1
The Nature of the Appearances and Some Clues
from Sri Aurobindo
At the very outset we must say that, judged from Paul's list of appearances, the so-called Resurrection was not a universal historical fact: the "risen" Jesus did not go about, open to the sight of all men. Although to have appeared to "over five hundred brothers" renders him fairly public, we cannot conclude that people outside this group could have seen him just as well. Some psychological "mirroring" condition was a prerequisite. Yet to posit a believer's frame of mind at a certain pitch is not sufficient to account for the limited number or rather occasions of appearances. There must have been many converts with the same intensity of believing mind to whom Jesus did not appear. Besides, Paul himself was not a believer, he was taken by surprise in the midst of his intense hostility.
The clue seems to lie in the turn of speech in the teaching that Paul declares himself to be handing down to the Corinthians when he recounts the appearances. He tells them that "Christ... was raised to life" (1 Corinthians 15:4): he does not say that Christ rose. The latter formula is not always avoided (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:14; Romans 14:9), but the standard version is the former: e.g., 1 Thessalonians 1:20; 1 Corinthians 6:14; Galatians 1:1; Romans 4:24; 8:11; 10:9; Colossians 2:12; Eph-esians 1:20 as well as our own text (1 Corinthians 15:4). God's power did the miracle or, when the other formula is used, God empowered Jesus to bring it about. So the occasions of the appearances would depend on God's will. In the Corinthian record the appearances to Cephas and to the Twelve come straight on the heels of Christ being declared "raised to life". The identical agency that did the raising may be understood to have led to the appearing.
In Galatians the appearing is couched in terms that leave
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no doubt of God's will. We may remember the words: "Then God... called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me—" (L15-16).1 On this work of God we get a most striking gloss from Acts. A part of Peter's sermon, upon which we have drawn, says: "God raised him to life and allowed him to be seen, not by the whole people but only certain witnesses God had chosen beforehand. Now we are those witnesses.. ."(10:40-41).2 It is God who allows the appearances and God who selects the recipients of them.
A word in Peter's sermon leads us on to a point we gather from Paul too. Peter uses the term "seen". And in 1 Corinthians 9:1 Paul has said: "I am an apostle and I have seen Jesus our Lord."3 As should be explicit from the very vocable "appearances" the basic characteristic of the "resurrected" Jesus is his visibility. And this vocable is also useful in driving home the idea of a force from outside the viewer acting upon him. It translates the Greek ophthe, a passive form of the verb "to see". C. F. Evans4 has emphasised that the dative construction employed with the verb suggests "appeared to" rather than "was seen by" as a translation. The initiative is vested in the one who is seen and not in the one who sees. As between these two parties, the former was the active agent, the latter the passive - even if in the ultimate reckoning the former was himself made to be an active agent by another: namely, God. Seeing, therefore, has to be understood in a special sense. In the same way the next characteristic indicated by Paul is to be understood: Communication, which implies hearing. We have already quoted his words to the Galatians: "... the Good News I preached is not a human message that I was given by man, it is something I learnt through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (1:11-12).5
Brown,6 after noting Evans's gloss, ponders how precisely "appeared to" should be interpreted in the visibility it involves. He reflects on the Greek ophthe: "A study of this verb in the Greek Bible shows that it covers a wide range of visual experience including contacts with supernatural beings such as God and angels, so that it does not have to imply
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physical sight. Therefore we cannot simply assume that when Paul speaks of Jesus' 'appearing' to him or when he says he 'saw' Jesus (1 Cor 9:1), he means physical sight of a corporeal being." In favour of a possible purely internal experience Brown7 observes: "It is noteworthy that elsewhere he refers to his experience in terms of God's having revealed His Son to him - 'revelation' is a less physical term, although it would not exclude external sight."
Actually the text Brown brings before us has more suggestion of internality than he makes out. For the Greek original of Galatians 1:16 has en moi and the literal rendering would be The Jerusalem Bible's, which we have already cited: "in me" - and not "to me", as we would understand from Brown. The Jerusalem Bible's note8 to defend its "in me" runs: "Others translate 'reveal his Son to me'. Paul is not denying that his vision was real,... he is stressing the inwardness of this real vision and relating this inwardness to his call as apostle of the Gentiles." The defence is correct but needs more elucidation.
The impression we get from Paul's full statement here about his experience is that, although he was himself unaware, God had secretly implanted in him the Christian mission to the Gentiles and the sense of this mission came alive within him at the moment which he pinpoints when in 1 Corinthians 9:1 he says: "I have seen Jesus our Lord" and in 1 Corinthians 15:8 he tells us: "... he appeared to me..." The full statement in Galatians covers the words which incorporate some phrases from Isaiah 49:1 and Jeremiah 1:5: "Then God, who had specially chosen me while I was still in my mother's womb, called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach the Good News about him to the Pagans" (1:15-16).9
The fact of the hidden Christ in Paul is suggested also by the third of the three accounts in Acts of Paul's conversion. In the course of his speech to King Agrippa, Paul is made to recount: "...I heard a voice saying to me in Hebrew, 'Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you, kicking like this against the goad' "(26:14).10 The Jerusalem Bible11 clarifies
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the last phrase: "Greek proverb for useless resistance: the ox kicking against the goad succeeds only in wounding itself." Paul, in persecuting Christ through the Christians, was really wounding himself inwardly by going against his conscience which said that he was wrong. His activity served no purpose, for behind this conscience was the concealed feeling that he was really for Christ and was misguidedly his persecutor. Like an ox he was bound to the yoke and the plough of Christ's work: he had been destined to belong to Christ, prepared in his mother's womb to serve Christ and born to be at his service in the as yet unworked field of the pagan world.
To continue with Brown. While conceding that "revelation" tends to direct us to internality, he12 confesses: "Nevertheless, the overall evidence does not favor the thesis that Paul was describing a purely internal experience, for he speaks of Jesus' having appeared to more than 500 at once (1 Cor 15:6); and we can scarcely think of synchronized ecstasy. (This observation holds true no matter where Paul got the information about this experience; for Paul, who himself saw the risen Jesus, found no contradiction in positing that what happened to him could have happened to 500 people at the same time.) How are we to reconcile a 'sight' that is not necessarily physical and to be seen by all with an appearance that is not purely internal?"
A general answer to this question may be found from some words of Sri Aurobindo, master of the inner discipline of Yoga on its most integral level. Modern psychology has brought into use the term "subliminal" to indicate phenomena of experience beyond the knowledge of the outer consciousness. Sri Aurobindo13 writes: "...the subliminal being has... a larger direct contact with the world; it is not confined like the surface Mind to the interpretation of sense-images and sense-vibrations supplemented by the mental and vital intuition and reason. There is indeed an inner sense in the subliminal nature, a subtle sense of vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste; but these are not confined to the creation of images of things belonging to the physical environment, - they can present to the consciousness visual, auditory, tactual and
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other images and vibrations of things beyond the restricted range of the physical senses or belonging to other planes or spheres of existence...It is the subliminal in reality and not the outer mind that possesses the powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, second sight and other supernatural faculties whose occurrence in the surface consciousness is due to openings or rifts in the wall erected by the outer personality's unseeing labour of individualisation and interposed between itself and the inner domain of our being." Elsewhere a letter of Sri Aurobindo's14 informs us: "There is... a whole range or many inexhaustible ranges of sensory phenomena other than the outward physical which one can become conscious of, see, hear, feel, smell, touch, mentally contact - to use the new established Americanism - either in trance or sleep or an inward state miscalled sleep or simply and easily in the waking state. This faculty of sensing supraphysical things internally or externalising them, so to speak, so that they become visible, audible, sensible to the outward eye, ear, even touch, just as are gross physical objects, this power or gift is not a freak or an abnormality; it is a universal faculty present in all human beings, but latent in most, in some rarely or intermittently active, occurring as if by accident in others, frequent or normally active in a few....It comes more easily with the eyes shut than with the eyes open, but it does come in both ways."
