1 Corinthians 15:17
1 Corinthians 15:1717And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.
Affirmed — the resurrection is essential, and without it there would be no ransom and no hope. The Watchtower teaches that Jesus was raised as a spirit creature rather than in the body that died, but agrees entirely that the resurrection is indispensable to the Christian message.
Start from the agreement, because it is substantial. Paul makes the resurrection the hinge of everything: without it, faith is useless and sins remain. What follows is that the nature of the resurrection is not a side question. Paul is not saying a resurrection of some sort is needed; he is arguing from the specific event the witnesses in verses 5 to 8 saw. And what they described was a body — one that could be touched, that ate, that showed its wounds, and that left a tomb empty. Jesus himself frames it that way at : a spirit does not have flesh and bones just as you see that I have. That sentence exists to rule out the reading that he was raised as a spirit. So the question to ask is not whether the resurrection matters — you both agree it does — but what the apostles said they saw, and whether a spirit creature answers to their description. It also connects to identity. has the risen Christ say "I became dead, but look, I am living forever." The same "I." Compare , , .