“… the Resurrection (the earliest Christian teachers claimed to have witnessed) was not regarded simply or chiefly as evidence for the immortality of the soul. … I have heard a man maintain that ‘the importance of the Resurrection is that it proves survival.’ Such a view cannot at any point be reconciled with the language of the New Testament. … The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the ‘first fruits’ the ‘pioneer of life.’ He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened.
I do not mean, of course, that the writers of the New Testament disbelieved in ‘survival.’ On the contrary they believed in it so readily that Jesus on more than one occasion had to assure them that He was not a ghost. From the earliest times the Jews, like many other nations had believed that man possessed a ‘soul’ or Nephesh separable from the body, which went at death into the shadowy world called Sheol: a land of forgetfulness and imbecility where none called upon Jehovah any more, a land half unreal and melancholy like the Hades of the Greeks or the Miflheim of the Norsemen. From it shades could return and appear to the living as Samuel’s shade had done at the command of the Witch of Endor. In much more recent times there had arisen a more cheerful belief that the righteous passed at death to ‘heaven.’ Both doctrines are doctrines of the ‘immortality of the soul,’ as a Greek or a modern … understands it: and both are quite irrelevant to the story of the Resurrection. The writers look upon this event as an absolute novelty. …
There are, I allow, certain respects in which the risen Christ resembles the ‘ghost’ of popular tradition. Like a ghost he ‘appears’ and ‘disappears’: locked doors are no obstacle to Him. On the other hand He Himself vigorously asserts that He is corporeal … and eats broiled fish.”
C.S. Lewis, MiraclesLuke 24: 37 – 43 – “They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.”
