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Resurrection and Immortality in Hellenistic Judaism: Navigating the Conceptual Boundaries

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Resurrection and Immortality in Hellenistic Judaism: Navigating the Conceptual Boundaries RESURRECTION AND IMMORTALITY IN HELLENISTIC JUDAISM: NAVIGATING THE CONCEPTUAL BOUNDARIES C.D. Elledge In his popular study of the afterlife in Jewish thought, Neill Gillman de- scribes how resurrection of the dead and immortality of the soul within Second Temple Judaism would later merge and complement one another in the rabbis’ classic conception of “revivi cation of the dead” (íéúîä úééçú): From their predecessors, then, the talmudic rabbis inherited two doctrines about the afterlife: The rst taught that at some point after death, God would raise the body from the grave. The second taught that, at death, the body disintegrates and returns to dust, but the soul leaves the body and lives eternally. The rst, of uncertain provenance, is articulated in three biblical texts. The second, which originated in Greek thought, is not in the Bible. Both appear in the literature of the intertestamental period.1 Harry Wolfson described a parallel, if independent, development among the church fathers, who arrived at their own synthesis of resurrection and immortality: … to the Fathers of the Church these two beliefs were inseparably connected with each other. To them, the belief that Jesus rose on the third day after the Cruci xion meant that his soul survived the death of the body and was reinvested with his risen body. Similarly the belief that in the end of days there will be a general resurrection of the dead meant the reinvestment of surviving souls with risen bodies.2 These developments reveal the crucial context of the second-fourth cen- turies of the Common Era as a great age of synthesis for Judaism and Chris- tianity, in which earlier afterlife traditions were reinterpreted into classic a rmations of faith. 1 Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought (Woodstock, VA: Jewish Lights, 1997), 134–135. The “three biblical texts” are Dan 12:1–3; Isa 26:19; and Ezek 37:1–14. 2 Harry A. Wolfson, “Immortality and Resurrection in the Philosophy of the Church Fathers,” in Krister Stendahl, ed., Immortality and Resurrection: Death in the Western World: Two Conlicting Currents of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 55–56. 102 c.d. elledge Prior to this age, however, the literature of Hellenistic Judaism often dis- plays a more complex relationship between resurrection and immortality.3 While the two could potentially coexist, a signi cant number of earlier tra- ditions noticeably gravitate toward one conception or the other. Indeed, as Jon Levenson perceptively comments, the two ideas “can be diferent in crit- ical ways, and it can be profoundly misleading to subsume them under some simplistic master category, such as ‘afterlife’”:4 The expectation of an eschatological resurrection coexists easily with immor- tality so long as the latter is de ned as the state of those who have died and await their restoration into embodiment, that is, into full human existence. … But if immortality is de ned in connection with an indestructible core of the self that death cannot threaten (and may even liberate), then resurrection and immortality are at odds. … Whereas history in the classical Jewish vision of resurrection will culminate in God’s supernatural triumph over death, this second idea of immortality assumes a very diferent scenario: individuals at various times and without relationship to each other quietly shed their per- ishable casings to continue in an unbroken communion with their benevo- lent creator.5 Where they exist in their radicalized forms, apocalyptic resurrection of the dead and philosophical immortality of the soul assume very diferent con- ceptualizations of anthropology, creation, and history. While this distinc- tion casts greater appreciation on how later sources synthesized these two beliefs, it equally demands sensitivity to precisely where earlier sources stand along this important conceptual divide. 3 George W.E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamen- tal Judaism and Early Christianity (exp. ed.; HTS 56; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 219–226; Alan F. Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Reli- gion (ABRL; New York: Doubleday, 2004), 704–718; James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 94–116; James H. Charlesworth, “Where Does the Concept of Resurrection Appear and How Do We Know That?,” in J. Charlesworth et al., eds., Resurrection: The Origins and Future of a Biblical Doctrine (FSC; New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 1–21; Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Pales- tine during the Early Hellenistic Period (trans. J. Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), 1:196– 202; Martin Hengel, Jews, Greeks and Barbarians: Aspects of the Hellenization of Judaism in the pre-Christian Period (trans. J. Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 124–125; Mau- rice Gilbert, “Immortalité? Résurrection? Faut-il choisir?,” in Philippe Abadie and Jean- Pierre Lémonon, eds., Le Judaïsme à l’aube de l’ère chrétienne: XVIIIe congrès de l’association catholique française pour l’étude de la bible (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 271–297. 4 Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 20. 5 Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, 21. See also R.H. Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity (2nd ed.; Jowett Lectures; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913), 155–156..
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