This is Not the Resurrection You're Looking For
Resurrecting Easter would be a better book if it knew what it wanted to be. Art history? A husband-wife travelogue? A mystery novel à la Da Vinci Code?
Unfortunately, it never manages to decide.
In it, Jesus Seminar rockstar John Dominic Crossan and his wife Sarah travel (literally) to the ends of Christendom to tell the story of the emergence of the iconography of the Resurrection. He writes, she takes the pictures.
This important topic has received surprisingly little attention from art historians. Apart from Anna Kartsonis' magisterial 1988 Anastasis: The Making of an Image, there are virtually no monographs on the subject. The Phaidon Press series of anthologies on the art of Holy Week—Last Supper, Crucifixion, and Descent (i.e. deposition from the cross)—does not, surprisingly, devote a volume to the art of the Resurrection. Somehow, when it comes to art history, it's always Nativity, never Pascha.
So I praise the Crossans for perceiving this lack and attempting to address it. It's a pity they couldn't do so more successfully.
Oh, they do manage to chronicle the emergence and development of Christendom's two major visual representations of the Resurrection, with some attention to various dead ends and roads-not-taken along the way. Unfortunately, the art-historical material is interspersed almost randomly with pointless tales from their travels, including local-color details about what time they caught the cab and what T-shirt the driver was wearing. The quest—and narrative—are driven by forced cliff-hanger questions about the iconography (“What happens to the universal resurrection tradition in Eastern Christianity during that same fateful period?”) that are meant to seem urgent but mostly fall flat.
Having created a false dichotomy—disproved by their own visual evidence—of Western/Individual Resurrection versus Eastern/Collective Resurrection, the meandering quest peters out in the last few chapters and ends with a blindingly obvious contrast of Resurrection iconography with an image of Soviet tanks in Red Square.
Well, duh, and happy Easter to you, too.
Visually, the book is stunning, although you may want to keep a magnifying glass handy. The presentation of the beautiful photographs, however, is severely handicapped by the lack of accompanying captions. If you want to know the whens, whys, and wherefores of the images you see, you'll just have to wade through the accompanying text to find them. It's almost not worth the work.
Resurrecting Easter is a groundbreaking book.
If only it were a better one.
John Dominic Crossan & Sarah Sexton Crossan, Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision (2017). Harper One.