Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§18.6 Et Resurrexit
tween event, data, and facts (§6.3b), the resurrection certainly cannot be numbered
among the data which have come down to us. Nor can we speak of empty tomb and
resurrection appearances as data. The data are reports of empty tomb and of
seeings/visions of Jesus. If historical facts are interpretations of the data, then the
historical facts in this case, properly speaking, are at best the fact of the empty
tomb, and the fact that disciples saw Jesus. The conclusion, 'Jesus has been raised
from the dead', is further interpretation, an interpretation of interpreted data, an interpretation
of the facts. The resurrection of Jesus, in other words, is at best a second
order 'fact', not a first order 'fact' — an interpretation of an interpretation. 227
To put the same point in a slightly different way: part of the data is the interpretation
of the first disciples that 'God has raised Jesus from the dead'. The
data include the interpretation made by the disciples. For the twenty-firstcentury
quester, the conclusion that 'God has raised Jesus from the dead', as a
conclusion of the quest, is a further act of interpretation — again an interpretation
(evaluation) of the first-century interpretation. When we add the initial observation
— that departure from this life (death) can indeed be described as a
historical event, whereas entry on to some further existence can hardly be so described
— it can be seen just how problematic it is to speak of the resurrection
of Jesus as historical. 228
A further aspect is that, as again we observed in §6.3c, the historical
method inevitably works with some application of the principle of analogy. The
resurrection of Jesus as 'understood' in the beginning, however, broke through
the analogies given in the term itself — the analogy of waking or rising up from
sleep, the analogy of resuscitation, that is, of reversal of death. Even as already
used for the final resurrection, the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead
soon became a claim to something different. The resurrection of Jesus, in other
words, did not permit itself to be explained in terms of current or previous analogies.
On the contrary, the interpretation that God had raised Jesus from the dead
became itself paradigmatic, that which defines rather than that which is defined.
227. Cf. Marxsen's repeated emphasis in 'Resurrection of Jesus', that 'the resurrection
of Jesus' is an 'interpretation'. I leave unresolved the issue whether the interpretation 'resurrection'
would have emerged without the discovery that Jesus' tomb was empty, as the considerations
marshalled above (§18.2) would seem to suggest (cf. my Jesus and the Spirit 119-20).
But the possibility cannot be ruled out that the initial 'seeings' were of a sufficiently earthy
(tangible?) type (§ 18.5c) as to evoke the same interpretation. Craig, however, in talking of 'the
historicity or historical fact or event of the resurrection' does not give enough weight to the interpretative
jump involved (Assessing passim).
228. Cf. Pannenberg's convoluted attempt to state in what sense the resurrection of Jesus
can be designated as 'a historical event': it can be so designated in that 'the emergence of primitive
Christianity, . . . traced back by Paul to appearances of the resurrected Jesus, can be understood
. . . only ... in the light of the eschatological hope for a resurrection from the dead' {Jesus
98).
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