Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§18.5 Et Resurrexit
Paul believed that he had seen the resurrected body of Jesus on the Damascus
road, then what he saw was more like a 'light body', something rather closer to
the Hellenistic conception of a less substantial, more refined kind of postmortem
existence. 206 That was a conceptualization, presumably, easier to 'sell'
in a Hellenistic milieu like Corinth. What is of interest here, however, is that Paul
did not abandon either the idea of continued/re-created bodily existence, or the
language of 'resurrection'. The reason, we may infer, was partly that his own
thought was more constitutively Hebraic than Greek, 207 but also partly at least
because the Christian faith in which he had been first instructed had already
stamped the category of 'resurrection' firmly and indelibly on that faith. He gives
ground to his Hellenized interlocutors {spiritual body) but remains true to his
Jewish heritage (spiritual body). 20S Here again we are pointed to a conceptualization
which was integral to the post-Easter faith from the first — which indeed
was the post-Easter faith.
(3) It may well be that we should detect in Luke's strong emphasis on the
physicality of Jesus' resurrected body (Luke 24.39) a reaction against what might
have been regarded as Paul's dilution of the resurrection faith. The reaction is
even stronger in Ignatius, Smyrn. 3.1, 209 where Paul's subtle distinction between
'body' and 'flesh' has already been lost to sight. Conceivably John's discourage-
rection of believers (1 Cor. 15.20, 23, 44-49); that is, his concept of resurrection body includes
that of Jesus. On Paul's concept of 'body' and of the contrast here see my Theology of Paul 60-
61, with further bibliography. Pace Grass, it is unlikely that Paul would have accepted the reformulation
of his view in terms of a 'personal identity between the earthly and the eschatological
I, not necessarily a continuity between earthly and heavenly body' {Ostergeschehen 185); for
Paul 'identity' was never other than bodily identity.
206. D. B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University, 1995) rightly
points out that Paul's distinction would not have been understood as a distinction between material
and non-material (123-29); even so, pace Craig (Assessing passim), a highly refined substance
('material') is not the same as the 'physical' body unavoidably destined for decay and
death (1 Cor. 15.48; 2 Cor. 5.1).
207. I do not mean to evoke here the old outmoded antithesis between Hebraic and
Greek thought. It is simply that Hebraic and Greek anthropologies were different in regard to
the relation of soul/mind/spirit and body/flesh. See further my Theology of Paul chapter 3,
where I argue that Paul introduces a key distinction between söma and sarx (70-73): Paul does
not speak of resurrection as spiritual(ized) flesh (on the contrary an antithesis between spirit
and flesh is fundamental to his theology: 65-66, 477-82, 496-97), but only of spiritual body.
208. It is thanks to Paul that we can gain a clearer conception of the 'body', not as something
distinct from the person, something within which the real person exists, but as the person
embodied, whether in a three-dimensional context (physical body) or spiritual context (spiritual
body). See further again my Theology of Paul chapter 3.
209. 'For I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection' {Smyrn.
3.1), going on to cite Luke 24.39 and Acts 10.41 (3.2-3). See also Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection
117-21.
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