A. K. Chidgzey

The Apostle Paul wrote this epistle, which is just the Greek word for letter, to the Jesus followers of Corinth in Greece somewhere in the early to mid 50’s, about 20 years after Jesus’ death. And it’s basically responding to a series of pastoral and theological issues that rose up amongst these believers.

Paul had heard that some of these people were denying the resurrection of Jesus. And so wanted to clarify some of the concerns and argued that resurrection was absolutely central to the faith. This is all written down in chapter 15.

He says that Jesus’ resurrection happened and that our resurrection will be like his, and that it is bodily, but then he drops this little note, “Flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God.” What does he mean by that? Is he saying the risen body will be immaterial, that it’ll be this casper the ghost like thing?

And so this caused a number of headaches. Because people didn’t really know how to interpret what Paul was saying.

And so in the second century, a man named Marcion comes along. I mentioned him in the episode on Gnosticism. But most of what we know about Marcion comes to us through his opponents, because his actual writings weren’t preserved. But based on what other people have said about Marcion we know that resurrection was a pretty central issue and this verse in particular was a sticking point.

It seems that Marcion used this verse to argue that the resurrected body will not be a literal, physical, fleshly type body. That it’ll be this sort of disembodied, ethereal sort of existence, a spiritual body. Now Paul does actually use that phrase spiritual body elsewhere, so Marcion got a bit of a following. And because of this, interest in the writings of Paul increased. Prior to Marcion, Paul wasn’t really that well known or all that popular.

But along comes a couple of men by the names of Irenaeus and Tertullian. We’ve already mentioned Irenaeus in the episode on heresiology, because he wrote a lot about what he considered to be heresies. But they thought, nope, we’re going to take back Paul. Make Paul great again. And they argued against Marcion.

And their main argument was that this verse is not talking about the nature of the risen body itself, but is actually talking about the works of the flesh. The carnal, fleshly, human, corrupt, sinful desires. And they quote Galatians 5.19-21, which says, “The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, etc. …those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” There’s really only three or four verses in the bible which connects the word ‘inherit’ with the ‘kingdom of God,’ so when Paul says, “Flesh and blood will not inherit the Kingdom of God,” Irenaeus and Tertullian assumed that Paul was referring to those who live by the flesh. He’s not actually talking about the body, but is actually talking about ethics.

There’s more to their argument, of course, but this is the basic gist. And that essentially became the orthodox interpretation of this verse for the next millennium and is even a popular argument today. The Fourth Lateran Council in the 13th century declared, “All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear.” And in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, from the Council of Lyons in 1274, it says, “We believe in the true resurrection of this flesh that we now possess.”

So that was the first major argument, between Marcion and the early Christian apologists, and it was decided that when he says “flesh and blood do not inherit the kingdom of God” Paul is talking about those who live by the flesh. Not necessarily about the resurrected body itself.

Over the next 1000 years, roughly, interest in the nature of a bodily resurrection waned as people became more interested in the doctrines of purgatory and what is called the beatific vision, two Catholic doctrines which both deserve full episodes to really understand. Generally, understandings of the resurrection were based upon a Platonic view of the body and soul, that is not that the body and soul are like two old pals who only ever give one another side hugs, but refers to the Greek philosopher Plato who said that the body and soul were separate entities, that the soul is the real self which resides within the body and would continue to live after the body dies. In a nutshell.

But following the Carolingian Renaissance, led by our good friend Alcuin (see episode #8), and then the rise of universities, and then the infamous crusades, which I’m sure I’ll do at least a couple of episodes on one day, there was a rediscovery of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose work had been preserved in the Byzantine Empire and in Egypt and the Middle East. With the Crusades, particularly the fourth crusade and the sack of Constantinople – which, by the way, was a calamitous embarrassment for Christendom and was the punctuation mark of what was the comedy of errors and outright failure, economically, politically, and morally, that were the crusades – the works of Aristotle were reintroduced to Western Europe, which caused a real stir. This excitement lead to what is called Scholasticism.

Aristotle had been Plato’s star student, but he went in a very different way to his mentor. Aristotle argued that the soul and the body were actually mutually dependent; the soul could not exist without the body. So, naturally, people started to question, “Well okay then, if the soul doesn’t live on after the body dies, what happens after we die? What then does the resurrection look like?”

People’s interest in the resurrection body was reignited and with it, the flesh. They began to question whether things like hair, nails, and even aborted or miscarried fetuses would be resurrected? Would you have really long hair – all the collective hair you had ever grown – or would it be cut to your preferred length? I can’t help but imagine these scholars sitting around debating whether people would have mullets or manbuns in heaven. There probably won’t be many Australians in heaven if not.

A really big and really surprising concern was cannibalism. What happens to your body if you’ve been consumed by someone else, and what if that person was consumed by someone else? What happens to your body at the resurrection? The arguments get quite detailed and extensive and a little bit boring if I’m honest but the general idea is that all of your parts will be returned to you. But a concerning part of this is why people were so concerned with cannibalism. And I just went down a bit of a disturbing rabbit hole researching cannibalism in medieval Europe, and suffice it to say, it was a very common and acceptable practice – especially in times of famine.

