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It is to the Church Fathers in the orthodox succession whom we must now turn to see the philosophical battle to unite resurrection with the immortality of the soul. If Christianity was to take hold in the intellectual corners of the Roman Empire, it was going to have to face the contradiction between the apocalyptic dispensation that Jesus brought within its Jewish context and the natural right of the philosophically defined soul to immortality.

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The Church Fathers and Their Opponents

THIS CHAPTER will be concerned mostly with the Apostolic Church Fathers, especially those of the second and third century of the Christian era. But, to understand them, we must look at their opponents, both within the church and without. The Church Fathers’ writings overlap with the latest books of the New Testament and help us fill out the first few centuries of Christian life, already roughly sketched by reviewing popular apocryphal and pseudepigraphical religious literature. They alsogive us a clear example of how the New Testament was read by those leaders of the church who were responsible for forging what we now call the “orthodox” position.

The fathers would have maintained that their opinions were self-evident expressions of the tradition. But they are also significant and tendentious interpreters of the New Testament; in their comments, they reduce ambiguities and reformulate questions for ordinary Christians dealing with their Christian life. And they also produce a fascinating historical record of how Christianity fit its message to the Hellenistic world, while at the same time battling to retain the interpretation of its original kerygma or “proclamation.” It is the Church Fathers who created the Christianity that we recognize. They, and not Paul, are the second founders of Christianity.

Although the Church Fathers offered us major innovations in Christian belief, they always presented it as the most primitive doctrine. We have already seen how the Gospel of John combats the equally ancient traditions in the Gospel of Thomas. The Church Fathers came to terms with resurrection because it stood at the center of their religious life but they did not seem overly concerned with defining resurrection at first. That is not to say that they are not concerned with resurrection; the mission of Christianity was very much helped by focusing on the afterlife in proselytizing.

It is significant that resurrection is the afterlife doctrine that needed to be explained in detail in the Hellenistic context. It is most puzzling and disquieting to the Hellenistic world. If we look at the Letter of Barnabas, for example, an early apostolic writing probably dating from the end of the first century, we see that the promises of Daniel 12, understood as resurrection of the flesh, is prominently displayed in his picture of the coming end, though the Jews are already disowned (e.g., Let. Barn. 4:1-15). The pagan world, on the other hand, was comfortable with immortality of the soul. Christians from that world carried this doctrine into Christianity and set up an opposition between immortality and resurrection inside Christianity. The more intellectual the Christian audience, the more immortality of the soul appealed.

The evidence from Barnabas suggests that the missionaries had to distinguish their message from that of the Jews, who were better known though not as emphatic proselytizers. Not many of the Jews living in diaspora were enthusiastic believers in resurrection. That was more characteristic of revolutionaries and millenarians living in the land of Israel and also of the Pharisees, who had not yet made major inroads in Diaspora Judaism. Instead, the Jews who spoke and thought in Greek were involved in a very significant hermeneutical process, a translation process that allowed them to understand afterlife as continuous with immortality of the soul, thus combining native Jewish ideas with Greek philosophical ones. Resurrection was the product the fathers offered as