How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (24 page)

And that is the point of 1 Corinthians 15. The fact—Paul takes it as a fact—that the resurrected bodies of believers will be like the resurrected body of Jesus shows that the resurrection has not yet taken place. It is a bodily (not purely spiritual) event, and since it is a bodily event, it obviously has not happened yet because we are still living in our pathetic mortal bodies.

But the body Jesus had when he was raised was not simply his resuscitated corpse brought back to life. It was an astoundingly immortal body, a “spiritual” body. A body, yes. A material body, yes. A body intimately connected to the body that died and was buried, yes. But a transformed body that could not experience pain, misery, or death.

Paul reports that some of his opponents mock his views that there is to be a future resurrection of bodies: “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’” His reply is forceful: “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Cor. 15:35–36). He goes on to say that it is like a seed. It goes into the ground as a bare seed, but it grows into a live plant. The body is like that. It dies a paltry, bare, dead thing and is raised gloriously. For “there are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another” (15:40). Then he explains that it is this way “with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (15:42–44).

And so the body of the believer that is to be raised is still a body—and it is intimately connected with the present body—but it is a glorious, immortal, spiritual body, the present body transformed. And Paul knows this because that is the kind of body that Jesus had when he himself was raised.

Some modern readers have trouble understanding how there can be such a thing as a “spiritual body” that is still an actual body. The problem is that today we tend to think of “spirit” and “body” as two opposite things, with the spirit being invisible and nonmaterial and the body being visible and material. For us, spirit is intangible and body is made of “stuff.” Most ancient people, however, did not see spirit and body this way, which is why it is possible for Paul to speak of a spiritual body. It was widely believed in antiquity that the spirit we have within us was also made of “stuff.” It was material. But it was very highly refined material that could not be seen with the eyes. (Kind of like what people think when they imagine they’ve seen a “ghost”—there’s something there, made of stuff, since it can be seen, even though it’s pure spirit.)
³
When Paul speaks of a spiritual body, then, he means a body not made of this heavy, clunky stuff that now makes up our bodies, but of the highly refined spiritual stuff that is superior in every way and is not subject to mortality. That’s what the future bodies will be like, because that’s what Jesus’s resurrected body was like. His body did indeed come out of the grave. But when it did, it was a transformed body, made of spirit, and raised immortal.

Modern readers are not the only ones who find Paul’s views confusing or who read Paul to mean something that he didn’t say. We know that other Christians stressed either one or the other aspect of his spiritual body to an extreme. Some maintained that Jesus was not raised in the body at all but only in the spirit, and others insisted that his raised body was so closely connected to his corpse that it bore all the marks of its mortality still upon it.

Some ancient Christians—taking a line very similar to that found among Paul’s opponents in Corinth—maintained that Jesus was raised in the spirit, not in the body; that his body died and rotted in the grave, as bodies do; but that his spirit lived on and ascended to heaven. This view became prominent among various groups of Gnostic Christians.

There is no need for me to go into a lengthy discussion of early Christian Gnosticism in this context; there are numerous excellent studies.
⁴
For my purposes here it is enough to say that a variety of groups after the New Testament period—all of whom claimed, of course, to represent the “original” views of Jesus and his disciples—maintained that the material world we inhabit is a wicked, fallen place and that it stands at odds with the greater, purely spiritual realm to which ultimately we belong. The way to escape our entrapment in this world of matter is to acquire secret “knowledge” (= gnosis) from above of who we really are, how we came to be here, and how we can return to our heavenly, spiritual home. In this view, Jesus is the one who came down from the heavenly realm to provide us with this secret knowledge. These groups are called Gnostic because of their emphasis on gnosis/knowledge.

I will discuss this view of Christ more fully in Chapter 7. At this stage it is enough to stress that for many of these Gnostics, the figure we think of as Jesus Christ was not a single person, but was actually two persons—a divine being from above who had come temporarily to inhabit the material body of the man Jesus. In this view, the material body, belonging to the material world, and to the inferior God who created it, was transcended at Jesus’s death and resurrection, such that the body was killed but the divine spirit, which was distinct from it, was not touched. The divine spirit returned to its heavenly home, while the body was left to corrupt here on earth. In this view, the physical body was not transformed into a spiritual body, as in Paul; it was abandoned to the grave. The spirit lived on past the crucifixion—so much so that it did not actually need to be “raised.” It simply escaped the flesh at the crucifixion.

You can find this view in a book called the
Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
, which was discovered along with a cache of other Gnostic writings in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. This text gives a firsthand account of the crucifixion of Jesus as observed by Peter himself. What is striking—and very strange indeed—is that while Peter is actually talking to Jesus, he sees another Jesus being crucified. So there are apparently two Jesuses here, at the same time. And more than that, Peter sees yet a third figure hovering above the cross and laughing. This also is Jesus. In his completely understandable confusion, Peter asks Jesus (the one he is talking with) what it is he is seeing. The Savior tells Peter that they are crucifying not him, but only “his physical part.” It is the laughing Jesus above the cross who is “the living Jesus.” Peter is then told:

He whom they crucified is the firstborn, and the home of demons, and the clay vessel in which they dwell, belonging to Elohim, and belonging to the cross that is under the law. But he who stands near him is the living Savior, the primal part in him whom they seized. And he has been released. He stands joyfully looking at those who persecuted him. . . . Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception. . . . Indeed, therefore, the suffering one must remain, since the body is the substitute. But that which was released was my incorporeal body. (
Apoc. Pet.
82)
⁵

And so, what is killed is merely the physical shell of Jesus, which belongs to the God of this world (Elohim—the Hebrew term for God in the Old Testament), rather than the true God. The real Jesus is the incorporeal spirit that inhabited that body for a time but then was released. This “living Jesus” is laughing because his enemies think they can kill him, but in fact they can’t touch him. The divine Spirit of Jesus is raised, according to this view, not Jesus’s body.
⁶

We don’t know how early such full-blown Gnostic views came to expression in the Christian movement; they were certainly in place by the middle of the second century, and possibly earlier. But there were
tendencies
toward such views already in the New Testament period. If my reconstruction of the events in Corinth stated above are correct, then already in the 50s some believers in Jesus would have been open to the view that Jesus’s spirit, not his physical body, was raised from the dead. Further evidence that some Christians held this view can be found in the fact that some of the later Gospel traditions go to some lengths in order to counter it.

