The resurrection was also central to salvation from sins. Paul writes that Jesus “was delivered up because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification” (Romans 4:24-25). On the basis of the resurrection, Peter could proclaim, “Every one who believes in Him receives forgiveness óf sins” (Acts 10:43). Belief in Jesus’ resurrection was therefore one of the necessary conditions for salvation. An early confession cited by Paul states: “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved” (Romans 10:9). Apart from belief in the resurrection, there could be no salvation or forgiveness of sins. Without the resurrection, the cross would have no meaning. This is why Paul could write, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17).
It is quite clear that without the belief in the resurrection the Christian faith could not have come into being. The disciples would have remained crushed and defeated men. Even had they continued to remember Jesus as their beloved teacher, His crucifixion would have forever silenced any hopes of His being the Messiah. The cross would have remained the sad and shameful end to His career. The origin of Christianity therefore hinges on the belief of the early disciples that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
EXPLAINING THE BELIEF IN THE RESURRECTION
Now the question becomes: What caused that belief? As R. H. Fuller says, even the most skeptical critic must presuppose some mysterious x to get the movement going.3 But what was that x?
If one denies that Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he must explain the disciples’ belief that He did rise either in terms of Jewish influences or in terms of Christian influences. Clearly, it could not be the result of Christian influences, for at that time there was no Christianity. Since belief in Jesus’ resurrection was the foundation for the origin of the Christian faith, it cannot be a belief formed as a result of that faith.
But neither can belief in the resurrection be explained as a result of Jewish influences. To see that we must turn to the Old Testament. Resurrection of the dead on the day of judgment is mentioned in three places (Ezekiel 37; Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2). During the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the belief in resurrection flowered and is often mentioned in the Jewish literature of that period. In Jesus’ day the Jewish party of the Pharisees held to belief in resurrection, and Jesus sided with them on that score in opposition to the party of the Sadducees. So the idea of resurrection was itself nothing new.
But the Jewish conception of resurrection differed in two important, fundamental respects from Jesus’ resurrection. In Jewish thought the resurrection always (1) occurred after the end of the world, not within history, and (2) concerned all the people, not just an isolated individual. In contradistinction to this, Jesus’ resurrection was both within history and of one person.
With regard to the first point, the Jewish belief was always that at the end of history God would raise the dead and receive them into heaven. There are, to be sure, examples in the Old Testament of resuscitations of the dead; but the persons would die again. The resurrection to eternal life and glory only occurred after the end of the world. We find that Jewish outlook in the gospels themselves. Thus, when Jesus assured Martha that her brother Lazarus would rise again, she responded, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (John 11:24). She had no idea that Jesus was about to bring him back to life. Similarly, when Jesus told His disciples that He would rise from the dead, they thought he meant at the end of the world (Mark 9:9-13). The idea that a true resurrection could occur prior to God’s bringing the kingdom of heaven at the end of the world was utterly foreign to them. The greatly renowned German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias writes:
Ancient Judaism did not know of an anticipated resurrection as an event of history. Nowhere does one find in the literature anything comparable to the resurrection of Jesus. Certainly resurrections of the dead were known, but these always concerned resuscitations, the return to the earthly life. In no place in the late Judaic literature does it concern a resurrection to δόξα [glory] as an event of history.4
The disciples, therefore, confronted with Jesus’ crucifixion and death, would only have looked forward to the resurrection at the final day and would probably have carefully kept their master’s tomb as a shrine, where His bones could reside until the resurrection. They would not have come up with the idea that he was already raised.
As for the second point, the Jewish idea of resurrection was always of a general resurrection of the dead, not an isolated individual. It was the people, or mankind as a whole, that God raised up in the resurrection. But in Jesus’ resurrection, God raised just a single man. Moreover, there was no concept of the people’s resurrection in some way hinging on the Messiah’s resurrection. That was just totally unknown. Yet that is precisely what is said to have occurred in Jesus’ case. Ulrich Wilckens, another prominent German New Testament critic, explains:
For nowhere do the Jewish texts speak of the resurrection of an individual which already occurs before the resurrection of the righteous in the end time and is differentiated and separate from it; nowhere does the participation of the righteous in the salvation at the end time depend on their belonging to the Messiah, who was raised in advance as the ‘First of those raised by God.’ [1 Corinthians 15:20]5
It is therefore evident that the disciples would not as a result of Jewish influences or background come up with the idea that Jesus alone had been raised from the dead. They would wait with longing for that day when He and all the righteous of Israel would be raised by God to glory.
The disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, therefore, cannot be explained as the result of either Christian or Jewish influences. Left to themselves, the disciples would never have come up with such an idea as Jesus’ resurrection. And remember: they were fishermen and taxcollectors, not theologians. The mysterious x is still missing. According to C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge University, here is a belief nothing in terms of previous historical influences can account for.6 He points out that we have a situation in which a large number of people held firmly to this belief, which cannot be explained in terms of the Old Testament or the Pharisees, and that these people held onto this belief until the Jews finally threw them out of the synagogue. According to Professor Moule, the origin of this belief must have been the fact that Jesus really did rise from the dead:
If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole of the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with? . . . the birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church . . . remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.7