Hell, Heaven, Resurrection, Spirit, Angels, Rebirth

A Glossarium of Life After Death

Dedicated to the memory of my late brother, Michael, who passed from this world on December 12th, 2023. May his memory be eternal and for a blessing.

It occurs to me that in a few recent posts I have talked at some length about the resurrection of Jesus as his exaltation to a pneumatic or spiritual body (Grk: σῶμα πνευματικόν), which in antiquity would have still been a “physical” body, albeit one of a superior physis to the psychic body of flesh and blood (σῶμα ψυχικόν). I have also suggested that I find this kind of eschatology of resurrection to be a.) the more original take on what happened to Jesus after his death, b.) a more plausible, defensible take on what happened to Jesus after his death, and c.) a take on what happened to Jesus that has more comparative purchasing power in conversation not only with Judaism, our closest religious sibling, but also with other world faiths. A pneumatically risen Jesus is a Jesus that can be positively grouped with other deified heroes of Jewish tradition—Enoch, Moses, Elijah, etc.—and who can fit into other schemes of human transcendence cross-culturally. A sarkically risen Jesus, by contrast, becomes something of a historical anomaly, one whose credibility depends not only on our capacity to reconstruct the details of the empty tomb (on which see below) but also raises questions of theodicy (why Jesus, but not Akiva, or Anne Frank?) and also of eschatology (why did God raise Jesus but then allow history to continue unabated for 2,000 years?).