The historical datum now before us is a widely held, consistently shaped and highly influential belief: that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead. This belief was held by virtually all the early Christians for whom we have evidence. It was at the centre of their characteristic praxis, narrative, symbol and belief; it was the basis of their recognition of Jesus as Messiah and lord, their insistence that the creator God had inaugurated the long-awaited new age, and above all their hope for their own future bodily resurrection. The question we now face is obvious: what caused this belief in the resurrection of Jesus? [Wright and Bird, page 296]
Sunday School – The New Testament In Its World – “The Story of Easter according to the Apostle Paul”
April 27, 2025 – {All the quotes below are taken from “The New Testament In Its World, Wright and Bird, SPCK.}
Jesus Crucified Dead Buried and Risen!
Indeed, there was a sense of excited bewilderment about what had happened and who had seen him first. Importantly, they didn’t claim to have seen Jesus’ ghost (though they knew all about such things). Nor did they say they had seen him transformed into an angel, or seen a vision of him resting in the bosom of Abraham, or scooped up to heaven in a chariot of fire. Jesus’ followers believed that the God of Israel had raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus had been bodily resurrected. What exactly did they mean by this, and why did they say it?[Wright and Bird, page 297]
We will see that Jesus’ bodily resurrection, as a true event in history, is the best explanation for why the early church took the shape and direction that it did, and why its leaders proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes. For the first Christians, belief in Jesus’ resurrection and hope for their own future resurrection generated a series of new beliefs and new ways of life that made them stand out in the religious world of antiquity.[Wright and Bird, 297]
Paul’s Testamony To The Risen Jesus: The Son of God In Power
Paul is an important witness to Jesus’ resurrection, in terms of: (1) the origin of belief in Jesus’ resurrection among Jesus’ own circle of disciples; (2) Paul’s testimony to his own encounter with the risen Jesus; (3) how resurrection, something marginal in Judaism, became central in Christianity; and (4) how ‘resurrection’ as a metaphor for Israel’s socio-political restoration was deployed as a metaphor for participation in the Messiah’s life-giving power. In addition, Paul’s letters contain early traditions, almost creed-like fragments, that affirm two basic events: Jesus died and rose.2 Paul expounds this tradition frequently when explaining its pastoral and missional implications and warding off confusions. He is in fact our most important early source for Jesus’ resurrection and what it meant to his first followers. Paul was, after all, writing in the 40s and 50s, when (according to most scholars) the four gospels had not yet been produced, though no doubt many traditions about Jesus were circulating. The following survey of Paul’s statements on the resurrection can only be brief and selective, but it will highlight the key points.[Wright and Bird, 298]
1 and 2 Thessalonians
Jesus’ resurrection; his present location in heaven (God’s dimension of present reality, not a ‘place’ a long way away); his future return; and his deliverance of his people from wrath—all these are commonplace in Paul’s developed thinking. Here we see that they were central from early on in his writing, and capable of succinct summary.
Soon after, Paul talks about the believers’ future hope:
“Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him . . . For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.”
- 1 Thess. 4.13–14, 16
The words Paul uses, the nature of his argument, and the underlying story-line, all place him right in the middle of second-Temple Jewish beliefs about resurrection. Whatever beliefs Paul revised following his conversion, resurrection remained constant, with the major innovation being that Jesus himself had been raised in advance of everyone else. This means that we are bound to see resurrection as bodily, since there is no indication that what Paul meant by ‘rose again’ in 1 Thessalonians 4.14 was anything other than what that word would have meant to an ancient pagan or to a reader of the Septuagint. ‘Resurrection’ meant something bodily, not ‘ghostly’, something the dead did not presently enjoy. Resurrection would, in other words, be life after ‘life after death’.[Wright and Bird, 299]
Philippians
Philippians contains some climactic statements about the resurrection. This letter offers a hint, stronger than anywhere else except 2 Corinthians, that Paul was facing the serious possibility of his own imminent death; so we should not be surprised to find here as well some of his clearest statements about the Christian hope beyond death.[Wright and Bird, 299]
Where we find the resurrection theme in this letter is at the centre of Paul’s description of the Christian life and status, in chapter 3. There he speaks of knowing Jesus and participating in his resurrection power. Instead of clinging to his inherited covenantal privileges, like ‘circumcision’ and Israelite descent, Paul considers these things ‘loss’ compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Messiah Jesus as his lord. This is in order that
“I may be discovered in him, not having my own covenant status of righteousness defined by Torah, but the status of righteousness which comes through the Messiah’s faithfulness: the covenant status of righteousness from God which is given to faith. This means knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings. It means sharing the form and pattern of his death, so that somehow I may arrive at the final resurrection from the dead.”
