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“Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:” ‭‭1 John‬ ‭4:2‬ ‭KJV‬‬

Not addressing whether this is translated correctly in the present tense, though it would help to consult the Greek text.

The question is whether Jesus after He resurrected was

  • in a body
  • in a fleshly body
  • in a spiritual body
  • in a heavenly body
  • all the above

“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”” ‭‭Luke‬ ‭24:39‬ ‭

And in light of the following verse

“It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.” ‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭15:44, 48‬ ‭

Is Jesus currently IN the flesh? If yes, in what sense is He in the flesh?

(Not part of the question but something to consider for a future question, do angels/heavenly beings have spiritual bodies and are they fleshly bodies too?)

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    "is come" in KJV English means "has come" (i.e. the "is" is auxiliary, not present)
    – b a
    Dec 28, 2020 at 21:13
  • @ba understood, thank you. Hence not leaning on the Greek as much as coming to the same translation of is/has come from a forensic angle. If Jesus is currently in the flesh, then it stands to reason that, not only has He come in the flesh, He is come in the flesh. Leaning solely on the “has come” is but a partial truth potentially widening the narrow criteria John was arguing for identifying anti-Christ spirits. However if He is not in the flesh, the “is come” is incorrect in modern English. At which point John is merely referring to Jesus’ incarnate state. Dec 28, 2020 at 21:24
  • ἐληλυθότ (1 John 4:2)(undisputed) is the perfect participle active so 'has come' or 'having come'.
    – Nigel J
    Dec 28, 2020 at 21:55
  • Once again thank also @NigelJ but like I said in the second paragraph I’m not addressing the translation of the text. Dec 28, 2020 at 21:57
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    Technically - all ‘bodies’ are flesh. Man”s body was made ‘out of’ earth. So were animals. All have flesh. [bodies]. But, ‘flesh’ does not mean earthly. Angels bodies are not ‘earthly’ - but nevertheless are ‘flesh’.
    – Dave
    Dec 29, 2020 at 1:51

8 Answers 8

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The question is whether Jesus after He resurrected was:

  • in a body
  • in a fleshly body
  • in a spiritual body
  • in a heavenly body
  • all the above

I would say all of the above but with the following qualifications:

  • in a body?

In Moses' origin story of man, Adam was composed to two parts; a clay body animated by life giving breath. Together, these two components resulted in a living "person" aka "soul". In ancient Egyptian religion, the "soul" inhabited the body. Their deity Horus, the falcon, "embodied" this idea. The bird imagery suggested Horus' mobility and the idea that the same soul could thrive independent of a body, or move from body to body. (We see bird imagery in the dove that descended onto/into Jesus at his baptism). So when we say "in a body" we are actually moving away from Moses' conception into a more Egyptian and, I think, Greek notion. But that is clearly how Paul saw it:

[2Co 5:1-4 NET] (1) For we know that if our earthly house, the tent we live in, is dismantled, we have a building from God, a house not built by human hands, that is eternal in the heavens. (2) For in this earthly house we groan, because we desire to put on our heavenly dwelling, (3) if indeed, after we have put on our heavenly house, we will not be found naked. (4) For we groan while we are in this tent, since we are weighed down, because we do not want to be unclothed, but clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

So Paul clearly saw the person living in a replaceable body-house.

  • in a fleshly body?

Yes. Jesus proved this by eating fish. However, Paul explains that there are different kinds of flesh and the natural body is mortal and has to be changed:

[1Co 15:52 NKJV] (52) in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

[1Co 15:39 NLT] (39) Similarly there are different kinds of flesh--one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.

[1Co 15:37 NASB95] (37) and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else.

  • in a spiritual body?

The word "spirit" is bogus. It was coined for English translations from the Latin word "spiritus" which means "breath" (or "moving air"). We see clearly from context that he has in mind "the breath of life" from Genesis 2:7:

[1Co 15:44-45 NLT] (44) They are buried as natural human bodies, but they will be raised as spiritual bodies. For just as there are natural bodies, there are also spiritual bodies. (45) The Scriptures tell us, "The first man, Adam, became a living person." But the last Adam--that is, Christ--is a life-giving Spirit.

