The Thesis

Apart from the testimony of Acts 18.1–17, we have little information about Paul's first visit to the city of Corinth. On the basis of 1 Corinthians 15, however, we may surmise that when he founded the Christian community there, he did not—as he had done in Thessalonica—neglect to talk about the resurrection of the dead. Nothing suggests that the Corinthians did not receive his preaching on the topic well, but apparently at some point after he had left the community, factionalism broke out and some members of the church started to declare, against the apostle's teaching, that ‘there is no resurrection of the dead’ (1 Cor 15.12).Footnote ¹

The present essay will focus on Paul's response to that declaration. In particular, it will focus on the argument that Paul develops in 15.45–49 and its immediate context and on the ways in which that argument interacts with the intellectual presuppositions of those Corinthians whose scepticism he quotes in 15.12, cited above. Several scholars have argued that these Christians were influenced by the kind of Hellenistic Jewish philosophy that we find in the literature of Philo of Alexandria and that their rejection of the concept of the resurrection was particularly informed by the theory of ‘two men’ that Philo, if not invented, then at least promoted and developed throughout his writings.Footnote ² I agree with that assessment. In my view, Paul's reasoning in 1 Cor 15.45–49 is almost incomprehensible if we do not assume that Philo's theory played a central role for the position of his critics.

However, even though scholarship has in this way progressed in the sense that it has been able to isolate the relevant religionsgeschichtliche context for Paul's argument in 15.45–49, I shall claim that it still has not been able to grasp the true nature of Paul's argumentative strategy in that passage. What has been lacking is a willingness to distinguish between the ways in which Paul interacts with the theory of the two men itself and the ways in which he interacts with the Corinthian sceptics' interpretation and use of that theory. Scholars who assume a ‘Philonic’ background to 15.45–49 often argue that Paul is acting polemically in these verses,Footnote ³ and to a certain extent that makes sense. In 15.46 he discusses the order of ‘the psychic’ and ‘the spiritual’ in a way that seems to contradict what the sceptics had been suggesting, and a little earlier, in 15.36, he even identifies these people as morons (cf. ἄϕρων σύ). However, Paul nowhere dismisses or polemicizes against the theory of the two men itself. Rather, as will be elaborated below, what he does in vv. 45–49 is to reinterpret or rewrite that theory and then use it positively in his own exposition of how the doctrine of the resurrection should be rightly perceived.Footnote ⁴

In the course of this essay, I shall examine why Paul chose to interact with the theory of the two men in that particular way, i.e., why he chose to transform and appropriate it rather than dismiss it. The answer I shall propose is that he did so because his strategic aim in vv. 45–49 and the latter part of ch. 15 as a whole was to convince his critics of the truth of his eschatological preaching by proving that the theory on the basis of which they had so far rejected his doctrine of the resurrection actually supports it once that theory as well as his own doctrine of the resurrection have both been properly understood.

The essay has three parts. In part one, I shall make some preliminary remarks of relevance for the subsequent analysis of 1 Corinthians 15. In part two, I shall provide a discussion of Philo's theory of the two men and indicate how that theory may have informed the position of the Corinthian sceptics. Finally, in part three, I shall examine the text of the latter part of 1 Corinthians 15 with a view to substantiating my understanding of that text as outlined above.

1. Preliminaries

The first remark concerns the prehistory of 1 Corinthians 15 and the position of the Corinthian sceptics. With a number of other interpreters I take it that the concept of the resurrection that these people were rejecting was not quite the same as the one that Paul develops and defends in 1 Corinthians 15. The doctrine of the resurrection presented in that chapter may be summarized in the following manner. At the end of time, when ‘the last trumpet’ will sound (15.52), the dead will be brought back to life, and their bodies as well as those of the living will be transformed from flesh and blood into spirit (15.44, 51–53). All of them will then ascend to heaven. From a number of passages we know that, according to Paul, people who come to faith receive an infusion of God's spirit into their hearts (cf., e.g., Rom 5.5; 1 Cor 2.12–16; Gal 4.6). What will happen at the eschaton is then that God will convert the bodies of those who will be saved into the same substance that he has already infused into their inner persons. This means that once these individuals arrive in the heavenly regions, they will have been transformed into purely spiritual entities. In that way, they will come to resemble and share the nature of the entities that already reside there—the sun, the moon, and the stars (1 Cor 15.40–41), which likewise, according to Paul, consist of spirit.Footnote ⁵

