Larry Hurtado, head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, writing in Slate: “That Curious Idea of Resurrection: How early Christians grappled to accept the idea that Jesus returned from the dead“:
Christians in the first few centuries also had difficulty embracing the idea of a real, bodily resurrection. Then, as now, resurrection was not the favored post-death existence—people much preferred to think that after dying, souls headed to some ethereal realm of light and tranquillity.
