And yet, both Jesus and the Apostle Paul are on record in the canonical Gospels and Letters as saying that 'the dead' have nonphysical bodies, which seems more consistent with the NDE reports than the idea of a physical resurrection. From the Transfiguration on the Mount to the Resurrection to Paul's letters, there's a strong sense of 'metamorphosis', not just returning to a physical realm:
35But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?”
36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
37When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else.
38But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.
39Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.
40There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another.
41The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
42So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable;
43it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power;
44it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.
45So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”
f ; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.
46The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.
47The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven.
48As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven.
49And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we
g bear the image of the heavenly man.
50I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
51Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—
52in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
53For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.
'We will be changed'. 'The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven'. This feels to me like someone trying to find words/images to describe an experience they've witnessed.
Admittedly I've always read passages like this through the eye of my mother's NDE experience(s), where she once described the experience of transition as feeling like 'being a water lily, rising up out of a murky pool into the sunlight', and that the 'new body' she inhabited in that other realm was able to communicate telepathically 'like little thought bubbles' and travel instantly or fly 'as if I had no weight'. Also I think there was 'light coming from everywhere'.
Took me a few years to realise that a water lily is a lotus flower which is the symbol of spirit emerging from / uncorrupted by matter in Eastern philosophy, in almost exactly the same sense she described her experience. Yet my mother was a staunch Evangelical Christian and lotus symbology isn't really a part of that community. So how did both my mother and Eastern mystics happen on that same image unless there's some shared reality behind it?