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Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews
This book, written for religious and nonreligious people alike in clear and accessible language, Although this expectation, known as the resurrection of the dead, is widely understood to have been a part of Christianity from its beginnings nearly two thousand years ago, many people are surprised to learn that the Jews believed in resurrection long before the emergence of Christianity. In this sensitively written and historically accurate book, religious scholars Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson aim to clarify confusion and dispel misconceptions about Judaism, Jesus, and Christian origins. Madigan and Levenson tell the fascinating but little-known story of the origins of the belief in resurrection, investigating why some Christians and some Jews opposed the idea in ancient times while others believed it was essential to their faith. The authors also discuss how the two religious traditions relate their respective practices in the here and now to the new life they believe will follow resurrection. Making the rich insights of contemporary scholars of antiquity available to a wide readership, Madigan and Levenson offer a new understanding of Jewish-Christian relations and of the profound connections that tie the faiths together.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published April 24, 2008
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About the author
Kevin J. Madigan
6 books14 followersKevin Madigan is Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School. He specializes in the study of medieval Christian religious practice and thought. His books include Olivi and the Interpretation of Matthew in the High Middle Ages and The Passions of Christ in High-Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development, and he is co-author of Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History and Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews. He lives in Cambridge, MA.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 20, 2015
A Review of
Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews,
By Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson
Greg Cusack
January 19, 2015
This is another work that James Carroll cited in his fine book, Christ Actually, as it also shows the closeness of the early Christian and Jewish communities in their shared, but distinctively dissimilar, understanding of the concept of resurrection.
Coauthored by Christian and Jewish scholars, it shows that for most of Israel’s existence one “lived on” in one’s family after death. It was the survival of the people Israel, and not each individual, that represented the continuation of life. Furthermore, the Hebrew Scriptures most often speak of the afterlife in terms of a netherworld which, if not a place of suffering – as thought of, for example, in “the fires of Gehenna” – is not a place of joy or activity, either.
The authors do a fine job of succinctly stating their premise in their Preface:
One of the most common understandings of resurrection is that it is the same thing as immortality, that is, life after death…the survival of our souls after the inevitable deaths of our bodies. In fact, however, resurrection envisions the return of the whole person, body and soul together… a reversal of death brought about by the God who is the creator of nature and thus the sole master over it…
The hope that the dead would rise from the grave thus rested not on an analysis of human nature but on the conviction that god would prove faithful to his promises…
Because Christians associate “the Resurrection” (with a capital R) with the reports in the gospels o Jesus’ rising from his grave, they are often surprised to find that Jews had believed in resurrection long before Christianity emerged… The Hebrew Bible occasionally attests to God’s power over death and even tells a few stories of how he raised dead individuals. But, more centrally, it speaks with great frequency of God’s everlasting promise to Israel, the Jewish people, a promise that they would recover from even the most deadly adversity. In that promise, we show, lay the seeds of the belief in a future resurrection of the dead, brought about by the faithfulness of the God of Israel to the people Israel. About the time that the Christ church was emerging, rabbis found the promise of resurrection even in the five books of Moses…and they made the belief in resurrection an obligatory aspect of Judaism. Although both Christians and Jews often think otherwise, one cannot understand Jesus or the early church apart from ancient Judaism in generation and the question of how the Jews read their scriptures in particular.
And now I move forward to the book’s final chapter where the authors give a summary form of their conclusions.
…the form of Judaism from which the religious traditions of modern Jews descend took shape in the early centuries of the common era, that is to say, at the same time, and to a significant degree, in the same places as the church was taking shape. So it would be more accurate to say that rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are not parent and child but siblings, sister religions whose parent was Second Temple Judaism and whose more distant ancestors were still earlier phases of the religion of Israel. [p. 237]
…It is commonplace in Christian circles to say that one cannot understand the New Testament apart from the Old…but one also cannot adequately understand the New Testament apart from the Jewish literature of its own time, broadly conceived. And when Christians read the New Testament and other early Christian literature in this context, they become keenly aware that the familiar claims of the radical distinctiveness of Christianity over against Judaism are at least overdrawn and often downright wrong.
