NOTES for Co1 15:12
People guessed from the earliest times that physical death is by no means the end of a person's existence. Some ideas about the afterlife already existed among people in the Paleolithic era. But when it comes to Christianity, the matter is not the afterlife, but something qualitatively different: resurrection. It might seem that the difference is small. But it only seems so at first glance. In fact, every idea of an afterlife, of postmortem existence whether of a shade or of a soul, presupposes that after physical death a person no longer lives a full life.
From the most ancient idea of the world of shadows, the kingdom of the dead, where all are equal and where there is only a semblance of life, to teachings about recompense after death, about a good and bad afterlife, characteristic of civilizations such as the Egyptian or Greek, the spiritual and historical distance is very great. But even the ideas of the immortality of the soul characteristic of Greek philosophy did not presuppose a full life after death: only the soul remained of the person, only thought and self-awareness, while everything else remained on earth with the body left behind at the moment of death.
Of course, this is not the world of shadows, where consciousness barely glimmers and where there is no place for thought or memory, but still one cannot speak here of life even in that very relative fullness characteristic of a fallen person in a fallen world. For Greek philosophers, however, many of whom after Plato considered the body only a prison of the soul, such incompleteness was preferable to life in the body.
The Bible from the very beginning orients a person not so much toward existence after death as toward the complete overcoming of death. This is not surprising: none of the authors of the biblical books looks at the body as a prison of the soul. For them the fullness of life presupposes life in the body.
But to recent pagans who had turned to Christ, such a view evidently seemed strange. They may have imagined the Kingdom as some dwelling place of pious souls, something like the medieval Orthodox or Catholic paradise. Paul does not tire of reminding them that the Kingdom is not paradise, not Elysium, and not the fields of Osiris. The Kingdom is new life in all its fullness, spiritual and bodily, in the same fullness in which the fullness of the life of the risen Christ was revealed to the faithful.