a brief note on "The Challenge of Easter" (Chapter 6, part 1)

Well,  "The Challenge of Easter" is all about asking, "Did Jesus really rise from the dead?" from a historian's perspective. Wright spends a lot of time clarifying that yes, that phrase really means what we think it means, that early Christians really did mean Jesus resumed bodily form and walked among them. No merely spiritual resurrection, no body stolen from the tomb, no Jesus who didn't really die on the cross after all but simply revived once they took him down.

So, Wright says, the question for historians is:

We are therefore forced, as a matter of history, to attempt to explain how it was that the early church came to make a claim that only made sense in the Jewish world [resurrection of the dead], yet was not precisely what they as Jews had expected [all the dead to be raised together at one time]; how they came to describe Jesus in a certain way as the basis of their life and work, yet not in the way he was made known to them in their own day-to-day experience. That is the historical problem of the resurrection of Jesus. (140)

I haven't read to the end of the chapter, but I'm inclined to agree with the naysayers Wright dismisses at the beginning of the chapter: how can we possibly answer that question with the historical record? (he turns to the earliest writer from the period, Paul, but as I said, I haven't read that far yet) If we answer, well the only answer is that it must be true, that tells us nothing other than we weren't creative enough to find a different answer, and if we do somehow manage to come up with something else, we can't be sure it's true. I'm curious to discover what Wright has to say, but it's late enough that I'll have to hold out for another day.