The revival of the Jesus Tomb means the question of what kind of Resurrection is relevant. The short answer is a resurrection into a spiritual but material body, what the church has called a bodily or physical resurrection, but not simply a reproduction of mortal flesh. I have reproduced the key parts of three past blogs from Bock's blog to review the historical and biblical details. In the NT we have short discussions of this topic in the appearance textsof the gospels, where Jesus takes a meal in Luke to show he is not a ghost and enters a room with the doors locked in John to indicate his material makeup is altered from merely being flesh that can decay (so also 1 Cor 15:50). So Paul and John overlap and show a body is part of the spiritual makeup of what the resurrection will be and what Jesus's resurrection was.
So here are the three older blogs in full. I view them as summing up this renewed discussion on the Jesus Tomb in terms of whether a resurrection is important to this discussion. The resurrection is not a return to decaying flesh nor is it a mere spiritual thing that can be reduced to a metaphor. It has spiritual and material components, if the earliest Chrsitian witnesses to it are taken to explain what the earliest Chrsitians confessed about their message of hope.
(1) From: Hollywood Hype: The Oscars and Jesus' Family Tomb, What Do They Share? (expanded version) Feb 26, 2007
First,
there is a suggestion that this is a family tomb of Jesus, when Jesus
was in Jerusalem as a pilgrim, not a Jerusalem resident. How did his
family have the time in the aftermath of his death to buy the tomb
space, while also pulling off a stealing of the body and continue to
preach that Jesus was raised BODILY, not merely spiritually. The bodily
part of this resurrection is key because in Judaism when there was a
belief in resurrection it was a belief in a bodily resurrection a
redemption that redeemed the full scope of what God had created. If one
reads 2 Maccabees 7. one will see the martyrdom of the third son of
seven executed who declares that they can mutilate his tongue and hands
for defending the law, because God will give them back to him one day.
Here
are the details: As this third son faces death, 2 Maccabees 7:10-11
presents this summary of the martyrdom, “After him, the third was the
victim of their sport. When it was demanded, he quickly put out his
tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, and said nobly, “I
got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from
him I hope to get them back again.” After the sons perish, the mother
declares her hope in 7:20-23, “The mother was especially admirable and
worthy of honorable memory. Although she saw her seven sons perish
within a single day, she bore it with good courage because of her hope
in the Lord. She encouraged each of them in the language of their
ancestors. Filled with a noble spirit, she reinforced her woman’s
reasoning with a man’s courage, and said to them, ‘I do not know how
you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and
breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you.
Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of
humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give
life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for
the sake of his laws.’” The point is important, because just as with
the creation teaching, the difference between the alternative of only
having the spirit live and having the entire person be renewed is part
of what distinguished the two groups (Christians and Christian
Gnostics). The earliest Christianity came out of a Judaism that
believed in a physical resurrection, which is why a claim about only
needing a spiritual resurrection does not fit with historic
Christianity. To lack a bodily resurrection teaching is to teach in
distinction from what the earliest church had received as a key element
of the hope that Jesus left his followers, a hope that itself was
rooted in Jewish precedent. Paul, our earliest witness to testify to
this in writings we possess, was a former Pharisee who held to a
physical resurrection as 1 Corinthians 15 also makes clear. Paul
matches the Maccabean picture noted above. He explicitly denies an
approach that accepts only a spiritual resurrection.
(2) From: Robert Gundry on the Physicality of Jesus' Resurrection and the Issue of the Tomb - March 27, 2007
(This
is Prof. Gundry’s Take on the issue; his material is posted on:
http://normtroubles.blogspot.com/2007/03/robert-gundry-on-physicality-of-jesus.html
There’s
an element in the current discussion of Jesus’ family tomb, so-called,
that needs more scrutiny, it seems to me. I have in mind the agreement
or disagreement between the earliest oral and literary traditions of
what happened to Jesus’ corpse, on the one hand, and the interpretation
of an ossuary found at Talpiot as having contained the secondarily
buried bones of Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand. If I understand
Professor James Tabor correctly, he believes:
1. that the said ossuary probably did contain Jesus’ bones;
2.
that Jesus’ brother James revived and carried forward a messianic
movement started by John the Baptist and taken over by Jesus;
3.
that because of the removal of Jesus’ corpse from the tomb into which
Joseph of Arimathea had put it, and because of a secondary burial of
Jesus’ bones about a year later, James and others in the revived
messianic movement knew that Jesus hadn’t physically risen from the
dead, nor did they proclaim that he had;
4. that because of visions Paul claimed for himself, he proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead;
5. that Paul presented Jesus’ resurrection (and ours to come) as spiritual rather than physical; and
6.
that in the Pauline offshoot from the messianic movement then headed by
James, the notion of a spiritual resurrection morphed into legendary
stories of a physical resurrection, such as we have in the canonical
Gospels (The Jesus Dynasty [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006];
idem, jesusdynasty.com/blog/).
With such an understanding,
there’s no disagreement between the earliest literary version of Jesus’
resurrection—that is, Paul’s presentation of it as spiritual rather
than physical—and an ossuary’s having contained the bones of Jesus.
