Читать книгу The Resurrection of History - David Prewer Bruce - Страница 7

Did he or didn’t he? In this morning’s paper the lead story here in Canada was about Jason Kenney, minister of immigration, who has been accused of personally intervening on behalf of convicted felon Conrad Black. Lord Black, you may recall, came to international fame by becoming the publisher of the London Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Jerusalem Post¸ as well hundreds of other newspapers across North America. For his part in rescuing the Telegraph, Mr. Black was awarded a British peerage, becoming the Right Honourable Lord Black of Crossharbour. The Canadian prime minister at the time, the Right Honourable Jean Chrétien, often a target of Black’s media clout and conservative views, invoked an obscure Canadian law and demanded that Black renounce either his peerage or renounce his Canadian citizenship. Black was so outraged at this attempt to embarrass him among his fellow Lords that he renounced his Canadian citizenship, even though he and his Canadian wife continued to maintain a house in Toronto as one of their principal residences.

Several years later, embroiled in financial troubles, Black was charged and convicted in the United States of fraud and obstruction of justice, and sentenced to prison in Florida. After successful legal challenges to two of his three convictions, he served a total of three and a half years, and was released in May 2012. Since he was no longer a citizen of Canada, in anticipation of his release Black requested and received a temporary residence permit—a permit that would require renewal every year—to enter and live in Canada. As soon as he was released, he returned to Canada.

Noted immigration lawyer Guidy Mamann, in response to questions posed to him by the press, said he thought it was highly unlikely that someone of Black’s status and circumstances would have been granted a temporary residence permit without the knowledge of the minister of immigration, Jason Kenney. By saying that Kenney, the immigration minister, knew of the application, he was clearly implying that Kenney personally influenced the decision, a process typically left for bureaucrats to impartially decide, interfering in what should be a straightforward, non-politicized process. Kenney denied the allegation, and one of his aides pursued the matter, asking the Law Society of Upper Canada to censure Mamann for bringing the minister of immigration into disrepute. The Law Society of Upper Canada rejected the complaint, so more recently a group of Canadian immigration lawyers, led by Lorne Waldman, wrote a letter to the minister of immigration agreeing with Mamann’s contention that it was highly improbable that the decision to grant the residence permit to Black was made “without any input from yourself,” further asserting that they found “the attempt by you and your officials to muzzle freedom of expression to be reprehensible.”2

Kenney’s office responded, saying, “We gave [Waldman] the opportunity to review documents that contradict his and Mr. Mamann’s false accusations. Unfortunately, rather than review the evidence and pursue the truth as one would expect from a lawyer, he chose the path of shameless self-promotion and public spectacle.” Kenney maintains that, after learning about Black’s application for the permit in February, he turned the matter over to civil servants without further comment.

No doubt this story might seem like a very minor matter, but it could prove otherwise. Americans know from following presidential politics how major scandals start out in such minor events. There are a number of relevant background elements that come into play, which make the story more intriguing.

Since the time when Black was imprisoned, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal Party, under a new leader, lost the federal election (and two more since) to Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, who have formed a government far more in step with Black’s political and economic views. Black’s largest Canadian newspaper, the National Post, is highly sympathetic to Harper’s government. Furthermore, Harper’s government has routinely been characterized as more secretive and less open with the press about its inner workings than previous governments, and this allegation plays right into that perception, something that isn’t likely to be well received by the Canadian public. Still further, Prime Minister Harper has a reputation for being the most hands-on leader this country has had in decades, reading every file, scanning every brief, and having full control of his cabinet ministers. If Kenney influenced the decision to grant a residence permit to Black, is it possible that Harper was kept in the dark, or did this decision go all the way to the top? And yet further, if this decision in Black’s favor did come from the highest levels, and someone who is a friend of the government’s and among the super-rich appears to receive preferential treatment, and those voicing concern over the truth or even the perception that this is the case are threatened with harm to their careers—in this case, disbarment—what does that say about the current government’s values?

When the next election comes, a lot could rest on the answer to the question, “Did he or didn’t he?” A lot rides on the facticity of one tiny purportedly historical incident, an incident that no one has stepped forward to testify to, an incident that is at this point only an inference based on probabilities that are themselves dependent on a set of observed behaviors. Simple or complex, history matters.

