Immortality (14 page)

P
AUL
, the pious Jew, took the doctrine of resurrection directly from his sect, the Pharisees. The Judaism of the earliest books of the Old Testament lacked a clear narrative of personal immortality, focusing almost exclusively on the survival of the tribe of Israel as a whole. But over the centuries, a belief developed that God, in his goodness, would raise the dead to live again in paradise. However, the supposed circumstances of this resurrection were vague, and it was by no means universally accepted within Judaism. Paul’s genius was to use the Jesus story to develop a vivid and satisfying narrative
of how and when this resurrection would take place, then to spread it not only within Judaism but far beyond.

To the sophisticated Greek Gentiles whom he was trying to convert, however, resurrection was an alien and surprising claim. The predominant view in the Greek world was that people survived death as a soul—a purely spiritual entity that left behind the degraded, decaying body for good. Resurrection, by contrast, was an earthy, this-worldly belief centerd entirely on the body. To the Greeks, the idea of reviving their flawed and rotting flesh was risible and appalling. If Christianity was to be anything more than a minor Jewish sect, Paul had to persuade this urbane audience to overcome their revulsion at the very idea of rising from the grave.

He was well aware of his audience’s doubts, as he acknowledged in the New Testament’s most famous passage on immortality—chapter 15 of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Someone will ask, How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” He answers with a poetic image that would be instantly recognizable to the alchemists we considered in
chapter 2
as a description of transformation: a worldly body is like “a bare seed … sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power … For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” In other words, having been raised, we will be transformed so as to be fit for eternal life. Paul then builds to his crescendo: “When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ ”

It is a testament to this powerful passage that it is still read daily, some two thousand years after Paul wrote it—mostly, of course, at funerals to give hope and comfort to the bereaved. Yet many who hear it seem to hear an altogether different message from that which Paul intended. The majority of Christians today have sided with the
Greek belief that we have a soul, that it lives on after our death, and that it goes straight to heaven (or hell). But this is the opposite from what was preached by the early Christians, including both Jesus and Paul. Indeed, it is opposed to the sentiment that we find throughout the Bible: that death is terrible—“the last enemy” as Paul calls it.

If we have souls that go straight to heaven, then we would have no reason to dread death. Being made mortal would hardly have been a punishment for Adam at all. It would have been a matter of little consequence that he and Eve were barred from eating from the Tree of Life in Eden if they could have expected shortly thereafter to float off to heaven. But this is not the Bible’s message: it teaches that death is the end—or rather
was
the end, until the moment when Jesus redeemed Adam and Eve’s sin and so opened the way to resurrection.

The original Christian view of death can clearly be seen by comparing the last moments of Jesus with those of Socrates some four hundred years earlier—as the great theologian Oscar Cullmann did in the 1950s, causing considerable upset at the time. Socrates welcomed his coming execution: as described by Plato in the
Phaedo
, he explained to his followers that death was the liberation of the soul from the body; it was a transition that was to be welcomed. He then drank with serenity the poisonous hemlock and died in peace. In contrast, the Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus was “agitated and distressed” at the prospect of his execution; he told his disciples that he was “deeply grieved” (Mark 14:33–34). He did not want to be alone but continually woke his companions when he thought his enemies were coming. Finally, when hanging on the cross, he cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). This is not the behavior of one who believes death is liberation of the soul; for Jesus, unlike Socrates, it meant dread and extinction.

Indeed, it is only if death ordinarily means dread and extinction that we can make sense of the Jesus story at all. If we all have immortal
souls that by nature live on after our deaths, then there would have been nothing special about Christ subsequently appearing to the apostles. The belief that people live on as spirits that could return to visit the living was common at the time. There would therefore have been nothing new or distinctive in the Christian message if, as the Greeks would naturally interpret it, Jesus had died but his soul had lived on and returned to visit his disciples. Jesus’s resurrection only has the enormous significance that Christians ascribe to it if it would have taken a great miracle for him to have returned. This is the case only if death normally means oblivion. In other words, in its early days Christianity
needed
a belief in death and resurrection
—as opposed to
belief in an immortal soul. That was, in modern marketing parlance, its unique selling point.

What Paul offered with his version of Christianity was the promise of a real, tangible paradise in which we could experience joy as we can on earth. This was possible because of his claim that we would be resurrected with real, physical bodies—these very same bodies we know now, yet improved and made imperishable. This was a significant contrast to the vague and shady spirit existence widely believed in by the Greeks and Romans of his day. Paul then combined this claim that we would rise again with the apocalyptic beliefs also common in the Judaism of his day: the belief that there would very soon be a final reckoning, when good would triumph over evil and the world would be turned into a heaven on earth—at least for believers.

Paul expected the End of Days, as the Old Testament called this event, to come in his lifetime, as he told the congregation in Thessalonica: first the dead will be raised, then “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Here he was following the apocalyptic preaching of Jesus, whose core message was “The kingdom of God is at hand”
(Mark 1:15) and who according to the Gospel of John proclaimed, “The hour is coming in which all who are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth: they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28–29).

Therefore alongside his promise of a joyful immortality (or threat of a dreadful one), Paul introduced an idea of progress—of movement toward a better future—that would also have been new to most of his Gentile audience. And the conclusion of this historical development was imminent: those who wanted an eternity of bliss had better sign up now.