This, however, was hardly what he told the Corinthians when he introduced them to the doctrine during his first stay with them, and it certainly was not what they took him to have been telling them. Obviously, we have no hard evidence on how Paul preached the resurrection when he founded the community in Corinth. But since most scholars believe that he established the community there around the time of the composition of his first letter to the Thessalonians,Footnote ⁶ one may suspect that he will have told the Corinthians more or less the same as he put down in writing in 1 Thess 4.13–18. And nowhere in that passage does Paul speak about a pneumatic bodily change. What he tells the Thessalonians is merely that at the end of time the dead ‘will rise’ (ἀναστήσονται) and that ‘all of us’ will then be ‘snatched away in the clouds’ (ἁρπαγησόμεθα ἐν νεϕέλαις) and be with the Lord for all eternity. Obviously, Paul may have intended to imply that some form of bodily transformation would be involved in the process, but he does not say so explicitly and what he does say could certainly be taken to suggest that he was expecting the dead to be raised and elevated to the realm of heaven in the very bodies in which they had lived and died during their time on earth. After all, that sort of resurrection belief seems to have been around in ancient Jewish thought, as is testified, for instance, by 2 Macc 7.11 and 14.46.Footnote ⁷

Whether or not Paul was actually expecting that sort of resurrection when he stayed with the Corinthians for the first time, it seems clear from 1 Cor 15.35 that this was how the Corinthians had understood him and furthermore that it was precisely the idea of a fleshly resurrection (rather than the notion of a heavenly afterlife as such) that some of them were now objecting to.Footnote ⁸ If, as I have suggested, the sceptics behind vv. 12 and 35 were in fact influenced by Philo of Alexandria, it is quite understandable that they reacted dismissively to this idea. For as Dale Martin and Jeffrey Asher have pointed out, the idea of human bodies entering the heavenly regions fundamentally contradicted the hierarchical order that most intellectuals in the ancient world, including Philo, ascribed to the cosmos.Footnote ⁹ However, Paul's critics probably found the idea of a fleshly resurrection not only ridiculous, but also unattractive. We will see this once we have considered Philo's theory of the two men.Footnote ¹⁰

Before we get so far, however, I must add another preliminary remark. Some of the scholars who interpret vv. 45–49 against the background of Philo's theory of the two men take it that neither Paul nor his readers were actually familiar with Philo's writings. Rather, they suggest that Paul, the Corinthians, and Philo of Alexandria were all drawing on a common intellectual tradition.Footnote ¹¹ This is certainly possible. However, why should it be safer to assume that all these people were indebted to a common tradition, the existence of which we may only hypothesize, than to assume that Paul and his readers could actually have been familiar with Philo's own writings (possibly as mediated to them through Apollos), which we know to have existed at the time of the Corinthian correspondence and which we similarly know to have been ingested with enthusiasm by later generations of Christians? In what follows I will allow myself to assume that both Paul and the Corinthian sceptics knew certain ideas of Philo's—and even knew them fairly well. Clearly, the only way to prove the legitimacy of such an approach is to show in detail that it generates a better and more coherent exegesis of Paul's text than we would have been able to produce without it.Footnote ¹² Let us now turn to Philo and his theory of the two men.

