Jesus's Resurrection as Postmortem Vindication for a Righteous Martyr
A Proposal for Jewish-Christian Dialogue
In last week’s post, I wrote about the resurrection of Jesus in terms of what we can and can’t know about it from our primary sources (Paul, Mark, Matthew and Luke as extensions of Mark, and John). I suggested that the Pauline theory of resurrection as pneumatic metamorphosis of Jesus’s flesh-and-blood body into a pure body of spirit, capable of indwelling the heavens, which is the model for Paul also of the resurrection body of the righteous, was earlier, more consistent with other Early Jewish usage of language around resurrection and postmortem glorification, and ultimately more credible than the sarkic resurrection imagined in the Gospels.
There are various reasons I think this is true. For one thing, Paul writes at least a full decade before the composition of Mark, and claims that his experience of the risen Jesus in a vision as a pneuma is the same experience that Peter, the Twelve, James, and others had. For another thing, the Gospels do not agree on the resurrected Jesus: Mark does not let us see him, and Matthew lets us see but not touch or theorize about the risen Jesus. Luke and John present a risen Jesus who does many kinds of embodied, sarkic things, but in Luke’s case, Jesus’s resurrection is followed by his explicit ascension, after which he appears in less than fully sarkic ways to various people on earth like Stephen and Paul; in John’s Gospel, the constant antithesis between spirit and flesh, and the risen Jesus’s own insistence that he is going to ascend, seem to imply that his risen body (which is, as Candida Moss puts it, scarred over and therefore in the process of healing) is on a two-stage path of glorification that will culminate in his heavenly ascension. And, finally, the empty tomb stories match a known trope in Greco-Roman literature of the period that belongs at a minimum to the genre of “mythic historiography.”
Now, it occurs to me that accepting the Pauline theory of the resurrection opens up a new avenue in another area other than historical-critical study of the New Testament and/or bedrock questions of Christian faith: specifically, Jewish-Christian theological dialogue. To turn to Jesus himself as a potential lightning rod for new breakthroughs in Jewish-Christian dialogue is not new. As Susannah Heschel writes, “Many modern Jewish thinkers optimistically believed that uncovering the historical figure of Jesus would both reveal a pious Jew and, consequently, overcome Christianity’s anti-Jewish prejudices.”1 Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Emden, Abraham Geiger, Joseph Salvador, Heinrich Graetz, Levi Herzfeld, Joseph Derenbourg, Isaac M. Jost, Leo Baeck, Joseph Eschelbacher, Felix Perles, Samuel Cohon, Elias Soloweyczyk, Joseph Klausner, Gottlieb Klein, Michael Wyschogrod, Elliot Wolfson, Martin Buber, Schalom ben Chorin, Pinchas Lapide, David Flusser, Samuel Sandmel, Hans Joachim Schoeps, Yitzhak Baer, Ben-Zion Bokser, Haim Mantel, Haim Cohen, Geza Vermes, Hyam Maccoby, Jacob Neusner, and, indeed, modern scholars like Paula Fredriksen, Amy-Jill Levine, Judith Plaskow, Heschel herself, Ross S. Kraemer, Adele Reinhartz, Tal Ilan, Pnina Navé Levison, Eyal Regev, Uriel Rappaport, Joshua Efron, Israel Knohl, Daniel Boyarin, Shmuly Boteach, Shlomo Riskin, Alan Segal, and more all stand in a 200-year tradition of scholarship devoted to the recovery of Jesus as a pious Jew of the first century CE, best understood within the Judaism of his day and as a proponent of national aspirations for liberation and apocalyptic hopes of renewal and transformation for the world. This allows both Modern Jews to find in Jesus one of their own and Modern Christians to recover a sense of Jesus’s Jewishness.
