E. The resurrection body (15:35–49)
E. The resurrection body (15:35–49)
Paul turns his attention to the nature of the resurrection body. Some had evidently ridiculed the idea of a resurrection by asking questions about the nature of the body with which people would rise. ‘How can people possibly rise when their bodies have completely rotted away?’ seems to have been the kind of objection raised, an objection not unfamiliar in modern times. Paul counters by pointing to the miracle of harvest. The seed is buried, but it is raised up with a new and more glorious body. From this he goes on to consider that there are different kinds of body, and different kinds of glory. This leads to the triumphant climax that, though our bodies are ‘sown’ in corruption and dishonour and weakness, they will be raised in incorruption and glory and power. As God has willed that we should have bodies fitted for our life on earth, so he has willed that we shall have bodies fitted for our heavenly existence. Paul’s insistence on bodily life should not be overlooked. Those who held to the immortality of the soul, but denied the resurrection of the body, usually looked for nothing more than a shadowy, insipid existence in Hades. It is fundamental to Paul’s thought that the after-life will be infinitely more glorious than this one. This necessitates a suitable ‘body’ with which the life is to be lived, for without a ‘body’ of some kind there seems no way of allowing for individuality and self-expression. But Paul does not view this ‘body’ crudely. He describes it with the adjective ‘spiritual’ (v. 44), and he expressly differentiates it from ‘flesh and blood’ (v. 50). His thought is in marked contrast to that of Judaism. There we find that the body to be raised will be identical with the body that died. The writer of the Apocalypse of Baruch asks whether there will be any change when men rise, and the answer is that ‘the earth shall then assuredly restore the dead … It shall make no change in their form, but as it has received, so shall it restore them’ (50:2; the writer thinks that later on they will be ‘glorified’). Paul will have nothing to do with this view (see vv. 42ff., 52, etc.). While there will be identity there will also be difference.
35. Some hold that in the lively style of the diatribe Paul has posed his own question, others that he is dealing with a question raised at Corinth. We have no way of knowing. But is the strong adversative alla. Far from conforming to the kind of conduct Paul has just outlined, someone (the word is indefinite) will offer an objection. Paul either quotes the person, or uses the words he would imagine an objector would use. How are the dead raised? queries the mechanics of the process. With what kind of body will they come? inquires as to the form they will have. It was clear to these Greek scephics that a body quickly decomposes, and they thought to laugh the idea of resurrection out of court with their query about the body. What kind of body would arise from a heap of decomposed rubbish?
36. Paul deals sharply with such objections; he begins with ‘Fool!’. Modern translations usually soften this, as RSV ‘You foolish man!’, while NIV makes it an impersonal exclamation, How foolish! and JB shifts the derogatory word from the questioner to the question: ‘They are stupid questions.’ But Paul is being blunt. He is making it clear that he finds such arguments worthless. His you is strongly emphatic. He uses the personal pronoun, which is emphatic by itself, and he adopts the unusual course of putting it before the relative pronoun: ‘Fool! You, what you sow …’ The effect is to make it clear that what Paul has been saying about the resurrection is not without its parallels in activities familiar to, and even engaged in by, the objectors. If they only thought about what they were doing, they had the answer to their objection in their own habitual practices. They sowed seed, which was destroyed, at least in the form in which it was sown. The act of sowing (a ‘burial’!) was so similar to what follows death among mankind that Paul can speak of the grain as dying (cf. John 12:24). Carrying on this metaphor, the growth that follows is a giving of new life and that new life does not come unless the grain first ‘dies’. The seed must be destroyed if the new life is to appear. Familiarity with the marvel of harvest has dulled our sense of wonder. But if we did not know, how would we ever guess that casting a seed into the ground and burying it is the way to produce a living plant? Why, in the light of this, should we regard as incredible the transformation of a dead body? AV correctly translates zōopoieitai as ‘is quickened’; the verb is passive, not middle. The seed does not come to life of itself, but God gives it life. NIV’s does not come to life misses this. Paul is preparing the way for his further statement of what God does in giving new life (v. 38).