The same points carry important implications for Jews as well. Once one becomes aware of the variety and fluidity of Judaism during this period, one cannot simply describe Christianity as having “broken off” from Judaism. Rather, both traditions were in a state of formation and attempted consolidation in late antiquity…
Given this relationship, it is not surprising to find that the church fathers and the rabbis faced similar opposition and fought similar battles on behalf of the belief in an eschatological resurrection of the dead that they inherited from the same streams in Second Temple Judaism…faith in a God who transcends nature and can overcome it, even bringing back the whole person, body and soul, a God who acts in history, fulfilling his amazing promises to his people…
Against members of their own communities who interpreted their respective scriptures…as endorsing only the immortality of the disembodied soul, the church fathers and the rabbis insisted that the body, too, would be a locus of redemption -- that redemption did not mean disembodiment… they insisted that the redeemed life began in the here and now, with the life of discipleship (Christians) or the life of Torah (Jews), and would come to its spiritual fulfillment with the general resurrection and the eternal life that resurrection would inaugurate. [Pp. 236-37]
…In the ancient church “christening” …meant, not naming them primarily, but making them into Christians and inducting them into the resurrected life… the moment at which they were transferred from the domain of Satan and death to that of God and life. [p. 237]
…those who had emerged from the saving waters were, in a word, expected to be that which they had now become. Raised like Lazarus from the dead, they were to live now, in the here and now, the life f the resurrected. With baptism, that new life had begun, and it would be gained in full at one’s third and last birth…when one rises from the ground. [p. 242]
Thus the celebration [in the Eucharist] through eating bread and drinking wine in the Lord’s Supper was imagined, already very early in Christian history, as a literal and metaphorical experience and taste of the future resurrected life. [p. 244]
Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews,
By Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson
Greg Cusack
January 19, 2015
This is another work that James Carroll cited in his fine book, Christ Actually, as it also shows the closeness of the early Christian and Jewish communities in their shared, but distinctively dissimilar, understanding of the concept of resurrection.
Coauthored by Christian and Jewish scholars, it shows that for most of Israel’s existence one “lived on” in one’s family after death. It was the survival of the people Israel, and not each individual, that represented the continuation of life. Furthermore, the Hebrew Scriptures most often speak of the afterlife in terms of a netherworld which, if not a place of suffering – as thought of, for example, in “the fires of Gehenna” – is not a place of joy or activity, either.
The authors do a fine job of succinctly stating their premise in their Preface:
One of the most common understandings of resurrection is that it is the same thing as immortality, that is, life after death…the survival of our souls after the inevitable deaths of our bodies. In fact, however, resurrection envisions the return of the whole person, body and soul together… a reversal of death brought about by the God who is the creator of nature and thus the sole master over it…
The hope that the dead would rise from the grave thus rested not on an analysis of human nature but on the conviction that god would prove faithful to his promises…
Because Christians associate “the Resurrection” (with a capital R) with the reports in the gospels o Jesus’ rising from his grave, they are often surprised to find that Jews had believed in resurrection long before Christianity emerged… The Hebrew Bible occasionally attests to God’s power over death and even tells a few stories of how he raised dead individuals. But, more centrally, it speaks with great frequency of God’s everlasting promise to Israel, the Jewish people, a promise that they would recover from even the most deadly adversity. In that promise, we show, lay the seeds of the belief in a future resurrection of the dead, brought about by the faithfulness of the God of Israel to the people Israel. About the time that the Christ church was emerging, rabbis found the promise of resurrection even in the five books of Moses…and they made the belief in resurrection an obligatory aspect of Judaism. Although both Christians and Jews often think otherwise, one cannot understand Jesus or the early church apart from ancient Judaism in generation and the question of how the Jews read their scriptures in particular.
And now I move forward to the book’s final chapter where the authors give a summary form of their conclusions.