But relatively few of these scholars have treated at great length the question of Jesus’s resurrection as a point of possible reconciliation between Jews and Christians.2 To my knowledge, in fact, only four of them have treated the resurrection of Jesus at any length, and only two of them in the form of a monograph. Pinchas Lapide wrote The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective mid-century, and took the view that Jesus’s resurrection happened physically in the way the Gospels describe and that this was God’s vindication of Jesus and appointment of him to heavenly status, as Ancient Jews generally believed God had done for figures like Enoch, Moses, and Elijah, to begin the long process of bringing the gentiles to Jewish-style ethical monotheism in his name. Geza Vermes also wrote a book, The Resurrection: History and Myth, in which he similarly thinks that the experience of Jesus’s resurrection by his followers was a real experience, but one of Jesus’s spiritual presence in light of the experience of the empty tomb, visions of the glorified Jesus, and the descent of the Spirit rather than of the exact stories reported in the Gospels. This is not far from the position that Alan Segal takes in the relevant portions of Life After Death, either, insofar as Segal attributes the disciples’ experience of the risen Jesus to mystical/visionary experiences rather than the concrete, “empty tomb” version of a sarkic resurrection for Jesus.
In the grand scheme of things, none of these positions are particularly normative within mainstream Judaism. Most Jews are more likely to view the claim of Jesus’s resurrection skeptically if they think about it at all. For one thing, among those Jews who have historically believed in resurrection, specifically, the resurrection is reserved for the end-time, and there is a direct contrafactual readily available to Jesus’s resurrection understood this way insofar as no messianic era has seemingly elapsed since Jesus’s lifetime in which the nations experience genuine peace; nor is this olam habah, the world to come, understood either as a vertical world beyond the present one or a future age in which this world as we experience it will be restored. Furthermore, even Jewish interlocutors who have engaged the question with a belief that God performs miracles and that it is at least theoretically possible for God to raise the dead have sometimes raised the question, if Jesus did not bring the expected messianic era, why God should raise Jesus and not, say, the Ten Martyrs killed by the Romans, or the victims of the Shoah. Even Jewish scholars who can accept the historical Jesus as a faithful Jew and a Jewish martyr, martyred for his convictions about Judaism, might still object to the resurrection of Jesus on the grounds that Jesus is hardly the only faithful Jewish martyr in history, and given the ambiguity of his messianic status, it doesn’t make much sense for God to raise him but not to raise, say, the Maccabean martyrs or the rebels who perished in the wars of 66-73 and 132-136 against the Romans, or the civilians that were caught in either conflict. It doesn’t make much sense for God to raise Jesus for his commitment to Judaism, in other words, but not other people victimized for their commitment to Judaism. Perhaps Jesus was more righteous than they? How would this be evaluated? One could perhaps make the argument, but then one would be faced with the extra problem that not all such victims had reached an age of maturity so as to be measurable by justice or sin in the first place. Why did God not raise the children that died at Auschwitz, for example? And the problem only becomes worse when we expand the suffering we’re considering to include that of all humanity, all conscious beings…you get the idea. The question of Jesus’s resurrection becomes, in light of a delayed, deferred, or failed parousia, a question of theodicy: why Jesus, but not everyone else?
All of this reductive summary of the disagreements between Jews and Christians also presumes a Jewish interlocutor that believes in an afterlife. Many, if not most Modern Jews, are anywhere from ambivalent to negative on questions of an afterlife, and among those who do believe in one, there is no single, common belief about what happens after death.3 One could suggest that perhaps the afterlife is making something of a comeback in Modern Judaism, insofar as afterlife beliefs of various kinds are popular in Reform Judaism, the largest of the sectarian communities represented here in the States, and insofar as many Modern Jews, like Westerners generally, have had residual influences from Eastern traditions in the form of popular Hinduism, Buddhism, and New Age concepts. But the point is that the other thing that shapes contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue about the resurrection of Jesus is simply that many Modern Jews don’t believe in things like miracles or afterlives, even if they otherwise believe in God, or do believe in God and afterlives but not miracles per se, or don’t believe in any of the three. (Or messiahs, for that matter.) Christians, defined qua Christians by their beliefs, are likely to miss this in conversation with Jews (as so much else).
These problems are somewhat defanged when we consider a pneumatic resurrection rather than a sarkic resurrection. Specifically, I think that seeing Jesus’s resurrection as a transformation of Jesus’s body into spirit opens up a way of understanding Jesus’s resurrection sapientially rather than apocalyptically, as the kind of vindication that God offers to all the righteous after death, rather than a unique event in world history that singles Jesus out (and that puts extra pressure on his shoulders to eschatologically perform).
