Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE CLIMAX OF JESUS' MISSION §18.5
This latter would have been the most obvious category for those who saw
Jesus 'alive from the dead' to use as they attempted to articulate or make sense of
(it amounts to the same thing) what they saw. The precedents were there. And indeed
we do find various expressions of Christian belief to the effect that God vindicated
or exalted Jesus directly from death. 189 But more typically the thought of
exaltation is combined with (rather than understood as an alternative to) the predominant
category of resurrection. 190 To be sure, it can be argued that the memory
of Jesus himself predicting vindication for 'the Son of Man' in terms of resurrection
(§ 17.6b) could have been stimulus enough to the disciples to see
visions of the vindicated Jesus as resurrected Son of Man. 191 But the thesis stumbles
on the absence of any reference to Jesus as the Son of Man in the accounts of
resurrection appearances. 192
(3) Resurrection. I have already indicated the character of resurrection
hope in the Judaism of Jesus' day. 193 Also that the predominant expression of
that hope was in terms of the general or final resurrection, prior to the final judgment.
That might seem to rule out the category as relevant to understanding what
had happened to Jesus. 194 In contrast, however, it seems to have been just this
category, with its 'final' connotations, which provided the earliest articulation of
resurrection faith. 195 Consider the following indications.
189. Acts 5.30-31; Phil. 2.8-9; in John's Gospel the 'lifting up' seems to be a single upward
sweep through cross to heaven, as it were (John 12.32, 34); in Hebrews Jesus' death as
(high) priest symbolizes him taking the blood of sacrifice (his own blood) into the heavenly
sanctuary.
190. See, e.g., John 20.17-18; Acts 2.29-33; Rom. 10.9 (the resurrection made Jesus
'Lord'); 1 Cor. 15.20-28 (allusion to Ps. 110.1 [1 Cor. 15.25] set in the context of teaching on
the resurrection); Heb. 13.20; 1 Pet. 3.21-22.
191. R. Pesch, 'Zur Entstehung des Glaubens an die Auferstehung Jesu. Ein neuer
Versuch' (1983), in Hoffmann, ed., Überlieferung 228-55 (here 243-44).
192. Pesch ('Entstehung' 247-50) is able to point only to the visions of Stephen (Acts
7.55-56) and of John the seer (Rev. 1.13-16; 14.14), neither of which is usually reckoned a 'resurrection
appearance', and the Gos. Heb. 7 account of the appearance to James, cited above
(n. 171).
193. See above, §§17.6b and 18.2b.
194. As Wedderburn observes, the idea of an individual resurrection did not emerge so
much from the disparate texts, which only with hindsight were seen so to speak, as from what
was believed to have happened to Jesus (Beyond Resurrection 41). Müller reckons that
2 Maccabees 7 looked for an immediate resurrection (Entstehung 30-35; rightly questioned by
Wedderburn 41-42), but then argues that this would not have provided a way of conceptualizing
their visionary experiences for the first disciples; the decisive 'impulse' must have owed more
to Jesus' own preaching of God's kingly rule (24-35) and personal expectation (Luke 12.49-50;
13.31-32; Mark 14.25) (36-46), which pointed to eschatological resurrection (55-60, 67-71).
195. 'That the completely alien reality experienced in these appearances could be understood
as an encounter with one who had been raised from the dead can only be explained from
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