Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [259]
The Christian innovation is to have identified the angelic or divine figure who brought judgment, the Son of Man of Daniel 7:13 and who could also be called “the Lord,” with Jesus the Messiah or Christos. No other movement so far has shown any interest in conflating “Lord” with “the Messiah,” though the Qumran community had already identified divine terms like ’El, with the principal angels of God (11QMelch). On the basis of Daniel 7:9-14 and Daniel 12, together with Psalms 8 and 110, the Christian community found the Scriptural support that clarified what God had in mind for the end of history.
We can now see this in better detail. Since Jesus died as a martyr, expectations of his resurrection would have been normal in some Jewish sects.55 But the idea of a crucified messiah was unique. In such a situation, the Christians only did what other believing Jews did in similar circumstances: They turned to Biblical prophecy for elucidation. No Messianic text suggested itself as appropriate to the situation. But Psalm 110:1 was exactly apposite: The LORD says to my lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”56
Here was a description of the enthronement of a Davidic descendant, now understood as a heavenly enthronement after death and resurrection. Yet nothing in the Bible text makes the death or resurrection part of the narrative inevitable. It must have come from the historical experience of the events of Jesus’ life, not the other way around. The early Christian community, after they experienced these events, found the Scripture that explained the meaning of the events. Thereafter, Psalm 110:1 could be combined easily with Daniel 7:9-13, the description of the enthronement of the “Son of Man.” Daniel 7:9-13 seemed to prophesy Christ’s exaltation and ascension because Jesus could be identified with the Son of Man, an angelic figure, who is, in turn, identified with the second “Lord” in the quotation from Psalm 110. Daniel 12:2 had promised astral, angelic immortality to those who taught wisdom, confirming the entire set of expectations. The combination of Psalm 110 with Daniel 7:13 (possibly together with Psalm 8) gives us a good explanation for the difficult “spiritual body” phrase in Paul’s writing. In short, the combination of these two passages, seen together with the martyrdom of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, produced the kerygma of the Early Church. It was this as well that allowed Paul to come to the conclusions he did, though he also received revelations and visions which confirmed the teaching.
FIRST CORINTHIANS 15:37-50
First Corinthians 15:35-50 is one of the most systematic expositions of the Jewish mystical and apocalyptic tradition, which seems central to Paul’s message of the meaning of Christ’s resurrection. The coming end means transformation and resurrection for all who believe in him:
But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual