Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [239]
This Jesus and his apocalypticism are still mostly mysterious and mostly distant from us. His apocalypticism is what most challenges us. Otherwise, he would have been just another preacher of return to Jewish piety. This portrait of Jesus is not very different from the one which the New Testament gives us of John the Baptist, who lived and died as an apocalyptic Jew in everyone’s opinion. What changes the portrait is not Jesus’ marytrdom alone, as John was also martyred. It is Jesus’ followers’ interpretation of the Easter event. After the Easter events and Jesus’ presumed resurrection, the Jesus movement began experiencing his presence in their midst. Apparently, people anticipated that John the Baptist might come back, but no one actually experienced it. But Jesus’ disciples experienced his resurrection. Consequently they began to work out a Christology of a crucified Messiah raised to angelic and divine status. The event of Jesus’ resurrection also initiated the end of time, which they expected to come to conclusion very quickly. The fact that the end did not come as soon as it was expected has necessitated many changes in their thought structure, which evolved over centuries.
Jesus as Messiah
IN THE GOSPEL of Mark, Jesus denied himself the title “Messiah” whenever it was applied to him (Mark 8:27-31, for instance), except at his trial. But someone must have had Messianic expectations of him because that was recorded as the Roman charge against him on the cross: “King of the Jews.”42 This cannot be a Jewish charge because it was insulting and humiliating to Jews. The crucifixion extinguished any political Messianic expectation of some of Jesus’ followers. But it was the very title “King of the Jews” that his followers felt had been vindicated by the resurrection. Though the Gospels are clear that no one actually saw the resurrection event, his followers became convinced of the reality of the resurrection because of his postresurrection appearances. Resurrection is exactly the reward that apocalypticism promises for martyrs, but resurrection does not come until the end is nigh.
Since the resurrection had already happened, the disciples of Jesus became convinced that the end of time must already be upon them. From this point onward, Christians have believed that they are living in the end of days which will soon see fulfilled with the coming of the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ resurrected body of Glory appeared several times to Paul, showing him that those who believe in the risen Christ will soon follow him into the Kingdom and into Christ (en christo) in a transformed, even angelic state. All of these beliefs are understandable as Jewish apocalyptic beliefs transformed by the events of the fateful Passover in which Jesus journeyed to Jerusalem to worship his God properly and warn those who did not that the kingdom would shortly arrive.
Immortality of the Soul Versus Resurrection of the Body with Regard to the Jesus Movement
THE EARLY BIBLE writings so effectively guarded against the danger of Canaanite cults of the dead that when the “high” religion needed a notion of life after death it naturally turned to the two great dominant cultures of the Second Temple period: Persia and Greece. The Jewish writers borrowed resurrection of the body from Persia and immortality of the soul from Greece. They did not simply borrow but adapted notions to their own situation so that it became just as much a native Israelite discussion held with native Israelite terms and traditions. Persian ideas were more helpful to the masses because they were subversive to the Hellenistic and Roman order.
Cultures as a whole do not borrow. They do not adopt customs or ideas uniformly. Nor do they borrow without radically changing and refitting the ideas. Resurrection