← Ask NT Wright Anything
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- [00:32]
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- [01:00]
Tom Wright
Christianity appeals to history, and to history it must go. In other words, it really matters that this stuff did happen. There's a very interesting passage in Acts chapter 23 when St. Paul says, this is all about resurrection, knowing perfectly well that that puts the cat among the pigeons. We know of roughly a dozen Jewish messianic or revolutionary or prophetic movements in the hundred years or two, either side of the time of Jesus. Once we think about how resurrection language actually worked in the first century, then I think we have to say that the most likely explanation, historically speaking, is that Jesus really was bodily raised from the dead, leaving the empty tomb behind him.
- [01:43]
Michael Bird
The Ask NT Write Anything Podcast welcome back to another edition of the Ask nt Write Anything podcast. I'm Dr. Michael Bird from Melbourne, Australia.
- [01:55]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright from Oxford in England.
- [01:57]
Michael Bird
We're going to tackle some questions about the historical details in the Bible. Tell me, Tom, why are there so many questions about the Bible and history, the past, the future? What is all the fuss about?
- [02:12]
Tom Wright
It's a good question, because until about 200 years ago, I don't think people bothered about that much. I think they just thought the Bible's an ancient document like Herodotus or whatever. It's probably telling what happened and that's all we need to know. And it was really only in the last 250 years or so that, particularly in Europe, people who were probing and prodding at all sorts of other issues historically, and whether the ancient texts were all they seemed to be, and so on. And also when they were discovering new things in what we broadly call science, that people were questioning everything and looking at everything. And did this really happen like this? And this got bundled up with some fairly skeptical agendas in Western European philosophy, particularly, particularly of people who were fed up with the Christian world that they'd grown up in, whether it was what we would call Catholic or what we would call Protestant. And so they were chipping away and poking at different aspects of the Christian tradition to say, did this really happen like this? And then did Jesus really do and say this and particularly, did Jesus exist at all? And was he the sort of person that the Gospels say he was? So all that historical investigation comes out of that. And I actually, though many people think that's very damaging, I actually welcome it because I think Christianity, as my teacher George Caird used to say, Christianity appeals to history and to history it must go. There's a reason why Pontius Pilate is in the Creed. In other words, it really matters that this stuff did happen, more or less like what we find. And if it really didn't, if it was all made up, then we're all wasting our time, basically, and we should go and do something more interesting or fun or useful. So I think it's perfectly fine to be addressing these historical questions, but we've got to be careful how we do that. And I hope that's what we're going to be able to achieve, that.
- [04:05]
Michael Bird
Well, this is one of the question I ask my students is how much history in the Bible do you need for the Bible to be true? So I like to ask my students, you know, if there never was a historical Job, if Job is just an extended parable, is the book of Job still true? I mean, if someone convinced you that Job is a fictitious story, could you live with that? And then I give him the example of, you know, Jonah from the Book of Jonah, and then you go, you can go all the way back to the, the, you know, do you need a historical Adam, you know, in order for the Bible to be true? I'm pretty sure you need a historical Jesus. I'm pretty certain on that. But. But I wonder, do you ever think, Tom, you know, is there some things in the Bible that people might have thought were history but maybe were kind of a literary device that some people are just not simply aware of?
- [04:53]
Tom Wright
Well, of course, Jesus himself, in what we call his parables, was constantly telling stories which are very powerful and very meaningful. But it makes no sense to say when Jesus tells what we call the parable of the Prodigal Son. Excuse me, where was this farm exactly? Who owned the bit after it was sold off? And which road do you take to get there? You know, that's not what the story is about. The story is not meant to be historical. It is nevertheless very powerful. So Jesus himself is quite capable of telling powerful stories which resonated into that culture, but which were fictions, or what we would call fictions. And so already right at the very heart of the New Testament, we have that example. So it seems to me it makes perfect sense to ask those questions of earlier books. But I mean, if you go back to the stories of David and Solomon, I would say if there hadn't been a historical David, a historical Solomon, then all sorts of things in the Bible might well start to fall apart. And the idea that some scholars have had that this was all made up at the time of the exile or even afterwards, I really don't think that's going to fly as a historical account of those texts. But if really it could be absolutely demonstrated, then it would raise some very significant questions about what's actually going on. But for me, the center of it all is Jesus. And it's not a matter of first proving the Bible is true and then jumping to say, well, guess what? Jesus is in the middle of this story, so you need to do business with him. It's about looking hard at this figure of Jesus, who is very compelling, even though he's very extraordinary. And then everything else kind of works out from there. And I think methodologically, that's the right way to approach it.
