There is no evidence for a biblical jesus

[Sparko]

I'd never heard that before. From Biblestudyaids:
http://biblestudyaids.net/nt/vincent...apter%2015.htm

The period at which Christ became a quickening Spirit is the resurrection, after which His body began to take on the characteristics of a spiritual body.

I agree I am reading my own opinion into what I claim Paul believed. But I do think I have evidence to support my opinions.


If by "non-corporeal" you mean "no body", then I would disagree. Remember, I am arguing that Paul believed that a spiritual body could be solid. Think of Marcion's Christ, for example. His Christ had a solid body. It could walk around, speak to people, interact with them. According to Marcion, people thought that Christ was a man. That's the kind of body I think Paul believed Jesus had after his Resurrection.

Marcion was a heretic and a gnostic.

I would distinguish between "ghost" and "solid spiritual body". But that's a good point. The Gospels of Luke and John refer to the Risen Christ as having flesh, which is at odds to my reading of Paul. gMark and gMatthew don't describe the risen body as "flesh".


That matches what I think as well. The only difference is that I believe Paul didn't think Christ's body after resurrection was flesh. It was Something Else.

So you are calling Paul a gnostic heretic and expect Christians here to agree with you? Really?

[Adrift]

first, a "quickening spirit" refers to a "living soul" or a spirit that becomes flesh and blood in the womb. Not the other way around. "quickening" in Elizabethan english means "living" - it is talking about where each came from. as it explains:

1 cor 15:47 The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven.



second, you are just reading your own opinion into what you claim Paul believed because there is no biblical evidence to support it. To a Jew a spirit was non-corporeal. They believed God was spirit for instance. Jesus specifically told his apostles that he was not a spirit when they saw him after his resurrection, and he ate with them to show that he was flesh and bone. Now if Jews thought that the resurrected person was some sort of solidified spirit, then Jesus would not have proven anything to them would he? They would have already believed he was a solid spirit. But he ate with them and let them touch him to show that he was NOT a spirit, but a fleshly body. He even had his wounds on his body showing it was the SAME body.

Paul believed the same as the rest of the Jews, the Pharisees. That when you died your spirit went to be with God and one day you would be resurrected and your old body would be risen and reunited with your spirit. Paul teaches the same thing in his letters.

It seems to me that NT Wright leans towards your interpretation of the passage. His chapter on these passages are dense with information, so in citing him I tried to narrow in on areas I thought were exceptionally relevant, but the whole chapter is very good, and goes into a lot more detail than I'm able (or allowed) to provide here. I suppose I could paraphrase a lot of the other material, but I don't know that I would be able to articulate it nearly as well, and it'd take more time than I'm willing to spend to lay it all down (probably would be very long, and not as interesting to read either).

The Resurrection of the Son of God, NT Wright, pg. 351-354

Though it is dangerous to generalize in so widespread and pluriform a language as Koine Greek, it is generally true...that adjectives formed with the ending -ikos have ethical or functional meanings rather than referring to the material or substance of which something is composed. Had Paul wanted to contrast ‘a body composed of psyche’ with ‘a body composed of pneuma’ (even supposing that that would have made any sense), he might have chosen dififerent adjectives; granted that neither psychinos nor pneumatinos is found in extant literature, Paul was perfectly capable of coining a few helpful words here and there. In any case, the classical usage of pneumatikos well illustrates the meaning that seems to be in Paul's mind. Aristotle speaks of wombs that are ‘swollen with air’, hysterai pneumatikai,"' and Vitruvius (first century BC) speaks of a machine ‘moved by wind’, pneumatikon organon The adjective describes, not what something is composed, but what it is animated by. It is the difference between speaking of a ship made of steel or wood on the one hand and a ship driven by steam or wind on the other. The only major translation I know that attempts to come to terms with this is that of the Jerusalem Bible: ‘when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit. If the soul has its own embodiment, so does the spirit have its own embodiment.

...

