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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > August 2000

The Resurrection of Resurrection

Christianity was born into a world where one of its central tenets, the resurrection of the dead, was widely recognized as false—except, of course, by Judaism.

By N. T. Wright

Jews believed in resurrection, Greeks believed in immortality. So I was taught many years ago. But like so many generalizations, this one isn’t even half true. There was a spectrum of beliefs about the afterlife in first-century Judaism, just as there was in the Greco-Roman world. The differences between these two sets of views and those that developed among the early Christians are startling. Let’s begin with the Greeks. Some Greeks (and Romans) thought death the complete end; most, however, envisaged a continuing, shadowy existence in Hades. Homer, for example, tells of a murky world full of witless, gibbering […]

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Endnotes

1.

In more relaxed mode, however, some ancient Greek burial customs provided not only basic necessities for the hereafter, but also toys and games, and in some special cases, slaves and even wives.

2.

Passages such as Job 19:25–27, which in the King James Version seems to predict bodily resurrection more solidly than the Hebrew warrants, may have gained this meaning when read in the Septuagint.

3.

Philo, On the Giants 14.

4.

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1–3, often quoted as supporting “immortality,” must be read in the context of 1:16–3:9. The speech of “the wicked” (2:1–20) is intended as a classic statement of the pagan denial of resurrection; 3:7–9 is the answer. At the moment, the righteous souls are in God’s hand, but a new day is coming in which they will rule the world.

5.

It is thus misleading to describe this view as “a resolute view of death as resurrection,” as does Jon Davies, in Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 122.