“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me, and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you behold me having.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.'
Then He showed them His hands and feet, and told them to handle Him and make absolutely sure for themselves that He really was flesh and bones. For then at least they would surely realise that He could not be a ghost (pneuma), a phantasma. Ghosts just did not have flesh and bones like He had.
The slightly more common New Testament description for a man was ‘flesh and blood' (Matthew 16:17; 1 Corinthians 15:50; Galatians 1:16; Ephesians 6:12; Hebrews 2:14), but significantly we are informed that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingly Rule of God' (1 Corinthians 15:50). Jesus had taken on Himself ‘flesh and blood' when He had become man (Hebrews 2:14), in order that He might help those who were flesh and blood, and it was that flesh and blood that He had sacrificed for them (John 6:53-57), so that by partaking of Him they might find life.
But now He was no longer ‘flesh and blood', although He was ‘flesh and bones' as they could feel for themselves (compare Ephesians 5:30). But we should notice that as such He could appear and disappear at will, so that it was clearly not solid flesh and bones as known to man, even though His disciples could feel them. Rather He has deliberately manifested Himself in this way so that they might be able to satisfy themselves of His reality. We cannot therefore read out from this the nature of the resurrection body, which is a ‘spiritual body' (1 Corinthians 15:44-50).
Nevertheless Paul's reference in Ephesians 5:30 serves to demonstrate that ‘flesh and bones' was to be seen as an appropriate description for Jesus in His heavenly existence, possibly because Paul was connecting with these words of Jesus, which were thus clearly known to him. The question is, why? The answer may well be connected with Genesis 2:23 where flesh and bones represented man and woman in their perfect manhood (before they became creatures of ‘flesh and blood?). Thus flesh and bones may be intended to indicate perfect manhood, whereby the One Who was God became perfect manhood, the second man, the last Adam, in order to deliver us to perfect manhood. ‘He was the son of Adam, who was the son of God' (Luke 3:38). We can only leave it there. Any further theorising would probably only lead us into error for we are speaking of what we cannot know.
‘He showed them his hands and his feet.' There they would see the marks and nail prints. Later He would even tell Thomas that he could put his fingers in them and put his hand in the hole that the spear had made in His side (John 20:27). He wanted them to be left in no doubt about His reality. The memory of this experience was to last a lifetime.