Resurrection Scholarship

"Over the past five years, I have tracked well over two thousand scholarly publications on the resurrection. Each source appeared between 1975 and the present, in German, French, or English, written by a wide range of critical scholars....As firmly as ever, most contemporary scholars agree that, after Jesus' death, his early followers had experiences that they at least believed were appearances of their risen Lord. Further, this conviction was the chief motivation behind the early proclamation of the Christian gospel. These basics are rarely questioned, even by more radical scholars. They are among the most widely established details from the entire New Testament....This [the belief that the earliest Christians thought they saw Jesus risen from the dead] has been a mainstay of critical thought since nineteenth-century German theology....More recently, James D.G. Dunn agreed: 'It is almost impossible to dispute that at the historical roots of Christianity lie some visionary experiences of the first Christians, who understood them as appearances of Jesus, raised by God from the dead.'...I have argued elsewhere that, while they still hold a decidedly minority position among the total number of commentators, recent decades have revealed a slight increase in scholars who espouse naturalistic hypotheses to account for Jesus' resurrection....As it was at the end of nineteenth-century German liberalism, as well as at the end of the twentieth century, probably the single most popular alternative to Jesus' resurrection was the hallucination, or subjective vision, theory....After a hiatus of many decades, arguably almost a century, the subjective vision theory has made a comeback....One old standby, the swoon or apparent death theory, has even appeared in a few places recently, although it is seldom espoused by scholars....Each of the naturalistic theories was attacked piece by piece by the liberal scholars in the nineteenth century, as each criticized the others' approaches. In the twentieth century, critical scholarship has largely rejected wholesale the naturalistic approaches to the resurrection....Exhibiting an amazing amount of consensus, most researchers across a very wide conceptual spectrum have rejected naturalistic approaches as explanations for the earliest Christians' belief in the resurrection of Jesus....Accordingly, the path of natural alternative theories is definitely a minority approach....Even before the publication of N.T. Wright's monumental volume The Resurrection of the Son of God in 2003, the tide had begun to turn toward the view that Jesus not only was raised miraculously from the dead but also appeared in a spiritual body. So, the resurrection is an event that happened to Jesus, rather than either an internal experience or a natural occurrence. The risen Jesus featured both bodily continuity, including qualities that could be observed and perhaps even touched, as well as transformed discontinuity. Thus, Jesus appeared as far more than a vision of light from heaven. Further, it was usually held that firm historical evidence accompanied these appearances....While sporting a few new wrinkles as well as some improvements, the view that Jesus was raised bodily is currently the predominant position, if judged in terms of scholarly support. Moreover, some scholars who reject this view still hold that it was at least the New Testament position, including Paul's own teaching. This is a marked change from recent decades when Paul's view was often interpreted far differently....less than one-quarter of critical scholars who addressed the historicity question offered naturalistic theories...The almost three-quarters of remaining scholars hold either of the two views that Jesus was raised from the dead in some sense....[more than three-quarters of these people] take the position that Jesus was resurrected in a real, though still transformed, body...The supernatural view that Jesus rose from the dead in one of two senses is a distinct majority position over the natural option (almost three to one). Very surprisingly, while the supernatural internal category (the old 'objective vision theory') was the most popular among scholars through the middle to late twentieth century, it has been relegated to a minority response in recent years, in favor of bodily appearances of the risen Jesus (more than three to one)." (Gary Habermas, in Robert Stewart, ed., The Resurrection Of Jesus [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2006], pp. 78-80, 82-84, 86, 88, 90-92)