- [06:37]
Michael Bird
Well, that's great, Tom. Well, we've got our first question today. That comes from Tom Brandt. Now, Tom writes this. When Dr. Wright uses the language of time travel to comment on what the risen Jesus did at Easter, as you can find in this excerpt of Surprised by Hope, this is him quoting you. Easter was when hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. Is he, Tom, being just purely imaginative or metaphorical, trying to help us, trying to grasp a concrete theological point, or did Jesus really come from the future? Is there something in which I think Tom is asking, has the lines between present and future somehow become blurred, as if resurrection means Jesus can now travel through some kind of portal in and out of times from the new creation into our world? Tom, what do you have to say that? Because our friend here, a different Tom, Tom Brant, I mean, he's an artist, and he's interested in the literary and poetic way you can describe things like you do as sign posts. What's happening with resurrection and time?
- [07:50]
Tom Wright
Yeah, that's a great question, and I'm grateful to my namesake, Tom Brant, for this question. But I think the fact that he can refer to what I say as a sort of time travel indicates something that we in the Western world are very used to thinking of time in a purely linear fashion. Beginning, a middle and an end, one straight line just going forwards. So that any break in that any attempt to have something from the past overlap into the present or something from the future overlap into the Present looks to us like those movies about time travel, of which there have been a few, Back to the Future would be an obvious one. Those movies are ways of just poking at the Western idea of a linear time. Of course, not all cultures have looked at time like that. Some cultures have seen time going in great big loops. Like the ancient Stoics thought that everything that happened would eventually result in the world dissolving into a purifying fire and that everything would start up again and it would all happen once more. Since if the whole thing is divine, Stoic pantheism would believe, then of course it must happen again and again, because that's what the divinity is compelling it to do. Now, it's actually quite hard to live in a framework like that. But we'll leave that to one side. I think the point is, for the ancient Hebrews, then the Israelites, and then the Judeans of Jesus Day, there are all sorts of ways in which two things are going on. One, they retell the story of the Passover year by year, as our Jewish friends do to this day. But when they do that, they are quite clear. They're not just telling a historical story. They're saying that we are the people who came out of Egypt. There's a sense in which the ancient event of Passover comes forward. So that sitting around the Passover table right now in Oxford or London or New York or Melbourne or wherever they are, the people who came out of Egypt, this is their identity. They are Exodus people. Now, there's various ways we can talk about that, but when you look and see how that's been expounded over the years, often it is very much as though the past event is becoming real all over again. At the same time, there are many Jewish teachers in the ancient world for whom the weekly Sabbath was an anticipation of the age to come. So that they would take a passage like Isaiah 11, about all species living together, the wolf and the lamb lying down and so on, and say, well, on the Sabbath, you shouldn't even kill a fly, because in the new creation all species will live at peace. So the Sabbath is an anticipation of that new creation. So that you've got in the ancient world this sense of overlap of some past events which become in a strange way. I mean, we have to say in a strange way, because we don't normally think like this. In a strange way. Present again. And you've got some future events, in other words, God's promise of new creation, which every Sabbath we share in and we celebrate. And that by the way is why the Jews of Jesus Day celebrated the Sabbath. Not because it was a silly bit of ancient ritual or legalism, which they had to do in order to impress God, but because they believed in God' every week were delighted to have a chance to celebrate it in advance. Now, I think the idea of celebrating something in advance is something we are vaguely familiar with. When a couple gets engaged, they have an engagement party, which is, as it were, celebrating the wedding in advance. Which is why then, if the couple decide to split up, after all, it's like something really bad has happened. Something is broken in the fabric of the world at this point. And so we're not unfamiliar with things which. Which have got future resonances and past resonances. So then the point about Jesus and the resurrection is that in the first century, the Judean world, the