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The Church Fathers were influential Christian theologians and writers who established the intellectual and doctrinal foundations of Christianity. The earliest of these, who lived in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE are known as the Apostolic Fathers and are believed to have personally known some of the Twelve Apostles. Many of their writings seem to have been as highly regarded by early Christians as canonical writings produced in the same era that became part of the New Testament. The Church Fathers were tasked with explaining the resurrection of the dead in terms that a Hellenistic world could understand. As noted, paganism readily ascribed to the concept of the soul’s immortality. Pagans who converted to Christianity transported this belief into the setting of their newly adopted religion, thereby establishing an opposition within the faith between resurrection and immortality. Opposition to Christianity by contemporary Jews continued. The central message of the Epistle of Barnabas is that the writings comprising the Hebrew Bible (what would become the Old Testament of the Christian Bible) were, from even their times of authorship, written for use by Christians rather than the Israelites and, by extension, the Jews. Letter of Barnabas 4:6-8 describes a Christian interpretation of scripture that provoked the animosity of Jews:
Ye ought therefore to understand. Moreover, I ask you this one thing besides, as being one of yourselves and loving you all in particular more than my own soul, to give heed to yourselves now, and not to liken yourselves to certain persons who pile up sin upon sin, saying that our covenant remains to them also. Ours it is; but they lost it in this way for ever, when Moses had just received it. For the scripture saith; "And Moses was in the mountain fasting forty days and forty nights, and he received the covenant from the Lord, even tablets of stone written with the finger of the hand of the Lord." But they lost it by turning unto idols. For thus saith the Lord, "Moses, Moses, come down quickly; for thy people whom thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt hath done unlawfully." And Moses understood and threw the two tables from his hands; and their covenant was broken in pieces, that the covenant of the beloved Jesus might be sealed unto our hearts in the hope which springeth from faith in Him.
Hellenistic era Jews of the diaspora, in contrast to apocalyptic and millenarian Jews who remained in Israel, mostly dismissed beliefs in the resurrection despite its selective presence in the Book of Daniel. They had synthesized Jewish and Greek philosophical ideas, much as Christianity had begun to synthesize Christian and Greek conceptions of the afterlife. The rational and satisfying idea that everyone possessed an immortal soul did not require bodily or spiritual resurrection.
The author cites three factors that contributed to a rising interest in resurrection among the Christian polemicists. First, it was central to the faith, however it may have occurred or however it was interpreted. Second, the New Testament, despite its variety of voices and viewpoints, is not particularly enlightening about the precise nature of the resurrection. Third, as previously noted, the apparent delay in Christ’s return required an explanation that would not diminish aspirations to become a Christian and maintained belief in a moral universe wherein virtue is rewarded, and vice is punished. Widespread belief in the immortality of the soul in Late Antiquity was only questioned by the Stoics, Cynics, and Epicureans. The Church Fathers, to defend the special salvation that the cross alone offers to the faithful, were determined to defeat (like the Stoics, Cynics, and Epicureans) the pervasive belief in universal immortality. If immortality was a birthright, then none would stand in need of salvation. The church needed to provide a cogent and comprehensible doctrine that appealed to sophisticated and philosophically minded potential pagan converts.
Descriptions of the resurrection of Jesus not contained in other writings are exclusively provided by the noncanonical Gospel of Peter. 10:35-45 of this work synthesizes other Gospel accounts:
But in the night in which the Lord's day dawned, when the soldiers were safeguarding it two by two in every watch, there was a loud voice in heaven; and they saw that the heavens were opened and that two males who had much radiance had come down from there and come near the sepulcher. But that stone which had been thrust against the door, having rolled by itself, went a distance off the side; and the sepulcher opened, and both the young men entered. And so those soldiers, having seen, awakened the centurion and the elders (for they too were present, safeguarding). And while they were relating what they had seen, again they see three males who have come out from the sepulcher, with the two supporting the other one, and a cross following them, and the head of the two reaching unto heaven, but that of the one being led out by a hand by them going beyond the heavens. And they were hearing a voice from the heavens saying, 'Have you made proclamation to the fallen-asleep?' And an obeisance was heard from the cross, 'Yes.' And so those people were seeking a common perspective to go off and make these things clear to Pilate; and while they were still considering it through, there appear again the opened heavens and a certain man having come down and entered into the burial place. Having seen these things, those around the centurion hastened at night before Pilate (having left the sepulcher which they were safeguarding) and described all the things that they indeed had seen, agonizing greatly and saying: 'Truly he was God's Son.'
