PAUL SAYS THE RISEN BODY WILL BE DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT FROM THE UNRISEN BODY

Paul is the only writer we have who directly claimed to have seen the risen Jesus.

The Second Letter of Peter which admits to being influenced by Paul and in accord with him recounts the transfiguration of Jesus and the writer says he witnessed it and heard God saying Jesus was his son. Yet he said that the word of the Old Testament was even more sure than this! He had reason to believe that he had had an illusion albeit a possibly divinely inspired illusion. When what he hinted was a doubtful miracle was all he could present as evidence for Jesus it shows that there was nothing. And this coming from a tradition of Peter the rock Jesus supposedly built his Church on! When he thinks the Old Testament is the sole source of reliable truth he is against the production of any gospels and stresses that we must listen to this word of God until the new dawn of resurrection morn comes (2 Peter 1:19). The early Church thought that post-resurrection visions and the empty tomb of Jesus were not important reasons to believe in Jesus compared to the Old Testament saying Jesus would rise from the dead.  Second Peter thought so little of empty tombs and rising bodies that he eliminated the evidence for a physical resurrection.  How? By putting the focus and validation on a spurious interpretation of an ancient text.

The transfiguration story says that Jesus took Peter and James and John up a mountain and his robes turned pure white and his face shone like the sun and they could not believe their eyes literally and then Moses and Elijah appeared and talked with Jesus. NOT ONE OF THE RESURRECTION STORIES IS LIKE THAT OR SAYS JESUS LOOKED GLORIOUS!!! What we read in the transfiguration is what we should be reading about in the resurrected Jesus tales. And we see nothing like it. The story goes that the three apostles were banned by Jesus from telling anyone until after his resurrection from the dead. It reads more like an example of false history where people make things up years after they have supposedly happened. Why would Jesus care if they told or not? If the apostles hallucinated something on the mountain and Jesus died and one or two women had dodgy visions of him the apostles could have been susceptible to thinking Jesus rose. The transfiguration could have been the spark that ignited Christianity not the resurrection as such. The transfiguration is not claimed to show that Jesus' body was different from a normal human body. But it proves that if the resurrection visions were anything like it then the visions prove nothing about Jesus being forever glorious or immortal or having a spiritual body.

The gospels speak of the transfiguration.   The gospels speak of Jesus turning into a glowing white creature at this event flanked with Moses and Elijah.  Moses was secretly buried by God and Elijah was taken bodily up to Heaven so we are meant to understand they had a vision of those two men in their glorified bodies.  Jesus supposedly got a body like that when he rose.  Not one account speaks of him looking anything but ordinary so that is dubious. 

Jesus appearing in white like that is an image stolen from the Book of Daniel where an entity with snow white robes is mentioned in a visionary experience. 

The gospels say that white men were at the tomb when his body was found missing on the first Easter morning. he men at the tomb are not described as glowing like the transfigured Jesus was. They were just in white robes. That’s it.

If Jesus simply came back to life he could suffer and die again.  To make the resurrection important you need to pretend it has a lot to do with the meaning of life and life with God.  You need to have it saying Jesus is different and glorified and immortal.  Those ideas come from speculations by Paul.  Jesus himself never once gave any such teaching.  Ideas about the importance of Jesus' return from the dead come from Paul not Jesus.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 tries to explain how the resurrection body is not physical the way our bodies are now but is more spiritual than physical. Romans 8:11 has Paul saying that God will make alive our mortal bodies just like Christ's. That allows for dramatic transformation so that the risen body is very unlike the unrisen When Paul wrote that flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s kingdom it is said he explained what he meant. He said the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable in Heaven so flesh and blood just mean our fragile flesh and blood the way they are now. That needs a lot of renovation so the end result will be very unlike the body we now have.

Paul boasted he would reveal a mystery to the people of Corinth. He said not all will die but when the last trumpet sounds the living will not die but will simply turn into the same kind of imperishable beings as the dead will be when they rise. They will have a celestial body like the stars. The transformation will be instant. This is odd. In the light of how Christianity expected Jesus to return soon and in those days and thus raise the dead why is he saying it is mystery to say that there will be Christians alive when Jesus comes back and they will just change without dying? It could not have been the first time they would have heard that they would change if Jesus happens to come back. It looks like all the early Church did until then was say Jesus was alive but said nothing about what they meant by this - until now. Now from a vague resurrection report the Church was moving into detail and specifics. They were making it up as they went along. The argument that they were learning that they might never die is thin. It would be a strange gospel that would teach you that you must be killed at Jesus' return so that you can rise up. It is obvious that a transformation leaves you being very different from being a normal human being. Very different indeed - it is amazing and unimaginable.

John McCarthy said, “An atheist doesn’t have to be someone who thinks he has proof that there can’t be a God. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.”  The same can be said if you strip the resurrection to the bare bones - "Jesus died and met with people after alive".  And the kind of Jesus he was is another matter.  It is a subject by itself.  The Church says a man coming back alive and a resurrection are superficially similar but not the same thing at all.  So it is a dual problem.  You do not need to go to the alleged fairy fort to show there are no fairies and to be sure they do not exist.  You need a working knowledge of science and history and so it is with Jesus and so it is with any version of God and with the concept of God in the first place.

Final word, we can talk to people who say they can testify that werewolves are real and still we ignore them and why are we taking the accounts of men long dead who nobody even knows so seriously?