The Resurrected Body

One of the oddities of the Resurrection of the Jesus was the body that Jesus now had.

It was indeed a physical body that could be touched (Matthew 28:9; Luke 24:39) and could touch things (Luke 24:30; John 21:13). He could breathe (John 20:22) and he could eat (Luke 24:41-43; John 21:12-15). It was a physical body in every sense that one can imagine. Indeed, it was the very same body that Jesus had before he was resurrected. We know this from the fact that it had the scars of the crucifixion (Luke 24:39; John 20:20, 27).

Yet, while it was the same body, it was also a changed body. The people who knew him best did not always recognize him at first (Luke 24:15-31; John 20:4). The body was able to appear and disappear (Luke 24:31, 36; John 20:19, 26).

This was not simply a resuscitated corpse (John 11:44) but a complete retranslation of the same body in a new context. This is something that had never happened before and has yet to happen again.

Interestingly enough, in the pre-modern world, particularly among the Greco-Romans, the idea of disembodied ghosts was not an unbelievable idea. However, the concept of a resurrected physical body was considered complete nonsense by those  within the Greek worldview (Acts 17:18, 32). The idea that humans are holistic beings in which body and spirit are indivisible is a Hebrew concept. The body does not have a soul; the body is a soul (נֶפֶשׁ nephesh; ψυχή psyche).

The importance of this for Christians is that while everyone dies and both body and spirit afre destroyed and "sleep" in the earth, one day all believers will be resurrected (both body and spirit) into glorified bodies like Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:52; 2 Corinthians 3:18). This is why Jesus is referred to as the first fruits of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20, 23).

Three Reasons for the Resurrection

1)      Jesus was vindicated. When God raised Jesus from the dead, it proved that God supported Jesus’ message and claims. It proved Jesus’ claims to be a prophet of God and the Messiah. It proved his claims of the coming of the Kingdom of God, the return of God to Zion, and the imminent judgment of Israel by God via destruction by Rome.

2)      Death and Evil were defeated. The Resurrection proved that evil and death could do their worst on Jesus and his followers but that God would ultimately prevail. Death cannot hold Jesus.

3)      New Creation inaugurated. The Resurrection of Jesus was evidence that God was fulfilling his promise to save the world and resurrect his followers into unperishable bodies. Jesus was the “first fruits” of that promise.

Three Arguments for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus

1)      Hundreds of people were witnesses to the resurrection, many of them known historical personages, writing their accounts contemporaneously.

2)      Saul of Tarsus was a well-known zealot and persecutor of the followers of Jesus, who denied the resurrection and used violence in an attempt to squash the nascent Christian movement. His experience of seeing the resurrected Jesus on his journey to Damascus was the cause of this immediate conversion to Christianity. This historical episode is well-founded and by various sources, including three by Saul (now Paul) himself.

3)      The third argument is based on the cultural expectation of the Messiah to which Jesus made his claim and his followers agreed. For a century prior to Jesus and a century following, many individuals made claims to be the Messiah. The three qualifications of a Messiah were as follows: sit on the throne of David, rebuild the Temple, and defeat Israel’s enemies. Yet, every single one of them died by some form or another, usually by Rome, disproving to everyone, particularly, their followers, that they were not the Messiah. A dead Messiah was a failed Messiah. It would be something of a historical anomaly for people to say, “You know that guy who was killed by the Romans … maybe he was the Messiah.” That doesn’t make historic sense. In Jesus case, there had to have been something that superseded the basic disqualification of being put to death by Rome.

Here are Four Primary Theological Reasons Why Jesus Was Crucified.

1)      Jesus as prophet was performing a prophetic act predicting the destruction of Israel by Rome if Israel did not repent its current mode of being the people of God.

2)      God saw Jesus sinless and selfless obedience unto death as a pleasing act of love and devotion. Therefore, endorsing both his message, his means, and his claim to be the Messiah, God raised Jesus from the dead.

3)      In an act of grace, God chose to resurrect all who repent and follow Jesus, declaring that he would identify all such people with the sinless, self-less, obedient live and death of Jesus.

4)      Jesus intended his followers to use his life, message, and obedient death as an example of what true discipleship and true humanity is like.

Resurrection, Religion, and the Fear of Death

I've often hear people espouse the theory that humanity created religion in order to deal with the concept of death. This theory goes that people feared the finality of death and conjured up the idea of an afterlife in order to avoid confronting reality. This theory is probably not without some merit. I am sure there are plenty of people in this world who embrace religion merely to escape this fear.

Based upon their burial practices, there is some evidence that the Neanderthals may have believed in an afterlife. Certainly, the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Canaanite religions believed in a spiritual place after death.

Interestingly enough, the Hebrews and ancient Israelites actually did not believe in an afterlife until after the time of the Babylonian Exile (539 BCE). Up until this later era, general Israelite conceptions of death held that the body was created from dust and naturally returned to dust. The body was considered holistic, not being divided into body and spirit but as a unified materialistic substance. A body didn't have a soul (nephesh); a body was a soul. Therefore, the body, created by God originally from nothing, returned to nothing at death. There was no spirit world to which the immortal body was delivered. Sheol was the representation of the grave, a final resting place for all people in dust.

It is not until after the Exile that a resurrection from the dead began to appear in common Jewish religion. It seems that the Jews began to read Exilic Bible passages about Yahweh's promise to reform the nation of Israel from exile (Isaiah 26:19; Ezekiel 37) as a promise of resurrection of the body from death. This was later picked up by Daniel and 2 Maccabees. By the time of Jesus, the vast majority of Jews believed in a resurrection of the dead.

Resurrection of the dead, of course, is vastly different from other religious ideas of an afterlife. Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans believed that the body died and the spirit continued on in some immaterial, spiritual plane of existence. The Greeks in particular believed that the spirit was an immortal form that existed prior to bodily life and continued after bodily death. The spirit was said to be indestructible and thus continued on. This is a far cry from the idea of the creator god, Yahweh, who brings everything into existence out of nothing. The Jews believed that Yahweh would one day bring back to life all of the materials that made up a person, recreating out of dust the body and spirit of man. This seems to have been a unique view among the ancient world. The Greco-Roman worldview found the idea of a resurrection of the body to be foolish, both religiously and philosophically.

Naturally, the concept of the resurrection of the dead remained a matter of faith and theory for the first several centuries of its existence. It wasn't until around the year 30 CE with the resurrection of Jesus that it was proved that, yes, resurrection of the dead was the creator god's intended purpose for humanity.

So the ancient worshippers of Yahweh (the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) did not embrace religion in order to deal with any fear of death in hopes of an afterlife. In terms of mortality, their adherence to a monotheistic, creator god, one who creates out of nothing, was of almost stoic acceptance to a supreme being whose authority to create and utterly destroy was strictly a divine prerogative.

Thankfully, that prerogative is to recreate and offer the resurrection of the body to those willing to accept it.