... and religious fact.(The Resurrection of the Son of God)(Book Review)

The Resurrection of the Son of God, by N. T. Wright (Fortress, 817 pp., $39)

THIS is unquestionably the Book of the Moment in religious studies--hailed by preachers and lay scholars, Protestant and Catholic alike--and deservedly so. It makes the forceful and persuasive argument that the resurrection of Jesus is not just historically plausible, but in fact the most plausible existing explanation of how the early Christian message came to be believed. It is that rare theological book that combines academic depth and rigor with a lucid style that is not just accessible, but compelling, to the average educated layman.

The problem Wright sets out to address is this. After Jesus was crucified, his followers came to the near-unanimous conclusion that he had risen from the dead. How, in the context of the Rome-dominated ancient Near East, could they have come to believe this--and how could they have persuaded others to do the same? The commonly held view among skeptical scholars today is that the disciples were using symbolic language of bodily resurrection to represent their sense of Jesus' continued importance. In short, they invented stories of Jesus' empty tomb and post-death appearances as a metaphor, of the kind that their credulous cultural world would spontaneously have generated.

To investigate how this could have happened, Wright engages in a detailed historical analysis of the thought patterns of the Hellenistic world, and of the Jewish theology of the period. But what he discovers is that the idea of a bodily resurrection, far from being an idea swirling in the cultural air and ready to be used by the Christians, was actually a dramatic innovation with virtually no popular or elite support. Not among the Greeks: "Neither in Plato nor in the major [Greek] alternatives ... do we find any suggestion that resurrection, the return to bodily life of the dead person, was either desirable or possible." Nor among the Jews:

 
   Israel as a whole would be vindicated [at 
   the end of time]. But nobody imagined 
   that any individuals had already been 
   raised, or would be raised in advance of 
   the great last day. There are no traditions 
   about prophets being raised to new bodily 
   life ... There are no traditions about a 
   Messiah being raised to life ... The world 
   of Judaism had generated, from its rich 
   scriptural origins, a rich ...