Who Is This Man - John Ortberg

Chapter 1: the Man Who Won't Go Away

Jesus did not start by saying 'here are my proofs for divinity; affirm them and I'll accept you.'

Normally when someone dies their impact on the world immediately begins to reced... But Jesus inverted this normal human trajectory.

If someone's legacy will outlast their life, it usually becomes apparent when they die. On the day Alexander the Great or Caesar Agustus or Napoleon or Socrates or Mohammed died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny failed movement appeared clearly at an end.

The USSR's leader of the 'League of the Militant Godless' once remarked:

Christianity is like a nail. the harder you strike it, the deeper it goes.

Today the names of Caesar and Nero are used, if at all, for pizza parlours, dogs and casinos (or cafes), whereas the names in Jesus' book live on and on.

The quickest and most basic mental health assessment checks to see if people are 'oriented times three': whether they know who they are, where are and what day it is. I was given the name of Jesus' friend John; I live in the Bay area named for Jesus' friend Francis; I was born 1957 years after Jesus. How could orientation depend so heavily on one life? 

Historian O. M. Bakke wrote a study called When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity in which he noted that in the ancient world, children usually didn't get named until the eighth day or so:

Up until then there was a chance that the infant would be killed or left to die of exposure - particularly if it was deformed or of the unpreferred gender. The custom changed because of a group of people who remembered that they were followers of a man who said, 'Let the little children come to me.'

His impact on customs around death:

The word cemetery comes from a Greek word meaning 'sleeping place'. It expressed the hope of resurrection. 

How does Jesus survive his followers? They have done and do awful things in his name. Andrew walls noted that most religions remain centred in their original homes. But with the Jesus movement things are different.

It began in Jerusalem, but was embraced by unwashed Gentiles with such zeal that it began to move across the ancient Mediterranean to North Africa and Alexandria and Rome. Then more barbarians took it to heart, and it began to expand to northern Europe and eventually to North America. In the past century, it has dramatically shifted again: the majority of Christians now live in the global South and the East. When asked why, Walls said that 'there is a certain vulnerability, a fragility, at the heart of Christianity. You might say it is the vulnerability of the cross.' Where the faith has too much money and too much power for too long it begins to spoil, and the centre moves on.

H. G. Wells marvelled:

a historian like myself, who doesn't even call himself a Christian, finds the picture centring irresistibly around the life and character of this most significant man... The historian's test of an individual's greatness is 'What did he leave to grow?' Did he start men to thinking along fresh lines with a vigour that persisted after him? By this test Jesus stands first.

Chapter 2: The Collapse of Dignity 

Herod:

He had ten or eleven wives. He suspected the ambitions of the only one he ever truly loves, so he had her executed. He also had his mother-in-law, and two of his own sons by his favourite wife executed. When his old barber tried to stick up for his sons, he had his barber executed. Caesar remarked that (given the Jewish refusal to eat pork) it was better to be Herod's pig than his son. 

There are gradations of talent, strength, intelligence and beauty. Martin Luther King Jr. said 'There are no gradations of the image of God.'

George MacDonald delighted in writing about princesses and princes. Someone asked him why he always wrote about princesses. "Because every girl is a princess,' he said. When the questioner was confused, MacDonald asked what a princess is. "The daughter of a king," the man answered. "Very well, then every little girl is a princess." Every human being is the child of a King.

In the ancient world this wasn't true for every person. The practise of exposure was commonplace. Plutarch once wrote that until eight days old:

the child was more like a plant than a human being.

The term 'god parents' was invented by the community of the church. In a society that didn't value children, Christians appointed 'god' parents to look after children in the event of their parents dying.

Since the birth of Jesus babies and kings and everybody else look different to us now. Jesus bestowed dignity, worth and honour on not only children but every human being whether healthy, sick, male or female. On the following people, Jesus gave dignity:

The autistic or Downs syndrome or otherwise disabled child... the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. 

These were viewed by our ancient ancestors as burdens to be discarded. To see them instead as bearer of divine glory who can touch our conscience and still our selfishness - this is what Jewsus saw and Herod could not see.

Chapter 3: A revolution in humanity

The Pharisees generally took great pride in following perfectly in their homes the regulations that were supposed to govern the temple. They believed the temple had been corrupted by Rome, so they could honour God by treating their homes as miniature temples. All regulations that should be observed in the temple would be observed in their homes.

One of the most famous sermons in that century was by Gregory of Nyssa (brother of Basil who introduced the vision to create communities that cared for sick people). This is what he said:

Lepers have been made in the image of God. In the same way you and I have, and perhaps preserve that image better than we, let us take care of Christ while there is still time. Let us minister to Christ's needs. Let us give Christ nourishment. Let us clothe Christ. Let us gather Christ in. Let us show Christ honour.

That was the beginning of what would come to be known as hospitals. The Council of Nyssa (same council that produced the Nicene creed) decreed that wherever a cathedral existed, there must be a hospice, a place of caring for the sick and poor... They were the world's first charitable institutions.

Another follower of Jesus named Jean Henri Dunant couldn't stand the sound of soldiers crying out on a battlefield after they had been wounded, so this Swiss philanthropist said he would devote his life to helping them in Jesus' name. This started an organisation in the 1860s that became known as the Red Cross. Every time you see the Red Cross, you are seeing a thumbprint of Jesus.

In the ancient world a slave was a non habens personam literally 'not having a person' a non-person. In the early church a slave might wander in and have one of the masters - one of the rich and powerful - get down on his knees, take a basin and a towel, and wash his/her feet.

A WELCOMING church:

An early church document (the Didascalia Apostolorum) instructed bishops not to interrupt a service to greet a wealthy person of high rank who entered late. But if a poor man or woman entered the assembly, the bishop was to do whatever was needed to welcome them in, even if it meant the bishop were to end up sitting on the floor. The seating chart was changing.

In AD 379 Gregory of Nyssa criticised slavery and scolded Christians who owned slaves:

You condemn to slavery the human being, whose nature is free... upon the one who was created to be lord of the earth and appointed to rule the creation, upon this one you impose the yoke of slavery.

Christians began also to care for prisoners. John Ortberg describes life in marxist Ethiopia:

Years ago I was in Ethiopia when it was under a Marxist regime and the church was mostly underground. One or another of the leaders of the Christian group would frequently be arrested and put into prison, which was horribly over-crowded and unspeakably foul. Other prisoners used to long for a Christian to get put in prison, because if a Christian was jailed, his Christian friends would bring him food - actually, far more food than that one person could eat, and there would be leftovers for everybody. It became the 'prisoner's prayer'; 'God send a Christian to prison.'

 Slavery today. Slavery still exists and endures today but with one major difference, the complete collapse in price. Historically slaves were worth around $40, 000 in today's money. Today the average slave costs around $90. They have become disposable units.

Chapter 4: What Does a Woman Want?

John 4. The woman at the well. Brilliant piece of revelation and insight... women did not and could not divorce men. Therefore it follows that when Jesus says to this woman 'you have had five husbands and the man you're living with now is not your husband,' it was unlikely that this was because she was a serial adulterer (as is usually the thing pointed out by commentators). This woman was someone very familiar with rejection. She had been 'kicked to the curb' a lot in her life.

Equally:

Her current arrangement was probably not about casual sexuality. If a man wanted a woman of lower class, he could bring her into his pre-existing marriage as a concubine or second wife, this was very possibly her only means of survival.

This woman was not a social outcast or 'notorious' woman either. She went and told them about Jesus and 'many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.'

In Christ there is no longer Jew (insider) nor Greek (outsider), slave (outsider), free (insider), nor is there male (insider), and female (outsider), for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
For inheritance sometimes a male would be adopted since a female was not able to inherit a family's estate but it would pass to another male relative instead. Not so in the church. All are part of the family of God now.

Motherhood. Women were blessed if they gave birth to a boy. In ancient Sparta a mother who gave birth to a son would receive twice the food rations as a mother who gave birth to a daughter. Check out this insight then:

One day Jesus was teaching. "As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, 'Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.'"
Someone was complimenting Jesus' mother. We could expect a polite reply: 'Thank you. My mum's the best ever. She was a virgin you know."
Instead, Jesus offered a sharp rebuttal: 'Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it."
Jesus deliberately gave an edgy response: "No; you're wrong." For Jesus, the highest calling of a woman was no longer to bear a child. Motherhood, like fatherhood, is a noble calling. But it's not the ultimate calling. If you don't have children, you have not missed out. 

FACT: manus is Latin for 'hand', therefore a manuscript is something handwritten.

Women's testimony wasn't trusted, and yet it was women who first found the empty tomb: Celsus, a Greek philosopher looking to discredit Christianity said about this event 'But who saw this? A hysterical female, as you say, and perhaps some one other of those who were deluded by this same sorcery.'

Chapter 5: An Undistinguished Visiting Scholar

Jesus had a quality - generally restricted to either a genius or a psychotic - of being so convinced that he was right that even intense opposition did not sway him.

Jesus was supremely humble in his relationships yet supremely confident in his convictions.

Early church fathers had a favourite saying that the Gospels are a river in which a gnat can swim and an elephant can drown.

The historical impact of Jesus' thinking is so pervasive that it is often taken for granted. The gospels have impacted the world so much that they have been translated into 2,527 languages. The second-most translated book, Don Quixote, has been translated into about 60 languages.

