1 Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) 158; Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) xix; idem, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 177; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

2 Johnson, Meaning of the Body, xiv–xv, 173–74.

3 All translations of New Testament texts are my own.

4 The so-called Pfleiderer-Teichmann line of developmental theories, however, has been criticized for falsely assuming a sharp dichotomy between Paul’s Jewish and Hellenistic modes of thought and depicting Paul as having to resolve intellectual conflicts by gradually changing from one mode to another (Dale B. Martin, “Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Dichotomy: Toward a Social History of the Question,” in Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide [ed. T. Engberg-Pedersen; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000] 30; Frederick S. Tappenden, Resurrection in Paul: Cognition, Metaphor, and Transformation [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2016] 77). See Otto Pfleiderer, Paulinism: A Contribution to the History of Primitive Christian Theology (trans. Edward Peters; London: Williams & Norgate, 1891); Ernst Taichmann, Die paulinische Vorstellungen von Auferstehung und Gericht und ihre Beziehungen zur jüdischen Apokalyptic (Freiburg: Tübingen, 1896).

5 John Gillman, “A Thematic Comparison: 1 Cor 15:50–57 and 2 Cor 5:1–5,” JBL 107 (1988) 439–54.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 454.

8 Richard N. Longenecker, “Is There Development in Paul’s Resurrection Thought?,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament (ed. Richard N. Longenecker; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 171–202, at 196.

9 Ibid., 196–97.

10 Gillman, “Thematic Comparison,” 450–51.

11 Ibid., 445–46.

12 Ibid., 454.

13 Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) 16, 25.

14 Ibid., 16. See also Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 48.

15 Martin, Corinthian Body, 16.

16 Ibid., 17. James Longrigg, Greek Rational Medicine: Philosophy and Medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 46.

17 Martin, Corinthian Body, 46.

18 Ibid., 16 (emphasis in original).

19 Georg Luck, “Studia Divina in Vita Humana: On Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ and Its Place in Greco-Roman Philosophy,” HTR 49 (1956) 207–18, at 214.

20 Martin, Corinthian Body, 28–34.

21 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 42. See also Martin, Corinthian Body, 17.

22 Martin, Corinthian Body, 16–18.

23 Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 58, 86; cited in Martin, Corinthian Body, 18.

24 Elizabeth C. Evans, Physiognomics in the Ancient World (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1967) 23.

25 Giovanni B. Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups (Synkrisis; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) 209.

26 The manipulation of bodily formation began before birth and continued through childhood, adolescence, and even to the later parts of life. Central to this manipulation was the idea of bodily balance. For example, since women, infants, and younger men were moister and softer than older men, the manipulation of the young male body was a process of properly “drying and hardening” so that the body could gradually arrive at and maintain the correct balance of moist/dry and soft/hard that corresponded to the age and demonstrated the aristocratic beauty. See Martin, Corinthian Body, 25, 27–29.

27 Ibid., 34–35.

28 Philip F. Esler, The First Christians in Their Social Worlds: Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1994) 48; Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: WJK, 2000) 144; Colleen Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 181.

29 To say that these expressions are “metaphorical” is not to imply that people do not believe in the expressions in a literal sense—they probably do. Here I rely on the idea of “conceptual metaphor” in cognitive linguistics to use the term “metaphor” or “metaphorical,” not in opposition to “literal,” but to describe the way in which the human mind functions to conceptualize abstract ideas and beliefs on the basis of concrete practices and experiences. For example, people can make sense of their special and dramatic experiences (such as losing the sense of gravity or being overwhelmed) on the grounds of their more familiar experiences (such as floating or being immersed in water).

30 Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 1.

31 Ibid., 65.

32 As Stowers says, “gentiles who come to share the pneuma of Christ in baptism share in this contiguity back to Abraham and are thus seed of Abraham and coheirs as they participate in the stuff of Christ.. . . Those in Christ are literally of the same stuff.” See S. Stowers, “What Is ‘Pauline Participation in Christ’?,” in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders (ed. Fabian E. Udoh; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) 352–71, at 216–17; Martin, Corinthian Body, 15–29; Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 93–98; Tappenden, Resurrection in Paul, 216–17.

33 Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) 47–48.

34 Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (rev. ed.; NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014) 671 (emphasis in original).

35 John Newman, “Eating and Drinking as Sources of Metaphor in English,” Cuadernos Filología Inglesa 6 (1997) 213–31, at 213–14.

36 Åshild Næss, “How Transitive Are Eat and Drink Verbs?,” in The Linguistics of Eating and Drinking (ed. John Newman; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009) 27–43 (emphasis added).

37 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 400–44.

38 Bazzana emphasizes the social and ethical functions of the experience of receiving the Spirit in the Pauline groups, see his Having the Spirit of Christ, 134–66, 199.

39 Martin, The Corinthian Body, 94.

40 Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991) 157–60.

41 Victor Paul Furnish, II Corinthians (2nd ed.; AB 32A; Garden City: Doubleday, 1984) 278.

42 Callie Callon, Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse (LNTS 597; London: T&T Clark, 2019).

43 Matthew B. Roller, Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 226.

44 Jennifer A. Glancy, “Boasting of Beatings (2 Corinthians 11:23–25),” JBL 123 (2004) 99–135, at 128.

45 Ibid., 107–13.

46 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 27–59, 330–31.

