Many New Testament scholars have observed that the conception of the resurrection body implied in 1 Corinthians 15 clashes so violently with that presupposed in the gospels that the latter must be dismissed as secondary embellishments, especially as 1 Corinthians predates the gospels.

A critic may reject some miracle stories as legendary, and not others, with no inconsistency at all for the simple reason that even if one holds miracles to be possible, one need not hold legends to be impossible! There are other factors, literary and historiographical ones, that might lead a critic to conclude that even though miracles can happen, it does not appear that in this or that case they did.

The born-again gospel promises joy and peace of mind, but it does so by prolonging childhood.

For the believer in divine creation, the open question of the Mystery of Being is like an open wound. It stings and gapes, and the believer cannot rest till it be healed up, closed up, smeared with the soothing balm of an answer, even if his doctrine be a sophisticated one like Aquinas's or that of the latest Liberal Protestant theologian.

By itself, 1 Corinthians 15 just wouldn't mean much. He wants the appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 to be read as if they had in parentheses after them 'See Luke 24; Matthew 28; John 21.'

If, when we compare two versions of a story, the second known to be a retelling of the first, and find that the second has more of a miraculous element, we may reasonably conclude we have legendary (or midrashic or whatever) embellishment. The tale has grown in the telling. This sort of comparison is common in extrabiblical research and no one holds that it cannot properly indicate legend formation there.

What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.