Most scholars who have studied Paul’s teaching on the resurrection body agree that he is not talking about a body made of spirit. But many theologians persist in talking this way. There seems to be a great gap here between biblical studies and theology.
In any case, everyone agrees that Paul did not teach immortality of the soul alone, but the resurrection of the body. I challenge any theologian to explain the difference between an immaterial, intangible, “spiritual” body and the immortality of the soul. To say Paul did not teach the latter but did teach the former is theological double-talk.
Therefore, the arguments used by critics to drive a wedge between Paul and the gospels have not only failed, but actually have led to the opposite conclusion. We see that Paul did believe in a physical resurrection body and that he did not regard the other appearances as being necessarily the same type of experience as his own on the Damascus road.
But we can go further. There is positive evidence that Paul also regarded the appearances of Jesus as actual physical appearances.
(a) Paul (and indeed all of the New Testament) makes a sharp distinction between an appearance of Jesus and a vision of Jesus. The appearances of Jesus were confined to a brief period at the beginning of the Christian Way; they soon ceased and were never repeated. Visions, however, continued and were repeated. Paul himself had visions (2 Corinthians 12:1-7), but what he saw on the Damascus road was no mere vision. That is very interesting, for it shows that the appearances seen by the disciples were essentially different from visions, with which they were familiar.
Visions, even ones caused by God, were exclusively in the mind of the beholder, whereas an appearance involved the actual appearance of something “out there” in the real world. That conclusion seems to me to be nearly inescapable. The resistance of many modern critics to it is mainly due to a bias against the physical resurrection. But if one rejects that conclusion, then how can we explain the difference between an appearance and a vision as drawn by the early church? Grass answers that only in an appearance was the glorified Christ seen.20 But that is patently false, for there were visions of the glorified Christ, too, in the early Christian fellowship (Acts 7:55-56; 2 Corinthians 12:1; Revelation 1:10-11). I challenge any critic to explain how early believers distinguished between a vision and an appearance, if it was not that a vision was purely mental whereas an appearance was physical.
If this is so, then in listing the appearances of Christ, Paul is stating implicitly that these were not visions, but actually occurred in the real world. This was true even of the appearance to Paul, which was semivisionary in character. Thus, Paul can include it in the list with good conscience. Paul held then that the appearances were not visions, but occurred in the physical realm.
But we can go further. Given Paul’s doctrine of the resurrection body, it is probable that he thought of the other appearances as bodily appearances. For Paul held that our resurrection bodies would be patterned after that of Jesus. Since Paul believed in a physical resurrection body, it follows that when he states that Jesus was raised and appeared, he probably means appeared bodily, just as He was raised bodily. He could make no mistake about that, since he had spoken with Peter and James about what they did see.
Therefore, Paul’s testimony certainly implies, even if it does not conclusively prove, that the appearances of Jesus which he listed were bodily appearances. We may say certainly that they were not visions, but actually occurred in the real world. If the stories in the gospels are reliable (as we have seen that they are), then we may be confident that Paul also held that these were bodily appearances.
(b) A second indication that Paul held to physical resurrection appearances of Jesus may be seen by looking at the reverse side of the coin. Suppose there were originally no physical appearances, but only visions. In that case, it becomes very difficult to explain how Paul’s teaching on the resurrection could have developed as it did. He could not have taught that we shall have physical resurrection bodies patterned after Jesus’ body, for Jesus apparently had no body. Indeed, as we shall see below, it is doubtful that Paul would have used the idea of “resurrection” at all to explain such events. Mere visions of Jesus after His death, in other words, are not sufficient to explain the direction and development of Paul’s teaching on the resurrection body. That confirms what we have already seen—that the original resurrection appearances were probably both physical and bodily.
b) The gospels prove that the appearances were physical and bodily. The gospels testify unanimously that Jesus appeared physically and bodily to the disciples. Critics who object to the physical resurrection usually say that the physicalism of the gospels was invented to counteract Docetism. Docetism was a heresy that held that matter is evil, and that therefore God could not really have become incarnate in Jesus. Docetists held that either Jesus’ body only appeared to be physical, but really was not, or else that God’s Spirit took control of the man Jesus, but left Him at the cross. Against the Docetists John wrote, “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7; compare 1 John 4:1-3). Some critics say that the physical nature of the resurrection appearances was invented to counteract Docetism by emphasizing that Jesus rose physically.
That objection, however, cannot be sustained:
(1) Docetism was the reaction to the physicalism of the gospels, not the other way around. We have seen that for a Jew, “resurrection” meant physical, bodily resurrection of the dead man from the tomb. A “spiritual” resurrection would have been nonsense. Therefore, when the early believers said Jesus was raised from the dead, they meant “physically.” Docetism was the later reaction of philosophical speculation to the original physicalism of the Christian believers. Ellis points out that the gospels did not materialize the appearances; rather the heretics dematerialized them.21 Thus, the critics have gotten the true situation backwards.
(2) Docetism denied the physical incarnation, not the physical resurrection. Docetists denied that God ever became flesh; it was not the physical resurrection to which they objected. In fact, some Docetists held that the divine Spirit deserted the human Jesus on the cross and that the human Jesus then died and was raised physically.22 Thus, it would be pointless for the gospels to invent physical appearances of Jesus to counteract Docetism, since Docetists did not deny the physical resurrection.
(3) The gospels’ sources existed before the rise of Docetism. All the gospels’ sources of information concerning Jesus’ appearances tell of physical appearances. But Docetism arose much later and is probably referred to in the letters of John, which most scholars date A.D. 90-100. Hence, the physicalism could not be a response to Docetism, which was a later theological development.