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(i) Introduction

We have now established the context within which we can approach the two central ‘resurrection’ passages in the Corinthian correspondence with a good hope of understanding them. Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians and chapters 4 and 5 of 2 Corinthians both contain significant problems of their own, which must be examined carefully; and the relationship between them (particularly, the question as to whether Paul’s ideas developed and changed) can only be assessed when that has been done. We therefore take them in sequence.

First Corinthians 15 is a carefully composed whole, with a balancing introduction and conclusion (A and a below), two lengthy main arguments (B and b), each in two parts (B1 and B2, b1 and b2), with a short middle section (C) in a different tempo. The balance can be seen in the following outline, including the similarity of the word-count in the matching sections:¹

A 15:1–11 (161 words): introduction: Paul’s gospel, and his own role

B 15:12–28 (246 words): the question and the basic answer

[B1 15:12–19 (111 words); B2 15:20–28 (135 words)]

C 15:29–34 (81 words): practical interlude

b 15:35–49 (214 words): what sort of body?

[b1 15:35–41 (110 words); b2 15:42–9 (104 words)]

a 15:50–58 (148 words): conclusion: the mystery revealed

I am not suggesting that the argument presents an exact chiasm in terms of content (e.g. that sections B/b discuss precisely the same themes); rather that Paul seems to have envisaged the argument as a complete whole, laying it out step by step, not simply improvising his way through a random selection of things he wished to say.² We have already seen that the letter as a whole leads the eye up to this chapter, demanding that something now be said about the continuity between the present life and the one believers are promised in the coming age. Now we discover what Paul had in mind all along.

The argument is, in fact, an exposition of the future resurrection of all those who belong to the Messiah, set out as an argument about new creation. Genesis 1–3 forms a subtext for the whole chapter, and even when Paul appears to be merely offering illustrations of his point these, too, are drawn from the creation stories (see on 15:35–41). Having warned against taking the B/b sections as too closely parallel, we nevertheless note that in both B2 (15:20–28) and b2 (15:42–9) the place of Adam, and the reversal and undoing of Adam’s fall and its results, is central. In B2 Paul quotes, as we have seen him do elsewhere in related passages, from Psalm 8:7, with its evocation of the creation story, and in b2 he concludes triumphantly, as does the account of creation in Genesis 1, with humans bearing the ‘image’—though now the image they bear, as in Romans 8:29, is the image of the truly human being, the Messiah. Section b2 is in fact the final nub of the argument, the place where Paul reaches his most detailed explanation of the continuity (and discontinuity) between the present body and the future body, and he establishes the link between this argument and B2 precisely by means of the Adam-reference. B2 itself takes the form of a small apocalyptic account of the coming of God’s kingdom, establishing God’s rule over the world and defeating all the enemies of his kingdom, much as Daniel 7, itself drawing on the creation account in Genesis 2, in which the human race was set in authority over the beasts, envisages YHWH’s kingdom as a new creation. And in the concluding passage of b2 Paul draws into the discussion the most fundamental aspect of creation, heaven and earth, as in Genesis 1:1, showing how the new creation represents, at last, the Jewish dream of the kingdom, embodied in the new humanity that, as in Philippians 3:20–21, comes ‘from heaven’. The two key moments in the argument, B2 (15:20–28) and b2 (15:42–9) thus possess a measure of thematic as well as formal parallelism.

Genesis 1–3 is thus not only a frequent point of allusion, but provides some of the key structural markers in the argument. Even in its own terms, there can be no doubt that Paul intends this entire chapter to be an exposition of the renewal of creation, and the renewal of humankind as its focal point. When we place it alongside the various Jewish expositions of a similar theology on the one hand, and Paul’s own briefer statements studied earlier, it should be beyond argument that this chapter belongs with them both. In terms of the spectrum of beliefs in the ancient world, this passage is specifically Jewish rather than pagan; within Judaism, it is a classic example of resurrection-theology, based on the twin beliefs in the creator god and his justice.³ Within this framework of thought, death is an intruder, a violator of the creator’s good world. The creator’s answer to death cannot be to reach some kind of agreement or compromise. Death must be, and in the Messiah has been and will be, defeated (15:26).⁴ Anything other than some kind of bodily resurrection, therefore, is simply unthinkable, not only at the level of the meaning of individual verses and phrases but at the level of the chapter’s argument as a whole. ‘Resurrection’ does not refer to some part or aspect of the human being not dying but instead going on into a continuing life in a new mode; it refers to something that does die and is then given a new life.⁵ This distinction, so often ignored in both popular and scholarly treatments of the topic, and of this chapter, is vital. Before we examine some of the ways in which Paul goes beyond anything that had been said in Judaism before, we must be quite clear that in outline and basic theology (i.e. the view of the true god presupposed throughout) he stands rock-solid within the worldview of Pharisaic (i.e. at this period mainstream) Judaism.

The overall structure and logic of the chapter thus confirms what we would have guessed from the direction in which the rest of the letter points: that this is intended by Paul as a long argument in favour of a future bodily resurrection.⁶ As we saw in the previous chapter, Paul repeatedly indicates earlier in the letter that Christian behaviour in the present life is predicated upon continuity between this life and the future one. It would be surprising if now, addressing the issue head on at last, he were to undermine what he had said all along. There was, in any case, no indication in Judaism either before or after Paul that ‘resurrection’ could mean anything other than ‘bodily’; if Paul was going to argue for something so oxymoronic as a ‘non-bodily resurrection’ he would have done better not to structure his argument in such a way as to give the appearance of articulating a Pharisaic, indeed biblical, worldview in which the goodness of the present creation is reaffirmed in the age to come. Since that is the kind of argument he has composed, at the conclusion of a letter which constantly points this way, no question should remain. When Paul said ‘resurrection’, he meant ‘bodily resurrection’.

In any case, as Dale Martin has importantly reminded us, we should not assume that the ontological dualism between what modern westerners since Descartes at least think of as ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’, or ‘material’ and ‘non-material’, would have meant very much to Paul’s audiences. Most pagan philosophers of the period who believed in the existence of souls would have thought that they, like the body, were composed of material, albeit in finer particles.⁷

But we can go further. Had Paul been concerned about a non-bodily survival of death, his argument would be unnecessary, since many people in a city like Corinth believed in that anyway. None of it, indeed, would make sense: neither in outline nor in detail does 1 Corinthians 15 resemble an argument for the immortality of the soul. The whole point is that, at some future moment beyond death, the creator god will perform an act of new creation which will correspond to, and be derived from, that already performed in the case of Jesus (verses 20–28). What matters for our purposes in the present book is the ground of Paul’s argument, since unlike him we are not presupposing Jesus’ resurrection and building on it a theology of Christian hope, but examining his theology of Christian hope in order to understand more precisely what he thought had happened to Jesus. The ground of his argument is the resurrection of Jesus himself (15:3–11), which is appealed to as the event through which ‘the resurrection of the dead’ has burst in upon the surprised world, and on the basis of which the future resurrection of those ‘in the Messiah’ is guaranteed (15:20–28, 45–9). The final body of the redeemed will correspond to that of the Last Man, the Messiah (verse 49). For our purposes, the more Paul says about the future resurrection, the more we can fill in the blanks of what he might have said about Easter itself. However much Paul develops and in some respects modifies the basic Jewish account of resurrection, it is still resurrection he is talking about.

The developments and modifications are basically threefold: they concern the when, the what and the who of resurrection. Still at the level of overall argument, they stand out strikingly. Section B (verses 12–28) addresses the timing of the resurrection: contrary to Jewish expectation, he argues that ‘the resurrection of the dead’, as an event, is to happen in two stages—first the Messiah, and later all those who belong to him. This also highlights the personal focus: instead of resurrection being simply for all the righteous, for ‘all Israel’ in some sense, it is first and foremost for Israel’s representative in person, and thence for all those, whether Israelite or not, who belong to him. Section b (verses 35–49) addresses the what, i.e. the type of body envisaged: going beyond any previous Jewish expositions of the topic, Paul argues that resurrection is not merely a resuscitation into the same kind of body, but is rather a going on, out the other side of death and whatever lies immediately beyond, into a new, transformed embodiment. All these points need more detailed discussion, of course, but it is important that we see them, in an introductory bird’s-eye glimpse, as modifications from within of the Jewish, more specifically the Pharisaic, worldview. They are new ways of emphasizing and reinforcing the Jewish view of God as creator and justice-bringer, rather than subtle abandonments of that worldview and theology. Nor do we have to seek far to discover the causes of these developments and modifications; they are predicated, obviously, on what Paul believed happened to Jesus at Easter. Jesus’ resurrection remains, throughout, the prototype and model for the future resurrection. This enables us to work back quite precisely to what Paul meant when he said that the Messiah had himself been raised from the dead.

The aim of chapter 15 is to answer the challenge of verse 12: some of the Corinthian Christians had been saying that there was no resurrection of the dead. This must mean that they were denying a future bodily resurrection, and the strong probability is that they were doing so on the standard pagan grounds, as set out in chapter 2, that everybody knew dead people didn’t and couldn’t come back to bodily life. Even if they believed, like the two teachers mentioned in 2 Timothy 2:17–18, that ‘the resurrection’ as a whole had already occurred, in other words, that ‘the resurrection’ referred to some kind of spiritual experience or event, they would still be denying that there would be a future bodily resurrection. (The proto-gnostic belief is thus shown up already as what it really was and is, namely, a form of paganism rather than of Judaism.)⁸ If the denial were to be sustained, clearly, much of Paul’s previous argument would be undercut, depending as it does on the promise of resurrection. This is why Paul opens the chapter with a restatement of the fundamental Christian gospel, highlighting particularly the fact of Jesus’ own resurrection, which will be the basis for both the initial argument in B1 (verses 12–19) and the developed argument of B2 (verses 20–28). An event has occurred which has changed the shape of the creator’s history with the world.

The argument of chapter 15, then, runs as follows: what the creator god did for Jesus is both the model and the means of what he will do for all Jesus’ people. As an aid to clarity in what follows, we may offer an overview of the whole chapter:

A. The gospel is anchored in the resurrection of Jesus (verses 1–11).

B1. But if this did not happen then the gospel, with all its benefits, is null and void (verses 12–19).

B2. Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of ‘the resurrection of the dead’, the final eschatological event, which has now split into two; the risen Jesus is the ‘first-fruits’, both the initial, prototypical example, and also the means of the subsequent resurrection of his people, because it is through his status and office as the truly human being, the Messiah, that death and all other enemies of the creator’s project are to be defeated (verses 20–28).

C. Paul then quickly mentions (verses 29–34) what would follow if the resurrection were not true after all: the central nerve of Christian living would be cut.

b. He then moves (verses 35–49) to the what of resurrection, which is based at several points on B2: the risen Jesus is the model for what resurrected humanity will consist of, and also, through the Spirit, the agent of its accomplishment.

a. He concludes triumphantly (verses 50–58) with a description of the future moment of resurrection, emphasizing the incorruptibility of the new body, and hence the character of the event as victory over death. He closes with both praise (verse 57) and exhortation (verse 58).

Keeping our eyes on the horizon provided by this overview should enable us to avoid motion sickness in the choppy exegetical waters through which we must now sail.

(ii) 1 Corinthians 15:1–11

The introduction is formal, solemn, complex and controversial. It stands as a fifth witness to the original Easter events, alongside the accounts in the four gospels, and is thus of extraordinary importance for our present study. Bultmann, famously, criticized Paul for citing witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, as though he considered it an actual event, instead of being merely a graphic, ‘mythological’ way of referring to the conviction of the early Christians that Jesus’ death had been a good thing, not a bad thing.⁹ The inauthenticity of an entire stream of twentieth-century New Testament scholarship is thus laid bare; if Paul really allowed himself, in so serious and sober an introduction to a carefully crafted chapter expressing the central point that underlay an entire letter, to say something as drastically misleading as Bultmann imagined, he is hardly a thinker worth wrestling with in the first place. But in fact Bultmann was simply wrong: the resurrection of Jesus was a real event as far as Paul was concerned, and it underlay the future real event of the resurrection of all God’s people.¹⁰

All this emerges at every point in verses 1–11. Paul refers to the resurrection of Jesus as an event for which there were witnesses—a large, though finite number, comprising at least 500 who had seen Jesus. Some of these witnesses had already died, and no more would be added to their number, because the sightings of the risen Jesus had a temporal end; when he, Paul, saw Jesus, that was the last in the sequence (verse 8).

This reference to seeing the risen Jesus cannot therefore, in Paul’s mind at least, have anything to do with regular and normal, or even extraordinary, ‘Christian experience’, with ongoing visions and revelations or a ‘spiritual’ sense of the presence of Jesus. As is clear from 1 Corinthians 9:1, this ‘seeing’ was something which constituted people as ‘apostles’, the one-off witnesses to a one-off event. The Corinthians had had every kind of spiritual experience imaginable, as the previous chapters have made clear; but they had not seen the risen Jesus, nor did either they or Paul expect that they would do so.¹¹

The introduction to the introduction (15:1–3a) sets out in solemn fashion the fact that Paul’s gospel, which hinges on Jesus’ resurrection, was the one he himself ‘received’ in the tradition of the very early church, and that it is this gospel alone which gives shape to Christian living and value to Christian hope:

¹ So I must remind you, my dear family, of the gospel which I announced to you—which you also received, in which you stand firm, ² through which you are also saved, if you hold fast to the word by which I announced it to you, unless indeed you believed in vain. ³ For I handed on to you at the start what I also received …

This ties in closely with the conclusion of the introduction (15:11):

¹¹ So, then, whether it was I or whether it was they, that is the way we announced it, and that is the way you believed.

