Review of Resurrection: Investigating a Rabbi from Brooklyn, a Preacher from Galilee, and an Event That Changed the World
(avg. read time: 3–6 mins.)
I had planned to review another book today: Willi Marxsen’s Jesus and Easter. But after the disappointingly negative review of the last book, I did not want to follow that up with a review of a book I found so little of value in. Instead, we will be reviewing this book:
Brown, Michael L. Resurrection: Investigating a Rabbi from Brooklyn, a Preacher from Galilee, and an Event That Changed the World. Lake Mary, FL: Charisma, 2020.
I have read some articles from Brown over the years, but this is actually the first book by him that I have ever read. And I must say that I was impressed, especially for a popular-level work.
I was especially interested in this work in light of my work on comparative analysis (in my dissertation and in a series based on it for this Substack). Brown’s work is a comparative project, as he notes in his introduction: “Thankfully, we now have a unique opportunity to revisit the question of Jesus’ resurrection in light of the claims made about Rabbi Schneerson, otherwise known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Perhaps by comparing what happened to these two movements—the movement that proclaimed Yeshua as Messiah and the movement that proclaims the Rebbe as Messiah—after the deaths of their leaders, we can shed light on what really happened two thousand years ago” (xi–xii). The scope of comparison is actually broader than that, but we will get to that matter later. I simply find this to be a fascinating and helpful way of approaching the subject of Jesus’s resurrection.
After all, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement is a curious case of messianism among the Jews that thus provides a parallel, in some ways, with the Messianic Jews and Christianity more broadly. This movement has a history that Brown reviews informatively with plenty of citations in the first two chapters with a focus on its history during and after the life of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Rebbe (mainly among insiders) or the Lubavitcher Rebbe (mainly among outsiders). He was thought to be the Messiah by this movement (though he did not declare himself to be such), but a crisis was presented by the fact that he died before accomplishing the messianic mission. Brown helpfully reviews both insider and outsider perspectives on the response of the Lubavitchers to the Rebbe’s death, including those who claimed that death could be part of the messianic mission, as long as it was followed by resurrection. Of course, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement did not go that path. They did not claim that the Rebbe was resurrected. They believe he will partake in the eschatological resurrection, but those who insist that he is the Messiah simply think that he for now continues on in a different, spiritual mode of existence. He is concealed for now, but he will eventually be revealed.
In these chapters and the following ones, Brown shows good familiarity with rabbinic texts and later Jewish texts as well. He does well to show that, just as with Second Temple Judaism, there is not one singular vision of the Messiah (or Messiahs) or one way of thinking about messianism. Judaism is home to considerable diversity of thought. He thus shows the number of conceptual resources appealed to over the years, including of reincarnation/gilgul (ch. 3; esp. 29–38).
Chapter 4 goes beyond the main focus by looking at some other claimed Messiahs. One that I have seen mentioned in other contexts is the variously spelled seventeenth-century figure known Shabbetai Zevi. His is one of the most baffling true stories you will ever hear, and unlike Rabbi Schneerson, he not only proclaimed himself to be Messiah, but he also spoke of himself as “the Lord your God” (51). Ultimately, though, he was forced to convert to Islam while in Istanbul (thereby becoming Aziz Mehmed Effendi). While this proved devastating for some who thought him to be the Messiah, others of his followers, known as the Dönmeh/Dönme, converted with him, at least formally (that is, they remained crypto-Jews while outwardly presenting as Muslims). The Sabbateans and their descendants persisted long after Zevi’s death, even in some small measure to this day. Brown reviews how they explain their Messiah’s actions in more detail while acknowledging its complexity, but in short it concerns a notion of “redemption through sin” (52) that was also exploited egregiously by the messianic pretender Jacob Frank (57–60). And yet, while curious explanations are given for both Schneerson and Zevi by their followers, neither of them were claimed to have been resurrected already. Nor were they claimed to have been seen by a multitude of their followers. Indeed, the Rebbe was expected to rise and did not, whereas Jesus’s earliest followers had a hard enough time accepting that Jesus would die that they did not take seriously until later the predictions that he would individually rise again, so that they did not necessarily expect it and had to be reminded of what he said.
While Brown does briefly interact with claims of cognitive dissonance and hallucination as explanations for the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and he does review predictions of and references to Jesus’s resurrection in the context of the changes in the disciples (particularly in chs. 5 and 6), the burden of the last few chapters of the book is to address issues of what Jesus’s resurrection means in light of what he taught, especially about himself. And this is crucial to what makes this book stand out. After all, as Pinchas Lapide has demonstrated (and as a Muslim could demonstrate), it is entirely possible for someone to believe that Jesus’s resurrection happened without actually changing their larger theological framework, provided that the theological framework allows for resurrection. But Jesus’s resurrection is not a standalone event. Even in the simple ancient declaration that “God raised Jesus from the dead,” each significant word is loaded with content and context to be unpacked.
First, he notes effective miracles done in Jesus’s/Yeshua’s name to this day. He has a nice brief survey (83–89), and my old professor Craig Keener has gone over evidence of other miracles quite extensively in a couple books. Second, he briefly presents some of the scriptural framing that Jesus and the NT writers used for making sense of his death and resurrection. Third, he examines how the OT/Tanakh provides precedents with how it speaks of the Angel of the Lord for what the NT and Christians say of Christ. Fourth, perhaps his most interesting chapter is addressing the question of whether the resurrection was a test of faith for the Jews. This is especially problematic to claim because
throughout the Bible, only God raises the dead. Satan cannot do it. Demonic spirits cannot do it. Human beings cannot do it. Why, then, would God perform an act that only He could perform to back the message of a false prophet? This would be similar to God parting the sea or sending fire from heaven or speaking from another mountain (like Sinai) to back the message of a false teacher…. In the same way, for God to raise a false teacher from the dead (never to die again) to test His people would be to undermine His uniqueness. (132–33)
There is more to his argument for this point, but that was a particular highlight. He then closes the book with points about how a “two ways” notion of Judaism for the Jews and Christianity for the gentiles cannot coherently work, as well as how Jesus’s resurrection changed the world.
I thus recommend this book both as an introduction to the messianic examples he cites (as well as to resources about the same) and as a resource for articulating the theological framework of Jesus’s resurrection.