Paul and Jesus

The Greek idea of immortality of the soul presupposed a dualistic understanding of the human person as consisting of two separate components. The physical body, mortal and perishable, was viewed as a kind of “house” for the true self, which was the inner spirit or soul of the person and would never die. Death was not the end of the individual, but a release of the soul from the restrictions of the body. Plato, for example, likened the mortal physical body to a prison, from which the pure soul achieved release and moved to a more blessed place to continue on its path of spiritual development. The body, with its passions and sensual limitations, was seen as an obstacle to the soul’s highest spiritual development. Detachment from the body was both the ideal and the goal of the higher spiritual life. According to Plato, “the soul of the philosopher greatly despises the body and avoids it and strives to be alone by itself.”⁵ Although one was not permitted to take one’s own life, unless by necessity, nonetheless death was infinitely better than the imprisonment of the body, and philosophy, in essence, was “a training for death.”⁶

In the classic Greek view the soul at death descended into Hades, the mythical realm of the dead, where it was judged, reborn to another human life in a cycle of reincarnation, and ideally, after eons of time, could ascend to the higher celestial realms wholly free from the restrictions, contaminations, and imperfections of the lower physical world. Ironically, given this perception of reality, death, which released the soul, was viewed as “life,” while birth, which imprisoned the soul, was like a kind of “death.”

In the second most famous death in Western history, that of Socrates, Plato relates how his master courageously, even cheerfully, drank the bowl of hemlock, choosing death over exile, all the while admonishing his disciples to weep for themselves, not for him, since his release from the body was at hand and he was departing to a better place. He presents an extended philosophical argument on the nature of the body and the soul as he lies dying, concluding, “it is perfectly certain that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will exist in Hades.”⁷

Cicero’s Republic, a text much closer to the time of Jesus and Paul, provides a concise précis of this philosophical dualism that was so popular in the Greco-Roman world:

Strive on indeed, and be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure that can be pointed out by the finger. (6:24)⁸

Platonic body/soul dualism became the standard belief in Greco-Roman antiquity, even among some Hellenized first-century Jews such as Philo and Josephus.⁹ The great early Christian theologians, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine, considered Plato a kind of honorary “pre-Christian” and reshaped their exposition of the Christian faith almost wholly in Platonic categories.

As a result it is extremely difficult for people today, whether Christian, Jewish, or in any other Western spiritual tradition, to conceive of life after death other than in Platonic terms—the body perishes and the immortal soul passes on to an unseen realm of the spirit.

THE ANCIENT HEBREW VIEW OF DEATH

The Jewish concept of resurrection of the dead, adapted by the Christians and put at the center of their faith, insisted that the dead would live again at the “end of days,” rising up from their graves in newly created bodies. This view of afterlife, unique to Jews and Christians, developed out of a distinctively different understanding of the human person, the nature of death, and the importance of a body. God “formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). The phrase in Hebrew, “living being,” was translated in the King James Version and some older translations as “a living soul,” which is quite misleading since it might imply some parallel to the Greek notion of the immortal soul. The Hebrew word (nefesh) simply means a “breathing creature” and the same phrase is used for the various animals that also have what is called the “breath of life” (Genesis 1:24; 7:15). When a human or an animal dies, the breath of life departs and the body returns to the ground, thus Adam is told, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). So in Hebrew one can speak of a “dead” nefesh (Numbers 9:7). The book of Ecclesiastes, the most philosophical in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, provides the starkest summary:

For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. (3:19–20)