Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [233]
Josephus’ Eleazar first appealed to heroism. God determined that they should all die since the Romans were close to vanquishing them, although they enjoyed the best strategic position possible and an enormous cache of supplies and weapons. On the other hand, God graced them with information that many of their compatriots in revolt had not possessed-the knowledge of their imminent capture. He therefore urged “a noble death in liberty” (J.W. 7.326) rather than a life in slavery and dishonor.
Though some were convinced by this appeal, others were more compassionate for their wives and children. For this reason, Eleazar continued on to a discussion of the immortality of the soul (J.W. 7.341). Josephus reports that “Death truly gives liberty to the soul and permits it to depart to its own pure abode, there to be free of all calamity” (J.W. 7.344). Josephus continued by positing that the soul is the principle of life in the world: whatever it inhabits is alive and whatever it abandons immediately dies. He then tried to demonstrate that the soul is independent of the body in sleep and will be all the more independent after death.
We recognize immediately that this is Plato’s proof of the immortality of the soul, if somewhat popularized. As an actual historical occurrence, this proof is unlikely to have occurred to Eleazar, leader of the Zealot defenders, at this momentous occasion. But it is sure to have impressed Josephus’s readers deeply, especially his Greco-Roman audience, who would better understand the motivations of the Jews when phrased in this particular way; when possible, the Romans emphasized that they had vanquished worthy enemies, not overrun some group of ill-prepared peasants.
Thus, Josephus figured the zealot defenders of Masada as if they were Greek philosophers. But it is unlikely that the events or conceptions Josephus described were anything like the ideas of afterlife that the desperate defenders of Masada would have embraced. They, like all other Jewish sectarian groups of the day, would have been more attracted by the notion of bodily resurrection to enjoy the rest of the life which had been denied them by faith. We have noticed that all the nativist groups of the first century-all the groups that faced martyrdom, Christianity included-affirmed bodily resurrection, not the immortality of the soul.
Some More Information about Life after Death from Acts
JOSEPHUS’S DESCRIPTION of the afterlife beliefs of the sects of Judea is most dramatically confirmed by a story Luke tells us about Paul. Acts 23 illustrates that the issue of life after death was still being fiercely fought in first-century Judea:
When Paul noticed that some were Sadducees and others were Pharisees, he called out in the council, “Brothers, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. I am on trial concerning the hope of the resurrection of the dead.” When he said this, a dissension began between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the assembly was divided. (The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three.) Then a great clamor arose, and certain scribes of the Pharisees’ group stood up and contended, “We find nothing wrong with this man. What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?” (Acts 23:6-9)29
This passage tells us that the Sadducees denied any resurrection, either as a soul (obviously as an immortal soul) or as an angel (angelomorphic resurrection). So far as Luke is concerned, there were two ways in which our immortal lives could be figured: as an immortal soul or as an angel. From everything we have seen, the latter description is another way