Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [212]
Philosophers of the fourth century were not only the academics we expect them to be today but also members of philosophical communities which look very much like religious voluntary associations (thiasoi). Certainly the Jews who performed the Hekhaloth ascensions were also members of a very highly defined religious community. Michael Swartz’s book, Scholastic Magic suggests formal philological grounds for distinguishing between the ascent techniques and the Sar Torah (“Prince of Torah”) material. The Poimandres, also known as Corpus Hermeticum I, as well as Tractate VII, make clear that the speaker belongs to a community of like-minded people with a mutually agreed ethics where there is a missionary impulse and perhaps even a kind of eschatology present. It would be hard to say which of these phenomena was earlier but the origin is not the issue. Hypothesizing an origin for a religious phenomenon is actually more like projecting a theory onto the past.
In any case, it is clear from the hermetic literature, from magic, and these writings that the separability of the soul from the body was confirmed in these ecstatic states-indeed, standing outside the body is exactly what “ecstasy” means in Greek. These RISC experiences naturally confirmed that the classical worldview was correct, just as they confirmed for the apocalypticist the notion that he was part of the elite who would soon be transformed into an angel as a reward for his patience and suffering in God’s name. Both of these experiences were, with no difficulty at all, called prophecy in the ancient communities that produced them, though they could also be known by other names.
The long-standing consensus among Jewish scholars, based indeed on the Rabbinic proposition that prophecy had ceased centuries before the rise of Christianity, is challenged even by such a “rationalist” as Josephus. As Rebecca Gray shows in her provocative book on prophecy in Second Temple times, Josephus was capable not only of ascribing prophecy to ordinary people who were almost contemporaries but also understanding that the prophecy was for the purposes of disclosing notions of “immortality of the soul,” as he always calls notions of life after death:48
I do not consider such stories extraneous to my history, since they concern these royal persons, and in addition, they provide instances of something bearing on the immortality of the soul and of the way in which God’s providence embraces human affairs; therefore I have thought it well to speak of this. (Ant. 17.354)
Josephus demonstrates his faith in life after death by the fact that a deceased person named Alexander, the husband of Glaphyra, appears to her in this prophetic dream, thus showing God’s “providential care.” Josephus understands that such an important aspect of God’s special providence for the righteous is revealed through prophecy and that this further demonstrates that the soul is immortal. Josephus never questions the notion that the soul of a deceased husband can actually appear in a dream-vision. He illustrates that even Hellenistic intellectuals valued their dreams as divine proof that God would immortalize them after death.
Apocalypticists likewise held that the righteous would be absorbed into God’s human form. Hellenistic intellectuals thought that the soul was separable from the body, that it remembered the basics of life from previous existences, that it was immortal and so would guarantee preservation of knowledge and consciousness into the infinite future. All of that was vouchsafed to the ancients through altered states of consciousness. At the same time, their descriptions of the presumed afterlife helped them define who they were in their own society.
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Sectarian Life in New Testament Times
THE TWO DIFFERENT views of afterlife in Jewish society-resurrection