Hermeneutics & Typology Resurrection Anthropology

The New Jerusalem and the Glorified Resurrection Body of the Corporate Bride

By Kyle Swinehart · 6,610 words · Notes & Bibliography included

Abstract

In this essay I argue, first, for a claim I take to be exegetically well established: the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21–22 is a symbol for the corporate, covenant-unified people of God, identified explicitly with the Bride of the Lamb rather than merely compared to her.¹ I then propose, as a further constructive synthesis rather than a shared exegetical conclusion, that this same corporate identity discloses itself as the glorified resurrection embodiment of the people of God — an argument I build first from Revelation's own internal pattern, in which the overcomer promises of 3:12 and the book's shifting temple vocabulary (ναός, σκηνή) find their fulfillment in 21:22, 22:4, and 21:25–27, and only afterward bring in Paul's "building from God" language in 2 Corinthians 5:1–10 and the "one flesh" typology of Genesis 2:24 and Ephesians 5:31–32 as texts that illuminate and receive support from that pattern rather than establish it.² Because this constructive step goes beyond what the commentators I rely on for the first claim are willing to argue, I mark the transition explicitly and close with a section stating what evidence would count against my own proposal.³

Introduction

The New Jerusalem is one of the most visually arresting images in the Apocalypse, and interpreters have traditionally divided between two dominant positions: some read the city as a literal, future dwelling place descending onto the renewed earth, while others read it symbolically as the perfected people of God in their covenantal and communal glory.⁴ The symbolic reading has substantial support in recent technical scholarship, especially because Revelation 21:9–10 identifies what John is shown not simply as a place he is led to, but as “the Bride, the wife of the Lamb,” before immediately presenting “the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.”⁵

This essay proceeds in three parts. Part One establishes what I take the text itself to require: the identity of Bride and city, and the covenantal, rather than merely architectural, character of the city's structure. Part Two moves into constructive theological synthesis, building on that established base to argue for the further, more contested claim that this covenantal identity is specifically resurrection embodiment. Part Three engages the strongest competing readings and states plainly where my own proposal goes beyond, rather than simply reports, scholarly consensus.⁶

Part One: What the Text Establishes

The Bride is the city

The exegetical starting point is Revelation 21:9–10, where an angel promises to show John “the Bride, the wife of the Lamb,” and then shows him “the holy city, Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.”⁷ G. K. Beale's technical commentary grounds this identification in the passage's own grammar: the angel's promise and the vision that fulfills it share a single referent, so that the city is not merely likened to the Bride but disclosed as what the Bride, in apocalyptic vision, actually is.⁸ Craig Koester's Anchor Yale Bible commentary reaches the same conclusion from a different methodological starting point, reading the New Jerusalem as a metaphor for the holy community of God's people rather than a literal future construction project, and noting that this metaphorical reading coheres with Revelation's broader practice of disclosing the identity of a group through a symbolic vision of a place or object.⁹ Richard Bauckham's structural analysis of Revelation independently supports the same conclusion: the New Jerusalem vision (21:9–22:9) is introduced with a formula parallel to that of the Babylon vision (17:1–3), and just as Babylon is explicitly a woman symbolizing a city and its inhabitants together, so New Jerusalem is a woman-city symbolizing the redeemed and their dwelling as a single reality.¹⁰

Two widely used popular-level treatments state the same conclusion in more accessible language, and I cite them here only as corroborating restatements of a position already established by the technical commentaries above, not as independent scholarly authorities. Sam Storms writes: “We don't simply live in the new Jerusalem. We are the new Jerusalem.”¹¹ The Bridgeway Bible Commentary states the same point more cautiously: “God's redeemed people … are now symbolized by a holy city, the new Jerusalem … In fact, they are the city.”¹² I treat both as convenient summary statements of a conclusion that Beale, Koester, and Bauckham each reach through independent argument, and I rely on the latter three for the exegetical weight of this claim.¹³

The architecture is covenantal, not merely municipal

Once Bride and city are identified, the city's architecture reads as covenantal and personal rather than merely spatial. Beale's own analysis of the city's foundations and gates makes this explicit: “the integration of the apostles together with the tribes of Israel as part of the city-temple's structure prophesied in Ezekiel 40–48 confirms further … that the multiracial Christian church will be the redeemed group who, together with Christ, will fulfill Ezekiel's prophecy of the future temple and city.”¹⁴ On this reading, the twelve-tribe and twelve-apostle nomenclature is not decorative; it identifies the city-temple complex as the corporate, covenant-unified people of God spanning both testaments.¹⁵

The city's cube-shaped dimensions reinforce this personal reading. Beale and Campbell's commentary observes that the New Jerusalem's equal length, width, and height reproduce the cubic proportions of the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and temple, so that the entire city becomes an expanded most-holy place in which God dwells fully with his people.¹⁶ Because the Holy of Holies was never simply a room but the locus of God's manifest presence with his covenant people, this architectural detail supports reading the city as a picture of the redeemed community's uninterrupted access to that presence rather than as a description of a literal building's dimensions for their own sake.¹⁷ Taken together, these two arguments — the tribal/apostolic foundations and the cubic Holy-of-Holies proportions — are, in my judgment, sufficient on their own to establish that the New Jerusalem symbolizes the corporate, covenant-unified, temple-indwelling people of God. That claim does not depend on any of my own prior writing and is not, so far as I can tell, seriously disputed among the commentators surveyed here.¹⁸

The temple vocabulary: ναός and σκηνή across Revelation

A further line of support for reading the New Jerusalem's architecture as covenantal and personal, rather than merely spatial, comes from Revelation's own vocabulary for sacred space. John does not use a single, static word for “temple” throughout the book; he moves between ναός (naos, the inner sanctuary) and σκηνή (skēnē, the tent or tabernacle), and the shift between them tracks the very trajectory this essay is arguing for. Earlier in Revelation, the martyrs “serve him day and night in his temple [ναῷ]” (7:15), and “the temple of God [ὁ ναὸς τοῦ θεοῦ] in heaven was opened,” disclosing the ark of the covenant (11:19).¹⁹ By 15:5, the two words are fused in a single, deliberately layered phrase: John sees “the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony [ὁ ναὸς τῆς σκηνῆς τοῦ μαρτυρίου] in heaven” opened, filled with the smoke of God's glory, and closed to entry until the seven plagues are completed.²⁰ Through Revelation 15, then, sacred space is still pictured as an enclosed, guarded, and inaccessible ναός, even when named in tabernacle terms.