In other words, as the breath of life enters clay and animates it, so Christ enters a person's situation and produces everlasting life. So we should ditch the bogus words "spirit" and "spiritual" in favor of "breath" and "pneumatic" (or "breath-").

  • in a heavenly body?

Christ's body is a heavenly body primarily because he is in heaven. Angels, for example, are basically men who live in the sky. They are DNA compatible with humans as exhibited in their desire to leave the sky for the American Dream and their successful mating with women (Gen 6).

So, to repeat, I'm with "all of the above".

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  • Was it a fleshly body, you say yes because he ate fish. manna is said to be the food of angels so clearly they eat too and in the new kingdom, with new bodies we will again be eating and drinking of the fruit of the vine. What I’m saying is, that it’s not so obvious, unless angels also have fleshly bodies because they too eat. Mar 12, 2021 at 13:42
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    @NihilSineDeo Please see the section of my answer, "in a heavenly body?" Thanks.
    – Ruminator
    Mar 12, 2021 at 13:57
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    Psalm 78:25 is strong evidence that angels have a body just like Jesus had when he ate fish: [Psa 78:25 NLT] (25) They ate the food of angels! God gave them all they could hold.
    – Ruminator
    Mar 12, 2021 at 14:04
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Moving back in 1 Cor 15 from vv. 44 and 48 in the OP, a question is raised in v. 35, which Paul answers in vv. 36-49:

35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” 36 You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. 38 But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. 39 For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Michael Heiser simply but helpfully points out that the answer to v. 35 is not a juxtaposition of body and spirit, but a confirmation of something bodily. There is a natural body and a spiritual body, which is established by v. 44. This observation also makes sense of Paul's words in Phil 3:21:
"he will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to his body of glory." and 2 Cor 4:6: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." Glory is connected to the physical body of Jesus.

(https://www.nakedbiblepodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Transcript-88-Spiritual-Body.pdf, especially pp. 8-9).

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Is the resurrected body of Jesus fleshly?

No. The apostle Peter plainly tells us:

For Christ died once for all time for sins, a righteous person for unrighteous ones, in order to lead you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.–1 Peter 3:18 [bold mine]

Furthermore, Paul says:

But I tell you this, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s Kingdom, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.–1 Cor. 15:50 [bold mine]

So why did Jesus say, "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones just as you see that I have." (‭‭Luke‬ ‭24:39)?
In verse 38, Jesus' own words state that his disciples about what was happening and who this was in front of them. Jesus was in effect saying 'I am not a figment of your imagination, but I have been raised up just as I told you previously.'

In order to prove to them further, Jesus asks for something to eat. (vs. 41-43) But this begs the question, "If Jesus was 'made alive in the spirit' how could he have consumed food?"
There are several accounts in the Bible that show angels, i.e. spirit creatures, taking on human form and physically interacting with humans:

1 The two angels arrived at Sodom by evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the earth. 2 And he said: “Please, my lords, turn aside, please, into the house of your servant and stay overnight and have your feet washed. Then you may get up early and travel on your way.” To this they said: “No, we will stay overnight in the public square.” 3 But he was so insistent with them that they went with him to his house. Then he made a feast for them, and he baked unleavened bread, and they ate.–Gen. 19:1-3 [bold mine]

Then he lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree. But suddenly an angel touched him and said to him: “Get up and eat.”–1 Kings 19:5 [bold mine]

On that very night the angel of Jehovah went out and struck down 185,000 men in the camp of the Assyrians. When people rose up early in the morning, they saw all the dead bodies.–2 Kings 19:35 [bold mine]

But look! Jehovah’s angel was standing there, and a light shone in the prison cell. Hitting Peter on the side, he woke him, saying: “Get up quickly!” And the chains fell off his hands.–Acts 12:7 [bold mine]

So 1 John 4:2 is talking about those who were teaching doctrine and that if the doctrine was declaring that Jesus had come to redeem mankind, then it was a valid doctrine. John further states in verse 3 that "every inspired statement that does not acknowledge Jesus does not originate with God".