Paul is at pains to stress that this gospel, though announced by him, was not peculiar to him. The Corinthians, after all, had had visits from numerous other apostles and teachers, Cephas and Apollos being probably only two of many. Had Paul said something significantly different from the others, on this point above all, they would have noticed. He is quite capable of emphasizing something he wants to say on his own authority, in contradistinction to other Christian teachers; but in this case it is important to him (and to our investigation as well) that he knew, and that he knew the Corinthians knew, that in what he was about to say he was standing on exactly the same ground as all the other apostles.

Paul does not here undermine what he had said in Galatians 1 about the independence of his gospel.¹² The content—that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and the basic truths that followed from that—he had, it is true, received independently of anyone else, on the road to Damascus. But the form, this way of putting it, this manner of telling the story, was apparently passed on to him (verse 3), and passed on by him to his churches.¹³ This is the kind of foundation-story with which a community is not at liberty to tamper. It was probably formulated within the first two or three years after Easter itself, since it was already in formulaic form when Paul ‘received’ it.¹⁴ We are here in touch with the earliest Christian tradition, with something that was being said two decades or more before Paul wrote this letter.

The question of how much of verses 3b–8 constituted the core of this tradition need not concern us. It is quite possible that the whole passage was common tradition, with the final word being ‘to Paul’ instead of ‘to me’, and that Paul has added phrases like ‘most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep’. It is also possible that the traditional formula ended with verse 5 (the mention of the Twelve) and that Paul added verses 6–8;¹⁵ or that Paul has combined two or more different traditions.¹⁶ This does not affect the basic point to be made, either by Paul or by ourselves.¹⁷ What counts is that the heart of the formula is something Paul knows the Corinthians will have heard from everyone else as well as himself, and that he can appeal to it as unalterable Christian bedrock.

The formula is dense and important, and we take it step by step, beginning with verses 3b–4:

³ … that the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, ⁴ and that he was buried, and that he has been raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures …

It is important, first, that Jesus is designated in this formula as ‘Messiah’, Christos. Precisely because this is such an early formulation there is no chance that this word could have been a proper name without connotation, and every reason to suppose that the early Christians intended it to have its royal designation. Paul himself mounts an explicitly ‘messianic’ argument in verses 20–28, complete with biblical proof-texts about the coming Messiah and with a statement of his worldwide kingly rule.¹⁸ The evidence suggests that this is rooted in the earliest Christian conviction, expressed here in the formula. It is because Jesus is Messiah that his death represents the turning-point in which the present evil age is left behind and those who belong to Jesus are rescued from it; what Paul says in Galatians 1:4, that the Messiah ‘gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age’, is of the greatest relevance here, indicating that the dealing with sins which Paul has in mind is part of, is indeed the key focal point of, the great eschatological turning-point in the divine purpose. The turning-point in question is focused on those who now benefit from it, i.e. ‘us’: the Messiah died for our sins. Paul does not mention ‘sins’ again in the chapter except at verse 17 (and ‘sin’ at verse 56), but those occurrences are crucial: they reveal part of the point of the entire exposition. Without the resurrection, there is no reason to suppose that Jesus’ crucifixion dealt with sins, or with sin. But, with the resurrection, the divine victory over sin(s), and hence over death, is assured.

The idea of God’s dealing with sins once and for all is rooted, within second-Temple Jewish tradition, in the complex of thought for which ‘return from exile’, ‘covenant renewal’, and indeed ‘resurrection’ (in the metaphorical sense we find in Ezekiel 37), are all appropriate metonyms and/or metaphors.¹⁹ The transition from ‘the present evil age’ to the incipient ‘age to come’, by means of sins being dealt with, is exactly (for instance) what is promised in those well-known, central and frequently cited passages Isaiah 40:1–11, Jeremiah 31:31–4, and Ezekiel 36:22–32. It is also the central subject of the great prayer in Daniel 9, which is simultaneously a prayer both for forgiveness of sins and for return from exile. Since the whole chapter, as we have seen, belongs so firmly in the tradition of Jewish restoration theology, this is without a doubt the right context within which to interpret such a reference.

This indicates, before we go any further, the primary meaning of ‘in accordance with the scriptures’. Paul is not proof-texting; he does not envisage one or two, or even half a dozen, isolated passages about a death for sinners. He is referring to the entire biblical narrative as the story which has reached its climax in the Messiah, and has now given rise to the new phase of the same story, the phase in which the age to come has broken in, with its central characteristic being (seen from one point of view) rescue from sins, and (from another point of view) rescue from death, i.e. resurrection. We may again compare verses 56–7. There are of course several scriptural passages which point in this direction, including some of the Psalms and several parts of Isaiah 40–55; but Paul is primarily concerned with the entire sweep of biblical narrative.²⁰

The mention of Jesus’ burial (verse 4a) can only have attained such a significant place in a brief and summary traditional narrative if it was regarded as important in itself. Much debate has circled around this point, but the most likely reason for its mention is twofold: first, to certify that Jesus was really and truly dead (something the gospel accounts take care of in their own way, as we shall see); second, to indicate that when Paul speaks of resurrection in the next phrase it is to be assumed, as anyone telling or hearing a story of someone being raised from the dead would assume in either the pagan or the Jewish world, that this referred to the body being raised to new life, leaving an empty tomb behind it. The fact that the empty tomb itself, so prominent in the gospel accounts, does not appear to be specifically mentioned in this passage, is not significant; the mention here of ‘buried, then raised’ no more needs to be amplified in that way than one would need to amplify the statement ‘I walked down the street’ with the qualification ‘on my feet’. The discovery of the empty tomb in the gospel accounts is of course significant because it was (in all the stories) the first thing that alerted Jesus’ followers to the fact that something extraordinary had happened; but when the story was telescoped into a compact formula it was not the principal point. The best hypothesis for why ‘that he was buried’ came to be part of this brief tradition is simply that the phrase summarized very succinctly that entire moment in the Easter narratives.²¹

‘He has been raised on the third day according to the scriptures.’ The verb is actually perfect, not (as most translations imply) aorist (‘he was raised’, matching ‘died’, ‘was buried’ and ‘was seen’); the Greek perfect tense indicates the ongoing result of a one-off event, in this case the permanent result that Jesus is now the risen Messiah and lord (see verses 20–28).²² The verb, like the others here, is passive, indicating divine action; Paul regularly sees the resurrection of Jesus as a great act of the creator himself.²³ Like the scriptural narrative invoked as the world of meaning for ‘the Messiah died for our sins’, the qualifying phrase here looks back to the scriptural narrative as a whole, not simply to a handful of proof-texts. And the point Paul has in mind within that longer scriptural narrative is the point at which YHWH forgives Israel’s sins, ushering in the new age, renewing the covenant, restoring creation—and raising his people from the dead. Ezekiel 37 is important here, but so, too, most would agree, is Hosea 6:2.²⁴ Whatever its original meaning, the signs are that by Paul’s day this passage was being read in terms both of resurrection itself ‘after three days’, and of the restoration of Israel after sin. Paul seems to intend both of these meanings, and indeed they belong closely with each other.

The phrase ‘after three days’, looking back mainly to Hosea 6:2, is frequently referred to in rabbinic mentions of the resurrection.²⁵ This does not mean that Paul or anyone else in early Christianity supposed that it was a purely metaphorical statement, a vivid way of saying ‘the biblical hope has been fulfilled’. In fact, the mention of any time-lag at all between Jesus’ death and his resurrection is a further strong indication of what is meant by the latter: not only was Jesus’ resurrection in principle a dateable event for the early Christians, but it was always something that took place, not immediately upon his death, but a short interval thereafter. If by Jesus’ ‘resurrection’ the early church had meant that they believed he had attained a new state of glory with God, a special kind of non-bodily post-mortem existence, it is difficult to see why there should have been any interval at all; why should he have had to wait? If, however, the early church knew from the first that something dramatic had happened on the third day (counting inclusively) after the Friday when Jesus died, then not only the appeal to Hosea 6:2 and the wider tradition thereby represented, but also the shift represented by the Christian use of Sunday as ‘the lord’s day’, is fully explained.²⁶

In the tradition, then, firm, universal and early, we find unambiguous evidence that the earliest Christians believed both that Jesus had been bodily raised and that this event fulfilled the scriptural stories. These were perceived as stories not simply about a Messiah, emerging out of the blue, but about Israel, about the doing away with Israel’s time of desolation, about the coming of the new age that would reverse the effects of the present evil age. Paul could appeal, in the mid-50s, to this entire tradition as something which all early Christians knew well.

But it is not enough for Paul, or the early tradition, simply to declare that the Messiah was in fact raised. Witnesses must come forward:

⁵ and that he was seen by/appeared to Cephas, then the Twelve, ⁶ then he was seen by/appeared to more than five hundred members of the family at one time, of whom most remain alive to this present day, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he was seen by/appeared to James, then by all the apostles.

As this carefully ambiguous translation shows, the verb ophthe, occurring three times here, and then again with reference to Paul in verse 8, can in principle be translated either way. Some, wanting to stress the ‘visionary’ nature of the appearances, and hence to insert the thin end of a wedge with which to force a ‘non-objective’ understanding of Easter, have emphasized the meaning ‘appeared’, and the parallel uses in which the subject is a non-bodily ‘apparition’, rather than someone or something within the normal space-time universe. The fact that it is followed in each case by a dative indicates that ‘appeared to’ may be marginally preferable. However, the verb is passive, and its normal meaning would be ‘was seen by’.²⁷

The use of ophthe is in fact quite varied, as a glance at the LXX concordance will show. The word occurs 85 times, of which a little over half refer either to YHWH, or YHWH’s glory, or an angel of YHWH, appearing to people.²⁸ The remaining 39 occurrences refer to people appearing before YHWH in the sense of presenting themselves in the Temple;²⁹ or to objects being seen by people in a straightforward, non-visionary sense;³⁰ and to people ‘appearing’, in a non-visionary and unsurprising way, before someone else.³¹ The classical background does not give much more help; the passive of the verb is not found in Homer, and the usage elsewhere more or less mirrors what we have seen in the LXX. It is in fact impossible to build a theory of what people thought Jesus’ resurrection appearances consisted of (i.e. whether they were ‘objective’, ‘subjective’ or whatever—these terms themselves, with their many philosophical overtones, are not particularly helpful) on this word alone. The word is quite consistent with people having non-objective ‘visions’; it is equally consistent with them seeing someone in the ordinary course of human affairs. Its meaning in the present context—both its meaning for Paul, and its meaning in the tradition he quotes—must be judged on wider criteria than linguistic usage alone.³²

The list of witnesses, despite the anguished protests of Bultmann and his followers, is a clear indication that Paul does not suppose Jesus’ resurrection to be a metaphorization of an experience of the disciples, or of some ‘ineffable truth beyond history’.³³ What is more, ‘the great variety in times and places of the appearances makes it difficult to hold all the reports of appearances to be legendary.’³⁴

The mention of ‘Cephas’ accords with Paul’s normal way of referring to Peter, though it almost certainly here belongs to the pre-Pauline tradition which he is quoting.³⁵ An early, personal appearance to him is mentioned in Luke, where he is named as ‘Simon’.³⁶

The appearance to ‘the Twelve’ is the more significant in that the gospel traditions make it clear that one of the Twelve, i.e. Judas Iscariot, was already dead by the time of the discovery of the empty tomb and the start of the appearances. In Matthew 28:16, Luke 24:9, 33 and the longer ending of Mark (16:14), they are referred to as ‘the eleven’, and in Acts 1:12–26 the eleven are listed and provision is made to appoint someone to replace Judas. It is difficult to know how much weight, and in what direction, to place on this reference. It could mean that the present tradition represents an early telling of the story which the gospel accounts have made more precise; or that the gospel accounts have preserved the early sense of loss over Judas, and that, by the time the tradition had solidified into the form before us here, not least once a replacement had been appointed (Acts 1:15–26), the story was being told in terms of ‘the Twelve’, as part of the reflection on the theological significance of the Twelve within early Christianity. Nothing much hinges on this for our present purposes, but we shall return to the point when examining the gospel accounts.

Attempts have sometimes been made to line up the appearance to the 500 with Luke’s account of Pentecost.³⁷ This is not only unnecessary, but virtually impossible: a classic case of critical scholarship treating two incidents as variations on a single one, the equal and opposite syndrome to the scholarly penchant for ‘discovering’ two or more separate sources or ‘original incidents’ hidden within a single narrative. The suggestion does as much violence to Luke’s account of Pentecost as it does to Paul’s account of a resurrection appearance which he expressly distinguishes from other types of Christian experience. Experience of the Spirit and seeing the risen Jesus are never, in early Christian writings, assimilated to one another.³⁸ (If they were, why should we not claim that the Pentecost-experience was ‘in fact’ a seeing of, and meeting with, the bodily resurrected Jesus? It is revealing that those who have suggested that ‘experience of the Spirit’, ‘seeing the risen Jesus’, ‘acclaiming Jesus as the exalted one’, and ‘the beginnings of Christian community’ are all ‘really’ different ways of talking about the same thing never dream of making that move.) It is far more likely that the appearance to the 500 was an occasion like that reported in Matthew 28:16–20 (though Matthew only mentions the eleven there). The crucial note here, at the end of verse 6, makes it clear why Paul (and/or the tradition he is quoting) is referring to the 500: though some are now dead, most are still alive, and—the strong implication—they could be interrogated for their own accounts of what they saw and knew. The whole thrust of the paragraph is about evidence, about witnesses being called, about something that actually happened for which eyewitnesses could and would vouch. Paul would hardly call eyewitnesses for an experience which continued unabated, not least in Corinth itself.

