Although the Corinthian letters were addressed to a single church and were concerned primarily with local problems existing at that time, they are of special interest to readers of the New Testament. One reason for this interest is that the letters were writ- ten at an early date; therefore, they throw considerable light on the character of the Christian movement prior to the writing of any gospel account of Jesus' life. Paul's statements concerning the resurrection of Jesus constitute the earliest preserved record of that event. The same is true of his account of the institution of the Lord's Supper. His remarks concerning the gift of tongues, along with the other gifts of the spirit, help us to understand the way in which these manifestations were viewed by the early church. Finally, the many problems discussed in 1 Corinthians tell us a great deal about the conditions that prevailed at that time.
Paul's account of the resurrection enables us to see how his view differed from those of the ancient Greeks and also from the view found in certain portions of the Old Testament. The Greeks believed in the doctrine of the soul's immortality. According to this doctrine, souls do not have a beginning or an end. They are eternal realities capable of existing apart from the bodies in which they were incarnated. This view was contrary to the Hebrew conception, which viewed man as a single unit including body, soul, and spirit; the soul was not something that existed apart from the body. After death, all went down to Sheol, a cavern below the earth, but no memory or consciousness of any kind attended this state of existence.
In contrast to these views, Paul believed in a genuine resurrection from physical death in which a person's individuality and moral worth would be preserved. But this preservation was not to be a reanimation of the corpse and a continuation of life as it had been before. Flesh and blood, Paul tells us, will not inherit God's kingdom. The body that is raised will not be the natural body but rather a spiritual body. Paul does not tell us what this spiritual body will be like, but he is sure that it will be a body of some kind, for the personality includes body, soul, and spirit, and salvation is not achieved until all three have been transformed together. The Gnostics of Paul's day, who believed that only spirit is good and that all matter is evil, taught that Jesus did not possess a physical body but only appeared to do so. For Paul, this position was untenable: Unless Jesus possessed a body in common with other human beings, his triumph over evil would have no significance for humans. Jesus' resurrection means a triumph of the entire personality over the forces of evil; what it means for Jesus it also means for all those who put their trust in him.
