The Historical Resurrection of Jesus
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
That a believing Jew would write a book on the New Testament was mildly interesting. That his book argued for the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus-and even rebuked certain Christian theologians for their embarrassment about the subject-was quite astonishing, and it is hardly surprising that his book drew the attention of Time magazine (7 May 1979). Now, after nearly twenty-five years, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective, the English translation of a work originally written in German by the Jewish scholar and Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide, has been reissued.
Lapide has devoted much of his scholarly attention to the New Testament, and to the troubled relationship between Jews and Christians. (In January of 1993, one of us spent a week with him and others in a Muslim-Christian-Jewish “trialogue” held in Graz, Austria, where, among other things, he reminisced about his participation in a meeting, years before, between then U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson and David Ben Gurion, the first president of Israel.) Lapide disclaims any interest in converting to Christianity, and frankly states that he does not accept Jesus as the prophesied messiah. But he recognizes Jesus as a holy Jewish figure, blessed by God.
In fact, he insists upon the utter and complete Jewishness of Christianity in its earliest form. Not only was Jesus a Jew, but so were his disciples and the first Christian believers, and all of the witnesses to Christ’s resurrection. “The Easter event . . . was primarily and chiefly a Jewish faith experience.” “Not one Gentile saw [Jesus] after Good Friday. Everything that the Gentile church heard about the resurrection came only from Jewish sources because he appeared after Easter Sunday as the Risen One exclusively to Jews.” Thus, Lapide says, dialogue between Christians and Jews today is a conversation between Jesus’ disciples, on the one hand, and, on the other, Jesus’ brothers and sisters, and Christianity’s increasing recognition of its own Jewish roots represents the “bringing home” [Heimholung] of a religious tradition too long alienated from its origins. Further, he very much wants Jews to reciprocate.
Fellow Believer
“When one asks the basic question of what separates Jews and Christians from each other,” Lapide writes, “the unavoidable answer is: a Jew. For almost two millennia, a pious, devoted Jew has stood between us, a Jew who wanted to bring the kingdom of heaven in harmony, concord and peace-certainly not hatred, schism, let alone bloodshed.”
Jews should recognize Jesus as a fellow-believer “who had a central role to play in God’s plan of salvation.” It was right and necessary, Lapide says, that some Jews accepted Jesus’ message in its earliest preaching. They had to do so, in order to ensure that the message would survive. But, from Lapide’s point of view, it was also right and necessary that most Jews rejected Jesus and Christianity. Had they not done so, Christianity would have languished as a minor sect within Judaism. Because it was driven out of Judaism, however, Christianity took God’s fundamental message of salvation, “of the one God and his gracious love,” the essence of Judaism and the Abrahamic covenant, beyond Jewry, to the entire world-an achievement of which Judaism had become (and remains) incapable. Judaism and Christianity are, thus, two equally valid paths to God.
In support of his position, Lapide cites “a high rabbinic authority”-no less than the illustrious philosopher, physician, and commentator Moses Maimonides (d. 1207), universally recognized as the greatest intellectual figure of medieval Judaism: “All these matters which refer to Jesus of Nazareth,” that famous rabbi wrote in his masterful Mishneh Torah, “only served to make the way free for the King Messiah and to prepare the whole world for the worship of God with a united heart, as it is written: ‘Yea, at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord’ (Zeph. 3:9). In this way the messianic hope, the Torah, and the commandments have become a widespread heritage of faith-among the inhabitants of the far islands and among many nations, uncircumcised in heart and flesh.”
Moreover, the resurrection of Jesus and the global spread of basic Jewish ideas in the form of Christianity, contends Lapide, remind Jews of the faithfulness of the God in whom they have hoped. Jesus is part of the preparation for the messianic age. Lapide cites Rabbi Joseph Javitz, a victim of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, who, in roughly 1495 AD, wrote with moving appreciation for the religion of those who had expelled him that “The Christians believe, like we do, in the creation of the world, in the patriarchs, in revelation, in retribution, and in the resurrection of the dead. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, that he has left us this remnant . . . If there were not these Christian nations, our faith might have-God forbid-wavered.”
Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday
What convinced Pinchas Lapide that Jesus’ resurrection actually occurred? Simply the fact that, “against all plausibility, his adherents did not finally scatter [and] were not forgotten,” and that “the cause of Jesus did not reach its infamous end on the cross.” “His disciples, who by no means excelled in intelligence, eloquence, or strength of faith, were able to begin their victorious march of conversion only after the shattering fiasco on Golgotha-a march which put all their successes before Easter completely into the shadow.” There can be only one explanation, he says, for the transformation of a rabble of peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, frightened, scattered, and demoralized, hiding from the authorities, denying their leader, into the zealous and remarkably successful missionaries who took Christianity to the nations of the world. Between Good Friday and the end of Easter Sunday, something happened. What was it? Lapide answers without hesitation: “The resurrection of Jesus from the dead.”
“As a faithful Jew,” Lapide concludes, “I cannot explain a historical development which, despite many errors and much confusion, has carried the central message of Israel from Jerusalem into the world of the nations, as the result of blind happenstance, or human error, or a materialistic determinism. . . . The experience of the resurrection as the foundation act of the church which has carried the faith in the God of Israel into the whole Western world must belong to God’s plan of salvation.”
Pinchas Lapide. The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002.
