Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

Is “the gospel in the gospels” simply a matter of the bare fact of Jesus’s death, which Paul and others would then interpret as “good news” even though nobody saw it like that at the time?

Paul’s mystical experience is the encounter with the Word of God, with the very person of Jesus. Jesus invites Paul to share in his life by seeing Paul’s life through the narrative shape of Jesus’s death and resurrection.24

That, perhaps, is why traditional atonement theologies have, bizarrely to my mind, failed to draw on the gospels for their primary source material. (Yes, Paul has plenty to say on the subject, but when “biblical” theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong.)

This, then, appears to be the Gospel’s final word upon the new life that is given at Easter: that with it comes the possibility of seemingly impossible reconciliation, the healing of wounds that normally could never be healed, and the hope of beginning anew precisely when all hope would seem to have been extinguished.