View from the inside of a tomb looking out.

Orientation

In the eyes of Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus was a unique event which had never before happened in history. Other stories in the Bible of people coming back to life after death are properly understood as raisings, revivals, reanimations, or resuscitations of the physical body, not resurrections. These include the raising of the widow's son (1 Kings 17:17-24), the raising of Jairus' daughter (Luke 8:40-42, 49-56), and the raising of Lazarus (John 11:38-44).

The first distinguishing feature of a resurrection is that the person experiences a complete psychosomatic transformation. This likely explains why so many of Jesus' close associates do not immediately recognize him after the resurrection, because his body and person have altered from when they had seen him last. In a resuscitation the person continues to have the same body and appearance he or she had before death.

A second distinguishing feature of resurrection is that death no longer has any power; one lives always. In a resuscitation, by contrast, one is vulnerable to dying yet once again. Presumably the widow's son, Jairus' daughter, and Lazarus all died a second time later on in their lives.

Third, the resurrection of the body, a Jewish idea which originally appeared late in the Old Testament era, is also different from the Greek notion of the disembodied soul that separates from the body at death and floats upward to some ethereal, eternal sphere. Texts such as 1 Corinthians 15 make it clear that resurrection includes the body, not just the soul or spirit.

A fourth distinguishing feature is that God resurrects without human intervention. Resurrection happens only when God takes the initiative and is accomplished solely by God's power.

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