The Resurrection and Genesis

by Lita Cosner

Published: 10 April 2009(GMT+10)

Photo wikipedia.com

On Easter, Christians around the world celebrate the Resurrection of our “great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13), in the most important holiday of the Christian calendar. The doctrine of the Resurrection of Christ is one of the most important doctrines of Christianity; without the Resurrection, we have no hope of salvation from our sins (1 Corinthians 15:12–18).

The pagan culture of the first century did not accept resurrection even as a possibility, and non-Christians today are just as resistant to the idea, even coming up with ludicrous theories where Jesus was not really dead when He went to the tomb to try to explain His appearance three days later. Or they claim that His appearance was spiritual; that perhaps it was a hallucination or a vision, but certainly not a physical manifestation.

But ancient people had language to speak about spirits and ghosts, and indeed, that would have gone over much better with people in the Greco-Roman culture. But when they say that Jesus was resurrected, they mean precisely that He was brought back to life in a physical body.

Jesus’ Resurrection as a Historical Event

When we call Jesus’ resurrection a historical event, we must define ‘historical’, because unbelieving scholars use different definitions of ‘historical’ to deem Christ’s resurrection unhistorical. So we must explore the different uses of historical to determine in which senses we mean when we speak of Christ’s resurrection as a historical event.¹

The simplest definition of ‘historical event’ is simply something that happened, whether or not it is important in terms of world history, whether or not there is a record or even a witness of it. So by this definition, anything that happens is historical. So Jesus’ resurrection is historical in this sense. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright calls this definition “history as event”.¹ Another definition is “history as significant event;” hardly anyone who believes that the Resurrection of Christ is historical in the first sense would argue that it is not in the second sense.

What is usually contested is whether or not Jesus’ Resurrection is historical in the sense of being a provable event. Skeptics of the Resurrection accounts sometimes argue that all we have are the accounts in the Gospels which were written decades later, and even those do not depict the actual moment of the Resurrection. They argue that in the intervening decades mythology took over and they explained the missing body of Jesus with a Resurrection story. But this view is flawed on several points.

The earliest evidence

First, the accounts in the Gospels are neither the only nor the earliest evidence we have of Christian writing about the Resurrection. That honor goes to 1 Thessalonians; one of the earliest of Paul’s letters, which will be examined below, which was written around AD 50.² So we have evidence that about two decades after Christ’s death, there was a group of people who insisted He was raised from the dead, and had built a decent portion of their theology around that fact, which doesn’t happen overnight. But the Gospel accounts, while penned decades after the events they describe (AD c. 30–33), go back to early oral tradition, which seems remarkably untainted by ‘theologizing’ on the part of the authors.

The Gospel accounts

The Resurrection accounts in the four canonical Gospels (penned from AD 55–85³) are often criticized for being contradictory, but many of the alleged contradictions are no more than we would expect from any four different accounts of an event several decades after the fact. They include things such as who precisely made up the group of women who went to the tomb, whether there was one angel or two, and so on. Most of these are not even contradictory, and the critics clearly don’t understand logic, since they are not mutually exclusive; for instance, one account may mention only the angel who spoke, while the other account mentioned both angels. It would be a contradiction if one account specified only one angel.

It makes sense that the men who wrote the accounts might recall different details, even seemingly conflicting details, in their retelling of the event. What does not make sense is to say that since the authors include different women in the group that went to the tomb, the Resurrection obviously did not occur, and the same goes with all the other alleged contradictions.⁴

The Early Church

One of the strongest evidences for the historical nature of the Resurrection is somewhat indirect, in that it is required to explain a series of historical events, which make absolutely no sense unless the Resurrection actually happened. First, the disciples of Jesus went from cowering in an upper room (Peter had apparently already gone back to fishing), afraid for their lives, to proclaiming in the streets a little over a month later that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and had risen from the dead. Ten of the apostles were martyred in various ways; only John died of old age, and Christians underwent many different periods of persecution, both at the local and state level. One could argue that many Christians were deluded, but to say that the apostles would die for what they knew to be a lie stretches credulity.⁵

That they were claiming He was resurrected was about the most unlikely way a first-century Jew would have explained an empty tomb. First-century Jews had diverse beliefs about the afterlife, from the Sadducees who did not believe in the Resurrection at all, to Pharisees, who believed in the Resurrection (but even among them there was diversity of opinion as to whether the unrighteous would be resurrected). But no type of Judaism believed that one person was going to be resurrected before everyone else; this is likely why the disciples had no idea what Jesus was talking about when He predicted His death and resurrection; the belief that the resurrection was something that would happen all at once at the end of time, whether to everyone or to the righteous only, rendered His words incomprehensible to them until they actually saw the Resurrection.

