Immortality (13 page)

Until now, we have focused on how the will to immortality has driven progress in the material aspects of civilization, as it is this that enhances our prospects of Staying Alive. The idea of resurrection, however, straddles both the material and the symbolic aspects of human culture: it is deeply embedded in many ancient religious traditions, but it is also a motivating force in a hugely influential narrative about the power of science and material progress. In this chapter we will begin at the beginning: with resurrection’s symbolic importance—including how it has inspired the most powerful religious tradition in history—before going on to look at whether the resurrection story is a plausible one.

It might seem obvious that religion has, at least in part, arisen to satisfy our will to immortality. Certainly, almost all religions have a clear account of how it is that we in fact survive bodily death (“If you believe in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God!” as Martin Luther said). And equally, it might seem obvious that religion and its siblings, ritual and myth, have contributed hugely to the development of civilization. But the story of just how religions function as immortality narratives—and in particular as Resurrection Narratives—is much subtler and more interesting than these first appearances suggest.

The practice of ritual and religion in the broadest sense is as old as our species—which is to say, at least 150,000 years old. Evidence for this is centerd, unsurprisingly, on what people did with their
dead—burying them in particular ways with particular tools or weapons as if they might have a life beyond the grave. Burial sites in Qafzeh, Israel, for example, that are at least 100,000 years old have been found containing shells and deer antlers, and burials from between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago involving the use of the pigment red ocher are widespread in Africa. These finds led the historian of religion Karen Armstrong to conclude that belief systems are “nearly always rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction.” By the time recognizable civilizations emerged, with writing, agriculture and so on, the afterlife had already long been a fundamental part of the human experience.

Rituals are found in all cultures. What makes them distinct from other activities is both that they are highly rule-bound—they must be performed by certain people, at certain times, in certain places, in certain ways—and that their effects are indirect, unseen or symbolic. A man slaughtering and roasting a goat is not performing a ritual; he is just preparing dinner. But if that man first takes that goat to a temple, sings incantations to the animal’s spirit, cuts off the goat’s head in a single blow, then leaves certain choice cuts of meat for “the gods,” he is doing far more than what is required just to fill his belly. This “more” is ritual.

Rituals are the physical manifestation of a particular religion or mythology; they are what make a set of beliefs practical and real. In a worldview in which spirits or gods influence every aspect of daily life, rituals to appease, befriend, charm or fool them are common. Not all rituals are in themselves an expression of a yearning for eternity—some are simply about getting on with the business of life, such as eating a goat without incurring the wrath of the goat god. But there are deep-lying aspects of many rituals and religions that should lead us to think that they are very much driven by the will to immortality.

There are many different approaches to understanding ritualistic behavior, but there are two important themes that stand out. The
first is that ritual is very often about control. Sigmund Freud first pointed out the similarities between the obsessive behaviors involved in religious ceremonies and the behavior of neurotic obsessives. In both cases, actions are performed that make little practical sense but that bolster a belief that everything will be all right—that some danger or bad luck will be avoided and purity or peace achieved. Subsequent research has borne out this link, suggesting that ritual behavior, like that of obsessive-compulsives, is often a response to the same overactive scenario-generating systems in our brains that cause us to imagine danger—and death—around every corner.

Which links into the second important aspect of ritual and religion. Freud wrote that “the gods … must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death.” In part, this is achieved by ritual’s generation of the sense of control. But fully reconciling us to death requires more than this; it requires the possibility of transcending the smallness and frailty of our lives. This is the function of religion at its grandest: enabling mere mortals to attain cosmic significance, to become one with their gods and so to attain immortality.

In early religions, the line between this world and that of gods and spirits was a fine one, and much of their ritual was about intentionally crossing it. Shamans, for example, would seek union with the spirits of animals in order to benefit from their powers. In the mystery cults of ancient Greece and Rome that persisted unchanged for many centuries before being pushed aside by Christianity, participants engaged in complex rites often lasting for days and including all-night feasts, processions, drunkenness, sex, music and dancing, role-plays and secret props all designed to unite the worshipper with the god or gods, affording a transcendent experience that promised wisdom, strength and the key to immortality.

Such rituals offered the humble mortal a chance to partake in the power of their deities and to imbue their actions with the magic of a cosmic drama. Still today, every Sunday, just such an immortality
rite is repeated around the world, when Christians take Holy Communion: many of them believe that they are literally consuming the blood and body of their god, and all consider themselves to be reliving a crucial moment in his story. And the result? The Gospel of John explains: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever” (6:51).

Religions and rituals, with their hymns and incense, do not merely add color to a civilization—their practitioners regard them as the heart and soul of their worldview, that which gives meaning and shape to their lives and deaths. To the extent that they offer the possibility of transcending our ordinary, fleshly selves, many rituals offer a glimpse of eternity and triumph over death. But there is one particular recurring pattern in beliefs worldwide that shows the importance of the Resurrection Narrative in the development of the religious story.

All ancient cultures were keen observers of natural rhythms—they had to be, as those rhythms determined the success of the crops on which their civilizations were completely dependent. They recognized many such patterns, from the daily rising and setting of the sun, to the four-weekly moon cycle, to the turning of the stars and the migrations of the birds. They saw that the turning of those elemental wheels brought about that great miracle of nature: the annual renewal of life.

In contrast to these cycles of nature, the life of an individual man or woman seems starkly linear. We are born, we mature, we grow frail and die. Left to its own devices, a corpse does not rise again—the earth does not sprout a replacement of your fallen comrade in the way that it sprouts new flowers in springtime. Many ancient peoples, such as the Egyptians, were well aware of these two opposing conceptions of time—the cyclical and the linear—and the threat that the latter posed to their prospects of living forever. If our time is linear, they believed, then life for the corpse lies behind it and ahead is only the unending blankness of death. Therefore their most important
rituals, with all their elaborate and expensive trappings, served one goal: to break that linearity and to bind their human fates to the cycles of nature—the cycles that promised life, death and life again.

