News We're Watching
CNN on Bart Ehrman
CNN
May 18, 2009
What Was Jesus' Route During His Death?
CNN
April 10, 2009
Dead Sea Scrolls To Go Online in the Next Few Years
CNN
August 27, 2008
Add Widget
Click here to add the PrimeTimeJesus widget to your site (Blogger, Facebook, iGoogle etc.)
Most Popular
Recent Blog Posts
- Jesus and his Return
- Jesus and the soul?
- Jesus and "hell"
- Bart Ehrman: Without Peer… Review
- We're Back: On Erhman, CNN and the Middle East
- Via Dolorosa and Happy Easter
- More on the Essenes
- Discussion of Essenes Relates to Dead Sea Scrolls and Jewish Sect Background for 1st Century
- Ehrman's Latest March 16 09
- Erhman Review Down the Road
Recent comments
- True, Absolute Freedom, through Jesus Christ
20 weeks 4 days ago - Another Approach
21 weeks 1 day ago - "It is not a contradiction
21 weeks 3 days ago - Paul tells us in Galatians
21 weeks 3 days ago - What about the ID movement?
23 weeks 4 days ago - I can only imagine what this
23 weeks 5 days ago - Thanks for the post, Dr
24 weeks 4 days ago - I am not sure I see the point.
25 weeks 2 days ago - Early corruption of the NT
25 weeks 2 days ago - Postponed Peer Reviews and Perishable People
25 weeks 4 days ago
About PrimeTimeJesus
PrimeTimeJesus features leading Christian professors, writers and thinkers who have come together to engage the media and culture about the person and work of Jesus Christ. For more information about the contributors, please see the Authors page in the top menu bar. To schedule interviews and appearances please see the Contact page.
Add PrimeTimeJesus to your feed reader - subscribe by clicking the orange button below. Look here to learn more about feeds.
Syndicate
Dr. Blomberg, thank you for the interesting and exciting summary of Bauckham.
Prof. Bock, always a pleasure reading your texts and comments. Here as well as in your own blog which I follow quite regularly. Thanks for your time at the dinner table few years back in Hungary in Lausanne Jewish evangelism conference. I've since graduated from Helsinki University and did my masters thesis in Biblical Studies on the Jewish resurrection belief during the intertestamental period.
This little "intro" brings me to my short comment to one aspect of Steven Carr's rejoinder.
CARR
Paul was not writing to Jews. He would have known what flesh and blood meant to his readers.
I think the question about Paul's audience is not as meaningful and persuasive as you make it.
As N.T. Wright points out, the idea of eschathological resurrection was after all thoroughly Jewish idea and as such involved corporeality, referring to something that happened to bodies "after life after death". Paul's audience - pagan as it was you pointed out - knew that Paul wrote to them as a Jew about something that was utterly Jewish. The concern for the audience, after all, did not stop Paul writing from thoroughly Jewish perspective to Corinthians about other things that would have been more meaningful to Paul as a Jew than perhaps to his supposedly pagan-background audience. See for example 1 Cor 10 where Paul talks about what happened to "OUR FATHERS" in the wilderness during exodus. Also, I think it is worth noting, that in 1 Cor 15:35-47 Paul is loosley writing against the background of Genesis when he speaks about earthly and heavenly bodies (plants, birds, fish, cattle, man). This reinforces the idea that Paul writes as a Jew about something thoroughly Jewish. As also his rabbinic idiom "flesh and blood" indicates to which Blomberg referred to.
It therefore seems to me that in 1 Cor 15 Paul's audience readily understood that he is writing to them about Jewish bodily resurrection and they therefore would not have confused it with their own pagan belief in the life after death with incorporeal astral bodies as you suggested.
Happy New Year to all.