I will put forward the argument that the best explanation for all the data is that the earliest Christians from Peter to Paul to the authors of the gospels all believed and preached that Jesus was bodily resurrected from the dead, leaving behind an empty tomb. It should be noted that “resurrection� does not equate to “a raising�. Jesus was said to be resurrected; Jairus’ daughter, Lazarus; they were “raised�.
First the data to be explained:
The gospels were written last and therefore reveal the latest form of Christian beliefs. By that time bodily resurrection, the kind that would leave behind an empty tomb, was a fixed clause in Christian teaching.
This requires explanation: if we begin with the belief in a bodily resurrection, we have no difficulty; getting from a to a is easy. It is when we propose that the original belief entailed a spiritual, non-bodily resurrection that we come up against a problem: getting from a to z. Thus the onus lies on those who need to trace an evolutionary process; how a spiritual resurrection becomes a bodily one, with the addition of an empty tomb, women as the first witnesses, and tactile encounters. I should point out one very large obstacle in this: bodily resurrection was a very Jewish belief. The kind of spiritual resurrection proposed on this forum would have sat well with Gentile conceptions. But when the gospels were written, the communities in which they were produced were largely Gentile. That is, we must explain how what started as a Gentile conception became more Jewish in theology as the church became more gentile in demography.
Next we have Acts. Much is made of the three descriptions of Paul’s Damascus experience. Typically the arguments in favor of a spiritual conception ignore everything that hurts it and focuses on everything that helps it. Thus it is completely ignored that the author of Luke/Acts believed Jesus was bodily raised from the dead when he wrote the three Damascus events; this means, in his conception, the Damascus accounts are compatible with a bodily risen Jesus. Since we are in search of what the earliest Christians believed, apparently Christians of 60/70 AD do make as much as we do of the dichotomy between “visions from heaven� and “bodily resurrections�. The Jesus that reveals himself to Paul is the "Incarnate Lord". We should also note that in Acts the term "resurrection" is foreign to the philosophers of Athens; but the kind of spiritual resurrection proposed by Yahwhat and others would have been quite familiar. That Acts is written later than Paul is irrelevant to the linguistic aspect here.
Next we go back to Paul. I will anticipate some of the more questionable linguistic arguments that have been made thus far. Some have pointed to Galatians 1:16 as stating that Paul’s conversion was based on an “inner revelation�, the connotations I suspect mean something warm and fuzzy. A kind of “ah ha� moment. That is placing far too much wait on one tiny preposition: �ν. What is most certain is that this preposition is not translated "inner" so as to exclude a corporeal revelation. That is a kind of sleight of hand move on the part of those pushing for a spiritual resurrection. The spiritualists need way more than this tiny preposition.
Others like to dwell on the term “revelation�, as though the Greek connotes something incorporeal. It doesn’t. ἀποκαλύπτω means to “reveal� or “disclose� something. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical constitution of the person disclosing it; that the agent of such revelations are often God or angels is irrelevant to the linguistic argument, since "reveal" does not have embedded in it the phrase "by something incorporeal and dreamlike".
Still others like to point to 2 Cor 12 as providing evidence that Paul believed his encounter with Jesus was with an incorporeal, spiritual Jesus—similar to someone today saying, “I feel like grandma is speaking to me� (despite the fact that grandma is known to be buried six feet below in the local cemetery). This errors in two ways: first, 2 Cor. 12 does not refer to Paul’s initial encounter with Jesus. In that text Paul explicitly says that he saw things of which he cannot speak: but the original encounter with Jesus was explicit in its commission to preach the gospel, cf. Galatians. Second, the experiences recounted in 2 Cor. explicitly deny a necessarily incorporeal experience: Paul says he doesn’t know if he was in the body or out. For all he knows, his body may have been assumed into the heavenly sphere. Again, we cannot force upon 1st c. Jewish concepts our own modern ones.
And we may also point out that 2 Cor. as a whole preaches a physical resurrection.
Here is a look at 2 Cor. 4 14
We see here that Paul links Jesus’ resurrection with the future resurrection which believers will undergo. Now, if Jesus’ resurrection were conceived as “spiritual�, that is, non-bodily, we should expect our own to be ‘spiritual’, that is, non-bodily. Is that what we find? No. We read on: 2 Cor. 5:114 knowing that He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and will present us with you. (2Co 4:14 NAS).
We see here that a disembodied soul is not the end which Paul has in mind; rather, Paul wishes that his present body (=tent) would be clothed with the heavenly body. Indeed, the verb for “clothed� is very strange: Paul adds a prefix so that what we have is �πενδύω; that is, to put on “over� something else.For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
2 For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven;
3 inasmuch as we, having put it on, shall not be found naked.
This is thoroughly Jewish. The literature from the Pseudepigrapha and Rabbinic tradition talk of the dead receiving back their former bodies, which are themselves altered: a kind of two stage resurrection. (We can corroborate this with Paul’s description of those who survive to see the Parousia in 1 Cor. 15: they do not shed their bodies; rather, their bodies are transformed.)
We read on in 2 Cor. 5
What is “mortal� = their current fragile bodies are swallowed up in their resurrected bodies.4 For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed, but to be clothed, in order that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. (2Co 5:1-4 NAS)
Those who desire to defend a “spiritual� resurrection, need to demonstrate how all the nuances here are explicable as such. Why should the Corinthians not wish to be “unclothed� and found “naked�?
What would follow is 1 Cor. 15. But I think there is enough so far to chew on. From my perspective, the easiest explanation is that the original core of the Christian proclamation involved a bodily resurrection, the kind that would leave a tomb empty. Some will complain that “tomb� is only explicitly made in the gospels. I believe 1 Cor. 15 is far more sensible if assume some form of a “tomb narrative� lies behind “was buried�; for now, it will suffice to allow others to explain how they would like to get from a proclamation without a tomb, to one with a tomb, as well as make sense of the linguistic arguments mentioned above.
As far as I can see, even before looking at 1 Cor. 15, the spiritualists have a very steep climb ahead of them.
