Paul and the Bodily
Resurrection of Jesus
"When Jesus' followers claimed that he alone rose from the dead--bodily, that is, not as a disembodied spirit or ghost--Jewish listeners were skeptical. Jesus' disciples, however, thought that his resurrection signaled the beginning of a general resurrection of all believers in the near future" (VOC:53).
Posted: July 19, 2005
Updated: May 1, 2006
It has frequently been claimed that Paul taught that Jesus only resurrected ‘spiritually,’ meaning Paul did not believe Jesus rose bodily from the dead. However, this is a myth. It has also been claimed that people only saw apparitions of Jesus, causing them to conclude Jesus had risen from the dead. However, this claim is also inaccurate. Both of these claims will be evaluated below.
1. The Transformed Resurrection Body of Jesus:
The New Testament scholar C.F.D. Moule wrote:
“ Let me begin, then, by a brief statement, largely in Paul’s own words, of his salient views, before I take up each of them in turn and try to elucidate them in relation to the views of his contemporaries or near contemporaries.
( 1 ) Paul believed in the possibility of an ultimate transformation of the soma (body). Our soma, as it is at present (or, if that is too temporal a phrase, let us say our soma in some respects or if left to itself is a ‘death-laden’ body (Rom. 7:24); it is mortal (Rom. 8:10), perishable (1 Cor.15:53, 1 Cor. 15:42, 1 Cor. 15:50), merely ‘animal’ (1 Cor.15:44,46); it is a humiliating and humiliated body (Phil. 3:21); it constitutes a condition in which we groan (2 Cor. 5:2,4). But it is capable of being transformed into an imperishable, a spiritual and glorious body (1 Cor. 15:42-44; 1 Cor. 15:51).
( 2 ) If one asks, How is it to be thus transformed? Paul’s answer is a wholly Christ-centered and a wholly moral one. If transformation is to take place at all, it is because God, by his glorious power, raised up Christ from among the dead, and, therefore, is able to raise up our mortal bodies also (Rom. 8:10; 1 Cor.15:22; Phil. 3:21; Col. 3:1-4); it is because Christ, thus raised, is able to transfigure our humiliating and humiliated bodies into bodies like his own glorious body; it is part of God’s triumphant act of conquest in Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:4; 1 Cor. 15:26)" (SPD:108).
The New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders wrote:
“ As in 1 Thessalonians, he (Paul) equated the future state of the living with that of the dead in Christ: they will all be transformed.
Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. (1 Cor. 15:51-52).
The change would make them like the risen Lord. ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Christ]’ (1 Cor. 15:49). Just what would this be like? Paul understandably had difficulty in saying precisely what the transformed body would be. He was convinced that he had seen the risen Lord (1 Cor. 9:1), and thus it follows that the ‘man of heaven’ was both visible and identifiable. On the other hand, there had been (and would be) a real transformation. ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven’ (1 Cor. 15:50). The chief characteristic of bodies of flesh and blood is that they are perishable, and the perishable cannot inherit what is imperishable (1 Cor. 15: 42, 50).
Paul, that is, thought of the resurrected Jesus neither as a corpse which had regained the ability to breathe and walk nor as a ghost. He regarded Jesus as ‘first fruits’ of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20) and thought that all Christians would become like him. He denied that the resurrected body would be the ‘natural’ body, but maintained that it would be a ‘spiritual’ body (1 Cor. 15:44-46). ‘Not a natural body’ excludes a walking corpse, while ‘spiritual body’ excludes a ghost (which would be called in Greek simply a ‘spirit,’ pneuma). Positively, there would be continuity between the ordinary and the resurrected person, as there was in the case of Jesus. To express this, Paul used the simile of seed, which, when planted, is in one form, but, when grown, in another (1 Cor. 15:36-38).
The degree to which he thought of ‘transformation’, rather than either disembodiment or resuscitation, can be seen in his discussion of ‘putting on’ immortality. Thinking of those who would still be alive when the Lord returned, he wrote that the ‘perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. This would fulfill the Scripture, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ (1 Cor. 15:53f.). He used the same imagery in 2 Corinthians 5. The living are in an ‘earthly tent’, and they wish not to be ‘unclothed,’ ‘but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life’ (2 Cor. 5:4). The metaphor changes from ‘tent’ to ‘clothing’, but the meaning is nevertheless clear. Immortality is ‘put on’ and replaces mortality. Paul was not thinking of an interior soul which escapes its mortal shell and floats free, nor of new life being breathed into the same body, but again of transformation, achieved by covering mortality with immortality, which then ‘swallows’ it.
