Paul’s limited portrait of the coming apocalypse, was indeed spoken to the first century church. You are beating a very dead horse here.
TO the first century church, yes, but most obviously FOR the church through the centuries. Far from a dead horse, the hope of the Savior’s return is a very’ live horse’, right now, today.
And the Resurrection is promised at His return. Two live horses!
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From what I understand this occurs when we return to God.
Zech. 1:3 " Return to Me, declares the Lord Almighty, and I will return to you."
Jer. 15:19 " If you return, I will restore you, and you shall stand before Me."
John 15:4 Abide in Me and I in you."
Chad calling Paidion!
It’s yet to come, with Z-Hell (1, 2, 3)…None of the gospel writers or academic historians/archeologists, speak of zombies around 70 A.D.
Well actually more pertinent to the point Paul is reinforcing his earlier argument that without resurrection their faith was futile — that’s the context (vss. 13-14) of vs. 32.
Given you’ve spent vociferous energy defending the first portion of the above I’m stumped as to how you NOW find space for the latter consideration… are you having second thoughts on your position? Certainly Paul features the futility of faith “IF the dead rise not” as some there were claiming.
In the biblical context resurrection was BOTH an event AND a process… so there were BOTH concurrent AND future aspects at play. There was a coming end, i.e., the resurrection typically understood in terms of a general resurrection…
Acts 24:15 I have hope in God, which they themselves also accept, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust.
This above is what John writes of here…
Rev 20:4c-5 And they lived and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. (But the rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were finished.) This is the first resurrection.
Those of the parenthetical phrase who… “did not live again until” refers to the event of AD70 i.e., the general resurrection such as is described by Jesus in Jn 5:28-29; whereas the bolded portions given above speak to the firstfruit saints’ ‘being raised in that end-time age’ to newness of life in Christ (Rom 6:4 et al)… a process of dying and rising daily — again, this is what John writes of, identifying such as… “the first resurrection” and is what Jesus first refers to in Jn 5:25 which precedes the whole harvest, as per AD70.
This then answers to your quandary here…
SEE ABOVE. Further to this I share these quotes from Max King…
The Two Stages of Eschatological Resurrection
Ladd, we believe, brings out clearly the imminency factor that inheres in the term “firstfruits.” He wrote, “Jesus’ resurrection is the ‘first fruits’ of the eschatological resurrection at the end of the age. First fruits were common in Palestinian agriculture. They were the first grain of the harvest, indicating that the harvest itself was ripe and ready to be gathered in. The first fruits were not the harvest itself, yet they were more than a pledge and promise of the harvest. They were the actual beginning of the harvest. The act of reaping had already begun: the grain was being cut.” (quoting premillennial futurist G. E. Ladd., A Theology of The New Testament p.326)
Along these same lines, Davies wrote, “In the thought of Paul, however, the Resurrection of Jesus is regarded as the firstfruits. This figure implies in the words of Johannes Weiss ‘that the full harvest will follow.’ We cannot doubt that in the Resurrection of Jesus Paul saw the beginning of the End; already in that resurrection the powers of the Age to Come were at work.”
While most scholars, including Ridderbos, Ladd and Davies as quoted above, recognize that the firstfruits signal the beginning of the harvest, few, if any, attempt to explain why there was no follow through of the harvest. If, in the traditional view, the resurrection of the dead is still future, it is apparent that “Christ the firstfruits” signaled a beginning that soon dropped out of sight. This, however, is not the case in either Scripture or mid-first-century expectation. There was a decisive beginning and a full consummation without failure, delay or postponement.
Just as the term “firstfruits” denoted two inseparable stages in the completion of a harvest, we find in the New Testament two successive and inseparable stages in the resurrection of the dead. In John 5:25-29, for example, Jesus spoke of the hour that “is coming, and now is” when the dead would hear his voice and live (v.25), and then of a coming hour when all that are in the graves shall hear and come forth (vv.28, 29). The restricted resurrection in verse 25 preceded the unrestricted resurrection in verses 28-29 in the same sense that the firstfruit grain preceded the rest of the harvest.
Max R. King., The Cross and The Parousia of Christ p. 386-387
That’s really confusing to read. You say… “I see no reason why if that process had not been taking place,…” — in-kind with MK. I’m saying that process WAS taking place… thus the rest of your sentence is redundant.
I’m NOT contending that. But what you’re not seeing (because of your belief) is that… at any juncture when someone dies, present tense, they rise to God and that reality is a rolling reality, i.e., such will always be true, and thus by nature of the case also future tense from any prior perspective.
I see your point in the English BUT it’s still a poor example to try and make your point BECAUSE the present tense of the English “brings” poorly renders the Greek εἰσαγάγῃ eisagagē which is actually not in the present at all, but AORIST… should read as “brought”.
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Where is the “unconscious state” mentioned?
In appreciating… context, literary licence and genre, timing, i.e., the relevance of OT / NT events etc.
Like so many things… we simply aren’t told.
