The primary Christian feast day is evidence of the apocalypse cult that still lies buried beneath the edifice of modern Christianity, which peeks out from time to time.
Always fun to read your writings Peter; you are far better read than most Christians on the subject. I am writing this instead of reviewing my notes for law school exams, so I'll keep this brief. I am not going to really fight the claims about the problems of imminent apocalypticism in St. Paul's writings (for brevity's sake, and also I'm not sure it would bother me much if I though St. Paul believed in the imminent Second Coming), but it's less clear to me that the primacy of Easter over Good Friday is as fossilized a remnant as you make it out to be.
A basic "orthodox" schema:
1) Sin and Death (overlapped and intertwined in the Christian imagination as aberrations in the divine plan) entered the world through Adam and Eve
2) Christ as the New Adam through his death and resurrection redeems the world from that
3) When we are baptized, we die to self and our born in Christ (which is why you are often baptized on Easter), and participate in the new life in God. Imaginatively, as you pointed out, this culminates in the Beatific Vision in Heaven, which often competes with the New Jerusalem where we have new bodies and yet are still fully united with God (a Christian gloss of the Pharisaic belief you pointed out in Revelation).
It seems that the Triduum, taken as a whole, is not merely a celebration of the moment of Atonement, in which case you'd be right, and Good Friday would be pre-eminent. Rather, it is the celebration of the new order brought about by God, typified by the risen Christ. I guess this is a lot of words to quibble that the focus on Easter is somehow less appropriate for the post 1st-century Christians. For both, it's celebrating the making of the cosmic order anew by celebrating the first instance of that. Even in the orthodox belief, sin and death are so intertwined that the Resurrection still does work, rather than just being a sign; the Resurrection, by conquering death, is the thing which wrenches the world back into the cosmic order.
Think of it like this: if Christ had died but not been resurrected, he would still be the Paschal Lamb, but death would not have been defeated, and the fruits of the Original Sin of Adam would not have yet been undone. It makes sense then, that orthodox Christians would celebrate this first act of the New Jerusalem (the imminence of which I am leaving aside here)*
Apologies if my cosmology isn't as crystal clear as it should be; like I said, I'm writing this instead of reviewing Civil Procedure notes. And if this was really just a vehicle to talk about imminent apocalypticism, you can disregard my protestations about the propriety of contemporary Christian practice.
*I have not gotten a nihil obstat on any of this; consult the Catechism or your local priest to check me for error.
A lot of this is obviously complicated by the fact that there are lots of different ways of interpreting the basic orthodox schema (evidenced by the question marks in my own crude summary). I want to be careful not to be too specific, but staying at the level of generalities might not be too helpful; difficult line to walk, so let me know if this comment doesn't make sense.
Ok, so, your basic claim: "the Triduum, taken as a whole, is ... the celebration of the new order brought about by God, typified by the risen Christ" - yes, I agree with this, and the corollary that Easter therefore has to be the high-point of the celebration, since the resurrection is at the heart of Christian understanding of the 'making of the cosmic order anew'.
But the point I was trying (and maybe failing) to make was that this whole idea of 'making the cosmic order anew' does not actually fit particularly well with lots of small-o orthodox theology, and has not actually been all that key to the average believer's faith for 1000+ years.* Thus my claim that Christianity's key celebration is premised on a set of ideas that sit somewhat uncomfortably with the main bulk of modern Christianity; and thus my interpretation of Easter as a symbol of Christian messiness / inconsistency / historicity.
Within early Christian apocalypticism, the 'remaking of the world' motif had a very clear and concrete meaning, and the place of Jesus' resurrection in the whole schema was obvious. We can expect the resurrection imminently precisely because we have witnessed its 'first fruits', the first person God has raised from the dead. The eschaton really has started; we are living through an 'imminent crisis'; 'nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines'.
After the late-first-century / early-second-century 'disappointment' (which was probably more of a gradual process than a single event, as important as St John's death may or may not have been), though, the 'remaking of the world' motif loses a lot of its resonance. If Jesus' death has 'wrenched the world back into the cosmic order', why is there still sin and death and famine and war and all the other things? Not just 'why is the world bad' (this is not the problem of evil) - why is the world _prosaically_ bad, with bad things happening that are obviously not part of the unfolding of the eschaton? This is the standard Jewish argument that's been repeated untold times: if the Christians say the Messiah has come and the cosmic order has been remade, why does everything still look the same? and what's been keeping him away from creation for 2000 years?
