Where did the body of Jesus go?

This is a question that has always nagged at me. If Jesus had a physical body after his resurrection as we think of it and he ascended up (I assume) to heaven, this means his body defied every physical law and wherever heaven is "up there" he had to have moved faster than the speed of light to get there or he would have somehow hit warp speed and traveled to another universe or dimension. Pretty fantastical stuff, more like science fiction than faith.

So where did he go?

As we were standing in worship service at church one Sunday, the music struck a very hypnotic, trance inducing tone and it was as if the entire room was truly on one accord, hands lifted high, no song lyrics just a mantra-like phrase in the song. I looked around the room and had a striking and crystal clear thought: this is the body of Christ. This, I thought to myself, is Jesus.

Paul speaks of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27 et al). He also notes that the Lord is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:17). This view is Biblical. It bears similarity to the Ummah in Islam and the Sangha of Buddhism only there is a more "mystical" flair to Paul's version as Muslims don't believe the Ummah is the body of Muhammad nor is the Sangha the body of Buddha.

Paul makes no mention of a physical ascension. He speaks of an exalted Jesus (cf. Philippians 2:9-11). Either the ascension was assumed or well known amongst the communities to whom he spoke or it was unimportant or even unknown to him. It isn't until we get to the Gospels that a "bodily" ascension comes into play.

Paul mentions (assuming these writings are actually his) those who believed the resurrection to have already happened, a spiritual not "factual" event, Gnosticism already beginning to show its roots. It seems pretty clear from this passage that Paul believed in a bodily resurrection of some kind. If this is true then we can safely assume that he believed that the "spiritual body" of Jesus was not a disembodied spirit floating ethereally in the atmosphere somewhere. What this body is certainly is far from clear. It's the same but it's different.

But again, where is this body? In heaven? Where is this heaven? Is it "up" as we all believe, Jesus' body ascending like a photon through space?

Or is the glorified body somehow different or transcendent of such physical limitations?

Or is the "right hand of the Father" something of a metaphor for retirement?

Or is his body the Church, i.e. you and I, Christ in us through the Spirit?

Where is this body?

By the way, Muslim tradition (though perhaps not universally accepted, especially by more critical scholars) teaches that instead of being crucified, Jesus was rescued at the last minute and was taken up to heaven bodily while a substitute (perhaps Judas, who must have looked like Jesus) was crucified in his stead, the Jews thus believing him to be crucified and spreading what was in effect a lie. No glorified body, no body transformed, no spirit body, just the real, physical body of Jesus.

Jesus' sacrifice is Jewish, not pagan, in origin...part two

Round two of Conclusions:

1) The Palestinian Targum proves quite conclusively that already in the first century AD there existed a firm belief that the principal merit of the Akedah sprang from the virture of Isaac's self-offering...

2) ...the Akedah, although ritually incomplete, was indeed a true sacrifice and Israel's chief title to forgiveness and redemption. The purpose of other sacrifices, including the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, was to remind God of Isaac's perfect self-oblation and to invoke his merits.

3) ...in the ancient liturgy of Israel a powerful bond linked the Binding of Isaac with Passover and eschatological salvation.

Vermes then goes on, with scholarly support, to further the view that Paul's symbolic use of the Akedah is the bridge between "the genuinely Jewish teaching of atoning suffering" and "the non-Jewish concept of a Saviour who was both man and God." (p. 218)

Vermes notes that Paul follows a traditional Jewish pattern enabling him to "coordinate with the framework of a coherent synthesis the most profound and anomalous religious concept ever known to the human mind....For although he is undoubtedly the greatest theologian of the Redemption, he worked with inherited materials..." (p. 221)

Using the premise that the early chapters of Acts are from a Palestinian stratum more ancient than Paul's writings, he notes that Jesus is called "Servant of God" and ties this not to Psalm 2 but to Genesis 22. On this premise he poses the possibility that it was Jesus, not Paul, who introduces the Akedah motif into Christianity.

Finally, noting that the Passover lamb of John's Gospel is problematic in many respects because the Passover lamb is not an expiatory sacrifice, he notes that, for the Palestinian Jew, all lamb sacrifice hearkens back to the Akedah and its effects of "deliverance, forgiveness of sin and messianic salvation." (p. 225) Jesus is the new Isaac.

Vermes does qualify this by noting that the Christian doctrine of Redemption is not just a Christian version of the Akedah. He simply emphasizes that the essential role of the targumic representation of the Binding of Isaac in its development.

"Indeed," he notes, "without the help of Jewish exegesis it is impossible to perceive any Christian teaching in its true perspective." (p .227)

Jesus' sacrifice is Jewish, not pagan, in origin...

I'm going to ease into this one as I haven't read all posts so am not certain what has been covered. However, this is primarily in response to the debate about dating Mithraism and whether its predating Christianity would equate to Christianity borrowing from it.

Geza Vermes, a Christian who reverted back to Judaism, discusses, in a stellar article, the conncetion between the Akedah and Jesus' crucifixion and its redemptive power. The article itself is over 30 pages long and is thick with exegesis, drawing from the Midrash, the Targums and Second Temple literature to draw out the connection. It can be found in Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies.

While not his primary focus, this article does reveal that the crufixion of Jesus is drawn from within Judaism and accusations of "pagan" borrowings are quite simplistic (making the early Christians look like a bunch of comparative religious scholars which, ironically enough, looks a lot like the scholars who make such accusations). In fact, these accusations are not necessary at all. In fact, by drawing the "pagan" connection, it actually casts misunderstanding on the significance of the crufixion from the understanding of the early Christian movement as many of these scholars may point out the similarities but they often fail to spend any time on the differences.

Anyhow, part one brings forth the following conclusions:

1) The two main targumic themes of the Akedah story, namely, Isaac's willingness to be offered in sacrifice and the atoning virtue of his action, were already traditional in the first century AD.

2) Genesis 22 was interpreted in association with Isaiah 53. That is to say, the link between these two texts was established by Jews independently from, and almost certainly prior to, the New Testament.

3) The theological problem which apparently led to the creation of this exegetical tradition was that of martyrdom.

4) The tradition must consequently have established itself some time between the middle of the second century BC and the beginning of the Christian era.

I'll try and draw this out more but questions are welcomed to help focus my responses.

The other work that is significant in this regard is Shalom Spiegel's The Last Trial. He shows, in much greater detail (Vermes references this work), the tradition where Isaac was actually killed and resurrected by God.

Though not a common belief, it is not unknown in Jewish circles. This idea is mentioned briefly in the movie The Believer.

Again, this stuff is dense but it convincingly shows that there is no need to go outside of Judaism to explain the core of Christian beliefs. If there is any "pagan" influence it either came to Christianity through Judaism (what Spiegel calls the residual "dust" of paganism) or by those who interpreted Christianity once it left the environs of Jerusalem.