Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [257]
Even more so for those who actually suffer for their faith. These spiritual experiences of transformation into the Christ form analogies to the life and death of Jesus. Those who suffer as the Christ suffered can expect identification with the exalted Christ (symmorphosis). And more concretely it means that the believer must be ready to accept suffering as part of Christian discipleship.49
For Paul there was not much explicit recognition that a resurrection without the end was very strange. Paul apparently felt that the time was peculiarly out of joint because the first resurrection had happened but the end had not yet come about. Clearly, he thought the last stage would shortly arrive. And, as we know, the demonstration that the age had begun was the actual appearance of Jesus to him.
Paul-in contradistinction to some later Gnostic traditions-began from the supposition that the death and burial was real and hence the resurrection was actual and in accordance with Scripture (1 Cor 15:3). Paul then listed those to whom the postresurrection Jesus appeared. In Paul’s understanding the postresurrection appearances rather than the physical presence of Jesus was primary. He included himself modestly in the list of those to whom Jesus had appeared. But if the list had been made up of those who knew Jesus in the flesh, Paul would have been left out and James would have been preeminent. The corruptible flesh of the earthly Jesus is not the point for Paul. He deliberately widened the concept of apostleship to include persons like himself who had a spiritual relationship with the Christ. For him, it is Jesus the heavenly redeemer who reveals himself to his chosen, who is the proof of faith, not merely those who may have heard Jesus’s preaching.
In verses 12-19, Paul claimed that the deniers of the resurrection of the dead were denying the Gospel which they had received and initially believed. He began a series of arguments which ended in the reductio ad absurdum that “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” The rhetoric depended on the hearers’ understanding that the premise was wrong. This argument only made sense to believers; no one else would have seen the absurdity of the conclusion. A great number of scholars have speculated on what the Corinthians had been misled into believing. They could have been pre-Gnostics or proto-Gnostics, who denied that the body is raised.
But, in fact, they need not have been either; they could merely have been following ordinary Greek popular thought in a Platonic vein, thinking that the soul is immortal but that the body cannot be raised from the dead (nor would anyone want to be embodied, given the choice). That is to say, they may only have been ordinary Greeks for whom the Christian message of the resurrection of Jesus might naturally have been interpreted in a different context than the apocalyptic one out of which Paul originally spoke. A person might survive death through the immortality of the soul in Greek thought but a bodily resurrection was never any significant part in Greek thinking.50
It is not necessarily true, as Paul argued, that all those who died in Christ would have been thought by his listeners to have perished. They may merely receive their divine reward on the basis of their deeds, or knowledge, or the soul’s natural inclination.51 But, as Paul suggested, this notion, whoever the author is, denies the salvific nature of Christ’s death in totality. It is the bodily resurrection of Jesus that guarantees that God’s plan for the final destruction of the evil ones of the world is already set in place. For if the soul is immortal by nature and that is the highest form of immortality to be achieved, then the sacrifice of Christ is unnecessary.
In verses 20-28 Paul stopped arguing against enemies and began articulating his own notions. He showed that the resurrection of Christ entails the future resurrection of all the righteous dead as Christ is the “firstfruit of them who have fallen