[All scripture quotations from the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Study Edition)]

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  • Thank you for your response. First flesh and blood is different from flesh and bone. Second no where does it say angels take human form, for all we know they already have a human-like form but superior, so that’s adding unsubstantiated claims to the text. Mar 14, 2021 at 3:32
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It is clear that Jesus rose in the same body in which He lived, for He showed the scars to Thomas (John 20:27) and even ate fish and honeycomb (Luke 24:42) to show that it was a real flesh, the same flesh which was dead for three days and now resurrected.

And similarly did He affect to rise from dead Lazarus (John 11:44) and also all those righteous dead in Jerusalem who rose after His crucifixion and entered the City in their physical resurrected bodies, with the same bones, which were dead just few minutes before (Matthew 27:53).

That means that also all humans will be resurrected in their physical bodies, the very bodies they lived. But, of course, those bodies will change and be transfigured, they will no more be susceptible to illnesses and destruction; they will no more need sex and procreation (Matthew 22:30); they will no more need physical food for nourishment (1 Cor. 6:13); they will participate in eternal bliss just like their souls that survived their death, for by grace of God the created souls of men survive the death of their bodies, just like Jesus' created human soul survived death of His body for it is exactly together with this soul that the incarnate God-Logos went and preached to the dead peoples' souls, even of those people who died as early as during the deluge of Noah's times (1 Peter 3:19), while His body laid dead in the tomb. Thus, all souls of dead people are living and it is very important to pray for them to God, as it is deeply ingrained in traditions to which vast majority of Christians belong: Catholics, Orthodox and I guess also mainstream Protestants as well.

Now since we have established that it is the physical, fleshly body that will be resurrected, then we can move to the issue that this very physical/fleshly body will become a spiritual body, for the Holy Spirit will transfigure not only human intellectual soul, but also human body, so that "the perishable will be clothed in imperishable" (1 Cor. 15:53) applies both to soul and body, to the entire human person. But what is the "cloth" that acts as the Principle of imperishability for both bodies and souls of men? Of course the divine grace is this "cloth", which metaphorically is also called the "fire" (cf. Matthew 3:11). Divine uncreated grace makes creatures invested with the feature of uncreatedness, so that creature becomes uncreaturly and divine; the created becomes uncreated by grace and not on its own right and according to its own essence. For an analogy: we can say that a piece of iron is just a greyish-blackish piece of iron, but when it is put on fire, it starts to glow and becomes red and fiery, similarly our created bodies at resurrection will become invested with and clad in immortalizing divine grace and so eternally.

Thus, a question "with which body did Jesus rise?" is apparently misleading, for Jesus' body is both fleshly with regard of its material "stuff" and spiritual, for it is the same material stuff, the same flesh has been clad in divine immortalizing grace even while He was alive and not only at His resurrection, for we see that the same flesh was manifested to the disciples as transfigured visibly His face having started to shine like the sun on the mount Tabor (Matthew 17:2).

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I agree that there are details that have not been recorded in scripture, but we are given a significant amount of information nonetheless. The fact that we cannot answer every question does not mean we cannot answer any question.

By my count there are 7 separate questions in the OP; #4 & #7 are phrased in such a way that they can be read multiple ways. If #4 & #7 are interpreted in the sense I propose below, I believe we can indeed answer all 7 questions. In fact, I believe the authors wanted us to be able to answer these questions, because these questions are at the heart of what they were willing to live & die for.

--

1. In a body

Yes

He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. (Matthew 28:6)

His body was not there because He had redeemed it. The proclamation of Easter, which began in Jerusalem, would never have gotten off the ground if a body lay moldering in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb.

--

2. In a fleshly body

Yes

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. (Luke 24:39)

Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. (John 20:27)

Jesus explicitly claims to have flesh and bones. He also has form, including hands, feet, side, etc.

Now what about the apparent conflict between 1 Cor 15:50 (“flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s kingdom”) and Luke 24:39 (“flesh and bones as you see that I have”)?

This can be solved through formal logic:

  1. Flesh ^ Blood = FALSE (1 Cor 15:50)

  2. Flesh ^ Bone = TRUE (Luke 24:39)

  3. Therefore, Flesh = TRUE, Bone = TRUE, Blood = FALSE

I found The Votive Soul’s comments about not bleeding despite retaining wounds to be very insightful.

