In the context of Jewish-Christian disputation, the denial of resurrection can therefore be a potent weapon in the armamentarium of the Jewish disputant. It provides them with an element of religious justification for their own continued existence in the face of the extraordinarily powerful pressure to assimilate to the Christian host culture: the Christians, vulnerable to a crude superstition about a god-man who came back from the dead, have perverted the Hebrew Bible by introducing something altogether foreign into it. In contrast, the Jews, by adhering to their Bible's belief in the naturalness of death, are the true and exclusive heirs to the Scriptures and, what is more, exemplars of a position altogether in line with modern scientific thinking. By excluding the resurrection of the dead from Judaism, modern Jews can appear to the world and more important, to themselves as simultaneously adhering to a way of thinking that is as old and particular as the Hebrew Bible and as new and universal as modern science.
Jon D. Levinson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies, Harvard University, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel.
In contrast to Professor Levinson's Judaism of the modern Jew, everything Paul says in his epistle to the Roman's is centered around, and based on, the belief that a Jewish man died (as all men died before him), and was resurrected as no man before or since has been raised from the dead. Paul is claiming that the fact of the resurrection of a man from the dead focuses the attention of all men on the brokenness of a natural law, and a natural god, who overplays his most powerful threat for lawbreakers by trying to apply it to all men equally when its original purpose is to set apart the sheep who follow natural law from the goats who don't.
Paul's victorious proclamation is that this natural law, and natural god, went one man too far and has therein spilled the beans and upset the apple-cart calling to the attention of all men the brokenness of a law and or god who overplays his most powerful weapon: death. Paul is saying that even the myth of Jesus' resurrection from the dead (even if that were all it is) makes thoughtful men think about the dichotomy above: why is a law designed to enforce natural law applied to all mankind as though all mankind is by its nature a lawbreaker at birth? If natural law is a good, and the lawful man is good, and the lawbreaker is bad, why do the good and the bad die one and all?
Death is either a natural part of nature's laws, and thus has no moral calling or purpose in contrast to Romans chapter one (in which case the Tanakh and Judaism become problematic for their threats against lawbreakers the ultimate being death), or death is a tool used to enforce natural law against lawbreakers such that its universal application stands out like a sore thumb or up like another thumb-like appendage.
The disciples are asked to work towards their salvation not in the presences (parousia) but in the absence (apousia) of the master: without either seeing or knowing, without hearing the law or the reason for the law. Without knowing from whence the thing comes and what awaits us, we are given over to absolute solitude.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death.
In context, the quotation above comes within Derrida's pointing out Paul telling the disciples to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). They know the Master is the one man too far concerning natural law's application of the death sentence, so that blessed among all men, the disciples have had the veil pulled back on natural law and the natural god now that he's overstepped the viable constants of nature's law of death for the lawbreaker by breaking the most perfect manifestation of one who didn't break the law.
Though the disciples may be full of fear and trembling at the revelation of something so disturbing and unhinging for Jew, Judaism, and the Tanakh (and its traditions), Paul, alone, is trembling with joy and excitement knowing, unlike the other disciples, that this overstepping of the law, for the first time ever in the history of the the universe, is the revelation of something hidden since the foundation of the world (Ephesian 1:4) and revealed only now, with the death sentence of Jesus of Nazareth (John 19:30): this universe is finished, it's purpose fulfilled. It was and still is merely a facade, the "old" testament. The old law is a fore skene covering up the fact that we are all just prisoners here, but not of our own device.
Without the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, it would be the case that natural law and the nature god (the latter being the judge, jury, and executioner of all mankind), would rule forever and ever no man the wiser. Only the death of a truly innocent man, and his subsequent resurrection, opens the eyes of all mankind to the phantoms and ghosts barely glimpsed in the shadows and dust of the old testament when the light is shown through it at the right time and at the right angle.
In Paul's eyes the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, far from rescinding the law, utterly fulfills it in a way it did not itself perceive or foresee. For Paul, those who understand the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are blessed beyond all men since it will be they alone who will, in due time, start applying the knowledge that natural law was being misapplied by a questionable judge and jury of that law, and provably so, since a mere mortal, Paul, was made able, through the death of Christ, to see deeper into the reality of the world, and the meaning and purpose of the law, than the god made judge, jury, and executioner of that law.
Through Jesus' death and resurrection, Saul of Tarus, become Paul, became more powerful than the god of the old testament, the writer of the natural law, who was its judge and executioner. The death of Paul, at the behest of the god of the old testament, the natural law, far from extinguishing Paul's Gospel, merely sped its dissemination, in written form, to the very ends of the earth where it took root in the soil of the
goyim and began to lead to the Popperian scientific revolution based not on trust in the empirical presentation of the laws of nature, but based, as Popper claims, on precisely the opposite: utter lack of faith in the natural laws, and the natural perceptions, the observational experience, they foist on the unsuspecting:
What prevented Anaximander from arriving at the theory that the earth was a globe rather than a drum? There can be little doubt: it was observational experience which taught him that the surface of the earth was, by and large, flat. Thus it was a speculative and critical argument, the abstract critical discussion of Thales theory, which almost led him to the true theory of the shape of the earth: it was observational experience which led him astray.
Conjectures and Refutations, p. 139.
John
