Once a man has died, and the dust has soaked up his blood, there is no resurrection. – Aesch. Eumen
While the pyre was burning, it is said that a cloud passed under Hercules and with a peal of thunder wafted him up to heaven. – Apollodorus The Library
You accursed wretch, 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. – 2 Macc. 7.9
All the quotes below are taken from The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians by N. T. Wright; Michael F. Bird; Publishers: Zondervan; SPCK, 2019
To begin with, beliefs about death and what lies beyond come in all shapes and sorts and sizes. Even a quick glance at the classic views of the major religious traditions gives the lie to the old idea that all religions are basically the same. There is a world of difference between the Muslim who believes that a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers goes straight to heaven, and the Hindu for whom the rigorous outworking of karma means that one must return in a different body to pursue the next stage of one’s destiny. There is a world of difference between the Orthodox Jew who believes that all the righteous will be raised to new individual bodily life in the resurrection, and the Buddhist who hopes after death to disappear like a drop in the ocean, losing his or her own identity in the great nameless and formless Beyond. And there are of course major variations between different branches or schools of thought in these great religions. {Page 265}
When viewed together, the three accounts are striking for their differences: (1) death is permanent, (2) heroes get translated into heaven without dying, and (3) the faithful who die are returned back to life! There were, then, multiple options about what death was, and how to live beyond it. We will explore these perspectives further by surveying greco-roman and Jewish views of life, death, and the world beyond. {Page 266}
GRECO-ROMAN VIEWS OF THE AFTERLIFE: Witless Shadows in a murky world
The ancient Greek author Homer, whose significance for antiquity is perhaps akin to that of the King James Bible and Shakespeare in our own day, provides a window on ancient views of life after death. In his work, the dead become shades (skiai), ghosts (psychai), or phantoms (eidola). They are certainly not fully human beings. They may sometimes look like them; but the appearance is deceptive, since one cannot grasp them physically. Theirs is a shadowy and wispy existence in an underworld abode, even though they may occasionally appear to the living. {Page 267}
A good example comes from a scene in the Iliad where Achilles is confronted with the shade of his recently killed friend, Patroclus. Patroclus has been killed in battle, but remains unburied while Achilles goes off to get revenge for him by killing the Trojan prince Hector. Only then does Achilles return to the task of mourning the now avenged Patroclus. He addresses the corpse as now a resident in Hades, telling him of his vengeance, and he makes preparation for the funeral the next day. That night, however, as he slept:
There came to him the spirit of hapless Patroclus, in all things like his very self, in stature and fair eyes and in voice, and in like raiment was he clad withal; and he stood above Achilles’ head and spake to him, saying: ‘Thou sleepest, and hast forgotten me, Achilles. Not in my life wast thou unmindful of me, but now in my death! Bury me with all speed, that I pass within the gates of Hades. Afar do the spirits keep me aloof, the phantoms of men that have done with toils, neither suffer they me to join myself to them beyond the River, but vainly I wander through the wide-gated house of Hades. And give me thy hand, I pitifully entreat thee, for never more again shall I come back from out of Hades, when once ye have given me my due of fire . . . Homer, Iliad 23.65–76 {Page 267}
In response, Achilles tries to embrace his old friend:
Achilles held out his arms to clasp the spirit, but in vain. It vanished like a wisp of smoke and went gibbering underground. Achilles leapt up in amazement. He beat his hands together and in his desolation cried: ‘Ah then, it is true that something of us does survive even in the Halls of Hades, but with no intellect at all, only the ghost and semblance of a man; for all night long the ghost of poor Patroclus (and it looked exactly like him) has been standing at my side, weeping and wailing, and telling me of all the things I ought to do.’ Homer, Iliad 23.99–107 {Page 267}
So what of the dead according to Homer? They are in Hades, under the eponymous rule of the underworld’s god and his dreaded wife. They are sorry both to be where they are and about much that happened in their previous human existence. They are sad at their present subhuman state. In some cases they are tormented, as punishment for particularly heinous crimes. For the most part, Hades holds no comforts, no prospects, but only a profound sense of loss. The inhabitants of Hades remain essentially subhuman and without hope. {Page 268}
Disembodied but otherwise fairly normal
