John A. T. Robinson on Dematerialization
The late, liberal Church of England (Anglican) bishop and biblical
scholar, John A. T. Robinson, author of the bestseller, Honest to
God, famous also for reappraising common wisdom about when various
books of the New Testament were written, believed that the Shroud was
not the work of a medieval forger. In contemplating the notion that the
author of John, the fourth gospel, may have meant for us to interpret
that Jesus passed through his burial cloths, he addressed
dematerialization in the context of the Shroud of Turin. He seemed to
want to redefine it or at least be diplomatic:
Dematerialization is I suspect a modern way of envisaging the relationship between flesh and spirit, matter and energy, of being 'changed' or 'clothed upon' with a body of 'glory'. How a first-century Jew would naturally have envisaged resurrection (though this does not of course mean that this is how it actually happened) would surely have been as a corpse waking up from sleep, like Tabitha in Acts (9:40), as indeed Jesus predicts of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then like Lazarus walking out of the tomb. The difference in the case of Jesus was that the grave-clothes did not need to be taken off him nor the stones removed: he did it himself. For, unlike Lazarus, he was not simply being restored to the weakness of a flesh-body. In the power of the Spirit he broke the bonds of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.
Compare with conservative scholar Russell Kirk on Dematerialization