Of course, when the eyes are open, it is still not the physical sight that is operative: an inner vision acts simultaneously with the outer and imposes its own discoveries on what the latter discloses. In the situation pictured by Brown, the reality of a supraphysical body of Jesus makes itself manifest to one or many in whom the inner faculty of sight has been suddenly opened. A deeper being in them becomes receptive to a greater unearthly range of existence.
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2
The Nature of the New Body in the Light of
Sri Aurobindo's Yogic Knowledge
The problem, however, remains: "What kind of supraphysical body does Paul ascribe to the 'resurrected' Jesus?" There is only one direct hint: it comes in connection with the Second Coming of Jesus, the Parousia, when there will be a general resurrection of the dead. Paul writes: "For us, our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the saviour we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ, and he will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body" (Philippians 3:20-21).15 An impression of great luminosity is created by the closing expressions: that is all. But fortunately Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, has gone into some detail about the transfiguration of "these wretched bodies of ours" at the Parousia and from that we can infer the state of Jesus' own transfigured body whose "copies" ours will be. We have already quoted the whole passage, along with The Jerusalem Bible's annotation on the difference between what Paul dubs soma psychikon and what he calls soma pneumatikon. The former, the physical body, is one whose psyche or "soul" is not to be understood as in the Greek or the later Christian philosophy but simply as that body's life, the principle of animation common to animals and men, so that the soma psychikon is the living natural or physical body, the sensing, feeling, thinking "flesh and blood" which can never "inherit the kingdom of God", never be regarded as "the heavenly man" who possesses the soma pneumatikon, the superhuman, supernatural, Spirit-expressive body that will be our future ethereal state. This latter body is said to be not only "glorious" (15:43) but also "imperishable" and "powerful" (ibid.) as well as "immortal" (15:53).
Although the two bodies are utterly antithetical to Paul, he still affirms a continuity from the one to the other - misguided by Old-Testament prophecy and also most probably because the supraphysical body appeared with a certain clarity and
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definiteness which made it comparable to the physical. To understand the import of this very likely impression as well as to ascertain whether it was all that Paul could have received from the "appearance" he had witnessed, we must turn again to Sri Aurobindo's Yogic knowledge and cast a glance too at other texts of Paul on the after-death existence of Jesus.
Sri Aurobindo16 writes: "The oldest Vedantic knowledge tells us of five degrees of our being, the material, the vital, the mental, the ideal, the spiritual or beatific and to each of these grades of our soul there corresponds a grade of our substance, a sheath as it was called in the ancient figurative language. A later psychology found that these five sheaths of our substance were the material of three bodies, gross physical, subtle and causal, in all of which the soul actually and simultaneously dwells, although here and now we are superficially conscious only of the material vehicle. But it is possible to become conscious in our other bodies as well and it is in fact the opening up of the veil between them and consequently between our physical, psychical and ideal personalities which is the cause of those 'psychic' and 'occult' phenomena that are now beginning to be increasingly though yet too little and too clumsily examined,even while they are far too much exploited."
Again, we read in Sri Aurobindo:17 "Our substance does not end with the physical body; that is only the earthly pedestal, the terrestrial base, the material starting-point. As there are behind our waking mentality vaster ranges of consciousness subconscient and superconscient to it of which we become sometimes abnormally aware, so there are behind our gross physical being other and subtler grades of substance with a finer law and greater power which support the denser body and which can by our entering into the ranges of consciousness belonging to them be made to impose that law and power on our dense matter and substitute their purer, higher, intenser conditions of being for the grossness and limitation of our present physical life and impulses and habits. If that be so, then the evolution of a nobler physical existence not limited by the ordinary conditions of animal birth and life and death,
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of difficult alimentation and facility of disorder and disease and subjection to poor and unsatisfied vital cravings ceases to have the appearance of a dream and chimera and becomes a possibility founded upon a rational and philosophic truth which is in accordance with all the rest that we have hitherto known, experienced or been able to think out about the overt and secret truth of our existence."
A few more excerpts from Sri Aurobindo18 will be in order. After mentioning communication with supraphysical planes through "symbolic, transcriptive or representative images presented to the different psychical senses", he19 says: "But also there is the possibility of a more direct, concretely sensible, almost material, sometimes actively material communication -a complete though temporary physical materialisation seems to be possible..." Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo20 tells us: "... in the theory of the occultists and in the gradation of the ranges and planes of our being which Yoga-knowledge outlines for us there is not only a subtle physical force but a subtle physical Matter intervening between life [i.e., the vital plane] and gross Matter and to create in this subtle physical substance and precipitate the forms thus made into our grosser materiality is feasible."
Sri Aurobindo's Yogic insights and realisations bring into focus the truth behind Paul's list of Jesus' appearances as well as behind the resurrection which he erroneously attributed to him and anticipated for all who - to adopt a recurrent Pauline phrase - "live in Christ", that is, rise inwardly and outwardly above sin, above the alienation from God in one's heart and the performance of acts displeasing to him.
The "appearances" were not of a resuscitated gross-physical body, however changed, but of a subtle or else causal one. As Jesus recovered his own original divinity we should understand the manifesting body to be that which Paul describes as exalted in almost the very act of being resurrected: in other words, the causal body in some sense pertinent to the mystical knowledge of the time and not necessarily in the literal Vedantic or Aurobindonian sense. In 2 Corinthians 12:2,
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a context whose psychological and metaphysical implication we shall discuss later, Paul speaks of "the third heaven".21 In terms of the five sheaths mentioned by Sri Aurobindo, the three heavens would be the vital, the mental and the ideal planes above or beyond the gross-physical, and the third heaven would be the ideal plane. As this heaven is evidently the highest in Paul's visionary hierarchy, we may think of it as holding in its uttermost depths some reflex also of the plane Sri Aurobindo names "spiritual or beatific". Jesus' God-status would manifest - to Paul and to the numbered fortunate others - in the body which would be his on the supraphysical level towards which Paul directs the minds of his flock at Colossae: "Since you have been brought back to true life with Christ, you must look for the things that are in heaven, where Christ is, sitting at God's right hand" (Colossians 3:1).22 There is even a direct reference to Jesus' heavenly body in another phrase already cited by us:"... from heaven comes the saviour we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ, and he will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body" (Philippians 3:20-21).23 In 1 Corinthians itself we have talk of the first Adam and the last Adam (Jesus) "who is from heaven" (15:47): "And we, who have been modelled on the earthly man, will be modelled on the heavenly man" (15;49).24 Two of the earliest heaven-Jesus associations in Paul run: "...the Lord himself will come down from heaven" (1 Thessalonians 4:16)25 - "God will very rightly... reward you, who are suffering now, with the same peace as he will give us, when the Lord Jesus appears from heaven with the angels of his power" (2 Thessalonians 1:6-7).26 The word "appears", chiming with the four-time repeated "appeared" in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8, seems most appropriate in the heaven-Jesus association, but the chiming is only in the English translation: the original Greek is apokalupthei, not ophthe, and corresponds literally to: "will be revealed."
Yes, out of the highest heaven the Resurrection-exalted Jesus of Paul appeared - to single individuals on the one hand and to a plurality of them on the other. As we have argued
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at the very start, the experience of the plurality must mean an objective appearance projected into our space-time framework from the supra-physical level. Since Paul equates all the appearances to one type alone, the experience of single individuals was brought about by the same kind of manifestation as to the many. But when we term the manifestation "objective" in the framework of our space-time and when we regard it as visible to a group looking at it with open eyes though by means of an inner faculty and when we further understand that it would yet be not a public self-revelation as by a concrete material body whose presence anyone might verify, we have to conceive Jesus' appearances in a special manner. Using Sri Aurobindo's terminology, we may suppose that God's will made Jesus create a replica of his third-heaven body in the substance which Sri Aurobindo puts between the vital plane and the gross-physical: that is, in the subtle-physical matter. A precipitation of Jesus' divine form into this substance could be thought of as producing just the right degree of materialisation for God's chosen and specially attuned beings to witness and for the rest of their fellows to miss.
