The bodily resurrection of Jesus

If you are one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, you have been taught that Jesus was raised as a spirit creature, that God disposed of the body that died, and that when the disciples saw and touched him he had taken on a body for the occasion. You rest this on the Bible, especially 1 Peter 3:18, which says he was “put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit” (the New World Translation reads “in the flesh” and “in the spirit”). This page reads it closely too, with your translation in view.

If you hold no faith, read this page as a question about documents: what did Jesus’ first followers mean when they said he was raised? Whether it happened is a separate question, taken up in the resurrection witnesses.

Paul calls the resurrection body a “spiritual body” and says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:44, 50). The risen Jesus is sometimes not recognized at first, and he appears in a room with the doors locked (John 20:19). Whatever the resurrection body is, it is not an ordinary body brought back to its old life. That much is common ground.

Luke tells of the risen Jesus appearing to the disciples in Jerusalem. They are “startled and frightened, thinking they had seen a spirit.” He answers that fear directly:

“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.” (Luke 24:39)

Then he asks for food and eats a piece of broiled fish in front of them. The New World Translation renders the verse to the same effect; the contrast between a spirit and flesh and bones is in every translation.

The disciples think he is a spirit, and Jesus corrects them. If he were a spirit creature wearing a temporary body, the disciples’ first impression would have been the right one, and his correction would have misled them. He also points to his hands and feet, the places the nails went in, as proof that “it is I Myself.” A body made for the occasion would not need wounds. Their purpose is to show that this is the body that was crucified.

John’s Gospel makes the same connection in two places.

Early in his ministry, Jesus tells his opponents, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” John adds that the temple he meant was his body (John 2:19-21). The body that would be destroyed is the body that would be raised. Jesus does not say God will dispose of it and provide another.

After the resurrection, Thomas refuses to believe unless he can see the nail marks and put his hand into Jesus’ side. A week later Jesus offers him exactly that (John 20:27). The wounds from the cross are still there, on the risen body.

Then there is the tomb. Every Gospel says it was found empty, and Matthew records that opponents explained this by saying the disciples stole the body (Matthew 28:11-15). If the resurrection were the creation of a spirit, the body could have stayed where it was. The first accounts treat the empty tomb as part of what “he has risen” means. In Acts, Peter puts it plainly: God did not let Jesus’ “body see decay” (Acts 2:31).

Paul’s chapter on the resurrection is the strongest text for the other view, so it needs the closest reading. He writes: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44).

The Greek word translated “natural” is psychikos, from psyche, soul or life. Nobody thinks a natural body is made of soul. The word describes the body as it is now, alive with ordinary human life. “Spiritual,” pneumatikos, works the same way: it describes a body given life by God’s Spirit, not a body made of spirit. Paul uses the same word earlier in the letter for a “spiritual” person (1 Corinthians 2:15), who is a living human being with a body, guided by the Spirit.

The same “it” is sown and raised. Paul is describing one body that goes into the ground and comes out changed: perishable to imperishable, weak to powerful.

“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom” fits this. In Jewish idiom “flesh and blood” means a human being in their mortal weakness. Paul’s next sentence explains what has to happen: “the perishable must be clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:53). Nothing is discarded; the body is clothed with something it did not have.

Return to 1 Peter 3:18. The verse sets “the flesh” against “the spirit.” Read on its own, it can sound like a contrast between two substances: Jesus died as a body and lived again as a spirit.

Paul uses the same pair, though, for two conditions rather than two substances. He says Jesus was a descendant of David “according to the flesh” and was “declared with power to be the Son of God” through the Spirit “by His resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:3-4). “The flesh” is life in its weakness and mortality; “the spirit” is the power of God that raises and renews. Peter’s point is that Jesus was killed in human weakness and raised by, and into, the life of God’s Spirit. Nothing in the verse says his body was disposed of, and nothing in it contradicts Luke’s “flesh and bones.”

Paul also says Christ “will transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). He expects the risen Jesus to have a body, and he expects ours to be changed to match it, not abandoned.

All of these texts insist on continuity. The risen Jesus is changed, deathless, and no longer bound by the old limits, and he is still the man who was crucified. In Revelation he says, “I was dead, and behold, now I am alive forever and ever!” (Revelation 1:18). The one speaking is the one who died.

For Christians the resurrection is also a promise. Paul calls Jesus the “firstfruits” of those who have died (1 Corinthians 15:20), the first part of a harvest that shows what the rest will be. If Jesus’ body was set aside, the hope offered to everyone else is the hope of a new creature in their place. If it was raised and transformed, the hope is that the person who dies is the person who rises.

This page has shown what the New Testament says. It has not shown that the resurrection happened, and it does not settle every question a Witness might ask about who Jesus is; the page on whether Jesus is Michael the archangel takes up one of them.