If Christ Is Raised, Death Does Not Keep the Last Word

“Declare” is gnorizo, to make known, as though reminding people of something they have let slip. Across this verse and the next Paul traces the gospel through their lives in four verbs: he preached it, they received it, they stand in it, and by it they are being saved.

“Keep in memory” is katecho, to hold fast, the verb of 11:2, “keep the ordinances, as I delivered them”. “Are saved” is present in Greek, are being saved. “In vain” is eike, without cause: faith in a gospel that was never true would have been faith in nothing.

“Delivered” and “received” are the technical pair for handing on tradition, the same pair Paul used for the Lord’s Supper in 11:23. The balanced lines that follow read like a formula, and most scholars take verses 3 to 5 as a creed Paul was himself taught within a few years of the crucifixion. “First of all” means of first importance.

“Was buried” stands as its own line in the formula, sealing the reality of the death and implying a tomb. “Died” and “was buried” are simple past, but “rose” is a Greek perfect, egegertai, has been raised and stays raised. “The third day” may look to Hosea 6:2, though Paul names no text.

Cephas is the Aramaic form of Peter’s name, the one Paul regularly uses (1:12, 3:22, 9:5). Luke 24:34 records this same private appearance, “hath appeared to Simon”. “The twelve” is the group’s title, kept even though Judas was gone.

The appearance to more than five hundred at once is found nowhere else in the New Testament. Paul adds that most are still alive, which amounts to an invitation to go and ask them. “Fallen asleep” is koimao, the Christian word for death, from which “cemetery”, a sleeping place, comes.

This James is the Lord’s brother, who did not believe during the ministry (John 7:5) and later led the church in Jerusalem, where Paul met him (Galatians 1:19). No Gospel records an appearance to him; this line is its only mention, and it goes a long way to explaining his change.

“One born out of due time” is ektroma, a miscarriage, a child born dead or deformed. It is a savage word to use of oneself, and the Greek gives it the article, “the ektroma”, which has led some to suspect it was an insult his opponents threw at him first.

Paul’s Roman name, Paulus, means “small”, and some hear a play on it in “least”, elachistos, though he never makes it explicit. He recalls his persecution in almost the same words in Galatians 1:13, where he “persecuted the church of God”, and in 1 Timothy 1:13.

The claim to have laboured more than all of them is not idle: 2 Corinthians 11:23–28 lists the beatings, shipwrecks and sleepless nights behind it. “Bestowed upon me” is literally “toward me”, grace aimed at him. “In vain” here is kenos, empty, a word the chapter will come back to.

“Therefore” resumes the thread broken off by Paul’s digression about himself. “So we preach” is present tense and “so ye believed” is past: the message has not changed from one apostle to the next, and the only open question is whether Corinth will keep what it believed.

“Some among you” were denying the resurrection of the dead in general, not Christ’s by name. Many Greeks held that the soul is freed from the body at death, so a raised body sounded like a step backward; the Athenians laughed at Paul at exactly this point (Acts 17:32).

The logic is strict: a general denial covers every particular case. If no dead person rises, there is no room left for an exception, and the Greek puts it emphatically, oude Christos, not even Christ.

“Vain” is kenos, empty, containing nothing. The “vain” of verse 17 is a different word, mataios, futile, pointless; English uses one word for both, and Paul uses two, first for the hollowness of the message and then for the uselessness of the faith that rests on it.

“False witnesses of God” can mean witnesses who misrepresent God or, reading the Greek kata more sharply, witnesses against God, claiming he did what he did not. The ninth commandment forbade false witness (Exodus 20:16), and Paul reckons the apostles guilty of it toward God himself.

The King James varies “risen” and “raised”, but the Greek verb is the same passive in verses 13 and 16, egegertai. Paul repeats his premise almost word for word, clearing the ground before he draws the harder consequences in the next three verses.

“Vain” this time is mataios, the word Greek writers used of idols and empty rites. “Ye are yet in your sins” ties forgiveness to the resurrection and not to the cross alone; Romans 4:25 says Christ “was raised again for our justification”.

“Perished” is apollymi, the verb Paul used in 1:18 for “them that perish” and in 10:10 for the Israelites “destroyed of the destroyer”. The believing dead would join those whose end the letter has already described as ruin.

“Most miserable” is eleeinoteroi, most to be pitied. The Greek places “only” awkwardly, and many read it as “if we have merely hoped in Christ in this life”, with nothing beyond. Paul’s own life, as he described it in 4:9–13, was the kind others pitied.

