N.T. Wright | The Point of Resurrection

Wright:

There are four virtues, which the ancient world didn’t count at all, but which really mattered. And they are patience, humility, chastity, and charity, in the sense of outward looking love to and help to anybody and everybody. So to believe in the resurrection involves saying, there is this new way of being human, and we are committed to it. Though we all fail, we are jolly well going to carry on in the power of the Holy Spirit. Then comes the extraordinary point of continuity, that even though what we do at the moment seems often to be useless, we try this and that and it doesn’t seem to get us very far. We are promised that in the new creation, all that has been of God and of the Holy Spirit, in the present world, will be there somehow in God’s new world. 

I am Tom Wright, that is NT Wright, to put it more formally. I am senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, which is an Anglican Seminary in Oxford University.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host Jim Stump. 

It’s Maundy Thursday, at least when this episode is being released, the day when we commemorate the Last Supper and anticipate Jesus’s march to the cross tomorrow, and then the resurrection on Sunday. These surprising events are the foundation of Christian faith, though for many today, they don’t want to think about them too long for fear that they sit awkwardly with our scientific view of things. I don’t think that’s really the case though, and not from ignoring the question or adopting a blind faith that attempts to believe in spite of the evidence. And by evidence I don’t really mean evidence for an empty tomb. That’s not quite an empirical data point we have access to. But the claim that the first generation of Jesus’s followers believed that he resurrected and ultimately gave their lives for that belief, is an empirical data point, and we can marshal arguments for what best explains that data. Were they crazy? Were they just wrong? Did they not really believe it? In his massive book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, NT Wright thoroughly examines all the potential explanations for the beliefs of the first Christians, and concludes that the best explanation is that Jesus really did resurrect that first Easter morning. 

Of course, there’s a lot more to the resurrection than can be discussed in one hour-long conversation. And an easier entry into his thinking about the resurrection and its importance is his book for a more general audience, Surprised by Hope. And he has a recent ebook called Preaching the Cross in Dark Times, which you can download for free from his website NT Wright Online dot org slash cross. There’s a link in the shownotes. 

Tom Wright has been a friend to BioLogos for a long time, lending his name and credibility to our work since our very early days. And if you’ve not seen the duets that he and Francis Collins have written and performed on science and faith themes, stop listening to this right now and go find them on YouTube. But then please come back to this episode. It’s always fun talking to Tom Wright about anything. I hope you have as much fun listening.

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

Well, Tom Wright, thanks so much for joining us again, welcome to the podcast.

Wright: 

Thank you. It’s good to be with you.

Stump:

We are releasing this episode during Easter Week and we can think of no one better than you to talk to you about this central event for Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus. But before we do that, our audience would be very interested in hearing a little bit more about you and your life. I think most of us have always known you as a scholar, but I suspect you weren’t born that way or known as NT to your boyhood friends. Where did you grow up? What was your family like?

Wright: 

I grew up in the far northeast of England in the country called Northumberland, which is if you think geographically, it’s kind of England’s equivalent of Maine, the top right hand corner as it were.

Stump:

Just north of Newcastle, right?

Wright:

Right, yeah, just north of Newcastle, a little town called Morpeth, which is really now a dormitory town for Newcastle. But it’s within a short distance of the wonderful northeast coast with its lovely beaches, and the equally wonderful hills of the Cheviot Hills, which are on the border between England and Scotland. So I grew up kind of between the mountains and the sea, which is where I sort of like to be, which is why Oxford is kind of odd for me, because we’re a long way from the sea and along with many mountains, but Oxford has its other attractions. I grew up into a family in a family, which had a lot of church associations, because particularly on my mother’s side, there were lots of, of Anglican clergy of various sorts, archdeacons and parish priests and goodness knows what. And on my father’s side, a lot of lay involvement with the church, my father was churchwarden at the church where we attended regularly. So I grew up just assuming that on Sundays, whatever else was going on, you put your fine clothes on, you went to church and I grew up assuming that every night before you went to bed, you knelt down and said your prayers. These things were not things that were discussed or argued about, that was just what we did. That was in a very English, middle of the road sort of way. It wasn’t fervently evangelical or Anglo Catholic or anything like that. It was just kind of ordinary, you read your Bible, you say your prayers, you go to church, you sing hymns, and Psalms and you try to live in the way that seems to be mandated from within that great tradition. That’s how I grew up.

Stump:

And that was common for other families in the area? You weren’t standing out in some way as different for doing this?

Wright: 

I think, no doubt it did stand out a bit in that I think there were only three or four other families on the street where we lived that did attend church, and not all of them attended our church. Indeed, one of the neighbors that we had was the minister at the local Methodist Church who we knew well, and we got on fine with. But it didn’t occur to me that what my family did was in any way, odd or unusual, though, I’m guessing that even in the 1950s and 1960s, it was not the norm. I don’t know what the church going statistics were in those days, but they certainly wouldn’t be more than maybe about 35%—that’s a very rough guess—and quite possibly lower than that.