In this narrative the cross itself speaks, a personification intended to remove doubts about the ability of Jesus to save others when he had died an ignominious and painful death. The Gospel of Peter offsets the scandal of the cross within the context of its message of exaltation and salvation. Discussions of resurrection are seldom the focus of the writings of the earliest of the Church Fathers, but this topic emerged from the periphery to the extent that by the 3rd and 4th centuries CE the fathers devoted entire tractates to it. What had begun as perceived liability, at least in the eyes of the pagans, but this irritant became transformed into a pearl of great price as the irritant gained luster through the application of many layers of theological reflection.
During Christianity’s earliest period beliefs about the end of the world were an important component of proselytization. The early fathers differed in opinion about the sequence of end times events. Polycarp, Clement, and Barnabas believed that every risen soul will be judged. Didache, Papias, and Ignatius believed that only those who had been successfully absolved from judgement would be raised from the dead. The “orthodox” tradition displays a trend toward a physical and bodily resurrection, favoring the Gospels as a source rather than the more spiritualized writings of Paul. Conversely, sectarian Christians moved further away from belief in bodily resurrection, characteristically emphasizing the Pauline viewpoint. Views on the nature of resurrection served as a pretext for accusations of heresy or as confirmation of doctrinal purity.
A formidable early challenger to proto-orthodox conceptions of resurrection was Docetism, a term based on the Koinē Greek words dokeĩn, meaning "to seem," and dókēsis, meaning "apparition, phantom." Docetism claimed that Jesus, being divine, only “seemed” to suffer and die, so Christ’s divine nature was never compromised. This face-saving doctrine was also characteristic of Gnosticism. A body that only seemed to have ignominiously died only seemed to have been resurrected, so a risen Christ was merely a revelation of his true divinity. In Gnosticism, as in the Gospel of Thomas, salvation was obtained through knowledge of Christ’s divinity and that he ascended to heaven in a purified, spiritual form. Both Docetism and Gnosticism both served to connect the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus with the mainstream of Hellenistic views on the nature of immortality.
Scholarly interest in Gnosticism revived after the 1947 discovery in Egypt of the Nag Hammadi collection of Coptic codices, including the Gospel of Thomas (which displays both Gnostic and orthodox characteristics). A recurring theme among the various Gnostic sects is that the material world is highly flawed and ruled over by the Jewish supreme god YAHWEH, a malevolent deity who is not the Supreme God, but rather a lower deity. The greater beneficent God/essence is only knowable through spiritual illumination. The cosmogonies (models of the Universe) may vary from group to group, but Gnostics essentially all held that complex structures of Light, Being, and Deities were the great Truth that was hidden or obscured by the more standard scriptures of 1st century CE Judaism and Christianity. “Sethian” Gnosticism is featured in several of the Nag Hammad manuscripts, a syncretic mix of Jewish and Christian theology which claimed that Adam and Eve’s third son Seth was a divine figure who returned as the Messiah in the form of Jesus Christ.
Seth was part of a trinity which included the “Great Invisible Spirit” (the Father), “Barbelo” (a Mother), and the “Self-Created One” (a Son, Seth), all ruling from a divine realm called the “Pleroma. The Father breathed life into Adam, the Mother was manifested as Eve, and Seth was the Logos/Christ, the fundamental principle of being that manifested as the human race. Documents promoting Valentianism (named after the Gnostic theologian Valentinus) were also discovered at Nag Hammadi. They are the work of a moderate branch of Gnosticism that believed they had access to a higher, more exclusive revelation. Current scholarship notes the importance of Valentinian doctrine to the later rise of anthropocentric modes of Christian spirituality. These influenced every era of church history after the emergence of its prototype, Pelagianism.
