Reading Wright, RSG, Chapter 1
The Target and the Arrows
I’ve decided to continue my Reading Wright series—I post much more faithfully when there is a ‘reading schedule’ versus free-form. The next book in his series Christian Origins and the Question of God is The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press: Minneapolis) published in 2003. The late Tim Keller calls Wright’s book a “masterwork” in his opening chapter of his book on the resurrection. One of Wright’s formidable strengths is his familiarity with second-Temple Jewish and classical literature and he brings this to bear on the resurrection question. Readers of previous Reading Wright posts may recall the five historical questions that Wright seeks to answer in this series and his focus will be on the fourth question—“How did the early church come into being, and why did it take the shape that it did?” (JVG, 90) The first chapter of RSG encompasses pages 1-31, beginning Part 1: Setting the Scene.
As a historical matter, one must explain how the Christianity we see emerging from the first century actually arose from within the second-Temple Jewish and Greco-Roman context from which it was birthed. Secular scholars prefer to take much of the Gospel stories, including the resurrection, as myth, or layers of invention over decades to generate the stories we now have in the Gospels. They read the Gospel stories like Jefferson did, but instead of removing the content, they arrange it into ‘evolutionary’ layers of invention due to the growing needs of the church. It can be downright dizzying to read how they parse a passage into its assumed layers, like the logic of Vizzini in Princess Bride, “I can clearly not choose the [passage] in front of you.”
We are faced with the challenge, as Wright discusses in pp. 12-28, of how history and theology intersect. Some argue that you can’t answer the question of the resurrection because theology can’t or shouldn’t be investigated historically—either because miracles, a priori, can’t happen, or because we cannot ‘reach’ the divine (I oversimplify here). Wright uses an allegory of archers trying to shoot the sun with arrows (p. 11).
While we certainly cannot reach the divine, Christianity holds that the divine has reached out to us—quite often! Since we exist in space and time, this will be reflected in history. This is a nonsensical idea that history and theology are separate and never intersect—these scholars have never read the Old Testament and how frequently God interacts with His world.
In the New Testament, the incarnation of the Son of God should be the final nail in the coffin of this 'history-is-separate-from-theology' idea. And the resurrection the deep sixing of the coffin. Unfortunately, bad ideas don't like staying in the coffin, and this one keeps digging its way back out, stinking up everything and making a nuisance of itself. We may be in a “mostly dead” situation where Miracle Max (the secular scholars) keep bringing it back to life.
What can we say as a historical matter about the resurrection? Wright will take us on a journey through classical and Jewish literature, on what was meant by the term “resurrection.” Words have meanings in context and can change in meaning over time (certainly connotation). Some scholars hold that this word can mean something other than a bodily resurrection. It may now, but did not then, Wright will argue.
In pages 12-13, Wright details five senses of what we mean today by ‘historical.’ In the first sense, we have history as an event. In the second, we have history as a significant event. That I brushed my teeth this morning is an event. Had my toothbrush malfunctioned and killed me would have made it a significant event (at least to those near me). The third sense is a provable event. The fourth sense is history-as-writing-about-it (this could include historical novels). The fifth sense, and the one that generates the most trouble, is the post-Enlightenment-history view. Most secular scholars take this last view and conclude the resurrection is impossible—because after all, post-Enlightenment says miracles cannot happen. Dead people stay dead. Duh! The Science(TM) says so. You could say that the fifth sense filters what is historical through a lens of the post-Enlightenment worldview of what is and is not ‘possible.’ Wright has observed elsewhere that our modern post-Enlightenment views are similar to Epicureanism. There really is nothing new under the sun.
Wright argues that we must have something that has sufficient explanatory power for the rise of early Christianity in the form we see in the New Testament. We oversimplify this today in the 21st century. But just how do you get early Christianity out of second-Temple Judaism in a Greco-Roman world? It is both similar and dissimilar to both! Something radical had to happen, especially to make die-hard Jewish people accept Gentiles and forcefully argue there was no need to practice the Jewish rituals (Paul in Galatians)! An explanatory argument such as “the disciples were so overcome with grief they felt that Jesus would ‘live on’ in their hearts and this came to mean resurrection” is insufficient given the cultural context. And Wright will press this argument back into its coffin with the literature of the time and what was meant by resurrection (and what were the expectations of resurrection).
Next time we will continue with looking at the classical Greco-Roman literature on death and resurrection.