Bart Ehrman on 'Jewish' and 'Greek' views of the afterlife

 Bart Ehrman on 'Jewish' and 'Greek' views of the afterlife

"It is often said that the key difference between ancient pagan and Jewish views of the afterlife is that Greeks developed the notion of the immortality of the soul but Jews came to believe in the resurrection of the body. Even though there is an element of truth in this characterization, it is far too simple and, in fact, demonstrably problematic. To be sure, there are differences between Plato’s view of immortality and, say, Daniel’s view of resurrection. In Plato’s view the soul is inherently immortal. It simply always will exist because it is its nature always to exist. Unlike the body, it cannot die. This entails a kind of dualistic anthropology: humans are made up of two competing entities, the mortal body and the immortal soul, which at death separate from each other. That is indeed different from most of the ancient Israelite and then later Jewish texts we have examined so far. These assume a unitary understanding of the human being. The soul is not a separate essence or substance that can exist independently of the body. The person is a body that can be alive, but when the breath of life leaves it, it is dead. At that point neither the body nor the breath is living. The body disintegrates and disappears and there is no soul to live on. In the later Jewish doctrine of the resurrection, God reverses death by bringing the breath of life back into the body, ensuring it will never die again. Unlike in the Greek tradition, here the person is made immortal. Immortality is an act of God, not an innate nature of the real essence of the human. Moreover, in these Jewish texts, the idea is not that people cannot die but precisely that they do die. God needs to raise them from the dead because they really are dead. That certainly is not the doctrine of immortality. But in reading this description you may be puzzled by one of the texts we have already considered. If people are really dead in Jewish traditions, and the soul does not live on after death, how does one explain 1 Enoch 22, where there are four holding places—“hollows” in a giant mountain—for “souls” being kept for the future judgment? As it turns out, the neat differentiation between pagan and Jewish views does not always hold. There were pagans who had no trouble imagining that bodies could live forever—for example, Menelaus in the Odyssey. And there were Jews who believed in the immortality of the soul, as possibly hinted at in 1 Enoch and as more explicitly affirmed in texts we will examine later. The characterization of the sharp lines between pagan immortality of the soul and Jewish resurrection of the body is therefore too simplistic. Historical reality was much muddier than that. That is not to deny the unique importance of the doctrine of resurrection as it developed in Judaism in the years leading up to the life of Jesus. Indeed, it is fair to say that by the time of Christianity, most Jews held to some version of this doctrine, believing in a future restoration and resuscitation of the body that did not involve simply a temporary return to life but an entrance into life eternal, not lived as a disembodied soul but as a unified person, body and soul." (Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, p. 124)

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