Of course, some Christian groups across history have decided they know the answer to these questions. (A contemporary example: maybe Jesus has been waiting for the Gathering of Israel, which is now underway post-1948!) But the mainstream of Christianity since late antiquity has wisely adopted agnosticism. While still officially committed to the view that Jesus' resurrection reset the cosmic order, when they come to talk about what that actually *means* in concrete terms, the terrain tends to shift onto the institution of the church and the state of believers' souls: Jesus has enabled God's grace to reach humanity and bring us closer to Him. On this story, if the cosmic order is being remade, it's at best an indirect effect of what happened in 33AD (mediated by the actions of the church in history, actions which are enabled by divine grace), not a direct metaphysical consequence of the beginning of the eschaton. The stuff about the second coming and the New Jerusalem hangs uneasily on at the end of this story. You can try to patch these together theologically; but I think it's better to see the whole thing historically, perceiving distinct elements that don't entirely overlap or cohere.
To put it differently: orthodox Christianity does indeed still say that Jesus' resurrection defeated death and undid the fruits of the Adam's sin. But to untrained eyes, it certainly doesn't look like death has been defeated, or that evil has been undone! Early Christians said: these are the birth pangs, wait and see, it will soon become obvious what has happened - and they really meant *soon*. From the second century onwards, that strategy stops working, and orthodoxy had to recast the meaning of these claims in order to make them defensible. But the way they recast the meaning shifted the theological focus from the resurrection to the crucifixion: from 'Jesus is the first fruits of the general resurrection' to 'Jesus died for your sins'.
Were orthodoxy to be a complete and consistent intellectual edifice, totally replacing the earlier apocalyptic schema, it would have to say that the 'new order brought about by God' *just consists in* the availability of saving grace, brought about by Christ's death. Of course, part of my point is that orthodoxy did not create a complete and consistent edifice, that Christianity still retains those earlier layers. Some of that can be seen in the persistence of ideas about the remaking of the cosmos that don't (I claim) entirely fit with the more common story of Jesus' sacrifice making God's saving grace available to believers. And it can also be seen in the persistence of celebrations, like Easter, that are based - as you correctly observe - on the 'remaking the cosmos' story.
Thanks for your engagement, too - it's good to hear from you.
Yeah, I was talking about this last night in the Catholic house I live in, and it is not a settled question in the Catholic mind. A related distinction to yours is the soul/body distinction. You might be able to trace this to Gnostic influence (or remains, because, as you pointed out, it's not always obvious which version of Christianity is the "main" or "true" one, except with the benefit of hindsight).
The trajectory of the soul after death seems to be, from my mind, which is not formally trained in theology but fairly well-read: I die, I (1) am judged by God, (2) hopefully get sent to Purgatory where my soul is cleansed of the impurities and weight of sin, (3) behold the Beatific Vision, perfectly united with God, (4) get reunited with my body on Judgement Day and am judged body and soul, (5) am perfectly united with God bodily in the New Jerusalem (all this is assuming I am not sent to Hell for my manifold sins and wickedness)
It is not clear, to me, what exactly the difference between (3) and (5) is. What extra work, so to speak, is my body doing? I obviously think it is important for the Creation arc that Genesis is done again, but right this time, and so there is the mirror of Genesis and Revelation. Therefore, I accept as rational, not just something I am obligated to believe, that the final plan is to have us reunited bodily, not just as souls. Otherwise, Creation wouldn't be additive, and it seems not to be the case that Creation is good, as we are explicitly told. It's not really clear to me however, exactly what the choirs of Heaven are missing that makes the New Jerusalem different (epistemic uncertainty about Heaven doesn't bother, to be clear, just being intellectually honest)
Two responses to this, still within the non-imminent camp are soul-sleep, or that purgatory lasts until the New Jerusalem. My understanding is that various passages of Scripture prevent these superficially plausible paths, not least of which is the Thief on the Cross. Also I think these would prevent saintly intercession, and so is obviously not ok for orthodox Catholics (an interesting alternate schema of relics, where they have mystical power because of the saintliness of the dead body, but don't involve actually intercession of conscious saints, might have been popular in the Early Church, but I'm pretty sure is heretical now).
So, yes, I think even Christians would (or at least I would) take well the idea that there are these competing visions, which are latent even in the Church today, about the nature of eschatology, especially the soul/body distinction and the consequences for after-death judgement.
Postscript: I also think a related concept is individual/worldly re-ordering, which I think is referenced but not fully teased out in your post. The New Jerusalem emphasizes the world being made anew, and the New Creation being done right, while the orthodox view emphasizes the rightness of the individual believer's soul. I think the competing visions also shoot through Christian thought.