Contemporary scholars question whether the term “Gnosticism” is useful since it describes such a heterogenous group of doctrines. It was used by the Church Fathers as a label for an assortment of heresies. A general definition, however, can be provided. Gnostics believe that there exists a specific, divinely revealed saving knowledge (gnosis) which, when received and understood, elevates the Gnostic above the common run of humanity. Most tended to depreciate the world as being corrupt. In the manner of Plato and Philo, matter was seen as feminine and irredeemable. Attributing genders to phenomena, among Gnostics, conforms to a broad mythological pattern, despite the existence among some groups of female leaders. The Church Fathers noted female leaders as part of their overall condemnation of these sects. As noted in a previous chapter, the Gospel of Thomas elevated the status of women by ritually transforming them into males, the primordial gender. “Orthodox” Christianity, like Gnosticism, also derided women as well as the Old Testament. Sin and death was attributed to Eve, rather than to Adam. The Epistle of Barnabas 12:5 is an early example of this bias:
Again Moses makes a representation of Jesus, showing that he must suffer, and shall himself give life, though they will believe that he has been put to death, by the sign given when Israel was falling (for the Lord made every serpent bite them, and they were perishing, for the fall took place in Eve through the serpent), in order to convince them that they will be delivered over to the affliction of death because of their transgression.
Sin, and by extension death, is equated with sexuality, a concept which existed prior to Augustine’s extensive treatment of this subject. Forgiveness for this pervasive sin was only possible through the sacraments of the church. Similarly, Jews came to be increasingly vilified and were regarded as the antithesis of the Gospel message. Jewish disinterest in asceticism reinforced these accusations. The advent of the doctrine of Original Sin reinforced the importance of Christ’s atoning sacrifice and the rites and sacraments of the church required for deliverance from the fatal consequence of Eve’s transgression. This construct facilitated the mission of the evolving church as expectations of Christ’s immediate return began to diminish. To be delivered, a person must become a Christian. Resurrection became directly connected with Plato’s views about the immortality of the soul. Mary Magdalene was demoted in the post-Gospel era of the early church, particularly in the wake of her conjectured identification with the “woman taken in adultery.” The status of Peter was enhanced since he was granted the “keys to the kingdom” in the Gospel of Matthew, and because he was the first apostle to encounter a resurrected Jesus. Ironically, the initial encounter Jesus experienced after his resurrection was with a group of females. The Apostolic tradition, bedrock of Catholic doctrine, was derived exclusively from the writings of males (rather than the relatively less communicative females) who had known, followed, and personally witnessed a resurrected Christ. Women, like Jews, were marginalized. Forgiveness and affirmation for Eve and other women was more freely extended by Gnostics than from the developing mainstream of Christianity.
Despite its increasing synthesis with Platonic conceptions of universal immortality, the orthodox wing of the early church emphasized the physicality of Christ’s resurrection. Jesus had the unique distinction of having risen from the tomb bodily, and not as an ethereal shade or spirit. The requirement that Christians must imitate Christ tended to exclude women from the transmission of the traditions of the church because of their physical differences. Others believed that Christianity transcended sexuality. Paul’s assertion in Galatians 3:28-29 describes an ideal that would be realized after the second coming of Christ, but was far from evident the Hellenistic era:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Distinctions that marked society were not easily transcended, but one strategy for salvation that cut across every class, belief system, or gender identity was the practice of asceticism. Asceticism originally derived from the dietary restrictions and exercise regimens adopted by Greek athletes. Early Christian writings frequently compared martyrdom and asceticism to athletic contests. A prominent example of this can be found in Paul’s parting words to his apprentice, Second Timothy 4:6-8:
For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.
