Description
The accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances in the four gospels were never intended to be understood in narrow historical categories. They are an interpretation, not a literal description, of this seminal event (notionally 9th April 30 CE), for the simple reason that, apart from the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, there are no eyewitnesses to it. St Paul, writing c. 50, is our first canonical attestant to the resurrection, based on his mystical experience of the Risen Jesus, though some women and Peter were most likely the original recipients of a similar ecstatic vision.
In the final book of his “Jesus trilogy”, Peter Keenan, in this thought-provoking study, explores how Jewish traditions – particularly the enriching genre of midrash – have shaped the evangelists’ accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Midrash works by employing earlier stories and traditions to elucidate later situations: “on the third day”, for example, first appears in the Book of Genesis (22:4; cf. 1Cor. 15:4).
About the author
Peter Keenan is a former secretary to the Committee for Catholic-Jewish Relations of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. His The Birth of Jesus the Jew: Midrash and the Infancy Gospels was published in 2021 by Columba Books, followed by The Death of Jesus the Jew: Midrash in the Shadow of the Holocaust, in 2023. A second, much expanded, edition of The Birth of Jesus the Jew, with a new subtitle (‘Midrash and the first Christmas’), is in preparation.