2
" The question of god lay at the heart of second-Temple Jewish life. Each affirmation, each act of worship, contained the question: not Who? (they knew the answer to that), nor yet Why? (again, they knew: because he was the creator, the covenant god), or particularly Where? (land and Temple remained the focus), but How? What? and, above all, When? How, they wanted to know, would YHWH deliver them? What did he want them to be doing in the meantime? And, When would it happen? The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth provided the early Christians with a new, unexpected and crystal clear answer to these three questions; and, by doing so, it raised the first three in a quite new way. "
― N.T. Wright , The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #3)
3
" There is no reason in principle why the question, what precisely happened at Easter, cannot be raised by any historian of any persuasion. Even if some Christians might wish to rule it off limits, they have (presumably) no a priori right to tell other historians, whether Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, gnostics, agnostics, or anyone else, what they may and may not study. "
― N.T. Wright , The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #3)
4
" Though my approach throughout the book will be positive and expository, it is worth noting from the outset that I intend to challenge this dominant paradigm in each of its main constituent parts. In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘more spiritual’ view; (3) that the earliest Christians believed, not in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his ‘going to heaven’ in some kind of special capacity, and that they came to use ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty tomb or of ‘seeing’ the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such ‘seeings’ of Jesus as may have taken place are best understood in terms of Paul’s conversion experience, which itself is to be explained as a ‘religious’ experience, internal to the subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus’ body (opinions differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not ‘resuscitated’, and was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.11 Of course, different elements in this package are stressed differently by different scholars; but the picture will be familiar to anyone who has even dabbled in the subject, or who has listened to a few mainstream Easter sermons, or indeed funeral sermons, in recent decades. "
― N.T. Wright , The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #3)
6
" The Pharisaic, and rabbinic, view of the resurrection always involved two stages: an intermediate stage, in which the dead were in some way or other still alive, and a final stage in which they would be re-embodied. And, since in fact rather few Jews seem to have believed that disembodied immortality was really the final state, into which one passed immediately upon death, the main debate as far as the Pharisees were concerned was between their two-stage view and the Sadducees’ no-stage view, in which people ceased to exist altogether after death. What is more, everybody knew that what was normally meant by ‘resurrection’ had not happened yet. The question ‘What do you say about resurrection?’ was always a question about the future. "
― N.T. Wright , The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #3)
7
" Rather, by psyche here Paul basically means what the Hebrew nephesh regularly meant: the whole human being seen from the point of view of one’s inner life, that mixture of feeling, understanding, imagination, thought and emotion which are in fact bound up with the life of the body and mind but which are neither in themselves obviously physical effects nor necessarily the result, or the cause, of mental processes. Just as, for Paul, soma is the whole person seen in terms of public, space-time presence, and sarx is the whole person seen in terms of corruptibility and perhaps rebellion, so psyche is the whole person seen in terms of, and from the perspective of, what we loosely call the ‘inner’ life. And Paul’s point is that this person, this psychikos, ‘soulish’, person, still belongs in the present age, deaf to the music of the age to come. Here (2:11) and elsewhere Paul can use the word pneuma to refer to the human ‘spirit’, by which he seems to mean almost what he sometimes means by kardia, ‘heart’, the very centre of the personality and the point where one stands on the threshhold of encounter with the true god. "
― N.T. Wright , The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #3)
8
" The introduction is formal, solemn, complex and controversial. It stands as a fifth witness to the original Easter events, alongside the accounts in the four gospels, and is thus of extraordinary importance for our present study. Bultmann, famously, criticized Paul for citing witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, as though he considered it an actual event, instead of being merely a graphic, ‘mythological’ way of referring to the conviction of the early Christians that Jesus’ death had been a good thing, not a bad thing. "
― N.T. Wright , The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #3)