Amen
No, I am no finding any such space. Nor am I having second thoughts. I am asking myself what Paul could have meant when he said, " If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Paul supposed that if there were no resurrection, “tomorrow we die.” In what sense would we die if there were no resurrection? He couldn’t have meant physical death since we all die physically whether or not there is a resurrection. So I was trying to think of ways in which without the resurrection we would be so wiped out that we may as well enjoy ourselves (eat and drink) as much as possible in this life. I could think of only two possibilities: the one which I espouse (non-existence) or some existence such as “soul sleep” to which many other people hold.
Again, I was referring to Paul’s statement, “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.” If the resurrection of the dead refers only to the process of Israel being raised to a new level of spiritual consciousness, why, if that were not the case, would Christ not have been raised, as Paul affirmed. Nothing redundant here.
However, are you now saying that when someone dies, he rises to God (goes to heaven), and that is what the dead being raised means? There are thousands who believe and teach that.
It’s true that Christ ascended to God, but that ascension did not take place immediately at He death. He spent 3 days in the tomb and then God raised Him to life. But even then He didn’t “rise to God.” First, He showed Himself to His disciples. When Mary saw the risen Lord, she was overwhelmed.Then Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”
I may have missed it Don, but did you address the possibility of Jesus’ being in Paradise for those 3 days, then resurrected?
It wasn’t even all that as you’ve pondered… it was coming from Paul, simply, as a rhetorical question. Paul knows full well God is keeping his promise to Israel and can’t believe some dare question this GIVEN to do so, by the logic of the case, puts their very own security in jeopardy; again, it was rhetorical.
Quite simply… Paul says this because resurrection was promised to Israel and now such has started in Jesus, i.e., Israel’s firstfruits. The mystery of the gospel was… Gentile inclusion, and yet here there were some gentile believers saying there is NO resurrection! — a rather bizarre claim for a card-carrying Christian to make given the resurrection is the mainstay of said belief.
THAT should tell you something… certain gentile believers understood the promises to Israel BUT completely misunderstood their place as beneficiaries (Rom 15:27) of the fulfilment of Israel’s promises, of which included resurrection. Some were concluding that their inclusion now meant God was done with Israel — Paul says most emphatically, WONG!! Paul points out the obvious, as in… IF God has rejected Israel of which Jesus came THEN Jesus himself likewise of Israel, must be excluded too; which faulty belief actually left them squarely in the do do… which is what Paul is pointing out in that whole passage, vss. 12-19, 29-32.
That’s all true… and your point exactly?
Resurrection was promised to Israel on the condition that they return to God.
Deut. 30:1-3 " Now it shall come to pass, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your god drives you, and you return to the Lord your God and obey His voice, according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul, that the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you."
What many in Israel didn’t realize was that they were NOT Israel or even a part of Israel ( the land of the living). John 8:33 “They answered Him, " We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can you say, ’ You will be made free’?”
The descendants of Abraham are those who follow the same God as Abraham. Jesus was returning to the God of His Father, Abraham, the Father of all who believe.
Not so, according to 1 Thess. 4: 17.
I shamelessly copied part of JP’s post on another thread, pertinent I think:
"The non-bodily resurrection crew tend to deny any miraculous activity having been objectively real event (at best, sometimes just straight out lies), so regard GosLuke (and GosJohn and GosMatt and even GosMark) as being mythically late constructions. This idea is sometimes (though not always) paired with attempts at arguing that Paul of Tarsus taught a non-bodily resurrection of Jesus; but it always involves the idea that the original experiences were at best only mental visions of a Jesus whose body remained dead somewhere (consumed by dogs and vultures, in Crossan’s pithy way of putting it.) The late Robert Funk underlined this in his inaugural address to the Jesus Seminar (whose group he instrumentally formed) when he said that “we need a new fiction” and he hoped the JSem could help supply this new fiction to replace the old, outdated fiction of the miraculous Jesus (especially including the bodily resurrection). Notably, another key member of the JSem back in the 90s, Burton Mack, vociferously thought we dang well didn’t need a new fiction either because the old fiction had radically damaged human history down to the Reagan administration. 
Without going into the pros and cons of variations of this position, such proponents would simply reply that GosLuke only shows that bodily resurrection had been developed in some Christian communities by the time of its composition: its testimony about what happened to Jesus in this regard (and many others) would be rejected as fictional."
Even if the Bible is “infallible”…like the elephant in this Indian story…we only see part of its truth…like the blind men, describing the elephant!
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Checkout his youtube channel.
Pertinent I think to also point out… I’m not aware of anyone in this thread holding to a non-bodily resurrection of Jesus. That said… I aware that some members here do deny and so reject the reliability of certain texts that trouble their own suppositions, claiming such texts to be in err, i.e., misrepresenting or having mistakenly reported or recorded the truth, etc.
Again… some likewise in-kind even question the reality of the transfiguration claiming such to be nothing more than mere mental visions, i.e., what three guys independently witnessed was no miraculous event, but a figment of their collective imaginations.
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Well worth the read.