by Stephen Cave
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 pathbreaking 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.
RAISED IN GLORY
IN 30 CE 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.
THIS 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 dea
th 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.
PAUL, 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.
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THE 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.”
