Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [241]
PART FOUR
THE PATH TO MODERN VIEWS OF THE AFTERLIFE
10
Paul’s Vision of the Afterlife
PAUL IS OUR first Christian writer. His writings present us with the first reflections on the faith that the man Jesus was both Christ and God and that, through Him, all who have faith will be resurrected. His writing not only presented the first witness to an important new vision of the afterlife in Judaism, it also gives us interesting evidence for the notions of afterlife among the Pharisees, which we found difficult to understand from Josephus’ report alone. Our difficulties are compounded by the fact that the Rabbis, who claim the Pharisees as their forebears, did not redact their literature in canonical form before the beginning of the third century. When the first Rabbinic literature was finally produced, the Rabbis had already refined their notion of the afterlife in subtle ways. So Paul gives us good evidence for the history of Jewish ideas in the mid-first century, evidence which we cannot easily find elsewhere.
Paul offers us the same opportunity with regard to Christianity. He wrote in the mid-decades of the first century CE before the Gospels were compiled. He made very infrequent reference to any of the traditions found within them, although we believe that the Gospels were already in some stage of development. He rarely gives us any of Jesus’ words. He quotes Jesus directly on only two subjects, divorce (1 Cor 7:10-12) and the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:23-27), indirectly only on a few more. Both categories have enormous significance for our understanding of Christian afterlife. Paul’s testimony is consonant with later Gospel tradition about the Lord’s Supper and divorce but does not agree with it in every word. His understanding of the ritual parallels his notions of the resurrection body. Other than that, Paul gives us scant information about the man Jesus.1 What Paul gives us is a record of his own spiritual life and his faith in the crucified messiah. To appreciate all the important data that Paul gives us regarding both Judaism and Christianity, we need to be able to distinguish between Paul’s use of Jewish and Christian teaching and his innovations. This task is most difficult.
But we have some aid. When Paul quotes Scripture, it is the Hebrew Bible in Greek that he cites. For him, there was no other Scripture, no written New Testament Gospels and no Christian document with the authority of Scripture. Though he must have known something about the Gospel traditions, the evangelion was for him an oral message, which was a genre certainly familiar from his Pharisaic background. He even uses Rabbinic formulas of transmission when he quotes them (e.g., 1 Cor 11:23). Although the Gospel traditions fulfilled Scripture, they were not yet Scripture.
Most scholars agree that Paul’s characteristic rhetoric and style have little in common with the language of the Gospels. Although he may have considered the actual words of Jesus part of an oral tradition, he quotes them only where a Pharisee would need to rely on exact formulations: for deciding legal issues. When dealing with apothegms and other traditions, Paul shows us the same willingness to paraphrase and even to encode for memory that a Pharisee might have utilized in learning Rabbinic tradition. In short, Paul is surprisingly free of the religious thought structures of the Gospels and, what is even more interesting, the Gospels (which are later than his writings) are surprisingly independent of Pauline thought. Considering the effect that we now automatically ascribe to Paul’s career, this is a very important