2. Philo's Theory of ‘Two Men’ and its Reception in Corinth

Philo developed his theory of the two men on the basis of the creation narratives given in the book of Genesis. As is well known, Genesis offers two different accounts of the creation of the human species (one in 1.26–27 and another 2.7). While this has suggested to modern scholarship that the text of Genesis has come down to us as a compound of different sources, it suggested to Philo that God had created two categorically different ‘types of people’ (Leg. 1.31): a ‘heavenly man’ (οὐράνιος ἄνθρωπος), ‘fashioned in the image of God’ (cf. Gen 1.26–27), and an ‘earthly man’ (γήϊνος ἄνθρωπος), ‘moulded out of clay’ (cf. Gen 2.7).

Philo never states explicitly how the distinction between these people should be understood, but he comments on their different characteristics at various places throughout his work. In Opif. 134–135 and Leg. 1.31–32, for instance, he states that the heavenly man is noetic, incorporeal, genderless, ‘a kind of idea or type or seal’ (ἰδέα τις ἢ γένος ἢ σϕραγίς) and ‘entirely without part in corruptible and terrestrial substance’ (ϕθαρτῆς καὶ συνόλως γεώδους οὐσίας ἀμέτοχος), whereas the earthly man is a sense-perceptible, mortal, and gendered synthesis of body and mind that ‘partakes of quality’ (μετέχων ποιότητος). In Leg. 1.92–96 he explains that the heavenly man is perfect and ‘possesses virtue instinctively’ (ἔχει τὴν ἀρετὴν αὐτομαθῶς) unlike the earthly man, who is flawed and therefore fully dependent on ethical teaching and other forms of instruction (cf. also Her. 45–53). And in Leg. 3.97–104 he declares that whereas the earthly man may be able to apprehend the existence of God through inferences based on perception through the senses, the heavenly man is able to ‘lift his eyes’ and to gaze directly into the essence of the divine.Footnote ¹³

How should we make sense of this set of contrasts? Or to put it differently, what, according to Philo, are these distinctive types of ἄνθρωποι? Several scholars have argued that the heavenly man should be conceptualized as the Platonic idea of man and the earthly man as the material manifestation of that idea in the realm of phenomena.Footnote ¹⁴ This is understandable given that Philo refers to the heavenly man as ἰδέα τις ἢ γένος ἢ σϕραγίς in Opif. 134. However, as David Runia observes, the fact that Philo describes this man precisely as ἰδέα τις κτλ. suggests that he uses the term ‘idea’ here in a loose and slightly untechnical sense.Footnote ¹⁵ Furthermore, it is difficult to see how a Platonic idea should be able to possess virtue instinctively and gaze into the divine essence. And as Gerhard Sellin has pointed out, the fact that Philo identifies the two men as διττὰ ἀνθρώπων γένη in Leg. 1.31 renders this interpretation almost impossible since, according to a Platonic conceptuality, one γένος cannot operate as the material manifestation of another.Footnote ¹⁶

In my view, Runia's reading is a lot more convincing. At various places throughout his work Philo indicates that prior to their lives in the flesh human beings pre-existed as pure and disembodied minds (Gig. 12; Somn. 1.135–138) and once their lives on earth come to an end, they will return to that form of existence (Leg. 1.105; 2.77; Cher. 114; Sacr. 5; QG 3.11).Footnote ¹⁷ According to Runia, it is precisely this contrast between life in the flesh and life as a bodiless mind that is highlighted by the theory of the two men. In Runia's words, ‘the contrast that Philo has in mind’ is a contrast ‘between the “true man” and man in his corporeal existence’,Footnote ¹⁸ and the true man is to be defined ‘in eschatological terms’ as ‘man as he is when he has left the body and all earthly cares behind and as an ἀσώματος ϕύσις is able to contemplate the divine things without ceasing’.Footnote ¹⁹

This reading coheres well with the ontological (Opif. 134–135; Leg. 1.31–32) as well as with the ethical (Leg. 1.92–96) and epistemological (Leg. 3.97–104) differences that Philo establishes between the two men, given that in his view disembodied minds were ontologically, ethically, and epistemologically superior to ordinary earthly human beings. It thus makes sense, provisionally at least, to define the heavenly man as man as he is prior to and after his earthly existence—i.e., as a pure and disembodied mind—and the earthly man as man as he is during his life on earth—i.e., as a synthesis of mind and flesh.

