Paul and Bodily Resurrection

Rook Hawkins and others deny that Paul believed in bodily resurrection. This is based on several different lines of argumentation, all of which I believe are muddled. They seem to take a phrase from one source, or a gloss from another, and illegitimately form a potpourri of first-century thought, so that Paul is a Marcionite in one place, an Ebionite in another, a Rabbinical Jew in another, an Essene in another, and so on.

Like taking words and phrases from all of these various groups and super-imposing them on Paul is going to give us a better view of Paul's thought than using an internal critique of Paul's own writings and noticing how he uses familiar words and phrases in new and unique ways, looking at how his contemporaries and early interpreters understood him.

Imagine the misinterpretations that would result from randomly picking words and phrases from various disparate religious traditions today, and applying them books written by Richard Dawkins! Can you imagine replacing his intended meaning of "irrationality" with the one used in Jainism (i.e., the attraction of negative karmic particles to the eternal, immaterial soul). I somehow doubt that would go over very well, or be perceived as being in any way rational. Yet with Paul, replacing his idea of salvation with some type of proto-gnostic, mystery cult idea of escaping the meat-prison body through an existential Christ experience, is supposed to be good scholarship? There is some kind of double-standard going on to think it's OK to deconstruct and reconstruct Paul like that but not contemporary writers. But I digress.

To the point, a simple counter-argument topples the entire house of cards on this issue of Paul and bodily resurrection:

1 Corinthians 15:30, 32 Why am I in danger every hour? . . . What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” (ESV)

Paul makes the point that he has no reason to risk his life if, when he physically dies, he will not be raised. In that case, he says, he might as well join the scoffers (he quotes Isaiah 22:13, LXX) and get as much pleasure as he can from life before his time is up. Some people get caught up on whether he means "beasts" as literal animals in some sense, or as human opponents to his preaching, but that is entirely beside the point; the point is simply that he daily finds himself in mortal peril and he contrasts this physical peril of death with "being awoken" (ἐγείρονται, egeirontai). And this makes sense, given that physical death is euphemistically called "sleep" by Paul (as it is through-out the Hebrew scriptures). Notice how truly absurd it is for the revisionist to argue that Paul meant some sort of lack of enlightenment by "sleep" given that in verse 18 he speaks of people who have "fallen asleep in Christ"! But wait; resurrection, "arising," "awakening" is supposed to be this spiritual experience of initiation into the mysteries of Christ, so how can anyone have "fallen asleep in Christ"?

"But wait," they will say, "Paul explicitly contrasts the earthly and the heavenly, the body of dust and the body of spirit. He tells us in no uncertain terms that 'flesh and blood' cannot enter Heaven. Obviously then, this resurrection business is not talking about 'flesh and blood' bodies." I agree. It is not simply a revival of natural human bodies; it is a radical "change" (v. 51), as dramatic as the difference between an ear of corn and a kernel of corn (v. 37). So while there is some difference between the "natural body" and the "spiritual body" (v. 44), they are both "body" in some sense. Paul could have said "sown as a natural body, raised without the body", or "sown as a natural body, raised as a spirit", but he doesn't. Instead, he makes it quite clear that he is referring to a bodily resurrection.