That pattern breaks at 21:3, before the city's architecture is even described. The voice from the throne does not announce a temple opening but a tabernacle arriving: “Behold, the dwelling place [σκηνή] of God is with man; he will dwell [σκηνώσει] with them” (21:3).²¹ John reaches for the tabernacle-verb, not the temple-noun, to describe this new and final mode of presence — the language of pitching a tent among a people, not of an inner sanctuary opened to a few. The trajectory then completes itself at 21:22, where ναός reappears twice in a single verse only to be denied and immediately redefined: “I saw no temple [ναόν] in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple [ναός].”²² The architectural sanctuary John had described as opened, filled, and guarded in chapters 7, 11, and 15 is explicitly absent from the New Jerusalem — not because sacred space has disappeared, but because, as G. K. Beale puts it, “the old physical container will be shed like a cocoon and the new physical container will be the entire cosmos.”²³ Beale's broader argument in the same essay is that this movement from tabernacle-arrival (21:3) to temple-negation-and-redefinition (21:22) is the same movement traced by Ephesians 2:20–22, where the church is “being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” — a building not yet an enclosed shrine, but a people under construction toward one.²³

My own prior work draws the identical connection between Revelation 21:22 and Ephesians 2:22, independently of Beale's technical argument: citing “I saw no temple in the city [of New Jerusalem], for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” alongside “we are therefore being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22), I concluded that “the entire city of New Jerusalem … is in fact the new holy temple of Almighty God.”²⁴ I cite that formulation here, as with the overcomer-promise and “New Jerusalem Resurrection Body” material cited later in Part Two, as a supplementary illustration of a conclusion the technical scholarship above establishes on independent grounds, not as the evidence that establishes it.

A secondary but related word study strengthens the “building from God” argument taken up later in Part Two. Paul's contrast in 2 Corinthians 5:1 is not between two occurrences of the same word, but between σκῆνος (skēnos, “tent,” used in the New Testament only here and at 2 Peter 1:13–14 to picture the mortal body as a temporary dwelling) and οἰκία / οἰκοδομή (oikia / oikodomē, “house” / “building,” the same building-vocabulary Ephesians 2:20–22 uses for the church): “if the earthly tent [σκῆνος] we live in is destroyed, we have a building [οἰκοδομήν] from God, a house [οἰκίαν] … eternal in the heavens.”²⁵ The lexical shift Paul makes within a single verse — tent giving way to building — is the same shift traced across Revelation above: temporary, tent-like dwelling giving way to a permanent, God-built structure in which he himself is present without mediation.

Part Two: A Constructive Theological Synthesis

Everything argued to this point is, I believe, exegetically well supported and shared across commentators who otherwise differ substantially in method and conclusion. What follows is different in kind. I now propose that this same covenantal-communal identity specifically implies, rather than merely accompanies, the glorified resurrection embodiment of the people of God. This is my own synthesis. Beale and Koester, the two technical commentators most responsible for the claims argued above, do not draw this further inference, and I want that fact visible to the reader before I make the case for it.²⁶

Method: reading Revelation's disclosure pattern

My argument for this further step depends on a recurring literary pattern in Revelation in which what John hears promised and what John then sees disclosed are two vantage points on a single underlying reality — a pattern I have elsewhere called a “hear/see” or “bait-and-switch” disclosure, evident in the Lion/Lamb sequence of Revelation 5 and the 144,000/great multitude sequence of Revelation 7 as much as in the Bride/city sequence of Revelation 21.²⁷ Stated in more conventional terms, this is a typological and intratextual argument: Revelation interprets its own symbols through patterned recurrence, so that later visions gather up and intensify earlier promises, identities, and images.²⁸ On that basis, I read the New Jerusalem as the climactic recapitulation of the overcomer promises of Revelation 2–3, the purity imagery of Revelation 7 and 19, and the Edenic restoration of Revelation 22, rather than as an isolated architectural vision.²⁹

Because this argument draws on several distinct lines of evidence, I take them up in a deliberate order rather than all at once. I first build the resurrection-embodiment reading from material internal to Revelation itself — the overcomer promises of Revelation 2–3 together with the lexical parallels the rest of the New Testament supplies for their key terms, the purity and white-garment imagery, and the vocabulary of dwelling and building that runs from the tabernacle-verb of 21:3 through the temple-negation of 21:22 to the embodied vision of 22:1–5 — and I try to let that internal case stand on its own before appealing to anything outside Revelation.³⁰ Only once that case is in place do I turn to Paul's “building from God” language in 2 Corinthians 5:1–10 and the “one flesh” typology of Genesis 2:24 and Ephesians 5:31–32, both of which I treat in what follows as texts that illuminate and corroborate the pattern already established rather than as its foundation.³¹