It
would be problematic, though, if the earliest oral and literary
versions of Jesus’ resurrection presented it as physical. For the
earlier the notion of a physical resurrection of Jesus, the greater the
tension between that notion and the knowledge of Jesus’ original
followers that his bones lay in an ossuary of nearby, known location,
especially if those who held the notion of a physical resurrection and
those who had contrary knowledge of Jesus’ ossuary-interred bones were
in conversation with each other. On so fundamental a point we should
expect some literary evidence of disagreement among them. And the
tension becomes even more severe if the original followers of Jesus
knew about his bones and some of these followers had themselves
interred those bones yet proclaimed him as physically resurrected.
Professor
Tabor affirms correctly that Paul and Jesus’ original followers were in
conversation with each other: “There is little doubt that the apostle
Paul was accepted into the inner circles of Jesus’ original followers,”
and they “publicly endorsed his missionary preaching to the Gentile
Roman world (Galatians 2:9). It was what he preached and taught that
began to create problems” (The Jesus Dynasty, 262). But Tabor
immediately goes on to discuss Paul’s view of “a heavenly Christ,”
including a nonphysically resurrected one, as though that view of him
created problems for Jesus’ original followers. Not so! As Paul clearly
points out in Galatians 2, the problems had to do with issues of
circumcision, law-keeping in general, and table fellowship. There’s
nothing about a problem of disagreement over whether Jesus was
physically resurrected.
To support a Pauline presentation of a
nonphysically resurrected Jesus, though, Professor Tabor states that
Paul “claimed to hear a disembodied ‘voice’ that he identified as
‘words’ of Jesus” (The Jesus Dynasty, 262). But the texts Tabor cites
in note 4 on page 262—that is, 2 Corinthians 12:9; 1 Thessalonians
4:15; 1 Corinthians 11:23—say nothing about a disembodied voice. (Nor,
for that matter, does the word voice appear in those texts despite
Tabor’s putting quotation marks around it.)
Professor Tabor’s
view that Paul presented a nonphysically resurrected Jesus rests above
all, however, on Paul’s statements in 1 Corinthians 15:44, 46, 50,
about which Tabor states, “Paul, our earliest witness to the
resurrection, speaks of a ‘physical body’ and a ‘spiritual body,’ and
though it is a body, he clearly presents both the resurrection of Jesus
and the future resurrection of the dead at the end of the age, as
putting off the flesh like a garment and being transformed into a
higher spirit life.” Likewise, Tabor writes that according to Paul, at
the second coming the Christian dead will be resurrected “in gloriously
transformed spiritual bodies” (The Jesus Dynasty, 264), that Christians
still living at the time “will likewise be instantaneously changed from
flesh to spirit” (ibid.), and that “Paul seems to be willing to use the
term ‘resurrection’ to refer to something akin to an apparition or
vision. And when he does mention Jesus’ body he says it was a
‘spiritual’ body. But a ‘spiritual body' and an ‘embodied spirit’ could
be seen as very much the same phenomenon” (ibid., 232). (Actually, Paul
talks about a spiritual body only in connection with Christians’
resurrection, but the parallel with Jesus’ resurrection, which Tabor
draws, is to be accepted.)
Has Professor Tabor understood Paul’s
discussion of resurrection correctly? I think not. In the first place,
Paul contrasts “a spiritual body” with “a soulish body,” not with a
“physical body” (1 Cor 15:44, 46). But what do these expressions mean?
Take first the adjective “spiritual.” When Paul describes some
Christians in Corinth as “spiritual” rather than “fleshly” or “carnal,”
he doesn’t mean that some Christians in Corinth are floating around its
streets in a ghostly form as opposed to others who are pounding the
pavement with their feet. No, he’s describing some Christians as
taught, filled, and led by the Holy Spirit, whose temple is their
present physical bodies, as opposed to others dominated by their sinful
proclivities despite the indwelling Spirit (1 Cor 2:10–16; 3:1; 6:19;
14:37; Gal 6:1). When Paul speaks of “spiritual gifts,” he means gifts
given by the Holy Spirit (Rom 1:11; 1 Cor 12:1; 14:1). The manna, the
water-supplying rock, and the Mosaic law—all in the Old Testament—are
“spiritual” in that the Holy Spirit gave them to the Israelites (Rom
7:14; 1 Cor 10:3–4). And the gospel is “spiritual” as given by the Holy
Spirit (Rom 15:27; 1 Cor 9:11). So we should capitalize the adjective
Spiritual and dismiss the notion that it indicates nonphysicality. In
Paul’s view, that is to say, the resurrected body is Spiritual not in
the sense of nonphysicality (he even switches back and forth between
“body” and “flesh” in 1 Cor 15:35–41) but in the sense of its having
been raised by God’s Spirit, which is none other than Christ’s Spirit,
rather than procreated, as in the case of our present bodies, animated
as they are by the soul—hence the contrast with “soulish bodies.” But
let Paul speak for himself to the effect that in resurrection a
Spiritual body is a body raised by the Holy Spirit: “The last Adam
[Christ] became a life-making Spirit” (1 Cor 15:45); “But if the Spirit
of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who
raised Christ from the dead will make alive also your mortal bodies
through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Rom 8:11).
