The section is titled “Blessed (and Disembodied) Immortality
He opens with the differences in Judaism at the time of Jesus and later, Paul. The reality is, after Alexander the Great changed the game: cultural, social and political structures.
Even ”faithful“ Jews that resisted assimilation still found themselves within Hellenistic Judaism. ”By the time of the first century AD all the many varieties of Judaism were to a lesser or greater extent Hellenistic, including those anchored firmly in the soil and cult of Palestine.“
Some Jews known as Sadducess denied ”a future life beyond death, including the popular belief in resurrection.“
Rather, these Sadducess affirmed a future blissful life for the righteous, in which souls, disencumbered of their physical bodies, would enjoy a perfect life forever.
Interesting, sound familiar?
Wright says ”For such thoughts to be thinkable, the step had to be taken, more explicitly than in the OT, to describe how the soul or spirit would leave the physical body at death and be capable, not just of going to Sheol, but of further more dynamic experiences.“ Get a hold of his footnote: ”… Ps. 16 [LXX 15].10, ‘you will not leave my nephesh/psyche in Sheol’, where the Hebrew seems to designate the whole life, which the Greek, read within post-Platonic hellenistic culture, would push the reader in the direction of a body/soul dualism.’
This body/soul dualism doesn’t come from Hebrew language. Later, platonic thinking: hellenistic culture starts to influence how scribes, authors and readers understand the text. Here’s some examples.
The soul lives on after death,’ declares Pseudo-Phocylides:
For the soul remains unharmed among the deceased.
For the spirit is a loan of God to mortals, and his image.
For we have a body out of earth,
and when afterward we are resolved again into earth we are but dust;
and then the air has received our spirit…
All alike are corpses, but God rules over the souls.
Hades is our common eternal home and fatherland,
a common place for all, poor and kings.
We humans live not a long time but for a season.
But our soul is immortal and lives ageless forever.”
Get the common thread here? This text is hard to date, but most agree it’s from the first century BC or AD.
Similar thoughts are found in other texts like Testament of Abraham 20.14, book of Enoch which seems to echo Daniel 12.2-3.
In the Testament of Abraham passage we find a hellenistic approach: in which the immortal soul passes out of the body and on to either bliss or torment:
“…The spirits of those who died in righteousness shall live and rejoice; their spirits shall not perish, nor their memorial from before the face of the Great One unto all the generations of the world…”
“… You yourselves know that they will bring your souls down to Sheol; and they shall experience evil and great tribulation…”
Even in the rabbis we find (for example, Hillel or Johanan ben Zakkai) a similar type of thinking. Zakkai “was said to have wept at the end of his life because he feared the judge who had power to assign people either to the Garden of Eden or to Gehenna.“
Wright notes, which I’ve also seen in the Sages, they believed in eventual resurrection but seem to have been employing new concepts of a body/soul dualism to explain what happened between bodily death and the final state of blessedness.”
Like this this statement “The idea of a soul separable from the body, with different theories as to what might happen to it thereafter, was widespread in the varied Judaisms of the turn of the eras.” He claims this may have offered a help in dealing with persecution and suffering, though by no means was it the only way.
This will do for now. I’ll share more quotes plus reaction. Stay tuned!
