The Journal of Religion

totelian conceptions do not work for the heavenly realm, Aquinas seems to have had little choice but to become a Platonist in heaven and so be saddled with the incoherencies that follow (both from the difculties inherent in Platonism and the difculties of combining Aristotelianism and Platonism). The dualism between two generically different kinds of entitiesmaterial and immaterialmay help explain the problems in Aquinass account. Kennys work is exemplary in its rigorous scholarship and careful analysis. He both perspicuously explicates Aquinass thought on esse and demonstrates some of the difculties embedded in this conception. FRANCISCO BENZONI, Princeton University. WRIGHT, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God, no. 3. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. xxi817 pp. $49.00 (cloth); $39.00 (paper). The third volume in N. T. Wrights massive oeuvre on Christian origins and theology is an historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus. By resurrection, Wright does not mean the resurrection proclamation or postmortem spiritual experiences that might be interpreted as appearances of the risen Jesus. He means, rather, the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus (pp. 3031, 685, 717). Wrights argument is as follows: when compared to pagan and Jewish statements about postmortem rescues, the Christian resurrection proclamation stands out as utterly unique. This is demonstrated by one of the most thorough and meticulous surveys of all relevant pagan (pp. 3284), Jewish (pp. 85206), and Christian (pp. 207682) literature ever undertaken, through which Wright pursues with relentless focus the uniqueness of the Christian materials. How shall we account for the unique form that Christian faith took: an empty tomb and bodily appearances of Jesus to his disciples? Wrights answer: the only condition that supplies both a necessary and sufcient (p. 687) answer to this question is the apparent fact that the tomb was empty and Jesus did indeed appear bodily to his followers after his death. And if that is so, then the conclusion that God really did raise Jesus from the dead, impossible as it may seem to the modern mind, is inevitable (pp. 686718). Wright supplements this main line of thought with a similar strategy applied to claims about Jesuss messiahship, his lordship, and his preaching about the Kingdom of God (pp. 55383). If Jesus did not fulll messianic expectations, was crucied by a more powerful lord, Caesar, and preached a kingdom that did not come, how did these claims about him arise? Christians said that he was the Messiah, Lord of the universe, and bringer of the Kingdom because God raised him from the dead. That is an answer both necessary and sufcient to the problem, in Wrights view. Many will nd Wrights command of the materials (primary and secondary literature) and the force of his argument both impressive and persuasive. Impressive it truly isa masterwork. But it will fail to persuade many. For the Christian proclamation to be unique, there must rst be a singular Christian proclamation. Thus, Wright constructs a Christian resurrection proclamation that is uniform across all the (canonical, orthodox) witnesses and that includes both an empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The obvious problem with this is that Paul never mentions the empty tomb and

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apparently did not believe in physical, but spiritual resurrection (1 Cor. 15: 4250). Wright, however, asserts that Pauls words presuppose the empty tomb, even though he never explicitly mentions it (p. 321). And Pauls term pneumatikon in 1 Cor. 15:44 refers, he argues, not to the kind of body the resurrection entails, but to the means by which the new, physical resurrection body is enlivened (pp. 34760)a novel view that cuts against just about every other treatment of this well-worn text. Is the Christian proclamation unique? That depends on what counts as unique. It certainly has distinctive elements, but then so does every story of resurrection, resuscitation, and apotheosis from the annals of ancient Mediterranean religion. Everything is unique by some measure. Must it all therefore derive from actual, unique events? Hardly. Innovationeven Christian innovationcould well derive from the heat of argument, the necessities of apologetic, or simply the human imagination. Did early Christians regard their claims as unique? If Justin gives us any clue, one would have to say no. In his First Apology he invites Antoninus Pius to regard his claims about Jesus as utterly comparable with similar claims made about all those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter: Mercury, Aesclepius, Bacchus, the Dioscuri, and so on. (1 Apology 21). Wright dismisses these comparisons as though Justin did not mean them to be taken as truly comparable, but merely stepping stones toward the truth (p. 501). But Justins very words belie this; for him the truth of the Christian proclamation clearly did not depend on its uniqueness. Is the actual resurrection of Jesus sufcient to account for early Christian faith? We do not really know. No one claims to have witnessed it. What we have are stories or reports about an empty tomb and postmortem appearances. Are these sufcient? Not at all. To the nonbeliever, an empty tomb is just a stolen body, and a postmortem appearance (with body or without) is just a ghost story. Combining these elements does not make them unassailable, Wrights claims to the contrary (pp. 69293). Far more people in antiquity rejected these claims than accepted them. Those who did accept Jesuss resurrection as a fact might well have done so out of sheer devotion to their slain martyr and the conviction held by many pious Jews, that God in his righteousness would not give the enemy the nal word. As much as Wright has tried to build an incontrovertible case for the resurrection as an historical event, in the end his argument must rest, like all others, on pillars of subjective judgment. The Christian proclamation looks unique to him; he cannot imagine it arising apart from actual events; and for him, bodily resurrection from the dead does not fall outside the realm of real possibility. To those who share these opinions, Wrights tome will be deeply satisfying. To those who do not, the argument nally reaches an impasse, as the modern discussion of resurrection almost always does. Unfortunately, when Wright reaches that impasse, he does not simply acknowledge it and close. Rather, he seizes a rhetorical cudgel and tries to shame his opponents into submission. Those who deny the possibility of actual, physical resurrection are, he says, the Herods, the Caesars, and the Sadducees of this world, who try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection (p. 737). The irony of such an ending is not to be missed. STEPHEN J. PATTERSON, Eden Theological Seminary.

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