Rating: 
Summary: Did Jesus Really Come Back to Life?
Review: With both tireless scholarly attention and an engaging writing style, Wright seek to answer this question. Starting with the question of what the term "resurrection" (anastasia and cognates) meant in the ancient world, he goes on to examine all of the relavant biblical and early Christian literature to try to grasp what actually happened. As I finished reading I found myself thinking, "wow, he has actually PROVED that the resurrection happened."I would love to challenge skeptics and atheists to read this book and see if it doesn't change the mind.
Rating:
Summary: Massive, definitive work on the resurrection of Jesus
Review: With this 800 page volume, N. T. Wright has now written the definitive work on the resurrection of Jesus. From this point on, scholars will be arguing with, for, or against Wright. All discussion must now start with this book and Wright's discussion of the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. In breadth and depth of scholarship, *Resurrection of the Son of God* can only be compared to Raymond Brown's *Death of the Messiah*. Wright thoroughly dismantles all attempts to interpret the resurrection narratives as "interpretations" of the death of Jesus or as symbolizations of the new found faith of the disciples of Jesus. Wright also effectively destroys the arguments of those who advance the theory that the first Christians employed resurrection language to speak of Jesus' eternal, though spiritual, life with God after his death on the cross. The evidence does not allow us to entertain the possibility that the apostles might have claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead even while his corpse was still lying in the tomb. If the desire was to simply assert that Jesus was now "with God" or that his soul was in heaven, there was language and conceptuality available to make such claims. To speak of someone being "raised from the dead" can only have one meaning within first century Judaism--God has acted to bestow upon that person an embodied, "physical" form of existence. The surprising thing is that the early Christians employed this language about Jesus even though it was clear that the expected general resurrection of the dead had yet to occur! There was no precedent at all for such a restricted use of resurrection language; but such was the mystery of Easter! It is time for the Church to finally move beyond Bultmann, Marxsen, and Crossan and confidently reclaim the New Testament proclamation of Jesus' embodied resurrection. This message may be wrong; but let's at least be clear that this is the message of the Church. Highly recommended.
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