- Phil. 3.9–11 NTE/KNT (italic phrases added)
The punchline of Paul’s statement—and the heart of our present concern with this passage—is that the body will be transformed, not abandoned. This is one of the clearest answers to the question: what did Paul mean by resurrection? Here he means that, in the new world which the creator God will make through the all-encompassing authority of the Messiah, his people will be given renewed bodies. Those who are presently alive, those to whom he is writing, will be transformed.[Wright and Bird, 300]
Ephesians and Colossians
“Wake up, you sleeper!
Rise up from the dead!
The Messiah will shine on you!”
The darkness of the present world is contrasted with the light of the creator’s new day, a light which Christians, along with the Messiah, must already shine, without in any way implying an over-realized eschatology. Final resurrection remains in the future; but those on their way to it must shine like lights even in the present time (see too Phil. 2.15). As the final chapter of Ephesians makes clear, Christians still have a battle to fight (Eph. 6.10–20). The enemies are not yet finally defeated, but the eschatology that has been inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus means that victory is assured.[Wright and Bird, 301]
Colossians shares this mixture of metaphor and mystery surrounding Jesus’ resurrection, and makes it the mode of new life and the ground of future hope. As Paul warms to his theme in the opening chapter, he rejoices in the fact that the creator God has qualified his people to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light, by delivering them from the kingdom of darkness and transferring them into the kingdom of his son, in whom they have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Col. 1.12–14).[Wright and Bird, 302]
In the spectacular poem we know as Colossians 1.15–20, Paul places Jesus’ resurrection (Col. 1.18) in parallel with the creation of the world (Col. 1.15), seeing it as the ground and origin of what the creator has now accomplished and is now implementing, namely the reconciliation of all things to him. The very shape of the poem insists that Jesus’ resurrection, as a one-off event, is an act, not of the abolition of the original creation but of its fulfilment. The same Messiah and lord is the one through whom all things were made in the first place, the one in whom all things cohere, the one in and through whom all things are now brought into a new relationship with the creator God and with one another.[Wright and Bird, 302]
Romans
Paul’s letter to the Romans is suffused with resurrection. Squeeze this letter at any point, and resurrection spills out; hold it up to the light, and you can see Easter sparkling all the way through. If Romans had not been hailed as the great epistle of justification by faith, it might easily have come to be known as the chief letter of resurrection.[Wright and Bird, 303]
We begin where Paul begins, with the gospel
“about his son, who was descended from David’s seed in terms of flesh, and who was marked out powerfully as God’s son in terms of the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus, the king, our Lord! Through him we have received grace and apostleship to bring about believing obedience among all the nations for the sake of his name.”
