Just to add fuel to the fire, Paul claims in 1 Corinthians that bodies can’t be physically resurrected and calls people “fools” for believing they can. He claims that resurrections can only happen with “spirit bodies.”
I also wonder where Jesus’ physical body is supposed to be now. Did he take it to Heaven with him? If so, why? Is he still walking around in it or does he have it hanging in a closet up there? How did it survive the ascension once he got into outer space?
Questions to ponder.
It’s probably stored right next to Elijah’s and Melchezedek’s.
Dude, this a thread about people choosing pepperoni over anchovies. You can’t just come here and say that pizza sucks.
The wound on his side was still there. He asks Thomas to touch that one, too.
I see where your post is going, when people die, they have a good reason to be dead and if you bring them back they just die again. If you poison someone and bring him back, you better have that antidote ready.
That said, Jesus didn’t come back as a breathing bleeding mortal, He came back as a Glorified body. He entered locked rooms, appeared in faraway places without travelling from one to the other. He wasn’t bound by our limitations.
I asked Him and He said it’s because He likes the whistling sound they make when He flies around.
I prefer to call them “claims”.
Either that was his same body, or it wasn’t. A lot of effort by early theologians was expended arguing over this very question. But suffice to say, if that was his original body running around, it seems a little strange that something like the coagulation of blood, rigor, decay, and all the rest were healed whereas some superficial wounds were not.
So, then, you’re saying that the holes in his new spiritual body were self-re-inflicted in some kind of emo cry for attention?
It just looked the way it did when he died (actually the way his followers expected it to look). The internal functioning wasn’t there (I would say). I don’t think the resurrected Jesus pooped or breathed or bled.
Am I the only one who read this and immediately thought “ZOMBIE JESUS ! !” :eek:
If you went through all that trouble for a set of new piercings, would you just let 'em close up?
They expected him to be dead, so that’s not it. 
Actually, I’ve made that point before, DT – I remember commenting that the Resurrection is not supposed to be “Night of the Undead Messiah.” (Although this does have possibilities in re the blind-faith people thinking that Jesus wants them not to use their brains! ;))
I’m going to ask the participants to allow one distinction to be made: between Jesus’s Resurrection on the one hand, and all the assorted miracles of healing the sick, raising the dead, etc., on the other.
The latter group, Biblical critics analyzing the Gospels tend to see as having been told as signs of Jesus’s authority and power. Specifics vary from miracle story to miracle story, but the bottom line is that each has some relationship to a spiritual point Jesus is making. In, for example, the story of the paralyzed man at Capernaum (Mark 2:1-12), what Jesus initially does is to pronounce that the man’s sins are forgiven. The scribes present think this is blasphemy, since only God can forgive sins. Jesus asks which is easier, to heal the paralysis or forgive sins, and then proves he has the authority to forgive sins by telling the man to pick up his pallet and walk. Likewise, Jesus makes the point that he is the one who bestows life by raising Lazarus, dead three days(John 11:1-44). It’s often worthwhile to read these miracle stories as if they were fables, with an eye for the spiritual/moral point being made.
The Resurrection, on the other hand, is something vastly different. Even though Jesus had in fact explicitly prophesied it (or at least the Gospel stories say so; Diogenes may have words on that), his actually doing it shocks the pants off everybody who encounters him. And we’re left with a peculiarly odd portrait of the post-Resurrection Jesus: on the one hand, he bears the wounds of the Crucifixion, eats meals with disciples, and so on, but on the other, he mysteriously appears and disappears, even in locked rooms, seems unrecognizable to people who had known him well less than a week before… 'Tis a pozzlement!
The solution is in the passage, I Corinthians 15, that Diogenes mentioned earlier. But not in the way most people approach it.
PRR, Der Trihs and others would hold up as superstition the whole idea of post-death survival in any form. And the conventional wisdom of our day would consent to this – “When you die, you die dead, all over.”
But for the people of the First Century, Jews and Greeks alike and presumably most other Mediterranean cultures as well, the reality was something quite different. When your body died, your spirit definitely survived it – this was the near-universal belief. But a disembodied spirit, though immortal, can do little but gibber and haunt; it has no means of affecting the material world. For that, one needs a body. But a body is mortal, subject to hunger, fatigue, injury, handicap…
What Paul sees is that the Resurrection got the best of both worlds: a spiritual body not subject to the limitations of our mortal human bodies, nor to the limitations which “everybody knows” impede a disembodied spirit. The Resurrected Christ, with spiritual body, is ruler over the physical world, not answerable to it. And such, we are promised, will be our own fates at the General Resurrection – at least according to Paul.