But anyway back to the topic at hand. Conservative scholars condemned the Aristotelean view of the body and soul, but that didn’t really do much, and many other scholars embraced Aristotle. One of whom was that Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas. And he turned his attention to 1 Corinthians 15:50 and the claim that flesh and blood do not inherit the kingdom of God. His argument is quite interesting. He states:

“Our resurrection will be conformed to the resurrection of Christ. Now in Christ’s resurrection His blood rose again; otherwise the wine would not now be changed into blood in the Sacrament of the altar. Therefore the blood will rise again in us also.”

In other words, Aquinas is basing his understanding of Jesus’ resurrection on the eucharist, specifically on a doctrine called transubstantiation, which is the belief that the bread and wine literally turns into the body and blood of Jesus. The wine could only turn into the blood of Jesus if Jesus had risen with his blood.

So for Aquinas, the resurrection must in fact include flesh and blood.

What then does he make of this verse? Well he actually just follows Tertullian and Irenaeus, that ‘flesh and blood’ here refer to deeds of the flesh. This flesh and blood signifies corruption. Put differently, Paul does not have the resurrected body in mind, but instead is talking about corrupt, finite, fleshly concerns. i.e. those who act according to the flesh and not according to the will of God will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Following scholasticism, the Reformation and then the Enlightenment drastically changed how the body was to be understood. New scientific and philosophical developments meant that earlier arguments and assumptions required re-evaluation. On the extreme end, the resurrection was denied outright, making 1 Corinthians 15:50 superfluous. But there were some who didn’t reject it but reinterpreted it. In 19^th and 20th centuries there was a movement called liberalism. The word liberal is here being used in a technical sense, relating to the idea of liberation and freedom. They were modern, enlightened Christians who were throwing off the shackles of old Catholic superstition and were trying to make sense of Christianity and the bible in light of these new developing ideas about the world and emerging philosophies and scientific advancements.

One of these liberal scholars was Rudolf Bultmann who was born in 1884. He was inspired by an Enlightenment figure named David Strauss, who was a philosopher and theologian of the 19^th century who was critical of the New Testament portrayals of Jesus and proposed this idea of myth. Basically, the ancient people who wrote the New Testament were scientifically ignorant, at least compared to modern people, and so when they wrote the texts there were some things that were interpreted spiritually or supernaturally which, with our modern sensibilities and scientific knowledge, we would understand differently. Some events were seen as miracles where today we could understand the natural reality behind those events and so could interpret those events scientifically. So the argument went. We know that dead people don’t rise from the dead, so we cannot say that they ever rose from the dead. And so Jesus’ resurrection was not a literal reanimation of Jesus’ corpse, but was a spiritual metaphor. The New Testament authors didn’t know how to communicate their experience, if they even understood it entirely, and so they resorted to what Strauss and Bultmann called mythological language. And it is our job today to demythologize these portrayals of Jesus and his resurrection.

For Bultmann, when Paul speaks about flesh and blood, he is talking about humanity in general, in its weakness and its opposition to God. In the resurrection the body is transformed, but the flesh is dead. It is not a physical body in any sense, but rather a spiritual one. It is in fact an existential event. Jesus’ resurrection was not a historical, physical, or fleshly event, but something that happened within the minds of the disciples. It is the elevation of Jesus as Lord in their minds. And so the resurrection is a metaphor. Hence why Paul could say that flesh and blood do not inherit the kingdom of God; in other words, frailty, corruption, and death will not be present in God’s eschatological future.

Now all of this is very generalized. And there’s so many more scholars from each of these different contexts, and in my paper I went into a little more detail and will go into even more detail when I write it and submit it to a journal. But I wanted to give a bit of a snapshot of a few different ways this verse has been interpreted. Personally I just find it really fascinating, but I can be a bit of a nerd. And if you’ve listened this far…guess what! You’re a bit of a nerd too! Congratulations!

A lot of modern scholars have argued that the phrase flesh and blood is an expression or an idiom that basically refers to that which is corruptible and will die. If it is perishable, it cannot exist within the kingdom of God, and so must be transformed.

And there’s some logic to this, but for me, against scholars who have interpreted this phrase in various ways so as to say that Paul does not have literal flesh and blood in mind, I do actually think he has literal, actual flesh and blood in mind. I am not suggesting that the resurrection is not physical or is immaterial, in fact I would argue the opposite, but what I think is happening here is that Paul is struggling to describe the resurrection. Throughout this chapter he uses a lot of different analogies, refers to different types of bodies, uses these ambiguous phrases and words, because ultimately all of our words and describe are inadequate. Precisely because of the nature of the resurrection. It is an eschatological event of new creation and so transcends our current experience of reality. Our language is inadequate; the resurrection is ultimately indescribable, at least with our own current frameworks.

For Paul, the resurrection is the recreation of the human body that exists right now in the present, but it is also its transformation as the universe itself is resurrected, transformed and redeemed. The risen body is as different to the present body as the tree is to the seed. It is the same but very different; the seed cannot possibly comprehend the nature of the full grown tree. So the resurrection transcends what we know as flesh and blood.