A History of “Deathology”

Preface

One of the things that has always disturbed me about Christianity is the apparent arbitrariness of Jesus’ birth. Why was he born then, rather than now—or at any other point in human history? Why there, rather than somewhere else?

Christianity does not, of course, present his birth as accidental. The story of the Virgin Birth gives his conception the appearance of direct divine intention. Yet that story rests upon a significant change in translation. Isaiah 7:14, in the original Hebrew, speaks of an ‘almah—a young woman—not explicitly of a virgin. The Septuagint rendered the word as parthenos, “virgin”, and it was this Greek version that Matthew 1:22–23 applied to Jesus.

The doctrine may therefore appear to establish a divine purpose in the manner of Jesus’ conception, but it does so through the Greek translation rather than through the meaning of the original Hebrew text. In any case, it does not answer the more fundamental questions: why then, and why there?

Why should this supposed act of God have occurred in first-century Judaea? Why at that particular moment in history? Why should a revelation intended for all humanity have been confined initially to one small country, one cultural setting and one brief human life?

The significance of the time and place lies not in any self-evident divine necessity, but in the world into which they placed him. Jesus was born in Roman-occupied Judaea, within a Jewish society already shaped by Greek culture and divided by religious, political and apocalyptic expectation. He responded to the philosophical, religious and political currents of his age. Those forces, acting upon his character and experience, helped make him the man he became: a man prepared to die for the truth as he understood it.

This article considers one consequence of that setting. Jesus’ teaching about death, resurrection and judgement did not emerge outside history. It took shape within the intense arguments of the Jewish and Mediterranean world in which he lived. To understand what he taught, we must first understand the questions his contemporaries were asking and the answers already available to them.

Once Jesus is restored to history, the Church’s claim to absolute moral authority becomes much weaker. His teaching can then be examined, accepted or rejected like that of any other moral thinker. That matters especially for those who have been harmed, controlled or persecuted under Christian authority. No institution should be allowed to turn the words of a first-century teacher into an unquestionable weapon against the conscience of another human being.

Introduction

Between roughly 200 BC and AD 100, the eastern Mediterranean became one of the great formative arenas in the history of belief about death and what might follow it. The century on either side of Jesus was especially crowded with competing answers. Greek theories of the immortal soul, Jewish doctrines of bodily resurrection, apocalyptic expectations of judgement, and sceptical denials of any continued existence stood side by side.

Greek thought was an important influence, but not the only one. Persecution, political upheaval, apocalyptic expectation and the unresolved problem of divine justice all helped force the question. If the righteous suffered and the wicked prospered, could death really be the end? Different traditions answered in different ways.

Christianity arose where these ideas met. It inherited Jewish resurrection, absorbed Greek concepts of the immortal soul, retained apocalyptic judgement and gradually combined several partly incompatible answers into a single doctrinal system. The result has shaped Western thought ever since.

That is the central history of what may be called deathology: mankind’s attempt to explain, organise and make bearable the fact of death.

See the codicil at the end for a selection of Old Testament passages on the brevity of life and the finality of death.

1. The dead remain, but barely

In many early cultures, burial rites imply that the dead were thought to continue in some fashion. Yet survival was often shadowy rather than desirable.

In Homer, the dead descend to Hades as diminished shades. They survive, but not as fulfilled persons enjoying moral reward. Ancient Israel’s Sheol was broadly similar: the grave or underworld, without a developed scheme of heaven for the righteous and hell for the wicked. Earthly life, descendants, honour and communal survival mattered more.

2. Death becomes a philosophical problem

From the sixth century BC onwards, Greek thought greatly expanded the meaning of psychē, or soul. Pythagorean and Orphic traditions developed ideas of transmigration and purification. Plato then supplied the most influential philosophical defence of an immortal soul separable from the body. His dialogues discuss pre-existence, judgement, reward, punishment and reincarnation. Yet such beliefs were not universally accepted; even Plato presents immortality as something requiring argument, and Epicureans later denied personal survival. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

This is crucial: Greek culture did not hand Judaism and Christianity one settled doctrine. It supplied a vocabulary and a range of rival theories.

3. Jewish resurrection emerges

The traditional Israelite expectation was that God rewarded righteousness within history. That became difficult to sustain when faithful Jews were persecuted and killed while their oppressors prospered.