I write ‘provisionally’ because this construction needs to be modified in two ways (none of which, though, contradicts Runia's analysis).Footnote ²⁰ First, in Opif. 135 we learn that after his creation the earthly man was blessed with an infusion of God's spirit (πνεῦμα). Even though he does not say so explicitly, Philo seems to imply that this spirit is what provided the earthly man with life (cf. Leg. 1.32) and with the faculty of rational thought (cf. Leg. 1.34). However, in the subsequent and rather more detailed analysis in Leg. 1.31–42 he specifies that what the earthly man received was not really πνεῦμα in the strict sense of the word, but rather a less powerful version of that substance, viz., πνοή or ‘breath’, and he then declares that strictly speaking only the heavenly mind, created in the image of God, ‘might be said to partake of spirit’ (πνεύματος ἂν λέγοιτο κεκοινωνηκέναι) (Leg. 1.42). Seen in that light, we may redefine the heavenly man as man as he is as a pure and disembodied mind vivified and enlightened by God's spirit and earthly man as man as he is as a compound of body and mind vivified and enlightened by God's breath.Footnote ²¹

Second, the above considerations suggest that the notion of heavenly man signifies a mode of existence characteristic of human beings only prior to and after their lives on earth. However, according to Philo, virtuous people may actually be transformed into this mode of existence even while they remain physically connected to the flesh. According to QE 2.46, Moses, for instance, experienced such a transformation after he had climbed Mt. Sinai to receive the tablets of the law (cf. Exod 24.12–18). Philo writes:

Philo does not explicitly state what it means to be ‘reborn’ in this fashion and thus to be transformed into an οὐράνιος ἄνθρωπος without actually leaving the body in physical terms. However, other factors let us know that it means to be caught by what the Alexandrian otherwise refers to as ‘inspiration’, ‘divine frenzy’, or ‘prophetic ecstasy’.Footnote ²³

For one thing, texts such as Mos. 1.158 and QE 2.29 unambiguously testify that Moses was prophetically inspired when he rested on the mountain. De Vita Moses 1.158 explains that once he had been summoned by God, Moses ‘entered into the darkness (τὸν γνόϕον) where God was, that is into the unseen and invisible and incorporeal paradigmatic essence of all things (εἰς τὴν ἀειδῆ καὶ ἀόρατον καὶ ἀσώματον τῶν ὄντων παραδειγματικὴν οὐσίαν) and perceived (κατανοῶν) what is imperceptible (τὰ ἀθέατα) to mortal nature’. Likewise, though in a more direct and less artistic style, QE 2.29 declares that on the mountain Moses was ‘divinely inspired and filled with God’ (trans. LCL).

Also, Philo's characterization of the heavenly man matches what he elsewhere says about divine or prophetic inspiration. According to Philo, prophetic inspiration occurs when God allows his πνεῦμα (not his πνοή!) to descend on the minds of virtuous people. In order for such people to obtain inspiration, though, they must in advance have liberated themselves completely of all earthly cares and bodily influences (Gig. 54; Her. 64; cf. Leg. 3.69; Mos. 2.68–69) since only then will their minds be pure enough to serve as an abode for the spirit. Philo then explains that once the spirit arrives, it supplants everything in the mind that belongs to its ordinary human constitution (including the πνοή, presumably) and forces the mind to ‘leave itself’, transcend earthly realities, and give itself over unreservedly to visions of the divine (Leg. 3.41; Her. 69; Somn. 2.232). In this way, the description of the inspired mind matches the description of the heavenly man. It is enlightened, not by God's breath, but by his spirit, and even though it continues to be physically attached to the flesh (and in that way remains earthly), it nevertheless operates as if it were de facto disembodied.Footnote ²⁴

