But the most important thing that happened to me as I finished working on the material of these lectures, clarifying a lot and filling in many gaps, was the appointment of me as a visiting lecturer at the MacDonald Chair at Harvard Theological Seminary for the fall semester in 1999. Unexpectedly, I got the opportunity to devote not two or three lectures to the topic that concerned me, but as many as twenty, and my listeners were highly erudite and intelligent and, in the best sense of the word, critical students. Naturally, with each lecture I became more and more convinced of the need for an even more thorough and large-scale development of the problems covered in the curriculum. My previous plan to write a small book based on the materials of these lectures, as I expected, failed. But on the other hand, I received a favorable opportunity to lay the foundation for work on the book, which is now held in the hands of the dear reader. In this regard, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my colleagues and friends at Harvard, and in particular to Al MacDonald, the founder of the department, whose personal support and constant interest in my work inspired me to great achievements. Thus, although the book in its eventual form was quite different from what had been conceived at Yale, the seeds sown then sprouted and bountifully harvested at Harvard. I am sure that my friends in both of these most illustrious schools will not make much objection to the indissoluble bond which has now been established between them, particularly because of my book.

II

This book has reached its current size in part because, as I was working on the material and working through vast amounts of secondary literature, it always seemed to me that all sorts of unsympathetic concepts concerning key ideas and key texts had become undeservedly widespread. And to eradicate them, as is the case with various weeds that have flooded a wonderful garden, very often the only way left is to dig them up by the roots. In particular, it has become almost commonplace in New Testament studies that the early Christians did not think of Jesus as rising from the dead in the most bodily way; at the same time, Paul, who is constantly quoted, is presented as the main witness to what is now fashionable to call the "spiritual" view of this problem. This seems to me to be an extreme misconception (although researchers do not like to say that some of their colleagues are frankly wrong, I will still dare to use the term "delusion" as a designation of opinions that I think are incorrect, in view of the vital importance and seriousness of the problem), which has become too widely accepted to remain calm, and not to take up a shovel and eagerly begin to dig up this multitude of weeds at the roots. and then proceed to sow a noble and useful crop; Such an adequate remedy against weeds, in my opinion, is an alternative approach rooted in the historical soil. The reader may be satisfied that I do not give many examples of various "fallacies" about Judaism and the New Testament in different places. I preferred to turn to the primary sources and let them shape the structure of the book, rather than allow endless idle talk about the "clear formulation of the question", which most often does not contribute to a constructive search for an answer. (The first part of the IBP provides the necessary background for further discussion around the main problems and methods.)

The book would take on incredible dimensions if I entered all the details of the discussions or set myself the task of quoting at least once every researcher with whom I express agreement or disagreement. In the same way, it could be doubled if I were to analyze all sorts of interesting and original, but misleading, solutions to this or that problem.

Many secondary points related to the main problems of the book are mentioned only in passing, if at all. Those who are now engaged in the study of the Shroud of Turin, for example, may be annoyed with me for the fact that it is never mentioned here.2 I am acutely aware that I deal with some discussions in more detail than others, and that in some cases it would be useful to discuss my own, perhaps insufficiently reasoned, judgments more thoroughly with colleagues and friends. Such judgments are especially common in Part II, which is devoted to Paul, which I will try to fill in as much as I can in the next volume of the series. I saw my most important task in this book to write out the most valuable, in my opinion, arguments that seemed to me vitally important for clarifying the main problem of the study. In contrast to the previous ones in the same series, I regard the present work as a monograph of a very general character, containing a single line of reasoning, the scheme of which I sketch in the first part. And although the form of this book can hardly be called original, its main purpose is to explore the way and manner in which the concept of the "resurrection", rejected by the Gentiles, but accepted by a considerable number of Jews, was reproclaimed and reinterpreted by Christians; As far as I know, the solution to such a problem has not yet been posed by anyone either before me or after. Thanks to this approach and the structure of the work, a significant part of the material, previously inaccessible to a wide audience, became available to the public. Therefore, I very much hope that the book will not only make a certain contribution to further discussion on the problem, but will also contribute to the historical understanding and justification of the Christian faith.