The appearance to James (this clearly refers to the brother of Jesus, not to either of the members of the Twelve who had that name) is especially interesting in that it is not mentioned in the gospel accounts, except for one much later text which may be dependent on our present passage.³⁹ It is of course common knowledge that James, the brother of Jesus, became the central leader in Jerusalem in the mid-century, while Peter and Paul and others were travelling around the world. Since he had probably not been a disciple of Jesus during the latter’s public career, it is difficult to account for his centrality and unrivalled leadership unless he was himself known to have seen the risen Jesus.⁴⁰

The mention of ‘all the apostles’, without being more specific, cannot be further glossed, except to say that Paul (or the tradition) seems to have thought that there were considerably more than 500 who had seen Jesus alive after his death; otherwise verse 7b seems otiose. Since an ‘apostle’ was, for him, one who had seen the risen Jesus, this seems to be a way of saying, not that there was a last large-scale appearance to a sub-group of those already mentioned, but that there was an appearance to a larger group than the Twelve or perhaps even the 500.

The list of witnesses in verses 5–7 is impressive but, to the minds of readers of the gospels, interestingly incomplete. The two on the road to Emmaus are perhaps taken care of under ‘all the apostles’, though it seems as if the present list is designed to be in some kind of chronological order (‘then … then … then … last of all’), and Luke presents their story earlier than the others (except for Simon/Cephas). More important, the list Paul quotes here, which by his day is traditional, makes no mention of the women who feature with such remarkable prominence in all four gospel accounts. How is this to be accounted for? Do we, as so many have done down the years, simply accuse Paul of being anti-women, and leave it at that?⁴¹

Recent scholarship has settled on what is far and away the most likely solution historically, one which explains the present passage and highlights the real shock in the gospel accounts. It is notorious that women were not regarded as reliable witnesses in the ancient world.⁴² They could not be expunged from the gospel accounts; their story of finding the tomb remained a primary datum, which we shall discuss later.⁴³ But when, in the very early years, the Easter story was being told both for the benefit of members of the church itself and in its witness to outsiders, and especially when it was ‘handed on’ to new converts in the wider world, the pressure to omit mention of the women in a brief formal statement must have been enormous.⁴⁴ That this does not imply that Paul does not regard women as ‘apostles’, i.e. as witnesses to the resurrection, is clear from Romans 16:7.⁴⁵

This brings us to Paul’s reference to himself:

⁸ Last of all, as to the one born at the wrong time, he also appeared to/was seen by me. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles; I do not deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted God’s church. ¹⁰ But it is by God’s grace that I am what I am; and his grace towards me was not in vain. On the contrary: I worked harder than all of them—yet it was not me, but God’s grace that was with me.

‘Last of all’: as we have already seen, Paul did not regard these ‘sightings’ or ‘appearances’ as part of normal ongoing Christian experience. When he saw Jesus, he was only just in time; the appearances were more or less at an end, and none had occurred after his own. (Had this not been known to be the case throughout the early church, Paul could scarcely have made this claim when writing to the Corinthians, who, in addition to their own rich variety of Christian experience, had heard several teachers who were independent of Paul.) This differentiation of Paul’s seeing of Jesus from every subsequent type of vision, spiritual revelation and experience, including his own (see, for instance, 2 Corinthians 12:1–5 ⁴⁶), and this placing of it not with such multiple later events but with the ‘seeings’ of Cephas, James and the rest, indicates not merely Paul’s insistence on his own apostolic authority (that he was on a par with the other apostles) but also his sense, which he must have known would not be challenged even by those who wished to resist other aspects of his teaching, that he had seen what the other apostles had seen, namely Jesus himself, personally present.

Paul is aware, however, that the ‘seeing’ of Jesus that had been granted to him, though belonging in the sequence of the other primitive and non-repeatable ‘seeings’, was nevertheless peculiar within the sequence. He indicates this peculiarity with the little phrase hosperei to ektromati, which I have translated ‘as to the one born at the wrong time’.

An ektroma, properly, is an untimely birth, due either to miscarriage or, more normally, abortion.⁴⁷ The word could be used as a term of abuse, and carried connotations of ugliness.⁴⁸ There are two important questions about what Paul says here. First, why has he described his seeing of Jesus, which took place after the other ‘seeings’ had come to an end, with a word that describes something happening too early? Second, why has he inserted the definite article, ‘as to the one untimely born’?

Paul clearly cannot intend all the possible overtones of the word. An aborted or miscarried foetus would not normally live, but the event had brought him to life in a whole new way. However, the sense of something that happens too soon, too early, might be right, not for his place within the sequence of ‘seeings’, but for his own process of getting ready to be born—or rather, of his not being ready to be born. Place him for a moment in parallel with the other apostles, and the point becomes clear. The others had had a process of gestation, knowing Jesus, keeping company with him, watching, listening, praying, even helping during his public ministry. Paul had had none of this: he was a zealous young right-wing Torah student, ready for anything, including violence, that might hasten the kingdom of God and, with it, Israel’s victory over pagans without and traitors within. The other apostles were not exactly ready to think in terms of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, but at least this was the Jesus they knew. Paul was not even on the map; in terms of the process of gestation and birth, he was many months from being ready to emerge into the light of a new day in which YHWH and Israel had been redefined around a crucified Messiah.⁴⁹

This may be part of the reason why Paul used the image of an untimely birth. He was, as it were, ripped from the womb in a traumatic way, blinded by the sudden light like an infant whose organs had not yet developed sufficiently to cope with the demands of the outside world. Paul gives here, I suggest, a hint that he knows his ‘seeing’ of Jesus was indeed a little different from those of the others. The blinding light, the drama of it, as reported by Acts, may be stylized.⁵⁰ But the Luke who wrote Acts is the same Luke who also describes the road to Emmaus and the other ‘ordinary’, non-dazzling post-resurrection ‘appearances’. And Paul explains the difference between himself and the others not in terms of his seeing of Jesus being a different sort of ‘seeing’, but in terms of his own personal unreadiness for such an experience. It took an emergency operation, he may be saying, to bring him into the list of witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection; his ‘seeing’ of Jesus was the same as theirs in terms of the Jesus they saw, but it was radically different in terms of his own experience, being ripped from the womb of zealous Judaism, to come face to dazzling face with the crucified and risen lord.

The definite article (the untimely birth) remains a puzzle, and addressing it may help to gain more clarity here. It implies that Paul has in mind a particular example of an ektroma, a stillborn child. He could conceivably be echoing Job 3:16, where the phrase hosper ektroma occurs: Job is wishing that he could have been like a stillborn child who never sees the light. This would mean that Paul was alluding, not to the process of his ‘birth’ as such, but to the condition he was in immediately before it: he was like someone as good as dead, unable to see anything, but all that was changed in a fresh act of life-giving grace. The other possible allusion is to Numbers 12:12, where Moses prays that Miriam, who has opposed him and been punished with leprosy, should not remain leprous, ‘like one equal to a dead person, like a stillborn infant (hosei ektroma) that comes forth from its mother’s womb with its flesh half consumed’. This may offer more illumination.⁵¹ The context is of Miriam and Aaron challenging Moses’ leadership (Numbers 12:1–9). YHWH summons all three, and declares that he speaks with Moses face to face, and that Moses ‘sees the form of YHWH’ (the LXX has ‘sees the glory of the Lord’, probably to avoid speaking of someone actually seeing YHWH). If Paul is alluding to this story he is doing so in order to align himself with Miriam, and the early church with Moses, the ones who have seen the lord face to face. Hosperei to ektromati, again, would then allude, not so much to his experience of being ‘born’, as to the state he was in as a result of his persecution of those who had rightly claimed to have seen the lord. This makes an excellent link with what now follows, and—though as usual Paul’s multiple imagery should not be pressed too far—it allows him to speak in biblical terms both of his opposition to the new covenant people on their wilderness wandering and of the divine forgiveness which had healed him of that condition.⁵² Paul had been ‘like the untimely birth [in the story]’, until the forgiving grace of the covenant god caught up with him as well.⁵³ This is of course unprovable, but it at least opens up possibilities.

This explanation fits well with verses 9–10, which otherwise seem unnecessary. Introduced with gar, ‘for’, they explain something in verse 8, and the best candidate is the phrase ‘as to the one untimely born’. Paul’s earlier persecutions mean that he, unlike the others, does not deserve the title of ‘apostle’; but he reinforces the fact that he bears this title none the less by referring to his tireless hard work. This, too, he says, is the result of the particular grace (personal commission, with the sense of divine power overcoming human undeserving) given to him.⁵⁴ Paul embodies in himself the transforming power of the age to come which has burst into the present age with the resurrection of Jesus. These two verses continue to keep him lined up alongside the other apostles, some of whom were themselves known to the Corinthians; but his point in verse 11, which has been the strength of the whole paragraph, is that the gospel he and they all preached was the same. Paul, Cephas, James and everyone else announced that the Messiah had died and been raised.

What they must have meant by this, for the present paragraph to work, is the sense that those words would naturally have borne in both the pagan and the Jewish worlds of the day: that, following bodily death and burial, the Messiah had been bodily raised from the dead. If Paul and the others had intended to refer to anything other than this, the talk of ‘seeings’ would be irrelevant; the idea that they occurred for a while and then no more would be incomprehensible; and the idea that with this event the new age had broken in to the present age would be unimaginable.

It would still be open, of course, for anyone in Corinth or elsewhere to look at verses 12–19, agree with the logic, and draw the conclusion that Christianity as a whole was indeed based on a mistake, and was empty, futile and without hope. But Paul will not of course leave it there. The second half of section (B2) lays out Paul’s classic statement of the larger picture of resurrection, that of Jesus and that of all those who belong to him as Messiah. This is the point above all where Paul is trying to teach the Corinthians to think eschatologically, within the Jewish categories of ‘apocalyptic’—not of an ‘imminent expectation’ of the end of the world, but of the way in which the future has already burst into the present, so that the present time is characterized by a mixture of fulfilment and expectation, of ‘now’ and ‘not yet’, pointing towards a future in which what happened at the first Easter will be implemented fully and the true God will be all in all.⁶¹ This passage offers a rethought kingdom-of-God scenario, after the manner of many such pictures in second-Temple Judaism, with the victory of this God over all enemies as the subject, and the resurrection and rule of the Messiah as the key redefining elements.⁶²

Paul never loses sight of the main question he is addressing, and nor should we. He is arguing for the certainty of the future bodily resurrection of all the Messiah’s people. The present passage sketches the framework within which this belief not only makes sense (not least in terms of the timing: first the Messiah, later all the Messiah’s people) but follows inescapably. The basic point is made, as often with Paul, in the opening verse of the sequence (in this case, verse 20): the Messiah has been raised from the dead as the aparche, the ‘first-fruits’, the first sheaf of the harvest which guarantees that there will be more to come.⁶³ This is explained as follows:

²¹ For since through a human came death, through a human came also the resurrection of the dead; ²² for as in Adam all die, so also in the Messiah shall all be made alive.

The future resurrection is guaranteed, in other words, by Jesus’ status as the truly human being, the one who fully bears the divine image. Paul only mentions this theme at the very end of his main argument, in verse 49, but by holding it in mind throughout (as we often have to do with Paul) we can see where he is going. It is because humankind was created with the purpose of bringing the creator’s order to the world that now, because Jesus is the truly human one, he is invested with the task of bringing the creator’s rescuing new order to the world. This theme is closely correlated with the installation of Jesus, at the same time, as Messiah: his resurrection has already revealed him as the world’s true lord, and he will rule, as the scriptures said the Messiah would, until he has conquered all the enemies of the creator god, that is, all the powers of the world (supremely of course death itself) that raise themselves against the good creation and the fulfilment of the creator’s purposes for it. Thus, by asserting in verses 21–2 that Jesus is the true human and the Messiah, Paul explains both that his resurrection is the beginning of a larger harvest and how that harvest will be accomplished.

This passage is, indeed, all about new creation as the fulfilment and redemption of the old. Paul develops it, and the parallel argument in the second half of the chapter, not least by means of reflection upon some of the classic biblical texts which speak of the original creation and of humankind as the creator’s image-bearing steward over it. The stories of creation and fall, as told in Genesis 1:26–8 and 3:17–19, lie below the surface throughout, and the later parts of the chapter will allude frequently to the same passages. The great Psalm which speaks of humankind’s vocation to rule the creation as the creator’s vicegerent (Psalm 8), is explicitly quoted in verse 27, where it is closely aligned with the messianic Psalm 110 and with the multiple echoes of Daniel.⁶⁴ This is not a mere ‘appeal to scripture’, as though Paul were mounting an argument about something else and needed to drag in a few proof-texts;⁶⁵ he is thinking his way through a theology of creation and of humankind, and the biblical allusions indicate the narrative of which the resurrection of Jesus now forms the climax, helping the story to its intended goal. Just as, when Israel failed to be the light-bearing people for the world, the covenant God did not rewrite the vocation but rather sent the Messiah to act in Israel’s place (that is the argument of Romans 2:17–4:25, and indeed lies behind much of Romans 5–8 and 9–11), so now the failure of humankind (‘Adam’) to be the creator’s wise, image-bearing steward over creation has not led the creator to rewrite the vocation, but rather to send the Messiah as the truly human being. The purpose is that in his renewed, resurrected human life he can be and do, for humankind and all creation, what neither humankind nor creation could do for themselves. That is the theology of the true God, of humankind and of creation which, rooted at every point in the Old Testament, is reaffirmed in this treatment of the resurrection of those who belong to the Messiah. And this takes its place within the larger picture of Easter as the critical first step in the plan and purpose of this God to be, through the Messiah’s victory, ‘all in all’ (verse 28). When, within a theology of new creation such as this passage manifestly offers (the reaffirmation of the old creation and the liberation of it from everything that spoils, defaces and kills it), we find ‘resurrection’ as the central theme, this clearly refers, should there be any lingering doubt, to the resurrection of the body.

