Reflections on Scholarly Interpretations
of the Nature and Reality
of Jesus' Resurrection Body

 

Prof. Pieter Craffert
University of South Africa, Pretoria, RSA

 

The aim of this paper is to engage in the discussion of the postmortem appearances of Jesus and, therefore, belongs to "the rhetoric of inquiry". It is not concerned with an analysis of the resurrection stories themselves but focuses on scholarly interpretations of seeing Jesus' resurrected body and therefore directly with only one strand of evidence for claims about Jesus' resurrection. The question is, how do scholars move from the data in the texts to their viewpoints regarding Jesus' resurrected body? The current rationalistic debate is analysed in terms of three components: views on the nature of Jesus' resurrected body, what is meant by "seeing" and the understanding of reality involved in different proposals. These are contrasted with a cultural sensitive reading which allows the existence of multiple realities, the existence of visionary bodies and visions as a way of seeing. It is argued that what is today taken in scholarship to be the meaning of the biblical descriptions of Jesus' resurrected body (like Paul's soma pneumatikon) is the result of "seeing a body into being". It is researchers' view on seeing together with their respective world-views which determine what the nature of Jesus' resurrected body is and not so much what the sources say or do not say.

 

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