3
The Pauline Resurrection Seen through
Sri Aurobindo's Eyes
The general truth of Paul's idea of Resurrection emerges on being put in Sri Aurobindo's light not as it applies to Jesus or to the dead at Parousia-time but as it applies to men whom "the last day, the day of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 1:8)27 will surprise in their living bodies: "I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed. This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet sounds. It will sound, and the dead will be raised, imperishable, and we shall be changed as well, because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability and this mortal nature
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must put on immortality" (1 Corinthians 15:51-53). An earlier declaration figures the same situation on "the Day of the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 5:2):29 "those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise, and then those of us who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).30 As The Jerusalem Bible explains, "Paul includes himself among those who will be present at the parousia.. .31 At first Paul expected he would live to see the Last Day...; he later realised he might die before it.. ,"32 In any case, the Last Day was not to be far. He and his contemporaries were living in the radiant shadow thrown before by it. In an Epistle written eight years after those to the Thessalonians,33 Paul warns his people: "... you know 'the time' has come: you must wake up now: our salvation is even nearer than it was when we were converted. The night is almost over, it will be daylight soon..." (Romans 13:11-12).34 In regard to whoever happened to be living on the Lord's Day, there would be in the Pauline vision of the near future no Resurrection in the strict sense which refers to the dead: there would be only a rising or being raised into a new life from the old. The absence of death as a stage between the two would answer to Sri Aurobindo's insight about entering by his integral Yoga what he has called the "ideal" state higher than the vital and mental, part of which is all we know at present in our embodied condition - the state also characterised by him as Supermind, Gnosis, Truth-Consciousness or, in Upanishadic language, vijnana.
Sri Aurobindo thinks at the same time of our being's ascent into that plane and of the descent of that plane into our being. By the confluence, as it were, of our being and the "ideality" which is Supermind, there would be a recovery here and now of what we really are in our ultimate selfhood, a divine perfection. But the recovery is made through a long process of Yoga, through a protracted practice of concentration on the Divine Reality and of self-consecration to it in all our movements inner and outer. It is not an "instantaneous" achievement, a change accomplished "in the twinkling of an eye". Also, the
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consummation for Paul is not a new earth-life: it is a departure from it into an other-world of glory and blessedness. Yet, in the concept of the transfiguration of the living into spiritual bodies at a future time there is a genuine prefiguration, faint and off-centre though it be, of the Aurobindonian vision. Rendered in an inadequate revelation, set in a world-transcending rather than a world-perfecting context, offered without a specific call for mystical self-development which would make the result organic and intrinsic, it is still an astonishing fore-glimmer of the fulfilment which would be in the spiritual logic of things as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo.
Here a point stressed by Willi Marxsen in connection with 1 Thessalonians is very significant. This epistle is Paul's earliest, written in about 50 A.D. from Corinth where he was on his second missionary journey, soon after founding the church in Thessalonica. Marxsen35 writes:
"We learn first what the Christian message was which Paul brought to the Thessalonians: the time is at hand: every man must be prepared and make ready for the coming of the Son of God. All who cleave to him he will save from the coming wrath of the Day of Judgment (cf. 1 Thess. 1.9b-10, where Paul repeats his missionary proclamation).
"After the apostle's visit to Thessalonica he had sent Timothy to the church there. Timothy has meanwhile returned, bringing good news, generally speaking. In spite of persecution, the church has kept its faith. At the same time, however, Paul now learns of deaths that have taken place, deaths with which the Thessalonians cannot come to terms: Christians are mourning their dead.
"This shows clearly that in his missionary preaching during his stay in Thessalonica Paul had not spoken of the resurrection hope. Why should he? It was unnecessary in view of the imminent expectation of the second coming of Christ.
"But now the time appointed for this second coming begins to present a problem, for the Thessalonians are of the opinion that those who have died in the meantime will have no share in the parousia and its accompanying salvation. They believe
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the dead to be lost. Consequently they themselves are also bound to be afraid of dying before the parousia, since they too would then be excluded from the coming salvation."
Paul assures them that there is no need for grief or fear. "We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and that it will be the same for those who have died in Jesus" (4:14).36 The point for us to mark is not this assurance from a later period, but that in the opening mission of his career Paul had not preached the resurrection of the dead at all: he had preached the exaltation of the living into heaven. On the very first occasion when he must have implied the utterly transformed condition of which we read in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul applied this condition solely to the living human body. Initially, the Resurrection signified to Paul the transformation of that body by Christ's return within a generation or so of his death. The basic idea to him was not dying and being raised from the dead but getting lifted up into a state of perfection while still alive - an idea along Aurobindonian lines although in terms of life's bodily ascent into perfection rather than in those of perfection's descent into bodily existence on earth as the crown of a mystical self-development.
The lack of this self-development, no less than that of perfection's descent, brings a false note into Paulinism. The change in the twinkling of an eye and the sudden uplifting into heaven introduce a sheer cleavage between the flesh-and-blood body, however alive it may be, and the entirely dissimilar new body which alone can inherit the kingdom of God. A hiatus is created such as to render the idea of transformation illogical, whether we speak of those alive being exalted or of those dead being resurrected.
4
Pauline Mysticism and the Lead from It
Perhaps we would do an injustice to Paul if we said that the element of a mystical self-development, though not really
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active for the Last Day, was quite absent from Paulinism. Even though the call for it was neither constant nor intense as by Sri Aurobindo, Paul, when he kept asking his flock to be true Christians, did not always harp merely on individual and social morality. Doubtless, morality is part of even the via mystica and Paul was right in telling the Corinthians: "people of immoral lives, idolaters, adulterers, catamites, sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers will never inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:10).37 But to put oneself genuinely in accord with God's kingdom and feel as though a native of it, a deeper stress upon a new creation of the Old Adam in one is required. A trend in the direction of a dedicated religiousness is perceived when Paul writes in the same Epistle: "Whatever you eat, whatever you drink, whatever you do at all, do it for the glory of God. Never do anything offensive to anyone - to Jews or Greeks or to the Church of God; just as I try to be helpful to everyone at all times, not anxious for my own advantage, but for the advantage of everybody else, so that they may be saved. Take me for your model, as I take Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:33; 11:1).38 Exemplifying Christ to them, Paul's greatest teaching in this Epistle comes after his exhortation to the Corinthians to be under the influence of the Holy Spirit working through "a variety of gifts" and "all sorts of service". He says: "Be ambitious for the higher gifts. And I am going to show you a way that is better than any of them", and then he launches on one of the most inspired passages in the New Testament, starting: "If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing..." (13:1).39 A directly personal note is struck and sustained through the whole opening portion and, after a many-sided description of non-sensual love [agape in Greek), it returns at the close where love discloses its power of understanding and the agency of the Holy Spirit in it and guides us towards an intimacy with and knowledge of God just as God's intimacy with and knowledge of man is through his love. Paul recounts how he matured and is getting ready
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for a plenary love-knowledge at the world's end: "When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and think like a child, and argue like a child, but now I am a man, all childish ways are put behind me. Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect but then I shall know as fully as I am known" (13:11-12).40 The Jerusalem Bible gives a footnote to the last word: "I.e. by God."41 A relationship in particular between Paul and his Maker and in general the same Man-God relationship for every Christian who is commanded to experience agape is the undertone to the whole rhapsody of the awakened human heart going out in religious warmth to its fellows.
