Are the dead going to reanimate as skeletons and cremated dust? Or are their skin cells and organs going to somehow magically reverse their deteoriated process?
I thought this might be the reformation of the Grateful Dead,some of whose original members are dead I believe. Seriously though,as a now confirmed Gnostic Christian,I take these things largely as metaphor.Most Christians I suppose take the bible as the divinely inspired word of God.For me though a lot of it is just later additions by perhaps well intentioned disciples that however do not represent the real Christ.I could be wrong here as I am no biblical scholar. For me resurrection is about salvation here and now on Earth.There is living Hell on Earth,and there is salvation here and now on Earth.
The most recent estimate I could find of the total number of people who have ever lived is 107 billion! To think of it another way, the dead outnumber the living by approximately 10:1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_humans_who_have_ever_lived " ...around 40% of those who have ever lived did not survive beyond their first birthday." So we'll have around 43 billion babies to take care of. And of course most of the reanimated adults won't understand modern society and would be considered barbarians by today's standards. They won't be able to find employment, housing or food. I mean all this to be tongue in cheek of course. Dead people stay dead, and the living will eventually join the dead. Enjoy the time you have and try to be kind to one another.
I believe the same as you, and regard the resurrection as metaphor. To the best of my knowledge, the only thing Jesus himself said about resurrection was in John 11:25 :"I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die." Most scholars think this was the latest of the scriptures, and one which shows Hellenistic or Essene/Persian influence. The Jews originally did not believe in resurrection, and the Sadducees who supplied the Temple priesthood rejected the doctrine. The Pharisees and Essenes though, who were most heavily influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism, believed in it, especially after the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, when it was thought that surely God did not intend for so many brave men to die permanently. The followers of Jesus believed it too. But it was Paul who made it into the central focus of Christian faith.
It has always seemed to me that once a body is dead, it is dead for keeps. The doctrine of an actual literal resurrection has always been one of the things that keeps me at a distance from mainstream Christianity, and its offshoots that teach the same thing. Maybe it works for some as a symbol or a metaphor, but to my mind it's a clumsy metaphor that has led to a lot of nonsense. The survival of death by some element in us called 'soul' seems less unlikely.