- Rom. 1.3–5 NTE/KNT
The resurrection, in other words, has marked Jesus out as the world’s true ruler.[Wright and Bird, 303]
Moving deeper into Romans, we observe that resurrection forms a significant part of Paul’s description of how ‘God’s righteousness’—that is, God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham—has been unveiled in the gospel events concerning Jesus . . . This faith is evidenced by the fact that Abraham believed in the divine power to give him a child even when he and his wife Sarah were ‘as good as dead’ because they were long past childbearing age. Abraham’s faith did not waver, confident as he was in God’s power; that is why his faith was ‘credited to him as righteousness’ (Rom. 4.19–22). Part of Paul’s purpose here is to reverse the sorry story of human idolatry and corruption in Romans 1. This, he is saying, is how faith in the true God, and in his life-giving power, is the sign that humankind is being restored.[Wright and Bird, 304]
The resurrection demonstrates that the cross was not just another messy liquidation of a would-be but misguided Messiah; it was the saving act of God. God’s raising of Jesus from the dead was therefore the act in which justification—the vindication of all God’s people ‘in Christ’—was contained in a nutshell. Romans 4 thus not only shows that for Paul the resurrection of Jesus was a life-giving event, overcoming death itself by the sheer power of the creator God. It was part of the larger story in which the covenant God was demonstrating his faithfulness by vindicating all those who believe in him, as he had promised to Abraham.[Wright and Bird, 304-305]
Long section:
When Paul speaks in Romans 5.9–10 of being ‘reconciled to [God] through the death of his Son’, it leads to the exclamation: ‘how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!’ Clearly this ‘life’ is the resurrection life of the Messiah, the new life that follows his sacrificial death. The next paragraph, Romans 5.12–21, is notoriously dense. But at its epicentre we find a glimmering statement of resurrection: ‘So, then, just as, through the trespass of one person, the result was condemnation for all people, even so, through the upright act of one person, the result is justification—life for all people.’ Paul splashes his verbal paint onto the canvas in huge dollops, and does not pause to touch it up. We are left to add the smaller details: the ‘upright act’ appears to be a way of referring to Jesus’ obedient death, indicating that it balances and indeed outweighs Adam’s trespass, and ‘justification—life for all people’ appears to refer to the resurrection seen as God’s act of vindication, not only of Jesus himself but, proleptically, of all those who are ‘in him’. Paul can therefore explain in the next verse that it is through the ‘obedience’ of the one man, seeing Jesus’ death and resurrection as a single act, that the many are given the status of ‘righteous’.
Thereafter, in Romans 6, Paul draws together the future hope of the resurrection of the individual believer culminating in eternal life (Rom. 6.4, 8, 23) in tandem with a metaphorical description of dying and rising with the Messiah already in baptism (Rom. 6.1–11). The pattern continues in Romans 8, where Paul states: ‘if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised [the Messiah] from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.’ Consequences follow from this. Those who live ‘in the Messiah’, in the interval between his resurrection and their own, stand on resurrection ground and must therefore continue to resist ‘the flesh’, the old ways which lead to death, rather than let it reign over them. The climax of the whole section arrives with unequalled poetic beauty and theological flourish in Romans 8.30–39. Can anything now come, Paul asks, between the Messiah’s people and final salvation? Each time, Paul answers in terms of what God has already done in the Messiah, emphasizing that Jesus’ resurrection is the cornerstone of the Christian hope: ‘Who is going to condemn? It is the Messiah, Jesus, who has died, or rather has been raised; who is at God’s right hand, and who also prays on our behalf!’17 The present suffering, persecution, and martyrdom of God’s people is as nothing in the light of the love God has poured out through the Messiah. Paul is persuaded that
“neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor the present, nor the future, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Messiah Jesus our lord.”[Wright and Bird, 305-306]
-Rom. 8.38–39 NTE/KNT (amended)[Wright and Bird, 306]
The most fundamental reason why Paul is convinced of this is that death itself, heading this list of potential enemies, has been defeated. Not redefined; not understood in a different light, but defeated. That is one of the most central points in the whole of Romans, and it undergirds Paul’s belief in both the love and the power of the creator and covenant God.[Wright and Bird, 306]
The careful structure of chapters 9—11 has right at its centre (10.9–11) the central Christian belief and confession that ‘Jesus is lord’ and that ‘God raised him from the dead’. That confession itself is a sign that covenant renewal has taken place; those who exhibit this faith are its true members and beneficiaries—even if, being born gentiles, they have never been part of the ethnic family of Israel (see Rom. 3.27–31; 4.18–22). Later, Paul reminds his gentile audience that the gospel is for the Jews first and then the gentiles, not for the gentiles instead of the Jews.[Wright and Bird, 306-307]
Finally, the risen Christ stands at the centre of Paul’s exhortations to unity in Romans 14.1—15.13:
“For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat.”