Martyrs who died in the course of public spectacles were describes as entering an agōn, or athletic contest from which the English word agony is derived. For early Christians, agōn could refer to a variety of practices including dietary restrictions, fasting, celibacy, or monasticism. The Gospel of Thomas commends asceticism as a prelude to divine revelation. Pachomius, a founder of Egyptian Christian monasticism, asserted that asceticism and monaticism were required for the attainment of angelic status prior to death. Section 98-99 of “Pseudo-Athanasius on Virginity” proclaims the benefits of abstemiouness:
Fasting, along with compassion, saves from death, for the Ninevites were able by the remedy of fasting to turn aside the wrath that had been decreed against them. It is beautiful, therefore, to fast, and for the body to brought into subjection and become enslaved to the soul. For if the flesh and spirit are opposed to one another in a struggle, why do you give opportunity to the flesh through foods and drinks to strengthen itself against the soul? If we do not give it pleasures like these, it dies, and it does not strengthen itself against the spirit, especially in young men and women. For just as a fire, when wood and straw are given to it for food, gives a lot of heat, but, when you withhold these things, goes out quickly, so too if lots of food and the warmth of wine are not given to a human being, desire is extinguished in him, and little by little it dies. But if these things are in abundance, that person is inflammed and resists love for God. Therefore, it is beautiful to fast, for it is not the case that if we eat, we flourish, nor is it the case that if we do not eat, we are diminished.
Clement of Rome, also known as Pope Clement the First, was a bishop of Rome in the late first century CE. He is regarded as the first of the Apostolic Fathers of the Church. First Clement is a letter from Rome to Corinth which is loosely attributed to Clement of Rome. First Clement 36:1-2 applies the ambiguous phrase “immortal knowledge” to describe the nature of resurrection:
This is the way, dearly beloved, wherein we found our salvation, even Jesus Christ the High priest of our offerings, the Guardian and Helper of our weakness. Through Him let us look steadfastly unto the heights of the heavens; through Him we behold as in a mirror His faultless and most excellent visage; through Him the eyes of our hearts were opened; through Him our foolish and darkened mind springeth up unto the light; through Him the Master willed that we should taste of the immortal knowledge Who being the brightness of His majesty is so much greater than angels, as He hath inherited a more excellent name.
The nature of the resurrection body is addressed in Second Clement 9:1-5:
And let not any one of you say that this flesh is not judged neither riseth again. Understand ye. In what were ye saved? In what did ye recover your sight? if ye were not in this flesh. We ought therefore to guard the flesh as a temple of God: for in like manner as ye were called in the flesh, ye shall come also in the flesh. If Christ the Lord who saved us, being first spirit, then became flesh, and so called us, in like manner also shall we in this flesh receive our reward.
It is probable that First and Second Clement were written by different authors but taken together they proclaim the importance of the church and justify apostolic succession. Second Clement asserts that Christians, like Christ, acheive salvation in the flesh. Many in the early church denied that the resurrection was fleshly or literal, particularly the Gnostics, but also those who developed the pneumatology of Paul into Docetism.
Ignatius of Antioch, together with Clement of Rome and Polycarp, is considered one of the three most important of the Fathers of the Church. His letters address the difficult choice between martyrdom and apostacy that confronted aspiring believers. Chapter 4 of the Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans alludes to Luke’s account of the “falling asleep” of the first Christian martyr, Stephen:
I write to the Churches, and impress on them all, that I shall willingly die for God, unless you hinder me. I beseech of you not to show an unseasonable good-will towards me. Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body; so that when I have fallen asleep, I may be no trouble to any one. Then shall I truly be a disciple of Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my body. Entreat Christ for me, that by these instruments I may be found a sacrifice [to God]. I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles; I am but a condemned man: they were free, while I am, even until now, a servant. But when I suffer, I shall be the freed-man of Jesus, and shall rise again emancipated in Him. And now, being a prisoner, I learn not to desire anything worldly or vain.