One reason I make this suggestion is because a pneumatic resurrection may be interchangeable with metempsychosis in Ancient Jewish psychology and eschatology depending on the context. Josephus describes the Pharisees as believing in something that sounds very much like metempsychosis: they think that “every soul is imperishable,” and good, righteous souls “pass into another body” (J.W. 2.163).4 Insofar as Paul is our only self-professed Pharisee of the first century, who talks about an afterlife of anastasis, “resurrection,” which he understands to be metamorphosis into a pneuma, a spirit being, rather than a flesh-and-blood reanimation (which he thinks is impossible), it may be that what Josephus and a Greek-speaking audience would acknowledge as metempsychosis with outsider-language was, for insiders like Paul, more frequently phrased as resurrection. This also matches, as I suggested in the last post, a general ambiguity in Ancient Jewish and Christian texts around the meaning of resurrection: whether it is an immediate, postmortem, vertical experience that can also be described with language like glorification, becoming an angel or a god, exaltation, going to heaven, participating in the heavenly Temple, etc., or whether it is an eschatological, sarkic, intrahistorical event that marks the end-time.5 Interestingly, Paul is somewhere between these options. Paul believed that Jesus’s resurrection was pneumatic and that it signaled the beginning of the end-time, and that the metamorphosis of those alive when Christ returned and the resurrection of those who had already fallen asleep would occur at the parousia (1 Thess 4:13-18); in this, Paul is an apocalypticist, who believes in an imminent intrahistorical event of some kind that’s been confirmed for him by revelation, rather than someone like Philo of Alexandria, who does not seem to envision any imminent transformation of the world order on the basis of such visionary experiences (though he does imagine one happening at an undisclosed time in the future, the beginning of a new golden age that itself will ultimately elapse in the eternal cycling of the world).6 Philo, however, does think that the possibility of achieving superior embodiment after death in a heavenly form is the goal and reward of the virtuous, and that further beyond this there are even higher forms of being the righteous can attain to.7 Paul does not speak in such realized terms in his undisputed letters, and seems fixated on the coming parousia as the moment of eschatological resurrection.
Yet we cannot rule out that Paul may have believed the parousia to simply be the latest in a series of cyclical rejuvenations of the cosmos, where the righteous passed into new, glorified forms of embodiment, and that as Paul’s life wore on and the parousia’s delay lengthened he could not have indulged from time to time in language that seems to imply that death itself is the gateway to resurrection, rather than simply the cooler where the souls of the dead await future vindication. Paul also speaks, for instance, about going to be with Christ should he die (Phil 1:23), and says that the resurrection body is already available and waiting in the heavens (2 Cor 4:13), implying that Paul himself may have experienced some degree of ambiguity between the unrealized elements of his eschatology, in which he believed in a future resurrection at the time of the coming of Jesus, and its realized elements encouraged by his Pharisaic cosmology and his own mystical experiences in the Christ movement. Having an eschatology of coming transformation for the world order would not have put Paul out of step with other Hellenistic Jews: Philo does, as mentioned above, and so does Wisdom of Solomon (e.g., Wis 3:1-9; 4:16-23). But while Paul dabbles in sapiential elements, they are subordinated for Paul to personal visionary experiences, traditions about Jesus and his prophecy of the kingdom, and influential apocalyptic texts.
