Do you believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus?
In this post, we will turn to the question of the afterlife and bodily resurrection as it emerges beyond the Jewish world. N. T. Wright notes the following:
The pagan world denied resurrection itself, even though many pagans believed in all kinds of life after death. The one thing they knew did not happen was people coming back into a bodily life at some point after death. There is a famous story in Greek mythology of Orpheus and Eurydice that illustrates the point. Eurydice, Orpheus’ beloved, had died and gone down to Hades, existing in a shadowy form in the underworld. Orpheus was then allowed to go down and seek permission to bring Eurydice back up again, but with one stipulation: if he looked back to see her while leading here out of Hades, which he naturally was longing to do, then he would lose her and she would be gone forever. So they start the journey up the long, ascending stairway, but evetually Orpheus’ longing to see his beloved gets too strong and he looks back, therefore losing her permanentally….The point of the myth is clear: you can think about what it might mean if somebody were to come back bodily from the dead and really be here again in some significant bodily way, but the pagan world knew it did not acually happen. This same sort of denial of bodily resurrection is also here in Homer, Plato, and Pliny and it is there consistently through a thousand years of paganism, up to and through the time of Jesus.
So, to clarify our discussion at this point - life and death for both Jews and Pagans are qualities of existence, not the lack of it.
But the Jewish world, however, by contrast did hold out the possibility of resurrection and we will return in the next post to how such a belief evolved.
But first, I want to take a side trip.
We all know that translating from one language to another is a difficult task. While we might hope that words in one language have a one-to-one relationship with a word in another language, we all know that it isn’t that simple. So, if one asks an Alaskan Inuit what the word for snow is, the return question would be, “what kind of snow?” It is documented that there are some 41 different words in that culture for snow. Some anthropologists have suggested there are as many as 400.
Moving from one culture to another means that sometimes packed into the new word, i.e. the vehicle supposedly carrying the original meaning, there is often found in the trunk (or boot, if you are from Britian) some unexpected baggage.
Between the 3rd and 1st Century BCE, given the Jewish diaspora, which some estimate represented 80% of the population, the Hebrew Bible (The Tanakh) was translated into a Koine Greek language version in Alexandria called the Septuagint (LXX). Of course, we are well aware of some of the problems in the translation process, for example where the Hebrew word for “young woman” as in “a young woman will bring forth a child,” was translated by a similar word in the Greek language (see Mt 1:23, Is 7:14). Interestingly though, the Greek word also had the connotation of a “virgin” – an association that the original Hebrew did not have. So at the point that the author of the Gospel according to Matthew began to tell his version of the story of the birth of Jesus, I am sure that he was delighted to find a reference in the LXX that might “predict” that Mary had remained chaste before giving birth.
Now, I am not suggesting that Matthew invented this notion of virgin birth himself. Obviously, the story was already circulating and the author of Luke, in a totally different narrative version, also alludes to it it in his gospel. What becomes fascinating is that had the writer of Matthew been reading only the Hebrew text, he would not have found the reference. Given Matthew’s proclivity to argue that the Jesus movement was as Jewish as the emerging Rabbinic movements after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, we should not be surprised at his creative use of scripture.
Matthew also uses the Hebrew texts as well when it serves his purposes. In the same story, he suggests that the newly born King of the Jews, who rightly according to Scripture would hail from Bethlehem, was also predicted to come from the village of Nazareth. This does seem to be assumed in at least three of our canonical gospels. Matthew’s justification of this fact, in justaposition to the Bethlehem references, is curious. Matthew writes, And he went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfiulled. (Mt 2: 23) We hear that phrase often in this particular gospel, many more times that in the other three. The problem is that nowhere in the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint for that matter do any prophets say that! Apparently, Matthew’s strategy was to find a comparable reference that started with the first three consonants of the term Nazareth. He perhaps found his justification in a “mistranslation” of the term for Nazarite whose meaning is not a home town boy from the Gallilee, but a child dedicated to ascetic holiness, like for example John, the Baptizer. (Judges 13:5) Perhaps, Matthew is playing with the word for “branch” that shows up in many references in Hebrew scriptures.