– Rom. 14.9–10 [Wright and Bird, 307]
‘For Paul resurrection is not an isolated axiom but part of a linguistic complex that understands God, humanity’s plight, the destiny of God’s people, and salvation through faith in Christ in an apocalyptic perspective. Believers are not aliens in a hostile world, but persons in whom the transforming power of the Spirit unleashed by the Messiah’s death and resurrection is already at work.’
Pheme Perkins, ‘Resurrection and Christology: Are They Related?’ in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children, 75.[Wright and Bird, 307]
INTERLUDE
If we can offer an interim report about Paul on Jesus’ resurrection, prior to launching into 1 Corinthians 15, we have to say that for Paul, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth is the heart of the gospel. It is the object of faith, the ground of justification, the basis for obedient Christian living, the motivation for unity, and, not least, the challenge to the principalities and powers. Moreover, there can be no question that when Paul speaks of resurrection in all these ways it is the bodily resurrection of Jesus he has in mind. His multiple metaphorical uses of resurrection, in terms of experiencing new life in Christ, highlight rather than diminish the underlying literal meaning. They are in any case consistent developments from within the ancient Jewish picture, where resurrection was used as an image for national restoration and forgiveness as well as referring literally to the new bodily life in store for God’s people. But when Paul wants to ground his theological arguments and baptismal metaphors of new life on bedrock, it is to the literal, bodily resurrection that he returns. Something has happened as a result of which the cosmos itself is a different place. And when people are brought into that newness through baptism and faith they, too, become different people.[Wright and Bird, 307-308]
I CORINTHIANS
A glance through 1 Corinthians is like a stroll down a busy street. All of human life is there: squabbles and lawsuits, sex and shopping, rich and poor, worship and work, wisdom and folly, politics and religion. But the letter climbs through these upward steps to a summit which is only reached in chapter 15, where Paul responds critically to the news that some of the Corinthians were denying the very possibility of resurrection.[Wright and Bird, 308]
1.
Paul emphasizes that the resurrection of Jesus was a real event, and constitutes the foundation story with which a Christian community must not tamper. Paul here quotes what he says is the early tradition that not only he but all other Christian preachers had used: ‘The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; he was buried; he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; and he was seen . . .’[Wright and Bird, 308]
First, ‘resurrection’ in Paul’s world meant bodies. To claim ‘resurrection’ while not caring if there was a body in the tomb would be self-contradictory. The phrase anastasis ek nekrōn, ‘resurrection from the dead’, literally means the ‘standing up of dead corpses’. Second, we should note that Paul doesn’t mention, in quoting this early tradition, several other elements of what we know from the gospels to be the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. He here ignores Pilate, Caiaphas, Jerusalem, Judas, and Passover, and their omission can hardly mean either that Paul didn’t know about them or that they never existed. The discovery of the empty tomb in the gospel accounts is of course significant, because it was the first thing that alerted Jesus’ followers to the fact that something extraordinary had happened, and because ‘appearances’ of a previously dead person but without an ‘empty tomb’ would at once have been interpreted as ‘visions’ or ghostly visitations.[Wright and Bird, 308]
Jesus was ‘seen’, he writes; some have wanted to take the verb horaō (‘I see’) as indicating that the ‘seeing’ in question was either that of an apparition, without actual bodily form, or else a purely subjective visionary event. The linguistic problem with that suggestion is that the verb can be used to refer to all sorts of visual experiences, ranging from witnessing the appearances of YHWH’s glory in the Temple to people just turning up and being seen in an ordinary sense . . . The list includes prominent disciples like Cephas (that is, Peter; see Lk. 24.34), the ‘twelve’ (see Mt. 28.16; Lk. 24.36; Jn. 20.19–20; presumably the twelfth in this group is Matthias, as in Ac. 1.15–26), an unknown crowd of some