…the form of Judaism from which the religious traditions of modern Jews descend took shape in the early centuries of the common era, that is to say, at the same time, and to a significant degree, in the same places as the church was taking shape. So it would be more accurate to say that rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are not parent and child but siblings, sister religions whose parent was Second Temple Judaism and whose more distant ancestors were still earlier phases of the religion of Israel. [p. 237]
…It is commonplace in Christian circles to say that one cannot understand the New Testament apart from the Old…but one also cannot adequately understand the New Testament apart from the Jewish literature of its own time, broadly conceived. And when Christians read the New Testament and other early Christian literature in this context, they become keenly aware that the familiar claims of the radical distinctiveness of Christianity over against Judaism are at least overdrawn and often downright wrong.
The same points carry important implications for Jews as well. Once one becomes aware of the variety and fluidity of Judaism during this period, one cannot simply describe Christianity as having “broken off” from Judaism. Rather, both traditions were in a state of formation and attempted consolidation in late antiquity…
Given this relationship, it is not surprising to find that the church fathers and the rabbis faced similar opposition and fought similar battles on behalf of the belief in an eschatological resurrection of the dead that they inherited from the same streams in Second Temple Judaism…faith in a God who transcends nature and can overcome it, even bringing back the whole person, body and soul, a God who acts in history, fulfilling his amazing promises to his people…
Against members of their own communities who interpreted their respective scriptures…as endorsing only the immortality of the disembodied soul, the church fathers and the rabbis insisted that the body, too, would be a locus of redemption -- that redemption did not mean disembodiment… they insisted that the redeemed life began in the here and now, with the life of discipleship (Christians) or the life of Torah (Jews), and would come to its spiritual fulfillment with the general resurrection and the eternal life that resurrection would inaugurate. [Pp. 236-37]
…In the ancient church “christening” …meant, not naming them primarily, but making them into Christians and inducting them into the resurrected life… the moment at which they were transferred from the domain of Satan and death to that of God and life. [p. 237]
…those who had emerged from the saving waters were, in a word, expected to be that which they had now become. Raised like Lazarus from the dead, they were to live now, in the here and now, the life f the resurrected. With baptism, that new life had begun, and it would be gained in full at one’s third and last birth…when one rises from the ground. [p. 242]
Thus the celebration [in the Eucharist] through eating bread and drinking wine in the Lord’s Supper was imagined, already very early in Christian history, as a literal and metaphorical experience and taste of the future resurrected life. [p. 244]
January 3, 2021
In this very readable summary of the history of the concept of resurrection in Jewish history--and eventually in that very early Christian history--Madigan and Levenson do much to defend the Jewish roots of the idea. Ehrman's Heaven and Hell makes much use of the idea that early Jewish faith that early Jewish thinkers thought of resurrection mostly on a national restoration level rather than on that of a personal level. That idea is present in this book as well, but Madigan and Levenson do much to show how this concept was still tied in to later more personal ideas and how the rabbis were able to easily interpret passages from the Torah in such a way.
The gist of the argument is that eternal life--like one's identity--in the ancient Jewish belief system was tied to one's genetic descendents, one's family. One lived on through them--and through one's name (through one's descendents). Eventually, once there was a nation of Israel, this was extended to that nation--and the idea of national restoration. This is the emphasis of resurrection passages in scriptures like those of Ezekiel 37.
That said, even with emphasizing nation and family, there's something of a hint of what would later be made explicit in Daniel and in various works written during the second temple era. The promises of an enduring name offered to families are offered also to people like eunuchs, who obviously have no hope that their name won't be expunged. Likewise, ideas of God being a giver of life began to be extended to a giver of eternal life--if he could create life, why could he not restore it? Tales of restoration of physical life became types for restoration of human life in general.
This Jewish belief was passed along to Christians, who took it up in their cause with regard to Jesus and eventually all Christians. What changed, however, in the years following was Judaism's interaction with Greek philosophy (and though not covered in the book, Christianity's as well). Eternal life was not a given in ideas about resurrection; the Greeks, however, believed in an immortal soul apart from the body. Eventually, this belief, in a soul apart from the body rather than with the body, would work its way into Judaism, and then the idea that that soul was eternal. As such, old ideas about resurrection would begin to fall by the wayside in medieval times, and current systems of belief among Jewish religious authorities often leave the belief regarding the ultimate reward of believers to believers themselves.
