1. Introduction: The Early Christian Hope
One of the most striking features of the early Christian movement is its virtual unanimity about the future hope. We might have expected that the first Christians would quickly have developed a spectrum of beliefs about life after death, corresponding to the spectrums we have observed in the Judaism from within which Christianity emerged and the paganism into which it went as a missionary movement; but they did not.
This observation forms the hinge upon which turns one of the central arguments of the present book. This can be expressed in the form of a question. Granted that the early Christians drew freely on Jewish traditions, and engaged energetically with the pagan world of ideas, how does it happen that we find virtually no spectrum of belief about life after death, but instead an almost universal affirmation of that which pagans said could not happen, and that which one stream (albeit the dominant one) of Judaism insisted would happen, namely resurrection? Let us be quite clear at this point: we shall see that when the early Christians said ‘resurrection’ they meant it in the sense it bore both in paganism (which denied it) and in Judaism (an influential part of which affirmed it). ‘Resurrection’ did not mean that someone possessed ‘a heavenly and exalted status’; when predicated of Jesus, it did not mean his ‘perceived presence’ in the ongoing church. Nor, if we are thinking historically, could it have meant ‘the passage of the human Jesus into the power of God’. It meant bodily resurrection; and that is what the early Christians affirmed.1 There is nothing in the early Christian view of the promised future which corresponds to the pagan views we have studied; nothing at all which corresponds to the denials of the Sadducees; virtually no hint of the ‘disembodied bliss’ view of some Jewish sources; no Sheol, no ‘isles of the blessed’, no ‘shining like stars’, but a constant affirmation of newly embodied life. As Christopher Evans put it a generation ago, ‘there emerged in Christianity a precise, confident and articulate faith in which resurrection has moved from the circumference to the centre’.2
This alone demands historical explanation. But there is more. There are substantial mutations from within the ‘resurrection’ stream of Judaism. In particular, the historian must account for the fact that, with early Christianity thus being so clearly a ‘resurrection’ movement in the Jewish sense, the well-established metaphorical meaning of ‘resurrection’—the restoration of Israel in a concrete socio-political sense—is almost entirely absent, and a different set of metaphorical meanings emerge instead. How does it come about, in other words, that early Christianity located its life-after-death beliefs so firmly at the ‘resurrection’ end of the Jewish spectrum, while simultaneously giving the word a metaphorical meaning significantly different from, though in long-range continuity with, the meaning it had within Judaism? How do we account for both the strong similarity between Christianity and Judaism (there is no sign, in early Christian resurrection belief, of anything remotely like a move in a pagan direction) and the equally clear dissimilarities?
The shape of the remainder of this book is determined by these questions, and by the two-layered answer we shall give them. In Parts II and III, we shall examine the early Christian movement with two ancillary questions in mind: what did the early Christians believe about life after death? and what metaphorical meanings did ‘resurrection’ have, and how did they relate to the metaphorical meanings current in Judaism? We shall discover that early Christianity was a ‘resurrection’ movement through and through, and that, indeed, it stated much more precisely what exactly ‘resurrection’ involved (it meant going through death and out into a new kind of bodily existence beyond, and it was happening in two stages, with Jesus first and everyone else later); second, that though the literal ‘resurrection’ of which the early Christians spoke remained firmly in the future, it coloured and gave shape to present Christian living as well. In the final chapter of Part III we shall widen the scope by asking two other questions which reinforce the central one: why did early Christianity take the shape it did, and why, in particular, did the early Christians believe that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah?
Throughout Parts II and III, and on into Part IV, we shall examine the reasons the early Christians themselves gave for their beliefs about life after death, for their fresh metaphorical usage of ‘resurrection’, and for the shape of their own movement and their view of Jesus. Their answer—this may seem obvious, but it must be spelled out—was that their future hope for ultimate bodily resurrection and the various ways in which that hope had been made more precise, their redefinition of the metaphorical meanings of ‘resurrection’, and their sense of who they themselves were and who Jesus was, were based on their firm belief that Jesus of Nazareth had himself been raised from the dead. This will enable us to clarify more precisely what exactly the early Christians meant when they used this language. What can we say, as historians, about what they thought had happened at Easter?
This leads to Part IV, in which we shall turn to the accounts of the first Easter in the canonical gospels. These have been treated, almost routinely within much post-Enlightenment scholarship, as mere back-projections of later Christian belief, with only the shakiest claim to historical veracity. We shall discover that this position, fashionable though it has been, creates enormous historical problems which disappear when the accounts are treated as, at least in principle, descriptions of what the first Christians believed had actually happened on the first Easter day. The accounts, in fact, make sense not as the final product of a development of theological and exegetical reflection within the early church, but as something like the source from which that development emerged. They are not the leaves on the branches of early Christianity. They look very like the trunk from which the branches themselves sprang, even though the writings in which we meet them are to be dated towards the end of the first generation, or even later.
This will lead us, in Part V, to stand back and ask what, if anything, the contemporary reader—the historian, the student of worldviews, the theologian—can say by way of comment on this early Christian belief. If the first Christians really did believe that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead, what can we say about their belief? Have we an alternative explanation for the rise of the early church, and particularly for its reaffirmation, development and modification of the Jewish resurrection belief? If not, what must we say, as historians, about Easter itself?
The sources do not, of course, lay the matter out in so orderly a fashion. They weave together, in many rich patterns, the questions of their own future hope on the one hand and the resurrection of Jesus himself on the other. This is so particularly in the case of our earliest and most detailed source, the apostle Paul. (We leave until Part IV the question of whether the gospel accounts go back to oral traditions as early as Paul; he, certainly, is our earliest written source.) As usual, Paul mocks our attempts to tidy everything into neat bundles. He frequently speaks in a single passage, sometimes (one suspects) in a single breath, about the resurrection of Christians, about Jesus’ death and resurrection, about the present life which grows out of the latter and anticipates the former, and about various other vital topics (justification, say, or the Jewish law). It would be both artificial and unbearably repetitive if we were to parcel out his thought into separate sections; one would meet the same passages, and often the same verses, over and over again in category after category. For this reason, and also because the contribution of Paul to the entire discussion has often itself been controversial, it seems best to devote this Part of the book to his writings, and by working through them with an eye to the central questions of Parts III and IV: what was the early Christian hope? what meanings did ‘resurrection’ carry? what answers would the early Christians have given to the worldview-questions, framed in relation to the dead, that we put to ancient paganism and Judaism? what, in particular, did the early Christians think had happened to Jesus after his death? Part II thus takes us once around the circle of questions which will occupy us in Parts II and III, focusing on our earliest evidence.
This investigation of Paul must itself be seriously curtailed. Most aspects of Paul’s thought link up with most other aspects in a wonderfully complex web of ideas, biblical echoes, implicit narratives and practical instructions. The resurrection (of Christians, and of Jesus) is central in much of this, and to follow through all the ramifications of what Paul says would entail writing detailed commentaries on many sections of many letters, and engaging in discussion with a whole world of monographs and articles. Here, to keep length under control, I must refer to detailed discussions elsewhere; much of the material in the present and following chapter is uncontroversial, and is included principally to set the context, in a way which is usually not done in treatments of the resurrection, for the harder questions raised in 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 4 and 5.3 Among the many debates into which there is no room to enter is the vexed question of which of the ‘Pauline’ letters were actually written by Paul himself. My main arguments rest firmly on the letters commonly regarded as authentic, namely, Romans, the two Corinthian letters, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon and 1 Thessalonians. Ephesians and Colossians are important but not foundational (and their contribution remains significant even if they are held to be by someone writing later within a ‘Pauline’ tradition); 2 Thessalonians offers little help on our topic, so the question of its authenticity does not impinge. The Pastoral Epistles have some significant points to add, and we shall discuss them in a separate section at the end of the present chapter.
Pragmatic reasons suggest a particular path through the material. The two letters to Corinth are full of interest for our topic, both because 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s major statement on our subject, is complex and controversial, and because many scholars have argued that a significant development took place in Paul’s thought between the two letters, particularly between 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 4 and 5.4 It will be as well, therefore, first to survey the material in the other letters, and then to come to the Corinthian correspondence with some idea of the range and force of Paul’s thinking in this area. Nothing much hinges on the order in which we take the other letters, and I shall examine them in what I believe (controversially, of course) to be something like their historical sequence: the Thessalonian letters and Galatians first, followed by the Prison Letters, and ending with Romans. Then will come the appended note on the Pastorals.
Within the framework already outlined, there are three particular questions to put to these rich and dense texts, and indeed to all the other early Christian texts (which we shall examine in Part III). (1) Where does Paul’s belief about the ultimate Christian hope belong on the spectrum of possibilities in the ancient world? This question subdivides into four: (1a) Granted that he spoke frequently of this hope in terms of resurrection, what did he mean by that? (1b) Did he, like various Jewish thinkers, develop ways of speaking about an intermediate state between death and eventual resurrection? (1c) How did he handle questions of continuity and discontinuity between the present life and the ultimate future one? (1d) How does the resurrection function within his larger picture of the future which the true god had promised? (2) In what ways did Paul use ‘resurrection’ and similar language and ideas metaphorically? What has happened, in his writings, to the Jewish metaphorical use, denoting the restoration of Israel? (3) What does he say about Jesus’ own resurrection, and what precisely does he mean by it? This investigation is the more urgent in that, as we shall see, a serious misreading of Paul on the crucial point has become so widespread in secondary and indeed popular discussions as to be almost taken for granted. It is commonly asserted, often indeed simply assumed, that Paul held what in the modern sense is called a ‘spiritual’ view of the resurrection, that is, one for which a body, and an empty tomb, would be irrelevant. This whole Part of the book is designed not least to argue conclusively against this idea, and in particular against a disastrous mistranslation in 1 Corinthians 15 which has given it wide currency.5
1 Thessalonians, by common consent, dates from around AD 49/50, shortly after Paul’s brief visit to Thessalonica on his first journey in Greece.6 A letter of pastoral rather than polemical character, much of its value for our present enquiry lies in what Paul takes for granted and refers to in simple summaries. There is, however, one passage of central relevance, which needs close and careful attention.
Paul’s opening summary of the Thessalonians’ initial faith focuses on how they came to believe in the true and living God as opposed to the idols of paganism (1:9). Then, in a hint of what is to come towards the end of the letter, he summarizes what his gospel has to say about Jesus:
… and to wait for God’s son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead: Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.7
Jesus’ resurrection; his present location in heaven; his future return, and his deliverance of his people from wrath: these are commonplace in Paul’s developed thinking, and here we see that they were central from very early on in his writing, and capable of succinct summary. So, too, in the next chapter, he can indicate the future Christian hope with one word we have already met in Galatians and another which will become a major theme, to be explored more fully elsewhere: you must, he says, walk worthy of the God who calls you ‘into his own kingdom and glory’.8 Here, as in Galatians 5:21, the ‘kingdom of God’ is the future state.
But how will that future arrive? This is what concerns Paul in a major passage for our purposes, namely 4:13–5:11:
13 We don’t want you to be ignorant, my dear family, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you don’t grieve like others, those who have no hope. 14 lf, you see, we believe that Jesus died and rose again, in the same way God will, with Jesus, bring those who have fallen asleep through him. 15 For this is what we must tell you by the word of the lord: we who are left alive until the royal presence of the lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with God’s trumpet. The Messiah’s dead will rise first; 17 then we who are left alive will be snatched up, along with them, on the clouds, to meet the lord in the air. In this way, we shall always be with the lord. 18 So comfort each other with these words.
5:1 But when it comes to times and seasons, my dear family, you don’t need me to write to you. 2 You yourselves know very well that the day of the lord comes like a thief in the night. 3 When people say ‘peace and security’, then sudden destruction will come on them, like labour-pains on a pregnant woman, and they won’t be able to escape. 4 But you, my dear family, are not in the darkness, for the day to overtake you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of darkness. 6 So, then, let’s not fall asleep, as the others do, but let’s stay awake and keep watch.
7 People who sleep, you see, sleep at night. People who get drunk get drunk at night. 8 But we are of the day: so let’s keep watch, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and the hope of salvation for a helmet. 9 For God has not appointed us to wrath, but to possess salvation, through our lord, Jesus the Messiah. 10 He died for us so that, whether we wake or sleep, we shall always live with him. 11 Therefore comfort one another, and build each other up, just as you are doing.
This is a spectacular text, addressing a particular pastoral problem (what happens to those who die before the lord returns?), and exhibiting several of Paul’s key beliefs about the resurrection. Unfortunately it is also a highly contentious passage, being used with astonishing literalness in popular fundamentalism and critical scholarship alike to suggest that Paul envisaged Christians flying around in mid-air on clouds. The multiple apocalyptic resonances of the passage on the one hand, and its glorious mixed metaphors on the other, make this interpretation highly unlikely. Fortunately, the rest of the passage is reasonably clear, and contributes substantially to our investigation on all fronts.9 We may take our questions in order, beginning with the overall topic: (1) Where does Paul come on the spectrum of ancient views about life beyond the grave?
(1a) What does Paul mean by ‘resurrection‘? In this passage he clearly indicates that those who have already died will, at some future date, be raised from the dead ‘in the same way’ (houtos, 4:14). Jesus’ resurrection will be the model for that of his people. Those currently dead will rise up (anastesontai, 4:16), and so possess ‘salvation’ rather than being the objects of ‘wrath’ (5:9). The words Paul uses, the nature of his argument, and the underlying story-line, all make it crystal clear that he belongs, at this point, right in the middle of second-Temple Jewish beliefs about resurrection. Take Jesus out of this picture, and what is being asserted—the future resurrection to salvation from wrath, for those presently dead who belong to the people of the one god—is familiar from our study of Judaism: it is the position of the Pharisees. Whatever other beliefs Paul revised following his conversion, resurrection remained constant. This means that we are bound to see resurrection as bodily, not only because of the terminology (there is no evidence that the anastasis root meant anything other than bodily resurrection, either in the paganism that denied it or the Pharisaic Judaism that affirmed it), not only because of the obviously Jewish context, but also because of the narrative logic. Resurrection is something new, something the dead do not presently enjoy; it will be life after ‘life after death’.
The close parallel between 4:6–17 and 1 Corinthians 15:51–2, which we shall explore later, suggests that ‘being snatched up on the clouds to meet the lord in the air’ is functionally equivalent, in Paul’s mind, to being ‘changed’ so that one’s body is no longer corruptible, but now of the same type as the lord’s own risen body.10 Again, we should not be misled by the metaphor of going up on a cloud. The picture evokes Daniel 7:13, which uses this image to speak of the vindication of the covenant people after their suffering. It is, in other words, another way of saying what Paul said in Galatians 5:5: the people who belong to the one God will be vindicated. That vindication will consist, for those already dead, in their resurrection; for those still alive, in their transformation so that their body is no longer of the corruptible sort. This will mean ‘salvation’ (as opposed to ‘wrath’ as in 1 Thessalonians 5:9), in the sense of rescue from death itself.
(1b) What does Paul have to say about an intermediate state? Like other second-Temple Jews who believed in resurrection, Paul is left with an interval between bodily death and bodily resurrection, and this passage provides his fullest description of it. To begin with, he uses the regular image of falling asleep for death, enabling him to speak of people who are currently asleep but who will one day wake up again, and to do so with echoes of Daniel 12:2, which as we saw was one of the primary biblical passages on the subject.11 Three times, in 4:13, 14 and 15, Paul uses this language, employing it also in a different sense in 5:6–10 (see below). This has led some interpreters to speak of ‘the sleep of the soul’, a time of unconscious post-mortem existence prior to the reawakening of resurrection.12 But this is almost certainly misleading—another case of people picking up a vivid Pauline metaphor and running down the street waving it about. For a start, though Paul can refer to the ‘soul’ (psyche) among other anthropological terms, it is noticeable that he does not employ this term when referring to the intermediate state—unlike, say, the Wisdom of Solomon, and indeed Revelation.13 In fact, if we were speaking strictly, we should say that it is the body that ‘sleeps’ between death and resurrection; but in all probability Paul is using the language of sleeping and waking simply as a way of contrasting a stage of temporary inactivity, not necessarily unconsciousness, with a subsequent one of renewed activity.14 The other references to the presently dead in this passage refer to them as ‘the dead in the Messiah’ (4:16), and as people who, though having fallen asleep, continue (and will continue) to ‘live with him’ (5:10), to be ‘with Jesus’ (4:14), or ‘with the lord’ (4:17). That is the paradox and tension inherent in belonging to the risen Messiah on the one hand and being bodily dead, and not yet raised, on the other.
(1c) What signs are there of continuity and discontinuity between the present life and that final resurrection state? In 5:4–8, Paul states boldly that Christians are already ‘children of light, of the day’. When he speaks of not falling asleep, but of staying awake, he is not envisaging someone staying up later and later into the night, but of someone getting up very early, while it is still dark before dawn. This, he insists, is the present condition of Christian believers. When the day dawns—the biblical ‘day of the lord’, now reinterpreted as ‘the day of the lord Jesus’—those who are already up and awake will not be startled by it. As in Galatians, this has a strong ethical implication: it is important to be conducting oneself as though it were already daytime. The passage thus offers an inaugurated eschatology in which Paul draws on the (Genesis-based) imagery of night and day to say that Christians are already, as it were, ‘resurrection people’. Their bodies still need to be transformed, but in terms of the resurrection-related imagery of sleeping and waking they are already ‘awake’, and must stay that way.
