Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [236]
As a way of combating this cultured critique of religion, a number of scholars throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed criteria that would apply to any historical source, such as the New Testament, which was written by people who had already accepted the truth of its major propositions. A number of important criteria were adduced-like Jewish background, multiple and early attestation, easy translation into Aramaic-but they can all be expressed as “the Criterion of Dissimilarity,” especially if it is understood to include criteria of embarrassment and multiple attestation.35 For a fact about Jesus to be accepted as unassailable, it must not be in the interest of the church to tell us.36
The historical question is more limited. How does Jesus fit into the Jewish world’s notions of the afterlife? One must come at the problem indirectly. One must begin with several assured or virtually assured conclusions, many deduced by pure logic from the Gospel stories: Jesus lived as a Jew and died for his Judaism. His politics were seen as subversive to the Romans. He must have been an apocalypticist himself, otherwise there would have been no adequate reason for his movement to have expected his return immediately. He was the leading figure in a small movement of apocalyptic Jews who saw his death as a martyrdom, like many previous Jewish martyrdoms. Whether he was actually a political danger is quite another question. Some apocalypticists have political ambitions; others do not. Some movements have political objectives and others remain inchoate. Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Whatever Jesus’ Jewish and Roman politics were, they were not considered primary to his church, once the church understood his message as the salvation of the world.
Then we come to the mystery of the Resurrection, which we pass over for a moment. Jesus’ earliest disciples saw a moral and apocalyptic victory in “the Easter event.” They interpreted it not just as a sign that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead but had ascended to heaven to sit next to God, inaugurating the final consummation of history. The earliest Christians experienced the continued presence of Jesus in their lives, not in some attenuated form but exactly in the form of resurrected Messiah, angel of the Lord, the Son of Man (all at once) who was enthroned next to God.37 This must be true though it does not pass the criterion of dissimilarity because it is simply what all the canonical New Testament documents say about the Christ of faith. Paul identified Jesus as risen savior and Messiah because he had visions that clarified that relationship for him.
The Gospels show that the identification of Jesus with the “Son of Man” in Daniel is early and important but it is a postresurrection doctrine. The evangelists preached that the man Jesus, crucified and resurrected, became the figure prophesied in Daniel 7:13-14, a figure the church calls “the Son of Man” but who is probably better understood as “a manlike figure in heaven” not a title at all (e.g. Matt 24:29-31; 25:31-46 and parallels). We know how they made this identification, that it was part of the kerygma (the core proclamation of the Early Church), and that it was consistent with Paul’s ecstatic and visionary Christianity.
The Gospels make this identification on the basis of two other Hebrew Bible passages—Psalm 110 and Psalm 8, taken in conjunction with Daniel 7:13-14. The three passages together can almost be read as a narrative of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus as the figure enthroned next to God (cf. Mark 13:24-27; Luke 21:25-28). We do not know why the Gospels make this identification except that the figure was part of a very famous apocalyptic document-the visions of Daniel 7-12, the first place where resurrection is mentioned unambiguously in the Hebrew Bible and is part