"‘Are there any historical precedents for this idea of resurrection?’
‘Well, you you have, you have a very obvious one that, I think is shadowing everything that Paul writes. And indeed, when Paul writes that Jesus is the Son of God who has risen from the dead and ascended to his father, it would have been read by many, many people across the span of the Roman Empire, as a kind of blasphemy. And the blasphemy is against Caesar Augustus, who, who was, one of his names was Divi Filius, son of a god. And the God was the deified Julius Caesar, who had adopted Augustus. Augustus himself when he dies is said to have risen up into the heavens and to be sat at the right hand of his Heavenly Father. He is a God who was also a man who had brought peace to the world. And certainly in the Greek half of the Roman Empire, the, the peace that Augustus had brought to a war ravaged world is specifically called evangelion, good news, from which we get the word evangelist. This is, you know, the good news is the gospel. So when Paul is preaching his evangelion, his good news, about a man who has risen from the dead and, and, and is to be regarded as divine, the echo of the cult of Caesar is very, very palpable, and I think very, very deliberate…
We know right from the beginning, because it's there in, in the Gospels that people claim that the the disciples removed the body. Perhaps that the Sanhedrin, the kind of assembly of Jewish elders, they had removed it. There's even a wonderful theory that the church father Tertulian quotes, who says that, people, people claim that the gardener had removed the body because he was worried that crowds would come and trample on his lettuces, which I think is is a fantastic theory… there were gnostic writers, Christians who, who, for theological reasons, didn't want to countenance the idea, idea that Jesus had been mortal, that he'd been made of flesh and blood, and therefore argued that the the body on the cross was not properly corporeal, or that if it was then Jesus was not, you know, at the moment he got nailed to the cross and died, the Spirit of Jesus rose and left. So in a sense, the body is no longer Christ's. You have a particular refinement of this in a gospel by a writer called Basilides, writing at the end of the second century, who, who says that Jesus is taking the cross through the streets of Jerusalem, and he meets with Simon of Cyrene, who is a figure in the Gospel who shouldered the cross when Jesus stumbles to try and give him a moment of rest.
According to Basilides, Jesus swapped places with Simon of Cyrene, so it's poor old Simon, who ends up being nailed to the cross and according to Basilides, the real Jesus watches this happened and we're told laughs. So doesn't give a particularly pleasant spin on, on Jesus. This version goes underground. It's not canonical, it doesn't end up in the canon of, of Orthodox scripture. But it seems to have been perpetuated and it reappears in the Quran....this story again, is further refined by the Ahmadis who are a subsect of Islam who claim that Jesus went to Kashmir and is buried in the tomb in, in Kashmir'...
‘What does a historian like yourself in this kind of scenario, what do you do when you’re writing about Jesus? Can you entertain theories with a supernatural or miraculous component? Or do you have to search for an alternative?’
‘I think that certainly since, since the age of Gibbon, the idea that history might have a place for supernatural explanations isn't one that is generally accepted. The discipline of apologetics, which basically means making the case for the truth of a particular revelation, is a highly distinguished one, entirely legitimate, but it's not one that, that really coincides with history. So I think that it's a mystery because there is no clear answer to it. And so I think that the most that a historian can properly do is to essentially say, yes, there is a mystery.’...
‘There's been a lot of discussion recently around depictions of Jesus in the West and whether it's appropriate that he's often shown as being a white man in Western art. Do you have any thoughts about that at all?’
‘I have absolutely no problem with that at all. Because if you're a Christian, you think that Christ came and died and raised from the dead for the sins of, of everyone. There is no Jew or Greek, there is no man or woman there is no slave or free. That's the kind of fundamental teaching of Christianity. All human beings are created equally in the image of God, and therefore, Jesus is to be understood as living in the society that you inhabit. So that's why in the Roman period he's portrayed in Roman dress. In the Byzantine period, he's portrayed in Byzantine dress. In Renaissance Italy, he's portrayed as living among Renaissance Italians, and now today, where the gospel has spread to South America or to Africa or to China, so he will look South American or African or Chinese. That is a kind of theological fundamental’...
‘So your, I don't know solution is the right word. But your view is that we should really is something that will change through time rather than any need to go back and amend the representations we have from the past.’
‘I think it would, it would kind of verge on heretical to say that, that Jesus didn't look like an Italian or didn't look like a, someone from Flanders or whatever. Because Jesus, if you, if you believe that he is, he is the risen Lord, he is alive wherever there are Christians. So it's entirely legitimate for people from whatever period, whatever background, whatever geographical location to portray him as living among them.’"
Grievance mongering fail!
