PMW 2025-062 by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr.

James P. Ware’s The Final Triumph of God: Jesus, the Eyewitnesses, and the Resurrection of the Body in 1 Corinthians 15 (Eerdmans, 2006) is one of the most compelling and insightful books I have read in many years. It is absolutely spell-binding in its careful exegetical observations regarding the physical resurrection of the body in 1 Corinthians 15. And in our day of the arising of a new neo-Gnosticism (!) it is a “must have” book. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Christ’s physical, bodily resurrection or our own. And to any who might want to witness to hyper-preterists (or liberals who hold the views). This might be a good tract to  give them.

Instead of my own personal review, I will simply cite most of the Foreword by A. Andrew Das. He focuses on the essence of the book and the importance of Ware’s own triumph!

Here is the Foreword:

James P. Ware’s groundbreaking commentary on 1 Corinthians 15 is perhaps the most comprehensive to date. Not a page goes by without fresh, satisfying interpretations building on the best recent scholarly work. This rich volume remains accessible to the pastor, Bible study leader, or interested lay reader. While it is well researched, Ware cites only what is relevant to the text at hand and does not catalogue every ancient or modern source. This text-based approach models the wisdom of the late Abraham Malherbe, who admonished his Yale students to interpret texts from the inside out. One must never lose sight of the meanings of words, the grammatical features of a text, genre, similar features and parallels among contemporaries, and how the ideas fit together into a larger, cohesive whole. So absorbed is Ware with the text — in the very best sense — that he does not offer concluding reflections. Perhaps I may indulge a friend by highlighting some of the treasures the reader will encounter in these pages.

Have We Missed the Second Coming:
A Critique of the Hyper-preterist Error
by Ken Gentry

This book offers a brief introduction, summary, and critique of Hyper-preterism. Don’t let your church and Christian friends be blindfolded to this new error. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

For more Christian educational materials: www.KennethGentry.com

Ware’s text-based approach raises substantial questions for a new paradigm in Pauline studies. Historic Christianity interpreted the resurrected Jesus in 1 Cor 15 as endowed with an improved version of his earthly body but still flesh and bones, just as in the Gospels and Acts. As early as 1872, however, Hermann Lüdemann described the pneuma (“spirit”) of the resurrected “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon) in 1 Cor 15:44 as consisting of “heavenly light substance” in agreement with Stoic patterns of thought. Otto Pfleiderer likewise denied a fleshly resurrection, whether Jesus’s or the believer’s at the Last Day, favoring a “spiritual corporeity,” a “heavenly light-substance.” Ernst Teichmann’s 1896 book claimed a non-fleshly spiritual resurrection consisting of fine, pneumatic stuff. By the mid-twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann summarily claimed, “The accounts of the empty grave, of which Paul still knows nothing, are legends.”

….

Prominent voices have dissented: Richard B. Hays, Martin Hengel, N. T. Wright, and Volker Rabens. Missing has been a careful, text-based study of 1 Cor 15. Enter James P. Ware. Ware points early on to vv. 5–8, a pre-Pauline confession of resurrection appearances that Ware dates to within two to five years of Jesus’s death and resurrection (!), and as Ware demonstrates, 1 Cor 15 is the climax of the letter. From the very first chapters, Paul has been targeting the wisdom of the world that had made its way into the Corinthian congregation, a wisdom that categorically dismissed that flesh and bone will one day rise from the dead. Not even the Greek and Roman gods possessed such power. Whether in Greek antiquity (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus), the philosophical schools, or the mystery cults, corpses will remain just that, garbage according to the second-century Celsus. Paul draws attention in v. 35 to the mockery of the resurrection by “some” at Corinth (15:12, 34). This philosophy threatens to render the proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection “in vain” (15:2, 14, 17, 58).

Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond
(ed. by Darrell Bock)

Presents three views on the millennium: progressive dispensationalist, amillennialist, and reconstructionist postmillennialist viewpoints. Includes separate responses to each view. Ken Gentry provides the postmillennial contribution.

