Did Paul's View of the Resurrection of the Dead Undergo Development?

Abstract

I IT not a remarkable thing that you should have started the idea— and the word—Development, as the key to the history of church doctrine, and since then it has gradually become the dominant idea of all history, biology, physics, and in short has metamorphosed our view of every science, and of all knowledge? So wrote Mark Pattison to John Henry Newman in 1878, 33 years after the publication of Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Rarely had a single idea so rapidly and thoroughly transformed a whole culture's field of vision. This implies, to be sure, that Newman had had predecessors and allies of sorts as well as kindred and alien successors. Among the predecessors was G. W. F. Hegel, whose triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis impinged on biblical history and exegesis especially through the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur. By the end of the century development had established itself in biblical studies as an indispensable heuristic resource. Likewise, by century's end Richard Kabisch and Johannes Weiss had discovered as the very form of early Christian consciousness, aspiration, and reflection. Soon Albert Schweitzer would so effectively thematize the issue of eschatology as to make it foundational for the exegesis of the New Testament, the history of religions (Judeo-Christian sector), and New Testament theology. Moreover, these two thought-forms, development and eschatol-