In 2 Corinthians the secret pervasive mysticism of Paul comes in several shades of explicitness. The mirror-simile is taken up again but here more positively. Turning to Christ is compared to the removal of a veil from the mind: "And we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit" (3:18).42 The identical theme is touched upon a little later: "It is the same God that said, 'Let there be light shining out of darkness', who has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God's glory, the glory on the face of Christ" (4:6).43 Towards the end of the Epistle, Paul pitting himself against rival preachers whom he considers misleaders allows his usual modesty to be set aside a little and recounts the numerous terrible hardships he has gone through and then reminisces in a style at once direct and indirect about his inner life: "... I will move on to the visions and revelations I have had from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who, fourteen years ago, was caught up - whether still in the body or out of the body, I do not know; God knows - right into the third heaven. I do know, however, that this same person - whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know, God knows -was caught up into paradise and heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language" (12:l-4).44 If Paul has
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set himself before the Corinthians to be imitated, even as he attempts the imitation of Christ, there is in such a passage a tacit pull on the Corinthians to strain towards a living sense of the spiritual reality. A hint of it comes when the Epistle is about to finish: "Examine yourselves to make sure you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ is really in you?" (13:5)45
Paul's being a true mystic is undeniable. Sri Aurobindo46 has written in a letter: "... St. Paul had remarkable mystic experiences and, certainly, much profound spiritual knowledge (profound rather than wide, I think)..." He47 has also commented on a passage in the Epistles - not exactly identifiable by us - which refers "Perhaps to the supramental body or to some other luminous body in its own space and substance, which he found sometimes as if enveloping him and abolishing this body of death which he felt the material envelope to be." Paul's mysticism should be evident even from the variations he plays time and again on the theme of his being "in Christ". Quite apt is the remark of Ernest F. Scott48 on Paul: "He was assured that in some manner he had become one with Christ, and that this was the secret of the new life into which he had entered." The Pauline key-formula Scott49 cites runs in The Jerusalem Bible's translation:50 "I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). However, what we have quoted from 2 Corinthians about "the third heaven" is a most relevant lead to a final assessment of the momentous issue whether in 1 Corinthians 15:18-19 Paul wrote, as The Jerusalem Bible seems at first glance to imply, without considering the possibility of the "soul" being immortal irrespective of the resurrection of the body.
5
The Question of Immortality before the Resurrection
What 2 Corinthians 12:1-5 superficially shows us is an unresolved wonderment twice-repeated, but the whole drift
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is actually one way. To be "caught up" into a plane of being which is far beyond the earth, to feel lifted into the highest "paradise" is to be temporarily disembodied even during one's life. If Paul was undeniably out of his body for a while, he must grant a conscious entity's existence separable from the physical form despite its alliance with it until death. In accordance with the common usage followed by The Jerusalem Bible's note,51 we shall speak of "soul" here although later we shall stick to Paul's special sense of what corresponds to it and look for his equivalent of the term we are employing now.
The soul, then, in order to be an active agent, is not dependent on the body's resurrection at the world's end. Its independence is also suggested in a personal vein by Paul's Epistle to the Philippians: "Life to me, of course, is Christ, but then death would bring me something more; but then again, if living in this body means doing work which is having good results - I do not know what I should choose. I am caught in this dilemma; I want to be gone and be with Christ, which would be very much the better, but for me to stay alive in this body is a more urgent need for your sake" (1:21-24).52 The Jerusalem Bible53 observes: "...this supposes that the (good) Christian who dies is with Christ at once without any temporal gap between death and 'last judgment'."
Ahead of this observation The Jerusalem Bible refers us to "2 Corinthians 5:8+". The reference is of the utmost interest because within the same section of the Epistle we have a clear mention of the resurrectional transfiguration of the Christians still alive when the world reaches its termination, as well as a clear indication of a separate soul finding itself immortally joined to its Lord in the moment of the body's death. First we read: "For we know that when the tent that we live in on earth is folded up, there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens. In this present state, it is true, we groan as we wait with longing to put on our heavenly home over the other; we should like to be found wearing clothes and not without them. Yes, we groan and find it a burden being still in this tent, not that we want to
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strip it off, but to put the second garment over it and to have what must die taken up into life. This is the purpose for which God made us, and he has given us the pledge of the Spirit" (5:1-5)54 Immediately after these words we are told: "We are always full of confidence, then, when we remember that to live in the body means to be exiled from the Lord, going as we do by faith and not by sight - we are full of confidence, I say, and actually want to be exiled from the body and make our home with the Lord. Whether we are living in the body or exiled from it, we are intent on pleasing him" (5:6-9).55
Brown56* seems to think that the first passage "may have moved on" from the topic of resurrection, which is prominent in 1 Corinthians 15, "to a new problem, namely, how the faithful dead live with Christ in the interim between death and resurrection..." But the phrase - "to put the second garment over it and to have what must die taken up into life" - must allude to the physical body itself getting changed into the spiritual. The Jerusalem Bible rightly interprets Paul here as having in mind those who would happen to be living on the day of the general resurrection of the dead. It has two notes.57 The one on the expression "our heavenly home" says: "That is, to be given our 'spiritual body', 1 Corinthians 15:44, without having to suffer death and corruption, v. 4." The other note, applying to the sentence ending with the words - "and not without them" - reads: "That is to say, on the supposition that we are still alive when Christ returns in glory. Paul wants to be of the number of those who will live to see the coming of the Lord and whose bodies will be transformed without having to die. Over the 'natural body' they will, as it were, 'put on'
* Ramsey, op. cit. p. 110, fn. 1, after drawing attention to the opinion of "many scholars" that in the text concerned Paul favours the doctrine of the soul's immortality, writes: "F. W. L. Knox in St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles, pp. 135-145, argues that 2 Cor. v. 1-10 marks a change in Paul's belief under the influence of Hellenistic thought. But the similarity of belief in 1 Cor. xv and 2 Cor. v. 1-10 is convincingly shown by L. S. Thornton in The Common Life in the Body of Christ, pp. 284-286."
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the 'spiritual body', 1 Corinthians 15:44, 53, 54, which will be 'absorbed' by the former."
The Jerusalem Bible is right in not pursuing Brown's line, but it does not seem to pay heed to the beginning of Paul's passage. Would not the folding up of a tent that we live in on earth mean the dying of the earthly body? The King James Bible says: "...if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved..." Then surely "a house built by God for us, an everlasting home... in the heavens" could suggest an after-death existence either in a new immortal body which God has always kept for us or else simply in a divine habitation which is eternal. Brown inclines to understand that existence in the second sense, but the first sense which considers Paul to be thinking of an exchange of bodies, "a spiritual body replacing the earthly body", and which Brown58 wants to fault, is equally legitimate on the actual wording. If we go no further than Paul's initial statement, scholars like T. E. Pollard59 who favour the replacement-idea are not less justified than Brown. And for The Jerusalem Bible to take the passage as concerned only with those who happen to be still in their bodies at the Parousia is to fly in the face of a very definite indication to the contrary at the start. However, the rest of the passage is indeed a single-track thought as The Jerusalem Bible makes out except for two points where the commentary falls short. The divine "tent" into which we should like to change our embodied state is as if something ready for us and not brought into being: it seems to be there like a vesture to be worn by us rather than a new developing garment. Paul is lacking in precision at this point and we should be aware of it. Again, the text has no shade of the physical body absorbing the other: Paul speaks of the opposite - of having the mortal taken up into the immortal. The metaphor of putting on, which is carried over from 1 Corinthians 15:53, cannot involve absorption of the ever-living by "what must die". But this is a secondary matter. The primary question is how to get round Paul's ambiguous sequence and link the opening assertion with the rest. We may propose the following: "Although death is not an end,
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although by being dead before the world's termination we will have a heavenly transfiguration, we would much prefer to keep alive in the final act of world-history."
On the next passage The Jerusalem Bible60 comments: "Here and in Philippians 1:23 Paul has in mind a union of Christians with Christ on the death of each individual. This does not contradict the biblical doctrine of the final universal resurrection, Romans 2:6+; 1 Corinthians 15:44+, but this expectation of happiness for the soul that has left the body after death betrays the influence of Greek thought, an influence already making itself felt in the Judaism of the period, cf. Luke 16:22; 23:43; 1 Peter 3:19+. Cf. also the texts referring to ecstatic states when the soul is 'out of the body', 2 Corinthians 12:2f; cf. Revelation 1:10; 4:2; 17:3; 21:10."
