There are several interesting things about the New Testament's stories of the resurrection, but two things in particular stand out. The first is that there were no eye-witnesses of the 'event' of the resurrection itself. Mark, widely assumed to be the earliest gospel, has the women visiting an empty tomb and running away terrified by an angelic messenger. Presumably, this is the core testimony upon which other 'details' were added. The other thing to notice is that there is never an agreed upon definition of the resurrected body. In several places an implied transfiguration is substantial enough to make him unrecognizable. At the end of Luke he walks for hours with some on a dusty road, and isn't recognized until he 'breaks bread' with them. In John, Mary of Magdala thinks he's the gardener until he speaks her name. In several stories the body of Jesus has both ghostly and strangely material qualities at the same time. He walks through walls (or just appears?) and eats fish. No effort is made to explain how this could be, and I wouldn't expect one. Leave it to Paul, however, to try to stitch these all together.
Paul, of course, had his own experience with the Jesus after the resurrection, but the Damascus road story seems to move away from the kind of stories presented in the gospels toward something closer to what we might call a vision, such as ones recorded throughout the Old Testament. Still, he interprets the experience as an encounter with "the risen Christ"and spends a good deal of his time defending his apostleship on the basis of it to his detractors. In 1 Corinthians 15, for example, Paul is reviewing the appearances (in tradition) of Jesus to his disciples and followers and includes himself last in the list.
In the section that follows (15.12-34), he explains the importance of the resurrection for the church. It had to have happened, because Jesus is the beginning of the general resurrection of the dead (you believe in that, don't you?), and if the dead stay dead forever, we might as well break out the booze and celebrate the little time that we have remaining. In the next section (15.35-58), he attempts to answer his critics by explaining what a resurrected body is. Here is where it gets interesting. I encourage you do read the passage yourself, but here is my summary of it:
1. Each kind of thing has its own particular nature and dignity/beauty. (Paul uses 'flesh' and 'glory').
2. Like a seed contains what it will grow into, the body starts out corruptible and becomes
incorruptible ('physical' and 'spiritual' in many translations can be misleading)
3. Adam-people are corruptible but Jesus (now that he is resurrected?) is incorruptible.
4. In our present state we cannot inherit the kingdom, but we who bear Jesus' image shall be changed.
5. For those alive at the general resurrection, metaphorically speaking, transformation is like putting
on a imperishable-immortal garment.
6. In both cases, both before and at the general resurrection, death has been defeated.
Maybe Paul was clear in his own mind what he intended to say (notice his "don't be a dim-wit"), but I'm missing a few things. On the top of my list is the question of how the analogy of a seed growing into wheat fits with the reappearance of the same 'cells, molecules, and amino acids' (Updike). Perhaps it doesn't. I've already cast some doubt about the easy proofs offered by the old apologists. Is it possible that those apologists were also wrong in stressing a 'physical' resurrection? In what sense can we say that the resurrection is 'physical? Is there a better way to describe resurrection?
This, of course, is not all the New Testament has to say about resurrection. Often it is used metaphorically to refer to a way of being alive to God. Jesus, for example, emphasizes this aspect in a debate with the Sadducees.
"He is not the God of the dead, but of the living."Then there is the phrase "Christ is risen", a continuous present participle in Greek. This would have reference to the "firstfruits" concept we just met in 1 Cor. 15, but it may also allude to the taking up of mortality, exemplified in sorrow, pain, and struggle, into the resurrection.
Now, these metaphorical meanings do not necessarily have to be in conflict with the historical dimension that Paul's definition seems to imply. But, conversely, they could potentially stand on their own without a ontological event to ground them. This is the typical "liberal" solution, to make resurrection a metaphor for a deep psychological experience of transformation.
So far, I've tried to show that the naive conception of the resurrection as an event amenable to normal historical investigation and packaged in a box of near certainty is problematic.There are also questions about how to best describe the event of the resurrection even if it was a space-time event in history. Updike's perspective, a view meant to uphold the biblical tradition, is called into question by Paul's explanation in 1 Corinthians. The path of interpreting the resurrection naturalistically as a "historicized" inner experience is clearly an option. Are there others?
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