theory that he thought people in the audience would find plausible, that he tried to get them to accept as plausible a theory that he himself had literally said ten seconds earlier he couldn’t and didn’t accept as plausible. With repeated emphases! The echoes from his denouncing of this theory had barely returned from the parking lot before he was trying to suggest to the audience that they ought to find that sufficiently plausible anyway.

Well, yeah, that kind of behavior would be totally damaging to his professional career. :laughing:

(Incidentally, BE thinks all Jesus Myth proponents are ridiculously wrong, including the guy who’s currently re-publicizing his Caesar’s Messiah theory. :wink: )

Anyway, it’s hard to guess what kind of incoherencies such people are willing to live with (and even promote), so please don’t feel bad about charitably assuming that if they thought the texts were historically accurate enough to report some kind of occurrences (thus there were appearances that need explaining) the same texts would at least be accurate enough about the important details of those occurrences since those important details are part of why the texts say these people went on to do what they historically did. :slight_smile:

#12

Jason, I don’t find a non-bodily resurrection satisfactory, but in reading the links above, if one said Borg thought there was not “Any miraculous activity,” but “ONLY mental visions” of Jesus, wouldn’t he say that they were real experiences of Jesus caused by God, and perhaps then quibble with the conception of miracle, believing that God somehow genuinely works within the created order (though not as spectacularly as traditionalists do)?

#13

Bob, true which is one reason I said “I should add that Marcus Borg is among the relatively more moderate proponents of this idea”, although I didn’t get into details.

To give a comparison and contrast, John Shelby Spong has a sort-of similar notion of the resurrection, except that his notion of God (such as it is) is like a combined human psychological gestalt, so when he says he affirms that “God” sent the visions he really means something like the unconscious human collective imagination or words to that effect – which we should revere as God anyway, since that’s the best we’re ever going to get, except when that’s inconvenient to do so. :wink:

I don’t think MB goes that far off the rails in agreeing that “God” “sent” visions of Jesus. I gather this is one of several reasons why he and NTW get along fairly well. :slight_smile:

But yes, I should have added that MB bucks the trend among non-res proponents by believing that an objectively existent non-human rational force acted to affect the natural order to produce the visions.

#14

My takes on the Resurrection are both practical and spiritual.

For one, it worked.
Christianity become the largest religion in the world even though the Empire where it started was against it and tried to violently stamp it out.
Too many improbabilities have to take place for Christianity to have such humble and unusual beginnings and become so successful.
I see God’s hand in it’s success.
The Apostles died believing it.
If it was a made up story then why not recant under imprisonment, torture and death?
Visions don’t interact with people.
Thomas touched Christ’s wounds.
Jesus ate with and touched people in his new translated glorified body and this new body obviously comes with a few new abilities.
We are also supposed to get one of those glorified bodies one day.