The gist of the argument is that eternal life--like one's identity--in the ancient Jewish belief system was tied to one's genetic descendents, one's family. One lived on through them--and through one's name (through one's descendents). Eventually, once there was a nation of Israel, this was extended to that nation--and the idea of national restoration. This is the emphasis of resurrection passages in scriptures like those of Ezekiel 37.
That said, even with emphasizing nation and family, there's something of a hint of what would later be made explicit in Daniel and in various works written during the second temple era. The promises of an enduring name offered to families are offered also to people like eunuchs, who obviously have no hope that their name won't be expunged. Likewise, ideas of God being a giver of life began to be extended to a giver of eternal life--if he could create life, why could he not restore it? Tales of restoration of physical life became types for restoration of human life in general.
This Jewish belief was passed along to Christians, who took it up in their cause with regard to Jesus and eventually all Christians. What changed, however, in the years following was Judaism's interaction with Greek philosophy (and though not covered in the book, Christianity's as well). Eternal life was not a given in ideas about resurrection; the Greeks, however, believed in an immortal soul apart from the body. Eventually, this belief, in a soul apart from the body rather than with the body, would work its way into Judaism, and then the idea that that soul was eternal. As such, old ideas about resurrection would begin to fall by the wayside in medieval times, and current systems of belief among Jewish religious authorities often leave the belief regarding the ultimate reward of believers to believers themselves.
May 7, 2009
This is an excellent look at the development of the belief in resurrection for both Jews and Christians. I enjoyed both parts that Prof. Madigan and Levenson did, although some of the middle part (about the early historical ideas of life and death in ancient Isreal) were a bit tough going. Overall it puts the doctrine in a fascinating historical context, and shows the theological necessity for resurrection in both faiths.
August 26, 2018
Given the recent clash between David Bentley Hart and N.T. Wright, I decided to recollect and review some Second Temple Judaism stuff since I am so divisive; I needed to pick sides. It's more of a pride thing, really. Partly FOMO. Who would want to miss out on the conversation of the century?
Madigan and Levenson's Resurrection traces the development of the Jewish idea of resurrection from the time of its conception to its recent (d)evolvement in Rabbinic Judaism and Gnosticism. One of the most interesting ideas I found in this book is Levenson's chapter on Sheol, which corrects the misconception that everyone goes to Sheol in the OT. Levenson shows how it's a state that happens during life-threatening illnesses, and, more importantly, a state of barrenness(!). The OT has plenty of examples of those who happily die and do not go to Sheol because they have children who carry their names; thus, they live "eternally." Another misconception is that people go to Sheol because of their naughty behavior. Levenson gives a big no-no to this theory using the story of Job and the story of Jacob, who, when they lost their children, mentioned that they would go to Sheol.
Both Madigan and Levenson cover other topics like the temple, this-worldliness vs. other-worldliness in Judaism and Christianity, the apocalypse, etc. The book could use some plot, of course, but it's well worth the read.
Madigan and Levenson's Resurrection traces the development of the Jewish idea of resurrection from the time of its conception to its recent (d)evolvement in Rabbinic Judaism and Gnosticism. One of the most interesting ideas I found in this book is Levenson's chapter on Sheol, which corrects the misconception that everyone goes to Sheol in the OT. Levenson shows how it's a state that happens during life-threatening illnesses, and, more importantly, a state of barrenness(!). The OT has plenty of examples of those who happily die and do not go to Sheol because they have children who carry their names; thus, they live "eternally." Another misconception is that people go to Sheol because of their naughty behavior. Levenson gives a big no-no to this theory using the story of Job and the story of Jacob, who, when they lost their children, mentioned that they would go to Sheol.
Both Madigan and Levenson cover other topics like the temple, this-worldliness vs. other-worldliness in Judaism and Christianity, the apocalypse, etc. The book could use some plot, of course, but it's well worth the read.
April 29, 2021
This book is clearly written for a lay audience, but also the kind of lay audience that is SUPER into biblical/religious scholarship (you know who you are). Also clearly written slightly more for Christians, but with an interesting interfaith perspective, such that I assume non-Christians could find it meaningful/interesting as well.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews