No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Early Christian Worship and the Historical Argument for Jesus’ Resurrection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Apologists such as N.T. Wright, Gerald O’Collins, Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, and Gary Habermas have appealed to the post-mortem appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection to lend credibility to Jesus’ resurrection. The earliest and most pertinent evidence concerning the earliest church's worship and devotional life has not been utilized to defend the resurrection (or to defend the historicity of the evidence itself).
On the other hand, scholars of early worship such as Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, and James Dunn have not seen their work as having apologetic import. This essay seeks to bridge the gap between these research paradigms and show that they can only complement each other for the better, especially for the sake of apologetic purposes.
Keywords
- Type
- Original Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- © 2011 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2011 The Dominican Council. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
References
1 Dunn, James, Jesus and the Spirit, (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), p. 97Google Scholar.
2 Hurtado, Larry W., Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 28, 29Google Scholar.
3 Marshall, I Howard, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 83Google Scholar.
4 Wright, N.T., The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003)Google Scholar.
5 For a thorough analysis of Wright's argument, see Craig, William Lane, ‘Wright and Crossan on the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus’, in Stewart, Robert B., (ed), The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2006), pp. 139–148Google Scholar.
6 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 710, cf. 707.
7 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pp. 716, 717. See also N.T. Wright, and Marcus J. Borg, , The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), p. 124Google Scholar.
8 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pp. 477–478.
9 Lapide, Pinchas, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective, trans. Linss, Wilhelm C. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1982Google Scholar; reprint, Eugene, OR, Wipf and Stock, 2002), pp. 130, 131. ‘I cannot rid myself of the impression that some modern theologians are ashamed of the material facticity of the resurrection. Their varying attempts at dehistoricizing the Easter experience which give the lie to all four evangelists are simply not understandable to me in any other way. Indeed, the four authors of the Gospels definitely compete with one another in illustrating the tangible, substantial dimension of this resurrection explicitly. Often it seems as if renowned New Testament scholars in our days want to insert a kind of ideological or dogmatic curtain between the pre-Easter and the risen Jesus to protest the latter against any kind of contamination by earthly three-dimensionality. However, for the first Christians who thought, believed, and hoped in a Jewish manner, the immediate historicity was not only a part of that happening but the indispensable precondition for the recognition of its significance for salvation. For all these Christians who believe in the incarnation (something I am unable to do) but have difficulty with the historically understood resurrection, the word of Jesus of the “blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel” (Matt. 23:24) probably applies’.
10 Hurtado, Larry W., ‘Jesus’ Resurrection in the Early Christian Texts: An Engagement with N.T. Wright’, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 3.2 (2005), p. 205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 O’Collins, Gerald, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1973), pp. 63–76Google Scholar.
12 Dulles, Avery, The Survival of Dogma, (New York: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 41, 42, 60–75, 202Google Scholar: ‘I do not propose an apologetics of hope as self-sufficient, still less as a substitute for all other forms of apologetics. To show the full credibility of the Christian message it is necessary, today as always, to appeal to the data of history. The story of Jesus of Nazareth cannot be by-passed, for Jesus himself is the most striking sign of the truth of his own message. The Resurrection of Jesus stands as the most powerful expression of God's omnipotent redemptive love. But the Resurrection remains largely inaccessible to the historian, if he follows the conventional methods of scientific research. He has no way of dealing with such a unique phenomenon, in which the barriers between time and eternity dissolve and the end of all history is anticipated. To accept the reality of this event one must already be, or at least one must be disposed to become, a man of transcendental hope…. Thus the apologetics of history, as it deals with the Resurrection, interlocks with the apologetics of hope. What one makes of the narratives depends in great part on how one answers the question: “What may I hope for?”’
13 Ratzinger, Joseph, Introduction to Christianity, trans. Foster, J.R. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), pp. 234, 235Google Scholar.
14 O’Collins, Gerald, Easter Faith: Believing in the Risen Jesus (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2003), p. 32, cf. 33Google Scholar.
15 Ibid., 40.
16 O’Collins, Gerald, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University, 1995), p. 51Google Scholar.
17 O’Collins, Gerald, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Some Contemporary Issues (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1993), pp. 2–11Google Scholar.
18 O’Collins, Gerald, Jesus Risen: An Historical, Fundamental and Systematic Examination of Christ's Resurrection (New York: Paulist, 1987), p. 108Google Scholar.
19 Gerald O’Collins, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Some Contemporary Issues, pp. 16, 18.
20 O’Collins, Gerald, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1973), pp. 70, 71Google Scholar.
21 Cf. O’Collins, Gerald, Retrieving Fundamental Theology: Three Styles of Contemporary Theology (New York: Paulist, 1993), pp. 87–97Google Scholar.
22 For representative texts, see The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996)Google Scholar; The Risen Jesus and Future Hope, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003)Google Scholar; ‘Explaining Away Jesus’ Resurrection: The Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories’, Christian Research Journal, 23 (2001), pp. 26–31Google Scholar; ‘Experiences of the Risen Jesus: The Foundational Historical Issue in the Early Proclamation of the Resurrection’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 45.3 (Fall 2006), pp. 288–297CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Habermas, Gary R. and Flew, Antony G.N., Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate, Miethe, Terry L., (ed) (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 19, 20Google Scholar.
