Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Resurrection Shows Jesus was a Material Being Not a Spirit!
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Rising From The Dead
The most convincing miracle of Jesus for Christians is his rising from the dead on the third day. It is this rising from the dead that is called resurrection. The point of it is that the risen Jesus is not just a ghost of the dead man returned to prove that there is a spiritual life after death—something that most people in ancient religions believed anyway, and that people readily believe today without any demonstrations of it to convince them—but he is the actual self-same man in the same material and physical human form revived from death to live in the material existence of the world again. Proof of it is that Matthew says that other saints, meaning perfectly righteous people who had previously died were resurrected from their tombs at the same time as Jesus and wandered around the city:
And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.Matthew 27:52-53
Indeed, the author of Matthew does not seem to realize that this is the more remarkable miracle, yet it is glossed over in two verses. These saints had been dead for some time, not just for the couple of days of Jesus—a time that could have allowed resuscitation as a non-miraculous explanation—but that men who had been dead for months or years had been resurrected is much more convincing.
Moreover, Jesus goes to some trouble, if the author of Luke is to be believed, to persuade his own disciples that he was not a ghost. Note that they were willing to believe that he was a spirit, but Jesus wanted to prove he was actually living in his own self-same body, the very body that had been tortured to death:
Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me, and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet. And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat? And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them.Luke 24:37-43
The disciples had shown themselves in the gospels to have been poltroons. They legged it when Jesus was captured, and so did not know anything as eye-witnesses about the events after the capture because they were hiding to avoid the same fate themselves. What they had about the events was hearsay, and in Luke, they had just been told by Simon and Cleopas that Jesus had risen and they had met him on the road at Emmaus. Later in the story of Christian origins, Paul met Jesus on the road in an incident so important to the early gentile Church that it is recorded three times, but Paul was a visionary, had some affliction, thought by many to have been epilepsy, but really simply that he was a Roman spy, and the accounts of his supernatural experiences are much more of visions rather than meetings with flesh and blood. But in the story in Luke, the author has Jesus demonstrating as clearly as possible that he really lived in a material body.
What then is to be made of the evident fact that Jesus was not a spirit after he had risen from the grave? Soon he was taken up to heaven, so was a he taken up as a physical body, and do Christians therefore have physical bodies in heaven? The incarnated God has answered the question. Replying to Sadducees who did not believe in resurrection, Jesus shows to them that a resurrected woman who had had seven husbands was not resurrected as a normal woman but as an angel. Her seven husbands likewise, so none of them would be thinking of taking their former spouse as any sort of sexual partner again. People were resurrected but, when they were, they were not just ordinary people again.
The two explanations are contradictory. Luke tries to have Jesus resurrected into a normal body, even with its wounds, and has Jesus elaborately showing it to his hapless disciples, but Jesus himself had denied that the resurrected body was normal, according to Mark 12:18-27. Luke was trying desperately to refute the critics who had said the disciples were deluded. He has Jesus giving this elaborate demonstration as concrete proof that he actually lived again in a physical body, the same one as he had when he died, and ten or so people witnessed it. If he were merely a ghost, the appearances could have been fobbed off as hallucinations, wishful thinking and so on, but Luke meant to avoid it all. All he does is make God into a liar because he had already explained that the resurrected body was angelic.
The later experiences of the Christian saint who actually founded Christianity, Paul, agrees that the resurrected body is a spiritual body, even if it seems in every respect to be an ordinary physical one. If it were an ordinary physical body in every respect, then there could be no eternal life. The physical body must die again. In fact, as it had already died, it could not have been the ordinary physical body in every respect unless it were still dead. Nor do angels need to eat food like broiled fish and honeycombs.
It all merely raises the whole unsettled question about what Jesus was when he was God incarnated. Christians need to believe that God was entirely a man when He made Himself into flesh and blood, even though He was really still God! Not only that but He lived man and boy on earth as a man for over thirty years, and His arch enemy, the Devil, never noticed, and was quite unable to take advantage of the God weakened into humanity as He was. If He was not thus weakened then He was not a man at all, but was God pretending to be a man. Christ was resurrected into a body that was spiritual but was material at the same time. He was entirely a man and entirely a God at the same time. God Himself is transcendent and immanent at the same time. Simply inventing impossibilities and asserting that “everything is possible for God” might impress some, but it is deeply unsatisfactory for creatures made in God's image to have to believe. Did God give us brains so that we had to ignore them? For Christians the answer is affirmative!