Much of the Christian message would consequently have been novel to the Greco-Roman world, yet it built on ideas they could recognize. As we have seen, the idea of a dying and rising god was already common in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Indeed, the narrative parallels between Christianity and the Greek mystery rituals were so close as to have to be explained away as the devil’s work by early church leaders. As Christianity developed it absorbed other widespread rituals, allowing its followers to partake in the cosmic drama of the Christ story: the two central Christian celebrations are both based on older rites—Christmas on the Roman celebration of the birth of the new sun after the winter solstice, and Easter on aspects of the Jewish Passover festival and on pagan spring festivals of rebirth, from which the name “Easter” comes.

The complete package offered by Christianity was therefore a set of rites that had already stood the test of time, but overlaid with a very concrete promise of imminent eternal life in paradise. We have seen that worldviews succeed by reconciling our will to live forever with the Mortality Paradox, in particular our awareness of death. This Christianity achieved spectacularly well, with enormous consequences for the development of Western civilization.

•  •  •

T
HE
centrality of physical resurrection—both of Jesus and of us all at the end of time—is why it remains dogma throughout the Christian church. The Nicene Creed, the profession of faith written by the first ecumenical council in 325
CE
to unify the church, states, “We look for the resurrection of the dead.” This is recognized as the core expression of Christian belief by Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches and many others. And the ritual, mentioned earlier, of Holy Communion or Eucharist, which practicing Christians perform every Sunday, is, according to the official
Catholic Encyclopedia
, “a pledge of our glorious resurrection and eternal happiness,” following the promise of Jesus: “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:54).

Christianity is here not alone: as we have seen, the belief in physical resurrection came from Jewish tradition, and what is now orthodoxy for Jews—known as Rabbinic Judaism—evolved from the teaching of the Pharisees, the tradition of St. Paul. The most widely accepted of the Jewish statements of faith, that devised by the medieval rabbi Moses Maimonides, ends with a resounding commitment to resurrection: “I believe with perfect faith that there will be a revival of the dead at the time when it shall please the Creator.”

Similarly, the youngest of the Abrahamic religions, Islam, is just as clear, as the Qur’an says: “It is God who gives you life, causes you to die, then gathers you together for the Day of Resurrection, of which there is no doubt” (sura 45, verse 26). There is also no doubt that Muhammad’s vivid descriptions of the very physical pleasures awaiting believers in paradise—especially for those who died in battle—helped to motivate them in spreading their faith. Indeed, one scholar of Islamic history, Nerina Rustomji, has described how this new religion was defined by its graphic images of the afterlife, which was as novel to the pagans of the Arabian Peninsula as it was to the Gentiles to whom Paul preached.

Thus half of the world’s population—some three and a half billion people—
officially
subscribe to the physical resurrection of the bodies they have known in this life. In reality, however, the figure is much smaller. One 2006 survey showed that, although 80 percent of Americans belong to one of the three Abrahamic religions, only just over 30 percent of Americans believe they will be resurrected. This means a majority of believers—totaling half of all Americans—do not believe one of the core dogmas of their faith. Responding to a survey, one Christian said that she associated the idea of resurrection with “bad horror movies,” while Jon Levenson, professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, recently wrote that the historical centrality of resurrection to their faiths “comes as a shock to most Jews and Christians alike.”

The reason for this astonishing gap between doctrine and actual belief is simple: despite its initial atractions, the idea of physical resurrection is a rather problematic one.

A
NYONE
believing that a Resurrection Narrative will satisfy his or her will to immortality must believe that it really is he or she, that selfsame person, who will rise again. Paul did not expect that someone merely
like
him in certain respects would rise from the grave on the Day of Judgment—he expected that
he himself
would. Indeed, only if the people who rise from the grave are really the selfsame people as those who once lived does the judging part of the Day of Judgment make sense: it would be grossly unfair to condemn anyone to hellfire unless that person really was the one who had committed the sins in question. This might sound obvious, but it in fact presents the resurrectionist with a problem.

If Paul believed that
he
would rise again, then he must have believed that he could somehow pull through the ordeal of being killed, buried and then revivified. This is, after all, what happened
in the Jesus story: he is supposed to have pulled through being crucified, entombed and brought back to life. And many millions of people accept this story. Partly, they accept it because it
seems
not hard to imagine: we think it easy enough to picture a person dying and somehow a short time later reawakening to live again. But what we imagine is only the surface—someone becoming pale and cold, then magically warm and rosy-cheeked again. There is, however, much more to death than this.

Experts argue over the exact moment when we cross the boundary from life to death (or whether there is such a definite moment), but we can still sketch the outlines of what is usually involved. First, your heart stops beating, depriving other organs of life-giving oxygen. With no oxygen, your brain stops regulating your body’s functions and stops supporting consciousness, and individual cells throughout your body begin to die. Bacteria in your gut take advantage of the cessation of your immune system and start consuming you from the inside. Before long, although you may still be recognizable from the outside, on the inside, whole parts of your body, including the brain, have lost their complex, delicate structures and have begun to turn to mush. After a week, much of your insides will have putrefied; after a month or so, you are a liquefying, bloated, unrecognizable mass. It might seem easy to imagine a corpse once again becoming rosy-cheeked, but it is much more difficult to imagine how putrefied lungs can breathe again or how a liquefied heart can beat.