The judgment that something is in fact historical, that some report of an incident is in fact true, routinely determines whether or not someone keeps her job or is fired, whether someone gets to keep custody of his children or must relinquish that role to someone else, and in some jurisdictions whether or not someone lives or dies. Our entire system of justice is based on investigating whether or not alleged behavior actually took place. Documents, eyewitness testimony, expert opinions, and even previous rulings involving similar elements are all weighed in the minds of judges and jurors until a verdict—a fallible but highly consequential verdict—is delivered.

Even when past events occurred too long ago for us to question eyewitnesses, those events can and are routinely reconstructed in narrative form in order to provide perspective on present day realities. Let me offer an example.

My last name is Bruce. Everywhere I go, I get called “Bruce” as if that were my first name. I am used to that by now, but for years I’d wished I had a last name that was more commonly a surname, like Smith, Jones, or McDonald. And though I never asked them, I bet my children felt the same way—that is, until one summer when we went to Scotland on a family holiday. From Edinburgh we took a bus out to Stirling, and toured the museum situated at the historical site of the Battle of Bannockburn, which tells the story of the rise of Robert the Bruce as king of Scotland, and Bruce’s decisive victory over superior English numbers in June of 1314 that paved the way for centuries of Scottish independence. Just as awe-inspiring as the statue of a mounted Bruce at Bannockburn was the image of our great ancestor carved into a pillar of the main gate of Stirling Castle. Bearing the surname of that great warrior made our hearts swell with Scottish pride, and we couldn’t help but wonder if bearing the surname Bruce didn’t entail some kind of obligation to embody his virtues: his courage, his cunning, his determination. At some point during the day, my son turned to me and said, “Now I understand what it means to be a Bruce.”

Ask anyone why they feel it is important to be Italian, Kenyan, or Australian, and once they’ve told you what they treasure about their national identity, they will usually be happy to relate a culturally authorized and highly polished historical narrative, one that involves a battle, a migration, a flourishing kingdom, the rise of a great hero, or the invention of some great contribution to civilization.

For those of us who are Christian, we likely carry with us a small batch of stories that we trot out to explain why we identify with the particular branch of the church we find ourselves in. Christians from India proudly relate the tradition that the Apostle Thomas travelled to India and founded congregations there. Roman Catholics talk about the crucifixion of St. Peter in Rome. Lutherans and Anglicans share the stories of Luther and Cranmer (and maybe even Henry VIII), and Methodists recall the tireless work of the Wesleys. In cases like these, historical events aren’t simply curiosities, the answers to the Sunday Times crossword, but serve as vital, genetic components of our identities, and help explain why we are the way we are, as if they had a force that reached far into their own future. History matters.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of the company of one of my favorite theological discussion partners, a rabbi of the Reformed tradition of Judaism. She asked me about this project, and she offered, in revisionist fashion, the opinion that it didn’t really matter to her whether or not so many million Jews left captivity in Egypt or not. I then asked her about the law. Allowing for her view that the law had been collected and edited over centuries rather than dictated to Moses quite as literally as is portrayed in the Pentateuch, I asked her whether or not it mattered that the law was given by God, rather than being a purely human construction. She agreed that it mattered a great deal, and I pressed on, asking her whether or not the scholarly pursuit of when and where certain elements of the law (e.g., the Ten Commandments, the sacrificial laws, Moses’ farewell address) came into being was of any value, and she said yes, it mattered very much. When I asked her if she was prepared to agree with me after all that history does matter, she hesitated, so I went for the jugular. I asked her if it matters whether or not the Jewish people exist. She laughed out loud and said that of course it matters. And does it matter, I playfully demanded, that the Jewish people be understood in historical terms? We both smiled broadly as it was her turn to say, “Okay. History matters.”

I would go so far as to say that history matters to each and every one of us each and every day. I get up in the morning and after breakfast walk to a certain street corner to catch a bus to work. Why do I stand there, and not somewhere else? Because I remember having caught the bus there on previous occasions. Why do I take that bus to a certain destination, and enter a certain building, expecting to be recognized? Because I remember having done so before. We have all seen movies where someone experiences partial or total amnesia (we may have even encountered it directly ourselves or in someone close to us), and we realize just how much of who we are and what we do is dependent on accurate memory of past events. Even on an individual, personal level, history matters—it matters very much.

What Is “History”?

