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M. J. Edwards, La Résurrection chez les Pères. Edited by J.-M. Prieur. Pp. 279. (Cahiers de Biblia Patristica, 7). Strasbourg: Université Marc Bloch, 2003. isbn 2 906805 06 8. Paper n.p, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 296–298, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flj023
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Extract
This is a collection of thirteen erudite, if miscellaneous, articles, the first five of which review the patristic handling of the great biblical texts which pertain to the resurrection, while the Fathers themselves supply the titles of the other eight. In Raymond Windling's ‘Le Psaume 23 (24) et son utilisation pour la thème de la résurrection’, Justin Martyr is said to have been the first to discover a prophecy of Christ's resurrection and exaltation in the enthronement of the king of glory. In the question of the gatekeepers, ‘who is this king of glory?’, Justin detects an allusion to the veiling of Christ's divinity by his flesh. Had Windling's definition of the term ‘pères’ been sufficiently broad to include not only Tertullian, Origen, and Didymus but the authors whom they stigmatized as heretics, he might have felt obliged to relegate Justin to second place after the Naassene sermon, in which Psalms 24 and 22 are juxtaposed to show that Christ's abasement in the body was the precondition of victory in the heavens. The failure of the archons to recognize Christ is a common motif in Gnostic literature; so too is the supersession of the hebdomad—the mundane realm, which is subject to fate and temporal vicissitude—from the ogdoad, or everlasting sabbath of the Father, which is noted by Windling here as an anomaly in the exegesis of Didymus. By contrast, Enrico Norelli in ‘La Réception de 1Thess 4.13–18’ sets Tertullian against the Gospel of Thomas, concluding that neither was wholly at one with Paul but that each was able to adduce the words of the Pauline text to characterize the other as a man ‘without hope in the world’. Clement of Alexandria's depiction of the Gnostic ascent through the hebdomad to the ogdoad, which is not expressly said to commence with a carnal resurrection, is adjudged to have been borrowed not directly from his Valentinian neighbours but from a reservoir of ‘spéculations protochrétiennes’ (p. 80). This may be a peremptory conclusion, but Norelli produces evidence to corroborate his theory that Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, and the Didache were all privy to an eschatological teaching which was transmitted by presbyters independently of the Pauline corpus. Origen's originality lies, as Norelli observes, in his conjecture that the ‘dead who sleep in Christ’ are those who await regeneration, while the ones who are taken up living are the few who have already been perfected in this world. In Maurice Canavet's article, ‘L’Exégèse d’Ezekiel 37.1–14’, Origen is commended for a reading which elicits from the text a promise not only of individual resurrection, prepared and foreshadowed by the renewal of virtue within, but also of the corporate adoption of God's people into Christ—a notion taken up with picturesque embellishment by Gregory of Nyssa. Neither can vie in imagination with Hilary of Poitiers, for whom the reconstitution of the dry bones represents the consummation prophesied by Adam when he hailed Eve as ‘bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh’.
