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people of the book
[ 49 ]
justify oneself before God by deeds but by submission to God’s will. Paul’s inter-
est in inwardness was not due to the soul’s being the seat of human reason but
based on the potential of God’s word to change a person from the inside out. It is
from the inside that a person is awakened to a new life and becomes whole. This
transformation, Paul thought, is effected by the same spirit
of God that awak-
ened Jesus from the dead.
Yet despite Paul’s antipathy toward philosophy, his words, especially what he
had to say about the resurrection, exercised a profound influence on subsequent
Christian philosophy. In his account, just as death came through one man—
Adam—so also “the resurrection of the dead has come through one man”—Jesus.
14
As we have seen, the idea of bodily resurrection had already arisen within
Judaism. At the time of Paul, whether people were resurrected and, if so, how had
become a point of contention between Pharisees and Sadducees.
15
According to the New Testament, some followers of Jesus were convinced
that they had seen Jesus alive after his death on the cross and subsequent burial.
Most historians of early Christianity believe that whatever the actual experience
of these followers of Jesus had been, at least their thinking they had seen Jesus
after he had died was instrumental in the initial formation of Christianity. When
the early church fathers later tried to make sense of the idea that everyone would
survive his or her bodily death, most of them felt that it was necessary to under-
stand this doctrine of survival in the context of some more-or-less systematic
worldview. Their scriptural point of departure in constructing such a view of
the resurrection was invariably the words of Paul. Thus, one of Paul’s contribu-
tions was to elevate the doctrine of the resurrection to one of the central tenets of
Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, your
faith is futile and you are still in
your sins”; “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we
die.’ ”
16
Easy enough to say, but from the beginning the doctrine of the resurrec-
tion was extremely puzzling, as Paul’s pagan critics were quick to point out.
At Corinth, Paul had encountered people who doubted the possibility of res-
urrection, and wanted a detailed explanation of how it would come about: “But
some one will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they
come?’ ”
17
Probably Paul accepted from tradition that the resurrected Jesus was
able to eat and that his body was solid to the touch. Yet, according to that same
tradition, Jesus was able to appear and disappear at will, even passing through
locked doors. There was a question, then, about the nature of Jesus’ resurrected
body. By implication, there was the same question about the nature of anyone’s
resurrected body.
Paul seems to have concluded that a resurrected body—anyone’s—is material
but differs in significant ways from the bodies humans have during their earthly
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