The way is now open to the heart of the argument, which is about the appropriate order within which all this will happen—both the chronological sequence and the ontological or even metaphysical hierarchy through which the world is brought ‘to order’.⁶⁶ Paul describes this ‘ordering’ by means of an extended exposition of Psalm 8:7, where the key verb (‘God has put all things in order under his feet’) is repeated and exploited to build a theology of new creation as the fulfilment of the intention for the old. Within this, he has woven the theme of kingship, of messianic rule, from Psalm 110 and Daniel, in order to emphasize that the future bodily resurrection of all the Messiah’s people is guaranteed because Jesus fulfils the roles through which, according to the promises, the world is to be brought under the saving rule of its creator God. The focal point of this saving kingdom is the defeat and abolition of death itself (verse 26). And the defeat and abolition of death must of course mean new life, new bodily life, resurrection life.

We may set out this dense argument as follows, with bracketed comments indicating the themes, biblical allusions and echoes which give it its depth and power:

²³ But each in their own order [en to idio tagmati]: the Messiah as the first-fruits, then, at his royal appearing [parousia], those who belong to the Messiah. ²⁴ Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the father, when he has abolished all rule and all authority and power. ²⁵ For he must reign until he has ‘put all his enemies under his feet’. ²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death. ²⁷ For ‘he [i.e. God] has put everything in order (hypetaxen, cognate with tagma in verse 23] under his feet.’ But when it says that ‘everything is put in order [hypotetaktai]’, it is obvious that it makes an exception for the one who put everything in order [hypotaxantos] under him. ²⁸ When he puts everything in order [hypotage] under him, then the Son himself will be placed in order [hypotagesetai] under the one who placed everything in order [hypotaxanti] under him, so that God may be all in all.

We should note, first, the primary biblical echoes. In the Theodotion version of Daniel 2:44, Israel’s God will ‘raise up a kingdom’ (anastesei ho theos basileian); in Daniel 7:14, and particularly 7:27, the saints of the Most High receive the everlasting kingdom. The first of these resonates with verse 24, the second with verse 25. The idea of putting all the Messiah’s enemies under his feet comes, of course, from Psalm 110:1, which is frequently used messianically in early Christianity.⁶⁷ Finally, Psalm 8:7 comes to dominate the argument completely, with Paul getting from it the idea of the divinely intended order in which humankind plays an intermediate role between creator and creation.

The human task and the messianic task thus dovetail together: the Messiah, the true Human One, will rule the world in obedience to God.⁶⁸ This task is carried out during the present age by Jesus, constituted as Messiah in virtue of his resurrection. The task involves activity for which in biblical and apocalyptic literature the imagery of battle and victory is standard, and the military overtones of the word tagma in verse 23 (drawing up soldiers in ‘order’ or ‘array’ for battle) may well be intentional.⁶⁹ The flurry of occurrences of this word, or rather its various cognates, in verses 27–8, dependent on Psalm 8:7, indicates that from the beginning of the paragraph Paul had intended to work towards this point, and that he saw the fulfilment of Psalm 8:7 precisely in terms of the Messiah’s metaphorically ‘military’ victory over all the creator’s enemies, the ‘rulers, authorities and powers’, both human and suprahuman, that threaten the good creation.⁷⁰ This is where the allusions to Psalm 110 and to Daniel make their point, fitting in well with the overall second-Temple Jewish viewpoint on the coming establishment of God’s kingdom. The result is the establishment of a final, stable ‘order’ in which the creator and covenant god is over the Messiah, and the Messiah is over the world—with the Messiah, in other words, taking precisely the position marked out in Genesis 1 and 2 for the human race, and in Daniel 7 for ‘the people of the saints of the Most High’: under the creator, over the world, reflecting the divine image into the world in terms of bringing the creator’s victorious, wise, rescuing order to the world that would otherwise be subject to the destructive rule of death and all the powers that lead to it.⁷¹ This god will be seen to be God, and will in the end be ‘all in all’.⁷²

The heart and centre of it all, then, is the defeat of death in the future, based on the proleptic defeat inflicted in the resurrection of Jesus himself; or, to put it another way, it is the final completion of the ‘age to come’, which was inaugurated, in the midst of the ‘present evil age’, through the Messiah’s death and resurrection. This is the moment when the events spoken of in verses 3–4 are finally worked out. And this, clearly, is the moment when, at Jesus’ royal appearing (parousia), all those who belong to him are themselves raised bodily from the dead.⁷³ Verse 23 makes it clear (not that Paul or any of his readers would have doubted it) that the Christian dead have not yet been raised; wherever they are at the moment, their resurrection has not taken place.

The statement about the parousia in verse 23 corresponds closely to what is said in 1 Thessalonians 4:14–18 (where the developed and highly metaphorical picture of the future is, as here, based on the fundamental gospel events of Jesus’ own death and resurrection, noted formulaically in 4:14), and also in Philippians 3:20–21, which in turn is based on the gospel events set out in 2:6–11. Though the parousia is not mentioned specifically when Paul recapitulates the present chapter in verses 50–58, the reference to the final raising of the dead in verse 52 picks up what is said in verse 23, and the ‘victory’ spoken of in verse 57 is another way of summarizing the effect of the whole present paragraph. Thus, though our present passage is one of Paul’s more dense and allusive pieces of writing, its main lines stand out clearly, and we can reconstruct them with a fair degree of certainty both through the network of biblical allusions and through what we know from his other writings on similar topics, and the larger context in the present letter. The whole argument establishes, with rock-solid theology and considerable rhetorical power, the point that the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah is the starting-point and means whereby the creator, in completing the work of rescuing and renewing the original creation, will raise all the Messiah’s people to new bodily life.⁷⁴

We should not ignore the political overtones in this, another letter to a Roman colony. The whole paragraph is about the Messiah through whose ‘kingdom’ (basileia) the one true God will overthrow all other authorities and rulers. ‘Resurrection’, as in Pharisaic thought, belongs firmly within kingdom-of-god theology; and every first-century Jew knew that kingdom-of-God theology carried inescapable political meaning. The present ‘ordering’ (tagma) of society places Caesar at the top, his agents in the middle, and ordinary people at the bottom; the creator’s new ordering will have himself at the top, the Messiah—and his people, as in 6:2 and elsewhere!—in the middle, and the world as a whole underneath, not however exploited and oppressed but rescued and restored, given the freedom which comes with the wise rule of the creator, his Messiah, and his image-bearing subjects. This passage thus belongs with Romans 8, Philippians 2:6–11 and 3:20–21 as, simultaneously, a classic exposition of the creator God’s plans to rescue the creation, and a coded but powerful reminder to the young church, living in Caesar’s world, that Jesus was lord and that at his name every knee would bow.

(iv) 1 Corinthians 15:29–34

The next paragraph is short: something of an interlude, a brief respite from dense and involved argumentation.⁷⁵ Jerky writing; short sentences; swift subject-changes; a quotation from pagan poetry. The flavour is both ad hoc and ad hominem, a quick, improvised, scattergun approach to make sure the listener is still awake.⁷⁶ Four different subjects in five verses, with resurrection the thread that links them all; four small windows, each affording a glimpse of the continuity between the present life and the future one. Underneath is the logic which sustained verses 12–19: if the denial of the resurrection were to be upheld, think what that would actually mean for Christian symbolic practice, for Paul’s own apostolic lifestyle, for the Christian ethic. Think, and be ashamed, he says, at the ignorance of the true god which the denial implies.⁷⁷

The first topic remains controversial (verse 29). Paul assumes that people were being ‘baptized on behalf of the dead’, and declares that this practice can only have a point if the dead are to be raised. There is no agreement on what this ‘baptism on behalf of the dead’ was, there being no other reference to it in early Christianity. A case has recently been made for interpreting it simply as people seeking baptism (and hence joining the church) because a Christian relative or friend has recently died and they want to be sure of being reunited with them in the life to come.⁷⁸ That seems possible, but equally possible, I think, is the more traditional reading, that some people who had come to Christian faith in Corinth had died before being baptized, and that other Christians had undergone baptism on their behalf, completing vicariously in their own persons the unfinished sacramental initiation of the dead.⁷⁹ If we go with the majority interpretation, Paul is saying that the dead are still in some sense alive, but not yet raised, and the symbolic dying and rising with the Messiah which is portrayed in baptism can be claimed on their behalf, looking ahead to the resurrection which is still to come. If the other proposal is adopted, the argument still holds, though the practice of seeking baptism in order to be sure of being reunited with dead friends or relatives would of course be equally compatible, at that level, with various different theories of what happened after death.

Paul then develops in verses 30–32a the thought he mentioned briefly in verse 19, alluding also to the mention of his apostolic labours in verse 10: what is the point of undergoing so much suffering, persecution, hard work and ill treatment if there is no coming resurrection?

³⁰ Why do we undergo danger every hour? ³¹ I die every day—I swear it by the pride I take in you, my dear family, in the Messiah, Jesus our lord! ³² If it was for ordinary human reasons that I fought with wild animals at Ephesus, what profit is that to me?

Again, there are exegetical problems that do not concern us.⁸⁰ What matters is once more the continuity which Paul sees between the present life and the resurrection life, and the fact that the future life thus gives meaning to what would otherwise be meaningless.

The second half of verse 32 applies the same continuity to the question of Christian ethics, just as Paul did in chapters 5 and 6. He thinks into the logic of the denial of resurrection hope, echoing Isaiah 22:13 and following the argument of ‘the wicked’ in Wisdom 2:5–11: if there is no future life, why then, the present is to be enjoyed to the full.

^32b If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ ³³ Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company destroys good habits.’

The context of Isaiah 22 is one of judgment: Israel had forgotten her God (22:11), and would not listen to his call to repentance (22:12), but instead went ahead with festivities (22:13a), saying, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ (22:13b). Israel’s sins were thus not forgiven (22:14). Paul, having already warned that if the resurrection is not true ‘you are still in your sins’ (verse 18), seems to refer to this whole sequence of thought, as we see in the the sharp warning and exhortation that immediately follow.

It was not only careless ancient Israelites, of course, who could think like that, as the parallel in Wisdom shows. This attitude was popularly ascribed to the Epicurean school of philosophy.⁸¹ Even the pagan poets know, says Paul as he quotes Menander’s play Thaïs to the effect that living among people who are careless of the future will eat away at good moral habits.⁸² Though Paul awakens many echoes both in the Bible and in the popular thought of the time, his main point is the same as earlier in the letter: the resurrection is the ultimate grounding of Christian moral effort.⁸³

This leads naturally into the closing appeal of verse 34: sober up, think rightly, stop sinning! Some, Paul declares—presumably the ‘some’ in verse 34 are the same as the ‘some’ in verse 12, not a different group, and not outsiders—have no knowledge of the true god. The church should be ashamed of itself for allowing such a situation to develop. Jews often declared that Gentiles did not know the true God,⁸⁴ but this seems to be more specifically a charge that the people concerned do not know the power of this God to raise the dead.⁸⁵ A true knowledge would show what this God is capable of doing, and also that he is the judge who will call everyone to account. This charge goes closely with previous references to the creator God in the letter,⁸⁶ and indeed with the entire argument of the preceding chapters, not least 5 and 6. Get your thinking straightened out, Paul seems to be saying, instead of muddling along in the theological equivalent of a drunken stupor.⁸⁷ Recognize who the true God really is, and everything will become clear.

The brief interlude over, Paul resumes his large-scale task. He did not, presumably, suppose that verses 29–34 would by themselves win over any doubters; the task of this passage is rather to put down a few markers to remind his audience of various things that would follow if the views of the doubters were to become widespread. Though, as we have said, some parts of the passage might by themselves be compatible with a non-bodily view of post-mortem existence, the probable meaning of verse 29, and particularly the parallels between the ethical appeal and earlier parts of the letter where the resurrection is emphasized, rule this option out. Paul’s way is now clear to address the hardest problem he faces. If the dead are indeed to be raised, how will this occur? What sort of a body will they have?

(b) 1 Corinthians 15:35–41

Paul’s sharp reaction to the initial question (‘Fool!’, verse 36) makes best sense if we assume that he takes the question to be posed, like the Sadducees’ question in the gospel, not as a genuine enquiry but as a dismissive put-down. ‘How are the dead raised?’, in other words, probably implies ‘We all know it’s impossible!’; ‘In what sort of body will they come back?’ implies ‘I can’t imagine any sort of body that would do that!’ The word ‘how’ itself can carry this overtone: ‘How can you say that the dead are raised?’⁸⁹

The two questions seem to focus on different points, not simply to be two ways of raising the same one.⁹⁰ The English word ‘how’ can slide easily from ‘by what agency’ to ‘in what manner’. The meaning of ‘How do I look?’ will vary depending on whether the speaker is struggling to see through a telescope or emerging anxiously from a dressing-room. Though the Greek pos can carry several shades of meaning, and can point to a second question which simply elucidates the first,⁹¹ the most natural way of reading the first question is not ‘How, that is, in what appearance or type of body, are the dead raised?’, but ‘By what agency or power can this extraordinary thing happen?’ Certainly the passage that follows answers this question as well as the one about the type of body. In the present subsection Paul prepares his answer to the first question by saying that, in the case of a planted seed, the creator ‘gives it a body’ (verse 38); in the following subsection he applies this specifically in terms of the Messiah’s authority and the power of the Spirit (verses 44–6). In the present subsection he prepares the ground for his answer to the second one by insisting that there are many different types of body, and that it is possible for there to be continuity as well as discontinuity between different types. It looks as though he is giving a two-stage answer to two questions: ‘How is it done?’ and ‘What sort of a thing will it be?’ We may note—a rather obvious point, but perhaps it needs to be stressed—that he would scarcely have needed to go to all this trouble if what he meant was that the resurrection ‘body’ was not in some sense ‘physical’, if after all he had been talking about a non-embodied soul or spirit.⁹²

Paul now glances quickly through different aspects of the present created order, beginning with seeds and plants, describing the process of sowing, germination and new life in language carefully chosen to serve as a model for what he is going to say. He does not, of course, suppose that the resurrection body will grow out of the present body, after burial, in the same way that an oak grows from a planted acorn. His point is that the creator’s power ‘gives life’ to the seed that has ‘died’ (verse 36):

³⁶ Fool! What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. ³⁷ And, when you sow something, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a naked husk, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. ³⁸ But God gives it a body in accordance with his wishes, giving each of the seeds its own body.

