This really is a bit of a puzzle. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus says concerning the hour and day of God’s judgment of Israel and the concomitant vindication of the Son of Man that it will be as in the days of Noah. In the midst of life catastrophe will come (Matt. 24:36-39). At the parousia of the Son of Man there will be two men working (presumably) in a field. One is taken and one is left. Two women are grinding grain at the millstone. One is taken, one is left.

The early apostolic testimony was that Jesus was “raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3). So the standard belief has been that the resurrection of the Messiah was prophesied in the Old Testament—somewhere, it’s never quite clear where, probably in the prophets.

The Old Testament, of course, was not written with Jesus in mind, so there is no prediction of his resurrection, as such. But the thought is found in a small number of texts that the dead will be raised and come to life again. How are they to be understood? And what can we infer from them, if anything, about the resurrection of Jesus?

Thom Stark’s book The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When it Gets God Wrong is an attack on the doctrine of inerrancy—or perhaps better, an attempt to reframe the problem of biblical errancy. In chapter 8, which is the only chapter I’ve read so far, he argues that Jesus proclaimed that “the world as we know it” would end within a generation. He comes to the “paradoxical conclusion” that if the Gospels are right, then Jesus was wrong. “In the inerrantist universe, this is surely a paradox of cosmic proportions.”

I have addressed the troubling longer term historical implications of my reading of the New Testament in a number of posts, some of which are listed below. But the question has come up again, so here’s another go at outlining a response to the charge that Constantine and Christendom were a very poor realisation of the kingdom of God.

In a new comment on an old post entitled “The battle between theology and history for the soul of the church: 24 antitheses” Matthew makes a sensible observation about the theological process. It comes, I guess, in response to the tendency I have to polarise “theology” and “history” as hermeneutical methods, as approaches to reading the New Testament: theological interpretation sets out with the aim of confirming or developing already established convictions about what constitutes “truth”; historical interpretation proposes to read the texts with a more or less open mind about what they “meant” in their original context. Resolving that tension is a key challenge facing the church today.