Stump: 

We’ll get to school and academic things in a bit. But what about other kinds of things you are interested in growing up, hobbies or passions?

Wright:

We were a very musical family. We had a piano at home which my sister and I both played. Then my younger two brothers when they came along, one of them played it extremely well actually. We sang in choirs, and sometimes we would sing around the piano at home. At Christmas when there were more family around and uncles and cousins and people we could even manage several of the choruses from the Messiah. People taking it in turns to bash out the stuff on the piano and everyone picking whichever part they could do. All that sort of thing was kind of taken for granted, that making music was what you did. Perhaps that’s partly because if you live as far away as we did from concert halls and that sort of thing, you can’t just hop on a bus and go to a symphony concert, you have to make music yourself. And I grew up loving classical music, folk music, any music I could get my hands on. When the era of people like Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard and so on came along in the late 50s, early 60s, I was eager for a guitar, even though my fingers weren’t big enough for one. As soon as I was able to play the guitar, I did, partly taught by a cousin and partly self taught. Through the 60s, particularly when I was a teenager, all that era of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and so on, that was very much grist to my mill. As well as I also, somebody stuck a trombone into my hands and explained to me that it’s the easiest of the symphony orchestra instruments. I found myself sitting in the back row of the school orchestra oom-pah-ing away through some classics. That was really how I got to know classical music from the inside as it were, because when you’re in an orchestra, there’s all sorts of things which you discover, which you don’t discover simply by listening to the radio or a gramophone record. Anyway, that was kind of the musical atmosphere. Then in parallel with that, sport was always very important to me, whether it was a ball to be kicked or thrown or hit, or whether it was simply walking in the hills or whatever, all kinds of physical activity always appealed to me. It’s one of the sorrows of my old age that my knees do not allow me anymore to do all the things that I did 50 years ago, 60 years ago.

Stump:

So because this is BioLogos, I should ask a little bit about scientific kinds of things. You mentioned nature, the hills and the sea. Do you recall any particular attachment to the natural world or finding interest that perhaps went into scientific interest of some sort? 

Wright:

No, I’m afraid my scientific record is very poor. The closest I would have got, you mentioned the hills, that I loved maps from an early age, I loved figuring out the contours and which would be the steepest way up a hill or which would be the slackest way up a hill. I still love maps, I love to pull up maps on the internet and examine bits of the countryside, including countries that I don’t know at all. But it’s just still fascinating to me. The way that we depict reality has always been interesting to me. I’m afraid when I got to my secondary school, because in my day, we didn’t have to do physics or chemistry or biology until we were 13 or 14. Nowadays, they start them much younger than that. I really hadn’t done anything with any of those subjects until I was 13. And then I was quite clear that I knew which vocational track I was on, I wanted to go up the classical route, I wanted to do Greek and Latin and ancient history. That meant that I only had to do one year of physics and chemistry. And I confess, I did not try terribly hard at my physics and chemistry. Indeed, several years later, I met the guy who had had the sad task of trying to teach me chemistry and we had a good laugh about it, because he wrote my report at the end of that one year, he said, “Wright has maintained his position,” which was 24th out of 24 in that form. Then he added “with occasional signs of interest now and then.” Chemistry had not grabbed me at all. I did actually eventually enjoy physics a bit more, because I loved mathematics. I was very good at maths through my mid teens until I gave it up in order to concentrate on the classics. So I suspect that physics could have wooed me back in, but I didn’t give it enough chance. In those days, we specialized quite early on, in a way which I think is probably wrong. But that was it. So I was deeply into the Greeks and the Romans and their literature and history from quite an early age.

Stump:

Okay, so it’s off to Oxford, then to study classics, right? In the 60s, what was your experience there like?

Wright:

Yes, I came up to Oxford to read classics. Well, that was a slightly curious story to that, because originally, I thought I would start by reading theology, because I knew that I wanted to be ordained. I thought I would start theology straight off. But I was well advised when I arrived in Oxford, that I should change and do classics first and then switch to theology after it, which is what I did. In Oxford in the late 60s, I was reading… The Oxford classics course consists of both the language and literature, but then particularly the ancient history, and then philosophy, but philosophy, not just ancient philosophy, but also modern. So doing philosophy, up to the present day in parallel with ancient history. And those two have remained my kind of academic backbone to this day, as I look around the shelves in the study where I’m sitting, that’s really what it’s all about, ancient history and philosophy with then the life of the early church and the Jewish world, of course, growing out of or nested within that. I was in Oxford as a graduate from ‘68 to ‘71 and then went to Wycliffe Hall, where I’m now curiously 50 years later, as a kind of supernumerary extra teacher. I studied theology at Wycliffe Hall, on top of my classics, as it were, and that was ‘71 to ‘73, by which time Maggie and I had already got married. All sorts of other things were going on in my life.