In verse 36 the crucial verb should not be translated ‘come to life’, as in NRSV; it is passive, indicating divine action.⁹³ This is the point of verse 38, beginning the answer to the question ‘how’. The basic image speaks of continuity (the corn growing from the seed), but Paul here stresses the discontinuity: seed and plant are not identical.⁹⁴ You do not sow a cauliflower, nor do you serve cauliflower-seed with roast beef. Paul is careful to describe the present body, the ‘seed’, as ‘naked’: it is not yet ‘clothed’ as one day it will be. When given its new soma it will no longer be ‘naked’. This links with 2 Corinthians 5:3–4; behind both passages stands the nakedness of the first humans in Genesis 2 (the passage which, quoted in verse 45, reveals itself as having been in Paul’s mind for some while).⁹⁵ The emphasis of verse 38 is then on the new body not only as the work of the sovereign God, but as a gift; Paul wants to stress that resurrection is a work of grace.

His initial implied answer to the question of verse 35, then, is this: resurrection will come about through the creator’s agency; and the sort of body that it will involve is like the fully clothed version of something which at present is ‘naked’.

Having established the seed-and-plant principle as a partial analogy for resurrection, Paul begins a different train of thought in verse 39. There are different types of ‘body’ or ‘flesh’, each with its own dignity and worth:

³⁹ Not all flesh is the same kind of flesh, but there is one sort for humans, another sort for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. ⁴⁰ There are physical objects in the heavens, and there are physical objects on the earth; but the proper ‘glory’ of the heavenly ones is one kind of thing, and that of the earthly ones is another kind of thing. ⁴¹ The ‘glory’ of the sun is one kind of thing, the ‘glory’ of the moon is another, and the ‘glory’ of the stars is different again—for one star differs from another in ‘glory’.

Paul’s main purpose here is to establish that there are different kinds of physicality, each of which has its own proper characteristics. It is possible that he has Daniel 12:2–3 in mind, but if so he seems to be modifying it importantly as he goes along, since what he does not go on to say is that the newly embodied resurrected ones become like stars (still less does he suggest, of course, that they actually become stars).⁹⁶ The distinction between ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ bodies in verse 40 anticipates that of verses 47–9; though it is important that, whereas here the word he uses for ‘earthly’ is epigeios, ‘upon-the-earth-ly’, a word principally of location rather than composition, the word in verses 47–9 is choikos, ‘earthy’, a word describing physical composition.⁹⁷ Subtle changes like this are important in a carefully argued passage, as any politician or speech-writer, never mind philosopher or theologian, will tell you. Paul is careful not to imply that the analogies he is offering in the present subsection are actually analyses of how the resurrection itself will be. He is here setting up a network of metaphor and simile, not metonymy.

That the ‘glory’ of the different creatures does not primarily refer to luminosity, though in several cases it includes that, is clear from verse 40b, where physical objects in the heavens (i.e. in the sky) have one kind of glory, and those on the earth have another. Objects on earth do not shine as do the sun, moon and stars; but they still have their own proper ‘glory’. Here ‘glory’seems to mean ‘honour’, ‘reputation’, ‘proper dignity’.⁹⁸ As we saw in discussing 2 Corinthians 3, the word remains multivalent even in a passage where some of its uses seem to refer more or less directly to ‘shining’; Paul’s other uses in the present letter do not have anything to do with luminosity.⁹⁹ It is of course the proper dignity, reputation and honour of the sun that it should shine brightly, and of stars that they should twinkle in their own appropriate manner, one differing from another (as Paul says) in its own particular way. The implicit contrast, as he makes clear in verse 43, is not between ‘glory’ (= ‘luminosity, brightness’) and ‘darkness’ (i.e. not shining), but between ‘glory’ (= the splendour proper to this object being fully what it is) and ‘dishonour’ or ‘shame’.¹⁰⁰ Just because it is part of the ‘glory’ of a star that it shines, that does not mean that everything else must have ‘glory’ of that sort. It is no shame to a dog that it does not shine, or to a star that it does not bark.

Paul does not, then, think of ‘heavenly bodies’ as ‘spiritual beings clothed with light’.¹⁰¹ He is not buying in to the cosmology of the Timaeus; indeed, the way the entire chapter is built around Genesis 1 and 2 indicates that he is consciously choosing to construct a cosmology, and within that a future hope, from the most central of Jewish sources. The sun, moon and stars are objects in a different part of the universe, possessing their own properties, which happen to include shining. If Paul is aware of a shift in meaning between ‘heavenly’ as meaning ‘the location of sun, moon and stars’, as in the present passage, and ‘heavenly’ as he uses it in verse 48–9, he does not indicate it, but leaves his readers to make the transition through his move, in what now follows, from metaphor and simile to explicit description. Just as the seed/plant analogy remains important, though Paul does not suppose that resurrection bodies grow from corpses as cherry-trees do from cherry-stones, so the earthly body/heavenly body distinction remains important, though Paul does not suppose that resurrection means becoming a star—or, indeed, a sun or a moon.

There is thus no suggestion in this passage that he is intending to explain the resurrection body within the framework of ‘astral immortality’. As we saw when discussing Daniel 12 and Wisdom 3, this concept will in any case not work for those Jewish texts that, like Paul here, see the future beyond death in two steps or stages. Nor does Paul suppose that there is a ‘soul’ which corresponds, in its material make-up, to the stars; if that had been his intention, he would hardly have spoken in verses 44–6 of the present body as the ‘soulish’ one, the soma psychikon. Nor is the problem he faces the same as the one Plato and Cicero dealt with in their exposition of ‘astral immortality’. They were eager to escape the prison-house of the body; but for Paul the problem was not the body itself, but sin and death which had taken up residence in it, producing corruption, dishonour and weakness. Being human is good; being an embodied human is good; what is bad is being a rebellious human, a decaying human, a human dishonoured through bodily sin and bodily death. What Paul desires, to take his terminology at face value, is not to let the soul fly free to a supposed astral home, but to stop the ‘soul’, the psyche, from being the animating principle for the body. Precisely because the soul is not, for him, the immortal fiery substance it is for Plato, he sees that the true solution to the human plight is to replace the ‘soul’ as the animating principle of the body with the ‘spirit’—or rather, the Spirit. And that takes us into the next section.

‘So it is with the resurrection of the dead.’ This is Paul’s main conclusion, drawing the argument together into a dense statement of how the new, resurrection body will differ from the present one, and of how this will be accomplished.¹⁰² Paul continues with the language of sowing and harvesting, knowing it here to be metaphorical:¹⁰³

^42b It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; ⁴³ it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; ⁴⁴ it is sown as a soma psychikon, it is raised as a soma pneumatikon.

These four contrasts are mutually explanatory. The first is the main thing Paul wishes to stress at the level of the nature of the new body;¹⁰⁴ the last, as the sequel will show, is the point which explains how it is all achieved. Part of the problem of verse 44 is how to translate the key terms in that final phrase, which is why I have left them for the moment in Greek.

In the concluding section of the chapter, Paul will stress the distinction between a body which is corruptible, i.e. which can and will decay, die and ultimately disintegrate altogether, and a body of which none of this is true (verses 50b, 52b, 53, 54). This contrast of corruption/incorruption, it seems, is not just one in a list of differences between the present body and the future one, but remains implicit underneath the rest of the argument, not least between the present humanity in its choikos (‘earthy’) state, ready to return to dust, and the new type of humanity which will be provided in the new creation. The fundamental leap of imagination that Paul is asking the puzzled Corinthians to make is to a body which cannot and will not decay or die: something permanent, established, not transient or temporary.

Within this framework, verse 43 draws attention to two other features which the new body will have as a result: honour instead of shame, power instead of weakness. These are closely related. Earlier in the letter (6:2–3) he spoke of the future life as one in which the Messiah’s people, at present insignificant and powerless, would be in a position of ruling or judging. As in Philippians 3:20–21, the new body will have both a status (see above on ‘glory’, doxa) and a capability of which the present body knows nothing. The sense, arising from the previous paragraph, is of human beings becoming what they were made to be, attaining at last their proper doxa instead of the shameful, dishonouring status and character they presently know. There are echoes here of Paul’s earlier statements (1:25–31) about the ‘weakness’ and ‘power’ of God; in the new world, the power of the creator, at present paradoxical and visible only to the eye of faith, will be manifest in the new bodies of his people.

The fourth and final contrast is the one that has caused the most problems in exegesis and interpretation. Paul phrases it slightly differently to the other three. Instead of the body being sown ‘in’ corruption, dishonour and weakness, and raised ‘in’ incorruption, glory and power,¹⁰⁵ it is now sown ‘as’ a soma psychikon and raised ‘as’ a soma pneumatikon. In fact, in English as in Paul’s Greek, there is no need even for the ‘as’: it is sown a soma psychikon, it is raised a soma pneumatikon.

But what do these two phrases mean?¹⁰⁶ Here the ghost—or perhaps the psyche—of Plato must be chuckling at the quiet triumph achieved in so many English translations. The King James version made the two phrases ‘a natural body’ and ‘a spiritual body’, and while this appears a reasonable approximation it opened the door to the Revised Standard Version, and its widely used successor the New Revised Standard Version, which brazenly made them ‘a physical body’ and ‘a spiritual body’.¹⁰⁷ The New English Bible, interestingly, made the first phrase ‘an animal body’, but its successor, the Revised English Bible, has followed the RSV into Plato’s ugly ditch. So has the Contemporary English Version. It is safe to say that not only those who read the RSV, NRSV and REB, but quite a few who read other versions as well, assume at this point that Paul is describing the new, resurrection body as something which, to put it bluntly, is non-physical—something which you could not touch, could not see with ordinary eyesight, something which, if raised to life, would leave no empty tomb behind it. And though Paul is here of course talking about the resurrection bodies of Christians, not of Jesus himself, it is widely and correctly recognized that his picture of the Christian resurrection body is modelled closely on what he thinks was and is true of Jesus.¹⁰⁸

The problem with the explicit contrast of ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’, and with the word ‘spiritual’ itself when heard by most modern western persons in contrast also with words like ‘natural’ or ‘animal’, is that it sends highly misleading messages. As we saw earlier, the ancient philosophers made distinctions between different kinds of substance, but they did not draw the line in the same place that modern western thought has done, between ‘physical’ and ‘non-physical’. As a result, contemporary readers are liable to be thrown in quite the wrong direction: to the contrast between the world that science can observe and the world that it cannot, the division between the world of space, time and matter on the one hand and a very different, ‘spiritual’ world on the other hand, which according to the mainstream post-Enlightenment worldview do not intersect with one another. It evokes, that is, the Deist picture of a remote, detached God, and of a private ‘spirituality’ removed from public or political events; or, as one of the offshoots of such a position, the division between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, with all its attendant philosophical problems.¹⁰⁹ (The Living Bible, though adding other elements of paraphrase, has ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ at this point.¹¹⁰) This multifaceted disjunction is simply untrue to ancient thought in general and to Paul’s thought in particular.

At the same time, however, it would be wrong to think that the ancients, at either a popular or a sophisticated level, had no distinction corresponding to our material/non-material. If the soul was made of something, it was a totally different sort of something. Not that that means, of course, that Paul would think of the soul in the same way as did the tradition which embraced both Plato and the Stoics, which envisaged the soul going off eventually to join the stars.¹¹¹ In particular, such an analysis, every bit as much as the more common one, fails to get to grips with the precise words he uses, and what he himself has already indicated about the way he uses them.

