The last question is the easiest to answer: we cannot know whether Jesus rose from the dead the same way that we can know that, for example, the time at which I write this in the Central Standard zone is 8:10 AM on a Thursday (November the 9th, in fact) or that Gyalpo Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is currently the monarch of Bhutan. We cannot know whether Jesus rose the same way we can know the process by which water droplets refract light by bending it into the colors that we perceive as the rainbow. The truth is that the resurrection simply is not that sort of knowledge.
There are three closely related reasons that we cannot know the veracity of the resurrection the same way that we can know ordinary facta of this kind. One of them has to do with the nature and number of our sources that testify to the resurrection of Jesus. Of all the New Testament documents that talk about Jesus’s resurrection, only the authentic Paulines are written by someone who claimed to have actually experienced the risen Jesus himself; in fact, Paul, who did not know Jesus during his lifetime, is the only person who claims to have seen Jesus alive again from the dead firsthand. While readers can, and often do, claim that the stories of the risen Jesus that we get in Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John (again, for the people in the back, probably written in that order) go back in some way to apostolic witness, this is conjecture: and, crucially, when Paul describes his own resurrection experience, he describes it as the common experience held with the apostles before him, and the experience he describes, as well as the “science of the resurrection” within which he frames that experience, to borrow Bruce Chilton’s phrase, differs massively from what the Gospels, particularly the later Gospels of Luke and John, describe.1
This segues to the second reason we cannot know whether Jesus rose from the dead with the kind of “objective” certainty (which doesn’t really exist for anything, of course) or at least the kind of confidence that obtains in the natural sciences and some of the social ones: the nature of the claim itself is a point of dispute among the sources that report it. On the one hand, this is a point in the resurrection’s favor: despite their varied understandings of the event and its meaning, many different traditions of the Early Jesus Movement agree that Jesus rose from the dead. But on the other hand, the semantic width that language of resurrection—תקומה in Hebrew, ἀνάστασις and ἔγερσις in Greek—encompasses makes the nature of what exactly is being predicated of Jesus so ambiguous as to weaken the force of agreement between the sources. Paul, our first, earliest, and only self-proclaimed eyewitness of Jesus’s resurrection, is completely confident that Jesus’s resurrection means that his flesh and blood, which are incapable of inheriting the Kingdom of God by virtue of being flesh and blood, were metamorphosed into πνεῦμα, Latin spiritus, the heavenly, celestial, divine, intelligent, fiery stuff that the bodies of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and the other gods are composed of and that is, in Stoic cosmology, the World Soul, the logos, and God itself, indwelling the universe and rendering it a rational animal (1 Cor 15:35-58). His eschatology, which involves Jesus returning to do battle with errant gods and oversee the general resurrection, includes the metamorphosis of the saints (for Paul, the whole nation of Israel, confessing Jesus as messiah, and the righteous among the gentiles that have embraced his gospel) into similar divine bodies and their ascent to heaven to dwell there with Christ forever, where their resurrected bodies await for them even now (15:20-28; 2 Cor 4:1-5:5; 1 Thess 4:13-18; Rom 1:1-4; 11:1-36). Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s resurrection as the model for the general resurrection matches his more Hellenistic cosmology, anthropology, and hermeneutic of Jewish Scripture (in Greek translation). This also matches another thing we know about Paul: that he is, as Paula Fredriksen has put it, the only self-professed Pharisee whose writing we possess from Jewish antiquity.2 Josephus describes the Pharisees as distinct among Jews for believing that “every soul is imperishable” and good, righteous souls “pass into another body” (J.W. 2.163). Parsed with Paul, this probably testifies to pneumatic resurrection, which is not incompatible either with the strong possibility that Josephus understands the Pharisees to believe in metempsychosis, which we know other Hellenized Jews and many other Hellenistic people generally to have believed in, contrary to popular discourse today that differentiates the two.3 For Paul, then, Jesus’s resurrection means that Jesus has acquired a higher level body vertically in the cosmos, becoming a “life-giving pneuma” (1 Cor 15:45) after having been a flesh-and-blood human being.
