Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [277]
The famous story of “Doubting Thomas” is often understood as John’s endorsement of the “spiritual body.” Careful analysis shows the opposite. Jesus appeared to the disciples in a locked room. Many claim that Jesus’ entrance into a locked room demonstrates his spiritual nature. It may just as easily demonstrate that his appearance was not a cheap magic trick. While the motif of the locked room appeared for the purposes of showing the miraculous nature of Jesus’ resurrection body, what happened after he materialized inside the room was a demonstration of the physicality of the resurrection body.
We think that a material or physical body cannot just appear in a locked room, so we conclude that the point of the story is that Jesus’ body is spiritually present. The ancient world had fewer presuppositions about physical possibilities in nature, especially when the point of the story was that God’s handiwork was being made miraculously manifest. If it were a science fiction story, say Star-Trek, which had said that Jesus was teleported to there from a spaceship we would have few problems accepting his physical and actual presence within the locked room. We understand that Jesus could be physically present if certain counterfactual, science fiction claims are accepted. The writers of this Gospel simply had different, counterfactural assumptions about the physical world. They wanted to stress the miracle that Jesus was a real body who miraculously appeared in a locked room. Thus, the story is in line with the other physical depictions of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Doubting Thomas’ touching of Jesus’ wounds only confirms the intention of the evangelist. It is the concrete-ness of the depiction, not its spiritual nature, which is the point of the story.
The miracle of Jesus’ materialization led directly to Thomas’s demonstration of Jesus’ physicality. It also demonstrated, as the other stories did, that Jesus’ appearance was not merely the appearance of a ghost or spirit. The story draws the further conclusion, which is the most important point, that those who believe and have not seen what Thomas saw are even more blessed for their greater faith. We shall see that the Gospel of Thomas does evince an overtly visionary view of Christ’s resurrection.
In John 6, an explicit link between the resurrection and the eucharist is made. In John 6:35-50 we have one of John’s feeding stories about the manna in the wilderness. In this context, the living bread is the lifegiving word of Jesus. Whoever believes in him will be resurrected on the last day (John 6:40, 44). As opposed to the Synoptic tradition, John did not emphasize that God was the author of these actions. For John it was Jesus himself who was manifesting his power.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
As we have previously seen, the physicality of the Eucharist is stressed in this passage. A number of readers have expressed almost