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By Root 2486 0

of the body and immortality of the soul-begin to be blended together in various ways in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE. One great exception to this blending of doctrines of the afterlife is the nascent Christian movement, which at first eschews the notion of the immortality of the soul as hostile to its message. After a century, the church, as it spreads through the Hellenistic world, began to synthesize the resurrection of the body with the immortality of the soul in ways that made sense to its growing Hellenistic audience.

Tombstones and Epitaphs

DURING THE LATE Hellenistic period, we find a great many important epitaphs and graffiti. Not many mention resurrection or immortality explicitly but one should not conclude that views of the afterlife were equally rare. Even the few we have show that the idea was percolating through society. Especially by the third and fourth century CE and later, from whence most of them came, notions of afterlife were widespread within the Jewish and Christian communities.

The fact is that not everyone chooses to mention resurrection or immortality of the soul on a tombstone, where thoughts of mortality may be equally apposite. In New England cemeteries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one finds thoughts of mortality regularly, mentions of resurrection rarely. One should not from that distribution of evidence conclude that the American colonists were not Christians.

The evidence from tombs has been well collected in a variety of archeological publications and gathered in the handy summary of Pieter W. van der Horst.1 The majority of tombstones from the Hellenistic period concentrated on the life and death of the occupant of the tomb; or else they cursed anyone who would desecrate the grave. For instance, this widely-quoted one:

Here under the shelter of this stone, stranger, lies …

Demas, deserting the old age of his very pitiable mother

and his pitable little children and his mourning wife.

He helped many men by his skill.

Weep for the man who has left the most honourable …

and his city, and the abodes and friendship of men.

Demas, about thirty years old, in the fifty-fourth year,

the third of the month Hathyr.

You too, Alexander, friend of all and without reproach,

excellent one, farewell.

(Leontopolis, 117 BCE, van der Horst, 154)2

There is no mention of the afterlife.

On the other hand, notions of afterlife are more frequent in the later centuries than the early ones. Sometimes they make an unusual appearance:

I, Hesychios, lie here with my wife. May anyone who dares to open [the grave] above us not have a portion in the eternal life. (129)

or

Whoever would change this lady’s place [i.e. the woman buried in this grave], He who promised to resurrect the dead will Himself judge. (162)

This is certainly not the kind of appearance one would expect of a religious innovation as momentous as beatific afterlife. On the tombstone, it is the graverobber who is threatened with the lack of an afterlife rather than the pious dead who is lauded with its surety. It even leaves grounds for thinking that the writers were using the conception ironically, expecting that it would be effective in keeping the grave safe from the rabble. It, however, leaves no doubt that such a belief is to be found amongst the Jews by late Antique times.

Even more, the following short graffito is of uncertain tone: “Good Luck on your Resurrection!” (van der Horst, 194)3 It is hard to know exactly how to understand this sentiment. One wants to think it is a pious wish, but a nagging feeling of facetiousness accompanies any modern reaction to the line. Perhaps it would be better to translate it as “Good fortune on your resurrection!” One thing is clear: Resurrection was clearly a well understood notion in the community by the fourth century. Exactly what happened earlier can only be resolved by looking at texts.

Prelude: The Book of Jubilees

JUBILEES is centuries older than these epitaphs, though it is also hard to tell exactly what or how old the book of Jubilees is. It