The second theme which may be lurking in the undergrowth is a determination on Paul's part to rule out any suggestion of one particular interpretation of his key text, Genesis 1 and 2, which we know to have been current at the time and which may have been held by some within the Corinthian church. In Philo’s allegorical exegesis of Genesis, the first man, in Genesis 1, was ‘heavenly’ (ouranios), while the man created from the dust of the earth in Genesis 2 was ‘earthy’ (geinos). The ‘heavenly’ man, according to Philo, was not physical, and hence not corruptible; those attributes belong to the second man. This reading of Genesis suggests that the real destiny of humankind is to leave the created order, the world of space, time and matter, entirely, and to make one’s way back to the primal state of humanity, the ‘first man’, in whose existence of pure mind and spirit the physical universe is no longer relevant.
To this rich mixture of Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy Paul can have only one answer, and it is very germane to his point: when Genesis 2 speaks of the creator making Adam as a living psyche, this was not a secondary form of humanity, but its primary form. What humans now need is not to get away from, or back behind, such an existence, but rather to go on to the promised state of the final Adam, in which this physical body will not be abandoned, but will be given new animation by the creator's own Spirit. Paul does not believe in a retum to a primal state, but in a redemption from the sin and death which has corrupted the primal state, in order that a way forward be found into the new creation which, though always in the mind of the creator, has never yet existed. And the ‘heavenly man’ is not one who, unsullied by the world of creation, remains in a purely non-physical state; he is the lord who will come from heaven (verses 47-9, corresponding closely to Philippians 3.20-21). He will enable other humans, not to escape from the physical world back to an original ‘image of God’, but to go on to bear, in the newly resurrected body, the ‘image of the man from heaven’.

...

He (Paul) has had the first two chapters of Genesis in mind throughout, and he now proceeds to draw on them both. Verse 44b provides his firm basic statement, his initial answer to the question, ‘What sort of body will the dead have when they are raised?’ They will have a soma pneumatikon, a body animated by, enlivened by, the Spirit of the true God, exactly as Paul has said more extensively in several other passages (the note for this provides Romans 8:9-11, and for background Job 33:4; Ps. 104:30; Ezek. 36:27; 37:9f, 14). This helps to provide a satisfactory explanation for why he has homed in on this unique phrase at this point in the chapter. It is the most elegant way he can find of saying both that the new body is the result of the Spirit’s work (answering ‘how does it come to be?') and that it is the appropriate vessel for the Spirit's life (answering ‘what sort of a thing is it?).
In fact, this is the first point in which pneuma has been mentioned in the whole chapter, because it is at last the point where Paul is giving his answer both to ‘what sort of body will it be?’ and also ‘how will God do it?’ If there is a soma psychikon, he declares — to which the answer is, of course there is: that is the normal sort of human soma, a body animated by the ordinary breath of life - then there is also a soma pneumatikon, a body animated by the Spirit of the living God, even though only one example of such a body has so far appeared.

© source where applicable

bold sections are mine.

[seanD]

Because he is arguing that the resurrection body, and therefore Christ was not a fleshly body but some sort of solidified spirit substance. But Jesus himself is clear that his glorified body was flesh:

Luke 24:39
Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

To claim otherwise is gnostic heresy.

I agree that it was a fleshly substance -- looked like flesh and felt like flesh -- only not the same flesh as before. The problem with declaring that it was flesh like before is that you run into a contradiction with 1 Cor 15:50. I think the contention is what he's technically calling it -- a solidified spirit. I wouldn't call it that simply because I don't what it is, but I don't really see where he was that heretical in his description of what it was.

[Adrift]

I agree that it was a fleshly substance -- looked like flesh and felt like flesh -- only not the same flesh as before. The problem with declaring that it was flesh like before is that you run into a contradiction with 1 Cor 15:50. I think the contention is what he's technically calling it -- a solidified spirit. I wouldn't call it that simply because I don't what it is, but I don't really see where he was that heretical in his description of what it was.

Not sure if this clarifies things for you, but here again is NT Wright's answer to any possible contradiction:

The Resurrection of the Son of God, NT Wright, pg. 359

Why then does he say ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit God's kingdom’? Ever since the second century (and increasingly in scholarship during the twentieth) doubters have used this clause to question whether Paul really believed in the resurrection of the body. In fact, the second half of verse 50 already explains, in Hebraic parallelism with the first half, more or less what he means, as Paul's regular use of ‘flesh’ would itself indicate: ‘flesh and blood’ is a way of referring to ordinary, corruptible, decaying human existence. It does not simply mean, as it has so often been taken to mean, ‘physical humanity’ in the normal modern sense, but ‘the present physical humanity (as opposed to the future one), which is subject to decay and death'. The referent of the phrase is not the presently dead but the presently living, who need not to be raised but to be changed; and this brings us back to the dual focus of verses 53 and 54. Both categories of humans need to acquire the new, transformed type of body.

