1 Corinthians 15:18

18. Fallen asleep Ruckert quotes an elegant sentence from Photius: “In regard to Christ, Paul uses the term death in order that his dying should be clearly affirmed; when he speaks of us, he uses the cheerful word sleep, that he may yield us consolation. When resurrection is the subject he frankly says death; but when he dwells upon our hopes he calls it sleep.”

Are perished Literally, They that fell asleep in Christ perished; that is, aoristically, they perished in the act of falling asleep. They fell asleep in Christ, according to the Christian and Pauline view; they perished upon the non-resurrection and non-Christian view. What, then, is the meaning of perished? And it seems not pertinent here to say, with Kling: “Perdition, according to Scripture, is not annihilation, but the state of damnation remaining in gehenna;” for Paul is writing for, and probably arguing with, those who ignore Gehenna, and even the future existence of the soul. Nor does it seem pertinent to say, with Alford, that perished means “passed into misery in hades.” Both these views Paul seems carefully to avoid expressing, and uses the generic term perished, which was in use among Gentiles on this very point, and which does not define the nature of the ruin. Besides, his statement that the falling asleep and the perishing is one and the same thing, forbids this applying the word perishing to an after state. Those with whom he argues confine the hope in Christ to this life, 1 Corinthians 15:19; and their view yields the Epicurean maxim of 1 Corinthians 15:32, both of which passages suggest that these heretics denied the future of the soul.

The philosophers who mocked Paul at Athens denied alike the resurrection, and the immortality of the soul. A short time before Christ, Cesar, in the Roman senate, argued against executing the followers of Cataline under the assumption, fully expressed, that death is the last of man; and of the entire senate not one dissented from that belief. This was the settled view of the civilized paganism of the age. Even the poets, who playfully prattled of manes, hades, and shadowy Plutonian domes, did, as prosaic thinkers, reject and laugh at such myths. And these Corinthian deniers of the resurrection clearly held the view that Christianity only presented a resurrection of the soul from sin, and was, therefore, a good thing for this life, but nothing for the life to come.