The Platonic and Gnostic View
"the body is the prison of the soul" (Plato, Phaedo, 65, see 67-68 and 91-94)
"You {Judas} will exceed all of them {twelve apostles}. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me" (Jesus in the Gospel of Judas, 56; see the Gospel of Judas edited by Kasser, Meyer and Gregor Wurst, National Geographic Society, p. 43)
"for he {Christ} put aside the world which is perishing. He transformed himself into an imperishable aeon and raised himself up, having swallowed up the visible by the invisible, and he gave us the way to immortality" (Treatise on the Resurrection, 44. The author(s) go on to insist this means shedding the flesh, cf. ch's 47-48)
"When you strip off from yourselves what is corrupted {flesh}, then you will become illumators in the midst of mortal men" (Jesus in The Letter of Peter to Philip, 137. Nag Hammadi Library, p. 435).
"The soul answered and said, 'What binds me has been slain, and what surrounds me has been overcome, and my desire has been ended, and ignorance has died. In a world I was released from a world and in a type from a heavenly type, and from the fetter of oblivion which is transient" (Mary revealing Jesus' secret teachings in The Gospel of Mary, see Nag Hammadi Library, p. 526)
The Jewish/Christian View Exhibited in The Church Fathers
Before I produce a few quotes illustrative of the theme I have chosen, I need to refer to a passage in N. T. Wright's popular level book Judas and the Gospel of Jesus (Baker 2006). Wright summarizes, correctly, I believe, the three major themes the early Church held dearly in continuity with the Hebrew Bible and its Jewish worldview: 1) the belief that the Creator God is none other than the Father of Jesus the Christ and his creation is good; 2) the belief in the ultimate justice of God and 3) a belief that is directly and intimately connected with the previous two is the conviction in the resurrection of the body as part of the restoration of all things (p. 102), this is argued in considerable detail by Wright in some heafty tomes). These beliefs are in stark contrast with Greek Platonism and Gnosticism. Indeed it evident that the Fathers rejected as Gnostic what some today long for ... that "pure spiritual environment."
Josephus, a Pharisee, offers this view of what his party believed about the resurrection,
"they who depart this life in accordance with the law of nature and repay the loan which they received from God, when He who lent is pleased to reclaim it, win eternal renown; that their houses and familes are secure; that their souls, remaining spotless and obedient, are allotted the most holy place in heaven, whence, in the revolution of the ages, they return to find in chaste bodies a new habitation" (Jewish Wars, 3.374)
There could not be a starker contrast in this statement and that made by Plato, the "Jesus" of the Gospel of Judas and the Gnostic treatise on the "resurrection." Another text that I simply cannot reproduce for it is too long is the narrative of the martyrdom of the Seven Brothers in 2 Maccabees 7. But they freely give up their lives in belief of the bodily resurrection in a new creation along the lines in Josephus. These texts can be multiplied at length but there is no need.
One of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament is First Clement which actually belongs to "first century Christianity." In 1 Clement 42, Clement says Christians are "fully assured through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ" that our faith is true. Earlier in ch. 24, Clement appeals to many life experiences to support the belief in the resurrection of the body.
If move down the line about 20 years we encounter Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius is interesting on many levels. He is a bishop. He is a martyr. And he had the gift of prophecy, at least he so claimed and the early church believed he did. That does not make his writings canonical but it is interesting that his writings were appealed to from time to time in the early church as if they were Scripture. Just an interesting tidbit. Ignatius has opportunity to address the idea of resurrection far more than Clement did. In the period from Clement to Ignatius there arose some who started to teach that Christ and Jesus were not one and the same; that Christ was the divine nature that came upon Jesus in his baptism; that Jesus only 'seemed' to suffer and that Christ did not "really" become flesh. Of course anyone familiar with 1 and 2 John recognizes some of this heresy. Ignatius also has to deal with this teaching. He exhorts the Trallians for example to hold onto the faith that Christ was really crucified under Pilate, they he really suffered, that he was really raised from the dead by God who "in like fashion will so raise us who believe in Him--His Father, I say, will raise us" (Trallians 9). In the next "chapter" Ignatius warns of the "godless" who say that Christ was not really "bodily" but was a mere "semblance" (Trallians 10).
Writing the same folks at Smyrna as John did in the Revelation he comments on the nature of the resurrection of Christ in distinction of those who (he believes) teach false doctrine. He clearly rejects any notion of a mere "spiritual" resurrection ...
"For I am confident that even after the resurrection he {Christ} was in the flesh. And when he came to those with Peter he said to them, 'Take, handle me, and see that I am not an incorporeal being {a ghost}.' And they immediately touched him and believed, being mingled with his flesh and spirit. Therefore they despised death and were found to be above death. And after the resurrection he ate and drank with them as a being of flesh, though he was spiritually united with the Father" (Smyrnaens, 3)
This belief in fact fueled Ignatius own faith. He was glad to suffer martyrdom because he believed he would be raised in the flesh just as Jesus Christ was.
The next writer of critical importance is Polycarp. Polycarp was himself a disciple of the at least some of the apostles and was one of the bishops of Smyrna. Polycarp's Epistle to the Philippians dates early in the second century A.D. Polycarp has even less patience with those who want to spiritualize Christ's resurrection. He writes, pointedly:
"For 'everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is anti-christ'; and anyone who does not confess the testimony of the cross is 'of devil'; and anyone who perverts the sayings of the Lord to suit 'his own lusts' and says there is neither a resurrection nor a judgment--that man is the first-born of Satan" (Letter to the Philippians, 7.1)
Polycarp has other thoughts on the resurrection of the body but this one is plain enough to make us take notice.
The writers we have quoted in this section are not being given canonical status by any means. But I do find it rather interesting that these early post-Apostolic teachers (some like Polycarp with apostolic connections) have such continuity with the Jewish view quoted at the head of this section and that it stands in such radical distinction of that of Plato and the Gnostics. In the comments section of Heaven Part 1 I quoted from Justin Martyr extensively and he is right in line with these thoughts quoted here. Christ came in the flesh to redeem the flesh. Christ died in the flesh and was raised in the flesh. To attempt to make the resurrection of the body somehow "spiritual" was tantamount to denying the resurrection and a denial of the Gospel.
I bring this blog to a close with a quote from Bart Erhman. Erhman is no friend of Orthodox Christianity. He is a "hostile" witness so to speak. But he understands, and clearly so, the difference between what the Jewish and early "orthodox" Christians believed and what his precious Gnostics believed. He promotes their veiw in many books but I am here quoting from his essay in The Gospel of Judas published by the National Geographic Society last year. Note how he, ironically, confirms what Wright said in the quotation above,
"According to most gnostics, this material world is not our home. We are trapped here, in these bodies of flesh, and we need to learn to escape ... Since the point is to allow the soul to leave this world behind and to enter into 'that great and holy generation' {a quote from Judas, B.V.} -- that is, the divine realm that transcends this world--a resurrection body is the very last thing that Jesus, or any of his true followers, would want" (Gospel of Judas, pp. 84, 110).
The contrast between this view, identical to my opening quotations, and that in the Church Fathers could not be more stark. The faith of Christianity is this: the BODY that came down from the cross; the BODY that was laid in the borrowed tomb; the BODY that was guarded by Roman soldiers ... is the same body that came out of the tomb. The body of Jesus was raised by the power of God to new life. His body was glorified (redeemed from death and was victorious) and liberated from the curse. As Ignatius pointed out, our hope in our bodily resurrection is based on the fact that Jesus is the first fruits. Jesus still exists in the flesh ... we will never understand the new heavens and new earth if we do not believe what Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp held. Resurrection of the flesh, not a "pure spiritual environment," is essential to the Christian faith.
Shalom,
Bobby Valentine
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