PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

15:35-49:
15:50-58:
You should know that the seed that you sow will not come to life unless it dies
It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory.
For the trumpet will blast and the dead will be raised imperishably, and we will be
changed. For it is necessary for… this mortality to be clothed with immortality. 70
Death [will be] consumed by victory.
Where, O Death, is your victory?
Where, O Death, is your sting?
….But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul thus uses the problem of “denial of resurrection of the dead” as the ultimate paradigm of
the puffed up, status-obsessed Corinthian refusal to adopt the position of the crucified. There
is something of a parallel here to the rhetorical function of an insistence on resurrection in the
book of 2 Maccabees. George W.E. Nickelsburg writes:
The book in general is directed toward the non-Jewish reader, who might think that
people who suffer in this way have no portion with God. 71
Likewise, those in Corinth who consider the foolish (4:10), the defrauded (6:7-8), the obligated
(7:5), the weak (8:7), the enslaved (9:19), the restricted (10:23), the subject (11:3), the
unimpressive (12:15), the restrained (14:28), and the dead (15:12) – that is, the cruciform – to
70 Chrysostom draws attention to the fact that even those who are alive are thus labelled with
death: “What he means is this: We will not all die, but we will all be changed, even those who
do not die – for they are also mortal”. Homily 42; PG 61.364.
71 Nickelsburg, Resurrection, 123.
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