The stimulating discussions among Paul, Peter and Jacob have reminded me of a book that I am currently reading entitled “The Resurrection of Jesus: Dom Crossan and Tom Wright in Dialogue.” I think the thread has already moved beyond this issue, but I don’t get the chance to go on OST very often…

Peter Wilkinson wrote “But as regards the historicity of the New Testament, and the resurrection of Jesus in particular, the testimony of the NT itself is that the story depends on its factual basis - as far as anything can be proved to have taken place.”

Here are two quotes from Crossan from the book on the subject:
Referring to the harrowing of hell… “that I have great trouble seeing literally. Let me admit it. If I take that literally, that means that I think that the people who said it were literal. Then there would be hundreds of empty tombs around Jerusalem. it wouldn’t be a matter of checking out one on Easter Sunday, but seeing how many empty ones. So I will concede that maybe I like the harrowing of hell, at least I place a lot of emphasis on it, and Tom does not,… It you take the harrowing of hell, I think it will push you toward the metaphorical. If you don’t talk about it, you might be talking about Jesus’ raising, and that is much easier to take literally.” (pg. 27)
“I see now two routes before us. We can argue about mode: Is the resurrection to be taken literally or figuratively? Is it maybe, as Tom has suggested, a literal resurrection for Jesus, metaphorical for Christians, literal again for everyone? Or might it be metaphorical for Jesus, literal now for everyone who is a Christian, again metaphorical at the end? We can go on debating that. It seems to me that we have been debating it for two hundred years, and we have reached an impasse; nobody is persuading anyone else about it that I can see…. if you want to debate mode, what has to be taken literally, what has to be taken metaphorically, it is a perfectly valide debate. But there is something else: the question of meaning.” (pg. 29)

Even though I personally believe in a factual resurrection as advocated by Wright, I have gained a greater appreciation for folks like Crossan through this book. I guess what I appreciate about both of them is that they do take the discussion “personally” in the sense that both of them want to talk about action and the consequences of that belief be it literal or metaphorical.

Again, Crossan says, “Now if I take that spectrum, from 100 percent literal to 100 percent metaphorical, …Wherever you take it, … any way you take it you are committing high treason (against Caesar). That’s what scares me a little bit becaseu we’ve been doing it for two hundred years. I don’t see much evidence of it changing people. And, it seems to me that it’s the great magnificent cop-out… could we spend as much time talking about putting the resurrection of Jesus, the general resurrection, into practice…”

Crossan is surprisingly convicting, even though I disagree with a lot of what he says.

Carlos