Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [363]
The Gospel of Thomas and Gnostic Christianity affirmed it anyway. In so doing, they were voting for the superiority of vision and gnōsis over creeds and statements of faith in the teachings of the apostolic tradition. A person who sought the presence of Jesus in ascetic preparations and visions had little need of the Gospel stories or creeds from the Church hierarchy for the person of Jesus was immediately available through visions. This differing view of the resurrection reflects the “Gnostic” realization that all can be saved provided they seek truth in the correct way, with or without the apostolic sacraments. For their part, “the orthodox” used martyrdom as a test and proof of the truth of their faith as everyone was impressed with the bravery and courage with which Christians went to their deaths.
Intermediary forms, such as Valentinianism, did not deny the authority of the other Christians, only denigrated them as incompletely aware of the power of the dispensation in which they lived. Thus, the Valentinian Christian Gnostics distinguished between levels of salvation. The truly elect realized that a number of issues that the “orthodox” obsessed over were truly adiaphora, of no real concern to the elect and enlightened. One could be ascetic or not ascetic; one could believe in the bodily resurrection or the spiritual resurrection; one could affirm or deny martyrdom. But the truly enlightened Christian knew that either way lay salvation if one had achieved gnōsis.
The Gnostics had more sophistication intellectually and arguably more universality and more of humanity than the “orthodox” but, by all accounts, the “orthodox” built a more committed populace, more willing to undergo death rather than recant. With it came the sectarian notion that salvation adhered only to the converted, not to anyone outside of the church. Such a notion became even more obvious when Augustine denied the practice of baptism on behalf of the dead. By then, Christianity had achieved a normative role and was no longer sectarian in outlook. It also had to face the issue that as an established religion it needed the respect, as well as the support, of the imperial rulers. To do so, it had to synthesize the pagan notion of the immortal soul with the apocalyptic notion of resurrection of the body. It was Augustine who wedded the two together and sealed both with political power. But before he did, the difference between resurrection and immortality had functioned to distinguish Christian from pagan, Jew from Christian, male from female, philosopher from ordinary Christian, and rich from poor.
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The Early Rabbis
The Rabbis and Rabbinic Literature
WE TURN FROM the religious leaders who created Christianity to those who created contemporary Judaism. The Rabbinic movement had an entirely different function in Jewish society than the Church Fathers did in Christian society. They did not dispense sacraments nor lead services, they did not write intellectual tractates, they did not run dioceses. They did not even control synagogues. The Rabbis were legal specialists, religious lawyers, dispensers of wisdom, and judges, rather than priests or academic intellectuals. Their training prepared them to be judges; the Jewish legal system depends on panels of judges of various sizes, more like the Napoleonic Code than English common law. Rabbinic authority was based, first of all, on the respect in which they were held as judges-which is to say, on their ability to interpret the law.
The early Rabbis, the Tannaim, went through periods of Roman support and lack of support. Likewise, the progress of Rabbinic authority was slow within Jewish society, as the synagogue had its own local officers, who seem to be highly correlated with the wealth of the community. For instance, the synagogues of Galilee do not immediately seem to follow