But there were many early Christians who regarded this as nonsense. Didn't Paul say that flesh would not inherit the Kingdom? Expectations of the afterlife body were varied in early Christianity. The Valentinian Gnostics, for instance, were quite literal interpretators of Paul. They believed that at death, the soul body or psyche would undress, stripping the "garments of skins" that the creator god had given them when they left the garden. This glorified soul body would ascend to the highest heaven where it would await the resurrection at the End-of-Time. At the End, the soul body would be taken off and the glorified spirit body or pneuma would be released and join in matrimony with a beautiful angel. Together all the spirit-angel newlyweds would enter the Godhead, the Bridal Chamber, and make love for eternity within God's embrace.
This is such a different picture of the afterlife than the "orthodox" that came to dominate, where the heavens will be filled with the celibate bodies of resurrected flesh.
Why this different picture? The Valentinians believed that sacred marriage and procreative activity was what God was all about, and also what humans should be all about. I came across a passage I never noticed before when reading the Extracts of Theodotus last week. It was startling even for me who has studied the Valentinians for years.
And because Seth was spiritual he neither tends flocks nor tills the soil but produces a child, as spiritual things do. And him, who "hoped to call upon the name of the Lord" who looked upward and whose "citizenship is in heaven" - him the world does not contain.I think the Valentinian perspective is a lovely hope for life after death, much more appealing than the resurrected flesh living in perpetual abstinence. Why this celibate-flesh choice was made by the early Christians is the subject of the book I am now writing, Sex and the Gnostic Mysteries. More on this in later posts.
For now, have a wonderful Easter if you are celebrating this day of resurrection, whatever your personal understanding of it is.
7 comments:
Hi April. Good post on the Valentinian understanding, but I strongly dispute your tracing this back to Paul.
We are very familiar with the "orthodox" Easter story, the story of Jesus rising from the dead, a story interpreted to be a resurrection of Jesus' physical body, leaving behind an empty tomb. But there were many early Christians who regarded this as nonsense. Didn't Paul say that flesh would not inherit the Kingdom?
Yes, but I don't think this means he didn't believe the original body was raised. The biggest obstacle to understanding Paul's view is his adamant hostility to "the flesh" -- it keeps interfering with his (equally adamant) insistence on the continuity between the old body and the new one.
Alan Segal accounts for the ambiguity in terms of Paul's Pharisaic background. In-between the Sadducees (who shunned an afterlife because they already had paradise, of sorts, on earth) and the millenial revolutionaries (who needed a strong/"fleshy" idea of the resurrection for the sake of justice), the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the old body without necessarily bringing flesh into the picture. They seem to have grounded the resurrection in terms of Jewish apocalyptic, but not to the extent that angry millenarians did. They did have a happier fleshy existence, after all, than revolutionaries and martyrs. Segal notes their favoring the first half of Isa 26:19 ("the dead shall live") over the second half ("their corpses shall rise"):
"We can translate tehiat hametim as 'vivification of the dead', even 'resurrection of the dead', but not 'resurrection of the flesh' [tequmat hanevelot]." (Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion, p 608).
Paul was even more hostile to "the flesh" (maybe owing to his sectarianism?), and he too insisted on the continuity between the old and new body. The metaphor of the seed (I Cor 15:35-38) suggests that God transforms the old body, no matter how dead and decayed, into a new glorified one. He's quite clear: the old seed itself is given a body (15:38), and the perishable itself must put on imperishability (15:53-54). Richard Carrier's two-body hypothesis is wrong: Paul believed the original body was raised, and so he presumably believed in an empty tomb.
The question is what happens to all the flesh from the old body. Is it still there but hyper-transformed? In that case "flesh and blood" would have been Paul's loose way of referring to an ordinary human body as yet unchanged; meaning "flesh and blood in and of itself cannot inherit the kingdom". But I think Paul hated "the flesh" more than that. He's so consistently hostile to it in his letters that he must believe it's all eradicated in the new body -- in which case the old body is so transformed that the flesh has been transmuted into something else altogether. I guess that's what Paul's (unsatisfying) ambiguity is all about.
Happy Easter! (If you celebrate it in any way, unlike me...)