History is the past that matters in the present.

Quantum mechanics and parallel universes aside, philosophers and historians tend to agree that there is such a thing, in this time-line at least, as “the past.” The past is the collection of all mental, verbal, and physical events that have occurred prior to the present. These events all took place in the context of other events, shaping and being shaped by those other events. These events were all in principle observable or relatable by those present at the time, even if a complete description of these events can never, in practice, be reconstructed, because no one has the time or ability—even if they had the inclination—to sort out every possible point of view on any given event. Declaring the past to be real is the same sort of fundamentally metaphysical decision as declaring the world to be real: you may have your doubts, but if you don’t suspend those doubts you won’t find many people willing to talk to you for very long.

“History” is a subset of the past. The existence of “history” is based on a process of selecting, consciously or unconsciously, some events as being highly significant for our appreciation of the present. This selecting is naturally relative to the interests of whoever is doing the selecting. For the most part, because of their relative power to influence economies, armies, and culture, much of what we call “history” has to do with royalty, military commanders, great thinkers, and artists. It is actually mind-boggling to recognize how few people, places, and events of the past have been considered material for the subject of history, whether that history consists of the known chronology of the local cider mill or the collection of widely known facts that might appear on a television game show. History is in fact a miniscule sliver of the past.

In English, there are several more terms that further refine our understanding, all of which are variations on the word “history.” The first is “historical,” which is used to indicate that a purported event did in fact happen—or at least is determined to have happened by the majority of those employing recognized standards of historical writing or historical method (something that I will discuss at length in this book). It’s as if a verdict has been handed down, and some hypothesis, some educated conjecture, of what has happened in the past has been confirmed: that judgment is usually referred to as an event’s historicity. If an event’s historicity is accepted, it can be referred to as a historical fact, meaning that it has been deemed—at least by those involved in the conversation—worthy of being relied on in the attempt to reconstruct what happened in a particular case. Further research, of course, can cast doubt on the historicity of something once thought of as a historical fact: its historicity can be revoked, and it would no longer be eligible to be used as evidence in a historical reconstruction, unless it was flagged as doubtful.

The art of history writing is the art of discovery. Like a detective trying to solve a crime, a historian looks at the evidence at hand, does a little digging to see if there are any more reliable pieces of evidence that might have been previously overlooked, and then creates a hypothesis, a tentative reconstruction, of what happened. The best history writing attempts to take the most solid evidence available, including the reconstructions created by other historians, ask some hard questions about why any of the facts at hand were included, excluded, or thought to be of greater or lesser significance, then adopt a new or adjusted perspective, and finally create a new hypothesis and express it in narrative form. In the case of Mr. Kenney, the allegation that he influenced the bureaucratic process regarding Black’s temporary resident permit is a historical fact: it is well documented and now part of the public record. However, the hypothesis that he actually did anything to influence that process has not yet been proven, at least in the minds of most observers, at least not beyond all reasonable doubt. Without a “smoking gun”—that is, hard evidence that would confirm the allegation was justly made, such as a memo or an email or even the unambiguous and disinterested testimony of the bureaucrat who signed the permit—Kenney’s exertion of influence should not be regarded as a proper historical conclusion; most historians would see this as a violation of sound historical method and therefore poor history writing. Any history writing, any narrative that assumed Kenney’s guilt would be flawed to the extent that it relied on this unproven hypothesis.

Another term we need to keep in view is “historic.” Of the many things in the past that could be regarded as historical, some are more clearly seen to have wide-ranging implications for the way that we interpret the present, and these are often referred to as historic. Historic figures and events are seen as generating history. By way of example, many minor royal figures in Europe died in the first half of the twentieth century—their deaths are historical facts, which are recorded, searchable, and verifiable—but few are cited as frequently as the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, whose death set off a chain-reaction of political and military consequences that resulted in the onset of WWI. His death—perhaps more important than the accomplishments of his life—was not only historical but historic. In the case of Mr. Kenney, the controversy over his alleged use of ministerial power may in fact just fade away, dying a natural death for lack of evidence, or being overshadowed by larger events. His use of influence could prove to be historical, and not historic; on the other hand, if it is widely believed that Kenney acted as he denies, if “perception becomes reality,” the controversy could prove to be historic without their being any historical fact at the heart of it—such is political life!