In Luke’s Gospel, for example, written possibly around 80–85
CE
, when Jesus is raised the disciples have trouble believing that it is really him, in the body—even when they see him. This is explicitly stated in Luke 24:36–37: “While they were saying these things, Jesus himself stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and afraid, and thought that they were seeing a spirit” (sometimes translated “ghost”). Jesus rebukes them and tells them to feel his body so they can see it is real: “Look at my hands and my feet, to see it is I. Handle me and see—for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (24:39). They still have trouble believing it, and so he asks them for something to eat. They give him a piece of broiled fish, and he eats it before their eyes.

The point of this story is that it really is Jesus, the same Jesus who had died, and he still is thoroughly a body, with flesh, bones, mouth, and, presumably, digestive system. Why such an emphasis on the bodily nature of the resurrected Jesus? Almost certainly because other Christians were denying that it was the body that was raised. If there had been a debate between Paul (from 1 Corinthians) and Gnostics (from the
Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
) about whether Jesus was raised in the body, Luke would land firmly in the Pauline camp.

But with a possible difference. When Paul speaks of Jesus’s spiritual body, he is emphatic in 1 Corinthians that that body is transformed into an immortal being. That, for Paul, is necessary, because the flesh-and-blood body is not of the right “stuff” to enter the kingdom of God. As he states unequivocally in that context: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (1 Cor. 15:50). The mortal, perishable body will be transformed into something else—an immortal, imperishable, spiritual body. Only then will it inherit eternal life. And so that is the kind of body, for Paul, that Jesus also had at his resurrection.

But for Luke it appears that Jesus’s resurrected body was simply his corpse that had been reanimated. It is true that he does not say that the body is still “flesh and blood” (to use Paul’s term for what cannot enter the kingdom). But he explicitly does say it is “flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39). And unlike a spirit, it can eat a meal of broiled fish. It looks as if Luke is emphasizing that Jesus’s resurrection was precisely in the
body
to counter those who wanted to argue that it was in the
spirit
. In doing so, he may have altered Paul’s views by emphasizing even more the very real fleshly character of Jesus’s body, not as transformed, but as in pure continuity with the body that died.

Later one finds a similar emphasis in John, in the scene of “doubting Thomas.” According to John 20:24–28, Thomas was not with the other disciples when Jesus first appeared to them. He does not believe that they have seen the risen Lord and tells them, somewhat overemphatically, that he won’t believe it until Jesus appears to him and he can feel the wounds in his hands and side. And sure enough, Jesus shows up and tells Thomas to do just that. Thomas instantly believes.

Here again, Jesus is in the very body that was crucified, wounds and all. Thus, both Luke and John want to emphasize the reality of Jesus’s resurrected body and, correspondingly, its absolute continuity with the crucified body, so that it is not obviously “transformed” into something else, as it was in Paul. One could argue that it is no longer a normal body, because even in these Gospels Jesus seems to be able to show up through locked doors, and so
some
kind of transformation appears to have occurred. But it needs to be remembered that even during Jesus’s life his body allegedly had superhuman abilities—it was able to walk on water, for example, and to become “transfigured” in the presence of his disciples. And so the stress of Luke and John appears to be that it really was the same body, raised from the dead.

This was the view that ultimately became the dominant one throughout Christianity in later periods, in no small measure because, as we will see in Chapter 8, some Christians denied that Jesus ever had a body
at all
. A stress on the physicality of Jesus was meant to put any such view to rest. Jesus had a real body during his life and even after his resurrection. Paul’s stress that it was a different kind of body—one made of spirit instead of flesh and blood—came to be deemphasized with the passing of time.

It is hard to know what the very earliest Christians, before Paul, thought about Jesus’s body after the resurrection—whether they had a view more like that found in Paul, our earliest witness, or more like the one found Luke and John, who were writing later. What is certain is that the earliest followers of Jesus believed that Jesus had come back to life, in the body, and that this was a body that had real bodily characteristics: it could be seen and touched, and it had a voice that could be heard. Why did they come to think this, at the very beginning of the Christian tradition? What made them believe that Jesus had been bodily raised from the dead? Something did. And I think we know what it was. Some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after he had been crucified.

I
T IS INDISPUTABLE THAT
some of the followers of Jesus came to think that he had been raised from the dead, and something had to have happened to make them think so. Our earliest records are consistent on this point, and I think they provide us with historically reliable information in one key respect: the disciples’ belief in the resurrection was based on visionary experiences.

I should stress that it was visions, and nothing else, that led the first disciples to believe in the resurrection. Frequently it is stated that a combination of things led to this faith: the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus. My view is that an empty tomb had nothing to do with it. This is not only because the reports of an empty tomb are highly doubtful, as I have tried to show, but even more because an empty tomb would not produce faith, as I will try to demonstrate, and even more important because the earliest records indicate that the tomb did
not
produce faith.