The New Testament teaches in some passages with sufficient
The resurrection coincides with the parousia and the arrival of the future aeon (Luke 20:35; John 6:40; 1 Thessalonians 4:16). From 1 Thessalonians 3:13; 4:16 it has been inferred that the dead rise before the descent of Christ from heaven is completed; the sounds described in the later passage are then interpreted as sounds accompanying the descent (compare Exodus 19:16; Isaiah 27:13; Matthew 24:31; 1 Corinthians 15:52; Hebrews 12:19; Revelation 10:7; 11:15; "the trump of God" = the great eschatological trumpet). The two words for the resurrection are egeirein, "to wake," and anistanai, "to raise," the latter less common in the active than in the intransitive sense.
1. Its Universality: The New Testament teaches in some passages with sufficient clearness that all the dead will be raised, but the emphasis rests to such an extent on the soteriological aspect of the event, especially in Paul, where it is closely connected with the doctrine of the Spirit, that its reference to non-believers receives little notice. This was already partly so in the Old Testament (Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2). In the intervening Jewish literature the doctrine varies; sometimes a resurrection of the martyrs alone is taught (Enoch 90); sometimes of all the righteous dead of Israel (Psalms of Solomon 3:10; Enoch 91– 94); sometimes of all the righteous and of some wicked Israelites (Enoch 1–36); sometimes of all the righteous and all the wicked (Ezra 4; 2 Esdras 5:45; 7:32). Josephus ascribes to the Pharisees the doctrine that only the righteous will share in the resurrection. It ought to be noticed that these apocalyptic writings which affirm the universality of the resurrection present the same phenomena as the New Testament, namely, that they contain passages which so exclusively reflect upon the resurrection in its bearing upon the destiny of the righteous as to create the appearance that no other resurrection was believed in. Among the Pharisees probably a
diversity of opinion prevailed on this question, which Josephus will have obliterated. Our Lord in His argument with the Sadducees proves only the resurrection of the pious, but does not exclude the other (Mark 12:26, 27); "the resurrection of the just" in Luke 14:14 may suggest a twofold resurrection. It has been held that the phrase, he anastasis he ek nekron Luke 20:35; Acts 4:2, always describes the resurrection of a limited number from among the dead, whereas he anastasisis ton nekron would be descriptive of a universal resurrection Plummer, Commentary on Luke 20:35, but such a distinction breaks down before an examination of the passages.
The inference to the universality of the resurrection sometimes drawn from the universality of the judgment is scarcely valid, since the idea of a judgment of disembodied spirits is not inconceivable and actually occurs. On the other hand the punishment of the judged is explicitly affirmed to include the body (Matthew 10:28). It cannot be proven that the term "resurrection" is ever in the New Testament eschatologically employed without reference to the body, of the quickening of the spirit simply (against, Fries, in ZNTW, 1900, 291). The sense of our Lord's argument with the Sadducees does not require that the patriarchs were at the time of Moses in possession of the resurrection, but only that they were enjoying the covenant-life, which would in due time inevitably issue in the resurrection of their bodies. The resemblance (or "equality") to the angels (Mark 12:25) does not consist in the disembodied state, but in the absence of marriage and propagation. It has been suggested that Hebrews contains no direct evidence for a bodily resurrection (Charles, Eschatology, 361), but compare 11:22, 35; 12:2; 13:20. The spiritualism of the epistle points, in connection with its Pauline type of teaching, to the conception of a pneumatic heavenly body, rather than to a disembodied state.