[This is
an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s 5 volume series, Christian
Origins and the Question of God. This series is widely read and bridges the gap
between the academic and devotional world. It is therefore worthy to be
carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand his key points while at
the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his rather bold claims. This
series of posts are concerning volume 3 –
The Resurrection of the Son of God.]
N.T. Wright’s second chapter wherein he considers
resurrection in second temple Judaism will bring out a relatively rare aspect
in these blog reviews – I tend to agree with him. Wright argues that, much like
Biblical views, second temple Judaism was interested in a “life after life
after death.” He argues that this was a revolutionary moment that was primarily
understood in apocalyptic terms. This post will simply summarize some of his
key points and then show what it is that Wright is attempting to foreshadow and
prove about Christian ideas (and countering false ideas).
First, Wright presents that belief in resurrection was
fundamentally different from an idea of a non-bodily ethereal life directly
after one dies. Rather, the hope that was presented was something that occurred
at the end of days which would be very much a kingdom of God on earth in a new
kind of existence. Wright argues that there were various different views of
life after death, but that they were all relatively the same for this
particular aspect:
If the bible offers a spectrum of
belief about life after death, the second-Temple period provides something more
like an artist’s palette: dozens of options, with different ways of describing
similar positions and similar ways of describing different ones.[1]
Resurrection, we must again insist, meant life after “life after death:” a two-stage
future hope, as opposed to the single-stage expectation of those who believed
in a non-bodily future life.[2]
The two passages present thing clearly – there was a variety
of different types of writings (and there were), but in some way, there always
was a view that something else was coming. I would have used the language of a
“coming kingdom” more than Wright did, but the idea is essentially the same.
Wright is correct in showing that all of the expectation for
a future life were revolutionary in its grandest sense. The expectation of a
future life after death was popular in the sense of not just extending a life,
transporting out of this life, or becoming above this life. Instead,
resurrection implied a radical disruption and recreation of the sense of life
itself. There is no way to express this outside the language of revolution.
The real problem was that
resurrection was from the beginning a revolutionary doctrine. For Daniel 12,
resurrection belief went with dogged resistance and martyrdom. For Isaiah and
Ezekiel, it was about YHWH restoring the fortunes of his people. It had to do
with the coming new age, when the life-giving god would act once more to turn
everything upside down – or perhaps, as they might have said, right way up. It
was the sort of belief that encouraged young hotheads to attack Roman symbols
placed in the Temple, and that, indeed, led the first-century Jews into the
most disastrous war they had experienced.[3]
Wright, in his interest in understanding the context of
Judaism as focused around the problem of “exile” focuses more on the political
than the cosmic, but for second temple Judaism, these things were united.
Their not having their land was accepted as a condition of
the corrupted world in which they lived. They recognized that for any future
life that would have things set “right” again, they could not simply exist as
the political entity Israel as they did under the monarchy as before the
Babylonian exile, they had to go farther and change the way living was
structured. The way they would receive the land was not by conquering their
foes in battle, it was through changing who and what their foes were. If they
simply ceased to exist in a cosmic battle between good and evil in which good
wins (as god would be directing it), then a real kingdom of God could be
established.
