It's the resurrection, silly

Had Jesus not been raised bodily, who knows how the Christian story would have run—or, rather, whether there would have been one at all (1 Cor 15). But in fact he had, and a fortiori so shall we: the story thus runs in the direction from him to us. Paul’s argument that we shall receive spiritual bodies upon our resurrection, Luke’s ordering of the church’s kerygma from Jesus’ resurrection to the hope of our own (see Acts 23:6; 24:15; 26:23), and Justin’s insistence that the immortality of the soul is insufficiently Christian precisely because it discards our bodies, all presuppose the fundamental importance of Jesus bodily resurrection for what we make of our end. To say it slightly differently, the way the Christian story runs to its end is unintelligible without the bodily resurrection of Jesus.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 222