Book Recommendation

Well, this afternoon I'm finishing up what will surely be (alas) my last accomplishment of summer reading, N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God. I don't dare presume competence to write a review. All I can say is that as a student and a preacher, but most especially just as a Christian, I am very glad for the inspiration to read this book.

If you have ever found yourself perplexed about the differences in Paul and the evangelists themselves--not to mention the oddness of what they say--or by everything that has been interpreted for you about what really happened on the first day of the week following Jesus' execution, from noli me tangere to whether you can end a sentence with gar, or from what you have been told by priests and professors, by Bultmann and Crossan to Mel Gibson and the 'History' Channel, then read this book. I know it's 800 pages. You won't be sorry.

No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including intellectual and cultural tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent. But it is the real world, in Jewish thinking, that the real God made, and still grieves over. It is the real world that, in the earliest stories of Jesus' resurrection, was decisively and for ever reclaimed by that event, and event which demanded to be understood, not as a bizarre miracle, but as the beginning of the new creation. (737)