by David Bentley Hart
James Ware has taken exception in these “pages” (or however one describes a web-journal) to an earlier article of mine on Paul’s metaphysics of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15. Now, everything I said in that original piece was—let me brash up front—both entirely correct and entirely uncontroversial among serious scholars of late antiquity, as well as among good New Testament scholars who have a deep training in Graeco-Roman intellectual history. In a sense, I feel no need to defend myself in that regard. I do feel compelled, however, to point out that Ware in fact did not attack me for what I said so much as for what he imagined I was saying; and that, moreover, his misunderstanding regarding the import of my argument is a splendid example of precisely the kind of habitual misreading of Christian scripture I originally set out to expose. Because, as I said there, the principal difficulty we have today in understanding the exquisitely abstruse spiritual and speculative language of the earliest Christian writers is the result of our (almost inevitable) tendency tacitly to superimpose our modern categories on texts from an age that thought in very different forms.
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