© source where applicable

[lilpixieofterror]

I agree that it was a fleshly substance -- looked like flesh and felt like flesh -- only not the same flesh as before. The problem with declaring that it was flesh like before is that you run into a contradiction with 1 Cor 15:50. I think the contention is what he's technically calling it -- a solidified spirit. I wouldn't call it that simply because I don't what it is, but I don't really see where he was that heretical in his description of what it was.

But Sean, it would only be a contradiction, if you believe Paul literal means 'flesh and blood' instead of 'weakness, sinfulness, etc' and spirit meaning 'strength'. Of course, I do agree with you that the Skeptics running to amen GakuseiDon's post understand that he isn't agreeing with them, but that doesn't make his position anymore orthodox or right either.

[Sparko]

I agree that it was a fleshly substance -- looked like flesh and felt like flesh -- only not the same flesh as before. The problem with declaring that it was flesh like before is that you run into a contradiction with 1 Cor 15:50. I think the contention is what he's technically calling it -- a solidified spirit. I wouldn't call it that simply because I don't what it is, but I don't really see where he was that heretical in his description of what it was.

The Greeks had a problem with flesh being "evil" and so they came up with all sorts of excuses and heresies claiming that Jesus did not bodily resurrect in the same body he died in. These gnostic heresies have been condemned for over 2000 years now.

If someone is denying the fleshly resurrection of Jesus and claiming he was some sort of solidified spirit, then they are gnostic. And they will need to change their faith designation to Christian (other) which Gakusei already has, but if you are agreeing with that, then perhaps you should also.

[seanD]

Not sure if this clarifies things for you, but here again is NT Wright's answer to any possible contradiction:

The Resurrection of the Son of God, NT Wright, pg. 359

Why then does he say ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit God's kingdom’? Ever since the second century (and increasingly in scholarship during the twentieth) doubters have used this clause to question whether Paul really believed in the resurrection of the body. In fact, the second half of verse 50 already explains, in Hebraic parallelism with the first half, more or less what he means, as Paul's regular use of ‘flesh’ would itself indicate: ‘flesh and blood’ is a way of referring to ordinary, corruptible, decaying human existence. It does not simply mean, as it has so often been taken to mean, ‘physical humanity’ in the normal modern sense, but ‘the present physical humanity (as opposed to the future one), which is subject to decay and death'. The referent of the phrase is not the presently dead but the presently living, who need not to be raised but to be changed; and this brings us back to the dual focus of verses 53 and 54. Both categories of humans need to acquire the new, transformed type of body.

© source where applicable

The problem for me here is that Paul goes to great pains to distinguish the different fleshly makeups, such as 1 Cor 15:40-41, which indicates to me that he's expressing a different fleshly composite than the one before. But I don't see where I"m necessarily disagreeing with Wright when he says: "The referent of the phrase is not the presently dead but the presently living, who need not to be raised but to be changed; and this brings us back to the dual focus of verses 53 and 54. Both categories of humans need to acquire the new, transformed type of body."

.

The Greeks had a problem with flesh being "evil" and so they came up with all sorts of excuses and heresies claiming that Jesus did not bodily resurrect in the same body he died in. These gnostic heresies have been condemned for over 2000 years now.

If someone is denying the fleshly resurrection of Jesus and claiming he was some sort of solidified spirit, then they are gnostic. And they will need to change their faith designation to Christian (other) which Gakusei already has, but if you are agreeing with that, then perhaps you should also.

Oh please, quit with the religious dramatics. Didn't I say that I didn't agree with what he called it? I wouldn't call it a "solidified spirit" simply because I don't what it is and what it's made of. All I know from scripture is that it's a "transformation body." The gnostics, or more specifically the docetists, didn't deny Jesus had a different body after resurrection because they denied Jesus was ever a fleshly being before and after the resurrection. There's big difference there.