Evidently, Paul's metaphysical vision of the individual's destiny is not so single-strained as 1 Corinthians 15 might incline us to think. What adds to the complexity are statements in Colossians and Ephesians which appear to modify in a mysterious way the sheer futurity of the general resurrection. The Colossians-passages, already quoted in another context, are about the spiritual power of baptism: "You have been buried with him, when you were baptised; and by baptism, too, you have been raised up with him through your belief in the power of God who raised him from the dead" (2:12)61 -"Since you have been brought back to true life with Christ, you must look for the things that are in heaven, where Christ is, sitting at God's right hand. Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on the things that are on the earth, because you have died, and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God. But when Christ is revealed - and he is your life -you too will be revealed in all your glory with him" (3:1-5).62 The Jerusalem Bible annotates the second passage: "Through union with Christ in baptism, 2:12, his followers already live the identical life he lives in heaven, cf. Ephesians 2:6+, but this spiritual life is not manifest and glorious as it will be at the
parousia.''63
The relevant passage in Ephesians goes in full: "But God
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loved us with so much love that he was generous with his mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ - it is through grace that you have been saved - and raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven, in Christ Jesus" (2:4-5).64 The Jerusalem Bible's gloss65 is very significant: "Here as in Colossians 2:12; 3:1-4 the use of the past tense shows that the resurrection and triumph of Christians in heaven is considered as actually existing, whereas the future tense in Romans 6:3-11; 8:11,17f treats it as something that has still to take place. Treating the eschatological reality as already existing is a characteristic of Paul's letters written from prison."
Paul's telescoping of the future into a spiritual fait accompli must imply in him and in his Christian contemporaries a consciousness which can participate in the heavenly state without having to wait for the Lord's Day - a consciousness which would not be lost in sleep with the body's perishing but remain in Christ's presence. Although the presence would be to it more intense when the flesh fell away and most intense when the flesh was believed to lose its weakness and obscurity and mortality in the creation of a spiritual body on the Day of the Lord, it would be a living reality - the very core of one's self - even while the flesh had its lease of earthly years. This consciousness is what Paul intends in his prayer to God in Ephesians 3:16-19: "Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through the Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God."66
"Hidden self" - there we have the Hellenistic thought of Paul's time in a Paulinised form: the resurrection is seen as perfecting this secret mode of spiritual existence in one by giving it a body fit for it of power and glory and imperishability in place of its ordinary embodiment. A supernatural body
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of Spirit (pneuma) substitutes at the resurrection the animal body of Soul (psyche); but there is a human spirit no less than a human soul already present in the Christian. To grasp the complexity of Paul's vision of the total human entity, we must explore his notion of pneuma.
This term, like others in Paul relating to man's being, has several nuances. Our task is to fix its central significance. But before we do so, we may clear what we have called the "momentous issue" connected with the general resurrection: "Do the passages about that event in 1 Corinthians 15 rule out the possibility of an immortal entity surviving the body's death?"
6
The True Sense of Resurrection in Paul
Paul is always taken as subscribing to a supposed early Christian view derived from Judaism, which Brown67 briefly puts before us when he writes: "Of course, 'body' did not mean for Paul what it means for most Christians today, since his basic anthropology did not involve a body-soul composite." To get the proper perspective of the alleged Pauline position we may quote Anderson:68
"In Hebraic thought, man is body (dust) animated by the Spirit or breath of God (see Genesis 2:7). Contrary to the Greek way of thinking, there is no eternal element (or 'soul') imprisoned in the physical body. Man's life is a unity, the unified existence of a creature responsible to his Creator. When he dies, his personal existence ceases. His body returns to the dust and his 'shade' - a vague double of his former self - goes to Sheol, the land of darkness and death. Consistent with this view of human nature, if man is to have a future life there must be a new miracle, a re-creation. God must raise up the body from death, reanimate it with his life-giving Spirit, and restore man to the God-relationship which is the source of his life."
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We are expected to understand that because early Christianity, like the Judaic tradition, had no concept of a genuine supraphysical entity automatically surviving physical dissolution, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 insists on Jesus having corporeally risen and on his congregation having the certainty of a similar rising in the future with the help of Jesus. No doubt, there is a lamenting note in: "...if the dead are not raised,... and if Christ has not been raised,... all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people" (15:17-19). But it would be an exaggeration to interpret quite negatively The Jerusalem Bible's annotation69 of the last sentence: " 'This life' has become for Christians a state from which life in Christ, through the resurrection, will deliver them. If there is no resurrection, they have lost their deliverance. Note that the possibility of the soul's immortality without the resurrection of the body is not considered."
Simply because the soul's immortality in its own right is not under consideration here, are we justified in holding that the passage in Paul excludes it? For the right answer we have only to grasp the creedal implication of Paul's having belonged to the Jewish party-group named Pharisees (Philippians 3:5). The Pharisees, unlike the party-group of the Sad-ducees, believed in the doctrine of bodily resurrection.70 To Paul, the Pharisee, the raising of the body from the dead was of paramount importance: without its resuscitation the ultimate being of man would be seriously truncated. An extreme emphasis falls on physical immortality in 1 Corinthians: that is the utmost we can read and that is the answer to our question. Paul can be taken as intending nothing more than what The Jerusalem Bible71 conveys elsewhere: "Greek philosophers thought of the higher soul (the nous) escaping from 'the body', to survive immortally. Christians thought of immortality more in terms of the whole person, involving a resurrection of the body effected by the Spirit or divine principle which God withdrew from human beings because of sins, Genesis 6:3, but restored to all who are united to the
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risen Christ, Romans 1:4+; 8:11, who is the 'heavenly' man and life-giving Spirit, 1 Corinthians 15:45-49." We may understand these words to mean that, though the body's resurrection in the far future was most vital to Paul's idea of immortality, we need not take him to rule out the escape of whatever he may have regarded as the Christian's higher soul from the body at the time of death in the immediate present.
If we do not read such a "slant" we shall not make sense of several of Paul's own declarations. We have seen how in 2 Corinthians 5:6-9 he says that for him and his fellows "to live in the body is to be exiled from the Lord" and that they "actually want to be exiled from the body and make our home with the Lord". As The Jerusalem Bible has pointed out, here "Paul has in mind a union of Christians with Christ on the death of each individual". Would it not be irrational on our part to overlook the fact that 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians were letters written to the same church and' that they were sent even in the same year - 57 A.D.?72 How could Paul preach in such circumstances two diametrically opposed doctrines? The doctrines just have to be reconcilable and the sole reconciliation possible is to see the one relating to the general resurrection as we have done. The Jerusalem Bible too must be seeing this doctrine thus if it comments, as it does, that here is no contradiction of "the biblical doctrine of the final universal resurrection". What would be still more irrational is to pit against 2 Corinthians 5:6-9 the immediately preceding passage (5:1-5) which speaks of our putting "the second garment" over "the tent that we live in on earth" and of our having "what must die taken up into life". If this passage, which The Jerusalem Bible elucidates as a reference to the change of the physical body into the spiritual by those who happen to be alive at the time of the Parousia, implies anything more than that ultimately the body will share in immortality and if it tacitly denies a supraphysical element in man capable of enjoying immortality before the resurrection, then we shall have a statement running quite counter to the one that comes on its very heels. It will never do to envisage
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Paul conununicating in almost the same breath a couple of absolutely antithetical theses. Neither will it do to appreciate the out-of-the-body experience narrated towards the close of 2 Corinthians and yet understand verses 5:1-5 as bearing an implicit Hebraic sense which accepts "no eternal element... imprisoned in the physical body".
