So Where Is the Body? (1 of 2)

Seam Twelve pressed both wings on whether the resurrection body is real. CBV denies that it is a real body at all. IBV-R affirms a body, and Baker's statement of faith describes it as "an immortal individual Spiritual body" (point 72).⁷⁹ That is to IBV-R's credit, as far as it goes. It also makes IBV-R answerable to a question CBV never has to face. If an immortal individual body has existed for every believer raised or changed since AD 70, where is it?

There are three places it could be, and Scripture says what each one should look like.

In the graves. The apostles had a test for whether a resurrection had happened, and Peter used it in the first sermon the church ever heard:

"Brothers, I can speak confidently to you about our forefather David, that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day."

— Acts 2:29 (NET)

An occupied tomb meant no resurrection. Of the Christ, Peter says David "spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was neither abandoned to Hades, nor did his body experience decay" (Acts 2:31).⁷³ The gospel Paul passed on has the same shape: "and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:4). The one buried is the one raised. Paul calls the risen Christ "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (15:20). The firstfruits left an empty tomb. Jesus said where the rest would be when He called them: "a time is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come out" (John 5:28-29). Full preterism places that in AD 70 along with everything else. On IBV-R, that day came and every tomb stayed full. By Peter's own test, that isn't the resurrection of anyone who was buried. And IBV-R does not dispute the tombs. Baker's statement of faith says it in so many words: "We believe physical bodies return to the Earth and are not physically resurrected" (point 67).⁷⁹ Peter's test was an occupied tomb, and IBV-R's own statement of faith concedes that the tombs stay occupied.

The strongest reply comes from the same chapter: "And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare seed" (1 Corinthians 15:37). But the next verse reads: "But God gives it a body just as he planned, and to each of the seeds a body of its own" (15:38). The NET's translators point out, in their note on verse 42, that the "it" sown and raised there is the body itself, as verse 44 makes plain. And Paul points at the body his readers are living in: "For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality" (15:53). Put on, not swapped out. This body, not another. When the wheat comes up, nobody digs up the old seed lying whole beside it. The seed is what became the wheat.

The NET's translators also explain, in their note on verse 49, what the whole chapter was written to correct. Some of the Corinthians apparently believed they were already enjoying every benefit of the resurrection body in the present, and concluded that how they lived no longer mattered. Paul wrote against that over-realized eschatology. On the reading the translators judge most likely original, Paul makes two points: the resurrection is bodily, not an out-of-body experience, and what a believer does in the meantime still matters.⁷⁴ Full preterism is that same over-realized move, made on a larger scale.

On the living. IBV-R holds that at the coming, believers still alive were changed and gathered away: "We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, at the last trumpet" (15:51-52). All of them. What they put on was immortality (15:53), and a body that has put on immortality cannot die. That makes the claim checkable, because the church remembered by name some believers who were alive in AD 70.

Eusebius records the choice of Symeon to lead the Jerusalem church after James, placing it "After the martyrdom of James and the conquest of Jerusalem which immediately followed": "They all with one consent pronounced Symeon, the son of Clopas, of whom the Gospel also makes mention; to be worthy of the episcopal throne of that parish. He was a cousin, as they say, of the Saviour" (Ecclesiastical History 3.11). On how far back Symeon's faith reached, Eusebius writes: "And it might be reasonably assumed that Symeon was one of those that saw and heard the Lord, judging from the length of his life, and from the fact that the Gospel makes mention of Mary, the wife of Clopas, who was the father of Symeon..." (3.32). He then quotes Hegesippus on Symeon's death: "Certain of these heretics brought accusation against Symeon, the son of Clopas, on the ground that he was a descendant of David and a Christian; and thus he suffered martyrdom, at the age of one hundred and twenty years, while Trajan was emperor and Atticus governor." And: "And after being tortured for many days he suffered martyrdom, and all, including even the proconsul, marveled that, at the age of one hundred and twenty years, he could endure so much. And orders were given that he should be crucified" (3.32).⁷⁵ Trajan reigned from 98 to 117. If every believer alive in AD 70 was changed into an immortal body, Symeon was crucified in one. That test is aimed at IBV-R, which says every living believer was changed. CBV makes no such claim and is pressed elsewhere in this essay.