Apocalypticism, wisdom, and prophecy were overlapping, mutually embracing, and dialoguing genera in ancient Judaism, whose distinct emphases really come down to the relevance or legitimacy of claims to personal reception of direct divine communication, and the relevance of revelation as a theoepistemic category.8 Some apocalypses are more sapiential and cosmological than eschatological, and some sapiential texts have eschatology that does not require divine revelation. Wisdom texts like Proverbs, Job, and Qoheleth make very little of the idea that God has specifically spoken to a chain of authoritative prophets, offered covenants and laws to humans, or that he is especially concerned with human cult; they do not engage scripture as a reliable epistemic category. For them, what can be known about God and God’s Wisdom is evident in nature, and the question is rather whether humans are competent to know these things with certainty or not. For Hellenistic Wisdom texts like the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach, Temple and Torah are the incarnation of Wisdom in the world (Sir 24), but this works both ways: what makes them the incarnation of Wisdom in the world is not divine voluntarism or just-so revelatory history, but the fact that they reveal and correspond to the structure of the world revealed by reason, which is sufficient for wise living in accordance with God’s laws. As such, Ben Sirach disputes ideas like the afterlife, which were becoming more popular in the Judaism of his day, and also casts aspersions on the value of prophetic, oneiromantic, and apocalyptic revelation in his own day. Wisdom of Solomon, composed in Alexandria in Greek rather than the Hebrew and Palestinian milieu of Ben Sirach, disagrees with Ben Sirach on the afterlife, which the author considers essential to any theodicy with teeth, but concurs with Ben Sirach about the idea that Israel’s tradition is in some sense the embodiment of Wisdom of God in history and that this is the selfsame Wisdom that governs the natural order. These things are simply rational conclusions about the nature of reality derived from philosophy and scriptural exegesis, not revelation.
These provide important contrasts for thinking about Pauline resurrection, but also helpful context for understanding what became of Pauline apocalypticism after Paul’s death.9 Wisdom, Paul, and Philo all agree that there is some kind of coming redemption; all agree that there is life after death, at least for the righteous; and all, seemingly, agree on describing that life after death as a reward for the righteous, the patient, and the suffering, and in terms that depict the future life not as a simple restoration to earthly life but as advancement to heavenly, angelic, divine kinds of existence.
But there are also differences. For both Philo and Wisdom, the fundamental structure of the universe is not going to change: things are as they are, already created that way perfectly by God, but humans, through cultivating wisdom and virtue (for both texts, in part by abandoning idolatry and immorality and embracing Jewish Law and cultic worship), can bring about God’s own government in the human world, correcting the effects of human sin, and God himself might rise to join the clamor (reread the passages from Wisdom cited above). Where messianism is missing in Wisdom and muted in Philo, it is Paul’s central thing: he believes the risen Jesus is the messiah, and that he is God’s agent of cosmic transformation at the coming parousia, and he believes all this by revelation. Philo’s “gathering” and Wisdom’s restoration of right government on earth are secondary for both of them to the more important life of the immortal soul after death, which is always available. Indeed, “resurrection” is language with an inherently eschatological inflection, appearing in texts that emphasize finality to future divine judgment and restoration in the contexts of dreams, visions, and prophecies (Ezek 37; Dan 12) rather than revolving ages as one finds in Philo. In a more sapiential context, resurrection might code more easily as a more positive outcome of rebirth.
This sapiential, rather than strictly eschatological, form of apocalypticism with respect to the afterlife certainly became normative after Paul. The reasons are easily grasped: a failed parousia, a failed war of liberation against the Romans, and the destruction of the Temple all encouraged not the total abandonment of apocalypticism but, at a minimum, a more sapiential approach to apocalypticism, or even apocalyptic wisdom. This includes a more sapiential approach to life after death. After all, the Jesus of the Gospels, written after Paul, is met by an already-divinized Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8; Mk 9:2-8; Lk 9:28-36), and his dispute with the Sadducees about the resurrection (Mk 12:18-28; Matt 22:23ff; Lk 20:27-40) turns on the notion that God is God of the Living because God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which only works if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are all alive presently.10 The Lukan Jesus is explicit about this: “for to him all live” (Lk 20:38). So when Luke later, in Acts, frames Paul’s trial in Jerusalem as being put on trial for his belief in resurrection of the dead, a belief that Sadducees dispute whether as angel or as spirit, which the Pharisees confess (Acts 23:6-8), his argument, too, says nothing about an intermediate state, but puts in Paul’s mouth an equivocation between belief in Jesus’s resurrection and general belief in resurrection. One can read this as an indication that Luke takes Paul to have believed the general resurrection to have begun with Jesus, or, read against what we have written above, as believing generally in resurrection as a feature of reality.
