Loading...Here some more of the excellent questions I have received from readers, and my responses.
QUESTION:
Dale Allison has said that the word for buried in 1 Corinthians 15 means to be buried in a mass grave, tomb or stone cave but it does not mean in a shallow grave where bird eat the corpse. Is this true?
RESPONSE:
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
Off topic again.
There are five places where Jesus mentions the ‘cross’ in the gospels (Matt 16:24 — Mark 8:34 — Luke 9:23 and Matt 10:38 — Luke 14:27). They all say things like to follow JC, people must take up their own ‘cross’, or something with the same kind of meaning. They all occur a good amount of time in the narratives before the actual crucifixion.
If the concept of the ‘cross’ didn’t exist yet, because the crucifixion hadn’t occurred yet, how could Jesus have been talking and teaching about it?
If he was in some way predicting the future (which is another subject), how would any of his listeners have known what he was talking about?
“Cross” is a common word in ancient Greek, and occurs 16 times in the Gospels. Many thousands of crucifixions had occurred before Jesus’ day.
But how could Jesus have been telling people to ‘carry their own cross’ before the metaphorical meaning of the “cross” existed?
That’s one reason crticial scholars doubt that Jesus actually told his disciples to “take up their cross.” It’s more likely that these sayings were put on his lips by later followers who knew all about his crucifixion.
Paul wrote in 1 Cor 15:45 that when Jesus was raised, he “became a life-giving spirit”. So when he wrote that the raised Jesus “appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve”, did he perhaps mean that the spirit of Jesus came down from heaven and took on his human appearance to show the disciples that he is still alive? It is similar to those cases in the OT where angels came down from heaven and took on human appearance in order to give someone a message. (These angels were also able to give the appearance of being clothed, which explains why the raised Jesus was not naked or still wrapped in a burial shroud in later appearance legends).
When you read the entire passage, it’s clear that it means that Jesus was raised in a pneumatic *body*, that is, a body that is not made of the coarse stuff human bodies are made of, but of a finer substance that Greeks called “pneuma.” (It was still “stuff,” but just a better more refined “stuff” that could not get sick or injured or die)
Dr. Ehrman,
Would a good argument for a resurrection based on transformation rather than a complete doing away with the earthly body be the following? From 1 Cor. 6:15ff ? i.e. Bodies as well as the world itself are fallen and need to be redeemed, but because God originally made things to be “good” these things are not complete throwaways, is this correct?
“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”
I certainly think Paul’s view of transformation at the resurrection, as set out in 1 Cor 15, is intimately tied to his apocalyptic views of the falleness of the material world in its current state.
As I mentioned, I am moving to Southeast Asia and Greece. For your next trip to Greece, could I just meet up with you and pay for the packages while covering my own plane tickets? I want to go where Dionysus was! Lol. I can’t wait for your next trip, and hopefully, I’ll be fully moved by then.
An historical account of the human quest
for a solution to the problem of evil.
An off-topic question, please Dr Ehrman. I was watching a podcast in which a NT scholar claimed that John used Luke as a source. Can this be correct? I always thought that John’s sources were unrelated to the Synoptic Gospels?