Pharisees taught that in the last day, when God made the new creation, God would raise all his people from the dead and possibly all people as a whole. That was a debating point. Would it be everybody or would it just be God's own people? But it was going to be all people at the end. So then, when Jesus is raised from the dead in the middle of history, with ongoing history continuing, there's a sort of realignment that something has happened in the present which we thought was a future hope. I actually believe now that this is one of the principal reasons why, even though he was crucified, Jesus was hailed as Messiah because he was Israel's representative, God had done for him in the present what he was going to do for Israel in the future. Now, that's quite a complicated answer, but I hope it says this isn't just about some weird time travel idea, nor is it simply an imaginative metaphorical aid. I think the ancient Judeans and the early Christians would say no new creation is going to be very solid. And what we would call this worldly new creation will be heaven and earth coming together. And there are moments in the present when we anticipate that. As a Christian, I would say that's what the sacraments are all about. That's what baptism and the Eucharist are all about. They're bringing God's presence, past events concerning Jesus into the present, and they're bringing God's future events, of the great moment, when all things will be made new, into the present as well. And we kind of enjoy them, both retrospectively and prospectively. And I don't think that's just an imaginative metaphor. We may need to use many imaginative metaphors to get the point Across. And certainly I've always found that art and music are great help to opening people's rather truncated Western imaginations to hold onto the possibility of God doing things differently from how we normally conceive it. But I think the reality is more than. I mean, I don't want just to say more than a metaphor, because that implies I'm rather putting metaphors down. Metaphors are enormously important. But it's not just a sort of arm waving. Oh, it's going to be something like this. It will be new creation. And new creation in the person of Jesus came, as it were, forward into the present. The place you see this sharply is in the story of the raising of Lazarus, where Martha says to Jesus, if you'd been here, my brother wouldn't have died. And Jesus says, your brother will rise again. And Martha says, I know he'll rise again at the resurrection on the last day. In other words, thanks, mate, but that's not much help. Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. In other words, you have seen resurrection as something that's going to happen to everybody at the last day, including your dear, late lamented brother. But you know what? I am resurrection in person. And when you reorient it around Jesus, then I think that's one of the clearest statements of something coming from the expected future into the present. So that's the framework that I would bring to it.
- [14:53]
Michael Bird
Yeah, that's a very powerful world, Tom. And I find that very consoling because once when I was at theological college or seminary, we were in the middle of class and one of our students literally just got up and dropped dead. A poor girl who had, you know, just been married six months earlier, just, you know, had a, you know, blood clot in a leg that went to a heart. It was. It was tragic. And we were praying for her when they're doing cpr, and then they told us that she passed away. And then someone got out those. Those words from, you know, the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. The idea, even though that death is here, eventually the veil that separates the present and the future life from death, that veil will be torn up by Jesus himself.
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Hilton Voice
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Tom Wright
Wait, what?
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Michael Bird
That's right, ma'am. You have rooms 201 and 709. No, we cannot be five floors away from our kids. Eh? The doors have double locks. They'll be fine.
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Hilton Voice
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Michael Bird
Well, Tom, we've got another question, and I think this is indicative of the global reach of this podcast. We have a question from Jose Rodrigo in Guatemala. Jose is a new convert, but he's come across some skeptical and naturalistic explanations of the Resurrection as something like a hallucination. So he says that, I'm a new convert. I do not want to be an agnostic or an atheist anymore. But my question is, how can I gauge, with these kinds of questions, how can I defend my faith and learn about the historicity of the Bible to make my case? Thank you. Regards from Guatemala.