However, Philo is very clear that precisely because the prophetic mind remains connected to the flesh, this form of inspiration always comes to an end (Virt. 217; Her. 45–46, 264–267; Somn. 2.232–233); for even though virtuous people may be able to suppress corporeal stimuli for a while, their bodies always at some point manage to regain at least some level of control. And according to Philo, God's spirit cannot endure to abide in a mind preoccupied with fleshly concerns (Gig. 19–20, 28). This means that even though virtuous people may, during their lives on earth, be transformed and reborn as οὐράνιοι ἄνθρωποι, any permanent transformation of that nature must await the moment of death. For only then—when the mind leaves the body in physical and not just ethical and epistemological terms—will it be irrevocably free of its powers and hence able to hold on to the spirit and, as Runia puts it, ‘contemplate the divine things without ceasing’.Footnote ²⁵

We may now summarize Philo's theory of the two men in the following way. The heavenly man is man as he is as a pure and disembodied mind vivified and enlightened by God's spirit. The earthly man, by contrast, is man as he is as a compound of body and mind vivified and enlightened by God's breath. Through prophetic inspiration, virtuous people may be transformed into heavenly men during their lives on earth, but it is only at the moment of death, when the mind and the body physically disconnect, that this transformation may become final and irrevocable.

On the assumption that the Corinthian sceptics were familiar with and valued Philo's theory of the two men, it should be clear from this analysis why they will have found the idea of a fleshly resurrection not only bizarre, but also unappealing. These Christians may have believed that they were able to transcend the powers of the flesh when ‘by the spirit’ they were speaking ‘secrets’ ‘to God’, as Paul describes the act of glossolalia in 1 Cor 14.2. But if they shared the outlook on the flesh that Philo had advanced throughout his writings, they would nevertheless have sensed that those powers would never be truly vanquished until after the moment of death when their minds would be physically detached from their bodies. Thus, for them to imagine that their bodies should somehow be brought back to life after that blissful event and join the mind in its heavenly afterlife would be quite repulsive. For it would imply that they would never be free of those distractions and inclinations of the flesh that make this present life so constrained and unfulfilling (cf. Gig. 31; Leg. 3.69–71).

It is possible that prior to Paul's writing of 1 Corinthians these individuals had explicitly pointed to Philo's theory of the two men as a way of elucidating why they had to reject what they had perceived to be the content of Paul's preaching—arguing, for instance, that any final and eschatological transition from an earthly to a heavenly mode of existence must take place through a departure from, and not through some mysterious revivification of, the flesh. It is also possible that the theory of the two men had merely informed their stance in a less explicit manner and that Paul was for some reason aware of that. In any case, as we shall now see, in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul responds to their position by clarifying what his doctrine of the resurrection was really all about (viz. pneumatic bodily change) and by rewriting Philo's theory of the two men in such a way that it explicitly supports and reinforces that doctrine.

3. Paul's Transformation and Application of the Theory of ‘Two Men’ in 1 Corinthians 15

Paul opens his discussion of the form of the resurrection by quoting the critical voices of the Corinthian sceptics: ‘How will the dead be raised? With what bodies will they come?’ (πῶς ἐγείρονται οἱ νεκροί; ποίῳ δὲ σώματι ἔρχονται;) (15.35). As we have seen, these questions almost certainly reveal that the sceptics were assuming that, according to Paul, the dead would be raised and removed to the realm of heaven in ordinary human bodies. Right from the outset, however, Paul makes it clear that this is not what the resurrection will involve. Rather, the bodies of the deceased will be substantially transformed as a part of the resurrection process (15.37–38). And according to v. 36, death is a precondition for that transformation.Footnote ²⁶

In 15.39–44a Paul then clarifies in what particular way the bodies that rise will be transformed. He says,

According to some interpreters, Paul's aim in 15.39–41 is to point to the great variety of bodies that exist in the cosmos ‘all of which is God's doing in creation’.Footnote ²⁷ Since in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul promotes and defends a concept of eschatological bodily change, that claim makes sense to the extent that Paul could very well have been interested in showing, as Gordon Fee puts it, ‘that “body” does not necessarily mean one thing’, but can mean a variety of things.Footnote ²⁸

