Ankerberg Show

Dr. John Ankerberg: Welcome to the John Ankerberg Show Classics Edition. For decades, we’ve been privileged to host esteemed scholars discussing a wide range of topics from apologetics and science to biblical prophecy and beyond. Join us as we revisit these timeless conversations and make them accessible to you wherever you are.

Dr. N. T. Wright: I think, granted all we know about what first-century Jews believed about death and believed or hoped about resurrection, it makes no sense at all. You see, if Jesus’ followers had seen a vision, if they had had a revelation, they had categories already available in their culture to talk about seeing an angel or maybe being visited by a spirit.

You notice how in Acts chapter 12, when Peter is in prison and the early church is having a prayer meeting for his release—but they’re not that faithful because they actually think he’s going to be killed—and then Peter is miraculously released and then shows up at the house. When he’s still outside knocking on the door and the little maid Rhoda says, "It’s Peter! It’s Peter!", they say, "It must be his angel."

You see, they think that Peter has been killed in the prison, which was what they were expecting, and that this is a sort of angelic vision of Peter while he is on his way maybe to paradise. They don’t say he’s been raised from the dead. Being visited like that by someone—we know it in our culture as well. Sometimes after somebody we love has died, they appear. They sit at the foot of a bed. They’re suddenly there in a chair and then they’re gone again.

For them, that would be perfectly compatible with the normal process of grieving and mourning and the normal process of burial. They would bury the body and then a year or so later, secondary burial, they would collect the bones and put the bones in an ossuary. Now, there is not a shred of evidence that anyone ever did that with Jesus because they didn’t believe this was an angel or a spirit; they believed this really was him.

Therefore, as a historian, I am forced to say that two things must have happened. One, they certainly had sightings of Jesus. But two, they really knew the tomb was empty. Either of those without the other, they would have had easy explanations. Empty tomb? Somebody’s stolen the body. Vision? It’s just one of those visions that happen, and it doesn’t mean he’s not dead.

But the fact is they said he isn’t dead anymore. Resurrection is not a way of redescribing death in a rather more hopeful fashion; it’s a way of overthrowing death. That’s at the center of the New Testament. The early Christians, being first-century Jews, had ways of saying that somebody’s body was in the tomb but they were now in a place of honor. That’s what they said about the martyrs. That’s what they said about people like John the Baptist.

It’s interesting that some people thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back again. That’s a bizarre thing. Herod Antipas apparently thought that. Whatever else that means, it means that if somebody’s back from the dead, they’re not a ghost wandering around; they’re actually a flesh-and-blood human being doing stuff and saying things. Absolutely. So, resurrection isn’t about the soul going marching on or being safe in the hands of God.

There’s a passage in the book called *The Wisdom of Solomon*, which is roughly contemporary with the New Testament, in which they talk about the souls of the righteous being in the hands of God. But then it goes on in the same chapter to say that at the time of their visitation, they will run like sparks through the stubble and God will set them over nations and kingdoms.

When they talked about people being safe in the hands of God as a blessed soul or whatever, this was a temporary stage waiting for the time when God would then do the new thing, which would be changing the whole world and bringing his people to rule over this new earth. For Paul and for all the early Christians that we have good evidence for, talking of the continuing presence of God or of Jesus with them was talking about the Holy Spirit.

Now, some scholars have tried to collapse talk of the resurrection into talk of the Holy Spirit, but actually, that just won’t work in either John or Paul or the other bits of the New Testament. There are two quite separate things that they believe. They believe that Jesus was raised from the dead as a one-off event and that he was seen by a certain small number of people for a certain limited time.

One of the key phrases in 1 Corinthians 15 is when Paul says, "Last of all, he appeared to me." Paul knows that the Corinthians to whom he’s writing have had all kinds of spiritual experiences, that they know the presence of the risen Lord in a different sense with them in their worship—they are filled with the Spirit—but they didn’t see the risen Lord because Paul was the last one who did.

Of course, some scholars deny that and just say Paul was wrong. But it seems to me, if when Paul said that in 1 Corinthians 15, the Corinthians could have come back at him and said, "Rubbish, Paul. You weren’t the last. We’ve seen him too," Paul would know that they would have come back and said that. He’d be wasting his breath.

