"That He Was Raised": Notes on the Resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament and Theology

Sketch 1: Pannenberg's Idea of the Resurrection

Not a long time ago, I had the privileged to teach Christology at the Divine Word Seminary in Tagaytay City due to the non-availability of a professor. Christology is the historical and systematic study of the person and work of Jesus Christ as the object and foundation of the Christian faith. Below are some of my notes on the resurrection.

A. Some Preliminaries

• The Three Stages of formation of NT: Jesus - Oral Tradition - Evangelists
• Note on the  Interpretation of Texts: Three Worlds - of the author, text, reader
• The Quest for the Historical Jesus: First-Second-Third Quest

B. Three Types of Literary Sources on the Resurrection of Jesus

1. The Easter Proclamations

 a. Kerygmatic Preaching: brief statements (kerygma) of the Resurrection faith 

•  Jesus says that he will be raised, or Christians proclaim that Jesus was raised, with no narrative details. The earliest NT texts related to Jesus' resurrection are brief proclamations, not narratives; see esp. 1 Cor 15:3-4. Note the Greek EGEIRO (to raise) in the passive voice (be raised).

•  Some NT texts (esp. in Mark’s Gospel) suggest that Jesus’ resurrection will occur "after three days" META TREIS HEMERAS ANASTENAI (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; 14:58; 15:29; see also Matt 12:40; 26:61; 27:40, 63; John 2:19-20). 

• Many other passages (esp. in Matthew & Luke) instead quote Jesus as saying, "on the third day" (Matt 16:21; 17:23; 20:19; Luke 9:22; 18:33; 24:7, 21, 46; Acts 10:40; cf. 1 Cor 15:4). 

• Speeches, like the speeches of Peter in Acts (cf. 2:24 as an example)

b. Christological Hymns 

• Phil 2:5-11; Col 1:15-20; 1 Tim 3:16; Heb 1:1-3; 1 Pet 2:21-25; also, Eph 1:20; John 1:14)

2. The Preparations for the Easter Story

a. In the Passion Narratives itself 

• Example: at the Institution of the Eucharist – Mark 14:25//Matt 26:29; the last words of Jesus in Mark and Matthew; cf. John’s Book of Signs and Book of Glory.

b. In the Ministry of Jesus

• Examples: Mark 9:9-13 - “After the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Also Mark 12:10-11 (stone rejected becomes the cornerstone)\

c. In the Infancy Narratives

• Example: Matt 1:23 “Emmanuel” and the Risen Jesus in Matt 28:20. Also Luke 2:10-11//Isa 9:6// Phil 3:20.

3. The Easter Narratives (Two Traditions)

a. The Empty Tomb Tradition 

• a few days after Jesus' death, some women find his tomb empty, his body missing

• Mark 16:1-8;  Matt 28:1-8, 11-15;  Luke 24:1-12;  John 20:1-13

• Details differ in these accounts as to the number and names of the women, the number and description of the heavenly messenger(s), their message, and the reaction of the women.

b. The Appearances Tradition

• the Risen Jesus appears to various individuals or groups of his disciples; also the Ascension)

• Matt 28:9-10, 16-20;  Luke 24:13-35, 36-49;  John 20:14-18, 19-23, 24-29, 21:1-23;  cf. also 1 Cor 15:5-8;  Acts 1:3-5;  [Mark 16:9-18]

• Details differ in these accounts as to where, when, and to whom Jesus appears; how he is described, and how the disciples react.

• Ascension Narratives (Jesus "ascends" or is taken up to heaven):
• Only in Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:2, 6-11, but not in Matthew, John, or the first editions of Mark.
• The brief mention of Ascension in Mark 16:19-20 is part of the later ending of Mark, added sometime in the 2nd Century (Mark originally ended at 16:8).
• In contrast, Matt 28:16-20 could be called an "anti-Ascension"! Jesus does not ascend to heaven, but instead says that he will remain with the disciples forever! (cf. Matt 1:23 - "Emmanuel" = "God with us"

C. Historicity and the Theology of the Resurrection

The most “crucial point” in Christology. “Whether Jesus merely was or whether he is also is—this depends on the Resurrection (Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two).

1. The Debate

• David Friedrich Strauss; reaction to philosophers like Spinoza and David Hume who put the reasonableness of miracles into question as they were considered as the suspension of the lawn of nature.

• Willi Marxsen: we have access only to the beliefs of the disciples on the resurrection but not on the history of the resurrection.

• For Bultmann: Resurrection of Jesus is existentially irrelevant (as a reaction to the Quest). “To believe in the Christ present in the kerygma is the meaning of the Easter faith “(read his essay “New Testament and Mythology”).

• Karl Barth: The Resurrection as a historical event beyond critical inquiry (Church Dogmatics, 1953). Resurrection was a call for a “decision of faith.”