The overcomer promises and the New Jerusalem

The seven overcomer promises of Revelation 2–3 already anticipate the New Jerusalem vision. The overcomer is promised the tree of life, a white stone with a new name, a pillar in God's temple, citizenship in the New Jerusalem, and enthronement with Christ.³² Revelation 3:12 already joins pillar imagery, divine-name imagery, and citizenship in “the city of my God—the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven from my God,” and each of these threads is picked up again in Revelation 21–22: the saints are made pillars in the temple-city (21:22, where God and the Lamb are the temple), they bear the divine name on their foreheads (22:4), and they are citizens of the city whose gates never shut (21:25–27).³³ Matthijs den Dulk's study of the seven letters' overcomer formula argues that these promises are not scattered, ad hoc rewards but a coherent, cumulative sequence that Revelation 21–22 resumes and fulfills item by item: the tree of life reappears at 22:2, the book-of-life and second-death language of the letters recurs at 21:8 and 20:15, the letters' new-name promise is echoed in the city's own inscribed foundation stones (21:19–20), and the apostles named in 21:14 complete a structural promise the letters had already anticipated.³⁴ Read this way, the fulfillment pattern is not an inference I am importing into the text but one Revelation's own overcomer sayings and New Jerusalem vision are already designed to complete. This intertextual convergence is not, by itself, a resurrection-body argument; it establishes only that Revelation 2–3's language of reward is fulfilled specifically in the New Jerusalem vision, which is consistent with either a purely communal reading or the further embodiment reading I am proposing.³⁵ My own earlier work develops this same convergence in more devotional and synthetic terms, linking the promised citizenship of New Jerusalem to glorified bodily transformation, temple indwelling, and bridal union with Christ; I cite that material here as a supplementary illustration of the pattern, not as the evidence that establishes it.³⁶

It is worth pausing here to state plainly what would weaken this particular thread of the argument. If the overcomer promises of Revelation 2–3 were best read as individual, personal rewards unrelated to any corporate or ecclesial structure — a reading no commentary surveyed in this essay, including den Dulk's study of the promises themselves, in fact takes, but one that remains conceivable — then the intertextual link drawn here between those promises and the New Jerusalem's architecture, and the lexical parallels reinforcing it below, would weaken considerably.³⁷

στῦλος: pillar language beyond Revelation

Revelation 3:12's promise that the overcomer will become “a pillar [στῦλον] in the temple of my God” draws on a term with its own life elsewhere in the New Testament, and that wider usage confirms the ecclesial, rather than merely architectural, sense the word carries. Paul uses the plural στῦλοι for James, Peter, and John as the recognized “pillars” of the Jerusalem church (Galatians 2:9), a metaphor for persons who bear up and stabilize the community rather than for building components in any literal sense.³⁸ The Pastoral Epistles extend the same metaphor to the church as a whole: “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress [στῦλος καὶ ἑδραίωμα] of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).³⁹ George Knight's commentary on the Pastoral Epistles reads this description as identifying the church itself, not any building it occupies, as the structure that upholds and displays the truth — the same personal, corporate sense Revelation 3:12 anticipates when it promises the overcomer a place as a pillar in a temple that turns out, at 21:22, to have no architectural sanctuary at all, only God and the Lamb.⁴⁰ Read against this background, Revelation's pillar-promise is already, on purely lexical grounds, a promise about persons built into a living structure rather than about ornamental columns in a literal building.

πολίτευμα: citizenship language beyond Revelation

Revelation 21:25–27's picture of citizens with permanent, unbarred access to the New Jerusalem has a Pauline parallel in Philippians 3:20: “our citizenship [πολίτευμα] is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”⁴¹ Peter O'Brien's study of the church's heavenly and eschatological identity argues that Paul's πολίτευμα language here is not a metaphor for private spiritual belonging but a corporate, civic claim: believers already constitute a colony whose full citizenship rights, and whose returning Lord, belong to a commonwealth not yet fully manifest on earth.⁴² Gordon Fee's commentary on Philippians makes the same point in more strictly exegetical terms, noting that Paul's choice of πολίτευμα rather than a more generic term for belonging trades deliberately on the civic and political associations the word carried for his Roman-colony audience at Philippi.⁴³ That combination of corporate citizenship and awaited bodily transformation is explicit in the verses immediately following, where Paul states that the Lord Jesus “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21) — so that the citizenship language of verse 20 is already, in its own context, tied to resurrection embodiment rather than left as an abstract status. Revelation's citizen-imagery for the New Jerusalem's inhabitants draws on the identical conceptual pairing: a corporate, civic identity inseparable from a transformed, embodied future.

White garments and purity

A second intertextual thread strengthens the case for reading the city's holiness as embodied rather than merely locational. In the letters to the seven churches, white garments signify accepted, purified, victorious identity, and this garment imagery recurs at Revelation 7:13–14 and 19:7–9, where the faithful are washed in the blood of the Lamb and clothed in fine linen at the wedding feast.⁴⁴ The New Jerusalem is radiant, transparent, precious, and undefiled; nothing unclean enters it.⁴⁵ Those descriptors are consistent with a holy city in the abstract, but I take them as equally consistent with, and I would argue better explained by, the culmination of the white-garment motif applied to a corporate and now transformed body of people rather than to a structure they merely occupy.⁴⁶ This inference is again a matter of theological synthesis rather than a claim the purity texts alone compel.⁴⁷

This exclusion language deserves a further clarification before the argument moves on. Revelation's repeated insistence that nothing unclean, detestable, or evil can enter the city (21:27; 22:15) is sometimes read as an admissions policy — a boundary sorting who is let in from who is kept out. But Paul's parallel claim in 1 Corinthians 15:50, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," performs a different function: it is not a behavioral checklist believers must satisfy but a statement about the kind of existence required to belong there at all — an ontological claim about transformed nature, not a gatekeeping requirement.⁴⁸ Read this way, Revelation's exclusion formula performs the same work: it does not describe a gate policed against outsiders so much as it describes what the redeemed themselves now are, by virtue of the transformation the vision as a whole depicts. Nothing evil enters the New Jerusalem not primarily because it is screened out, but because the city's inhabitants have already been made into the kind of resurrected people evil cannot characterize.

