Jesus's Resurrection and the General Resurrection in Acts

(avg. read time: 17–33 mins.)

One of the overarching foci of my planned series on resurrection in the NT will be how the various writers link Jesus’s resurrection with the general resurrection. If possible, I would also like to write at least one article on such a link. Particularly, the preference for now is that I would like to write an article on this link in Acts.

There are now a couple of book-length treatments on the theology of resurrection in Acts. Kevin Anderson’s ‘But God Raised Him from the Dead’ remains the go-to resource on the subject, but Brandon Crowe’s volume The Hope of Israel is also worth reading, and it is perhaps the better one to serve as an introduction to the scholarly landscape. But here I wish to explore further what Anderson in particular has noted about the link of Jesus’s resurrection to the general resurrection, though I proceed in a different way than he has.

The link is implicit, never as explicit as Paul makes the link in 1 Cor 15. But I think the link is important to understanding the theology of resurrection in this book as something Luke indicates is present in the Church’s theologizing in the early days. It needed to be stressed in 1 Corinthians because of Paul’s interaction with the resurrection deniers, but Luke leaves it implicit perhaps simply because he is content with leaving it assumed. Whatever exactly the case may be, we can still see the influence of this connection in Luke’s text at several points. Some of these points are from a time before Paul, but it is notable that we also see it in the text covering Paul’s journeys, thereby showing what he will bring to the surface in Corinth.