Complete destruction of the flesh presents no barrier to a miraculous resurrection. Ignatius describes himself as the “wheat of God,” a reference to Christ’s description of himself found in John 6:35:
And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.
In Luke 22:19, Mark 14:22, and Matthew 26:26 the bread consumed during the Lord’s Supper is described as the literal flesh of Jesus, the basis for the doctrine of transubstantiation. Here is Matthew 26:26:
And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
Ignatius implies that martyrs are ground into flour prior to their transformation into a similarly material manifestation of the body of Christ, consumed like the bread of the Eucharist, but promising salvation to others. The first and second chapters of the Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans by Ignatius emphasizes the physical suffering, physical death, and physical resurrection of a crucified Jesus:
Now, He suffered all these things for our sakes, that we might be saved. And He suffered truly, even as also He truly raised up Himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that He only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be Christians. And as they believe, so shall it happen unto them, when they shall be divested of their bodies, and be mere evil spirits. For I know that after His resurrection also He was still possessed of flesh, and I believe that He is so now. When, for instance, He came to those who were with Peter, He said to them, Lay hold, handle Me, and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit. And immediately they touched Him, and believed, being convinced both by His flesh and spirit. For this cause also they despised death and were found its conquerors. And after his resurrection He ate and drank with them, as being possessed of flesh, although spiritually He was united to the Father.
Ignatius incorporated Greek conceptions of the immortality of the soul by asserting that those who refuse to believe in a physical resurrection will enter the afterlife in a non-physical form, as evil spirits comparable to the immaterial Greco-Roman pagan gods. The same fate is promised for Gnostics, who similarly denied the physical manifestation of Christ. Ignatius wrote about martyrdom before the term “martyr” gained currency, but his sympathy for those who are persecuted for their beliefs is evident in the 11th chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians, a Christian community that was experiencing persecution:
The last times have come upon us. Let us therefore be of a reverent spirit, and fear the longsuffering of God, that it tends not to our condemnation. For let us either stand in awe of the wrath to come or show regard for the grace which is at present displayed — one of two things. Only in one way or another let us be found in Christ Jesus unto the true life. Apart from Him, let nothing attract you, for whom I bear about these bonds, these spiritual jewels, by which may I arise through your prayers, of which I entreat I may always be a partaker, that I may be found in the lot of the Christians of Ephesus, who have always been of the same mind with the apostles through the power of Jesus Christ.
Valentinus promoted opposing beliefs about the physicality not only of a resurrected Jesus, but of the Jesus who conducted his ministry in the world. He was the best known and most successful early Christian Gnostic theologian. He founded his school in Rome. According to Tertullian, Valentinus was a candidate for bishop but started his own group when another was chosen. His authority rested on his claim that he was a student of one of Paul’s students. His Alexandria origin thoroughly exposed him to Neoplatonist doctrine, but he employed Christian imagery in a Gnostic manner in his writings. The Epistles of Paul, presumed teacher of his teacher, could easily be subjected to a “spiritualized” interpretation. The psyche (soul) of Plato was antithetical to emerging Christian doctrine, but the pneuma (spirit) of Paul permitted the infusion of God’s prophetic spirit into Plato’s psyche, an augmented version of the soul retrofitted for Christian use. Valentinus can be regarded as a Hellenized interpreter of Paul whose writings express elaborate cosmological myths that are characteristic of Gnostic and Platonist prescriptions for salvation. Fragment 4 of his lost, but reconstructed writings is representative of this mystical, nonmaterialistic genre:
From the beginning you are immortal and the children of eternal life. You wished to distribute death amongst yourselves to consume it and annihilate it, and so that death might die in and through you. For when you dissolve the world and are not yourselves dissolved, you rule over creation and over the whole of corruption.