Conceivably, had Paul known about atoms and molecules, he would have put all this in different terms. What he is affirming and denying is clear: resurrection means transformed body, not walking corpse or disembodied spirit. We can hardly criticize him for not being able to define ‘spiritual body’ more clearly. His information on the topic was almost certainly derived entirely from his experience of encountering the risen Lord-an experience which he does not describe in his letters. That experience led him to the statements we have seen, which stop a good deal short of being a full definition. We cannot describe the experience on his behalf and then improve on his definition of the resurrected body, and we must be content to know only what he thought” (P:28-30).
The New Testament Commentator Anthony C. Thiselton wrote:
“The raised body provides conditions for the meaningful experience of receiving and giving this creative love. As J. Cambier reminds us, v. 44 sums up the transformation which is introduced in vv. 37-38-‘what you sow is not the body which shall be…God gives…’-and turns neither on two ‘compositions’ nor on two ‘states,’ but on ‘two tendencies, two forces…’ Paul is concerned with how the new, raised ‘body’ is ‘oriented’; and ‘the principal enemy’ which he targets is the reduced existence of the soul-shade in the ‘Sheol-Hades’ of both Jews and Greeks. Hence he leads on to the triumph of v. 55: ‘Where, O death, is your victory?’" (TFEC:1280).
The New Testament Scholar Bart D. Ehrman wrote:
“Sometimes this chapter is misunderstood by modern readers as an attempt to prove that Jesus was raised from the dead, for example, by citing a group of ‘witnesses’ in verses 5-8. In fact, Paul is not trying to demonstrate to the Corinthians something they don’t believe, he is reminding them of something they already know (see vv. 1 and 3), that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead.”
For Paul, Jesus’ resurrected body was a glorified spiritual body, not like the mortal flesh that we ourselves are stuck with; but just as important, it was an actual body that could be seen and recognized (15:5-8, 35-41). Paul’s point is that the exalted existence that Jesus entered involved the total transformation of his body ( 15:42-49, 53-54). It was not some kind of ethereal existence in which his disembodied soul was elevated to the realm of divinity; his was a bodily resurrection. The reason this matters becomes clear in the context of Pauls’ response. There were some in Corinth who were saying that there was no such thing as the resurrection of bodies from the dead ( 15:12).
Paul spends most of chapter 15 demonstrating that since Christ was raised bodily from the dead-and since he is the ‘first fruit’ of the resurrection, as all of the Corinthians came to believe when they accepted his gospel message-then there is going to be a future resurrection of the dead when Christians come to participate in Christ’s exalted status, that is, when they themselves are raised in glorious immortal bodies (15:12-23, 50-55)” (TNT:322).
2. Sightings of a Bodily-Resurrected Jesus:
The New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan wrote the following:
“Resurrection is not the same as apparition. The question is not whether apparitions and visions occur or how they are to be explained. The ancient world presumed their possibility; for example, the slain Hector appears to Anchises at the end of the Trojan War and the start of Virgil’s Aeneid. The modern world does too; for example, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV judges them not as mental disorders but as common characteristics of uncomplicated grief. That might be especially so, then and now, after the sudden, tragic, or terrible death or disappearance of a beloved person. Even if, therefore, no Christian texts had mentioned apparitions or visions of Jesus after his crucifixion, we could safely have postulated their occurrence. But, and this is the point, apparition is not the same as resurrection or anything like enough to invoke its presence” (EJ:259).
The New Testament scholar N.T. Wright wrote:
“As this carefully ambiguous translation shows, the verb ophthe, occurring three times here (1 Corinthians 15:5-7), and then again with reference to Paul in verse 8, can in principle be translated either way. Some, wanting to stress the ‘visionary’ nature of the appearances, and hence to insert the thin end of a wedge with which to force a ‘non-objective’ understanding of Easter, have emphasized the meaning ‘appeared’, and the parallel uses in which the subject is a non-bodily ‘apparition’, rather than someone or something within the normal space-time universe. The fact that it is followed in each case by a dative indicates that ‘appeared to’ may be marginally preferable. However, the verb is passive, and its normal meaning would be ‘was seen by’.
