Why did Christianity begin, and why did it take the shape it did? To
answer this question which any historian must face renowned New
Testament scholar N. T. Wright focuses on the key question: what
precisely happened at Easter? What did the early Christians mean when
they said that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead? What
can be said today about this belief?
This book, third in Wright's series Christian Origins and the
Question
of God, sketches a map of ancient beliefs about life after death, in
both the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds. It then highlights the
fact
that the
early Christians' belief about the afterlife belonged firmly on
the
Jewish spectrum, while introducing several new mutations and
sharper
definitions. This, together with other features of early
Christianity,
forces the historian to read the Easter narratives in the
gospels, not
simply as late rationalizations of early Christian spirituality,
but
as accounts of two actual events: the empty tomb of Jesus and
his
"appearances."
How do we explain these phenomena? The early Christians' answer
was
that Jesus had indeed been bodily raised from the dead; that was
why
they hailed him as the messianic "son of God." No modern
historian has
come up with a more convincing explanation. Facing this
question, we
are confronted to this day with the most central issues of
worldview
and theology.