Some cherished the hope that, despite the gloomy Homeric picture, there would after all be elements of normal life. In many ancient cultures it was common to bury the deceased with the kind of household goods that one was accustomed to: furniture, adornments, charms, toiletries, even toys for deceased children. There was still a life, of sorts, beyond the grave, and burial helped to prepare for it. While that might seem odd, the stories that were told of the dead frequently involved a life similar to the present one—albeit with not much to do, no hunter-gathering or similar tasks, and hence more time to gossip and mope. Many believed that they would meet old friends again. With the ancient Greek poet Pindar, the Homeric gloom has chinks of light: riding, gaming, gymnastics, and especially drinking-parties feature in writing, painting, and other decorations illustrating the life of the dead. {Page 268}
Souls Released From Prison
If Homer functioned as the Old Testament for the hellenistic world—which by the first century included the entire middle east—its New Testament was unquestionably Plato. In contrast to Homer, the Greek philosopher Plato had a very different conception of human existence, its place in the cosmos, and the post-mortem destiny of the individual. Plato, building on the work of other philosophers like Socrates and Pythagoras, believed that the essence of a human being was a soul, which was non-material. Bodily life was full of delusion and danger; the soul was to be cultivated in the present, both for its own sake and because its future happiness would depend upon such cultivation. The soul, being immortal, existed before the body, and would continue to exist after the body had gone. The soul would therefore not only continue after bodily death; it would be delighted to do so. If it had known earlier where its real interests lay it would have been longing for this very moment. It would now flourish in a new way, released from its enslaving prison. Its new environment would be just what it ought to have wanted. Popular opinion might lean towards bringing the dead back, if that were possible, but that would be a mistake. Death was frequently defined precisely in terms of the separation of soul and body, seen as something to be desired. The fact that all this sounds quite familiar in our world shows the extent to which modern western culture has been affected by Platonism. {Page 269}
It is hard to overestimate the importance of Plato for the later and wider world into which there burst the phenomenon we know as Christianity. For the Roman author Seneca, the immortal human soul had come from beyond this world—from among the stars, in fact—and would make its way back there. Though one might hold that it simply disappeared, it is more likely that it would go to be with the gods. Death was either the end of everything, in which case there was nothing to be alarmed about, or it would be a process of change, in which case, since the change was bound to be for the better, one should be glad. The soul, in fact, was at present kept as a prisoner within the body, which was both a weight and a penance to it. One should not, then, fear death; it would be the birthday of one’s eternity. Platonic thought provided the tectonic plates for much Christian thought well into the middle ages. The second-century Christian apologist, Justin, was an eager Platonist (though he firmly believed in bodily resurrection). The second-century ‘heretic’ Marcion was well and truly steeped in Platonic ideas, regarding the human body as a ‘sack of excrement’ unfit for God to incarnate himself in, with the corollary that salvation must mean deliverance of the soul from this body, rather than the body’s resurrection. This divergence has continued among Christian teachers to this day. {Page 270}
Becoming a God (or at least a star)
‘Oh dear,’ the emperor Vespasian is reported to have said on his deathbed, ‘I think I’m becoming a god.’ He was neither the first nor the last to think such thoughts, though perhaps the only one to put it so memorably. From early Greek writings onwards we find hints that some heroic mortals would not just find their souls going into a state of bliss; they would actually join the Immortals themselves, the gods of the greco-roman pantheon. {Page 270}
The possibility that a human being could become a god developed from these mythological beginnings through to the divinization of hellenistic rulers, particularly notable in the case of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). At least as early as 331, Alexander had begun to represent himself as a son of Zeus, and to put himself alongside Hercules, expecting divinization (apotheosis) after his death. {Page 271}
By the early Christian period similar beliefs were widespread throughout the Roman world. Just as Augustus had his adoptive father Julius Caesar declared a god, so Tiberius did the same for Augustus in his turn. Although living emperors were never officially worshipped as part of the Roman state cult, they were venerated in private cults, family shrines, and various associations in Italy. Temples to the emperor and his family were built across the provinces, and imperial images were revered throughout the empire. This ‘divinity’ was not merely fictive or political; it was real religious devotion. The emperors, deceased and living, were worshipped because they provided benefaction and benevolence to their subjects. They, in turn, lavished gratefully upon them the highest honours possible, climaxing in divinity and cultic worship. This imperial ‘divinity’, however, was (in our terms) relative rather than absolute. The emperors were not gods in the same way that Jupiter or Zeus was supposed to be. But this distinction was lost on most people. What mattered was that they were the gods of the Roman state which—so ran the propaganda!—had conferred such blessings on its empire. {Page 271-272}
