Resurrection

• Matthew 10:28 teaches the importance of the soul and God’s power over it.
• John 20-21 shows how Jesus’ resurrection body had continuity with this pre-resurrection body, though it was transformed.
• I Corinthians 15 uses the analogy of a dead seed planted and springing to new life to explain the relationship between our current and resurrected bodies.
• Philippians 1:21-4 shows that what is most important for the Christian is to depart from the ‘flesh’ to be with Christ.
• Rudolph Bultmann believed that modern people could no longer accept Biblical myths, such as a bodily resurrection.
• He defined myth as a story used to explain the unknown through invoking supernatural elements.
• The science of cause and effect is understood, but more than ‘facts’ are needed in life; faith is an existential condition of hope that there is a power greater than death.
• Rather than simply removing the mythological stories from the Bible, we should look at the meaning behind them, a process called demythologisation.
• The meaning of the resurrection myth is that the disciples came to believe in a power greater than death and despair.
• Having faith in Jesus means having an encounter in which we are awakened to hope and inspiration as the disciples were.
• N.T. Wright says that it is naïve to dismiss the bodily resurrection as the product of an unenlightened, gullible and pre-modern society.
• In fact, it takes more faith to believe in the ‘swoon theory’ that Jesus didn’t fully die on the cross, but later revived – the Romans knew how to kill people!
• The Biblical writers and their contemporaries knew that dead people didn’t rise.
• The bodily resurrection of Jesus was not something the disciples’ cultural-religious system prepared them for – this, alone, is good evidence for believing their testimony.
• The disciples would have believed in a general resurrection at the end of time; thus, their beliefs underwent a dramatic mutation.
• They also would not have believed that a messiah could have failed – only a miraculous occurrence could have changed their minds.
• Other mutations for the disciples included that in Judaism there was a spectrum of beliefs as to what could happen after death, but this did not include a physical resurrection in this world.