Paul's stand in Philippians calls for the same internal consistency of exegesis. We have marked how in 1:21-24 Paul, although choosing to live longer for the sake of his flock at Philippi, says that death would bring him something more even than a life lived in Christ here and that he is tempted to "want to be gone and be with Christ". Here union with Christ at once after death is looked forward to. But Philippians, as Gunther Bornkamm73 observes, not only speaks of "a consummation directly following upon the individual's death, effected by final union with Christ": it also speaks of "the 'day' of Christ (1:6, 10; 2:16)", the announcement of which, along with the announcement of the world-judgment, forms part of "the apostle's cosmic expectations of the end" as in 1 Corinthians 4:5; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 14:12, etc. Bornkamm remarks that Paul "shows no interest in offsetting the one against the other to form a coherent world picture and conceptual system". According to Bornkamm, Paul for some reason which was connected with "what the apostle was trying to effect" made use of "diverse" statements about "the Christian hope" and mostly they are "too dispersed" to warrant our wanting to systematise them. But surely statements cannot be considered "too dispersed" if they are diverse within the same letter or addressed to the same readership at periods not at all far apart. Then they need explanation and the only one conceivable is what we have given about the sense in which the general resurrection does not contradict the immortality of a supraphysical element in man.
The admission of such an element sets Paul in tune with the Greek notion of "a body-soul composite". We should not be surprised at this attunement; for, as The Jerusalem Bible informs us, the Hellenistic influence was already making itself
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felt in the Judaism of the period. How easy it would be for Paul to come under that influence may be guessed from a piece of information we can cull from Brown74 himself who repudiates for Paul the Greek notion: "In the Book of Wisdom [about 50 B.C.75] the survival after death of the just who had been persecuted is described in terms of an immortality [of a soullike principle] granted by God: "The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed in the view of the foolish to be dead, and their passing away was thought to be an affliction... but they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of Himself. As sacrificial offerings, he took them to himself... they shall judge nations and rule over peoples' (Wisdom 3:1-8)." Brown's comment,76 though intended to show that "the choice of resurrection language [in the traditional Hebraic mode which does not separate 'soul' from 'body'] was not an mevitability for the early Jews who believed in Jesus", can serve very well our standpoint: "Since this concept of immortality was scarcely confined to the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria who composed the Book of Wisdom, Jesus' fate could have been described in a similar manner without any more resort to resurrection than is found in Wisdom."
Brown's opinion that Paul employed orthodox "resurrection language" assorts ill with his already noticed interpretation77 - though wrong-headed according to The Jerusalem Bible as well as in our eyes - of 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 as not only alien to the topic of Jesus' Resurrection but as also probably moving on to the different problem of how the faithful dead Christians live with their Saviour in the period before the Resurrection. Face to face with Paul's background it should be natural to regard his vision of Resurrection in an unorthodox light. Even apart from the internal evidence of his Epistles, to flout which would force us to accuse Paul of flagrant self-contradiction which would result in his losing all credit with the churches founded by him, there are the facts of his milieu and of his education to favour our exegesis. The Jerusalem Bible78 ably features these facts:
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"Paul was a Jew with a Greek cultural background which he had possibly begun to acquire when a boy in Tarsus and which was certainly reinforced by repeated contact with the Graeco-Roman world; this influence is obvious not only in his logical method but also in his language and style. He sometimes quotes Greek writers, 1 Corinthians 15:33; Titus 1:12; Acts 17:28, and was familiar with popular Stoic-based philosophy from which he borrows concepts (e.g. of the soul separated from the body and bound for another world, 2 Corinthians 5:6-8; the cosmic pleroma in Colossians and Ephesians) and cliches (1 Corinthians 8:6; Romans 11:36; Ephesians 4:6). From the Cynics and Stoics he borrowed the rapid question and answer method (the diatribe), Romans 3:1-9, 27-31, and the rhetorical device of heaping word on word, 2 Corinthians 6:4-10. Even his use of long, packed phrases in wave after wave, Ephesians 1:3-14; Colossians 1:9-12, has a precedent in hellenistic religious literature. The Greek that was a second mother tongue to Paul (cf. Acts 21:40), that he was able to use so familiarly with only occasional semitisms, was a cultured form of the koine, i.e. the Greek of his own day..."
Paul's Graeco-Roman culture fused with his Pharisee-faith and his borrowing from "popular Stoic-based philosophy" the concept of an immortal supraphysical entity in man must be remembered in relation to that other longest treatment of the Resurrection-theme -1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 - no less than to the discourse in 1 Corinthians 15. Here, however, a new truth emerges which is worthy of attention. The whole passage79 runs:
"We want you to be quite certain, brothers, about those who have died, to make sure that you do not grieve about them, like the other people who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and that it will be the same for those who have died in Jesus: God will bring them with him. We can tell you this from the Lord's own teaching, that any of us who are left alive until the Lord's coming will not have any advantage over those who have died. At the trumpet of God, the voice of the archangel will call out the command and the
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Lord himself will come down from heaven; those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise, and then those of us who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air. So we shall stay with the Lord for ever. With such thoughts as these you should comfort one another."
The new truth emerging from the passage is in the words: "We can tell you this from the Lord's own teaching." They connote that what Paul taught is the very message of his divine Master Jesus. Directly they refer to the statement "that any of us who are left alive until the Lord's coming will not have any advantage over those who have died". But this statement is integral part of all else: everything hangs together with it serving as the central assurance bearing straight upon the worry expressed by the converts in Thessalonia. The assurance only brings to a specific focus the fundamental doctrine of the Resurrection: that doctrine as taught by Paul may rightly be attributed to Jesus himself.
Obviously, the doctrine revolves around the theme of bodies in relation to the Resurrection. How will the Resurrection affect people in connection with their bodies? The apparent advantage of the living over the dead at the time of Jesus' return is that they will have intact bodies whereas the others' bodies will have corrupted and disappeared. Paul assures the mourners of Thessalonia that their deceased relatives and friends, unlike those who have not died in the religion of faith in Jesus, will have their bodies again just as Jesus himself had his. The stress is on having or not having "hope" of recovering the bodily existence which mattered so much to Judaeo-Christianity as distinguished from Graeco-Roman belief. Whether or not a supraphysical entity present in man survives in its own right is an irrelevant issue here. Still we should note that elsewhere 1 Thessalonians itself testifies in a most explicit manner to man's being something other and more than the reality which is implied by psyche and soma and which 1 Corinthians 15 presents in a form merging them as soma psychikon, the natural living physical body. For, in 1
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Thessalonians 5:23 Paul prays for his flock: "... may you all be kept safe and blameless, spirit, soul and body, for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."80 The original Greek for "spirit" is pneuma, the term whose central meaning we have to explore. What is of great import is that 1 Thessalonians is the earliest document of Paul's, dating to c. 50-51 A.D.81 So from the very start of his preaching career we may assume that the true sense of Resurrection in Paul was concentrated on the revival of bodily existence, soma psychikon, in however transfigured a shape, and left untouched the fate of the third component of man affirmed by Paul: pneuma.
7
The Pauline Pneuma - Signpost to the
Solution of Our Problem
The Jerusalem Bible82 comments on 1 Thessalonians 5:23: "Paul seems to have developed no coherent system of anthropology: this is the only place he mentions a tripartite division of body (cf. Romans 7:24+), soul (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:44+) and Spirit (which can be taken in two ways: as the divine presence in a human being, giving him new life in union with Christ, Romans 5:5+, or more probably as the innermost depths of the human being, open to the Spirit, cf. Romans 1:9+)."
The second definition keeps the term in line with the other two terms as what belongs by nature to man's being, though in that mode it does not exclude the action of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God and Christ, in this nature. The reference to Romans 1:9+ begins: "The God I worship spiritually.. ."83 The Jerusalem Bible84 appends the note: "Lit. 'Offer worship in my spirit'..." Another note85 tells us: "By spirit (pneuma) Paul sometimes means the highest element in a human being— This he distinguishes from the flesh, the lower element..., from the body..., and from the psyche also...; it bears some relationship to nous____By choosing this traditional term...instead of the nous of the Greek philosophers, the NT. can
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suggest a deep affinity between the human spirit and the Spirit of God that stimulates and guides it....There are many texts where it is hard to tell whether it is the natural or the supernatural spirit that is referred to, the personal or the indwelling spirit...."