This would explain why Paul does not seem to have an eschatology that culminates in an earthly Kingdom of God: educated in Greek physics (and metaphysics?) as he is, Paul thinks that upper heaven is the already-extant Kingdom of God, and that when Christ returns in the parousia it is to re-subordinate the powers of the lower heavens that are in rebellion and to raise up his people, Israel, together with his gentiles-in-Christ, to take their proper place in the heavenly kingdom at his side as cosmic rulers. For Paul, an earthly kingdom does relatively little for living, heavenly spirits. It would also explain why the post-Pauline tradition so consistently phrases the goal in terms of cosmic or spiritual ascent rather than imminent apocalyptic irruption, and Deutero-Pauline texts like Colossians and Ephesians emphasize ideas of resurrection and cosmic ascent rather than ideas like parousia.4 This is undeniably the sort of resurrection and eschatology understood by Origen of Alexandria, himself an avid Paulinist.
Is this a corrupting innovation from an earlier, purer, more fleshly, sarkic resurrection to be found in the earliest Jesus community and previous Judaism? It has been tempting to many scholars and apologists to think so. Jon D. Levenson, for example, holds a sarkic resurrection as the only kind that underlines what he takes to be the central theme of Judaism, the victory of the God of Life over his cosmic enemy, Death.5 James Ware has contended against the straightforward reading of Paul’s Greek in multiple publications to preserve a Jesus resurrected in the flesh as the only way to secure the continuity of the incarnation.6 But as C.D. Elledge has contended, resurrection as metaphor and/or resurrection as indicative of a state that is not merely fleshly, in the sense of a reanimated corpse, is actually the older and arguably more consistent “science” of resurrection in Early Judaism, to invoke once more Chilton’s language.7 Throughout the history of Early Christianity, too, multiple perspectives on the character and meaning of Jesus’s resurrection and the current/postmortem/future resurrection of Jesus’s followers competed with one another, some stressing a vertical, pneumatic resurrection and cosmic ascent and others a temporally horizontal, sarkic resurrection and future beatitude on earth.8 Allegedly, the sarkic resurrection has won the day in Christianity with the creedal confession of resurrectio carnis, but what exactly this means is still debatable (after all, if resurrection simply is metamorphosis, then what’s being confessed is the metamorphosis of the body, not simply its reanimation); and if one reads, say, Gregory of Nyssa’s De Anima et Resurrectione or In Illud or De Opificio Hominis or even something like Maximus the Confessor’s Capitula and so on it becomes more difficult to believe that such theologians really maintain belief in an imminent parousia in which an enfleshed Jesus is due to return from heaven and reanimate the dead. Certainly many Christians did believe that, but there remains a theological tradition in late antiquity where even references to this kind of eschatology in the literature feel vestigial given some of the other things that they believe; and resurrection of this sort in Judaism and Islam was not taken for granted in the post-rabbinic period or in the period of formative Islamic philosophy and theology.