• Impact on the 20th cent.  Suspicion of historicity and non-relevance of Resurrection of Jesus to Christian faith.
• Karl Rahner: the “shrinkage of Easter theology and piety”
• O’Collins: “strange neglect of the resurrection persists” (Believing in the Resurrection, 2012).

• The fundamental question: the tension between what subjective and what is objective in Resurrection of Jesus.

• Subjective – Resurrection of Jesus as an inner experience of the disciples (a matter of faith);
• Objective – Resurrection of Jesus as historical (open to critical inquiry).

2. Insight of  Wolfhart Pannenberg  

• d. 2014.
• He was only 36 years when he wrote Jesus – God and Man!
• The Resurrection as a historical event open to critical inquiry (McGrath’s summary):
• History in all its totality can only be understood when it is viewed from its end-point.
• The end of history is disclosed proleptically in the history of Jesus Christ. The end of history which is yet to take place has been disclosed in advance of the event in the person and work of Christ. Thus for Pannenberg, the resurrection of Jesus is an objective historical event witnessed by all who had access to the evidence.
• RJ is a “proleptic disclosure of the end of history”.
• It anticipates the general resurrection at the end of time and at the same time brings forward into history bot that resurrection and the full and final revelation with of God. The RJ is thus organically lined with the self-revelation of God in Christ; it establishes Jesus' identity with God and allows this identity with God to be read back into his pre-Easter ministry. It thus functions as the foundation of a series of central Christological affirmations, including the divinity of Christ and the incarnation.
• For a critique on Pannenberg’s Resurrection Christology, see Brian McDermott, “Pannenberg’s Resurrection Christology: A Critique,” Theological Studies 35 (1974): 711-21.
• See Sketch 1 Above

3. Karl Rahner

d. 1984

Read Karl Rahner, “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” in Theological Investigations 4; also “Theology of the Death and the Resurrection of Jesus,” in Foundations of Christian Faith (German 1976; Eng. 1978). A short summary is found in Denis Edwards, “Resurrection of the Body and Transformation of the Universe in the Theology of Karl Rahner” -  accessible online.

• For Rahner, the theological discussion on the resurrection of Jesus must be a key concept in dogmatic theology. In the past, it was simply relegated to Fundamental Theology (in the discussion of miracles) and apologetics (defending the historicity of the resurrection and marshaling proofs for it). Post-Tridentine theology likewise had emphasized Christology and Soteriology that spun around incarnation (Christmas) and crucifixion  (Good Friday). What for example is the significance of the resurrection when Jesus’ crucifixion is already seen as redemptive? Resurrection had been treated as simply an added event to Good Friday. This situation even worsened when Bultmann in his demythologizing agenda looked away from Easter and concentrated his theology on the cross. For Rahner, however, the resurrection is the starting point of all Christology.

• Here's a sketch of Rahner's Christology:

Sketch 2: Rahner's Christology

 How does Rahner argue for this resurrection Christology?  [The following are excerpts of Edwards’ article]

• Rahner argues that, in the light of the resurrection of Jesus, a universal human hope for resurrection can be discerned. In every authentic act of human freedom and commitment, he finds an implicit hope for definitive and eternal meaning and validity. This hope includes a longing for eternal life of the whole embodied person.

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• Rahner sees this eternity not as time spinning on endlessly, but as the final and definitive fulfillment of our freedom. Eternity “comes to be in time as its own mature fruit” (FCF, p. 271; See TI 11: 288-308; TI 19: 169-79). Rahner sees the transcendental hope of resurrection as the gift of God’s grace and this grace-filled experience of hope provides the context in which Jesus’ resurrection becomes credible.

• Rahner insists that the resurrection of Christ is a unique and radical transformation of the crucified. It is not the revival of a corpse to live again in the old way, but the “eschatological victory of God’s grace in the world” (TI 17: 22).

• The death of Christ is not simply one moral act among others performed before death. It is, rather, “the totality of Christ in act, the definitive act of his freedom, the complete integration of his time on earth with his human eternity” (TI 4: 128). In this context, the resurrection can be seen not simply as an event that occurs after Jesus’ death, but rather as a manifestation of what happens in the death, as Jesus freely hands his whole bodily existence into the mystery of a loving God.  In the death of Jesus, a piece of this world is handed over in freedom into God in complete obedience and love and is fully taken up into God. This is salvific for the whole of reality: “This is Easter and the redemption of the world” (TI 4: 128).

• The resurrection is not simply a juridical event in which God accepts Jesus’ self-giving, but essentially the event in which God irrevocably adopts creaturely reality as God’s own reality. This adoption occurs by God’s primordial act, which has “already” found expression in the incarnation of the Word. It is this that culminates in the resurrection when God divinizes and transfigures the creature.  