It should be quite clear that what is considered historical by one generation might be declared as unhistorical by another. For instance, the historical verdict of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting President Kennedy may one day be modified or overturned; less consequentially, an aging Elvis might be discovered eating fried chicken at a roadside diner in Mobile, Alabama, in which case the historical record of his death would have to be expunged. Sometimes the very same data, when viewed through a different lens with modified assumptions, can yield strikingly different results. In this respect historical research can be seen as analogous to medical research: studies using certain assumptions and certain methods yield certain results, but then the implications of the results are subject to interpretation and debate. To write off historical research as merely subjective, however, would be to go too far, just as ignoring the contribution of medical research because of its occasional ambiguity would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the same way that a scientist’s revisiting of the relationship between pesticides and cancer rates could prove worthwhile in calling for the elimination of certain carcinogenic chemicals, a historian’s revisiting of accepted historical reconstructions of, for instance, the relationship of Caucasians and aboriginal populations might prove worthwhile in creating a fairer resolution of existing disputes and land-claims.

And yet another verbal variation to watch for (English is a subtle and confusing language) concerns the use of the word “history” itself. Most of the time we use the word history to refer to, as I said above, those past events that are seen to have significance for the present. Sometimes, however, we use the word “history” to refer to the work of historians, since what historians produce is the narrative reconstruction of history: the craft is named after the product. If that seems a little abstract, consider the word “plumbing”: it refers both to the craft of being a plumber—the knowledge, skills, and ability required to be a plumber and to work on pipes—and to the object of the plumber’s craft: the pipes, pumps, and valves through which water flows are often referred to collectively as “plumbing,” as in “The plumbing in that house is brand new.” Where possible, I have tried to remember to use the term “historical research” or “historical inquiry” rather than just “history” to signal this usage, but there may be times that I have used the pairing of “theology and history” to indicate the academic disciplines involved. There are also times when you will see the word “historiography,” usually when I am quoting someone else. When properly used, this term refers to history writing, the principles of weighing evidence in history writing, and the history writing of a particular time and place, such as “Ancient Chinese historiography.” I have avoided using this term as much as possible, knowing that this book may well be the first that many will be reading on the subject of history writing, and I hated to pack too much into a single word if I could avoid it.

Finally, while lots of casual observers have opinions on various historical subjects, those who dedicate significant time and resources to such subjects are those that are usually referred to as “historians.” Historians, like “journalists” or “scientists,” come in all shapes and sizes. Some are mainstream academics, and recognized by having articles appear in respected, peer-reviewed publications, while others are relative amateurs, who pursue historical investigations with all the passion of a hobbyist. All historians work within the parameters of their own worldviews, but worldviews are never totally fixed, and I should declare my admiration for those historians who are willing to leave their worldviews open to modification based on the results of historical investigations—their own or those of others.

What Is “Resurrection”?

“Resurrection” is a term packed with theological meaning, and a great deal of what follows in subsequent chapters has to do with unpacking that meaning, in light of what historians can and cannot do within the scope of their historical investigations. At this point, it is important to establish that the Christian tradition sets forth a particular historical claim regarding the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, using the term “resurrection.” To understand this claim—suspending, for the moment, any judgment on whether or not we should deem this purported occurrence to be historical in the sense of having in fact happened—we should explore what Christians have meant by “resurrection.”

It is vital to remember that Jesus was Jewish, his inner circle was Jewish, and before his death and for several years afterwards virtually all of his followers were Jewish. While Jewish thinking at the time of Jesus was not monolithic, the centrality of the reading and interpretation of their scriptures for their religious life is unquestionable. While temple life and sacrificial worship were important in Jerusalem and surrounding areas, the vast majority of Jews lived dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, largely out of touch with the temple and its priesthood. Rather, it was the weekly reading and interpretation of the scriptures in the life of the local synagogue developed centuries before during the Babylonian captivity (a practice Jesus himself regularly participated in) that bound Jews together in their religious and ethnic identity. The Sadducees ruled the temple priesthood, and there were various movements of political revolution (known as Zealots) or communal isolation (e.g., the Essenes), but the vast majority of Jews in Jesus’ day were influenced by the Pharisaic movement, who excelled in scriptural interpretation and its ethical implications. The Pharisees regarded the collection of ancient psalms and the writings of certain prophetic figures as sacred scripture alongside the Torah, the law of Moses. This was the tradition that Jesus participated in when, in his hometown of Nazareth, he read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah (Luke 4:16–30). This was also the tradition that the highly influential Saul of Tarsus / Apostle Paul was trained in, something that he boasted about rather than concealed (Phil 3:5).