Yet, supposedly, the fleshly resurrection is the more original kind. Texts like Ezekiel 37 or Daniel 12 are invoked in this direction from the Hebrew Bible, though in Ezekiel 37, resurrection is a visceral metaphor for national restoration of the people of Israel, and in Daniel 12, the resurrected wise become stars. Supposedly there are more references to a fleshly resurrection in the New Testament than to a pneumatic one, though this too is debatable. When Jesus talks about the resurrection in the Gospels, which he seldom does, it is to say that the resurrected righteous will enjoy divine, angelic, or heavenly life and qualities: things like “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt 13:43), or that the resurrected will be like the angels (Mk 12:25; Matt 22:30; Lk 20:36). The Transfiguration, the one scene explicitly to be paired with the resurrection by its own instruction, has Jesus metamorphosed to shine with heavenly light alongside other deified/angelified prophets like Moses and Elijah (Mk 9:2-8; Matt 17:1-8; Lk 9:28-36). And the resurrection scenes in the Gospels themselves are deeply ambiguous. In the original ending of Mark, Mark 16:1-8, we have our earliest version of the empty tomb scene, which includes natural phenomena and angels and the whole shebang, but no sighting of Jesus himself. In Matthew’s resurrection story, we get an empty tomb, but Jesus isn’t seen until the disciples meet him in Galilee, where they worship him but some doubt him: no speculation on the exact character of Jesus’s body/state, just the command to go and make disciples (Matt 28). It’s only in Luke and John, the latest-written of the Gospels, that we get a Jesus who is explicitly fleshy, walking, eating, inviting palpation, and even, in Luke, explicitly denying that he is a pneuma (Lk 24; Jn 20-21). In John the story may well be more complicated, since the constant antithesis in the Gospel between spirit (pneuma) and flesh (sarx), the connection between spirit and glory on the one hand and flesh and shame on the other, and the consistent refrain that Jesus is going back to the Father and the glory shared with him, might well imply that an ascension is imagined for Jesus post-resurrection that will not involve flesh; that may well be why Jesus tells Mary Magdalene not to hold on to him since he has not yet ascended (Jn 20:17). In Luke, though, we are right to think that the Evangelist doth protest too much, since his Gospel is also the prologue to his history of the early community in Acts, where he wants to paper over other kinds of dissent and disagreement between the early apostles and their networks and especially wants to dispute what we can fairly imagine to have been accusations by Luke’s contemporaries of Paul’s heterodoxy.9
These data seem to give the lie to the idea that the more original resurrection was the fleshier one. Particularly if the Gospels are all written after Paul’s lifetime, from the 70s onwards, and by people who did not personally know Jesus and whose personal knowledge of the apostles is at least debatable, as is the consensus of most modern scholars (again, John’s a bit weird and a good case can be made that this is John the Elder at the origin of this Gospel), and they are written from within Greco-Roman literary-generic categories that can adjust our expectations of their historical value as eyewitnesses,10 then we really only have Paul as a reliable firsthand witness to the resurrection of Jesus. Perhaps we can include Mark, too, if we agree with Papias that Mark was Peter’s interpreter and therefore that Mark’s Gospel reflects Petrine preaching, but even then, Mark does not tell us what sort of resurrection Jesus experienced or even let us “see” the resurrected Jesus in his text. Paul alone both says that he saw Jesus, that he saw Jesus the same way that other people saw Jesus, and explains that what he saw was a pneumatic being, a human being metamorphosed into a god.11
So the third reason that we cannot know with certainty whether Jesus rose from the dead is that, quite apart from philosophical and scientific questions about the possibility of resurrection, what we are dealing with is a.) one obvious, strong source who is b.) writing about an experience that he had several years prior that he c.) does insist was also had by other people but d.) whose own accounts of their experiences we do not get other than in e.) very late, very literary, very theological dramatizations that f.) disagree with our one strong, firsthand source about the character of the event itself (including its status as an “event” within observable history). The notion that strict sequential logic can assure us of a clear transition from indisputable first principles to an inescapable conclusion on the historicity or veracity of the resurrection is simply either uniformed about the real character of our sources or willfully ignorant about the problems that beset them. Epistemically the question of Jesus’s resurrection faces us with the same degree of verisimilitude or possible falsehood as other stories of antemortem, antimortem, or postmortem human achievement of transcendence.12 And in coming to terms with that epistemic ambiguity we meet at the same time the ambiguity of the mechanical or scientific question of what exactly we are affirming in the resurrection of Jesus anyway, though the notion that Jesus’s resurrection means he has been metamorphosed into a divine or angelic being, with a body of pneuma, certainly stands out as the more original and credible of the two options together with sarkic resurrection on the basis of our sources.
