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of the body appealed to the activist groups. It evolved out of religious martyrdom because it gave martyrdom a transcendent justification; but behind it was often a political and religious struggle for Jewish independence. It is the same struggle that produced the independent kingdom of the Maccabees. The Maccabees themselves did not write the book of Daniel; they were too astute politically. It was written by a sectarian group, possibly the shadowy “Hasidean” sectarians, possibly the group who evolved into the Qumran sectarians. Resurrection of the body provided a way to balance the equation of divine retribution. Foreign invaders had killed the faithful saints of Israel. Resurrection of the body gave transcendent worth to the death of the martyrs by stating that God would make good on his covenantal promises to reward the righteous and punish the iniquitous. It also shows us what the young martyrs wanted and needed most: They deserved to get their bodies back and to live again on the earth. And they deserved to be transformed into immortal and unchangeable stars, to become God’s avenging army of angels who would scourge the earth of persecutors and evildoers.

The immortality of the soul came from different circles and reflected entirely different social concerns. It was adopted by a very well educated, very acculturated Jewish elite, completely at home or nearly at home in Greco-Roman culture. This elite understood the intellectual heritage of Platonism but also wanted to express it in Jewish form. The rewards of immortality of the soul were precisely what an educated elite wanted most. Older scholars and intellectuals do not need or even want their old bodies back. What they want is a continuation of their well-schooled and well-studied consciousness, the knowledge and the wisdom that they have accumulated through a lifetime of meditation. It is an “intellectual’s immortality,” one in which the result of continuous study would never be lost. The Jewish version of immortality of the soul, with its sure sense of personal, conscious survival of death, was even better for an intellectual elite in Israel than the Platonic form of the proof once reincarnation was removed. The once-and-for-all nature of Philonic notions of the immortality of the soul could then more fully serve Jewish ethical interests. Philosophical meditation on the immortal soul also provided a way to allow that at least some of us could find immortality in the stars, just as resurrection of the body did. Both had individual traditions that provided for ascent and transformation to astral bodies in the heavens. This was also in keeping with Greek notions of the apotheosis of heroes and Egyptian notions of the proper destination of the righteous. Indeed, the notion that the soul ascended to the stars was the dominant religious notion of the Hellenistic world. It crossed many different religions and was the closest thing to a universal religious doctrine that the Roman world produced.

Expectations of resurrection and ascension can be assumed to be high in the events surrounding Jesus’ death. Jesus died as a martyr, trying to protect and fulfill teachings of the Jewish law, especially as he had preached repentance and understanding for sinners. In the eyes of his followers, his martyrdom was seen as a symbol of the beginning of the promised recompense for the righteous’ suffering, the apocalyptic consummation. Specifically, the events of Easter were seen by the first Christians as the beginning of the fulfillment of the events in Daniel. Daniel 7:9-14, Daniel 12:3, together with Psalm 110 (most often used to express Jesus’ ascension and often his divine status), and Psalm 8 are the most commonly quoted Old Testament passages in the New Testament. (When the New Testament was being written, the Jewish Scriptures were the only Scriptures.)

The Christians were not the first group to speculate on the traditions in Daniel. Although it is doubtful that the “Son of Man” was a specific title before Christianity, the verses in Daniel assured that the identity of the