When it comes to assessing evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, what the Apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 15 is paramount. There, Paul passes on a creedal statement which he says he “received” (“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received”), and this seems in fact to be the case, as much of the language in this statement is non-Pauline. It says that
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,
that he was buried,
that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,
and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3-5)
What makes this so significant is Paul’s proximity to the resurrection event itself (whatever that event may have been). Paul probably had his “Damascus Road” experience of the risen Jesus between one and five years after the crucifixion. Three years after that, Paul tells us (Galatians 1:18-19), he went to Jerusalem to investigate or research matters, staying fifteen days with Peter and also visiting James, the brother of Jesus—both purportedly recipients of resurrection appearances. All of this helps explain why 40 years ago, C. H. Dodd claimed that Paul’s creedal statement could be traced to Jerusalem somewhere around 35 C.E. This puts us extremely close, in terms of time, location, and eyewitness testimony, to the resurrection.
Here we have, then, what seems like important evidence that something happened after the crucifixion that was very much like what the gospels report. This initial impression, however, tends to fade when skeptical scholars note that we should not uncritically conflate Paul’s view with that of the gospels, which came decades after his writings. After all, they say, once Paul quotes that early tradition, he goes on to explicitly contrast Jesus’ “physical body” with his post-resurrection “spiritual body.” And he openly says, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (15:50). Paul’s view of the resurrection, then, can easily appear to be hardly a physical one at all. Stephen Patterson, prominent member of the Jesus Seminar, speaks of “Paul’s pneumatic, ghost-like Jesus”, which stands in stark contrast to the “living, breathing, flesh and blood Jesus” we find in Matthew, Luke, and John (The Fourth R, Vol. 24, Number 3, pp. 7, 8).
Because I Corinthians 15 is our earliest testimony to the resurrection, scholars hotly debate just how physical or non-physical is the “spiritual body” described by Paul. On this issue seems to hang the question of how objective the resurrection was. A non-physical body apprehended only by a spiritual faculty in witnesses doesn’t sound very objective at all.
While the nature of the spiritual body is clearly important, when it comes to assessing the objective status of the resurrection as framed by Paul, I believe there is an easier, more basic way in. This is what I will call the transformation question: Did Jesus’ corpse transform into his resurrected, “spiritual body”? Or did it stay buried, while the spiritual body roamed free and appeared to his followers (however we might conceive of that)? In other words, was Paul talking about one body in two different modes—first physical then spiritual—or were there actually two different bodies—physical and spiritual?
So we have two questions—the resurrection body question and the transformation question—and of these two, I believe the transformation question is senior. No matter what the exact substance of the resurrection body, if the corpse transformed into the resurrection body, then that means there was indeed an empty tomb and a paranormal event of massive significance.
Further, of these two issues, the transformation question is one that I believe can be definitively resolved, in the sense that we can firmly ascertain what Paul himself believes.
I Corinthians 15 itself seems clear on this. First, the sequence that Paul passes on—died, buried, raised, appeared—makes most sense if all four steps happened to the same thing, if the same thing which died was buried, and then was raised and appeared. The dramatic arc of the sequence is all about the downward trajectory of the first two terms (died, buried) being reversed by the upward trajectory of the last two terms (raised, appeared). Yet that reversal is only a real reversal if the very same thing that traveled the downward trajectory also ascended the upward one.
Second, Paul ties the resurrection of Jesus to the general resurrection (15:20: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep”; 15:13: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised”), and the general resurrection was expected to be a transformation of dead bodies into resurrected bodies.
Third, Paul uses the metaphor of a seed growing into a plant to speak of the relationship of the physical body and the spiritual body: “What you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain....So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable” (15:37, 44). The metaphor seems to evoke the image of transformation: Seeds transform into the plant that grows out of them. No seed lies intact in the ground while a new plant merely grows on top of it.
Fourth, Paul’s language identifies the spiritual body as the same thing that had been the physical body: “It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” (15:43-44). In this language, the same “it” covers both the physical body and the spiritual body.
For these four reasons, it seems to me that in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul has in mind the transformation of the physical body into the resurrection body. However, many commentators do not see it this way. Brandon Scott, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar, while unpacking 1 Corinthians 15 in his The Trouble with Resurrection, says,
Is something left over, some element that connects the body as seed planted in the ground and the plant that grows? Probably the most we can say is that Paul’s understanding of death in 1 Thess 4:17 [“then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”] leads to the conclusion that he thinks nothing subsists. A body planted in the earth would turn to dust, and God would raise up another body. God can bring life from nothing.
So in Scott’s view, nothing actually “connects the body...in the ground” with the resurrected body that rises out of the ground. The corpse does not transform into the resurrection body. Rather, the physical body completely disintegrates, and God raises up “another body.” On the transformation question, Scott thus sees Paul answering in the negative. Apparently, then, different commentators reading 1 Corinthians 15 can see Paul coming down on different sides of the transformation question.