Implications of Christ’s Resurrection for His Followers

There is evidence that, almost from the beginning of the Christian movement, Christ’s resurrection was used to explain what His believers would experience in the Resurrection. In fact, one thing that marks the Gospel accounts out as going back to a very early oral tradition that was not tampered with by the Gospel authors is the distinct lack of such extrapolation from Christ’s resurrection to our own.⁶ In 1 Thessalonians 1:10, Paul calls Jesus “[God’s] Son from Heaven, whom He raised from the dead.” He does not return to resurrection until near the end of the letter in 4:13–18, but that short passage is very important for reconstructing early Christian belief in the Resurrection, because it is the earliest example of Resurrection theology: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” So the Resurrection of Jesus becomes the basis for the Christian’s resurrection when He returns. In Philippians 3:20-21, we find the explicit statement that our resurrection bodies will be just like Jesus’.

Christ as the Firstfruits of the Resurrection and the Last Adam

The most important developments of Paul’s theology regarding the resurrection of believers are his statements in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5:12–21 (penned in 53–54 AD⁷ and 57–58 AD,⁸ respectively). In the former we find for the first time the reason why Christians can expect to be resurrected because of Jesus’ resurrection; Jesus is “the firstfruits” of the Resurrection, a guarantee that those who are under him will also be raised when He returns (1 Corinthians 15:23).

Paul made a clear contrast between the sin of the first man, Adam, vs. the Last Adam, Christ. Adam’s sin makes us all sinners by nature, but Jesus’s sacrifice enabled our sin to be imputed (credited) to Him (Isaiah 53:6), and His perfect life enabled His righteousness to be imputed to believers in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). This is hard for modern Westerners to understand, because Western culture is very individualistic. But in New Testament time, and indeed in most cultures today, they thought in collective terms, so would readily understand this. That is, the actions of one person necessarily affected the whole; especially the actions of the head of a certain group. And if corporate punishment is ‘unjust’, whatever that might mean in an atheistic framework, then so is corporate redemption.

Paul essentially makes the argument that there are two ultimate ‘heads’ of two types of humanity; Adam and Christ.⁹ All people are under either one or the other, and the action of one’s ‘head’ determines their standing before God:

‘Paul is insisting that people were really ‘made’ sinners through Adam’s act of disobedience just as they were really ‘made righteous’ through Christ’s obedience. … To be righteous does not mean to be morally upright, but to be judged acquitted, cleared of all charges, in the heavenly judgment. Through Christ’s obedient act, people became really righteous; but ‘righteousness’ itself is a legal, not a moral, term in this context.’¹⁰

Adam was the firstfruits of death, in a manner of speaking; the first sentence in history to capital punishment (Genesis 3:19) showed that all who were under him would also die. Paul calls Jesus the ‘Last Adam’, because humanity’s relationship to Adam is the only one that remotely resembles the relationship of Christians to Christ. Even so, most of the time Paul talks about them in terms of contrasting the two; the only similarity he ever brings out between the two is that both were heads of humanity whose actions had far-reaching consequences for those under them.¹¹ This similarity is the foundation for the contrasts he goes on to point out.¹²

There are several important points of contrast that Paul brings out in the two key passages:

1. The effects of Adam’s sin are universal; Christ’s obedience and sacrifice are only effective for those who believe (i.e. ‘those who receive’—Romans 5:17).
2. Christ’s action itself is infinitely better than Adam’s action, as are the results of the action. Adam’s disobedience occurred when men were morally ‘neutral’ and it made them morally evil, and resulted in both the physical death and spiritual estrangement from God of every person descended from him. Christ’s life of obedience and selfless sacrifice, on the other hand, occurred when we were morally evil and makes us morally ‘good’ (Romans 5:16).
3. Christ Himself is infinitely better than Adam was, even before the first man fell, in that while Adam received life as a gift from God, Christ has the power and authority to bring His new humanity into being (1 Corinthians 15:45).¹³

The first man, Adam: a historical figure

This comparison between Adam and Christ is absolutely essential to Paul’s argumentation, and his theology of the Resurrection in general. This requires that both Adam and Christ be historical figures who both have a kind of headship over the humanity that is under them, whose actions had widespread consequences for those under them.

