Resurrecting Jesus
by Warren Farha
Feast of the Right-Believing Pulcheria, Byzantine Empress
Anno Domini 2020, September 10
Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters
(Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha Supplement) by Dale C. Allison, Jr.
I will simply give up the charade of objectivity and indulge in first person singular. This is a difficult annotation to write, for many reasons. Dale Allison is one of my dearest friends, so my sense of awe at the monumental scholarship on view here is utterly compromised (if you are seeking more objective opinion, go to the website for Continuum International, and read an effusion of scholarly praise like I’ve not seen in seventeen years of selling books and looking at thousands of book-blurbs). Factor in also his scholarly output: a three-volume commentary on Matthew in the International Critical Commentary, major contributions to the study of the historical Jesus—The New Moses: A Matthean Typology, The Intertextual Jesus: Scripture in Q, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet, The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination, and much more. This book is a collection of six essays, including “Secularizing Jesus,” a deconstruction of the commonly accepted schematic of “three quests” for the historical Jesus; “The Problem of Audience,” grappling with the interpretation of some of the “difficult sayings” of Jesus; “The Problem of Gehenna,” a biblical and historical catalog and critique of interpretations of the doctrine of everlasting punishment of the damned in hell; and the book-length centerpiece of the collection, “Resurrecting Jesus.” It is here that the historical convictions of the author and those of his readers might collide. Dale Allison is the epitome of intellectual honesty—he explores the purely historical-critical approach to Jesus to its limits, and to the limits of his own profoundly moving experience of death and its aftermath. In a context other than this book he relates in summary fashion that he believes “Jesus lives, historical-critical research is quite limited (more limited than what I once thought, and more limited than a lot of others think), some traditional apologetical arguments are surprisingly shallow, and while we may be embodied in the afterlife, it won’t be because of physical continuity with our present bodies, so the (historically probable) empty tomb, while it works well to vindicate Jesus, whom I wanted vindicated, is philosophically puzzling.” Dr. Allison is not willing to grant, using only historical tools, the exultant “Christ is risen!” for which our hearts yearn and the liturgy grants vision. But he admits that other tools are necessary to more fully comprehend the Resurrection, an admission the poignance and eloquence of which compel quotation at length: “When the mundane historical work is done, the results are disappointingly scanty, severely circumscribed. Most of the important questions have eluded our capture, and harder tasks remain. At this point, then, the discussion has to be handed over to the philosophers and theologians, among whose lofty company I am not privileged to dwell... although ignorance should not be the mother of devotion, true religion nevertheless involves realms of human experience and conviction that cannot depend upon or be undone by the sorts of historical doubts, probabilities, and conjectures with which the previous pages have been concerned. For myself, all I have to do is look up at the night sky or look into the face of my neighbor, and then I know that there is more to life and faith than this.”
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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