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3. In a spiritual body

Yes

It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. (1 Cor 15:44)

Luke 24:39 + 1 Cor 15:44 means that a “physical body” and a “spiritual body” are not mutually exclusive. The text certainly does not provide a course in celestial biology, anatomy, and physiology. I don’t think that was Paul’s point. Paul makes it clear that a change was wrought upon Jesus’ body such that He could no longer die:

…the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. (1 Cor 15:52-53)

Paul refers to this modified, glorified body using words like “spiritual” and “incorruptible.”

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4. In a heavenly body

It depends on what we mean by “heavenly body”.

In everyday English a “heavenly body” refers to objects in outer space like the moon, Saturn, etc. If this is the sense in which we are using the word, then I think it is safe to say the answer is no.

But if a heavenly body means a body that can dwell “in the heavens”, or perhaps to be more precise, in the presence of God, the answer is yes:

Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. (John 20: 17)

And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. (Acts 7:56)

The embodied, glorified Christ can exist in the highest level of Divine glory. If that is not a heavenly body (in the 1 Corinthians sense of the word, not the astronomical sense), what is?

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5. All the above

Yes, if we apply the definition for “heavenly body” discussed in #4.

--

6. Is Jesus currently IN the flesh?

Yes

53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. (1 Cor 15:53-54)

Surely nobody would try to conclude that at the resurrection we are going to get better bodies than Jesus did. I understand Paul to mean—to use terminology applied to other things that decay—a resurrected body has no expiration date.

Jesus’ resurrected body was incorruptible and immortal. If death took from Him something that could never be truly restored, wouldn’t that be a victory for death? If the resurrected body was just a temporary state to impress/inspire people, how exactly would Jesus dispose of an incorruptible body?

The word rendered "incorruptible" is ἀφθαρσία (from ἄφθαρτος), which connotes: indestructible, imperishable, undecaying, unending existence. (see here & here)

If Jesus’ resurrected body later decayed, were discarded, or ceased to exist, it wouldn’t be incorruptible.

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7. If yes, in what sense is He in the flesh?

It is unclear to me exactly what this is asking….

The best answer I can offer here is that He is in the flesh now in the same sense He was when He appeared to the apostles (compare #2 & #6), and in the same sense He will be when this promise to the righteous is fulfilled:

“And they shall see his face” (Revelation 22:4)

He still has the same body He had on Easter. Some feel apprehension about the idea of an embodied God. To borrow an effective rhetorical question from Jeffrey Holland:

If the idea of an embodied God is repugnant, why are the central doctrines and singularly most distinguishing characteristics of all Christianity the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the physical Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ? (see here)

--

Conclusion

Bodily resurrection is an absolutely central piece of the Biblical message. God redeems what He created. Easter and the Christian message do not work without the empty tomb.

This place of central importance is emphasized by the fact that the only detail of the resurrection narrative found in all four Gospels—with no divergence whatsoever—is the fact that the tomb was empty.

Yes, Jesus rose bodily from the dead, He took back His body from death, and the victory was permanent.

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I believe the following things:

1.) Jesus resurrected into the very body which He had when He died on the cross. It was a spiritual event, caused by "the glory of the Father" (Romans 6:4), but the effect was entirely physical, and occurred in the natural, material realm. Jesus plainly said, after His resurrection, that He was not mere spirit, but had flesh and bones, something spirits do not have (Luke 24:39). He invited them to touch Him and experience Him through their tactile senses, to prove the reality of His resurrected physicality. He was not a mirage, or a vision, or mass hallucination. He was present and accounted for, in true physical fashion.

However...

2.) Christ's physically resurrected reality defies the laws of physics and all other forms of natural science and medicine. His body had massive, unhealed wounds in them, and yet, He wasn't bleeding all over the place, and felt no pain, as shown when He invited Thomas to "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side." (John 20:27). No normal, human body can experience holes in the hands and feet, and have a gaping hole the size of a Roman spear-head sufficient for a man to put his entire hand into it, and be considered standard.