Ah, but what
about 1 Corinthians15:50, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom
of God”? Professor Tabor appeals also to this text for a nonphysical
understanding of resurrection on Paul’s part (The Jesus Dynasty, 264).
Well, the immediately following statement reads, “Nor does
perishability inherit imperishability.” These two statements parallel
each other, so that the phrase “flesh and blood” corresponds to
“perishability.” Together, the terms refer to the present body in
respect to the perishability of its flesh and blood, not in respect to
the physicality of its flesh and blood. For Paul proceeds to say that
it is “this perishable body” that will put on imperishability and “this
mortal body” that will put on immortality (1 Cor 15:51–55, especially
verse 53). And since for Paul the resurrection of Christians will
follow the pattern of Christ’s resurrection, as Tabor recognizes, Paul
must have thought that when Christ was raised, it was the perishable,
mortal body of his earthly lifetime that put on imperishability and
immortality, not that he was raised and exalted to heaven in some
nonphysical form.
According to 1 Corinthians 15:1–7 Paul
“received” information about Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and
appearances as resurrected to Cephas (Peter) and others, including
James. On the basis of Galatians 1:10–23 Professor Tabor interprets
this reception as a direct revelation from heaven rather than as the
passing on of tradition by one or more earlier followers of Jesus. But
in Galatians Paul is talking about the gospel he preached before going
to Jerusalem and conversing with Cephas three years after that direct
revelation, whereas in 1 Corinthians he’s talking about the sort of
information he’d get from one or more earlier believers. So contrary to
Tabor’s earlier cited identification of Paul as “our earliest witness
to the resurrection,” our earliest witnesses to it are the ones or one
(probably Cephas) who passed this information on to Paul. Or, rather,
our earliest witnesses are those who claimed to have seen Jesus as
resurrected before Paul did, as admitted by Paul in his phrases, “And
last of all . . . also to me” (1 Cor 15:8). Therefore we have to
investigate not only Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ resurrection,
whether it was physical or nonphysical, but also what was the
understanding of it by the earlier witnesses and traditioner(s).
“Cephas,” the Aramaic form of “Peter,” and the two instances of
“according to the Scriptures” in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 favor that the
tradition stemmed from Jesus’ original followers, Jews still closely
tied to their ancestral faith, Judaism. Now Tabor correctly writes, “In
Judaism to claim that someone has been ‘raised from the dead’ is not
the same as to claim that one has died and exists as a spirit or soul
in the heavenly world. What the gospels [here we might substitute the
witnesses and traditioners behind 1 Cor 15:3–7] claim about Jesus is
that the tomb [in which he ‘was buried,’ according to the pre-Pauline
tradition] was empty, and that his dead body was revived to life
[‘raised,’ according to that same tradition]—wounds and all. He was not
a phantom or a ghost . . .” (The Jesus Dynasty, 232). So it looks as
though those witnesses and traditioners, given their Judaistic
upbringing, would have understood Jesus’ resurrection as physical just
as Paul did and just as we should expect in that by definition
“resurrection” means the “standing up” of a formerly a supine corpse.
We’re
left with this question: If Jesus’ bones were known to be lying in an
ossuary near Jerusalem, how is it that the earliest literary tradition
in 1 Corinthian 15:1–7, the even earlier oral tradition stemming from
Jesus’ original disciples, and Paul’s properly exegeted
understanding—how is it that all of them presented Jesus’ resurrection
as physical? This question seems to me hard to answer.
(3) Why Discuss 2 Maccabees 7 with Resurrection? A Case for Using Jewish Backgrounds June 13, 2007
I
have been asked on various occasions why use a text like 2 Maccabees 7
to discuss resurrection? It is an important and fair question.
One
uses such a text because it indicates (1) how physical a resurrection
the Jews anticipated and (2) because the meaning of resurrection of
Christians is what is being debated, making use of the Bible a problem
for some who are listening to the discussion.
Many of the
biblical texts from the OT discuss a resurrection but are not clear
about how physical it is. For example, Daniel 12:1-2 simply declares a
resurrection but with no detail. In 2 Maccabees there is no doubt that
a physical resurrection is what was meant. In this passage seven sons
of a faithful Jew are being murdered for keeping the Law one by one.
When the third son's turn comes he holds out his hands and stick out
his tongue (which the persecutors had come to remove). He basically
tells them they can have these bodily parts because one day God will
give them back. That makes it pretty clear he expects a physical
element to the body he will get at the end. This view is like that of
the Pharisees and was the view of resurrection Paul had as a Pharisee.
When he sees Jesus in a glorified form, it indicates and reinforces
this understanding of resurrections.
So here is a good example
where knowing background of what was believed in the first century also
helps us to see what was meant by Christians when they discussed
concepts that are taught in the OT but detailed in these later works
that the NT also indicates.
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