One of the most important issues for the apostle Paul is the future resurrection of the dead.  It is also one of the must misunderstood topics among readers of Paul today, who often claim that Paul had just the *opposite* view to the one he had.  And that’s because they completely misconstrue his understanding of Jesus’ own resurrection.  If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it 834,000 times: “Paul thought Jesus was raised spiritually, not bodily.”   Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It will take a while to explain.  I deal with the matter in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).  Here is the first bit of what I say there.

 

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 The Glorious Transformation of the Resurrected Body

Undoubtedly the most important passage for Paul’s view of the future resurrection is 1 Corinthians 15.   The chapter, in fact, is often called “the resurrection chapter.”  It is also one of the most misread passages in all of the New Testament.  Many casual readers have thought Paul wrote it in order to prove that Jesus was raised from the dead.  That was not why.  The chapter assumes Jesus was raised, as both Paul and his Corinthian readers know.  It uses this assumption in order to build the case Paul wants to make for the naysayers among his readers: there will be a future resurrection for Jesus’ followers, a resurrection like Jesus’ own.  Dead bodies will come back to life.  But not in the state in which they were buried.  They will be completely transformed and made into immortal, spiritual bodies.  They will still be bodies.  But they will be glorified, just as Jesus’ body was.

To make sense of the passage we need   a bit of context.  Paul founded the church in the city of Corinth, located on an isthmus on the eastern side of Achaia, sometime after his mission to the Thessalonians.   As always happened, once the church was established and running, Paul left the fledgling community to move on to other missionary grounds.  Sometime later, he learned of problems that the Corinthian church was having.  They were serious indeed: massive and deep divisions in the church; considerable infighting among the factions that supported one leader or another; cases of rank immorality, including Christian men visiting prostitutes and bragging about it in church and one man sleeping with his stepmother; chaotic scenes in the worship services, including the weekly communion supper, with some members coming early to gorge themselves and drinking all the wine and the poorer members arriving late when there was nothing left.  Paul writes his letter to deal with such problems, one by one.

But he saves the problem he considered most threatening to the life of the community for last.  It may not seem as serious to modern readers.  Paul was astounded by the theological claim of some of the Corinthian believers that:  “There is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:12).  Paul sees this as a major problem because his entire gospel message hinges on the apocalyptic realities of the future climax of God’s cosmic plan.  And so he spends the entire chapter trying to prove that in fact there will be a real, physical, glorious, future resurrection in which bodies come back to life and are transformed into immortal beings.  It apparently was a hard sell.

Scholars have debated why this was even an issue for these believers in Jesus.  It is not obvious what they thought the alternative was.  Some interpreters have thought the Corinthians must have denied there was any life after death, but that can’t be right.  Later in the chapter Paul reminds them, in maddeningly vague terms, that they practice baptism for the dead:  “If the dead are not raised at all, why are some baptized for them?” (15:29). It is altogether unclear what the Corinthians were doing in these “baptisms for the dead,” and there have been roughly twenty thousand interpretations over the years.  Are living Christians being baptized as stand-ins for Christians who came to faith but were not baptized before they died?  Are they being baptized for unconverted dead relatives, in hopes this will secure their salvation?  Or for dead people generally, to make salvation possible, say, to those who lived before Christ?  Or for … something else?  We don’t know.  But the verse almost certainly shows they believed in some kind of life after death, because baptism appears to have been efficacious in some way for those who have passed on.

Then why do they reject the idea that the dead will be raised?   Other scholars have maintained that the offending Corinthians do not believe in a future resurrection of believers because they, like other Christians we know about from later times, believed followers of Jesus had already in some sense been “raised from the dead” when they came to faith in Christ and were baptized (see, for example, Ephesians 2:1-6).  That may be the case, but Paul does not explicitly say anything specifically about the Corinthians believing they were already resurrected believers.  These scholars may be reading a later Christian view into this early Pauline writing.

It may be simplest to think that these former pagan converts have brought their original understanding of the afterlife with them into their Christian faith.  As Greek-speaking and Greek-influenced pagans, they would have been raised on the very Platonic idea that the soul is immortal and cannot die, and that life after death involves a separation of the soul from the body, for a soulish existence forever.  Possibly these pagan converts still think so as Christians.  For them, there is no resurrection of the dead because life in the body forever is an absurd, even repulsive idea.  The body is the problem.  What lives on is the soul.  If this view is correct, then Paul writes to correct them in their view.  Just as Jesus was bodily raised from the dead, so too will be his followers, at the end of time, in the climactic moment of all of history.

 

I will discuss Paul’s response to this issue – in which he discusses how he understands Jesus’ own resurrection – in the next post.