Resurrection Reconsidered - by Gregory J Riley (Paperback)

About the Book

Gregory J. Riley surveys the variety of conceptions of life after death in the Greco-Roman world. Demonstrating how the oldest Christian perspective on the resurrection of Jesus was consistent with concepts of Jews and Greeks in antiquity, he shows how it is possible to see the Gospel of John as a corrective not of some lost Gnosis but of ideas preserved in the Gospel of Thomas.

Book Synopsis

This study centers on a protracted debate within early Christianity concerning a foundational aspect of the Gospel of Thomas and its related literature: the concept of the body and resurrection. It traces the background of this idea in the Semitic and Greco-Roman world, and its expression in the Thomas literature as a whole: the Gospel of Thomas, Book of Thomas, and Acts of Thomas. But the inspiration for the study, and its main focus, is the controversy between the two closely related Christian communities of Thomas and John, between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John, on the issue of resurrection, expressed in John most clearly in the story of Doubting Thomas.