10/07/2020 – Paul and the Resurrection of Jesus

What happened to the body of Jesus? Hang with us. Hang with us? That’s awful. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. In my last video I mentioned a few things about the resurrection of Jesus that I realized needs further explication. Some professors of religion who teach Christianity begin the first day of class by stating that if you had a time machine and traveled back to Greece in the first century, and dropped in to observe a gathering of small group of the apostle Paul’s followers meeting in one of the cities in which he started small Christian communities, such as Corinth, don’t assume you would have even the slightest idea what was going on.

It is easy to assume, based on familiarity with how Christianity is believed and practiced today, that the earliest forms of Christianity would have had some basic likeness to what we know today; obviously not the architectural style of modern churches since they met in people’s houses, but the essential content of how they worshipped. This might be the case for Christianity four or five hundred years later, when the liturgy, creeds, and certain patterns of doctrines were taking a more definite shape – especially in forms of Christianity that were under the control of the church at Rome. But during Paul’s time, Christianity was very different. Modern Christians today often impose their views of modern Christianity back onto the letters of Paul found in the Bible without realizing how different that view of the world actually was. Paul’s Christianity can be understood only against the worlds of mysticism, magic, miracles, prophecy, and the supernatural manifestations of the spiritual world – both angelic and demonic – so alien to our modern scientific worldview.

And in addition to that, they believed largely in a three-tiered universe with “gradients” in each tier. There were different levels of realms both above and below this realm with different types of beings in each realm, such that, for instance, the concept of god wasn’t black or white, but more like a continuum of higher and lower levels of “god-ness.” Let’s unpack how this impacts the resurrection of Jesus from the perspective of the apostle Paul.

One big question some people have is: What happened to the body of Jesus? Before we get to that, we have to first talk about some Greek and Hebrew differences as the notion of the resurrection of the dead is a distinctly Jewish way of thinking about life after death. But even today, people confuse the idea of resurrection with the notion of immortality of the soul which was more of a Greek idea. These are two different things.

Greek Dualism

In the Greek view, death was not the end of the person but a release of the soul from the restrictions of the body. At death, the soul descended into Hades, the mythical realm of the dead, where it was judged, reborn to another human life in a cycle of reincarnation, and ideally, after eons of time, could ascend to higher celestial realms completely free from the restrictions, contaminations, and imperfections of the lower physical world. Death and life in this view sort of became reversed – death released the soul to “life,” while birth imprisoned the soul as a kind of “death,” since for Greeks, the physical existence was somewhat constraining and tortuous for the soul. There was this dualism between the body and the soul which became the standard belief in Greco-Roman culture for centuries.

The Ancient Hebrew View of Death

The Jewish concept of the resurrection of the dead, largely from the book of Daniel, was adapted by the Christians and put at the center of their faith. The dead would live again at the “end of days,” rising up from their graves in newly created bodies. This view of the afterlife, unique to Jews and later Christians, developed out of a distinctively different understanding of the human person, the nature of death and the importance of a body. It was quite different from the Greek view.

Like the Greeks, however, the ancient Hebrews had a concept of an underworld of the dead that was called “Sheol,” sort of like the Greek “Hades,” but “Sheol” was primarily a metaphor for the grave.

Psalms 88:10 says, “Dost thou work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise thee?” In this verse, the dead in Sheol are mere shadows of their former embodied selves; lacking substance they are called “shades.” [Y’all gonna be a shade someday.]

Or in Ecclesiastes 12:7, the body returns to the dust, the life-breath or spirit returns to God, who gave it, and the “soul” of shade of the former person rests in the underworld.

It may seem strange to Christians today, but nothing is ever said about any kind of a blessed afterlife, much less the notion of an immortal soul leaving the body and joining God in heaven. No such concept existed in ancient Judaism.

There were only two ideas of the resurrection of the dead. The first involves a rare case where a prophet or holy man resuscitates the corpse of one who has recently died, so that the person delays death, but eventually grows old and dies like everyone else. The other concept affirms that at the end of time those in Sheol, or Hades, will come forth, newly embodied in a kind of transformed, immortal form.

There are only three resuscitations mentioned in the Hebrew Bible – Elijah raises a child (I Kings 17:17-22), Elisha raises a child (2 Kings 4:32-37) and Elisha again (2 Kings 13:21), when Elisha dies and is buried another corpse touches his body and lived and stood up.

In the New Testament there are five resuscitations. The daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:41-43), the funeral procession of young man (Luke 7:11-17), Lazarus (John 11:43-44), Dorcas after Peter’s prayer (Acts 9:36-41), and Eutychus falling from a third-story window revived by Paul (Acts 20:9-12).

Most scholars agree there is only one unambiguous reference to a general resurrection of all of the dead in the entire Hebrew Bible, (Daniel 12:1-3). In this story, Daniel writes at a time, in the mid-second century BCE, when Jews had chosen to die at the hands of their Greek conquerors rather than give up the practice of their religion (1 Maccabees 1:41-64).

Here we see emerging a new Jewish understanding of both life and death. The older idea, found in much of the Hebrew Bible, was beginning to unravel. But if Daniel’s vision of the future were true, then any question about God’s justice would become moot since the dead would be raised at the end of time and all would face final judgment. Knowing the history of how the idea of the resurrection of the dead developed is important.

So, during the time of Jesus, the groups of Jews called the Pharisees and Essenes accepted the view of the resurrection of the dead from Daniel while the Sadducees rejected it. The Sadducees represented the aristocratic classes and were more interested in wealth and political power. I wanna do the joke so bad. It’s pretty sad, you see…Sadducees…sigh…

By the time the Jesus movement developed, the resurrection of the dead at the end of the age was understood as the release of the dead from Sheol, or Hades, clothed in a new spiritual body no longer subject to death or decay. The idea of resuscitating corpses, or reassembling decaying flesh and bones long perished or turned to dust, did not even enter the picture in their mindset.

The Jewish notion of resurrection of the dead never meant disembodied bliss, or even “life after death,” but always a re-embodied life. This is quite different from the Greek idea of the immortal soul being freed from the mortal body and experiencing heavenly bliss.

A decade or two after the execution of Jesus by the Roman government, the apostle Paul essentially joined these two understandings – the Greek view and the Jewish view. Take a look at 2 Corinthians 4:16-18. One would be hard-pressed to find a more concise expression of Greek dualism:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

This passage is not talking about a physical body. Look at the next chapter.

In 2 Corinthians 5:1-4, Paul writes:

“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”

Here Paul draws upon a mixed set of metaphors, contrasting a tent with a permanent dwelling, and old clothing with new clothing. What does he mean? To die is to be in a naked state, unclothed, without a proper “housing” for the body, whereas to be resurrected from the dead is to be reclothed, or rehoused, with a new spiritual body.

As a Pharisee, Paul must have had some general notion of resurrection of the dead as involving a reembodied spiritual self, but as a Christian he has developed his understanding much further. He is convinced that Jesus’ resurrection is actually the proof that this new cosmic process of transforming physical beings into a higher spiritual form for everyone is already happening. Christ’s resurrection as a life-giving spirit launches the process of the new creation.

Christ’s manifestation in power – both in public and to the cosmos – is tied to the general resurrection of everyone, thus to the coming of the Kingdom at the End. But the point of Jesus’ own resurrection appearances, according to Paul, was not to assert his divine status, but to inform this select community of Jesus-following insiders of what time it was on God’s clock. The end marked by the general resurrection of everyone was coming soon.

Now we can go back to the question about the body of Jesus. There are two important points to be made here:

First, since Paul emphatically makes the point in 1 Corinthians that the resurrected Christ dwells in a spiritual body as a life-giving Spirit, the Christ that Paul claimed to have “seen” was not Jesus’ physical corpse resuscitated or reanimated.

Second, since Paul equates his experience of “seeing” Christ with the experiences of the Jerusalem apostles who were before him, in Paul’s view of the matter, their experiences were identical – they all saw the same risen Christ in his glorified spiritual body.

Paul clearly believes in a bodily resurrection, or more properly, a re-embodied resurrection. It is one thing to say the dead will be raised bodily and it is quite another to insist that the same bodies, long ago turned to dust and ashes, or buried at sea, must somehow be reconstituted in order to experience resurrection.

Take a quick look at the key example of John the Baptist. The Gospel of Mark records the beheading of John by Herod Antipas. John’s disciples took his body and put it into a tomb. Herod hears reports about Jesus and thought he might be John raised from the dead, (Mark 6:14) but Herod did not investigate John’s tomb to check if it was empty. Why not? Because the idea is, if Jesus was somehow John the Baptist resurrected, this “new” John would have been reclothed in a new body, not John’s old buried body coming alive again. Get it?

The bottom line is this: Jesus’ physical body died in a Roman crucifixion. If Paul’s understanding of resurrection is the accepted view, then the empty tomb accounts in the later Gospel narratives of Mark and Matthew were originally understood as spiritually metaphorical. The apparent claims of a post-resurrection Jesus as a reanimated corpse in the gospels of Luke and John were written many decades later indicating that the interpretation of the resurrection concept had changed by that time and they had rejected a key concept in Paul’s view. Lastly, Jesus’ newly created spiritual body immediately after the resurrection first mentioned by Paul, is entirely a theological discussion and not an historical one other than indicating that this was what he believed.

And with that, I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.