Whether this final section comes in reply to reports (15:12) or tentative questions that are just beginning to be asked (15:35), its principal purpose is clear. Paul writes to defend, to clarify, and to broaden his teaching concerning the resurrection (15:1–11). From the content of the statement attributed to some of the Christians at Corinth (15:12), it seems that their attitude was being shaped by a skeptical aversion similar to that of the Athenians whose attentiveness to Paul’s preaching came to an end at his mention of the “resurrection of the dead” (Acts 17:32).

If this is so, then the crux of the issue was probably not a denial of the possibility of a life after death but an opposition (which was characteristic of Greeks and, on occasion, of Jews living in a Greek environment) to …