Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [295]
The apocalyptic framework suggests an intermediate state and the final return of the righteous to the earth. The use of the word “soul” at this place may also have a social implication in that it refers to a specific group of Christians, those who had suffered and died and whose return will signal that God’s justice is accomplished. One might also suggest that Hellenistic popular notions were being synthesized with the Hebrew ones to help combine notions of resurrection with immortality of the soul. The setting itself describes a much more Hellenized environment than the Gospels. Furthermore, the literature is a narrative rather than philosophical tractate, which facilitates the synthesis.
Christian resistance at this period, like Jewish martyr resistance before it, was predominantly passive resistance. That was what produced martyrs in this period and not political revolutionaries. We think that the group that produced Daniel was also politically passive in opposition to Syrian Greek rule; if the group was the “Hasideans” it was not militarily sophisticated. We cannot totally rule out active military action for all who revered the Dead Sea Scrolls, as some of the documents are extraordinarily militant, and who may have taken part in the First Jewish revolt against Rome (66-70 CE).
But, even they considered themselves the allies of the angels. It was God, not the human community, who was going to correct the situation. As in most religious millenarian movements, the role of the faithful is passive; they will wait while God and his divine agencies clear away the sinners. The faithful will even undergo martyrdom for their faith, suffering every torture with patient endurance. A number of scholars of millenarian movements point out that, in general, were there a reasonable chance of political or military action, the millenarian movement would likely have become a political revolutionary movement. In the early period, Christians followed the example of Jesus and were content to let God avenge the righteous because no one could militarily oppose Roman order and expect to win.
Apocalyptic Attempts to Handle Immortality of the Soul
BUT AN APOCALYPTIC expectation of the end of time could not be maintained forever without the arrival of the end. Eventually, Christianity would have to come to terms with the delay of the parousia or it would be abandoned as disconfirmed. Even Paul’s notion of inward transformation depended on the arrival of the eschaton. As Christianity came to terms with the continued existence of the world, it incorporated two conceptions that were quite foreign to its original formulation-the immortality of the soul and an interim state in which the soul exists until the Savior arrives to judge the world. It also took an assumption of the corrupted, apocalyptic worldview and turned it into the doctrine of Original Sin, which builds human imperfectibility into the universe. In turn, it demands the rite of infant baptism to counteract it.6
We can find the attempt to come to terms with the delay of the parousia (the arrival of Jesus) in two primary literatures: the Church Fathers and the Apocrypha. As John Gager has cogently pointed out, Christianity had to deal with an enormous change in its religious life. In the first century, Christians were praying for the arrival of the apocalypse: “Thy Kingdom, come” (Matt 6:10). By the end of the second century, Tertullian tells us that Christians prayed “for the emperors, for their deputies, and all in authority, for the welfare of the world, and for the delay of the consummation.”7 The millenarian aspects of Christianity need to be jettisoned while keeping the motivations and energy of Christianity’s proselytizing mission intact.
A similar problem existed within Judaism, in that the destruction of the Second Temple raised enormous apocalyptic expectations, which were first expressed, then disconfirmed, then explained further. But only a