No, Steven, that just will not do!

It warms my heart to know that Steven Carr thinks "...Paul's beliefs are pretty coherent" but, as for the fact that "...some very early converts to Christianity did not believe in resurrection of corpses; does anybody?

It may seem to some that we are at risk of arguing about semantics here but, I think we all accept that Paul and the Corinthians, and the whole of the Roman Empire - including the inhabitants of Palestine - accepted that dead bodies rot.

I therefore find it very hard to believe that, on the basis of one phrase in one verse (1 Cor 15:45b), Steven tries to deconstruct one of the fundamental – if not the fundamental – historical tenants of Christianity... and I am bound, therefore, to question his motives. Perhaps Jesus had Steven in mind when he inspired Paul to write “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds… [and with them we] …demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”. (2 Cor 10:4-5)!

Both Paul and his audience (in the widest possible sense) believed in an afterlife, (or a spirit world - call it what you will) but, even to them, it was not normal to see spirits wandering around, and certainly not normal for them to be “seen” by more than one person (1 Cor 15:5-9). However, if we take Paul’s writings as a whole, it is just not tenable to conclude anything other than that, in the case of the body of Jesus, Paul believed something special had happened. This is not negated by his acceptance that “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable”. (1 Cor 15:42).

When Paul said “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised” (1 Cor 15:12-13), he was not questioning his own faith – he knew Jesus had been bodily raised from death because – as far as he was concerned – it was impossible that God could be defeated by death (i.e. stay dead).

The point Paul was making, to those Corinthians (like the wise Men of Athens in Acts 17) who questioned how Christians could believe in the bodily resurrection of a man when “everybody knew that” that was impossible, was that there would have been no point in Jesus’ victory over death if there was no afterlife at all. Having established that point; Paul then goes on to (try to) explain his understanding of the nature of the “spiritual body"...

Of course, Steven will not accept this because, although he likes to make it sound like he empathises with Paul’s “world view”, his intention is to try and prove that “...if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile [and]... If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men”. (1 Cor 15:17-19).

However, I'm afraid Steven, that just will not do!