It appears therefore, that there was no blood in His resurrected body (an assumption, I admit, but circumstantially born out by the evidence, i.e. the bloodlessness of His resurrected, but still mortally wounded/unhealed body).

This shows that, while His body was physical and real, it had become like something the world had never seen before.

3.) Jesus could obscure Himself supernaturally, after He resurrected, so that close, personal friends and disciples, who had walked with Him, talked with Him, and had even eaten the Passover Seder with Him before He was crucified, couldn't recognize Him (Luke 24:16). This isn't something a normal human can do, without a disguise or some other act of subterfuge. Jesus somehow made His face not look like His face, or somehow blinded these men's minds from experiencing standard facial recognition.

If the former, then Jesus can shift the physical structure and appearance of His face at will, making the physical nature of His human body unlike anything that has ever existed before.

4.) Jesus can dematerialize and rematerialize Himself at will (Luke 24:31 and John 20:19 and 26). Whether He can miraculously teleport, become invisible (i.e. refract light away from Himself), or phase Himself through walls, or all of the above, the fact is, in order to do so, the nature of His physical body had, in the resurrection, to have undergone a fundamental shift in what other normal human bodies are capable of doing. In order to do what Jesus did (disappear, reappear, teleport, and/or etc.) means that Jesus had to have been able to divest Himself of any standard molecular reality, while maintaining control over His existence in order to reinvest Himself with molecular reality. Physical molecules at the microscopic level are still physical, and cannot occupy the same space as say, the molecules that made up the door Jesus must have teleported or phased through in John 20. This means His molecules passed out of physical existence into a spiritual reality we cannot comprehend, then re-emerged back into comprehensible, physical reality.

5.) Jesus can defy gravity (Acts 1:9). As Christ ascended through the atmosphere, some scientific realities must be understood. Eventually, as one ascends higher and higher in the sky, breathable oxygen disappears, and the temperature plummets dramatically. If Christ didn't somehow phase His physical body out into a spiritual reality, then it would have to be realized that Jesus can exist in a physical frame without the need to breath, or to have warmth.

Since Jesus is now immortal, it might stand to reason, of course, that He had and has no need of blood, oxygen, and etc., in order to keep Him alive, but if His body was truly physical when He resurrected (and it was) then by necessity, unless we want to think of Jesus as some merely re-animated corpse a la a horror or zombie flick, we must recognize that such a physical body must still have some kind of physical needs. Jesus could eat (Luke 24:42). He could speak, (obviously, no Scripture reference needed!), but speaking requires the ability to breath, as exhaled air passes over the vocal cords.

And yet, as He ascended physically, if no change in Him occurred, Jesus would have lost the ability to breath, and thus, to speak, in any physical, natural way, that is.

6.) If no change into a spiritual form took place some time during the ascension, Jesus would have had to move His body to escape velocity, which is 7 miles/second, or 25,000 mph. And since escape velocity is not dependent upon the mass of the body leaving orbit, but rather upon the body from which the escaping body is departing, the same would be true of Christ's body: He would have had to move that physical form 25,000 mph to leave earth's orbit. See: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-es...age-human-body

This is where the whole Jesus still has a physical body begins to really break down. The stress of tidal and g-forces of 25,000 mph upon an unprotected human body, which hasn't been glorified yet in heaven, would tear it apart (This is called the Roche Limit. It's what causes meteors to break up in earth's atmosphere as they descend through the sky, or satellites as they lose orbit and fall into the atmosphere). We could of course argue that the power of the Most High would hold Christ's body together, but...

7.) If Christ ascended through outer space in a physical form, and God kept it from being ripped to shreds, allowed it to survive without breathing, and kept it from immediately freezing into a solid mass of ice, then at some point however long it took, Christ ascended to a realm within the physical universe, meaning the "heaven" He ascended to was merely some place in the vastness of space. If Christ's body is still physical, then the heaven He ascended to has to be physical as well, and thus, a part of the material universe. This means the heaven we all want to go to and enjoy has a geo-spatial reality and relationship to where we are today on earth, that, with enough time and the proper heading, without any collisions, we could physically travel there, taking perhaps the same route Christ took in His ascension. Newtonian physics would allow us to get there, eventually, even if it took a million earth years.

