Expectations and the Interpretation of Resurrection as "Bodily"
(avg. read time: 20–40 mins.)
There has been an ongoing debate in scholarship about resurrection belief among early Jews and early Christians as to whether these people thought that resurrection language entailed a bodily event or if they thought it could involve other anthropological aspects in such a way as to be non-bodily. What further complicates the articulations of such possibilities is the question of how metaphorical uses of resurrection language—readily acknowledged by all—contribute to our understanding of what these ancient people expected to be involved in resurrection. Still, the scholarly views on the possibilities can be broken down into two broad views which could be further subdivided (though not for my purposes here).1 What I call the “open-source resurrection” view states that, even prior to Gnostic uses of resurrection language, early Jews and early Christians presented expectations of eschatological resurrection that could or could not involve the body in literal expressions.2 I also describe it as “open-source” because its notion of the source domain for metaphorical resurrection texts is more open-ended in terms of a simple revival, in which the body may or may not play a part. The opposition to this position is the “body-source resurrection” view, according to which, prior to Gnostic uses of resurrection language, early Jews and early Christians presented expectations of eschatological resurrection that necessarily involved the body in literal expressions.3 The “source” aspect of this description conveys that, in the case of the metaphorical uses of resurrection language, the source domain remains a bodily event, namely of the restoration of a dead body to life that also implied an upward physical movement.4 Both views recognize the importance of analyzing the character of the “source domain” from which the ancient authors drew the conceptual metaphor of resurrection and in the light of which they understood the “target domain” (often, the restoration of Israel or healing) for understanding resurrection language more broadly.5 What is at issue in the cases of metaphorical usage is which view more accurately conveys the character of the source domain.
I have designated Gnostic uses (and, by implication, sometime in the second century) as the cutoff in these descriptions because scholars of both camps recognize that the Gnostics use resurrection language to refer to events that explicitly do not involve the body.6 What is in dispute is how the language is used beforehand, and thus whether or not the Gnostic uses of resurrection language represent a departure from previous Jewish and Christian tendencies. But since there is an agreement on the fact that the Gnostics use this language in this way, I will not be addressing these texts here.
However, there is more to this debate than the question of what given texts say or do not say about resurrection. Another aspect of this debate that is underexplored is how the expectations of scholars contribute to their definitions of resurrection belief. In fact, I suggest that a major impetus for one of these views is that the expectations of scholars based on their presuppositions of what should be present have been violated, rather than expectations that emerge from ancient conventions per se.7
I argue that the body-source resurrection view produces expectations for reading early Jewish and early Christian texts that better comport with what those texts convey, especially because this view comports better with the semantics of the resurrection verbs and with the implications of the metaphorical uses of resurrection language. In short, this view rightly discerns from these factors what expectations are licensed by the use of resurrection language, even when “body” language is not explicitly present. To demonstrate this thesis, I proceed in three steps. First, I explore examples of scholars who articulate these views related to OT and Second Temple Jewish texts used to address questions of modality (whether resurrection is bodily or not). Second, I consider the factors by which we identify resurrection texts and how those factors contribute to the question of what our expectations should be based on analysis of the given texts. Third, I apply these considerations to two prominent biblical texts regularly ensconced in this debate: Dan 12 (specifically vv. 2–3 and 13) and 1 Cor 15 (particularly Jesus’s resurrection as related in vv. 3–4).
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