Sincere and thoughtful people do sometimes differ, and that has to be acknowledged and truly owned by those who want to think through the question of Jesus’ resurrection with any measure of seriousness. It is important to note that both points of view take the question of what kind of event the resurrection of Jesus is to be a relevant question. If the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event like other historical events, it potentially has different implications than if that is not the case. The resurrection of Jesus is the perfect test-case for studying the intersection of theology and history.
Some might want to dismiss the question and claim that it doesn’t matter whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event. It might be ventured that what really matters is that people believed that the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event, and that’s all that really matters. Such an attempt to shelve the question has its own implications, however. It suggests that those who presented the resurrection of Jesus to the world as a historical event—at least by the time the Gospel narratives were written—were self-deceived or intellectually limited, which would have to cast doubt on the intelligibility of their representation of Jesus’ vision and ministry. It also suggests that those who lived—and in many instances, sacrificed—their lives for the integrity of the church in subsequent centuries were misguided, and perhaps to a large extent distracted from the real existential and ethical issues at hand. It further suggests that theologians, clergy, and dedicated lay persons have wasted enormous time, energy, and resources presenting, explicating, and defending something inconsequential, possibly indicating a deep-seated pathology on the part of the entire Christian movement.
An analogy might be that of the original moon landing. Some conspiracy-theorists claim that the moon landing was faked, with footage of the “lunar” event actually shot in a television studio to spare the American government the embarrassment that they had failed in their promise to put a man on the moon and thereby demonstrate global technological supremacy. In some respects, it might be true that if the moon landing was faked, it had much the same consequences as a successful mission: the expansion of funding to the space program and the inspiration of the American people. In other respects, the consequences of pronouncing the original moon landing to have been faked are enormous in terms of what that says about the relationship of the American government to the American people, in terms of social spending priorities, and in terms of the positioning of the United States in the global community. Beyond the emotional distress of having “lived a lie,” any American citizen has to consider the opportunity-cost of those funds going to the space program that might have gone to improving health and education or other social infrastructure, or the impact of an unearned reputation for America’s role as technologically dominant on its self-appointed role in policing global conflicts.
Even if the consequences of misconstruing the resurrection of Jesus to be a historical event were not so dire, to take the position that the historical question doesn’t matter is in effect to have already taken up the revisionist point of view. In saying that the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was an historical event doesn’t matter is to say that the real event was the psychological conversion of the disciples of Jesus to declare him as alive in their own faith and witness to his life and teaching.
What This Book Discusses
The question of the nature of the event of the resurrection of Jesus is not an easy one to discuss, as it involves questions of metaphysics, epistemology, systematic and pastoral theology, and the faith of real women and men all around the world. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the editorial comment that “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” about Jesus (John 21:25) follows that Gospel’s resurrection narratives. There has been an enormous amount of ink spilled over the subject of Jesus’ resurrection, and what you are reading is just a little more.
Most of what has been written about the resurrection has been devotional and inspirational literature in which the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event isn’t raised, either because the authors hadn’t thought much about these questions, or assumed (perhaps rightly) that this wasn’t a question their readers were prepared to pursue. It may be safe to say that for most Christians through most centuries of the church’s existence, the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event was something only examined by professional theologians and more thoughtful clergy.
More recently, in the last couple of centuries, the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event has reemerged among scholarly theologians in response to shifting worldviews. Many of these scholars ventured that the resurrection of Jesus was not a historical event, at least not in the sense that other chronicled events are considered historical, and were quite inventive in offering new categories of language, writing, and community tradition to help others grapple with their insights. Many of them tried to preserve the fundamental meaningfulness of the resurrection of Jesus as an element of Christian faith without committing themselves to declaring it to be a historical event, at least not along the lines of the traditional view. Other authors, especially among American evangelicals in the last century, offered vigorous defenses of the resurrection as a historical event, but often did so without much regard to either the profundity of their opponents’ arguments or attention to the theoretical question of what makes any event a historical event. Some of those writings, despite their shortcomings, are encyclopedic in their amassing of details, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for their efforts to uncover the truth.
This book is unique (or at least very rare) in its focus on issues that should be examined before anyone plunges into weighing and judging the evidence on the resurrection of Jesus. Just as courts are guided by rules of law, historians are guided by certain methodological rules. However, just as the law evolves, slowly and carefully, so the rules of historical method evolve, slowly and carefully. There is no one body of historians who make up the rules that historians have to use when engaged in their craft, and there are differing opinions about the how to prioritize recognized elements of sound history writing. Most historians, I have discovered, don’t regard themselves as experts on historical method, but tend to write the findings of their historical research in an intuitive fashion, along the lines of the kinds of history writing they have known and admired. Over the last couple of centuries there have been discernible shifts in thinking—at least in the Western world—affecting the work of the majority of professional historians, and some of what follows is an attempt to take those shifts into account when approaching the question of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus is an historical event. I will, in a way, argue that the discipline of history writing almost died and has been resurrected in a form that allows it consider the resurrection of Jesus on historical terms.
I will try to offer some background on the development of contemporary historical method and outline some of the shifts that have occurred, in increasing detail as we approach our own day, and discuss how they affect our central question. I will also trace how these shifts were confronted or embraced by some of the greater theological minds of the twentieth century. As the reader will see, I have chosen to dwell on the work of those theologians whose writings feature significant reflection on the issue of whether or not the resurrection of Jesus was historical. I will also engage the multidisciplinary world