Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Substack wanted me to re-post this entry from four years ago.
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You originally published "Idolatry and Atheism" 4 years ago. Consider sharing it again with your readers. Sharing relevant old posts is a great way to engage your audience who might not have seen them already without having to create new content.
So I did despite the fact that they miscounted: it was only three years ago. No matter, it still reads well and speaks truth. See if you don't agree.
Bill,
Q1: Did the Sadducees, in rejecting the resurrection of the body, equate that rejection with the rejection of personal immortality tout court? My guess is yes.
Q2. Did any of the rabbis hold to a personal immortality along Platonic lines? My guess is no.
Although I too am no biblical scholar, my careful reading of the works of two authorities in the ancient Hebraic understanding of resurrection and the afterlife, John W. Cooper and N. T. Wright, * confirm your “guess[es]” regarding the Sadducees in Q 1 and the rabbis in Q2.
With regard to the Sadducees, our knowledge of whom depends on Josephus, the New Testament, and the rabbis, none of which is a neutral source, Cooper writes:
“The Sadducees denied the resurrection [of the body] and any meaningful life afterward…. When the body dies, the whole person ceases to exist. Perhaps they adopted Hellenistic materialism, as Josephus suggests. However, if they were simply faithful to the Old Testament notion of Sheol, as they claimed, they would be minimal dualists of some sort. For the rephaim [a variety of meanings for nephesh: “vital principle or life-force,” “soul,” “person” or “self” (39)] continue to survive biological death, even if they are comatose and eventually fade away (91).”
Essentially agreeing, Wright states: “Basically, the Sadducees denied resurrection: it seems more than likely that they followed a quite strict interpretation of the Old Testament, and denied a significant future life at all (131).”
As to the rabbis, that is, the Pharisees or those following them**:
“The souls of the departed, deprived of their bodies, were at best only ‘truncated personalities’ who must await the resurrection for their fullest expression…. The Greek notion of immortality was utterly foreign to their Hebrew mentality…. Not the immortality of the soul but the union of soul and body in resurrection, that alone could ultimately express the survival of men’s personality in the life beyond” (D. S. Russell, Between the Testaments, 157, quoted by Cooper 86).
For the rabbis, while the soul, separated from the body, continues to exist in the intermediate state between death and resurrection (the Pharisees liken it to a spirit or angel), it is only a diminished form of the person. This state is not, as in Plato, one of liberation but one of loss (death as an evil); and the regaining of the fullness of self is dependent on an act of God and not on any power of the soul itself, which neither pre-exists the body nor is immortal.
*John W. Cooper, Body Soul and Life Everlasting, Eerdmans (1989) and N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Fortress Press (2003).
**Thus, we exclude someone like the Jewish Hellenistic philosopher Philo.
Vito
The story’s not the essay, for all its merits: the story is “Substack” making “suggestions.”
Is this a “feature” you can disable, or is it just kinder, gentler AI? (h/t Richard Brautigan)
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