However, as Jeffrey Asher has pointed out, the way in which Paul applies these verses to his discussion of the resurrection body in vv. 42–44a reveals that his purpose is slightly more specific than that;Footnote ²⁹ for even though Paul certainly discriminates between different types of σώματα ἐπίγεια and σώματα ἐπουράνια, vv. 42–44a demonstrate that his principal aim in vv. 39–41 is not to distinguish between the different species within these categories, but rather to distinguish between these categories themselves. Thus, in 15.42–44a he clarifies that the bodies that belong to the former of these classes are perishable, dishonourable, weak, and ‘psychic’, whereas those that belong to the latter are imperishable, honourable, powerful, and spiritual and that (cf. οὕτως καὶ ἡ ἀνάστασις τῶν νεκρῶν) whereas the bodies in which Christians presently live and die belong to the former group, the bodies in which they will rise and ascend to heaven will belong to the latter.

Thus, even though Paul will later return to this issue (viz., in 15.52–54), he has already now clarified ποίῳ σώματι—‘with what bodies’—the dead will be raised. The answer is: with spiritual bodies, i.e., with bodies that share the nature and composition of the sun, the moon, and the stars. In the following section, 15.44b-49, Paul seeks to substantiate that answer exegetically. Formally, the section reads as an exegesis of Gen 2.7. However, I suggest that it was intended to serve just as much, if not more, as an exegesis of Philo and his theory of the two men. Paul writes:

Earlier in ch. 15, in vv. 21–22, Paul introduced a highly significant contrast between the figures of Adam and Christ, arguing that since (ἐπειδή) death entered the world through one ἄνθρωπος (Adam), the dead must also be raised through one ἄνθρωπος (Christ). In 15.44b-49 he absorbs and appropriates Philo's theory of the two men by allowing that theory to merge with the earlier juxtaposition. He does so by identifying Adam and Christ respectively as the earthly and heavenly men (15.45–47) and by defining these men ‘Philonically’ as paradigms of different modes of existence, each of which may, or may come to, characterize individual human beings (15.48–49). Thus, in v. 49, Paul suggests that whereas he and his readers have previously belonged to the category of earthly man, once their fleshly lives have come to an end and the resurrection become a reality, they will come to belong to that of the heavenly man.

However, Paul not only absorbs the theory of the two men: he also transforms it into a theory about eschatological bodily change. He does so in three ways. First, in 15.45 he explicitly introduces his discourse about Adam and Christ as the earthly and heavenly men, respectively, as scriptural evidence for his claim in v. 44b about the existence of both psychic and spiritual bodies (cf. οὕτως καὶ γέγραπται)—a claim which itself serves to substantiate his previous argument that ‘what is sown as a psychic body is raised as a spiritual body’ (v. 44a). Thus, right from the outset Paul makes sure that his readers perceive what he says of the earthly and heavenly men in this passage as a discussion of different types of bodies and of the pneumatic transformation of the body that Christ believers can expect.

Second, in 15.46 Paul speaks of the two men, not as Philo would have done as different types of minds or people, but rather as different types of bodies. Scholars have traditionally been puzzled by Paul's use in that verse of the articles τό … τό in connection with the adjectives ‘spiritual’ (πνευματικόν) and ‘psychic’ (ψυχικόν). The trouble is that Paul appears to be referring to the two men (ἄνθρωποι) of v. 45 and that one might then have expected him to use the masculine form of the article (ὁ … ὁ) instead of the neuter. Some interpreters therefore suggest that τό … τό really refer to the different bodies (σώματα) mentioned in v. 44.Footnote ³² Others, however, maintain that it must refer to the two men in spite of the grammatical difficulty that such a reading involves.Footnote ³³ Yet others submit that Paul could be referring neither to bodies, nor men, but rather, in a more abstract sense, to spiritual and psychic ‘principles’, ‘orders’, ‘states’, or ‘situations’.Footnote ³⁴ The solution, however, is probably much simpler: in v. 46 Paul refers to Adam and Christ, who were mentioned in v. 45, but not in their capacities of being different types of ἄνθρωποι, but rather different types of σώματα.

