Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§18.5 EtResurrexit
(i) One of the early confessional formulae which Paul echoes is Rom. 1.3-
4: the gospel (not just Paul's gospel) concerns God's Son, 'who . . . was appointed
Son of God in power ... as from the resurrection of the dead'. The last
phrase is striking. We would have expected 'the resurrection from the dead'
(anastasis ek nekrön). 196 Instead we have 'the resurrection of the dead'
(anastasis nekrön), the phrase used when it is the final resurrection which is in
view. 197 The point is confirmed by the fact that elsewhere Paul is recalled as
treating the Christian claims for Jesus' resurrection as a test case for the Pharisaic
belief in the (final) resurrection. 198 The point is that Paul and those who articulated
and used the formula regarded the resurrection of Jesus as of a piece with
the final resurrection. 199
(ii) Paul also uses the imagery of 'firstfruits (aparche)' to describe the significance
of Christ's resurrection (1 Cor. 15.20, 23). The imagery is of resurrection
as a harvest of the dead; Paul returns to the agricultural metaphor in 15.37-
38, 42-44 — resurrection as the emergence to new (different) life of the seed
which has 'died' in the ground (15.36). But the aparche is actually part of the
harvest itself, the first sheaf of corn to be reaped and set aside to be offered up to
God. There is no time-gap between the first sheaf and the rest of the harvest; the
aparche is the beginning of the whole harvest. 200 Such a metaphor could have
been coined only if Jesus' resurrection had been regarded as the beginning of the
final resurrection. In which case, it is equally unlikely that the metaphor was
coined by Paul himself or coined some twenty years after the event. Its origin
must surely go back to the earliest days, and it can have been coined only by
those who did indeed regard Jesus' resurrection as the beginning of the (general)
resurrection of (all) humankind (1 Cor. 15.21).
(iii) This line of thought probably illumines the otherwise completely puzzling
report in Matt. 27.52-53 that Jesus' resurrection coincided with the resurrection
of many of the saints (buried outside Jerusalem). To be more precise: the
earthquake at the time of Jesus' death opened the tombs of the dead, many were
the presupposition of a particular form of the apocalyptic expectation of the resurrection of the
dead'; 'Only as the beginning of the end . . . could Jesus' resurrection be understood as the confirmation
of his pre-Easter claim to authority' (Pannenberg, Jesus 93, 106). Cf. Crossan and
Reed, Excavating Jesus 258-62.
196. As in Luke 20.35; Acts 4.2; 1 Pet. 1.3.
197. Matt. 22.31; 1 Cor. 15.12-13, 42; Heb. 6.2. On Heb. 11.35 see above, chapter 17
n. 274.
198. Acts 23.6; 24.21. Similarly Acts 17.31; was part of the disbelief in 17.32 occasioned
by the suggestion that the resurrection preparatory to judgment (17.31) had already happened?
199. See, e.g., Allison, End of the Ages 67-68; Dunn, Romans 15-16.
200. Further detail in my Romans UTi-lA.
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