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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - 1 Corinthians 15:12 - 15:12
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12. From this point to 1Co 15:19 the Apostle insists on a belief in a resurrection as absolutely essential to the existence of any Christian faith whatsoever, and stigmatizes the absence of such a belief as fatal to the acknowledgment of the Resurrection of Christ.
εἰ δέ. But if. Followed by the pres. this is equivalent to, ‘if it be really true that.’
πῶς λέγουσιν … τινές. There were three different schools of thought among those outside the Christian Church which denied the doctrine of the Resurrection from the dead. The first was the materialistic school, represented by the Epicureans among the heathen and by the Sadducees among the Jews. They thought that man would entirely cease to exist after death, and that any other idea was only the result of man’s vanity and his insatiable longing after existence. The second, in which the Stoics were the most prominent body, taught, what amounted to the same thing, the Pantheistic doctrine of the ultimate reabsorption of the soul into the Divinity from which it had sprung, and therefore the final extinction of the individual personality. The third school, of which the disciples of Plato were the chief representatives, while maintaining the external personality and immortality of the soul, regarded matter as the cause of all evil, the only barrier between the soul and the Absolute Good, a thing, in fact, essentially and eternally alien to the Divine, and they therefore could not conceive of immortality except through the entire freedom of the soul from so malignant and corrupting an influence. Hence the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body was the principal stumbling-block in the way of an early reception of Christianity. It aroused the antagonism of an influential section among the Jews (Act 4:1-2; Act 5:17; Act 23:6-9), and was considered by heathen philosophers inadmissible and even absurd (Act 17:32). This doctrine for many centuries remained the chief hindrance to the progress of Christianity. It produced the numerous Gnostic sects, which were willing to accept the doctrine of eternal life through Christ, so long as it was not encumbered by the necessity of believing in the resurrection of the body. The Manichaeans and their followers maintained for many centuries a conflict with the Christian Church, mainly on this point, and were able for many years to boast of so distinguished a convert as St Augustine, who describes them, after his return to the Church, as holding that ‘Christ came to deliver not bodies but souls.’ De Haer. 46. It may be questioned whether a doctrine more nearly corresponding to the immortality of the soul than the resurrection of the body is not still held by a large number of Christians. For information concerning the tenets of the heathen philosophers on this point, the student may consult Archer Butler’s Lectures on Philosophy; for the early Christian heretics, Neander and Gieseler’s Church Histories, and Mansel’s Gnostic Heresies, and for both, Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy. We may add that 1Jn 4:2 is directed against such heretics. And if, as is generally supposed, Clement’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians has been wrongly attributed to him, and is of later date, we see how obstinate the error was by the words in c. 9 καὶ μὴ λεγέτω τις ὑμῶν, ὅτι αὕτη ἡ σὰρξ οὐ κρίνεται οὐδὲ ἀνίσταται.