Stump:

And some of those other things, tell us a little bit about the decision to go toward parish ministry itself or not, and academic theology. What was your thinking?

Wright:  

That was curious, because when I was growing up, none of my family were academics. Only one of my four grandparents had been to university; that was my grandfather, who was a clergyman who became an Archdeacon. The others, it was just assumed you didn’t go to university unless you wanted to go into one of the more learned professions like being a lawyer, or a doctor, or a judge, or whatever it might be, or a clergyman. Because the universities were a kind of a specialized interest in those days, nowadays, almost everybody who can goes to do some sort of degree somewhere if they can, but that wasn’t the case then. I grew up knowing the world of the church really quite well, but assuming that if I was called to the ministry, I would end up as a parish priest, like so many of the family that I knew, it was a kind of an easy world to think my way into. Indeed, I got lots of support from my family for that ambition, because that was kind of a natural, good thing to do. Yes, we know plenty of people, knowing what I now know, there are many people who are called to ordination, whose families are absolutely horrified. And goodness, we can’t have clergy in the family. How terrible is that? I didn’t meet any resistance on that front. But when I was in Oxford, doing my first degree, I basically loved ancient history, but I fell in love with philosophy. I absolutely thought, wow, this is the most amazing thing. I struggled a bit, maybe I was supposed to be a philosopher. Then reality kicked back in and I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to be somebody who studied and taught the Bible, which just meant so much to me, and had done from an early age. So I thought, no, the philosophy and ancient history is a good basis for that. But then, I discovered academic theology, which I knew nothing whatever about beforehand, and discovered that there was this world called the academy where people went on studying and writing and teaching all their lives. I thought, oh my goodness, how wonderful is that? In those days, there were quite a lot of people in the Oxford theology faculty, who were also clergy of various denominations, many Anglicans, but also the man who became my professor, when I did my doctorate, George Caird who was from the congregational tradition. There were also many Roman Catholics and others around Oxford teaching. That was really where I set my aim to become part of that group of people who were both pastorally involved because there was no sort of division as we have now very often between the academic and the pastoral, it was assumed that one could and probably should try to do both. Although somebody did try and warn me against trying to do too many things at once, but I took no notice. Much to the chagrin of my wife subsequently has had to bear with all the fluctuations of a career that’s gone in both directions. So I was set on that, and so signed on to do a doctorate in 1973. In those days, you didn’t have to do a master’s degree first, that just came as an extra, you went straight from doing the initial bachelor’s degree into doctoral work. So I started in ‘73, and launched into the Letter to the Romans, which in a sense has been my intellectual as well as in a way spiritual home ever since.

Stump:

So your publishing career has also reflected these two different interests, the more practical general kind of books as well as academic theology. If you were to pick one book from each of those tracks that you hope you’re remembered for in another 50 or 100 years, what would they be?

Wright:

Well, I think my best known book at the popular level is Surprised by Hope. And I suspect we’ll be talking about that in a little while, because increasingly, through the 80s and 90s, I became aware that even those who professed to believe in Jesus’s resurrection didn’t actually or mostly weren’t really reflecting on what resurrection was actually all about. Because they were still living the narrative which says, the point of being a Christian is to die and go to heaven, which is not what the New Testament says at all. The point of being Christian is to be part of God’s project on Earth as in Heaven, bringing the life of heaven to earth, ultimately, in the new creation, which involves resurrection. So Surprised by Hope will be the obvious one. I still hope that of my academic books, one of my most recent ones, History and Eschatology, which was my Gifford lectures from 2018, might have an impact. Because it came out just as the pandemic was beginning, there hasn’t been much feedback or reaction to it so far, and I have no idea if people are reading it or not. But I hope they will because I’ve actually said a lot there, which I still think is really quite important. That book stands on the shoulders of my big series, Christian Origins and the Question of God, and is trying to look more broadly at worldviews and the large arguments about God and the world which go rumbling on.

Stump:

Well, I will tell you that I have that on my list to read and we’ll have another conversation on the podcast after I’ve done that, and we can talk about that a little bit. But let’s transition here then to what you alluded to the resurrection. I said that we’re releasing this during Easter Week, the high point on the church calendar. Talking about the resurrection, Paul said, if it didn’t happen, our faith is in vain. So you just mentioned this massive scholarly project you have done called Christian origins and the question of God. Can you first maybe situate your work on the resurrection within that larger project? What were the origins of that project? Maybe some of the central conclusions or takeaways?

