Bodily Resurrection? No Way!

Still considering the cultural context of Resurrection: for non-Jews, Greco-Roman thinking held that the soul or spirit was good and the physical and material world was weak, corrupt, and defiling. The physical, by definition, was always falling apart and therefore salvation was seen as liberation from the corruptible body. In this worldview resurrection was not simply impossible it was repulsive. No soul, once free of the body, would want to return to it. Even those who believed in reincarnation understood that returning to embodied life meant that the soul was not yet out of its prison. The ultimate goal was to be free of the confining body forever.

Also of note, historians find that in all the societies studied in this respect, beliefs about life after death are very conservative.  Faced with the drama of death, people tend to build upon beliefs and practices they know, and are familiar and comfortable with; where they came from; how their tradition, their family, their village, has always performed burial customs. Communities or groups of people are highly unlikely to come up with inventive understandings about the nature of death.

Consequently, it is remarkable that all the early Christians believed in a future bodily resurrection, even though most came from the pagan world. A world, a culture, where this was regarded as complete and utter rubbish.The Christian view of resurrection is unprecedented in history, and sprang up full-blown immediately after the death of Jesus. There was no development of thought here. It was not merely a subtle new twist that evolved out of any thinking prevalent at the time.