Reflections on the Resurrection, Part 2
Reflections on the Resurrection, Part 2
Paul Copan and Robert Gagnon | Bulletin Roundtable
We continue this month’s Roundtable devoted to Christ’s redemptive work in celebration of Easter. Paul Copan draws timely insights on the resurrection from the work of theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, and guest contributor Robert Gagnon reflects on the meaning and significance of Palm Sunday.
He Is Risen Indeed!
Christopher Reese
Editor-in-Chief
“Nothing Else Matters”
Jaroslav Pelikan on the Significance of Jesus and His Resurrection
By Paul Copan
In 1988, I came across the late Jaroslav Pelikan’s book Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (1987). It was a riveting read penned by the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. Although I utilized Pelikan’s translation of Martin Luther’s complete works while in seminary, his Jesus Through the Centuries expanded my horizons and led to exploring his other works. With every Pelikan book I’ve read, I’ve been impressed by the breadth, depth, and integrity of Pelikan’s scholarship.
I purchased and read his rich, valuable five-volume Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. These volumes present “the history of the person and work of Jesus Christ for the faith and teaching of the Christian church.”[1] One of the statements that stood out to me in reading Pelikan is the insightful distinction between tradition and traditionalism. Whereas tradition is “the living faith of the dead,” traditionalism is “the dead faith of the living.”[2]
His book Jesus Through the Centuries tells of Jesus’s place in the general history of culture. In the introduction, Pelikan wrote:
Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of supermagnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?
Indeed, our calendar reflects the centrality of Jesus, who profoundly changed our understanding of history. Christian historians like Luke and Eusebius retained the Roman system of dating events by the reigns of Rome’s emperors, which in turn were computed from the legendary date of the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus (AUC, or ab urbe condita = “from the founding of the City”), though Rome was actually founded in the fourth century BC. But by the sixth century, Dionysius Exiguus—a Scythian monk in Rome—proposed a new system of reckoning based on the incarnation of Jesus Christ, even though this monk miscalculated by four to seven years. In this and other ways, Pelikan writes, “everyone is compelled to acknowledge that because of Jesus of Nazareth history will never be the same.”[3]
In addition, Pelikan points out that though Jesus is “the same, yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), each successive epoch, as Albert Schweitzer noted, has in some sense created Jesus in accordance with its own character. Jesus was a rabbi to his own disciples—though of course much more—but he would eventually be viewed as “the Cosmic Christ,” “the monk who rules the world,” “the universal man,” “the teacher of common sense,” the “poet of the spirit,” “the liberator,” “the man who belongs to the world.”
As we think about Easter—Resurrection Day—Pelikan’s analysis of the development of the doctrine of immortality offers insight. Although the Greeks believed in “the immortality of the soul” and although this doctrine crept into Christian thinking and remains to this day, Pelikan stood firmly on the biblical doctrine of the immortality of the body. Our bodies will be raised immortal (1 Cor. 15:53-54), just as Jesus’ body was raised from the dead. He notes how the early church father Tatian rejected the soul’s immortality; the soul is not naturally immortal.[4] Furthermore, Tatian rooted this belief in the Christian doctrine of creation. Pelikan summarizes the logic here:
Man wants to claim pre-existence for his soul because he aspires to immortality; if his soul existed before the brief arc of earthly existence began, it can continue to exist also after that arc has been closed . . . . If the soul does not need an act of the Creator in order to come into existence but pre-existed all along on its own power, then it does not need an act of the Creator to come to life after death but can go on living immortally by its own power.[5]
The only man to whom God grants the life eternal is the man who refuses to grasp for immortality on his own. God brings men not from life to life with smoothness and ease, but from life to death to life with the pain of childbirth and the pangs of death and the continuing threat of nonexistence hanging over them. Living in hope, therefore, means living by faith in the God who can reach even into the hollowness of nonexistence . . . to confer life.
Clearly, the resurrection mattered to the earliest Christians, without which the Christian movement could not have gotten going. Pelikan firmly believed in the historical and theological reality of Jesus’s bodily resurrection. His faith was anchored in realism, as reflected in what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:13-21. Elsewhere, he wrote: “If Christ is risen, then nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen, then nothing else matters.”[6]
Notes
[1] Jesus Through the Centuries (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), xv.
[2] Ibid., 9.
[3] Ibid., 33.
[4] The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600): The Christian Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 1:51.
[5] This and the following quotations are taken from Pelikan’s The Shape of Death: Life, Death and Immortality in the Early Fathers (Nashville: Abingdon, 1961).
[6] Quoted in Martin E. Marty, “Professor Pelikan,” Christian Century 123 (June 13, 2006): 47.
— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.