So, it’s clear to me that the early Christians did believe in resurrection appearances which lasted for a short time and then in the spiritual awareness of the spiritual presence of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit, which continued and continues to this day. The one depends on the other, but the two are not the same thing.

That’s one of those phrases which has caused endless problems because the word "spiritual" in our culture doesn't mean at all what Paul meant by it. In the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version, which many Christians use—and which are very good versions in many ways—they oppose the physical body to the spiritual body.

In our culture, that means physical, this sort of stuff, and spiritual is nebulous like a ghost or a vision or whatever. But the actual words in the Greek don’t mean that. In the Greek, what we have is *soma psychikon*, which is from the same word that we get "psyche" or "psychedelic" or "psychiatrist," and that’s what is translated "physical." It seems to mean the embodiment for the soul.

And then the *soma pneumatikon* is the spiritual body, which is the appropriate embodiment for the spirit. What we have then is not a contrast between what we would call physical and spiritual, but a contrast between this present body, which is corruptible and which is heading for death, and a body which, because it’s finally animated by God’s Holy Spirit—the resurrection body—is not corruptible.

When Paul is talking about this in 1 Corinthians 15, that is the main contrast he’s making—between a body that is corruptible, going to die and going to corrupt in the grave, and a new body which will be incorruptible and has come through death and out the other side and will never be touched by death again.

I think for Paul again, because he’s our earliest witness, you can see it very clearly. You could summarize it like this: that what Paul expected God to do for all the righteous at the end of time, he discovered that God had instead done for Jesus in the middle of time. So, you have this sense of, not just this is a very odd thing that’s happened, but this was what was supposed to happen to everybody.

And it’s happened to Jesus. And that is, of course, one of the reasons why for Paul, Jesus is the Messiah who represents the whole people of God. It’s as though in him, all of this has actually happened, has actually come to pass. So that you then get not just a sharpening up of the idea of resurrection—that it isn’t just resuscitation, it means going through death and out into this new sort of body—you also get a revising of the timetable of history.

Instead of history going along and then suddenly at the end God’s going to do it all, God has done an advance version in the middle of the present sequence of what he’s going to do at the end. It’s very interesting that in the Greek Orthodox tradition of iconography, I don't know if you can see, but I’ve got on the mantelpiece—we might run this sequence again and you can see there—at the left-hand end of the mantelpiece, that is an icon of the resurrection.

What we have there is not simply Jesus as the risen one, but Jesus helping up Adam and Eve out of the tomb. When I bought a different icon just recently in a Greek Orthodox shop, I said I want an icon of the resurrection of Jesus, and they pointed me to one like this, which is actually of the resurrection of all people. They said, "Yes, this is Easter. This is what it’s all about."

And whereas for us in the West, we have really separated that out—there’s Easter over there and then there’s all of us being raised there—in the Eastern church, these things belong together and they have never really separated them out. That’s a very biblical and very Pauline insight. I’m not sure whether Marcus Borg would actually say that a new day or new age has dawned; I think he might say that a new level of spiritual experience is now on offer or something like that.

Because for the early Christians who were, I say again, first-century Jews, what mattered was things that actually, as we would say, happened in history. If you’d said to a first-century Jew the Kingdom of God is here, they would say, "Look out the window. Of course it isn’t. People are still dying. The world is still a mess. The pagans are still ruling us. How can you say the Kingdom of God is there?"

And if you’d said, "Oh, what I mean is I’ve had this wonderful experience of the presence and love of God which fills my soul and my heart with a new sense of love and forgiveness and so on," they would have said, "Congratulations. But you know, we Jews have psalms which talk about that stuff, and it still doesn’t mean the Kingdom of God is here."

To be "earthed" in first-century Palestine, it’s got to have happened. One of the interesting things about the scholarly debate here is that with the whole tradition of liberal scholarship that has denied the resurrection, they have had to push forwards onto the idea of the second coming—the idea of an event in history which will validate all of this.

And then scholars have said, "Oh, so the early church was really upset because the second coming didn’t happen in a generation." All of that sequence of thought is kind of misplaced energy because they haven’t realized that for the early church, it was the resurrection which was the event in history through which the kingdom had come and the world was now a different place.