- [17:02]
Tom Wright
Well, what a great question. And Jose, I've never been to Guatemala, but God bless you. I'm sure there are many believers there who will help you as well. But let me just say the two or three things which come straight into my mind. The first thing to say is that in the first century, people knew about hallucinations. This is not a discovery of modern psychology or whatever. In fact, in the New Testament, when the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, there are a couple of points where they think they're seeing a ghost. And then Jesus has to say, no, no, no, look here, touch me and see, or let's share some broiled fish together. And there's a very interesting passage in Acts, chapter 23, when St. Paul is on trial in front of the Sanhedrin, and he says, this is all about resurrection, knowing perfectly well that that puts the cat among the pigeons, because half the people who are listening to him believe in the resurrection. And the other half, and the half who do, the Pharisees, they don't actually think that Jesus, that he's saying Jesus has been raised from the dead. They think he's a bit muddled and that what Paul has encountered is somebody who's, as it were, halfway between bodily death and bodily resurrection. And the theories that they had about that was that maybe people went into a kind of angelic mode or into a kind of a spirit mode. And so they say, well, maybe he's in fact telling the truth, because maybe an angel or a spirit spoke to him. And Paul is emphatic, of course, it isn't an angel, it isn't a spirit. It's actually Jesus himself who's alive again. But these are signs that they knew about hallucinations. Another one, also in Acts, is when Peter gets out of jail free in Acts chapter 12. And he comes and knocks on the door of the house where the disciples are praying for his release. And. And the little maid comes to the door and hears Peter's voice and she's so excited she forgets to open the door and comes back and says it's Peter. And they say it must be his angel. In other words, they knew all about those events where somebody has died and then somebody somewhere else has a brief visitation. We know about them too. This is a well known phenomenon in contemporary research and writing. I know of two occasions, one in my own family, where somebody who had died appeared in the room with somebody else, looking large as life and quite happy, and then disappeared again. And then they made some urgent phone calls and discovered that the person had in fact died. So this is an ancient phenomenon, it's a modern phenomenon. And they knew about this and it would have been so much easier to say that's what happened. It wouldn't have disturbed their worldview. But this is why, as far as I'm concerned, in order to believe the Gospel record of Jesus resurrection, you have to say both that they really did meet somebody, that they took firmly Jesus, and that the tomb was empty. Because if they had met somebody that they thought was Jesus but then had gone to the tomb and discovered a body was there, they would have said it's one of those hallucinations. I don't know what word they'd have used for hallucinations. Phantasma or something like that. In other words, you can't explain the resurrection simply as hallucination, because resurrection is about bodies. The word resurrection doesn't mean survival. It doesn't mean John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave while his soul goes marching on. It's about people who are physically dead becoming physically alive again. So that's the first and perhaps the most important thing to say about the hallucination theory. The second thing is a bigger picture, and I've spelt this out in detail in various books, but it goes like this. We know of roughly a dozen Jewish messianic or revolutionary or prophetic movements in the hundred years or two either side of the time of Jesus. That there's the several messianic movements going on during the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 to 70 AD. And there's the last one under Simeon Bon Kozibah, also known as Bar Kokhbar, 132 to 135 AD. Routinely, those messianic movements ended with the violent death of the founder. Now we can study those in the historian Josephus and elsewhere. And when, when the person that you've been following gets killed by the Romans, as they often did, you've got a choice. Either give up the revolution and go and hide somewhere and hope they won't come for you as well, or get yourself a new leader. And we've got evidence of movements that did that. So and so's dead. Oh well, he wasn't the Messiah after all. But here's his cousin or his nephew or his grandson and he's a great leader, a great fighter, a great, great prayer warrior as well. Maybe he's the Messiah. Now in early Christianity, the leader of the Christian movement in Jerusalem was James, the brother of the Lord, who is referred to by the historian Josephus in Jewish Antiquities 20 as the brother of the so called Messiah. How easy it would have been for followers of Jesus to say, well we thought Jesus was the Messiah, but obviously the Romans killed him, so he can't have been. Because Messiahs don't get killed by the opposing forces. They're supposed to be the ones who are defeating the enemy and rebuilding the temple and stuff like that. But here is Jesus, brother James, he's a wonderful man of prayer. He's a great leader and teacher. We love him, we trust him, he's our. So maybe he is the Messiah. There is no evidence that anyone ever thought James was the Messiah. Why not? Because they knew he was the brother of the one who had been raised from the dead. And the connection between resurrection and Messiahship is made very early on in Christianity by the way they use 2 Samuel 7 where God says to David, I will raise up your seed after you. I don't know that any Judeans prior to the time of Jesus have made that connection between David's seed, the Messiah and being raised from the dead. The early Christians spotted it at once and we see it in early passages like the beginning of Paul's letter to the Romans. So I think once we think about how resurrection language actually worked in the first century, then I think we have to say that short of complete mass delusion, which would cause us to rewrite the entire history of the first century, we have to say that the most likely explanation, historically speaking, is that Jesus really was bodily raised from the dead, leaving the empty tomb behind him. Now I and others, including Mike, have spelt this out in various books and writings and articles and things online and so on, so that there's much more to be said and details to be filled in than I've been able to say now. But that's, that's how I would start.
