As part of the secularist and religious pluralist project of destroying the traditional exclusivistic and divine view of Jesus, some scholars have tried to change the meaning of the word "resurrection". Consistent and explicit atheists in general respect the actual meaning of the word, but deny its historical instantiation in Jesus.Atheists masking themselves as Christians affirm the resurrection, but deny its proper, Jewish, common and literal meaning (as applied to Jesus, at least). With this trick, they can both affirm the "resurrection" (in its new, idiosyncratic meaning) and deny the resurrection (in its proper, Jewish sense, as bodily resurrection, which is the way in which the resurrection appears in the NT documents and how everybody understand it).
In his contribution to the debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, religious pluralist scholar Marcus Borg appeals to Paul's distinction between a spiritual body and a natural body, in order to conclude that Paul "explicitly" denied bodily resurrection: "He [Paul] explicitly denies that it is a physical body; instead, it is a spiritual body" (Will the real Jesus please stand up? p. 123).
People familiar with Borg's academic works and his religious pluralistic bias about the historical Jesus, will inmediately perceive what he is trying to do. He's trying to make the bodily resurrection of Jesus wholly irrelevant to Christianity, in order to defend a religious pluralist position according to which you can believe in Christianity and Christ (and keep calling youself a Christian) even if Jesus was a mere man, teller of stories or spiritual teacher (like many others: Buddha, Sai Baba, Yogananda, Wyne Dyer), who didn't need that anything special or divinely unique had to happen to him (like the extraordinary and unique event of the bodily resurrection). What happened to the body is irrelevant to the concept of "resurrection" and the viability (among other religious options) of the Christian religion. This is the position of Borg, Crossan and the Jesus Seminar.
But people familiar with the Jesus Seminar and, specifically Borg's works, already know (or should know, if they're objective critical readers without anti-Christian prejudices) this point. My interest here is not to stress this point, but to analyze if Borg's argument is true or false (after all, the fact he's an anti-Christian religious pluralist doesn't imply that his argument is false).
Keep in mind that Borg is arguing that Paul's distinction between a natural and a spiritual body EXPLICITLY denies the resurrection understood in a BODILY form. Taken at face value, this interpretation is obviously hard to believe, for several reasons:
1-The resurrection appearences which are written in the NT (which most scholars accept as historical) present Jesus' resurrection in a BODILY form, not in a pure inmaterial-spiritual-non-physical form. Nobody reading the NT would conclude that the disciples had a "vision of an inmaterial, purely spiritual, Jesus". Prima facie, this point alone suffices to undermine Borg's interpretation of Paul.
2-As most commenters and experts in Paul have stressed, the original word used by Paul to refer to the "natural" body is "psychikos", which literally means "soul-ish". Obviously, Paul is not implying that our current, natural body is made out of "soul". So, when Paul uses this word contrasting it with the the "spiritual" body (pneumatikos), he's not using words which refer to the the substance or matter of the resurrection body. As many scholars have noted, Paul is probably referring to the orientation of the body (namely, the natural body, like the natural man, is not oriented to God; in contrast with it, the spiritual body, like the spiritual man, is oriented to God).
The contrast wouldn't be between a physical body and a non-physical body, but between the physical body subject to corruption, sin, decay, disease, and mortality (the natural body); and the same physical body (the resurrected body=spiritual body) transformed by God to make fit to inmortality and the spiritual dimension in God's presence.
This interpretation is perfectly coherent and fit better with Paul's chosen words. But let that pass. Suppose that you conclude that, based on that passage alone, you cannot conclude exactly what Paul means, because it is too ambiguous.
In this case, the obvious scholarly procedure is to study other texts by Paul and other relevant texts and evidences for Jesus' post-mortem appearences, in order to see which meaning fits better with Paul's (putative) ambiguous passage.
You cannot simply, as Borg does, to stick to ONE passage and to force an interpretation of it which is at variance with OTHER relevant texts (by Paul and others) and evidence for the bodily resurrection (specially when other interpretations, which fit better with these evidences, are available). It is just bad scholarship.
3-So for example, in 1 Corinthians 15:4, when Paul says "that he was buried and that he was raised", he's implying a continuity between the body which was buried and the body which was raised, what entails a bodily resurrection.
As New Testament scholar James Crossley (a member of the Jesus Seminar who is as far a more serious, honest and competent than Crossan or Borg) comments: "1 Corinthians 15:4 ("that he was buried and that he was raised") refers to bodily resurrection in the strongest sense: Jesus was literally and bodily raised up from the dead". (How did Christianity begin? p. 54)
4-Consider, for example, Paul's view in 1 Corinthians 15: 42-44 in which the notion of continuity and transformation of the same body is evident: "The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body".