More specifically, it requires that Adam be the literal ancestor of all humans whose sin really caused the introduction of death and the estrangement of humanity from God, just as Christ is a historical human being whose life of obedience to God and sacrificial death reconcile us to God and pay the sin-debt in a way that no one else could.

Some argue that it is not necessary for Adam to be historical. C.K. Barrett is typical of this view:

“Sin and death, traced back by Paul to Adam, are a description of humanity as it empirically is. For this reason the historicity of Adam is unimportant. It is impossible to draw the parallel conclusion that the historicity of Christ is equally unimportant. The significance of Christ is that of impingement upon a historical sequence of sin and death. Sin and death (to change the metaphor) are in possession of the field, and if they are to be driven from it this must be by the arrival of new forces which turn the scale of the battle, that is, by a new event. As Paul knew, this event had happened very recently, and its character as historical event raised no doubt or problem in his mind. This observation is not intended as a defence of the gospel narratives as historical documents; they are entirely open to question and must stand their own ground. But so far as the ‘Second Adam’ or ‘Heavenly man’ figure is mythological, the myth has been historicized by Paul, and that not only because he was aware of Jesus as a historical person, but because a historical person was needed by the theological argument.”¹⁴

But his argument fails because it requires sinfulness and mortality to be the original state of humanity. But the whole point is that sin and death were themselves intruded on human history when Adam disobeyed God’s command. This is the reason why Christ’s obedience and sacrificial death were needed to overturn the rule of sin and death¹⁵. If Jesus has to be a historical person, so does Adam. The historicity of the person of Jesus and His sacrifice means that we will be free from sin and death in the Resurrection. But without the historicity of Adam, we do not know why the world was under the rule of sin and death in the first place. If death had always been a part of the created order, part of what God called “very good”, then there is no way that death could be called the ‘last enemy’. Even Barrett has to admit that Paul treats Adam as a historical figure.¹⁶

Conclusion: without a historical Adam and Fall, the Gospel dangles rootlessly

As CMI has explained before, it is possible to be a Christian while not believing that the first chapters of Genesis relate historical events. However, it leaves those Christians with little foundation to resist the attacks and ridicule of sceptics, atheists, liberal religious leaders, fellow students, or work-mates, etc. That’s because those few chapters set the stage for everything to come, both in the Old and New Testament. Genesis is the foundation of the Gospel; without that we are left without an explanation for the origin of everything Christ came to remedy (see also Biblical creation impedes evangelism?). When we celebrate Easter, we celebrate the dawning of what can quite literally be called a ‘new humanity’ under Christ, but if our sinfulness does not come from being under a sinful head of humanity, the first Adam, then we cannot be made righteous under a new head of humanity, the Last Adam, Jesus Christ. They logically stand or fall together, as Paul realized.

Feedback on this article

• Gospel Dates and Reliability

Related articles

• The naturalistic attack on the Virginal Conception and Resurrection
• Easter’s earliest creed
• Can we believe the Gospels?
• Easter and Good Friday: questions and answers
• Melito’s Passover Sermon (AD ~170)

Further reading

• Did Jesus Christ really rise from the dead?
• Jesus Christ Questions and Answers
• Christian Apologetics Questions and Answers
• Creation: Why It Matters

References

1. See N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) for a detailed discussion of historicity, especially pp. 12–22. Return to text.
2. F.F. Bruce 1 & 2 Thessalonians. Word Biblical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), p. xxi. Return to text.
3. See Robert Guelich, Mark 1–8:26. Word Biblical Commentary (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989), p. xxxii and D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John. The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 86. Return to text.
4. See J.P. Holding, “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” Tekton Apologetics Ministries. Return to text.
5. See J.P. Holding, “The Impossible Faith” Tekton Apologetics Ministries. Return to text.
6. N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. (New York: HarperOne, 2008), p. 56. Return to text.
7. Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 73. Return to text.
8. Grant Osborne: Romans. IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2004), p. 14. Return to text.
9. L. Cosner, Romans 5:12–21: Paul’s view of a literal Adam, Journal of Creation 22(2):105–107, 2008. Return to text.
10. Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans: New International Commentary on the New Testament, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 345. Return to text.
11. Ben Witherington III, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 146-7. Return to text.
12. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), vol 1, p. 192. Return to text.
13. Anthony Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text. TNIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 1283. Return to text.
14. C.K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians. Black’s New Testament Commentary (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1968), p. 353 Return to text.
15. Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians. NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), p. 752. Return to text.
16. Barrett Ref. 14, p. 352. Return to text.