The Bible is the best selling book of all time, according to the Guiness Book of World Records. The second bestselling is the Guiness Book of World Records!

In the academic world, scholars keep score by how often an article they write is cited by other scholars. By this sheer secular score, Jesus' intellectual impact is unprecedented. Harvard Professor Harvey Cox:

The words of the Sermon on the Mount are the most luminous, most quoted, most analysed, most contested, most influential moral and religious discourse in all of human history. This may sound like an overstatement, but it is not.

Augustine: All truth is God's truth.

In 1647 Mass. the first law requiring mass universal education was passed by the puritans who called it 'The Old Deluder Satan Act'

Robert Raikes started the Sunday School movement in 1780. He was unwilling to accept the cycle of poverty and ignorance that was destroying children. He said 'The world marches forward on the feet of little children.' Children who were forced to work six days a week were given access to a FREE school on Sundays. He said 'I'm going to start a school for free to teach them to read and write and learn about God.'

Within 50 years there were 1.5m children being taught by 160k volunteers.

The alphabet of the Slavic peoples is called Cyrillic. It was named for St Cyril who was a missionary to the Slavs and discovered they had no written alphabet. Thus he created on for them so they would be able to read about Jesus in their own language.

Technological advancements in the middle ages grew out of an understanding of the rationality of God. People saw matter as good, God as rational and consistent and work not as an evil but as a gift from God.

• The first recorded use of a windmill was by Abbot Gregory of Tours in the sixth century, to free his monks to pray.
• Mechanical clocks were invented by  monks because they needed to know when to pray... for centuries it was the church from which villages learned the time.
• 1300. The invention of an eyeglass by monks needing to read.

Chapter 6: Jesus was not a great man

Status symbols and orders within society. The toga in Roman society was a status symbol, but an inconvenient one all the same:

A male citizen from the age of about fourteen was allowed to wear toga virilis, the garment of manhood. Ironically, the toga was 'a remarkably incommodious garment.' Drafty in winter, sticky hot in summer, keeping one hand covered and unusable, difficult to arrange (the rich employed slaves specially trained in toga-draping), it had only one value: the proclamation of status.

The rich were also treated differently than the poor in their death. Crucifixion was reserved particularly for slaves; it was informally known as the 'slave's punishment.'

So when the apostle Paul started a letter to people in Rome by describing himself not as a citizen of the Roman Empire (which he was), not as a wearer of the toga, but as a 'slave of Christ Jesus,' he was committing social suicide. No one talked that way. 

 Christians would have described themselves as being slaves to the slave Jesus Christ since Jesus died a slaves death. Therefore as leaders in the church we are slaves to the slaves of a slave.

Learning to blow your own trumpet in Roman society was expected. Celebrate your greatness, make others aware of it. Plutarch wrote a self-help book entitled: How to Praise Yourself Inoffensively. Caesar Augustus wrote a book: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus which he had inscribed in bronze and distributed throughout the empire. Some excerpts:

Three times I triumphed at oration. Twenty-one times I was named emperor. The Senate voted yet more triumphs for me which I declined because of victories won by me. The Senate voted thanks for me to the immortal gods. Fifty-five times in my triumphs, nine kings or children of kings were led before my chariot. I have been consul 13 times. I was highest-ranking senator for 40 years. I held the office of Pontific Maximums. All citizens with one accord unceasingly prayed in every holy place for my well-being.

 Compare that list with Paul's own 'trumpet blowing' list in Philippians 3 and then in 2 Corinthians 6(?).

Humility was not an admired quality.

But things were changing. A poor rabbi who never wrote 'The Deeds of the Divine Carpenter,' said to his friends 'You know that the rulers of this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them... not so with you. Instead whoever wants to become great must be your slave...'

Jesus washes Judas' feet. The so-called divine Augustus never washed anyone's feet. A culture built on honour is beginning to implode, but almost no one back then realises that.

How are doing at prizing humility above greatness?

The gravitational pull of the ego is relentless. I sometimes wonder whether those of us in the church are just as preoccupied with honour and status as anyone else, just cover it up with a thin veneer of spiritual language.

Has the church lost it?

There is an old story that Thomas Aquinas was being shown the glories of the Vaitcan by Pope Innocent IV. The pope said, referring to the story of a lame beggar in the book of Acts, 'The church no longer has to say, 'Silver and gold have I none.'" And Aquinas replied, 'Yes, but no longer is the church able to say, 'In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, Rise up and walk.'" 

Jim Collins: Level 5 leaders have a tenacious will and humility.

Chapter 7: Help your friends, punish your enemies

German political theorist Hannah Arendt said that forgiveness and love of enemies is a distinctively Christian contribution to the human race:

the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.

Decapolis. Stated simply as going to 'the other side' by Jesus was a place Jews were very wary of. Many felt it was the place Satan lived. It was dark, oppressive and demonic. There were pagan temples and it housed a legion of 6 000 Roman soldiers. The symbol of a Roman legion was a boar's head. No respectable rabbi went there, but Jesus did. Not content with the crowds in his home territory he set out for 'the other side'.

The pigs and the demoniac. Jesus granted the spirits wishes to go into the pigs and the pigs ran into the sea. But why?

Any Israelite would think of the story recorded in 1 Maccabees, how Jewish patriots were forced by Tome to eat the flesh of pigs, and when they resisted they were slaughtered. So the pig is also the symbol of Roman power of the legion. And the tormented man was delivered from the legion.

The locals were scared of Jesus and sent him away. The locals saw that he had power but his power was from the 'other side', the wrong side, not their side. The healed demoniac asked to follow Jesus but instead Jesus told him to go and tell his story. A while later Jesus returned to Decapolis and this was his reception:

They ran throughout that whole region and carried sick on mats to wherever they heard he was...

Wow! The 'other side' was the place that the seven nations of Canaanites that weren't driven out were supposed to reside. Check this out:

In Mark 6 Jesus feeds a crowd on Israel's side of the lake. There were 12 baskets left over, the twelve tribes.
n Mark 8 Jesus fed a crowd on 'the other side' and seven baskets of food were left over, why seven?

This is just a guess but it's almost as if Jesus was saying: 'Good news is coming for the twelve tribes. But good news is coming for the seven nations of Canaan too. Twelve tribes, seven nations - it really doesn't matter to me. I love them all. It's good news for our side and good news for the other side.

Luther on enemy love:

The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the kingdom of Christ; he wanted to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared.

Pacifism began with the early church.

Amish:

The world was moved when in Oct 2006 five children were shot to death in a schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Penns. and the Amish community forgave the gunman donating money to the gunman's widow and children

Chapter 9: The Good Life Vs the Good Person

Two questions posed about life: who has the good life, who is a good person? The first gets addressed in advertising, the second at funerals.

Our advertisements are filled with promises to give you the very thing you wouldn't want listed in your obituary: great looks, great money, great sex, great food, great widescreen TV.

Jesus' movement produced many hypocrites. Given that there are more than 2b Christians in the world, maybe Christianity produced more hypocrites than any other movement in history!

Mark Twain once listened to a greedy, unscrupulous businessman piously drone on about his plan to travel to the Middle East and read the 10 Commandments from the top of Mt. Sinai. "I have a better idea," Twain is supposed to have said, 'Why don't you stay home in Boston and keep them?"

Hypocrisy as a word:

It is clear from the literary records that it was Jesus alone who brought this term hypocrisy and the corresponding character into the moral record of the Western world.

If you ever wanted to post a scathing blog about religious hypocrites you'll have to get in line behind Jesus. Jesus began, "Woe to you..." "Woe" didn't just mean trouble was coming; it meant trouble was coming in the form of divine judgement. God, Jesus said, will not tolerate hypocrisy.

Jesus used the strongest warnings of judgment and hell not as warnings to those outside his community of faith, but at the people inside it!

Because of Jesus' emphasis on the human heart, goodness does not begin with right behaviour. It begins with openness to the truth about the mess in my inner being.

Imagine taking your car in for a check-up and being told it was fine only later to nearly crash and discover your brakes were out of fluid. The mechanics protestations about wanting to 'make you happy' and feel 'at home' and 'accepted' aren't going to please you, not when your life is at stake. It's the same with a Dr. You don't want lies of flattery and assurances of good health when you're desperately sick. You want the truth. We want the truth. Jesus brought that truth-telling into the world of religion too. No longer (as in the pagan world) could you simply pay off a priest, offer a sacrifice and go on your way only to never change. For Jesus, the heart was in his crosshairs and before he could help us and heal us, he needed to expose us.

Chapter 10: Why it's a small world after all

God chooses Israel for the world, not instead of it.

The idea of a community that included everyone and treated every single human being as being of equal worth and value was an idea that had never been had before.

Tertullian: It is our care of the helpless, our practise of loving-kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. 'Only look' they say, 'look how they love one another.'

When the church became 'official' in the early fourth C, a movement sprung up of desert dwelling Christians who sought a more pure form of faith.

The desire to be a spiritual athlete is never far from self-righteousness.

One of these desert dwellers, Simeon Stylites is said to have lived thirty years bound by a rope to a column thirty feet high. His flesh putrified around the rope and teemed with worms. When the worms fell out, he would put them back and say, 'Eat what God has given you.'