One flesh and new creation

A further thread, this one drawn from outside Revelation, both receives clarification from and lends additional support to the pattern already established above. Genesis 2:24 describes marital union as two becoming "one flesh,"⁴⁹ and Ephesians 5:31–32 applies that same formula typologically to Christ and the church, calling it "a great mystery."⁵⁰ Harold W. Hoehner's technical commentary on Ephesians observes that Paul's citation of Genesis 2:24 in 5:31–32 functions exactly as it does in 1 Corinthians 6:15–17, where the same "one flesh" formula is applied directly to the believer's union with Christ: in both passages, Genesis 2:24 establishes a pattern in which two parties become a single, new identity rather than two parties who merely share proximity.⁵¹

Frank Thielman's commentary on Ephesians corroborates Hoehner's reading of the typological direction at work in this passage, concluding of Ephesians 5:31 that "the union of husband and wife in 'one flesh' was originally intended to prefigure and to illustrate the union that Christ now has with the church" — that is, human marriage was designed from the beginning to typify the Christ-church relationship, rather than the reverse.⁵² I have argued this same designed-typology point at greater length elsewhere, tracing how Ephesians 5's citation of Genesis 2:24 reframes marriage itself as a sign pointing forward to its own antitype. See my article "The Ancient Jewish Marriage Motif as a Hermeneutical Framework" for the fuller argument that human marriage was patterned after the Christ-church relationship from the beginning rather than the reverse.⁵³

That distinction matters directly for Revelation 21. If marital union was designed from the outset to typify the corporate relationship Christ has with his people, rather than merely furnishing a convenient later metaphor for it, then this typology supplies a conceptual resource already available when Revelation 21:9–10 discloses the Bride not merely as a partner who dwells in a city but as a bride who, in a single unveiling, is disclosed as the city itself. On the reading argued above from Revelation's own overcomer promises and temple vocabulary, that disclosure needs no support from Genesis 2:24 or Ephesians 5 to stand; but the "one flesh" pattern, read as designed typology rather than retrospective analogy, corroborates it, since the same two-becoming-one logic Paul finds already embedded in the creation account resurfaces exactly where Revelation's own vision reaches its climax.

My own prior work states this same connection more directly, describing the city not merely as the redeemed community's dwelling but as an expression of resurrected identity: the city of New Jerusalem "represents our 'New Jerusalem Resurrection Body.'"⁵⁴ I cite that formulation here, as with the overcomer-promise material earlier in Part Two, as a supplementary illustration of the pattern already established by the argument above and below, not as the evidence that establishes it.

It is worth noting here too what would weaken this particular thread specifically. If Genesis 2:24 and Ephesians 5:31–32's "one flesh" language were judged inapplicable to a non-marital, corporate referent — that is, if the marital-union formula could not legitimately be extended to describe the corporate Bride's relationship to her own resurrected identity — this would weaken this intertextual thread specifically, even though it would leave the overcomer-promise, lexical, embodiment-vocabulary, and 2 Corinthians 5 arguments made elsewhere in Part Two untouched.⁵⁵

Embodiment and the vocabulary of dwelling

Revelation's temple vocabulary carries a further lexical thread worth tracing before turning to Paul. The verb Revelation 21:3 uses for God's dwelling with his people — σκηνώσει, "he will dwell" or, more literally, "he will tent" — is the identical verb John's Gospel uses for the incarnation: "the Word became flesh and dwelt [ἐσκήνωσεν] among us" (John 1:14).⁵⁶ Raymond Brown's commentary on John reads this verb as a deliberate echo of the tabernacle traditions in which God's glory took up residence in a tent among Israel, so that John 1:14 identifies the incarnate Christ, in bodily form, as the locus of that tabernacling presence.⁵⁷ Revelation 21:3 applies the same verb to God's final dwelling with his people, and if John's Gospel has already established that σκηνόω describes embodied divine presence rather than a merely architectural or atmospheric one, then Revelation's use of the same verb for the New Jerusalem's inhabitants plausibly carries the same embodied sense forward, rather than describing simple cohabitation in a symbolic city.

A parallel movement runs through Revelation's ναός vocabulary once it is read alongside the Gospel of John and Paul. When the Jerusalem authorities demand a sign, Jesus answers, "destroy this temple [ναόν], and in three days I will raise it up," and John explains that "he was speaking about the temple of his body" (John 2:19–21).⁵⁸ D. A. Carson traces this identification of Jesus' own body as the ναός forward through the New Testament's temple theology to its terminus in Revelation 21:22, where God and the Lamb are themselves declared to be the city's temple.⁵⁹ Between those two points sits Ephesians 2:20–22, already cited above, where the church is "being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit" — the same body-as-temple identification extended corporately from Christ to the people united to him.²³ Read in sequence, John 2:19–21, Ephesians 2:20–22, and Revelation 21:22 trace a single progression: temple language moves from Christ's individual body, to the church's corporate body, to the New Jerusalem's final, unmediated identification of God and the Lamb as the temple its inhabitants no longer need built apart from themselves.

Peter's first letter supplies the same body-as-temple logic in explicitly architectural, embodied vocabulary. Believers are described as "living stones [λίθοι ζῶντες]" who "are being built up [οἰκοδομεῖσθε] as a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5), language that, like Ephesians 2:20–22, pictures the church's corporate identity as a building composed not of inert material but of living persons.⁶⁰ Paul Achtemeier's commentary on 1 Peter reads this image as deliberately extending temple imagery to the community of believers themselves considered as embodied persons in the process of construction, rather than to a structure they merely occupy.⁶¹ This same personal, embodied sense of "building" vocabulary is exactly what the New Jerusalem's architecture pictures on the corporate scale: a city built from living, resurrected persons rather than inert stone.

This embodied sense of Revelation's building and dwelling vocabulary is reinforced by a contrast within Revelation's own visionary sequence. The souls of the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11 are given white robes and told to rest a little longer, and the twenty-four elders enthroned in Revelation 4:4 are already crowned and robed — both scenes of recognizable personal identity and speech, but each still short of the full participatory embodiment pictured later.⁶² By Revelation 22:1–5, the redeemed are pictured seeing God's face, bearing his name, and reigning "forever and ever" — verbs of embodied agency rather than disembodied waiting.⁶³ Read across this sequence, Revelation's own narrative progressively intensifies the embodiment of the redeemed from partial and provisional images toward the full, participatory embodiment of the New Jerusalem vision, independently of any argument drawn from Paul.

