[JSNT 26A (2004) 505-510] ISSN 0142-064X

An Incompleat (but Grateful) Response to the Review by Markus Bockmuehl of The Resurrection of the Son of God N.T. Wright
Auckland Castle, Co. Durham DL14 7NR bishop.of.durham@durham.anglican.org

I am grateful to Dr Bockmuehl for his generous and lively response, and to the Editor for the invitation to reply. Most of Dr BockmuehFs criticisms I cheerfully acknowledge. However, as he sees, if I had been able to do what he asks (more attention to some key texts, and so on) I would have incurred even greater grumbles about length. I remain impenitent about that, for the reason he alludes to as 'answering Epicurus'. In the course of reading the current literature (all right, not as much in German as I might have done, but see above) I found a seemingly endless supply of bad arguments, mistaken exegesis, begging of questions, and so on. I realized that if I simply set out my own argument without dealing with it all I would inevitably seem, in turn, to be begging key questions. This applies particularly to Paul. Writers on the resurrection often go straight to 1 Cor. 15 (sometimes to 2 Cor. 4 and 5, too) and offer, as a quick reading of those texts, something that a reading of the whole correspondence, let alone the whole Pauline corpus, undermines. This battle had to be won, not by a quick frontal attack (it does not work; you meet bland reassertion), but by large-scale outflanking, so that when you get to the head-on engagement with key texts it takes place on the proper ground. No, I did not treat Plato and Socrates fully enough. Once I got into Platonism I realized that chapter 2 could explode into a whole further book, and.. .well, perhaps I do not need to explain why that was not a good idea. However, there is no serious doubt about the contours of Plato's position. All I needed was to demonstrate that resurrection does not feature, and indeed (granted his worldview) could not have featured, among all the life-after-death options Plato considers.
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I am not so sure about Dr Bockmuehl's puzzle over my exposition of the Old Testament. I thought it important at least to attempt a diachronic reading, not in order to suggest that that was how the early Christians read it but in order to lay out fairly and clearly the apparently quite different positions in different texts. (Synchronic treatments, in my experience, invite the charge of over-systematization.) In doing so I became particularly interested in a point that I am still waiting for someone to take up, namely that the idea of resurrection, when it occurs, is not so much a further development, beyond a general life-after-death hope such as may be found in some of the Psalms, and hence even further awayfromthe (early?) belief in Sheol, but in a sense a reversion to the earlier view that the only sort of life that really counts is full, bodily life, with the (admittedly explosive) addition of the promise that this sort of life will be renewed. I do indeed think, and I am sorry if this was not clear, that what matters for the study of early Christianity is how the ancient scriptures were being read in thefirstcentury. That was why I gave space to the Septuagint, which (in whatever recension) was the scripture most early Christians knew; to apocalyptic books like 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, which involve reinterpretations of scripture (not least Daniel) under particular first-century conditions; to Josephus; and perhaps above all to the Wisdom of Solomon. Here again I was concerned by critical scholarship's endless and apparently effortless repetition of what is demonstrably the wrong reading of Wisdom, and I am not sure that Dr Bockmuehl has quite represented what I was saying. I did not suggest that a single word in 5.1 'safely denotes resurrection', but that the entire narrative of thefirstsix chapters, read as a whole, runs like this: (a) the wicked kill the righteous and declare that death will be the end of them; (b) God, however, is looking after the currently dead righteous; (c) there will come a time when the wicked will be astonished because the righteous have not only come back again but are set in authority over nations and kingdoms; (d) the kings of the earth must therefore learn true wisdom, so that they do not behave as the wicked have done. This is then backed up, in the second half of the book, by a retelling of the Exodus, to demonstrate how God rescues his people and judges their persecutors. It is within this large-scale reading that the particular passages make the sense they do. Writer after writer makes the standard claim that Wisdom teaches immortality and therefore not resurrection, and then (a) ignores the larger argument and (b) wrongly assumes that these two (immortality and resurrection) are an either/or choice. As Jewish and Christian sources testify, belief in ultimate resurrection entails belief in

