Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [432]
Paul too was an apocalypticist but he was a powerful thinker in every area of life. For Paul, all were sinners and were redeemed by Jesus’ death. The emphasis on sinfulness is typical of an apocalyptic missionary cult. Though Paul spoke for himself and for a small gentile minority, Paul’s interpretation of these events gained a special cogency as gentiles more and more predominate in the church. But, Paul could not have known the success his “minority report” would gain; indeed, it was used to frame the triumph of the gentile church in a way that would certainly have saddened him.
What the Gospels narrate is not what actually happened; nor is it fraudulent. The evangelists naturally imported into the life of Jesus details and Bible texts that demonstrated their own faith in the crucified and risen Messiah. They naturally externalized the visionary truths of Paul’s religious life; they may even have taken a polemical position against Paul’s more “spiritual” position, that Christ’s glorious body is the end point of our transformation in faith. Paul believed that believers shall become one with the body that Christ achieved in his resurrection.
COMPETING TRAJECTORIES OF THE MEANING OF JESUS’ LIFE
So did the evangelists. But for them, Christ’s body was the earthly church, which they led and represented. The ritual of communion became incorporating the body and blood of Christ literally. When the evangelists told the narrative of Jesus’ life, his resurrection naturally became more and more physical. Thus, the resurrection of believers also became a more and more material fact. The Gospels preach the literal, fleshly resurrection of Jesus and the subsequent literal, fleshly resurrection of all believers. Additionally, the state of sin was an apocalyptic characteristic, the necessary concomitant to the social necessity of conversion. Positing that humanity lacks something without Jesus is part of the uniquely suited missionary gospel of early Christianity. The remedy to the state of sin is a physical resurrection, a unique event in history. What demonstrated that Jesus’ death was uniquely meaningful for human history was not the fact that he survived death but that he was physically resurrected, as the first sign that the general resurrection would soon be upon us.
One of the competing portraits of Jesus against which the Gospel of John polemicized, must surely be the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas. By seeking a vision of him, like Paul’s vision, the ascetics of the Gospel of Thomas learned the transformative RASC process which linked them with the direct knowledge (gnōsis) of Savior and hence with immortality of the soul. This was accomplished without the teaching of the apostles and indeed without the canonical Gospels but with the help of RASC, developed by reading their own Gospel while performing their ascetic discipline. This is what gnōsis, saving knowledge, meant-an actual religiously interpreted meditative state unique to the Gospel of Thomas.
In many ways, the central dramatic fights of early Chrisianity were caused by these differing sources of salvation. The early Christians believed that Jesus brought resurrection which could be communally experienced in ritual. The process was one of transformation but the issue was galvanized by an imaginative rendering of the end point, the body of Christ that was both the church and the goal of the believer.
The Synthesis of Immortality of the Soul with the Resurrection of the Body
AS CHRISTIANITY moved slowly around the Roman Empire and slowly up the social ladder, it met a much more formidable form of the argument against the uniqueness of Jesus’ postmortem existence: the immortality of the soul. The soul was immortal by nature in Platonic thought, not needing the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, and this was one of the dominant intellectual theories of the day. Perhaps it was the dominant, intellectual tradition of late Antiquity. The doctrine of the immortal soul was eventually