The Strangeness of Jesus’ Resurrection

Abstract

The strangeness of the New Testament testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection has led people to seek alternative explanations for this testimony than the explanation offered by the New Testament. This chapter first discusses contemporary ways of explaining away the New Testament’s claim that Jesus concretely manifested himself in his risen flesh to his disciples. Second, the chapter examines the intrinsic strangeness of the New Testament claim that Jesus’ corpse was raised from the dead to glorified life. Third, the chapter engages Thomas Aquinas’s theology of the Resurrection of Jesus. Aquinas rejects any spiritualizing of the raising of Jesus’ corpse to glorified life. His discussion draws upon John of Damascus’s On the Orthodox Faith as an important patristic witness to the bodiliness of the Resurrection of Jesus. Damascene is aware of Gnostic and Muslim perspectives that spiritualized Jesus’ death and Resurrection, and the chapter briefly surveys a number of these perspectives.