Wright:

Yes, wow. For a long time, ever since I started teaching the New Testament I have wanted to write a big book about St. Paul because my doctoral dissertation was on Romans, and I discovered that in order to understand Romans inevitably, I had to understand as much as I could of the rest of Paul as well. I was aware that there were different competing visions of who Paul was and what he was all about. Quite by accident, I stumbled sideways into what then became known as the new perspective on Paul. And I have followed that line through although the new perspective is not so new as it once was, since that was in the 1970s actually when that was all going on. I’ve tried to develop the Paul theme, but from at least the late 70s, I got very interested in the question of who Jesus really was within his own historical context. The upsurge of interest in Second Temple Judaism, which was going on through the 60s and 70s, not least because of the Dead Sea Scrolls being edited, and so on. That contextualized a whole new shift in Jesus studies, which I and others have referred to as the third quest, it’s a bit complicated how you get there, but never mind that for the moment. So for a long time I had in mind, I want to write a big book about Jesus and a big book about Paul, and that will be what I will do. I went to Jerusalem on sabbatical in 1989, I was teaching a small course at the Hebrew University on Paul, which was fascinating. But I had plenty of time for research and writing in the three months I was there. I was trying to write simultaneously this big book on Jesus, this big book on Paul and I discovered that the introduction to both books had to be pretty much the same, like who are the Pharisees, what were second temple Jews hoping for, how did all this nest within the Roman Empire, etc, etc. So that then turned into a whole volume in itself called The New Testament to the People of God, which was actually looking back now, that was all the stuff that I wished my students had known before they started, rather than having to have it explained to them in tutorials and lectures as they went along. Because it’s really how to study the New Testament, and what the historical context of Judaism and Christianity really was. That was volume one. That was the platform upon which Jesus and the Victory of God volume two then sat, though, it took me more years than I expected to finish it. That was ‘96 that came out. The trouble with the book on Jesus was that there was supposed to be a big final chapter on the resurrection. And there wasn’t room. The publishers told me I had to stop after about 600 pages. I still had all this material on the resurrection. I sort of sighed deeply and thought, oh, well, it better be a separate volume then. When I started researching for that separate volume, it grew from the projected 200 pages to 700 pages, because I discovered that so many people who’d written about the resurrection one way or another had misread the textures, got this bit wrong, had misinterpreted Paul, had misunderstood Second Maccabees, whatever it was. That was a very exciting book to write, sorting all that stuff out, and coming out with the conclusion that the best explanation for the rise of Christianity is that Jesus of Nazareth really was alive bodily after his death, even though his bodily condition was transformed in ways that nobody had expected. Then, having done that, that set the scene for the big book on Paul, which then grew and grew and grew into two volumes–Paul and The Faithfulness of God, total of about 1700 pages, I never intend to write a book that long again, it’s very hard work during the bibliography, never mind anything else. There is supposed to be a volume five, which will be The Gospels of the story of God. There might even be a volume six, maybe I need some rejuvenation in this, I need a fresh shot of academic energy after all these years. But I’m still hoping to get at least one of those done. There are other projects as well. The resurrection book was an accident, it was supposed to be the final chapter in the Jesus book, but I’m really, really glad I did it because it gave me the space to explore all sorts of aspects, which I wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Stump: 

So let’s focus in on that more particularly. I should tell you, perhaps confess is the better word, that a few years ago I decided to read this book for Lent, and I don’t mean that as a penance. You said these kinds of books are very difficult to write, they also take a fair bit of discipline to read properly. But I remember being so impressed with the kind of comprehensive treatment and critique of the various explanations scholars have offered for the accounts of the rise of Christianity that had been given and what to do with these claims. So maybe that’s a good place for us to start on this topic. What are the other kinds of options scholars have given for this scandalous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, dead and buried, and then on the third day rose again from the dead? How do scholars understand the kinds of accounts that we have that seem to testify to this but give differing explanations? Give us a little survey of what those options are, and at least the short versions of what’s wrong with those and why the better option is that Jesus really did rise.

Wright:

Until the rise of what we now call historical criticism in the 18th century, there had always been skeptics, of course, but skeptics outside Christianity. But then from the 18th century onwards, there were skeptics who came up from within a broadly Christian tradition, particularly interestingly, because within the Lutheran world, there was so much emphasis on the redeeming power of the cross, that often the resurrection didn’t seem to have much work to do. If you look at even dear beloved Johann Sebastian Bach, I mean, obviously, he did believe in the resurrection, but his settings of the Matthew Passion and the John Passion, by the end of those which tell the story of Jesus’s crucifixion, you’ve more or less got a complete theology of redemption, all set to music. It’s almost as though the Easter story is just a kind of a nice addendum, and then oh, by the way, you know, he rose again, and he ascended to heaven, that’s the end of the story sort of thing. Any sense that the resurrection was actually the launching of new creation on Earth, as in Heaven, just had disappeared from the theological tradition. Then, when skeptics from within Western scholarship came up and said, well, actually, he never really did rise. Then people started to say, well, look, Paul says it was a spiritual body and so that presumably means that Paul didn’t think it was a physical body. Paul was the earliest writer we’ve got, so all these stories in the gospels were obviously written down later on, because the gospels were probably written in the 60s, or 70s, or 80s, or 90s, so clearly, people started to make up stories a long time after the event. The original idea was simply that after Jesus’s death, his followers had this strong sense that God loved them anyway, or that Jesus’s project was still continuing, or that there really was some sort of a life after death. That then got downgraded into what a great many people in churches were taught through the 18th 19th and 20th century, so that the people who had swapped the biblical gospel of new creation for the Platonic gospel that the real aim is for us to go and live with God in a non physical, non spatio-temporal place called heaven. Once you’ve got that, then what’s the point of resurrection? So many people grew up saying, I believe in the resurrection of the body, in the Creed, but actually meaning I believe in the immortality of the soul, which is, of course, a very different thing. But once you’ve got a lot of would be Christian people believing that actually what matters is the immortal soul going off to heaven, then what’s the point of having a bodily resurrection? Then the skeptical scholarship comes along and says, well, there you are. When they said he was raised on the third day, what they actually meant was that God’s Kingdom continues, and that we will one day go and be with him, which is, of course, not what the language of resurrection meant at all. So there’s been an odd confusion between skeptical scholarship and muddled believers, who will say, well, clearly Jesus is alive because when we say our prayers, we have a sense of his presence. But obviously, he’s alive in a spiritual way, because he went to heaven, so he’s no longer around. The amount of sheer muddle and misinformation, both among Christians and among non-Christians has been such that it took me a lot of unpicking in the big book, and in the smaller book, Surprised by Hope, to try even to lay out what the options were. Of course, then you get skeptics who come along and say, well, if he didn’t actually rise from the dead, then, in what sense was there anything achieved at all by his life? Was he not simply whistling in the dark? Or was he not simply suggesting that there might be new ways of ordering your life which will be less unpleasant than other ways? And so the whole thing gets downgraded. To try to come back from that, and to say, no, let’s actually read the texts which are about new creation being launched in the very physical body of Jesus. This has been and for many people continues to be quite a shock. This is not what they expect to hear on Easter morning.

Stump:

It also doesn’t seem to be what the disciples, Jesus’s first followers were expecting. You’d think if they had been there would have been a vigil of some sort outside the tomb waiting for him to come, right? Why is this? How would this take them by such surprise?

Wright: 

Because if they were Jews of a certain kind, let’s be clear, not all Jews of the period believed in bodily resurrection, the Sadducees certainly didn’t, we’re not sure whether the Essenes did or not, and some philosophically minded types, like Philo of Alexandria, pretty certainly would have preferred the immortality of the soul to the resurrection of the body. But the Pharisees who were pretty powerful in terms of opinion-forming in the time of Jesus, they believed in the resurrection, all right, but the resurrection was something that was going to happen to everybody at the end, not to one person in the middle of history. You see this in John chapter 11, when Lazarus has died, and his sisters say to Jesus, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Jesus says, your brother will rise again. And they say, I know he’ll rise at the resurrection on the last day. But you know, in other words, that’s not much help right now is it? Then Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. That’s then the same point that Paul makes in 1st Corinthians 15, where he says, the Messiah rises as the first fruits, and then at His return, at His coming, all those who belong to Him. This is a radical innovation within the Jewish expectation. They weren’t expecting one person to rise in the middle of history. So when Jesus said, The Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles, and they will crucify him, and on the third day, he’ll be raised, I think the disciples must have heard that as a kind of odd metaphor, as though Jesus was saying, this is going to be very nasty, some of us may get hurt, some of us may get killed, but we’re going to win. Because the language he was using had no purchase for them, and indeed, the Gospel writers say, they actually didn’t understand what he was trying to tell them. I think that’s where they were, their hopes were dashed.

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hey Language of God listeners. If you enjoy the conversations you hear on the podcast, we just wanted to let you know about our website, biologos.org, which has articles, videos, personal stories, and curated resources for pastors, students, and educators. And we’ve recently launched a new animated video series called insights. These short videos tell stories and explore many of the questions at the heart of the faith and science conversation. You can find them at biologos dot org slash insights or there’s a link in the shownotes. All right, back to the show!

Stump:

So if I have my chronology correct, Paul’s letters were written and in circulation in the early church before the gospels were written, at least in their final form, right?

Wright:

That’s been the common scholarly opinion for the last 150 years or so. There are scholars today, both radical scholars and more conservative ones, who are trying out the possibility that the gospels were being written in the 50s, and 60s, and Paul’s letters are appearing or being sent in the late 40s and through the 50s. It is possible that there was some overlap, but most scholars, and I’m perfectly comfortable with this, would date the gospels in the 60s or 70s. I think they’re quite likely at the early end of that, but nothing much hinges on that.

Stump:

Is part of the argument for an earlier date for the gospels that we don’t see a lot of the sort of theologizing influence of Paul’s thinking about the resurrection in the gospels themselves?