The Pharisees firmly believed in the resurrection, an idea that had gradually evolved in Hebrew/Jewish theology. According to Jewish prophets, priests, and poets, God had proved to be a God of justice, as demonstrated above all in providing for their exodus from slavery in Egypt, and in giving them the law through Moses as a means by which they might live in just relationships among themselves. As a tiny nation among more powerful neighbors, their belief in God’s merciful justice served as the explanation of their fortune, both in good times and in bad: when times were bad, they got what they deserved, but God’s covenantal love for them meant that God would always provide opportunities for repentance, and a restoration of the relationship of the nation with God. As their understanding of God expanded beyond that of a partial, tribal deity to a cosmic creator, God was seen to be not only the God of the nation but of heaven and earth. Their understanding of God’s merciful justice became universalized and was converted into a metaphysical concept: not only would God rescue their national existence from its “death” at the hands of more powerful nations (Isa 26, Ezek 37), but each individual life would stand to be redeemed from the grave at the end of time, to receive the rewards and punishment dictated by divine justice (Dan 12).

The emergence of this concept might have been partly due to a gradual acceptance of Plato’s ideas about the distinction of body and soul. While Roman military might dominated the Western world, including the Holy Land, for the century and a half before the birth of Jesus, Greek philosophy in its various forms served as the common intellectual touchstones among the educated. With several centuries of growing influence, it is probable that popular versions of Greek philosophy were accessible to most people in first-century Palestine. The Platonic distinction of body and soul, with the body being regarded as corruptible and dispensable and the soul being regarded as eternal and indispensable, fed a growing individualism: one might belong to a nation or a people by virtue of one’s bodily existence, but a person should be essentially identified with his or her soul, whose fate was ultimately beyond all earthly attachments. In some ways this thinking was an extension of the sensibilities of the exilic and post-exilic Hebrew prophets: “The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own” (Ezek 18:20).

The idea of resurrection might also have been partly the product of martyrdom. In the final stages of the Greek Empire, and the early days of the Roman Empire, the remnant of Jews that had returned from their exile in Babylon to rebuild the second temple under Ezra faced constant military threats, not only to their peace but to their very existence. Vastly outnumbered, they fought courageously against their would-be oppressors, and many of them died heroically. How could a God of justice permit their deaths? How could God abandon to oblivion those who were willing to give their lives for the honor of God’s name?3 With some basis in their scriptures, and some exposure to the ideas of immortality in other traditions, the Jews began to clarify how the individual’s hope, and not simply the nation’s hope, was in God: “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself” (Wis 3:1–5).

Distinguishing itself from Greek ideas of immortality, however, the Jewish understanding of resurrection was unabashedly corporeal. Rather than a doctrine of an immortal soul being released from its destructible body, Jewish thinking about resurrection included the reconstitution of the complete person, body and soul, at the end of time. While there were vague ideas about a spiritual existence between historical death and ultimate resurrection (see Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31), resurrection was a holistic idea that included the body. The bodily conditions would be somewhat altered, though, with the body being imbued with the same kind of immortality that the soul might be thought to have. Jesus is reported to have said, countering the Sadducee’s doubt in the resurrection, that in the resurrection we “neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:18–27), and Paul states that the dead “will be raised imperishable” (1 Cor 15:50–58).

The bodily nature of the resurrection in Jewish and early Christian theology is important in establishing what those authors whose works are included in the New Testament believed they were referring to when they talked about the resurrection of Jesus. Paul, whose writings predate the Gospels by several decades, talks about the “appearances” of the resurrected Jesus, but always in a fashion that differentiates these from either a ghostly presence (as in the case of the postmortem appearance of Samuel, conjured for Saul: see 1 Sam 28:7–20) or a revivification of someone recently deceased (as in the case of the widow’s son: see Luke 7:11–17). Paul maintains “a firm and sharply delineated belief in a past event, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”4 The Gospels of course depict the resurrection of Jesus as an event in time, a couple of days after the crucifixion of Jesus. The resurrected Jesus spoke with his disciples (Matt 28:16–20), ate with his disciples (Luke 24:36–42), and even bore the wounds of his crucifixion (John 20:24–29). There would be some justification for saying that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus’ resurrection that was so shocking to the disciples—after all, if Jesus was a righteous person, God would raise him in vindication with all the martyrs and righteous dead—as the timing of it. Jesus’ end-of-time resurrection, the early Christians said, happened during the course of time, in history, as if to mark out the beginning of the end time.