[Adrift]

The problem for me here is that Paul goes to great pains to distinguish the different fleshly makeups, such as 1 Cor 15:40-41, which indicates to me that he's expressing a different fleshly composite than the one before. But I don't see where I"m necessarily disagreeing with Wright when he says: "The referent of the phrase is not the presently dead but the presently living, who need not to be raised but to be changed; and this brings us back to the dual focus of verses 53 and 54. Both categories of humans need to acquire the new, transformed type of body."

Wright agrees that Paul is trying to "establish that there is different kinds of physicality, each with its own proper characteristics", but also that "Paul is careful not to imply that the analogies he is offering in the present subjection are actually analyses of how the resurrection itself will be. He is here setting up a network of metaphor and simile, not metonymy."

If I'm reading Wright correctly, the distinctions in these characteristics are used to represent types of glory. That's why Paul goes into things like the splendor of the sun and other stars (the luminosity is a metaphor for glory), and why he then leads in with "it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory".

"for Paul the problem was not the body itself, but sin and death which had taken up residence in it, producing corruption, dishonour and weakness. Being human is good; being an embodied human is good; what is bad is being a rebellious human, a decaying human, a human dishonoured through bodily sin and bodily death. ....he sees that the true solution to the human plight is to replace the 'soul' as the animating principle of the body with the 'spirit'

[Challenger Grim]

I was reading the Terror by Arthur Machen and thought a passage from the close was... appropriate here.
http://arthursclassicnovels.com/machen/terrmach10.html

"And yet," he said, "it is not a true end, or rather, it is like all the ends of human inquiry, it leads one to a great mystery. We must confess that what has happened might have happened at any time in the history of the world. It did not happen till a year ago as a matter of fact, and therefore we made up our minds that it never could happen; or, one would better say, it was outside the range even of imagination. But this is our way. Most people are quite sure that the Black Death -- otherwise the plague -- will never invade Europe again. They have made up their complacent minds that it was due to dirt and bad drainage. As a matter of fact the plague had nothing to do with dirt or with drains: and there is nothing to prevent its ravaging England tomorrow. But if you tell people so, they won't believe you. They won't believe in anything that isn't there at the particular moment when you are talking to them. As with the plague, so with the terror. We could not believe that such a thing could ever happen. Remnant said, truly enough, that whatever it was, it was outside theory, outside our theory. Flatland cannot believe in the cube or the sphere."

I agreed with all this. I added that sometimes the world was incapable of seeing, much less believing, that which was before its own eyes.

...

You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you can't see what you don't believe. It was so during the time of the terror. All this bears out what Coleridge said as to the necessity of having the idea before the facts could be of any service to one. Of course, he was right; mere facts, without the correlating idea, are nothing and lead to no conclusion.

And so we see that the atheist saying there is no evidence for Jesus is like the blind man saying there are no rainbows.

[seanD]

Wright agrees that Paul is trying to "establish that there is different kinds of physicality, each with its own proper characteristics", but also that "Paul is careful not to imply that the analogies he is offering in the present subjection are actually analyses of how the resurrection itself will be. He is here setting up a network of metaphor and simile, not metonymy."

If I'm reading Wright correctly, the distinctions in these characteristics are used to represent types of glory. That's why Paul goes into things like the splendor of the sun and other stars (the luminosity is a metaphor for glory), and why he then leads in with "it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory".

"for Paul the problem was not the body itself, but sin and death which had taken up residence in it, producing corruption, dishonour and weakness. Being human is good; being an embodied human is good; what is bad is being a rebellious human, a decaying human, a human dishonoured through bodily sin and bodily death. ....he sees that the true solution to the human plight is to replace the 'soul' as the animating principle of the body with the 'spirit'

I got to disagree with this, and this actually sounds like what I've heard from skeptics who deny Paul taught a transformed fleshly body. Paul is distinguishing the different composites in a fleshly context. If he was being metaphorical then he could have used the word soma in the context of 1 Cor 15:40-41. Instead he used sarx, which tells me he was targeting specifically a different composite makeup of the resurrection body -- one before the transformation (mortal) and one after (immortal). But then again, I'm just an amateur; I'm no scholar.

