People have been playing games for thousands of years with some of the absurdity in the idea of a physical resurrection of a long-dead body. If a cannibal eats another person, so that the cannibal’s body is now made up of the other person, and the other person only exists in the body of the cannibal… then which of them owns the body that gets resurrected on the Day of Judgement?

A traditional way of handling “Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

St. Augustine dealt with it, and so did John Donne, Voltaire, and Cyrano de Bergerac, and it continues to amuse writers of fantasy and science fiction. A man is eaten by a wild boar, which is then caught and eaten by other men… where is the first man now? Alternatively, what of the worms that eat a buried body, and of the things that then eat the worms? Or what of the cannibal’s sweat and piss and shit, as he disposes of parts of the person he ate?

Theologians dismiss these mind games as just that, and say that the individual will be resurrected regardless of the scattering of the original body. Why then do they pay so much attention to the care and burial of the body in the superstitious hope of physical resurrection? (Well, but of course there is a lot of money to be made from funerals…)

If you would like to read Cyrano de Bergerac’s take on things, I recommend you to the weekly online SF magazine Bewildering Stories, specifically this issue.