Was Jesus' Resurrection Spiritual or Physical?
According to the Gospels, Jesus is raised bodily from the dead after his crucifixion. However, while the resurrected Messiah is embodied, that body does not behave like our earthly bodies. Instead, Jesus’ body both appears and disappears, is recognized and unrecognized, and is tangible and intangible. This “both/and” presentation of Jesus coheres with Jewish views of post-resurrection bodies: when people are raised from the dead, their physical bodies are made of “spirit” material unfettered by the physics of our terrestrial realm.
On the one hand, ancient Jews viewed resurrection in quite concrete terms. The Maccabean literature expects that the same body parts that exist in one’s earthly life will be reanimated through resurrection. When the third of seven Jewish brothers is tortured at the hands of the Seleucids, the book of Second Maccabees says that he stuck out “his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands and said nobly, ‘I got these from [God in] heaven… and from him I hope to get them back again’” (2 Maccabees 7:10-11). The most gruesome description along these lines is in the death of the righteous Razi who, after being stabbed by the Seleucids, “tore out his entrails, took them in both hands, and hurled them at the crowd, calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to give them back to him again” (2 Macc 14:46). These texts show that Jews before Jesus hoped that God would restore the body parts that they had lost at the end of their lives by raising them from the grave. Jesus’ resurrected body affirms this Jewish belief when he tells Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side” (John 20:27). Jesus’ resurrection body retains the wounds he had sustained on the cross. Both the 2 Maccabees and the Gospel of John show that resurrection is a physical phenomenon by which the formerly deceased retain the bodies they had in life.
On the other hand, one’s resurrection body was made of material unlike the flesh and blood indicative of earthly existence. According to a text known as 2 Baruch, which is roughly contemporaneous with the Gospels, those who are raised from the dead will have their bodies changed: “their splendor shall be glorified through changes, and the form of their face shall be turned into the light of their beauty, that they may be able to acquire and receive the world that does not die…. They will be transformed… and made like the angels, and be made equal to the stars, and they shall be changed into every form they desire” (2 Bar. 51.3, 5, 10). This vision of the resurrection echoes Paul’s description: “With the resurrection of the dead, what is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable…. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body…. [For] flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable…. The dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed (ἀλλαγησόμεθα; allagesōmetha). For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44, 50, 52-53). This “change” from flesh to spirit explains Jesus’ ability to appear suddenly in a room whose “doors were locked” (John 20:19), as well as his disciples being “kept from recognizing him” before he “vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:16, 31). Jesus’ resurrection was both physical and spiritual: his physical body is the same one that was crucified outside Jerusalem and that body is changed in substance and appearance. According to Jewish theology, those who are raised from the dead are the same beings whose earthly bodies had been made in the image of God, and those bodies are reformed into imperishable spirit material.
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