Good to do this again; Substack is much better for long thoughts than Twitter!
'Catholic group house' guys will literally just reinvent monasticism from first principles instead of going to therapy
As I was writing, I noticed both the soul/body and individual/cosmos distinctions pressing into my writing, but I tried to exclude them as much as possible.
For individual/cosmos, I think it's kind of right in some ways but a bit misleading in others, because it misses out something that (to be fair) I also didn't mention much: the role of the *church* in orthodox thought. It's not just that God's grace saves individual believers, it's also that it builds up ~the collection of believers into a collective body, the bride of Christ. One of the things (I would argue) the earliest Christians lacked was a deep and theoretically-grounded ecclesiology – early Christians obviously preached their message and formed social groups, but it was pretty practical and unreflective. But we begin to see actual ecclesiology forming very quickly from the late first century. (And not just in orthodoxy: Gnosticism too concerned itself with the relationships between individual believers and the structure of distinctions, though very differently. Or think of Donatism, a kind of "purely ecclesiological" heresy.) You sometimes see capital-O Orthodox people leaning into "individualistic west" tropes to argue that Western Christianity focusses too much on individual salvation whereas they know better, but I don't think this is an East/West thing: the Catholic Church obviously has a very well developed ecclesiology!
If I were a Christian, I think I might see ecclesiology as the most promising "glue" to stick together the atonement-grace narrative and the resurrection-eschaton narrative: against the arguments of Jews (and others), God/Christ *is* visibly acting in the world to bring about the eschaton, but he's doing it indirectly through the church. I still don't think this answers all the questions, not least for the reason you raise: once you've introduced the Beatific Vision into your theology, you have a hard time explaining what exactly is missing from it and what the point of the general resurrection is. It's still not immediately clear what the point of this whole era of history is or why God needs the church. But if I were committed to the belief that there _must_ be some rational explanation of how the two different schemes fit together (even if it's only in the mind of God), this might be where I look.
I agree with you that this is where the pressure comes in. You mention Gnosticism but I think the much more obvious and repeated source of influence (in the sense that a bunch of different Christian thinkers kept independently borrowing from it over and over) is Platonism.*
It's notable that late antique Platonism itself faced the problem – most explicitly and acutely in Plotinus, but only because he was obviously the smartest and most insightful and so noticed the severity of the problem – of trying to explain the origin and purpose of the material world, when the higher world of Forms / Nous / whatever exists and is obviously better. Augustine famously borrowed Plotinus' vague-and-incomplete attempt at a solution here and applied it to the problem of evil. I think this suggests that the same kind of problem arose for orthodox Christians, who were committed to the idea that the world is good (scripturally, it says so in Genesis, and also philosophically, the Platonist's argument applies: the Good / a good God cannot give rise to evil), but obviously felt the pull of the Platonist thought that life as a soul freed from the world was better than life as a body 'trapped' in the world of sin.
Indeed, maybe the apocalypticism inherited from early Christianity made the problem even more acute for them! The Platonists had no problem saying that life as a soul was obviously better than life as a body, they just had to explain why you had a body in the first place. But the Christians faced the problem, of not only explaining why bodies and matter and etc. were created in the first place, but also saying – in the context of a very Platonist-y theology oriented towards life as a soul contemplating the source of Goodness – why exactly they featured so heavily in the culmination of God's plan. This is basically the problem you mention, of explaining what's missing from (3) such that (5) is needed.
*Indeed, I think it's plausible that the distinctive elements of all the Gnostic theologies we know a lot about (like Sethianism) come either directly from Middle Platonism, or are at least creatively informed by Middle Platonism. In turn, definitely at least _some_ of Neoplatonism is a reaction against Gnosticism and wouldn't have existed in the form we have it without it. It's at this point questions start arising about the 'two Origens' and I nope out, but it would be cool to know more than we do about these relationships.
I don't want to distract too much from your studying, and so I don't expect a response, but just on the basis that you said you enjoyed this discussion - re: imminent apocalypticism in Paul, it has been brought to my attention that the late Pope agreed with me on this, and indeed used the same topic - sexual ethics and virginity - for his example.
"Saint Paul recommended virginity because he expected Jesus’ imminent return and he
wanted everyone to concentrate only on spreading the Gospel" (Amoris Laetitia para 159.)
Not to argument-from-authority you into falling down at my feet (I know Amoris Laetitia wasn't uncontroversial), just thought you might find it interesting!