At least as far as the New Testament documents depict it, the announcement of the resurrection of Jesus was at the very heart of the early Christians’ proclamation. The resurrection of Jesus is the climax of all four canonical Gospels (Matt 28:5; Mark 16:6; Luke 25:5; John 20:18), and Jesus’ own predictions of the resurrection are a recurring motif within each Gospel (Matt 12:40; 16:21; 17:22; 19:17; 26:32; Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; 14:28; Luke 9:22; 18:33; John 10:17; 14:19; 16:16). The apostolic proclamation identified in the Acts of the Apostles is the vindication of Jesus’ ministry by means of God raising Jesus to new life (Acts 2:32–36; 10:34–43; 17:16–31). The dependence of the believers’ new life “in Christ” on the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus is a central theme in most of Paul’s letters (2 Cor 4:13–17; Eph 1:3–14; Phil 2:5–13; Col 3:1–4; 2 Tim 2:8–13). Even the Apocalypse repeatedly identifies “the Lamb who was slain” with “the Living One,” the one “who was, and is, and is to come” (Rev 4:1–11). Throughout the New Testament, the death of Jesus is portrayed as an ordinarily shameful end to Jesus’ life—except for the extraordinary raising of Jesus to new life. The resurrection of Jesus was taken to be God’s seal of approval on Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign, and God’s own proclamation concerning human destiny (Rom 1:1–6; Acts 4:1–12; 1 Pet 1:3–9). Once again, the historical claim that Jesus was raised from the dead can be disputed by historians, but we should from the outset recognize that the canonical Christian scriptures are unanimous in ascribing central theological significance to that claim.

While it can be argued that the Christian tradition has changed in many respects over its twenty centuries, the historical eventfulness of the resurrection of Jesus has been consistently affirmed, and this has been directly connected to the understanding of the resurrection as a bodily event. There is certainly little doubt that the Christian authors of the first and second centuries CE affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus against the Docetic view that the Son of God never actually took human form. It is clear that by the beginning of the second century, leading figures such as Ignatius declared belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as absolutely essential to Christian faith.5 Later in the second century, it is still apparent that the church understood the term “resurrection” as bodily. Tertullian argued that since we are told by the apostles that Jesus experienced resurrection, it must have been bodily; therefore, he goes on to say, our future resurrection will be bodily as well, although our bodies will be animated not by natural principles but by “spiritual” principles, through the agency of the Holy Spirit.6

In the early third century, Origen defended the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb. Origen argued that Christianity is a faith founded on the acts of God in history, every bit as much as Judaism. For Origen, the New Testament reports of Jesus’ bodily resurrection are historical accounts that can be examined and critiqued. Because they all report, in their various ways, the same event, Origen tends to regard them as comprising a single historical record, standing or falling together. Origen, while confident of the historical value of the Gospel accounts, struggles with questions regarding the nature of what they report, and feels compelled to qualify his claim to Jesus’ bodily resurrection in order to maintain its historicity.7

In the fourth century, living in the newly powerful and newly privileged post-Constantine church, Athanasius engaged in a very different kind of historical reasoning. He assumed that since God was sovereign, there must be some sort of ultimate morality to the march of history. His understanding of what constituted historical evidence for the resurrection included the miracles wrought by the apostles in Jesus’ name, the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem, the diminishing of pagan religions, the fulfillment of prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures, the past courage of martyrs, the chastity of virgins, the consistency of the resurrection with Greek metaphysical categories, and the widespread acceptance of Christian faith:

For although the Greeks have told all manner of false tales, yet they were not able to feign a Resurrection of their idols—for it never crossed their mind, whether it be at all possible for the body again to exist after death.8

