What is historical in Jesus’ resurrection? The canonical Gospels never describe Jesus’ resurrection. But they assert that in order to know what happened to him, we are of necessity referred to what happened to the disciples and what we call the Easter experience. St. Paul preached what Christians believed (I Cor 1.1:3h-5): that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, and that he was resurrected on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. The texts affirm that something happened to Jesus’ disciples, something they attribute to their encounter with Jesus whom they call the risen Lord. A change was worked in the disciples before and after Easter. The proclamation of the message that God raised Jesus from the dead presents Christians with a historical invitation to a reasonable faith. That God has acted in history through such events can in fact be seen as a reasonable response to a sum total of historical indicators, which include credible texts and personal experiences.
So also the creed of early Christian faith that ‘Jesus was raised from the dead’ expresses a certainty about the future of the Jesus who was killed and by his death was condemned to the past. The Christian resurrection hope is kindled by the appearances of Jesus; as a result it first casts its light backwards on to the Jesus who died on the cross. Only from him and through him does the resurrection hope then extend to the living and the dead. ‘For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living’ (Rom. 14.9). W. Benjamin has expressed the dialectical identity of eschatology and history in a still more subtle manner: “Only the historian has the gift of kindling the sparks of hope in the past which is permeated by it; even the dead will not be safe from the enemy when he conquers. And this enemy has not ceased to conquer.” The Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared. The symbol of the ‘resurrection of the dead’, which is used by eschatological belief, combines God’s future with the past of the dead and expresses not only hope for those to come, but also hope for those who have passed on in God. Faith’s own historicity arises only from the eschatological connection between Jesus and his future, which it perceives. F. Rosenzweig has spoken even more aptly of history as an ‘unfinished world’: “This state of becoming and unfinishedness can only be grasped by a reversal of the objective relationships of time. Whereas the past, that which is already finished, lies there from its beginning to its end and can be narrated… the future can only be grasped as what it is, namely the future, by means of anticipation.”
God will reveal himself in his glory only at the end of the old age and at the beginning of the new. But in the history of the unrighteous world there are already anticipatory revelations of his future. That is an old prophetic and apocalyptic tradition: ‘Surely the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets’ (Amos 3.7). The new and scandalous element in the Christian message of Easter was not that some man or other was raised before anyone else, but that the one who was raised was this condemned, executed and forsaken man. This was the unexpected element in the kerygma of the resurrection, which created the new righteousness of faith. The resurrection message of the early community was an apocalyptic anticipation of what was to come, but in content it was the proclamation of the crucified Christ as the Lord of righteousness. The scandal was not the message that one man had been raised before all others in the final judgment and the Kingdom of God, but the certainty that this one man was the crucified Jesus. In form, Christian faith in the resurrection is eschatological faith. In content, this eschatological faith is Christian, because it proclaims the resurrection of the crucified Christ.