Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [232]
When Josephus said that “the soul of the good alone passes into another body,” he meant that the earthly body is corruptible. Josephus probably meant that the Pharisees believed that righteous persons will receive a new, incorruptible body. This is exactly what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. Since Paul was an ex-Pharisee (as well as a Christian), Josephus may have been accurate in his own way, though it would hardly appear to us as the simplest way to describe their beliefs.27
The Pharisees’ belief in life after death was entirely congruent with their Roman client status. The rabbis, the Pharisees’ intellectual descendants, believed in an afterlife that could be figured flexibly in either Greek or more native apocalyptic terms, or even others terms, depending on the circumstances (see ch. 14).
This hypothesis preserves the symmetry between the Pharisees’ middle social position and their afterlife beliefs. Judaea evinced a party system that expresses social, political, and religious differences. The afterlife, whether based on resurrection or immortality of the soul, was one of the crucial subjects that distinguished between them. This is not so surprising as it sounds since beliefs about the afterlife are also highly correlated with class and politics in the United States.
Martyrdom and the Fate of the Essenes
THE ESSENES are not mentioned in Rabbinic literature but were fully described by Josephus. They seem to be closely related to the group that secreted the texts we find in the caves around Qumran, though not all the texts found there need be Essenic, and the Dead Sea Scroll sectarians may not be the only kind of Essene that existed. Josephus had no doubt that these people believed in life after death, though he figured it as immortality of the soul. Resurrection of the body is more likely to have been their true belief, as their own texts tell us. Josephus again characterized Essene beliefs in a way that Romans would understand. Dead Sea Scroll texts tell us that it was resurrection of the body that preserved Essene faith, a faith that was tested by martyrdom28 According to Josephus, the Romans tortured the Essenes for refusing to renounce their Jewish practices, especially the dietary laws:
They were racked and twisted, burnt and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver and to eat some forbidden thing; yet they refused to yield to either demand, nor even once did they cringe to their persecutors or shed a tear. Smiling in their agonies, mildly deriding their tormentors, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again. (J.W. 2.152-53)
Josephus explained the martyrdom of Essenes who, he said, believe in fate and the immortality of the souls and also believed that souls can ascend to be immortalized. He figured them in exactly the same terms as 2 Maccabees figured the woman and her seven children. Josephus also described the Essenes in terms that the Romans would understand. They respected the brave endurance of those tormented among the Jews just as they respected the same qualities of Christian martyrs afterwards. They expected to receive their souls back again. This seems very much like resurrection; it is hard to know what a Roman would have made out of that statement. Now that we know that the Dead Sea Scrolls do evince resurrection of the body, it makes special sense. The Essenes believed in fate only in the sense that they were apocalypticists who believed that God has already foreordained who will live and die when the end of days comes. As seems implicit here, Josephus used the term “soul” when he meant resurrection of the body, the doctrine most closely associated with martyrdom in Jewish culture. The phenomenon is quite widespread in Hellenistic Jewish literature but the connection with resurrection of the body comes clear only when Josephus discussed the suicide of the defenders of Masada.
Josephus’s Account of the Martyrs at Masada
WHEN JOSEPHUS discussed the act of martyrdom that ended