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Michael Bird
But I think that's a good point, Tom, that the resurrection appearances alone would not have been enough to indicate resurrection belief. You've got to have empty tomb and the appearances. It's not just one and not just an empty tomb, not just the appearances. You've got to have both. Mind you, that, that does remind me. I once had a profound hallucination and this wasn't drug induced. When I was in the army, we were on this massive competitive event called the Hydra. And by the end of it, I was so dehydrated I was having a hallucination that I was having a boxing match with a seven headed dragon and I was actually punching a tree. And, you know, next thing I know, I got people pouring water all over me and they took me to hospital and got a drip in me and everything. But it was, it was a, like. I also knew it was a, a hallucination because there aren't really seven headed dragons the last time I've chased checked. But yeah.
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Tom Wright
I thought you still had them in Australia.
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Michael Bird
Oh, we have, we do have big crocodiles, but thankfully they've only got one head, not seven.
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Advertisement Voice
Okay.
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Michael Bird
I don't know. I think they'd be more scary if they had more than one head. Terrible thought. Terrible thought. Well, anyway, Tom, we've got another question from Sean Forrest. Sean says this. He says, hello, Tom, I have heard you say that no one was expecting a dying or rising messiah. But why did Pilate put guards in front of the tomb? Being worried the apostles might steal his body to make it look like he rose. It seems they had an idea about the possibility of people expecting a rising messiah. He says that and, and thanks for all your teaching. He adds.
- [25:30]
Tom Wright
Yeah, I mean, this is a little story which occurs towards the end of Matthew's Gospel. And in the story, the way Matthew tells it, it's quite clear that they are the Jewish or Judean authorities, and indeed the Roman authorities have heard rumors about Jesus during his teaching, saying that the son of man himself is going to be executed, killed, and on the third day will rise again. Now, so I don't think this tells you anything about a broader Judean belief at the time. I think it's just that there's a rumor that this man, who obviously was an imposter, as we know, was telling people he would rise again after his death. So now that he's dead, we better guard the tomb in case his followers come and do this. And that doesn't indicate that they believed that that was something that might well happen. It just indicates that they believed that Jesus had said that so that Jesus followers might want to deceive people by saying, oh, guess what? He's not there anymore. Well, of course he's alive again. So now come with us and we're the new thing. So I think this is purely a reaction to a memory of things that Jesus was supposed to have said. We know that rumors about what Jesus had said and what he might have meant by it were swirling around all the stuff about you who would destroy the temple and build it again in three days. Now that is something which they mock Jesus with at the foot of the cross. But it goes back to a saying which is recorded in John chapter two, near the start of Jesus public career, where Jesus says, destroy this temple and in three days I'll rebuild it. What are you talking about? And so. So word gets around. The bush telegraph is enormously powerful still in the Middle east to this day. People whisper to one another what somebody said and what they might have meant by it. So we're talking about a rumour mill, not about a settled belief of any great Judean teachers at the time.
- [27:33]
Michael Bird
Yeah, I mean, there was no great expectation for a dying and rising Messiah. I mean, that was not mainstream Judaism. But they've probably heard, heard some mangled or garbled reports about Jesus's passion, predictions, or someone will rebuild the temple or he'll be vindicated in the future, or he'll be like three dead, like Jonah, three days in the belly of a fish. And they're trying to think, you know, what's going on here, make sense of that. Yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable expectation. They might have given the rumor mill that was going on. You don't require an established belief in a dying and rising Messiah.
- [28:07]
Tom Wright
That fits into a world where, as you find in the Judean book called Second Maccabees, there are tales of people being martyred rather than giving up their Jewish practice. And as they are martyred, they are saying, you can cut off my hands, you can tear out my tongue, because God is going to give me this body back again. But they are all referring to the future resurrection. But the idea of people saying, well, whatever they do to me, I'll be back. That is quite deep within the Judean culture. So that what people had then rumored that they'd heard Jesus saying would fit within a larger world, even though it would appear bizarre and garbled within that.
- [28:48]
Michael Bird
Excellent. Well, Tom, that is all for today. To the people listening, let us know what you think. Go to askntirite.com and log on there. Have a look around, leave a question, a comment, and if you like, have a really good binge lesson. You know Tom's got a good back catalog. There's a vast archive you can listen to to. Until next time then. Take care everyone. It's goodbye from Tom Wright.
- [29:14]
Tom Wright
Bye bye.
- [29:15]
Michael Bird
And it's goodbye from me. God bless you and see you all. The next episode of Ask N.T. wright. Anything.