b. The word 'resurrection' in the first century, whether used by people who believed in it (Christians and some Jews) or by those who didn't (pagans and some other Jews), ALWAYS meant something to do with people being physically, concretely, bodily alive having been physically, concretely, bodily dead. It acquires metaphorical meanings (e.g. to do with baptism and holiness) early on but still doesn't lose its basic meaning. Thus if the early Christians had wanted to say 'Jesus died and then went to heaven in an exalted state', or 'Jesus died but his cause lives on', or 'Jesus dies but we can still sense his presence with us', they would never have used the word 'resurrection'. They had perfectly good ways of saying those other things, and the word 'resurrection' (i.e. its Greek or Aramaic equivalents) wasn't one of those ways.

c. Thus to say Jesus was raised but to mean something that didn't involve a body being alive again was, and still is, a contradiction in terms. But -- and this is hugely important -- this does NOT mean that Jesus' resurrection is simply a very odd thing that Christians are required to believe even though nobody in their right mind could sensibly do so. The New Testament presents the resurrection of Jesus not as a bizarre event within the old creation, the present world of decay, corruption and death, but as the foundational, prototypical and generative event within the new creation, the renewal of heaven and earth which Israel's God had long promised and which was decisively launched when Jesus came out of the tomb (not, we note, as a mere 'resuscitated corpse', as some have accused me and others of suggesting, but in a transformed physicality that decay and death could no longer touch).

d. Jesus' resurrection is thus the foundation -- ontologically, and also epistemologically -- for all the work Christians are thus called to do for the renewal of creation, society and human lives. Indeed, to be a Christian at all is to be called to be both part of that new creation, by the renewal of the mind and the obedience of the body, and also an agent of that new creation in the wider world. Believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not, despite what many in North America imagine, a way of shoring up a 'conservative' world view with all the political fallout that that engenders. Resurrection always was, for the Pharisees and others who believed it would happen eventually and for the early Christians who believed it already had in one case, a highly revolutionary doctrine. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant. The news that the living God is sovereign over death itself is therefore very bad news for tyrants. The fact that some of today's tyrant s profess to believe in the resurrection, but haven't noticed how it relativizes their power, only goes to show how far 'religion' and 'public life' have drifted apart in some areas of the western world. The resurrection was and is all about 'God in public', which is perhaps why some are so shrill in their rejection of it -- as they always were ever since Paul and others announced it.

e. I have said a lot more about all this, of course, in "The Resurrection of the Son of God," and now in a more popular format in "Surprised by Hope."

f. A happy Easter to one and all!