The Jewish Annotated New Testament (156 page)

Neither Job nor Ecclesiastes suggests the possibility of an afterlife as a venue for righting earthly wrongs. The first Jewish text to take that step is the
Book of the Watchers
, as scholars call the work preserved as
1 Enoch
1–36. This work, which reached its final form by the end of the third century BCE, was extremely influential during the Second Temple period. In the last portion of the
Book of the Watchers
, the patriarch Enoch, mentioned briefly in Genesis 5.21–24, is taken on a tour of the earth in the company of the archangels. After seeing the fiery abyss in which the watchers of the title of the work, angels who descended to earth to marry women, are imprisoned (
1 En
. 21), Enoch comes to a mountain with four chambers. Three of the chambers are dark, but the fourth is light and has a fountain in its midst (
1 En
. 22). Although difficult, the passage suggests that the chambers house the souls of the dead, with the souls of the wicked consigned to the dark chambers while the souls of the righteous enjoy light and the fountain as they await their final disposition on the Day of Judgment. In at least one of the dark chambers the wicked souls are already undergoing punishment.

A little later in the tour Enoch arrives at the center of the earth where he sees a holy mountain and an accursed valley (
1 En
. 26–27). In keeping with the setting of the
Book of the Watchers
in the period before the flood, the place is not named as Jerusalem. Yet the holy mountain is Mount Zion, on which the Temple later stood, while the valley is the valley of Hinnom (Heb
Gehinnom
; Gk
Gehenna
), where Jerusalemites are said to have sacrificed their children as burnt offerings to the god Moloch (see, e.g., Jer 7.31–32). The angelic guide tells Enoch that at the last judgment, those who have cursed God will be gathered there, cursed forever. Later Jewish as well as Christian texts will detach Gehinnom/Gehenna from its geographical associations and use the designation as a name for hell.

By the end of the third century BCE, then, we have evidence that some Jews imagined the survival of the soul after death as an opportunity to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. It is possible that exposure to Greek culture, with its idea of the immortality of the soul, contributed to these developments, although there is nothing in the
Book of the Watchers
to suggest the strong body/soul dualism found in some strands of Greek thought.

It is difficult to gauge how quickly the new picture of the afterlife became widespread among Jews. It is not prominent among the sectarian writings of the Dead Sea community. There is no hint of it in the Wisdom of ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), written in the early second century BCE, not long after the composition of the
Book of the Watchers
. A little later the book of Daniel promises that at the last judgment

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. (Dan 12.2–3)

This picture differs significantly from that of the
Book of the Watchers
. Reward and punishment are administered only after the last judgment, and in the meantime the dead “sleep.” Furthermore, not everyone will receive reward or punishment: “many” will awake, but not all. Finally, unlike the
Book of the Watchers
, Daniel describes the righteous who enjoy eternal life as like the stars.

Daniel’s picture probably reflects concern for the deaths of some of the “wise”—as the book calls the pious elite to which its author belonged (Dan 11.33–35)—in the course of the Maccabean revolt (167–163 BCE). The martyrs who died for observing Torah in the face of prohibitions by Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king to whose empire Judea belonged, posed the problem of the suffering of the righteous in a new and acute way. They suffered and died not despite their righteousness but because of it. The many who awake are, presumably, the martyrs, the righteous who suffered in this life, and the wicked who flourished; those righteous who lived out the full measure of their days in peace and those wicked who received their just desserts in this world are not in need of postmortem redress.

The expectation of reward after death also plays a central role in the story of the mother and her seven sons martyred by Antiochus, preserved in 2 Maccabees (ch 7), an account written in Greek in the decades following the revolt. Because they refused the king’s order to violate Torah by eating the meat of swine, the sons are tortured and put to death together with their mother, who urges them on in defying the king. A central theme of the words of both mother and sons is the certainty that God will reward them by returning them to their bodies for eternal life (7.23,36). This understanding of the afterlife as involving bodily resurrection stands in contrast to Daniel’s picture of the righteous dead as stars.

Two centuries later, as Josephus testifies, belief in reward and punishment after death had become the dominant view among Jews, and the idea is central to rabbinic Judaism, which emerged in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Mishnah, the earliest document of rabbinic Judaism, completed early in the third century CE, insists that all Jews have a portion in the world to come as long as they do not forfeit it through particular forbidden beliefs and practices (
m. Sanh
. 10.1). This statement indicates both the centrality of the belief in an afterlife and the fact that not all accepted it. But the rabbis also remind Jews that they will be held to account for their deeds: “This world is like an antechamber before the world to come; prepare yourself in the antechamber so that you may enter the banquet hall” (
m. Avot
4.16). The embrace of these ideas about the afterlife by Jews in the late Second Temple period and the early rabbinic era helps to explain why the New Testament takes them for granted. But even as reward and punishment after death became a central Jewish belief, there was a range of views about the precise contours of the afterlife. The differences in the sources discussed earlier over the status of the body in the afterlife, and the relationship between postmortem reward and punishment and the last judgment, were never definitively resolved. A consensus eventually emerged on some points, such as the bodily resurrection of the righteous, but the rabbis do not appear to have been worried about the lack of unanimity on this subject, which had no legal implications.