Crucially, the Gospels do not suggest that Jesus’s resurrection is unique. In Matthew 27:52-53, many saints rise from the dead and go to the city when Jesus dies; in John, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead (Jn 11:38-44), with no indication that what Jesus has done for John is necessarily different from what Jesus himself undergoes or from what believers in Jesus undergo. In fact, the scene is framed in such a way to suggest that the Johannine Jesus wants to dispel a suspended belief in future resurrection as opposed to present belief in postmortem, imminent resurrection. When Martha comes to meet Jesus, he reassures her that her brother will rise again; when she says “I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day,” Jesus replies “I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me, even should he die, will live, and everyone living and believing in me will not die forever” (11:23-26). The only way this makes any sense is if John’s resurrection is not a future eschaton but something presently available through faith in Jesus, which preserves the individual even though they apparently die. The discomfort with the notion that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” (who is possibly Lazarus himself) would live forever is only part of the appendix added to John’s Gospel well after the completion of its first edition (21:22-23).
All of this to say, the notion that Jesus is the first or pivotal resurrection in history, signifying apocalyptic change in the cosmos, is inconsistently witnessed and interpreted in the early texts, and opens itself to sapiential reinterpretation. Paul does compare Jesus to Adam in both 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, to the end that just as Adam is the progenitor of psychic, sarkic existence and sin, so Jesus is the progenitor of righteousness and the pneumatic life of the resurrection. But this is Paul’s creative exegesis inspired by his vision and eschatological fervor. In an age of relaxed or deferred apocalypticism, Paul’s belief in the uniqueness of the event of Jesus’s resurrection is qualified by stories of other prophets and heroes, martyrs all, being vindicated with heavenly life after or instead of death, among whom Jesus is placed, and the present character of Jesus’s offer of resurrection becomes more and more emphasized. That Jesus is “firstborn of the dead” (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5) does not even necessarily signify the idea that Jesus is the very first person to rise from the dead, anymore than the idea that the nation of Israel or the Davidic king being called God’s firstborn sons (Exod 4:22; Ps 89:27) in fact means that no one prior to Israel or the Davidic king was called son of God (angels?). It rather signifies a status that Jesus holds in the view of these writers.
So, even within Christianity, a more sapiential than apocalyptic way of reading Jesus’s resurrection emerged in the history of Christian theology and liturgy. But one need not accept any of that to believe, more basically, that Jesus received the same kind of postmortem vindication that other suffering innocents and righteous receive. I offer this pneumatic-sapiential way of framing the resurrection of Jesus as a possible site of reconciliation between Jews and Christians insofar as it makes Jesus’s experienced glorification of a kind with, rather than a standout from, the kinds of postmortem glorification ancient Jews imagined for the righteous generally and the sort that Modern Jews interested in an afterlife want for everyone. I also offer it as a theoretically neutral interpretation of Jesus’s resurrection as regards his messianic identity and his divinity, the two doctrines most in dispute between Jews and Christians. Jesus can be a “resurrected” (in the sense of glorified/exalted to heavenly/angelic status and spiritual embodiment) prophet and martyr like Enoch, Moses, and Elijah, or like any Jewish martyr or innocent sufferer of any background throughout history, without being the messiah and without being God, even if the people who most believe in Jesus’s resurrection have typically taken it as evidence of both things.