(1d) How does resurrection in this passage function within Paul’s larger picture? Initially, as an incentive to the right sort of grief (4:13): not the kind of grief that overtakes people without hope, people in the pagan world the Thessalonians knew so well. There is nothing unchristian about grief, and Paul can refer to grief, including his own, as a Christian phenomenon needing no apology.15 This is, in fact, as close as we come in early Christian literature to the theme much beloved of preachers at funerals, namely the promise of a reunion beyond the grave with Christians already dead. Nothing is said, one way or the other, about such a reunion taking place before the resurrection itself; but the pastoral logic of the passage insists that an eventual reunion is what the creator God has in mind, and will accomplish at the time of Jesus’ return.
Equally important is the picture of heaven and earth, and of their eventual joining, which Paul draws on in his much-misunderstood language about the lord descending, believers going up on the clouds, and meeting the lord ‘in the air’. The language of this passage is a rich blend of two things in particular.16 First, there is Daniel 7, already referred to, from which we get the idea of being taken up on the clouds; here this refers, obviously, to believers rather than to Jesus. Second, there is the language, well known in the pagan world, of an emperor or other dignitary making a state visit to a city or province—or even, when the emperor had been elsewhere, his return to Rome. In fact, the Greek word parousia, which has become a technical term for the literalistic construct of an early Christian hope involving the end of the space-time world, with Jesus ‘coming down’ in a ‘second coming’ and believers flying upwards to meet him, is drawn, not from the Bible at all, but from the world of pagan usage, where it was almost a technical term for this kind of imperial ‘visitation’. Properly, parousia means ‘presence’ as opposed to ‘absence’; Paul can use it in that way of himself, without implying that he is going to be flying downwards on a cloud;17 but the point here is that the ‘meeting’—another almost technical term in the Greek—refers, not to a meeting after which all the participants stay in the meeting-place, but to a meeting outside the city, after which the civic leaders escort the dignitary back into the city itself. This passage thus belongs very closely with 3:13, and with Philippians 3:20–21, pointing towards the larger picture of 1 Corinthians 15:20–28 and Romans 8:12–30, indicating not that believers will be taken away from the earth, leaving it to its fate, but that—in the language of apocalyptic imagery, not in literal spatial reality—they will ‘meet’ the lord as he comes from heaven (1:10) and surround him as he comes to inaugurate God’s final transformative, judging-and-saving reign on earth as in heaven.18
(2) What has happened to the metaphorical usage of ‘resurrection’ in second-Temple Judaism, referring to God’s deliverance of Israel from oppression and exile and investing that event with the meaning of new creation? It has disappeared, and has been replaced by an equivalent metaphorical construct, in which language relating to resurrection (sleeping and waking, as in Daniel 12:2) is re-employed to denote the transformation of life which comes about through the preaching of the gospel, the ‘word’ which has done its work in the community (2:13) and must now have its full effect of producing holy and generous lives.19 Through this metaphor, Paul is able both to draw on an inaugurated eschatology to reinforce his moral teaching (you already are this sort of people, so make sure you live out your real identity), and to invest that theological and moral teaching with the overtone that says: what Israel longed for, both resurrection and restoration, is already coming true in your lives in Christ, empowered by the Spirit.
(3) What, finally, does this passage have to say about the resurrection of Jesus himself? It is the presupposition of the whole argument, as the brief credal formula in 4:14 indicates; 4:14 is, in fact, a succinct summary of virtually the whole of 1 Corinthians 15. The fact that Paul carefully models the resurrection of presently dead Christians on the resurrection of Jesus himself (‘in the same way’, 4:14) indicates, since he is fairly explicit about certain aspects of the Christians’ resurrection, what he believed to be true about the Messiah. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was not something that happened immediately upon his death, an exaltation which was virtually synonymous with death itself (death ‘seen as’ resurrection, or something of the kind). There is no indication, in other words, that Paul meant by ‘rose again’ (aneste) in 4:14 anything other than what that word would have meant to an ancient pagan or to a reader of the Septuagint. As far as Paul was concerned, resurrection, for Jesus as for Christians, was a new life after a period of ‘life after death’, not a new state into which he had slipped at bodily death, leaving his body to be buried as irrelevant. He does not say that Jesus had been ‘asleep’ between his death and his resurrection, but he implies that there must have been a period between the two events. And, since the language he uses about the death and resurrection of believers is soaked in the language of various biblical passages, both the Genesis account of the creation of night and day and Daniel’s prediction of sleepers awakening, we have a strong sense that, for Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was the sharp, shocking fulfilment of the hope of Israel, inaugurating a new, unexpected period of history in which those called by the gospel would live as children of the day, waiting for dawn to break at last.
Little is added to this picture in 2 Thessalonians, though the picture of the ‘day of the lord’ is considerably expanded in 2:1–12. But the two verses which follow that passage, which are actually a functional equivalent to Paul’s great summary of his argument in Romans 8:29–30, indicate again what we saw in 1 Thessalonians 2:12: Paul can describe the final goal of the Christian as that of sharing the glory of the lord Jesus, the Messiah (2 Thessalonians 2:14). This ‘glory’ is set in parallel with the ‘salvation’ spoken of in verse 13, which presumably is the same thing as the ‘salvation’ in 1 Thessalonians 5:9. We are beginning to build up a picture of the multiple ways Paul could describe the ultimate goal of the Christian. The clue to it all is that in the death and resurrection of Jesus the creator God has defeated the power of death, so that the life of his new world, the new creation, the dawning new day, is already anticipated in the lives of those who have been grasped by the word of the gospel, and will be completed at the return of the Messiah. At that time the dead will be raised and the living transformed, so that all his people, rescued (‘saved’) from ultimate corruption, will share the glory he already enjoys.
Resurrection is not a main theme in Galatians, but neither the overall argument nor the detail is comprehensible without it. Paul’s opening rhetorical flourish indicates that the covenant God has already mounted a rescue operation ‘to deliver us from the present evil age’; Paul was clearly thinking within the eschatological categories of the Pharisees and rabbis. Something had happened, he believed, because of which the ‘age to come’ had broken in to ‘the present age’.20 The very first verse of the letter indicates what this ‘something’ was: ‘God the father … raised [Jesus the Messiah] from the dead.’21 Paul thus associates the breaking-in of the coming age with the twin events of Jesus’ death and resurrection, seeing the former as his self-giving ‘for our sins’, in fulfilment of the overall divine purpose.
It is, in fact, inconceivable (as we shall see in chapter 12) that the death of a messianic pretender could by itself give rise to the notion that the ‘age to come’ had already broken in, and that people could even now be delivered from ‘the present evil age’. As frequently, we have to supply a reference to the resurrection (hinted at here in the opening verse) to make sense of each reference to the cross, drawing on other passages in which Paul makes the fuller picture clear.22 Galatians 1:4–5 thus already addresses questions 1(d), 2 and 3. The death and resurrection of Jesus are the inauguration of the promised new age; and this ‘age to come’ is the long-awaited time of deliverance. The Jewish metaphorical meaning (resurrection as the rescue and restoration of Israel after exile and oppression) is retained but transformed: the divine rescue operation through Jesus is for all people, and delivers Jew and Gentile alike from the present evil age.
This points to the dramatic passage at the end of chapter 2, where Paul describes how he confronted Peter in Antioch. The heart of his argument is that he, Paul, has ‘died’ and now ‘lives’ in a new way:
19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah; 20 nevertheless I am alive—but it isn’t me, it’s the Messiah who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
Scholars have long debated whether Paul, speaking of his own ‘death’ and ‘coming alive again’, was referring to his conversion (including baptism), or whether he was looking behind that to the death and resurrection of Jesus himself.23 The answer is probably that both are in view, and that here we have an example of the Jewish metaphorical usage: ‘resurrection’ as the rescue of Israel from oppression and exile, coming true in a new way in the person of Paul himself, in a transformation which is rooted in the events of Jesus’ own death and resurrection and which results in Paul’s bearing of a new identity, no longer defined by his ‘fleshly’ existence. This new identity is the point of the paragraph, in which Paul is arguing strenuously (by means of reporting to the Galatians the argument he had used to Peter during the confrontation in Antioch) that the old solidarities of the ‘flesh’, meaning here particularly ethnic identity, had become irrelevant in defining the people of the covenant god.24 All, Jew and Gentile alike, now belonged at the same table; the symbolic differentiation between them had been done away with, and their sole badge of identity was now pistis Iesou Christou, the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.25
Paul is here speaking of dying and rising in a metaphorical sense. He has not actually died physically, or been raised physically. But the referent of the metaphor remains a concrete reality, namely his identity as a renewed human being and his table-fellowship with all those who have similarly ‘died and been raised’. The reason he can speak in this way is once more because of the concrete events of Jesus’ death and, still unstated but powerfully present, his resurrection. The new life that is given the other side of this ‘death’ can be described (a) as ‘living to God’ and (b) as possessing, within, the life of the Messiah. Both of these are quasi-technical terms which we shall meet again as we make our way through Paul.
The transformed fulfilment of the Jewish hope is one of Paul’s main subjects in Galatians 3. He describes in verses 10–14 how the promise to Abraham, that the whole world would be blessed ‘in him’, had apparently got stuck when Israel fell victim to the curse of the law. But Israel’s God has acted through the Messiah, who bore the law’s curse on Israel’s behalf, so that ‘the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles in the Messiah, Jesus—and that we (Jewish Christians, in other words) might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith’.26 The implicit narrative underlying this passage is that of Israel’s subjugation and the divine rescue—in other words, that for which the picture of ‘resurrection’ had been used in various Jewish texts; and the reason why Paul can declare that the promises have been fulfilled is, obviously, the death and resurrection of Jesus.27 The promises have not, however, been fulfilled in the way that most Jews, including Paul himself, had expected or wanted. That is why there is such a huge problem facing the early Christians, the problem to which Galatians is part of Paul’s answer. His way of addressing the matter demonstrates that he has taken the existing metaphorical meaning and has allowed it to be redefined by the events he believed to have taken place concerning Jesus.
One of the most crucial passages in the whole letter is 4:1–7. Once again, Paul does not here mention resurrection explicitly; instead, he tells a story in which ‘resurrection’ overtones are powerfully present. In describing the way in which Israel’s God sets the slaves free from their bondage and makes them his own children, Paul draws, as in Romans 8, on the well-known Jewish story of the exodus.28 Through the work of the son, the one God has broken the power of the slavemaster; through the work of the Spirit, the same God assures his people of their own status as his children and heirs.29 In Romans 8, the same story is developed with an explicit focus on resurrection. Even without this parallel, we only have to place Galatians 4 alongside 1 Corinthians 15:20–28 to see that substantially the same ideas are involved.
So far in Galatians, then, Paul has drawn on the underlying (and usually unstated) idea of resurrection to inform and direct his particular concern. World-changing events have occurred; Paul himself has become a different person through them; the promises have been fulfilled in a different way from Israel’s (and his own) previous expectation. In the next passage, he refers to the personal and still-future hope, again without mentioning resurrection explicitly, but speaking instead of final ‘vindication’, attaining the status of ‘righteous’ in the ultimate divine lawcourt: ‘for we, by the Spirit, and on the basis of faith, eagerly await the hope of righteousness’.30 Similar passages elsewhere in Paul, not least in Romans 8, suggest that Paul could easily have written elpida anastaseos, ‘the hope of resurrection’, in place of elpida dikaiosunes, ‘the hope of righteousness’. He has chosen to speak of the status Christians will possess at the last day, rather than the state they will be in, because of the specific argument of Galatians. The proximity of thought between the two highlights something important for Paul, which will emerge later: the conceptual link, at various stages in his thought, between resurrection and ‘justification’, past, present and future.
The future, and its effect on the present, is in view towards the end of Galatians 5, where Paul warns that people who behave in certain ways ‘will not inherit the kingdom of God’ (5:14). Though he can speak of this kingdom as present,31 he more often sees it as future, using the phrase to denote the ultimate future seen as the time when, because the creator’s writ runs fully and without exception, nothing that spoils or defaces the creation, and in particular the creatures that bear the divine image, will be allowed any further space.32 Paul’s main contrast in this passage is between the ‘flesh’ and the ‘spirit’, seen as the two spheres of life, character and behaviour in which a human being can live. His thought, as often, moves at a rapid pace, and leaves much to be understood by implication; but it is clear that those who, in his terms, ‘walk according to the Spirit’ will ‘inherit God’s kingdom’. This is, then, another way of describing the ultimate future for the covenant people, using language which any first-century Pharisee would have lined up at once with the hope of resurrection. And the immediate implication of this future hope is that the present life in the power of the Spirit is the guarantee of the future inheritance—a point which Paul amply reinforces elsewhere.
He develops this in chapter 6, using a different image. Where before he had spoken of ‘walking’, he now thinks in terms of ‘sowing and reaping’:
7 Don’t be deceived; God is not mocked. People reap whatever they sow. 8 lf you sow to your flesh, from the flesh you will reap a harvest of corruption; but if you sow to the Spirit, from the spirit you will reap eternal life. 9 So let’s not grow weary of doing what is right; for in due time we shall reap, if we don’t lose heart.
Several points emerge here which fit exactly into some of Paul’s developed expressions of the future hope, and which indicate that, even when writing rapid polemic, he still gives evidence of the detailed belief about the future which we see him expound more carefully elsewhere. He describes the future goal in terms of reaping the harvest from plants sown earlier. This is not exactly the same use of the ‘seed’ metaphor which we find in 1 Corinthians 15:35–8, 42–4, but it is not far removed (and it shows, incidentally, how flexible Paul is in the subtle variations he can make within the same metaphor); there he uses ‘sowing’ as an image of ‘dying’ (as in John 12:24), whereas here he simply thinks of behaviour and its long-term results. This, too, is how he envisages the continuity between the present life and the life to come: not because certain types of behaviour in the present establish a claim on the covenant God, but because behaviour is an indication of which of the two spheres one belongs in, ‘flesh’ or ‘Spirit’. While ‘flesh’ is, for Paul, always corruptible, decaying and often rebellious as well, the ‘Spirit’, when it refers as here to the divine Spirit, is always, in his usage, the gift of the one God in the present, through which the future inheritance is assured.
We observe, too, that Paul can denote the final goal—the same, we presume, as ‘righteousness’ in 5:5 and ‘God’s kingdom’ in 5:21—with the phrase ‘eternal life’. We shall meet this phrase in Romans, where I shall argue that it does not mean, as it is so often taken to mean, ‘continuing life in disembodied bliss’, but rather ‘life in the “age to come” for which Israel longs’.33 In our present passage it corresponds to 1:4: the covenant God has rescued us from ‘the present evil age’, and those who now ‘sow to the Spirit’ will, in place of that present age, inherit ‘the age to come’. Finally, the exhortation to continue in well-doing without growing tired corresponds closely to 1 Corinthians 15:58. For Paul, in these very different letters, the thought of the future inheritance (however he describes it) is never an incentive to shrug one’s shoulders and wait passively for the final divine rescue operation, but always to be doing in the present those things which properly anticipate, and hence lead to, the future inheritance itself. As in the first letter to Corinth, this speaks powerfully about the continuity between the present and final state of Christian existence.
This picture is confirmed by Galatians 6:14–16, where Paul declares that the one thing that matters is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, but new creation. It is precisely the appeal to the one God as creator which underlies the mainstream Jewish hope for resurrection; and in this final, dense passage we see how once more Paul’s thought about the death and resurrection of Jesus has reshaped both his vision of the renewed world and his understanding of what it means to live in the present in the light of that future:
14 God forbid that I should boast, except in the cross of our lord Jesus the Messiah, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world; 15 for neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but only new creation. 16 And as many as walk by this rule, peace be upon them and mercy, even upon the Israel of God.
Note, here, the threefold sequence which shows how Paul’s mind works, even when drawing together the threads of a hasty, dense and polemical letter. First, the sequence of ‘cross—new creation’ has all the marks of resurrection upon it, and moreover resurrection seen precisely as new creation. The resonances with 2 Corinthians 5:17 are important; so too are the echoes of the various Jewish sources which speak of Israel’s God renewing his world in a great new creative act. As we shall see later, Paul keeps Genesis 1 and 2 in the back of his mind at all times, and regularly (but particularly in 1 Corinthians 15) sees the final act of redemption not as a rescue from creation but as the renewal of creation. This places him firmly on the Jewish map of eschatological hope; and, as in 2:19–20, Paul understands the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection to mean that the world is a different place, and that he is a different person in relation to it. The result, again, is that the distinction between Jew and non-Jew ceases to have any relevance. Those who ‘walk by this rule’ (the rule of ‘no ethnic barriers, but rather new creation’) will have the ‘peace and mercy’ that Israel’s God promised to his people. The biblical echoes summon up the picture not just of ‘peace and mercy’ in the present time, but of Israel’s long-term hope for ultimate salvation, for the new world in which the covenant people will dwell free and secure.34
Thus, though Galatians does not mention the resurrection explicitly, there are many points at which it is so close to the surface that we can see it just below the waterline, supporting those other aspects of Paul’s thought which protrude more obviously because he needs them for his ‘above-the-surface’ argument. The resurrection of Jesus, part of the divine plan to usher in ‘the age to come’ in place of ‘the present age’, is the beginning of the creator’s ‘new creation’, and gives retrospective meaning to Jesus’ death, enabling it to be seen as the divine act of redemption, dealing with the curse of the law, setting the slaves free, and exhibiting, indeed, the love of Jesus himself (2:20).