37. It is important that what dies is nothing like what appears. A dead-looking, bare, dry seed is put into the ground, but what comes up is a green plant, vigorous and beautiful. It is not the body that will be that is sown. Paul will presently develop the thought that the body that is raised is incomparably more glorious than the body that is buried. Here he leaves it to be implied. Far from the decomposition of the body presenting an obstacle to the resurrection, it merely prepares us for the truth that the body that is raised is much more wonderful than the body that is buried. Plant life is always on hand to teach us. We sow nothing more than just a seed, whether it be corn or anything else; this is common to all seeds. At sowing there is no indication of the plant with its stem and leaves and flowers. But they come. There is a combination of identity and difference. The difference between seed and plant is obvious. But there is identity, too, for the seed produces that particular plant and no other.
38. Paul explicitly mentions the divine oversight of the whole process only here, but this must be held to be determinative of his thought throughout. Plants do not rise (and people do not rise) of their own volition. Nor do they do it by chance. They do it because that is the way God has determined it shall be. There is a change of tense here. God gives is present; it indicates the habitual practice. God is always giving seeds bodies in this way. As he has determined is the aorist, signifying a decisive action. Once and for all God planned what should be and all things continue to follow his plan (the present has continuous force). There is regularity as this plan unfolds, but no uniformity, for God gives its own body to every seed.
39. From grain and plants Paul turns to flesh. All flesh is not of the same kind. The flesh of men, animals (the word strictly means ‘bought’, and thus domestic animals, beasts of burden, cattle, but the point is not important), birds and fish are all different. Paul is preparing the way for the thought that there can be a difference between the kind of body we have before the resurrection and the kind we shall have after it.
40. Similarly there is a difference between heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. We use the term ‘heavenly bodies’ of the stars, and some see this as Paul’s meaning, though usually with the rider that the stars were seen as living beings. But this is probably not Paul’s thought. He comes to the stars in the next verse, and further, the counterpart of ‘heavenly bodies’ in that sense of the term is ‘the earth’, not earthly bodies. It was an accepted idea that heavenly beings, or at least some of them, had bodies. Paul’s point is that their bodies are bodies proper to heavenly beings, while those on earth have different bodies, bodies proper to earthly beings. Proper both may be, but they are not the same. The splendour of earthly beings is of a different order from that of heavenly beings. The beings are different and their splendour is different, too.
41. This leads to a consideration of the heavenly bodies in our sense of the term. The sun, the moon and the stars are all glorious, each in its own way, and each in a way differing from anything on earth. Even the stars differ in splendour; one is more glorious than another. Wherever he looks Paul sees evidence of this principle of differentiation. It is a marvellous universe, and in it God has set so many things, so many glorious things, which yet differ markedly from each other.
42. It is along this line of differing bodies and differing splendours that the resurrection is to be understood. There is a definite article with the dead (i.e. ‘the collective dead’; see on v. 12). Paul does not insert a subject for the following verbs, but he is clearly referring to the body (which NIV inserts; it is not in the Greek). He has pointed to a wide variety of phenomena in his examples, with his different kinds of flesh, heavenly bodies, etc., but is sown shows that what is primarily in mind is the sowing of seed, with the resultant new and vigorous life (vv. 36f.). He points to a number of differences between the body now and the body raised, and begins with perishability. The words NIV translates by perishable and imperishable are more strictly ‘corruption’ and ‘incorruption’. While ‘corruption’ refers primarily to the body’s liability to decay, the analogy between physical and moral corruption may not be out of mind. ‘Incorruption’ was in common use to indicate the quality of life in the hereafter, and it is particularly telling at this point. The chief objection the typical Greek had to any doctrine of resurrection was that the body is essentially corruptible. By its very nature it is subject to decay. He looked for an existence when the soul would no longer be handicapped by this corruptible body, when the soul would exist ‘in incorruption’. Paul associates this very state with the resurrection body. He agrees that liability to decay is a property of our earthly body, the body that is to be put into the grave. But he insists that the body that will be taken from the grave at the resurrection will be a transformed body (cf. Rom. 8:21). It will be ‘raised in incorruption’. That very feature that the average Greek regarded as incompatible with the body, because he thought only of the present body of flesh and blood, Paul sees as characteristic of the resurrection body.
