Matthew, Session 92
This is a very short (25 minutes) session on some verses of Chapter 26, beginning at verse 29. We continue the Chapter in the next session.
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In reference to Yeshua’s prediction of His suffering and death and His own vindication/resurrection. Do not most scholarship of today believe that these references were inserted by the early believers after the fact? N. T. Wright disagrees! His argument is based on the Jewish general concept of “The Resurrection” happening to all of mankind at the end of days, and not to just an individual person. Yeshua was speaking outside the box of understanding of His day (no wonder the disciples did not get it)!
In another work by James Dunn, Christianity In The Making Volume 1 (of) Jesus Remembered on p. 869 he writes:
(i) One of the early confessional formulae which Paul echoes is Romans 1:3-4: the gospel (not just Paul’s gospel) concerns God’s Son, ‘who . . . was appointed Son of God in power . . . as from the resurrection of the dead’. The last phrase is striking. We would have expected ‘the resurrection from the dead’ (anastasis ek nekron).196 Instead we have ‘the resurrection of the dead’ (anastasis nekron), the phrase used when it is the final resurrection which is in view.197 The point is confirmed by the fact that elsewhere Paul is recalled as treating the Christian claims for Jesus’ resurrection as a test case for the Pharisaic belief in the (final) resurrection.198 The point is that Paul and those who articulate and used the formula regarded the resurrection of Jesus as of a piece with the final resurrection. End of quoting James Dunn.199
There are four different references found in this paragraph.
196. As in Luke 20.35; Acts 4.2; 1 Peter 1.3
197. Matthew 22.31; 1 Cor. 15.12-13, 42 Heb. 11.35 see above,chapter 17 n. 274
198. Acts 23.6; 24.21. Similarly Acts 17.31; was not part of the disbelief in 17.32 occasioned by the suggestion that the resurrection preparatory to judgment (17.31) had already happened?
199. See, e.g., Allison, End of the Ages 67-68; Dunn, Romans 15-16.
When we come with a respect and reverence to the text that springs from its own time and place, simple phrases are loaded with contextual meaning anchored within the idioms of the religious life of the Pharisees, then transferred and used by the early believers and writers of the NT. These phrases begin to explode our minds open to the rich textual phrases that have great significance for these early believers, and hopefully shape our own communities around these life transforming phrases.