We have, in fact, already met the key terms, in contexts where it should be quite clear what Paul means—and does not mean—by them. The two sorts of ‘body’, the present corruptible one and the future non-corruptible one, are, respectively, psychikon and pneumatikon; the first word is derived from psyche, frequently translated ‘soul’, and the second from pneuma, normally translated ‘spirit’. In 1 Corinthians 2:14–15, the psychikos person does not receive the things of the spirit, because they are spiritually discerned, while the pneumatikos person discerns everything.¹¹² There is, of course, no question there of ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ as appropriate translations. Nor would those words, with the connotations they normally have today, be appropriate at 3:1, where Paul declares that he could not consider the Corinthians as pneumatikoi, but merely as sarkinoi or perhaps sarkikoi.¹¹³ The words clearly refer to matters quite other than whether the people concerned are ‘physical’; clearly they are, and the question is rather to do with whether they are indwelt, guided and made wise by the creator’s Spirit, or whether they are living at the level of life common to all humankind (psychikos), or whether indeed they are living at the level of life common to all corruptible creation (sarkinos). So, too, when Paul discusses pneumatika in chapter 12, these ‘spiritual gifts’ are certainly not ‘spiritual’ in the sense of ‘non-physical’, but involve in most cases the operation of the Spirit precisely on aspects of one’s physicality, whether through gifts of inspired speech, healing or whatever.¹¹⁴ They are things which, though operating within the human body and life, enable that body and life to do things which would otherwise be impossible. The same is true of many other uses of the word, in this letter and elsewhere in the New Testament.¹¹⁵

In fact, within the shadowlands of meaning and usage between ancient Hebrew thought and the highly influential Greek language, the word psyche and its cognates were able by this period to move to and fro over a wide range of meaning. This would be so not least for minds soaked in the Septuagint. The range would lie between a minimal meaning of ‘soul’ as opposed to body—according to which, if one wanted to say ‘non-physical’, one would use psychikos, not pneumatikos, which shows how misleading the regular translations are!—and a maximal meaning corresponding broadly to our word ‘life’, or even (without the pantheist overtones) ‘life-force’: that is, the sense of aliveness, operating through breath and blood, energy and purpose, which is common to humankind.¹¹⁶ That Paul has this maximal usage in mind seems evident from his explanatory quotation of Genesis 2:7 in verse 45, on which see below. Thus far, the psychikos/pneumatikos contrast of verses 44–6 would have to be characterized as ‘ordinary human life’ contrasted with ‘a life indwelt by the Spirit of God’. If there had been any variation away from this, its effect would almost certainly have been to make psyche less ‘physical’, not more; it would certainly be an extremely strange word to use, within either early Christian, second-Temple Jewish, or late-antique pagan usage if what one wanted to label was the ‘physical’ as opposed to the non-physical. Ironically enough, the modern form of Platonism which has crept into contemporary readings of 1 Corinthians 15 forbids forcing a cognate of psyche, which for so many people in the ancient world meant ‘soul’ instead of ‘body’, into meaning something that would have seemed to them more or less the opposite.¹¹⁷ Had Paul wanted in any way to produce the kind of contrast suggested to a modern reader by ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’, not only would pneumatikos have been an unhelpful word to have used for the latter idea, but psychikos would have been exactly the wrong word to use for the former.¹¹⁸ In fact, if Paul had wanted to find a word for ‘non-physical’, psychikos (which could literally be translated as ‘soulish’) would itself have been a possible option.¹¹⁹ If anything, if a reader of first-century Greek came upon a phrase containing the word psychikos, contrasted with anything else, he or she might well expect that, if there was a physical/non-physical contrast in the offing, psychikos would refer to the non-physical side, and whatever was being contrasted with it would be seen as more firmly bodily, more substantial.

There is one other factor to be be taken into account which tells strongly in the same direction. Though it is dangerous to generalize in so widespread and pluriform a language as Koine Greek, it is generally true (as we saw above in connection with 1 Corinthians 2) that adjectives formed with the ending -ikos have ethical or functional meanings rather than referring to the material or substance of which something is composed.¹²⁰ Had Paul wanted to contrast ‘a body composed of psyche’ with ‘a body composed of pneuma’ (even supposing that that would have made any sense), he might have chosen different adjectives; granted that neither psychinos nor pneumatinos is found in extant literature, Paul was perfectly capable of coining a few helpful words here and there. In any case, the classical usage of pneumatikos well illustrates the meaning that seems to be in Paul’s mind. Aristotle speaks of wombs that are ‘swollen with air’, hysterai pneumatikai,¹²¹ and Vitruvius (first century BC) speaks of a machine ‘moved by wind’, pneumatikon organon.¹²² The adjective describes, not what something is composed of, but what it is animated by.¹²³ It is the difference between speaking of a ship made of steel or wood on the one hand and a ship driven by steam or wind on the other. The only major translation I know that attempts to come to terms with this is that of the Jerusalem Bible: ‘when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit. If the soul has its own embodiment, so does the spirit have its own embodiment.’¹²⁴

We should by now be coming out of the jungle of misinterpretations and into something of a clearing; but before we can get much further we need to note no less than three other things which seem to be going on in this passage, and which have almost certainly helped to determine the way Paul has put his point.

The first is the way the Corinthians seem to have regarded themselves. It is likely that they used the word pneumatikos of themselves, imagining themselves to have developed beyond earlier categories, not least the one described as psychikos. Other people were ‘merely human’, living on the ordinary level, but they, especially with all their pneumatika gifts, were living on a different level entirely. Paul has already stuck a pin into this over-inflated balloon (2:14–3:4), and found it to contain, not pneuma, but a combination of psyche and sarx (a lot of hot air, in fact). Now he approaches the same question from a different angle: their very ‘super-spiritual’ boast has led them to imagine that there can be no such thing as a resurrection of the body—such an ‘unspiritual’ idea! But if they only knew who the real God was, and what he intended to do precisely through the work of his pneuma, they would see that the destination of the genuine pneumatikos was to be raised to new bodily life. The psychikos life, the ordinary human one, is what you have at the moment, even though you are indwelt by the Spirit of the living God; but that same Spirit will give life to your mortal bodies also. That, as in Romans 8:9–11, is the somewhat ad hominem argument underlying this passage.

The second theme which may be lurking in the undergrowth is a determination on Paul’s part to rule out any suggestion of one particular interpretation of his key text, Genesis 1 and 2, which we know to have been current at the time and which may have been held by some within the Corinthian church.¹²⁵ In Philo’s allegorical exegesis of Genesis, the first man, in Genesis 1, was ‘heavenly’ (ouranios), while the man created from the dust of the earth in Genesis 2 was ‘earthy’ (geinos).¹²⁶ The ‘heavenly’ man, according to Philo, was not physical, and hence not corruptible; those attributes belong to the second man. This reading of Genesis suggests that the real destiny of humankind is to leave the created order, the world of space, time and matter, entirely, and to make one’s way back to the primal state of humanity, the ‘first man’, in whose existence of pure mind and spirit the physical universe is no longer relevant.

To this rich mixture of Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy Paul can have only one answer, and it is very germane to his point: when Genesis 2 speaks of the creator making Adam as a living psyche, this was not a secondary form of humanity, but its primary form. What humans now need is not to get away from, or back behind, such an existence, but rather to go on to the promised state of the final Adam, in which this physical body will not be abandoned, but will be given new animation by the creator’s own Spirit. Paul does not believe in a return to a primal state, but in a redemption from the sin and death which has corrupted the primal state, in order that a way forward be found into the new creation which, though always in the mind of the creator, has never yet existed. And the ‘heavenly man’ is not one who, unsullied by the world of creation, remains in a purely non-physical state; he is the lord who will come from heaven (verses 47–9, corresponding closely to Philippians 3:20–21). He will enable other humans, not to escape from the physical world back to an original ‘image of God’, but to go on to bear, in the newly resurrected body, the ‘image of the man from heaven’. The importance of this will unfold as we proceed.

The third element which Paul is carefully weaving in to his exposition, by contrast, is his own new-creation reading of Genesis which, as we saw, overarches the whole chapter. He has had the first two chapters of Genesis in mind throughout, and he now proceeds to draw on them both. Verse 44b provides his firm basic statement, his initial answer to the question, ‘What sort of body will the dead have when they are raised?’ They will have a soma pneumatikon, a body animated by, enlivened by, the Spirit of the true God, exactly as Paul has said more extensively in several other passages.¹²⁷ This helps to provide a satisfactory explanation for why he has homed in on this unique phrase at this point in the chapter. It is the most elegant way he can find of saying both that the new body is the result of the Spirit’s work (answering ‘how does it come to be?’) and that it is the appropriate vessel for the Spirit’s life (answering ‘what sort of a thing is it?).

In fact, this is the first point in which pneuma has been mentioned in the whole chapter, because it is at last the point where Paul is giving his answer both to ‘what sort of body will it be?’ and also ‘how will God do it?’ If there is a soma psychikon, he declares—to which the answer is, of course there is: that is the normal sort of human soma, a body animated by the ordinary breath of life—then there is also a soma pneumatikon, a body animated by the Spirit of the living God, even though only one example of such a body has so far appeared. That is the point to which he is now building up, explaining that the unique, prototypical image-bearing body of Jesus is to be the model for the new bodies that Jesus’ people will have. But he intends to get there not just by saying that the creator will accomplish this through the Spirit, but by the route he had already proposed in verses 20–28: Jesus himself, the Messiah who is already ruling the world under the father, and will finally hand it over to the father once all enemies have been overthrown, is the one who himself gives the Spirit which brings people to that new bodily life in which they will share his own new image-bearingness.¹²⁸ The earlier Adam-narrative in verses 20–28, made explicit in verse 22 but implicit throughout, establishes the fixed point to which Paul can now return. In that Adam-narrative, after all, the way was barred to the tree of life (Genesis 3:22–4); now, at last, the way has been thrown open.

Thus, if Genesis 2:7 spoke of the creator breathing into Adam’s nostrils his breath of life, the pnoe zoes, making him a psyche zosa, Paul will now speak, in parallel and sequence, of the creator’s new act of creation in and through the Messiah and his resurrection. Verse 45b depends on verses 20–28 in a number of ways; Paul is not simply inserting Jesus into the argument of Genesis without prior warrant. The Messiah has been raised, the first-fruits of those who slept; through him comes the resurrection of the dead (verses 20–21); thus, as in Adam all die, so in the Messiah shall all be made alive. Very well: he is then the new type of humanity, and can be placed alongside the Adam of Genesis 2, with the differences brought to the surface. He is not just a soma pneumatikon in his own right, so to speak, the first example of the large number of such beings the creator intends to make through resurrection, but he is also the one through whom the creator will accomplish this—because he is the one who, as ‘life-giving Spirit’, will perform the work of raising the dead.¹²⁹ Genesis 2:7 is thus not so much a proof-text, more a part of the larger story which the Christian, looking at Jesus’ resurrection, can now tell; and the good news which emerges from this is that Jesus has pioneered the way into the long-awaited future, the new age which the creator has planned (verse 46). The pneumatikos state is not simply an original idea in the mind of the creator, from which the human race fell sadly away; this model of humanity is the future reality, the reality which will swallow up and replace merely psychikos life.

Thus Paul develops the Adam—Messiah contrast, placing the discussions and assertions of the previous twelve verses within a larger narrative, the narrative of creation and new creation, of earth and heaven. As in Philippians 3:20–21 and other passages studied above, the ‘second man’ (who appears, for Paul, to be functionally identical to the ‘final Adam’) comes from heaven; this place of origin, the motion from it to earth (the final ‘appearing’ or ‘coming’ of Jesus, not his first appearing in incarnation), and above all the character of ‘heaven’ as the creator’s own sphere, where Jesus is currently ruling, is then indicated by epouranios, ‘heavenly’, in verses 48–9.

The point is not, in other words, that the new humanity will exist in a place called ‘heaven’. Rather, it will originate there, where Jesus himself currently is in his own risen and life-giving body; and it will transform the life of those who are presently located on earth and earthy in character (ek ges choikos, verse 47). The whole argument runs in the opposite direction not only to Philo but to all kinds of Platonism ancient and modern. The point is not to escape from earth and find oneself at last in heaven, but to let the present ‘heavenly’ life change the present earthly reality. Heaven and earth, after all, are the twin partners in the creation which, at the heart of the passage Paul has in mind throughout this chapter, the creator had declared to be ‘very good’.¹³⁰

With that in mind, there is no sense that when Paul refers to the redeemed as ‘the heavenly ones’ (verse 48) he is thinking of them as astral bodies, stars, the kind of ‘pneumatic bodies’ postulated by various scholars over the years.¹³¹ Verses 36–41 were illustrative, rather than part of his substantive point. Rather, in a climax reminiscent of Romans 8:29 (itself at the climax of a section which began with the Adam—Christ contrast in 5:12–21), of 2 Corinthians 3:17–4:6 (part of Paul’s argument from new covenant to new creation, based in 3:1–6 on the life-giving work of the Spirit), and of Colossians 3:10 (based on the earlier poem about Christ as the image and firstborn of the creator God), Paul looks all the way back to the creation of humans in the divine image in Genesis 1:26–8, and all the way on to the ultimate future, when all those ‘in the Messiah’ will be ‘renewed in knowledge after the image of the creator’, will be ‘conformed to the image of the son of God, so that he might be the firstborn of a large family’. The last verse of the section takes the bald statement of verse 44b (‘if there is a soul-filled body, there is also a spirit-filled body’) and applies it to ‘us’: just as ‘we’ have borne the image of the earthy man (Adam’s image passed on to his descendants, as in Genesis 5:3), so ‘we’ shall bear the image of the man whose life shares the life of heaven.¹³² The verb used for ‘bear’ (phoreo) is often used for the wearing of clothes; as in Ephesians and Colossians we found the language of putting off the set of clothes belonging to the former humanity, and putting on those belonging to the new one, so here, and as we shall see in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul speaks of present and future in terms of ‘wearing’ one model of human existence or the other one.

Not until this point, in the present chapter, has he spoken of the present location of Jesus, as he does for instance in Colossians 3:1–4. Now that he does so, we find the same integration between his view of Jesus as bodily risen from the dead (verses 12–28) and presently active in heaven as we did in Romans 8:34. Paul has completed his basic answer to the doubters of verse 12, and the questioners of verse 35; all that remains is to tell the story one more time, celebrating the victory of the creator God over all that destroys and corrupts the good creation.

(vi) 1 Corinthians 15:50–58

The final paragraph has the sustained excitement of a celebration. It adds no fresh arguments to those already advanced, but it explores more fully what it all means, not least for a group of people Paul has not mentioned up to now, namely, those who will find themselves still alive at the moment when Jesus reappears and the dead are raised. Paul, as we saw, takes it for granted in this passage that he will himself be one of that number. That perspective changes in 2 Corinthians and Philippians, but the underlying theology and eschatology do not.