Third, Paul's use of the verb ϕορέω suggests that the εἰκόνες of which he speaks in 15.49 are the bodily natures of Adam and Christ. As numerous scholars have pointed out, ϕορέω is often used in connection with clothing and the term therefore carries distinct overtones of ‘wearing’ (cf. ἐνδύσασθαι in 15.53, ἐνδύσηται in 15.54, and ἐπενδύσασθαι in 2 Cor 5.3).Footnote ³⁵ In the present context, the only things that believers could be ‘wearing’ are the different bodies that Adam and Christ each represent. Thus, while in this verse Paul clearly accepts and appropriates Philo's identification of the two men as paradigms of different modes of existence for individual human beings, he suggests that these modes of existence refer, not to their minds, but rather to their corporeal natures.

Through these textual operations, Paul seeks to suggest to his readers that according to the theory of the two men, the final and irrevocable transformation of earthly people into οὐράνιοι ἄνθρωποι will take place, not through a disconnection of the body and a pneumatic transformation of the mind, but rather through a pneumatic transformation of the body. It seems unlikely, though, that at this stage of his argument any of his critics should have been persuaded by his proceedings. After all, up until this moment he has not really justified the amendments he has made to Philo's theory and it would not be hard for anyone familiar with Philo's writings to dismiss them as misguided and out of place.

However, from 15.50 Paul goes on to demonstrate that the particular way in which he has reworked the doctrine of the two men in the previous section may in fact be justified by Philo's own text. He does so by subtly alluding to a passage in which Philo suggests that some people do experience a bodily transformation like the one ascribed by Paul to Christians as part of their transition from an earthly to a heavenly form of existence. Paul introduces this passage by suggesting that he is now going to summarize what has already been established (τοῦτο δέ ϕημι). To a large extent, this is also what he does. He repeats that human bodies will need to be transformed as part of the resurrection process (15.50–52a) and that they will be transformed in such a way as to obtain immortality and incorruptibility (15.52b-54). However, at one point Paul's argument differs slightly from what has previously been claimed. The text reads as follows:

The deviation I have in mind is to be found in the affirmation in 15.51 that ‘we shall not all die, but we shall all be transformed’. Paul presents this affirmation as the climax of his whole exposition (cf. ἰδοῦ μυστήριον ὑμῖν λέγω). Precisely for that reason, it is noteworthy that it appears to contradict v. 36, which, as stated above, seems to identify death as a precondition for the kind of transformation that the resurrection will involve.

Scholars sometimes argue that the two verses are not mutually exclusive given that, rightly understood, v. 36 does not really speak about death as a prerequisite for transformation. Thiselton, for instance, writes: ‘Paul is not emphasizing the necessity of death, but “the fact of transformation through death and vivification”. The grammatical conditional ἐὰν μὴ ἀποθάνῃ underlines the logical and contingent condition of discontinuity in order to allow for a meaningful and conceivable continuity’.Footnote ³⁶ In a similar vein, Fee argues that ‘Paul's concern is with death as a precondition of life, not in the sense that all must die but in the sense that the seed itself demonstrates that out of death a new expression of life springs forth’.Footnote ³⁷ These readings seem slightly forced and unnecessarily complex and they certainly go beyond what Paul could have expected his audience to take v. 36 to mean. It should be recalled that in the preceding verse, Paul has quoted the question of how the dead will be raised. Given that this constitutes the immediate context for v. 36, it seems implausible that the Corinthians should have been able to interpret Paul's ἐὰν μὴ ἀποθάνῃ in any other way than to imply that one must necessarily die in order to come to experience the kind of transformation of which the remainder of ch. 15 speaks.

