In Luke 24:39, the KJV reads:
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.
Other translations render πνευμα as "ghost" instead of "spirit," and such fits the context better. The NRSV, for example, reads:
Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.
While I disagree with much of the book, Daniel Smith’s discussion of this particular in his volume on the empty tomb and resurrection narratives is well-done:
Are We Seeing a Pneuma?
Having Peter, the primary witness of the appearance traditions, verify the empty tomb is a significant development, since it narrowly limits how the appearances can be interpreted. It requires complete bodily continuity between the dead Jesus in the tomb and the risen Jesus who appears—which is very different from the complete transformation Paul envisioned. Of all the Gospels, Luke is the most explicit about the mode of Jesus’ postresurrection bodily existence. When he appears suddenly among the Eleven and the rest (24:36), Jesus himself explains that he is not a spirit (Gk., pneuma), for he has flesh and bones as a spirit cannot . . . In Greco-Roman antiquity, it would not be out of the question to see someone who was dead . . . Although such an apparition could be interpreted as some aspect of the dead person—that is, the soul, shadow, or daimon—becoming visible to living persons. We would call this a ghost—as ancient Greek and Latin speakers would as well, with varying terminology—or possible, a “post-mortem apparition.” In fact, most current translations render pneuma here in Luke 24:39, not as “spirit” but as “ghost.”
According to ancient thinking, certain types of people were more likely to appear after their death in ghostly manifestations. As noted, the typical view was that those who had died young (or before marriage), those who had died violently, and those whose bodies were not given proper burial or cremation were more likely to have a restless post-mortem existence and to cause trouble for the living. Jesus, executed as a criminal, would of course all into the category of those dead by violence. Virgil (70-19 BCE) held that among those doomed to a restless afterlife, excluded for a time from rest in Hades, were people unjustly executed or who took their own lives. Lucian (c. 125-80 CE) has one of his characters number the crucified (or impaled) among those especially given to appearing in ghostly manifestations: “such as, if a person hanged himself, or had his head cut off, or was impaled on a stake, or departed life in some other way such as these” (Lucian, Philops, 29) . . . An outsider could have concluded that followers of Jesus who were talking about his post-mortem appearances had simply seen his ghost. As it seems, this would not have been considered unusual or extraordinary. But Luke makes it clear to his readers that however the appearances of Jesus could have been interpreted, they were epiphanies of someone who had been raised from the dead—with an empty tomb. As already seen, this is confirmed by Peter himself when he finds the tomb empty except for the grave clothes . . . Another potential concern arises, however, in view of the interpretation of the resurrection appearances as ghostly apparitions . . . The corpus of spells and incantations called the Greek magical papyri attests to this, in particular to the ways that body parts could be used to control the ghosts of the dead—and the shade or spirit (often called a daimōn) of a person who died by violence would be particularly powerful if controlled. (Daniel A. Smith, Revisiting the Empty Tomb: The Early History of Easter [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010], 106-7)
The apologetic value of this to Latter-day Saints can be seen by the fact that some critics tie Jesus’ words in Luke 24:39 with John 4:24 as “proof” that God cannot be embodied. Apart from the fact that Jesus is assuring his followers in Luke 24:39 that he was not a ghost, critics are guilty of eisegesis of John 4:24, too. For a discussion, see:
