Beyond Resurrection

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2001 by Bibza, James

Beyond Resurrection. By A. J. M. Wedderburn. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999, 306 pp., $19.95 paper.

A. J. M. Wedderburn, professor of NT at the University of Munich, has attempted to use the historical-critical method to ascertain whether the resurrection of Jesus is historically probable, improbable, or "somewhere in the middle." After having decided in the first half of the book that we must be agnostic as to the historicity of Jesus' resurrection, Wedderburn spends the second half of the book attempting to come to terms with the implications of this verdict.

Wedderburn is well read, as the 22-page bibliography and 45-page section of end-- notes demonstrates. Yet one is struck by the almost complete absence of evangelical sources. In fact only about a dozen conservative works are cited in the bibliography and almost none are actually utilized in the endnotes. This may very well be because of the dismissive manner with which Wedderburn treats any attempt to deal with textual discrepancies. Wedderburn gives the impression of being very fair-minded and open to the evidence, as seen by his long and somewhat convoluted discussions on various points, but he is extremely closed minded and biased when it comes to considering questions dealing with the reliability of the Gospel texts.

Wedderburn begins his study by arguing that the resurrection of Jesus must be open to historical scrutiny, and that attempts to safeguard the resurrection by calling it "metahistorical" or "suprahistorical" will not do. He then turns his attention to historical problems in the resurrection accounts, listing ten well-known historical discrepancies between the accounts given in the four Gospels. However, rather than a discussion of evangelical explanations to these problems, one finds a less than one-page treatment here. Wedderburn notes that one could say that each Gospel writer did not always give all the details and information that was available, yet he dismisses this with the statement: "Yet in the end such attempts to salvage the accuracy of the accounts in their entirety run into intractable problems like Luke's exclusion of the possibility of appearances to the disciples in Galilee. His Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles simply leave no room for resurrection appearances to the disciples there" (p. 26).

Wedderburn continues by stating that anyone who does not recognize the disunity of the texts is "concerned to press the texts into a fundamentalist straitjacket" lp. 26). This cavalier attitude is quite disappointing since the problem of Galilean appearances and Luke's Gospel is not a new problem. Evangelical scholars have offered plausible exegetical solutions to this problem. It is one thing for Wedderburn to enter into dialogue with these scholars and find their solutions wanting. It is quite different simply to ignore those attempts and then conclude that there is an intractable problem in the text!

Wedderburn dismisses the accounts of the empty tomb as unhistorical, believing that Jesus would have been buried with other criminals in a common grave. Thus, no one could have produced the body of Jesus unless they could have identified the specific remains as being those of Jesus. The tomb could not have been empty since others were buried there, not just Jesus. Wedderburn believes that the lack of any veneration of Jesus' tomb proves that he was not buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, but in a common grave.

Concerning the nature of Jesus' resurrection body, priority must be given to Paul's account. Since the resurrection of Jesus is viewed as visionary by Paul, whether subjective or objective, "we cannot, without good reason, assume that any claimed `appearances' of the risen Jesus were different in kind and nature from whatever Paul experienced on the way to Damascus" (p. 74). Wedderburn appears to lean toward an interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus that would identify it as a way of expressing the transformation and empowering of the early Christians.

Wedderburn's conclusion is that "very little can be verified historically above and beyond the disciples' faith: something, a mysterious something, happened to them, but further than that we cannot penetrate" (p. 89). We must be prepared "to move beyond this 'resurrection' to expound the nature of Christian existence in a way that is independent of this term" (p. 95).

The second part of Beyond Resurrection is "concerned with the implications of this apparent `dead end' for our understanding of Christian faith and of God, with a coming to terms with the loss of what had previously been thought to be the firm basis for so many traditional assertions about God, Jesus and the world" (p. 99). In this endeavor, Wedderburn self-consciously moves beyond the NT, though he claims that he is keeping with the spirit of Jesus' teaching in John's Gospel that after Jesus is gone, the Spirit would lead them into greater truth. "We cannot rest content with the answers which the New Testament gives us, for it sees that the New Testament is not internally consistent, nor can it be shown to correspond to what we know of the world" (p. 106).