I was wondering about what's up in footnote 2 the other day, so...thanks!
Always fun to read your writings Peter; you are far better read than most Christians on the subject. I am writing this instead of reviewing my notes for law school exams, so I'll keep this brief. I am not going to really fight the claims about the problems of imminent apocalypticism in St. Paul's writings (for brevity's sake, and also I'm not sure it would bother me much if I though St. Paul believed in the imminent Second Coming), but it's less clear to me that the primacy of Easter over Good Friday is as fossilized a remnant as you make it out to be.
A basic "orthodox" schema:
1) Sin and Death (overlapped and intertwined in the Christian imagination as aberrations in the divine plan) entered the world through Adam and Eve
2) Christ as the New Adam through his death and resurrection redeems the world from that
3) When we are baptized, we die to self and our born in Christ (which is why you are often baptized on Easter), and participate in the new life in God. Imaginatively, as you pointed out, this culminates in the Beatific Vision in Heaven, which often competes with the New Jerusalem where we have new bodies and yet are still fully united with God (a Christian gloss of the Pharisaic belief you pointed out in Revelation).
It seems that the Triduum, taken as a whole, is not merely a celebration of the moment of Atonement, in which case you'd be right, and Good Friday would be pre-eminent. Rather, it is the celebration of the new order brought about by God, typified by the risen Christ. I guess this is a lot of words to quibble that the focus on Easter is somehow less appropriate for the post 1st-century Christians. For both, it's celebrating the making of the cosmic order anew by celebrating the first instance of that. Even in the orthodox belief, sin and death are so intertwined that the Resurrection still does work, rather than just being a sign; the Resurrection, by conquering death, is the thing which wrenches the world back into the cosmic order.
Think of it like this: if Christ had died but not been resurrected, he would still be the Paschal Lamb, but death would not have been defeated, and the fruits of the Original Sin of Adam would not have yet been undone. It makes sense then, that orthodox Christians would celebrate this first act of the New Jerusalem (the imminence of which I am leaving aside here)*
Apologies if my cosmology isn't as crystal clear as it should be; like I said, I'm writing this instead of reviewing Civil Procedure notes. And if this was really just a vehicle to talk about imminent apocalypticism, you can disregard my protestations about the propriety of contemporary Christian practice.
*I have not gotten a nihil obstat on any of this; consult the Catechism or your local priest to check me for error.
A lot of this is obviously complicated by the fact that there are lots of different ways of interpreting the basic orthodox schema (evidenced by the question marks in my own crude summary). I want to be careful not to be too specific, but staying at the level of generalities might not be too helpful; difficult line to walk, so let me know if this comment doesn't make sense.
Ok, so, your basic claim: "the Triduum, taken as a whole, is ... the celebration of the new order brought about by God, typified by the risen Christ" - yes, I agree with this, and the corollary that Easter therefore has to be the high-point of the celebration, since the resurrection is at the heart of Christian understanding of the 'making of the cosmic order anew'.
But the point I was trying (and maybe failing) to make was that this whole idea of 'making the cosmic order anew' does not actually fit particularly well with lots of small-o orthodox theology, and has not actually been all that key to the average believer's faith for 1000+ years.* Thus my claim that Christianity's key celebration is premised on a set of ideas that sit somewhat uncomfortably with the main bulk of modern Christianity; and thus my interpretation of Easter as a symbol of Christian messiness / inconsistency / historicity.
Within early Christian apocalypticism, the 'remaking of the world' motif had a very clear and concrete meaning, and the place of Jesus' resurrection in the whole schema was obvious. We can expect the resurrection imminently precisely because we have witnessed its 'first fruits', the first person God has raised from the dead. The eschaton really has started; we are living through an 'imminent crisis'; 'nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines'.
After the late-first-century / early-second-century 'disappointment' (which was probably more of a gradual process than a single event, as important as St John's death may or may not have been), though, the 'remaking of the world' motif loses a lot of its resonance. If Jesus' death has 'wrenched the world back into the cosmic order', why is there still sin and death and famine and war and all the other things? Not just 'why is the world bad' (this is not the problem of evil) - why is the world _prosaically_ bad, with bad things happening that are obviously not part of the unfolding of the eschaton? This is the standard Jewish argument that's been repeated untold times: if the Christians say the Messiah has come and the cosmic order has been remade, why does everything still look the same? and what's been keeping him away from creation for 2000 years?
