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Intimations of Immortality in the Thought of Jesus: The Ingersoll Lecture for 1959

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

Henry J. Cadbury
Henry J. Cadbury
Affiliation:
Haverford, Pennsylvania
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Extract

The historic Ingersoll lectureship on the Immortality of Man requires of the lecturer both some legitimate extension of its terms and some necessary limitation of his field. One is justified in supposing that the pious layman who planned the foundation was not thinking in highly technical terms, but like laymen of our day was thinking of a widely shared belief in the post mortem survival or revival of those who die. If he had wished to specify the indiscriminate persistence of the individual as a philosophical tenet of the nature of man, he could well have used the more familiar term — the immortality of the soul. On the other hand, if he had wished to be faithful to the wording of much of the Bible and to the Church's creeds, he would have spoken of the Resurrection of the Dead.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 1960 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1960

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References

1 Titles of books by Rufus M. Jones, 1943, and Paul S. Minear, 1946, respectively.

2 Cf. most recently C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 1958, Chapter 5.

3 See the excellent unpublished paper, The Biblical View of Time by James Muilenburg.

4 Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. John, Gospel of St.

5 Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34. The parallels say “on the third day,” and, in Matthew, “be raised.” In general resurrection is expressed in the New Testament as “from the dead” (κ νεκρν) not “of the dead.”

6 R. R. Niebuhr, Resurrection and Historical Reason, 1957.

7 See my Peril of Modernizing Jesus, 1937, pp. 59 f., 61–63, with notes.

8 John Knox, The Death of Christ, 1958, Chapter 5.

9 Matt. 10:28. Cf. Sharman, H. B., The Teaching of Jesus about the Future, 1909, pp. 267–270.Google Scholar

10 The ethical implications of such sanction are well discussed by Wilder, A. N., Eschatology and Ethics in the Teaching of Jesus, Revised Edition, 1950.Google Scholar

11 Cullmann, O., “Immortality of the Soul and Resurrection of the Dead: The Witness of the New Testament,” Harvard Divinity School Annual Lectures and Book Reviews, No. 21, 1955–6Google Scholar; published also in French, and separately in 1958 in English (London: Epworth Press; New York: The Macmillan Co.).

12 Jeremias, J., The Parables of Jesus, Eng. Trans., 1954, pp. 15 f.Google Scholar

13 It is noteworthy how often students of this field while admitting that Jesus shared the usual views on resurrection and general eschatology have concluded that “he felt very little interest in them.” So, for example, Kümmel, W. G., Promise and Fulfilment, Eng. Trans., 1957, p. 92.Google Scholar Cf. the older statements, as in B. H. Streeter, Immortality, 1917, pp. 122 f.

14 The material is of course extensive. I refer only to two essays. For the literary sources on the Essenes see Smith, Morton, Hebrew Union College Annual xxix, 1958, 273–313Google Scholar; for the absence thus far of convincing evidence of resurrection belief from Qumran see the unpublished thesis of George Wesley Buchanan, Drew University, 1959, The Eschatological Expectations of the Qumran Community, Chapter 5, note 4.