Steven Carr

http://www.breslov.com/world/parsha/...anan_5754.html

'The Talmud tells us that in the time when G-d will resurrect the dead all the decayed bodies of all those people who are destined to rise will be reconstructed from the remains of this tiny bone.'

If you believe , as Jews do, that God built Eve from just one bone, this is not such a silly idea. They believe there is precedent.

But it does mean that Paul would not have been fazed in the least by seeing a decayed body of Jesus, still dead. He would simply have said that God had extracted the luz bone, and resurrected Jesus from that, and we should expect the rest of the body to decay.

So why would Christianity have been refuted if the body of Jesus had been produced?

Toto

This is interesting, but what would the date of this belief be? Rabbi Nachman dates to 1772-1810. The Talmud was not around in the second Temple period.

The Jewish Encyclopedia online has this on Luz:

However, if you google "luz bone resurrection" you will find claims that cremation is against Jewish law because the fire destroys even the "luz" bone.

Paradox

Well, for one thing, a recreated body from the bone would probably not have stigmata. Could this indicate that the resurrection of Jesus is fundamentally different to the Jewish idea?

Steven Carr

Or that the Gospel concept of resurrection, with wounds and all, contradicts Paul's idea of a body of glorious splendour?

Paradox

That too! I once questioned a visiting speaker (John Hosier) about this and his answer was that Jesus in his glorified form could take on whatever appearance suited his purpose. He justified this by using the various Scriptures that seem to show how Jesus would suddenly reveal his identity to followers that didn't recognise him immediately (Mary, the men on the road to Emmaeus etc etc). Very dubious.

Richard Carrier

Just FYI, this is a topic that N. T. Wright covers accurately, and his discussion is well worth reading. I had already read the scholarship on it beforehand, so I can vouch for Wright's coverage. Of course, I discuss it myself in my new defense of the Spiritual Resurrection theory in the forthcoming anthology from Prometheus Books, Jesus Is Dead, but that won't be out until Summer of 2005.

But for some brief comment:

First, even the Pharisees argued heavily about this subject, so there was no orthodox view. Only some adopted the "indestructible coccyx" theory, as a way to nip various skeptical arguments in the bud, and these were generally a faction of the larger group who defended a bones-first resurrection, against another faction who defended a skin-first resurrection (and thus had no need of any bone--they probably argued for an atomic reassembly, as one can guess from the early Christian fathers, drawing on the already-accepted idea that atoms are indestructible, which even many non-Epicureans adopted). Of course, sects other than the Pharisees ranged even farther, some believing only the soul survives, and others believing we get entirely new bodies, which is what Paul certainly appears to argue (even some Pharisees agreed, like Josephus and, possibly, Rabbi Mari), and still others that we would be raised in the flesh and then transmutated into angels. And so on. Given that there were between ten and forty Jewish sects in the Second Temple period, most of which divided even further into various factions, experts agree you can probably find every conceivable belief held by at least one of them.

Second, the indestructible coccyx idea probably does date from the Second Temple period--the Talmud I think attributes it to Second Temple rabbis, but at any rate the fact that secondary burial was a raging fad in the Second Temple period strongly supports wide acceptance of something like the idea, which is why Jews took such trouble to preserve the bones of the deceased--and it would be in such a context of widespread bone gathering that the question of "what if some bones are missing?" would arise, and the natural answer (the only one on record from the bones-first faction) is that one particular bone is indestructible. Support for this is also gained from what was certainly a Second Temple belief (since it only made sense when there was a temple and some semblance of a Jewish state, even if a subject state) that the bones of those buried in the diaspora would roll through hidden caverns to Palestine and be resurrected there.

Third, it is not clear whether the bones-first faction thought that an entirely new body would grow from the coccyx, or whether God would make use of all remaining materials and just add what was missing. The skin-first faction might have thought a new body would arise, or perhaps that the atoms of the old body would be collected and reassembled. Again it isn't clear. There are hints of both views. The spiritual resurrection factions definitely imagined some spiritual substance inside the flesh rising from the flesh and assembling into a body, so it would be an easy parallel from that to a second body of flesh--and along that very line, 1 Clement equates the resurrection with the Phoenix, and explicitly describes the Phoenix as rising from its ashes in a new body and carrying its old bones home. If that is what Clement believed, then he must have believed Jesus left his old bones in the grave, too--unless he was carelessly employing a false analogy. Clement also implies the resurrected body was flesh (unlike Paul), which if correct would mean Clement imagined a new body of flesh rising from the old one, and leaving the old one behind, just as Steven suggests. But I doubt the original Christians believed this (unless there was disagreement from the start), since Paul is adamant that the new body is made of an entirely alien substance, and all flesh will be destroyed (on that issue there is a lot of evidence from Paul, more than is generally recognized, but I will cover it in my contribution to that forthcoming book).