[Tom O'Loughlin] At the very centre of Christian faith and
liturgy is the whole notion of resurrection.
The Easter story.
Christ has risen again, hallelujah. But
we often think of resurrection in a very narrow sense
and with me is Dr Sara Parks.
Sara, let's talk a little bit about resurrection.
[Sara Parks] Okay, in this day and age,
we do often associate resurrection instantly with Christianity.
It's at the heart of Christian belief.
There's a spectrum of Christian belief around it,
ranging from: it's a metaphor,
it's an important metaphor for us, all the way to
it literally happened to Jesus and now he's
literally in heaven, and is going to come back.
All of that range of belief.
But I want to push the notion of resurrection back earlier,
before the Jesus movement,
before Christianity into the Second Temple period of Judaism,
where it was already a hot topic.
We often forget that.
[Tom] And of course, if we forget it,
we should remember that
Paul likes to think of
himself as someone who has always believed
in resurrection. [Sara] Yes,
we do see hints of it,
right in the New Testament that it was already a hot topic.
Speaking of Paul, there's
a tale in the Book of Acts where Paul is
hauled into Jewish court and he knows he's in hot water.
And so all he has to do to get himself out of it is to say,
'hey, I'm being pulled in here because of my views on - my,
my views on resurrection.'
And then 'boom,' the two kind
of classic different Jewish views on resurrection,
the Pharisees and the Sadducees,
they start fighting with each other about it because it
was already a point of tension.
[Tom] Tell us about the Pharisees' and Sadducees'
views of resurrection. [Sara] Well, I mean,
Sadducees have nothing to do,
want to have nothing to do with it.
But Pharisees, it's part and parcel of
their kind of view of, of what would happen.
However, it's not a Christian view of resurrection,
which is quite individual, which is, you know,
I die and then I will go to heaven.
In the Second Temple Jewish view that we
see coming through Pharisees,
the resurrection is a time.
It's a, it's a time.
The resurrection is a day when, an eschatological day, when time
as we know it will end and then it'll be the new time of hope,
New Jerusalem, and all this stuff.
But it's not, it's not individual, it's collective.
[Tom] Well, it's very interesting because of course,
it's only in recent centuries
that resurrection has become
highly individualised in Christianity,
because originally Christianity's vision of resurrection is
that Christ is the first of the new time,
and Christ is the harbinger of the new time.
And for Paul, he's looking forward to a time
when the whole people will be the New Risen people.
And so it's very interesting how there seems to be a phenomenon,
there is a phenomenon in Christianity,
that 'whatever I believe now is always what was believed.'
And of course, one of the interesting things
about studying the history of
belief is that we realize that often when Christians today say,
this is what we believe,
and have always believed, it's actually a very recent belief.
Resurrection, curiously,
is an image that makes perfect sense, for instance,
in the whole Jewish world where Jews, and what
makes them very different, is they always bury their dead.
And so they're looking forward to the time when
all the graves will be empty.
And it's interesting that in,
in, in, for the early Christians,
one of their interests, they're interested in the empty tomb of
Jesus because that's the beginning of all the tombs.
[Sara] Exactly, yes.
I mean, if we look through
Second Temple Jewish texts about resurrection,
they are really varied.
And there's a great, there's a taxonomy of
resurrection texts published by James Charlesworth,
where he's just taken them all and put
them into categories for us to see.
And we can see some, some were imagining a body,
your body is resurrected. Some were
imagining it was ethereal,
like you would become a star,
for example, we're all going to become a star.
Others where we become sort of spirit.
We were resurrected with a spiritual body.
All of that different stuff is
all out there before Christianity.
But this business of the empty tomb of Jesus was
an expectation that comes through a stream of early Judaism
known as apocalyptic thinking, Apocalypticism.
And so if someone,
if there was one person's empty tomb, i.e.
Jesus, that meant the time had begun.
So any minute now
everyone would rise and it was, it would be the end.
But of course, we see in the New Testament
the little bit of anxiety when this doesn't happen.
I think that the first Jesus followers,
when they heard tales of an empty tomb, said, this is it.
It's the end of the world and the beginning of a new
world full of justice and everything will be peace.
And I think Paul bought into this.
And then we see in the later New Testament texts
people who are in anguish,
like 'some people have died now,
what will happen to them?
Like when is it going to happen?'
And Christianity really has to change in the second century
to adapt to the fact that The Resurrection,
as in the end of time, has not happened.
And so now what are they going to do?
[Tom] And now, they've got t put it out to the omega. To the very end.
[Sara] Yeah.
[Tom] Sara, thanks for exploring the problematic of this very central
belief.