The Bodies of the Messiah: Transfiguration, Resurrection, and Ascension

Scholars have often imagined that Luke’s account of Jesus’s resurrected body in Lk. 24 stands in irreconcilable tension with Paul’s account of Jesus’s pneumatic resurrection in 1 Cor. 15. This article argues otherwise. Luke imagines not one resurrected body or form but two, distinguished by the ascension: a pre-ascension sarkic body of flesh and bone, and an ascended body transfigured, doxaic, and pneumatic —a bodily form anticipated in Luke’s transfiguration account. This ascended body is angelic in form, consistent with Luke’s claim that the resurrected righteous are isangelic and with Paul’s concept of the resurrected body. Both authors, furthermore, imagine Jesus’s heavenly body as “fluid,” capable of “fracturing” or “extending” into the bodies of the righteous on earth. Acknowledging the two discrete stages of Luke’s concept of the resurrection helps to ease this ostensible tension.