Thanks for all three replies, gentlemen!

Anonymous, the biggest importance of such early testimony is that it refutes the commonly held notion that resurrection belief was a late, legendary development.

Darrell, glad to be of help.

Steven, reinforcing Darrell's comments, "flesh and blood" was a stock rabbinic idiom for "mere mortal."  E.g., hundreds of rabbinic parables begin with the expression, "there was a king of flesh and blood" to indicate that the story is first of all about an earthly rather than heavenly king, or even a messianic one.  "Spiritual body" translates soma pneumatikon, which as 1 Corinthians 2-3 shows, when contrasted with a "natural body" (soma psychikon) means "supernatural," or "Spirit-empowered," not non-physical.

 For further detail, see N. T. Wright's massive demonstration in The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) that first-century Jews had no conception of resurrection except for physically embodied forms.  Paul need not go into details because everyone would have understood what he was talking about.

Reply

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Scripture references placed between [bible][/bible] tags will be quoted.
  • Scripture references will be linked automatically to an online Bible. E.g. John 3:16, Eph 2:8-9 (ESV).

More information about formatting options

Captcha
This question is used to make sure you are a human visitor and to prevent spam submissions.
Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.