His essay is longwinded. I'll go straight to the salient point:
Corpse revival is not resurrection of the dead–at least in its classic sense of what happens to all humankind in the end of days. This might be the view of a child who does not yet understand the idea, or metaphorically one could speak of the dead “coming out of their tombs,” as in the famous Michael Jackson video “Thriller,” but no one thought of it literally that way in terms of what would happen at the end of days.
There are two kinds of corpse revival.
A temporary corpse revival, later followed by dying again, is not the resurrection of the dead. But there is also a definitive corpse revival, for most of us reserved to the end of days.
By the way, neither involves anything like undead, corpses moving without real restoration of biology. So, "Thriller" is simply a strawman.
Now, the point is, from the fact that the definitive corpse revival at the end of days is NOT the same thing as a temporary one, James Tabor has concluded it is not a corpse revival at all.
He offers what he purports to be proof of this idea, in a verse of St. Paul.
Paul is the crystal clear on this point. Some of his converts in the city of Corinth were denying the resurrection of the dead. They were most likely thinking along the lines of Plato—if the immortal soul is freed from the prison of the body at death, why would it ever return to the body? And yet that is precisely what Paul defended—a return to a body—but as he makes very clear, it is not a natural or “physical body”—the one he calls the body of “dust,” but a spiritual body—literally “wind body,” (pneumatikos), that is transformed and not subject to death (1 Corinthians 15:42-50).
Well, the body is transformed. It's physically different. But it's not physically another one. It's not physically similar on all accounts, but it is physically the same.
Tabor is recycling the doctrines about Jesus' body which have been used to deny the Eucharist ("he has no flesh and blood that can bilocate miraculously" some* have pretended), and also to deny Our Lady remains Mother of God ("she is not mother of THAT body" the same ones* have pretended).
These doctrines involve a pretty clear over-interpretation of the difference of adjectives in the verse of St. Paul, and a clear under-interpretation of the pronouns He uses.
It is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body. If there be a natural body, there is also a spiritual body, as it is written
[1 Corinthians 15:44]
While there is a change of natural to spiritual, there is an identity of it and it.
This is a doctrine of Albigensians, perhaps also back then of Waldensians, and the Church answered** them:
Indeed, having suffered and died on the wood of the cross for the salvation of the human race, he descended to the underworld, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. He descended in the soul, rose in the flesh, and ascended in both. He will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, to render to every person according to his works, both to the reprobate and to the elect. All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear, so as to receive according to their deserts, whether these be good or bad; for the latter perpetual punishment with the devil, for the former eternal glory with Christ.
Now, James Tabor has pretended something else. He has basically suggested that if Jesus' bones were found, and they were undisputably Jesus', then the resurrection belief of St. Paul, pretendedly prior to narratives by St. Matthew and others, would be restored to its "full" sense.
His post alleges, like the rigmarole of Higher Criticism has pretended since the 19th C., that Paul is earlier than Mark, and Mark way earlier than Matthew, Luke and John. This is not the traditional authorship assignment, it rests purely on reconstruction, and that reconstruction rests purely on conjectures biassed against the Christian faith. And obviously St. Paul is misread in I Cor, and St. Mark gets the shorter ending, just so one can pretend that Jesus somehow didn't physically appear to the disciples. Stamping accounts as "legendary" is supposed to guarantee they are non-factual, and pretending gratuitously they are late is supposed to guarantee there was time for mistakes to creep into the "legend" and even mistakes of this order.
I do not believe in this kind of epistemology. I have already said and will say it again, I prefer believing most of Hercules' life is factual over believing oral tradition inevitably degrades into a telephone game that inevitably garbles the original facts. And by the way, the parts of Hercules' life that are not factual, that's not mostly due to the passing of time, that's mostly due to misunderstandings and deliberate lies (on his own part and on parts of others) while he lived. The exception would be Alcestis, plagiarised from Elias raising the widow's dead son. The kind of reconstruction that Tabor does while pretending to be a Christian is an institutional insanity.
As to Hercules getting up into the Olympus, that's precisely in the kind of unverifiable likeness that is only liberated through the destruction of the physical body, and so it is simply a guess (or a private revelation, not an actual observation) in those first telling that. Tabor is reducing the Resurrection of Jesus to this level.
* I'm sorry, I'll have to be imprecise. I refer to debates held on FB and initially copied to my blog HGL's F.B. writings, but then taken down, so my answer to that evil doctrine was not left documented as I wanted to. There was another post from debates with Protestants which was also taken down, and that one documented two Evangelical women who harrassed me taking turns for about a month, whenever I logged in to FB.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Brice of Tours
13.XI.2024
Turonis, in Gallia, sancti Britii Episcopi, qui fuit discipulus beati Martini Episcopi.
https://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/
** Fourth Lateran Council : 1215 | Confession of Faith
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm#1
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