"The new covenant beliefs of the early Christians meant that, in hailing Jesus as 'Son of God', they believed that Israel's God had acted in him to fulfill the covenant promises by dealing at last with the problem of evil. One standard Jewish analysis of evil, represented for instance by the Wisdom of Solomon, did not believe that the created order was itself evil, but that human beings, by committing idolatry, distorted their own humanity into sinful behavior and courted corruption and ultimately death. Death- the unmaking of the creator's image-bearing creatures- was not see as a good thing, but as an enemy to be defeated. It wast the ultimate weapon of destruction: anti-creation, anti-human, anti-God. If the creator God was also the covenant God, and if the covenant was there to deal with the unwelcome problem, that had invaded the created order at its heart and corrupted human being themselves, it was this intruder, death itself, that had to be defeated. To allow death to have its way-to sign up, as it were, to some kind of compromise agreement whereby death took human bodies but the Creator was allowed to keep human souls- was no solution, or not to the problem as it was perceived within most second-Temple Judaism. That is why 'resurrection' was never a redescription of death, but always its defeat."
-N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (731-732)
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