A number of questions that may arise in connection with the style and content of the book are dealt with by me in the prefaces to the NTPG and the IBP. However, I would like to answer one fresh and frequently asked question here. People of the period of antiquity, who were neither Jews nor Christians, I call, following many ancient historians, "pagans"; I did not intend to offend anyone or express my disdain; I just think it's quite acceptable and convenient to use this concept in relation to many different peoples. Naturally, this term here has an ethical (etic) and not an emic (etic) meaning3 (i.e., this term has never, at least today for sure, been used by anyone as a self-designation, but contains an indication of people alien in spirit – in this case, alien to Jews and Christians). With this understanding, this term has a purely heuristic meaning.

Despite the concerns of some of my readers, I continue to write the word "god" with a lowercase "b" in most cases in this book. I do not do this at all because of a lack of reverence for God. Such a spelling should remind both me and the readers that in the first century (as well as in the twenty-first) the question was not whether you believe in "God" (as if all people have a clear idea of the subject matter), but rather which god out of the vast number of gods are we talking about, and what can be said about him at all? When the Jews or Christians of the first century spoke of "the god who raises the dead," they meant that this god, the creator god, the god who made the covenant with Israel, was the God proper, the one and only to whom such a name could be applied. However, most of their contemporaries did not think so, so it was not for nothing that the first Christians were called "atheists"4. Even some New Testament scholars can easily be deceived into making false assumptions about who the name refers to, and it is precisely this kind of misunderstanding that this book seeks to dispel. When I expound the views of the early Christians, quoting from early Christian writings, I often capitalize the word "God" to emphasize that for the writers, the god they speak of, worship, and invoke was, from their point of view, the only true God. In the final chapters of the book, I begin to use a capital letter to express my own position on the question of God (as I have done in the corresponding chapters of the IBP); The motives for this, I am sure, will become clear in the course of reading. I really hope that this kind of letter balancing act will not confuse anyone. An alternative to this is to try to adapt the standard designation of the divine name to our present consciousness, which, I believe, is a refusal to provoke the interest of most readers in the most important questions, the solution of which is the subject of the books in this series.

In addition, there is one more important thing to mention in the same field, as I have spoken of this in more detail in a special essay. In this book, I invariably try to avoid contrasting the "literal" understanding of the resurrection with the "metaphorical" one. I understand what people mean when they use these expressions, but it does not help to clarify the point. The concepts "literal" and "metaphorical" indicate how words and the things denoted by the words are related, but they do not indicate things in themselves. For the latter problem, more appropriate terms might be "concrete" and "abstract." The phrase "Plato's doctrine of ideas" literally refers to abstract reality (in fact, it turns out to be a double abstract reality). The phrase "fat spoon" refers metaphorically, or even metonymically, to a concrete reality, namely to a cheap roadside café. Words, used metaphorically or literally, can tell us almost nothing on their own about the reality to which they somehow point.

When the ancient Jews, Gentiles, and Christians used the word "sleep" to refer to death, it was a metaphor that referred to a very specific state of affairs. We often use similar language, but in reverse: for example, we say that someone who sleeps very soundly is "sleeping like a dead man." From time to time, as in Ezekiel 37, the Jewish author uses the language of "resurrection" to metaphorically describe a specific political situation—the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity. This prophetic metaphor, while simultaneously denoting a specific event, contains a connotation on the idea of a new creation, a new Being. As we shall see shortly, Christians developed their own metaphorical language, which also correlated with a very concrete reality. In most cases, Jews and Gentiles who talked about the resurrection – whether justifying it (as the Pharisees did) or denying it (as the Sadducees and the rest of the Greco-Roman pagan world did) – used a concept that indicated, of course, a specific event, but only as hypothetical or expected in the future, when some Jews thought it was going to happen. the general bodily resurrection of all dead people. And although the words that were used for this (e.g. Greek. anastasis), could have a number of other meanings (anastasis originally denoted the action of restoring, lifting or placing [on a pedestal] some thing or person), when applied to the topic discussed in the book, they were used in a certain meaning - denoting the act of "resurrection" from the dead. It turns out that the usual meaning of the language associated with "resurrection" correlated with a very specific state of affairs in reality. One of the major questions discussed in this book is whether the early Christians, who were innovators in so many ways, used the language and imagery of the resurrection in the same way as they had done before them, or in some other way.