Right. Got it.

I am not sure what you mean. This isn’t about deciding based on feelings. The facts are sufficient.

It seems like you are confusing “you” with “them.” You have data they didn’t (the entirety of modern science and modern critical historical methods). So your decision is easy. It is not about what you like. It’s about what is the case.

They were not in that position. So if we are to advance hypotheses about them, we have to take into account the position they were in (their intellectual, cultural, epistemological, and ideological context).

They were deciding based on feelings and not facts. And this created a “culture war” within the church from the very first generation (the war even predates them, as it consumed Judaism as well, and they simply inherited it), which was mostly but not entirely a class war, regarding what kind of resurrection people “wanted” (or could understand). Once they decided that, it became de facto the resurrection that had to have happened to Jesus. The desire drives the propaganda: if someone wants resurrection of the flesh that died (contra Paul in 1 Cor. 15), then “therefore” Jesus rose in the same body that died. The myth must support the desired belief, so it gets rewritten to suit, and belief tracks desire.

This is how all delusional belief systems work. If someone does not “like” climate remediation policies, then they “must” believe there is no global warming, “therefore” there is no global warming, which requires a mythology about global conspiracies of scientists. Desire drives belief, and dictates what the mythology must say. None of this is driven by factual reality. That’s not even relevant.

Once we understand this, resurrection apologetics collapses, because it is based on assuming facts dictate belief, but this was belief dictating facts. And the evidence proves it.

re: There was no great upheaval. Paul is already arguing against sarcicists.

OK. I get your position now.

What we have is, on one hand, this view that Paul *wasn’t* talking about a “resurrection process” that affected a corpse, and on the other hand, the view that Paul *was* talking about such a corpse-affecting resurrection.

So, I, then, get to be the “Great Decider” of which view is correct. I mean, I’m handed two views, and it all gets down to which one I like best.

But, I’m well aware that my decision isn’t going to alter “What Really Happened” one bit. It’s just going to be “whatever sits right with me at the moment”, and may not have a thing to do with What Really Happened at all.

*Sigh* I’ll confess: I guess I was hoping for something more substantial. But I guess historians of ancient history, no matter how you cut the cake, can only very rarely ever say anything about “what happened 2000 years ago” with any real degree of certainty.

So, where’s the evidence from the first century?

The authentic letters of Paul.

We have no other documents from the first century that discuss the metaphysics of resurrection.

the Gospel of Matthew, which is sarcicist.

Actually we can’t tell that. Matthew is mythographic and thus writes in symbolism (as Mark 4:11-13 explained), so we can’t know whether Matthew himself or his insiders thought his account was literal or only symbolic. We only get explicit literalism in Luke and John, which are early second century texts.

Matthew might also have been appealing to both markets and thus deliberately vague on the point (as Origen explains the Gospels do, called the theory of double truth, expecting elite insiders to know the text is not literal, while letting the masses believe they are literal: see
Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians).

what’s the evidence from the first century that shows that (presumably?) between, say, the early 60s and the mid-to-late 80s, there was some great “upheaval” in “Christiandom”,

There was no great upheaval. Paul is already arguing against sarcicists. Jews before then were already divided into those two camps. That wasn’t a new thing. Pneumaticist vs. sarcicist resurrectionism debates were the status quo in Judaism when Christianity arose. Paul represents the apostolic position within Christianity, arguing against upstart Jews and pagan converts who hewed sarcicist, causing the tumult at Corinth that Paul is aiming to resolve in 1 Cor. 15 (see, again, Martin).

We have no data on the relative “size” of the competing factions come the 2nd century, but the pneumaticists were clearly numerous and problematic (hence all the anti-heretical attacks on them and insistence that they be shunned: see, again, Bynum). The sarcisists decided which texts would survive for us to see them now, so that’s why everything we have is sarcicist (and only references pneumaticism as a heresy). It would be the other way around if the pneumaticists had won the propaganda war and Constantine’s ear.

But we can expect they wouldn’t have because pneumaticism required education to understand, and the masses hoarding into the church were not educated, so they brought with them the popular yokel view of sarcicism. So any church that expected to “win” had to appeal to the sarcicists to outdo the others in numbers of members and thus size and influence. This then attracted more investors, escalating their financial advantage, and was the only sect Constantine could use (because he needed a high membership church to use it for imperial influence), so it was the only one he was likely to endorse. The rest is history.

What I do find is that guys like Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, and Clement of Rome – guys who were all born in the first century, and became Christians in the first century, were either from churches that Paul had written to, or they were writing to churches that Paul had written to. And they were all sarcicists.

You are repeating modern Christian propaganda here.

We have no data on Clement’s position on resurrection ontology, other than that he endorsed Paul’s letter to Corinth and thus would most likely have been a pneumaticist.