What has happened, in Galatians, to the metaphorical meaning of ‘resurrection’ in second-Temple Judaism, according to which Israel was to be set free from pagan oppression? Paul seems to have developed it in a new way. He speaks of a different slavery, and a different freedom: the bondage of humankind under the ‘elements of the world’, and of Israel under the law, on the one hand, and the present life of the Christian, led by the Spirit, already part of the new creation, free from the law and the powers of the world, on the other (4:1–11). It is a life of faith (2:20), a life lived ‘to God’ (2:19); a life in which ethnic boundary-markers, especially circumcision, are no longer necessary or relevant, because new creation has begun, and all those who believe the gospel belong to the single family which the one true God promised to Abraham (3:28–9), and must order their common life accordingly. The Christian hopes eagerly for the future moment when ‘righteousness’ will finally be accorded, for the full and final coming of the kingdom; present life in the Spirit is a genuine anticipation of this ‘age-to-come’ life. This is significantly different from anything we find in second-Temple Judaism outside early Christianity (though it has some analogies at Qumran, precisely because there too we find an inaugurated eschatology); but it is only explicable as a mutation from within the worldview of the second-Temple Jews. It is remarkably well developed in Paul’s mind, whenever we date Galatians (but especially if we place it early, as I am inclined to do). Precisely because resurrection and new creation is not the main topic of the letter, it is all the more striking that, every time Paul comes near the subject, what he says about it falls into the pattern which his other writings so firmly articulate.
With the letter to Philippi we reach something of a climax in Paul’s reference to, and use of, the resurrection. (There is still no agreement on which prison Paul was in when writing this letter; I incline towards Ephesus, thus placing the letter between the first and second letters to Corinth, though the arguments on this point are not without their difficulties. Nothing for our present purpose hinges on this, since I am not proposing a developmental scheme.) This letter offers a hint, stronger than anywhere else except 2 Corinthians, that Paul is facing the serious possibility of his own imminent death; so we should not be surprised to find here as well some of his clearest statements about the Christian hope beyond death. These are set within a more overtly counter-imperial theology than we have seen up to now: Jesus is lord and saviour, and by strong implication, easily audible to residents in a Roman colony, Caesar is not.35 The integration of an explicit resurrection-based theology with a politically subversive gospel has not been sufficiently remarked upon, and we shall note it further as we proceed.
The tight thematic integration of Jesus’ story with that of believers is one of the main themes of the letter, and the parallels and other links between 2:6–11 and 3:20–21 must be explored in more detail presently. But Paul’s opening statements, too, are full of interest for our topic. In his initial thanksgiving he affirms that the God who ‘began a good work in you’ will ‘bring it to completion until the day of the Messiah, Jesus’. As in 1 Thessalonians, Paul envisages the preaching of the gospel as the vehicle of the Spirit, effecting a radical change of heart and life. The point here is continuity (question 1 c): Paul believes that what this God has already done in the present life through gospel and Spirit is the guarantee of the final salvation which he will describe more fully in 3:20–21.
This leads him to some extended reflections on his own situation, in which he thinks through the issues that face him, and which indeed are out of his control: will he die, presumably through being condemned to death by the Roman authorities, or will he live and continue his apostolic work? He turns the matter this way and that, revealing almost casually the way in which he looks at death in the most telling of cases, namely his own:36
1:18b Well, but I shall go on celebrating, 19 because I know that this will result in my deliverance, through your prayers and the continued working of the Spirit of Jesus the Messiah, 20 in accordance with my eager expectation and hope, that I won’t be ashamed in any way, but that with all boldness, as always and so now, the Messiah will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death.
21 To me, you see, living means the Messiah, and death means gain. 22 If it is to be living in the flesh, that means fruitful work for me; so I don’t know which to choose. 23 I am pulled hard by both at once: I badly want to make my departure and be with the Messiah; that would be better by far. 24 But to stay on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake. 25 Since I’m convinced of this, I know that I shall remain, and continue on with all of you, for your benefit and the joy of your faith, 26 so that your celebration may abound in me in the Messiah, Jesus, through my coming to you again.
If this was the only passage of Paul, or even of Philippians, which addressed the question of what happens to Christians after they die, we could be forgiven for thinking that Paul held a one-stage view of life after death: Christians depart and go to be with the Messiah (verse 23). We know from the other letters that this was not his position; but, more importantly, we know from Philippians itself that he believed in a two-stage view: final resurrection will follow ‘life after death’ (3:20–21). What we have here, therefore, is a reinforcement of what we saw in 1 Thessalonians 4: between death and resurrection, Christians are ‘with the Messiah’. Paul describes this in such glowing terms (‘better by far’) that it is impossible to suppose that he envisaged it as an unconscious state. He looks forward to being personally present with the one who loved him and whose love will not let him go.37 This is the clearest answer we ever get from Paul to question 1b, the question of an intermediate state. He does not speak of ‘going to heaven’, though he would presumably have given that as the present location of the Messiah. His present life is defined in terms of the Messiah, and his future one will be as well (1:20–21).
We note, too, that as in Galatians 2:20 Paul describes the present life as living ‘in the flesh’. He does not here give this phrase the negative moral connotation it sometimes acquires elsewhere (e.g. in Romans 8:9). Rather, it carries negative ontological connotations: the flesh is weak and corruptible, and will one day die. He does not in this passage give an equivalent anthropological term (such as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’) to denote the sort of entity he will be after his death and before his resurrection. It is, again, enough to know that during that period he will be ‘with the Messiah’.
Paul’s initial appeal to the Philippian Christians, in 1:27–30, is that they will live worthy of the gospel in their public, even civic, life (1:27). He returns to this theme in 2:12–18. They will, of course, meet opposition, and face persecution, as they are already doing. But their cheerful refusal to be cowed will be a sign to their opponents that they (the opponents) are on the broad road to destruction, while those who belong to the Messiah, Jesus, are assured of soteria, not here necessarily ‘deliverance’ in the sense of escaping persecution or even martyrdom, but a deeper ‘salvation’ which nothing in the imperial system can either rival or harm. Putting this together with the rest of the epistle, we can be confident that Paul understands this ‘salvation’ to consist in rescue from death, not by avoiding it, nor by regarding it as an irrelevant transition to a better life, but by the overcoming of death in bodily resurrection (3:20–21).
With the famous passage 2:6–11 we meet a particular problem: that Paul here speaks, not of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but of his death and exaltation.38 It has often been suggested that these were more or less synonymous for the earliest Christians, and that it was only later, with Luke’s two-part work, that a distinction was made between the resurrection and ‘ascension’.39 This is at best a half truth, and, so to speak, the wrong half. John, often cited as a representative of the view in which resurrection and ascension mean the same thing, has the risen Jesus declare that he has ‘not yet ascended’;40 and Paul is well able to tell a fuller story, in which both resurrection and exaltation have a sequential and differentiated place.41 What is more, the way Paul develops the present passage in chapter 3 indicates, as we shall see, that resurrection was very much in his mind. Why then did he not highlight it here?
One way of getting round the difficulty is to suggest that the poem is written by someone else, and that Paul is simply quoting it. This, too, has been advanced as a reason for supposing that the earliest Christians told a story about Jesus’ death and exaltation rather than resurrection. I regard this as not only unprovable but unlikely. The poem is carefully constructed, and dovetails so well, at so many levels, with chapter 3 that I find it much easier to suppose that Paul wrote it himself for this purpose, or at the very least that it was written by someone he knew and trusted and that he quoted it here because it said what he wanted to say both in chapter 2 itself and as the basis for chapter 3. A much better answer, I believe, and one which fits well with the thrust of the letter as a whole, is that Paul was consciously modelling the poem, and its portrait of Jesus, not simply on Adam and Israel, as I argued in an earlier work, but also more specifically on Caesar (or rather, perhaps, on the whole tradition of arrogant emperors going back at least to Alexander the Great, with the Roman emperors as the current embodiments of the type). Jesus succeeded where Adam failed; he completed the task assigned to Israel; and he is the reality of which Caesar is the parody. As has recently been argued, the poem follows quite closely the narrative sequence of imperial propaganda, and thereby stresses the point for which the Paul of Acts was accused: of saying that there is ‘another king, namely Jesus’.42 He, not Caesar, is the world’s true lord.43
Part of the point, of course, is that the one thing Roman emperors did not claim was that they or anyone else had been raised from the dead. Exalted to heaven, yes; resurrected, no. The counter-imperial theme is then reinforced in the following verses, where Paul urges his readers to work out in practice what their type of salvation means, as opposed to the sort that Caesar offered (2:12–13).44 And—a tell-tale hint and a very important one—those who learn how to be Jesus’ people in Caesar’s empire will ‘shine like lights in the world’. This is a deliberate echo of Daniel 12:3, indicating that Paul, here as elsewhere, had thought through the present life and vocation of Christians in terms of a resurrection life which had already, in one sense, begun, even though it was to be completed in the bodily resurrection itself.45
The pen-portraits of Timothy and Epaphroditus provide an unexpected interlude at the end of chapter 2, and offer one bright spotlight on Paul’s attitude to death. Epaphroditus was the messenger through whom the Philippian church had sent money to the imprisoned apostle. He then fell sick and was near to death, but recovered; and Paul’s comment on this (2:27) is that ‘God had mercy on him, and not only on him but also on me, so that I would not have one sorrow on top of another.’ This is a long way from the Stoic portrait of ‘the Christian facing death’ that the later church has often presented, and it indicates more clearly what Paul means when he commands the Thessalonians not to grieve like those without hope: not that they should not grieve, but that their grief, however deep, should be of the hopeful variety.46
This brings us to chapter 3 (more specifically, 3:2–4:1; 3:1 is an introduction whose problems need not detain us here), where the resurrection, in several different senses, plays a vital part. As we have suggested, the whole passage is closely modelled on 2:6–11, and indeed on 1:27–2:18; this is important for interpreting the references to ‘resurrection’ throughout. As often with Paul, it will help to begin at the end, to understand the climax to which he is aiming. The end, in fact, is itself one of Paul’s clearest statements of what he believes about all the topics we are presently considering.
Paul introduces the crucial passage by warning against those who are ‘enemies of the Messiah’s cross’, who are opposed, in other words, to the message set out in 2:6–8. They are heading, he says, for destruction; their belly has become their God, and they set their minds on the things of the earth.47 But, he continues in 3:20–21,
20 our citizenship is in heaven; and it is from there that we eagerly await the Saviour, the lord, Jesus the Messiah. 21 He will transform the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the power which gives him the ability to put all things in subjection to himself.
And this leaves Paul with a strong and clear conclusion (4:1):
Therefore, my beloved family, whom I long for, my joy and my crown—stand firm in the lord in this way, my beloved ones.48
The most important point to get clear from the start is the nature of citizenship. Countless readers have assumed that what Paul means in 3:20 is that, being ‘citizens of heaven’, Christians look forward to the time when they will return and live there for ever.49 Verse 21 has thus been read—despite what it actually says!—as an affirmation of this point. This basically assimilates Paul to Philo, who says clearly that true wisdom lies in not regarding the present world as anything other than a temporary abode, and keeping one’s sights on heaven, from whence we came and whither we must return.50 But this is precisely what Paul does not say. Philo, expounding the wickedness of those who settled at Babel and built the tower there, makes a clear distinction between temporary sojourners and ‘colonists’. Temporary settlers, for whom Abraham sets the pattern, know that they are only in this body for a while, and act accordingly. But colonists (like the Babel-builders) take up permanent residence in their new abode, which stands in Philo’s allegory for those who settle down all too comfortably in the present body.51 Paul and Philo are not complete opposites here, but very nearly. Paul agrees with Philo that the important thing is to be a citizen of heaven, but he draws the opposite conclusion from it. Paul knew, the Philippians knew, and surely even Philo knew, that Roman citizenship (the obvious model behind this imagery) created neither an expectation that one would make the city one’s eventual home nor an entitlement to do so. The point about citizenship is a point about status and allegiance, not about place of residence. Indeed, the colonists of Philippi a century before Paul’s day had been placed there precisely because nobody wanted them back in Rome, or even in Italy: there was too much overcrowding, unemployment and shortage of food in Rome as it was. Those who were granted Roman citizenship in non-colonial cities such as Alexandria, Philo’s home, would certainly not interpret that as a standing invitation to retire to Rome in due course. The logic of colonies and citizenship works the other way round, as Philo himself saw when he urged that one should see oneself as a temporarily displaced heaven-person rather than a colonist: the Roman citizens whose forebears had originally colonized Philippi were there to stay. Their task was to live in the colony by the rules of the mother city, not to yearn to go home again.52 What they might need from time to time was not a trip back to Rome, but for the emperor to come from Rome to deliver them from any local difficulties they might be having.
That is the model Paul is drawing on, and it is operating here on at least two levels. First, it functions powerfully at the anthropological level. For Paul, there is no sense that any human being (other than Jesus) existed prior to conception, no sense of a soul trapped temporarily in a body from which it hopes to be released, able to go back home whence it came. That idea comes from Pythagoras and Plato, not from the Hebrew Bible.53 The punchline of Paul’s statement—and the heart of our present concern with this passage—is that the body will be transformed, not abandoned. This is one of his clearest answers to the question, what did he mean by resurrection? Here he means that in the new world which the creator God will make through the all-encompassing authority of the Messiah, his people will be given renewed bodies. Those who are presently alive (the ones he is referring to here) will be transformed; we assume, filling in the gaps from the parallel passages in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, that those who have died will be raised into bodies that have been similarly renewed and transformed. More specifically, the transformation will be from ‘humiliation’ to ‘glory’; in the parallel passage in 1 Corinthians 15:43, 49, 52 the emphasis is on the contrast of ‘corruptible’ and ‘incorruptible’. The two are different aspects of the same thing: the most ‘humiliating’ thing about the present body is that it is corruptible, bound for death. As in Romans 8:29, the Christian is promised that he or she will be ‘conformed to the image of God’s son’. The present body is not a prison from which to escape; what it needs is transformation.
What lies underneath this? A theology of creation very different from that of Philo. The final phrase of verse 21 echoes Psalm 8:6, just as in 1 Corinthians 15:27–8; the Messiah here is the truly human being, the fulfilment of God’s purpose in creation, now set in authority over the rest of the created order. There is no need to escape from the created order; the Messiah is its lord. Nor is there any need to escape from earth to heaven; instead, the Messiah will come from heaven to earth, to rescue his people not by snatching them away from earth but by transforming their bodies.54 Paul does not here develop the wider context for this, that of the transforming renewal of creation itself; but when he does just that in Romans 8 he merely fills in the details of the present lightning sketch rather than adding anything that alters its shape and content. It is because of this continuity between the present and the future that the practical conclusion of Paul’s argument here, exactly as in 1 Corinthians 15:58, is focused not on waiting for a different life altogether but on ‘standing firm in the lord’ (4:1).
Second, this functions very differently at the political level, and this is closely intertwined with resurrection itself. Though, as Goodenough showed sixty years ago, Philo too was capable of serious and sustained political critique of Rome, not only explicitly in the Legatio and Ad Flaccum but in a coded form,55 for him the goal of the process was always to escape from the present world order entirely, whatever intermediate tasks might occupy him meanwhile. For Paul there is much more sense of confrontation. The return of Jesus from heaven to earth, the parousia, was formulated, probably by Paul himself as the earliest Christian thinker known to us, in conscious opposition to the parousia of Caesar. The idea of the emperor coming from the mother city to rescue the beleaguered colony had explicit resonances in the Philippians’ own experience.56 The christological titles Paul uses here for Jesus (saviour, lord, Messiah) are blatantly counter-imperial, with the word ‘saviour’ in particular, used here for the only time in the normally accepted Pauline letters, echoing around the Mediterranean world with the claims of Caesar.57 And the all-embracing claim of verse 21, echoing Psalm 8:6, and thereby reminding us of 1 Corinthians 15:25–8, positively shouts that it is Jesus, not Caesar, who holds power over all things, and who will exercise that power in transforming the present ‘body of humiliation’ so that it corresponds to the ‘body of his glory’. This corresponds, of course, to 2:6–11, where Jesus himself accepted humiliation and death and now is exalted and glorified.
The underlying story on which Paul is here drawing concerns the fulfilment of the creator’s plan for the world. The aim had been, all along, as in Genesis 1, that this should be put into operation through the agency of the image-bearing human race. Paul sees this plan fulfilled in Jesus, and now to be completed through Jesus’ people sharing his glory, reflecting God’s image in the same way. The Adam-Christology which was partly responsible for Paul’s formulation in 2:6–8 now comes full circle.58 God’s plan for the world is thus, in Paul’s mind, the reality of which Caesar’s dream of world domination is the parody. And the ‘power’ of which he speaks explains more fully what he meant in 1 Thessalonians 1:5 and 2:13, and what he will say in Romans 1:16: the gospel is God’s power, because when Jesus is announced as lord his rule is extended, pointing forwards to the day when, by the power which raised him from the dead, God completes the task of bringing the whole creation to life and order, defeating death itself, the tyrant’s final weapon.