In the early fifth century, Augustine labored long over the concept of resurrection, dealing with questions such as the possibility of the reconstitution of the parts of a disintegrated human body for its future resurrection. His assumption seems to be that if intellectual objections to the bodily nature of resurrection can be met, people will happily embrace the historical resurrection of Jesus: “But if they do not believe that these miracles were wrought by Christ’s apostles to gain credence to their preaching of His resurrection and ascension, this one grand miracle suffices for us, that the whole world has believed without any miracles.”9 Both Athanasius and Augustine inferred the historical dimension of the resurrection from its historic dimension, entering into evidence for the historical eventfulness of the resurrection the fact that something so initially incredible had come to be believed so widely. While this is certainly something that would be considered out-of-bounds by present-day historians, it is important for the present discussion to note that it is still the historical nature of the resurrection that is being talked about here.

By the thirteenth century, various conflicts including the Crusades had brought Christians into large-scale engagement with the Muslim world. This brought the historical claims for the Christian faith, and the resurrection in particular, into significant doubt for the first time in eight hundred years. These developments may have prompted some of the detailed reflections of Thomas Aquinas, who once again approached the question of the nature of the event that is testified to by the Gospels. Thomas asserts that Jesus rose in a state of glory with specific properties that were attributable from both theological considerations and analysis of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. There is something new developing here: whereas in most previous analyses the bodily nature of the resurrection supports an argument for its historical nature, here the historical nature of the resurrection, firmly assumed, is used to support the argument as to its bodily nature. For Thomas, there is a full complementarity of the bodily dimension of the resurrection and the historicity of the resurrection, each helping to explain the other. Using great subtlety, Thomas says, “The individual arguments taken alone are not sufficient proof of Christ’s resurrection but taken together, in a cumulative way, they manifest it perfectly.”10 The Protestant Reformers, for all their distaste for the scholastics, share with Thomas a high regard for Augustine’s certainty as to the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Calvin says, “But it is to be observed, in passing, that when he is said to have ‘risen from the dead,’ these terms express the reality both of his death and resurrection, as if it had been said, that he died the same death as other men naturally die, and received immortality in the same mortal flesh which he had assumed.”11

It is unquestionable that the majority of Christians through the centuries have believed that the resurrection of Jesus involved the transformation of his body, and it is almost as safe to say that the majority of New Testament scholars today, whatever their personal beliefs, will agree that the New Testament depicts some kind of bodily resurrection of Jesus. Thomas F. Torrance sums up the larger historical Christian tradition on the proclamation of the bodily nature of the resurrection when he says. “Everything depends on the resurrection of the body, otherwise all we have is a Ghost for a Saviour.”12

Can a Christian Doubt the Resurrection?

There is an old philosophical riddle that goes like this. A wooden ship sails the seas for several years, and one of its boards needs replacing. The board is replaced and the ship sails on. A while later, another board is replaced for reasons of wear and tear, and then another, and another, until, after many years, every board on the ship has been replaced. The riddle is, when is the ship a new ship? When the first board is replaced? When half the boards have been replaced? When the last board has been replaced? Never?

There are certain elements of Christian belief and practice that have been altered over the years. At some point, in the Western Church at least, the rule that married men could serve as priests was replaced with a rule that only celibate men could serve as priests (something which the Reformation sought to reverse). At some point, the belief that the earth was the physical center of the universe gave way to a heliocentric model in which the earth revolved around the sun. More recently, the belief that the Mass could not be celebrated in the vernacular and still be valid was overturned, causing widespread change in liturgical practice. All of these elements of the Christian faith were considered nonessential; even with these changes, the ship remained the ship.

Paul is adamant that the ship of Christian teaching must include the historicity of the resurrection (though we will encounter important arguments about its precise nature in chapters to follow). To the Christians in Corinth, Paul writes:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then, Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor 15:12–18)

The author of the letter to the Hebrews refers to “the God of peace, who brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant” (Heb 13:20); Peter says of Jesus that “through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory” (1 Pet 1:21); all New Testament writers refer to Jesus as being alive, and about to come again in glory. The hope of the Christian, according to these authors, seems to be predicated on the resurrection of Jesus. Can something that appears so key to the Christian message and so universally shared in the apostolic age be negotiable in ours?