Wright:

That is part of it, certainly. And yes, if you look in the gospels for the kind of thing you get in 1st Corinthians 15, Paul’s detailed biblical exposition of the resurrection, you don’t get that at all, really. But it’s a little tricky, because there are some bits of the Gospels, which do look as though they’ve been shaped by the theology of the 50s, and 60s, but the resurrection narratives themselves in Matthew 28, and Mark 16, and Luke 24, and John 20-21, are remarkably devoid of the developed theology which you find in Paul. That’s one of the arguments which I and others have advanced for saying that even if the Gospels are being edited in the 60s or 70s, or even later, the resurrection narratives themselves, look really fairly much unadorned, and they have certain tweaks and turns in them, which imply that the people who are telling these stories are aware of some of the biblical overtones, but by and large, there’s very little of the biblical exegesis which you find in Paul. Which is surprising when you contrast it with the narratives of the cross where, as Jesus is going to his death, all four gospels tell the story in such a way as to echo Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, and other passages, redemptive death passages from the Old Testament. But they basically don’t do that with the resurrection. It looks as though those stories have been told in this surprising, breathless way, right from the beginning. Once they were told that way again, and again and again, that’s how they basically stayed.

Stump:

What are we to do with the slightly different accounts of the details of the resurrection from the different gospels? Which women went to the tomb? How many angels were there? Where did Jesus first appear? That kind of thing.

Wright:

It’s seems a glorious muddle at first sight, but there’s some fascinating things going on there. People have often made the case of saying, if you’re in a court of law, and you get eyewitnesses who all saw the same road accident, and you keep them apart from one another, so that they don’t hear each other’s testimony, they will each give you different details about, the car was traveling in this direction, or it was a red car or was a blue car or whatever. Any judge knows perfectly well that eye witness testimonies often do seem to conflict. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an accident, doesn’t mean that nobody was hurt, whatever it may be. That’s an argument people have often used. I’m not too worried about that one way or another. There are ways of fitting the stories together with greater or lesser ingenuity. But it looks as though it’s all happening in a rush and a flurry and nobody’s quite sure who else is doing what at any given moment. But here’s one of the fascinating things: if you line up the original Greek text of the four resurrection stories, plus the beginning of Acts by the way, even when they’re telling basically the same story, they use very different language, it looks as though they are not copying from one another, it looks as though these are independent Greek accounts. Compare and contrast for much of the rest of the Gospel story, as is well known, the Synoptic Gospels, they we call them that because you can put them side by side. There’s very similar Greek phrases and sentences for many of the stories between Matthew Mark and Luke at least. So the gospel stories look as if they’re this early, breathless, we can’t quite believe it, but this is what we think we just saw happen, kind of story, which have not been tidied up. Nobody has worked over them to say we better produce a more coherent account, that they are what they are. For many people, myself included, that has something of the ring of truth about it.

Stump:

That seems to be a really powerful argument for the kind of historical reliability of the central fact that they’re bearing witness to. Does it, however, make some people nervous for things like the inspiration of Scripture for God?

Wright:

Yes, but you see, I mean, here’s the silly thing, we have so elevated a doctrine of Scripture, as to put it above the resurrection itself as though you first have to believe in the inspiration of scripture in order then to believe in the resurrection. The resurrection is the fulcrum and, and foundation point of all Christian epistemology, nevermind anything else. I believe in the Bible because of the resurrection, not the other way around. We have to be a bit careful. In terms of the history of Western Protestantism, Scripture became enormously important because of the Reformation, that we believe in sola scriptura, rather than relying on the Pope to tell us what to believe that then that gets pumped up and pumped up to the point where it’s almost as though we have to go on defending the Bible. And then how are we going to do that? Well, we have to defend it by rationalist means so we invent new doctrines like inerrancy, or infallibility or whatever, because they appeal to our rationalist Western minds. Instead of saying no, for goodness sake, let’s read the text as it is, and invent our theories about it later. Rather than insist that the text should conform to some 18th century theory that we happen to have dreamed up.

Stump:

What’s the importance, either historically or theologically, that women were the first witnesses to this event?

Wright: 

That’s extraordinary in terms of the culture of the time. There’s a passage in Josephus, the Jewish historian who is a younger contemporary of St. Paul, a passage in Josephus, where he says very clearly, women are not acceptable as witnesses in a court of law in our world. Now, you can find exceptions to that, there are some cases where women do give evidence for this and that, and there’s been a lot of debate about this, partly from people who don’t like the implication of this, that the stories really have the ring of truth. But to be honest, if you look at the difference between the gospel narratives, and what Paul says is the received common tradition in 1st Corinthians 15, Paul’s tradition has already airbrushed the women out. It’s impossible to imagine that all the early traditions had simply male witnesses and that then, after Paul has written that to the Corinthians sometime in the early or middle 50s, that then people have invented from whole cloth stories of Mary Magdalene and the other women going to the tomb and meeting Jesus or seeing angels or whatever, they just would not have done that. So it must be the case that the stories about the women are the really early ones. And that already within 25 years of the crucifixion when Paul is writing First Corinthians 15. You remember what he says there, he says, this is the tradition which we all received and all believed. In other words, the Corinthians have had many teachers, they’ve had Peter, they’ve had Apollos, they’ve had other people turn up, and this is what everybody teaches. So this is not unique to Paul. But the women stories must go back much earlier than that; they must go back to the 40s and the 30s.