Of course, some Christian groups across history have decided they know the answer to these questions. (A contemporary example: maybe Jesus has been waiting for the Gathering of Israel, which is now underway post-1948!) But the mainstream of Christianity since late antiquity has wisely adopted agnosticism. While still officially committed to the view that Jesus' resurrection reset the cosmic order, when they come to talk about what that actually *means* in concrete terms, the terrain tends to shift onto the institution of the church and the state of believers' souls: Jesus has enabled God's grace to reach humanity and bring us closer to Him. On this story, if the cosmic order is being remade, it's at best an indirect effect of what happened in 33AD (mediated by the actions of the church in history, actions which are enabled by divine grace), not a direct metaphysical consequence of the beginning of the eschaton. The stuff about the second coming and the New Jerusalem hangs uneasily on at the end of this story. You can try to patch these together theologically; but I think it's better to see the whole thing historically, perceiving distinct elements that don't entirely overlap or cohere.
To put it differently: orthodox Christianity does indeed still say that Jesus' resurrection defeated death and undid the fruits of the Adam's sin. But to untrained eyes, it certainly doesn't look like death has been defeated, or that evil has been undone! Early Christians said: these are the birth pangs, wait and see, it will soon become obvious what has happened - and they really meant *soon*. From the second century onwards, that strategy stops working, and orthodoxy had to recast the meaning of these claims in order to make them defensible. But the way they recast the meaning shifted the theological focus from the resurrection to the crucifixion: from 'Jesus is the first fruits of the general resurrection' to 'Jesus died for your sins'.
Were orthodoxy to be a complete and consistent intellectual edifice, totally replacing the earlier apocalyptic schema, it would have to say that the 'new order brought about by God' *just consists in* the availability of saving grace, brought about by Christ's death. Of course, part of my point is that orthodoxy did not create a complete and consistent edifice, that Christianity still retains those earlier layers. Some of that can be seen in the persistence of ideas about the remaking of the cosmos that don't (I claim) entirely fit with the more common story of Jesus' sacrifice making God's saving grace available to believers. And it can also be seen in the persistence of celebrations, like Easter, that are based - as you correctly observe - on the 'remaking the cosmos' story.
Thanks for your engagement, too - it's good to hear from you.
Yeah, I was talking about this last night in the Catholic house I live in, and it is not a settled question in the Catholic mind. A related distinction to yours is the soul/body distinction. You might be able to trace this to Gnostic influence (or remains, because, as you pointed out, it's not always obvious which version of Christianity is the "main" or "true" one, except with the benefit of hindsight).
The trajectory of the soul after death seems to be, from my mind, which is not formally trained in theology but fairly well-read: I die, I (1) am judged by God, (2) hopefully get sent to Purgatory where my soul is cleansed of the impurities and weight of sin, (3) behold the Beatific Vision, perfectly united with God, (4) get reunited with my body on Judgement Day and am judged body and soul, (5) am perfectly united with God bodily in the New Jerusalem (all this is assuming I am not sent to Hell for my manifold sins and wickedness)
It is not clear, to me, what exactly the difference between (3) and (5) is. What extra work, so to speak, is my body doing? I obviously think it is important for the Creation arc that Genesis is done again, but right this time, and so there is the mirror of Genesis and Revelation. Therefore, I accept as rational, not just something I am obligated to believe, that the final plan is to have us reunited bodily, not just as souls. Otherwise, Creation wouldn't be additive, and it seems not to be the case that Creation is good, as we are explicitly told. It's not really clear to me however, exactly what the choirs of Heaven are missing that makes the New Jerusalem different (epistemic uncertainty about Heaven doesn't bother, to be clear, just being intellectually honest)
Two responses to this, still within the non-imminent camp are soul-sleep, or that purgatory lasts until the New Jerusalem. My understanding is that various passages of Scripture prevent these superficially plausible paths, not least of which is the Thief on the Cross. Also I think these would prevent saintly intercession, and so is obviously not ok for orthodox Catholics (an interesting alternate schema of relics, where they have mystical power because of the saintliness of the dead body, but don't involve actually intercession of conscious saints, might have been popular in the Early Church, but I'm pretty sure is heretical now).
So, yes, I think even Christians would (or at least I would) take well the idea that there are these competing visions, which are latent even in the Church today, about the nature of eschatology, especially the soul/body distinction and the consequences for after-death judgement.
Postscript: I also think a related concept is individual/worldly re-ordering, which I think is referenced but not fully teased out in your post. The New Jerusalem emphasizes the world being made anew, and the New Creation being done right, while the orthodox view emphasizes the rightness of the individual believer's soul. I think the competing visions also shoot through Christian thought.