[seanD]

I got to disagree with this, and this actually sounds like what I've heard from skeptics who deny Paul taught a transformed fleshly body. Paul is distinguishing the different composites in a fleshly context. If he was being metaphorical then he could have used the word soma in the context of 1 Cor 15:40-41. Instead he used sarx, which tells me he was targeting specifically a different composite makeup of the resurrection body -- one before the transformation (mortal) and one after (immortal). But then again, I'm just an amateur; I'm no scholar.

Correction: 1 Cor 15:39.

[Adrift]

I got to disagree with this, and this actually sounds like what I've heard from skeptics who deny Paul taught a transformed fleshly body. Paul is distinguishing the different composites in a fleshly context. If he was being metaphorical then he could have used the word soma in the context of 1 Cor 15:40-41. Instead he used sarx, which tells me he was targeting specifically a different composite makeup of the resurrection body -- one before the transformation (mortal) and one after (immortal). But then again, I'm just an amateur; I'm no scholar.

Correction: 1 Cor 15:39.

As stated, Wright (and other scholars) don't deny a type of physical transformation, but the main transformation of the flesh itself is from corruptible and prone to death, to one that sees no corruption, one that sees no death, and that's specifically because the new body is animated by the indwelling spirit rather than the soul.

Possibly of note, Wright writes, "The distinction between 'heavenly' and 'earthly' bodies in verse 40 anticipates that of verses 47-9; though it is important that, whearas here the word he (Paul) uses for 'earthly' is epigeios, 'upon-the-earth-ly', a word principally of location rather than composition, the word in verses 47-9 is choikos, 'earthy', a word describing phyisical compostion. Subtle changes like this are important in a carefully argued passage, as any politician or speech-writer, never mind philosopher or theologian, will tell you." (bolded mine)

[Adrift]

Something that continually occurs to me throughout this discussion is the Jewish belief in preserving the bones of the deceased. They were extremely careful in how they handled dead bodies, and how they gathered up the bones of those bodies and put them in ossuaries. The physicality of the fleshy body itself was extremely important in the grand scheme of the general resurrection, and this seems to me to be a concept that Paul, trained as a Pharisee, does not seem to wholly abandon. Even if the body returns to dust (as it must), there's still some sort of importance attached to the material substance, and I think this is probably relevant to the context while reading these passages.

[GakuseiDon]

I would distinguish between "ghost" and "solid spiritual body". But that's a good point. The Gospels of Luke and John refer to the Risen Christ as having flesh, which is at odds to my reading of Paul. gMark and gMatthew don't describe the risen body as "flesh".


That matches what I think as well. The only difference is that I believe Paul didn't think Christ's body after resurrection was flesh. It was Something Else.

So you are calling Paul a gnostic heretic and expect Christians here to agree with you? Really?

I don't think Paul was a gnostic heretic. I think he was an Adoptionist heretic.

I don't think you can divorce early Christians' views on the resurrected body, with their views of what the world will be when the general resurrection occurs. The thinking of that time was that there was a firmament, above of which was the realm of God and perfection, and below of which is the earth, the realm of decay and corruption. At the end of time, the firmament will be rolled up, and the purifying spiritual fires in the Heavens will burn away all decay and corruption on earth.

There will be a new Heaven and a new earth, and we will have bodies to suit. These won't be the old fleshly bodies, the ones that get sick and grow old. These will be transformed bodies. We will have bodies like angels, which already live in the realm of perfection.

The mindset you need to put yourself into is one where it was thought everything was made up of elemental particles, or "atoms". These atoms were earth, water, air and fire. So they used to wonder, "What material does Heaven consist of?" "What are the bodies of angels and demons made from?" "what kind of body is the resurrected one?" These are questions that don't really exercise us today. But it was very important 2000 years ago.

I believe that Paul thought the resurrected body will be an incorruptible one not made from flesh. By the Second Century, the prevalent view among Christians was that the resurrected body will be an incorruptible one made of flesh. Other than what the resurrected body was made from, I don't think there was difference in the two views. Both involve a transformation of our fleshly bodies, which will be raised in a new state of incorruption.

[seanD]

I think he was an Adoptionist heretic.

I believe that Paul thought the resurrected body will be an incorruptible one not made from flesh.

Now that's where we disagree.