Were Jews Ready for a Resurrection?

By Dr. Nicholas J. Schaser

July 31, 2024

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The concept of resurrection factors into a popular Christian rationale for why Jesus’ messiahship did not receive wider Jewish support in the ancient world. Whereas first-century Jewish expectation envisioned a universal resurrection at the end of days, the argument goes, Jews of Jesus’ day were not ready for one man being raised from the dead in the middle of history. Thus, the earliest Christian movement diverged from Judaism and constituted a bridge too far for many of Jesus’ contemporaries. While this understanding of Jewish eschatology is common in Christianity, there is no reason to think that ancient Jews would have been surprised by a singular resurrection in the first century.

First, Israel’s Scriptures attest to individuals being raised from the dead before the birth of Jesus. For instance, the prophet Elisha raises a Shunammite woman’s son from the dead (2 Kgs 4:32-37). After Elisha sees the boy “lying dead (מת; met) on his bed” (4:32), he stretches himself upon him and “the child opened his eyes” (4:35). Years later, following the same prophet’s death, a corpse is “thrown into the grave of Elisha, and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he lived (ויחי; vayehi) and stood on his feet” (2 Kgs 13:21). Based on stories like these, any first-century Jew familiar with their Scriptures would have been open to the possibility of one person’s resurrection—the fact that Yeshua’s disciples “did not understand” (Mark 9:32) when their teacher alluded to his own says more about their lack of biblical acumen than a lack of Jewish openness to reanimation.

Even the Jewish literature after the time of Jesus attests to isolated resurrection of a single figure. According to the Babylonian Talmud (c. 600 CE), after Rav Kahana died, “the next day Rabbi Jonathan… went up to his [burial] cave… asked for mercy [from God], and raised him (ואוקמיה; ve’oqmeh) [from the dead].” (b. Bava Qamma 117ab). Thus, well-informed Jews of Jesus’ day were well aware of God’s ability to reach into history for resurrective purposes, whether at the end of history or in the middle of it. Though there would have been various reasons why a first-century Jew might have been dissuaded from following Yeshua, the plausibility of his resurrection would not have been one of them.