Yes, we have to realise that we are not going to understand these matters fully. My point about Jesus’ lips, never intended very seriously, is perhaps going too far because it is looking for details which are not in the Bible. But I do think I am within my rights to point out that Jesus himself, as recorded by Luke, said that his resurrection body had flesh and bones. As for blood, we can only speculate.

Kathy, I am with you in “recovering from a lifet[i]me of being taught an overly spiritualized eschatology”. That is why I am sensitive to anything which sounds like a suggestion that the risen Jesus or our own resurrection bodies will effectively be disembodied spirits. But I don’t want to err too much the other way. The resurrection life must be more than resuscitated and perfected physical bodies living on a renewed earth. (Is this the view of Jehovah’s Witnesses?) But I continue to explore exactly what it will be like.

Kathy, in one sense I think those are precisely questions we can’t answer. In another, let me attempt this inadequate answer. What we normally mean by body includes a very strong sense of our own identity, a sense of real actual existences, and experience of space-time existence, ageing and decay. When we start talking about Jesus’ risen body, we are trying to say something about his identity, and his real existence as a human being, being taken up and transformed in such a way that it is now fitted for eternal and non-decaying existence. The former means that we are talking about the real body that was buried (in Paul’s language “the seed that was sown”) and the latter that we’re talking about something that is quite unlike what we normally mean by body in everyday life (in Paul’s language “the body that is to be.” I think that lies at the root of the disagreement between Peter and me, because I think he is taking things we predicate of body as we know it, and applying them to body as we can’t fully comprehend it.

We don’t think things through, and most of us end up with a disembodied eschatology and a confusing Jesus whom we peak of as ominpresent and omniscient while imagining him floating around “heaven” a physical body.

I have lots of questions. But I don’t know which ones are right and which ones are wrong.

So, here is one (in two parts): In the essence of the Trinity, how does Jesus’ physical body function in that eternal unity, unlimited to space and time? Has he always had a risen body in eternity? Or do I misunderstand eternity?

It seems we make a sandwich and put time the middle of it, as if there is a slice of eternity before time and a slice of eternity after time. I don’t think eternity functions that way, but I don’t know.

I say these things desiring to learn and stretch my grasp of them. I’m enjoying the three of you debating. Please carry on!

But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. 1 Corinthians 15:35-38

OK, not “docetic”. It was some other heresy whose name I have forgotten to claim that Jesus’ humanity was only temporary up to his death - which you deny following.

was ‘flesh and blood’ synecdoche for the human in the time of Paul?

Yes, at least in Ephesians 6:12 where it is not about parts of the body. Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 15:50 Paul is not talking about body parts, but about humanity.

If the risen Jesus did not have blood, what colour were his lips? If they were white, as would be those of a human body without blood, why did the disciples on the Emmaus Road not note this oddity? Don’t say he was wearing lipstick!