43. Paul continues to pick out those features of bodily life that seemed to the Greek to demonstrate the folly of the idea of the resurrection, and to show that they have no relevance to the resurrection body. Dishonour translates atimia, a word that applies in various ways. It is sometimes used of loss of the rights of citizenship; a corpse has no rights. Again, there are ‘less honourable’ parts of this body (12:23), and when dead the whole body lacks honour. Further, the Jews held that a dead body conveys uncleanness (Num. 19:11). Look at it how you will, there is nothing honourable about a decaying body as it is put into a grave. But that has no relevance to the way the body is when it is raised. The resurrection body is a glorious body, just as far surpassing the present body as the beautiful plant surpasses the seed from which it sprang. The Greek’s doubts arising from the dishonourable nature of the body that now is are groundless. The body that is to be raised will be a body in glory.
Again, the present body is characterized by weakness. Cultivate it as he would (and the Greek did cultivate bodily prowess), it still remains a weak instrument, far outspanned by the mind that is in it. And when it dies (the primary reference is to the dead body), it is the very symbol of powerlessness. But the resurrection body will not be limited as this body is. Just as surely as this body is characterized by weakness, so the body that is to be raised will be characterized by power.
44. Natural translates psychikon, ‘pertaining to the soul or life’ (psychē); Conzelmann has ‘psychical’, NEB ‘animal’; Thrall explains, ‘the human being considered as part of the natural world’. It has to do with the present life in all its aspects, especially as contrasted with the supernatural life (cf. its use in 2:14 of the merely ‘natural’ man). There is nothing necessarily sinful or blameworthy about it (unless someone deliberately chooses to live on a lower plane when he could live on a higher). Here it means that the body we now have is a body suited to the present life. It is adapted to the psychē, the rational principle of life. But such a body is ill-adapted to life in the world to come. For that a body is needed that is attuned to the spirit, in fact a spiritual body. This does not mean a body ‘composed of spirit’, but rather ‘which expresses spirit’, ‘which answers to the needs of spirit’. At the end of the verse the apostle argues that, just as there is a body related to the psychē, so there must also be a body related to the spirit. The spiritual body then is the organ that is intimately related to the spirit of man, just as the present body is intimately related to this earthly life.
45. Characteristically Paul appeals to Scripture to clinch his argument. This is not something he has thought up for himself. Yet we should notice that he does not employ his usual formula of quotation kathōs gegraptai, ‘as it is written’, but houtōs kai gegraptai, ‘in this manner also it is written’. This may indicate something other than exact quotation. Paul refers to Genesis 2:7 (inserting first before man and Adam after it). His point appears to be that the characteristic of man from the very beginning is psychē, ‘soul’ (NIV living being). That was true of Adam and it is true of all his descendants. The first Adam passed on his nature to those who came after. The Scripture passage cited does not include Paul’s second point. He may have intended to prove only the first one from Scripture, the second being his own addition. Or he may mean that Scripture as a whole witnesses to Christ as a life-giving spirit. Or he may mean that this is implicit in Scripture. That is to say, Adam was the progenitor of the race, and his characteristics are stamped on the race. In the same way, Christ is the last Adam, the progenitor of the race of spiritual people. In modern times we often read of ‘the second Adam’, but Paul never uses this term (though cf. ‘the second man’, v. 47). There is a finality about ‘the last Adam’: ‘There will be no other Head of the human race’ (Robertson and Plummer). By virtue of his office as the last Adam he stamps his characteristics on those who are his. The first Adam implies the last Adam, and the first Adam’s work implies the last Adam’s work. In this office Christ’s characteristic is that he is a life-giving spirit. Not only is he the pattern of those who are in him, but he is the source of that spiritual life that will result in the bodies of which Paul speaks. We should understand became with this expression. Paul sees Christ as having become a life-giving spirit in his work of saving sinners. Some narrow this down to the incarnation, or the resurrection (about which this chapter says so much), or the second advent. But Paul is not specific.