“Firstfruits” is aparche, recalling the first sheaf of the barley harvest waved before the LORD on the day after the sabbath of Passover week (Leviticus 23:10–11). That day fell on the first day of the week, the day of the resurrection, and many have seen the date as part of Paul’s image.

Two lines, each hinging on “by man”, di’ anthropou. Death and resurrection both arrive through a human being, which makes Christ’s humanity essential to the rising, not incidental. Paul holds back the name Adam until the next verse.

“In Adam” and “in Christ” are parallel phrases of belonging. Whether the second “all” means every human being or all who are in Christ is debated; verse 23 narrows it at once to “they that are Christ’s”. Romans 5:12–21 develops the same comparison at length.

“Order” is tagma, a military unit, a company of troops marching in its turn. “Coming” is parousia, the word for a king’s or emperor’s arrival on a state visit, which Paul also uses of Christ in 1 Thessalonians 4:15.

“Put down” is katargeo, to render inactive, the verb 13:8 used of prophecies. Rule, authority and power are Paul’s names for the forces ranged against God, the same trio as Ephesians 1:21. “Delivered up” uses the verb of handing on tradition from verse 3.

The line reworks Psalm 110:1, “until I make thine enemies thy footstool”, the Old Testament verse the New Testament quotes more than any other. “Must” is dei, the word of divine necessity; the reign has a fixed end point, and it is set by the enemies’ defeat.

The Greek sentence is short and ends on its subject: last enemy abolished, death. The verb is present tense, katargeitai, “is being abolished”, which speaks of the destruction as though it were already under way.

The quotation is Psalm 8:6, “thou hast put all things under his feet”, a psalm about humankind that Paul reads as fulfilled in the one true man. Hebrews 2:6–9 reads it the same way, and Ephesians 1:20–22 sets Psalm 8 and Psalm 110 side by side.

“Subject” is hypotasso, the verb of 14:32 and 14:34. Arians in the fourth century cited this verse against the Son’s full deity; Nicene writers answered that it describes his mission as mediator, not his nature. “All in all” recalls 12:6, God “which worketh all in all”.

Scholars have counted some forty readings of this clause, and Latter-day Saint proxy baptism appeals to it. Paul says “they”, not “we” or “ye”, which keeps the practice at arm’s length, and switches to “we” in the next verse for dangers he does own.

“Jeopardy” is kindyneuo, to run a risk; 2 Corinthians 11:26 spells out its forms, perils of waters, of robbers, of his own countrymen, in the city and the wilderness. “Every hour” is no exaggeration in a life like that.

“I protest by” renders ne, a Greek particle of oath found only here in the New Testament: I swear by. What Paul swears by is his pride in the Corinthians, a surprising oath. “I die daily” means daily exposure to death, not a spiritual exercise.

“After the manner of men” means humanly speaking, with merely human hopes. A Roman citizen was not normally sent to the arena, so many read the beasts as a figure for violent opponents, like the Ephesian riot of Acts 19. “Let us eat and drink” quotes Isaiah 22:13, where Jerusalem feasts as the siege closes in.

“Evil communications corrupt good manners” is a line of verse from Menander, the Athenian comic playwright, by then a common proverb. “Communications” means company, homiliai, the people one keeps; “manners” means character. Paul quotes the theatre to people who prized Greek learning.

“Awake” is eknepho, to sober up, to come out of a drunken stupor, the right word after “let us eat and drink”. The Greek reads literally “ignorance of God some have”, a hard word for a church that boasted of knowledge (8:1).

Paul voices an objector with two questions, how and with what body. The second is the real challenge: a corpse decays, so what could come back? For many Greeks the body was a prison the soul was glad to leave, which made the question a sneer as much as a query.

“Thou fool” is aphron, senseless, singular, aimed at the imaginary questioner. The Greek stresses “thou”: what you yourself sow every season. Jesus used the grain that must die to bear fruit in John 12:24.

“Bare grain” is gymnos kokkos, a naked kernel. “It may chance” is ei tychoi, the “it may be” of 14:10. Every farmer knows that what goes into the ground looks nothing like the stalk that comes up, and plants it anyway.

“As it hath pleased him” is past tense in Greek, “as he willed”, which points back to the creation week, when each plant was made to yield seed “after his kind” (Genesis 1:11–12). Each seed receiving “his own body” keeps continuity: what is sown as wheat comes up wheat.

