I own Wright's Commentary on 1 Corinthians. I'm not a fan of this particular commentary series, but it came as part of my Logos Bible software program. Here are the sections you are probably looking for if you care to read them,
I'm not sure why your friend said what he did because Wright (in harmony with St. Paul) sees the Resurrection as a necessary part of the Christian faith.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:12–19
What If the Messiah Wasn’t Raised?
12 Well, then: if the royal proclamation of the Messiah is made on the basis that he’s been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no such thing as resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no such thing as resurrection of the dead, the Messiah hasn’t been raised, either; 14 and if the Messiah hasn’t been raised, our royal proclamation is empty, and so is your faith. 15 We even turn out to have been misrepresenting God, because we gave it as our evidence about God that he raised the Messiah, and he didn’t!—if, that is, the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead aren’t raised, the Messiah wasn’t raised either; 17 and if the Messiah wasn’t raised, your faith is pointless, and you are still in your sins. 18 What’s more, people who have fallen asleep in the Messiah have perished for good. 19 If it’s only for this present life that we have put our hope in the Messiah, we are the most pitiable members of the human race.
Robert had longed to play in the school football team. He had watched every game since he had come to the school. He had idolized the players and thought about the different styles of play, the different skills that were needed, and (of course) the excitement of running out on to the pitch himself to do his best for the school. He worked hard at his game, made sure he was fit, and played in one of the junior teams. Then one day a friend came running up to him.
‘You’ve made it!’ he said. ‘You’re in the team! I’ve seen it on the notice-board! Congratulations!’
Robert was on his way to a lesson at the time and couldn’t check the notice-board for himself, but instead spent the following hour in a haze of excitement. It had happened. His dream had come true. Life was going to be different from now on. As he came out of class, he whispered to another friend, ‘I’m on the team! Sam saw it on the notice-board!’
The friend looked puzzled.
‘But they never put up the team list this early in the week,’ he said. ‘Sam must have made a mistake. They wouldn’t do that. It doesn’t happen that way!’
Robert’s state of mind at that moment is exactly the state of mind Christians ought to be in if someone says ‘resurrection? Things just don’t happen that way!’ People have often tried to reinvent Christianity as something quite different. Some have supposed that to say ‘The Messiah was raised from the dead’ was simply a fancy first-century way of saying ‘God’s cause continues!’ or I still regard Jesus as my leader and teacher’. That’s all very well if Christianity was simply a set of ethical commands, or if Jesus was simply one guru among others, teaching a way to God which one could follow or not as one chose. There are some today who want Christianity to be that kind of thing. It is, after all, much less demanding on several levels. Sometimes the desire that Christianity should be this sort of thing has even been made a reason for denying that Jesus was raised from the dead. ‘We can’t say the resurrection happened,’ someone once said to me, ‘because that would make Christianity different from all the other faiths.’
But the gospel which Paul and the others announced was that Jesus was the Messiah—Israel’s Messiah, God’s Messiah, and hence the world’s true Lord. This meant that there was ‘another king’ (Acts 17:7): a king who would trump Caesar himself, a king at whose name every knee would bow (Philippians 2:10–11). That kingship over the world is precisely what Paul is going on to talk about in verses 20–28. And as far as Paul is concerned the evidence, the demonstration, that Jesus is the true King is that God has raised him from the dead (Romans 1:3–4). This is what he means in verse 12: it isn’t just (a) that Jesus is Messiah and (b) that he’s been raised from the dead, but that we know Jesus is Messiah, and we announce him as such, because he’s been raised from the dead. It’s only the resurrection that makes the crucifixion appear anything other than a horrible end for another failed Messiah.
Paul’s careful argument in this section is designed to show the Corinthians, starkly, what would follow if you were to declare that there is no resurrection. Since this is what virtually all ancient pagans believed, the best explanation for why some in Corinth were denying the resurrection is that it made no sense within their surrounding world-view. There was no room for it in the culture they had grown up in. But Paul wants them to see that the Christian world-view is different, and that it has the power at the personal level and the rigour at the intellectual level to take on the old pagan world-views and win. The resurrection is the foundation of the Christian counterculture. And the immediate results go beyond culture into the world of royal claims: Jesus is Lord, so Caesar isn’t.
