Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [231]
After Josephus was captured by the Romans, and indeed was accepted into the retinue of Vespasian and Titus, he began to change his opinion about the Pharisees. This makes a great deal of sense as he must have realized the futility of any hostility against the Romans. The Pharisees became his favorite candidates to take over the reins of government after the revolt in his later work the Antiquities for they are most in favor of peaceful co-existence with the Roman Empire.25 It was the Pharisees who take over the role as mediators of the Roman rule and representative leaders of the native community.
Why then did they believe in resurrection, which is the mark of a revolutionary group? The Pharisees, who were expert at understanding the law, believed that there are rewards and punishments, as well as life after death. They were educated men, helpful in running the state. Though Josephus was from a priestly family himself and so heir to the Sadducee position, should he have desired it, he stated that he learned to govern his life according to the rules of the Pharisees, since he wanted a career in public life (Vita 10-12).
This is not to be interpreted as Josephus’ conversion to Pharisaism.26 In the Jewish Wars, Josephus often appears not to like Pharisees much, especially in his public career as a general during the war, when they were constantly trying to have him removed from office. His background made him suspicious of them and his attempt to style himself as a Pharisee was less than entirely convincing. In his later writing, Jewish Antiquities, Josephus suggested that the Pharisees were the class of people who Rome trusted best to govern Judea after the destruction of the Temple. That was decades after the war but that was Josephus’ final position, after a great many twists and turns.
Yet, more religious persons than Josephus found the Pharisees’ piety impressive. Jesus said that unless one’s “righteousness surpasses even that of the Pharisees,” one will not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:20). Jesus’ admiration had limits, because, according to Mark, the Pharisees could be criticized for setting aside the commands of God in order to observe their own traditions (Mark 7:9). We do not have to accept these statements as the actual words of Jesus to understand the kind of praise and criticism that was being offered by ordinary Jews. In this respect, Christianity gave us invaluable evidence about the opinions of ordinary Jews. The Pharisees, like all the sects of first century Judaea, were a controversial group.
Josephus was like Philo in his almost complete avoidance of the term anastasis (literally, raising up, the Judaeo-Greek technical term for “resurrection”) and related words for resurrection proper. He does not seem at all interested in the notion of resurrection of the body. “Immortality” is the term he used to describe life after death, and he quite often, like Philo, larded the description of life eternal with notions of heavenly journeys to the deathless stars.
Josephus said of the Pharisees: “Every soul, they maintain, is imperishable but the soul of the good alone passes into another body, while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment” (J.W. 2.163). This has often been taken to mean that the Pharisees believed in fleshly resurrection in the same way as Christians do; but this is a very broad generalization. The Pharisees, we will see, had a less specific and more interesting view.
Nor does this mean that Josephus attributed to Pharisees the Platonic notion of metempsychosis, or reincarnation, though he certainly used exactly that language to describe Pharisaic beliefs. Rather, Josephus described the Pharisees as envisioning another, different kind of body for imperishable souls. Because Josephus was involved in a very tricky hermeneutical process in explaining Jewish beliefs for a sophisticated, philosophical pagan audience, whose notions of the afterlife were deeply affected by Greek philosophy, exactly what the Pharisees believed is not recoverable from him.