The monks who renounced the world, ended up reshaping it.

Dan Shaw went as a missionary and anthropologist to Pap New Guinea. He faced a difficulty however. They believed in the supernatural and saw spirits and gods in many places, but they had no word for a Big God who was ruler and creator over all.

Dan got to know them and found over the years that in extended families there was a figure called hi-yo, a father figure who would arbitrate disputes and make sure everyone was cared for and decide what was fair. Dan began his translation of Genesis: 'Back before the time of the ancestors, hi-yo created the heavens and the earth.'

People said, 'Wow. We had no idea. He is hi-yo over everything.'
Dan asked, 'What if he's hi-yo for everyone? Not just for you. Also for your enemies. For the cannibals across the river.'
'Oh no. We'd have to make peace with them.'
And peace happened.

At the end of their time together, they had not caused much of a stir. If you could have been there on the day after he died, if you could have seen the Roman Empire with its Pax Romana and its 250,00 miles of roads and its extension from Asi to Africa to Europe and its history of dominance and its social status that was envied throughout the Mediterranean... and then if you could have seen a few dozen failed, frightened, demoralised, defeated, confused former followers of an executed carpenter... 

If someone had asked you to place a bet on which group would still be around in two thousand years, all the smart money would have been placed on the Roman Empire. Which is as extinct as the dodo bird. Who was this man?

Chapter 11: The Truly-Old Fashioned Marriage

More marriages have been performed, more weddings vows taken in his name than any other.

The person who changed marriage in the Western world more than anyone else, was himself never married.

In our day people speak of keeping sex within marriage as 'old fashioned' when actually the reality is precisely the opposite.

Sexual activity ranging far outside a marriage covenant is a much older social arrangement.

Outside of Israel sex wasn't restricted to marriage for moral reasons. A Roman writer from the first-century:

We have mistresses for our enjoyment, concubines to serve our needs, and wives to bear legitimate children. 

Greek Drs would diagnose women with 'hysteria' a word that comes from their word for 'uterus' and was said to be cured by having intercourse.  Another Dr prescribed sex for adolescents as a way of curing melancholia, epilepsy and headaches.

The promise in marriage according to Jesus:

is not just to avoid adultery or divorce. It is to pursue oneness on every level: physical, intellectual, and spiritual - a oneness that does not diminish the individuality of the other but makes it flourish.

G.K. Chesterton on marriage:

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible. 

Naomi Wolf, an author with no religious ax to grind:

published an essay several years ago musing on the hurts that the soul absorbs through casual sex with multiple partners and the loss of a sense of faithful love that can endure through life. 

Tim Keller referring to the promiscuity of the ancients in the sexual practises:

The ancients were stingy with their money, but generous with their bodies; the Christians were stingy with their bodies but generous with their money. 

The church has also had a lot of wrongness and weirdness when it comes to sexuality. In order to avoid lust, some monks would proudly keep a record of how many years it had been since they had seen a woman. Jesus wouldn't have done this!

Origen mistook Jesus' ironic words about physical mutilation as a means to spiritual goodness and castrated himself. Jesus' whole point was that mutilating the body is not the way to goodness.

Chapter 12: Friday

The Chief Priests threaten the stability of the region with the comment that Jesus is setting himself up to rival Caesar.

Caesar wants grain. Grain was to the Middle East in that day what oil is to the Middle East today.

Why did Jesus die? In a real sense, he died for corn. 

There were lots of messiahs around the time of Jesus and Jesus could have announced his messianic intentions at any point and gained an instant following:

He would never claim the title.

They brought false witnesses before Jesus but Jesus didn't need the false witnesses to incriminate him, he did it himself: and you will see the Son of man coming on the clouds. Meaning: 'you now see God present and working in a unique way, in me.' he did what no amount of false witnesses could have done!

sin = human darkness.

Chapter 13: Saturday

Easter Saturday was the only day in the last two thousands years when no one on earth believed that Jesus was alive.

That there are three days is significant and yet no one really gives much thought to Saturday. Saturday is the day the dream died.

Paul: Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

Abraham and Isaac: The sacrifice was provided on the third day. 

Joseph's brothers: After being put in prison are released on the third day.

Rahab: Tells the Israelite spies to hide and that they'd be safe on the third day. 

Esther: When she hears that her people are going to be slaughtered she goes away to fast and pray. On the third day, the king receives her favourably.

It's such a recurring pattern that the prophet Hosea says,

'Come let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces... after two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.'

All three day stories share a structure. On the first day there is trouble, and on the third day there is deliverance. On the second day, there is nothing - just the continuations of trouble.

The problem with third-day stories is, you don't know it's a third day story until the third day. When it's Friday, when it's Saturday, as far as you know, deliverance is never going to come. It may just be a one-day story, and that one day of trouble may last the rest of your life.

Augustine once said that time was one of those realities he thought he understood until someone asked him to explain what it is.

We live 'between the trees' between the tree in Genesis and before the tree in Revelation.

Humble Jesus claimed to be the hinge of history: 'the time has come' he announced. Jesus changed how we think about history:

The year was given a new starting point. In Israel a baby was brought to the temple and given a name on the eighth day of life. January 1 is eight days past December 25. January 1 marks the beginning of the NY, because that's the day when the name of Jesus came into the world.  

600 years after Jesus a monk from Scythia (Iran) proposed a new dating system for reckoning history, centred not on the pagan myth of the founding of Rome but on the birth of Jesus.

Caesar Nero died in the year of our Lord 68. Napoleon (the emperor of the world) died in the year of our Lord 1821. Joseph stalin in the year of our Lord 1953. Maybe Jesus was not Lord of Lords and King of Kings but how strange that now every ruler who ever reigned must be dates in reference to the life of Jesus.

Yale Professor Carlos Eire wrote a book called A Very Brief History of Eternity. He observes that human life is either incredibly significant from a cosmic perspective or incredibly insignificant given its brevity next to the history of the cosmos, let alone eternity.

If you represent the entire history of our planet as one twenty-four-hour time period that ran from midnight one day to midnight the next, Homo Sapiens would make their arrival at 11:59 minutes, 59.3 seconds.

That is the span of humanity. Recorded history is far shorter - less than the pop of a flashbulb. Your life is too brief to be measured.

Chapter 15: Sunday

Jesus first word when he appeared alive was: 'Greetings.' Which is as close as he could have got to 'Hey. How you doing?'

A pastor named Skip Viau tried to tell this story in a children's sermon one time. He posed the question, 'What were Jesus' first words to the disciples after he was raised from the dead?' Before he could give Matthew's answer, a little girl waved her hand, and Skip deferred to her. 'I know,' she said. 'Ta da!' It's as good a translation as any.

Jesus effectively says: 'Tell the all that the cross failed, Caesar failed, Pilate failed, the chief priests failed.'

Christians thought about death differently as a result of Jesus' resurrection. In Rome the dead were regarded with dread and were buried outside the city in a place of their own necropolis 'the city of the dead.'

Christians were buried in the church yard and some under the floor of the church buildings so that in a literal way the living and the dead were gathered together for worship.

Garret Fiddler, a guest columnist in the Yale Daily News noted the irony of the cross as a piece of jewellery: 'Really, the cross does not belong on the Christian; the Christian belongs on the cross.'

Nietzsche said that Zeus gave hope to men to torture them: 'In truth, [hope] is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment.'

Epitaphs that express the difference between Christian and non-Christian hope:

Mel Blanc (voice of Looney Toons) : 'That's all folks.'
Philip Yancey's friend's grandmother : 'Waiting.'

Epilogue

In the Middle Ages, maps were not intended to be used for travel - people would hire live guides for that. Instead, maps were attempts to reflect on the meaning of the world, rather than just its terrain.

 Map of life according to the Bible. Two circles, 'heaven' and 'earth' with an interlocking one in between 'temple', the place where heaven and earth intersect. Then with Jesus that word 'temple' became 'Jesus'. Now it is... us.

How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie

1. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive

principle 1. Don't criticise, condemn or complain

May 7, 1931 'Two Gun' Crowley the cop killer was brought into custody. He was a brutal killer but he believed himself to always be doing what was right. He didn't think himself to be a bad person. 'He will kill, at the drop of a feather.' said the police commissioner. Writing a letter before he died Cowley wrote 'under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one - one that would do nobody any harm.'

I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.
Al Capone

Carnegie:

Ninety nine times out of a hundred, people don't criticise themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.

As Lincoln lay dying Secretary of War Stanton said: there lies the most perfect ruler of men that the world has ever seen.

After studying Lincoln for ten years and devoting three years to writing a book on Lincoln Carnegie believes that his inability/unwillingness to criticise anybody else is a major part of why he was so successful and respected as a leader.

One of Lincoln's favourite quotes was 'judge not, that ye be not judged.'

When Mrs Lincoln criticised others and spoke harshly of the southern people, Lincoln replied: 'Don't criticise them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.'

Carnegie:

Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favour of it, but why not begin on yourself? From a purely selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others- yes, and a lot less dangerous.

Remembering a time someone rebuked him but he didn't let it go until after the man died:

If you and I want to stir up a resentment tomorrow that may rankle across the decades and endure until death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism.

