Loading...What did Paul actually teach would happen after death? It was not that after you died your soul would go to heaven or hell. Paul taught a future physical resurrection of your *body*, to have eternal life here on earth. I started explaining that in my previous post. I continue here: Paul’s argument for a coming resurrection of the dead. Again, this is taken from my discussion in Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
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Paul’s Teaching of the Resurrection
To make his case (for a physical resurrection of all people at the end of time), Paul begins the chapter (1 Corinthians 15) by summarizing what the Corinthians came to believe when they first joined the Christian community, that Christ died for sins and was raised from the dead, and after his resurrection he was seen not only by his disciples but by a large number of people, including 500 at one time and, finally, by Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:1-8). All these people actually saw Jesus. That’s because he was physically raised.
For most Jews, like Paul, “resurrection” always and incontrovertibly meant
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Life functions throughout the body, whether physical, mental or spiritual
To limit the life to a living body is to limit the life to a lot of combined cells that are replaced by billions every day. What will then resurrected ?, which cells will be included and which cells will not ,,, the cells of today, to a certain minute,,, ,,,,, or yesterday, or the day before ,,, or the day before. Before a week has passed ,,, many BILLIONS of cells have ceased to exist, and have been replaced by new ones.
Resurrection in such a concept becomes for me an absurdity, and it is hard for me to think Paul would limit his perception to such a concept.
I want a body upgrade.
Wait for it….
I wonder how one can refuse to believe in the immortality of the soul, but believe in a resurrected body? Could a resurrected body exist without a soul? Would you suppose that when Jesus was raised from the dead with his physical body that he walked here on earth without a soul? Doesn’t it seem odd to think that those who harbor the notion of any sort of physical resurrection of the body can refute the belief in a corresponding immortality of the soul?
Yes, it can be confusing. No, the resurrected body cannot exist without a soul. And the soul cannot exist without the body. The resurrected body gets resurrected by having the soul, or the “breath,” return to it. The human is a combination of body and soul, togethter; neither can exist apart from the other. The best analogy: think of the soul as your breath. When you breathe, you’re alive; when you stop breathing, your breath doesn’t *go* anywhere. It doesn’t exist apart from the living body.
“The resurrected body he imagines will be utterly and completely transformed. It will be a different kind of body.”
Did Paul make this up or inherit from others?
The idea that bodies would become immortal was found in apocalytpic Judaism broadly; it’s hard to know how much Paul developed the idea in his own idiom, and how much he inherited.
Dr. Ehrman, I just watched a fantastic lecture from Dr. Paula Fredriksen on why our conception of monotheism in the ancient world is anachronistic. I know you’ve spoken about Philo as an example of first-century Jewish “polytheistic” (for lack of a better term) belief; do you agree with Dr. Fredriksen’s approach, and more specifically that even Paul would have taken for granted the existence of other cults’ supernatural principalities, but believed nonetheless in the “megatheistic” dominance of the Jewish God and his son Jesus? (Hopefully I’ve understood her argument well enough!)
I haven’t heard her lecture so I’m not sure. In the Hebrew Bible only 2nd Isaiah firmly endorses something like monotheism (“I am God, there is no other”). Most Jews acknowledged there were other divine beings, but they were not to be worshiped (if that’s what she’s arguing).
Finally bought Heaven and Hell. Found it in a bookshop in Pretoria. Just finished reading it while holidaying in the bushveld in South Africa. Enjoyed it ++ thank you! Relieved to find out I’ll be OK in the end – no heaven for me.
Probably telling the Islamic accounting is so detailed-raised as we died in the bodies we died and and judged in those bodies, with our tongues hands legs testifying for or against us, but upon entering paradise enter in the paradise form of Adam, very tall and strong with no sickness or aging or death. I agree with Paul, that immortal form sounds way better than the body we’re given now:)
Same with the people of hell-raised and judged in the bodies they died in but enter hell in gigantic forms for increased torment. One narration describes the molars of a nonbelievers as the size of a mountain! To add to the pain and disgustingness, more places to torture and nerve endings and wounds for leaking pus.
Please Jesus, raise me in my 18-year-old body, and my girlfriend, too!
The utter absurdity of Christian beliefs led to remarkable variations of interpretations in an effort to get past the nonsense. Some of the “heresies” make a lot more sense than the orthodox beliefs stemming from Paul.
It always strikes me that the historical Jesus must have been a miserable teacher for there to have been, in a phrase, so many “Lost Christianities” after he was executed. Jesus made up his ideas as he went along and so did those who came after him. Striking is how incredibly naïve Paul must have been to imagine that he could waltz into a city, make some converts, then leave and expect them to have a clue what he was talking about.
I guess the upside of that is we have his letters, which at least allow us to glimpse the mind of an ancient person and how he interpreted his conversion to beliefs he had previously held in disdain.
Dr. Ehrman, if Paul didn’t believe in an eternal soul that went to Heaven to go be with Jesus when we die, then what did Paul mean in Philippians 1:21-24 where he said: “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.”? Isn’t Paul saying that if he died at that moment he would go join Jesus (wherever Jesus was/is at that moment, presumably Heaven or with God) but that he didn’t want to die right then so he could continuing helping the Philippians by remaining here on Earth with them? Thank you.
In my book Heaven and Hell I argue that this passage, and 2 Cor. 5 both indicate that at the end of his life Paul came to think that he wold somehow be present with Christ until the resurrection. But that’s not he same as saying everyone has an immmortal soul.