Wright correctly points out that this ideal was thoroughly
apocalyptic. The understanding of hope was fully apocalyptic in that there was
an expectation that the evil in this world must be destroyed. Wright explains:
And in the middle of the texts and
their subject-matter we find frequent references to the purposes of Israel’s
god for his people after their death. In keeping with the genre and style of
the apocalyptic writing, these references are often cryptic; but again and
again the hope they express, as we might expect from the spiritual heirs of
Daniel and Ezekiel, is not for a permanently disembodied immortality but for a
resurrection at some time still in the future.[4]
There is a reason it is called “apocalyptic hope.” The
apocalyptic is the world in which there is an expression that there is a great
evil in the world that is putting down the good. This evil must be punished and
destroyed. Those who are righteous are currently suffering and are to but wait
until God will destroy that evil. When that happens, once for all, life will be
fundamentally different. Therefore, the coming changes are in the language of
judgment – the apocalyptic event is judgment upon that evil that is currently
plaguing the world:
Resurrection thus belongs clearly
within one regular apocalyptic construal of the future that Israel’s god has in
store. Judgment must fall, because the wicked have been getting away with
violence and oppression for far too long; when it does, bringing with it a
great changing in the entire cosmic order, when those who have died, whose
souls are resting patiently, will be raised to new life. Many of these
apocalypses, as we have seen, allude to Daniel 12 in making the point. And all
of them, in doing so, hold together what we have seen so closely interwoven in
the key biblical texts: the hope of Israel for liberation from pagan
oppression, and the hope of the righteous individual for a newly embodied, and
probably significantly transformed, existence.[5]
The new existence only can occur when judgment occurs, evil
will be destroyed and then Israel can truly be Israel.
Part of the effects of the destruction of Israel is that the
whole people of God will be united. If they were not, then how can the readers
say that the new life is any different from the previous? If that is so, then there
must be a new way of dealing with the problem of death and thus the concept of
resurrection is used. Resurrection is a new way of living in the future that
includes everyone after the apocalyptic event:
[Resurrection] was one particular
story that was told about the dead: a story in which the present state of those who had died and would be replaced by a future state in which they would be
alive once more. As we noted a the end of chapter 1, ‘resurrection’ was a life after life after death, the second of
two stages in the post-mortem program. Resurrection was, more specifically, not
the redefinition or redescription of death, a way of giving
a positive interpretation to the fact that the breath and blood of a human body
had ceased to function, leading quickly to corruption and decay, but the reversal or undoing or defeat of
death, restoring to some kind of bodily life those who had already passed
through that first stage. It belonged with a strong doctrine of Israel’s god as
the good creator of the physical world.[6]
For evil and death to be destroyed, then they had to
practically destroyed for it to be a new kingdom of God.
Wright’s analysis is generally sound. It can be argued that
his emphasis on the apocalyptic is overemphasizing one version of Judaism to
the detriment of others. The Sadducees, for instance (which Wright does discuss
as an exception to the rule)[7]
held that there really was no significance to a future life at all outside of
the traditional value in descendants as the focus of how to live forever. The
Sadducees cannot have been the only Jews to have this view. However, a fair
point can be argued that this view is certainly not left to us in surviving
texts. Those who wrote and whose writings have been preserved do tend to
prioritize an apocalyptic expectation – indeed, the Sadducees themselves left
us no writings that have been preserved. Therefore, even if this was not the
majority position, it certainly was the loudest minority that dominated the
discussion at least in later Jewish though and most probably during that same
period.
Wright, however, presents all of this in order to set up a
dialogue that is coming – that resurrection should not be understood as
something that happens directly after someone dies, but rather is something
that happens at the end of days. This is not surprising for Jewish thought in
the second temple period, but would be rather shocking to many modern
Christians who make vague comments about heaven as if it is something that is
currently being populated directly after one’s death. Therefore, Wright goes to
extra lengths to counter this position that resurrection was a future expectation rather than a present reality for those who have died.
Consider the following example:
In that world, nobody supposed that
the dead were already raised;
resurrection, as we have seen, describes new bodily life after a present mode of ‘life after death.’ So: where and what are
the dead now? To this, we may surmise (and verse 9 will demonstrate it
further), the Pharisees gave the answer: they are at present like angels, or
spirits. They are presently disembodied; in the future, they will receive their
new embodiment.[8]
Wright makes this comment to address his readers. There are
very few people who think that the Pharisees would have thought that there was
any type of resurrection as a present state. There are, however, many
Christians who believe this. Wright here is foreshadowing his future argument
about the New Testament which will show that this construct was for ancient
Judaism and is the same for the New Testament. He realizes that this will challenge
many evangelical Christians’ understandings and he is completely comfortable
with that – in many ways that is his primary goal.
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