4. Edward Schillebeeckx

• d. 2009
• The Easter experiences of the disciples were not empirical experiences of historical reality, but rather faith-motivated experiences of grace and forgiveness; a kind of “conversion” experience.
• Schillebeeckx writes:
• Thus we end up in a remarkable hermeneutical circle: Jesus’ living and dying on earth suggested to Christians, in virtue of their experiences after Jesus’ death, the idea of the resurrection or coming Parousia of Jesus, while on the basis of their faith in the risen or coming crucified One they relate the story of Jesus in the gospels; in other words, these gospel stories of Jesus are themselves a hermeneutics of Jesus’ parousia and resurrection, while belief in the Parousia or in the resurrection was engendered by things remembered of the historical Jesus. The “matter to be interpreted”—Jesus of Nazareth—came eventually to be interpreted in and through the faith-inspired affirmation of his resurrection (Parousia), while that resurrection or Parousia is in its turn the “object of interpretation” which is then interpreted through the gospel narratives as “remembrances of Jesus’ earthly life, as also in the light of his resurrection or coming Parousia (Jesus, p. 402).

5. N. T. Wright

• The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003). – more than 800 pages.
• In his study, Wright showed that Christian faith in resurrection had no strict precedent even in Judaism. Wright deploys the historical data that support accepting the appearances of the risen Christ and the discovery of his empty tomb. Those two events prompted the resurrection faith in Jesus as the messianic Son of God, a faith that set Christianity going and provided its essential shape Wright traces to the third century the trajectory of Easter faith and resurrection hope triggered by Jesus’ own victory over death.

6. Joseph Ratzinger 

See his Jesus of Nazareth II

• Resurrection of Jesus was utterly different.  It “was about breaking out into an entirely new form life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lies beyond it –a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence.”

• An “evolutionary leap”. It is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it… It has nevertheless its origin within history. Therefore it can be attested by witnesses as an event of an entirely new kind.

• • The witnesses had experienced a real encounter—the self-revelation and verbal communication of the risen Christ. This gave rise to the apostolic preaching.

7. Gerald O’Collins

author of a number of important books on the resurrection, the latest of which is Believing in the Resurrection: The Meaning and Promise of the Risen Jesus (Paulist Press, 2012).

• The disciples experienced Jesus personally alive, not only his forgiveness. This experience of ‘Jesus being alive in God’s glory (DOXA) is an essential dimension of the disciples’ experience. Without it Easter faith is weak and kerygma is not possible.

• Embodied History as being raised up. This approach also makes very good sense of what happened to Jesus, the prototype of our resurrection. When he rose from the dead, his whole life rose with him. In his risen state Jesus possesses fully his whole human story. His resurrection and glorification have made his entire life and history irrevocably present. Even if they never thought explicitly in terms of the irrevocable presence of Jesus’ earthly history, the four Evangelists wrote their Gospels out of a sense that the earthly life of Jesus had risen with him and remains indispensably significant for his followers through the ages.

8. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

Read: Christ and Reconciliation (2013).

• Resurrections as confirmation of Jesus’ divinity. For Kärkkäinen, the resurrection of Jesus “dispelled and removed the ambiguity that had earlier clung to the person and history of Jesus” (quoting Pannenberg). Confirmation means that was confirmed at the event of resurrection was there already at the beginning of the history of Jesus.

9. Gerhard Lohfink

• Read: Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was (2012) – chapter 18: “The Easter Events,” pp.. 288-378. Note the title, “Easter Events” (in plural). The resurrection of Jesus as “historical” due to the different paschal events that evoked the eschatological expectation. You may read chapter 18 here (link).
• See also his latest work: Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life (Claretian, 2019). 

1. Visions (Appearances of the Risen Jesus):  “a disclosure experience” – “a real vision” that is both entirely a human production and entirely a work of God.

2. Exaltation as Ehrhöhungskerygma (Exaltation-Kerygma): Earliest tradition attests that resurrection and exaltation is just one event. It was Luke (hence redactional) who was responsible of separating resurrection and exaltation into two distinct events.

3. Rapture: It was also Luke who was the “first to translate and visualize the kerygma of Jesus exaltation into a rapture story” [rapture story: story in which an individual who stood out above others would be swept away from earth by God at the end of his or her life. Example: the ascension in Luke 24 and Acts 1).

4. End-time Expectations: the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. It is an eschatological event; it will happen at the end of history, or at the end of the world. This was believed by a larger of the population during the time of Jesus.  Matthew captures this Jewish eschatological expectation when he notes that when Jesus died, "tombs were opened and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep wre raised. And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many." (Matthew 27:52-53).

The resurrection of Jesus “was experienced as an end-time event and a prelude to the general resurrection of the dead” (297).  It is from this perspective, that is, eschatological that the resurrection (and the appearances) of Jesus must be seen as historical. “The experience of the Risen One in the Easter visions in Galilee and Jerusalem must have been shocking, deeply moving, and all-shattering: now the dead will rise, the end of the world is near, the great eschatological turning has begun” (296). 

Sketch 3: Lohfink's Idea of the Resurrection