The issue does not end there, however. There are several Pauline passages outside of 1 Corinthians 15 that seem to make it clear where exactly Paul comes down on the transformation question. For these, I will use the Scholars Version, a translation produced by the Jesus Seminar in The Authentic Letters of Paul, by Arthur Dewey, Roy Hoover, Lane McGaughy, and Daryl Schmidt. The first passage is Philippians 3:21:
He will transform our weak and mortal body into a body as glorious as his, by the power he has to make everything subject to his will.
There are two things that interest us here. First, Christ will “transform our weak and mortal body into” a glorified body. Second, our glorified body will be like Jesus’ glorified body (i.e., resurrection body). This seems to liken what will happen to our bodies (transformation into a glorified body) to what happened to his.
And if the power of the One who raised Jesus from among the dead resides in you, the One who raised the Anointed from among the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through the power and presence of God that resides in you. (Romans 8:11)
This verse draws an even clearer connection between what happened to the body of Jesus and what will happen to our bodies. The same power that raised Jesus will give life to us. And since it specifically will “give life to your mortal bodies,” the natural implication is that that is what it did to Jesus’ mortal body.
We know that the whole creation has been moaning with birth pangs till now; and not only the creation, but we who have savored the first taste of God’s power also sigh within ourselves while we await our adoption, the release and transformation of our bodies from their earthly limitations and fate. (Romans 8:22-23)
Just as creation is moaning with the birth pangs of a new creation, so we are sighing while we await “the release and transformation of our bodies.” Paul expects our earthly bodies to be transformed into bodies no longer bound by “earthly limitations”—into glorified bodies. And we know from other passages that he sees what happened to Jesus as the template for what will happen to us.
In any case, the body is not intended for sexual indulgence, but is intended for the lord, and the lord is intended for the body. God raised up the lord and God will raise us up by divine power. (I Cor 6:13-14)
This passage makes it especially clear that what happened to Jesus will happen to us: “God raised up the lord and God will raise us up by divine power.” That this sentence is preceded by a sentence about the body implies that the raising up is something that happens to the body. If we put all that together, then, “God raised up the lord’s body and God will raise our body up by divine power.”
In these passages, a clear and repeating pattern emerges, which we saw in I Corinthians 15 (my second point there), and which is a specific version of Paul’s frequent teaching that Jesus was the “first fruits” of a coming collective resurrection. That pattern is this:
1. What happened to Jesus in the resurrection will happen to us.
2. What will happen to us is that our mortal body will be transformed into a glorified body.
These two points act as premises that lead to an inescapable logical conclusion: According to Paul, Jesus’ mortal body was transformed into a glorified body.
These passages, then, seem to make clear that on the question of transformation, Paul answered yes. And that necessarily entails Paul believing in an empty tomb. If the glorified body that appeared to Peter, James, and Paul himself was the dead body transformed, then that body was obviously no longer in the tomb. Thus, no matter how he saw the nature and substance of that glorified body, Paul appears to have envisioned an empty tomb resulting from God transforming Jesus’ dead body into a glorified body.
This is so significant, as I said earlier, because of Paul’s proximity to the event. Given that, the importance of his words can hardly be overstated. Of course, there is always room for the possibility of misreporting, on the part of Paul or his sources. Yet Paul is so early, so close to the event, that there is immeasurably less room than with later sources like the gospels.
Much of my reading over the years has been of scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar, and I remain deeply grateful to them, for they identified for me a body of radical spiritual teaching which I believe was the core of Jesus’ ministry. However, I also have major disagreements with them, one of which involves their separation of Jesus the wisdom teacher—which they affirm—from Jesus the miracle worker and from Jesus’ resurrection—which they tend to deny. I personally don’t see that separation. I believe that Jesus’ miracles and resurrection were intended as demonstrations of his wisdom, to show that his teachings were not pie-in-the-sky idealism, but rather a kind of higher pragmatism, capable of producing powerful results in the real world.
For all of my gratitude for the Jesus Seminar, and Marcus Borg in particular, I believe I see significant holes in their accounts of the resurrection. They tend to see the resurrection story growing ever more fantastic over the decades, until the gospels finally have Jesus leaving the tomb, eating fish, and urging Thomas to thrust his hand into his side. In this vein, these scholars often propose that no one had ever heard of the empty tomb story before Mark put it in writing forty years after the fact. This version clearly gives us enormous wiggle room with regard to the original event. A story that takes fifty years to reach mythical proportions may have easily begun as something entirely inauspicious and tame.
Yet this version requires that Paul not be in possession of the full-blown story at the beginning of that fifty-year process. And so my sense is that there is tremendous psychological pressure to read into Paul a more modest, less developed resurrection scenario, one that, in my view, does not do full justice to his words.
I believe that when we read Paul sensitively and accurately, we find something rather remarkable: testimony in writing from a man who, within several years of the event itself, spent two weeks in Jerusalem with an eyewitness and central figure (Peter), met with the leader of the church and brother of Jesus (James), and then passed on to us a tradition he received, in its own words rather than in his. This tradition appears to require an empty tomb, and the man who passed it on seems to have definitely understood it that way.
With so little room for a fantastic tale to grow up in between the event itself and Paul, we are naturally left wondering: What happened on that first Easter which could inspire, so soon and apparently in those directly involved, the remarkable story that Paul has passed on to us?
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