The Work
The Resurrection of the Son of God was published in 2003 by SPCK (London) and Fortress Press (Minneapolis). It is the third volume of Wright's series Christian Origins and the Question of God, which also includes The New Testament and the People of God (1992) and Jesus and the Victory of God (1996). The book is approximately 800 pages, with detailed bibliographical apparatus. It surveys Jewish and pagan beliefs about death and the afterlife before making the historical case that the earliest Christian proclamation of Jesus's bodily resurrection cannot be adequately explained except as a response to an actual event of bodily resurrection. The book won the Theology Prize at the British Book Awards and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the resurrection question in the modern era.
Biblical Engagement
The book's argument moves from the broad historical survey of ancient attitudes toward death and afterlife to a close reading of the New Testament resurrection texts, with detailed attention to vocabulary, genre, and context.
1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is the book's primary New Testament text and the earliest literary witness to the resurrection tradition. Wright argues that this passage represents a pre-Pauline creed - Paul explicitly says 'I delivered to you what I also received' (v. 3), using the technical vocabulary of Jewish oral tradition - which most scholars date to within two to five years of the crucifixion. The creedal formulation ('died... was buried... was raised... appeared') follows a specific pattern that Wright argues cannot be explained as legend, hallucination, or spiritual experience: the language of 'resurrection' (anastasis) in first-century Jewish usage always referred to bodily rising, and the 'appearances' (ophthe, 'he was seen') are distinguished from the general affirmation of resurrection in a way that points to discrete, specific events.
1 Corinthians 15:35-54 receives extended treatment in Part 3. Wright argues at length that Paul's understanding of resurrection is neither simple resuscitation (restoration to identical mortal life) nor purely spiritual (the survival of the soul without the body) but transformation: a body that is continuous with the pre-resurrection body but gloriously transformed - 'sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body' (vv. 43-44). The 'spiritual body' (soma pneumatikon) does not mean an immaterial body but a body energized and transformed by the Holy Spirit.
Luke 24:36-43 and John 20:24-29 are treated as the Gospel accounts most explicit about the physical nature of the resurrection body - Jesus invites the disciples to touch him (Luke 24:39: 'Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have'), eats fish (Luke 24:41-43), and shows Thomas his wounds (John 20:27). Wright examines these accounts in the context of ancient ideas about ghosts, spirits, and the soul to argue that the disciples would have described a purely spiritual appearance in entirely different terms.
Acts 2:24-31 (Peter's Pentecost sermon) and Acts 4:2 (the apostles' proclamation 'Jesus and the resurrection') demonstrate that the resurrection was from the beginning the central, non-negotiable claim of the earliest Christian community, not a later theological development.
John 20:1-18 (Mary Magdalene's encounter with the risen Christ) and Matthew 28:1-10 (the appearance to the women at the tomb) are examined for their cultural and historical significance: in a first-century Jewish or Greco-Roman context, women's testimony was regarded as less reliable than men's, making the Gospel tradition's consistent emphasis on women as the first witnesses of the resurrection highly unlikely as a literary invention. This 'criterion of embarrassment' - the principle that details unlikely to have been fabricated are more likely to be authentic - is one of Wright's important methodological points.
Author & Context
Nicholas Thomas Wright (b. 1948) was educated at Exeter College, Oxford (BA, MA, DPhil), where his doctoral thesis examined Paul's letter to the Galatians. He served as a New Testament lecturer at Oxford, as the chaplain of Worcester College, and later as Dean of Lichfield Cathedral and Dean of Queen's College, Oxford. He was Bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010 and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Andrews.
Wright is the most prominent representative of what he himself calls the 'Third Quest' for the historical Jesus - the movement in New Testament scholarship from the 1980s onward that has insisted on reading Jesus within his first-century Jewish context rather than against it or in abstraction from it. His intellectual formation drew on George Caird's biblical theology, E.P. Sanders's reconstruction of Second Temple Judaism, and the broader movement in hermeneutics associated with Anthony Thiselton.
The immediate context of the book was the state of New Testament scholarship at the turn of the millennium. The Jesus Seminar had attracted considerable media attention with its skeptical conclusions about the historical Jesus. Gerd Lüdemann's The Resurrection of Jesus (1994) had presented a detailed case for explaining the resurrection appearances as psychological phenomena (hallucinations born of grief and guilt). John Dominic Crossan and other scholars had argued that the disciples' experience of the risen Christ was 'spiritual' rather than bodily. Wright's book was a deliberate, comprehensive, scholarly response to these positions, engaging them on their own historical and methodological terms.
