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Rethinking the Resurrection

ByKenneth L. Woodward/NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Apr 8, 1996

IF CHRIST IS NOT RAISED

, Saint Paul wrote in his firstletter to the Corinthians, "then our preaching is in vain andso is your faith." This is the week Christians round the worldgather to remember the passion and death of Jesus on acriminal's cross. Once again, the familiar story will berelived in liturgy, sermon and song: the somberness of GoodFriday, the tomblike silence of Holy Saturday, followed bythe radiance of Easter Sunday proclaiming Christ'sresurrection to new life by the power of God. As the ApostlePaul insisted, the Risen Christ is the center of the Christianfaith, the mystery without which there would be no church,no hope of eternal life, no living Christ to encounter ineucharistic bread and wine. By any measure, theresurrection of Jesus is the most radical of Christiandoctrines. His teachings, his compassion for others, evenhis martyr's death--all find parallels in other stories andreligious traditions. But of no other historical figure has theclaim been made persistently that God has raised him fromthe dead.From the very beginning, the resurrection of Jesus was metby doubt and disbelief. To the Jews of Biblical Jerusalem, itwas simply blasphemous for the renegade Christians toclaim that a crucified criminal was the Messiah. To thecultivated Greeks, who believed in the soul's immortality,the very idea of a resurrected body was repugnant. Evenamong Gnostic Christians of the second century, thepreferred view was that Jesus was an immortal spirit whomerely discarded his mortal cloak. And yet, if the New Testament is to be believed, it was the appearance of theresurrected Christ that lit the flame of Christian faith, andthe power of the Holy Spirit that fired a motley band of fearful disciples to proclaim the Risen Jesus throughout the

Greco-Roman world. According to the late German Marxistphilosopher Ernst Bloch, "It wasn't the morality of theSermon on the Mount which enabled Christianity to conquerRoman paganism, but the belief that Jesus had been raisedfrom the dead. In an age when Roman senators vied to seewho could get the most blood of a steer on their togas-thinking that would prevent death- Christianity was incompetition for eternal life, not morality."Christianity won, but the battle for the spiritual imaginationis never ending. Every generation reinterprets for itself themeaning of Jesus; it's one way to keep faith--and itstraditions--alive. While believers head for church and evenlapsed Christians prepare holiday lambs, this seasonacademics, most of them committed Christians, do battle.Over the past five years, scholars have published more thantwo dozen books and scores of footnoted articles, initiatinga fierce debate over the Risen Jesus. In their relentlesssearch for "the historical Jesus," various Biblical scholarsargue that the Gospel stories of the empty tomb and Jesus'post-resurrection appearances are fictions devised longafter his death to justify claims of his divinity. To hear themtell it, the Resurrection is an embarrassment to the modernmind and a disservice to the itinerant Jewish preacher fromrural Galilee.

THEY PUBLISH, THEY QUARREL

and they meet. InFebruary, Oregon State University hosted a nationalsymposium celebrating "Jesus at 2000." And next week,beginning Easter Monday, an equally august group willgather for a four-day Resurrection Summit at the seminaryof the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. They will presentan assortment of theological and philosophical papers. AtSt. Patrick's Cathedral they will listen to two sopranos fromthe Metropolitan Opera. And they will publish yet anotherbook.Now as before, Jesus lives in controversy. The questioningcould not be more basic, more subversive, or more relevantto believers and professional critics alike. What can beknown about the real Jesus? Can the historical Jesus beseparated from the Risen Christ of faith? Does Christianityowe its origins to the Resurrection? What do Christiansmean when they claim that Jesus rose from the dead and

ascended into heaven? Must a Christian believe in Jesus'bodily resurrection?For answers, the scholars deploy the tools at hand. Theysearch for traces of a historical figure who did not leavebehind contemporaneous accounts. They apply the criticaltools of today: text chopping, psychological speculation andcolleague-bashing. And then they take leaps of faith, oftenof their own creation. Of the dozens of recent booksdenying the resurrection stories, many are written by liberalscholars who think the time has come to replace the "cultic" Jesus of Christian worship with the "real" Jesus unearthed byacademic research. Theirs is not disinterested historicalinvestigation but scholarship with a frankly missionarypurpose: by reconstructing the life of Jesus they hope toshow that belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is aburden to the Christian faith and deflects attention from hisrole as social reformer.Most Christians still believe in the Risen Jesus. Forfundamentalists, the Bible is as good as its word, whichevertranslation happens to be in use. Since the Scriptures say Jesus returned physically from the dead, then that's whathappened. But very few Christians are literalists on thispoint, and among Christians there is a range of opinion onwhat the Resurrection means. For example, a Harris polltaken in 1994 found that 87 percent of Americans believethat Jesus was raised from the dead. But a surveyconducted last month by the Barna Research Group, aconservative Christian organization in Glendale, Calif., findsthat 30 percent of "born again" Christians do not believethat Jesus "came back to physical life after he wascrucified."Nor does German New Testament scholar Gerd Ludemann, avisiting professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School. To him, theResurrection is "an empty formula" that must be rejected byanyone holding a "scientific world view." In his latest book,"What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach tothe Resurrection" (147 pages. Westminster John KnoxPress), Ludemann argues that Jesus' body "rotted away" inthe tomb. The Risen Christ that appeared to the ApostlePeter, according to Ludemann, whose book evoked a roar of protest from German Christians, was a subjective "vision"produced by Peter's overwhelming grief and "guilt" for

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