The answer found in Daniel and the Maccabean martyr traditions was not primarily the Platonic immortality of a separable soul. It was resurrection: God would restore the dead to embodied life, vindicate the righteous and judge the wicked.

This development occurred within a deeply Hellenised world. Judaism both resisted and absorbed Greek culture, while political and religious tensions encouraged apocalyptic literature. (Cambridge University Press)

Persian influence is also often proposed, particularly regarding resurrection, judgement and cosmic conflict, although the precise lines of influence remain debated.

4. The great convergence: about 100 BC–AD 100

This was an unusually intense period of debate.

Within Judaism alone, there were several positions:

• Sadducees apparently rejected resurrection.
• Pharisees affirmed resurrection.
• Apocalyptic groups expected imminent judgement and a transformed world.
• Some Jewish writings spoke of the dead awaiting resurrection.
• Others moved towards the survival of souls immediately after death.
• Alexandrian Jewish thinkers, especially Philo, interpreted Judaism through Platonic categories.

Alongside these stood Greek and Roman alternatives:

• Platonic immortality;
• Stoic theories of the soul;
• Epicurean extinction at death;
• mystery cults promising purification or blessedness;
• popular traditions of Hades, ghosts and heroic immortality.

Jesus and Paul therefore spoke within a world in which the question was very much alive. Jesus’ resurrection teaching was recognisably Jewish and apocalyptic. Paul retained bodily resurrection but expressed it in a Greek-speaking intellectual environment. Christianity then carried these ideas into the wider Mediterranean world.

So this period was not merely when people became more interested in death. It was when different intellectual systems collided:

Hebrew embodied life and resurrection; Greek soul-body dualism; apocalyptic judgement; Roman religious practice; and popular hopes for personal survival.

5. Christianity combines incompatible models

Early Christianity inherited bodily resurrection from Judaism but attracted converts accustomed to Greek ideas of an immortal soul. The result was not the replacement of one doctrine by another, but their accumulation.

Hence the developing Christian sequence:

1. the body dies;
2. the soul survives;
3. the soul receives an interim reward or punishment;
4. the body is resurrected at the end of time;
5. soul and body are reunited;
6. final judgement follows.

This solved some problems while creating others. Why resurrect a body if the person is already alive in heaven? Is the soul judged twice? What age and condition does the restored body possess? Christian theology spent centuries reconciling the layers.

The Church Fathers drew heavily on Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism, while attempting to retain resurrection. Later thinkers such as Origen show how closely Christian eschatology could interact with Platonic conceptions. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

6. Medieval systematisation

The medieval Church turned this inherited mixture into an extraordinarily detailed system:

• heaven;
• hell;
• purgatory;
• limbo;
• particular judgement at death;
• final judgement;
• resurrection of the body;
• prayers and masses for the dead;
• graded rewards and punishments.

“Deathology” became an institution. It shaped burial, confession, wills, art, pilgrimage, indulgences and the economic life of the Church. Dante did not invent hell, but in the Inferno he gave it its most memorable imaginative architecture.

7. Reformation and fragmentation

The Reformers rejected purgatory, indulgences and many practices connected with the dead, but retained heaven, hell, judgement and resurrection.

Protestant groups then disagreed about:

• whether the soul remains conscious between death and resurrection;
• whether the wicked suffer eternally or are annihilated;
• whether only the elect are saved;
• whether judgement is immediate or future.

The old system did not disappear. It fractured.

8. Modern competition

From the Enlightenment onwards, biblical criticism, geology, evolutionary theory and materialist accounts of mind weakened confidence in the inherited Christian scheme.

New deathologies appeared:

• Spiritualism: identifiable dead persons communicate through mediums.
• Theosophy: reincarnation, karma and spiritual evolution.
• Psychical research: survival treated as an empirical hypothesis.
• Secular memorial survival: one lives through descendants, influence or culture.
• Existentialism and materialism: death ends the person.
• Modern therapeutic spirituality: the dead “remain with us” in an undefined manner.

Modern society has not abolished deathology. It has privatised and diversified it.

Was Greek influence decisive?

It was decisive for the later Christian idea of the immortal, separable soul, but it would be too simple to attribute Jewish resurrection directly to Plato.

The strongest distinction is:

• Greek model: the true self or soul can survive apart from the body.
• Jewish apocalyptic model: the dead person must be restored to embodied life by God.
• Christian model: eventually tries to retain both.

Codicil