Keeping all this information as our background, we may take up 1 Thessalonians 5:23 as the starting-point for our study. The words - "for the coming of our Lord" - show Paul, as often elsewhere, haunted by the idea of the Parousia which would transfigure the Christian, inducting him into a divine existence. But, as 1 Corinthians 15:44, 50 makes it explicit, what exists before the transfiguration is the soul-body, the animated physicality: the transfiguration brings about a spirit-body and this spirit-body is the powerful, glorious, immortal opposite of the soul-body. The latter's "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God". Obviously, the soul-body, soma psychikon, ceases and the spirit-body, soma pneumatikon, stands in its stead. Yet Paul wants us to believe that the dead who are soma psychikon become soma pneumatikon: otherwise there would be no meaning in speaking of the resurrection of the dead. In spite of the acknowledged total disparity an essential continuity is sought to be understood. So a vital logical link is missing, a link which, while the soma psychikon cannot be said to enjoy resurrection, is capable of entering the new state of soma pneumatikon.
We must be wary of the temptation to find an easy way out by saying that the missing link is actually in front of our noses when Paul writes in the vein: "I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die... the dead will be raised, imperishable, and we shall be changed as well, because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability and this mortal nature must put on immortality" (1 Corinthians 15:51-53). The easy way out is to aver that what enters the new state is that which Paul indicates by "I" and afterwards by "we" and lastly puts in the possessive case with "our". But in the end-part does not "our" become synonymous with "this"? "Mortal nature" is the thing meant:
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no one is intended to be a separate possessor of it. All the pronouns are just linguistic modes: they point simply to the living as contrasted to the "dead" who will be raised. Is there an "I" or "we" existing in the dead apart from their perished soul-bodies and waiting to be brought up from the grave? Will we imply it if we speak of the dead getting their soul-bodies back? Unquestionably, with the soma psychikon differing toto coelo from the soma pneumatikon, there has to be a common factor to ensure continuity by passing into the new state. But linguistic modes by themselves cannot be said to provide the answer.
We approach the answer through a hint thrown out by The Jerusalem Bible86 when in the course of its long gloss on soul-embodiment and spirit-embodiment it speaks of the psyche in fundamental usage thus: "As it only gives natural life, 1 Corinthians 2:14..., it is less important than pneuma by which a human life is divinised by a process that begins through the gift of the Spirit, Romans 5:5+..., and is completed after death____" The reference to 1 Corinthians 2:14 - that is, to a verse in the very Epistle where the paradox of total disparity and essential continuity at the Resurrection is set forth - puts us on the track of the missing link. This verse and its immediate sequel run: "An unspiritual person is one who does not accept anything of the Spirit of God: he sees it all as nonsense; it is beyond his understanding because it can only be understood by means of the Spirit. A spiritual man, on the other hand, is able to judge the value of everything, and his own value is not to be judged by other men" (2:14-15).87 The Jerusalem Bible88 annotates "An unspiritual person": "Psychikos: man left to his own natural resources. Cf. the note on soma psychikon of 15:44." The Greek original, as is to be expected, for "A spiritual man" is pneumatikos. And, going a few verses earlier, we find Paul's declaration: "...we teach what scripture calls: the things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him. These are the very things that God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit reaches the
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depths of everything, even the depths of God. After all, the depths of a man can only be known by his own spirit, not by any other man, and in the same way the depths of God can only be known by the Spirit of God" (2:9-11).89 So there is an explicit positing of a spirit in man balanced by the Spirit of God.
To this spirit 1 Corinthians has a reference not only general but also in persona propria: Paul refers to it in his own self. The Jerusalem Bible90 interprets the mention of the "spiritual man" who is in opposition to the "unspiritual person" as an allusion to Paul himself: "A defensive remark: Paul, a 'spiritual' man, is not to be judged by the Corinthians who are 'sensual', 3:1-3." Paul's spirit finds open expression when he says: "Though I am far away in body, I am with you in spirit..." (5:3).91 Here is no mere synonym for "thought" or "mind": the word pneumati is used and pneumatos follows soon after when the theme of condemning an extraordinarily immoral Corinthian is pursued further, with a final pointer to that Corinthian's pneuma in a very meaningful way for our purpose: "When you are assembled together in the name of the Lord Jesus, and I am spiritually present with you, then with the power of our Lord Jesus he is to be handed over to Satan so that his sensual body may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord" (5:4-5).92 Whatever the handing over to Satan may precisely connote, the punishment, as The Jerusalem Bible93 rightly notes, "is intended to convert the man" in the interests of his spirit's salvation. This salvation bears illuminatingly on our argument because of the phrase: "the day of the Lord." The final universal Resurrection is in view in connection with the condemned man: hence the saving of his spirit on that occasion should imply the passage of this spirit from the soul-body, which the kingdom of God excludes, to the spirit-body which is the ultimate and supreme gift to the devoted Christian by the "life-giving spirit" (15:45)94 that Jesus risen from the dead has become.
The human pneuma seems to be the missing link between soma psychikon and soma pneumatikon. Paul does not overtly
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name it as such anywhere in 1 Corinthians 15, but we may intuit it from expressions like the one we have just cited and like that other about the succession of the two Adams, he who was earthly and he (Christ) who is from heaven: "... first the one with the soul, not the spirit, and after that, the one with the spirit" (15:46).95 By the grace of the second and last Adam the embodied soul that we are comes to an end and there takes place an embodied spirit: the spirit-embodiment is in response to Jesus who already has that embodiment. This appears to imply that we the soul have an embodiment but we the spirit lack it - at least in full identity - until the former vanishes with death and the latter which has grown during life gains a complete body in which it comes into its own. What happens during life is well touched off in 2 'Corinthians 4:11,16, where Paul speaks of the Apostles having "the spirit [pneuma] of faith that is mentioned in scripture", and affirms the result: "though this outer man of ours may be falling into decay, the inner man is renewed day by day."96
We may sum up how the ordinary death and the Resur-rectional situation stand for Paul. When the Christian's soul-body dies, his pneuma which has been building up within him goes to Christ. At the general Resurrection, this pneuma gets a plenary body for itself by the resuscitation of the dead soul-body in a transfigured shape. Those whose soul-body has not died before the Day of the Lord have no need of a resuscitation and they get a transfiguration of it straight away. Paul affords no rationale of the transfiguration. The two forms are poles apart, absolute opposites, as though the later one was a replacement of the earlier instead of a development of it. Even the alleged change is said to be instantaneous, like a sudden substitution rather than a process.
One further quotation from Paul may be made to serve more or less as a clincher of our pneuma-vision and at the same time to lead from the concept of the Christian's spirit-state to that of Christ's: "The Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of God. And if we are children we are heirs as well: heirs of God and coheirs with Christ, sharing
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his sufferings so as to share his glory" (Romans 8:16-17). Here not only is it Christ's Holy Spirit that is set together with the inmost spiritual depths of us like the major and minor chords of the same divine harmony, but what will happen to us in our fulfilment as sons of God is suggested to be a small future reflex of what happened to God's Son par excellence in the past. This means that it was by Jesus' spirit which was secretly the supreme Holy Spirit itself that the event mis-termed by Paul his Resurrection came to pass. We get the exact statement of the fact when Paul as an apostle summarises to his followers the "Good News" he was mystically chosen to preach, telling how the man Jesus was revealed to be the Divine incarnate: "This news is about the Son of God who, according to the human nature he took, was a descendant of David: it is about Jesus Christ our Lord who, in the order of the spirit, the spirit of holiness that was in him, was proclaimed Son of God in all his power through his resurrection from the dead" (Romans 1:3-4)98
8
The Upshot of Our Inquiry
Now we may claim to understand how the complete discontinuity between Jesus' human form, which was a crucified soma psychikon, and the divine form, the glorious soma pneumatikon, in which he appeared after his death to Paul as well as to some fortunate others, was overcome. By his God-filled spirit the identical Jesus, losing his sacrificial soul-body, crossed over to a supernal spirit-body. Paul, positing a Resurrection, went against his own testimony that the heavenly body of Jesus which had appeared to him had no slightest feature of earth, no trait of physicality in the least. He was misguided, like all his Christian contemporaries, by Old-Testament prophecies whose long-believed validity about the life of Jesus as well as about other future events has no place, according to Brown,99 in "most serious scholarship today". In
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the teeth of his witness to the contrary Paul asserted God's raising of Jesus from the dead. And he went on doing so although he knew that Jesus' body had been thrown as that of a felon into a common burial-ground where his grave would be undiscoverable and could never provide any evidence of being left empty by a resuscitated corpse, a cadaver resurrected and transfigured.
