GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
Acts 26:23 and 1 Corinthians 15:20 call Jesus the firstfruits of the resurrection and the first to rise from the dead. But the witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28:11-14 raises Samuel from the dead centuries earlier, and the Hebrew Bible has Elijah and Elisha raising others (1 Kings 17, 2 Kings 4, 2 Kings 13), as does Jesus himself in the Gospels (Lazarus, Jairus's daughter, the widow of Nain's son). Jesus is not chronologically first.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Cited passages
how the Christ must suffer, and how, by the resurrection of the dead, he would be first to proclaim light both to these people and to the Gentiles.”
But now Christ has been raised from the dead. He became the first fruits of those who are asleep.
Cited passages
Then the woman said, “Whom shall I bring up to you?” He said, “Bring Samuel up for me.” He said to her, “What does he look like?” She said, “An old man comes up. He is covered with a robe.” Saul perceived that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and showed respect.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The verses cited do not in fact make the same kind of claim. Acts 26:23 has Paul declare before Festus that the Messiah, "by being the first to rise from the dead (*prōtos ex anastaseōs nekrōn*), would proclaim light," and 1 Corinthians 15:20 calls the risen Christ "the firstfruits (*aparchē*) of those who have fallen asleep." The objector lines these up against a string of earlier revivals: the medium at Endor brings up Samuel (1 Samuel 28:11-14); Elijah revives the widow of Zarephath's son (1 Kings 17:17-24); Elisha revives the Shunammite's son (2 Kings 4:32-37) and a corpse revives on contact with his bones (2 Kings 13:21); and in the Gospels Jesus himself raises Jairus's daughter, the widow of Nain's son, and Lazarus — all before his own resurrection.
The decisive harmonizing distinction, developed at length by N. T. Wright and standard in the technical commentaries, is between resuscitation and resurrection. The earlier figures were resuscitated: restored to ordinary mortal life, subject again to death. Lazarus walked out of the tomb to die a second time; Jairus's daughter grew up and died; the Shunammite's son lived a normal lifespan. Resurrection in the sense Paul intends is something categorically different — the entry into an imperishable, transformed, deathless body that Paul spells out in the same chapter (1 Corinthians 15:42-54, *sōma pneumatikon*, raised "in incorruption"). Christ is the first to be raised in that sense, and the agricultural metaphor *aparchē* makes the point precisely: the firstfruits are the initial installment of a harvest of the same kind, guaranteeing the rest (15:23, "Christ the firstfruits, then those who belong to Christ at his coming"). The cognate language of Colossians 1:18 and Revelation 1:5 — Christ as *prōtotokos ek tōn nekrōn*, "firstborn from the dead" — confirms that the claim is about inaugurating a new order, not about chronological priority among all revivals.
This distinction is not special pleading imported to rescue the text; it is built into Paul's own vocabulary and argument. The whole logic of 1 Corinthians 15 depends on Christ's resurrection being the unrepeatable, eschatological first of a series that the dead in Christ will share — a status none of the resuscitated figures occupy, since all of them died again. Fitzmyer reads Acts 26:23 the same way, with *prōtos* marking Christ as the pioneer of eschatological resurrection rather than the first human ever to return from death. Thiselton and Fee both stress that *aparchē* is a representative-and-guarantee term, not a stopwatch.
The Samuel example, on which this entry leans, is in fact the weakest of the lot and cuts against the objection. The apparition at Endor is not a resuscitation to bodily life at all: Samuel is summoned as a shade "coming up out of the earth" (28:13), speaks, and is not described as restored to living embodiment — he is a denizen of Sheol briefly made to appear. By any definition Samuel neither resuscitated nor resurrected; he was, at most, a necromantic manifestation. As a counterexample to "first to rise from the dead" it fails on its own terms. The genuinely tight counter-cases are Lazarus and the others raised within the Gospel narratives — but those are precisely the cases the resuscitation/resurrection distinction was designed to handle, and handles cleanly: they returned to die again, whereas the risen Christ "dies no more; death no longer has dominion over him" (Romans 6:9).
One can still observe that the Hebrew writers and the Synoptic narrators did not operate with Paul's developed two-age framework, so the harmony is a function of Christian theological systematization rather than a claim the earlier authors would have recognized. But that is a point about conceptual development, not a logical contradiction. Read in their own senses, the texts do not collide: Paul asserts Christ's chronological-and-categorical primacy in eschatological, deathless resurrection, a claim untouched by temporary revivals to mortal life.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable — the texts use 'rise from the dead' in two distinct senses, and Paul's claim concerns resurrection-to-immortality, not revival.
Sources for this reading