Early Jews and Christians were clearly fascinated with the specifics of postmortem reward and punishment. In the
Apocalypse of Peter
, a second-century Christian work, the apostle Peter is granted a vision in which he sees the rewards and punishments that begin after the Day of Judgment. The righteous inhabit a garden filled with beautiful, fruit-bearing trees and fragrant spices while the wicked endure terrible punishments, including fire, boiling mud, and wild beasts, as angels of torment supervise. Some of the punishments are appropriate for specific sins. For example, sinners hang by the sinful limb: the tongue for blasphemers, the hair for women who engaged in sexual sins, and the thighs for men who also did so. Such hanging punishments play an important role in Jewish visions of hell as well, and although no surviving Jewish text predates the
Apocalypse of Peter
, the work appears to have adapted the punishments from earlier Jewish works. In the centuries that followed the
Apocalypse of Peter
, the subject of postmortem reward and punishment was taken up by many other apocalyptic works, both Jewish and Christian. Virtually without exception these works give more attention to the punishments of hell than to the rewards of paradise.

The afterlife and the resurrection of the dead become a central aspect of Jewish thought in the rabbinic period and beyond. The opening paragraphs of the
Amidah
, the central prayer in the rabbinic liturgy, repeatedly praise God for bringing the dead back to life, and the passage from Mishnah
Sanhedrin
promising all Israel a portion in the world to come is recited before each chapter of
m. Avot
when it is read in the synagogue on Sabbath afternoons. Maimonides, the great philosopher and legal authority of the twelfth century, included the resurrection of the dead among his thirteen articles of faith. Where the traditional liturgy is in use and the classical texts of the Jewish tradition are studied, the idea remains very much alive.

PAUL AND JUDAISM

Mark D. Nanos

AUTHORSHIP AND DATE

Paul (Saul), author of many important New Testament letters (including Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Philemon [others attributed to him are disputed]) was born to a Jewish family, early in the first century CE. (All dates for Paul’s life are conjectural but fall within the first sixty or so years of the first century CE.) At some point after the early Jesus-following subgroups became active, Paul (who had opposed these groups) had a change of heart about their merit following an experience while traveling toward Damascus to seek to stop these Jews from continuing on their course. From about the mid-40s CE he traveled and founded communities in the eastern Mediterranean area, writing to his congregations and to others. He was arrested by the Roman authorities and taken to Rome; there is no mention in the New Testament of his death, but tradition holds that he was beheaded during one of the persecutions of Christians by the emperor Nero, in the mid-60s. All that we know about Paul is what can be deduced from his letters, to which many features are traditionally added from the account of his ministry in Acts of the Apostles. Acts, however, was written some decades after Paul’s presumed date of death and is a problematic source for a number of reasons, not least that it does not mention either that Paul wrote letters or that he was actively engaged in raising collections from the non-Jews of his communities for the benefit of poor Jewish followers of Jesus in Judea (Rom 15.25–32; 1 Cor 16.1–4; 2 Cor 9.1–15; Gal 1.10; Phil 1.15–19), both of which are otherwise central to what we learn from Paul firsthand.

Few would disagree that Paul was born and raised a Jew, or that he had practiced Judaism according to Pharisaic norms, all of which Paul acknowledges (Rom 9.1–5; 11.1; 2 Cor 11.22; Gal 1.13–16; Phil 3.4–6; cf. Acts 9.21–26). More controversial is whether he continued to practice Judaism
after
his change from being a persecutor of the followers of Jesus to becoming an apostle to the nations (i.e., the Gentiles). Paul has traditionally been portrayed as having converted from Judaism to Christianity, and thus as both the original apostate and a threat to the Jewish people and to Judaism. But that is not the only way to interpret Paul. During his time, Jews who accepted the proclamation that Jesus was the Messiah understood themselves (and were understood by many others) to be practicing Judaism, albeit as representatives of a new subgroup.

In Philippians 3.3–11 (cf. citations in the previous paragraph), Paul argues from his special status as an observant Jew, one who observed Torah “blamelessly” (Phil 3.6), to make the case that even though he has this standing and his Gentile audience does not, he is nevertheless no greater than they in their relationship to God through Jesus. Paul also held that those Jews who did not agree with him about proclaiming Jesus to the Gentiles were in a position of advantage: they (male) had circumcision to signify that they were set apart to observe God’s Torah (“teaching”), and the “words” or “oracles” of God (Rom 3.1–2; 4.1,12; 15.8). These words from Moses and the Prophets not only informed Jews about what righteousness meant for themselves but were also the message they were privileged to announce to the nations, the task Paul understands himself to be undertaking (Rom 1.1–6). Indeed, Paul declared, the Torah overall was “holy and just and good,” even “spiritual” as opposed to “of the flesh” (Rom 7.7–25). In Romans 11.28–29, Paul explained that the Jews who did not agree with him about Jesus’ role were nevertheless “beloved for the sake of the patriarchs” of Israel, and thus will be restored, because “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable” (11.26,30–32).

Paul set out some of these gifts in Rom 9.4–5:

They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship [i.e., the Temple sacrificial system], and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah.

Paul speaks in the present tense of these privileges for Israelites and their continued covenant standing regardless of their current view of Jesus. Paul even informed the non-Jews to whom he wrote the letter that his own ministry among them was in part a vehicle to demonstrate to his fellow Jews his gospel proposition, that Gentiles would be admitted to membership in Abraham’s people by way of Jesus (11.13–14).

INTERPRETATION

For Paul, those of his fellow Jews who did not share his persuasion were not outsiders to God’s family. He saw them as temporarily mistaken, and thus outsiders to the Christ-following remnant—and that by God’s design, but only until the message had begun to go out to the rest of the nations. Thereafter, he believed that his fellow Jews would join him in his convictions about Christ, and in the task of declaring this news to the nations (Rom 9–11). He also saw his role as fulfilling Torah, for he maintained that the promise to Abraham was not just of one nation, but that he would be “the father of many nations” (Gen 12.1–3,17; 22.15–18; Rom 4; Gal 3.6–9).