24 Habermas, Gary R., ‘Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What are Critical Scholars Saying?’Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 3.2 (January 2005), pp. 135–153CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Ibid., 135.
26 Craig, William Lane, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), pp. 350–400Google Scholar. See also Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, 3rd ed., Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 16 (Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 2004)Google Scholar.
27 McCullagh, C. Behan, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1984Google Scholar); idem, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar.
28 Craig, William Lane, ‘The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus’, New Testament Studies, 31 (1985), pp. 39–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Copan, Paul and Tacelli, Ronald, (eds), Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann (Downer's Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 2000Google Scholar); Copan, Paul, (ed), Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998)Google Scholar.
30 Licona, Michael, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010)Google Scholar. See also Licona, Michael and Habermas, Gary, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2004)Google Scholar.
31 Swinburne, Richard, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford: Oxford University, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Swinburne, Richard, Was Jesus God? (Oxford: Oxford University, 2008), p. 5Google Scholar.
33 Ibid., 83.
34 Swinburne, Richard, ‘Evidence for the Resurrection’, in Davis, Stephen T., Kendall, Daniel, and O’Collins, Gerald, (eds), The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Resurrection of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University, 1997), p. 201Google Scholar.
35 Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, pp. 163–170.
36 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, p. 118. Cf. 176, 180, 406.
37 Hurtado, Larry W., At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 2, 53, 55Google Scholar.
38 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, p. 152. Cf. 615.
39 Ibid., 73, 74, 184, 378, 388, 389, 401, 410, 564–578, 651.
40 Bauckham, Richard, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 106Google Scholar.
41 Ibid., 127–151.
42 Ibid., x.
43 Hurtado, Larry W., How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions About Earliest Devotion to Jesus, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 42–45Google Scholar.
44 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, pp. 132, 133. Cf. 165.
45 Hurtado, Larry W., One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 2d. ed. (New York: T & T Clark, 2003), p. 99Google Scholar.
46 Ibid., 100–114.
47 Ibid., 17–92, 123, 124.
48 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, p. 52.
49 Ibid., 104.
50 Ibid., 126. Cf. 118–126.
51 Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, p. 3.
52 Ibid., 9; cf. 10, 11
53 Ibid., 87.
54 Ibid., 32.
55 Ibid., 23.
56 Ibid., 23, 24.
57 Ibid., p. 84.
58 Dunn, James, The First Christians Worship Jesus?: The New Testament Evidence, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), p. 12Google Scholar.
59 Ibid., 39.
60 Ibid., 6.
61 Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?, 55.
62 Ibid., 135.
63 Ibid., 167, 173, 182, 183, 203, 215, 605.
64 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, pp. 91, 92.
65 Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, ix.
66 Hurtado, One God, One Lord, p. 99.
67 Ibid., 100.
68 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, pp. 483, 484, 650.
69 Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship, p. 4.
70 The Romans allowed for many different forms of religious expression. Thus, it was unique for the Christians to enter the highly diverse and pious religious scene of the Roman world and claim that all religions other than Christianity were illicit.
71 Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship, p. 18. Cf. 39. “Likewise with scant basis are the occasional scholarly assertions of a ‘trend’ or ‘tendency’ toward monotheism in the Roman period. To be sure, among some sophisticated writers in the ancient world there were attempts to posit a unity behind the diversity of gods. But this is hardly monotheism as we know it in classical forms of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, in which one deity is worshipped to the exclusion of all others.”
72 The quick success of Christianity partly depended on showing where pagan religious devotion was in error. This, in turn, provided an opportunity to share the Christian message of the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ.
73 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, pp. 77, 402.
74 Ibid., 619. Cf. 619–624.
75 Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship, pp. 23–26, 46.
76 Ibid., 25.
77 Ibid., 46.
78 Ibid., 29, 30.
79 Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?, pp. 4, 5.
80 Ibid., 13.
81 Ibid., 57.
82 Ibid., 56–82.
83 Ibid., 29, 30.
84 Ibid., 38–42.
85 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, p. 195.
86 Ibid., 196.
87 Ibid., 4.
88 Ibid., 24. Cf. 40, 110, 111, 215, 216.
89 Ibid., 558. Cf. 519–561.
90 Ibid., 134–153.
91 Ibid., 584.
92 Moule, C.F.D., The Phenomenon of the New Testament, (SCM Press, 1967)Google Scholar.
93 For a representative summary, see Martin, Michael, “Skeptical Perspectives on Jesus’ Resurrection,” in Bukett, Delbert, (ed), The Blackwell Companion to Jesus (New York: Blackwell, 2011), 285–299Google Scholar.
94 Tilley, Terrence, “Remembering the Historic Jesus—A New Research Program?,”Theological Studies, 68.1 (March 2007), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
95 Ibid., 5.
96 Allison, Dale C., The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 22–29Google Scholar.
97 Bauckham, Richard, “The Lord's Day,” in Carson, D.A., (ed), From Sabbath to Lord's Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982), pp. 236–240Google Scholar.
98 Johnson, Luke Timothy, Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Study, (Minneapolis, MJN: Fortress, 1998)Google Scholar.
99 Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?, p. 130.