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some kind of continuing disembodied life after death. Nobody until the Gnostics used 'resurrection' (as many do today) to denote the immediately post-mortem state. Wisdom thereby offers, too, an example of resurrection as a counterimperial theme. (What matters here, by the way, is not simply cult, but ideology and rhetoric.) It is the story of the righteous martyrs coming back from the dead that confronts the rulers of the world with the need to find true wisdom. Likewise, the book of Daniel, for instance as re-read by 4 Ezra, announces the coming kingdom that will overthrow the pagan kingdoms. The dilettantes and greybeards of Athens may have scoffed at Paul's idea of resurrection, but earlier in the same chapter (Acts 17.7) we find Paul charged with teaching disobedience to the imperial dogmas and saying that there is 'another king, namely Jesus'. Once we read Phil. 2 and 3,1 Thess. 4 and 5, and indeed Rom. 1.3-4 and 15.12 with imperial ideology and rhetoric in mind, it does indeed look as though, for Paul, the resur rection constitutes Jesus as the world's true lord, before whom Caesar should tremble. It is perhaps significant that Dr Bockmuehl, in company with all other reviewers so far, has passed over in silence my quite full treatment of Jesus' debate with the Sadduceeswho, as is well known, denied the resurrection not because they were liberals, but because they were conservatives. I do think that Lazarus, like Jairus's daughter and the widow's son at Nain, was genuinely dead. However, the question of what we mean by 'genuinely dead' is harder to tie down than one might think. Many people in our own day have been pronounced dead, with neither breath nor pulse, for minutes or even hours, sometimes even to the point of a funeral service, and have then astonishingly revived, often with remarkable tales (whose interpretation is of course contested) oftheir 'post-mortem' experi ences. We now call such events 'near-death experiences', as much for linguistic as for physiological reasons (since, when we say 'death', we usually think of finality). If we were to press medical opinion on the point, I suspect that many would say, 'Yes, they really were dead', while others might say ' They only seemed to be dead'. Coming to Jn 11, Lazarus ' s body had not begun to decay; I am convinced that is why John has emphasized Martha's fear of the smell (v. 39). Truly dead but somehow kept from corruption: that, I reckon, is what John is inviting us to imagine. And that, I take it, is what he wants us to think about Jesus himself between Calvary and Easter. The little word in Jn 14.2 has of course done sterling service, from

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early on in the tradition, as a reference to an ultimate heaventhough it is interesting that the passages cited in Lampe's Patristic Lexicon begin with Clement of Alexandria. It is interesting, too, that the other patristic and classical meanings of the word include 'hostel' or 'stopping place, marking the end of a day's journey', and, frequently, 'distance between two stops, stage of a journey'. Usage alone cannot determine the question, and I take seriously Jesus' promise to take his followers to the place where he is. But I also take seriously the larger context in John where (unless we adopt unwarranted redactional theses) a classicfinalresurrection is envisaged (not only 5.28-29 but also 6.39-40, 44 and 11.23-27). While we are on little but significant words, I suppose I was asking for trouble by using 'completion' in relation to the story of Israelthough, as Dr Bockmuehl realizes, this really belongs in a different discussion. I know the problem with 'replacement' or 'supercessionist' theologies; indeed, Rom. 9-11 can be read as the first polemic precisely against such a thing. Yet that is where wefindthe great story of Israel as told in the first century described as reaching its appointed - with the Messiah. I am happy with 'proleptically reaffirmed and fulfilled' as a gloss on what I said, though that leaves open for another time what might be implied by 'proleptically'. So to the final three questions. I wish I had taken more trouble with the point that Dr Bockmuehl probes so tellingly (the apparent exceptions to the rule that first-century Jews were not expecting a single individual to rise again in advance of the general resurrection). He agrees with me that Antipas's reported comment can hardly be the basis of a whole theory. However, he pushes further than these apparent exceptions, and asks whether, after all, people at the time were expecting the Messiah himself to suffer and rise from the dead. I have argued elsewhere (against, e.g., John O'Neill) that they were not, and I think Mk 9.9-10 points in this direction, as do the resurrection narratives themselves, with the recurring (and, to the early church, embarrassing) motif of dismay, incredulity, wrong interpretations ('It's a ghost!') and so on. If I can boldly summarize the argument in chapter 12 o Jesus and the Victory of God, first-century interpretations of Isa. 53 might either involve a Messiah (but not a suffering one) or a suffering and vindicated figure (but not a Messiah). Not before Jesus himself do we find these two fused into one. I do wonder (though this would need more teasing out) whether we need to distinguish, as perhaps only with hindsight we can, different kinds of coming back from the dead. Lazarus, Jairus's daughter and the widow's son would all have to die again, which the early Christians were quite