Moreover, though, framing Jesus’s resurrection in this way invites us to reconsider not only the apocalyptic-messianic roots of Christology but also its sapiential roots as a possible pathway to better Jewish-Christian mutual understanding. After all, Christian belief in Jesus as a human embodiment of God’s Wisdom (Sophia) and Word (Logos) take its origins from Jewish belief in these emanations and intermediaries of God and, crucially, their embodiment in a human form associated with Israel’s royal, priestly, and prophetic traditions (Moses, David, the high priest, and more all receiving treatment as deified humans incarnating God’s Wisdom or Logos in Early Jewish literature). While Rabbinic Judaism ultimately came to see secondary deities as incompatible with strict monotheism and discouraged especially belief in human deification, Jewish mystical traditions from antiquity to the present have cherished the possibility of the human being in some sense embodying God, now or in the future. In a Modern Jewish context where belief in a nondual God and talk about the divine indwelling all creation and all people is once more lively, Modern Jews may not have much interest in talking about Jesus as an embodiment of God for its Christian associations, but I certainly see the capacity for some degree of partial reconciliation in seeing Jesus, the righteous martyr vindicated by God, as someone in whom the Divine Mind and Wisdom were humanized. Jews could theoretically believe this (if they were inclined) about Jesus without, importantly, coming to conclude that Jesus had a special, isolated importance, since the model itself, including the way Early Christians used it, turns on the idea that Jesus can be described this way because Jesus is like other figures of Jewish history that can be described this way. Conversely, meditation on this shared tradition of a humanized embodiment of God’s emanated reason and wisdom also invites Christians to consider the Incarnation not as a delimited, purely ad hoc event in history but as a genuine apocalypsis of the common mystery of God, world, and humanity at large.11
Anyway, I’m not sure who, if anyone, would take interest in this form of Jesus’s resurrection and the reconciliation it can offer (an eschatology where all righteous souls ascend, where unrighteous souls, in good Philonic fashion, must repeat a grade, so to speak, and hopefully do better next time; perhaps, in Origenist perspective, after some time in cosmic rehab intervening, and Jesus is one of these righteous souls, whom Christians contemplate and devote themselves to as a humanization of God, and whom Jews may accept as righteous and vindicated without so doing). I imagine that for most Jews the nuances of what Jesus’s resurrection actually means in context and where Jews and Christians might have something like a shared perspective on it is probably as negligible a concern as Jesus himself, messiahs, and afterlives altogether in everyday Jewish faith and praxis and, well, existence. Very few Christians I know are aware that there might be epistemic problems with their faith as currently formulated. This just isn’t the stuff that defines the ordinary experience of religion for most people, and that’s okay.
But I think that Jesus’s resurrection does intersect many interesting questions in comparative religion and theology—between Jews and Christians, yes, but also with other faiths, like Hinduism and Buddhism. Christians, I think, have not thought sufficiently about the fact that the arguments they regularly employ in defense of the resurrection oblige them to believe in at least the possibility these other stories, too. Many scholars have suggested Jesus as not uniquely Christian property, but a figure of world religious significance; I think this can be true not just for the historical Jesus but also for the risen Jesus, at least if someone believes in afterlives. Resurrection may be the sine qua non of Christian faith in Jesus, but it is not on its own sufficient to believe either that Jesus is messiah, or divine embodiment, or second hypostasis of the Trinity. What I am envisioning here is an acceptance of Jesus’s glorification as a datum of interreligious, philosophical, and theological dialogue that can spark interesting conversation in numerous directions, and not just a new ignition of apologetic convenience for Christian interlocutors.
For all of us, Jesus’s resurrection can at a minimum witness the hope that righteousness and suffering do not go unseen or unrewarded. Perhaps righteousness is its own reward, and suffering is not made meaningful simply by vindication. Perhaps. But it seems surely true that, at a minimum, if our lives and minds are only here briefly and subsequently snuffed out, our mitzvot and pain unacknowledged by anyone or, even worse, left unaddressed by the supreme power of reality, then our aspirations to justice and our pretenses of goodness are indeed empty assertions. At the very least, the risen Jesus testifies that there is something beyond for those who, as Schweitzer envisioned, are crushed under the wheel of history: something triumphant, something restorative, something more alive than what we think is life and untouchable by what we perceive as death.
Susannah Heschel, “Jesus in Modern Jewish Thought,” 736-741 in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
The only monograph that summarizes the views of different scholars is David Mishkin, Jewish Scholarship on the Resurrection of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017), but caveat lector, it has something of an apologetic bent.
See Hillel Halkin, After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Jewish Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Simcha Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); and broader histories of the afterlife as a concept, such as Segal’s monograph and Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). In general, premodern Jews were much more confident in the reality of an afterlife, both of the immortality of the soul and of resurrection from the dead, than modern Jews are.
See Fredriksen, “Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee,” 134-135 and 134 fn 53, contrasts pneumatic resurrection with metempsychosis, but I’m not convinced that the two are necessary alternatives. See Sami Yli-Karjanmaa, Reincarnation in Philo of Alexandria (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015); idem, “Returning from the Diaspora of the Soul: Eschatology in Philo of Alexandria,” 209-221 in Eschatology in Antiquity: Forms and Functions, ed. H. Marlow, K. Pollman, and H. van Noorden (Abingdon, Routledge, 2021); and idem, “The New Life of Good Souls in Josephus: Resurrection or Reincarnation?” Journal for the Study of Judaism 48 (2017): 506-530. It is also possible that a good deal of this Hellenistic Jewish psychology/eschatology of metempsychosis was received in Alexandrian Christianity. See idem, “Clement of Alexandria’s Position on the Doctrine of Reincarnation and Some Comparisons with Philo,” 75-90 in Studia Patristica: Papers Presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2019, ed. M. Vinzent and V. Husek (Leuven: Peeters, 2021). (I have borrowed this footnote from the previous post on Jesus’s resurrection rather than rewrite it.)
