juantoo3
....whys guy.... ʎʇıɹoɥʇnɐ uoıʇsǝnb
Found this in the paper today:
News from The Associated Press
Mar 20, 12:00 PM EDT
Religion Today
-excerpt:
By RACHEL ZOLL
AP Religion Writer
On Easter Sunday, Christians will proclaim the message at the heart of their faith - "He is risen" - and will affirm the hope that God will raise all the dead at the end of time.
But this belief is deeply misunderstood, say scholars from varied faith traditions who have been trying to clear up the confusion in several recent books.
"We are troubled by the gap between the views on these things of the general public and the findings of contemporary scholarship," said Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson, authors of the upcoming book, "Resurrection, The Power of God for Christians and Jews."
The three scholars also have been challenging the idea, part of Greek philosophy and popular now, that resurrection for Jews and the followers of Jesus is simply the survival of an individual's soul in the hereafter. The scholars say resurrection occurs for the whole person - body and soul. For early Christians and some Jews, resurrection meant being given back one's body or possibly God creating a new similar body after death, Wright has said.
Madigan and Levenson, among other scholars, also emphasize that resurrection for humankind is a belief that Christians and Jews share.
Christians generally find it difficult to imagine that a faith that doesn't believe in Christ's Resurrection can believe in resurrection at all.
But "as the early church was developing, rabbis were making resurrection an article of normative belief," Madigan and Levenson said in e-mailed answers to questions from The Associated Press. "That is something many Jews do not know. Like many Christians, they are under the misimpression that resurrection is a uniquely Christian hope." (emphasis mine, -jt3)
Jews in the time of Jesus believed that resurrection was bodily and communal - in that it brought justice to the oppressed and renewed creation, wrote Madigan, who teaches Christian history at Harvard Divinity School, and Levenson, who teaches Jewish studies there. That Jewish belief was absorbed and reshaped by the earliest Christians to form part of their religion.
Most modern-day Jews don't know this. Except for the Orthodox branch of Judaism, Jewish groups deleted belief in resurrection from the traditional prayer book during revisions that began during the 19th century in response to rationalistic, Enlightenment thought. (emphasis mine, -jt3)
Yet Wright and others say *the church should teach what the first Christians believed.* Wright also has argued that the physical reality of a future world after death shows "the created order matters to God, and Jesus' Resurrection is the pilot project for that renewal." (emphasis mine, -jt3)
News from The Associated Press