Ignatius explicitly attests to pneumaticists and condemns and attacks them, so he actually proves they existed even as he insists on sarcicism (by shunning and banning pneumaticists and their books). And those letters are agreed by most scholars of Ignatius now to date mid-second century, so it is not likely Ignatius was ever an adult in the first century and might not have been been born then (if he was 30 when he wrote around 140 he’d have been born in 110). Note that there are a ton of fake Ignatian letters, and Ignatius’s “traditional” date was fudged by later Christian fictionalists (it is not in the letters themselves, nor in any authentic text of the second century).

And Polycarp also never discusses resurrection ontology in anything we have, but we believe he threw his hat in with the sarcicists like Ignatius, so he was probably a sarcicist, but that’s already mid-second century (Polcarp was also not likely born in the first century, or never an adult then; late, fabulous traditions otherwise are unsourced and incredible). And in any event, as sarcicists date all the way back to Paul and even before Christianity, even if Polycarp was an adult and converted to Christianity before the end of the first century, it’s entirely plausible he could have been among those who threw in with the sarcicists against the pneumaticists, as that dispute had been ongoing since Paul and even before.

re: And we have countless examples of whole churches of pneumaticists being condemned and shunned in the second and third century anti-heretical writings

So, where’s the evidence from the first century? I mean, we got Paul, who as a pneumaticist (in this view), writing up until the early 60s. Then we got the Gospel of Matthew, which is sarcicist. And gMatthew, at least, according to most scholars, was from the 80s.

So, what’s the evidence from the first century that shows that (presumably?) between, say, the early 60s and the mid-to-late 80s, there was some great “upheaval” in “Christiandom”, and destroying of writings, and so on – the great “doing-away” of the pneumaticists?

I can’t seem to find any.

What I do find is that guys like Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, and Clement of Rome – guys who were all born in the first century, and became Christians in the first century, were either from churches that Paul had written to, or they were writing to churches that Paul had written to. And they were all sarcicists.

So I can’t put together how all that worked. Somehow, there was this Big Change, with Christianity going from pneumaticist to sarcicist, but I can’t find any evidence that this Big Change actually occurred.

The general zeitgeist of that era held that you can’t claim this (the bodily afterlife) without god-magic. And the market was thus flooded with god-magic resurrection cults (all the mystery religions). So, everyone gets resurrection who unites with the right god with the right rituals and behaviors (typically always baptism, communion, and fictive kinship).

Thus Aunt Mildred gets this too. Just, within the rules of the cult she joined (or that someone joined and was baptized after her death on her behalf). So, in the Christian cult, everyone who follows the rules gets this outcome at “the end times” (which was originally to be soon, per 1 Cor 15:20 and 1 Thess. 4).

But for any cult to claim to offer this, they need to sell a “first guy” who established it. Typically (though not always) this was a first resurrected guy, the first guy to figure out the god-magic needed to get the outcome. For example, Osiris and Dionysus. Jesus is just the Jewish version. And thus, being the Jewish version, he had to find a way that can be justified by some combination of scriptures. And so that’s what the first Christians constructed (the whole of 1 Cor. 15, Heb. 9, and Romans 16:25–26), so they could sell their own god-magic package.

This is the “Why Jesus?” answer in respect to their construction (why they invented a Jesus, or this outcome for Jesus, to market the same outcome for inductees).

The answer to the “Why Jesus?” question in respect to persuasion—how did they convince people Jesus achieved this feat and thus they can now offer it—is the same as every other mystery cult (how did they convince people Osiris and Dionysus did it?). It’s in the religious epistemology of the time. I document that in detail in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (as the contrast to the scientific epistemology of the philosophers, which has become the dominant epistemology today, though we still have some people being seduced by the old religious cult logic). Paul describes it often (enduring tribulations, moving scriptural exegesis, and miracle tent shows prove the salesman was not a liar, etc.).

As to the elite ontology “being a loser” that’s what Bynum and Martin discuss: the masses were suspicious of and didn’t understand elite ideas and so to gain numbers, the marketing had to appeal to the masses, and so sarcicist rather than pneumaticist resurrection won out politically, but only by declaring pneumaticists heretics and shunning them and destroying their writings. The last great pneumaticist was Origen. Declared a heretic for it. And most of his writings destroyed or doctored to erase his “heresies.” But Origen was right: he was only clinging to the ontology Paul himself sold, the original ontology of the sect. And we have countless examples of whole churches of pneumaticists being condemned and shunned in the second and third century anti-heretical writings (I document this now in Ch. 7 of Obsolete Paradigm).