Good to do this again; Substack is much better for long thoughts than Twitter!
'Catholic group house' guys will literally just reinvent monasticism from first principles instead of going to therapy
As I was writing, I noticed both the soul/body and individual/cosmos distinctions pressing into my writing, but I tried to exclude them as much as possible.
For individual/cosmos, I think it's kind of right in some ways but a bit misleading in others, because it misses out something that (to be fair) I also didn't mention much: the role of the *church* in orthodox thought. It's not just that God's grace saves individual believers, it's also that it builds up ~the collection of believers into a collective body, the bride of Christ. One of the things (I would argue) the earliest Christians lacked was a deep and theoretically-grounded ecclesiology – early Christians obviously preached their message and formed social groups, but it was pretty practical and unreflective. But we begin to see actual ecclesiology forming very quickly from the late first century. (And not just in orthodoxy: Gnosticism too concerned itself with the relationships between individual believers and the structure of distinctions, though very differently. Or think of Donatism, a kind of "purely ecclesiological" heresy.) You sometimes see capital-O Orthodox people leaning into "individualistic west" tropes to argue that Western Christianity focusses too much on individual salvation whereas they know better, but I don't think this is an East/West thing: the Catholic Church obviously has a very well developed ecclesiology!
If I were a Christian, I think I might see ecclesiology as the most promising "glue" to stick together the atonement-grace narrative and the resurrection-eschaton narrative: against the arguments of Jews (and others), God/Christ *is* visibly acting in the world to bring about the eschaton, but he's doing it indirectly through the church. I still don't think this answers all the questions, not least for the reason you raise: once you've introduced the Beatific Vision into your theology, you have a hard time explaining what exactly is missing from it and what the point of the general resurrection is. It's still not immediately clear what the point of this whole era of history is or why God needs the church. But if I were committed to the belief that there _must_ be some rational explanation of how the two different schemes fit together (even if it's only in the mind of God), this might be where I look.
Regarding body/soul...
I agree with you that this is where the pressure comes in. You mention Gnosticism but I think the much more obvious and repeated source of influence (in the sense that a bunch of different Christian thinkers kept independently borrowing from it over and over) is Platonism.*
It's notable that late antique Platonism itself faced the problem – most explicitly and acutely in Plotinus, but only because he was obviously the smartest and most insightful and so noticed the severity of the problem – of trying to explain the origin and purpose of the material world, when the higher world of Forms / Nous / whatever exists and is obviously better. Augustine famously borrowed Plotinus' vague-and-incomplete attempt at a solution here and applied it to the problem of evil. I think this suggests that the same kind of problem arose for orthodox Christians, who were committed to the idea that the world is good (scripturally, it says so in Genesis, and also philosophically, the Platonist's argument applies: the Good / a good God cannot give rise to evil), but obviously felt the pull of the Platonist thought that life as a soul freed from the world was better than life as a body 'trapped' in the world of sin.
Indeed, maybe the apocalypticism inherited from early Christianity made the problem even more acute for them! The Platonists had no problem saying that life as a soul was obviously better than life as a body, they just had to explain why you had a body in the first place. But the Christians faced the problem, of not only explaining why bodies and matter and etc. were created in the first place, but also saying – in the context of a very Platonist-y theology oriented towards life as a soul contemplating the source of Goodness – why exactly they featured so heavily in the culmination of God's plan. This is basically the problem you mention, of explaining what's missing from (3) such that (5) is needed.
*Indeed, I think it's plausible that the distinctive elements of all the Gnostic theologies we know a lot about (like Sethianism) come either directly from Middle Platonism, or are at least creatively informed by Middle Platonism. In turn, definitely at least _some_ of Neoplatonism is a reaction against Gnosticism and wouldn't have existed in the form we have it without it. It's at this point questions start arising about the 'two Origens' and I nope out, but it would be cool to know more than we do about these relationships.
I don't want to distract too much from your studying, and so I don't expect a response, but just on the basis that you said you enjoyed this discussion - re: imminent apocalypticism in Paul, it has been brought to my attention that the late Pope agreed with me on this, and indeed used the same topic - sexual ethics and virginity - for his example.
"Saint Paul recommended virginity because he expected Jesus’ imminent return and he
wanted everyone to concentrate only on spreading the Gospel" (Amoris Laetitia para 159.)
Not to argument-from-authority you into falling down at my feet (I know Amoris Laetitia wasn't uncontroversial), just thought you might find it interesting!