The four kinds of flesh, men, beasts, fishes, birds, run roughly backward through the days of creation in Genesis 1. “Flesh” is sarx used plainly, bodily substance, without the moral sense the word carries in Romans 8.

“Celestial” and “terrestrial” are the Latinate English for epouranios and epigeios, heavenly and earthly. Whether “celestial bodies” means sun and stars or angelic beings is debated; the next verse, with its sun, moon and stars, tilts it toward the sky.

“One star differeth from another star in glory” was sound astronomy to ancient eyes: Greek astronomers already ranked stars by brightness, a scale traditionally traced to Hipparchus. “Glory” here is doxa in its plain sense, visible splendour.

“So also” applies all the illustrations at once. The verbs are “sown” and “raised”, and the subject is left as a bare “it”: burial is described in a farmer’s language, not a gravedigger’s. “Corruption” is phthora, decay.

Two more pairs follow, dishonour and glory, weakness and power. A corpse was unclean and shameful in the ancient world and was carried outside the city to be buried. “Dishonour” is atimia, the word 11:14 used of long hair on a man.

“Natural” is psychikos, from psyche, soul: the body animated by ordinary life. The same word in 2:14 describes “the natural man” who does not receive the things of the Spirit. The second sentence insists the spiritual body exists, not merely that it could.

The quotation is Genesis 2:7, “man became a living soul”, with “first” and “Adam” added by Paul. The second half is not from Genesis at all but Paul’s completion of it: the last Adam became a spirit that gives life.

Philo of Alexandria read Genesis 1 and 2 as describing two men, a heavenly ideal man first and an earthly one after. Paul insists on the opposite order: the earthy comes first, the spiritual afterward. Whether he is answering that kind of reading directly is an inference, but the fit is close.

“Of the earth, earthy” is choikos, made of dust, choos, the word of Genesis 2:7, “the dust of the ground”. The oldest manuscripts read “the second man is from heaven”, without “the Lord”; the King James follows later copies that added it.

The Greek has no verbs, only paired adjectives, dusty and heavenly, and reads almost like an equation. Belonging decides nature: those who belong to the dust share its fate, and those who belong to the heavenly man share his.

“Image” is eikon, the word of Genesis 1:27 and 5:3, where Adam begets a son “in his own likeness, after his image”. Many of the oldest manuscripts read “let us also bear”, an exhortation, for “we shall bear”; in Greek the difference is one vowel.

“Now this I say” signals a summary. “Flesh and blood” is a Hebrew idiom for humanity in its mortal frailty, as in Matthew 16:17, “flesh and blood hath not revealed it”. “Inherit” is the covenant word for receiving the promised land, now used of the kingdom.

“Mystery” in Paul is a secret God has now disclosed, not a puzzle. His “we” counts himself possibly among the living at the end, as in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Some manuscripts garble the line into “we shall all sleep, but we shall not all be changed”.

“Moment” is atomos, uncuttable, an instant too short to divide, from which “atom” comes. “Twinkling” is rhipe, a flick or a blink. The trumpet summoned Israel to assemble (Numbers 10:2) and sounds as the Lord descends in 1 Thessalonians 4:16.

“Put on” is enduo, the ordinary verb for getting dressed. Immortality is put on over mortality, not swapped for it, which fits a body changed rather than replaced. The repeated “this” points, as it were, to the speaker’s own body.

The saying is Isaiah 25:8, from the feast God spreads for all peoples on Mount Zion, where he also wipes away tears. The Hebrew reads “for ever”; Paul’s wording, “in victory”, matches a Greek version other than the Septuagint, which read the same Hebrew word that way.

Paul adapts Hosea 13:14, “O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction”, turning a threat into a taunt. The oldest manuscripts read “O death” in both lines. “Sting” is kentron, a scorpion’s sting or an ox goad.

A compressed line that anticipates Romans 5 to 7: death stings through sin, and sin draws its force from the law that names and provokes it (Romans 7:8–11). First Corinthians was written a few years before Romans, so the idea was already formed.

“Giveth” is present tense: the victory is being handed over now, not only promised. The thanks lands where Romans 7:25 lands after its own wrestling with sin and law, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord”.

“Stedfast” is hedraios, firmly seated, and “unmoveable” is ametakinetos, found only here in the New Testament. “Labour” is kopos, toil to the point of weariness, Paul’s usual word for his own work. After fifty-seven verses of doctrine, the chapter ends on a work order.