The pioneering anthropologist Sir James Frazer was the first to suggest that the pattern of death and resurrection was a universal in human mythology, with his hugely successful but still controversial book
The Golden Bough
citing countless examples from around the world. He argued that the story was usually told in the form of a god or king whose own passage through death and back to life was thought to have cleared the way for ordinary mortals. Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife whom we met earlier, is a classic example: he is murdered, only to be put back together and resurrected, thereby opening the way to immortality for his people. His rites were also closely associated with the return of life to the land—they even involved growing plants in mummy-shaped pots, in ways that explicitly associated the cycle of the seasons with the possibility of immortality.

Gods that disappear and reappear, that descend to the land of the dead and reemerge, or that actually die only to rise again appear in many ancient religions. In the Greco-Roman mystery cults mentioned above a key figure was the goddess Demeter, credited with bringing agriculture to the Greek people. She was also thought to disappear into the underworld for a time (in pursuit of her daughter, Persephone, who had been kidnapped by Hades); her cult both served to persuade her to return in order to bring life to the land each spring and by extension offered the possibility of rebirth to the cultist.

The claim of resurrection—that lifeless bodies, on their way to feeding the maggots, can somehow breathe again—is an extravagant one. It requires a great deal of faith in powerful magical intervention to think the processes of death and decay can be undone. It was the role of these path-breaking deities—known in the study of ancient religion as “the dying and rising gods”—to provide this
power; their example broke the stark linearity of human biography, and so opened the way to connecting with the cyclical rhythms of nature and subverting the finality of death.

The worship of such gods frequently involved rites of mourning and reinvigoration. Because of their association with the seasons, these ceremonies were often around the winter solstice, at the end of December, the time of the birth of the new year, and around the time of the spring equinox, when plant life begins to return in the Northern Hemisphere. With these dates in mind, it is now time to return to the most famous dying and rising god of all and his standard-bearer, St. Paul.

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a small group of women—friends and fellow believers—went to the tomb of their charismatic leader to anoint his corpse three days after his martyrdom. But the tomb was empty. As they stood “perplexed,” a man (or possibly two men or possibly angels) appeared to tell them that the one they sought, Jesus of Nazareth, was not to be found among the dead: “He is not here; for he is risen.”

The women rushed to tell the menfolk, who thought their report “idle tales, and they believed them not” (Luke 24:11). But they—in particular “doubting” Thomas—were finally persuaded when Jesus appeared among them and demonstrated that he was not a mere ghost but the full man, risen again to new life: John (20:27) reports that Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” According to Luke (24:42), he even ate before them “broiled fish and honeycomb” in order to demonstrate that he was truly “flesh and blood.”

For Jews of the time, the claim that an actual physical resurrection from the dead had taken place was immensely significant. Alongside established Jewish factions such as the Pharisees, to which Paul belonged, there were many apocalyptic and revolutionary
groups preaching the coming of the Messiah and the end of the world. They were awaiting any sign that the age of liberation and justice was drawing near. That a martyr had risen from the dead was just such a sign: Jesus’s resurrection meant the End Times had begun.

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message was embraced by the most influential interpreter of the Jesus story: St. Paul. The apostle had been busy since his escape from Damascus in a basket. A man of remarkable energy, drive and intellect, he had been spreading the word of Christ throughout Asia Minor and even to mainland Greece, the heartland of the most sophisticated philosophical culture of the day. Wherever he went, he established churches of those he had converted—congregations for whom he remained the spiritual leader. The letters he wrote to those churches were the earliest Christian documents to be considered canonical, written even before the Gospels. They total half of the New Testament and strongly influenced the other half. Christianity as we know it is therefore largely Christianity as it was understood by Paul—remarkable given that he himself never met Christ and had once ruthlessly persecuted those who had. And it was a Christianity based on the promise of resurrection.

Perhaps because Paul had never met him, it was not Jesus’s sayings that guided the apostle’s letters, but rather what Jesus symbolized. For Paul, there were only two really significant events in his Messiah’s life: the death on the cross and the resurrection three days later. These and these alone were proof of the prophecies; they heralded the coming of the End Times and revealed God’s plan for humanity: to raise the faithful from the grave to eternal life.

In focusing on the resurrection, Paul set about transforming the biggest problem of Jesus’s followers into their greatest selling point. The problem, simply, was that Jesus had been executed. At first glance, the killing of its leader should have put an end to this fledgling movement, just as it had for countless other charismatic cults in
the region. It certainly seemed to disqualify Jesus from the role of Messiah, whom pious Jews expected would lead them in battle to reestablish the kingdom of David. And it disqualified him from the role of a hero for the Greeks and Romans, who saw crucifixion as the most disgraceful and unheroic of ends. He was therefore a most unlikely savior, as Paul acknowledged at the beginning of his first letter to the faithful in Corinth when he wrote, “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:22–23).

But Paul believed that if Jesus had risen from the grave, then his humiliating execution was meaningful after all. By focusing on the resurrection, he could claim that Jesus had defeated death, not just for himself, but for all humanity; the crucifixion and resurrection had undone the curse of the Fall that brought death to mankind—“as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Just as with the heroes, deities and kings of many earlier religions, Jesus’s rising again paved the way for us all to rise again. In other words, Paul claimed for Jesus the role of the dying and rising god, a symbolic figure whose life, death and rebirth enabled resurrection for all those who followed him. In Paul’s hands, the historical Jesus story was transformed into a living myth, a narrative with the power of the legend of Osiris, yet set not in a legendary past but within the here and now.