What did Paul actually teach would happen after death?  It was not that after you died your soul would go to heaven or hell.  Paul taught a future physical resurrection of your *body*, to have eternal life here on earth.  I started explaining that in my previous post.  I continue here: Paul’s argument for a coming resurrection of the dead.  Again, this is taken from my discussion in Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

 

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Paul’s Teaching of the Resurrection

To make his case (for a physical resurrection of all people at the end of time), Paul begins the chapter (1 Corinthians 15)  by summarizing what the Corinthians came to believe when they first joined the Christian community, that Christ died for sins and was raised from the dead, and after his resurrection he was seen not only by his disciples but by a large number of people, including 500 at one time and, finally, by Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:1-8).  All these people actually saw Jesus.  That’s because he was physically raised.

For most Jews, like Paul, “resurrection” always and incontrovertibly meant   “resurrection of the body.”  It involved bodies coming back to life.  This Jewish notion of resurrection stood, therefore, in contrast to the Greek view of the immortality of the soul.[1]

Paul wants to insist that those who are “in Christ” will have the same experience Jesus did.  If Christ was raised (bodily!), so will they be.  Conversely, if they are not to be raised, then Christ must not have been.  And if Christ was not raised, he did not bring salvation, and those who thought they had been made right with God in fact will not be saved (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).

But for Paul (and his original converts) Christ has been raised and for that reason he can be called the “first fruits of the resurrection” (1 Corinthians 15:20).  This is an agricultural image.  The part of the harvest brought in on the first day (the “first” fruits) is like the harvest to come thereafter.   The wheat harvested on day one is, in substance, no different from that on day two.  Jesus thus shows what will happen to his followers.  Just as he came back with a bodily substance, so too will they.

Some of the Corinthians raised an obvious objection to the idea of resurrection, which Paul states in order to answer.  Over the ages, others have had similar difficulties: My body is the source of all my problems!  I may not even like my body.  And you are saying that I have to live in it forever?  That’s ridiculous.  The body grows old, gets injured, sickens, dies, and corrupts  We have to live eternity like that?  And even more: which body, exactly, is raised?  The one I had as a teenager?  At the height of my physical prowess?  As it is when I am old and infirm?  Really?  And will it have all the same physical defects, injuries, and wounds?  Will blind people be blind forever?  The paralyzed paralyzed?  Those born with birth defects forced to have them for eternity?  As the Corinthians mockingly stated the objection: “How are the dead raised?  With what kind of body do they come?”   (1 Corinthians 15:35).

In their own historical context, these first-century Corinthian opponents of Paul– especially those born and raised in Greek culture with ideas that had trickled down from Plato – may have had a deeper problem:  for them, the body was made of coarse, gross stuff that had to be dispensed with so the more highly refined and immortal soul could live on.   Paul, though, has a different idea.   He does not at all believe in the immortality of the soul.  But when he speaks of the future resurrection, he is also not referring to the simple revivification of the dead corpse, brought back to life from a Near Death Experience.   For Paul there are bodies and then there are bodies.  The resurrected body he imagines will be utterly and completely transformed.  It will be a different kind of body.

Paul argues that the human body that goes into the ground is like a “bare kernel” of some kind of grain that grows into a plant.  What grows is intimately tied to and related to what went into the ground; but it is also vastly different.  When you plant an acorn it doesn’t grow into a forty-foot acorn, but into an oak tree.    So too the human.  When the body comes out of the ground it is transformed into “the body that God gives it, as he wishes” (15:38).   That is because “there are heavenly bodies, and earthly bodies” and they have different kind of glories, just as there is “one glory for the sun, another glory for the moon, and another for the stars; even the stars differ in glory from one to the next” (15:40-41).

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I conclude this mini-thread in my next post, where I deal with the most widely-misunderstood verse in all of Paul’s writings:  “Flesh and blood will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”  That means their eternal life will be *spiritual*, not *bodily*, right?  Nope.  Wrong.

 

[1] As with all things Jewish, there are of course isolated exceptions, as seen, for example, in the book of Jubilees (23:30-31), as my friend and perennial corrector Joel Marcus has pointed out to me.