The Body, Not the Soul

In the strict sense the doctrine of resurrection is about the raising of the dead in the body, and it is deliberately distinct from the survival or immortality of a soul. The creeds are specific, "the resurrection of the body," "the resurrection of the dead", where popular belief often drifts toward a disembodied afterlife the doctrine does not teach.

Within the Hebrew Bible an explicit hope of resurrection emerges late and unevenly; Daniel 12:2, with its promise that "many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake," is the clearest statement, and by the first century it divided the Pharisees, who affirmed it, from the Sadducees, who did not. Christian teaching makes the resurrection of Jesus the hinge: in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul argues that Christ is raised as the "firstfruits," that the dead will be raised likewise, and that what is raised is a "spiritual body", transformed, not merely resuscitated flesh, but bodily nonetheless. In Islam the parallel doctrine of bodily resurrection at the Day of Judgement is treated in its own entry.