47 Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians (2nd ed.; WBC 40; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014) 72.

48 Margaret E. Thrall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 vols.; ICC 34; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994) 1:322.

49 Quoted by William D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (4^th ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980) 313.

50 Furnish, II Corinthians, 278.

51 Ibid., 253.

52 For example, Plutarch speaks of a vast amount of silver coins contained in jars (ἐν ἀγγείοις) in the triumphant parade celebrated by Aemilius Paulus (Plut., Aemil. 32). As Thrall deduces from the following passage that explicitly specifies the material when it is special (some in the procession carried “silver bowels”), most of these jars should be ordinary ones. See her Second Corinthians, 1:322.

53 Thrall, Second Corinthians, 1:322.

54 Quoted in Martin, 2 Corinthians, 230.

55 Rudolf Bultmann, “νεκρός, νεκρόω, νέκρωσις,” TDNT 4.895, citing Galenus 18.1; Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) 345.

56 Martin, 2 Corinthians, 232.

57 Harris, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 346. See also the summary of commentaries in Furnish, II Corinthians, 255.

58 Furnish, II Corinthians, 283.

59 Another difference is that Paul’s experiences are not one-time events but repeated (2 Cor 4:11).

60 Tappenden, Resurrection in Paul, 201.

61 Frederick S. Tappenden, “Coming Back to Life in and through Death: Early Christian Creativity in Paul, Ignatius, and Valentinus,” in Coming Back to Life: The Permeability of Past and Present, Mortality and Immortality, Death and Life in the Ancient Mediterranean (eds. Frederick S. Tappenden and Carly Daniel-Hughes; Montreal: McGill University, 2017) 181–214, at 188.

62 Tappenden, Resurrection in Paul, 201.

63 Colleen Shantz indicates that two notions concerning body status are usually associated with religious ecstasy: the transformation of the body and the escape from the body. See Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy, 96.

64 See discussion below.

65 Harris, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 314.

66 Martin, 2 Corinthians, 215.

67 Martin considers 3:17 as Paul’s “interpretive comment” on 3:16. See his 2 Corinthians, 214.

68 Even if one interprets κατοπτριζόμενοι in 3:18 differently, the logic that “the Lord is now present as the Spirit,” taken from 3:17, would still ultimately mean that “the same image” is whatever is revealed by the Spirit. For example, N. T. Wright and Linda L. Belleville consider κατοπτριζόμενοι as “reflecting” and “the same image” as “the same image as each other” (emphasis added). However, partly based on the pneumatological logic of 3:17, Wright argues that the word καθάπερ adds an explanatory tone to the preceding description of the ongoing transformation: “from glory to glory—that is to say, from the Lord, the Spirit.” The transformation, then, occurs from the glory of the Lord/Spirit that the Christians merely behold to another glory that they also reflect. See N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991) 188–89; Linda L. Belleville, Reflections of Glory: Paul’s Polemical Use of the Moses-Doxa Tradition in 2 Corinthians 3.1–18 (JSNTSup 52; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991) 273–96.

69 Wright, Climax of the Covenant, 189. As Murray J. Harris also argues, “there appear to be no NT exceptions to the rule that ‘if a prep[osition] is followed by two anarthrous substantives, both in the genitive case, it always qualifies the former.’ ” See Harris, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 317–18.

70 Gillman, “Thematic Comparison,” 454.

71 Ibid., 441.

72 Lisa M. Bowens, “Investigating the Apocalyptic Texture of Paul’s Martial Imagery in 2 Corinthians 4–6,” JSNT 39 (2016) 3–15, at 3.

73 Ibid., 3–10.

74 This inner transformation is to be understood in a material sense. First, it is fueled by the material Spirit indwelling a person. Second, it is in parallel with the physical deterioration of the outer in the present. Third, it will be completed at the future transformation of the whole person.

75 Paul’s reconceptualization of mortality had a continual effect on early Christian traditions. An example is the Treatise on the Resurrection (NHC I, 4) from the Nag Hammadi codices, in which the aging of the mortal body is considered as a part of pregnancy for the resurrection life (esp. Treat. Res. 47.17–22). Hugo Lundhaug has indicated the intertextual connections between Treat. Res. and both 1 Cor 15 and 2 Cor 3–5. There is also a distinction in Treat. Res. 47.34–48.6 between the outer, visible members of a person that are mortal and the inner, invisible members that are eternal and will be “uncovered” in resurrection. More importantly, Treat. Res. uses gestational metaphors to articulate the constructive role of mortality in resurrection and eternal life. By using gestational metaphors, Treat. Res. inherits Paul’s reconceptualization of mortality. Hugo Lundhaug, “ ‘These Are the Symbols and Likenesses of the Resurrection’: Conceptualizations of Death and Transformation in the Treatise on the Resurrection (NHC I, 4),” in Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body, and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity (eds. Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Økland; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009) 187–205, at 190–95.