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Evidence · Case 02 · Resurrection of Christ

The reports were visionary and the physical details grew later

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The claim here is that Paul, our earliest source, only lists that Jesus ‘appeared’ (1 Corinthians 15) without describing a physical body or an empty tomb, while the bodily details, being touched, eating fish, the empty grave, show up only in the later Gospels. On this reading the tradition began with visionary experiences and grew more physical over time. This is the careful form of the skeptical case, closer to Gerd Lüdemann than to a crude hoax theory. The reply is that Paul already assumes a bodily resurrection. He places ‘raised’ right after ‘buried’ in the same early summary, and he argues at length in 1 Corinthians 15:42-44 for a raised body, which only makes sense if the tomb was empty. Paul also had visionary experiences he reports differently, in 2 Corinthians 12, and he does not put the resurrection appearances in that category. So the earliest source is not merely visionary, and there is little time for a physical legend to develop before it.

Sources

Objections & responses

Paul says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom and calls the resurrection body spiritual. Doesn’t that mean Paul believed in a non-physical resurrection?

This turns on the Greek. Paul contrasts the natural (psychikon) body with the spiritual (pneumatikon) body, and the same word pair appears in 1 Corinthians 2:14 to 15 for natural versus spiritual people, where it obviously does not mean immaterial people. Spiritual for Paul means empowered and governed by the Spirit, not made of nothing. Flesh and blood is a standard idiom for mortal, perishable human nature, which is why the next clause says the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable. His seed-and-plant picture requires continuity between the thing sown and the thing raised, transformed. That means the body in the tomb is the body that was raised.

The trajectory from Paul (bare “appeared”) to Mark (empty tomb, no appearances) to Matthew and Luke (appearances) to John (Thomas touching wounds) looks like a legend getting more physical over time.

The sequence looks neat until the dates are checked. Paul’s creed, the earliest source, already implies bodily resurrection through buried and raised and through his argument later in the chapter. Luke and John, the most physical accounts, are also the ones that stress the risen Jesus could appear and vanish and was not immediately recognized, which is not the direction a legend of crude physicality would run. And the physicality in Luke and John serves an anti-docetic purpose that already existed in Paul’s day. The trajectory argument requires the earliest source to be non-physical, and it is not.

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