The central emphasis of the paragraph is on the transformation that will be required for those presently alive if they are to be part of the kingdom.¹³³ This alone, closely parallel to Philippians 3:21, should have been enough to indicate what Paul’s view of the resurrection was: people still alive when the kingdom finally arrives will not lose their bodies, but have them changed from their present state to the one required for God’s future. As before, however, a few words have been seized upon to suggest that Paul holds a different view, involving the loss of physicality in the new life. Since the verse in question is the one which opens the paragraph, it may be as well to see what the thrust of the rest of it is before returning to the passage in question.

The main feature of God’s new world will be, as Paul said in verse 26, that death itself will have been defeated. Victory is assured, because that which caused death from the beginning, namely sin, has been dealt with (verses 56–7).¹³⁴ And the central force of the paragraph is therefore that, as the dead are raised ‘incorruptible’ (verse 52), so ‘we’—that is, we who are left alive—will be ‘changed’ (allagesometha):

^52b The trumpet shall sound; the dead shall be raised incorruptible; and we shall be changed. ⁵³ For this corruptible [body] must clothe itself with incorruptibility; and this mortal [body] must clothe itself with immortality. ⁵⁴ When this corruptible [body] has clothed itself with incorruptibility, and this mortal [body] has clothed itself with immortality, then shall come to pass the word that is written:

Death is swallowed up into victory.

⁵⁵ Where is your victory, death?

Where is your sting, death?

The solemn repetition of virtually the same sentence in verses 53 and 54 is extremely rare for Paul, who (unlike some of us) seldom uses three sentences if he can get away with one. Clearly this is a point he wants to underline, to rub in as hard as he can, to stress against the doubters and the questioners, to make it clear to all the Christians in Corinth that the body is meant for the lord, and the lord for the body (6:13), and that the lord in whose own person death had been defeated would one day implement that defeat on behalf of all his people. They will not lose their bodies; nor will they be found ‘naked’ (verse 37).¹³⁵ They will ‘put on a new suit of clothes’, will be given a new type of physicality, whose primary characteristic, the first in the list in verses 42–4, is that it cannot wear out, cannot corrupt, cannot die.

This is what ‘must’ happen if those presently alive are to inherit the new creation. The final body will need to be ‘incorruptible’, ‘immortal’. These words have different shading (‘incorruptible’ implies that no part can wear out or decay, ‘immortal’ that the body cannot die), but the two were near-synonyms in Paul’s world.¹³⁶ However, a case was made nearly half a century ago for Paul intending ‘the corruptible’ here to refer to those already dead, and ‘the mortal’ to those still alive, giving verse 52 a double focus (‘the dead’ will be raised, and ‘we’—that is, we who are left alive—will be changed).¹³⁷ This is important for understanding verse 50 (below).

Putting the two together brings Paul to the position where he can pick up a couple of lines from Isaiah and Hosea and turn them into a taunt song against Death. The whole chapter has been, not about coming to terms with Death, but with its defeat; and here, like a warrior triumphing over a fallen enemy, Paul mocks the power that has now become powerless.¹³⁸

Thus, he declares, the creator God ‘gives us the victory’ (verse 57), just as this same God, faced with a naked seed buried in the earth, ‘gives it a body’ (verse 38). This is another part of the answer to the question ‘how’ in verse 35. God as creator and life-giver has been the main subject of the whole chapter; Paul takes this view of the living God for granted in many passages, mentioning it explicitly when he needs to do so (as in Romans 4, for example). This is, clearly, a theology in which the present physical body is not to be abandoned, nor yet to be affirmed as it stands, but is to be transformed, changed from present humiliation to new glory (Philippians 3:21), from present corruption and mortality to new incorruption and immortality. This is indeed the defeat of death, not a compromise in which death is allowed to have the body while some other aspect of the human being (the soul? the spirit?) goes marching on.

This should make it clear what is, and what is not, meant by the often controversial opening words of the paragraph:

⁵⁰ This is what I mean, brothers and sisters: ‘flesh and blood’ cannot inherit God’s kingdom, nor can corruption inherit incorruption. ⁵¹ Look! I am telling you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—⁵² in a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet.

Verses 51–2a fit easily into the line of thought we have been looking at. Paul describes the scene of the last day, in language reminiscent of 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17, the imagery being drawn from standard Jewish pictures.¹³⁹ This is a ‘mystery’, a vision of God’s eschatological future, and an insight into how the creator will bring about a world in which his writ runs so completely that death itself is done away with. This will take a great act of new creation, as much for those still alive as for those already dead. That is exactly what Paul affirms.

Why then does he say ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s kingdom’? Ever since the second century (and increasingly in scholarship during the twentieth) doubters have used this clause to question whether Paul really believed in the resurrection of the body. In fact, the second half of verse 50 already explains, in Hebraic parallelism with the first half, more or less what he means, as Paul’s regular use of ‘flesh’ would itself indicate: ‘flesh and blood’ is a way of referring to ordinary, corruptible, decaying human existence. It does not simply mean, as it has so often been taken to mean, ‘physical humanity’ in the normal modern sense, but ‘the present physical humanity (as opposed to the future one), which is subject to decay and death’.¹⁴⁰ The referent of the phrase is not the presently dead but the presently living, who need not to be raised but to be changed; and this brings us back to the dual focus of verses 53 and 54. Both categories of humans need to acquire the new, transformed type of body.¹⁴¹

The final verse of the chapter could be felt as an anticlimax, but only if we had allowed ourselves to forget the multiple ways in which this extensive discussion of resurrection was linked to the rest of the letter. A casual reading of Paul, assimilating his thought to popular piety, might have expected him to end such a chapter by saying, ‘Therefore, brothers and sisters, look forward eagerly to the hope that is set before you!’ Instead, he redirects their gaze to the present time, to the tasks awaiting attention and the call to be ‘steadfast and immovable’ in them. The point of it all has been that, despite the discontinuity between the present mode of corruptible physicality and the future world of non-corruptible physicality, there is an underlying continuity between present bodily life and future bodily life, and that this gives meaning and direction to present Christian living.¹⁴² ‘In the lord your labour’—your work for God’s kingdom in the present—‘is not in vain.’ If the Messiah had not been raised, Paul’s proclamation and the Corinthians’ faith would have been ‘in vain’; but the Messiah, the lord, was indeed raised; and proclamation, faith and continuing labour are thereby rescued from ‘vanity’, from futility. What is done ‘in the lord’ in the present will last into God’s future. That is the severely practical message which emerges from this, the prince of early Christian resurrection discussions.

(ii) 2 Corinthians 4:7–15

The first of these paragraphs gives details of the sufferings of which Paul has become so aware, and of which the Corinthians, perhaps, have become so ashamed. Paul has been speaking of the power and glory of the living God, shining in the face of Jesus the Messiah; now he explains that, so far from this giving the apostle the right to stride through the world trailing clouds of glory, it actually means the opposite:

⁷ We have this treasure in earthenware pots, so that the surpassing nature of the power may belong to God, not to us. ⁸ We are troubled in every way, but not overwhelmed; we are at a loss, but not in despair; ⁹ we are persecuted but not abandoned; we are knocked down, but not destroyed. ¹⁰ We are always carrying the death of Jesus in the body, so that the life of Jesus may be manifest in our body. ¹¹ For we who are alive are always being given over to death through Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifest in our mortal flesh. ¹² Thus death is at work in us—but life in you.

This belongs naturally with 1 Corinthians 4, where Paul contrasts his hard and demanding apostolic work with the apparently easy life of the Corinthians. The picture has developed further, because of what Paul has suffered in the meantime; and this enables him to argue not only that there is an explanation for his strange style of ministry, but that it is in fact the necessary embodiment of the gospel, of the death and new life of Jesus. This is one of the most vivid of Paul’s ‘present resurrection’ passages, declaring not only (as some later thinkers would put it) that resurrection in the present meant a new kind of spiritual life, but that the life of Jesus should be manifest ‘in our body’ (verse 10), and even ‘in our mortal flesh’ (verse 11)! Even the part of present humanity which remains mortal, and which will decay, die and rot, is to be suffused in the present with the signs of resurrection, the life which the risen Jesus already has and which his people will one day enjoy. This is Paul’s vivid explanation of the ‘not overwhelmed … not in despair … not abandoned … not destroyed’ sequence in verses 8–9. He is himself a walking visual aid of the gospel of Jesus. As a result—the twist in the tail—it is not just that the life of Jesus is visible in his body: it is that, through the principle of interchange between apostle and church, as he draws the suffering on to himself, the church itself experiences life (verse 10).¹⁴⁴

Paul now widens the picture with what at first sight appears a cryptic reference to the Psalms, but which, when explored, turns out to shed a flood of light on his thinking. We have, he says (4:13), the same spirit of faith as the one who wrote ‘I believed, and therefore I spoke’. The quotation is from Psalm 116:10, which in the LXX is numbered as the first verse of Psalm 115; but there is good reason to suppose that, whether or not Paul was used to that division of the Psalms (the MT corresponds to the English versions at this point), he had the whole of Psalm 116 (114 and 115 in LXX) in mind.

The Psalm is a grateful love-song to YHWH. Israel’s God has heard the poet’s prayer, and won his eternal loyalty; more particularly, he answered him when ‘the snares of death encompassed me, and the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me’. Paul has been through the same experience, and wants to say, with the Psalmist,

Return, then, my soul, to your rest;

for YHWH has dealt favourably with you.

For you have rescued my soul from death,

my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling.¹⁴⁵

The next verse in the MT declares, as in most English versions, ‘I will walk before YHWH in the land of the living’; but the LXX interprets ‘walk’, not unreasonably granted regular Hebrew usage, in terms of behaviour: ‘I will be well-pleasing before the Lord’, euaresteso enantion kyriou. Paul, as we shall see, echoes exactly this later in the passage (5:9). The Psalm seems to have been in his mind throughout, not only in this part of chapter 4.

The Psalm then continues (in the LXX, the new Psalm begins) with the verse Paul quotes. The point of quoting ‘I believed, and so I spoke’ is not simply that Paul is declaring that, when he preaches, he speaks out of genuine faith, but rather that the Psalmist ‘believed, and spoke’ when he was greatly afflicted (116:10), when he might have despaired of all human help (116:11). That is where Paul had been, as we know from chapters 1 and 2; now he joins the Psalmist (116:12–19) in praising YHWH for deliverance from death and calling out praise from others:

^4:14 for we know that the one who raised the lord Jesus will raise us with Jesus and present us with you. ¹⁵ For all this is for your sake, so that the grace which overflows through the multitude of thanksgiving may abound to the glory of God.

The close parallel between verse 14 and passages such as 1 Corinthians 6:14, not to mention 1 Corinthians 15 in its entirety and such other clear statements as Romans 8:11, should have given pause to those scholars who have tried to assert that Paul here has left behind the Jewish doctrine of bodily resurrection and substituted something else instead. And the point of it all—the drawing in detail on the Psalm, the clear affirmation of resurrection—is that by sharing in the Psalmist’s journey, from the snares of death to the joy of rescue, Paul is going through, in advance, the process of dying and rising which Jesus has already gone through. Thus, just as the church rejoices and praises God for the events of the gospel themselves, so they must celebrate with more and more thanksgivings when they see the same pattern working out in the lives of his people, not least his apostle. The apostolic sufferings, in other words, are not only not something to be ashamed of. They are a paradoxical revelation of glory, and are themselves an occasion for rejoicing and gratitude.

The Psalm has another secret to reveal, and so has Paul. In Psalm 116:15, after declaring that he will praise YHWH and pay his vows to him for deliverance, the poet says, ‘Costly in the sight of YHWH is the death of his holy ones.’¹⁴⁶ Paul will not say that death is a good thing; it is still, for him, the final enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). But even if it should occur, God is greater than death, and will perform on a large scale that rescue for which Jesus’ resurrection is the model and present apostolic experience the foretaste. That is the point to which he will now give attention. In terms of our overall questions, 4:7–15 should leave us in no doubt that Paul still expects bodily resurrection, modelled on that of Jesus; and that this future resurrection is anticipated in the present, not merely as a metaphor for a kind of spirituality but in the to-and-fro which he must experience between suffering and death on the one hand and life and joy on the other.

(iii) 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:5

These conclusions, contrary to repeated scholarly assertions, are reinforced, not undermined, by the passage now before us.¹⁴⁷ Paul is continuing to explain why he is not downcast in the midst of his sufferings—and, by implication, why the Corinthians ought not to be ashamed of him because of them.¹⁴⁸ His reason is that, as in Romans 8:17, present suffering is the path to future resurrection. The covenant God is at work by his Spirit to prepare the apostle for, and ultimately to accomplish, the new existence which he is promised. At the moment he must keep the eyes of heart, mind and faith on the promise, and on the unseen future reality to which it points.

Paul’s description of this unseen reality, and of its relation to the present life, introduces some terms which have caused exegetes problems, giving rise to the suggestion that he has here changed his views:

¹⁶ So we do not lose heart; but rather, even if our outer humanity is being destroyed, our inner humanity is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For our small and temporary suffering is accomplishing for us an eternal and incomparable weight of glory, ¹⁸ since we do not look at the things that can be seen, but at the things which cannot. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

So: the inner person rather than the outer, and the unseen realities rather than the seen! And then, in the next chapter, the present body being destroyed, and, instead, an eternal house, not made with hands, in the heavens (5:1)! This is what has enticed some readers into the view that Paul has shifted his ground from a Jewish eschatology to a Platonic cosmology.¹⁴⁹ But not only is this in itself highly unlikely (we would have to postulate that he then quickly shifted back again in time to write Romans not many months afterwards; and we would also have to postulate significant internal muddles in the present letter); it is exegetically unwarranted. It is always vital to read the whole argument and to understand technical language in terms of it, and this passage is no exception. The rest of the section, with some explanatory notes, will help to make this clear:

^5:1 ‘For we know that if the earthly house of our dwelling [literally, our earthly house of tent] is dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens. ² For in this [present dwelling] we also groan, longing to put on, on top of it, our dwelling from heaven, ³ if thus also, putting it off [several good MSS read ‘putting it on’], we shall not be found naked. ⁴ For we who are in [this] tent groan, being weighed down, not because we want to be unclothed but because we want to be more fully clothed [the same verb, in the passive, as ‘put on on top’ in verse 2], so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. ⁵ The one who worked this thing in us in preparation [literally, ‘who accomplished us for this thing’] is God, who gives us the guarantee of the Spirit.

