Jesus rose as a spirit creature

On the evening of his resurrection, Jesus stood among his disciples. Luke records what they thought: “they were startled and frightened, thinking they had seen a spirit” (Luke 24:37). The view that he was a spirit was the first thing the people who saw him thought.

Jesus corrected it. “Look at My hands and My feet. It is I Myself. Touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (24:39). Then he asked for food, and “He took it and ate it in front of them” (24:43).

He does not say “I have taken on a body for this visit.” He says that a spirit does not have what he has. And he points to his hands and feet, the places where he had been nailed. Those wounds were in the body that died on Friday. If Jesus had been raised as a spirit and had formed a new body to appear in, there would be no reason for that body to carry crucifixion wounds, and every reason for Jesus not to say that a spirit lacks flesh and bones.

John records the same thing with Thomas. “Put your finger here and look at My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side” (John 20:27). The proof Jesus offers that it is really him is the body that was wounded. See Luke 24:36-43.

Early in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Tear down this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19, New World Translation). John explains, “But he was talking about the temple of his body” (2:21). And he adds that after the resurrection, the disciples remembered this and believed it (2:22).

“This temple” is the thing they will tear down. “It” is the thing he will raise up. The body that is destroyed and the body that is raised are the same, and he says he will raise it.

Peter makes the same point on the day of Pentecost. Quoting Psalm 16, he says that “neither was he forsaken in the Grave nor did his flesh see corruption” (Acts 2:31, New World Translation). David, Peter says, died and was buried, and his tomb is still there. Jesus’ flesh did not decay because it did not stay in the tomb; God raised him. See Acts 2:22-36.

And the tomb was empty. The angel’s message to the women was “He is not here; He has risen, just as He said!” (Matthew 28:6). If Jesus had been raised as a spirit, the body could have stayed where it was. The Gospels treat the empty tomb as part of the evidence.

1 Corinthians 15:44 reads, in the New World Translation, “It is sown a physical body; it is raised up a spiritual body.” The Greek behind “physical body” is sōma psychikon, literally a “soulish body,” from psychē, soul or life. No one thinks a psychikon body is made of soul. It is a body animated by natural life.

In the same way, a sōma pneumatikon, “spiritual body,” is a body animated and governed by God’s spirit. Paul uses the same word in 2:15 for “the spiritual man,” a living human being guided by the spirit. He does not mean a person without a body.

It is still a body, and the same “it” is sown and raised. “It is sown in corruption; it is raised up in incorruption” (15:42). Paul’s picture is a seed and the plant that grows from it: one thing, transformed. He says it plainly a few verses on: “this which is corruptible must put on incorruption” (15:53). The perishable body is not discarded. It is clothed with what cannot perish.

“The last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (15:45) belongs to the same contrast. Adam was a living soul, given life. Christ gives life. The verse is about what he does, not about his losing a body.

“Flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s Kingdom” (1 Corinthians 15:50, New World Translation) sounds decisive. But “flesh and blood” is a Jewish idiom for human beings in their ordinary, mortal state. Jesus told Peter, “this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood” (Matthew 16:17), meaning no human being had told him. Paul says that after his conversion “I did not rush to consult with flesh and blood” (Galatians 1:16), meaning other people.

Paul explains his own phrase in the next breath: “nor does corruption inherit incorruption” (15:50, New World Translation). The problem with “flesh and blood” is that it is perishable. The answer he gives is not that the body is left behind, but that “we will all be changed” (15:51).

So Paul and Luke do not disagree. Luke’s risen Jesus has “flesh and bones,” and Paul’s mortal “flesh and blood” cannot inherit the Kingdom. Jesus’ body had been changed: it was no longer mortal, no longer perishable. It was still his body.

1 Peter 3:18 says Jesus was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.” Peter is contrasting two conditions: Jesus’ life in weakness and mortality, which ended on the stake, and his life raised by God’s power. Paul uses the same pair in Romans 1:3-4, where Jesus is a descendant of David “according to the flesh” and declared to be the Son of God “through the Spirit of holiness” by his resurrection. Neither verse is about losing a body.

Peter himself tells you how he understood the resurrection. Preaching to Cornelius, he said God raised Jesus and let him be seen “not by all the people, but by the witnesses God had chosen beforehand, by us who ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead” (Acts 10:41). The same apostle who wrote “made alive in the spirit” ate and drank with the risen Jesus.

The times the disciples did not recognize Jesus fit this too. Luke says of the two at Emmaus that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16). God held their eyes; nothing is said of a different body. Jesus’ coming through locked doors shows what a changed body can do. It does not show there was no body.