D-E-A-D

Throughout his letters, then, Paul’s logic is clear enough: when Jesus died, he was dead—not partly dead, as if he possessed a soul that escaped death, but really, truly, and fully dead. Paul consistently speaks, in fact, of Jesus’ resurrection in the passive voice, as something that can only be attributed to the act of God (see Rom 4:25 et passim). Because he was dead, Jesus could not raise himself; it was God who raised Jesus from the dead. And when he was then alive again, he was alive with the body by which he lived his earthly life. This body, however, was not flesh and blood simpliciter, a resuscitation like Lazarus’s in John’s Gospel or a revivified corpse; it was, rather, transformed flesh, transformed blood, a body that required the word spirit to describe it.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 94–95 (emphasis original)