But that has further epistemic complications when we consider what it might mean to affirm that in the twenty-first century. After all, Paul made his theoretical framework for thinking about the resurrection in a cultural context where pneuma was an accounted-for substance in the science, medicine, and cosmology of the day.13 Pneuma is the vital life-breath stuff that allows for sensation and cognition in the body, that slips down from above and is present to greater or lesser degrees in living things, most perfectly in humans and gods and the universe at large. As I wrote about here, it trades places as one moves from a Stoic-dominated to a Platonist-dominated philosophical scene in the early centuries of the Roman imperial period, such that it also comes to be associated with ideas like the vehicle of the soul and the World Soul in general. Where pneumatic beings reside is a discrete region of the cosmos beyond the atmosphere of the rotund but stationary Earth, somewhere among the seven crystalline spheres that are ruled by but which also enclose the planetai, the wandering stars whose souls are superintendent gods of the cosmos, or perhaps in the region of the Fixed Stars. For the Hermeticist or Neoplatonist perhaps the pneuma can convey the soul to regions beyond even these, but in general, these are the places that gods live, betwixt gross matter and the infinite nous.
It is not impossible to find ways to receive and translate the spiritual, philosophical, and metaphysical kernels of this worldview into our modern cosmology, defined by the real advances we’ve made in physics, chemistry, and biology over the last two millennia and particularly in the last several hundred years.14 But any such act of translation does mean that we are not affirming exactly the thing that Paul affirms when Paul affirms the resurrection of Jesus as a datum of his experience. Nor, it should be said, have any Christians since Paul simply or purely believed exactly what he does on the topic: there have always been different ways of theoretically framing the experience of Jesus’s resurrection, including, for example, Syriac appropriation of other kinds of human transcendence from the Silk Roads to explain Jesus’s resurrection.15 If the how of Jesus’s resurrection is its physics, and the what and why of Jesus’s resurrection is its metaphysics, then as physics in general have changed so too have the specific physics of the resurrection itself. This is another blow to the sarkic resurrection, too, since the traditional way of framing Jesus’s resurrection—Jesus’s corpse was reanimated and ascended physically into the heavens—once had a definitive beginning (the earth), direction (up), and terminus (the highest heaven), but is now difficult to imagine in a cosmos that expands in all directions and has no center and plausibly no edge. If Jesus is still one physical object among other physical objects in the observable universe just like you or me, then in theory, we should expect James Webb to see him speeding along in the not too distant future (that is, after all, how physical bodies of the sort we’re talking about function).
All of this puts us at the threshold of the original, and harder to answer question, of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead—a question that, if we answer it, we can utilize neither history nor science to answer, nor even philosophy, since while philosophy can supply us with necessary conditions that would have to be true for any kind of resurrection, pneumatic or sarkic, to occur, it cannot take us from potency to act in this case. There is perhaps one further step, though, between us and the resurrection itself, what I will call the why of the resurrection, the mezuzah on the doorframe we seek to pass beyond. For Paul—again, our earliest and best witness to Jesus’s resurrection—the point of Jesus rising from the dead is obviously that he will function as Davidic messiah in the imminent eschaton. Jesus’s resurrection, for Paul, signals the beginning of the end. To be clear, as I have argued before, Jesus’s resurrection alone would not have convinced Paul or anyone else that he was a or the messiah: resurrection covered a broad range of afterlife options that all kinds of Jewish heroes and martyrs might enjoy in the worldview of Ancient Judaism, and other categories existed to explain a Jesus that had been glorified by resurrection or vindicated after his death with it other than messianic identity. But that Paul also came to believe that Jesus was the messiah meant that, for Paul, the point of Jesus’s resurrection was to enable him to fulfill his role as the heavenly judge and king in the parousia, which Paul expected to occur within his own lifetime and which was already quite late by the time that he penned his first letters. This was also, presumably, based on everything we can feasibly know about Jesus and his earliest followers, what they thought was going to happen, what they understood the point of Jesus’s resurrection to be.
