Abstract
Divine Bodiess reveals that early Christian speculations about the nature of the resurrected body were much more than doctrinal or theological abstractions. They were sites for ancient Christians to reflect upon and mitigate their anxieties over human embodied life. Their speculations, Candida Moss argues, have much to tell us about our own priorities and fears. Early Christians queried: What parts of the body would be preserved in heaven? What form would these celestial bodies take? Would they be identifiably connected to the bodies borne on earth, and how? These questions, Moss shows, grapple with the continuity of the self and the threat to memory that death poses. Early Christian reflections on the resurrected body also conveyed cultural biases about the bodies that were of value in this world. Still, they were varied, and included images of exalted, yet scarred and impaired bodies. Indeed, imperfectly perfected bodies are on full display in the canonical Gospels, though they have escaped the attention of historians and theologians “because the images they contain seem—in ‘instinctive’ ways that are never vocalized or justified—incompatible with notions of heavenly perfection” (p. 19). Moss presses the question: What is missed when we overlook these bodies? What endures? Who we are?
Divine Bodies might best be described as an elaborated essay that will be of special interest to scholars of early Christianity and their students; but it also offers rich resources for reflection for pastors and religious leaders. The study builds on and extends Moss’s considerable writing and thinking about the resurrected body and disability in early Christianity. Artfully constructed and pleasurable to read, the book weaves together discussions of Christian iconography of the saints, classical philosophy, medicine, and mythology with a wide array of ancient Christian texts. Each chapter is oriented around the New Testament and focuses on a theme that dominated ancient Christian speculation about the resurrected body: identity, integrity, functionality, and aesthetics. The first three chapters proffer novel re-readings of New Testament passages, some of which rarely figure in scholarly treatments of the resurrection. Chapter 1 explores whether Jesus’s body in the Gospel of John (on full display before a doubtful Thomas in 20:24–29) is best described as wounded, as often presumed, or rather as scarred. Moss argues for the latter, contending that Jesus’s scars function as a guarantor of his identity and of the veracity of physical resurrection. But might they even be read as a notion that bodily imperfections endure, “transfigured but not obliterated” (p. 38)?
The second chapter presents Moss’s most startling discovery—namely, that some early Christians could envision impaired and disfigured bodies in the heavenly kingdom. Here Moss investigates Mark 9:42–48, a passage in which Jesus advises that amputation and blinding are preferable to engaging in sin: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell. . . . And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.” Moss resists the traditional reading that these injunctions are but metaphors, or references to corporeal punishment. Moss considers them, instead, in the light of ancient military and medicinal discussions in which amputation was not punitive, but curative; it was also a common life-saving measure. While Mark’s logic may not overturn ancient aesthetics and its preference for symmetrical bodies (indeed the shock value of Jesus’s statements rests on it), it does convey that self-inflicted therapies could be marks of virtue, signs that pain and disfiguring were to be endured in order to secure one’s very fate. Like the scars that mar Jesus’s resurrected flesh, disfigurement, in this instance, retains a positive value. “Rather than rushing to triage the newly awakened eschatological body, we should explore the interpretative possibilities latent in the image of the righteous amputees,” Moss concludes (p. 64).
Chapters 3 and 4 offer up early Christian images of the resurrected body that are decidedly more representative of ancient cultural codes of beauty and the “socioeconomic” biases that underlined them. Resurrected bodies would be whole, complete and entire, and bear clear resemblance to the bodies on earth. Some argued that they would be replete with generative and digestive organs (as Tertullian of Carthage would have it, even “rows of teeth,” p. 78, 104), even as these organs and bodily fixtures were no longer needed. Activities such as consumption of food, the enjoyment of sex, and childbearing were held to be incompatible with the celestial domain and with the angelic bodies Christians hoped to inherit. Moss shows us how images of sexed, but sexless bodies, figured in Jesus’s own sayings, emerged out of the philosophical and theological quandaries that consumed a host of early Christian writers, with cultural biases about feminine bodies entangled in them.
Chapter 4 considers the white-clad bodies of the exalted martyrs in the book of Revelation (Rev 6:11). Moss reveals how early Christian writers played into ancient elite thinking that correlated beauty with goodness and virtue—values that were inevitably linked to “ethnicity and class” (p. 92). Revelation’s white robes connote a sameness to the exalted martyred in the heavenly court. As Moss shows, white is also the color fitted to heaven in the vision in Revelation. The choice of white was also culturally meaningful, an “aspirational” and idealized color, signifying beauty, virtue and authenticity (p. 105). White was a hue almost impossible to achieve with ancient technologies, costly to effect, and even harder to retain. While the vision in Revelation conveys that robes of celestial white might adorn bodies now degraded on earth, it leans on, rather than subverts, social hierarchies that vaunted wealth and status. This is one of Moss’s larger points—namely, that visions of the resurrected body routinely tell us much about the cultural biases of those imagining them.
Divine Bodies challenges its readers to think about how reflections on the afterlife, then as now, are sites for the living to negotiate anxieties and fears. Most pointedly, Moss’s mining of the ancient Christian archive reveals “ableistic assumptions” that permeate the thought of some ancient Christians, and New Testament scholars as well. Yet contemporary debates about morality take different form than they did in antiquity. They circle around hopes (panicked and potentially dystopic) about the immortality of the consciousness and memory, for instance. Such concerns, Moss finds, smuggle in cultural prejudices that aim for preserved identities that banish disability of any kind. In this respect, Moss’s book critically intervenes in a Western culture that struggles mightily against aging, illness, and death. Cosmetics, medicinal and surgical treatments—technologies that make life livable, and worth living, for many—can, in other instances, represent a deep cultural bias that our bodies should not reveal too much. Certainly, Western notions of beauty place little value on showcasing the unevenness of human life, nor do they acknowledge that human bodies, and embodied experiences, are widely disparate. Some people are forced to live precarious lives in which their bodies are subject to the unjust vagaries of human existence (from the effects of racism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberal capitalism—what Jasbir Puar has called “debility,” that is, bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors [The Right to Maim, Duke University Press, 2017]). Early Christian theorizing about perfected resurrection bodies likewise sought to obviate precarity, just as the threat of this condition is muffled in contemporary hopes that we, or those we love, will be spared life eternal in an abject body and abject conditions, and endure, mostly unharmed. As readers take up Moss’s provocation to linger on the bodies in John and Mark that bear signs of wounding, they are pushed to revalue notions of disability, perhaps in a capacious way. Might we rethink the differentiated cartographies of our own flesh and bodies, and those of others? Corporeal particularities register the conditions from which we came and in which we make our way, and they are constituted out of all the experiences (even those that pain us most) that have made us who we are. “Perfection” may still beckon, but what it offers is a real loss and an unjust form of erasure.