resurrected body Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

A Third View of Jesus’ Body at the Resurrection

This will be my final post on the early Christian understandings of the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body. I have tried to show that Paul believed that Jesus’ actual body came out of the tomb, but as a spiritual, immortal body – completely transformed; other Christians, including groups of Gnostics, maintained that Jesus’ spirit lived on even though his body decomposed and ceased to exist (like all other bodies) In this final post I deal with another extreme in the opposite direction, one found already in the New Testament, possibly in order to oppose the idea that Jesus was raised only in spirit but not in body. Again, this is an extract from my forthcoming book How Jesus Became God. ************************************************************************************ The Raising of the Mortal Body We don’t know how early such full-blown Gnostic views came to expression in the Christian movement; they were certainly in place by the middle of the second century, and possibly earlier. But there were tendencies toward such views already in the New Testament period. If my reconstruction of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T17:40:41-04:00December 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

A Gnostic View of Jesus’ Resurrection

The Gnostic view of Jesus' resurrection. Yesterday, in response to a question, I discussed Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus. In response to several questions I was asked, let me say emphatically that YES, in my view Paul believed that Jesus' corpse itself was transformed into a spiritual body. If asked, he would have said that the grave was empty. That’s how I read 1 Corinthians 15. The body that comes out of the tomb is the same body that went into the tomb, but it is a transformed (not a different) body, made immortal. (And let me stress – again in response to a couple of questions I’ve asked: this is not *my* view of what happened to Jesus’ body. I’m just explaining what *Paul’s* view was). Paul’s view was not the only one found among the early Christians. I explain that view further in this excerpt from my forthcoming book How Jesus Became God: The Raising of the Spirit - the Gnostic View of Jesus' Resurrection Some ancient Christians – taking a [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-07T15:44:50-04:00November 30th, 2013|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Paul and the Resurrection of a Spiritual Body

QUESTION: You may have gone over this before, but do you think the earliest Christians, Peter, Paul, and Mary etc. believed in the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus, or do you think they believed his “spirit” was raised from the dead? From Paul’s writing it’s hard for me to judge. I ask this because it seems easier for me to attribute the resurrection belief to “hallucinations” if they were only experiencing visions of Jesus’ spirit. Even group “hallucinations” of Jesus’ spirit seems plausible, maybe during a group’s ecstatic experience or something. On the other hand I think there’s difficulty with the idea that several people hallucinated an experiences with a seemingly physical Jesus. RESPONSE: This is a great question. My view is that different early Christians had different views. Paul’s view for me is the most interesting. In a forthcoming book I’ve mapped out my understanding of that. Here’s what I say there: ****************************************************************************** It is striking, and frequently overlooked by casual observers of the early Christian tradition, that even though it was a universal [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T17:40:59-04:00November 29th, 2013|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

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A Third View of Jesus’ Body at the Resurrection

A Gnostic View of Jesus’ Resurrection

Paul and the Resurrection of a Spiritual Body