Do I really recommend a book of nearly 800 pages and costing over $80? Certainly I do. Bishop Tom Wright’s Resurrection of the Son of God is one of the most significant books on the resurrection and the heart of the Christian gospel published in my lifetime. It has an important message to Christian liberals, to us evangelicals, and to unbelievers as well.

For the Christian liberals, here is a decisive refutation of the claim that resurrection doesn’t necessarily mean transformation of the actual body of Jesus but is simply a spiritual event. Wright shows in exhaustive detail from the New Testament and its background material that when the Apostles used the word resurrection, they could not have meant anything other than an event involving the transformation of the body of Jesus. If they wanted to say that Jesus had only been raised to heaven or that his spirit continued on, or that he had gone to be with God, the word resurrection could not have been used. To talk of resurrection is, as Wright puts it rather nicely, to make a claim not just about life after death. Resurrection is about life after life after death. It is always about a post-death resurrection of the body to live again.

Bishop Wright’s book has also something important to say to evangelicals. Here is the clearest demonstration that popular evangelical piety with a focus on ‘going to heaven when you die’ is actually sub-biblical and has more in common with various Greek pagan ideas than a robust biblical faith. The book also shows that a common evangelical tendency to marginalise the resurrection as a kind of ‘postlude’ to all the great salvation of the Cross is to rob the gospel of its significant resurrection emphasis. For Tom Wright, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not primarily a New Testament claim about life after death – though it has crucial implications for that – but about restoring God’s kingship over his creation. Resurrection of the dead is about God the Creator’s faithfulness to the creation he has made and is committed to. In other words, Wright wants us to see that the New Testament presents the resurrection of the dead in a fundamentally ‘Kingdom of God’ context.

How does the book do it? The Resurrection of the Son of God is divided into five parts. In Part 1, ‘Setting the Scene’, Wright conducts an extensive, detailed analysis of beliefs in life (or not) after death in the Greek and Jewish world of the New Testament era and beyond. It is a remarkable bringing together of the diverse and, for most of us, inaccessible material, presented in a straightforward and comprehensible way.

In Part 2, ‘Resurrection in Paul’, Wright deals with every resurrection reference in the epistles of Paul but especially the key passages in 1 and 2 Corinthians.

Part 3, ‘Resurrection in Early Christianity apart from Paul’, deals with resurrection discussion in the Gospels other than the actual resurrection of Jesus narratives of the Gospels and Acts, the other letters of Paul and early Christian and associated writers up to the second century.

Part 4, ‘The Story of Easter’, is a close reading of the four resurrection accounts in the Gospels.

Part 5, ‘Belief, Event and Meaning’, is for me the most important section of the book and is the significant pay-off for all the hard work the author has done in the previous 679 pages. This is the section with something very important for the unbeliever. Here Wright asks, Did the resurrection of Jesus really happen historically? and, What does it mean?

Briefly, Wright’s argument goes like this: The early Christians held a distinctive belief about the resurrection of Jesus and of believers which, though drawing on concepts from their environment, could not have simply arisen spontaneously from it. So the question we face is, What occasioned this consistent and strong belief? The Christian answer in the New Testament concerns stories about Jesus’ tomb being empty and him appearing alive again to people. Wright says that neither an empty tomb nor the appearances by themselves would have generated the early Christian belief. Empty tombs would be a puzzle and appearances would have simply been regarded as some kind of extreme vision. But together, these two would indeed have generated the kind of Christian belief we find in the New Testament.

This leads to the second major step: how do we explain these two phenomena of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus? Wright argues that the combination of the empty tomb and the appearances of the living Jesus form a set of circumstances which is itself necessary and sufficient for the rise of early Christian belief. Without these phenomena, we cannot explain why this belief came into existence and took the shape it did. With them, we can explain it exactly and precisely.

He then deals with two other, alternative explanations for the rise of early Christian belief, showing their inadequacies. The conclusion Wright comes to is, “that the historian of whatever persuasion has no opinion but to affirm both the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ with Jesus as ‘historical events’ … They took place as real events: they were significant events. They are, in the normal sense required by historians, provable events: historians can and should write about them. We cannot account for early Christianity without them.”

This leads to the last step: how do you explain the historical event of the empty tomb and the meetings? The only answer that makes sense is the same answer given by the new Christians themselves, that Jesus was really raised from the dead. Of course, Wright is well aware of some of the problems that people have in accepting such a conclusion. He is well aware that saying that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead can never just be regarded as another ‘fact’ but deeply involves a person’s life and commitments, and a new way of seeing the world. Some of this is spelled out in his final chapter, ‘The Risen Jesus, the Son of God’, where he lays out the foundations of a fuller Christian Christology.

The Resurrection of the Son of God is quite a book. And yet, I am really hoping that the new Bishop of Durham will have time somehow to write a shorter, more accessible version of this important scholarly work. In the meantime, it is something that pastors, theological teachers and interested laymen and women would do well to buy and study.

One good $80 book is worth ten poor $20 books!