In the last few centuries, the Renaissance, the discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of the scientific paradigm, the industrial revolution, the harnessing of electricity, the rise of socialism, the adoption of the evolutionary paradigm, the invention of modern aeronautics, two pan-European armed conflicts, the unleashing of nuclear power, the technological revolution, and now the dawn of the information age have all served to underscore change as the only constant in the mind of the contemporary Westerner. Is it possible that doctrines once thought indispensable to Christian faith could be replaced with new ones, and that the claim that the resurrection of Jesus is a historical event can be dispensed with as a relic of a bygone era? There are many theologians who say that this can be done, should be done, and must be done, if Christian faith is to have any credibility in its third millennium. In this view, the greatest service that contemporary theologians can do for their forebears is to do as they have done, and adapt the basic symbols of the Christian faith to current conceptualities.

On the other hand, there are others who argue that the durability of Christian doctrine in the context of massive intellectual and social upheaval is one of the church’s greatest gifts to the twenty-first century. The continuity of what the church proclaims—even if practices alter—not only provides some sense of stability in uncertain times, but it also serves as offering continuity with what was understood and taught by Jesus himself. The early church, as contemporaries and eyewitnesses of Jesus, would have endeavored to proclaim Jesus on his own terms, and remain faithful to his understanding of God and God’s workings in the world, and so should we. In this view, it is up to the church to engage scholarship of every kind and discover ways to faithfully maintain its teaching as the teaching of Jesus, being careful to find points of agreement with and distinction from contemporary ideas in every new era.

This debate isn’t new to the twenty-first century, but with the waning of the authority of Christianity as the dominant cultural force in Western culture, the historical claims of the early church have been held up for examination in a way not seen since the first centuries of the church’s existence. What has gone unnoticed by many, however, is that the debate over how to deal with the resurrection of Jesus has been affected by the ground shifting under historians’ feet. What is considered to be sound historical method has undergone its own dialectical evolution, and this has affected—sometimes consciously, other times unconsciously—how theologians deal with the historical dimension of the resurrection of Jesus. What has happened over the last few decades, I believe, is the revival of a fuller, more robust understanding of historical method and the process of historical reconstruction, offering a renewed opportunity for contemporary theologians to assist the church in proclaiming the historical resurrection of Jesus.

There will be many who read what follows and will still not be prepared to assert that the resurrection of Jesus needs to be proclaimed as a historical event. It is likely that this very issue must have been at play among Christians at the end of the first century, when the story of Thomas’s doubt was recirculated in the Gospel of John. While the Gospel writer’s point of view on the resurrection of Jesus is clear, the story is related with a great deal of sympathy to those who find it hard to believe. Thomas is not portrayed as stupid, stubborn, or sinful: he is the one who, earlier in this same Gospel, is willing to meet his end with Jesus in Jerusalem, if that’s what loyalty demands. Thomas is not disowned by the other disciples, and is not shunned by Jesus. Jesus comes and makes a point of approaching Thomas, and it is Thomas who in the end offers one of the most profound expressions of faith in the entire New Testament: having come to believe that Jesus was in fact resurrected from the dead, he proclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

What follows is dedicated to all the Thomases among us, and the Thomas in every one of us, because with Thomas we know right down to our bones that history matters.

Questions for Consideration

Seminary

1. How would you describe the evolution from the notion of collective immortality to the notion of individual mortality?

2. How does the idea of resurrection reflect the image of God as being just?

Study Group

1. What scriptural stories, ideas, or quotes come to mind when you consider how history matters to our understanding of God?

2. What difference do you think belief in Jesus’ resurrection made to the apostles and the early church?

Individual

1. What would you offer to someone in your parish or congregation who said they didn’t believe in life after death?

2. When does believing in the resurrection seem easy? When does it seem hard?

2. Globe and Mail, August 2, 2012.

3. Crenshaw, “Love Is Stronger than Death,” 71–72.

4. Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, 374.

5. Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 3 (ANF 1:87).

6. Tertullian, Five Books against Marcion, 5.9 (ANF 3:447–49).

7. Origen, Against Celsus, 2.52 (ANF 1:456).

8. Athanasius, Incarnation of the Word of God, 50 (NPNF2 4:63–64).

9. Augustine, City of God, 22.5 (NPNF1 2:481–82).

10. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, Q55, Art. 6. Italics throughout are original to the quoted material.

11. Calvin, Institutes, 2.16.13.

12. Torrance, Space, Time, and Resurrection, 87.