436
From where did Jesus rise?
All: From the dead. “He is risen from the dead” ([Matt. xxviii, 7]). “It behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead” ([Luke xxiv, 46]). “He was risen from the dead” ([John xxi, 14]).
According to the Evangelists Jesus rose, not from the grave—not from the place where the bodies of the dead were deposited—but from the lower world—from the realm of the dead—where the shades of the departed were supposed to repose. Regarding this Dr. Hooykaas says:
“Let us begin by considering what that word ‘resurrection’ really meant, whether applied to Jesus or to others. Later representations, down to our own times, have regarded it as equivalent to a rising from the grave; but the question is, what it meant in the faith and preaching of the Apostles, in the genuine, original, primitive tradition that Jesus had risen. Now, ‘resurrection’ means elsewhere a return from the realm of shades to the human life on earth; and Jesus too had left the underworld, but not, in this case, to return at once to life upon the earth, but to be taken up provisionally into heaven. Originally the resurrection and ascension of Jesus were one. It was only later that the conception sprang up of his having paused upon earth, whether for a single day or for several weeks, on his journey from the abyss to the height.
“We may, therefore, safely assert that if the friends of Jesus had thought as we do of the lot of those that die, they would never have so much as dreamed of their Master’s resurrection or ascension. For to the Christian belief of today it would be, so to speak, a matter of course that Jesus, like all good and noble souls—and indeed above all others—would go straight ‘to a better world,’ ‘to heaven,’ ‘to God,’ at the instant of his death; but in the conception of the Jews, including the Apostles, this was impossible. Heaven was the abode of the Lord and his angels only; and if an Enoch or an Elijah had been caught up there alive, to dwell there for a time, it was certain that all who died, without exception, even the purest and most holy, must go down as shades into the realms of the dead in the bowels of the earth—and thence, of course, they would not issue excepting by ‘rising again.’ And this is why we are never told that Jesus rose ‘from death,’ far less ‘from the grave,’ but always ‘from the dead’” (Bible for Learners, vol. iii, p. 463).