Future for Followers - Beckaroo Bulletin #2

When Eusebius (c. ad260-339) wrote his History of the Church in the early 4th century it was filled with accounts of early heresies, spoke of the earliest leaders of the movement, but especially included detailed accounts of martyrs who were tortured and killed under several Roman emperors. Why did he think Christians were treated as a threat to the empire? One account gives some insight into the question. For a time under Marcus Aurelius (around 170) a number of Christians were martyred in Gaul. Some witnesses to it told of what the Romans then did.

Thus the martyrs' bodies, after six days' exposure to every kind of insult and to the open sky, were finally burnt to ashes and swept by these wicked men into the Rhone which flows near by, that not even a trace of them might be seen on the earth again. And this they did as if they could defeat God and rob the dead of their rebirth, 'in order,' they said, 'that they may have no hope of resurrection - the belief that has led them to bring into this country a new foreign cult and treat torture with contempt, going willingly and cheerfully to their death. Now let's see if they'll rise again, and if their god can help them and save them from our hands. (Book V, Part 1)

This shows both the Romans and the Christians clearly understood what resurrection meant. They knew it meant, if true, a person who died would come back to life - bodily life, not just a floating, ethereal spirit. And this belief stayed at the center of early Christian faith. According to theologian Tom Wright it remained central to Christians till the time of Thomas Aquinas. Today it seems to get mixed up with other ideas such as immortality of the soul (Platonic idea) and, among Christians, shows up when talk centers on "going to Heaven" and nothing else. Jesus told one thief on the cross he would see him in paradise when he died and Lazarus went to Abraham's bosom, but both the thief and Lazarus died long ago and the resurrection from the dead which only Jesus has experienced to date is yet to come. That's why Tom Wright speaks of life after 'life after death' for the Christian.

With theologians and critics giving their many different views about the meaning of resurrection, it's sometimes hard to sort it all out. I have found that Tom Wright's book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, covers the most ground in one volume on the history of the idea from ancient days through biblical times and the early Christian church. He concludes from a study of ancient worldwide beliefs and through biblical time that what the earliest disciples experienced and then preached to the world about Jesus' resurrection had no parallel.

When the early Christians spoke of Jesus being raised from the dead, the natural meaning of that statement, throughout the ancient world, was the claim that something happened to Jesus which had happened to nobody else. A great many things supposedly happened to the dead, but resurrection did not. The pagan world assumed it was impossible; the Jewish world believed it would happen eventually, but knew perfectly well that it had not done so yet. Jew and non-Jew alike heard the early Christians to be saying that it had happened to Jesus. (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 83).

The Christian church needs to return to its roots when it comes to Jesus' resurrection and what that means for every Christian today. Read through the last few chapters of each gospel, the book of Acts, and 1 Corinthians for a refresher on the subject.