Resurrection

Resurrection

 …if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are also found to be false witnesses of God because we witnessed of God that He raised Christ….

 If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. …Why am I in peril every hour? …I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1Cor 15:14-32).

The most objective way of validating a witness’ testimony is to show that that witness has “everything to lose, and nothing to gain”.

Witnesses are not only being challenged by Jewish and Roman authorities, they are being actively persecuted. 

Paul not only believes that he is speaking the truth, but that he is speaking the truth about the Lord he loves (that is, the Lord who has loved him first). He endures persecution not simply because he believes he has a duty to bear witness to the truth about the resurrection, but also because he loves the One about whom he bears witness. If Paul’s love is true, then it can hardly be thought that he is preaching a falsity about his Beloved.

The early Christian view of resurrection does not resemble the pagan notion of the “afterlife.” Indeed, the pagan notion of afterlife (disembodied immortality) does not resemble the Jewish notion of resurrection. No pagans known to us ever imagined that resurrection could or would really take place, let alone offered any developed framework of thought on the subject.

Though Paul views the resurrection through the lens of his Jewish background, he alters it considerably, “indicat[ing] that he thought he knew something more about what resurrection was, something for which his tradition had not prepared him.” He develops and changes the Jewish tradition in four respects:

[1] Resurrection was now happening in two stages (first Jesus, then all his people); [2] resurrection as a metaphor meant, not the restoration of Israel (though that comes in alongside in Romans 11), but the moral restoration of human beings; [3] resurrection meant, not the victory of Israel over her enemies, but the Gentile mission in which all would be equal on the basis of faith; [4] resurrection was not resuscitation, but transformation into a non-corruptible body.

The resurrection is the fulfillment of the Incarnation – not the overcoming of it. 

For more details: 
http://magischristwiki.org/index.php?title=Resurrection_Accounts#Paul.E2.80.99s_Experience_of_the_Risen_Jesus_.E2.80.93_Implications_in_his_Writings