Paul and Jesus

Two conclusions seem to follow from Paul’s formulaic testimony. First, since Paul emphatically makes the point in 1 Corinthians that the resurrected Christ dwells in a spiritual body as a life-giving Spirit, we can say with assurance that the Christ that Paul claimed to have “seen” was not Jesus’ physical corpse revivified. According to Paul, the “Lord,” that is Jesus, is the “Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17–18). Second, since Paul equates his experience of “seeing” Christ with the experiences of the Jerusalem apostles who were before him, we can conclude that, at least in Paul’s view of the matter, their experiences were identical—they all saw the same risen Christ in his glorified spiritual body. Since Paul explicitly says that Christ died and was buried but was subsequently “raised from the dead,” he most likely believed that Jesus’ physical body returned to the dust, and like a change of old clothing, had nothing to do with the new spiritual body Jesus received. His reference to Jesus’ burial was to make the point that he was truly dead.

Paul clearly believes in a bodily resurrection, or more properly, an embodied resurrection. It is one thing to say the dead will be raised bodily and it is quite another to insist that the same bodies, long ago turned to dust and ashes, or buried at sea, must somehow be reconstituted in order to experience resurrection. The latter was the absurdity that Greeks objected to in offering naïve objections to the Jewish idea of the resurrection of the dead.

Resurrection is not the transformation of the physical into the spiritual, for given the corruption of the body there is nothing left to transform. Resurrection is rather the reclothing or “reincorporation” of the essential self with a new immortal body that frees it from the Hadean state of death.

A good illustration of this point is the case of John the Baptizer. The gospel of Mark, as well as Josephus, records John’s brutal death at the hands of Herod Antipas, who had him beheaded.²⁰ Mark says that John’s disciples, hearing of his death, were allowed to take his body and lay it in a tomb. Sometime later Herod received reports of the miraculous activities of Jesus. He was so impressed that he said “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead,” thinking that what was reported of Jesus could only be explained if John had somehow returned from the dead (Mark 6:14). Yet there is no indication that Herod had John’s tomb checked to see if it was empty. He was not thinking about a beheaded corpse being revived but he still considered the possibility that John might have returned to life. This account illustrates how the Jewish culture of the time could imagine someone being resurrected and reclothed in a new body, their former body left in the tomb.

If we take Paul seriously as our earliest witness to Jesus’ resurrection, leaving aside for the moment the later reports in the gospels about an empty tomb, or stories of Jesus appearing after death as flesh and bones, we end up with an entirely different perspective on the resurrection. Paul’s position is clear. He concludes his lengthy exposition on resurrection with the emphatic declaration that “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50).

THE GABRIEL REVELATION

Recently an exciting new text was published that sheds significant light on this entire discussion.²¹ It was found around the year 2000 in Jordan, near the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. It is now in the hands of a private collector in Europe. This ancient Hebrew text contains eighty-seven lines written in ink on a stone tablet. Experts date it to the end of the first century B.C., so it is definitely pre-Christian. The text purports to be a revelation of the angel Gabriel about the final apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil. We have various texts from this period dealing with this theme, including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the second half of the text contains something entirely new. According to Israel Knohl of Hebrew University, the final section of the text focuses on the death and resurrection of a messianic leader, most likely Simon of Perea, who led a revolt in Judea in 4 B.C. following the death of Herod the Great.²² Josephus reports that Simon’s followers crowned him, a tall and handsome figure, as king of the Jews. He ravaged the countryside for a time, burning down the royal palace at Jericho. Gratus, Herod’s military commander, pursued Simon and caught up with him in Transjordan and beheaded him.²³ What is fascinating and new about this text is that the slain leader, who has, according to the text, become “dung of the rocky crevices,” his body decayed in the desert heat, is nonetheless addressed by the angel Gabriel: “I command you, prince of princes in three days you shall live!”