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JESUS IS DEAD

Introduction here‘s no shame in it. Everybody dies. Even great historical figures. Even Jesus. No one will deny that — at least if one believes there was an historical Jesus in the first place — but that‘s another can of worms! The issue is, did he stay dead? Everybody else does. Why should Jesus be an exception? But the Christian claim is that Jehovah did make an exception in his case — handing him over to the Grim Reaper, yes, but then snatching him back before his corpse was scarcely cool. How does one evaluate such a claim? Insofar as its proponents urge it upon us as a datum of history, we must evaluate the resurrection creed in historical terms. And the verdict I must then return is the title of this book. It is not quite so simple, but I do not want to obfuscate the issue with a haze of religious sentimentality as many do. In the present collection I have assembled some of my best writing and thinking on the resurrection (and in a couple of cases, closely related issues). ―Easter Fictions‖ was the opening statement in a debate I had at Colorado State University with Dr. Craig Blomberg. The next two, ―What Can We Know of the Historical Jesus?‖ and ―Must Jesus Have Risen?‖ are condensed versions of two chapters from my book Beyond Born Again (out of print at the moment). I have found these versions useful in debates with my pal and sparring partner Greg Boyd at UCLA and other venues. I wrote ―Night of the Living Savior‖ for the 2005 Atheist Alliance conference in Los Angeles. ―Was Jesus John the Baptist Risen from the Dead?‖ was a Jesus Seminar paper that nearly convinced even the late, great Robert Funk. ―How Secure Is the New Testament Witness?‖ began as a long answer to a question by my friend Fred Lykes. ―Templars and the Tomb of Jesus‖ grew out of research I did for another book, The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth is Stranger than Fiction (Prometheus Books). There turned out to be too many related books to survey in that context, but they invited comment anyway, and this seems the place for those comments. I analyzed another bit of pseudo-evidence about Jesus, The Talmud of Jmmanuel, for a course I teach

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