The author references Elaine Pagels (author of the 1979 work “The Gnostic Gospels”) and William Frend (author of the 1954 work “The Gnostic Sects and the Roman Empire”) as sources that cite “orthodox” early Christian accusations that Gnostics dismissed the idea of physical resurrection primarily to avoid martyrdom. In truth, neither the orthodox nor its opposition were as eager to suffer a martyr’s death as Ignatius was.
Gnostic expositor Basilides, companion of and successor to Valentinus, explicitly evoked Platonism to interpret resurrection. William Frend describes Basilides:
His is the earliest attempt by a Christian to reconcile the Jewish requirement of righteous suffering as an atoning sacrifice with the Platonic view of providence.
Plato had completely detached the goodness of God from the evil that is evident in the material world. In Book II of the Republic, he wrote:
The poet will only be allowed to say that the wicked were miserable because they needed chastisement, and the punishment of heaven did them good. If our commonwealth is to be well-ordered, we must fight to the last against any member of it being suffered to speak of the divine, which is good, being responsible for evil. Neither young nor old must listen to such tales, in prose or verse.
Basilides questioned the value of martyrdom. Like Valentinus, he believed that humanity was originally immortal. Death is the fruit of the demiurge who created the material world and imprisoned immortal souls in matter. Saving knowledge, gnosis, informs believers that they exist beyond the prison of this world, divorced from flesh and the contaminants that flesh is subject to. Salvation is the abolition of death, rather than the acceptance of death through martyrdom. The orthodox position committed adherents to a high degree of commitment and to well-defined communal boundaries. Gnostics, as cultural pluralists, acknowledged every variety of intellectual meditation.
The Gospel of Philip is a second-century text that is part of the Nag Hammadi collection. Sections 56:20 through 57:10 proclaims that both the orthodox (physical) and Gnostic (spiritual) views on resurrection are deficient:
Some are afraid that they'll arise naked. So they want to arise in the flesh, and they don't know that those who wear the flesh are naked. Those... to strip themselves naked are not naked. "Flesh and blood won't inherit God's kingdom." What is it that won't inherit? That which is on us. But what is it, too, that will inherit? It is Jesus' flesh and blood. Because of this, he said, "Whoever doesn't eat my flesh and drink my blood doesn't have life in them." What's his flesh? It's the Word, and his blood is the Holy Spirit. Whoever has received these have food, drink, and clothing. So I myself disagree with the others who say, "It won't arise." Both sides are wrong.
Sections 57:28 through 58:9 proclaim that Jesus can appear to his disciples in a variety of forms:
Jesus took all of them by stealth, because he didn't appear as he was, but he appeared as they'd be able to see him. He appeared to them in all these ways: he appeared to the great as great. He appeared to the small as small. He appeared to the angels as an angel, and to humans as a human. So his Word hid itself from everyone. Some did see him, thinking they were seeing themselves. But when he appeared to his disciples in glory on the mountain, he wasn't small. He became great, but he made the disciples great too so that they would be able to see him as great.
Comprehending Jesus as a human being underscores one’s humanity. Comprehending Jesus as an angel confirms one’s own transformation into an angel. The Gospel of Philip recognizes the validity of both positions, but in proper Gnostic manner advises readers to completely transcend their physical nature. The Testimony of Truth, another Gnostic text discovered at Nag Hammadi, argues against physical martyrdom more directly. Sections 31:22 through 32:8 state:
The foolish - thinking in their heart that if they confess, "We are Christians," in word only but not with power, while giving themselves over to ignorance, to a human death, not knowing where they are going nor who Christ is, thinking that they will live, when they are really in error - hasten towards the principalities and authorities. They fall into their clutches because of the ignorance that is in them.
Sections 33:25 through 34:26 of the Testimony of Truth describe the ineffectiveness and illusory nature of physical martyrdom, no matter how noble the orthodox faction believes it to be:
But when they are "perfected" with a martyr's death, this is the thought that they have within them: "If we deliver ourselves over to death for the sake of the Name we will be saved." These matters are not settled in this way. But through the agency of the wandering stars they say they have "completed" their futile "course…” But these… they have delivered themselves… but they resemble them. They do not have the word which gives life.