The use of ophthe is in fact quite varied, as a glance at the LXX (the Septuagint) concordance will show. The word occurs 85 times, of which a little over half refer either to YHWH, or YHWH’s glory, or an angel of YHWH, appearing to people. The remaining 39 occurrences refer to people appearing before YHWH in the sense of presenting themselves in the Temple; or to objects being seen by people in a straightforward, non-visionary sense; and to people ‘appearing’, in a non-visionary and unsurprising way, before someone else. The classical background does not give much more help; the passive of the verb is not found in Homer, and the usage elsewhere more or less mirrors what we have seen in the LXX. It is in fact impossible to build a theory of what people thought Jesus’ resurrection appearances consisted of (i.e. whether they were ‘objective’, ‘subjective’ or whatever-these terms themselves, with their many philosophical overtones, are not primarily helpful) on this word alone. The word is quite consistent with people having non-objective ‘visions’; it is equally consistent with them seeing someone in the ordinary course of human affairs. Its meaning in the present context-both its meaning for Paul, and its meaning in the tradition he quotes-must be judged on wider criteria than linguistic usage alone” (RSG: 323).
The New Testament scholar N.T. Wright also wrote:
“‘Meetings’ with Jesus, likewise, could by themselves have been interpreted in a variety of ways. Most people in the ancient world (though not so many, it seems, in the modern world) knew that visions and appearances of recently dead persons occurred.1 No doubt there are all kinds of explanations for things like that. Various theories can be advanced about the psychological state of the person who experiences them, though the evidence seems to suggest that in some cases at least the phenomena are clearly related to actual events (for instance, the recent death, unexpected, otherwise unknown and so far unexplained, of an absent loved one) rather than simply the projection of feelings of guilt or grief.2 But that such ‘seeings’, even such ‘meetings’, occur, and that people have known about them throughout recorded history, there should be no question.
Such things were not, perhaps, quite as frequent as some recent writers have tried to make out. Visions of this sort, in addition, did not normally involve physical contact, let alone watching the recently departed person eating and drinking; indeed, accounts of visions of the dead sometimes made it clear that this is what did not happen. But such ‘meetings’, even if they did seem to involve seeing, touching, or even eating and drinking with the recently dead person, could, at a stretch, have been interpreted as ‘angelic’ visitations of the kind the disciples thought they were having from Peter in Acts 12. They might have provided a very special case, perhaps even a very encouraging and heart-warming case, of the generally known and widely recognized possibility of short-lived encounters with something that seemed to be the dead person. The response to reported visions of this kind might of course have been, in the ancient as in the modern world, to question the mental balance, or perhaps the recent diet, of the witness. As we have remarked more than once, the ancient world as well as the modern knew the difference between visions and things that happen in the ‘real’ world. But visions did occur.
However, precisely because such encounters were reasonably well known (the apparently strong point of those who have recently tried to insist that this is what ‘really happened’ at Easter) they could not possibly, by themselves, have given rise to the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. They are a thoroughly insufficient condition for the early Christian belief. The more ‘normal’ these ‘visions’ were, the less chance there is that anyone, no matter how cognitively dissonant they may have been feeling, would have said what nobody had ever said about such a dead person before, that they had been raised from the dead. Indeed, such visions meant precisely, as people in the ancient and modern worlds have discovered, that the person was dead, not that they were alive.3 Even if several such experiences had occurred, if the tomb was still occupied by the dead body they would have said to themselves, after the experiences had ceased, ‘We have seen exceedingly strange visions, but he is still dead and buried. Our experiences were, after all, no different from the ones we have heard about in the old stories and poems” (RSG: 689-691).
1. A classic study is that of Jaffe 1979. Whatever interpretations are put on such events (the book is in the ‘Jungian Classics Series’), the phenomena which it reports are obviously widespread, though not frequently spoken of in a world where people are afraid of being thought gullible or the victims of fantasies.
2. Ludemann 1994, 97-100 makes experiences of this type central to his explanation of the initial ‘visions’ of Peter and Paul.
3. See e.g. Chariton, Call. 3.7.4f. Jaffe 1979 provides plenty of modern examples, typically of people who suddenly see a friend or family member in the room with them and subsequently discover that they had died at that moment.