C.D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE to CE 200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Outi Lehtipuu, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), whom I’ve referenced several times on the dispatch, are the most relevant scholars to read on this point. Contra N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2007), resurrection was not universally understood by Ancient Jews to convey sarkic reanimation and Greeks and Romans, by contrast, did not believe in exclusively bodiless afterlives.
On Philo’s eschatology, see Ken M. Penner, “Philo’s Eschatology, Personal and Cosmic,” JSJ 50 (2019): 383-402. Penner notes that “Philo’s eschatology is shaped by two convictions: (1) that God is good and can do no evil, and (2) virtue must be developed within people in this life” (384). While reincarnation has achieved consensus among Philonic scholars as Philo’s personal eschatology (396), less attention has been expended on his cosmic eschatology, in which “Philo took up the Greek cyclical view of history expressed perhaps most clearly by Pindar” (396). Philo “combined the cyclical with the linear, in a model best described as a spiral” (396), in which ages come and go in cycles of rising and falling fortune. Philo does foresee a coming “climax of history…triggered by the repentance of apostate Jews, ‘those who disregard the holy laws of justice and piety’…[who will be] ‘shamed into a whole-hearted conversion’” (398). Then, there will be “a gathering of the righteous, made possible by the freeing of captives” (398). This will bring peace to the natural world (Praem. 91), blessings of prosperity, and universal conversion of the nations to Jewish laws (398-400). Philo does not draw much attention to a messiah, though he makes two possible references to a militant messiah in Praem. 95 (“there shall come forth a man…leading his host to war he will subdue great and populous nations”) at the time of the gathering. Crucially, Philo’s eschatology depends on the free choice of embodied souls, particularly Jewish souls, to follow the Law, cultivate virtue, and this triggers the promised blessing. On messianism in Philo, see Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 124-135.
For a compendium of Philo that focuses on his “spirituality” or “mysticism,” see Philo of Alexandria, The Contemplative Life, The Giants, and Selections, trans. David Winston, CWS (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981).
Elledge, Early Jewish Writings and New Testament Interpretation, Essentials of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 23-96 has useful observations aimed at the student level to this effect.
See Adela Yarbro Collins, Paul Transformed: Reception of the Person and Letters of Paul in Antiquity, AYBRL (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 12-50.
Matthew Thiessen does not quite take this view, but I recommend his article “A Buried Pentateuchal Allusion in Mark 12:25,” CBQ 76 (2014): 273-290 for an introduction to the issue.
On divine embodiment in Ancient Judaism and how it spills into Christianity, see, inter alia, Deborah Forger, “Divine Embodiment in Philo of Alexandria,” JSJ 49 (2018): 223-262; Andrei Orlov, Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism (London: Routledge, 2021); idem, The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2021).
Very similar to what Dale Allison hinted at in his latest book on it. Would you say vindication is the baseline for inter-religious dialogue while you would be open to further Christian reflection and interpretation or would you prefer to leave vindication as the most responsible lens for the “resurrection”/Jesus event?
This article helped me place some of my chaotic thoughts together. Paul, was clearly occasionally wrong, speculating, philosophizing, and borrowing ideas from his culture, background, and experience. He was a theological creative; his lack of absolute authority laid bare. My problem with Paul is his authoratative, and arguably egotistical, voice. I think it's best I disregard that aspect of Paul and allow his experience and meditations flow through me, but not carry me away like the waves of the ocean. What you are suggesting here, in essence, is a creative way to think through Jesus and the resurrection, while still being accommodating to other faith traditions. I think this lines up quite well with NDE's and other mysterious phenomena, which are corroborated worldwide. I like it.