Stump:

Okay, perhaps some people think that it’s fine and reasonable for people 2000 years ago to believe in a resurrection. But today we have science, right? BioLogos is a science and faith organization. Do you see any scientific critique on the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus? That today, we ought to go okay, that’s what people back then may have believed, but now we know those kinds of things?

Wright:

There’s a wonderful, I have met this in many contexts, there’s a wonderful modernist arrogance about this. I was once debating with a learned German professor who had been a New Testament scholar teaching within a church academy, and then given it all up and written angry books against the resurrection against Jesus, etc, etc. And he thumped the table at one point and said, we know that the body of Jesus has, the word he used was molded in the tomb, I think he meant rotted in the tomb. He said, we know this. And I said, excuse me, how do we know this exactly? He said, I have 200 years of critical historiography on my side. And I said, excuse me, 200 years? Do you think that it was only with Descartes or Locke and Berkeley and Hume or Kant or somebody that people suddenly realized that dead people didn’t come back? Look at the history: Socrates knew that, Aeschylus says very clearly that there is no such thing as resurrection, and Seneca knew that, Cicero knew that. Early Christianity was born into a world where everybody knew that dead people didn’t come back. They laughed at St. Paul in Athens, when he said that God had raised Jesus from the dead. This is not a new thing that modern science has suddenly discovered. When the so called Jesus Seminar, were discussing the resurrection, they had a sort of show and tell to the press where they invited a young woman who worked in a morgue in Los Angeles to come and talk to the reporters about how the fact that she worked with dead corpses, and she knew perfectly well what happens to dead corpses. So this early Christian idea, and it was just laughable, as though people in the ancient world just didn’t know that this is what happened to dead bodies. There’s that sort of modernist arrogance, which we just have to laugh at and face down. But here’s the point: the resurrection from the beginning, was never seen by the early Christians as simply a very odd event within the present world. They always saw it and preached it as the beginning, the foundation, the launching point of a new creation. They did that in continuity with the promises about new creation, which are there in Israel scriptures, which are, I think, the only place in the history of culture, philosophy, religion, call it what you will, where there’s a picture of a new creation, a new world of peace and joy, and justice. Think of Isaiah 11, think of Psalm 72, etc. Notice that Paul quotes Isaiah 11, the root of Jesse rises to rule the nations and in Him, the nations will hope. That’s the passage about the wolf and the lamb lying down together, et cetera. He quotes that at the climax of Romans at the end of the passage in Romans 15, where he’s urging the church to live as people of new creation, and to show that by being united in faith and worship, and so on. For Paul, this is all about new creation. It isn’t that we can fit the the great tornado of resurrection into the small bottle of the old creation, the tornado of resurrection launches this new creation, uncomfortably because the old and the new, are then jostling together, and we see that happening in Paul’s letters, we see it happening in Acts, but that is the claim. If a scientist says, well, I’m a scientist, so I really can’t believe in this stuff. I want to say well fine, science studies that which we can repeat, which we can test in the laboratory. Of course, that’s what science does extremely well that has done very successfully. But the whole claim here is that there is something new launched upon the world, which in the nature of the case, you wouldn’t expect to be able to repeat in the laboratory except in so far, that the claim involves a claim about a new community, a new way of being human, a new way of living, which actually goes out into the world and has gone out into the world, and has had a transformative, though still controversial impact upon the world. That’s where the claim really comes home to roost.

Stump:

We’ve been focused here primarily on history, perhaps let’s end our conversation with applying this a bit more to the present and the future. Maybe along the lines of the book you alluded to already, Surprised by Hope. What does the resurrection or what maybe what should the resurrection mean to us today? How should it affect how we understand current events like a COVID pandemic, or war in Ukraine, or pick any other issue that threatens our livelihood or safety or our joy? How does resurrection speak into our experience today? Then the second part of that is what do we look for in the future? 

