So Where Is the Body? (2 of 2)

Baker has answered the John half of this, and the answer deserves a direct reply. His revised article argues that John died before AD 70, resting on "the testimony attributed to Papias." It also quotes Stevens: "John was supposed to be sitting on a throne judging the twelve tribes after Christ's return (Matt. 19:28), not wandering around the Ephesian countryside decades later," and concludes, "There is something desperately wrong with that picture."⁸¹ That is a leading writer in the wing saying that John alive after AD 70 would be fatal to the picture. (Baker gives no source for the Stevens lines, and no Stevens publication containing them has been located, so they are quoted here only as Baker gives them.) The evidence he rests on needs to be weighed plainly. The line from Papias survives in a fifth-century epitome by Philip of Side. Scholars divide on whether Philip reported Papias correctly. The line gives no date. And Irenaeus, the witness quoted above, calls Papias a "hearer of John."⁸³ Against that, Irenaeus, who knew Polycarp, who knew John, puts John at Ephesus until the time of Trajan. Baker's article also does not mention Symeon, and Symeon is the harder case: a believer before AD 70, crucified under Trajan, with no fragment offered against him. That gives two answers about this one apostle. Baker has him dead before AD 70. The church's early witnesses have him at Ephesus.

That makes two independent witnesses, about two named men, in two cities. It is exactly the kind of testimony Seam Two found missing for AD 70 itself, and here it points the other way. It also cuts straight across Stevens's account in Seam Two, where the living were removed and the church had to restart afterward. Hegesippus and Irenaeus put the same leaders on both sides of his gap.

The system has three ways out, and each costs something it can't spare. It can say Symeon and John weren't changed, but Paul said "all." It can say the change wasn't bodily, but that is CBV's answer, the one IBV-R exists to reject. Or it can say the sources are wrong, which means throwing out named, early Christian testimony about the very decades Stevens says left no record, to protect a claim with no testimony at all.

Nowhere anyone can point. What remains is IBV-R's answer for believers who have died since AD 70: each receives the incorruptible body at death, immediately, in the unseen realm. That describes a body that isn't the one buried, that no one can see, touch, or locate, received at the moment of death by someone no longer here. Paul names that condition and says it is not what he wants:

"For we groan while we are in this tent, since we are weighed down, because we do not want to be unclothed, but clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life."

— 2 Corinthians 5:4 (NET)

A body that can't be found, observed, or told apart from being unclothed isn't the clothing Paul longed for. It is the unclothed state with the word "body" written over it.

So the question is fair to put plainly to any full preterist who affirms a real body: where is it? It isn't in the graves, because they're full. It isn't on the believers alive in AD 70; the church remembered them still here, and one of them on a cross. It isn't anywhere anyone can point. Christ's body is where Peter said it would be: "This one heaven must receive until the time all things are restored, which God declared from times long ago through his holy prophets" (Acts 3:21). Ours are still where Jesus said they would be: "all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come out" (John 5:28-29).⁷⁷

Limits. The testimony about Symeon and John is early church tradition, not Scripture, and should be weighed that way. The editor's notes in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers edition say of Symeon's death, "The date of the martyrdom of Symeon is quite uncertain," and of his appointment, "The date of Symeon's accession (assuming that he did take charge of the Jerusalem church as James had done) cannot be fixed." This essay's own judgment, not a sourced claim: the age of 120 is hard to credit. The argument depends on none of these. The same holds for the Papias line: some scholars accept it as genuine, and the argument does not depend on dismissing it, only on its giving no date and standing against Irenaeus. It needs only that Symeon was a believer before AD 70 and was crucified after it. Partial preterism doesn't face this question. On its reading the tombs are full because the call hasn't come yet.