Accounts of orthodox martyrdoms are interspersed with accusations of the relative weakness of the faith of Gnostic heretics. Cohesiveness and group identity was enhanced within the orthodox faction through shared persecution, torture, suffering, and death.
Gnostics were not convinced that shared persecution, torture, suffering, and death were not prerequisite to becoming a committed Christian. Gnosis, meaning knowledge, could be extracted from Gospel writings allegorically, and the inclusivist approach of Gnosticism motivated the Gnostics of Nag Hammadi to search for parallels to their beliefs in other religious systems like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, classical Greco-Roman, and the mystery religions derived from the popular beliefs of various ancient cultures. As these were all equally valid when allegorically interpreted, no single system merited the death of a believer. Sections 79:11-21 of the Apocalypse of Peter is another criticism of what grew to become the prevailing, orthodox view about the martyrdom of Jesus as a model to be emulated:
These are the ones who oppress their brothers, saying to them, "Through this our God has pity, since salvation comes to us through this," not knowing the punishment of those who are made glad by those who have done this thing to the little ones whom they saw, and whom they took prisoner.
Gnostics who followed Valentinus adopted current Christian terminology to describe the nature of resurrection but deployed it to advocate the Platonic conception of the immortality of the soul, a spiritual, as opposed to a physical phenomenon. The Treatise on Resurrection is another Gnostic document discovered at Nag Hammadi. It is also referred to as "The Letter to Rheginus" because it is written as a response to questions about the resurrection posed by Rheginus, who may have been an “orthodox” Christian. Sections 45:23-46 states:
Then, indeed, as the Apostle said, "We suffered with him, and we arose with him, and we went to heaven with him". Now if we are manifest in this world wearing him, we are that one’s beams, and we are embraced by him until our setting, that is to say, our death in this life. We are drawn to heaven by him, like beams by the sun, not being restrained by anything. This is the spiritual resurrection which swallows up the psychic in the same way as the fleshly.
This statement by Rheginus can be superficially regarded as a precursor to contemporary theories that describie the unity of the body and the soul, but is actually an attempt to synthesize the immiscible concepts of physical resurrection with Plato's immortality of the soul. Rheginus regards physical resurrection as an allegory, much as Gnostics believed that the physical presence of Jesus in the world was merely an illusion. For proper Gnostics like Rheginus, ascension to heaven occurs before the death of the body through the acquisition of transformative knowledge, or gnosis. According to Elaine Pagels, Gnostics interpreted scripture in a manner that gave priority to texts that best supported their agenda. Biblical persons were divided into three classes. The least of these three were the hylics (“hyle” being the Greek term for “matter”), who could only conceive of flesh in a materialistic way. An intermediate class, the psychics (“psyche” being the Greek term for “soul”) had partially escaped their fixation with the material world. The topmost class was comprised of the pneumatics, or pneumatikoi (“pneuma” being the Greek term for “spirit”) who were fully aware of the true meaning of the Gospels. Those who did not interpret scripture in a purely spiritual sense were denied its fullest rewards. In the afterlife, punishment administered after resurrection (whatever the nature of this resurrection might be) was fitted to the crimes one may have committed. Those whose beliefs fell short of the Gnostic ideal would accordingly suffer because of their imperfect and incomplete grasp of the knowledge that leads to complete salvation.
The pneumatikoi could, therefore, dismiss all doctrinal pronouncements of the mainstream, orthodox leaders of early Christianity as irrelevant. They cooperated with leadership only to preserve unity among the brethren. Whatever was decreed by the orthodox Fathers of the Church, Gnostics were able to reinterpret it in a way that conformed to their distinctive (and soon to branded as heretical) theological tendencies. They believed that Gnostic doctrine was advanced, and superior to that of the common run of flesh-obsessed Christians. These spiritually minded but subversive elitists, despite their ostensible allegiance to the Apostolic Fathers, would not be suffered to remain within the Christian fold forever. Polycarp, Church Father and one of the earliest Christian martyrs, roundly condemns the pneumatikoi in his Epistle to the Philippians, 7:1:
For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is antichrist; and whosoever does not confess the testimony of the cross, is of the devil; and whosoever perverts the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts and says that there is neither a resurrection nor a judgment, he is the first-born of Satan.
