Was the Resurrection of Jesus a Spiritual or Bodily Resurrection?
Christians believe that Jesus died and that he rose from the dead on the third day. But what do we mean by that? What kind of resurrection do we think he experienced?
For those who believed that something real happened to Jesus after his death, and this would include the Apostle Paul and the Gospel writers, there are only a couple of options.
These are:
- A spiritual resurrection.
- A physical resurrection with the exact same body.
- A physical resurrection with a transformed body.
Spiritual Resurrection
I have encountered a number of skeptics who claim that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus had risen spiritually. That is, his body was still in the tomb, but his afterlife was very vivid and he appeared to his disciples in visions, or so they believed.
The advantage of this for skeptics is that the resurrection, rather than being any evidence of the truth of Christianity, is really just a coping mechanism after the death of a beloved religious leader.
There seems to be some logic to this. Even today, when a family member dies, we might talk about them running around in heaven in a new and healthy spiritual body. Nobody could disprove this claim because we do not have access to that experience.
But is that what the early Christians believed? Not at all. 1 Corinthians 15, which is a very early Christian writing, makes it clear that the resurrection of Jesus was understood as the first part of the general resurrection that both Jews and Christians anticipated.
What kind of resurrection did they look for? It was not a “spiritual resurrection” in the sense of the spirit went off to have a new existence in heaven. Resurrection always meant a raising up of the body. N.T. Wright explains it well here:
Resurrection With the Exact Same Body
So if the resurrection of Jesus, like our own future resurrection, was not a transformation to a disembodied spirit to live in heaven, what happened with the body?
Was it just the raising up of the old body with no real change other than repairing any damage to the brain and other organs so the body could operate again?
According to the Gospels, those kinds of things did happen in the ministry of Jesus. That is what happened to Lazarus and it is what we might call a resuscitation.
And yet when Jesus was raised from the dead, it is presented as an incredible event that really was unprecedented, even though the disciples were aware that Jesus had already raised some dead people.
While those resuscitations may have anticipated the resurrection of Jesus, they were different in kind. This means that the raising of Jesus did not mean that it was as simple as breathing life back into the old body.
Resurrection With a Transformed Body
My study of the Gospels and of Paul suggests that Jesus experienced in his resurrection a transformation of his old body into something familiar but different. So his physical remains were a part of the story but something happened to change it in some way. I sometimes refer to it as an upgrade for eternity.
The biblical evidence, and this is supported by other things we know about contemporary resurrection beliefs, is that the resurrection body is changed in some way. It was understood that there would have been damage to the body in some way, possibly leaving the body as no more than an ossuary filled with bones.
Something would have to be done with the remains to make it viable as a physical body. Since it was a body that would not grow old and die (like the raised bodies of Lazarus and others did), that body would need to be able to endure for eternity.
Some point to 1 Corinthians 15 and Paul talking about the resurrection bodies as “spiritual” bodies and thus considering the bodies as being made of spirit and closer to the first option that we looked at.
The problem is that our current natural bodies, in Greek are called in that chapter something like “soulish” bodies. Our current bodies are not made up of soul any more than our future bodies will be made up of spirit.
The resurrection body of Jesus, like our future resurrection, was a bodily resurrection rather than a spiritual resurrection. It was a resurrection to a body that was in continuity with our physical remains but with a transformation that also makes it somewhat different.