When dealing with people let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy to give up forever writing fiction. Thomas Chatterton (English poet) was driven to suicide by it.

Benjamin Franklin:

I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody. 

 Carnegie:

Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

Carlyle:

A great man shows his greatness, by the way he treats little men.

Bob Hoover a famous test pilot was returning to LA from San Diego. At 300 ft in the air both engines suddenly cut out. Deft at manoeuvring he managed to land the plane safely. Hoover inspected the engine's fuel. Just as he suspected it had been filled with jet fuel rather than gasoline:

Upon returning to the airport he asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives as well.

You can imagine Hoover's anger. One could anticipate the tongue-;lashing that this proud and precise pilot would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn't scold the mechanic; he didn't even criticise him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man's shoulder and said, 'to show you I'm sure that you'll never do this again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.'

W. Livingston Larned. FATHER FORGETS

Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. 

There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.

At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, “Goodbye, Daddy!” and I frowned, and said in reply, “Hold your shoulders back!” Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive‐and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. “What is it you want?” I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding‐this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: “He is nothing but a boy‐a little boy!” I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.  

Dr Johnson: God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. Why should you and I?

The Resurrection of the Son of God - NT Wright

Chapter One: The Target and the Arrows

History and faith are often kept at arm's length from one another.

Yet here of all places - with Christian origins in general and the resurrection in particular - they are inevitably intertwined. Not to recognise this, in fact, is often to decide tacitly in favour of a particular type of theology, perhaps a form of Deism who absentee-landlord god keeps clear of historical involvement.

Attitude toward historical study:

Historical work, it seems if fine, necessary even, as long as it comes up with sceptical results, but dangerous and damaging - to genuine faith! - if it tries to do anything else. Heads I lose; tails you win.

It's important to work hard to understand what the early Christians meant when they used the language they did. When someone says 'I'm mad about my flat' if they're American they mean 'I'm upset about my puncture', if they're British 'I'm enthusiastic about my living quarters.' So it is with Jesus. When the Christians said:

'The messiah was raised from the dead on the third day' what might they have been heard to be saying? 

On believing in resurrection then as well as now:

Proposing that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead was just as controversial nineteen hundred years ago as it is today. The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The historian who wishes to make such a proposal is therefore compelled to challenge a basic and fundamental assumption...  

Ways the word and concept of 'history' have been used:

1. history as event, to say simply and solely that they/it existed.
2. history as significant event; we say something was 'historic' not to sow it existed but to show it mattered. Not all past happenings were/are in that sense 'history'. 
3. history as provable event. To say something is 'historical' implies we have a degree of certainty about its ever having happened.
4. history as speaking writing/speaking-about-events-in-the-past. 
5. history as being what modern (post-enlightenment) historians can say about something. A past event that fits the post-enlightenment worldview.

Christianity as a quasi-messianic group within Judaism that transformed into the movement we know had never happened before or since:

The common post-enlightenment perception of Christianity as simply 'a religion' masks the huge difference, at the pint of origin, between this movement and, say, the rise of Islam or of Buddhism.) Both pagan and Jewish observers of this new movement found it highly anomalous: it was not like a club, not even like a religion (no sacrifices, no images, nor oracles, no garlanded priests), certainly not like a racially based cult.

How a sceptic became convinced:

Paul did not start off with a problem and then discover that Jesus was the solution; he discovered Jesus, found him to be God's solution, and then figured out that there must have been some kind of problem...

Although as a Jew he did of course have a problem in his mind before he found Jesus to be the solution:

The problem he eventually described was a rethought version of the 'problem' he had before he began. 

Wow. Thomas' journey toward a foolproof or better way of knowing and believing:

He begins by insisting on the sense of touch as the only foolproof epistemology. He is confronted by the risen Jesus. Then discovers that visibility is enough (he abandons his intention of touching), only to be told 'blessed are those who have not see, and yet believe'. His original epistemology led him in the right direction, even though, when faced with the risen Jesus, he abandoned it in favour of a better one, and was pointed towards a better one still. 

There is a problem when it comes ot proving historically that Jesus was raised from the dead. For many people the event of the resurrection is linked too closely to the theological implication/statement that he was therefore the Son of God. Whether this is or is not the case, we must be careful to draw theological implications from historic events. On the subject of messiahship Wright says:

To say that Jesus is 'the Christ' is, in first century terms, to say first and foremost that he is Israel's Messiah, no to say that he is the incarnate Logos, the second person of the Trinity, the only-begotten son of the Father. Even the phrase 'son of god', during Jesus' ministry and in very early Christianity does not mean what it came to mean in later theology, though already by Paul a widening of its meaning can be observed.

The Christian worldview is best understood as a startling, fresh mutation within second-temple Judaism. This then raises the question: what caused the mutation?

Among the more striking aspects of the mutation is the fact that nowhere within Judaism, let alone paganism, is a sustained claim advanced that resurrection has actually happened to a particular individual.

Different ways 'life after death' is talked about/meant:

1. the state that immediately follows the event of bodily death
2. the state that follows a period of being bodily dead
3. the state of affairs after death in the abstract has been abolished

Sense 1. is not what is meant by 'resurrection' in the first century. Resurrection did not mean that to Jews, Christians or pagans. They all understood 'resurrection' to mean 2. They meant 'new lfie' after death when they spoke of resurrection.

Chapter 2: Shadows, souls and where they go: life beyond death in ancient paganism.

Apollo, speaking at the foundations of the Athenian high court, the Areopagus:

Once a man has died, and the dust has soaked up his blood, there is no resurrection.

It was widely understood and accepted within the myths and stories in popular ancient pagan culture that once a person has died, there is no resurrection. Not only did people not believe in resurrection, many people went further and effectively denied the dead any real existence whatever. 'I wasn't, I was, I am not, I don't care' is an epitaph well known to all people and reduced simply to its Latin/Greek letters.

The only real immortality, many decided, was fame. 'A name and a beautiful image' was the most one could hope for.

Wright is quite clear:

The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believed the dead were non-existence; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection.

Commenting on the often mentioned parallels between ancient hero myths and the Jesus story Wright says:

It can be shown on good historical grounds that these suggested parallels and derivations are figments of the (modern) imagination.

In understanding a cultures worldview Wright suggests that we need to engage with their:

• praxis - what people do habitually and unreflectively. 
• symbol - cultural phenomena, including objects and institutions.
• story - the narratives whether factual or fictitious that encode the worldview.
• questions - what people asked and why.

Praxis: funeral customs and practises and post-funeral rituals and practices. Burial of the dead was not a particularly 'religious' event, in the sense that it did not involve the gods directly. There are descriptions of royal funeral customs but they aren't to be taken to represent the everyday practises.

Symbols: funeral monuments and inscriptions, objects buried with them etc.

Stories: Homer, Plato and other novels from the time illustrating what people believed about the afterlife. 

Questions: In relation to the dead - who are they, where are they, what is wrong, what is the solution and what time is it in the sequence of relevant events?

Shadows, Souls of Potential Gods?

From Homer's work the popular understanding of life after death is put on display. Achilles sums up the attitude toward death succinctly:

Never try to reconcile me to death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on Earth, to serve as the hireling of another, some landless man with hardly enough to live on, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.

Hades, clearly, is not fit for human habitation. Who are the dead then? For Homer, and the subsequent centuries that read him devoutly they are shades, ghosts and phantoms. They are not physical, they are not human beings.

Another point of interest is to note that prior to Plato the 'soul' (psyche) was not seen as a glorious immortal being that would enjoy life away from the body. There was life, but it was a sort of half-life, an existence as distinct from full life. Some believed they'd meet old friends and had a life similar to this one but without much of the present activity that makes life interesting.

Souls Released from Prison?

If Homer functioned as the Old Testament for the Hellenistic world its New Testament was unquestionably Plato. Plato was also (like a pagan Marcion) concerned enough about Homer that he suggested instead, cutting out bits or revising bits that didn't fit his own vision of things.

How will we ever get people to be good citizens, he asks, to serve in the army, to do their duty to their friends, if their view of the future life is conditioned by epic pictures of gibbering ghosts in a gloomy underworld?

Plato instead taught:

Death is not something to regret, but something to be welcomed. It is the moment when, and the means by which, the immortal soul is set free from the prison-house of the physical body.

Here is the central difference between Homer and Plato:

Instead of the 'self' being the physical body, lying dead on the ground, while the 'soul' flies away to what is at best a half-life, now the 'self, the true person, is precisely the soul, while it is the corpse that is the ghost.

For Plato, the soul is the non-material aspect of a human being, and is the aspect that really matters. Bodily life is full of delusion and danger. The soul existed before the body and will continue to exist after the body is gone.

Since for many Greeks 'the immortals' were the gods, there is always the suggestion, at least by implication, that human souls are in some way divine. 

Socrates stressed at his death, the real 'me' is not the corpse that will be buried but that which presently employs the limbs and organs. A human being is:

'a little soul carrying around a corpse.' Nature taught you to love the body in the first place, an when Nature tells you it's time to let it go, you shouldn't complain.

One should not fear death: it is the birthday of one's eternity.
As long as once ceases to hope, one ceases to fear. If death is to be welcomed it follows that an early death is a good thing, despite popular opinion: 'those whom the gods love die young.'