Stories on returning to life after death
First, necromancy—communication with the departed—has a long and varied history. Most cultures and most historical periods offer stories of the living establishing contact with the departed, or indeed the departed taking the initiative and appearing unbidden to the living. From Patroclus’s appearance to Achilles onwards, ancient literature has plenty of such incidents. Some of the classic encounters between the living and the departed occur in dreams, as with Achilles and Patroclus. Sometimes the dead appear to be summoned back for such visitations by grieving relatives, especially women. Sometimes, in such scenes, the dead have wisdom to offer the living about the realities of which they are now aware; sometimes they come to guide, or to warn, at a particular moment of crisis. {Page 272}
There were, however (second), mythic stories of actual returns from the underworld. We have, for instance, Homer’s famous tale about Odysseus’s visit to Hades. While in Hades he converses with his old friends Agamemnon and Achilles, and even the ghost of Hercules (the ‘real’ Hercules is feasting with the immortal gods, married to Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera, but even this does not prevent his shade from living in the house of Hades). But soon after, Odysseus has to flee before the goddess Persephone finds out he is there and sets the Gorgon on him. {Page 273}
Third, there was one belief, widely held by philosophers, according to which the dead did indeed return to some kind of this-worldly and bodily existence. This was the theory of metempsychosis, the transmigration or reincarnation of souls. The classic statement of this is found in Plato, who developed the idea from the work of the sixth-century Pythagoras; but belief in transmigration was also fostered in the Orphic cult, and continued among philosophers and cult practitioners thereafter, though without ever gaining much popular adherence.17 Plato’s basic scheme is reasonably straightforward: after death, the souls of all humans wait for a period, whereupon they are given the choice of what sort of creatures they will become in their next existence (such as a swan, a lion, an eagle, or indeed another human). The souls then proceed through the Plain of Oblivion, drink from the River of Forgetfulness, and so pass into their next existence, unaware of who they have been, or even that they have been anything at all. Since for Plato, as for the Hindu and Buddhist schemes of the same type, return to embodied existence means that the soul is once more entering a kind of prison, the ultimate aim is not simply to choose the right type of existence for one’s next life, but to escape the cycle altogether. {Page 273-274}
As some Jews glimpsed, and as the early Christians emphasized, resurrection life was a matter of going through death and out the other side into a newly embodied life beyond. Transmigration 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 that he or she had once had. {Page 274}
Conclusion: death as a one-way trip
Stories of ghosts and journeys to the underworld were entertaining, but no-one took them seriously as prospects for themselves. The transmigration of the soul was a possibility that some hoped for, while others disdained it as a return to the same mortal drudgery experienced in the previous lifetime. What everyone knew was that in principle the road to the underworld ran only one way. Throughout the ancient world, from its ‘Bible’ of Homer and Plato, through its practices (funerals, memorial feasts), its stories (plays, novels, legends), its symbols (graves, amulets, burial-goods), and its grand theories, we can trace a good deal of variety about the road to Hades, and about what one might find upon arrival. {Page 274}
Whatever the philosophical speculation about the afterlife, in the greco-roman world death was felt as a grievous loss both to the dying and to the bereaved. Rare indeed were those like Socrates and Seneca who could overcome such feelings. Some such people were able to welcome the escape from the prison-house of the body. {Page 277}
JEWISH VIEWS OF THE AFTERLIFE
Grasping this will not only clarify the context of the resurrection narratives in the gospels, but will also explain what Paul meant when he said (quoting very early tradition) that the Messiah ‘was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures’.18 It will also address the question of why Paul caused such a commotion by telling the Sadducees and Pharisees of the Sanhedrin, ‘I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.’19 What the early Christians said about the resurrection of Jesus was consciously rooted from the start within the second-Temple Jewish worldview, shaped not least by Israel’s scriptures. {Page 277}
‘Resurrection’ was not part of the pagan hope. If the idea belongs anywhere, it is within the Jewish world. {Page 278}
OLD TESTAMENT
The first thing we have to note is that resurrection makes only rare and late appearances in Israel’s scriptures. Hopes for the afterlife were at best on the periphery of the message of the Old Testament as a whole.