This is admittedly dense, and the problems of text and translation, noted in this extract, make it more so. But when we put the passage together, and read it in the light of the many interlinked passages elsewhere in Paul, it should be clear that he is finding fresh ways of exploring and explaining the same picture rather than changing to a new one. One good way in to the passage is to explore some of the obvious parallels in other Pauline expositions of similar themes.

In 4:17 he speaks of an eternal and incomparable weight of glory. One natural passage to set alongside this is Romans 8:17 (‘… provided that we suffer with the Messiah in order also to be glorified with him’), which draws together the thought of the much larger unit, chapters 5–8. The theme of suffering and glory is flagged up in opening and closing summaries (5:2; 8:30), and expounded extensively (8:18–25). The latter passage also speaks, as does our present one, of hoping for something we do not yet see (8:24–5), and in the same context Paul frequently refers to the work of the Spirit in preparing us for it (Romans 5:5; 8:9–11, 13, 16f., 23). The idea of the Spirit as a guarantee of the future hope (arrabon, 2 Corinthians 5:5), the present gift whereby the living God is already secretly accomplishing the future salvation in advance within the believer, picks up the same theme in 2 Corinthians 1:22 and Ephesians 1:14; 4:30.¹⁵⁰

The contrast between that which is seen and that which is not (4:18a) could by itself, of course, come straight from Plato, and might imply a dualism in which physicality, present and future, was downgraded in favour of a non-physical world and human existence.¹⁵¹ But this ontological dualism is questioned in the second half of verse 18, and disproved entirely in 5:1–5. Verse 18b indicates that the contrast is actually an eschatological one: ‘eternal’, again, could be read platonically, but the following passage indicates that it has to do, as usual in Paul, with ‘the age to come’, over against the present evil age in which the apostle lives, whose evidences are visible all around. These things are only for a time, he says; the age to come will last. This contrast then opens up the regular distinction, with which we are now familiar from 1 Corinthians, between the present corruptible body and the future incorruptible one. Verse 4 makes it clear that this is what Paul has in mind when, in a clear echo of 1 Corinthians 15:54 (itself quoting Isaiah 25:8) he declares that what is ‘mortal’ will be ‘swallowed up’ by life.

This parallel with the chapter we have just been studying opens the way to a true understanding of the contrast in 5:1–4 between the present body and the future one. This corruptible, mortal body, he emphasized in 1 Corinthians 15:53–4, must ‘put on’ (endusasthai) incorruption, immortality. Here he says that we who are in the present body are longing to ‘put on over the top’ (ependusasthai) the new body, the new ‘dwelling’ (5:2, 4). In the analogy in 1 Corinthians 15:37, he spoke of the seed as being ‘naked’ when planted, but given a new body by God; so here (5:3) he speaks of the longing of present human beings not to be found ‘naked’, but to be more fully clothed. The language of ‘nakedness’, as is well known, could be used in the wider hellenistic world to refer to the soul when divested of the body.¹⁵² Verse 4 may be read as declaring that Paul would prefer to go straight to the transformed body, as in the ‘changing’ language of 1 Corinthians 15:51–2 and Philippians 3:21, rather than divesting himself of his present body and then undergoing a period of waiting for the eventual resurrection. Granted, in Philippians 1:23 he speaks of departing and being with the Messiah, and in our present passage he speaks of being ‘at home with the lord’ if he were to die (5:8–9). This is about as explicit as he gets on the question of an ‘intermediate state’; clearly he believes that people in such a state will be happy and content. But, precisely because Paul is still thinking in a very Jewish manner, his preference is for the final state, in which one will be given a new body to be put on over the top of the present one, clothing the Messiah’s people in a new kind of physicality whose main characteristic is incorruption. Thus, though Moule is no doubt right that Paul can envisage here the possibility of ‘exchange’ (losing one body, getting another one) rather than ‘addition’, as in 1 Corinthians 15, we should not lose sight of the fact that even if such an ‘exchange’ were to take place the new body would be more than the present one: more substantial, more solid, more what a human being was made to be, as a result of the preparatory work that is already being accomplished through the Spirit.¹⁵³

Why then does Paul speak of the new body as being ‘in the heavens’? Does this not mean that he thinks of Christians simply ‘going to heaven’ after their death? No. This is one of the passages which have supplied later tradition with the materials for an unwarranted platonizing of Christian hope. As with Philippians 3:20–21, and indeed 1 Corinthians 15:47–9, the temptation of the tradition has been to drive a steamroller through what Paul actually says, clearing his careful words out of the way to make room for a different worldview in which the aim of Christian faith is ‘to go to heaven when you die’. The tradition has always found it difficult to incorporate ‘resurrection’, in any Jewish or early Christian sense, into that scenario, which is perhaps why orthodox Christianity has found it hard to respond to the attacks of secular modernity at this point. ‘Heaven’ for Paul, here as elsewhere, is not so much where people go after they die—he remains remarkably silent on that, with the possible exception of Colossians 3:3–4—but the place where the divinely intended future for the world is kept safely in store, against the day when, like new props being brought out from the wings and onto stage, it will come to birth in the renewed world, ‘on earth as in heaven’. If I assure my guests that there is champagne for them in the fridge I am not suggesting that we all need to get into the fridge if we are to have the party. The future body, the non-corruptible (and hence ‘eternal’) ‘house’, is at present ‘in the heavens’ as opposed to ‘on earth’ (epigeios) (5:1); but it will not stay there.¹⁵⁴ For us to put it on on top of our present ‘house’ (clothes, bodies, houses, temples and tents; why mix two metaphors if four or five will do?) will require that it be brought from heaven (5:2).¹⁵⁵ This is a key passage not only for understanding Paul but for grasping similar language elsewhere in the New Testament.

With all this in mind, we can return to 4:16–18 with some hope of seeing what foundations Paul is laying for this fuller statement of ultimate resurrection hope. The contrast between the ‘inner human being’ and ‘outer human being’, the one increasingly worn out and decaying, the other being renewed, is not a prelude to a disembodied bliss in which an ‘inner’ life or soul eventually and thankfully escapes embodiment. Nor is the mention of ‘being weighed down’ in 5:4 an indication of that worldview, despite the obvious parallel with Wisdom 9:15.¹⁵⁶ Paul’s other mentions of the ‘inner human being’ show that he can use the phrase in various ways; no conclusions about a radical change of philosophical perspective can be built on it, especially in the light of the entire passage and letter.¹⁵⁷

The central segment of the central passage of this resurrection-centred letter, then, does not depart from the picture we have seen throughout Paul. He looks forward to eventual bodily resurrection, to a new body which will have left behind the decay and corruption of the present one, and which will function in relation to present life like a new and larger suit of clothes to be put on over the existing ones. The way to this future, exactly as in Romans and elsewhere, is by suffering and the Spirit. And the present life which anticipates this future, and which can use the language of future resurrection metaphorically to refer to its present state, is one of ‘renewal’ (4:16), of ‘preparation’ in the full sense indicated above, and of a faith and hope which can see where ordinary sight cannot. This is a full statement, not simply of the same Christian hope that Paul has articulated elsewhere, but also of the reason why the Corinthians should not be ashamed of Paul’s sufferings, but should rather rejoice, both for him and for themselves, that the life of the age to come is already secure and assured, and is already breaking in, however paradoxically, into the present time of struggle and sorrow. It also, of course, carries forward the major theological theme which underpins this particular point, namely, the argument from new covenant to new creation. Paul, the minister of the new covenant, discovers the means of that covenant (the death and resurrection of Jesus) being worked out in his own life in the present. He knows that this is because the new creation, whose central feature is bodily resurrection, is being ‘prepared’; and that he is part of it.

This opens the way for the final section of this vital passage.

3. Conclusion: Resurrection in Paul

This concludes our study of the key passages in Paul’s letters. Understanding him must be near the heart of any understanding of early Christianity; certainly, getting to know where he stands on the question of death and resurrection, and more specifically of the death and resurrection of Jesus, is at the heart of discovering what the early Christians believed on these subjects. We may briefly summarize our findings.¹⁶⁵

When we place Paul on the spectrum of beliefs outlined in chapters 2–4 above, he clearly belongs on the Jewish map rather than the pagan one, despite the efforts that scholars sometimes make to get him to change his mind. Within the Jewish spectrum, he belongs, with most Jews of his day, at the same place as the Pharisees, many writers of apocalypses, and others whom we studied in chapter 4 above. He believed, that is, in the future bodily resurrection of all the true people of the true God, and he cautiously explored, here and there, ways of referring to the intermediate state which was the necessary corollary of such a belief. He believed that Israel’s God, being both the creator of the world and the God of justice, would accomplish this resurrection by his Spirit, who was already at work in the Messiah’s people.

At the same time, Paul believed two things which are only comprehensible as mutations within the Jewish worldview, not as combinations of a Jewish eschatology with something else. First, he believed that ‘the resurrection’ had divided, as a historical moment, into two: the resurrection of the Messiah in the first place, and then, at his ‘parousia’, of all his people. Second, he believed, and articulated in considerable detail, that the resurrection would not only be bodily (the idea of a non-bodily resurrection would have been as much an oxymoron to him as it would to both Jews and pagans of his day; whether you believed in resurrection or not, the word meant bodies), but that it would also involve transformation. The present body is corruptible, decaying and subject to death; but death, which spits in the face of the good creator God, cannot have the last word.¹⁶⁶ The creator will therefore make a new world, and new bodies, proper to the new age. From one point of view the new world, and the new bodies, are the redeemed, remade versions of the old ones; that is the emphasis of Romans 8. From another point of view the new world, and the new bodies, are ‘stored up in heaven’. We should not play these off against one another; the latter phrase means, among other things, that they are safe in the mind, plan and intention of the creator God. Though Paul does not refer to the tree of life in Genesis 3, his controlling narrative is constantly pointing to the way in which the creator finally brings his human, image-bearing creatures, and indeed the entire cosmos, through the impasse of the fall, of the thorns and thistles and the whirling, flashing sword, to taste at last the gift of life in all its fullness, a new bodily life in a new world where the rule of heaven is brought at last to earth.

Furthermore, Paul frequently used the language of resurrection, in a metaphorical way, to denote the concrete, bodily events of Christian living, especially baptism and holiness; and also, on at least one occasion, to denote the renewal of the ‘inner human being’. This, I have suggested, was a development of the metaphorical (and also metonymic) use of resurrection language within Judaism to denote the coming restoration of Israel, the great ‘return from exile’, the time spoken of in Ezekiel 37 and perhaps other passages.¹⁶⁷ This was not a ‘spiritualization’ of the idea of resurrection. Nor was it, as has often been suggested, a move away from Paul’s now/not-yet tension and towards a more fully realized eschatology. Still less was it a move towards the later gnostic use of ‘resurrection’ language to denote a spiritual experience understood within an ontologically dualistic world-view.¹⁶⁸ It was, rather, a way of bringing to articulation the experience and belief of Jesus’ earliest followers: that the Christian life belonged within a historical narrative which began with Jesus’ resurrection and ended with the resurrection of all believers, and that the divine Spirit who accomplished the first would accomplish the second, and was even now at work to anticipate and guarantee that final event.

The question any historian must ask, discovering such a nest of intricate ideas, at once so Jewish and so unlike anything any Jew had said before, is obvious: what caused these developments-from-within, these newly articulated resurrection-beliefs? Paul himself would have answered: it was Jesus’ own resurrection.¹⁶⁹ ‘The resurrection’, as envisaged by Jews of his day, had not happened; nor had the national restoration for which ‘resurrection’ could function both as metaphor and as metonym. However vivid the spiritual experience of Paul or other early Christians, there is no reason to suppose that they would have articulated their beliefs and hopes in anything like this way unless they really did believe that Jesus had been ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that everybody in the ancient world would have understood, that is, bodily. Nor is there any explanation for why Paul developed his view of the future resurrection body in the way he did, except for the one that would have been obvious to him: that the Messiah’s own resurrection body was certainly the same and curiously different, alive with a new kind of life. And since the call to holiness of life on the one hand, and suffering and persecution on the other, were major themes in Jewish literature, but in neither case was ‘resurrection’ language used metaphorically as a way of understanding or explaining them, we must draw the same conclusion about Paul’s new-minted metaphorical language for the Christian life and experience.

At the same time, we may note that it was out of that call to holiness, suffering and persecution that there arose, in Daniel and elsewhere, the first clear articulations of resurrection hope. It was in embracing this vision that Jesus took the road which led to his own death and (so Paul believed) his own resurrection. This in turn shaped Paul’s own understanding of holiness, suffering and persecution. That, one might say, is what the Corinthian correspondence is all about.

Paul’s many and varied statements about future and present resurrection thus pose a historical question to which the only satisfactory answer, for him and for the historian, is his firm and sharply delineated belief in a past event, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. How he arrived at this belief must be the subject of the next chapter.