James Tabor has a bit of a different take on Paul’s apocalyptic thinking. In Tabor’s reading, Genesis was the dust prototype of death and decay that would later be replaced by a cosmos of spirit (pneuma). Here are a few gems from the presentation:

The salvation is cosmic because all the forms of existence are passing away: being male/female; Jew/Greek; Slave/free; Rich/poor. The setup of this world is passing away (1 Cor 7:29-31) Those who are in Christ have a new spiritual body waiting for them in heaven. Tabor doesn’t say this but presumably the pneuma of Christ in you indicates to God who gets the new resurrection body, like the lamb’s blood on the door indicated to God which houses were to be passed over in Egypt. In this regard Christ was the ultimate Passover lamb of God. This was helpful to me because with previous presenters I initially thought they meant (correctly or incorrectly) the pneuma/spirit of Christ in you developed into the new spiritual resurrection body, but I think seeing Jesus as the ultimate Passover lamb (1 Cor 5:7) make more sense here. Another nuance Tabor adds is for Paul it’s not everyone who will be raised in the end of days resurrection but only Christians and the dead in Christ (1 Cor 15:23).

There is nothing in someone being raised from the dead that proves the end times general resurrection had begun. In the Hebrew scriptures:

• The prophet Elijah prays and God raises a young boy from death (1 Kings 17:17-24)
  
• -Elisha raises the son of the Woman of Shunem (2 Kings 4:32-37) whose birth he previously foretold (2 Kings 4:8-16)
  
• -A dead man’s body that was thrown into the dead Elisha’s tomb is resurrected when the body touches Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:21)

There must have been something special about what Paul saw as the resurrected Jesus. And the idea that in the end time general resurrection it makes little sense to think bodily resurrection is meant because what about people eaten by animals, or lost at sea, or burned. It makes sense that, as Tabor says, Jesus left his physical body behind like discarded clothes and put on his new spirit body. This would explain why Paul has no empty tomb story, which was later by Mark invented as a common apotheosis (person becoming god) trope such as Walsh and Price point out we see in Chariton’s novel.