Nicholas Banner, Trinity College, Dublin
The notion of bodily resurrection is one of the most distinctive doctrines of nascent and early Christianity, one which not only drew incredulity from opponents of the movement (particularly Platonist philosophers) but sometimes presented a stumbling- block to early Christians, particularly those with a Hellenic education. I will argue that the story of the development and eventual standardisation of the orthodox doctrine of the resurrection-body cannot be understood solely or even primarily in terms of intra-confessional developments within Christianity, nor that Platonist opposition to Christian bodily resurrection can be rightly understood through the polemical soul- body dualism sometimes employed by Platonist authors in opposition to Christianity. I argue, instead, for a shared discourse of ‘subtle bodies’ participated in by some Jews, Christians, Platonists, and Platonistic religious currents1 from at least the second cen- tury onward, and rising to increasing pre-eminence throughout the third century and beyond. We see, I would argue, a broad movement toward an embodied human eschatology across Abrahamic, school-Platonist, and Platonistically-religious currents as late antiquity progresses.
While the hard soul/body dualism often attributed to Platonist critics of Chris- tianity is not exactly a caricature (as it was often emphasised by the Platonists them- selves, especially in polemical contexts), it does not do justice to the interrelated com- munity of ideas of actual second-century speculation about resurrected bodies occur- ring across both the Abrahamic/polytheist divide and the divide – often assumed in scholarship but difficult to find in historical sources – between school-philosophy and demotic religious ideas. From the second century onward (if not earlier), some Pla- tonist philosophers had posited a subtle body – or a number of bodies – mediating between the gross, material body and the soul,2 and we find, in roughly-contemporary Platonistic religious movements, a number of linked notions – immortal resurrection- bodies, eschatological pneumatic vehicles, etc.3 – which bring into the story a strong eschatological element. While the Christian spiritual body emerges from the Jewish matrix of Paul’s writings, the development of these Pauline hints into the orthodox doctrine of the resurrection-body was in part the result of Christian appropriation or de ́tournement of Platonist and Platonistic ideas about the subtle body, a process already beginning in Justin Martyr, and in full evidence in Origen of Alexandria. But, crucially, the process of borrowing and adaptation of ideas typifying the growth of ideologies in late antiquity of course worked both ways: with the third century many Platonist subtle bodies are robustly eschatological, showing, I will argue, a great deal of ‘permeability’ to demotic religious notions – almost certainly including Christian ones – among the exponents of school-philosophy.
This paper will re-examine the evidence and argue for a rich culture of ideological borrowing and appropriation between second-century Hellenised Jews and (Jewish-) Christians, school-Platonists and adjacent thinkers, and Platonistic religions as the matrix for the eventual flowering of the doctrine of the immortal resurrection-body in writers as seemingly-opposed as Origen of Alexandria and Iamblichus of Calchis.