Dear Bart, I’ve still got problems with this. As you say, Paul lists his own personal experience of the resurrection as an ‘appearance’, at the end of a temporal sequence of resurection ’appearances’ to the disciples, Cephas, James and the 500. Yet, as far as we know, Paul’s experience was a visionary appearance, therefore, listing it together with these other ‘appearances‘, might suggest that the appearances to the others were also visionary and not bodily in the physical sense. Of course, Paul was a Pharisee and therefore steeped in the tradition of the belief in the bodily physical resurrection at some future time. But that’s not what he *experienced* and he uses his experience to start this chapter on the resurrection. Furthermore, in 1Cor 15:44, he says it (the body) is raised (resurrected) as a ‘spiritual body‘ and nowhere in the whole chapter does he unquivocally talk about a physical bodily resurrection. Maybe his own personal *expereince* of a resurrection *appearance* has changed his former pharisaical views on a physical bodily resurrection to a spitiual resurrection?
People who have “visions” almost always think that what they are seeing is material, not imaginary. Your grandmother really was in the room with you for a moment. As you known, there is a large literature on visionary experiences.
In Paul’s case it is a “spiritual body” — that is a “body” made of a substance, but the substance is PNEUMA, “spirit,” a more refined kind of “stuff” than the coarse, mortal bodies we have now…
I don’t agree. We have to be careful about using the word “substance”. You have conflated the modern English meaning of a solid, liquid or a gas with the Gk “ousia” meaning a fundamental entity. Aristotle and subsequent Greeks considered ‘pneuma’ to be the ousia that gave rise to psyche – the life and mind component of the human. Paul had an experience of seeing Jesus as a spirit; and you can only see a spirit if it manifests as a spiritual body (otherwise there’s nothing to see!) and it was very real to him. I’ve come to believe that this is what the disciples, the ‘Marys’ and the 500 saw. I believe that the spiritual is real – it exists independently of imagination, hallucinations, faith etc. I believe that what dying patients and their nearest and dearests often see (and have seen over the centuries) is real. I believe Jesus’s resurrection is real, that near death experiences are real. This what I think Paul said in 1Corinthians 15: that we will all be resurrected, but not in the physical way that the Pharisees had thought of prior to Paul.
Paul seems to have ignored the problem of “self” or “identity”. So the earthly body dies and one sleeps, to use Paul’s terminology. And then at the final trumpet we are given a new body made out of incorruptible, spiritual, stuff– some sort of stuff. So, how does our identity transfer? How do memories transfer? If memories don’t transfer how can an argument be made that the dead live again? It seems to require some OTHER kind of stuff that survives death, a packet of information in more modern parlance. And that packet of information would be who we actually are, as opposed to some vehicle made of some stuff to carry that packet of information. It’s hard to escape the idea of a soul. I don’t think Paul dealt with any of these issues very effectively. It was all beyond his paygrade, just as it is all beyond our paygrade. His solution seems unsatisfactory. Platonism gives us two kinds of things: material and spiritual. Paul requires 3 kinds of things, if you think it through. Paul didn’t think it through.
How did Jesus’ identity transfer? Who said memories don’t transfer? I don’t see the problem. David said he would one day see the son born to him and Bathsheba, the son who died because of David’s sin. How would he recognize or remember his son if identity doesn’t transfer? How did Jesus and the three disciples recognize Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration (though they were not yet in their resurrection bodies, but in their “spiritual bodies” ( I Cor 15: 40 “Further, there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies;”). 38 “But God gives a body as He pleases, …”.
It all goes to the question of what constitutes identity, and Paul doesn’t clarify that issue at all. For instance, an extreme example: I have a sense of self, and that remains if I have a terrible accident and my body is no longer recognizable. But nobody I knew before the accident can see that. I don’t look at all the same, or sound the same, if I can speak at all, etc. As far as an outside observer is concerned I’m NOT the same person. Now suppose I die and someone is able to construct a copy of my body. Is that copy “me”, in any sense? Is so, how??
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Question: During first century Christianity, while Christians waited for a “future resurrection” when the body is “utterly and completely transformed,” was it already the practice to pray for the dead? I understand that the concept of a purgatory is a later theological development. What then would have been the rational for praying for a deceased love one, for example, from a first century Christian perspective (assuming they did so)?
Thanks!
We don’t have evidence of prayers for the dead until later, for example in the legendary stories of Thecla and Perpetua from the late second and early third centuries.
Hi Bart,
Do you think that the idea of the earthly body as a seed of the resurrected here and the exhortation to sexual morality in 1 Corinthians 6:18-19 on the grounds that sexual immorality corrupts the body, which is supposed to be a temple to the Holy Spirit can be viewed as part of a larger project of Paul convincing the Corinthians that the body is, broadly, good?
Yes, at the heart of it is Paul’s view that God created the material world and would therefore redeem it. The world and body were not to be *escaped* for salvation; they were to be transformed.
Yet it can hardly be doubted that most Christians, today and in history, believe that their souls will go Heaven and live forever when they die, directly, not be resurrected and get new bodies after 1000+ years. They often imagine that their deceased loved ones watch them from Heaven.
This common Christian belief contradicts what the Bible says (not just Paul, but also Relevation, for example).
How is it that so many Christians have such an unbiblical view on the afterlife?
That’s the topic of my book Heaven and Hell.
Resurrection was always the “hope of Israel”, not the hope of all humanity.
Act 28:20 For this cause therefore have I called for you, to see you, and to speak with you: because that for the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain.
The promise was made to who?
Act 26:7 to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship night and day. And for this hope I am accused by Jews, O king!
The hope of their fathers was the hope of the “twelve tribes” and “your people” (Dan 12:1) which was Israel. It was the hope of resurrection to life, raised from the death of the law to life in Christ’s new covenant…a hope that was realized by Israelites nearly two thousand years ago.
Not a single verse in the bible speaks of resurrection and eternal life for anyone outside of a context of Israel.
I’d say 1 Corinthians and the book of Revelation do, pretty explicitly.