Of course, the second coming was going to happen, but it might happen at any time and it didn’t faze them at all that it didn’t happen after a generation because the resurrection had happened. That was why, in the place where in the Jewish worldview you find hope, in the Christian worldview you find joy. There is still hope, of course, but you have this sense that the thing has happened and we are now living out of that.

First-century Jews were waiting for God to do something dramatic to liberate them. They didn’t always have a very clear idea of precisely what that was going to be, but at the center of many Jewish hopes was the idea that God would raise all his people from of old from the dead—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the prophets, the lot. That would be part of this "package deal" whereby the forces of evil would be overthrown and the Kingdom of God would come.

Clearly, that hadn’t happened in the early church. However, they all said the kingdom is here, the resurrection has happened, and Jesus is the Messiah. We have to say as historians: why would they say that kind of thing? It cannot simply have been that they’d had a lovely new spiritual experience. It cannot simply have been that they were telling stories about the wonderful, provocative things that Jesus used to say when he was around.

They did that stuff too, but the only explanation for why they said the kingdom is here, the resurrection has happened, and Jesus is the Messiah, is that they believed that what they had expected God to do for all Israel at the end of time, God had done for Jesus in the middle of time; that he had come through death and out the other side into a new body which was untouchable now by death, and that that was therefore the basis for God’s new world of which they were not only the beneficiaries but also the agents.

Paul was what we would call a "right-wing Pharisee." We know a little bit about some right-wing Jewish agendas of our own day. This is a very politicized agenda. It’s about getting rid of pagans, getting rid of enemies, about God acting through the devotion to Torah of particular Jews, and God thus revealing what we call God’s righteousness—God’s faithfulness to the covenant.

This is Paul’s question: how is God going to be faithful to the covenant? And Paul’s answer as a Jew, Saul of Tarsus's answer, is that God is going to do this through the Torah obedience of his people through which he will act splendidly to bring about justice and peace for Israel and the judgment of the world.

Take this man Saul of Tarsus, have him going off zealously to persecute the followers of Jesus because they’re out of line—they’re being disloyal to Torah, they’re being disloyal to the temple and the land and all these other things—have him confronted by the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. Suddenly Paul’s world turns inside out because he realizes that Jesus has been raised from the dead, the Jesus who was executed as a blaspheming would-be Messiah.

This means that God has vindicated this Jesus as Messiah, which means that in fact, that whole plan of God has in fact been fulfilled in the messianic events of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection. From there, it’s actually only a short step to saying that in this good news, this gospel message of Jesus, God has now unveiled what his covenant plan was all along.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul says in the gospel is revealed the righteousness of God—the covenant faithfulness of God. On that basis, Paul then looks at Jesus himself and sees that God has done in Jesus what in the Old Testament God said he would do himself. In the Old Testament, God says, "I love my people so much I will come and deliver them."

Paul sees that God himself was present. He says God was in Christ, redeeming the world to himself. And so he writes that extraordinary poem in Philippians 2, in which he talks about Jesus being in the form of God but not regarding his equality with God as something to exploit—which is a way of saying being equal with God didn’t mean giving himself airs, putting on grandeur like a Roman emperor would.

It meant being committed to the path of self-sacrificial, humble service, being obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. That is why Paul says God has now raised him from the dead, exalted him, given him the name "Lord"—the name above all names—that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.

And we shouldn’t mistake what’s happening there. This is both a theological statement—it’s a way of saying in Christ, God has redeemed the world—and it’s also a political statement, because if Jesus is Lord, Caesar isn’t. All of that is there in a nutshell in Philippians 2:6-11 and in Romans 1:1-17.

When as an ancient historian I look at the evidence about Jesus and say what did he think he was doing, I am putting him alongside other figures in the world of first-century Judaism who we have some evidence for. And the first thing that I say quite clearly is that Jesus thought he was a prophet. He spoke of himself as a prophet; when other people referred to him as a prophet, he didn’t say, "No, you’re wrong." So that’s the historical starting point.

