Paul and Jesus

Paul was a Pharisee, one of the three major schools of thought among Jews of that time. He gives us our earliest and most extensive treatment of resurrection of the dead as understood, debated, and defended by his contemporaries (Philippians 3:5; cf. Acts 23:6). There are rabbinic traditions that discuss the Pharisaic view of resurrection of the dead, but they date much later, from the third to fifth centuries A.D. Josephus, our other first-century Jewish witness, offers little on this subject. Like Paul, he was a Pharisee, but he provides none of the expository detail that Paul provides, and he seems eager to cast the Pharisees and their views of afterlife in Greek dress: “Every soul, they maintain, is imperishable, but the soul of the good alone passes into another body, while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment.”¹⁶ It is possible that his reference to “passing into another body” could refer to resurrection of the dead, but it could just as easily fit Plato’s notion of reincarnation. Josephus was keen to slant things for his Roman audience, including the emperor Vespasian himself, who was his patron.

In contrast to Josephus, Paul addressed Plato directly, skillfully making use of the language of Greek dualism while maintaining a clear distinction between the Greek view of the immortality of the soul and the Jewish understanding of resurrection of the dead. Paul exhorts his followers at Corinth not to lose heart over persecutions:

Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day . . . 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. (2 Corinthians 4:16, 18)

One would be hard-pressed to find a more succinct expression of Platonic dualism. The body is obviously the outer perishing nature, which can be seen, while the unseen inner nature, which is eternal, is the soul. Paul is making use of standard Greek language but then he adds a most important twist.

According to Paul, we humans are “clothed” in a physical body, which we shed at death, but our desire is not to end up naked or unclothed—that is, stripped of the body, as Plato would have it—but to be re-clothed with a new eternal house that God will create (2 Corinthians 5:1–4). Paul draws upon a mixed set of metaphors here, contrasting a tent with a permanent dwelling and old clothing with new clothing. His meaning is subtle but clear. To die is to be in a naked state, unclothed, without a proper dwelling, whereas to be resurrected from the dead is to be reclothed, or rehoused, with a new spiritual body.

We can draw two very important conclusions. First, in contrast to Plato, Paul has no interest in the “naked” or disembodied soul. Second, the old clothing or the tent, that is, the physical body, perishes and is of no concern to him. This is Paul’s view of resurrection of the dead and it is consistent in all his letters.

1 Corinthians 15 is often called Paul’s “resurrection chapter.” There he clearly expresses his view of what resurrection of the dead involves, both for Jesus and those who have died and who he believes will be raised from the dead when Jesus returns. Apparently he had gotten a report that some in the Corinthian congregation were maintaining that “there is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:13). Presumably they had accepted Paul’s gospel message that Christ had been raised, but they saw no need for any future resurrection for those who had died. Their objection was likely based upon the influence of Greek thinking, in which the notion of the dead coming bodily out of their graves was absurd and unnecessary. If the dead were now free of their bodies, were they not closer to God than those yet imprisoned in the mortal body?

This Greek objection to resurrection of the dead appears in the book of Acts when the Stoics and Epicureans in Athens mock Paul as soon as he mentions the idea of resurrection (Acts 17:32). Celsus, a second-century Greek philosopher who wrote a treatise against Christianity, charged that Christians “believe in the absurd theory that the corporeal body will be raised and reconstituted by God, and that somehow they will actually see God with their mortal eyes and hear him with their ears and be able to touch him with their hands.”¹⁷ This is not at all what Jews and Christians believed about resurrection, as we have seen, but their position was easy to caricature in this way. Why would God, who is pure Spirit, have any interest in rotting corpses or dried bones? But even more to the point, how could God possibly raise the dead with bodies turned to dust, burnt to ashes, or lost at sea?