As will already be obvious, neither bore any resemblance to the belief and message of the early church.

Becoming a God (or at least a star)?

'Oh dear,' the Emperor Vespasian is reported to have said on his death-bed, 'I think I'm becoming a god.'

Alexander the Great begun in his mid-twenties, to represent himself as a son of Zeus and requested actual worship in Greece and Macedonia. While he was living people weren't too willing, but after his death his cult was quickly established and provided a model for the Roman imperial cult four centuries later.

Similar beliefs were already widespread in the early Christian period. Tiberius wasted no time in having his adoptive father declared divine, as Augustus had done with Julius.

By the time of the NT the emperors were routinely worshipped as divine, in the eastern parts of the empire at least, during their lifetime.

How to make a god. Upon someone's death witnesses were made to swear that they had seen the soul of the late emperor ascending to heaven, a theme made famous by Augustus' interpretation of the comet which appeared at the time of Julius Caesar's death.

Plato also taught (borrowing from Socrates who got it from Pythagoras I believe) that our souls originated in the stars, and upon a successful life as a man our souls return to the star assigned to it. He says:

He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second brith he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired.

Note that we 'return to' the stars rather than 'become' stars. 

This concept is sometimes called the 'transmigration of the soul' or more commonly today 'reincarnation'. As a belief its origins are unclear. Wikipedia records thus:

The origins of the notion of reincarnation are obscure.^[29] Discussion of the subject appears in the philosophical traditions of India. The Greek Pre-Socratics discussed reincarnation, and the Celtic Druids are also reported to have taught a doctrine of reincarnation.^[30]The ideas associated with reincarnation may have arisen independently in different regions, or they might have spread as a result of cultural contact. 

 Cicero built on and agreed with Plato on the essential idea that the body is a prison like place that the soul has been forced to occupy for an allotted period of time before being released to go an dwell with the gods, possibly among the stars. The idea was that our bodies had been made by a special fire-like substance to be able to contain our souls which are of similar material to stars.

Cicero is also in agreement that nobody 'in their right mind' would want their body back having once got rid of it.

At no point in the spectrum of options about life after death did the ancient pagan world envisage that the denials of Homer, Aeschylus and the rest would be overthrown. Resurrection was not an option. Those who followed Plato or Cicero did not want a body again; those who followed Homer knew they would not get one. The embargo remained.

Further life from within the world of the Dead?

Ordinary people in the greco-roman world clearly thought that from time to time one might see ghost, spirits or visions of dead people. It was even possible to precipitate such encounters oneself. But we should make the mistake of supposing that this had anything to do with resurrection.

Life after death, yes; various possibilities open to souls in Hades and beyond, yes; actual resurrection, no.

After Nero's death his popularity in the East and among his old soldiers gave rise to the myth or idea that Nero either hadn't really died, or had but was now back! Three lyre-playing imposters appeared claiming to be the later emperor and attracted followers. This was unusual and an exception to the normal belief that these things didn't happen. What is interesting about the whole episode is that it occurred at exactly the moment when, it seems, the motif of cheating death was beginning to make its appearance in works of romantic fiction. (and at a time when the Christian ideas were starting to spread.)

'Apparent death' became a popular feature in romantic novels of the first century. One such work 'Callirhoe' is quoted at length. A young lover ventures to his beloveds tomb only to find her body missing. He exclaims 'this is the work of tomb robbers. But where is the corpse!' (NB: the assumption of course is that the body is worth nothing to tomb robbers). Chaereas then assumes that either he was in love with a goddess, or that the gods have taken his love to be with them (NB: he doesn't assume or entertain notions of resurrection):

Even in cheerfully fictitious stories no actual resurrection ever occurs, and nobody suppose it actually can.

On the appearance of a new genre of romantic literature and one story in particular that features a young woman waking from supposed death Wright says:

For Mark (or anyone else) to invent such a story about Jesus on the basis of a plot-twist in a romantic novel is patently absurd. However, it is by no means impossible, as Bowerstock has recently suggested, that borrowing may have taken place in the opposite direction. If we suppose that strange, wild rumours of a real empty tomb were going round the ancient world in the middle of the first century, it is perfectly plausible to suppose that writers of fiction - in a very different genre to that of the gospel! - would have picked it up and developed it within their own narrative worlds.

Wright quotes other motifs or themes in stories from the mid first century onwards (some involving a resurrecting dog or 'golden ass' - which is curious given the mocked portrayal of Jesus as an ass in popular culture outside the church) and even cites a first-century philosopher and healer called Apollonius who has recorded an incident in Rome similar to the incident of Jesus and the girl at the funeral.

Given the appearance of these resurrection motifs in popular literature around the time of the gospels going out into the world: it would be daring to suggest that this is the result of the early Christian story of Jesus making its way into the wider greco-roman world.

Equally, says, Wright it is difficult to give a definite explanation for the famous Greek inscription from the same period, found near Nazareth:

The emperor [Claudius] issues an edict warning of penalties for breaking open or violating tombs.

But, says Wright on the above 'daring' comment:

It is even more difficult to suggest that the early Christian stories about Jesus were copied or adapted from these greco-roman sources.

Nobody in the pagan world of Jesus' day and thereafter actually claimed that somebody had been truly dead and had then come to be truly and bodily, alive once more.

Interesting comment: On Josephus. Josephus often reiterates OT and Jewish stories with Hellenistic appeal and symbol.

Transmigration of souls

Plato clear taught that we are all eternal.

Stoics believed that at the end of the present age everything would be dissolved in fire, and the whole order of the universe would come round again just as before.

Beliefs similar to Hindu karma existed in popular thought. After death, to reenter into a body is to be held once more in a physical prison. For believers in resurrection by contrast (Jews and Christians) the new embodied life is to be looked forward to and celebrated.

Belief in the transmigration of souls offered a far more interesting prospect for the future life than the gloomy world of Homeric Hades. But Homer's basic rule remained in force. Nobody was allowed to return from Hades and resume the life they once had.

Dying and rising gods

From very early times, in Egypt and elsewhere, some of the major religions centred their symbols, stories and praxis on the cycles of nature and on the gods and godesses who were believed to enact, or to have enacted, these cycles in themselves. Thus there emerged gradually and with far too many variations even to list, the well-known dying and rising gods and godesses of the ancient near east.

At the heart of the cults was the ritual re-enactment of the death and rebirth of the god, coupled with sundry fertility rites. The productivity of the soil, and of the tribe or nation, was at stake; by getting in touch with the mysterious forces that underlay the natural world, by sympathetic and symbolic re-enactment of them, one might hope to guarantee both crops and offspring. The myth which accompanied these rituals was indeed the story of resurrection, of new life the other side of death. 

Did this in any way form an exception to the rule laid down in the ancient world? Did any worshipper in these cults, from Egypt to Norway, at any time in antiquity think that actual human beings, having died, actually came back to life? Of course not. These multifarious and sophisticated cults enacted the god's death and resurrection as a metaphor, whose concrete referent was the cycle of seed-time and harvest, of human reproduction and fertility.

Go further!

We can go further... the Jewish world into which Christianity was born was influence in many ways by the wider-greco-roman world... But remarkably enough, there is no sign of dying and rising gods and goddesses within the Jewish world. Ezekial had charged Jerusalem women with taking part in the Tammuz-cult, but we do not find such practises in the second-Temple period. As we shall see, When Jews spoke of resurrection it was not something that they expected would happen to their god YHWH. Nor was it something that would happen to them again and again; it would be a single, unrepeatable event.
...
It is of course possible that when people in the wider world heard what the early christians were saying, they attempted to fit the strange message into the worldview of cults they already knew. But the evidence suggest that they were more likely to be puzzled, or to mock. When Paul preached in Athens nobody said, 'Ah, yes, a new version of Osiris and such like.' The Homeric assumption remained in force. Whatever the gods - or the crops - might do, humans did not rise again from the dead.

Conclusion: One-way street

Throughout the ancient world, the road to the underworld ran only one way. The problem was the body and death liberated the soul from the problem.

The ancient world was thus divided into those who said that resurrection couldn't happen, though they might have wanted it to, and those who said they didn't want it to happen, knowing that it couldn't anyway.

1. When the early Christians spoke of Jesus being raised from the dead, the natural meaning of that statement, throughout the ancient world, was the claim that something had happened to Jesus which had happened to nobody else.

2. The early Christian belief that Jesus was in some sense divine cannot have been the cause of the belief in his resurrection. Apart from old tales like Livy's story of Romulus, those who became divine mostly had graves, either known and cherished or assumed, unless of course they had been burnt on a funeral pyre. Divinization did not require resurrection; it regularly happened without it. It involved the soul, not the body.

Chapter 3 
Time to wake up: Death and beyond in the OT



What early Christians said about the resurrection of Jesus was deeply rooted from the start within the worldview of second-temple Judaism.

The OT is surprisingly quiet about whatever hope there may be about life-after death:

Generations of Christian exegetes convinced that 'life after death' is what true faith and hope are all about, have regarded it as strange that the Old Testament should have so little to say on the subject. In fact, however, an interest in 'life after death' for its own sake was characteristic of various pagan worldviews, not of ancient Israel; and when belief in resurrection eventually appeared, it is best understood, not as a strange foreign import but as a re-expression of the ancient Israelite worldview under new and different circumstances. It is sown in the same soil as the beliefs of the Patriarchs.