See more study materials at: www.KennethGentry.com

A Stoic approach to the bodies of 1 Cor 15, Ware shows, just does not work. The verb “raise” (egeiro) never means an assumption into heaven or transubstantiation into an ethereal state. Further, the Stoics defined pneuma in terms of the sublunar, airy heavens and not the celestial sphere. No ancient text identifies pneuma with that sphere. For the Stoics, the planets and heavenly bodies were not made of pneumatic “stuff” but rather divine fire. Paul does not refer to “spirit-matter” elsewhere in his letters. The key, for Paul, is his innovative contrast of pneuma with psuche, and the pneuma remains God’s Spirit. In vv. 42–44 a soma psuchikon is changed into a soma pneumatikon. The same subject governs vv. 42–44; it is the same body. Body x does not metamorphosize to body y, but a perishable body x is changed to an imperishable body x in what is not a subtraction but an addition, an enhancement. A body enlivened or determined by its soul will enjoy an enlivening. also by the Spirit in its return to life (contra Fredriksen). Paul therefore uses gar to refer to a whole person apart from God’s Spirit. For x to “change” (according to Paul’s mystery), it must continue to exist. Similarly, the use of psuchikos rules out a future ethereal body without flesh and bones. Even as the psuchikos person of 1 Cor 2:14 has flesh and bones and is not just soul, the pneumatikos would have to be similarly endowed. The Spirit, enjoyed as a down payment (2 Cor 1:22; 5:5) or firstfruits (Rom 8:23) “in” the body, will be given directly “to” the resurrected body! The “life-giving Spirit” in v. 45 is not, then, astral stuff. As for “flesh and blood” not inheriting the kingdom of God in v. 50, one must consider the chiastic structure connecting this to v. 53, as Paul identifies “corruptibility” as the defining feature of “flesh and blood” (cf. Sir 14:17-18; 17:30-32; Matt 16:27; Gal 1:16; 1 En. 15.4; T. Ab. 13.7; cf. the positive “flesh and bones”). The mortal, corruptible body will be rendered incorruptible and immortal. In denying a fleshly resurrection, modern scholars have, ironically, joined the very ranks of those Paul opposed at Corinth.

Perilous Times: A Study in Eschatological Evil (by Ken Gentry)

Technical studies on Daniel’s Seventy Weeks, the great tribulation, Paul’s Man of Sin, and John’s Revelation.

See more study materials at: www.KennethGentry.com

Since this volume is a commentary, Ware is not just responding to the new Stoic paradigm in Pauline studies. He is also resolving perennial interpretive issues along the way, including the untimely birth of Paul, the baptism for the dead, and the supposed subordinationist Christology of the chapter. As for Paul’s untimely birth (1 Cor 15:8), Ware dispenses with the notion that Paul received only a visionary experience of the risen Christ, against David Friedrich Strauss of old (The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History, 1835) and Adela Yarbro Collins and Dale Allison of late. Christ appeared to Paul as an ektroma prematurely cut short in the birthing process and not a late birth. Paul’s birth had failed in the womb, and so he did not see Jesus in the same way as the others before the ascension. Even as they had seen the risen Jesus, so also had Paul, but lastly. He saw the crucified (1:23) one arisen!

In vv. 20–28 Paul looks forward to the moment when the Son submits to the Father, leading many to affirm a sort of modern Arianism, a nondivine, nonincarnational Christology (with James D. G. Dunn and Wayne Meeks), or even the eternal functional subordinationist Christologies of some modern evangelicals (e.g., Wayne Grudem). Second Temple Judaism, however, never anticipated a temporary, interim reign of the coming Messiah but one that would last forever. “Until” (achri) does not necessarily point to the end of an action but an action’s goal, in this case to deliver the kingdom to the Father. Paul never says the Son ceases to rule, nor do early Christian sources. The Father reigns in and through the Son! Paul ascribes descriptions, actions, and functions of the Father to the Son, often with both as subjects, and sometimes including also the “life-giving Spirit” an early trinitarian theology on display. Ware documents the many biblical texts alluded to in the chapter, referring to Yahweh in the original, which Paul reapplies to Christ (e.g., Jer 9:23-24 in 1 Cor 15:31).

Paul asks in v. 29 about those “baptized for the sake of (huper) the dead.” The most common view, proxy baptism, is unattested in antiquity, except for Marcion’s use of this verse. Nor is this a reference to Christians’ being baptized in general, since Paul is identifying a subset of the faithful. Ultimately, Ware interprets this verse in its immediate context: Paul’s own suffering and struggle with wild beasts at Ephesus (vv. 30-32) should be taken literally (anticlimactic if not) as Paul em- ploys a word limited to arena combat (with which even Roman citizens sometimes had to contend). Thus Paul is pointing in v. 29 to people baptized in view of the dangers the martyrs faced. Whereas scholars such as Candida Moss have con- tended that early Christian martyrdom is largely a myth, if he is correct Ware is identifying the earliest reference to it, and even to arena combat.” At the end of the day, at the end of the age, as Augustine put it: “[Christ] came from heaven to be clothed with a body of earthly mortality, that He might clothe it with heavenly immortality” (Civ. 13.23; trans. Marcus Dods, NPNF 2:258).

A. Andrew Das
Niebuhr Distinguished Chair and Professor of Religious Studies

Elmhurst University

GOODBIRTH AND THE TWO AGES
I am currently researching a technical study on the concept of the Two Ages in Scripture. This study is not only important for understanding the proper biblical concept of the structure of redemptive history. But it is also absolutely essential for fully grasping the significance of the Disciples’ questions in Matthew 24:3, which spark the Olivet Discourse. This book will be the forerunner to a fuller commentary on the Olivet Discourse in Matthew’s comprehensive presentation. This issue must be dealt with before one can seriously delve into the Discourse itself.

If you would like to support me in my research, I invite you to consider giving a tax-deductible contribution to my research and writing ministry: GoodBirth Ministries. Your help is much appreciated! https://www.paypal.com/donate/?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4XXFLGKEQU48C&ssrt=1740411591428