Wright:

Let me do that the other way around, if I may, because the perspective of the New Testament is to say, God’s new creation is on the way, it’s already been launched and it will be complete. 1st Corinthians 15, Paul speaks of a time when God will be all in all. That is a sort of summary of what you find in Isaiah 11, and Habakkuk 2, and so on, the earth shall be full of the glory of God or the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea. This is the final reaffirmation of the goodness of God’s creation. That’s where we’re moving towards. We’re always then assailed individually and corporately, by evidence that seems to point in the other direction. When in baptism, we are told you’ve died to sin, and you now come alive with Christ, it’s very hard to believe that when temptation comes and whispers in your ear or your heart and says, well, it doesn’t matter, everybody does this or that or the other. So what’s the first, why not just go with the flow, because then the Christian, if you believe in the resurrection, that includes being prepared to say no to the old creation, when it comes in whispers in your ear, and yes to the new creation, there is a new way of being human. It’s very interesting that the early Christians discovered quickly that there are four virtues, which the ancient world didn’t count at all, but which really mattered. And they are patience, humility, chastity, and charity, in the sense of outward looking love to and help to anybody and everybody. And so to believe in the resurrection involves saying, there is this new way of being human, and we are committed to it. Though we all fail, we are jolly well going to carry on in the power of the Holy Spirit. And then comes the extraordinary point of continuity, that even though what we do at the moment seems often to be useless, we try this and that and it doesn’t seem to get us very far se are promised that in the new creation, all that has been of God and of the Holy Spirit, in the present world, will be there somehow in God’s new world. That’s that line at the end of 1st Corinthians 15, where Paul says, therefore get on with your work, because you know that in the Lord, your labor is not in vain. In other words, as Jesus himself said, every cup of cold water that you give to somebody in the name of Jesus, the Messiah, then that will not go unnoticed and unrewarded. There is going to be continuity between the present world and God’s future world. That’s why Paul talks about God coming in Christ to change our lowly body to be like his glorious body. He talks about the body being meant for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. So what we do in the present matters, because it is actually part of the future, which we are to be part of, when Christ comes again to renew this world and at that point, of course, very controversial in parts of America, I know, perhaps more in America and elsewhere, because the whole rapture theology is all about people being taken away from this world, to another world entirely. Whereas the whole point of the second coming in the New Testament is that Jesus is coming back to rule and to reign, to transform, to heal, to fill this present world with justice and joy and peace and love. And we are to practice justice and joy and peace and love in the present because it’s the language we’re going to be speaking when Jesus comes back.

Stump:

That point about continuity, I think, is so important and so often misunderstood as though there is no break or no dramatic work by God that has to happen in order to bring this about right? I think some of the liberal theologians of the early 20th century just thought that we could, by the right public policies and so on, enact the new creation. That’s not what you’re talking about.

Wright: 

No, I mean, right public policies are a whole lot better than wrong public policies, let’s be quite clear about that. That is because constantly… And I’m struggling with this at the moment because I have to preach a sermon in 10 days time. And with the Ukraine crisis going on, I can’t ignore that. I mean, we’ve got the end of next week, when I’m recording this, we’ve got the events of Maundy Thursday of Good Friday of yesterday, what does that got to say to the Ukraine crisis, and it has to do with God’s justice, and God’s mercy, somehow needing to come to birth and in our prayers, and in our advice to our politicians as to what they should be doing. We are looking for God’s putting off the world right, and though we don’t believe that we can do that by ourselves completely in advance of the coming of Jesus, every act of justice and mercy, appropriate justice, appropriate mercy. The trouble is, we often get those the wrong way around. We think that, oh, if somebody has done something wrong, or well, let’s not be too judgmental, let’s just be kind to them and pretend it didn’t happen. That’s not real mercy. Real mercy sits on top of real justice. Miroslav Volf, in Yale, is brilliant on this in his book Exclusion and Embrace, that real justice names the evil in order to deal with it, and then to have the embrace of reconciliation and mercy. You can’t have that unless you do the first. And that, in a sense, is what Good Friday and Easter day are all about, God naming and dealing with evil in order then once that’s done, to have the new day of Easter to be launched. In a sense, we all have to live through that in our preaching, in our praying, in our own lives. Because we all have to die to sin, individually and corporately. That’s a constant struggle, as Martin Luther and others saw, but that’s the only way through which we then come to glimpse and to instantiate even in small ways, the new creation, which is about peace, which is about reconciliation, which is about finding ways forward, globally, as well as personally.

Stump: 

May it be so. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, lots of other questions I could ask and topics we could explore. But I think maybe we’ll leave it there for now. How will you celebrate Easter this year?

Wright:

We will have family staying. And that will mean we have a busy household. So there’ll be lots of cooking and lots of celebrating and probably the odd bottle of champagne, because some of us gave up alcohol for Lent. So there will be a certain amount of judicious celebration, shall we say. We will have first one grandchild staying then another one and then another one. So we will have some young people in the house and that’ll be fun. We’ll probably go on bicycle rides around Oxford and do fun things like that. Also, hopefully go to some good musical events. I mean, music itself, I always think is actually a pointer towards the new creation. Whether it’s singing in the house or whether it’s going to concerts, I’m hoping we’ll be doing some of that.

Stump:

Well, very nice. All of those in anticipation of the new creation. Well, thanks, Tom, so much for talking to us again. We appreciate it. Christ is risen.

Wright:

Amen. Hallelujah. Thank you very much indeed.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and by individual donors who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Nate Mulder is our assistant producer. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you  will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.