Asleep with the ancestors

Sheol, the pit, the grave, Abadon. In the OT, as in Homer, death is a place of darkness and shadow. A big difference however between Jewish thought and Homer's audiences was that those who went there were said to be 'sleeping'.

Death itself was sad, and tinged with evil. It was not seen as a happy release, an escape of the soul from the prison-house of the body.

Death was a problem, a sadness brought about by the presence of sin in the world. Remembering the original sin:

We may note the especially pregnant point that if the promised punishment for eating the forbidden fruit was death, the actual, or at least immediate, punishment was banishment from the garden. Since, however, the point of banishment was so that they could not eat from the tree of life and thus live for ever, the two amount more closely to the same thing than it might appear at first sight.

Were human beings created immortal?

The Genesis story as it now stands indicates that humans were not created immortal, but had (and lost) the chance to gain unending life. 

Disturbing the dead

The regular forbidding of making contact with the dead is normally taken as good evidence that many in ancient Israel tried to do so. It would be extraordinary if they had not. Ancestor-cults were widespread in the ancient world, as they still are in many places today.

Disturbing the dead was possible but it was promised to only bring ruin, as in the case of Saul summoning Samuel from the dead. The point being made often in these instances is this:

The living god is the only source of true life, wisdom and instruction, and he will give it to those who truly seek him. 

The Unexplained Exceptions

Two figures (and perhaps a third - Moses) escape the common lot of mortals and find their way by a different route to a different destination.

Enoch who 'walked with God and then God took him' (leading to lots of later books attributed to secret revelation and wisdom), and also Elijah who went up to heaven in a whirlwind.

They are not held up as a model for what can await a devout or pious Israelite. Furthermore, no explanation is given as to why Enoch and Elijah were given a favour denied to such great figures as Ab. Joseph or Sam.

The Land of No Return

Job offers a fairly complete view of death; that although trees may die and be reborn, people don't. Ecclesiastes too, insists that death is the end. According to that book, we humans are no different from beasts in this respect: the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. He even goes further: who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth?

To die is to be forgotten for good. Death means that the body returns to the dust, and the breath to God who gave it.

The Nature and Ground of Hope

Interestingly. Wright suggest that the reason for this silence about hope beyond death was because the writers weren't concerned about individual eschatologies but corporate ones:

The hope of the biblical writers which was strong and constant, focused not upon the fate of humans after death, but on the fate of Israel and her promised land. The nation and land of the present world were far more important than what happened to an individual beyond the grave.

That is why there is such an emphasis on childlessness as a curse and the hope that is having children:

To the devout Israelite, the continuance of the family line was not simply a matter of keeping a name alive. It was part of the way in which God's promises, for Israel and perhaps even for the whole world, would be fulfilled.

Wow! Revelation coming...

Hence the importance... of those genealogies which seem so bafflingly unreligious to late modernity, and of the prophetic insistence on the 'holy seed'. 

Hence the significance in Gen. 23 of Abraham buying a field.

The themes of the land, the king and the temple were intermingled with one another but pointed to the same future hope and blessing. Yahweh's blessing of justice, prosperity and peace upon the nation and land, and eventually the whole earth.

At the heart of that hope was the knowledge that YHWH, the God of Israel, was the creator of the world; that he was faithful to the covenant with Israel, and beyond that with the whole world; and that as such he would be true to his word both to Israel and to the whole creation.

The constant love of YHWH was never merely a theological dogma to the ancient Israelites... supremely in the Psalms we find evidence that they knew this love in vivid personal experience:

It was this personal experience, rather than any theory about innate immortality that gave rise to the suggestion that, despite the widespread denial of such a thing, YHWH's faithfulness would after all be known not only in this life but in a life beyond the grave.

In some of the Psalms, notably 73 and 49 we see a distinction that because of his great love a better future, a future where wrongs are put right, awaits the psalmist. This is contrasted with the foolish who will only go to Sheol and remain there, leaving all their worldly fame and fortune behind.

The Basis of Future Hope

Where we find a glimmer of hope like this, it is based not on anything in the human make-up (e.g. and 'immortal soul'), but on YHWH and him alone. Indeed YHWH is the substance of the hope, not merely the ground: he himself is the 'portion', i.e. the inheritance, of the righteous, devout Israelite. At the same time it is his power alone that can make alive, as some ancient prayers have it. 'With you is the fountain of life,' 'in your light we see light.'

Awakening Sleepers

The OT does speak of resurrection. Resurrection as the OT/Jewish mind meant it/understood it, was the state of living after dying. Resurrection is not what happened to Enoch and Elijah. Resurrection then is a returning to bodily life after bodily death. Daniel 12:2-3 is the central txt to much of Jewish thought.

Here it seems that the righteous, the wise, will not so much be transformed into beings of light, as set in authority over the world. It seems that 'they will be raised to a state of glory in the world for which the best parallel or comparison is the status of stars, moon and sun within the created order.'

The prediction of resurrection (in Dan. 12) is not an isolated piece of speculation about the ultimate fate of humans, or even Judaeans, in general, but a specific promise addressed to a specific situation.

Fascinating: The scene in Dan. 12 is addressing the situation of martyrdom where faithful Israelites are raised to status and honour but where the torturers are raised to bodily shame and punishment. God is pictured as the righteous judge putting wrongs to right, punishing the wicked and vindicating the righteous.

Isaiah 24 is in the author of Daniel's mind as well. Is. 24 is the clearest reference to resurrection we have:

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.
O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

Hosea 6:

Come, let us return to YHWH;
for it it he who has torn and he will heal us;
he has struck down and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.

Some initial conclusions can be made:

a) the dead are 'asleep with the ancestors'
b) the dead may be 'received' by YHWH into some continuing life
c) some at least of the dead can hope for resurrection after any such 'life after death'.

Also:

The meanings 'bodily resurrection for dead humans' and 'national restoration for exiled/suffering Israel' are so closely intertwined that it does not matter that we cannot always tell which is meant.

The emerging belief in resurrection was not dualistic (like Zoroastrianism). It was a development, albeit a startling one, whose roots lay deep within ancient Israel itself. It grew directly from the emphasis on the goodness of creation, on YHWH as the god who both kills and makes alive and on the future of nation and land.

Resurrection is about the reversal of death.

Chapter 4: Time to wake up, hope beyond death in post-biblical Judaism 

People have said that whereas the pagans believed in immortality, the Jews believed in resurrection. This is half true. The main divergence between post-humous existence for pagans and for Jews was that for the pagan they believed in an eternal spark/soul that would never and could never be extinguished. The immortality of the human for a pagan was due to the human souls eternal nature. For the Jew however, it was the strength of YHWH’s love that kept them alive after death. The other main difference is that for the Jew, those who died were said to be sleeping and could await a resurrection to new life. The Jews believed in life after life after death.

Daniel 12 is the chapter that most expresses the second temple attitudes toward death; although it has to be said that ideas of ‘what happens next’ abound in second temple Judaism. One thing is clear is that resurrection is never used to indicate a non-bodily life; ghosts or phantoms is not what the Bible means by resurrection. 

The Sadducees. No Future Life, or None to Speak of

We learn about the beliefs of the Sadducees from the N.T., Josephus and the rabbis.

The Sadducees aren’t around to defend/explain themselves since they were wiped out in AD70. Their views can be reassembled however from the sources. The N.T. explains them simply as ‘not believe in in the resurrection,’ Josephus is slightly more sympathetic to them but what Wright points out is that the Sadducees weren’t marginal radicals because of their non-belief in resurrection. The Sadducees represented the conservatives in this. 

Two intriguing Bible passages are explored that shed light on second temple views toward life after death. In Acts ?? Paul pits the Saducees against the Pharisees and manages to end a court session with the disputes that follow. The Pharisees say that the Saducees don’t believe in the resurrection, or the spirit or angels. Wright suggests that this can’t mean a strict materialism since spirits and angels appear often in the Pentateuch. Instead, he suggests, it implies popular views (or at least views held by the Pharisees) surrounding our post-humous pre-resurrected state.

For the Pharisees, they were willing to entertain Paul’s ideas, because it seems they considered him to have met an angelic appearance of a significant figure in his pre-resurrected state. The Saducees denied Paul’s account because they denied any after life experience. 

This idea is further seen in the account of Peter being released from prison. In a comical ‘it must be his angel’ moment, that seems utterly bizarre to us, we see a widely held popular-level belief that after death we exist in a sort of spirit-like/angelic state. Then as now, people believed in hallucinations on the part of the grieving. 

Josephus:

The Sadducees wil have nothing to do with the persistence of the soul after death, penalties in the underworld, and rewards... Sadducees hold that the soul perishes along with the body.

This is closely in line with Luke’s account. The rabbinical accounts also concur. In fact the liturgy of the dedication of the temple was changed from saying ‘for everlasting’ to ‘from everlasting to everlasting’ because of the teaching of some ‘heretics’ (Sadducees).

Jesus Ben Sirach writes and expresses a view that a Sadducees would have agreed with. He writes in his Ecclesiasticus:

Give, and take, and indulge yourself,

Because in Hades one cannot look for luxury.

