I’m doing a lot of thinking about pre-Christian Jewish considerations of afterlife/immortality/resurrection at the moment. There was clearly a variety of beliefs about post-mortal vindication in early Judasim, and I’ve reluctantly decided to look into the so-called “Gabriel Revelation” to see if that adds anything.
I’ve always wondered: Why did Jesus and Paul think that the Scriptures predicted a resurrection on the third day??? I just don’t think that the hints in Hosea etc are sufficient – I think there must have been some sort of traditional development that employed the idea of vindication/judgement/climax after “three days”… and perhaps the Gabriel Revelation provides some evidence that this sort of motif was in use just prior to Jesus – which would be a pleasingly enlightening find!
But oh dear… Israel Knohl really seems to draw some silly conclusions from this possibility in this Time article:
This, in turn,[that is, the possibility that Judaism had begun to explore the idea of a three-day resurrection before Jesus was born] undermines one of the strongest literary arguments employed by Christians over centuries to support the historicity of the Resurrection (in which they believe on faith): the specificity and novelty of the idea that the Messiah would die on a Friday and rise on a Sunday. Who could make such stuff up? But, as Knohl told TIME, maybe the Christians had a model to work from. The idea of a “dying and rising messiah appears in some Jewish texts, but until now, everyone thought that was the impact of Christianity on Judaism,” he says. “But for the first time, we have proof that it was the other way around. The concept was there before Jesus.” If so, he goes on, “this should shake our basic view of Christianity. … What happens in the New Testament [could have been] adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”
Since when is the novelty of a three-day resurrection “one of the strongest literary arguments employed by Christians over centuries to support the historicity of the Resurrection”? On the contrary – I would say that the intended credibility of the early Christian message depended on previously existing Jewish traditions of expected vindication. But despite his misdirected apologetic approach, I have decided to buy Knohl’s book, just on the off-chance the text of the Gabriel Revelation itself helps illuminate the world of the 1st century BCE just a little more… we will see…
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