The building from God: 2 Corinthians 5:1–10

Having built the resurrection-embodiment reading from Revelation's own overcomer promises, temple vocabulary, and lexical parallels, I turn now to a Pauline text traditionally treated as central to any argument of this kind, but which I use here only to illuminate and corroborate a case already made, not to carry weight of its own: 2 Corinthians 5:1–5, where Paul contrasts the present “earthly tent” with “a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”⁶⁴ This passage is genuinely disputed among Pauline scholars, and representing that dispute accurately is more important to my argument than resolving it, especially since nothing argued above depends on resolving it. Edwin Reynolds's study of the passage identifies three main scholarly positions.⁶⁵ The first reads Paul anthropologically, positing an intermediate state in which a “naked” soul exists independently of the body until reunion with a resurrection body at the parousia; Reynolds notes that this has been “the prevalent view” historically and remains defended by Murray J. Harris in his monograph-length study of resurrection and immortality in the New Testament.⁶⁶ Harris's own position is that Paul envisions believers receiving an interim, non-physical form of embodiment immediately at death, with the final resurrection body granted at Christ's return — a mediating anthropological proposal that itself shows how contested the passage's metaphysics remain even among interpreters committed to bodily resurrection as the final state.⁶⁷ The second position defends the consistency of Paul's resurrection theology between 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5, with some proponents still affirming an intermediate state and others resisting it; Reynolds himself argues for a version of this position, concluding that Paul “did not change his theology or his anthropology over time” and that the “building from God” language refers to the future resurrection body granted at Christ's return rather than to any intermediate acquisition.⁶⁸ The third position treats Paul's language as neither strictly anthropological nor strictly eschatological, but as figurative language about the security of life and death more generally, without specifying a metaphysical sequence at all.⁶⁹

Pieter Verster's study occupies a mediating position within this three-way division, concluding cautiously that “Paul, indeed, had the idea of an intermediate state,” while also affirming that “according to 1 Corinthians 15 the resurrection of the body will take place at the parousia,” treating the two ideas as complementary rather than contradictory.⁷⁰ N. T. Wright's extensive study of New Testament resurrection belief supplies an important piece of background here: across the entire New Testament corpus, and especially in Paul, resurrection hope is consistently for a new, transformed, and thoroughly embodied form of existence rather than a permanently disembodied spiritual state, which is the framework within which any reading of 2 Corinthians 5's “building from God” language should be situated, whatever one concludes about the timing of an intermediate state.⁷¹ Given this range of scholarly opinion, I draw a modest and, I hope, defensible conclusion: 2 Corinthians 5:1–5 does not by itself settle the timing or precise metaphysics of resurrection embodiment, and readers should not treat my use of it as though it did, but it does establish, across all three of Reynolds's positions and Wright's broader framework, that Paul uses “building from God” language for the believer's ultimate, God-given, eternal, and bodily form of existence with him.⁷² That is the narrow claim 2 Corinthians 5 can bear in this essay: not the foundation for reading the New Jerusalem as resurrection embodiment — a case I have already made from Revelation's own overcomer promises, temple vocabulary, and building imagery — but a Pauline text whose “building from God” language happens to describe the same reality in strikingly similar terms, and which therefore illuminates and corroborates, without needing to establish, the reading argued above.⁷³

This same building-from-God framework converges with a second Johannine text that functions here as corroboration rather than as a new controversy. First John 3:2 states: "we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is."⁷⁴ That verse has generated its own literature on the timing and mechanism of eschatological transformation, but the narrow claim it supports here is far more limited and far less contested: final glorification is bodily, Christ-patterned, and consummated in unveiled vision of him. Craig Keener's study of the transformation-through-vision motif in this passage argues that the "seeing" John describes is not incidental imagery but the very means by which believers are conformed to Christ's glorified likeness — a transformation triggered by, rather than merely accompanying, unmediated sight of him.⁷⁵ Read this way, 1 John 3:2 supplies a verbal and conceptual bridge to Revelation 22:4's climactic promise that the redeemed "will see his face": both texts tie final bodily conformity to Christ directly to unveiled vision of him, reinforcing — without needing to adjudicate the Reynolds/Harris/Verster timing dispute discussed above — that the "building from God" Paul describes and the vision John narrates are the same climactic reality approached from two angles.

Revelation 22:1–5 and embodied worship

A further strengthening of the proposal comes from Revelation 22:1–5, which describes “the river of the water of life,” “the tree of life,” the removal of the curse, the vision of God's face, the divine name on the saints' foreheads, and the promise that “they will reign forever and ever.”⁷⁶ This passage is not spatial scenery detached from the city's identity: the river flows through “the street of the city,” the throne of God and the Lamb is “in it,” and “his servants will worship him” and “see his face.”⁷⁷ Beale's commentary reads the vision of God's face here as the removal of every remaining barrier between Creator and creature that Exodus 33:20 had established, and reads the saints' reigning as the direct fulfillment of the overcomer promises of Revelation 2:26–27 and 3:21.⁷⁸ I take the final Edenic imagery of Revelation 22 to be inseparable from embodied worship, unveiled communion, divine naming, and royal participation: a people who see, who bear a name, and who reign are pictured as agents with bodies and faces, not as a disembodied collective identity.⁷⁹ This does not prove the resurrection-body reading in isolation, but it strengthens it, because the text's climax is not merely habitation but a transformed, participatory, embodied mode of life before the face of God.⁸⁰

Part Three: Engaging Counterreadings

The literal-city reading

A literal-city reading remains influential, particularly in futurist and dispensational commentary. Robert L. Thomas's exegetical commentary on Revelation 8–22 argues that the New Jerusalem is a genuinely future, physically constructed dwelling place distinct from heaven itself, on the grounds that its dimensions are given with a precision that symbolic readings tend to explain away rather than account for.⁸¹ On this view, the bridal comparison in 21:2 (“prepared as a bride adorned for her husband”) is a simile limited to the city's adornment and readiness rather than a strict identity claim, and the twelve-tribe and twelve-apostle names on gates and foundations are read as inscriptions honoring a redeemed people who will dwell in, rather than constitute, the city.⁸²