Hi Loren,
The Valentinians, as most second century Christian interpreters of Paul, didn't give a hoot about what Paul actually meant (smile!). Hermeneutics is rather "plastic." It is not I who trace the Valentinans back to Paul on this point. They do this themselves.
Paul's actual ideology has not been accepted by any Christians who survived. The "orthodox" went with a view of the resurrected body as the flesh being raised (i.e. "the resurrection of the flesh" in the creeds). This certainly is not what Paul meant!
Nor did Christians go with the Valentinian picture, which is a blend of Jewish thinking about bodily resurrection and immortality of the soul. It is also not the picture that Paul actually advocated.
This is the thing about hermeneutics. Original intent of the author is usually not the concern for Christians interpreting scripture to fit their world view. Trying to recover "original intent" is usually the domain of historians. And now post-modernists are telling us that this is impossible, a point that I strongly dispute.
PS Loren,
I also liked your post today about the various types of belief about resurrection.
The Valentinians, as most second century Christian interpreters of Paul, didn't give a hoot about what Paul actually meant (smile!). Hermeneutics is rather "plastic." It is not I who trace the Valentinans back to Paul on this point. They do this themselves.
Ah, well, then the blame is all theirs. :)
Paul did not say flesh would not inherit - he said flesh and blood cannot inherit. [blood carries us far afield in its metaphor - I recommend Covenant of Blood by Hoffman.] And Loren, Paul did not use the term 'flesh' the same way every time he used it. He has both positive and negative views on the flesh. April - I am glad to see you are writing on this Valentinian view - but the words are too few. Nowhere in the canonical texts should you read abstinence as the only alternative to sex. Paul himself is quite explicit: The body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body. Bultmann was simply wrong in his published interpretation of this verse (The Theology of the New Testament). And in 1 Cor 7:7, Paul is even more explicit: some have a gift one way and others another.
Loren, Paul did not use the term 'flesh' the same way every time he used it... Paul himself is quite explicit: The body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body
Paul obviously believes that the body is for the Lord, and that believers' bodies are "members of Christ" (I Cor 6:15), but that's (ideally) a resurrected body he's talking about (I Cor 6:14), which brings us back to the question: what does a resurrected body consist of? The body of a believer has begun to take on whatever these characteristics are -- they've died with Christ, if not been raised with him (Rom 6) -- but they still "groan under the burden" of the present body and want its fleshy mortality to be completely swallowed up (II Cor 5:1-9). Paul says that fleshy parts like the stomach will be destroyed (I Cor 6:13). To me, there's no escaping that Paul is consistently hostile to "the flesh" (Galatians, Corinthians, Romans passim), even while insisting on a continuity between the old body and new. That's part of his paradox.
Hi April,
Your post reminded of my father's preference for the Muslim paradise of lovemaking over singing with the angels. For me, the two are not necessarily disjoint: a serenade to your lover, a Song of Solomon, which transforms mere sex into lovemaking.
Perhaps some understanding of the song, the poetic aspects, of the Last Supper and the Resurrection, is needed here. Part of poetry is reference and the risen Christ walking about and then being taken up is, I believe, a reference to Genesis 5:24. That is, Christ on the Cross has taken our separation from God (Psalm 22), bears our death in the Tomb, is then raised by The Father in a redeemed Body that stands for our redemption, our being like Enoch in communion with God.
And yet Christ's Body remains in another poetic sense as the Church, whose task is to show the Love of Christ. The Last Supper is the example, repeated in each Communion, of people coming together over bread and wine and becoming one in that Love.
In poetry, it is perfectly acceptable, indeed encouraged, to have multiple meanings for the same set of words. So we have (at least) two meanings for Christ's Body and it should come as no surprise that we have at least two meanings of the Christian's body. One is as a member of the Body of Christ. Another is in the beautiful butterfly-like imagery where all the impediments to love in our material existence are dropped to allow the the loving person to emerge. In affirming that imagery, I by no means am claiming that the mechanics of the process are precisely metamorphosis or even that there is single mechanism by which fleshly humans become loving beings. It is probably a variety, some butterflies, some Velveteen Rabbits, some martyrs, some George Baileys, etc.
Once thoroughly of Love, our ecstatic expression of it beyond our familiar stage would bear a resemblance to singing and to sex and a few other things beside.
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