Now that I’ve discussed the major themes and emphases of 1 Corinthians, explained when and why Paul wrote it, and given some bibliography to check out if you decided to dig deeper, I’d like to explain the one passage of 1 Corinthians I get asked about more frequently than any other.

It involves Paul’s view of the future resurrection of the dead.  I have repeatedly stated on the blog that Paul believed that ultimate salvation did not entail dying and your soul going to heaven or hell or any other kind of purely “spiritual” existence, but an actual bodily resurrection that, for the saved, would lead to a bodily existence for all time in the presence of God.

How is *that* supposed to work?  And didn’t he say that “flesh and blood” would NOT inherit the kingdom (1 Corinthians 15:50)?  Here I explain how Paul understood it was all to happen. This is taken (slightly edited) from my fuller discussion in my book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

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For Paul, the future resurrected body (of humans) will be utterly and completely transformed.  It will be a different kind of body.  Paul argues that the human body that goes into the ground is like a “bare kernel” of some kind of grain that grows into a plant.  What grows is intimately tied to and related to what went into the ground; but it is also vastly different.  When you plant an acorn it doesn’t grow into a forty-foot acorn, but into an oak tree.

So too the human.  When the body comes out of the ground it is transformed into “the body that God gives it, as he wishes” (1 Corinthians 15:38).   That is because “there are heavenly bodies, and earthly bodies” and they have different kind of glories, just as there is “one glory for the sun, another glory for the moon, and another for the stars; even the stars differ in glory from one to the next” (1 Corinthians 15:40-41).

Paul insists that this is how it will be at the future resurrection.  The body that does into the ground is corruptible and temporary; it will be raised incorruptible and eternal.  “It is sown in weakness but raised in power; it is sown a natural [Greek: psychic] body it is raised a spiritual [Greek pneumatic] body” (1 Corinthians 15:44).  It will still be a body, but it will be made up of the most highly refined “stuff” there is: pneuma, or spirit.   And so the resurrection is a glorious transformation, in which the raised body will be a spiritual body, one that can never grow infirm or die.

Paul goes on then to the most mind-stretching passage of the chapter, indeed, of the entire book, in which he describes, in greater detail than in 1 Thessalonians, what will actually occur at the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:50-53), when something happens to the mortal body to make it immortal.  He calls this a great “mystery”:

We shall not all sleep [that is, die], but we will be changed.  In a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet! For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we [the living] will be transformed.  For this corruptible body must put on incorruptibility and this mortal body must put on immortality. (1 Corinthians 15:51-53)

When that happens, “death will be devoured in victory.”  Death, then, will no longer have its fatal “sting.”

And so for Paul there will indeed be a resurrection.  It will be bodily.  But the human body will be transformed into an immortal, incorruptible, perfect, glorious entity, no longer made of coarse stuff that can become sick, get injured, suffer in any way, or die.  It will be a spiritual body, a perfect dwelling for life everlasting.

It is in that context that one of the most misunderstood verses of Paul’s entire surviving corpus occurs, a verse completely bungled not just by many modern readers but throughout the history of Christianity.  That is when Paul insists: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50).  These words are often taken – precisely against Paul’s meaning – to suggest that eternal life will not be lived in the body.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.   For Paul it will be lived in a body.  But in a body that has been glorified.

For Paul, the term “flesh and blood” simply refers to embodied human beings who were living in this world (see Galatians 1:16).  For Paul, people will certainly not enter into God’s kingdom as they are now.  They need to be transformed.  The gross earthly matter of their body needs to be transfigured into spiritual matter.  Otherwise they cannot be immortal.  And so the contrast he is drawing is not between “bodily” existence that cannot enter the kingdom and “non-bodily” that can.  It is instead between “flesh-and-blood bodies” made up of the coarse stuff to which we are restricted now (to our constant dissatisfaction and even misery), and “spiritual bodies” glorified at the culmination of all things when Jesus returns from heaven.

As a result, in addition to the ancient dichotomy of “immortality” of the soul and “resurrection” of the revivified body, Paul now offers a third alternative:  “resurrection of the transformed, immortal, spiritual body.”  That is how eternal life will be lived.

But what about in the meantime?  What about all those Christians who have died before it could happen?  What is happening to them?

This was never an issue with the historical Jesus, so far as we know.  Possibly Jesus never spoke about what would happen in the meantime because he thought there would not be much of a meantime:  the Kingdom of God was to arrive right away.  But Paul had to think about it.  At first he believed the end was to appear very soon with the return of Jesus from heaven: he himself would be alive when it happened (note how he speaks of “we who are alive” when Jesus returns, 1 Thessalonians 4:17).  But he knew that others had died before that climax of history.  And eventually he began to wonder if he too might die before the end came.  What then?

That is when Paul started thinking that since he was so closely united with Christ in the here and now, he surely would be at the point of death as well.  If he died before the resurrection came (say, next month) he would for the brief interim period be in the heavenly realm with Christ, possibly with an interim body until the resurrection.  That, then, is the view he begins to develop, notably already by the time he wrote one of the letters now found in Philippians (1:21-26) and 2 Corinthians (5:1-4), the latter of which will be my the focus of my next discussion in this “New Testament in a Nutshell” series.