Christians in the twenty-first century probably have to contend with the fact that two millennia of subsequent history in which this has failed to occur render it deeply improbable that this interpretation of Jesus’s life, significance, death, and resurrection, even if it goes back to Jesus himself, is correct. I say probably because there are obviously lots of Christians that still think belief in an imminent parousia is credible. I grew up one of them and tried to stay one of them as long as I humanly could. The most credible theological take on the problem of the parousia’s delay that I have ever read, which I have elsewhere called the Hays hypothesis,16 constructs what I would call the most impressive ad hoc argument one can construct for why Jesus has not returned—that is, an argument only possible if one decides from the beginning that Jesus’s return is still a credible or necessary component of Christian faith, and has to find an explanation for why this hasn’t yet happened. Worlds and world orders have come and gone since the life of Jesus of Nazareth and his first disciples; the social order that Jesus imagined, the Kingdom of God as a restored Israel ruling over the nations, not only failed but failed twice, in two decisive wars with the Romans, that led to his own people abandoning strong commitment to things like nationalism and messianism in the aftermath and that have encouraged Jewish skepticism about the most basic of potentially shared premises with Christians and Christianity for the better part of the common era. It does not seem reasonable to hold that this is going to happen either as Jesus or his followers imagined it would, so far out of time.
And that leaves us in the following position: if we answer in the affirmative that God raised Jesus from the dead, we’re going to find that what it means to us that such a thing happened will have to be almost completely different from what it meant to the original people who experienced and believed it. We will find that we do so on the basis of faith—faith informed by and answerable to reason, but faith all the same. And we will find that a whole world of possibility is opened to our imaginations about what it can mean that Jesus rose from the dead given our context that did not and would not have occurred to our forbears given theirs.
Bruce Chilton, Resurrection Logic: How Jesus’s First Followers Believed God Raised Him From the Dead (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019). The point about the continuity between Paul’s experience and that of the pre-Pauline apostles is Dale B. Martin’s. See Martin, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-First Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 198-215.
Paula Fredriksen, “Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee,” 112-135 in The Pharisees, ed. Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021).
Fredriksen, “Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee,” 134-135 and 134 fn 53, contrasts pneumatic resurrection with metempsychosis, but I’m not convinced that the two are necessary alternatives. See Sami Yli-Karjanmaa, Reincarnation in Philo of Alexandria (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015); idem, “Returning from the Diaspora of the Soul: Eschatology in Philo of Alexandria,” 209-221 in Eschatology in Antiquity: Forms and Functions, ed. H. Marlow, K. Pollman, and H. van Noorden (Abingdon, Routledge, 2021); and idem, “The New Life of Good Souls in Josephus: Resurrection or Reincarnation?” Journal for the Study of Judaism 48 (2017): 506-530. It is also possible that a good deal of this Hellenistic Jewish psychology/eschatology of metempsychosis was received in Alexandrian Christianity. See idem, “Clement of Alexandria’s Position on the Doctrine of Reincarnation and Some Comparisons with Philo,” 75-90 in Studia Patristica: Papers Presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2019, ed. M. Vinzent and V. Husek (Leuven: Peeters, 2021).
See Adela Yarbro Collins, Paul Transformed: Reception of the Person and Letters of Paul in Antiquity (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 12-50.
See Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); idem, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); and coauthored with Kevin J. Madigan, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). In general, I think Levenson’s textual and thematic analysis is quite sound, even where I have disagreements here and there, but I think the science of the resurrection that he and Madigan presume, drawn from later rabbinic texts and in the apologetic atmosphere of the early 2000s (when, for instance, NT Wright was most prominent), is hasty.
In book form, see James P. Ware, Paul’s Theology in Context: Creation, Incarnation, Covenant & Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), and his response to David Bentley Hart’s better and more correct essay on spirit in antiquity. I have fond memories of hanging out with Jim Ware at a variety of SBL conferences, and I was the person who initially urged him to publish his thoughts in response to Hart, at a time when I was younger in my scholarship, my life of faith, and had not allowed myself to simply deal with Hart’s scholarship and arguments honestly. Initially I was in the Dale Martin crowd on the Pauline resurrection, as a result of the teaching of my professor Mark Given at MSU; in a period when I was trying to make my academia and faith agree on orthodox standards, I allowed Ware to convince me of the synthesis he saw. I regret this flexibility on my part at the time, and my encouragement to him, because I think the evidence is overwhelmingly against his perspective, no matter how many heresiological lines in the sand he draws around it.
