Talpiot and the Doctrine of the Resurrection

Everyone seems to be talking about the Talpiot ossuaries and the supposed bones of Jesus. Others have ably commented on the ossuaries themselves. Ben Witherington does a great job of discussing the archaeological findings. I offer these comments as a theological framework about what the New Testeament church means when it says, “He is risen.”

The Core of the Message

The doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection cannot be divorced from the two streams of New Testament evidence pertaining to his resurrection: 1) Jesus’ tomb was empty and 2) Jesus appeared to many in a same-but-different body. The empty tomb and the appearance stories are not simply literary devices meant to convey an abstract spiritual truth. They are what the apostolic generation witnessed and what it proclaimed. And they are what I believe to be the core of the gospel message.

Dropped His Body

The Christian doctrine of the resurrection is closely related to the Christian of doctrine of creation and the Christian doctrine of the age to come. Resurrection is the redemption and completion of God’s physical creation, not the discarding of it.

During seminary, a friend of mine told me that he had become a follower of Meher Baba. I had never heard the name before, so I asked him to explain. He told me about Baba’s life and philosophy. As we talked, I asked, “Is he still alive?” and my friend answered, “He dropped his body.”

“What?”

“He dropped his body. His tomb is in India. His existence is purely spiritual now.”

My friend believed that Baba had entered a better form of existence unencumbered by the physical world. This is NOT what I understand the New Testament to mean when it speaks of Jesus’ resurrection or the age to come.

The idea of a purely spiritual resurrection would have been nonsense in Jesus’ own culture. No one is close proximity in time and space to Jesus’ crucifixion could have said “he is risen” when his body was still in a tomb (as tradition says he was and as some now apparently say he still is) or if his body was laying in a garbage dump (as an earlier generation of skeptics claimed).

Resurrection versus Resuscitation

There is a qualitative difference between Jesus’ resurrection and the resuscitation of Lazarus, the widow’s son at Nain, etc. Lazarus presumably died again. His bones (or bone dust) are indeed in some tomb somewhere. The New Testament sees Jesus’ resurrection as more than the revivification of dead flesh; it is the glorification of his existence.

Continuity and Discontinuity

As my New Testament professor (C.H. Talbert) frequently said, there is both continuity and discontinuity between the present age and the age of the resurrection.

The New Testament picture of the resurrected Jesus shows that continuity - discontinuity pattern. He eats fish but appears in locked rooms. His body shows the marks of crucifixion but he is whole. He is not recognizable, but then he is.

Paul indeed struggled with words to discuss the same-but-different resurrection existence. “Spiritual body” is a bit of an oxymoron, but it’s the best Paul can come up with. Paul insisted that the resurrected existence didn’t negate this created existence - it transformed it. “We shall be changed,” Paul says twice in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52.

The Ascension and the Resurrection

So where did Jesus “go” when he shot up into the sky in the book of Acts? He “went,” I reckon, to the same place that he “went” when he “vanished from their sight” at Emmaus. (Luke 24:31) The resurrected and glorified Jesus sometimes manifested himself visibly and sometimes did not. The ascension wasn’t an elevator ride to heaven; it was simply a form of disappearance.

What did Jesus do with his body when he ascended to heaven? He didn’t do anything with it. His bodily existence is an essential element of his being. Humans are not disembodied spirits entombed in flesh. We are spirit-mind-body beings existing in God’s creation. Does the doctrine of Jesus’ two natures say that he stopped being “fully human” at the ascension? I don’t think so. Jesus has arrived at our destination. He is what “fully human” truly means. Jesus did not need to discard his glorified body to enter the age to come; his glorified body belonged to the age to come. His resurrection is the first fruit of the that coming age.

(Based on comments I’ve left on a Methoblog discussion thread.)

[Update: For more on Judean burial customs and the Talpiot tomb, see Jodi Magness of UNC-CH and the Society of Biblical Literature. h/t Donald Sensing.]