One cohort of texts expresses a view, not all that different from that of Homer, that when a person ‘slept with his or her ancestors’ in death, such a person entered a post-mortem world of next to nothingness:
Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from [the] grave? – Psalm 6.5
It is not the dead who praise the LORD, those who go down to the place of silence . . . – Psalm 115.17 {Page 278}
The most lively biblical scene of continuing activity in Sheol merely confirms this. Isaiah 14 offers a splendid depiction of the king of Babylon arriving in the underworld to join the erstwhile noble shades who are there already. In a passage worthy of Homer, he is grimly informed that things are very different down there:
The realm of the dead below is all astir
to meet you at your coming;
it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you—
all those who were leaders in the world;
it makes them rise from their thrones—
all those who were kings over the nations.
They will all respond,
they will say to you,
‘You also have become weak, as we are;
you have become like us.’
All your pomp has been brought down to the grave,
along with the noise of your harps;
maggots are spread out beneath you
and worms cover you. {Page 278-279}
The dreariness of the fate of the dead reaches tragic lows in the book of Job. Notwithstanding the ambiguous verse, ‘after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God’,24 which, as the marginal notes in English Bibles indicate, is a difficult passage to translate, there remains a pattern of perpetual pessimism about the future. Job laments:
Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath;
my eyes will never see happiness again.
The eye that now sees me will see me no longer;
you will look for me, but I will be no more.
As a cloud vanishes and is gone,
so one who goes down to the grave does not return.
He will never come to his house again;
his place will know him no more.
But a man dies and is laid low;
he breathes his last and is no more.
As the water of a lake dries up
or a riverbed becomes parched and dry,
so he lies down and does not rise;
till the heavens are no more, people will not awake
or be roused from their sleep.
‘If only you would hide me in the grave
and conceal me till your anger has passed!
If only you would set me a time
and then remember me!
If someone dies, will they live again?
All the days of my hard service
I will wait for my renewal to come.’
This of course sounds incredibly glum and fatalistic. However, it is not the whole story of the Old Testament.
We do not have to press deep into the Old Testament before discovering that there is a confident and constant hope in God’s love for his people even beyond the veil of death. At the heart of that hope was the knowledge that YHWH, the God of Israel, was the creator of the world; that he would be faithful to the covenant with Israel, and further to that, that his purposes for creation and his special people were love, life, and glory. So, on the one hand, 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 its promised land. The nation and land of the present world were far more important than what happened to an individual beyond the grave. But on the other hand, the constant love of YHWH was never merely a theological dogma to the ancient Israelites. In many parts of their literature, and supremely the Psalms, we find evidence that they knew this love in vivid personal experience. It gave rise to the suggestion that, despite the widespread denials of such a thing, YHWH’s faithfulness would after all be known not only in this life but also in a life beyond the grave. {Page 280}
The first big hint we get of life as YHWH’s purpose for humanity is the very structure of Israel’s covenant. Moses held out to the people life and death, blessings and curses, and urged them to choose life—which meant, quite specifically, living in the promised land as opposed to being sent into the disgrace of exile. {Page 280}
But already in Deuteronomy there was the promise that even exile would not be final: repentance would bring restoration and the renewal both of the covenant and of human hearts.29 This explicit link of life with the land, and death with exile, coupled with the promise of restoration on the other side of exile, is one of the forgotten roots of the fully developed hope of ancient Israel. This was the hope that would eventually crystallize into belief about the resurrection of the dead as the ultimate proof of God’s faithfulness to Israel. {Page 281}
Given the premise of YHWH’s assurance of covenant life, and the hope for divine faithfulness, it is unsurprising that there are several texts which appear to offer hope that YHWH will deliver people from Sheol:
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
nor will you let your faithful one see decay.
