The Success of Immortal Flesh

Abstract

Whereas the resurrection of the flesh is clearly denied in the epistles of Paul, the same cannot be said about the gospels. As Alan Segal asserts, the gospels “strongly assert a physical, fleshly notion of Jesus’ bodily resurrection” in “flat contradiction to Paul.”¹ Looking at the various gospels, we find that the emphasis on the physical aspects of the resurrection seems to be increasingly emphasized as we chronologically get further away from the epistles of Paul. “The Church moved gradually toward a doctrine of the fleshly postmortem body of Christ, away from the ‘spiritual’ conception,” the American early Christian scholar Gregory Riley observes.²