This reading carries real interpretive weight because it takes seriously the concrete, measured, and materially described features of the vision, and it rightly resists collapsing every architectural detail into pure metaphor.⁸³ Even so, it must still reckon with the wording of Revelation 21:9–10, where the object shown to John is introduced by the same formula used for the Babylon vision, in which the woman shown is explicitly the city's population and character together, not a separate structure the population inhabits.⁸⁴ Beale's argument about the tribal and apostolic names as structural, rather than merely inscriptional, elements of the city supplies further support for treating the vision as a picture of covenant persons rather than as an independent geographic location merely compared to a bride.⁸⁵

The moderate participatory reading

A more moderate alternative to both the literal-city and resurrection-body readings holds that New Jerusalem is a picture of realized divine reign and presence rather than a direct identification with resurrection embodiment. Bauckham's analysis of the New Jerusalem chapter treats the vision under three converging aspects — place, people, and the presence of God — and concludes that its central theological claim is that “God's dwelling place is now among mortals” in a fully realized, unmediated form, without extending the image specifically to the metaphysics of the resurrected body.⁸⁶ Koester's commentary likewise stops at the corporate-community reading, describing the New Jerusalem as a metaphor for a holy sanctuary and a holy people rather than venturing an anthropological claim about the nature of their glorified bodies.⁸⁷

I find this reading compatible with much of my own essay, since it also rejects a merely locational reading of the city, but it stops short of identifying the city specifically as resurrection embodiment rather than as a realized covenantal and political order. My essay's distinctive claim, argued in Part Two above, is that the resurrection-body reading best accounts for the convergence of bridal, temple, naming, overcomer, and Edenic imagery once Revelation 22:1–5 and the New Testament's broader embodied-resurrection framework are allowed their full weight — but I want to be explicit that this is a further step beyond what Bauckham or Koester, my two strongest sources for the underlying exegesis, are willing to take.⁸⁸

Limits of the argument

Because the resurrection-body identification argued for in Part Two is a constructive synthesis rather than a shared exegetical conclusion, it is worth stating plainly what would count as evidence against it, rather than presenting the proposal as though no responsible interpreter could resist it. Two of the four falsification conditions bearing most directly on the overcomer-promise and “one flesh” arguments are stated immediately after those arguments above; the two that follow here concern the essay's more general argumentative structure.⁸⁹

First, and least threatening to the overall case, if 2 Corinthians 5:1–10 were settled decisively in favor of the anthropological intermediate-state reading in a form that excluded any bodily referent for the “building from God” prior to a separate, later resurrection event, that passage would no longer supply even the modest, illustrative support I have drawn from it above; because I have already argued the resurrection-body reading from Revelation's own internal evidence before appealing to 2 Corinthians 5 at all, this would narrow the essay's supporting material without disturbing its primary argument.⁹⁰ Second, and more significantly, both Beale and Koester, the two technical commentators whose exegesis carries the weight of Part One's claims, explicitly stop at the corporate-community reading of the New Jerusalem and do not extend it to the resurrection body specifically. Their restraint should be taken seriously: it means that the majority scholarly position, even among interpreters who share my rejection of a merely literal-city reading, is more modest than my own proposal.⁹¹ I have tried throughout to keep that gap visible rather than to obscure it by borrowing their exegetical authority for a conclusion they do not draw.⁹²

Conclusion

Part One of this essay established, on the authority of Beale, Koester, and Bauckham's independent exegetical arguments, that the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21–22 symbolizes the corporate, covenant-unified, temple-indwelling people of God, identified with rather than merely compared to the Bride of the Lamb.⁹³ Part Two proposed, as my own constructive synthesis building on that established base, that this same imagery discloses the glorified resurrection embodiment of that people — an argument built first, and primarily, from Revelation's own overcomer promises and its shifting temple and dwelling vocabulary, reinforced by the New Testament's own use of στῦλος, σκηνόω, ναός, λίθοι ζῶντες, and πολίτευμα language for the church, and only secondarily illuminated and corroborated by Paul's “building from God” language in 2 Corinthians 5 and the designed “one flesh” typology of Genesis 2:24 and Ephesians 5:31–32.⁹⁴ Part Three and the Limits section above have tried to state honestly where this proposal goes beyond, rather than reports, the conclusions of the scholars it depends on.⁹⁵

Read in that way, the New Jerusalem is, at minimum and on strong exegetical grounds, the people of God in finally realized covenantal glory. Whether it is also, more specifically, that people's glorified resurrection body is a further question this essay has argued for as a considered synthesis rather than settled it as an exegetical certainty — and I have tried to leave the reader able to tell the difference between the two claims at every step.⁹⁶

