Jesus didn’t die (says Islam, it was somebody else); Jesus died and stayed dead (says Judaism); Jesus died but didn’t stay dead (says Christianity).
That’s the negative way to put the truth of Easter: Jesus didn’t stay dead. The person known as “Jesus bar Joseph” was known not only before but after his death and burial. They knew him before, and afterward they recognized him as the same embodied self (though with some additional powers). They included not just his intimates, but “more than five hundreds brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive” (1 Corinthians 15:6 New Revised Standard Version). Beyond that earliest New Testament account, all four Gospels have post-resurrection, simple and complex interactions between Jesus and his disciples.
Now to the “Resurrection Faith” question: “Do you have to believe the resurrection is literally true – that Jesus came back to life in his body – to be a Christian?”
1.....Since the question would have made no sense to those who saw and interacted with Jesus after his death and burial, why does it make sense to anybody today? It is because some want to claim to be Christians in spite of their assumption that dead people-bodies stay dead, against the Christian creeds' affirmation of “the resurrection of the body.” So many are comfortable with this unbiblical marriage of convenience that scholars who teach it – for example, Marcus Borg – are popular in the mainline churches. / But that Jesus was resurrected only “in spirit” is massively contradicted in “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” an 800-page masterpiece by N.T.Wright, one of our “On Faith” panelists.
2.....Human beings are visible (Hebrew, “basar”) and invisible (Hebrew, “lev”). The body/soul split is Greek, not Hebrew – thus the doctrinal distinction between “the immortality of the soul [an invisible entity]” and “the resurrection of the body [the person as visible].” / Says a psalmist, “Inwardly and outwardly I sing for joy to the living God”: Psalm 84:2 (“My heart [lev] and my flesh [basar]....”). Of course he could not conceive of a bodiless human being, nor could Jesus’ disciples.
3.....Cultural-linguistic scholars teach us that to enter a language-culture world strange to us, we must suspend both our own language-world and our disbelief in the other language-world. Hard, humble work! I taught several generations of clergy to read their Bibles in Hebrew (the Old Testament) and Greek (the New Testament), the primary languages & language-worlds through which God chose to tell the Grand Story of his loving struggle to win humanity back from its waywardness. In and beyond the Bible, this Semitic-Hellenic conversation is the deepest layer of the Christian mind and – with the addition of Latin - of the mind of the West.
4.....The wider the diameter of our knowledge, the longer the circumference of our ignorance and of the mysteries transcending our little minds. But God has willed some tangencies between his Mind and ours, tangencies in all languages and cultures. / Now, in the West, some of these tangencies have been thoughtlessly neglected, some even willfully rejected. The balancing polarity between faith and reason has widely yielded to the monologue of reason against faith. Poetry has been reduced to usable prose. And the symphony of Hebrew-Greek-Latin has faded into the monotony of one’s own mother-speech.
5.....Easter’s “problems” is an annual reminder of the cultural-linguistic desert of today’s Western mind. In America, our earliest college (Harvard,1636) required its earliest graduates - all of them Congregational ministers - to be able to write in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (the languages in which I’ve read the Bible daily for the past 65 years): their skills as Christian leaders were to include the ability to read/think/feel in the three fundamental languages of our religion, culture, and civilization. (And of course they were masters of English, the tongue into which the West's three fundamental languages most easily flow.)
6.....For all of us, "Easter" means rebirth. For me, it includes the prayer for a Second Renaissance, the presence desert - dominated by the techno-mind and its products and prospects - re-blossoming as a rose. And for all of us Christians, Easter
means "the resurrection of the Son of God" with all its attendant splendors for time and eternity. The last word is not sorrow but joy, not death but life....
....as at Easter dawn I've heard Greek-speaking Christians shouting to one another, CHRISTE ANESTE! Christ is risen!
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