This takes us, too, into the deeper world of moral and spiritual reality, and by that route into the very structure of the cosmos itself. Paul’s strongest argument in this passage is to point up the link between sin and death (verse 17). If Jesus has been raised, the power of death has been broken, and final victory over it is assured (verse 26). Death, as always in biblical thought, is the result of sin, as humans turn away from the life-giving God and vainly attempt to find life elsewhere (see Romans 5:12–14). So if death has been defeated it must mean that sin has been defeated as well.
We could spell it out like this:
1. If Jesus has been raised, that proves he really was the Messiah, since God has clearly reversed the verdict of the court, which found him guilty of being a messianic pretender, and wrote that as the charge above his head. But if he really was the Messiah, and has now been raised from the dead, his death itself turns out not to have been simply a tragic and ghastly end but God’s strange means of dealing with the sin of the world.
2. However, if he wasn’t raised from the dead, he wasn’t and isn’t the Messiah, and his cross had no such effect. Sin has not been dealt with; the world is still as it was.
But Paul doesn’t believe that for a moment. With Jesus’ resurrection, he insists, a new world has opened up, in which the all-embracing power of sin and death no longer holds sway. The world we know—the world whose loveliness, majesty, fragrance and teeming life are mocked by death, decay, corruption and sheer entropy—has heard the news that there is after all a way forward, a way into a life yet greater, more beautiful, more powerful, than this one. Take away Jesus’ resurrection and all that is put into doubt.
With that, you lose any sense that the individual follower of Jesus really does live in a new world in which the power of sin has been defeated. ‘If the Messiah isn’t raised, your faith is worthless, and you are still in your sins.’ What’s more (verse 18), Christians who have died in the meantime are dead and gone; when some in Corinth denied the resurrection they were declaring, in effect, that the ancient pagan view of life after death (a shadowy half-existence in the world of Hades) was the best they could hope for.
And, as Paul says, without the hope of resurrection, what is the point of being one of the Messiah’s people in the first place? Hated, reviled, persecuted, struggling—if this is all there is, surely it would be better to throw in the towel, to admit that many other philosophies gave you an easier life, and to stop wasting your time with this Jesus nonsense? He will develop this later in the chapter, but already the point is coming through loud and clear.
Those who deny the resurrection, then, are not simply tinkering with one negotiable element of Christian belief. (Not long ago there was a survey among bishops in my part of the church; most of them said they did believe in Jesus’ resurrection, but some said that whether or not this was a bodily event didn’t really matter—you could believe it or not as you chose. That is a total misunderstanding of what Paul is talking about—and Paul is our earliest witness for the gospel itself.) They are cutting off the branch on which the gospel, and those who embrace it, are sitting. They are even accusing the apostles of ‘bearing false witness’ about God himself (verse 15). But, most importantly, they are declaring that no great event has yet happened through which the world has been changed. They are reducing Christianity to a form of spirituality, a new ‘religion’ to take its place alongside the others in the marketplace of ancient pluralism. This danger is as present today as it was in the first century.
Wright, T. (2004). Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (pp. 206–211). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:35–49
The Transformed Resurrection Body
35 But someone is now going to say: ‘How are the dead raised? What sort of body will they come back with?’ 36 Stupid! What you sow doesn’t come to life unless it dies. 37 The thing you sow isn’t the body that is going to come later; it’s just a naked seed of, let’s say, wheat, or some other plant. 38 God then gives it a body of the sort he wants, with each of the seeds having its own particular body. 39 Not all physical objects have the same kind of physicality. There is one kind of physicality for humans, another kind for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 Some bodies belong in the heavens, and some on the earth; and the kind of glory appropriate for the ones in the heavens is different from the kind of glory appropriate for the ones on the earth. 41 There is one kind of glory for the sun, another for the moon, and another for the stars, since the stars themselves vary, with different degrees of glory. 42 That’s what it’s like with the resurrection of the dead. It is sown decaying, and raised undecaying. 43 It is sown in shame, and raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, and raised in power. 44 It is sown as the embodiment of ordinary nature, and raised as the embodiment of the spirit. If ordinary nature has its embodiment, then the spirit too has its embodiment. 45 That’s what it means when the Bible says, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living natural being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But you don’t get the spirit-animated body first; you get the nature-animated one, and you get the spirit-animated one later. 47 The first man is from the ground, and is made of earth; the second man is from heaven. 48 Earthly people are like the man of earth; heavenly people are like the man from heaven. 49 We have borne the image of the man made of earth; we shall also bear the image of the man from heaven.
