Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Gary Habermas on the Differences between the Resurrection Accounts in the Pauline Epistles and the Gospels

  

Of course, there are still differences between the resurrection appearance details as described in the Gospel narratives and the brief statements in Paul’s Epistles. Hence, while Paul likewise accepts the notion of bodily resurrection appearances, the descriptive approaches vary. Many of the differences may be due to the Gospel authors narrating their stories, while the epistolary genre is entirely different, given brief statements of the reported earliest beliefs instead of detailed accounts. For example, Paul never describes (or even mentions directly) an empty tomb. Nor does Paul state that Jesus’s female followers held him by the ankles after his resurrection (Matt 28:9; John 20:17), that Jesus otherwise offered to be touched (cf. Luke 24:39-40; John 20:17, 27), or that he ate food in the presence of his followers (Luke 24:41-43; Acts 10:41, or as implied in John 21:9, 12). Consider this, though: these situations may have been described much differently if Paul had written a Gospel. But whereas the Gospel narratives in Matthew, Luke, and John make it clear throughout in their descriptions that Jesus’s appearances were bodily in nature, Paul also develops his view in other more theoretical ways in his teaching that he also thought that Jesus appeared bodily. Paul communicated his ideas in a variety of ways, such as by elaborating on his Pharisaic background views of both corporal and bodily resurrection, plus his teachings that the righteous would inherit a refurbished earthly creation (which would seem rather irrelevant or even just plain metaphysical nonsense for Platonic disembodied spirits!) Most of all, Paul’s notion of the resurrection body is further indicated by his usage and interaction between crucial terms such as sōma, anastasis, egeirō, and especially exanastasin in Phil 3:11, or similar phrases where the concept of anastasis was combined with ek nekron (as in Phil 3:11b; 1 Cor 15:12; or Rom 8:11). In these instances, especially for the Pharisees and in the majority Jewish parlance, this would most likely indicate that for Paul, the sōma that went down into the ground in burial was essentially the same sōma that emerged in the resurrection appearances (as in the creedal statement in 1 Cor 15:3-5). Of course, there were significant changes in resurrection bodies too, as Paul argues rather pointedly, especially in 1 Cor 15:35-45. It is even obvious in the Gospels that there were differences in Jesus’s resurrection body, such as when Jesus appeared and disappeared, or when he was already gone when the tomb was opened. Moreover, Jesus’s wounds were already healed, and he no longer suffered any pain, and so on. But Jesus’s physical body had died, was buried, was raised, and appeared afterward—that is, what “went down” in death and burial returned in the resurrection and appearances. Though there were marked differences, Jesus had not ceased having (or being) a body—his own body. This is why many scholars have added that an empty tomb is implied in the pre-Pauline creedal statement in 1 Cor 15:4 as well as in Paul’s other teachings on these matters. (See the critical works listed above by Wright, Cook, Licona, and Gundry). As Cook declares succinctly on the opening page of his treatise, his primary hypothesis that “there is no fundamental difference between Paul’s conception of the resurrection body and that of the Gospels” (Empty Tomb, 1). To be sure, the notions were expressed differently in the Gospels and in Paul, but the shared concept is that of the same raised body instead of a raised and glorified spirit. (Gary R. Habermas, On the Resurrection, 4 vols. [Brentwood, Tenn.: B&H Academic, 2024], 2:696 n. 25

 

 

 

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