These verses at the end of Philippians 3 give us a vantage point from which much of Paul’s thought on resurrection can be surveyed. Running through our questions, we note the following.
(1a) Paul looks for the still-embodied future of the true people of the one God. Those presently alive will be transformed; by implication, those already dead will be raised to a new kind of bodily life. The key contrast here between ‘humiliation’ and ‘glory’, which is cognate with similar contrasts in 1 Corinthians 15, does not speak of a future in which believers will shine like stars (Paul has already used that as a metaphor for the present life of the church), but of the future rule over the world which believers will share with the Messiah, in contrast to their present state of subjugation. Since the resurrection of those already dead is implied rather than being his main focus, he does not here mention any kind of intermediate state (1b); he has, of course, already done that in chapter 1.
(1c) He emphasizes the continuity between the present world and the future one. The body is transformed, not abandoned, and the present Christian task is to stand firm.
(1d) The future resurrection of believers fits in to his larger story of the power of the creator God transforming the whole world through the rule of his image-bearing son.
There is here no suggestion of a metaphorical meaning of ‘resurrection’ (question 2), but, as we shall see, the earlier part of Philippians 3, working towards this conclusion, contains just such a thing. And all is based, most significantly (question 3), on what Paul believes was and is true of Jesus. Where did Paul arrive at his belief in the future transformation of believers from humiliation to glory, if not from what he believed about Jesus himself? And does this not imply a belief that Jesus’ body, too, was transformed, not abandoned? Here we see, in other words, the answer to the puzzle about exaltation and resurrection in 2:6–11. The poem was formulated to make a specific contrast with the rhetorical claims of Caesar, and hence did not highlight resurrection; but the present passage, drawing out its significance a stage further, makes it clear that the exaltation of Jesus involved, not the abandonment of his body to corruption, but its transformation from the humiliation of death to the glory of resurrection.
The deeply Jewish nature of all this is seen not least in the political implications, making more explicit what we glimpsed in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 5. The resurrection and exaltation of Jesus proclaim and install him as the world’s true lord and saviour; in other words, according to Paul’s gospel it is because of the resurrection that Jesus is lord and Caesar is not. The future resurrection and glorification of Jesus’ followers will vindicate them as the true people of the one true God, despite their present suffering and humiliation, and herald the victory of the gospel over the powers of the world through the final act of new creation. As in Pharisaic belief, resurrection challenges the powers of the world, as no other theology or spirituality can do, with the news of the kingdom of the creator and covenant God.
The earlier part of Philippians 3 can now be seen in its proper light. In verses 2–14 Paul tells his own story, offering it as a model in verses 15–16 and then, in verse 17, urging his readers to imitate him. This sets the context for the passage just studied; the two stand in close correlation. Paul’s own story, set out here more fully than elsewhere in his writings, consists of two halves: his life as a Pharisee, and his life in the Messiah. We should not read this as pronouncing a negative judgment on the world of Judaism as a whole, since what Paul claims to have gained in his new life are precisely the Messiah and resurrection, the great twin hopes that as a Pharisee he had cherished.59 There is a strong note of fulfilment as well as of renunciation; what he has renounced is his status ‘according to the flesh’ (verse 4) and ‘under the law’ (verse 6). The story of the Messiah’s own humiliation and vindication, told in 2:6–11, is now acted out in the life-story of those who are ‘in him’ (verses 7–14).
There are many fascinating aspects of this description of the Christian’s life and status which are not relevant to our enquiry. But it is striking that at the centre stands the claim, ‘I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing the Messiah, Jesus as my lord.’ At the heart of Paul’s vision of the renewed-Jewish, or fulfilled-Jewish, life is the Messiah, described in terms which, echoing 2:10–11, provide the reason why Paul cannot say that ‘Caesar is lord’, and which look forward to the climax of the argument in verses 19–21. And this is filled in by the promise of resurrection (3:8–11):
… so that I may gain the Messiah, 9 and that I may be found in him, not having a status of ‘righteousness’ of my own, based on the law, but that which is through the faithfulness of the Messiah, the righteous status from God which is upon faithfulness, 10 which means knowing him and the power of his resurrection and the companionship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death, 11 if somehow I may attain to the resurrection of the dead.
Out of this dense juxtaposition of almost all of Paul’s soteriological language and categories—justification, faith, being ‘in the Messiah’, knowing the Messiah, suffering and resurrection—we here draw the main point for our current purposes: for Paul, the resurrection is primarily a future event, corresponding to the resurrection of Jesus himself, but that its power is already made known in the present life, even in the midst of suffering and death. The small chiasm in verses 10–11 (resurrection, suffering: death, resurrection) links this statement backwards to 2:6–11 and forwards to 3:19–21. The Messiah took the morphe doulou, the ‘form of a servant’, in 2:7; so Paul will be ‘conformed’ (summorphizomenos) to the Messiah’s death through his present suffering and potential martyrdom. When the Messiah returns from heaven, however, the body of present humiliation will be ‘conformed’ (summorphon) to his glorious body. Verse 10 is clear: those who are ‘in the Messiah’, who through their faith and his faithfulness have the status of ‘righteous’ in the present (verse 9), already know the power of his resurrection even in the midst of present suffering, and they look forward eagerly (verse 11) to the final resurrection. The language of ‘power’ (dynamis) remains important here, another link to 3:21 and the political meaning of resurrection. Paul believes that God’s power, unleashed in Jesus’ resurrection and awaiting its full unveiling when Jesus returns, is already available through the gospel for all who believe, who ‘know the Messiah’. ‘Resurrection’ is, for him, part of present Christian experience, however paradoxical this may be in the midst of suffering.
Paul remains emphatic, however, that the primary meaning of ‘resurrection’ is future. Eschatology is inaugurated, but not complete (3:12–14):
12 Not that I have already obtained this, or am already completed; but I press on to make it my own, for the reason that the Messiah, Jesus, has made me his own. 13 My dear family, I don’t reckon that I have made it my own, but I do this one thing: I forget what is behind, and strain forward for what lies ahead, 14 and press on towards the finishing-post, for the prize of God’s upward call in the Messiah Jesus.
The ‘upward call’ is not, in the light of 3:19–21, to be interpreted as a call which summons people to leave ‘earth’ for ever and live instead in ‘heaven’. That which lies ahead is ultimately the life of the resurrection, not of a state of bliss which leaves the body behind. And this resurrection life remains in the future for the presently living as well as the presently dead; there can be no sense of a super-spirituality in which resurrection life in all its fullness is already possessed by the Christian.60
I have argued elsewhere that this whole section, telling Paul’s story based on that of the Messiah himself in order to hold it up as a model for the Philippians to imitate, is a coded call to those living under imperial rule to celebrate the unique lordship of Jesus the Messiah, being prepared to sit loose to the privileges of empire as Paul was prepared to sit loose to his status as a Pharisee.61 I find further confirmation of this, beyond what I set out there, in the model provided by Philo in his coded attack on the Roman government in Egypt.62 Paul moves in 3:18–19 from the rejection of his former status under Pharisaism to a general warning against pagan society and its manner of life. In the light of this, his summons to his readers both to set themselves the same standard that he does (3:15–16) and especially to imitate him (3:17) must be seen as part of his overall aim: that Christians should live in the present as members, already, of the world that is yet to be. This new-age reality was inaugurated at Easter, and will be completed, through the powerful return of Jesus, in and through the final resurrection of all his people. The future resurrection thus provides and undergirds the present status, the present political stance, and the present ethical life of Christians. Moreover, this future resurrection is of course based foursquare on the resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus himself, which tells us a good deal about how Paul saw that event. The continuity of the present Christian life (lived ‘in the power of his resurrection’) with the future resurrection itself shows that for Paul there was continuity as well as discontinuity between the Jesus who died and the Jesus who rose, and that this continuity was not a matter of spirit or soul, but of body.
Most scholars still regard the two central ‘prison epistles’ as deutero-Pauline, the work of an imitator rather than the apostle himself. I belong to the recalcitrant minority, not least because the reading of the other letters to which I have come over the years suggests that the differences between them and these two are less significant than is often suggested, and in some cases are actually non-existent.
The resurrection itself highlights the point. It is frequently stated, and often simply assumed, that Ephesians and Colossians differ significantly from the rest of Paul’s writings precisely in this, that whereas elsewhere the resurrection of believers is still in the future, these letters see it as a present reality: ‘if you were raised with the Messiah, seek the things that are above’, as Colossians 3:1 puts it. But, though it is true that both these letters do indeed emphasize the present state and situation of the church rather than the future, in both there are clear signs that the writer—to whom I shall refer as ‘Paul’, cheerfully begging the question of authorship—was well aware of the future dimension, and had not collapsed the tension of inaugurated eschatology into a spirituality in which the End had already arrived, full and entire, in the present.
This is so already in Ephesians 1:14, where the image of ‘inheritance’, already seen in Galatians 3 and 4 in terms of the promises made to Abraham, emerges again in the language about the Spirit as the ‘guarantee of our inheritance until we gain possession of it’, arrabon tes kleronomias hemon eis apolytrosin tes peripoieseos. As in Galatians 4:7, the gift of the divine Spirit provides the sure knowledge of the future ‘inheritance’, which is assured but not yet possessed.63 Clearly Paul sees both continuity and discontinuity between present Christian experience and final Christian hope; there is still an ‘inheritance’, which speaks of this future hope not now in terms of the Christian’s own state of being, but of possession and responsibility. Those who ‘inherit’ the age to come will do so after the manner of Israelites ‘inheriting’ the promised land. Ephesians 1:3–14 is, among other things, a retelling of the exodus story.
This leads Paul to a celebration, in prayer, of the present position of the church as it awaits this full inheritance (1:15–23). The key to this is a retelling of the story of Jesus, emphasizing the divine power that was at work in him to raise him from the dead and (as a separate event) to sit him at the right hand of the sovereign God in the heavenly places, putting all things under his feet; we note once more the use of Psalm 8:6 to indicate the present rule of the Messiah over the whole world, fulfilling the divine intention for the human race. The power which did all this, says Paul, is at work on our behalf (1:19). As in Philippians 3:10, the future hope is anticipated in present reality.
Having told the story of the sovereign God and of Jesus as an exodus-narrative (1:3–14) and as the story of this God’s victory in the Messiah over all the powers of the world (1:20–23), Paul now tells the story of how humankind has been brought from universal death to life in the Messiah (2:1–10, focused on 2:5–6). The present state of those in the Messiah is that they have already been ‘raised with the Messiah’ and seated with him in the heavenly places; what is true of the Messiah in 1:20–23, in other words, is true of those who are ‘in him’. This is part of the central Pauline answer to our second question, concerning the metaphorical uses of ‘resurrection’ in early Christianity: ‘resurrection’ here refers, not to the restoration of Israel, to a ‘return’ from exile or oppression, as in Ezekiel 37, but to the restoration of humankind that has been effected through the gospel, the ‘return’ from the exile of sin and death. Without downplaying the future hope of actual resurrection itself, the fact that the church lives in the interval between the Messiah’s resurrection and its own ultimate new life means that the metaphorical use of ‘resurrection’ language can be adapted to denote the concrete Christian living described in 2:10: ‘we are God’s workmanship, created in the Messiah Jesus for good works, which God planned beforehand for us to walk in them.”
This enables Paul to sketch the larger picture of the coming together of the whole human race in the Messiah (2:11–22), for which again the resurrection of Jesus is the strongly implicit foundation. The covenant God has abolished, he says, the enmity between Jew and Gentile in the Messiah’s flesh (2:14, 16), so that he might create a single new humanity in him. This looks on to 4:13, where the notion of ‘mature humanity’, growing up in all things into the Messiah, again resonates with other Pauline passages in which the point of the resurrection is the reaffirmation of the divine plan for the human race. Resurrected humanity, it seems, is humanity reaching its full goal.
This metaphorical use—resurrection in the present as the ground of Christian living—is strongly emphasized in 5:14, where, in a passage full of echoes of 1 Thessalonians 5:1–10, Paul quotes what appears to be an early Christian song or poem:
Awake, you sleeper!
Rise up from the dead!
The Messiah will shine on you.
As with Philippians 2:12–16, the darkness of the present world is contrasted with the light of the creator’s new day, a light which Christians, along with the Messiah, must already shine. And, as in Philippians, this echoes the promise of Daniel 12:3, but brings it into the present rather than saving it for the future—without in any way implying an over-realized eschatology. Final resurrection remains in the future (the ‘inheritance’ still to come, as in 1:14 and 5:5); but those on their way to it must shine like lights even in the present time. As the final chapter of Ephesians makes clear, Christians still have a battle to fight (6:10–20); the enemies are not yet finally defeated; but the eschatology that has been inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus means that victory is assured.
Colossians also speaks of the future hope still to be realized as well as the present metaphorical resurrection life of believers. The introductory thanks-giving emphasizes ‘the hope which is stored up for you in the heavens’ (1:5), which, as we shall see with other similar phrases, does not mean that Christians must leave ‘earth’ and go to ‘heaven’ in order to make this hope their own, but that ‘heaven’ is where the divine purposes for the future are stored up, waiting to be brought to birth in the new reality, the new age in which heaven and earth will be joined in a fresh way. This comes to the fore in the central passage, 3:1–4:
1So then, if you were raised with the Messiah, seek the things that are above, where the Messiah is seated at God’s right hand. 2Think about the things that are above, not about the things on the earth. 3For you died, and your life has been hidden with the Messiah in God. 4When the Messiah appears—he is your life!—then you too will appear with him in glory.
The ‘appearing’ of the Messiah, and the ‘appearing’ of believers with him, is a fresh way of referring to the same event that Paul described in Philippians 3:20–21, and indeed this passage has several other echoes of that chapter. Despite popular impressions, Paul is just as happy to speak of the time when Jesus will ‘appear’ as he is to refer to his ‘arrival’ or ‘second coming’. And the language of ‘appearing’, not least in its double usage here, indicates well enough what is going on: heaven and earth are at present opaque to one another, but the day will come when the reality at present hidden in the heavenly places—the reality of the Messiah, reigning in glory, and of his people, presently ‘with him’—will be revealed. This, we may confidently say, is the moment of resurrection itself, the moment when the future hope comes to full realization. The present status of Christians, on the basis of baptism, is that they have already died with the Messiah and been raised with him, as 2:13 makes clear: ‘You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the power of the God who raised him from the dead.’ Those who were ‘dead’ both in their sins and in their Gentile status, excluded from the covenant people, have been ‘made alive’ with the Messiah, their transgressions being forgiven (2:13). In the Jewish thought where ‘resurrection’ was used metaphorically for ‘return from exile’, one central part of that hope was that Israel’s sins would finally be forgiven.64 Throughout this sequence of thought, the present metaphorical ‘resurrection’ of Christians, replacing the metaphorical usage in some Jewish texts, denotes their status ‘in the Messiah’ who has himself been concretely raised from the dead; and it takes its meaning from the fact that it anticipates their future literal ‘resurrection’, their eventual sharing of the Messiah’s glory. In the meantime, as in Philippians 3:14, 18–19, they are to set their minds on things above, not on the things of the earth.65
The basis of this sequence of thought is the unveiling of the Messiah as the image of the creator God, the ‘firstborn’ both of creation and then of the new creation. Colossians 1:15–20, a spectacular early Christian poem, places Jesus’ resurrection (1:18) in parallel with the creation of the world (1:15), seeing it as the ground and origin of what the creator has now accomplished and is now implementing, namely the reconciliation of all things to him.66 The very shape of the poem insists that Jesus’ resurrection, as a one-off event, is an act not of the abolition of the original creation but of its fulfilment: the same Messiah and lord is the one through whom all things were made in the first place, the one in whom all things cohere, the one in and through whom all things are now brought into a new relationship with the creator God and with one another. This passage has, of course, considerable implications both for Pauline cosmology (the whole cosmos is good, God-given, and, despite the rebellion of the powers within it, it has been reconciled to its maker) and politics (all the power structures of the world were created in, through and for the Messiah, verse 16).
The personal result is displayed on either side of the poem, and in both cases the story of Jesus’ resurrection undergirds the narrative that is told. The creator God has qualified his people to share in the inheritance of the saints in light, by delivering them from the kingdom of darkness and transferring them into the kingdom of his son, in whom they have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (1:12–14); Jesus’ death and resurrection, in other words, function as the moment of the new exodus, of the ‘return’ from the long exile of sin and death, of the overthrow of all the powers that enslaved the world, and those who now belong to the Messiah share the benefits of all this. Likewise, as in Ephesians 2, those who were estranged from, and hostile to, the one true God, have been reconciled by Jesus’ death, and must now stand firm on ‘the hope of the gospel’ which has been announced to every creature under heaven. This can only mean that with the resurrection itself a shock wave has gone through the entire cosmos: the new creation has been born, and must now be implemented.67
The result of all this, for basic Christian living, is a new lifestyle in which the divine intention for the human race is at last fulfilled. This means, in 3:5–11, no immorality, no anger and evil talk, and no distinctions of race or class. But for our purposes the key element, reflecting one of Paul’s central themes in Romans and the Corinthian correspondence, is the contrast between old and new humanity (3:9–10). The former has been done away with in baptism’s modelling of the death of the Messiah; the latter has been created in baptism’s modelling of his resurrection:
… seeing that you have put off the old humanity (ton palaion anthropon) with its deeds, and have put on the new one, which is being renewed into knowledge in accordance with the image of the creator.68
This belongs exactly in the network of ideas we have been discovering, not least in Philippians 3, and which we will see developed in Paul’s major statements elsewhere. The point of the resurrection, so far as Paul is concerned, is the reaffirmation of creation, not its denial. Already, before the final disclosure in which the Messiah’s people will ‘appear with him in glory’ (3:4), this new creation, human beings remade in God’s image, must be seen in the common life of the church.
In these respects at least, therefore, Ephesians and Colossians are not out of line with the treatment of resurrection in the other Pauline letters, either the ones studied so far or those we shall come to presently. In both, the resurrection of Jesus himself is the historical event through which the creator’s plan to rescue the world from sin and death has been decisively inaugurated, following the death whereby sin was itself dealt with. In both, the inheritance of the Messiah’s people lies still in the future. Yet, in both, the present life of Christians is already, metaphorically, one of ‘resurrection’, not now referring, as in second-Temple Judaism, to the restoration of ethnic Israel, but rather to forgiveness of sins and a new pattern of behaviour. When it comes to the meanings of resurrection, these letters belong where they are at the heart of the Pauline corpus.
Before we turn to Romans, and then to the Corinthian letters, we may note, almost as an interlude, the way in which resurrection functions by implication within the argument of the short letter to Philemon. In urging Philemon to take back the runaway slave Onesimus, Paul draws on the language of redemption he has employed in Galatians 4:1–7, and will use again in Romans 8:12–17, with echoes in both passages of God’s ‘redemption’ of Israel from slavery in Egypt:
Perhaps this was why he was separated from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever—no longer as a slave, but as much more than a slave, a beloved brother, beloved to me, and how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the lord!69
The logic of the surrounding verses fills in the details of Paul’s implicit narrative. Paul is bound to Onesimus with bonds of love; in sending him back he is ‘sending his very heart’ (verse 12). Yet Paul is also bound in ties of fellowship and mutual love and obligation with Philemon (verses 17–20). He can therefore appeal to Philemon to accept Onesimus as he would accept Paul himself. If Onesimus owes him anything, Philemon is to put it down on Paul’s account. This combination of representation and substitution has a familiar ring to anyone at home in Paul’s varied accounts of the cross; what we are seeing is the lived-out gospel of the death of Jesus.70 Once we realize that, we should be able to see, as well, the lived-out gospel of the resurrection. Onesimus is to be a slave no longer, but a brother of Philemon, because both are redeemed children of the one true God.
Romans is suffused with resurrection. Squeeze this letter at any point, and resurrection spills out; hold it up to the light, and you can see Easter sparkling all the way through. If Romans had not been hailed as the great epistle of justification by faith, it might easily have come to be known as the chief letter of resurrection (not, of course, that the two are unrelated); the Corinthian letters would be strong contenders for such a title, but Romans would give them a good run for their money. Romans offers plenty of answers to all our main questions, while supplying a massive framework of thought—it is, after all, one of the intellectual masterworks of the ancient world—within which to locate them. We shall have to be careful, in what follows, not to pursue its many lines of thought too far, so as to keep this treatment within the bounds of a subsection of a chapter.71
We begin where Paul begins, with a passage which many readers have leapfrogged in their eagerness to get to what exegetical tradition has declared to be the main theme, stated in 1:16–17. In that passage, Paul announces that the gospel is God’s power to salvation for all who believe, Jew and Greek alike, because in it God’s righteousness is revealed from faith to faith. Very well, exegetes have declared: this letter is about the gospel, that is, justification by faith, and the salvation which results. I have argued elsewhere that this is a severe truncation of Paul’s meaning in these verses alone; but the main fault of this exegetical move is that it ignores what Paul says right at the start of the letter, by way of a summary of ‘the gospel’, which forms part of his own self-introduction (1:3–5):
[God’s gospel] … concerning his Son, who was descended from the seed of David according to the flesh, and marked out as Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead, Jesus the Messiah our lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations for the sake of his name …
When Paul says ‘the gospel’, then, he does not mean ‘justification by faith’, though of course justification is the immediate result of the gospel. The ‘good news’ Paul has in mind is the proclamation of Jesus, the Davidic Messiah of Israel, as the risen lord of the world. This short passage, which has often been allowed to fall off the front of the letter, is in fact intended as every bit as much a thematic introduction as 1:16–17. The Messiahship of Jesus, with all that follows from it, is central to the whole letter, as we can see in Paul’s subsequent christological summaries, both at the conclusion of several arguments and at the introduction to the crucial section chapters 9–11.72
The point about this for our purposes is that Jesus is seen as who he is, with all the significance Paul will attach to this identification, because of his resurrection. Many were descended from David’s seed according to the flesh; James the brother of the lord could have made that claim, as could the various blood relatives of Jesus who are known in the early church.73 But only one Davidic descendant had been raised from the dead. This, Paul declares, marks him out as the ‘son’ of Israel’s God: that is, the Messiah.74
Place this claim in its second-Temple context, and it becomes apparent that Paul cannot possibly have meant that Jesus of Nazareth, after his execution by the Romans, had been exalted to a place of honour, like the martyrs, awaiting resurrection; or that his soul was in the hand of God, as Wisdom 3:1 puts it of the recently dead righteous ones. Nor is he talking about an apotheosis like that of the Roman emperors, whose souls were borne aloft, in popular belief and iconography, on a comet (as in the case of Julius Caesar), or by an eagle (as in the carving on Titus’ Arch).75 That would have constituted him as a divine being, with his heir and successor as his ‘son’, like a new emperor becoming ‘son of God’ by divinizing his predecessor. No. Paul’s point is this: that the resurrection has declared Jesus of Nazareth, descended from David, truly to be the Messiah, ‘son of God’ in that sense. This carried, once more, enormous political significance in a world where Caesar was the son of a god and the lord of the world; the resurrection has marked Jesus out as the true world ruler, the one of whom Caesar is a mere parody. We are here—at the start of a letter to Rome itself!—on the same page as Philippians 2:6–11 and 3:19–21. This is a Jewish message about a king of the Jews, designed (as Josephus knew such messages were designed) to challenge the pretensions of pagan empire.76 That is one of the reasons why Paul notes that the ‘marking out’ of Jesus was ‘in power’; as we have seen, when Paul thinks of Easter he regularly thinks of divine power, and when he thinks of power he is thinking about the challenge which divine power offers those in the present world who suppose they have a monopoly on it. This is good Pharisaic theology, refocused around Jesus. The resurrection always was a highly political doctrine, and with the totally unexpected event of Jesus’ own resurrection the powers of the world have been confronted with a new reality, the Jewish hope come to life, the vindication of the ‘son of man’ after his suffering at the hands of the beasts. This was not an isolated, freak occurrence. This was, in embryo, ‘the resurrection of the dead’, of all the dead.77
Why then did Paul imagine that the resurrection constituted Jesus as Messiah, as ‘son of God’ in that sense? As we saw in reviewing the extensive second-Temple literature on resurrection, at no point did anyone envisage a Messiah who would die a shameful death, let alone be raised from the dead. So deafening is the silence on the subject that we might conclude that, if someone else had been found to be thoroughly alive again after being thoroughly dead, people might have concluded that the world was a very strange place; they might have wondered if such a person was a great prophet, perhaps even Elijah; but there is no reason to suppose they would at once say that he was the Messiah. The Psalms and prophetic texts upon which the early Christians drew to make the connection between Messiahship and resurrection—which we see in Acts 2, for instance, as well as the present passage—were not, as far as we know, read like that at the time.78
But nor, we must add, would anyone have supposed, three minutes, three days or three weeks after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, that he was in fact the Messiah. Anybody who knew anything about messiahs knew that a messiah who had been crucified by the pagans was a failed messiah, a sham. I have argued in detail elsewhere that Jesus of Nazareth did do and say things during his lifetime which indicated to his closest followers at least, and in the end to some kind of a Jewish court, that he really did believe himself to be Messiah.79 But nobody, not even his closest friends and associates, would have dreamed of saying that he really was the Messiah despite it all, unless something else had happened, after his violent and shameful death, to make them think such a thing.
Thus neither Jesus’ life, deeds and teachings on the one hand, nor his resurrection on the other, could by themselves have had the effect of making people say at once, ‘He really was and is the Messiah.’ But put them together—which is what the early Christians did, including Paul immediately upon his conversion—and the result is clear. A would-be messianic life would be an insufficient condition for such a result; even resurrection by itself would likewise be insufficient; but both remain necessary conditions for the claim to be made. Put them together, however, and they become sufficient.80 The resurrection of the person who had done and said these things, and who had been put to death as a messianic pretender, said it all. Israel’s God, the creator, had reversed the verdict of the court, in reversing the death sentence it carried out. Jesus really was the king of the Jews; and, if he was the Messiah, he really was the lord of the world, as the psalms had long ago insisted.81 The event precipitated the exegesis: once early Christians had glimpsed the idea that a would-be Messiah, a descendant of David, had been put to death as a messianic pretender but had been raised from the dead, it was not long before the Septuagintal language about Israel’s God ‘raising up’ David’s seed after him, to sit on his throne, would come into its own.
To repeat the point: nothing short of resurrection, in the sense carried by that word in both ancient paganism and second-Temple Judaism, could possibly have had this effect. We can be more precise still. Nothing short of the firm belief that resurrection had occurred in this one case could have produced this result. We must hold over until Part V the question of what we can say as historians about this belief; but we cannot reasonably doubt that Paul (or whoever wrote 1:3–4, if as some have suggested he was quoting an earlier source) intended by this statement to refer to an event involving the body of Jesus acquiring new life after having been thoroughly dead. There is no other available referent imaginable within Paul’s world, other than bodily resurrection, which (a) could be described with the language he uses here and which (b) would have had the effect of him, or anyone else, saying of a dead man that he was after all the Messiah, the anointed one of Israel’s God. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of this letter, the heart of the gospel of Jesus’ Lordship, the centre of Paul’s implicit critique of Caesar, and the source of his doctrines of justification and salvation. Paul will return to the same point in 15:12, precisely when he is rounding off the main theological argument of the letter. Only when we see this link, which we shall explore below, will we grasp the centrality of Jesus as the resurrected Messiah in Paul’s thought in general and in Romans in particular.
As frequently elsewhere, Paul indicates that the resurrection was accomplished by the Holy Spirit. This is one of many elements in this packed opening statement which Paul will draw on in his climactic exposition in chapter 8.
The first major section of the letter (1:18–3:20) concerns the revelation of God’s justice against all human evil. After the opening scene (1:18–32), Paul sketches a brief picture of the final judgment, in which, as in much Jewish thought, the Messiah himself will be the judge.82 This scene, full of stock elements, contains a rich description (2:6–11) of the final state of those who are saved, as well as of those who are not:
6 [God] will give to every person according to their deeds. 7 To those who, according to patience in good works, seek for glory and honour and incorruptibility, he will give the life of the age to come; but to those who are contentious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and rage. 9 There will be suffering and distress for every human soul (psyche) who performs evil, Jew first and also, equally, Greek; 10 but glory and honour and peace for everyone who performs good, Jew first and also, equally, Greek. 11 For God shows no partiality.
Many expositors have marginalized this passage as though Paul did not really mean it, or was only holding out a hypothetical possibility which he would then deny; but this is unnecessary. This is the final judgment scene, and there is no need to ‘protect’ Paul from speaking of the ‘good works’ which people perform during their lifetime, in accordance with which this final judgment will be given.83 And, albeit in summary form, Paul sets out clearly his vision of the future for the true people of Israel’s God. They will inherit ‘the life of the age to come’, or, as zoe aionios is normally translated, ‘eternal life’; and this will be because, through a life of patience in welldoing, they have been ‘seeking for glory (doxa) and honour (time) and incorruptibility (aphtharsia)’. The last term is often translated ‘immortality’, and overlaps in meaning with that word (normally athanasia, ‘deathlessness’); strictly, however, aphtharsia means ‘non-decaying’, ‘unable to be corrupted’. Clearly Paul did not think that this quality was already possessed by human beings during the present life; and since the two terms are so close in their regular referent, it is safe to say that he did not regard immortality, either, as an automatic possession of human beings.84 When Paul repeats the list in verse 10 he substitutes ‘peace’ for ‘incorruptibility’, not because he intends to deny that his God will give the latter gift, but because this too is among the blessings of the age to come which, anticipated in the present (compare 5:1), will be part of the coming reward. While, then, Paul does not mention the resurrection specifically, the fact that aphtharsia is part of the list of blessings of the new age indicates clearly enough that he envisages it; and putting ‘honour and peace’ beside ‘glory’ indicates, as we shall see more fully in due course, that by ‘glory’, here and elsewhere, he does not mean so much a luminous or light-giving quality, but a position of esteem, responsibility and perhaps authority.
The next main section of Romans (3:21–4:25) explains how ‘God’s righteousness’—that is, God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham—has been unveiled in the gospel events concerning Jesus. His death and resurrection are God’s way of doing what he always said he would do (giving Abraham a Jew-plus-Gentile family), while simultaneously dealing with the universal sin that looked as if it might thwart this purpose. Romans 4 expounds Genesis 15, the chapter where the promise was made and the covenant established, and demonstrates that this chapter always envisaged that Abraham and his family would be marked out by faith—not works, not circumcision, not possession of Torah, but the faith which humankind as a whole had refused (1:18–32): faith in God the life-giver, who ‘gives life to the dead and calls non-existent things into existence’.85 This faith is evidenced by the fact that he believed in the divine power to give him a child even when he and his wife Sarah were ‘as good as dead’ because they were long past child-bearing age:
4:19 He did not weaken in faith as he considered his own body, which was already dead (nenekromenon, ‘having been put to death’) because he was a hundred years old, and the deadness (nekrosin) of Sarah, the mother. 20 He did not waver in unbelief at God’s promise, but grew powerful in faith, and gave God glory, 21 being fully convinced that [God] had the power to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness’.
The whole point of this faith, it seems, is that it gains its own power from reflecting on the power and promise of the creator God; and, as we have seen elsewhere, this ‘power’ is what Paul associates in particular with the resurrection. It was refusal to give glory to the creator, and to recognize his power, that paved the way for idolatry and the consequent corruption, dishonouring, degrading and death of humankind in the first place.86 Part of Paul’s purpose here is to indicate the way in which faith in the true God, and in his life-giving power, is the sign that humankind is being restored. There can be no doubt, from this passage, that Paul envisages the resurrection of Jesus as bodily. Anything less than that would simply not fit the parallel with Abraham and his ‘resurrection faith’. It would not take a special, unique act of divine power to translate Jesus’ soul into a glorious heavenly existence.
The conception and birth of Isaac is therefore an anticipation of Jesus’ resurrection, and Christian faith thus claims its share in the Abrahamic promise of Genesis 15:
23 But it was not written for his sake alone that ‘it was reckoned to him’. 24 It was also on account of us, to whom it will also be reckoned—to us who believe in the one who raised Jesus our lord from the dead, 25 who was handed over because of our trespasses, and raised because of our justification.
The final pregnant phrases are at first sight obvious in meaning, but become denser and more difficult on closer inspection. Much paper and ink has been used up in wrestling with the question of whether Paul really intends the two ‘because of’ clauses (dia plus accusative in each instance) to be exactly parallel, and, if not, why he has written it like that. The earlier part of the passage is reasonably clear, especially in the light of 10:9, where believing that the creator raised Jesus from the dead is, along with confessing him as lord, the criterion for justification and salvation. Abraham believed in the God who gives life where there is only death; so, Paul says, do we Christians, and thus, since we share Abraham’s faith, we share his justification. But is the final verse anything more than an imprecise rhetorical flourish?
Yes, it is. In several other passages Paul draws together statements about Jesus’ death and statements about his resurrection, and the same subtle imbalance is present in each. This is particularly so in the dense and complex ‘as … so …’ clauses of 5:12–21.87 And there is no real problem in seeing dia with the accusative meaning ‘because of in relation to an antecedent cause on the one hand (he was given up because of our sins) and an intended result on the other (he was raised because of [God’s plan for] our justification). The real question is, in what way is Jesus’ resurrection somehow specially instrumental in securing justification?
