1 Corinthians 15:12

how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? There were three different schools of thought among those outside the Christian Church which denied the doctrine of the Resurrection from the dead. The first was the materialistic school, represented by the Epicureans among the heathen and by the Sadducees among the Jews. They thought that man would entirely cease to exist after death, and that any other idea was only the result of man's vanity and his insatiable longing after existence. The second, in which the Stoics were the most prominent body, taught, what amounted to the same thing, the Pantheistic doctrine of the ultimate reabsorption of the soul into the Divinity from which it had sprung, and therefore the final extinction of the individual personality. The third school, of which the disciples of Plato were the chief representatives, while maintaining the eternal personality and immortality of the soul, regarded matter as the cause of all evil, the only barrier between the soul and the Absolute Good, a thing, in fact, essentially and eternally alien to the Divine, and therefore could not conceive of immortality except through the entire freedom of the soul from so malignant and corrupting an influence. Hence the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body was the principal stumbling-block in the way of an early reception of Christianity. It aroused the antagonism of an influential section among the Jews (Acts 4:1-2; Acts 5:17; Acts 23:6-9), and was considered by heathen philosophers inadmissible and absurd (Acts 17:32). This doctrine for many centuries has proved the principal hindrance to the progress of Christianity. It produced the numerous Gnostic sects, which were willing to accept the doctrine of eternal life through Christ, so long as it was not encumbered by the necessity of believing in the resurrection of the body. The Manichaeans and their followers maintained for many centuries a conflict with the Christian Church, mainly on this point, and were able for many years to boast of so distinguished a convert as St Augustine, who describes them, after his return to the Church, as holding that "Christ came to deliver not bodies but souls." De Haer. 46. For information concerning the tenets of the heathen philosophers on this point, the student may consult Archer Butler's Lectures on Philosophy; for the early Christian heretics, Neander and Gieseler's Church Histories, and Mansel's Gnostic Heresies, and for both Ueberweg's History of Philosophy,