Jesus did not heal his wounds because they had no effect on him, and served to make him recognizable to those who had seen him tortured and crucified.
Now, I am not prepared to actively argue for the reality of this bit of theology against all comers. But what I feel is important is to recognize that the conventional wisdom about what happens at death in those days is vastly different than today’s. Paul’s innovation was not survival after death; that was a given. Rather, it was having a body with which to affect the real material world after death that was what he saw as entirely new.
The issue is less the healing of the wounds or not, but why some were healed and others not, or why he would have some wounds but not all. Seems like a real jumble of ad hoc theology.
Not sure if this was directed at me, but…
I thought hard about putting an explanation for my comment, but others seem to have gotten my context. My basic point was that miraculous events like spontaneous healing and ressurection are, in fact, miraculous, and not subject to our ability to scrutinize and fully comprehend. Asking for explanations implies that there are rules and limits involved in the miracles, which turns them from miracles to, well, spellcasting.
He couldn’t.
But people believed it, just like the tent show healers of today.
Nothing new under the sun, nor nothing old.
John 20:24-28:
But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.
27 Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My LORD and my God.
29 Jesus saith unto him, BBBRRRRAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNZZZZ!!! And there was much wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and spraying of bodily fluids.
Another post in the Unfortunate Connection between Username and Post Content: A Continuing Series. 
Since Der Trihs asked, I shall note that if you are thinking of a sin in the classical manner, rater like a legal judgement, no one can pay for someone else. Yet Jesus’s ministry doesn’t generally treat it this way. When he pointed out some sin guy A did to guy B, he abrogated to himself the right and power to forgive said sin, even though he had not apparently been involved. In short, he acted as if he (God), was the party chiefly concerned and offended in all such crimes. When you sin, you may harm another human, but you are breaking God’s law. This incurs a debt, which you cannot pay. It is in fact an infinite debt. Now, an infinite debt cannot be settled by finite creatures: no matter how much they repay, they can never find enough. But Giod can. And in fact, Christians believe that God did pay other people’s debts to and for himself. The Son of God made good the debts of the servants of God, and promised that they would no longer be merely men, but the children of the Lord God himself.
Aside from that, were the marks wounds or marks of glory?
The problem comes when folks want us to believe these miracles happened. At that point, asking some snarky but plausible questions about why certain things happened or didn’t seems fair.
Why would Jesus need to have wounds in order for his disciples to recognize him anyway? Why wouldn’t they recognize the face they had spent all that time wandering around with and looking at? And if Jesus chose to have holes in his ghosty hands, isn’t that kinda, well, sorta emo?
The demonstration was, of course, at least intended to “prove” that the Jesus walking around was really the same dude who was up on the cross and not some switcheroo. In light of all the mumbo-jumbo about spiritual bodies, though, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And of course, that also raises the question then: maybe they didn’t recognize him because it wasn’t, in fact, him? Maybe it was his brother, who stole his body and then cut himself up in order to keep the whole thing going.
And maybe Mary got knocked up after all, and made up the story about virgin conception to avoid condemnation. Heck, there are even ways to get pregnant without breaking a hymen.
Again, the issue is the plausibility of the miracle claim, given what we are told about it and what sort of alternatives there are. Miracles may be able to do anything, but then so are stories.
That’s even more ridiculous though. God set up this entire situation. It’s as if a feudal lord raped a young woman, took her child and then demanded life long service from the child for the high crime of being born out of wedlock.
Enough… what? Are you suggesting that there is some sort of spiritual money? Is God not able to pay his mortgage on the universe because of all his broke tenants who can’t make good on the rent? Why does God need anything “repaid?” Just what is the debt composed of? How is it incurred?
Right, for this God, apparently committing human sacrifice on himself makes himself feel better so now he doesn’t worry about the debts?
Or was Jesus somehow full of this spiritual money, and breaking him open was like a pinata so that God now was paid back? Just what is the mechanism here?
You said that there was a debt: so where is it? And how does killing a guy resolve the debt? If I don’t pay my rent, will the government killing a random baby help pay it off?