See C.D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE to CE 200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 19-86. For the relationship between resurrection and the immortality of the soul, also frequently affirmed in the sources, see 107-129. Surveying texts like the Book of the Watchers, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Josephus (130-198), Elledge makes a compelling case that what I’ll call a “vertical” resurrection that is controvertible with things like ascension, exaltation, translation to angelic status, etc. was more common than “horizontal” resurrection in the temporal future through the reconstitution of one’s body. Elledge also sides with the scholars who have crafted the picture of what I describe above on Paul (208-210). On the perionymic character of these various transcendent afterlife states, see also Chilton, Resurrection Logic, 73-80.
See Outi Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (OECS; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Candida Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
See Collins, Paul Transformed, 36. The move made by Luke in Acts would have a long legacy in patristic interpretations of Paul, particularly of 1 Corinthians 15.
See, inter alia, Bart Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016); M. David Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament in Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); and, more recently, Michael Vicko Zolondeck, The Quest for a Historical Jesus Methodology: Graeco-Roman Biographies, the Gospels, and the Practice of History (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2023). These scholars differ among one another in terms of to what degree they feel that the Gospels present historically reliable information about Jesus based on their genre and based on human memory studies, and therefore also disagree on things like appropriate methodologies for abstracting historical data from the Gospels. The point, though, is that everyone agrees that a.) genre matters for the Gospels and b.) they are not simple commentarii or journals of Jesus’s life, but complex literary portraits created by later writers, perhaps making use of earlier traditions (though Walsh in particular is extremely skeptical on that point). On the effect that Gospel genre might have on the resurrection in particular, see Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (London: Routledge, 2017). Miller argues that the generic form of the empty tomb story would have cued its first readers into the idea that it was not historical. While I’m open to the idea that the first readers of the Gospels did not think that they represented the exact historical truth of Jesus’s life but rather offered something like a verbal icon, I have trouble following the logic of early Jesus communities that simply did not believe he had been glorified after death in any way. It does not seem to me that there would be any stake in it for them at that point.
For comparisons between stories of Jesus’s resurrection and those of other Mediterranean deities, see Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 141-180. As Litwa notes, there are numerous examples of numerous kinds of resurrection in antiquity, contra scholars like N.T. Wright who insist that the resurrection of Jesus is an anomalous report. There are also numerous stories of deified heroes from biblical literature in Second Temple Jewish literature that Jesus’s glorification would surely have mapped onto.
I recommend Dale C. Allison, Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 19-44 for more on some of these epistemic uncertainties specifically as related to resurrection.
See Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Two strong introductions to the modern physical universe that make regrettable gaffes on questions of philosophy and theology are Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (New York: Riverhead, 2016) and Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Hart is also running a series right now on life and mind in relationship to modern physics and ahead of his forthcoming book on the subject.
See Francis V. Tiso, Rainbow Body and Resurrection: Spiritual Attainment, the Dissolution of the Material Body, and the Case of Khenpo A Chö (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2016). That Syriac Christians facing the world of the Silk Roads must have encountered tales of transcended masters and other kinds of “deification” in the world of Central, South, and East Asian religion, and that these kinds of stories must have shaped their eschatologies, certainly deserves more attention.
Christopher Hays et al., When the Son of Man Didn’t Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017).
Not long after my father died, my mother went into the kitchen one morning to find him there, corporeal, since she went to him and put her hands on his chest and felt him just as if he were there. He had a sad face, said he was leaving forever, and disappeared. Now, my mother was not prone to drawing attention to herself or telling dramatic tales. She was a pragmatic Irish woman who had no belief in otherworldly things, but this was her direct experience. She in fact told none of the rest of the family about it, and only told me as she got older, taking me into her confidence. She's long since passed.
My point being, I could readily accept the disciples seeing Jesus after his death. Putting a finger in the wound. That much I could accept as a fact. I agree, David, that the rest is a matter of faith and what it means to the individual, and can't be seen a physical event that actually occurred.
Excellent. Even so, I still think you misrepresent what Paul expected from Christ's parousia in terms of its "warlike" or "violent" nature, since that is not actually his language, and you are imposing an eschatological grammar that does not come directly from his letters, but from a milieu with which he seems to have had only extrinsic associations.