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:
- history as event, to say simply and solely that they/it existed.
- 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'.
- history as provable event. To say something is 'historical' implies we have a degree of certainty about its ever having happened.
- history as speaking writing/speaking-about-events-in-the-past.
- history as being what modern (post-enlightenment) historians can say about something. A past event that fits the post-enlightenment worldview.
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:
- the state that immediately follows the event of bodily death
- the state that follows a period of being bodily dead
- 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:
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.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 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.Conclusion: One-way street
...
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.
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.Hosea 6:
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.
Come, let us return to YHWH;Some initial conclusions can be made:
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.
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:
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:
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:
The Wisdom of Solomon is thus to be read:
Resurrection in Josephus:
On risking ones life and dying for a cause Josephus says:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
Pharisees, Rabbis & Targumim
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.
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.
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