Paul can, of course, speak equally well of Jesus’ death having this function (as for instance in 5:9). But reflection on 1:3–4, which I have already suggested was designed as a proleptic statement of much of the epistle’s theology, indicates a way forward. Jesus’ resurrection was the divine vindication of him as Messiah, ‘son of God’ in that sense, the representative of Israel and thence of the world.88 Similarly, God’s ‘justification’ of all believers refers to his declaration that they are in the right, that their sins are now forgiven. We may compare the train of thought in 1 Corinthians 15:17: if the Messiah is not raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. The resurrection demonstrates that the cross was not just another messy liquidation of a would-be but misguided Messiah; it was the saving act of God.89 God’s raising of Jesus from the dead was therefore the act in which justification—the vindication of all God’s people ‘in Christ’—was contained in a nutshell (see below on 5:18). Chapter 4 thus not only shows that for Paul the resurrection of Jesus was a life-giving event, overcoming death itself by the sheer power of the creator God; it was part of the larger story in which the covenant God was demonstrating his faithfulness by vindicating all those who believe in him, as he promised to Abraham. Moreover, the passage explains, again quite densely, that this vindication is appropriate, because unlike those in chapter 1 who worship idols and so degrade their humanness, those who believe in the life-giving God are themselves being remade as genuinely human beings. They are, as Colossians 3 puts it, being renewed in knowledge after the image of the creator.
Romans 5–8 is the most majestic set piece Paul ever wrote. Carefully structured in sequential arguments, each with its own initial statement, development, and christological climax, it argues in a long arch, from the opening assertion that those who are justified by faith have peace with the true God and rejoice in the hope of his glory (evoking 2:6–11), to the final conclusion (8:31–9) in which this is again the central theme, now stated with the force of a QED. At every point, in the large structure and in the smaller arguments, the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit play key roles. And from at least chapter 6 through to chapter 8 Paul is deliberately echoing a story which, as we have already seen, was often just below the surface in his writing: the exodus.90 Our present task, as well as to avoid being distracted by the multiplicity of themes, is to focus on the meaning of the resurrection throughout, not least in the magnificent chapter 8, where most of the major themes of the letter, and of Paul’s theology as a whole, are gathered up in powerful celebration.
The overarching theme itself exhibits the shape of Paul’s picture of resurrection. As he declares in the succinct summary, those whom God justified, them he also glorified (8:30); in other words (as Ephesians puts it), those who are ‘in Christ’ are already seated with the Messiah in the heavenly places. Already they stand on resurrection ground (6:6–14). And the opening of the section, unfolding step by step from the initial statement in 5:1–2, makes the same point in its shape as well as its content: suffering produces hope, and hope does not make us ashamed (compare Philippians 1:20), because love for God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.91 The powerful resurrection of Jesus constitutes the sphere within which Christians now live, already justified and reconciled to God, and now looking forward to final rescue from wrath (which is functionally equivalent to being given ‘glory, honour, incorruption and peace’ as in 2:7, 10), in other words, to the life of the age to come (5:21, reflecting 2:7). Thus:
9 How much more, then, since we are now justified by his blood, shall we be saved through him from wrath. 10 For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, how much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved in his life.
‘In his life’: this, clearly, is the resurrection life of the Messiah, the new life that follows his sacrificial death. This is what Paul will expound more fully in Romans 6 and 8.
The next paragraph, 5:12–21, is as notorious among scholars for its compactness as it is among struggling students working out how Paul can write Greek sentences, as in verse 18, without subject, verb or object. Yet it is here, not least in verse 18 itself, for all its Tacitean density, that we find something very near the heart of Paul’s understanding of the effects of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Sin has spread through all humanity, bringing universal death; the true God has dealt with the problem, in fulfilment of the covenant promises, through the one man Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all, Jew and Gentile alike. The paragraph (like several passages already studied) depends for its force on Paul’s underlying theology of what human beings are in the divine intention and purpose; the tragedy of Adam is not just that he introduced sin and hence death into the world, but that humans were made to be the creator’s wise agents over creation, and if they worship and serve the creature rather than the creator this purpose goes unfulfilled. When summing up the same train of thought in 8:29, Paul puts it like this: we were, he says, ‘predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s son, that he might be the firstborn among a large family of siblings’. So here, in verse 17, we may be surprised to read that the result of God’s grace in the gospel is that those who receive the gift will themselves ‘reign in life as kings (basileusousin).’ This is what human beings were made for. It is also what Caesar thinks he can do without reference to the one true God; but he will discover his mistake.
Paul states his principal thesis in verse 18:92 ‘So then, as through one trespass—to all people—unto condemnation, in the same way also through one act of righteousness—to all people—unto the justification of life!’ Paul splashes his verbal paint on to the canvas in huge dollops, and does not stop to touch it up. We are left to add the smaller details: the ‘act of righteousness’ appears to be a way of referring to Jesus’ obedient death, indicating that it balances and indeed outweighs Adam’s trespass, and ‘the justification of life’ appears to refer to the resurrection as God’s act of vindication, not only of Jesus himself but, proleptically, of all those who are ‘in him’. Paul can therefore explain in the next verse that it is through the ‘obedience’ of the one man (now seeing Jesus’ death and resurrection as a single act) that the many are given the status of ‘righteous’ (verse 19). He then introduces the darker note of the law and its effects, which will take him all of chapter 7 to work through; but his assertion that God has dealt with this problem too leads him to the final statement of the chapter (5:21), which in turn will serve as a quarry from which subsequent arguments can be drawn:
… so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might also reign through righteousness to the life of the coming age (eis zoen aionion) through Jesus the Messiah our lord.
‘Grace’ here is obviously a shorthand for ‘the true God, acting freely and generously’; ‘righteousness’, though sometimes wrongly translated ‘justification’, clearly means that God is acting in and through his own faithfulness to the covenant, the covenant which was always intended to deal with sin and death; and the result is that all those who benefit from this action (Paul does not spell this out here but it has been present throughout the paragraph) will inherit zoe aionios, ‘eternal life’, or, as I have suggested as a preferable translation for readers soaked in Platonic imagination, ‘the life of the age to come’, that of which the Pharisees and rabbis spoke so eagerly, and which for them meant one thing only: resurrection. The resurrection is thus the creator’s answer not only to sin but to its consequences.
Part of the point of this sharp and dramatic paragraph for our purposes is to highlight the fact that Paul here draws together his thinking about the death and resurrection of Jesus in terms of their constituting the single act of divine grace and power through which the entail of human sin and death is broken. This is what he will now explore in the coming chapters. And he begins right away, in chapter 6, by drawing out the implications of 5:21 in terms, first of the status of the baptized, then in terms of their behaviour. In both, the resurrection of the Messiah leads, through the identification of the believer with him in baptism, to personal ‘resurrection’, both literally in the future and metaphorically in the present.93
This is where the now traditional scholars’ disjunction between Romans and the other ‘principal letters’ on the one hand, and Ephesians and Colossians on the other, is I believe mistaken.94 Granted, Paul does not use exactly the same terminology here as we find there; but that is true of almost all parallels and near-parallels between any passages in his various letters. But the questions he asks, and the answers he gives, only make sense if he is affirming a present ‘resurrection’ life for the Christian as well as a future one.
The first question in chapter 6, despite popular impressions to the contrary, is about status, not behaviour. ‘Shall we continue in sin’ treats ‘sin’ as a place where one might go on living, not as an activity one might continue to perform. The question depends for its force on Paul’s insistence on the grace of God reaching down ‘while we were still sinners’ (5:8). Do we then, he asks, have to remain as ‘sinners’ for God’s grace to reach us there? Is that to be our continuing status? Shall we stay as we are?
Certainly not, he replies. Something has happened to bring us out from that place, that state, that status. Baptism means identification with the Messiah; what is true of him becomes true of those who are baptized; and the Messiah died to sin, once, as a completed action, and was then raised to new life. We ‘died to sin’, Paul says, with the Messiah. Where, then, is the baptized person now? In a kind of limbo, or intermediate state, after death but before resurrection?
In a sense, yes, and this is not insignificant; but in a sense, no. This is very important for our overall argument, and must be unpacked further.
In a sense, yes. Paul is very clear that there is a still-future resurrection yet to come. The future tenses in 6:5 and 8 (‘if we were planted together with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also [in the likeness] of his resurrection’; if we died with the Messiah, we believe that we shall also live with him) are disputed; they may be real futures, that is, predicting a final resurrection, or they may be logical.95 Whatever we decide about that, 6:23 envisages the eventual gift of the ‘life of the age to come’, zoe aionios, which in 2:7 Paul declared was the divine gift, at the final judgment, to those who persisted patiently in well-doing. And in 8:10–11 (see below), and the long paragraph to which it leads (8:12–30), there is no question: however much inaugurated eschatology there is, however much ‘now’, there is a massive ‘not yet’ as well. The resurrection, in its literal meaning and with its concrete referent, has not yet happened, except to Jesus himself. From that point of view, the Christian who has ‘died with Christ’ in baptism is indeed in a kind of intermediate state; and it is interesting that Paul can use, of such a person, a phrase which was used precisely for the intermediate state by some Jews who believed in bodily resurrection. Those who have died are now ‘alive to God’.96
This must, however, be immediately qualified. Paul uses the same language of Jesus himself in 6:10, and he does not suppose that Jesus is in any kind of intermediate state. Perhaps the best account of the passage is this: Paul is aware that he is borrowing, and adapting, language from his native Judaism (in which nobody expected the Messiah to be raised in advance of anyone else), in order to describe the new situation in which, he believed, exactly that had happened. If there is a sense in which those who have died with Christ in baptism are, until their eventual resurrection, in a kind of intermediate state, there is a sense, too, and a more important one, in which they are not. Paul does not believe that those who have died with Christ are in some kind of neutral territory, halfway between death and life. His argument about status in verses 2–11, and his arguments about behaviour in verses 12–14 and 15–23, depend for their force throughout on his belief that in baptism the Christian not only dies with the Messiah but rises as well. ‘Reckon yourselves as well to be dead indeed to sin, and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus’ (verse 11). When Paul says ‘reckon’, he does not mean that the act of ‘reckoning’ something creates a new entity (even if he did, that would still mean that the Christian who had thus ‘reckoned’ was already alive the other side of death); the language of ‘reckoning’ is that of adding up a sum, a column of figures. When I add up the money in my bank account, that does not create the money; life is not, alas, that easy. It merely informs me of the amount that is already there. When I have completed the ‘reckoning’, I have not brought about a new state of affairs in the real world outside my mind; the only new state of affairs is that my mind is now aware of the way things actually are.
So it is here. When Paul says in verse 4 that ‘as the Messiah was raised from the dead through the father’s glory, so also we are to walk in newness of life’, he is not asking of Christians something that, being still ‘dead’, they are unable to perform. That is the strong argument for seeing the future tenses of verses 5 and 8 as logical, not temporal. And when the argument for status, whose conclusion is verse 11 (the Messiah died and was raised; you are in the Messiah; therefore you must reckon that you have died and been raised) gives way to the argument for behaviour in verses 12–14, there can be no doubt. ‘Yield yourselves to God as people alive from the dead (hosei ek nekron zontas), and your members as weapons of righteousness to God’ (verse 13). If the hosei simply meant ‘as if’, implying ‘which is not, of course, the case’, Paul would be perpetrating an cruel tease. Telling someone to yield themselves to God, and their members as weapons of righteousness, when they are not in any sense ‘alive from the dead’, is like telling someone to leap from a high building ‘as if you had wings’ when they do not.
Paul’s strong ethical argument, then, is not simply that there are two ways to live, and that one must choose between them; it is that the baptized have changed their ground, and must learn to behave according to the territory they now find themselves in, like someone moving to a new country and having to learn the appropriate language. This is the force of 6:15–23, which continues the ‘exodus’ theme—the story of how the slaves get to freedom by coming through the water of the Red Sea—by speaking of the former slavery to sin and the new condition in which, having been set free from sin, the baptized must live in the appropriate manner. Paul will later warn against behaviour that would be equivalent to the children of Israel wanting to go back to Egypt (8:12–17); but at the moment he simply rubs the point in, that his readers are no longer slaves to sin, and must not behave as if they were. Even here, therefore, where the argument is more focused on behaviour, we find that underlying status and ultimate destination are what matters. The underlying status of the baptized is that they have been set free from sin. Their ultimate destination, the divine free gift (as in 5:21), is the life of the age to come, zoe aionios.
So far, Paul’s argument has hinged on the central and decisive events of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and on the ways in which they create a new world of freedom from sin, which leads those who enter it to the literal and concrete future resurrection itself, the life of the age to come, by way of the metaphorical, though still concrete, ‘resurrection’ of a radical change in behaviour. This is the fullest example of something we have increasingly observed: that the metaphorical ‘resurrection’ in second-Temple Judaism, whose concrete referent was the return from exile, the connotation of which was release from sin (in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel in particular), has been replaced in Paul by the equally metaphorical ‘resurrection’ of the new life of the baptized believer, whose concrete referent is the communal and personal new life in which the shackles of sin have been broken. This is not, then, an arbitrary reuse of ‘resurrection’ as a metaphor. It is dependent upon the literal use in relation both to Jesus and to the future resurrection of believers, just as the metaphorical use within Jewish texts could be combined with a literal use in relation to the eventual resurrection of the righteous, and sometimes the wicked as well. Resurrection, when it was metaphor, was usually metonymy as well; and so it was with Paul. This is not, then, as has sometimes been supposed, the start of a move away from the literal meaning, towards something which will call itself ‘resurrection’ but which in fact belongs in a different worldview entirely, such as we find in the later gnostic writings.97 Paul’s metaphorical use is a new development from within the frame of reference provided by second-Temple Judaism, a development occasioned by the events concerning the Messiah and by Paul’s interpretation of what those events meant for those ‘in him’ both in the present and the future.
From this point, however, Paul moves into a different phase within the overarching argument of chapters 5–8. He has spoken frequently, in one-line remarks within other arguments, about the place of the Jewish law within the overall divine plan. He now turns to address the question directly; and, in doing so, he gives a different colouring to what he says about ‘life’, the life which the law could not give, and the life which God will give by the Spirit. This is not simply an attempt to deal with a problem (‘what am I saying about the law?’), though no doubt it is that as well. It is his way of explaining further what he means by speaking of the gift of God as ‘eternal life’ (6:23), of ‘grace reigning through righteousness to eternal life’ (5:21). It is his way, within the continuing new-exodus narrative, of speaking of what happens when YHWH’s people arrive at Sinai; only now, finding that Torah has become part of the problem instead of part of the solution, they must learn that the Messiah and the Spirit have done ‘what the Torah could not do.’98 7:1–8:11 forms a single section; the argument runs on to its triumphant climax in 8:11. At the same time, 8:1–11 is the start of the argument which continues, in one of Paul’s greatest passages, to the end of the chapter. But to understand those crucial eleven verses, with their rich exposition of resurrection, we must pass through the dark tunnel of chapter 7.
In 7:4 Paul sums up his argument in a typically dense and pregnant sentence:
Even so, my dear family, you too died to the law through the body of the Messiah, so that you might belong to another, to the one who was raised from the dead, so that we might bear fruit for God.
The basis for this is the evocation, in verses 1–3, of the Adam/Christ contrast of 5:12–21, seen in the light of its development in 6:3–11. Paul envisages someone who is ‘under the law’, that is, a Jew or proselyte who has lived under the regime of the Jewish Torah, as being bound by the law to the Adam-solidarity, just as a married woman is bound by the law to her husband. But when the husband dies—in Paul’s developed picture, when the ‘old human being’ of 6:6 dies with the Messiah—then the ‘you’, the woman in the illustration, is free to marry again; and the Messiah now appears on the other side of the picture, as in the double statements of 4:25, 5:9–10 and 6:3–4, 10, this time in the guise of the new bridegroom. Belonging to him enables ‘you’, like Abraham and Sarah despite their old age, to ‘bear fruit’. The resurrection of Jesus as the new bridegroom has opened new possibilities not previously available, which Paul then describes in 7:5–6 in the language which elsewhere we associate with the renewal of the covenant: we now serve, he says (echoing 6:15–23) not in the ‘oldness of the letter’ but in the ‘newness of the Spirit’.99 Once again, the literal resurrection of Jesus sets the context for the metaphorical resurrection of believers as the anticipation of their own literal resurrection, which Paul will shortly describe. And, just in case there is any doubt, we note that both the literal and the metaphorical meanings have concrete referents, the literal referring to bodily resurrection and the metaphorical referring to practical holiness and service.
This prepares the way for Paul’s intricate and complex exposition of what happened when the Torah arrived on Sinai, and when Israel continued to try to live under it, knowing it to be God’s law, holy and just and good. The law did indeed promise life, life as Deuteronomy had made clear (and as many second-Temple Jewish texts agreed).100 But those who embraced Torah found that from the moment of its arrival it highlighted the ways in which Israel was breaking it, and was thus recapitulating the sin of Adam (compare 5:12, 20); and those who continued to live under it—seen now with Paul’s Christian hindsight—discovered that the more they tried, the more the Torah condemned them. They were, after all, in Adam, and the Torah could not help becoming as it were a shadowy parody of itself (7:22–3), reminding Adamic Israel of its own sin and death. It could not give the life it promised, not because there was anything wrong with it in itself, but because, as we might say, the material it had to work with was not of the right sort. As in Galatians 3:10–14, Paul analyses the problem in terms of a promise of God which has become stuck at the point of Israel’s rebellion. Here, as there, he solves the problem in terms of the death of the Messiah and the gift of the Spirit.
‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus’: Romans 8:1 has become one of Paul’s most famous sentences, not least through being set to music by J. S. Bach in his motet Jesu, Meine Freude. The ‘condemnation’ in question is the Adamic condemnation spoken of in 5:12–21, which in turn looks back to the condemnation of sin in 1:18–3:20. The reason this condemnation is taken away for those ‘in the Messiah’ is given in verses 2–11, with constant reference to the resurrection: God has done what the Torah could not do, condemning sin in the flesh of the Messiah, as the representative of all his people, and by his Spirit giving life, in the present in terms of a new orientation and mindset (8:5–8), in the ultimate future in terms of bodily resurrection. This is Paul’s clearest statement of what he understands by the future resurrection of the Messiah’s people:
9 But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you. 10 If the Messiah is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness, 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit who dwells in you.
There can be no question but that Paul means by this that (a) the present body, the body that will die because of its innate mortality and corruptibility, is the body that will be raised, (b) this is in exact parallel to what happened to Jesus himself, and (c) there is a causal connection between the two. These are the most important conclusions to be drawn for our present purposes.101 But there are two other things to note as well.
First, the one who accomplishes the resurrection, both of Jesus and of believers, is the living God himself, as Paul regularly insists; but the means by which he will accomplish it is the Spirit. The Spirit, here as throughout Paul’s thought, is the present guarantee of the future inheritance, and of the body which will be appropriate for that new world; this strand has run right through the Pauline material we have so far studied, and remains important in the Corinthian letters as well.
Second, however, the language of the ‘indwelling’ of the Spirit belongs, within second-Temple Jewish thought, with the ‘indwelling’ of the Shekinah in the Temple, the ‘tabernacling’ presence of YHWH in the midst of Israel. The suggestion, then, that the Spirit is the one through whom the body will be raised belongs with Paul’s ‘new Temple’ theology, in Ephesians 2:11–21 and, more especially, in 1 Corinthians 3:16–17 and 6:19–20. The major resonances which Paul sets up, within his Jewish world, when he speaks of the resurrection of the Messiah and of all those who belong to him, are the rebuilding of the Temple (which cannot be done, of course, as long as Israel remains exiled in Babylon) and the strange but complete fulfilling of Torah.
Once again, in the process, those who live ‘in the Messiah’, in the interval between his resurrection and their own, stand on resurrection ground. They ‘set their mind on the Spirit’, rather than on the flesh, just as Paul gave similar commands to the Philippians and the Colossians.102 As a result, they enjoy ‘life and peace’ in the present as well as the future. This is where Paul makes the sharpest of his anthropological distinctions, pressing some of his key technical terms harder than he does anywhere else: ‘you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit’. He had earlier spoken of himself as being ‘in the flesh’, though not determined by it;103 now, to insist on the radical break that has taken place in baptism (6:2–23), he insists that the Christian is no longer ‘in Adam’, no longer ‘in the flesh’. The Christian still clearly possesses ‘flesh’, as we see when Paul warns against living ‘according to the flesh’ in 8:12–14. But Paul increasingly focuses his argument on the ‘body’, the body which at present is corruptible and doomed to death—and whose ‘deeds’ can still be aligned with the ‘flesh’ in 8:13—and yet which will be given new life, resurrection life, by the Spirit of the living God.
The remaining major argument of chapter 8 runs from verse 12 to verse 30, coming back at the end to the point where Paul began in 5:1–11: those who are justified by faith are assured of ‘glory’, sharing indeed the glory of the one true God (5:2), or, as he now puts it, being co-glorified with the Messiah (8:17). That last verse is the fulcrum around which these nineteen verses turn, with verses 12–16 leading up to it, verses 18–27 explaining it, and verses 28–30 summing up and drawing the conclusion.
Here, as in Philippians and elsewhere, the final resurrected state of the justified is described as ‘glory’. By this Paul seems to mean, not luminosity (there is nothing particularly godly, after all, in shining like a star), but the dignity, worth, honour and status that the Messiah’s people will enjoy, sharing that of the Messiah himself, whose ‘glory’ is now that he is the world’s true lord. As Paul said in 5:17, those who are his will share his kingly reign. This corresponds to the meaning of the request put by James and John to Jesus in Mark 10:37: they ask to sit at Jesus’ right and left in his ‘glory’. They do not imagine that they, or he, will be shining like torches; and indeed Matthew’s version of the saying (20:21) has ‘in your kingdom’. That is the point here: those who patiently walk through the present wilderness, being led by the Christian equivalent of the pillar of cloud and fire, in other words, by the Spirit, will eventually receive the ‘inheritance’. Romans 8:12–17, in other words, is another part of the Pauline retelling of the exodus story, the part that follows from the crossing of the Red Sea and the arrival at Sinai. The Messiah’s people must suffer with him, as Paul insisted in Philippians 3:10–11, in order to be glorified. The parallel indicates well enough that ‘glory’ is at least in part a synonym for ‘resurrection’.
But only in part. It is true that, as in Philippians 3:20–21, ‘glory’ here is a characteristic of the risen body; but, again as in that passage, it is here also a function of it. The risen body will be ‘glorious’ in that it will no longer be subject to decay and death. But those who are raised will also enjoy ‘glory’ in the sense of new responsibilities within the new creation. This leads the eye towards the ‘inheritance’, the theme we met in Galatians 3 and 4 and Ephesians 1 and which now forms the main theme of verses 18–25. This part of Paul’s larger picture of the world to come, the promised new age, focuses not so much on what sort of bodies those ‘in Christ’ will have in the resurrection, but on the sphere over which they will exercise their rule.
Verses 18–24 insist that the sphere in question is the whole renewed cosmos—and, indeed, that the cosmos will be renewed precisely through the agency of those who are thus raised from the dead to share the ‘glory’, that is, the kingly rule, of the Messiah.104 Paul is more precise in verse 21 than some of his translators: the creation itself, he says, will be set free from its bondage to decay ‘unto the freedom of the glory of the children of God’. He does not mean, I think, that creation will share the glory; that is not his point. Creation will enjoy the freedom which comes when God’s children are glorified—in other words, the liberation which will result from the sovereign rule, under the overlordship of Jesus the Messiah, of all those who are given new, resurrection life by the Spirit. The marginalization of this part of Romans 8 in much exegesis down the years has robbed Christian imagination of this extraordinary picture of the future; only by restoring it to its rightful place—which is, after all, in Paul’s build-up to the climax of the central section of his most important letter!—can we understand the larger picture within which his vision of resurrection makes sense. It is a picture in which the corruption and futility of creation itself, created good but doomed to decay, is seen as a kind of slavery, so that creation, too, needs to experience its exodus, its liberation. And God’s people, indwelt by the Spirit, find that they themselves, being in their own mortal bodies part of this same creation, groan in labour-pains as they await the birth of God’s new world. The Spirit is, once again, the gift that indicates what the future holds, here seen in terms of the ‘first-fruits’ metaphor, the first sheaf of harvest offered as a sign of the larger crop still to come.105 The Spirit thus again provides an inauguration of the eschatological fulfilment, even in the present time; Paul here sees this in terms of prayer (8:26–7), as the church anticipates, in inarticulate groanings, the glory that is to come when God’s people are set in authority over the world.
Paul sums up the whole argument in 8:28–30. Here, once more, the status of Jesus as the true divine image, and of Jesus’ people as being renewed in that image (and thus taking their rightful place as the creator’s wise agents, bringing his order to creation) comes to the fore, as in Philippians 3:20–21 and Colossians 3:10. This is so important that Paul even interrupts his own sequence of climactic verbs to bring it in at the appropriate moment. When he speaks of ‘predestination’ here he does not refer to an arbitrary decree; he means the creator’s provision of image-bearing humans to bring to his creation order, justice, renewal and above all freedom from the slavery of decay. And, turning the argument back to the human beings who have been its main subject, Paul repeats in six words what he said in 5:1–2 in thirty-eight: hous de edikaiosen, toutous kai edoxasen, ‘those whom he justified, them he also glorified’. Justification flows from the death and resurrection of Jesus; those who are justified already share his glory in the proleptic sense indicated in Ephesians, and will share it fully when their present bodies are transformed, as in Philippians 3:20–21, to be like that of Jesus himself. The metaphorical present looks on to the literal future.
The line of thought which runs from Jesus’ death and resurrection to that of his people is then celebrated in the final paragraph of Romans 8 (verses 31–9). Rhetorical questions enquire whether anything can now come between the Messiah’s people and final salvation, and each time Paul answers in terms of what God has already done in the Messiah. Central to this is verse 34, emphasizing that Jesus’ resurrection is the cornerstone of the Christian hope:
Who is there to condemn? It is the Messiah, Jesus, who has died—yes, rather, who was raised, who is also at God’s right hand, who also intercedes for us!106
The present suffering, persecution and martyrdom of God’s people is as nothing in the light of the love God has poured out through the Messiah. Paul is persuaded (8:38–9) that
neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth nor any other creature, will have power to separate us from God’s love in the Messiah, Jesus our lord.
And the most fundamental reason why he is convinced of this is that death itself, heading this list of potential enemies, has been defeated. Not redefined; not understood in a different light; defeated. That is one of the most central points in the whole of Romans, and it undergirds Paul’s belief in both the love and the power of the creator and covenant God.107
After the repeated emphasis on Jesus the Messiah and his death and resurrection in the letter so far, chapters 9–11 are rightly felt as a contrast, but it is important not to press this point beyond Paul’s obvious rhetorical intention, namely to bring the reader up short with the shock of personal grief following hard on the heels of the exalted conclusion of chapter 8. Chapters 9–11 are in fact closely and carefully integrated with the rest of the letter. The older attempts to prise the section away as a separate treatment of a different topic, and the more recent attempts to suggest that Jesus Christ plays no role in the argument, leaving the way clear for a ‘salvation’ for Israel which owes nothing to him, are without exegetical or theological foundation.108
In fact, the whole argument—a lengthy retelling of the story of Israel, from Abraham to Paul’s own day, highlighting various features which draw out the point he wants to make—comes to its head in the middle of chapter 10, where the resurrection of Jesus as Messiah is the centrepiece, the focus of faith, and the climax of the long covenant history of God and Israel. Telos gar nomou Christos, declares Paul in 10:4: the Messiah is the goal of Torah, the place where the whole story was heading, the point at which the divine faithfulness to the promises is finally unveiled. Israel had been languishing in the ‘exile’ of which Moses and the prophets had warned, longing for the time when her God would rescue her. One of the central passages of both warning and promise, drawn on both by later biblical writers and at least two important post-biblical sources, was Deuteronomy 27–30. This passage details, first, the blessings that will follow from covenant obedience; then the curses that will result from covenant disobedience, the final and most devastating of which is exile itself; and then, in chapter 30, the promise that if, in exile, Israel returns to YHWH with all her heart and soul, YHWH will gather her again and enable her to love him from the heart. At that time, Torah itself, which would up to that point prove difficult or impossible for Israel to keep, will come near to them; they will not need to go up to heaven for it, or across the deep sea, because it will be ‘on their lips and in their hearts’, so that they may keep it.
When we place Paul alongside other second-Temple readings of this passage, the meaning of Romans 10:4–13 becomes clear; and the resurrection of Jesus is at the middle of it all.109 The book of Baruch interpreted Deuteronomy 30 in terms of God’s Wisdom; that was what Israel needed if she was to escape from exile. The Qumran letter known as 4QMMT interpreted the chapter in terms of the particular rules of Torah the sect was anxious to see followed in the Temple. In both cases it was assumed that the covenant renewal promised in Deuteronomy 30 was on the point of happening, perhaps had already begun to happen. Paul agrees, but for a very different reason; he sees that the covenant has been renewed in and through the Messiah. As in many other passages he predicates of the Messiah things that other second-Temple Jews had said of Wisdom or Torah, so here he rereads Deuteronomy 30:11–14, as a focal point of the chapter about covenant renewal, in order to say: this passage is coming true whenever people believe the gospel of Jesus the risen Messiah and lord! The passage is admittedly dense, but if approached in this light it falls into place:
4 The Messiah is the goal of Torah with a view to righteousness for all who believe. 5 For Moses writes, concerning the righteousness of Torah, that ‘The one who does them shall live in them’ [Leviticus 18:5]; 6 but the righteousness of faith says [Deuteronomy 30:12–14], ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will go up to heaven?”,’ that is, to bring the Messiah down; 7 ‘or “Who will go down into the abyss?”,’ that is, to bring the Messiah up from the dead. 8 But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart,’ that is, the word of faith, the word which we proclaim; 9 because, if you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is lord’, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth one makes confession unto salvation.
The basic confession of Christian faith (‘Jesus is lord’), and the fundamental belief upon which it is based (that the creator God raised him from the dead), are the signs, when they occur, that covenant renewal has taken place, and that those who exhibit this faith are its true members and beneficiaries—even if, being born Gentiles, they have never been part of the ethnic family of Israel. Paul here draws together several threads in the letter and in his wider thought (within Romans, a line can be traced from 2:25–9, through 3:27–30 and 8:4–8, all the way to the present passage), and proposes the covenant renewal that has taken place in the Messiah as the basis for the Gentile mission upon which he himself is engaged (10:12–18). For him, clearly, the resurrection of Jesus is the covenant-renewing moment; and belief in that event, as the decisive act of Israel’s God, is the defining characteristic of those who belong to this renewed covenant, just as with Abraham in 4:18–22. And the point for our present investigation is this: the only possible meaning we can assign to Paul’s claim about the resurrection as the covenant-renewing event, and about belief in it as the covenant-defining badge, is that he was referring to the bodily raising of Jesus from the dead. Not only is that what ‘raising from the dead’ meant, in both paganism and Judaism. No other meaning (that Jesus was now ‘in heaven’ as a disembodied spirit, for instance, however exalted a status he might be assigned) remotely fits the logic of this paragraph. Many other patriarchs, heroes and righteous men and women were already resting in a place of honour after their death, according to much Jewish belief; if Jesus had simply joined their number, it is impossible to envisage Paul saying what he here does about the significance of his resurrection.
There is one other occurrence of resurrection terminology in Romans 9–11, and it echoes but transforms the metaphorical uses current in Judaism. In 11:1–10 Paul explains that there is at the present time a ‘remnant’ of ethnic Jews who, like himself, have believed in Jesus as the risen Messiah and lord, while the others, not believing, have been ‘hardened’. Well then, he asks in 11:11, is this the end of the matter? Can any more Jews be saved? His answer is an emphatic yes; and to explain this he describes the ‘trespass’ and ‘diminution’ of ethnic Israel in language which echoes what he had said, both about Adam and about the Messiah, in chapter 5: ‘if their trespass means riches for the world, and their diminution means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean?’ (11:12).110
He then looks his Gentile readers in the face. I am the apostle to you Gentiles, he says (11:13); and I make a big fuss of this task to which I’ve been assigned, because, in line with what Deuteronomy said about Israel being made jealous by non-Jewish people coming in to share their privileges, my aim is to make my fellow Jews jealous, and so save some of them (11:13–14). Actually, the word he uses for ‘my fellow Jews’ is, more literally, ‘my flesh’, in other words ‘my kinsmen according to the flesh’, as in 9:3; but the idea of making the ‘flesh’ jealous, and so saving it, presents to his mind the entire sweep of what he had already said in Romans 5–8 about what God does with the ‘flesh’, about the ultimate importance of no longer being ‘in the flesh’, defined by flesh, but of being in the Spirit and thereby being given resurrection life. This enables him to speak of the restoration of ethnic Jews to membership in the renewed covenant, using the metaphorical language traceable at least as far back as Ezekiel 37:
For if their casting away means reconciliation for the world, what will their receiving back again be if not life from the dead?111
Many have argued that zoe ek nekron here means literal resurrection, suggesting that the restoration of Jews to membership will come all in a rush on the last day, when they will all be raised to life. I am persuaded, however, that Paul does indeed mean it metaphorically, and that what he has in mind, here and throughout the passage, is ethnic Jews abandoning their unbelief in the gospel (11:22) and coming to membership in the polemically redefined ‘all Israel’.112 But our only present concern with this question is in so far as it enables us to decide what precisely 11:15 means; and it seems to me highly probable that Paul here, for the only time in all early Christian writings, uses the language of resurrection to speak of the restoration of Israel to full covenant membership, much as Ezekiel had done. The meaning is still, of course, reworked around Paul’s basic Christian paradigm; there is no hint of a geographical ‘return’, as in the prophet. But this passage suggests that the resurrection of the Messiah was at the heart of Paul’s understanding of the Messiah’s people ‘according to the flesh’, and that he was able, in the light of that resurrection, to reuse ancient imagery to fresh purpose.
The final section of Romans is considerably more important than many commentators have implied, and contains some further significant references to the resurrection. The framework for the whole argument is set by 12:1–2, which establishes the eschatological perspective of the overlap between the present age and the age to come. Christians, here as elsewhere, are urged to live according to the coming age which has already broken in, and they are to do so by the renewal of the mind:
12:1 I appeal to you therefore, my dear family, through the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God; this is your reasonable worship. 2Do not be conformed to this present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds, so that you may discover in practice what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Reading this passage in the light of Galatians 1:4, Philippians 3:20–21, Colossians 3:1–11, and the earlier parts of Romans, four points emerge which relate to our present enquiry. First, we note the contrast of the present age (which Galatians describes as ‘evil’) with the new world that is now breaking in; Paul does not refer to it specifically as ‘the age to come’, but his language here and in 13:11–14 indicates that he is working with this two-age scheme, and that he believes that the ‘age to come’ has already begun with the resurrection of Jesus.