Structure and Argument
Part 1 (approximately 200 pages) surveys ancient pagan understandings of death and afterlife - Homer, Plato, the mystery religions, Roman popular belief - demonstrating that 'resurrection' (bodily rising from the dead) was not part of pagan thought: the pagans hoped at best for the survival of the soul, not the resurrection of the body. This establishes that the Christian resurrection claim was a genuine novelty in its cultural environment, not borrowed from pagan sources.
Part 2 (approximately 200 pages) surveys Jewish beliefs about death and afterlife - from the Hebrew Bible's relative silence about the afterlife (Sheol, Ecclesiastes) through the development of resurrection belief in Second Temple Judaism (Daniel 12:2, 2 Maccabees 7, 1 Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls) to the diverse positions of Pharisees, Sadducees, and other Jewish groups in the first century. This establishes the Jewish background of resurrection belief and shows that when the disciples proclaimed Jesus's resurrection, their Jewish contemporaries would have understood them to be making a specific and definite claim about a bodily event.
Part 3 (approximately 200 pages) examines the New Testament resurrection texts in detail: Paul (1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8, Philippians 3), the four Gospels, and Acts. Wright argues that the resurrection tradition shows remarkable consistency across independent witnesses on two central claims: the tomb was empty, and the risen Jesus appeared to his followers. He argues that no other hypothesis - legend, hallucination, spiritual vision, theft of the body, wrong tomb - adequately explains both of these facts simultaneously.
Part 4 concludes with the historical and theological implications: what would have to be the case for the early Christians to make the specific claims they made? Wright argues that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the most historically plausible explanation of the evidence - not merely a matter of faith but of responsible historical reasoning.
Key Arguments
Wright's most distinctive methodological contribution is his careful analysis of the vocabulary of resurrection in Second Temple Jewish literature. He demonstrates that anastasis and egeirein consistently referred to bodily rising - the reunion of soul and body after death - and never to mere spiritual survival. When Paul writes that Christ 'was raised' (egerthe), his Jewish readers would have understood him to mean precisely bodily resurrection, not spiritual survival. The burden of proof lies with those who argue for a purely spiritual interpretation.
His treatment of the 'empty tomb' tradition is particularly important. He notes that the empty tomb narratives appear across all four Gospels and that the earliest Jewish counter-claim - 'his disciples came and stole the body' (Matthew 28:11-15) - implicitly concedes that the tomb was empty. An occupied tomb would have been far easier to produce as refutation of the resurrection claim. The fact that no ancient source claims the body was still in the tomb is historically significant.
Critical Reception
The scholarly reception has been broadly positive among New Testament historians, including many who do not share Wright's theological commitments. Markus Bockmuehl, Richard Bauckham, and Craig Evans praised it as a definitive work. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, the leading evangelical resurrection scholars, incorporated it into their own work.
Critical responses came primarily from two directions. Historical critics (Gerd Lüdemann, Robert Price, Bart Ehrman) argued that Wright's methodology - combining historical reasoning with theological conviction - was not genuinely historical in character. Process theologians and liberal Christians objected to the book's insistence on bodily resurrection as the irreducible core of Christian faith.
Theological Significance
The book's theological significance is its demonstration that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not a matter of faith alone but of historical reasoning - that responsible historical inquiry, far from undermining the resurrection claim, actually provides grounds for affirming it. This argument, made with unprecedented scholarly thoroughness, has permanently transformed the scholarly debate.
Wright's related argument - that resurrection in early Christianity was not merely a past event confirming Jesus's identity but the beginning of God's new creation, the 'first fruits' (1 Corinthians 15:20) of the universal resurrection - has substantial implications for Christian eschatology, ethics, and cosmology. If the resurrection is the start of new creation, then Christian life is not an escape from the material world but its anticipated renewal.
Legacy
The book is the standard scholarly reference on the resurrection in modern New Testament studies. It is assigned in graduate theology courses worldwide and is the foundation of every subsequent scholarly discussion of the resurrection. Its popular companion, Surprised by Hope (2008), extended the new-creation eschatology for a general audience. Wright's influence on evangelical theological scholarship in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is comparable to that of Barth on academic theology in the mid-twentieth century.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study 1 Corinthians 15 in its entirety (the resurrection of Christ and believers), Luke 24:36-53 (the appearance narratives), John 20:1-29 (Mary and Thomas), Acts 2:14-36 (Peter's proclamation), Romans 8:9-25 (the Spirit and new creation), and Daniel 12:1-3 (the Jewish background to resurrection belief).
Further Reading
- Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (2004) - the standard popular-level defense of the resurrection using the 'minimal facts' approach. - Dale C. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (2005) - a careful, skeptical engagement with the resurrection evidence by a distinguished scholar who ultimately reaches agnostic conclusions. - N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008) - Wright's own popular distillation of the theological implications of The Resurrection of the Son of God.