Let me start by quoting two paragraphs from one of my posts in that other thread:
AFAIK, any person who ascribes any degree of approach to accuracy to Matthew, Luke, or John, or to either of the two endings of Mark, will have to admit that something happened that changed the lives of Jesus’s followers from rather doltish and fairly cowardly individuals into people standing against torture and death for a truth in which they believed. The various theories to explain away the post-Easter stories suffer from the fact that, on the presumption that the Gospels are reporting something anywhere near the truth, almost immediately people began acting quite different than they had. Something convinced them.
I think a lot of skeptics have a big problem with the idea of the resuscitation of Jesus’s physical body – it sounds like a particularly cheesy “B” horror movie – “Night of the Undead Messiah.” (And in the back of my mind I can see Jesus chuckling at that idea and doing three or four stiff-legged arms-extended Boris Karloff-style zombie steps, grinning all the while.)
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Now, there are arguments, based in the gap of time between Jesus’s death and Paul’s first writings (and the Gospels are definitely later than at least the early Pauline writings, even for the more conservative folks who subscribe to early dates for them), that Jesus’s post-death appearances were a sort of urban legend. Spong in particular founds his Christology in the idea that the Apostles felt a strong sense of “continuing in His spirit” in the Upper Room after His death – the “He was known to them in the breaking of the bread” thing. Others argue that the doctrine of the Resurrection might have been founded in hallucinations, misperceptions, misunderstandings of the rather mystical teachings of early Christianity, etc.
I don’t buy it. I think there had to be some stong, unexpected, life-changing event that transformed them from how they depicted themselves, or had themselves depicted, in the Gospels, as rather dense assclowns with a strong sense of loyalty, into the wise, staunch-in-adversity figures of Acts and the Epistles.
Now, as to what actually happened:
The important thing to remember is that the audience Paul was addressing in Corinth in I Corinthians 15 had a quite different worldview than we have today. Today the base question on the issue of “afterlife” is, quite simply, is there one, or not? Do people as an entity die when their body does, or does something survive the body?
But that was not the case back then. There was almost universal subscription to the belief that a “spirit” survived death of the body – but we are not well equipped to grasp the nature of that belief. Because the spirit was effectively impotent – it had no body with which to interact with the world, it could not gain nutrition except by the kindness of the living, it could not do much of anything except survive, in a regretful state bemoaning what it had failed to do while in the body.
What Paul says in I Corinthians is that this sort of half-assed survival is not what happened to Jesus – and the writers of the Gospels are quick to dispell the notion that those who had post-Resurrection encounters had seen a ghost. (Ghost and spirit are synonymous in the ancient languages, and indeed in English down to about 1700.)
But he is also careful not to say that the physical, mortal, human body of Jesus was resuscitated and made to walk again (see the 2nd paragraph of my quote).
Rather, he proclaims something completely new, and outside of Paul saying it as true of Jesus, something beyond human experience: “It is raised a spiritual body.” That is, the Resurrected Jesus has the capabilities of a living, incarnate human being, not the limited ones of a ghost, but not the limitations which we mortals have. The resurrected body can eat fish, but is not stopped by locked doors. It can appear and disappear like some cheezy CGI animation – but when it’s present, it’s as real and touchable as any living person. (John, usually classified as the most “spiritual” Gospel, is quick to stress this point.)
Now, what we have here is an unfalsifiable statement. It’s pretty evident that the corpses of human beings don’t suddenly revivify on the third day after death. And the evidence for survival in spirit form is pretty iffy – in general, even the most rational and experimental-method-enthusiast of people don’t honor commitments they made to return as ghosts and perform simple tasks to prove their survival – yet about three people in ten can describe incidents where they have had experiences most easily explained (barring hallucination or self-deception) as an encounter with someone surviving in spirit after death. And their evidence is irreproducible and anecdotal, which causes the typical skeptical person to discount it.
But the question of whether a person can be raised to new life as a spiritual body is one not subject to any such tests. Evidently it has only happened the once, so far, although according to Paul it’s in the future of all of us, at an eschatological time. So no tests can be devised to decide whether such a thing is possible or not.
In fact, we can only get the vaguest hints of what a “spiritual body” is supposed to be like, from the handful of post-Resurrection accounts and from the statements in I Corinthians 15 – and even that is presuming some truth value to what they report and describe.
But there you have it – it’s not a resuscitation of a three-days-dead body, exactly – though the evidence of the Crucifixion is present on the resurrected body. But neither is it a ghost story. It’s something new, wierd, and different, without analog anywhere else.
And I cannot blame people for doubting it. But for my money, there’s definitely something to it – both in the change it wrought in the Apostles and in my own experience.