five hundred persons, a familial sceptic in James (see Mk. 3.31–35), a wider group of ‘apostles’ (perhaps Mary Magdalene, Cleopas, Junia, and Andronicus?), and finally an appearance to the former persecutor Paul himself. Paul did not regard these ‘sightings’ or ‘appearances’ as part of normal ongoing Christian experience. This was a complete list (‘last of all’, he says in relation to his own seeing of Jesus in v. 8). He was aware that the ‘seeing’ of Jesus that had been granted to him, though belonging in the sequence of the other primitive and non-repeatable ‘seeings’, was nevertheless peculiar within the sequence. He indicates this peculiarity with the little phrase hōs perei tō ektrōmati, which can be translated: ‘as to the one born at the wrong time’. When Paul saw Jesus, he (so to speak) only just made it in time. The appearances were more or less at an end, and none had occurred after his own.23 In sum, as Peter Stuhlmacher comments, ‘the great variety in times and places of the appearances makes it difficult to hold all the reports of appearances to be legendary’.[Wright and Bird, 309-310]
2.
If the resurrection did not happen, then the gospel, with all its benefits, is null and void (1 Cor. 15.12–19). Paul responds to the Corinthian denial of resurrection by a series of reductio ad absurdum arguments which display the chronic problems that such a denial entails. Those who deny the future resurrection, he insists, are cutting off the branch they are sitting on.[Wright and Bird, 310]
For Paul, the point of the resurrection is not simply that the creator God has done something remarkable for one solitary individual (as people today sometimes imagine is the supposed thrust of the Easter proclamation), but that, in and through the resurrection, the world is a different place, the power of sin and of the idols has been broken, and a new way of being human has been opened up. That is the only reason there is a ‘church’ in Corinth in the first place.[Wright and Bird, 310]
3.
Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of ‘the resurrection of the dead’, the final eschatological event (1 Cor. 15.20–28). Paul then spells out his counter-affirmation, beginning with the Messiah’s own resurrection and showing how the resurrection of all the Messiah’s people follows from it.[Wright and Bird, 310-311]
The whole argument establishes, with rock-solid theology and considerable rhetorical power, the point that the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah is the starting-point and the means whereby the creator, in completing the work of rescuing and renewing the original creation, will raise all the Messiah’s people to new bodily life.[Wright and Bird, 311]
4.
If the resurrection were not true then the central nerve of Christian living would be cut (1 Cor. 15.29–34). The next paragraph is short: something of an interlude, a brief respite from dense and involved argumentation . . . If the dead are not raised, then ‘why are people baptized for them?’ Paul describes a strange problem here; we can’t be sure what precisely he is talking about, but it may be that some had been baptized on behalf of people who had come to faith but died before baptism had taken place . . . Without resurrection, Paul indicates, you might as well embrace some form of Epicureanism: eat, drink, and be merry (as ironically voiced in Isa. 22.13) because tomorrow we die. Even pagan poets such as Menander, quoted here, censure that approach. Carelessness about future bodily resurrection, Paul indicates, will eat away at good present moral habits. Thus, the Corinthians have become senseless, sinful, and ignorant by indulging such false perspectives. Paul accordingly shames them for it. By denying resurrection, some of the Corinthians are undermining what undergirds both their future hope and their moral fibre.[Wright and Bird, 311]
5.
The resurrection body is a new and glorious body, of which the risen Jesus’ body is the prototype (1 Cor. 15.35–49). Paul now turns to the obvious questions—questions that still come up whenever people face the real challenge of resurrection. What exactly will it involve? How will it happen? What kind of body will it be? Paul’s answer to the how is that the resurrection will transpire by the creator’s agency, something that God himself gives: ‘God gives it a body’ (v. 38) . . . Paul is saying that the body is planted in a germinal state of mortality (into death) and comes to life in a whole new state of immortality (in resurrection), even while personhood and bodily identity are retained . . .