I see no reason to assume that Paul should not have anticipated that his readers would interpret v. 36 in this simple and straightforward manner. Why, then, does he now suggest in v. 51 that we shall not all die, but nevertheless all be transformed? The answer, I believe, is that through the precise wording of v. 51 he was trying to direct his readers' attention to a specific passage in Philo's writings (QG 1.86—and through that passage Mos. 2.288) where Philo suggests that some people are in fact removed to heaven at the end of their lives, not through a separation of mind and flesh, but precisely through a transformation of the flesh.

In QG 1.86 Philo argues that ‘the end of worthy and holy men [such as Enoch, Moses, and Elijah] is not death but translation’ (trans. LCL). In this particular passage, Philo does not explain what translation means except by hinting that it involves a certain kind of bodily assumption of the translated person into the realm of heaven. In Mos. 2.288, however, where he describes the end of Moses' life, he is more informative. When Moses ‘was to make his departure from this place to heaven and leave mortal life for immortality’, he writes,

This account reveals that Philo's concept of translation was modelled on the Stoic idea of ἐκπύρωσις.Footnote ³⁸ According to the Stoics, the world is a compound of two principles, the active and the passive, both of which are material entities. The active principle is spirit (πνεῦμα, also known as the mind of the world), the passive principle matter (ὕλη) or unqualified substance (ἄποιος οὐσία). These principles coexist in what the Stoics refer to as blending (κρᾶσις). At certain intervals, however, the world dissolves and burns up in an all-consuming world fire (ἐκπύρωσις) and through that fire the cosmos transforms from a blend of matter and spirit into pure spirit. This spirit then gives birth to a new world (composed of both principles), which eventually also burns up. In that way the world perpetually oscillates between destruction and re-creation.Footnote ³⁹

What Moses experienced at the end of his life was apparently a sort of personal microcosmic world conflagration. When summoned by God, the two principles of his nature, i.e., his body and mind, were dissolved and transformed into pure mind. Philo's debt to the Stoics is evident both from his use of the technical term ἀναστοιχειοῦνFootnote ⁴⁰ and from the fact that the mind into which Moses' two-fold nature was transformed had a certain fiery, i.e., ἐκπύρωσις-like, character (cf. ἡλιοειδέστατον). Furthermore, Philo seems to have believed that Moses' mind was pneumatic both before and after his translation into heaven. Thus, Mos. 2.289 explains that Moses was inspired when the translation was initiated and since, as we have seen, Philo believed that heavenly minds by definition ‘partake of spirit’ (Leg. 1.42), we may assume that it remained that way even after the translation had come to an end. Thus, just as according to the Stoics all that remains after the ἐκπύρωσις of the world is the pneumatic mind of the cosmos, so according to Philo all that remained after the translation of Moses was the pneumatic mind of the lawgiver.

I am suggesting that the Pauline ‘not all will die, but all will be transformed’ was designed to evoke in the minds of the Corinthian sceptics the Philonic ‘not death, but translation’ of QG 1.86 and through that the description of the end of Moses' life in Mos. 2.288. It should be clear from this analysis why Paul should wish to achieve this effect. The similarities between the Philonic concept of translation and Paul's description of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 are quite impressive. Both thinkers conceptualize translation/resurrection as a relocation of the resurrected/translated individual from an earthly to a heavenly position and as a transformation of the individual's entire physical being into the kind of substance—viz., πνεῦμα—that God has already infused into the inner person (i.e., into the mind or the heart) of the translated/resurrected individual at some point before his or her life has come to an end. And just as Paul suggests that resurrected believers will come to resemble and share the nature of the celestial bodies, so Philo describes the nature and appearance of the Jewish lawgiver after his translation to heaven as being ‘most sun-like’. Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesin 1.86 and Mos. 2.288 thus provided Paul with exactly the kind of ‘Philonic authorization’ that he needed for altering the theory of the two men the way he did.Footnote ⁴¹