1 Cor. 15:12-34 Jesus' Resurrection and Ours

12But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

Those among the believers in Corinth who disbelieved resurrection, were not specifically challenging Jesus' resurrection—they were denying any resurrection of the bodies of dead people. But of course to deny the possibility of any resurrection necessarily affected that of Jesus, as Paul reminds them. They may have entertained some idea that Jesus' spirit survived, but this would hardly qualify as a victory, since according to both Jewish and pagan belief the spirit of a person always survived physical death. This would reduce the victory of the resurrection of Jesus to a meaningless statement!

Paul makes it quite clear that a true bodily resurrection of Jesus is necessary to qualify what happened on the third day after the crucifixion as a victory over sin and death. If these Corinthians want to deny the resurrection of the dead body of Jesus, they will condemn themselves to a futile faith. And they will be still in the same predicament they were in before they became Christians: dead in sins!

But Paul includes himself and his fellow missionaries in the charade. If Jesus' dead body did not come back to life, he and his colleagues not only have no meaningful gospel, but they find themselves in the dangerous position of proclaiming a lie about God!

20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

20 Because at the beginning of this chapter Paul already produced the human evidence of Jesus' resurrection: witnesses, who saw, heard and touched his body alive after three days in the tomb, he does not hesitate to state most emphatically: "But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead!" And so the deadly chain of logic that led from a dead body to a world without hope has been broken—shattered in a million pieces.

But there is much more! The resurrected Jesus is the "firstfruits" (Greek aparchē). This term's meaning is strongly conditioned by its use in the Greek translation of the OT. It denotes the first offspring of sacrificial animals or the first fruit of food plants, that had to be presented in the temple as a gift to God. The giving of the firstfruits assured to the giver that God would make the rest of his harvest plentiful and good. So the presenting of the firstfruits was a kind of pledge of a future benefit. Paul's use of the term is a brilliantly creative adaptation to the new situation of redemption by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus' own resurrection is God's pledge that he will raise all believers' bodies to life at the End Time. Furthermore, in Romans 8:23 God has given believers now the indwelling Holy Spirit as "firstfruits", a pledge of our eventual glorification. so both the fact of Jesus' resurrection and the fact that we now possess the Holy Spirit are double pledges to us by means of "firstfruits."

21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

Here Paul makes good use of the Adam-Christ counterpart theme. Adam, the first man, sinned and brought all his descendants with him into death. Jesus, the last man, conquered sin and death, and brought all his spiritual "descendants" with him into life. Those who do not believe are still "in Adam," while those who do believe are "in Christ." And although Paul would agree with the gospel of John that believers in Jesus are already "alive" in spirit, when he speaks here of all who are in Christ will be made alive (future tense), he has in mind the future bodily resurrection of all believers.

23But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.

But there is a timetable for all this. First the Messiah (Christ), then at his return to earth all who belong to him.

24 Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For he "has put everything under his feet." Now when it says that "everything" has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. 28 When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.

Paul continues here with the theme of sequence. When Paul says that Jesus must reign until "he has put everything under his feet" (this last being a quote from Psalm 2, where the "everything" refers to enemies), he engages in another chain of logic. If all enemies must be subdued, surely the last and worst must be death itself, since it was also the first to result from the Fall of Adam and Eve. And if the Messiah (Christ) reigns until that happens, the eschatological reign of the Messiah must be followed by a final resurrection ("the end" may mean "the end resurrection"), at which time the reign of Christ will become the reign of the Triune God (including Christ as the Second Person), so that "God may be all in all."

29 Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them? 30And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? 31I die every day—I mean that, brothers—just as surely as I glory over you in Christ Jesus our Lord. 32 If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised,
"Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."
33 Do not be misled: "Bad company corrupts good character." 34 Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning; for there are some who are ignorant of God—I say this to your shame.

Here Paul returns to the immediate problem in Corinth. Another logical consequence of denying physical resurrection of believers is that the practice of baptizing surrogates for persons who believed and died before being baptized is meaningless. Baptism, as Paul will argue in Romans 6, is a picture of the believer's dying with Christ and being raised from the dead with Christ. And although there Paul argues for the "spiritual" resurrection of believers now which enables them to die to sin and live unto God, the imagery of physical rising from the grave is just too obvious to ignore. If no such prospect awaits believers, then why baptize at all? In fact, since in Paul's mind all the afterlife is conditioned on a God who will also give life to dead bodies, why would anyone expose himself or herself to the suffering involved in being a Christian?

It is a sober thought that so many people today—including believers who read their Bibles—have a crippled view of the final state of the blessed. They see disembodied souls, floating on clouds in the sky. For Jesus—read his parables about wedding banquets, music, dancing in the final kingdom—and for Paul (see Romans 8:18-25) the final state is a total reversal of the effects of the Fall. It involves a new universe ("heavens and earth") in which God's people will live and worship and celebrate in glorified bodies, what Paul in Romans 8:23 calls "our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies". This is the robust eschatology (view of the final state) of the Bible—Old and New Testaments. It is our hope.

Appendix on "Baptism for the Dead"

Most NT scholars today regard whatever practice Paul alludes to here as one that some of the Corinthians were practicing, but which he did not approve of (contrary to the opinion of Dunn, Unity and Diversity, p. 25 §5.3). He refers to it here, merely to show how logically it contradicts their denial of resurrection. About this matter Witherington writes:

In this wider context we are now prepared to talk about Paul's view of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Any discussion of Paul's view of baptism must face squarely the implications of 1 Corinthians 1. It is clearly not the most crucial thing to Paul; rather, preaching is. No one who says, "I am thankful that I did not baptize anyone of you except ," and adds, "for Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach " (1 Cor. 1: 14-17) could possibly have seen baptism as the means or chief means by which one becomes a Christian. In short, this implies a repudiation of a magical view of baptism. First Corinthians 15:29 suggests that some thought that baptizing a surrogate for a dead person was going to have some sort of unexplained benefit (eternal life?) for the dead person. Paul does not endorse such a view, though he uses it as an ad hoc argument to make his point (Saint Paul’s Thought World, p. 314).