Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [325]
The continuous growth in interest in resurrection was due principally to three factors. The first was the centrality of the notion of resurrection in the preaching of the Christian faith. As Tertullian said: “The religion of Christianity is the faith in resurrection.” Or again, “The resurrection of the dead is the Christian’s confidence. By believing it we are what we claim to be” (Res., 1). All Christians seemed to acknowledge that their faith depended upon the resurrection event in Jesus’ life, however they judged that to have been possible or interpreted it to have happened.
The second factor is that the New Testament, for all its voices, is relatively unhelpful in explaining exactly what resurrection is. Where it does enter into description, it argues for a physical resurrection which conflicted with Paul, who was much more spiritual and equivocal on the subject. The naiveté of the New Testament narrative and the emphasis on resurrection may just have irritated ordinary gentiles, who quite innocently absorbed far more sophisticated, intellectual notions of the immortality of the soul. Eventually, the question of what exactly resurrection is would have to arise. At a second stage, the church would provide a cogent and comprehensible doctrine which made sense to a sophisticated, philosophical, pagan audience.
Lastly, as we saw in the last chapter, Christianity needed to explain resurrection in just the right way so as to allow for the delay of the parousia; it had to accomplish the explanation without diminishing the motivation for being Christian and firmly remaining within a moral universe in which virtue is rewarded while sin is punished. In Late Antiquity, the immortality of the soul, demonstrated to many philosophers’ satisfaction by Plato, seemed, more and more, to be the self-evident end of earthly existence. Since it validated the life of the mind, it could almost be assumed among many philosophers. Even the Stoics took an interest in immortality, while it was the doctrine that the Cynics and Epicureans liked to dispute. Resurrection was a nonstarter; it was not even a worthy subject for discussion among the philosophers. They did not even understand it properly, thinking it more like resuscitation.
For their part, the Church Fathers took aim at immortality of the soul as the doctrine to defeat. They learned their task from the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics. Although the earliest fathers did not concentrate on the intellectual cogency of the resurrection, they did preach it steadfastly, fixing on immortality of the soul as a hostile doctrine because immortality of the soul vitiated the special salvation that the cross brought to the faithful alone. If immortality were a natural property of the soul, no one would need a Savior; one would need only an operational manual for the soul as an ethical guide, the right moral instructions to train the body to care properly for the soul.
Gospel of Peter
THE GOSPEL OF PETER offers an early reflection on the resurrection of Jesus. Actually it just supplies the scene that is missing in the Gospels, a description of the resurrection of Jesus.
Now in the night, when the Lord’s day dawned, when the soldiers two by two in every watch, were keeping guard, there rang out a loud voice in the heaven, and they saw the heavens opened and two men come down from there in a great brightness and approach the sepulchre. That stone which had been laid against the entrance to the sepulchre started by itself to roll and gave way to the side, and the sepulchre was opened, and both the young men went in. When now those soldiers saw this, they awakened the centurion and the elders-for they also were there to assist at the watch. And whilst they were relating what they had seen, they saw again three men come out from the sepulchre, and