The second thing is: what sort of a prophetic movement was this? What did he think he was doing as a prophet? And the answer is quite clear again: he thought he was a prophet announcing the Kingdom of God. Not just announcing it in the sense that it might happen in a day or a week or a year, but saying it’s happening now under your noses. This was his prophetic message, and he not only said it, he did it with the symbolic actions of healing and feasting and so on. And that’s why he got into trouble, because people didn’t like it.

The next thing in line from there is that not only was he announcing the Kingdom of God, by bringing it himself he seemed to think he was not just a prophet announcing it; he was actually the Messiah. That is to say, not he was the divine incarnate one—we’ll get to that, that’s the fifth stage—but that he was Israel’s anointed. He was the Lord’s anointed, he was the king.

Messiahs—there were always two things that messiahs had to do: messiahs had to defeat the pagans and build or cleanse the temple. Jesus was going to fight a different sort of battle. He talks about having battles with the enemy, but it isn’t Rome he has in mind; it’s the darker force of evil that he called "the Satan" or "the accuser"—the ultimate source of evil.

And he wasn’t going to build a new temple; he was going to do and be things which would, as it were, replace the temple. We’ll get to that in a moment. So, he’s a prophet, he’s announcing the kingdom, he believes he is the Messiah. But then fourthly, Jesus believed that his messianic movement was not about blitzing the enemy into submission in a political sense, but by actually taking the full force of evil onto himself and dying under the weight of that evil.

In fulfillment of the Scriptures, the long story of Israel’s tortured career was going to come to its climax in his own death at the hands of the pagans. And then fifthly and finally—and this is the really scary thing when we think about it historically, Jesus as a historical individual believing this—he believed that this entire vocation was appropriate for him because he was actually the personal embodiment of Israel’s God.

He told stories about Israel’s God coming back to Zion in order to explain what he was doing in his own last journey to Jerusalem. And that’s the way that I come round to saying that Jesus actually—you see, if you say "Did Jesus believe he was God?", people in our culture have this idea of God as a rather distant dictator or whatever. If you say Jesus believed he was that sort of figure, you have this idea of a rather lofty, detached Jesus, like the Jesus of some of the movies from the fifties and so on, with a faraway look in his eye.

Jesus had his feet on the ground of first-century Palestine. As a human being with this vocation, he believed he was embodying the personal presence of Israel’s God. And then you get a very different picture of God: you get a God who doesn’t stay detached from the process; you get a God who comes and gets his feet dirty and gets his hands nailed to a cross in order to rescue his people.

Of course, it’s very easy for any scholar or indeed people at a popular level to say, "Well, all that theology, maybe that was just what the early church believed and they just read it back into Jesus’ life" and so on. Now, of course, the early church did believe it and it was shaping their life and that’s why they did what they did.

But it’s very interesting that in the Gospels, the material about Jesus as Messiah, the material about Jesus as dying for the sake of Israel and the world, the material about Jesus as embodying Israel’s God—where we find this is in very cryptic, dark sayings and riddles which were a puzzle at the time.

Now, it’s clear that the early church didn’t tell riddles about Jesus as Messiah and Jesus’ saving death and Jesus as the incarnate Son of God. They went out on the street and told it as clearly as they could. Why would they have wanted to say dark things like "If they do this when the wood is green, what will they do when it’s dry?" Why would they have asked riddles about "Tell me about John’s baptism—was it from heaven or from men?"

And why would they have told these strange stories about a king coming back and the servants and so on? These were riddling ways of talking about these central truths. And those riddles only make sense within the context of Jesus’ own ministry, when people hadn’t even begun to rumble what he was up to yet and he was trying to find ways of opening their minds to these ideas.

Now, as I say, the early church didn’t bother with that kind of stuff; they just went out straight from the shoulder and told this. So, I think all that evidence must belong in the life and ministry of Jesus.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Thank you for listening to the John Ankerberg Show. We are a listener-supported ministry, and your gifts help us continue to share the gospel with millions of people worldwide. To learn more about our resources or to support our mission, visit jashow.org or please call us at 1-800-805-3030.

If you are in Canada, please visit jashow.ca or call us at 1-866-746-5803. Or you can subscribe to us on YouTube. Your support makes a difference in spreading God’s word.