Note that Paul is referring to the same body, which is (previous to the resurrection) perishable, dishonorable, weak and "natural"; and after the resurrection, it is imperishable, glorious, powerful, and "spiritual". It is the same body which, as consequence of the resurrection, is transformed in a better, most perfect form.
Clearly, Paul is not contrasting the physical body with a non-physical entity, but a body which previously is not informed or oriented to God (i.e. a purely natural body subjected to weakness and imperfection) with spiritual (the same natural body which is transformed in a way which make it perfect and powerful and oriented to God).
A crude analogy: suppose that I say "Jime Sayaka was a good student in college and now he is the author of the Subversive Thinking blog. He only spoke Japanese and now he speaks (imperfectly) English too, etc."
I ask you, in the above text in black, to whom refers the pronoun "HE"? Do you need to be an intellectual genius or superstar in order to know that "he" is referring to Jime Sayaka? Does not such pronoun imply reference to the same person and continuity between the Jime who was at a time good student and now a blogger, or who was at a time someone who only spoke Japanese but now also speaks English?
Likewise, when Paul uses "it", is not he referring to the same BODY of the dead which, after the resurrection, becomes inmortal? If that body is first natural and then (after the transformation by the resurrection) spiritual, then it makes no sense to say that the resurrection body is not the same physical body which was buried. It is the same body which, as result of the resurrection, has been transformed and has been raised in a powerful form (hence the empty tomb in the case of Jesus!).
No objective, honest, sane and rational person would confuse the clear meaning of Paul's position regarding what he means by the natural and the spiritual body. Only sophists, dishonest scholars, religious pluralists or people with a strong anti-Christian axe to grind would try to twist the meaning of Paul's position about the resurrection body, in order to undermine the traditional view of the resurrection and deceive their readers.
5-The bodily resurrection of Jesus implies the empty tomb. And that Jesus' tomb was found empty is a historical fact recognized by most scholars and historians. As Bart Ehrman (an agnostic New Testament scholar and harsh critic of Christianity) comments: ""the earliest accounts we have are unanimous in saying that Jesus was in fact buried by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, so it's relatively reliable that that's what happened. We also have solid traditions to indicate that women found this tomb empty three days later" (From Jesus to Constantine: Lecture 4, the teaching company, 2003)
So the evidence for the empty tomb fits perfectly with bodily, physical resurrection of Jesus (in contrast with Borg's non-physical, purely inmaterial concept of the resurrection).
So, clearly the bodily resurrection of Jesus fits perfectly with all the evidence (including Paul's own interpretation taken as a whole), while the Borg's view that Paul "explicitly denied" the bodily resurrection doesn't fit the evidence (not even with Paul's own view implying the continuity of the body that was buried and then resurrected) and is just a pseudo-scholarly way to force a limited and restrictive interpretation of a given passage on behalf of the author's personal anti-Christian prejudices.
If Borg were right that Paul "explicitly" denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus (and hence, defends a purely non-physical "resurrection"), how the hell are we going to explain Paul's own argument about the continuity of the body which was buried and the body which was raised? How are we going to explain the NT references to a risen Jesus which appeared to the disciples in a bodily, physical form? And the empty tomb?.
In other words, what hypothesis does fit better the known and accepted facts (including the empty tomb, Paul's own views, and the details about the post-mortem appearence of Jesus): the hypothesis of bodily resurrection, or Borg's hypothesis of a non-physical resurrection?
Any objective researcher would easily see that Paul is not denying (let alone, "explicitly") the bodily resurrection of Jesus. At most it could be argued that, in that specific passage, Paul is using an ambiguous or not sufficiently unequivocal vocabulary which, in order to be correctly understood and interpreted, has to be checked against and contextualized with other texts of Paul himself and other relevant texts in the NT about Jesus' post-mortem appearences and other relevant facts (like the empty tomb). When it is done, clearly the resurrection of Jesus was understood as a bodily resurrection, which by the way, is the way in which the Jews understood (and everybody, except radical revisionists like Borg, understand) the word "resurrection".
Borg's conclusions about the historical Jesus are largely pseudo-scholarship based on wishful thinking, religious pluralistic obsessions and anti-Christian hostility.