46. Paul insists on the right order of things. He begins with the strong adversative alla. This is puzzling, for what follows is not in strong contrast with the preceding (which may be why NIV omits it). Perhaps it contrasts the following ‘broad statement’ with the preceding details (Ellicott). Or Paul may mean that, though the ‘life-giving spirit’ is before all time and before all men, yet in the order of creation we now see not what is particularly related to him, the spiritual, but what has particular relevance to life in the here and now, the natural. We enter natural life first; it is only after that that we may enter into the spiritual. It is perhaps worth noticing that Philo held that God created a ‘heavenly man’ after his own image (Gen. 1:27), and only later an ‘earthly one’ (Gen. 2:7; De Opif. Mund. 134; Leg. Alleg. i, 31f.). Paul may be contradicting Jewish teaching of this sort.
47. The first man is, of course, Adam. He is ek gēs, ‘of the earth’ (ek indicates origin), and he is choikos, ‘made of dust’ (Gen. 2:7). The second man is Christ, set over against Adam once more, this time not in terms of work accomplished or natural constitution, but of origin. Though he appeared on earth, and lived and died and rose again on earth, he is not to be thought of as originating from the earth, as did Adam. He is from heaven. Some see here a backward glance to the incarnation and some a forward look to the second advent. But Paul is surely not looking specifically at either. He is contrasting Christ’s heavenly origin with Adam’s earthly one.
48. As was the earthly man points us to Adam once more. He is the pattern for all his descendants. As is his nature, so is theirs; all mankind are, in this sense, ‘earthy’ (choikos). Over against this is set ‘the heavenly’ (which, in accordance with v. 47, means the man from heaven). The use of the adjective (‘the heavenly’) rather than ‘from heaven’ points to his nature as a heavenly being, rather than his origin. But the really important point is the conclusion, so also are those who are of heaven (Greek, ‘the heavenly’). There is no question in the minds of either Paul or the Corinthians (or of the Greeks at large) that all people are ‘earthy’. Our bodies are earthy bodies and they share in the corruption that is part and parcel of earthy things. But Christians are not only earthy; they are also ‘heavenly’ because of their relationship to Christ. This means that Christ’s people will be like him (cf. 1 John 3:2). The resurrection body of Christ shows us something of what life will be like for believers in that new world that their resurrection will usher in. Then he will change their ‘lowly bodies’ so that they will be ‘like his glorious body’ (Phil. 3:21).
49. We have borne translates the verb phoreō, which is more intensive than the more usual pherō. Whereas the latter means simply ‘to bear’, the former conveys the idea of bearing continually or habitually (it is often used of wearing clothes; cf. v. 53). It is thus a natural word to use here, where Paul conveys the thought of our habitual state. The use of the aorist may, as Parry thinks, be inceptive, ‘began to wear, put on’. Or, from the standpoint of the resurrection, it may look back on earthly life as a completed whole. The bearing in question is seen in the whole of life, not simply in some parts. The likeness (eikōn), better ‘image’, is used of man being ‘the image of God’ (11:7). It can denote simply representation (as in the eikōn of the Emperor on a coin), or it can denote something more exact. Here it will be the image that corresponds to and reproduces the original. The majority of the more ancient MSS; read ‘let us bear’ instead of we shall bear in the second part of the verse. If this reading be accepted (as it is by Findlay, Williams and others), then Paul is exhorting the Corinthians to put on their heavenly state, progressively to make it their own (‘let us also try to be like the man from heaven’, Goodspeed). This sounds as though it were something people can do by their own efforts. But this is so far from Paul’s usual approach that we are justified in regarding ‘let us bear’ as a primitive corruption of the text by scribes interested in ethical exhortation, and not quite certain what the apostle meant. The context seems to make it clear that we shall bear is the right reading, and this is supported by some good authorities for the text, including Codex Vaticanus. Paul is saying, then, that just as throughout this life we have habitually borne the form of Adam, so in the life to come we shall bear that of our Lord. Just as surely as we have done the one, so surely shall we do the other. This is not a matter for doubt. For Paul the considerations adduced are decisive.