Author's Introduction
- The present work is Wright's third in his series of books on Christian origins, the sequel to "Wright (N.T.) - The New Testament and the People of God" (1992) and "Wright (N.T.) - Jesus and the Victory of God" (1996). It is cause for reflection that whereas John Meier1, that other producer of prodigious tomes on the historical Jesus, refuses even to touch the topic of Jesus' resurrection, Wright has devoted over 800 pages to this subject alone. The result is one of the most impressive studies of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection published to date.
- One of the most remarkable features of this large book is that it is almost exclusively dedicated to discussion of the primary sources alone. One would have expected so lengthy a study to be choking with references to the vast secondary literature on the resurrection and to involve itself in discussion with that literature. But, while he obviously knows that literature (the book includes a 29-page bibliography of such sources), Wright concentrates on discussing the primary source documents of ancient pagan, Jewish, Christian, and biblical literature that mention the subject of resurrection from the dead. By page 681 Wright can boast, "We have now surveyed the entire corpus of writing about Jesus and his resurrection in the first two centuries, setting it within the framework of beliefs about life after death in the ancient worlds of paganism and Judaism." The reader has realized long before then that were Wright to engage the secondary literature in the customary fashion, five more volumes of equal length would have been spawned. This preoccupation with primary sources leaves it largely to the reader to work out for himself what Wright would say to this or that contemporary scholar who does not share his views. But the advantage won for Wright is that this procedure makes Wright's book timeless, rather than tied to current fashion or scholarship. His study will remain a valuable sourcebook for future generations of students of the resurrection. After all, barring what Wright calls "a happy accident of archaeology" which yields new sources (such as discovery of what Wright regards as a lost ending to the Gospel of Mark), these will remain all the sources we have, so that if one's handling of them has been thorough and careful, one can ride out the shifting currents of scholarship.
- One of the curiosities of the book is that Wright is constantly taking aim throughout it at those who construe the Christian hope of life after death in terms of the immortality of the soul rather than resurrection of the body. This is the reason for his strange locution that resurrection is "life after 'life after death'" (p.30). I take this to mean that the Christian hope is that following a period of unembodied existence2 after death we shall experience reimbodiment in the resurrection. One would have thought that no such correction of popular misunderstanding would have been necessary subsequent to "Cullmann (Oscar) - Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?" (1958). But Wright is a churchman as well as a NT scholar, and I suspect that in his role as a clergyman he must constantly encounter persons who deny the resurrection of the body in favor of the immortality of the soul. Hence, his tilting at this windmill.
Author's Conclusion
- On the basis of his argument, Wright judges the historical probability of the twin facts of the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus to be "so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70" (p. 710).
- Now comes the final step in the argument: what is the best explanation of the facts of the empty tomb and appearances? Wright casts his argument here as an inference to the best explanation (p. 716), but he again focuses on explanatory power. The resurrection hypothesis explains the empty tomb and appearances; its rivals do not (p. 717). Wright recognizes that we here come face to face with worldview considerations; there is, he says, no neutral ground. It is not entirely clear to me what Wright's answer to Enlightenment naturalism is (pp. 710-716). He seems to say that the spirit of the Enlightenment is not to close a priori any door to understanding and then to invite the naturalist to shift grounds and see if the facts do not make better sense within a theistic worldview than within a naturalistic view. Wright concludes with a summary of reasons for rejecting the principal alternative explanations of the empty tomb and appearances (p. 718). But here again there is confusion. The four rivals he considers are in fact denials of the empty tomb and appearances, not explanations of them. These hypotheses should have been considered and rejected in his earlier discussion about the necessity of the empty tomb and appearances in explaining the origin of the disciples' belief in Jesus' resurrection. The rivals that should be considered here are those few hypotheses that concede these two facts and then try to explain them naturally. Wright's reference here to Habermas' survey of rival hypotheses is all that he provides by way of refutation.
- There is much, much more in this wide-ranging book. I think it is best seen as the most extensively developed version of the argument for the resurrection from the fact of the origin of the disciples' belief in Jesus' resurrection, an argument which may be supplemented by comparably strong or even stronger independent arguments for the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus and, then, for his resurrection. It is an invaluable reference work and a benchmark of resurrection scholarship.
Comment:
Review of "Wright (N.T.) - The Resurrection of the Son of God".
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 1: Footnote 2:
- Is this really what he says? Does he argue that we 'sleep' while 'alive' between death and resurrection or that we are conscious?
- See my note on disembodied existence.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)