I must confess that reading the books and articles about the Historical Jesus written by Borg is an exasperating experience. Bad arguments, logical fallacies, misleading uses of words and concepts, religious pluralist assumptions (which are not sufficiently argued or defended) are advanced on behalf of a watered down and politically correct version of Jesus compatible with religious pluralism and secularism. It becomes more unbereable when Borg pretends that a large part of his own opinion about Jesus is the opinion of "mainline scholars" (a point which I'm going to refute in future posts).
Take a further example of Borg's style of argumentation: In the same book mentioned above, Borg says that (in contrast to the supernaturalistic view about Jesus and his resurrection), for him as a Christian, it is a lot more important the meaning of the Christian faith as "committing oneself to Jesus as the decisive revelation of God" (ibid, p. 128)
But in the same book, in a previous paragraph (in the same page!), Borg says that ""I simply do not believe that God is known primarily or only in our tradition. Not only does this claim conflict with what I've seen in other religions, but it is inconsistent with the Christian notion of grace" (ibid, p.128)
But if Borg doesn't believe that God is known "primarily" or "only" in our (Christian) tradition, then how the HELL could the Christian faith to be understood as the commitment of oneself to Jesus as the DECISIVE REVELATION" of God? (If Jesus is "the" decisive revelation of God, then all the other religions are not "decisive" in the relevant sense; but this contradicts Borg's own explicit religious pluralism and his denial that God is known, by revelation, "primarily" or "only, and therefore "decisively", in Jesus).
Note, by the way, that in the page 127, Borg says "A second problem is that the notion of supernatural intervention tends to privilege Christianity". But is not Borg's view about the Christian faith as meaning the committing of oneself to Jesus as THE decisive revelation of God, something which also tends to privilege Christianity in the sense that it gives this religion a "decisive" knowledge of God, in contrast with other religions less "decisive"? Is not a religion which provides a "decisive revelation" of God more privileged than other religions which provide a non-decisive revelation of God?
Borg's position is literally and straightforwardly inconsistent.
And how the hell could God to be revealed (decisively or not) in a given religion, without a supernatural intervention (i.e. an intervention by a supernatural being = God)? Even if God uses purely physical means to reveal himself, his intervention is by definition supernatural, in the sense that a supernatural being is acting in order to provide some (decisive or non-decisive) revelation. Ontologically, the divine intervention in question is not natural, but supernatural (even if the means which it uses are purely natural or physical).
So, what does Borg mean with the idea that a supernatural intervention of God tends to privilege Christianity (which is supposed to be, according to Borg's own view of the Christian faith, the decisive revelation of God in Jesus)?
The above is just an example of Borg's sophistry. I could use 100 examples or more extracted of Borg's academic works. You can imagine my deception and strong exasperation while reading carefully his books and papers. It becomes almost unbearable, intellectually speaking.
I'm astonished by the respect that Borg enjoys in (liberal sectors of) the academy and among lay readers, and I can only explain this as a consequence of the naturalism of some (liberal) NT scholars and, specially (among the lay readers), as an direct consequence of the anti-Christian prejudices of many of them. They find in Borg a scholar in who they can trust in order to believe a bunch of ideas about Jesus (ideas misleadingly posed as the view of mainstream scholarship) which they find strongly palatable and sympathetic to their anti-Christian ears.
I'm convinced that people like Borg, Crossan and other members of the Jesus Seminar are causing a great deal of damage about the image and teachings of the historical Jesus. They're heavily prejudiced against the traditional view of Jesus and Christianity, and from these prejudices they read the evidence in a way which in advance undermines the traditional view of Jesus.
They are forced to deny or misrepresent historical facts relevant to critically assess the resurrection, and more importantly, to misrepresent, deny, undermine or bypass the sayings and deeds of Jesus implying his self-perception as the unique Son of God, and hence as the exclusive intermediary between God and human beings (a self-perception which, connected to the putative fact of the resurrection, has powerful theological and radical spiritual implications to human beings).
No human being may be indifferent to this question, because it could be matter of (spiritual) life or death, and hence it is essential that we know the TRUTH about the historical Jesus (whatever it may be).
In my current opinion, most of these scholars in the Jesus Seminar (a group which even includes a Jesus' denialist and mythicist like Robert Price, together with more serious researchers like James Crossley) are not interested in the truth, but in anti-Christian propaganda. They have correctly read the anti-Christian bias and hostility of a large sector of the intellectual public and are trying to confirm these anti-Christian prejudices with academic and popular works which pretend to be the conclusions of modern scholarship.
They are the CSICOP-equivalent of New Testament studies.
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