Image: Eugene Burnand, The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre
A Meditation about Palm Sunday
by Robert Gagnon
Palm Sunday begins the Passion Week culminating in Jesus' atoning death and life-giving resurrection from the dead. It celebrates Jesus' entry into Jerusalem riding on a young donkey. Both Matthew (21:5) and John (12:15) cite this in fulfillment of Zech 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
Onlookers, cognizant of Jesus' miracles and teaching in Galilee, and aware that the Passover marked Israel's redemption from an oppressive foreign power (once Egypt, now Rome), clearly were taken by messianic fervor. If they caught the allusion to Zech 9:9 in Jesus' riding on a donkey, they viewed in him their “king ... triumphant and victorious.” He is portrayed in the next verse as having the authority to “command peace to the nations (Gentiles)” (Zech 9:10).
The preceding text in Zech 9:1-8 spoke of the march of the Divine Warrior, Yahweh, absorbing Damascus, Tyre and Sidon, and Philistia within the enlarged borders of the ideal Davidic kingdom, with Yahweh “encamping at my house (temple) as a guard,” ensuring that “no oppressor shall again overrun them.” Yahweh is on the march, and so too is Israel's king, like David of old. This is what the crowd likely believed. It would mean triumph over Israel's enemies, chiefly the Romans.
What the crowds do not yet see, which would be divulged to Jesus' disciples privately four days later at their Passover meal, is Jesus' distinctive interpretation of Zech 9:11: “As for you also, because of [or: by] the blood of your covenant (i.e., my [Yahweh's] covenant with you, Zion), I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit” (v. 11). In this verse Yahweh responds as the Divine Kinsman to his people Israel's plight, obligating Yahweh to redeem Israel from her bondage to oppressor nations, much like a kin with the financial wherewithal purchasing freedom from slavery or captivity for a relative.
The reference in Zech 9:11 to “the blood of your covenant” resonates with Moses' shout to the people at the covenant ratification ceremony at Sinai, when he splattered sacrificial blood on the people and said, “See the blood of the covenant that Yahweh has cut (i.e., made) with you” (Exod 24:8).
Yet Jesus would interpret the cup of wine that he distributed to his disciples as “*my* blood of the covenant which (blood) is about to be poured out for many,” a transparent echo to the Suffering Servant text in Isa 53:12 (“He poured out himself to death, ... he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors”). Victory would not come (not yet at any rate) from thrashing Israel's enemies but rather by being thrashed by them, with the weakness of God triumphing in the cross over human strength and then inviting Gentiles to become converts to the God of Abraham and Jesus by carrying out the Isaianic role of the Servant to be “a light to the nations.”
Later, Paul would reformulate Jesus' words over the cup for a Gentile audience, “This cup is the new covenant (ratified or inaugurated) by my blood” (1 Cor 11:25), while Matthew would expand the words of Jesus over the cup with “for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28). Both saw another echo in Jesus' words of interpretation over the cup, an echo to Jer 31:31-34, which prophesied of a “new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” in which God would write his law on human hearts (through the gift of the Spirit), forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
But all this was in the future, and it would not be soon or readily understood. A crowd of people, exhilarated by the imminent prospect of an end to Roman oppression and the inauguration of the bliss of a new age marked by fulfillment of the great prophecies of old, welcomed Jesus' entrance. Some threw their clothes on the path that Jesus' donkey trod, while others, after cutting “leafy branches” from the trees in the fields, garlanded the ground before him (Mark 11:8; cp. Matt 21:8).
The “leafy branches” (stibadas) mentioned in Mark undoubtedly included among them “boughs of leafy trees” (as Lev 23:40 indicates in speaking of the branches to be used to construct booths during the Festival of Booths) and “branches of palm trees ... and willows of the brook.” Nehemiah 8:15 too, alluding to Lev 23:40 and reporting on how under Ezra Israel would now be celebrating the Festival of Booths with booths for the first time since the days of Joshua, mentions “bringing branches of olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm, and other leafy trees to make booths.” Every day of the 8-day Festival of Booths Ezra would read from the Book of the Law of Moses that he had brought with him from Babylon (a penultimate version of the Pentateuch). It was a time of rejoicing at this great religious renewal.
So palm branches were among the “leafy branches” that were strewn on the path before Jesus' donkey. But only John 12:13 specifically mentions palm branches: “A great crowd ... took the branches of palm trees and went out to meet him.” Possibly in John's version they were waving the branches at him, celebrating an anticipated national victory over the nations.
