Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§18.6 Et Resurrexit
move any idea of personal survival from the concept 'resurrection' 233 is not to
make the metaphor more meaningful but to destroy it. Reality grasped in and as
metaphor is no less reality even if it cannot be expressed in other terms.
Christians have continued to affirm the resurrection of Jesus, as I do, not
because they know what it means. Rather, they do so because, like the affirmation
of Jesus as God's Son, 'the resurrection of Jesus' has proved the most satisfactory
and enduring of a variety of options, all of them inadequate in one degree
or other as human speech, to sum up the impact made by Jesus, the Christian perception
of his significance. They do so because as a metaphor, 'resurrection' is
perceived as referring to something otherwise inexpressible, as expressing the
otherwise inchoate insight that this life, including Jesus' life, is not a complete
story in itself but can be grasped only as part of a larger story in which God is the
principal actor and in which Jesus is somehow still involved. In short, 'the resurrection
of Jesus' is not so much a criterion of faith as a paradigm for hope.
suggests that Matthew and Luke have differently interpreted the 'primordial myth' of Mark's
resurrection narratives into a 'foundation myth' of Christian origins — 'myth' being understood
as 'the narrative expression of the deepest realities of human experience' (12).
233. Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection 147-52.
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