Notes

Revelation 21:9–22:5 (ESV). ↩
See the argument developed in Parts One through Three below. ↩
This distinction between exegetically compelled and constructive-synthetic claims is developed explicitly in Part One, Part Two, and the “Limits of the argument” section below. ↩
For an overview of the literal-city and symbolic-community readings, see Robert L. Thomas, Revelation 8–22: An Exegetical Commentary (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995), and Craig R. Koester, Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible 38A (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). ↩
Revelation 21:9–10 (ESV). ↩
See Parts One, Two, and Three below, and the “Limits of the argument” section. ↩
Revelation 21:9–10 (ESV). ↩
G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 1069–70. ↩
Craig R. Koester, Revelation, Anchor Yale Bible 38A (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 814–20. ↩
Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, New Testament Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126–43; cf. Revelation 17:1–3 and 21:9–10 (ESV). ↩
Sam Storms, “The Holy City: New Jerusalem,” Revelation #36 (Bridgeway Church sermon manuscript, May 26, 2018), 4, available at https://www.samstorms.org/all-articles/post/the-holy-city-new-jerusalem--revelation-219-27--isaiah-601-511. ↩
Don Fleming, Bridgeway Bible Commentary, commentary on Revelation 21:9–21 (“New Jerusalem”), 650, available at https://www.bridgeway.org.au/books/BibleCommentary.pdf. Pagination follows the publisher's PDF, which has no independent print pagination. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1069–70; Koester, Revelation, 814–20; Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 126–43. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1070. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1070–71; Revelation 21:12–14 (ESV). ↩
G. K. Beale and David H. Campbell, Revelation: A Shorter Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 482; Revelation 21:15–17 (ESV). ↩
Beale and Campbell, Revelation: A Shorter Commentary, 482; cf. Exodus 26:1–37 and 1 Kings 6:20 for the cubic Holy of Holies. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1069–71; Beale and Campbell, Revelation: A Shorter Commentary, 482; Koester, Revelation, 814–20. ↩
Revelation 7:15; 11:19. Greek text: Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed., ed. Barbara Aland et al. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012). ↩
Revelation 15:5–8. Greek text: Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed. ↩
Revelation 21:3 (ESV, adapted to render the Greek σκηνή/σκηνώσει literally). Greek text: Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed. ↩
Revelation 21:22 (ESV, adapted to render the Greek ναόν/ναός literally). Greek text: Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed. ↩
Gregory K. Beale, “Eden, the Temple, and the Church's Mission in the New Creation,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, no. 1 (March 2005): 25, 29, 30, available at https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/files_JETS-PDFs_48_48-1_48-1-pp005-031_JETS.pdf. ↩
Kyle Swinehart, Apocalyptic Visions of the Victorious: A Comprehensive Study Guide on the Book of Revelation, section on the New Jerusalem and the temple of God, quoting Revelation 21:22 (NLT) and Ephesians 2:22 (NLT). ↩
2 Corinthians 5:1 (ESV, adapted to render the Greek σκῆνος/οἰκοδομή/οἰκία literally); cf. 2 Peter 1:13–14 for the only other New Testament use of σκῆνος for the body. See “The building from God: 2 Corinthians 5:1–10” below for the fuller discussion of this passage's contested anthropology, which this word study does not attempt to resolve. ↩
See the “Limits of the argument” section below for a full statement of where Beale and Koester's own conclusions stop short of the proposal offered in Part Two. ↩
Kyle Swinehart, Apocalyptic Visions of the Victorious: A Comprehensive Study Guide on the Book of Revelation, “bait-and-switch” and “New Jerusalem cipher” sections; cf. Revelation 5:5–6 and 7:4–9 for parallel disclosure patterns. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1069–70, discusses this recapitulatory pattern in Revelation's use of Old Testament and internal imagery. ↩
Revelation 2–3; 7:9–17; 19:6–9; 22:1–5 (ESV). ↩
See the “overcomer promises,” στῦλος, πολίτευμα, “white garments,” and “embodiment and the vocabulary of dwelling” subsections below, together with the “Revelation 22:1–5” subsection, for this internal argument developed in full before any appeal to material outside Revelation. ↩
See “The building from God: 2 Corinthians 5:1–10” and “One flesh and new creation” below. ↩
Revelation 2:7, 17, 26–28; 3:5, 12, 21 (ESV). ↩
Revelation 3:12 (ESV); 21:12–14, 22, 25–27; 22:4 (ESV). ↩
Matthijs den Dulk, “The Promises to the Conquerors in the Book of Revelation,” Biblica 87 (2006): 516–22, arguing that the seven letters' overcomer promises form a cumulative sequence resumed and fulfilled item-by-item in Revelation 21–22, including the tree of life (22:2), the book of life and second death (21:8; cf. 20:15), the city's foundation stones (21:19–20), and the apostles' names built into its structure (21:14). ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1070–71, similarly reads the overcomer promises as fulfilled in the New Jerusalem's architecture without extending this to a resurrection-body claim. ↩
Kyle Swinehart, Apocalyptic Visions of the Victorious, “New Jerusalem cipher” section. ↩
No commentary surveyed in this essay — Beale, Koester, Bauckham, or den Dulk — reads the overcomer promises as purely individual; this is noted here as a hypothetical counter-scenario rather than a position any cited scholar holds. ↩
Galatians 2:9 (ESV). ↩
1 Timothy 3:15 (ESV). ↩
George W. Knight III, The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992), on 1 Timothy 3:15. ↩
Philippians 3:20 (ESV). ↩
Peter T. O'Brien, “The Church as a Heavenly and Eschatological Entity,” in The Church in the Bible and the World, ed. D. A. Carson (Exeter: Paternoster, 1987), 88–119. ↩
Gordon D. Fee, Paul's Letter to the Philippians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), on Philippians 3:20; cf. Philippians 3:21 (ESV). ↩
Revelation 3:4–5, 18; 7:13–14; 19:7–9 (ESV). ↩
Revelation 21:11, 18, 21, 27 (ESV). ↩
Cf. Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1069–71, on the city's holiness as expressing the sanctified character of its inhabitants. ↩
This inference is my own constructive synthesis; see the “Limits of the argument” section below. ↩
1 Corinthians 15:50 (ESV); cf. Revelation 21:27 and 22:15 (ESV). ↩
Ancient Jewish betrothal customs likewise pictured covenantal union as the merging of two into a new whole. ↩
Genesis 2:24; Ephesians 5:31–32 (ESV). ↩
Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 777–78, noting the parallel use of Genesis 2:24 in Ephesians 5:30–32 and 1 Corinthians 6:15–17 to describe union with Christ. ↩
Frank Thielman, Ephesians, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 389. ↩
See my article “The Ancient Jewish Marriage Motif as a Hermeneutical Framework” for the fuller argument that human marriage was patterned after the Christ-church relationship from the beginning rather than the reverse. ↩
Kyle Swinehart, Cultivating and Maintaining a Healthy Covenant Relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “New Jerusalem and Marriage Feast” section, on the city as “our 'New Jerusalem Resurrection Body.'” ↩
See the “One flesh and new creation” subsection above. ↩
John 1:14 (ESV); cf. Revelation 21:3 (ESV). ↩
Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I–XII, Anchor Bible 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 32–34; see also Craig R. Koester, The Dwelling of God: The Tabernacle in the Old Testament, Intertestamental Jewish Literature, and the New Testament, Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 22 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1989), 105–6. ↩
John 2:19–21 (ESV). ↩
D. A. Carson, “Jesus the Temple of God,” The Evangelical Magazine of Wales, August–September 1995, 8–9. ↩
1 Peter 2:5 (ESV). ↩
Paul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter: A Commentary on First Peter, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 150–56. ↩
Revelation 6:9–11 (ESV); 4:4 (ESV). ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1109–12. ↩
2 Corinthians 5:1 (ESV). ↩
Edwin Reynolds, “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord’: 2 Corinthians 5:1-10 in Context,” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 24, no. 2 (2013): 137–52. ↩
Reynolds, “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord,’” 138–40; Murray J. Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985). ↩
Harris, Raised Immortal, esp. chs. 8–9 on the interim body and final resurrection. ↩
Reynolds, “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord,’” 148–51. ↩
Reynolds, “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord,’” 140–44. ↩
Pieter Verster, “Abode in Heaven: Paul and Life after Death in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10,” Missionalia: Southern African Journal of Missiology 44, no. 1 (2016): 19–33, esp. 30–32. ↩
N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), esp. chs. 7 and 11 on Pauline resurrection hope. ↩
Reynolds, “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord,’” 137–52; Verster, “Abode in Heaven,” 19–33; Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, chs. 7, 11. ↩
See the “Limits of the argument” section below for a statement of what would count as evidence against this extension of 2 Corinthians 5 to Revelation's New Jerusalem. ↩
1 John 3:2 (ESV); cf. Revelation 22:4 (ESV). ↩
Craig S. Keener, “Transformation through Divine Vision in 1 John 3:2–6,” Faith and Mission 23, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 13, on the conforming function of eschatological vision in Johannine theology. This narrower use of 1 John 3:2 does not depend on resolving the Reynolds/Harris/Verster dispute over 2 Corinthians 5:1–10 discussed above. ↩
Revelation 22:1–5 (ESV). ↩
Revelation 22:1–5 (ESV). ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1109–12, on Exodus 33:20 and the removal of the barrier to seeing God's face; cf. Revelation 2:26–27 and 3:21 (ESV). ↩
Revelation 22:4–5 (ESV). ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1109–12. ↩
Robert L. Thomas, Revelation 8–22: An Exegetical Commentary (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995), 448–52. ↩
Thomas, Revelation 8–22, 448–52; Revelation 21:2 (ESV). ↩
Thomas, Revelation 8–22, 448–52. ↩
Revelation 17:1–3; 21:9–10 (ESV); cf. Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 126–30. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1070–71. ↩
Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 132–43, esp. 132 on the three converging aspects of place, people, and presence, and 143 on Revelation 21:3. ↩
Koester, Revelation, 814–20, 836–38. ↩
Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 126–43; Koester, Revelation, 814–20. ↩
See Part Two above, especially the falsification conditions stated at the close of the “overcomer promises” and “one flesh and new creation” subsections. ↩
Reynolds, “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord,’” 137–52; Harris, Raised Immortal, chs. 8–9. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1069–71; Koester, Revelation, 814–20, 836–38. ↩
Cf. Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 126–43. ↩
Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1069–71; Koester, Revelation, 814–20; Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 126–43. ↩
Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, chs. 7, 11; Reynolds, “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord,’” 137–52; Harris, Raised Immortal, chs. 8–9; Verster, “Abode in Heaven,” 19–33; den Dulk, “The Promises to the Conquerors,” 516–22; Thielman, Ephesians, 389. ↩
See Part Three and “Limits of the argument” above. ↩
See “Limits of the argument” above. ↩

