Steven Carr

http://www.ankerberg.org/Articles/ap...aul-wright.htm

NT Wright says :-
'And what we have then is not a contrast between what we would call physical and spiritual but a contrast between this present body–which is corruptible and which is heading for death–and a body which, because it’s finally animated by God’s Holy Spirit, the Resurrection body, is not corruptible. When Paul is talking about this in 1 Corinthians 15, that is the main contrast that he is making between a body that is corruptible–going to die and going to corrupt in the grave; and a new body which will be incorruptible and has come through death and come out the other side and will never be touched by death again.'

Is Wright right?

Are our bodies going to die and corrupt in the grave, and there will be a new body , which will be incorruptible?

When Paul said that Jesus's body was corruptible and was going to die and corrupt in the grave, did he really, honestly, expect the body of Jesus to die and corrupt in the grave?

Would he have been astonished to see the old corrupted body of Jesus in a grave?

ichabod crane

Wright is giving the good ol' orthodox evangelical view, but it's certainly debatable. Elsewhere Paul uses spirit as an ontological category in dualistic contrast to flesh. More importantly, there are a number of indications in I Cor. 15 that the resurrection body is not physical in the normal sense:

(a) In verses 35-37, Paul writes: "But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain". He seems to be clearly saying that the body that dies is not the body that rises.

(b) In verse 44 he says "It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body". That seems to be moving away from physicality, contrasting the natural (psuche) with the spiritual (pneuma).

(c) Most important are verses 47-49 "The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven." This seems to contrast our present bodies "of dust" with the future heavenly body. But having a body of "dust" is tied to physicality.

(d) In verse 50 he says "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God", again distinguishing between physicality (being flesh and blood) and the future resurrection body.

In my opinion, Paul started out with the conventional 1st-century Jewish idea of resurrection (as seen, for instance, in I Thess.), but as he came under more Hellenistic influence he developed his ideas. I Cor. represents a more developed form of his thought where he has started to abandon the physical resurrection in favour of a more spiritualized notion. By the time you get to II Cor., being resurrected is seen as being "away from the body" (5:8, read in light of previous verses). The idea of a development in Pauline eschatology is fairly conventional in critical scholarly circles, but evangelicals like Wright won't accept it.

Matthew_Green

Steve,

I am not sure if you know this, but Richard Carrier has contributed to a skeptical anthology to be published on the resurrection of Jesus. It's called Jesus Is Dead and is scheduled to be released by the summer of 2005 by Prometheus Books. In particular, one of his chapters is "The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb". In this chapter he goes on to critique arguments defending a physical resurrection and in a personal e-mail correspondence, he told me that he would tackle N.T. Wright's arguments as well.

Matthew

judge

Where does Paul say this? Aren't you putting words in Pauls' mouth?

Toto

There is some discussion of this in this thread Richard Carrier to debate Greg Licona at UCLA