A Jesus who paid the full penalty for man's "sin" but who, although he had assumed a perishable soul-body like sinning man's, was not for that reason doomed to die for ever unless God intervened to resurrect him - a Jesus who had as his deepest identity in the assumed death-fated human form a spirit inherently immortal agrees best with Paul's declaration to the Corinthians in which he ascribes to him a divine pre-existence voluntarily put behind: "Remember how generous the Lord Jesus was: he was rich, but he became poor for your sake, to make you rich out of his poverty" (2 Cormthians 8:9).100 In Philippians 2:6-9 we have the locus classicus of Jesus' pre-existence as God's equal, his chosen act of extreme self-emptying (kenosis) for the sake of man's redemption, and God's upliftment of him after death to the topmost height as a reward.101 If his original "state was divine" (Philippians 2:6), then during his life he must have been always aware of the Incarnation that he was, for else he could not know the sacrificial role he was working out. In our citation of Romans 1:3-4, although he "was proclaimed Son of God" through his Resurrection, he was still God's Son, however secretly, when he took "human nature" and "was a descendant of David". As such, for all the impoverishment, kenosis and most humble condition accepted by him, even to the extent of "death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8), he could not be in Paul's eyes nothing more than the arch-exemplar of the human state figured in traditional Hebraic thought, wherein there would be no inner immortal entity, and death would mean by the perishing of the body the cessation of one's personal existence. Paul, in being misguided by the current obsession with Old-Testament prophecies, believed in the bodily Resurrection of the dead
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Jesus, but his announcement of Jesus' pre-existence in heaven as "the first-born of all creation", through whom and for whom "all things were created" (Colossians 115-16),102 would be inconsistent with any suggestion that Jesus had nothing in him which would by innate nature survive the end of his willingly assumed soul-body. Even the ordinary human being who was a creation of Jesus had, in Paul's view, a surviving spirit. All the more would the Pauline Jesus have a spirit masterfully triumphant - by the full presence of God's Holy Spirit within him - over the fall of the physical form into the grave.
That form itself, differing in toto by Paul's own unmistakable account from the after-death pneuma-embodiment, cannot be assigned continuity with the latter. We may recollect Brown's observation:103 "It seems he thought Jesus had risen bodily from the dead but paradoxically he rejected the idea that the risen body was natural or physical." On the strength of Paul's stark internal rift plus the blank we draw from him about any discoverable grave of one who suffered a criminal's crucifixion, the alleged miracle of a corpse-transfiguring Resurrection has definitely to be given up. In The Jerome Biblical Commentary104 Brown has focussed the hub of the controversy: "The NT does not claim that anyone saw the resurrection and makes no attempt to describe it....Therefore, the reality of the bodily resurrection hinges on the missing body or empty tomb and, above all, on the validity of the experiences of those who claimed they saw Jesus risen." The very material submitted by the first and most enthusiastic proponent of these experiences prompts us to dissociate them from the dead body of Jesus as well as to deny that the body was missing and that the tomb was empty. But, while we have to renounce a miraculous corpse-transfiguring Resurrection, the miracle of the supposedly God-commanded appearances of Jesus' spirit-body to some selected disciples in the wake of his soul-body's demise remains - on the attestation of its greatest eye-witness - a mighty truth in the world's religious annals.
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References
1. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 322.
2. Ibid., p. 218.
3. Ibid., p. 299.
4. C. F. Evans, Resurrection and the New Testament (Studies in Biblical Theology II, London: SCM, 1970), p. 64.
5. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 322.
6. The Virginal Conception..., pp. 90-91.
7. Ibid., p. 91.
8. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 323, col.l, note i.
9. Ibid., p. 322.
10. Ibid., p. 244.
11. Ibid., p. 246, col. 1, note e.
12. The Virginal Conception..., pp. 91-92.
13. The Life Divine (New York: The Sri Aurobindo Library, The Greystone Press, 1949), p. 479.
14. On Yoga, II, Tome One (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection, Vol. VII, 1958), p. 55.
15. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 342.
16. The Life Divine, p. 238.
17. Ibid., p. 239.
18. On Yoga, I: The Synthesis of Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection, Vol. IV, 1955), p. 1003.
19. Ibid.
20. The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1952), p. 59.
21. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 320.
22. Ibid., p. 347.
23. Ibid., p. 342.
24. Ibid., p. 308.
25. Ibid.,p. 352.
26. Ibid., p. 355.
27. Ibid., p. 293.
28. Ibid., p. 308.
29. Ibid., p. 352.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 353, col. 2, note i.
32. Ibid., note a.
33. Ibid., pp. 255, 257.
34. Ibid., p. 287.
35. Marxsen, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, translated by Margaret
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Kohl from the German (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), p. 177.
36. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 352.
37. Ibid., p. 296.
38. Ibid., p. 302.
39. Ibid., p. 304.
40. Ibid., pp. 304-05.
41. Ibid., p. 305, col. 2, note d.
42. Ibid., p. 313.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 320.
45. Ibid., p. 321.
46. Letters on Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, 1970), Vol. 24, p. 1237.
47. Ibid.
48. Ernest F. Scott, The First Age of Christianity (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926), p. 201.
49. Ibid.
50. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 324.
51. Ibid., p. 302, col. 2, note e.
52. Ibid., pp. 338-39.
53. Ibid., p. 339, col. 1, note j.
54. Ibid., p. 314.
55. Ibid.
56. The Virginal Conception..., pp. 86-87, part of fn. 147.
57. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 315, col. 1, notes a & b.
58. The Virginal Conception..., loc. cit.
59. T. E. Pollard, "The Body of the Resurrection", Colloquium 2,1967, pp. 105-15, especially p. 109.
60. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 315, col. 1, note c.
61. Ibid., p. 346.
62. Ibid., p. 347.
63. Ibid., col. 2, note b.
64. Ibid., p. 332.
65. Ibid., p. 333, col. 1, note e.
66. Ibid., p. 333.
67. The Virginal Conception..., p. 87.
68. Bernhard W. Anderson, Rediscovering the Bible, pp. 212-13.
69. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 307, col. 2, note e.
70. Rediscovering the Bible, p. 212 & fn. 1.
71. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 309, col. 1, note 1.
72. Ibid., p. 255.
73. Giinther Bornkamm, Paul, translated from the German by D. M. G.
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Stalker (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972), pp. 234-35.
74. The Virginal Conception..., p. 76.
75. The Jerusalem Bible, Chronological Table, p. 465, col. 2.
76. The Virginal Conception..., loc. cit.
77. Ibid., pp. 86-87, fn. 149.
78. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, pp. 253-54.
79. Ibid., p. 352.
80. Ibid., p. 354.
81. Ibid., p. 255.
82. Ibid., p. 354, cols. 1 & 2, note e.
83. Ibid., p. 267.
84. Ibid., col. 2, note f.
85. Ibid., noteg.
86. Ibid., p. 309, col. 1, note 1.
87. Ibid., p. 294.
88. Ibid., p. 295.
89. Ibid., p. 294.
90. Ibid., p. 295, col. 1, note i.
91. Ibid., p. 296.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., p. 297, col. 1, note c.
94. Ibid., p. 308.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., p. 314.
97. Ibid., p. 280.
98. Ibid., p. 267.
99. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 146.
100. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 299.
101. Ibid., pp. 239-40.
102. Ibid., p. 344.
103. The Virginal Conception..., p. 85.
104. "The Resurrection of Jesus", The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 791, col. 2.
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