Paul’s Concept of the Body in 1 Corinthians 15:35–58

Andrew W. Pitts

Introduction

Kirsopp Lake was among the first to insist on the possibility that the earli- est Christians posited an immaterial or spiritual body for the risen .1 According to Albert Schweitzer, Jesus died in a physical body but experienced a non-flesh and -blood (i.e. spiritual) resurrection. This was a departure from the Judaism of Paul’s day, which affirmed a physical resurrection—if they affirmed one at all—but was a necessary response to his own location in salvation history, growing in the fertile soils of Gnosticism that had already begun to penetrate his thinking, according to Schweitzer.2 For Paul, “The first Adam is the psychic man, created out of earthly material; the second, Christ, is the ‘pneumatic’ (spiritual) man, who comes from heaven.”3 Paul thought that believers were, therefore, able to take part in Jesus’ resurrection mode of existence spiritually (internally) until it would eventually culminate with the resurrection of the just (externally). C. F. D. Moule insists that Paul pro- poses an exchange thesis (the physical body is traded out for a spiritual one) in 1 Corinthians 15 but later developed this thought into a transformation of the body in 2 Corinthians 5.4 Since the post-Easter Jesus appears not to be con- strained by the spatio-material world, Murray Harris suggests that the body of the risen Jesus was characterized by “invisibility and immateriality,” and this is, of course, indicative of the resurrection body of the believer as well.5 Both Peter Carnley and Gerd Lüdemann assume that a straightforward reading of

1 Kirsopp Lake, The Historical Evidence for the Christ (London: Williams & Norgate, 1907), 22. 2 Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of (London: A&C Black, 1931), esp. 71–74, 94–97. 3 Schweitzer, Mysticism, 219. 4 C. F. D. Moule, “St. Paul and Dualism: The Pauline Conception of Resurrection,” nts 12 (1956): 106–23. 5 Murray J. Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 53 (italics original).

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Paul—even if it does not always cohere with the Gospel tradition—implies his belief in a spiritual (immaterial) body for the risen Jesus.6 Richard Carrier provides one of the most recent and sustained treatments of this view. His nearly book-length essay (127 pages) in the edited volume, The Empty Tomb, has received virtually no attention from biblical scholars—most likely due to its clearly polemic tone among other possible factors.7 Oddly, he presents the case as though it represents an original or new view, not significantly engag- ing with prior interpretation that has perpetuated similar stances toward the evidence. These proposals, and others like them,8 are largely driven by Paul’s descrip- tion of the resurrected Christ follower’s body as a “spiritual” body (σῶμα πνευματικόν) in 1 Cor 15:44 and his comment in 15:50 that “flesh and blood” (σὰρξ καὶ αἷμα) cannot inherit the kingdom. These remarks and their sur- rounding co-text are then typically interpreted in varying degrees against the diverse beliefs about resurrection and immortality in Second Temple Judaism and, in the case of older research, gnostic and related Hellenistic ideas. This exchange view, and its variations, may be set into contrast with the traditional view which locates in 1 Corinthians 15 a Pauline theology of transformation into a glorified material body rather than an exchange of a natural body for a different spiritual body. Since Carrier is one of the more recent and certainly the most detailed of these studies, my attention will focus primarily upon his presentation of the exchange thesis (he refers to it as the two-body theory). I take issue with two dimensions of Carrier’s approach—and these will be gen- erally applicable to other expressions of the exchange view: (1) his use and interpretation of primary (esp. Jewish) literature and (2) his linguistic analysis of 1 Cor 15:35–58.

6 Peter Carnley, The Structure of Resurrection Belief (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 231–34; Gerd Ludemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 177. 7 Richard Carrier, “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb,” in Robert M. Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder (eds.), The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (Amherst, ny: Prometheus, 2005), 105–219. 8 E.g. Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching (trans. Herbert Danby; New York: Macmillan, 1925), 359; Marcus Borg, “The Truth of Easter,” in Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), 129–42, here 132–33.