As far as the nature of the resurrection goes, that is another story which I am afraid you and I will not resolve over a casual web-interface…those are the kind of discussions that require face-to-face time, potentially involving various adult beverages.

Interpreting resurrection – when it is not used metaphorically – as having to do with anything other than bodies is both dangerous and contradictory; to do so is to cut resurrection language off from the first century context and ignore the definitions of the words themselves.

N.T. Wright lays out a good case in The Resurrection of the Son of God that in the first century resurrection language referred strictly to bodies and was as a result in direct opposition to the pagans of the day who knew as well as we know that the dead simply do not come back to life. Both pagan and Jewish conceptions of afterlife were simply not solutions to death; they were acknowledgements of it. Not until much later after the first century – in thought far removed from the Jewish context that engrossed and defined Jesus and his original followers – did resurrection come to refer simply to fluttering off to the afterlife as a disembodied spirit. Of course, there were some Gnostics who interpreted resurrection only around conversion (in contrast to the original Christians who saw conversion as an anticipation of bodily resurrection and the renewal of creation), but they, like the rest of the Platonic pagans, merely accepted death for the hope of a disembodied afterlife.

To suggest there remains no future bodily resurrection for the Christian church (or all of humanity) is to relieve God of his covenantal faithfulness and completely detach the language John and Paul use to describe the renewal of creation from their contexts in which resurrection referred to what would happen to bodies. More dangerous, however, is that in suggesting for the first century Christians the hope of resurrection did not involve bodies, it is equally suggestible that they did not even believe Jesus bodily rose from the dead; this is predicament Marcus Borg has found himself in, for example. “For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised” (1Co 15:16).

I’m not exactly sure what your position is, Virgil, but I’m aware of some hyperpreterists who downgrade the Christian hope to merely disembodiment. First century Judaism and Christianity stood over and against paganism for a reason, and to suggest that all along they were really in agreement with Plato, as far as I am concerned, is not only radical and but historically naive and theologically dangerous. I think if you do take the position of the hyperpreterists to which I referred, I suggest you read and heavily consider the argument Wright lays out in The Resurrection of the Son of God