And it was only the “popular with the masses” sect that could be of political use to Constantine to endorse, so he threw the entire weight of imperial oppression and funding (stick and carrot) to drive out the pneumaticists for good (this is when Origen gets condemned) and up-market the sarcicists.

That the pneumaticists existed is well documented. Even the sarcicists admitted that model existed. They just tried to claim it was deviant. But in fact their view was deviant. And this is well proved from Paul, who is explicitly pneumaticist, as everyone then knew, but sarcicists simply denied (as Christians typically deny all evidence against them no matter what it is) and continuing pneumaticists kept pointing out (including expert Pauline scholars like Origen).

The evidence for this is overwhelming and not even ambiguous. So if you didn’t know that, you’ve been duped by modern Christian propaganda, which is always built around concealing everything actually true about the original faith and its early development. But scholars who check the evidence know better (see my FAQ for a shortlist). Hence the two-body resurrection concept is well documented in pre-Christian Judaism, in the Pauline corpus, in the “heretics” of the second century, in Origen, and so on, and the only thing that prevents you not knowing that are the Christians who neglected to tell you about it (or disingenuously deny it exists).

The full collection of evidence is in my chapter on the pneumatic body in The Empty Tomb (especially the Jewish evidence), supplemented by my associated Empty Tomb FAQ, and the evidence for pneumaticist Christians in the anti-heretical literature in Obsolete Paradigm. I also ran a debate with a Christian apologist denier. So you have to confront the evidence, which has been referenced for 2000 years now, not just 200.

What you’re saying in your last two paragraphs is that yes, anyone could have claimed “Aunt Mildred died, but she’s been given a new ‘spiritual’ body” – but – unless Aunt Mildred was “something really special” to begin with, like Moses, then the claim would just be regarded as bullshit.

And, that’s why (as you say) “Paul had to run miracle tent shows…”.

If it wasn’t for these “miracle tent shows”, then Paul’s claim would just have been regarded as bullshit.

And this raises the big question: “Why Jesus?” What made Jesus more special in life than Auntie Mildred?

Maybe you can fill me in on that. But, whatever that answer might be, it wasn’t enough to keep this “two-body resurrection” idea afloat. Because it switched over to being a resurrection that affected an earthbound corpse. And that just tells me that the “original belief” (whatever it was) wasn’t important enough for anybody to keep around. If all those churches that Paul wrote to believed in this two-body resurrection idea, they evidently didn’t put up much of a fight against the late-comers who were claiming the “corpse-affecting resurrection”.

So, OK. That’s fine. That just means the original message of this “two-body resurrection” was a loser. Because it didn’t continue to get repeated. It got lost to history. Up until, maybe, somebody made some great “discovery” in the last couple-hundred years that a two-body resurrection was indeed the original claim.

OR – just spitballing here – maybe the original message WAS of a corpse-affecting resurrection all along. And at some point in the last 200 years or so, somebody just made up a total bullshit story about the “two-body resurrection of Jesus”.

So, who would *care* if this “Jesus” got a new body after dying?

So now it sounds like you are asking for a historico-cultural explanation of why ancient Jews developed this distinction and were so insistent on it.

This is now off the topic of resurrection apologetics. Since that they had this attitude is beyond doubt. Why they had it does not matter to that. It’s a different question to ask.

Before Christianity spun off of it, Judaism had (or most sects, some did not, but the ones Christianity came from had) the idea of an end-times resurrection as the only afterlife, that bodiless souls are fleeting and thus miserable (exactly as depicted even in Homer, where this is constantly depicted as an awful outcome no one wanted), or else cannot even be awake (that’s why Paul keeps talking about the dead as sleeping, and all his words for resurrection are words for waking up). So they came to believe that a soul “needed” a body to be properly alive and not miserable or asleep.

Thus, they could not countenance the idea of a person’s soul just going to live in heaven. No one did anyway, except the rare righteous elect (e.g. Moses gets to live in heaven; Adam stays dead in a grave, by some accounts a grave in heaven, but dead all the same). And the general view was that the rare exceptions (e.g. Moses, Enoch, Elijah) got bodies there (superbodies, but still, hence Paul is unsure whether he or whoever had the ascent vision was taken up in a body or temporarily by miracle allowed to visit heaven without a body, in 2 Cor 12; even pagans imagined the deified were given magical bodies and not just fleeting souls who could never touch or eat or lift anything, for example).

In result, since no one would imagine Jesus resurrected but in a body, all early talk of resurrection was about that. In fact even the very words for “resurrection” meant that (that was the difference between being a ghost and being resurrected).

So we’re stuck with 1) and 2). There is no way to get those to go away by some harrumphing over ancient minds being silly about this. They were silly about this. And that’s that. Hence any theory of the evidence we have must account for their silliness about this.