Bibliography

Achtemeier, Paul J. 1 Peter: A Commentary on First Peter. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.
Bauckham, Richard. The Theology of the Book of Revelation. New Testament Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Beale, G. K. The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.
Beale, G. K. “Eden, the Temple, and the Church's Mission in the New Creation.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, no. 1 (March 2005): 5–31.
Beale, G. K., and David H. Campbell. Revelation: A Shorter Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015.
Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John I–XII. Anchor Bible 29. New York: Doubleday, 1966.
Carson, D. A. “Jesus the Temple of God.” The Evangelical Magazine of Wales, August–September 1995, 8–9.
den Dulk, Matthijs. “The Promises to the Conquerors in the Book of Revelation.” Biblica 87 (2006): 516–522.
Fee, Gordon D. Paul's Letter to the Philippians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.
Fleming, Don. Bridgeway Bible Commentary. Commentary on Revelation 21:9–21.
Harris, Murray J. Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.
Hoehner, Harold W. Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002.
Keener, Craig S. “Transformation through Divine Vision in 1 John 3:2–6.” Faith and Mission 23, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 13.
Knight, George W., III. The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992.
Koester, Craig R. The Dwelling of God: The Tabernacle in the Old Testament, Intertestamental Jewish Literature, and the New Testament. Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 22. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1989.
Koester, Craig R. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Yale Bible 38A. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
O'Brien, Peter T. “The Church as a Heavenly and Eschatological Entity.” In The Church in the Bible and the World, edited by D. A. Carson, 88–119. Exeter: Paternoster, 1987.
Reynolds, Edwin. “‘Away from the Body and at Home with the Lord’: 2 Corinthians 5:1-10 in Context.” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 24, no. 2 (2013): 137–152.
Storms, Sam. “The Holy City: New Jerusalem.” Revelation #36. Bridgeway Church sermon manuscript, May 26, 2018.
Swinehart, Kyle. Apocalyptic Visions of the Victorious: A Comprehensive Study Guide on the Book of Revelation. Especially the New Jerusalem cipher and bait-and-switch sections.
Swinehart, Kyle. Cultivating and Maintaining a Healthy Covenant Relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Especially the New Jerusalem and Marriage Feast sections.
Thielman, Frank. Ephesians. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.
Thomas, Robert L. Revelation 8–22: An Exegetical Commentary. Chicago: Moody Press, 1995.
Verster, Pieter. “Abode in Heaven: Paul and Life after Death in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10.” Missionalia: Southern African Journal of Missiology 44, no. 1 (2016): 19–33.
Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

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