Imagine standing outside a car showroom, a hundred or more years from now. An advertisement has brought you and lots of others to see a new type of car. Different from all that went before, the slogan had said.
‘Looks pretty much the same to me,’ says one person.
‘Well, it’s similar,’ replies another, ‘but the engine seems different somehow.’
The inventor makes a short speech.
‘I know it may look like an ordinary car,’ he says, ‘but what makes this one totally different is what it runs on. We’ve developed a new fuel, nothing to do with oil or petrol. It’s clean, it’s safe, and there are limitless supplies. And because of the type of fuel, the engine will never wear out. This car is going to last for ever.’
A fantasy, of course—or perhaps not, since you never know what inventions are going to come next (who in 1880 would have predicted the jet engine or the microchip?). But it gets us to the point of this long, dense and hugely important discussion. What sort of a body will the resurrection produce? And what will it ‘run’ on?
We may as well go to the heart of the passage, to the verse that has puzzled people many times in the past, and still does. In verse 44 Paul contrasts the two types of bodies, the present one and the resurrection one. The words he uses are technical and tricky. Many versions translate these words as ‘physical body’ and ‘spiritual body’, but this is highly misleading. That is as though the difference between the old car and the new one was that, whereas the old one was made of steel, the new one is made of something quite different—plastic, say, or wood, or some as-yet-uninvented metal alloy. If you go that route, you may well end up saying, as many have done, that Paul is making a contrast simply between what we call a ‘body’, that is a physical object, and what we might call a ghost, a ‘spiritual’ object in the sense of ‘non-physical’. But that is exactly what he is not saying.
The contrast he’s making is between a body animated by one type of life and a body animated by another type. The difference between them is found, if you like, in what the two bodies run on. The present body is animated by the normal life which all humans share. The word Paul uses for this often means ‘soul’; he means it in the sense of the ordinary life-force on which we all depend in this present body, the ordinary energy that keeps us breathing and our blood circulating. But the body that we shall be given in the resurrection is to be animated by God’s own spirit. This is what Paul says in a simpler passage, Romans 8:10–11: the spirit of Jesus the Messiah dwells within you at the moment, and God will give life to your mortal bodies through this spirit who lives inside you.
But when the spirit creates a new body, it won’t wear out. Here, in order to make the illustration of the new car really work, we would have to say that the new fuel will not only preserve the engine for ever, but the bodywork too. That would be straining even fantasy-imagination a bit far. But we need to say something like that to do justice to what Paul has written here.
Paul does in fact think that the resurrection body will be a different kind of thing to the present one, because in verses 51 and 52, and again in Philippians 3:20–21, he declares that Christians who have not died at the moment when Jesus returns as Lord will need to be changed. But the contrast he then makes between the present body in itself, and the future body in itself, is not the contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘spiritual’. That, as we’ve seen, has to do with what energizes these two bodies, what they run on. The contrast between the two bodies in themselves is stated in verses 42 and 43. It is the contrast between corruption (our present bodies fall sick, bits wear out, we decay, die, and return to dust) and incorruption (the new body won’t do any of those things). It is the contrast between shame (we know we were made for more than this decaying, corrupting life, and we are ashamed of frailty and death) and honour (the new body will be splendid, with nothing to be ashamed of). It is the contrast between weakness and power.
We can now stand back from the detail in the middle of the passage and see how the whole argument works.