But if Christ ascended to the Third Heaven, i.e. the Heaven of Heaven's, that cannot contain God, according to Solomon, then Jesus at some point had to have transcended the Second Heaven (i.e. the Celestial Realm of the physical universe) and gone off in a spiritual unknown.

8.) With all that being said, God can re-materialize the physical body of His Son at will in the physical, material realm--meaning it still exists (Acts 23:11 and 2 Timothy 4:17).

9.) The final clincher, if you will, is, I believe, 1 Corinthians 15:45. The Last Adam, which is Jesus, became a "living spirit". The Greek word for "became" is Ἐγένετο - egeneto, the same Greek word in John 1:14 regarding the Logos becoming flesh.

Just as the Logos became human by being made flesh, so the human who the Logos became, reverted back in the Ascension, and was again made spirit, but in this case, a living, or in some translations "life-giving" spirit, a sure reference to the Holy Spirit (John 6:63).

The Spirit of God and of His Son, is the Spirit of Christ, and Christ in us, is the hope of glory (See: Galatians 4:6, Romans 8:9, Colossians 1:27, with John 14:23).

Jesus then, actively alive in the human believer, is no longer flesh and blood, but is spirit.

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  • A very astute observation about a a resurrected body not having blood. Mar 14, 2021 at 2:40
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+25

This will not answer the question because I do not believe it can be answered. However, I have assembled some information to illustrate the gaps in our Biblical understanding of this subject. Consider the following facts:

  • Jesus asked Thomas to examine and touch him to confirm Jesus' identity, This experienced strengthened Thomas' faith by confirming Jesus' earthly body
  • Philip had an earthly body but could be teleported to distant locations as occurred in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch.
  • Angels are spirits (Heb 1:14) as is the LORD in the OT (John 4:24) but that did not prevent angels and the LORD appearing to Abraham as ordinary men with ordinary-looking bodies who ate Abraham's food, Gen 18.
  • According to 1 Cor 15, the resurrected will be given heavenly bodies. However, we know nothing about what that means nor how such bodies are similar or different from earthly bodies, except, that they will live forever.

More than this we cannot say because it is not revealed.

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    Anything worth studying should be studied in depth. Yes on the surface there seems no way to know but a forensic analysis seems to indicate much can be known, case and point Paul seemed to know a lot about it and the Bereans would have checked him with Scripture. So it can be found out more than superficially, even if not fully. Appreciate the lost. Mar 14, 2021 at 3:36
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Was Jesus dead/ resurrected or Alive. Conflicting statements / depends how someone interpret the versus, can make an argument both ways, but the strongest evidence would be that Jesus was not a spirit.

He is either a spirit or flesh & bones – there is no middle ground or evidence of the same.

Spirit cannot die again - therefore no need to eat.

Luke 20:36 36 Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection. Rom 6:9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. Hebrews 9:27 - 27 Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,

Luke 24:42 - ate fish & honeycomb
Luke 24:30 – ate bread

Spirit has no flesh / bone – no need to show the marks

Luke 24:37-39 - 37 They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. 38 He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? 39 Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” 40 When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet.

John 20:24-27 - showed Thomas his body / flesh & bone / body marks

John 20:20 - 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

Is Jesus alive or dead

Mary - why was Jesus disguised as a gardner – scared to be captured as he is not a spirit or is he playing a joke – if he is a spirit he cannt die and has no need to fear.
What was the significance of John 20:14-17 if Jesus was a spirit. John 20:14-17 – 17…“Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father……….” Luke 24:23 23 but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Mark 16:11 11 When they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen him, they did not believe it.

Hebrews 5:7 Who in the days of his flesh, with a strong cry and tears, offering up prayers and supplications to him that was able to save him from death, was heard for his reverence.

Why protect bones if someone is already dead / spirit – bones

Psalm 34:20 - 20 he protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken.

John 19:33-34 - 33 But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.

Don’t break his bones as he is dead, but pierce his side - this would only help Jesus as it would stop blood clot.

Sign of Jonah - alive

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