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By Root 2485 0

body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Cor 15:37-50)

In 1 Corinthians 15:35 Paul began a brief exposition of the nature of the resurrection body. He was, in this passage, outlining a notion of afterlife which had nothing to do with immortality of the soul; it is an offshoot of Jewish apocalypticism, out of which the Christian kerygma grows. But he was also cognizant of the beliefs of the audience so he merely ignored and did not argue against the immortality of the soul. Instead, he fastened again on the notion of spirit to explicate how the physical body of believers would be transformed by the resurrection. His argument had nothing to do with what happened to Christ during the passion nor did he mention any empty tomb. His argument is by analogy with his own experience and, by expressing it this way, he was trying to keep faith with his own experience of the Spirit of God. His use of language of the body is entirely unique.

The term for “physical body” is not exactly what one might expect but this is due to an unfortunate English translation. Neither the term soma sarkikon (fleshly body) nor the term soma physikon (physical body) occurs; rather the term which occurs is soma psychikon, “ensouled body,” a word which can mean “natural body” but is not the most obvious term for it. Since it combines the word for soul with the term for body, it is in a sense the totality of the Platonic ensouled-body as the Hellenistic world understood it. In a Platonic system that would only mean human bodies as we know them, with matter and soul both, therefore corruptible bodies. Because “psyche” could be taken to mean life in the physical sense in a non-Platonic setting, it is not necessarily a problem, strange though it may look; soma psychikon does occur in Hellenistic literature with that meaning.57

But the contrasting term, soma pneumatikon is a complete contradiction in terms for anyone in a Platonic system, especially when contrasted with the psychic body just mentioned: “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:41).

There is no easy way to subsume this pair of statements into Platonism. What Paul was doing, however, was contrasting the Platonic view of humanity (the unredeemed body composed of soul and flesh) with his own view of the redeemed body, one that now had been transformed by the Spirit of God. One might say that Paul was trying to characterize his apocalyptic vision in a Hellenistic context, something like Josephus did for the speech of Eleazar ben Yair. But Paul’s message only really makes sense within its Jewish, apocalyptic context. For Paul, life in its most basic sense, psychic life, was also bodily life. “Pneumatic,” spiritual life is bodily as well, though Paul immediately reiterated that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 15:50). The psychic body is the ordinary body (flesh and soul); the soma pneumatikon is the ordinary body subsumed and transformed by the spirit.

This new, spiritual, glorious body, which is the redeemed, resurrected body, is equivalent to Christ’s body. And so the new body that God gives His faithful in the resurrection will be a “pneumatic” or “spiritual” body augmented by the “Spirit” of God. Indeed, Paul had been given a foretaste of the redeemed body because the Spirit of God already lived in him. As the end approaches,