Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [433]
THE RABBIS
In the Rabbinic community, there was a very different dynamic. The Rabbis did not need to define the nature of the resurrection body and they had no equivalent problem with the immortality of the soul; they quietly and quickly imcorporated both into their thinking of the afterlife, fudging the term Teḥiat Hametim (vivification of the dead) to mean whatever God had chosen to make it mean or whatever they needed it to mean at the moment. (For them it was the same thing.) There was, furthermore, no need to enforce intellectual orthodoxy. Each Rabbi might explain the afterlife as he wished, or indeed leave it to God to surprise us. Theirs was not the task of trying to define how God would bring about the fulfillment of His promises. Theirs was only the task of defining the human consequences of His covenant.
One can see their flexibility as a response to the changing location of Jewish life. Conceivably having its origin in Persian religion, the Rabbinic notion of resurrection could bend in the direction of Hellenistic philosophy, as the ex-Pharisees Paul and Josephus show. It could emphasize one kind of notion of resurrection in the presence of Christianity and another in the presence of Zoroastrianism. It could accommodate the philosophical speculations of Platonism or the literalism of early Islam. It needed to preserve that doctrinal flexibility to prevent religious intolerance from its host civilizations. The Gemara’s discussion particularly demonstrates how at home Rabbinic notions could be under Zoroastrianism, with its notions of the resurrection of the perfected flesh. But it could also match Christianity as it slowly absorbed the Hellenistic notion of the immortality of the soul. It could accommodate Islam’s early preference for resurrection of the flesh at the end-of-time. And it could even participate actively in Islam’s flirtation with Aristotelianism in the tenth through thirteenth centuries, which necessitated an articulated doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It then passed that philosophical acumen to Christian Aristotelian philosophers like Aquinas who worked out their own synthesis. It could do all this because resurrection or immortality of the soul was not their central concern; not much about the social significance of the Rabbinic movement depended on it. Jews did not rely on the Rabbis to resolve theological problems for them; they relied on them to resolve legal issues.
ISLAM
Islam is even more clearly a missionary religion than Christianity. In forming itself to promulgate its revelations, it put the day of judgment foremost in its teaching, save only for the unity of God. Resurrection would follow and it would be literal and material, a pleasurable goal worth the efforts of being a good Muslim. It supplemented this with various promises of paradise and horrors of hell. It rarely had to force conversions; instead it put the choice of resurrection or not, of heaven and hell, in front of its hearers. Then, it outlined the many financial, economic, and social advantages to conversion to the Muslim Ummah and waited for the inevitable “bandwagon” effect. After a century, practically no one was able to resist conversion. Luckily, Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism were given reprieves because of their Scriptures: They were considered “People of the Book,” though for their religious fortitude they endured many indignities and dangers as Dhimmis (protected ones). Thus, some Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians managed to survive the inescapable advantages of submitting to the message of Muḥammad.
Muslim eschatology