As to why no one claimed this of anyone else, a) they did (it was claimed of Moses, for example; see Ehrman’s book on becoming a god) and b) they couldn’t claim it of just anyone because that would then be the claim that God granted a rare miracle to them and maybe even has started the end-times resurrection, and no one would believe you unless you had some juice to convince them by (the juice that worked was not rational, but you had to have it all the same: I have a whole section of ancient Christian epistemology in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire).

This is why Paul had to run miracle tent shows to convince people his claim about Jesus was the real deal and not just pompous bullshit. Most people wouldn’t even try that for Aunty Sue or something, much less succeed.

re: But here we are addressing 3). 3) is false because the first Christians did not believe the body was the same, and so would not have believed the grave was empty. The corpse of Jesus would still be there, a vacated and empty shell (1 Cor 15), as his life/soul/mind jumped into a completely new body already built and awaiting this installation in heaven (2 Cor 5).

OK. I “get” that this is your assessment. No problem.

It does raise a question, though: If Jesus acquired his “second body” after his “spirit” was “raised”, then clearly, it’s a belief about something that happens in the realm of the “afterlife” (or, we could say,”afterdeath”). That is, the “spirit” rises up, and THEN, it gets this new, second body. OK. Fine.

But then, the same thing could have been said about anybody. “Grandma died, and her spirit has been given a new body ‘in the heavenlies'”. And, this could have been claimed by someone long before Jesus ever came along.

So, who would *care* if this “Jesus” got a new body after dying?

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not “arguing” that position. I’m just saying that when I look at the idea of this “second body” being given after death, it just looks to me like “Yet Another Afterlife Belief. And, as best I can make out, Jews could believe pretty much whatever they wanted to believe about the afterlife. So I just don’t “get” why this Two-Body Resurrection of Jesus was “significant”. I mean, if I can look at it and come up with this question, so could somebody else. Even “back then”.

In short, I’m wondering why anybody would have cared even to *repeat* this claim about Jesus, when the same thing potentially could have been said about anybody.

I am not sure you grasp what the debate is about here. So I must have to start from basics to catch you up:

We are not talking about reality (obviously it’s just all dreams and hallucinations). We are talking about what the first Christians believed (what did they think they were seeing or happened).

The apologetic goes like this:

1) No Jews believed in bodiless resurrection. Life can only exist in a body.
2) Therefore the first Christians (Paul included) must have believed Jesus rose in a real physical body (it can’t just be a soul or ghost living on).
3) Therefore they must have believed Jesus rose from the grave, leaving a verifiable empty grave.
4) They would never believe that without confirming it, and they could confirm it, and would have.
5) Therefore they confirmed it.
6) Therefore atheists need to explain what happened to the body.
7) Atheists cannot produce a better explanation than actual resurrection.

1) and 2) are verifiably true. A lot of atheists don’t know that; but they are true, and so any theory of what they believed, and thus what happened, must be based on 1) and 2).

By contrast, 3) to 7) are all dubious. One can critique any one or several of them (hence all the different counter-apologetics about the resurrection).

This particular thread is just the one chasing down 3).

I chase down 4) and 5) elsewhere with different arguments (e.g. Not the Impossible Faith). And I chase down 5) and 7) elsewhere with different arguments, and 6) with them, with this argument (e.g. The Empty Tomb, see my FAQs).

But here we are addressing 3). 3) is false because the first Christians did not believe the body was the same, and so would not have believed the grave was empty. The corpse of Jesus would still be there, a vacated and empty shell (1 Cor 15), as his life/soul/mind jumped into a completely new body already built and awaiting this installation in heaven (2 Cor 5).

So 3) is false. That they believed 1) and 2) does not entail 3) after all. And so the apologetic fails at its very first turn.

Outside the dumb context of apologetics, this has a more mundane relevance: it gets at the truth (and clears away anachronistic errors about ancient thought) of what the first Christians actually believed, not just about Jesus, but about their own future resurrections; and this touches on a debate in the church even in Paul’s day (and before, as I document these debates raged in Judaism even before Christianity), which connected class conflict and educational consciousness with resurrection beliefs (the illiterate poor tended to not understand and were suspicious of high ontologies like Paul’s and wanted their own flesh back, while the elite regarded that as crass and base and an obviously dumb hick thing to want, and so we got “liberal elites vs. MAGA on whether Haitians eat pets” only in respect to resurrection ontology). This is all interesting historically even without modern Christians still running this dumb debate.

It has led to several very good and valuable historical studies that would be so even if Christianity was no longer believed in, because it simply addresses the realities of ancient thought and conflict, e.g. Caroline Bynum’s Resurrection of the Body and Dale Martin’s Corinthian Body.