Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [290]
The nature of the transformed body of Christ and the location of that body on earth was a guide to the perfection of humanity. But it was, secondly, an argument that those who counted themselves the followers of Christ had no need to rule others; they knew that they shall rise to the heavens and become stars. The Synoptic Gospels, on the other hand, stress a tightly knit community whose salvation was based on accepting the legitimate apostolic authority of those who were physically taught by the master. They preached bodily resurrection and eschewed spiritual immortality of the soul. Both the Synoptic Gospels and The Gospel of Thomas seem to build on the revelation that Paul left. But they took it in completely different directions and they were each involved with a very different polemic with Paul.43 Paul may not have been the earliest or most important Christian. But, in retrospect, his Christianity seems to have been the most controversial one. What actually happened at Easter is still an historical mystery as well as a mystery of faith. The one sure thing is that each Gospel interpreted the resurrection in a way consistent with its view of ultimate felicity and the rites necessary to achieve it.
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The Pseudepigraphic Literature
SO FAR WE have investigated a very important social aspect of the concept of afterlife: It coheres with the class structure of Hellenistic Israel. It is absent from the very traditional Sadducean classes, the old-guard agricultural aristocracy. The urban, Greek-literate aristocracy (I am thinking of Roman clients like Josephus and classically educated but longtime aristocrats like Philo) had the opportunity to adopt Platonic thought and synthesize it with Hebrew notions to come up with an immortality of the soul that suits Biblical ethics. Jewish intellectuals, like Greek ones, presumably found continuity of consciousness an attractive value, self-confirming of the value of their intellectual lives. So they were motivated to combine it with a more personal afterlife explicitly based on Biblical ethics.
Earliest Christianity, being an apocalyptic, charismatic, Jewish, nativist movement, strongly favored resurrection over immortality of the soul at its inception but was divided on whether the resurrection body is material or spiritual. Without resurrection it could not maintain that Jesus’ death was unique, special, and redemptive. Very quickly though it became something quite a bit more, due to the missionary activities of Jewishly and Hellenistically educated people like Paul.
Paul had a very good Pharisaic education as well as a good command of Koine (Greek). Paul explained the ultimate Christian reward as resurrection but also affirmed that resurrection would take place in a spiritual body. The Gospels, by contrast, strongly affirmed that the resurrection body is our actual, physical, real body, as Jesus was really, actually, and physically present in the postresurrection appearances. He even ate and drank after his resurrection.
The contrast between them goes deep; it even shows up in their notions of the Eucharist. Whether the Gospels’ point of view represents an anti-Pauline polemic or simply another “trajectory” in early Christianity is obscure. But the earliest varieties of Christianity can be classified as easily by the resurrection they preached as any other variable. For Paul, resurrection had started: It was a spiritual experience of transformation to a spiritual body that was in the process of becoming actual as he spoke. The Gospel writers, writing a generation later, also thought that the end-time had begun. But they stressed the physicality of that resurrection body at the end of time, soon to arrive. In the interim they preached themselves as the physical, actual, successors of Jesus. The apostolic succession was built on the faith that what Jesus taught his disciples was being physically and actually relayed through his apostles and successors,