I normally don’t do book reviews unless i’ve read it multiple times or if I find the book to be too good to simply ignore. Well in this case it is the latter because I can quite honestly say that The resurrection of the son of God by N.T Wright is the best non-fiction book I have read. There is a lot to go over and I want others to read it for themselves so I will keep each part very brief. First the book is over 700 pages long so a review of it will be tiny compared to the book itself and each part is roughly 200 pages each and only part 5 is less than 100 so it’s clear that N.T. Wright made a lot of good points in detail.

The first part of the book addresses if the history of the resurrection should even be investigated. After All isn’t it the case that Christians must only believe by faith and not evidence? Well despite what skeptics think christians for the most part do believe because of the evidence and the resurrection can either be confirmed (If it’s the best explanation of the data) or falsified (if the body of Jesus were found). Whatever the cost N.T. Wright makes the point clear that we can in fact test the history of the bible to see if it stands up to criticism. In that there should be no a priori epistemological barrier for why we shouldn’t be able to figure out history in 1st century israel. History is not physics or chemistry where you repeat the same thing over and over again until you have (scientifically proven) something. It must pick up the evidence left behind and find the best explanation of what happened.

Next Wright dives into the beliefs of life after death in paganism and other beliefs at the time. Many believed in a disembodied afterlife and they didn’t think a “resurrection” was possible since they didn’t think death could be reversed in our physical bodies. Of course the early christian belief in resurrection as N.T. Wright points out was in fact a bodily one and not a spiritual one. In fact part 2 and 3 goes over almost (if not all) the cases in which a spiritual resurrection could be argued and N.T. Wright does an excellent job of showing why this understanding of resurrection is completely wrong. He goes through every major passage and shows that there is no way it cannot be referring to a bodily resurrection. This was one of the big arguments in the book and so anyone that denies the conclusion of that I would recommend they check it out.

In part 4 Wright gets into the resurrection itself and goes through the main 4 gospels as well as other passages to go through the similarities in the main storyline. This of course leads up to the final part of the book that argues that from all this the best explanation is that jesus did in fact rise from the dead in a bodily resurrection. The empty tomb and the “appearances” from eyewitnesses all show the best explanation is in fact the one that was reported on. I am not going to lay out his argument here since again I want readers to decide for themselves but he makes the case for the resurrection based on what we know resurrection meant, the eyewitnesses that saw him in his resurrected body and the empty tomb. He basically makes a historians case for the resurrection like how historians would infer any other event from the past (the best explanation of the data). He also is aware that any alternative theory of the resurrection can be made up to avoid the conclusion but so far no one has provided a better explanation than the resurrection itself.

Anyways I hope to one day read it again and learn more as I think there is a lot of information that I might have “missed” from when I first read it but I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to study the historicity of the resurrection.