JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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4. The Corinthians are still in their sins (v. 17).
5. Those fallen asleep (dead) in Christ have perished (v. 18).
6. And Christians are of all men most miserable if Christ has not risen (v. 19).
If the resurrection of Jesus were a "conjuring trick with bones" as Anglican bishop David
Jenkins put it, there would have been no Christian faith, and the most dynamic movement in
history would never have come to be. In his Areopagus address Paul appealed to the resurrection
as a piece of evidence which vindicated Christ's claims and laid upon His hearers an urgent
responsibility to respond to the gospel (Ac 17:31). Jesus regarded His own miracles in this light.
His healing miracles proved the presence of the kingdom in power (Mt 12:28). His mighty acts
put a deeper obligation upon those who observed them because they more explicitly pointed to
His credentials (11:21).
This section will investigate the evidence for the historicity of the resurrection. This
does not mean that Jesus' resurrection was merely the resuscitation of a corpse. Rather the New
Testament presents the resurrected Christ as One who has been transformed into a different kind
of existence. Some have argued this to mean that there was no continuity between Jesus' body in
the tomb and the risen Christ. But as we have already seen in Chapter 8, there is both continuity
and discontinuity.
MEANING TO JEWISH CONTEMPORARIES
The meaning of an event is the meaning attached to it by the persons into whose history it
comes. German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg points out what the fact of Jesus' resurrection
would have meant to his Jewish contemporaries:
1. To a Jew of the time Jesus' resurrection would have meant that the end of the world
had begun. Paul expected that the resurrection of all people, particularly of believers, would
quickly follow that of Jesus. Therefore he spoke of Jesus as the "first fruits of those who have
fallen asleep" (1 Co 15:20) and the "first-born from the dead" (1:18).7
2. The resurrection would have been evidence that God Himself confirmed Jesus' pre-
Easter activity. To the Jews, Jesus' claim to authority, putting himself in God's place, was
blasphemous. If he was raised from the dead, however, it must have been the God of Israel, the
God who had presumably been blasphemed, who raised him. Therefore, contemporary Jews
would have considered the resurrection as God's confirmation that Jesus really was what He
claimed to be.8
3. The resurrection would have established that the Son of man is none other than the
man Jesus. Before Easter, Jesus was understood to be a man who walked visibly upon the earth;
the Son of man was a heavenly being who would come in the future on the clouds of heaven.
After Easter, however, the two were regarded as identical.9