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clear Jesus would not have to do. Even if Antipas really did think Jesus was John redivivus, and ifwe add the mention ofJesus as an ancient prophet 'raised up' (Lk. 9.19), we must I think assume that this (a) would be a way of speaking loosely about the spirit of the person in question coming to life again in a new body, more like a reincarnation than what later is seen as resurrection, (b) would not imply that this person (Jesus, in this case) would now never die again, and (c) would not at all imply that 'the resurrection', the final great reawakening, had thereby begun. I appreciate that this seems to introduce some grey areas into what may have seemed a fairly black-and-white issue, but I do not think my overall argument will thereby suffer. So to the question of historiography. I am not an 'optimistic' historian except when viewed against the scepticism of some postmodernists who have difficulty with any extra-linguistic world at all. I have little to add at the moment to the relevant parts of The New Testament and the People of God, though I want to develop the case further in the future. When I quoted Tacitus, it was to indicate that I am aware of my own context, history, affiliations, predilections and so on, but that I still intend to tell the story as fairly and squarely as I can. I do not pretend to be objective but I do intend to engage in public discourse, open to question and challenge. I do not start out on a historical investigation convinced that I can solve it, even with sophisticated tools; it all depends on the state of the evidence. The point about 'shooting arrows at the sun', which those who have not read the book may not understand from Dr Bockmuehl's allusions, was not about historiography per se, but about the attempt to use historiography to get at questions about God (which is what many have declared one would be doing if one were to write historically about the resurrection). In denying that, in an introductory chapter about which Dr Bockmuehl is enthusiastic, I was concerned rather to propose that, though historiography might not shoot an arrow at the sun itself (i.e. God), it might be able to shoot at a key place where many have seen (though not all have seen, and not all would be obliged to see) a remarkable reflection of God (Col. 1.15; Heb. 1.3; etc.). History can take us to the point where non-historical questions can be seen in a new light, and perhaps with a new urgency. The Thomas incident is not simply about his refusal to believe the apostolic testimony; it is also about different types of evidence. He wants to touch, and is invited to do so; he then sees and believes, and is told that it would have been better to believe without seeing. I take this both as affirming that believing the testimony is the best thing and as saying that

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nevertheless (as with the Word becoming flesh in the first place) Jesus condescends to offer evidence that goes more than halfway to meet the sceptical challenges of thefirst,and perhaps the twenty-first, century. I see my whole book, in fact, as an address to those who in our own day have stood stubbornly with Thomas and have declined to believe the church's witness. It is no doubt a veryfinething to say (not that Dr Bockmuehl does, but he will see the point) that you are above all this messy and inconsequential historical argument, and prefer to shut your eyes and simply believe. But if Jesus himself invites Thomas to touch and see, the Christian historian may perhaps invite people, in the same spirit, to examine the historical evidence. What,finally,about ' going to heaven when you die ' ? The New Testament is singularly uninterested in this question, and that should give pause to the many Christian traditions in which it is central. To put it crudely: of course God's people go to heaven when they die, but that is not the end of the world. According to Rev. 21-22, there will be discontinuity as well as continuity, not only between the present and the future earth, but between the present heaven (Rev. 4-5 etc.) and the future one which will itself be fully integrated with the new earth. Jerusalem the Golden does indeed exist (as Paul knows in Gal. 4), but only when it comes down to earth will all things be made new. At that time, according to Rev. 22, the new Jerusalem does not 'embrace and subsume the new earth'. It is the point from which the river of the water of life flows out to irrigate the new earth; and the leaves of the tree of life, growing on either bank of the river, will be for the healing of the nations. John the Seer is rightly concerned about the souls currently under the altar (6.9-11). But his ultimate concern, like Paul ' s, is for the creator God, the one who wipes away all tears, to be all in all.

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