Carlos

I haven’t read any Dom Crossan - there comes a point where your interests preclude taking in everything that has been said about anything. Your extracts don’t fill me with confidence, however. Is Crossan assuming that a “harrowing of hell” is a biblical reality? Is he relating it to Matthew 27:52-53? I’m completely lost in his discussion about metaphorical/literal resurrection.

If we limit ourselves, in the first place, to the resurrection of Jesus, we are on much firmer ground. One might say there have been attempts, over the last 200 years, to turn a literal resurrection of Jesus into metaphor of the believer’s personal experience. But this runs contrary to all the assumptions of the 1st century literature in which the resurrection is grounded, and the 200 years of Israel’s history which preceded it. Culminating in Bultmann, attempts to turn the literalness of Jesus’s resurrection into metaphor are a peculiar feature of a brief phase in culture - when the supernatural was being airbrushed out of the prevailing worldview.

Again, I would assert that the reason we need to take the resurrection of Jesus as a literal, physical occurrence is not through a childish need to be reassured that we will live forever (although it does that), but because it is providing a material guarantee of a material renewal of creation, beginning in Jesus, spreading to all who believe in him as the guarantee of the Spirit, and eventually finding fulfilment in the resurrection of all who believe in Jesus and in a renewed creation which will provide a material environment for material resurrected bodies. (The ‘spiritual body’ of 1 Corinthians 15 does not mean an ethereal body, but a material body transformed by the Holy Spirit).

The literal resurrection of the body has huge implications for how we live now, not simply as those who challenge prevailing power systems, whether of Caesar or anyone else, but as those whose resurrected bodies will reflect very much how we have lived in the body in this life. Life in the material body is important - both now, and in the completed stage of the resurrection body, with the former having a direct effect on the latter. This is the primary reason why the resurrection of Jesus is relevant to people of all times, and not simply those living in the immediate history of 1st century Israel.