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Fact 3: The birth of the Early Church

It can be very easy in our 21st century beliefs to assume that people “ in those days” believed any kind of resurrection rubbish because they believed miracles were possible , but now that we have sophisticated minds which are more critical and scientific we know better.

We are only able to hold onto these kinds of views because we are mostly uninformed about resurrection beliefs in first century Palestine.

If we look at the beliefs of Jews and Greeks in the first century we can see that neither group believed that dead men rise! It was practically unthinkable.

But what about the resurrection in Jewish scripture and greek mythology, surely that is where they got their ideas from?

Greek mythology and resurrection

In short this is not true; there were some very fundamental differences in the concepts of ‘resurrection’ in all both parties. As we have already seen from 1 Cor 15 in the previous article, Paul is preaching a bodily resurrection, not merely a spiritual one. Greek thinking at the time was dominated by Platonic and Homeric thought, and in neither of these types of texts do we find any consideration of a bodily resurrection. Tim Keller writes ‘ In Greco-Roman thinking, the soul or spirit was good and the physical and material world was weak, corrupt, and defiling…therefore salvation was conceived as liberation from the body.’

In other words, in the views of the Greeks’ if you could lose your body then your soul would be free. If this is what you were hoping to achieve, being resurrected in the body was not only implausible to the Greeks, but it was also completely undesirable.

What about the Jews?

It is probable that the Jews were unaware or not impacted by these Greek worldviews, after all they were God’s chosen people in their eyes. They were immensely proud to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and would have been unlikely to look to the Pagans for a change of belief; since they believed they were given the Old Testament scriptures by God, why then look to another culture for a sudden change of view?

So what was the Jewish worldview involving resurrection?

Jewish Resurrection thinking

N.T. Wright points out in his extensive scholarly work, The Resurrection of the Son of God, that the Jewish community did have an expectation for a form of resurrection, but one at the end of the world. This is mostly seen in a few passages in the Old Testament such as Daniel 12:2-3, which alludes to an end-time resurrection for the nation of Israel as a whole. Such sentiments are displayed in Isaiah chapters 24-27 of  which talks of God’s judgement, and the hope for resurrection at the end of the world (Isaiah 26:19). This is also seen in Ezekiel 37, arguably the most famous of all resurrection passages.

It is true also that in non-canonical Judaic writings from 400 BC ( like 2 Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus) up to the times of Jesus that similar themes were established. The main two being the restoration of Israel, and resurrection bodies being given at the end of the world.

Messiah as warrior

However, we will note here that just like the long-awaited Jewish messiah was expected to be a warrior who would overthrow with power those governing over the Israelites (rather than a man who would be crushed and crucified); there was no expectation for the Messiah himself to be resurrected, nor for any other form of resurrection in the Jewish community before the end of the world.

Conclusion

N.T. Wright summarises: ‘The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false’.

The first two factors of the empty tomb, and the post-death encounters of Jesus alone are extremely persuasive in convincing us of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the birthing of the early church is quite simply the knock out blow. In Acts 2:41, Peter preaches the first sermon about Jesus’ resurrection  and we see 3000 promptly respond to become followers of Christ.

This incredible birthing of the early church took place in Jerusalem, the very area where these resurrection events had taken place a few short weeks earlier. Frankly, you could understand this world religion growing from a myth if this all happened a few thousand miles away, but not in a place where there were eye-witnesses. Surely it would have been quashed immediately?

In the final article of this series I will look at the implication of all these facts combined.

For the other articles looking at the resurrection of Christ please click below.

http://reason.cck.org.uk/tag/resurrection/

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This is a question that we, as Christians, are asked regularly and one to which I believe we should be prepared to give a good answer to. The overwhelming philosophy of our time is a post-modernist attitude to the truth which is summarised in the statement “That may be true for you.” We have abandoned real truth and as such we are inclined to view religions as equals, all attempting to express different aspects of a spiritual experience.

So what makes Christianity unique?

Christians are committed to the truth above all else, we want to know what is factual, so it is the historicity of the resurrection that I would like to emphasize first. We believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus as an event in history and there are many supporting documents which maintain that this is the case.

Firstly, we take the gospels as eye witness accounts as to what happened. These texts can be independently verified as to have been written in the first century AD. Similarly, there are contemporary documents by non-Christian scholars who attest to the existence of Jesus as a historical character.

I believe that from this we can make two points:

- Jesus did literally die and we have reliable records of his resurrection
- There is not enough time after the resurrection and before the gospels were written for a mythology to arise

Mythology takes time

It takes time for a mythology to arise and the dating of the gospels don’t allow for so much time to have passed. We know as fact that they were written when many people who had met Jesus were still alive. In fact in 1 Corinthians 15: 6, the apostle Paul, after listing the witnesses of the resurrection; points out that many are still alive, they could then refute what is being written if it were false.

Interesting mythological accounts of the resurrection did occur in the next couple of centuries and are called the Gnostic gospels (made famous by the Da Vinci code book by Dan Brown). These accounts represent the fantasised account of Jesus’ death that many claim from the biblical gospels. However, their existence mearly shows the gospels to be an earlier and far more grounded source.

The Shock of Monotheism

The historicity of the bible is not limited to the New Testament and the whole of scripture reads like nothing else written in history. When the Jews are declaring only one God it is completely unlike anything else being believed by their contemporaries at the time. I invite you to read Greek or Egyptian Mythology and compare it to the writings of the Bible. They are completely different in structure and style. Early Judaism was declaring a message unlike anything of the time; that there is one God and he is gracious and compassionate. This compares very differently to accounts of gods coming to earth and raping humans. Homer’s Iliad was written to satirise the gods as they increasingly became the object of ridicule and disbelief due to their evident immorality.

What about Osiris, Adonis etc? 

So what do we make of other accounts of resurrection? Firstly, they lack the historical verification of the resurrection accounts. We have no way of verifying the authenticity of these sources and I think you would struggle to find anyone who takes these accounts seriously. The events described in these myths are also difficult to compare to the resurrection of Christ. The differing accounts of the death of Osiris duplicated in the story of Adonis for example variously represent the God being cut into many pieces then reassembled with a significant piece missing only conclude with him in the underworld. This is not even close to Jesus who was claimed to have walked the earth again in a human body and was witnessed by many.

There are so many other accounts that are discussed which I don’t have time to deal with. I would recommend visiting: http://garyhabermas.com/articles/religious_studies/rel_stud_res_claims_in_non-christian_religions.htm

In summary, we can be sure of Jesus’ resurrection as a historical event of which the contemporary accounts read like history and lack the fantastical style of the compared myths. Myths surrounding supposed resurrections have always been around it seems, in some form. However, they just reveal an understandable hatred of death and it is not until Jesus that we have something we can trust as actual history.

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