The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

Now it must be said clearly that at first sight the coming to life of a single dead body, within the midst of a history which in other respects was proceeding as though nothing had changed, would be, though of course exceedingly striking, quite insufficient to make Jews of the time declare that the longed-for redemption, the eventual release from exile, had in fact occurred.95 Nor, it should be added, would such an event have at once the significance that so many modern scholars have imagined. In the ancient Jewish world, as in the modern Western one, for someone who had been certifiably dead to become visibly alive again would mean that the world was indeed a stranger place than one had imagined; it would not at all justify a claim that the person to whom this odd event had happened was therefore the saviour of the world, the ‘son of god’, or anything else in particular. If, coming closer to the topic, one of the two lestai crucified along with Jesus had been raised to life a few days later, we may suppose it very unlikely that he would have been hailed in any such way, or that anyone would deduce from the event that Israel’s fortunes had now been restored, that the kingdom of Israel’s god was indeed inaugurated, and so forth. This forces us to ask: could the belief that someone had been raised from the dead, whatever precisely was understood by that, have produced the results it did—unless certain things were known, and continued to be known, about the one who had thus b...