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The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God series Book 3) Kindle Edition
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- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSPCK
- Publication date7 June 2012
- File size5875 KB
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- ASIN : B008HHAIP0
- Publisher : SPCK (7 June 2012)
- Language : English
- File size : 5875 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 860 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 196,366 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 93 in Christian New Testament Study
- 146 in Children's Christian Bible
- 178 in New Testament Bible Study
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About the author

N.T. WRIGHT is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He is now serving as the Chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. For twenty years he taught New Testament studies at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities. As being both one of the world’s leading Bible scholars and a popular author, he has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. His award-winning books include The Case for the Psalms, How God Became King, Simply Jesus, After You Believe, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, Scripture and the Authority of God, The Meaning of Jesus (co-authored with Marcus Borg), as well as being the translator for The Kingdom New Testament. He also wrote the impressive Christian Origins and the Question of God series, including The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection of the Son of God and most recently, Paul and the Faithfulness of God.
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Wright is well aware of the two hundred-year fight to keep history and theology at arm’s length. The resurrection accounts in the canonical gospels have almost routinely been treated by post-Enlightenment scholarship as mere back-projections of later Christian belief, with only shaky claims to historical veracity, he claims. This understanding of Jesus’ resurrection is still widely accepted in scholarship and many mainline churches: ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘spiritual’ view; the earliest Christians used ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote such a belief but underwent a kind of fantasy or hallucination; and, finally, whatever happened to Jesus’ body, it was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories seem to require. Wright challenges this by saying that the resurrection of Jesus was just as controversial nineteen hundred years ago as it is today. The discovery that dead people stay dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Wright shows that this position, fashionable as it has been, leads to enormous historical problems which disappear when treated as descriptions of what the first Christians believed actually happened. They are not the leaves on the branches of early Christianity. They look very much like the trunk from which the branches themselves sprang.
Is there an alternative explanation for the rise of the early church? Early Christianity was a ‘resurrection’ movement through and through and Wright states precisely what ‘resurrection’ involves (going through death and out into a new kind of bodily existence beyond, happening in two stages, with Jesus first and everyone else later). Early Christianity’s answer was based on a firm belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead, his tomb was empty, and several people, who had not previously been followers of Jesus, claimed to have seen him alive in a way for which the readily available language of ghosts, spirits and the like is inappropriate. If one takes away either of these historical conclusions, the belief of the early church becomes inexplicable, Wright claims.
So, what is the ultimate theological impact of the resurrection? Wright offers some hints in the final chapter: "Death—the unmaking of the Creator’s image-bearing creatures—was not seen as a good thing, but as an enemy to be defeated. ... The early Christians saw Jesus’ resurrection as the act of the covenant god, fulfilling his promises to deal with evil at last" (727). Furthermore, "[c]alling Jesus ‘son of god’ ... constituted a refusal to retreat, a determination to stop Christian discipleship turning into a private cult, a sect, a mystery religion. It launched a claim on the world ... It grew from an essentially positive view of the world, of creation. It refused to relinquish the world to the principalities and powers, but claimed even them for allegiance to the Messiah who was now the lord, the kyrios" (729). And, finally: "The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter" (730).
These powerful messages, emanating from the historicity of the resurrection, offer the grounds for preaching the message of hope to a distressed and desperate humanity, a message that proves that the resurrection in fact is the reason behind the powerful start of Christianity as a world-changing grassroots movement that it truly has been.
Dr. Erastos Filos, Physicist, Brussels, Belgium



