Digital Logos Edition
Two of today’s most important and popular New Testament scholars, John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright, here air their very different understandings of the historical reality and theological meaning of Jesus’ resurrection. The book highlights points of agreement and disagreement between them and explores the many attendant issues.
This book brings two leading lights in Jesus studies together for a long-overdue conversation with one another and with significant scholars from other disciplines.
Logos Bible Software dramatically improves the value of this resource by enabling you to find what you’re looking for with unparalleled speed and precision. Scripture passages link directly to your English translations and to the original-language texts, and important theological concepts link to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and a wealth of other resources in your digital library. In addition, you can perform powerful searches by topic and find what other authors, scholars, and theologians have to say.
“The crux of the issue, then, is not whether there were real experiences, but how we explain the nature of these early experiences. What best accounts for the early Christian belief that Jesus had appeared after his death?” (Pages 80–81)
“Rather, the word resurrection always denoted the second stage in a two-stage process of what happens after death: the first stage being nonbodily and the second being a renewed bodily existence, what I have often called life after ‘life after death.’ Likewise, I’ve shown conclusively that Paul really did believe in the bodily resurrection, despite generations of critics going back as far as the second century who tried to make out that he didn’t.” (Page 17)
“Wrede’s approach led to historical skepticism and non-Jewish, modernist conclusions concerning Jesus, based largely on his willingness to treat messianic texts as inventions of the evangelists. Schweitzer’s approach, on the other hand, led to wholly eschatological, Jewish conclusions concerning Jesus, primarily for his refusal to assign messianic statements to the early church.” (Page 13)
“The book has, of course, a positive role, but one of its main tasks, if I can put it like this, was to negate the negative—that is, to show that the normal historical proposals about the rise of resurrection faith in the early church, the normal proposals that try to explain things without the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus, simply won’t work historically.” (Pages 16–17)
“Jesus said, and I think that Paul takes for granted, that we’re dealing with what I’m going to call a collaborative eschaton.” (Page 26)