Palm branches symbolized Jewish national pride, victory, rejoicing, righteousness (Ps 92:12), and the renewal of Yahweh's presence among the people. As noted above, palm branches were among the “leafy trees” used to construct the booths or temporary shelters of the Festival of Booths (Sukkoth). This festival reminded the people of Israel's humble dependence on Yahweh during the wilderness sojourn prior to the Conquest of Canaan, when God showed his compassion on Israel as his newlywed bride or as his child by providing for them graciously in a desert. That was the time before they arrived in Canaan, a land so abundant that they acted as if they didn't need Yahweh anymore.
Palms were also carried in the 8-day celebration of the first Festival of Hanukkah (“Rededication”) along with “ivy-wreathed wands and (other) beautiful branches” as the people celebrated with songs of thanksgiving the Cleansing and Rededication of the Temple accomplished by Judas Maccabeus in 164 B.C. (2 Macc 10:7). The Temple had been defiled and left in disrepair by the “madman” Seleucid tyrant, Antiochus IV. Judas's great accomplishment, brought about by a series of victories against Antiochus IV, did not usher in the expected Kingdom of God. Now maybe Jesus would. (Jesus too would “cleanse” the temple the day after his entry into Jerusalem, but in a surprising way: an action against a defilement brought by his own people rather than by the Gentiles.)
In addition, palms were associated with the final victory over Syrian (Seleucid) occupation 23 years later in 141 B.C., when Judas's brother Simon (high priest and “commander and leader of the Jews”) engineered the expulsion of Gentile soldiers from the citadel in Jerusalem, and Jews “entered it with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs, because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel. Simon decreed that every year they should celebrate this day with rejoicing” (1 Macc 13:51-52a).
The first-century Jewish historian Josephus treated palm branches as a national Jewish symbol. Pictures of palm trees would appear on the coins minted by the Jewish rebels in both the first and second revolts against Rome (A.D. 66-70 and 132-35). In Rev 7:9, John of Patmos presents an eschatological vision of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands,” a mark of victory over the power of Death in martyrdom (note that in ancient Egyptian religion the palm was used in funeral processions to symbolize life over death).
In both Greece and Rome, the palm branch was an important symbol for the goddess of victory (Greek Nike and Roman Victoria). The Roman historian Suetonius refers to the practice of victors running about with a palm branch (Caligula 32; similarly, the Jewish rabbinic text in Lev. Rab. 30:2).
As Jesus processed into the city of Jerusalem, the crowd cried out in the words of Psalm 118, “Hosanna” (meaning “Save us!”; v. 25a) and “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (v. 26a). Per Mark's Gospel, they added: “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest places (in heaven)!” (Mark 11:10).
Psalm 118 is a psalm of thanksgiving about (and partly by) one who has defeated “all nations [that] surrounded me” (118:10), likely the king of Israel, and who now enters the gates of the walled city of Jerusalem to give thanks to Yahweh at his temple. For the crowd in Jesus' day, it is a mark of exuberance that Jesus will triumph over the nations (Gentiles). However, Jesus in Jerusalem would use one of the verses of Psalm 118 with a very different meaning: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” (118:22). Used perhaps in its original context of God's deliverance of the king from enemy nations, Jesus will use it days later of Israel's rejection of him, the one who is killed when coming to collect the fruits from his Father's vineyard, Israel.
For all the excitement of Jesus' arrival, Mark presents it as culminating in a most anti-climactic action on Jesus' part: “He entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” (11:11). Jesus was not interested in stoking the flames of violent, narrow nationalism.
Jesus would fulfill the hopes and dreams of the prophets of the past, but not in the expected way. He would come not to be served but to serve by giving his life as a ransom for many. The nations (Gentiles) were not Israel's chief enemy: Sin and Death were their chief enemies. Gentiles would be part of the eschatological harvest for Servant Israel represented by Jesus. Jesus died that we might live, a greater act than any violent military display against the Romans in particular and the nations in general.
For this we wave our palms before him still, and spread them in his path, and sing even now, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”
— Robert Gagnon is Professor of Theology and Program Coordinator for Biblical Studies and Practical Theology at Houston Baptist University.
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In this comprehensive text, Douglas Groothuis makes a clear and rigorous case for Christian theism. Demonstrating how apologetics must be both rational and winsome, he addresses the most common questions and objections people raise regarding Christianity. After laying a foundation with the biblical basis for apologetics, apologetic method, and a defense of objective truth, he presents key arguments for the reality of God, a case for the credibility of Jesus, and evidence for the resurrection. Groothuis also evaluates alternative views and responds to challenges such as religious pluralism and the problem of evil.
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Read our recent excerpt from this new edition of Christian Apologetics, “The Christian Worldview and Religious Nonrealism.”
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— Paul Copan, Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach Atlantic University, and coauthor of The Gospel in the Marketplace of Ideas
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