You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.30
There is legitimate doubt over whether this refers to escaping death or passing through it to a life beyond, but there is no question of the basis of the hope. It is YHWH himself, the one the Psalmist embraces as his sovereign one, his portion and cup, the one who gives him counsel in the secret places of his heart.
Elsewhere the Psalmists hint more clearly at a future where YHWH ‘receives’ the speaker into glory or else ‘ransoms’ him from the power of Sheol:
When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.
Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterwards you will take me into glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
Given the premise of YHWH’s assurance of covenant life, and the hope for divine faithfulness, it is unsurprising that there are several texts which appear to offer hope that YHWH will deliver people from Sheol:
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
nor will you let your faithful one see decay.
You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.30
There is legitimate doubt over whether this refers to escaping death or passing through it to a life beyond, but there is no question of the basis of the hope. It is YHWH himself, the one the Psalmist embraces as his sovereign one, his portion and cup, the one who gives him counsel in the secret places of his heart.
Elsewhere the Psalmists hint more clearly at a future where YHWH ‘receives’ the speaker into glory or else ‘ransoms’ him from the power of Sheol:
When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.
Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterwards you will take me into glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion for ever.31
They are like sheep and are destined to die;
death will be their shepherd
(but the upright will prevail over them in the morning).
Their forms will decay in the grave,
far from their princely mansions.
But God will redeem me from the realm of the dead;
he will surely take me to himself. (Ps. 73.21–26; Ps. 49.14–15)
Where we find a glimmer of hope like this, it is based not on anything in the human make-up like an ‘immortal soul’, but on YHWH and him alone. {Page 282}
The covenantal fixtures of Israel’s faith meant that even the virtual ‘death’ of exile, as experienced by Israel, could only be the dark prelude to a glorious dawn of God’s life-giving power. This naturally leads us to Ezekiel 37, the vision of the valley of dry bones, which is arguably the most famous ‘resurrection’ passage of all. There God promised to open Israel’s graves and bring up the dead. {Page 282}
It is in the eighth-century BC prophet Hosea that we find the earliest references to bodily life on the other side of death:
Come, let us return to the LORD.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.
In the context of the book, this is a prayer that the prophet regards as inadequate, indicating a failure to repent and a belief that YHWH could easily be bought off. But in later times the prayer was thought to reflect faith in the life-giving, restorative power of YHWH. Another passage from Hosea utilizes similar life-after-death language:
I will deliver this people from the power of the grave;
I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
Where, O grave, is your destruction?
‘I will have no compassion,
even though he thrives among his brothers. {Page 283}
Again, in context, the Hebrew text seems to be denying that YHWH would redeem Israel from Sheol and Death. However, the Septuagint and other ancient versions, and also the apostle Paul, take this in a positive sense. Moreover, it seems that it was taken that way in Isaiah 26, which is arguably influenced by Hosea 13.14. Isaiah there speaks of Israel being dramatically rescued from a national crisis. The pagan nations may have lorded it over Israel for a while, but ‘They are now dead, they live no more; their spirits do not rise. You punished them and brought them to ruin; you wiped out all memory of them’, whereas God’s promise for Israel is:
But your dead will live, LORD;
their bodies will rise—
let those who dwell in the dust
wake up and shout for joy—
your dew is like the dew of the morning;
the earth will give birth to her dead.
The original Hebrew refers literally to bodily resurrection, and this is certainly how the verse was taken in the Septuagint and at Qumran. It is still possible, of course, that here resurrection was, as with Ezekiel, a metaphor for national restoration. But the wider passage, in which God’s renewal of the whole cosmos is in hand, opens the way for us to propose that the reference to resurrection was intended to denote actual concrete events. {Page 283-284}
The theme of life beyond the grave continues in Isaiah, especially in the fourth Servant Song. After the Servant has suffered, it is said, ‘he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.’ True, there is no explicit mention of resurrection itself, and only an oblique statement of what will happen to the Servant after his death (Isa. 53.11). But it is clear that the Servant (1) dies and is buried (Isa 53.7–9), and (2) emerges in triumph, however densely this is expressed (Isa. 53.10–12). The text was certainly open to an interpretation of resurrection, and both Jewish and Christian translators and authors took it that way.
Just as Hosea appears to have influenced Isaiah, so too Isaiah probably shaped the way the book of Daniel expressed the future hope of the faithful awakening from dust into glory:
Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.
Few now doubt that this always referred to concrete, bodily resurrection, and that is certainly how it was taken by later Jewish writers. {Page 284}
This is hardly out of line with the other evidence we have surveyed. The ‘wise’ are not abandoned to Sheol; that would allow the violent, wicked kingdoms that oppressed the covenant people to get away with it. The ‘wise’ experience the spirit’s regenerating power, much like the dry bones of Ezekiel. They are revived and restored; death holds no lasting ruin for them. The ‘wise’ come through their suffering and, like the Suffering Servant, see the light of life. They emerge from dust into ‘glory’, which could mean a literal shining like stars or could mean a position of honour or royalty in the new world. They inherit Isaiah’s promise of restoration from exile. The Deuteronomic promise of life, and vindication for covenant faithfulness, comes true in them. These texts all refer, in one way or another, to the common hope of Israel: that YHWH would restore his people’s fortunes at last, liberate them from pagan dominion, and resettle them in justice and peace, even if it took a great act of new creation, including resurrection, to accomplish it. {Page 285}
While explicit belief in bodily resurrection is thus rather a late development, it can be seen as growing directly out of the much earlier Israelite emphasis on the goodness of the created order and of embodied life within it. {Page 285}
The constant factor, throughout the types of belief we have surveyed, is Israel’s God himself. The vision of YHWH’s creation and covenant; his promises and his faithfulness to them; his purposes for Israel, not least his gift of the land; his power over all opposing forces, including finally death itself; his love for the world, for his human creatures, for Israel in particular, and especially for those who served him and followed in his way; his justice, because of which evil would eventually be condemned and righteousness upheld—this vision of the creator and covenant God underlies the ancient belief in the national and territorial hope, the emerging belief that the relationship with YHWH would be unbreakable even by death, and the eventual belief that YHWH would raise the dead. The biblical language of resurrection (‘standing up’, ‘awakening’, and so on), when it emerges, is simple and direct; the belief, though infrequent, is clear. It involves, not a reconstrual of life after death (as though ‘resurrection’ was just a fancy way of saying ‘life after death’), but the reversal of death itself. ‘Resurrection’ was not about discovering that Sheol was not such a bad place after all. It was not a way of saying that the dust would learn to be happy as dust. The language of awakening was not a new, exciting way of talking about sleep. It was a way of saying that a time would come when sleepers would sleep no more. Creation itself, celebrated throughout the Hebrew scriptures, would be reaffirmed, remade. {Page 285-286}
Post-biblical literature
Jews, it used to be said, believed in resurrection, while Greeks believed in immortality. Like most half-truths, this one is as misleading as it is informative, if not more so. If the Old Testament offers a spectrum of belief about life after death, the second-Temple period provides something more like an artist’s palette: dozens of options, with different ways of describing similar positions and similar ways of describing different ones. The more texts and tombstones we study, the more views there seem to be. Almost any position one can imagine on the subject appears to have been espoused by some Jews somewhere in the period between the Maccabean crisis and the writing of the Mishnah, from roughly 200 BC to AD 200. {Page 286}
The case against there being any future life at all was maintained distinctively by the Sadducees. They seem to have denied any resurrection, perhaps believing that body and soul would perish together at death. However, since we know about them through their opponents, the Pharisees and their successors the rabbis, it is possible that they did not after all hold such an extreme position. They believed, after all, in the Torah, the first five books, in which there might seem to be some kind of a shadowy post-mortem existence. The document that most closely reflects the Sadducean perspective of the afterlife is the Wisdom of Jesus ben-Sirach, sometimes known as ‘Ecclesiasticus’:
Remember that death does not tarry,
and the decree of Hades has not been shown to you.
Do good to friends before you die,
and reach out and give to them as much as you can.
Do not deprive yourself of a day’s enjoyment;
do not let your share of desired good pass by you.
Will you not leave the fruit of your labours to another,
and what you acquired by toil to be divided by lot?
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!’
The funeral inscription for a Diasporan Jew named Jesus ben-Phameis, from Leontopolis in Egypt, expresses a similarly sombre sentiment:
Traveller, my name is Jesus, and my father’s name is Phameis;
when descending into Hades I was 60 years of age.
All of you should weep together for this man, who went at once at the hiding place of ages, to abide there in the dark.
Will you also bewail me, dear Dositheos, because you are in need of shedding bitter tears upon my tomb?
When I died I had no offspring, you will be my child instead.
All of you, therefore, bewail me, Jesus the unhappy man. {Page 286-287}
The reason why Jewish aristocrats rejected resurrection might actually have less to do with theology than with sociology. The real problem was that resurrection was from the beginning a revolutionary doctrine. It implied a reordering of power, a radical overhaul of the existing hierarchies of authority. For Daniel 12, resurrection belief went with dogged resistance and martyrdom. For Isaiah and Ezekiel, 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 some might have said, the right way up. It was the sort of belief that encouraged young hotheads to attack Roman symbols placed on the Temple, and that, indeed, led the first-century Jews into the most disastrous war they had experienced.4Thus, for those on top of the social pile, whether in Jerusalem or in Corinth, resurrection beliefs might be seen to threaten their established position. People who believe that their God is about to make a new world, and that those who die in loyalty to him will rise again to share gloriously in the rule of that world, 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.
Moving from pessimism to Platonism, many Jews assimilated to hellenistic culture, and absorbed the belief in the immortality of the soul. The great first-century Jewish exponent of a thoroughgoing hellenistic viewpoint was the Alexandrian philosopher Philo. His subtle and fascinating writings contain much food for thought on this, but it is beyond controversy that he taught the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the dead. Philo is unambiguously dualistic in his thought: for him, the soul is immortal, or more accurately, the soul can be divided into several parts, one of which is immortal. For Philo, release from the prison of the body is God’s reward for those who, during their embodied phase, have remained pure from sensual defilement. Those who follow the patriarchs down this road will, after death, become equal to the angels. The immortal soul does not, after all, die, but merely departs. Like Abraham, called to leave his country and go to another one, the soul leaves its present habitation and sets off for the heavenly realms, the ‘mother city’. {Page 287-288}
Josephus was a Judean aristocrat who claimed to belong to the Pharisaic sect. In describing the Jewish world for pagan readers he effectively translated Jewish beliefs into hellenistic categories. He thus describes the Pharisees as holding to something like reincarnation or the immortality of the soul, even though there are strong signs that he knew their beliefs were quite different. Josephus says at one point that one of the reasons he wrote his histories was to demonstrate divine sovereignty over human affairs and to confirm the immortality of the soul—though this, too, may have been a way of trimming his Jewish sails to the Roman wind.
In another work, Pseudo-Phocylides, we find a strong confidence in the soul’s survival of death:
For the souls remain unharmed among the deceased.
For the spirit is a loan of God to mortals, and his image.
For we have a body out of earth,
and when afterward we are resolved again into earth we are but dust;
and then the air has received our spirit . . .
All alike are corpses, but God rules over the souls.
Hades is our common eternal home and fatherland,
a common place for all, poor and kings.
We humans live not a long time but for a season.
But our soul is immortal and lives ageless forever.
Elsewhere we see a crisp and clear account of resurrection, offering the hope that God will show his faithfulness to his people by raising them to new bodily life. {Page 288-289}
Resurrection thus belongs clearly within one regular apocalyptic construal of God’s intended future. Judgment must fall, because the wicked have been getting away with violence and oppression for far too long. When it does, bringing with it a great change in the entire cosmic order, those who have died, whose souls are resting patiently, will be raised to new life. Many of these apocalypses, as we have seen, allude to Daniel 12 at this point. 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. {Page 291}
Conclusion: death amid covenant hope
Given the preceding survey, it is safe to say that the old assumption that Greeks believed in immortality while Jews believed in resurrection is not merely historically inaccurate; it is conceptually muddled. There was a wide spectrum of belief in the second-Temple Jewish world regarding the fate of the dead. By no means all Jews believed in a coming resurrection. Other views were known and taught, like the general pessimism of the Sadducees and the immortality of the soul as advanced by Philo. Of course, anyone who believes in eventual resurrection is likely also to hold some kind of view about how the person continues to exist between bodily death and bodily resurrection. In the Wisdom of Solomon, this is done by speaking of the ‘souls’ of the righteous being ‘in the hand of God’ until the time of their visitation, when they will share God’s rule over the new world. {Page 292}
What we can say with some degree of confidence is that when Jews in this period really did believe in ‘resurrection’, it had two basic meanings: (1) the restoration of Israel (‘resurrection’ as metaphor, denoting socio-political events and investing them with the significance that this would be an act of new creation, of covenant renewal); and (2) the reconstitution of dead human bodies into new bodily life (‘resurrection’ as literal, denoting actual re-embodiment). Importantly, the two go together: resurrection was about the restoration of Israel on the one hand and the newly embodied life of all YHWH’s people on the other. This act of re-creation was the great event that would bring the ‘present age’ to a close and usher in the ‘age to come’. All of this was premised on the twin belief in YHWH as both the creator and the God of justice. Without the goodness of creation, divine justice might remake humans in some quite different way. Without justice, the sorrows of the present creation would be unrelieved. Creation and justice go together. The martyrs would be raised; Israel as a whole would be vindicated. {Page 293}
Testimony To The Living Hope
When we grasp the background materials, whether about ‘Hades’ in Homer or about the philosophies of Plato and Philo, we see how the New Testament authors are offering a different narrative about God, God’s purposes for this world, the restoration of Israel, and the hope of humanity. ‘Resurrection’—the Greek is anastasis—always had to do with physical bodies, never with a disembodied ‘life after death’. And the only group of people among whom we have clear evidence of this belief in the first century are the Jews. {Page 294}
What is more, reading this material reminds us that Jesus and his first followers did indeed enter into discussion with their contemporaries about God’s ultimate purposes beyond death, and that these discussions are urgent and relevant for practical life, not just airy-fairy speculations about a fantasy world ‘by and by’. (We sometimes talk about ‘the afterlife’, but since ‘resurrection’ means a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead we should perhaps call it ‘the after-afterlife’.) Whether we think of Jesus putting the Sadducees straight on the subject, or Paul rebuking the Corinthians because some were saying there was no resurrection, the point is not vague speculation about ‘the life beyond’ (like people today asking whether there will be ‘shops in heaven’, and so on) but because what we believe about the future tells us something about the God we worship, what that worship should look like, and how the fact that God’s new creation has burst into the present time with Jesus’ own resurrection can and must energize and shape our work as his people. The church today, too, has to confront our own culture’s myths of the afterlife, whether it is a Darwinian determinism which leads to a tragic pessimism, the strange mix of New Age religion and postmodern pop-psychology that fills daytime television, the philosophical nihilism that advocates unbridled hedonism as life’s only purpose, the Marxist or materialist vision that says the best we can hope for is an economic utopia, or even the competing eschatologies of Islam and Buddhism. We need to be aware of the fears, hopes, and dreams about death and afterlife that swirl around in our culture, so that we can meaningfully address them with the good news about how God the father ‘in his great mercy . . . has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade’. {Page 294-295}
The Carpenter's Nail 