Second, we should therefore not be surprised that when he refers to Christian obedience he speaks not of the ‘flesh’, but of the ‘body’. As has often been noted, the ‘body’, soma, is the transition point in his anthropology. It will still die, because it remains corruptible (8:10); it can still even sin, though this is now neither necessary nor desirable (6:12–14; 8:12–14); but it will be raised, and this makes it appropriate as the locus of present Christian worship and service. This is perhaps the place to note, uncontroversially, that like most of Paul’s anthropological terms ‘body’ is holistic in content. Whereas ‘flesh’ refers to the entire human being seen as corruptible and heading for death, with the frequent further overtones of ‘rebellious’ and ‘sinful’, ‘body’ refers to the entire human being, much as our modern word ‘person’ might do, seen as present within the good world of creation, within space and time, and called to live there in joyful obedience.113 It is possible that we should see 12:5, too, in this light; Paul identified ethnic Jews as ‘the Messiah’s people according to the flesh’ in 9:5, and here, in a similarly programmatic statement for the material still to come, he speaks of the multiplicity of Christians as forming ‘one body in the Messiah’. This does not mean that the church is ‘the resurrection body of the Messiah’ without remainder, as used sometimes to be said by those eager to combine a denial of Jesus’ bodily resurrection with a high ecclesiology.114 Rather, the church, composed of Jew and Gentile alike, is as it were the resurrection version, the new-covenant version, of the ethnic solidarity of Israel. And for that the appropriate language is not ‘flesh’, but ‘body’.
Third, when Paul speaks of being ‘conformed’ (syschematizesthe) and ‘transformed’ (metamorphousthe) in verse 2, he uses similar language to what we find in Philippians 3:21, where he promises that Jesus will ‘transform’ (metaschematisei) the present body to be like his glorious body. There, however, he was referring to the future event of resurrection itself (or, more precisely, the transformation of those still alive at the time); here he speaks of something that must happen in the present time. This too, it seems, is a piece of inaugurated eschatology, similar to that which we saw in Romans 6; and it applies specifically to the mind. That was where the human race had gone wrong (1:18–25); that was where its renewal would have to begin. Body and mind together, then, must live according to the new age, the period that has now begun with Jesus.
Fourth, this ‘transformation’ of the mind corresponds quite closely to what Paul said in Colossians 3:10: the ‘new human’ is being renewed in knowledge according to the creator’s image. Paul has already said that the divine aim was to create renewed humans who would be conformed to the image of his son (8:29); now we see something of what that will mean in practice. Paul is allowing part of his cluster of ‘resurrection’ language to make its way forwards from Jesus’ resurrection, and backwards from the promise of eventual bodily resurrection, into a foundational statement of what it means to live as truly human beings within the new age.
This eschatological introduction to the section introduces a sequence of thought which circles around and returns to the same point in 13:11–14.115 This adds little to what we have already seen, but is particularly interesting for its echoes of 1 Thessalonians 5:1–11, with its imagery of the night which is passing away and the day which is already dawning. Christians belong to the day, says Paul once more, and they need to behave in daytime manner rather than night-time—and here, too, we find the same mixed metaphor, of requiring the appropriate ‘weapons’ (13:12). Like Romans 6, this passage depends for its appeal on the belief that the Christian already stands on resurrection ground. Only so does it make sense to issue a command not to make provision for ‘the flesh’ (13:14). As in Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10, so here Paul urges his readers to ‘put on’ the new humanity, which is the Messiah himself, the risen lord Jesus.
The long argument of 14:1–15:13 is the centre of the section, and the theological conclusion of the letter as a whole. Paul is urging Christians from different social and particularly ethnic backgrounds to find ways of coming together, particularly of worshipping together, while respecting one another’s consciences on matters over which they disagree. This is not a merely pragmatic argument, but is based on the central gospel events, as chapter 14 explains:
7 We none of us live to ourselves, and we none of us die to ourselves. 8 For if we live, we live to the lord, and if we die, we die to the lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the lord. 9 For this was why the Messiah died and lived, so that he might be lord of both dead and living.
10 You there, why do you judge your brother? Or you—why do you despise your brother? For we must all be presented before the judgment seat of God,116 11 for it is written, ‘As I live, says the lord, to me every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall make confession to God.’ 12 So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.
Just when most expositors thought they were safely away from dense theology and into ‘practice’ or ‘ethics’, Paul writes a stunning little section like this, full of echoes of key passages in the other letters, not least Philippians 2:10–11, where he declares that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is lord. The universality of Jesus’ Lordship is emphasized here; in fact, part of Paul’s point in the section has been to use the word kyrios, ‘lord’, both in its full christological sense, as here, and in its metaphorical sense as ‘master’ in relation to servant or slave (see verse 4). That verse is itself significant in terms of ‘resurrection’ language: ‘What do you mean by judging someone else’s household servant? He stands or falls before his own master; and he will stand, for the master has the power to make him stand.’ The language of ‘standing’, cognate with ‘standing up’, anastasis, and the emphasis that the master/lord has the power to ‘make him stand’, should almost certainly be taken as at least a sidelong reference to resurrection. At the last judgment, all must give an account of themselves, and the lord will ‘make to stand’, in other words, raise from the dead, not those who have kept to a certain cultural code, however venerable, but those who have lived as his faithful servants.
This passage, then, holds together a clear statement of Jesus’ own death and resurrection with a statement (verse 8), similar to that in Philippians 1:18–26, and particularly 1:21, of the Christian’s position, belonging to the lord whether in life or in death. The fact that Jesus is lord of both dead and living (verse 9) is the basis for the final judgment; when Paul quotes Isaiah 49:18 in verse 11, the opening words, ‘as I live, says the lord’, pick up the theme of the Messiah’s resurrection, and he is now, as lord of dead and living alike, in the right position to summon all the living and departed to judgment. The eschatological framework enables the ecumenical project between culturally divergent Christian groups to move forwards on the basis of the gospel itself.
The final ‘resurrection’ passage in the letter comes, significantly, as Paul is drawing together the threads of his entire argument. He began with a statement of the gospel in which Jesus, as the Davidic Messiah, has been marked out as such by the living God in the resurrection. He closes his long argument for the unity of the church across traditional Jew-and-Gentile boundaries with a quotation from Isaiah 11:10, choosing to go with the Septuagint version in which the point becomes clear:
There shall be a root of Jesse,
One who rises to rule the nations;
In him shall the nations hope.
This verse (15:12) thus completes the huge circle that began with 1:3–5. The Davidic Messiah has been marked out by the resurrection as truly Messiah, the lord and judge of all.117 Paul’s mission has been precisely to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations for the sake of his name. Now he grounds the appeal for unity in the gospel once more, adding only a concluding blessing (15:13) which points to hope, hope in the power of the Holy Spirit—which to the reader of Romans can only mean one thing, namely, hope for the resurrection itself. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the heart of the gospel (not to the exclusion of the cross, of course, but not least as the event which gives the cross its meaning); it is the object of faith, the ground of justification, the basis for obedient Christian living, the motivation for unity, and, not least, the challenge to the principalities and powers.118 It is the event that declares that there is ‘another king’, and summons human beings to allegiance, and thereby to a different way of life, in fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures and in expectation of the final new world which began at Easter and which will be completed when the night is finally gone and the day has fully dawned.
Once again, there can be no question that when Paul speaks of resurrection in all these ways it is the bodily resurrection of Jesus he has in mind. His multiple metaphorical uses of the idea highlight, rather than diminish, the literal usage. They are in any case consistent developments from within the ancient Jewish picture, where resurrection was used as an image for national restoration and forgiveness as well as referring literally to the new bodily life in store for God’s people. But when Paul wants to ground his argument in bedrock, it is to the literal, bodily resurrection that he returns.
8. Interlude: The Pastoral Epistles
Debates about the Pastoral Epistles and their authorship will no doubt continue, and I do not wish to add to them here. I simply want to note, within this discussion of resurrection in the Pauline corpus, the contribution that they make to the overall picture of early Christianity. (It would be just as arbitrary to exclude them from a ‘Pauline’ section as to include them, since even if, as most scholars have supposed, they are not by Paul himself, they are clearly by someone, or more than one person, who thought they should belong closely with his work and thought.) Our question has to do with early Christian traditions about resurrection, not with plotting the contours of Paul’s theology, and that of his hypothetical followers, for its own sake. In fact, the rather slight reference to resurrection, though not unprecedented in the commonly accepted Pauline letters, is one of the reasons why the question of authorship has remained open for so long.
The Pastorals do not have much to say about the Christian hope. The clearest passage is the warning in 2 Timothy 2 about two men who appear to be teaching something at variance with the rest:
16 Avoid godless chatter, which leads people into further impiety; 17 their talk will eat its way like gangrene. In this category are Hymenaeus and Philetus; 18 they have swerved away from the truth by saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some. 19 But God’s firm foundation stands, and this is its seal: ‘The lord knows those who are his,’ and ‘everyone who names the lord’s name must depart from unrighteousness.’
The best explanation of what Hymenaeus and Philetus were teaching is that they were pioneering a view which, as we shall see, was to become popular in other circles in due course, according to which ‘the resurrection’ was now to be interpreted, not in terms of a future bodily hope after death, but purely and simply in terms of a spiritual experience which could be enjoyed during the present life. Certain people had had this experience; they were already, in this new metaphorical sense, ‘raised from the dead’. It is not clear whether the two were encouraging others to have this experience as well, or whether the point of their teaching was that if one was not already among those favoured in this way there was now no hope. One way or another, they were drawing people away from what was being seen as mainstream Christian hope.
What is especially interesting is the answer the writer provides in verse 19, in the form of two biblical quotations. Numbers 16:5 (‘YHWH knows those who are his!’) comes from the chapter which describes the rebellion of Korah, and particularly of Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab (a grandson of Reuben). The phrase quoted here is Moses’ comment when faced with rebellion; YHWH will show whether Moses and Aaron have arrogated to themselves their positions of leadership, or whether they hold them in virtue of God’s appointment. The further specific rebellion of Dathan and Abiram is to deny that the hope of a land flowing with milk and honey will ever come true.119 On the next day, the answer comes: Korah, Dathan, Abiram and their families are separated from the rest of the Israelites, and Moses declares that if they go on to die a natural death, then YHWH has not sent him, but that if YHWH creates something new, namely, an instant death in which the ground opens up and swallows them so that they go down alive into Sheol, then it will be clear that the rebels are the ones who have despised YHWH. And so it happens.120
There are many resonances between this story and the situation that seems to be addressed in 2 Timothy 2. Hymenaeus and Philetus may be seen as rebels, challenging the authority of the appointed leaders of the church, though this is not said specifically. What they are doing, more particularly, is challenging the future hope, as Dathan and Abiram challenged the promise of the land. And whereas the promise of resurrection is that God will do a new thing, out beyond what anyone could have expected, the punishment of Dathan and Abiram consisted of God doing a new thing in terms of judgment, different to what had happened to anyone else before. How much of all this was in the writer’s mind is of course impossible to say; it seems to me highly likely that some of it was. The upshot is not unlike the rabbis’ retort to the Sadducees: if you don‘t believe in resurrection, you won’t share it. The writer of 2 Timothy is warning that God will make it clear, in a future act of judgment, who belongs to him and who does not; in other words, which is the true teaching and which is not.
The second biblical quotation is less clear (‘Let those who name the name of the lord depart from iniquity’). It appears to be a combination of two passages: Sirach 17:26 (‘return to the Most High and turn away from iniquity’121), and Isaiah 26:13 (‘O YHWH our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but we name your name alone’122). Both passages are about what happens after death. Sirach, of course, believes that nothing happens: the next two verses declare that nobody sings praise to the Most High in Hades, and that thanksgiving ceases once people are dead. Is the writer of 2 Timothy aware of this, and perhaps warning Hymenaeus and Philetus of the fate in store if they say the resurrection is already past? The likelihood of this is increased by the context of Isaiah 26:13: there, the verse immediately following insists that those who are punished by YHWH have no chance of a future life, while verse 19, famously, proclaims: ‘Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise!’123 Second Timothy 2:19 appears to draw together in, dare we say, an almost Pauline density passages which, taken together, declare that Hymenaeus and Philetus are indeed wrong, and that the future judgment and resurrection which they deny will be the final evidence against them.
The Pastorals’ only other significant mention of the life beyond the grave is the repeated reference to ‘immortality’. In 1 Timothy 6:16, the writer declares that Jesus the Messiah is the true king (the passage is replete with echoes of imperial rhetoric, and cannot but be seen as subversive; but that is a topic for another time): he is the only potentate, king of kings and lord of lords, and ‘he alone has immortality’, dwelling in unapproachable light. This appears to indicate that, contrary to the general hellenistic view in which all humans naturally possess an immortal soul, Jesus is the only one who has gone through death and into a world where death has no more power over him. This, of course, corresponds closely to the picture we find in Paul. At the same time, Jesus himself has, according to 2 Timothy 1:10, ‘abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel’. Thus the denial that anyone else has immortality as their own possession is balanced by the affirmation that death has been defeated and a new life beyond has been opened up through the work of Jesus. Nobody else has yet attained it, but it is there for the asking. This, too, belongs closely with Paul.
Here, too, ‘resurrection’ language can be used to denote present Christian living. As in the synoptic tradition, which is surely the origin of this next passage from 2 Timothy 2, the challenge of the gospel can be phrased in terms of passing through death to life:
11 The saying is sure:
If we die with him, we shall live with him;
12 if we are patient, we shall reign with him;
if we deny him, he will deny us;
13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
for he cannot deny himself.
As in Romans 6, it is open to question whether ‘we shall live’ is a strictly temporal future, or whether it is logical, referring to a ‘life’ which already begins here and now. The parallel with the next clause (‘we shall reign with him’124) implies that it remains in the future. The gospel tradition of passages such as Mark 8:34–8 and parallels is here given a mnemonic form, in the service of the gospel itself. This is dependent, like Mark 8, on the confession of Jesus as Messiah which immediately precedes in 2 Timothy 2:
8 Remember Jesus the Messiah, risen from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel, 9 in which I suffer, including wearing chains like a criminal; but God’s word is not chained.
This is as close as any other New Testament text comes to a direct echo of Romans 1:3–4, in which Jesus’ Davidic Messiahship and divine sonship (which here amounts to the same thing) are affirmed, on the basis of his resurrection, as the core of the gospel. The tradition in Mark 8 and parallels was itself, of course, closely joined with Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah (8:29). The whole passage (2:8–13), when put back together, seems to build on that sequence of thought: Jesus as Messiah, followed by the challenge to suffering, to confessing him rather than denying him. Now, however, Jesus’ Messiahship is confirmed by his own resurrection, which reinforces the challenge to die with him in order to live with him. This in turn prepares the way for the warning about the teaching of Hymenaeus and Philetus in verses 16–19.
This leaves the puzzling little poem in 1 Timothy 3:16. Loosely attached to its present context (detailed instructions about the behaviour expected of office-holders in the church), it bursts in with a compact statement of Jesus’ story:
He was manifested in flesh,
he was justified in the Spirit,
He was seen (ophthe) by angels,
he was announced among the nations,
He was believed in the world,
he was taken up in glory.
Though we might be surprised at there being no explicit mention of the resurrection in such a formulaic statement, it is clearly some kind of a poem or hymn rather than a creed (it does not mention the cross, either), and should not be pressed for details of matters about which it does not speak. However, two points of interest remain for our purposes. It is likely that ‘he was justified’ (edikaiothe) is an oblique way of referring to the resurrection: Jesus was ‘vindicated’ by the living God—not least as Messiah—after being condemned and killed. We have already noted the subtle and important links between resurrection and justification.125 The phrase ‘in the Spirit’ will then refer to the agency of the Spirit in his resurrection, as regularly in Paul, not to a supposed ‘non-bodily’ sphere in which this ‘justification’ takes place.126 The mention of Jesus’ being ‘seen by’, or ‘appearing to’, angels (ophthe angelois) is unique; nowhere else is there a mention of the angels seeing the risen, or for that matter the ascended, Jesus, though we should assume that first-century Christians took this for granted. And the final line of the poem (if that is what it is) certainly implies that Jesus’ being ‘taken up in glory’ is a separate event to those described in the first two lines—though not presumably chronologically after all the other events spoken of, since the proclamation to the nations and the belief of the world follow, rather than precede, the ascension in all early Christian schemes that mention it.
The Pastoral Letters thus offer a few small vignettes of early Christian belief both in the future resurrection of Christians and in the bodily resurrection of Jesus himself, and in the link between them. Apart from the last passage, which remains opaque, they fit closely into the matrix of thought we have already studied. The comparative lack of mention of resurrection does at least raise a query over their supposed link with Paul; but what is said, though sometimes put in a different way to what we find elsewhere in Paul, is not obviously theologically distinct from the main letters.127