All living beings become old like a garment, for the decree from of old is, ‘You must die!’

Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades in place of the living who give thanks?

From the dead, as from one who doe not exist, thanksgiving has ceased;

Those who are alive and well sing the Lord’s praises.

Do not forget, there is no coming back; 

you do the dead no good (by excessive mourning), and you injure yourself.

Remember his fate, for yours is like it;

Yesterday it was his, and today it is yours.

When the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest too,

And be comforted for him when his spirit has departed.

This is the Lord’s decree for all flesh;

Why then should you reject the will of the Most High?

Whether life lasts for ten years or a hundred or a thousand,

There is no questions asked in Hades.

He also expresses a belief in the value and hope of the next generation:

Like abundant leaves on a spreading tree

That sheds some and puts forth others,

So are the generations of flesh and blood:

One dies and another is born.

Every work decays and ceases to exist,

And the one who made it will pass away with it.

Why did the Sadducees hold out against the doctrine of resurrection? This explanation perhaps also explains some of the reason so many modern westerners insist on there being no life after death, although perhaps for slightly different reasons:

It is noticeable that aristocrats down the years, and across many cultures, have taken what steps they could to ensure that the comfort and luxury they have enjoyed in the present life will continue into the future one.

Likewise: 

Powerful groups have sometimes advocated a strong post-mortem hope as a way of stopping the poor and powerless grumbling about their lot in the present life.

The real reason however that the Sads. Didn’t believe in resurrection was because res. Was from the beginning a revolutionary doctrine. From Daniel 12 res. belief went with dogged resistance and martyrdom. For Is. & Ez. It was about YHWH restoring the fortunes of his people:

It had to do with the coming new age when the life-giving god would act once more to turn everything upside down - or perhaps, as they might have said, right way up. It was the sort of belief that encouraged young hotheads to attack Roman symbols placed on the Temple and that index’s, led the first century Jews into the most disastrous war they had experienced. It was not simply even that they thought such beliefs might lead the nation into a clash with Rome, thought that will certainly have been the case. It was that they realised that such beliefs threatened their own position. People who believe that their god is about to make a new world, and that those who die in loyalty to him in the meantime will rise again to share gloriously in it, are far more likely to lose respect for a wealthy aristocracy than people who think that this life, this world and this age are the only ones there ever will be. 

We should also note that there is an important difference between a belief in heaven and resurrection in as much as heaven is ‘out there’ and away from here, whereas resurrection anticipates the renewal of this earth. It is an act of judgement where the creator god puts right what is wrong with the world:

Only if we misunderstand what resurrection actually involved can we line it up with the kind of ‘pie in the sky’ promises which earned the scorn of many twentieth-century social reformers. 

3. Blessed and disembodied immortality

Because of the political upheaval in the ITPeriod:

By the time of the first century AD all the many varieties of Judaism were to a lesser or greate extent Hellenistic, including those anchored firmly in the soil and cult of Palestine. 

As well as there being those who denied any such resurrection there was also plenty who believed in and spoke of an existence after death similar to the Greek ideas: an Eden state or a Ghenna gloom.

The idea of a soul separable from the body, with different theories as to what might happen to it thereafter was widespread in the varied Judaism’s of the turn of the eras. 

Fascinatingly whereas 2 Maccabees uses resurrection as an encouragement for martyrdom, 4 Maccabees tacks the other way (in tones similar to those used by Paul):

Let us with all our hearts consecrate ourselves to God, who gave us our lives, and let us use our bodies as a bulwark for the law. Let us not fear him who thinks he is killing us, for great is the struggle of the soul and the danger of eternal torment lying before those who transgress the commandment of God. therefore let us put on the ful armour of self-control, which is divine reason. For if we so die, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob will welcome us, and all the fathers will praise us.

Wright then points out from this:

Assuming that the writer knew and was using 2 Maccabees, we may state confidently that there was a conscious editorial decision to delete all mention of bodily resurrection and subtitle a version of the doctrine of the immortal soul, or at least of souls that could become immortal through the pursuit of wisdom. 

Philo, a first-century Jewish philosopher from Alexandria was a remarkable thinker. for our purposes he stands as the clearest first-century Jewish exponent of the view which did not come to dominate the horizon. there is no place in his thinking, any more than there was in that of Plato himself, for the resurrection of the body.

4. Resurrection in Second-Temple Judaism

Judaism was never a religion of speculation or private devotion only. It was rooted in daily, weekly and annual observance and worship. At the heart of that worship, open to all Jews whether or not they could get to the Temple with any regularity, was the life of prayer. And the central prayers in the first-century as in the 21stC were and are the Shema Israel (‘Hear O Israel...’) and the Tefillah the ‘prayer’ of all prayers. The second of these blessing is quite explicit: Israel’s god is the Lord who gives life to the dead:

You are mighty, humbling the proud; strong, judging the ruthless; you live for evermore, and raise the dead; you make the wind to return and the dew to fall; you nourish the living, and bring the dead to life; you bring forth salvation for us in the blinking of an eye. Blessed are you, O Lord, who bring the dead to life.

This prayer is pre-supposed in all subsequent rabbinic Judaism. Thus, it was woven into daily and weekly life and thought for mainstream Jews from at least the second century of the common era:

All the evidence suggests that with the few exceptions already noted, it was widely believed by most Jews around the turn of the common era.

Resurrection in the Bible: The More Greek the Better

The LXX is emphatic about resurrection. Written around 300BC it makes translation decisions that shadowy references to res. become clear and obscure references are drawn out further. In fact the translator of Job even adds a post script to the book saying that: it is written of him that he will rise again with those whom the Lord will raise. Wright says:

Clearly whoever drafted the translation of LXX Job had no doubt both of the bodily resurrection and of the propriety of making sure the biblical text affirmed it. 

The evidence f the LXX is worth pondering especially when we consider that we might have thought we were going to find. After all, here is a Hebrew text being translated into Greek- in Egypt, most likely. we might have expected to find every reference to resurrection would be flattened out into something more Platonic (as per 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees). 

New Life for the Martyrs: 2 Maccabees

2 Maccabees begins where Daniel leaves off, with the promise of new bodily life at some future date for those who had died horrible deaths out of loyalty to Israel’s god and the law. 

The story focuses on a mother and her seven sons who are tortured for refusing to obey the kings laws. As they go to their deaths several of them make statements about the form their divine vindication will take:

You accursed wretch [said the second brother] you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.

[the third brother] put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hand and said nobly ‘I got these from Heaven and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get the back again.

When he was near death, [the fourth brother] said ‘One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to Christ the hope God gives of being raised by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!’ 

The mother then offers words of encouragement to remain faithful believing in the promise of receiving her children back again.

Resurrection is the overthrowing of death and its reversal.

Another martyr in 2Mac14: ‘tore out his entrails, took them in both hands and hurled them at the crowd, calling upon the Lord life and spirit to give them back to him again.’

Resurrection in other words, is both the personal hope of the righteous individual and the national hope for faithful Israel.

Judgment and Life in God’s New World: Resurrection and Apocalyptic

And in the middle of the texts [apocalyptic] and their subject-matter we find frequent reference to the purposes of Israel’s god for his people after their death. In keeping with the genre and style of apocalyptic writing, these references are often cryptic; but again and again the hope they express, as we might expect from the spiritual heirs of Daniel and Ezekiel, is not for a permanently disembodied immortality but for a resurrection at some time still in the future.

This is seen clearly in The Book of Enoch (written sometime around 200BC) and also The Apocalypse of Moses (circa 100BC). there is even a description of how to prepare a body for burial in view of the resurrection to come:

Thus you shall prepare for burial each man who dies until the day of resurrection. And do not mourn more than six days; on the seventh day rest and be glad in it, for on that day both God and we angels rejoice in the migration from the earth of a righteous soul.

There are several other apocalyptic books that also contain resurrection promises: The Testament of Judah, The Testament of Levi, The Testament of the 12 Patriarchs.

2 Baruch:

‘dust will be called, and told, “Give back that which does not belong to you and raise up all that you have kept until its own time”

Of this book, Wright says:

The text is noteworthy, though, as providing the only clear anticipation of what we do find in the New Testament: the sense that resurrection will involve some kind of life-enhancing transformation.

Concluding comment on apocalyptic writings of the period:

And all of them, in doing so, hold together what we have seen so closely interwoven in the key biblical texts: the hope of Israel for liberation from pagan oppression, and the hope of the righteous individual for a newly embodied, and probably significantly transformed, existence.

A long argument is then made to show that Wisdom does not teach the Platonic form of 'immortality' but that its language of 'immortality' is rooted within a Jewish hope of resurrection.

The reality, though, is that the righteous have come through a time of fierce testing, through which their god has regarded them as a sacrificial offering. 162 Now they are at peace. Their hope is for immortality, a deathless life to which they look forward. 163 Though there are some puzzles here, the author clearly believes, as a general point, that the soul is not naturally immortal, but can attain immortality through obtaining wisdom.

As further evidence of a distanced view from Plato:

death, which for a Platonist would be a good thing to be warmly welcomed, freeing one from the nuisance and evil of a material body, is to be regarded as an enemy, an intruder into God’s good world.

