ews also looked for no restoration of the
fleshly body; for he not only studiously omits even the faintest
allusion to any such notion, but positively describes "the spirits
of just men made perfect in the heavenly Jerusalem, with an
innumerable company of angels, and with the general assembly and
church of the first born." The Jews and early Christians who
believed in a bodily resurrection did not suppose the departed
could enter heaven until after that great consummation.

The most cogent proof that the New Testament does not teach the
resurrection of the same body that is buried in the grave is
furnished by the celebrated passage in Paul's Epistle to the
Corinthians. The apostle's premises, reasoning, and conclusion are
as follows: "Christ is risen from the dead, become the first
fruits of them that slept." That is to say, all who have died,
except Christ, are still tarrying in the great receptacle of souls
under the earth. As the first fruits go before the harvest, so the
solitary risen Christ is the forerunner to the general
resurrection to follow. "But some one will say, How are the dead
raised up? and with what body do they come?" Mark the apostle's
reply, and it will appear inexplicable how any one can consider
him as arguing for the resurrection of the identical body that was
laid in the grave, particle for particle. "Thou fool! that which
thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but naked
grain, and God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him." "There
are celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies;" "there is a natural
body, and there is a spiritual body;" "the first man is of the
earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" "flesh and
blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God;" "we shall all be
changed," and "bear the image of the heavenly, as we have borne
the image of the earthy." The analogy which has been so strangely
perverted by most commentators is used by Paul thus. The germ
which was to spring up to a new life, clothed with a new body, was
not any part of the fleshly body buried in the grave, but was the
soul itself, once contained in the old body, but released from its
hull in the grave and preserved in the under world until Christ
shall call it forth to be invested with a "glorious," "powerful,"
"spiritual," "incorruptible" body. When a grain of wheat is sown,
that is not the body that shall be; but the mysterious principle
of life, latent in the germ of the seed, springs up a