They couldn't have thought that Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead in the sense of Resurrection because Jesus and John were contemporaries. Rather, what people meant was that Jesus had taken on the mantle of John the Baptists ministry just as other had thought that John the Baptist had taken on the mantle of Elijah (WLC).
FROM AN E-MAIL BY N.T. Wright in response to my asking if he thought Craig's answer above was plausible:
Yes: Herod’s answer is at first sight a puzzle. But the evangelists who report it are also among those who very clearly support the standard Jewish view of resurrection. I think the best answer is that Herod, to be honest, was unlikely to be using language very precisely. He surely did know of Jesus and John – it was an insecure monarch’s daily preoccupation to keep an eye on possibly dangerous men and movements – but having beheaded the one and then getting the other one it’s the kind of bluster someone like him might say. I once spoke in St Mary’s College Baltimore and the Principal, over-enthusiastically, said it was like hearing Raymond Brown come back from the dead. My comment was not that his theology was faulty but that I wondered what Brown had done wrong to be reincarnated as an Anglican bishop. It is likely that Herod was not well informed about the precise nuances of Pharisaic belief about resurrection, and that just as Josephus (who certainly was well informed) could represent the doctrine in ways that conformed more to pagan beliefs in eg reincarnation, so Herod could have thought of ‘resurrection’ as a kind of ‘reincarnation’. One way or another, I don’t find the passage troubling. Mark, after all, goes on in ch 9 to say that the disciples, faced with Jesus’ warning not to tell people about the transfiguration until the Son of Man had been raised from the dead, were puzzled as to what this ‘rising from the dead’ might mean. One person in the middle of history? Surely not…
Hope this helps
Tom Wright
Prof N T Wright
St Andrews
FROM AN E-MAIL BY N.T. Wright in response to my asking if he thought Craig's answer above was plausible:
Yes: Herod’s answer is at first sight a puzzle. But the evangelists who report it are also among those who very clearly support the standard Jewish view of resurrection. I think the best answer is that Herod, to be honest, was unlikely to be using language very precisely. He surely did know of Jesus and John – it was an insecure monarch’s daily preoccupation to keep an eye on possibly dangerous men and movements – but having beheaded the one and then getting the other one it’s the kind of bluster someone like him might say. I once spoke in St Mary’s College Baltimore and the Principal, over-enthusiastically, said it was like hearing Raymond Brown come back from the dead. My comment was not that his theology was faulty but that I wondered what Brown had done wrong to be reincarnated as an Anglican bishop. It is likely that Herod was not well informed about the precise nuances of Pharisaic belief about resurrection, and that just as Josephus (who certainly was well informed) could represent the doctrine in ways that conformed more to pagan beliefs in eg reincarnation, so Herod could have thought of ‘resurrection’ as a kind of ‘reincarnation’. One way or another, I don’t find the passage troubling. Mark, after all, goes on in ch 9 to say that the disciples, faced with Jesus’ warning not to tell people about the transfiguration until the Son of Man had been raised from the dead, were puzzled as to what this ‘rising from the dead’ might mean. One person in the middle of history? Surely not…
Hope this helps
Tom Wright
Prof N T Wright
St Andrews
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