“So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body [sōma psychikon], there is also a spiritual body [sōma pneumatikon].”
- 1 Cor. 15.42–44
Paul refers to four contrasts, or more properly, four transitions of the body in resurrection:
1. perishable → imperishable
2. dishonour → glory
3. weakness → power
4. natural → spiritual
[Wright and Bird, 312]
6.
The resurrection is about the transformation of present corruptible physicality, resulting in the victory of life over death (1 Cor. 15.50–58). Why then does Paul say that ‘Flesh and blood can’t inherit God’s kingdom; decay can’t inherit undecaying life’ (v. 50 NTE/KNT)? Some of Paul’s readers have puzzled over this from very early times, imagining that he was taking away with the left hand the solidly physical meaning of ‘resurrection’ he had just given with the right. That is not the case. For Paul, ‘flesh and blood’ was a way of referring to ordinary, corruptible, decaying human existence.[Wright and Bird, 313]
Thus the dead will receive their new, transformed body through resurrection, while those still alive at the lord’s final coming will be transformed in the twinkling of an eye. Both will then possess the same kind of body that Jesus himself has in his resurrection: an immortal physicality, something hard to imagine in the present world but utterly characteristic of the future one.[Wright and Bird, 313-314]
What you do in the present, in the lord and by the spirit, is not wasted. Paul is echoing the argument of verses 12–19: if the Messiah is not raised, the apostolic preaching and the Corinthians’ faith would indeed be ‘in vain’. But the Messiah, the lord, was indeed raised; and proclamation, faith, and continuing labour are thereby rescued from ‘vanity’, from futility. What is done ‘in the lord’ in the present will last into God’s future. That is the severely practical message which emerges from this, the prince of early Christian resurrection discussions.[Wright and Bird, 314]
PAUL: THEOLOGIAN OF THE RISEN LORD
Even from this brief and selective survey we can see that Paul’s beliefs about resurrection belong firmly within a Jewish worldview: he believed that Israel’s God, being both the creator of the world and the God of justice, had raised Jesus to new bodily life, thereby confirming him as Messiah and lord, and that he would likewise raise from the dead all the Messiah’s people. This would be achieved through the spirit, who was already at work in them so that their own work would be genuinely part of the already-begun new creation.
This makes sense, to repeat, within the Jewish world of the day, rather than in any corner of the non-Jewish world.28 At the same time, Paul believed two things which are only comprehensible as mutations within the Jewish worldview. First, he believed that ‘the resurrection’ had, as it were, split into two: the resurrection of the Messiah in the first place, and then, at his ‘parousia’, the resurrection of all his people. Second, he believed, and articulated in considerable detail, that the resurrection would not only be bodily, but that it would also involve transformation into imperishability and immortality.
Furthermore, Paul frequently used the language of resurrection, in a metaphorical way, to denote the concrete, bodily events of Christian living, especially baptism and holiness; and also to denote the renewal of the ‘inner human being’. This was a development of the metaphorical use of resurrection-language within Judaism to denote the coming restoration of Israel, the great ‘return from exile’, the time spoken of in Ezekiel 37 and perhaps other passages. We should be clear that this was not a ‘spiritualization’ of the idea of resurrection. Nor was it, as has often been suggested, a move away from Paul’s now-but-not-yet tension and towards a more fully realized eschatology. It was, rather, a way of bringing to articulation the experience and belief of Jesus’ earliest followers: that the Christian life belonged within a historical narrative which began with Jesus’ resurrection and ended with the resurrection of all believers, and that the divine spirit who accomplished the first would accomplish the second, and was even now at work to anticipate and guarantee that final event.[Wright and Bird, 314-315]
The Carpenter's Nail 