What is this book about?

What do people fear most of all? Isn't it the certainty of death? But above that certainty, there is a greater certainty: the goodness and mercy of God, and the certain fulfillment of His multiple promises of a final resurrection. God's righteous people need not fear death if they know that God promised them victory over this apparent finality.

Indeed, uncertainty in what awaits us after death can often instill fear, even in the believer, but on this side of eternity we should trust in God's promises of resurrection. Faith in these promises can carry us over the threshold of mortality to life everlasting. Death is not a finality but a step into the brightest future imaginable: "Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Messiah will shine on you" (Ephesians 5:14).

This book is aimed mainly at Christians, but Jews and others may also profit from an honest and careful study of these resurrection texts from early Jewish and Christian sources. We will focus here on a collection of written texts and documents that refer to the resurrection of the dead in the final days.

* What do the ancient Hebraic/Jewish texts say about the final resurrection?
* What did Jesus teach about the resurrection, and what did His own resurrection achieve?
* What was the basic resurrection doctrine established by the Apostle Paul?
* What did early Christian authors say about the final resurrection during the first few centuries of the Common Era?
* What are the early Rabbinic traditions about resurrection that most Jews still profess today in their daily prayers?

Our study of the eschatological event of the resurrection will begin with the earliest Biblical and extra-Biblical texts, and then move forward in time. After these have been identified and analyzed, we can build upon this information in order to obtain a more solid understanding of the final-day events. Our proposition is that if Christians want to understand end-time prophecies, they must not begin with the Revelation of John and then work backwards. They must begin with the foundational truths as God gave them to His Jewish people of old in progressive revelation to all peoples for all times. All later revelation must be interpreted in the context of earlier revelation. And as Madison and Levenson point out, "one cannot understand Jesus or the early church apart from ancient Judaism in general and the question of how Jews read their scriptures in particular” (Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, 2008).

As the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:19, if Jesus had not risen from the dead, we would be "of all men most to be pitied." But Paul clarified that Jesus' resurrection was actually a "mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things" (Eph. 3:9), bringing to fruition God's earlier covenants and promises to the nation of Israel, as well as to all Gentiles who would believe and trust in Him. Through His death, Jesus broke down the spiritual barrier between Jew and Gentile (Eph. 2:14), and because of His resurrection, we can all experience our own resurrection from the dead in the end of days (Rom. 8:11).

Rowan Williams comments that it is unlikely that the tension between the skeptics and the promoters of the empty tomb tradition can be easily reconciled other than by submitting the discourse "to the interior of the believer…” (The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, 2000). And if some insist that this event is questionable because the "historical" evidence is weak, we cannot provide further evidence than that which the Holy Spirit instills inside the believer.

One of the foundational texts in this book is 1 Corinthians 15:50, which declares: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable" (NASB). According to The Living Study Bible by Tyndale (1981), this can also read: "I tell you this, my brothers: an earthly body made of flesh and blood cannot get into God's Kingdom. These perishable bodies of ours are not the right kind to live forever." Stated the other way around, no one who has not undergone the bodily transformation from mortality to immortality can expect to experience the resurrection and be part of the Messianic Kingdom, and this implies whether Jew or Gentile. 

According to Abraham Cohen of Everyman's Talmud, "no aspect of the Hereafter has so important a place in the religious teaching of the Rabbis as the doctrine of the resurrection" (Everyman’s Talmud, 1949). And in spite of the obvious Messialogical (Christological) difference, the resurrection of the dead is also a central element for Christianity: "Paul declares that Christ's resurrection is of the first importance: it is no optional extra. On it the Christian faith stands or falls" (Eerdman’s Handbook to the Bible, 1983).

Thus, "though Judaism and Christianity do not share belief in the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth, nor in the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of the New Testament, many Jews and Christians have shared, and do today affirm, belief in the resurrection of the dead" (Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews

Importantly, this whole study will be based on the following fundamental premises:

1. God's promises to the Jews have never been revoked, and they will ultimately see the fulfillment of their promised resurrection from the dead and the inauguration of the Messianic Kingdom.
2. Jesus addressed a Jewish audience of the 1^st century, and the people's interpretation of Jesus' teachings was encased within the common Jewish worldview.
3. The apostle Paul spoke from an originally Jewish, later "Christianized," worldview, but still referred to the eschatological event of the resurrection in terms commonly upheld by most Jews of his time.

God promised the Kingdom of God first to the Jews before He promised it to the Christians, and the Kingdom became available to the Gentiles only through Jesus' death and resurrection. Even though Christians believe that Jesus is the promised Jewish Messiah, the Jews would probably prefer to receive any other messiah rather than Jesus. Nevertheless, we must be aware that their fidelity to God has been precisely what has kept them from believing in Jesus, or in any false messiah for that matter. Brad Young comments that "when some of the Jewish people rejected [Paul's] preaching of Jesus, they were really affirming their own strong faith in God…they were just saying 'yes' to God" (Paul: The Jewish Theologian, 1997).

Even though the main focus of this study will not be the Kingdom of Heaven, but rather the resurrection portion of the end-time scenario, it is difficult to separate the events without speaking about the whole picture. Even in Jesus' time, these things were inseparable, as when the Sadducees asked Jesus: "In the resurrection, when they rise again…" (Mark 12:23), using this phrase to refer to the whole Messianic period, which is often referred to by the Jews as the "Days of the Messiah." We must be clear, though, that Judaism has usually been more concerned with "orthopraxy," or right practice, rather than with "orthodoxy," or right theological thought, which Christianity tends to focus on (J. Julius Scott, Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament, 1995).