The point of my rather extended side trip is to raise the question of how the Jewish concept of Sheol may have evolved as that term in the Hebrew langauge was translated as Hades in the Greek language Septuagint.
Traditionally, there are similarities between Hades and Sheol. As the above quote from Tom Wright suggests, for the Greeks, as also in the early Jewish ideas of the afterlife, death does not lead to annihilation – rather in Hades, the dead lead a bland and sad existence in the underworld.
But there are important differences as well, some that will manifest themselves in later Christian mythyology. For example, the geography of Hades is far more detailed than Sheol and in time, questions of reward and punishment in the afterlife become associated with various places that the dead are assigned in the multiple underworld levels.
The evolution of images occasioned by crossing cultural boundaries are not hard to anticipate.
Now I can’t keep up with all my cousins in our extended family, I certainly need help with the whole plethera of gods, places, rivers, all the unique stories and associations from Greek mythology. In this post, my key source is scholar Carlos Parada who extensive work is documented in his Genelogical Guide to Greek Mythology
Speaking of the Greek understanding of reward and punishment in Hades, Parada notes that the soul receives judgement in the meadow (the Plain of Judgement) at the dividing of the road, whence are the two ways leading, one to the Isles of the Blest (or Elysium), and the other to Tartarus. Those who pass judgement are Aeacus, former king of Aegina, Minos, former king of Crete, and Rhadamanthys, brother of Minos. Aeacus, who keeps the keys of Hades, judges those who come from Europe, and Rhadamanthys the Asians, but Minos has the privilege of the final decision.
Tartarus is the place of punishment.
Round it runs a fence of bronze, and night spreads in triple line all about it. Some say that the gates are of iron and the threshold of bronze, and others that there is a threefold wall around it. Around this triple wall flows Pyriphlegethon with its flames and its clashing rocks. The entrance, in which there is an enormous portal has pillars of solid adamant that not even the gods could break. At the top of its tower of Iron sits the Erinye Tisiphone, with her bloody robe, – sleepless day and night, she guards the entrance.
So who receives punishment? Parada writes:
Among those punished in Tartarus are also those who in life hated their own brothers, those who struck their parents, those who loving fraud entangled their clients, those who kept their wealth for themselves without ever sharing (these are the majority), those who killed for adultery, those engaged in treason, those who corrupted the laws and became dictators, those who entered the beds of their daughters, and others who committed numerous crimes which would never cease to fill an unending catalogue; but equally unending are the punishments and retributions inflicted here: [for example] rolling huge rocks,
Remember Sisyphus!
In contrast to Tartarus, Elysium is a happy place which has a sun and stars of its own….Those who dwell in Elysium exercise upon grassy playing-fields or wrestle friendly on yellow sands; some dance and others sing or chant poems. Orpheus is here and Musaeus, who wrote songs and poems and uttered oracles. Some say several members of the Trojan Royal House dwell here.
I’ll let you do further research on your own if you are interested. However, at the point in Hellenistic culture when Greek mythology began to morph into Greek philosophy, there is a subtle move from a bodily life after death to a disembodied soul. In time, when we begin to mix Matthew’s notion of a burning Gehenna with Greek notions of afterlife punishments, by the middle ages we have Michelangelo’s fresco of a Last Judgment.
But again, Wright warns us that resurrection is not the same as going to heaven resting in some Platonic bliss and certainly not going to Hell for endless torment. The Biblical notion of resurrection is a second step after death, what he will term “life after life and death.”
Previous Posts in the Series:
Taking a Second Look at Resurrection – Sheol
Taking a Second Look at Resurrection – Confusion
Taking a Second Look at Resurrection – Credentials
Taking a Second Look at Resurrection – Resources
Taking a Second Look at Resurrection – Questions
All material posted in this series is copyrighted (c) and at this time may not be reproduced.
