Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [431]
We see a community of angels and saints at Qumran. But the angels and the saints are the same, like the butterfly and the caterpillar. Possibly, the members attained angelic status in this life with their ascetic practices. At the very least, their strict purity made possible a partnership with the angels, who would defeat their enemies. This was the vision of the end envisioned by this small group of religious revolutionaries, not unlike the ones we have seen in our premillennial days.
IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
The second notion of afterlife to be adopted in Hellenistic Jewish culture was aristocratic, elitist, and available at first only to those few who could get a good Greek education-immortality of the soul. In its classic form, it seems also solipsistic because it depends entirely on thinking and meditation. But it depended heavily on having the right kind of individual tutoring and instruction, instruction only available to the very rich and those with leisure to study.
It was the new aristocracy, the client scribal and intellectual classes of the Hellenistic world, people like Philo and Josephus, who were afforded an expensive Greek education, who served the rulers and adopted the Platonic notion of the immortal soul. They built the notion of the immortal soul on the earlier and less comforting Semitic notion of the nefesh, but their philosophical education identified the Hebrew soul with the Greek psyche. Their perspective did not see the body as valuable, rather the opposite. Nor did it consider a large society as its purview. Immortality of the soul is, at first, an individual salvation or, at most, a camaraderie of but a few enlightened philosophers. It posits as immortal those aspects of consciousness which were deemed most valuable to an elite, intellectual class-its education (paideia), knowledge (gnōsis), in short, its memory (anamnesis), a pious wish from a class of intellectuals totally subservient to their Hellenistic rulers except in the power of their minds.
These ideas of the soul’s immortality are not entirely divorced from martyrdom; Socrates himself was a martyr. Cato the Younger got the courage to do away with himself after rereading the Phaedo several times. But the point of the Platonic synthesis, the immortality of the soul, was that immortality was a natural human endowment, part of the very predicament of being human. Salvation came from learning how to stop the cycle of rebirths and live in deathless perfection as a disembodied soul. Popular versions of the immortality of the soul began to be found in Hellenistic Jewish literature, mixed with other notions like martyrdom, in the century in which Jesus lived.
CHRISTIANITY
Apostolic Christianity at first wanted nothing to do with immortality of the soul. Christianity did not belong to that tiny, elite class of Jews who wanted to preserve their intellectual achievements after death; it would be at least a century, maybe two, before many Christians rose to the social level of a Philo or a Josephus. Christianity’s beginnings were in the apocalyptic groups that believed in resurrection of the body. After all, the Jesus movement unexpectedly and tragically found itself faced with a martyred leader. It was natural, obvious in many ways, that a notion of resurrection would inform this group’s continued narrative about its relationship to God; the surprise was that it believed Jesus to be already resurrected, which inevitably led both to the notion that he was divine and to the conclusion that the apocalyptic end-time had begun.
To produce this notion, Jesus had to be identified with a divine candidate. The crucifixion made sensible a Messianic claim for Jesus in the charge of the Romans: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The resurrection made divine (perhaps more correctly, angelic) status likely. Jesus’ “divine” status was gained because he was higher than any other angel. It made him