by InterestedOne 64 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Jesus' resurrection body is a physical body that has flesh and bones.
It still had the wounds of Calvary, so there was some continuity between the pre-resurrection body and the post-resurrection body.
Yet those wounds were not causing him pain, nor did they cripple him, so his resurrection body was the glorified, transformed body about which Paul wrote.
Does that answer your question, BD, or have I missed the gist of what you are asking me?
Yeah, I think it does.
So Jesus had flesh and bone, like he told his followers. And they watched his physical body go up to heaven. So when Paul talks about flesh and bone not inheriting the Kingdom he couldn't have been speaking of literal flesh and bone, but as you said, he was talking about an unchanged physical body.
If we were to hold to the Watchtower's teaching, then Jesus could not have entered into the kingdom because he had flesh and bone. So it had to mean something else.
The NLT translates 1 Cor. 15:50 this way: "What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These perishable bodies of ours are not able to live forever."
The second sentence says directly what the first sentence says by way of synedoche (figure of speech).
Paul wasn't giving a chemistry lesson about the composition of resurrection bodies.
He was saying that they had to be transformed into immortal, imperishable bodies.
The only such body the world has seen so far is Jesus', which was a glorified body of flesh and bone, as Jesus told the disciples.
It still had the wounds of Calvary that he showed Thomas, so there was continuity between the pre- and post-resurrection bodies.
Yet those wounds did not cause him pain or incapacitate him so it wasn't an ordinary, severely wounded, perishable human body.
Perhaps what Jesus meant by "flesh and blood cannot enter the kindgom" was not a physical thing, but rather a materialistic carnal mindset.
Perhaps it was meant as a metaphor of the "worldly" man.
Why can't Magdalene embrace him b/c he is not yet risen to the Father, while Thomas could touch his very wounds. Strange.
Not that starnage if you accept that the 40 day delay for ascension is a later addition to the legend as is commonly believed by texual critics. Jesus was simply made to say that he didn't have time to linger in embraces with mary because he was very soon to ascend. This especially makes sense when you recognize mary Mag was depicted as a lover in some very early Jesus legends including some (eg. wedding in Canaan) that were included in the Synoptics with minor editing.