On the overall purpose and outline of The Wisdom of Solomon, (an apparently very influential book for some NT ideas):

it [should] be read as a coded message both to Israel and her potential or actual persecutors in a time of danger and distress. The god who acted at the Exodus to rescue Israel from the pagan Egyptians can and will do so again. Death, the greatest weapon of the tyrant, is an intruder in the creator’s world, and YHWH has it in his power to overcome it and not only restore the righteous to life but install them as rulers, judges and kings.

 The book should be read/seen to teach:

not as a cool, detached essay about how to gain immortality through the pursuit of Wisdom, but as an exciting and dramatic call to courage and perhaps even resistance. And, once disciplined historical imagination has got that far, it is only a short step to suppose that this was what the writer intended.

Conclusions on the apocalyptic writings and Wisdom:

It is unlikely that a quasi-Platonic belief in continuing disembodied existence after death could lead to a belief in resurrection, as Barr suggests; such a move would be cutting off the branch it had just begun to sit on. Rather, it seems probable that the emerging belief in resurrection (grounded, as we have seen, in the same belief in YHWH as creator that characterised ancient Israel) precipitated further reflection on the continuing identity of the people of YHWH in between bodily death and resurrection. For that task, hellenistic language about the soul lay ready to hand. It was capable of being imported without necessarily bringing all its latent Platonic baggage with it.

After reviewing several apocraphyl books:

Throughout these writings, resurrection is God’s way of firmly setting the world, and Israel, to rights after the long years of earthly injustice and the even longer years in which the righteous have waited, after death, for final vindication.

Resurrection belongs within the long range vision of all the Israel's god has in store for them along with judgement for the world for its violence and prolonged wickedness. Two things that are held together are:

the hope of Israel for liberation from pagan oppression, and the hope of the righteous individual for a newly embodied, and probably significantly transformed, existence.

v: The Wisdom of Solomon. Resurrection as Vindication

Scholars seem to struggle wiht the idea that immortality and resurrection can be held together. Largely since people seem only to consider immortality through the Platonic definition:

Platonic ‘immortality’ (in which a pre-existent immortal soul comes to live for a while in a mortal body, from which it is happily released at death) is not the only meaning of the word ‘immortality’ itself.

So Wright also says:

By itself, the word simply means ‘a state in which death is not possible’; unless one adopts a Platonic position ahead of time, this cannot of itself be limited to disembodied states.

A passage from Wisdom still used by Christians in funerals:

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. 2 In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, 3 And their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace. 4 For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet is their hope full of immortality.

Fascinatingly, Wisdom shows a point of view held by the 'wicked' that is equally held by many today, namely that death is the end of everything. That is not a modern idea or recent insight then. Jewish belief in the future hope of the dead was different from many pagan ways of thinking about death.

The Wisdom of Solomon is thus to be read:

as a coded message both to Israel and her potential or actual persecutors in a time of danger and distress. The god who acted at the Exodus to rescue Israel from the pagan Egyptians can and will do so again. Death, the greatest weapon of the tyrant, is an intruder in the creator’s world, and YHWH has it in his power to overcome it and not only restore the righteous to life but install them as rulers, judges and kings.

Conclusion from reflections on Wisdom:

Like the martyrs in 2 Maccabees, the ‘righteous’ described in chapters 2– 5 are faithful Jews who hold fast to their god in the face of torture and death, and are finally declared to be truly his children through the resurrection, the great event for which the Exodus from Egypt was the prototype. The resonances set up by this theme are of enormous importance not only for understanding second-Temple Judaism in general, but for grasping the heart of its extraordinary mutation, early Christianity.

The extraordinary mutation of early Christianity. Love that line.

Resurrection in Josephus:

On risking ones life and dying for a cause Josephus says:

even people who live lives free of danger cannot escape the chance of death. Those who strive for virtue, then, do well to accept their fate with praise and honour when they depart this life. For death comes much more easily to those who risk danger for an upright cause; and, at the same time, they win for their children, and their surviving male and female relatives, whoever they may be, the benefit of the renown they have won.

Josephus is important for the purpose of showing what Jews thought about resurrection. He was a well educated first century Jew and as such would have been typical of many others like him.

He shows:

FIRST. A two stage cosmic eschatology consisting of this age and the age to come but also a two stage personal eschatology in which the righteous soul lives in heaven after death until the resurrection:

This re-embodiment, Josephus says, will be into a holy and renewed body— perhaps the closest that we come in non-Christian Judaism to the picture of transformed embodiment we find in Christianity. What is more, this new life has been promised by the Bible, by Moses himself; and the promise is underwritten by the creator’s own power.

SECOND. We learn from his writings that the Pharisees belief was very similar to that espoused by 2 Maccabees, 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra.

Lastly from Josephus we learn more generally:

(a) Belief in resurrection is characterised, not necessarily by the presence of the word, but by a two-age cosmic and personal eschatology ending with a new embodiment. Where that story is being told, we have resurrection.

(b) The word ‘resurrection’ and its cognates, in Hebrew or Greek, is never used to denote something other than this position. The belief can occur without the word, but never the other way round. ‘Resurrection’ is never a way of re-describing death itself, or of ‘coming to terms’ with it as though it were not after all particularly significant. (Nor, strictly, does it refer to the first stage of the process, but always the second, which brings the first with it as its necessary preliminary.) It is always a way of reaffirming, as does Wisdom 1– 3, the goodness of the world, the nature of death as an evil intrusion into it, and the creator’s promise to overcome death by the gift of new bodily life.

The Essenes: The Community at Qumram

Resurrection is neither argued for nor against. It is something they felt as a point of controversy.

The Essenes’ future hope was an extension, beyond death and into the future world, of their present religious experience.

Pseudo-Philo: Biblical Antiquities

He contains a two stage hope as clear as anywhere else in all the other sources:

But when the years appointed for the world have been fulfilled, then the light will cease and the darkness will fade away. And I will bring the dead to life and raise up those who are sleeping from the earth. And hell will pay back its debt, and the place of perdition will return its deposit so that I may render to each according to his works and according to the fruits of his own devices, until I judge between soul and flesh. And the world will cease, and death will be abolished, and hell will shut its mouth. And the earth will not be without progeny or sterile for those inhabiting it; and no one who has been pardoned by me will be tainted. And there will be another earth and another heaven, an everlasting dwelling place.

Pharisees, Rabbis & Targumim

The Rabbis were the successors of the Pharisees following their being crushed by the Romans in AD70.

The two crises of AD 70 and 135 brought major changes, as the rabbis adjusted to living in a world where social and political revolution against pagan overlordship had become unthinkable— where crushing defeat of two large and popular revolts had forced a change from a kingdom-focus to a Torah-focus, from (more or less) politics to piety. 259 There are signs that this had an effect on what was already a widespread and strongly held belief in resurrection.

Conclusion:

Belief in resurrection was common but by no means universal, until the Sadducees were wiped out and the ascendancy of the Rabbis took place there were other ideas more similar to Greek ones.

‘Resurrection’, with the various words that were used for it and the various stories that were told about it, was never simply a way of speaking about ‘life after death’. 307 It was one particular story that was told about the dead: a story in which the present state of those who had died would be replaced by a future state in which they would be alive once more.

Worldview Questions:

Who or what are they? They are, at present, souls, spirits or angel-like beings, held in that state of being not because they were naturally immortal but by the creative power of YHWH.

Where are they? They are in the hand of the creator god; or in paradise; or in some kind of Sheol, understood now not as a final but as a temporary resting-place.

What’s wrong? They are not yet re-embodied, not least because their god has not completed his purposes for the world and Israel.

What’s the solution? Ultimate re-embodiment, which will be caused by YHWH’s power and spirit.

What time is it? It is still ‘the present age’; the ‘age to come’ has not yet begun (except, in the case of the Essenes, in the sense of a secretly inaugurated eschatology). This contrasts, of course, not only with the pagan views surveyed in the previous chapter, but with the two other main Jewish options, that of the Sadducees and that of Philo and the others in that category.

Concluding comments:

All of this (resurrection belief) was concentrated, for many Jews, in the stories of the righteous martyrs, those who had suffered and died for YHWH and Torah. Because YHWH was the creator, and because he was the god of justice, the martyrs would be raised, and Israel as a whole would be vindicated.

KEY:

But nobody imagined that any individuals had already been raised, or would be raised in advance of the great last day. There are no traditions about prophets being raised to new bodily life; the closest we come to that is Elijah, who had gone bodily to heaven and would return to herald the new age. There are no traditions about a Messiah being raised to life: most Jews of this period hoped for resurrection, many Jews of this period hoped for a Messiah, but nobody put those two hopes together until the early Christians did so.

FINALLY:

It may be obvious, but it needs saying: however exalted Abraham, Isaac and Jacob may have been in Jewish thought, nobody imagined they had been raised from the dead. However important Moses, David, Elijah and the prophets may have been, nobody claimed that they were alive again in the ‘resurrection’ sense. The martyrs were honoured, venerated even; but nobody said they had been raised from the dead. The world of Judaism had generated, from its rich scriptural origins, a rich variety of beliefs about what happened, and would happen, to the dead. But it was quite unprepared for the new mutation that sprang up, like a totally unexpected plant, within the already well-stocked garden.