R2210

ON RESURRECTING JESUS

Friday 18 June to Sunday 20 June Residential: £185, Non-residential: £123

Please arrive by 6pm on Friday. Course ends with lunch on Sunday.

Well known religious author Prof. David Catchpole returns to Ammerdown to continue his quest for the historical Jesus, focusing this time on the death of Jesus and what followed.

He writes: “The tragic ending of the life of Jesus in the year 30 CE invites careful weighing of the historical evidence concerning his approach during the fateful preceding days. And the truly astonishing vitality generated by whatever it was that happened two days later also calls for rigorous examination, as a movement that might have been expected to peter out suddenly achieved both survival and such theological dynamism as would enable it within just two decades to touch the world.”

Between the unqualified dishonour, unbearable anguish and the apparently unprecedented restoration of Jesus and his movement, there stand many historical questions. What equipment did the followers of Jesus have to enable them to cope with his demise? Had he, or had he not, encouraged them to link his fate to the providential plans of God? Was he properly buried and, if so, what can we say about the situation of his burial place? And what about the transformation: Did Jesus simply rise in their hearts? Was it just a matter of feeling forgiven after the trauma of a death in which those who had followed and then forsaken him were, in a sense, implicated? What is meant by talk of his ‘having been seen’, and how do such claims have light thrown on them by other human experiences of the nearness of beloved people who have died? And the biggest question of all: why choose ‘resurrection’ language in the first place to convey a sense that he was once again alive?

After all the historical questioning, and indeed the answering, however provisional it may be, the way in which ‘resurrection’ may touch human experience in the here and now ultimately deserves pride of place. That is what we will give it in an effort to pin down what it means for the Christian Church to be nothing less than ‘the community of the resurrection’.

David Catchpole worked for his doctorate on ‘The Trial of Jesus in Jewish Historiography’. He spent the bulk of his professional career at the Universities of Lancaster and then Exeter, where he was Professor of Theological Studies. Since 1998 he has been Scholar in Residence at Sarum College in Salisbury .www.sarum.ac.uk He is the author of several books, most recently ‘Resurrection People: Studies in the Resurrection Narratives of the Gospels’ (DLT: 2000) and ‘Jesus People: The Historical Jesus and the Beginnings of Community’ (DLT: 2006).

R2210

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