Reformation Christianity (People's History of Christianity) Book

This is a great book. Smith examines the earlies resurrection traditions in detail. He argues there are basically two kinds of traditions -- appearance traditions and disappearance traditions. The first is related to post-mortem visions of Jesus the second leads ultimately to the empty tomb stories. The two are not connected. Tombs were often empty in antiquity and the lack of a corpse in a tomb was not unexpected. Generally when a body was missing it was assumed that the God's had taken the body and often this is associated with some sort of vindication/exhaltation. Smith argues this is what we see in the pre-pauline texts. The disappearance tradition, Smith links to Q 13:35 "You will not see me" to the origin of the disappearance tradition. He's unwilling suggest a chronological order, acceding that perhaps the passage was inspired by a "rumor" of a missing body rather than arguing for the development of the tradition based on the text (though not eliminating this as a possibility either). Still I found this work exciting and conducts a non-theological attempt to work through the data in a thoughtful and insightful way.