The Zoroastrians believed in the resurrection, not of the physical
body, but of the soul, and that it was an act of miracle. Similarly
miraculous was the resurrection of Jesus. Although Jesus Himself never
mentioned what kind of resurrection, whether of body or of soul that
He meant and believed in, the interpretation of the writers of the
Gospels shows that His disciples understood Him to mean bodily
resurrection and the re-appearance of His physical form. The three
days remained, just as the Zoroastrians believed. The miraculous and
wondrous appearance of Jesus before His disciples was preached most
vigorously by Paul. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul declares
emphatically that the whole of the Christian religion depends upon the
miraculous resurrection and re-appearance of Jesus. Although Paul
said the spiritual body of the risen dead is not the same as flesh and
blood body (I Cor., XV), still that important point is generally
overlooked, and the result is the belief which we find amongst some of
the Christian sects; that at the call of the angels, the body will
rise from the grave and the mouldering dust of bones and flesh will be
put together by the miraculous power of the Almighty God. Paul says:
"But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of
them that slept" (I Cor., XV, 20). He preached that Christ was the
first born from the dead, that those who believe in Christ would rise
as He did and that those who would not believe in Him or in His
resurrection should not rise.
We have already noticed that the Parsees believed in a miraculous
resurrection; that the same miracle became more definite in the case
of Jesus; and that the Christian faith was afterwards founded upon
that miraculous event. Both the Parsees and the followers of Christ
did not mean by resurrection any universal law, but a miracle done by
certain supernatural powers. They did not give any scientific reasons
for such a miracle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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