What are you trying to say here? If you're saying Paul and our Lord didn't understand the difference between sleep and physical death, you're wrong. They understood the difference between being physically dead.... yet alive while physically dead.
Samuel was alive while physically dead, for example.
Moses and Elijah were alive while physically dead, for example.
I expect both knew quite a bit about physical death and sleep, since both experienced both, I believe. And they seemed to link the two. Both Jesus and Paul used the word "sleep" as a euphemism for "death". On that basis alone, the cults could certainly be forgiven for misunderstanding that "death" is akin to a state of "sleeping".
Now it seems weird to me that a body that is decaying would be said to be "sleeping". A body that is completely burned to ashes seems to be very little like a body that is "sleeping". And a body that is dumped into the sea and eaten by fish or sharks or crabs, bears little resemblance to a body that is "asleep".
If, then, a person that is dead can be compared to a person that is asleep, what is the basis of that comparison? Is it the bodily state? or the state of the mind? If the bodily state, as I suggested above, the word doesn't seem to fit. But if it is a state of mind--the mind is not currently doing anything, perhaps--then "asleep" is a fitting adjective, don't you think?
We often think of the "mind" as the active part of a person, which communicates and perceives and experiences, through the body, at least in this life. We "see" with our eyes, but we "perceive" with our mind using the sight from our ours. We "talk" with our mouths, but we "communicate" with our minds directing our mouthal function. We sense with our tongues and ears and fingers (and eyes), but we "experience" with our minds. Sleep, for the most part, is a cessation of these communicative and perceptive activities. Death is also a cessation of these activities.
Why, then, is it a bad thing to say that when Jesus talks about death, when Paul talks about death, and when the Old Testament in many places talks about death, they all mean the cessation of communication and perception and experience, and they call it "sleep"?
Samuel, Elijah, and Moses all appeared in some form, but we don't have enough information to do more than make assumptions about what form that was--if a physical body of some sort, or a spiritual essence, perhaps. Nor do we know their state outside of those times when they had some kind of manifestation seen by the living people (Samuel to Saul and Elijah and Moses to the 3 apostles). I expect this aspect of manifestation is what is missing in God (if something could be missing in God), when it says He is "invisible" (Col 1:15). And what appeared to be required anytime a heavenly being appeared to someone on earth, whether it was as a burning bush, or three men on their way to Sodom, or a captain of the Lord's hosts, or even a snake in the Garden. We have a special suffix used to denote an appearance of a spirit-being to a human, "-ophany". And I don't know of too many theologians that use that suffix in regard to Samuel, Elijah, and Moses. We don't talk that way, usually.
Here's a place where someone is considering what the appearance of Moses really was:
| With regard to Moses, on the other hand, we are a bit less certain: Some of theologians (notably, St. Thomas Aquinas) hold that Moses did not appear in his own body, but that it was only his soul which was present – the idea being that his soul would have made use of condensed air and dust for a bodily form. Others (Fr. Cornelius a’ Lapide) are inclined to think that Moses’ soul was temporarily re-united with his body for the apparition – for we know that St. Michael the Archangel guards the body of Moses (perhaps it is even incorrupt). In any case, it seems to us that the special care given Moses’ body (witnessed in the account of his death in the final chapter of Deuteronomy and also in the Letter of St. Jude) may have been a foreshadowing of his appearance on Tabor. |
You see that even those that thought it was [just] Moses' soul, it had to use "condensed air and dust for a bodily form."
In our physical world, using physical eyes, we can only see physical things. And the apostles all saw something physical, as far as we can tell. If they were seeing something physical, then that physical thing was the original bodies of Elijah and Moses (and Samuel), or it was new bodies made especially for the occasion, or it was a mirage or sight trick played on them, or an hallucination, shared by the three men. But those last two options then casts doubt on whether they really saw Jesus transfigured, if Moses and Elijah were just hallucinations.
Which leaves us with 1. original bodies (resurrected or preserved) or 2. some other kind of body (material uncertain, but compressed air and dust being one option).
Whatever the case, we don't know from the texts whether any of the three were really their never-dead souls reunited with the bodily manifestation or were really resurrected and put into these bodies. again. If they were resurrected temporarily, what happened next--after they were done with their missions? I don't know that, either.