The first paragraph (verses 35–38) introduces the idea of the seed which is sown looking like one thing and which comes up looking quite different. Paul doesn’t of course mean that when you bury a body in the ground, a new one ‘grows’ like a plant from its seed. The point he is making is simply that we understand the principle of transformation, of a new body in continuity with the old yet somehow different. And he emphasizes particularly that this happens through the action of God: ‘God gives it a body.’ That’s the first thing to grasp: the resurrection is the work of God the creator, and it will involve transformation—not merely resuscitation, as though the seed, after a while underground, were to emerge as a seed once again.
The second paragraph (verses 39–41) establishes a different point: that we are all used to different types of physicality, all the way from the fish in the sea to the stars in the sky. When Paul speaks of some of these physical objects having ‘glory’, he means of course ‘brightness’; but this doesn’t mean he’s preparing us for the idea that people raised from the dead will shine like electric light bulbs. When he describes the new body as having ‘glory’, it’s in contrast to ‘shame’ or ‘humiliation’ (verse 43, and Philippians 3:21), not to ‘darkness’. His point is simply to note that there are different types of created physicality, each with its own properties.
Throughout the passage so far, he’s been echoing Genesis 1, where God creates the sun, the moon and the stars, and particularly trees and plants that have their seed within them. (As I typed that sentence, a gust of wind blew a little shower of seeds in through the window from the tree outside.) The underlying theme of the whole chapter, remember, is new creation, new Genesis: God will complete the project he began at the beginning, and in the process he will reverse and undo the effects of human rebellion, especially death itself, the great enemy that drags God’s beautiful world down into decay and dissolution. Paul will now move to the climax of Genesis 1, the creation of human beings in God’s own image (Genesis 1:26–28). As with Jesus’ resurrection, so with ours: this will not be a strange distortion of our original humanity, but will be the very thing we were made for in the first place.
The final paragraph (verses 42–49) brings him to the crunch. The ultimate contrast between the present body and the future one is between two basic types of humanness. God already has the new model in store, he says, waiting to bring it out on show at the proper time—though, of course, the prototype, the resurrection body of Jesus himself, has already been launched.
Paul’s word for the place where God keeps things safe before unveiling them at the proper time is of course ‘heaven’. When he speaks of the ‘earthly’ humanity and the ‘heavenly’ humanity, he doesn’t mean that we will ‘go to heaven’ to become the new type. Rather, God will bring this new humanity, our new bodies, from heaven to earth, transforming the present bodies of Christians who are still alive, and raising the dead to the same kind of renewed, deathless, glorious body.
That is the hope set before us in the resurrection; and it is all based, of course, on the fact that Jesus himself, the Messiah, already possesses the new type of body. He is ‘the man from heaven’; and, as we have borne the image of the old, corruptible humanity (see Genesis 5:3), so we shall bear the image of Jesus himself (see Romans 8:29). The overall point of the chapter is that in the resurrection of Jesus himself the power of the creator God was at work to bring about the renewal of the world, and that through the work of the spirit this same creator God will give new, glorious, deathless bodily life to all his people.
Wright, T. (2004). Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (pp. 219–224). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Yeshua was the Lamb. Passover lambs (Exodus 12:3) were selected for purity, examined by the priests & kept for 4 days before Passover (from Nisan 10 to Nisan 14)...so was Yeshua. He stayed in Yerushalayim for 4 days before His death and was questioned by the Elders and Priests. Yeshua died exactly when the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple. He kept The Sabbath (Saturday) rest. The 1st Sunday after the Passover Sabbath the firstfruits (the barley harvest) were waved by the High Priest for acceptance (Lev 23:9-14 & Num 28:26-31). Yeshua is now our High Priest. Yeshua resurrected on the first day of the week (Sunday) as the Firstfruits of them that slept (the dead) and presented Himself to the Father for acceptance of His sacrifice. Yom HaBikkurim always falls on the first day of the week (Sunday). The omer is counted from this day to Shavuot (Pentecost is the wheat harvest).