Church Fathers like Polycarp who ultimately established official church doctrine believed that martyrdom was a good which ought to be encouraged, and that those who suffered martyrdom would be redeemed, body and soul, at the final judgement. In addition to Platonic immortality of the soul as opposed to Jewish apocalyptic bodily resurrection, gender played a role in discussions about the resurrection. In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a 2nd century Coptic text, Jesus teaches Mary Magdalene, in a vision, about mystical knowledge and the interconnectedness of all things. This visionary experience stands in opposition to the Apostolic tradition of faith and teaching. Equally unorthodox is Mary’s replacement of Jesus after his ascension as the source of spiritual comfort and knowledge, a role she announced in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene 5:4-10:
Then Mary stood up. She greeted them all, addressing her brothers and sisters, "Do not weep and be distressed nor let your hearts be irresolute. For his grace will be with you all and will shelter you. Rather we should praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us true Human beings." When Mary had said these things, she turned their heart toward the Good, and they began to debate about the words of the Savior.
The ”Good” referred to in this passage appears to be both Neoplatonic and descriptive of inner spiritual nature. In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene 10:1-4, Andrew questions Mary’s credentials as a spiritual leader:
Andrew responded, addressing the brothers and sisters, "Say what you will about the things she has said, but I do not believe that the Savior said these things, for indeed these teachings are strange ideas." Peter responded, bringing up similar concerns. He questioned them about the Savior: "Did he, then, speak with a woman in private without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?"
Levi defends Mary in 10:9-10:
“For if the Savior made her worthy, who are you then for your part to reject her? Assuredly the Savior's knowledge of her is completely reliable. That is why he loved her more than us."
The special status of Mary Magdalene is evident in other Gnostic writings. Section 59 of the Gospel of Philip, a Valentinian anthology, describes Mary as the “partner” of Jesus:
The perfect are conceived and begotten through a kiss. Because of this we kiss each other too, conceiving from the grace within each other. There were three who traveled with the Lord all the time: His mother Mary, her sister, and Magdalene, who is called his companion; because Mary is his sister, his mother, and his partner.
The end of the 63rd and beginning of the 64th sections clarify this relationship:
The Wisdom who is called "the barren" is the Mother of the angels and the companion of the [...Mary] Magdalene [...loved her] more than the disciples [...he] kissed her on her [...many] times. The rest of [...] they said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior said to them in reply, "Why don't I love you like her? When a person who's blind and one who sees are both in the dark, they're no different from one another. When the light comes, the one who sees will see the light, and the one who's blind will remain in the dark."
This description is deliberately provocative, a parallel to the close relationship between Jesus and Peter, or between Jesus and John. Possible sexual implications have been exploited by irreligious writers of fiction, but the Gospel of Philip, like other Gnostic writings, dismisses all things fleshly, promoting instead the purely spiritual attainments of Mary Magdalene. In another text from Nag Hammadi, the Dialogue of the Savior, Jesus guides Judas, Mary, and Matthew on a grand tour of heaven and earth to obtain a complete understanding of his teachings. The orthodox definition of Apostolic succession as an exclusively male prerogative is again countered by an exchange between Jesus and Mary after the conclusion of this tour:
Mary said, "Tell me, Lord, why I have come to this place to profit or to forfeit." The Lord said, "You make clear the abundance of the revealer!"
The orthodox argument that physical resurrection in a second-class female body is unthinkable was irrelevant for the Gnostics. While they, too, regarded living women to be inferior to men, knowledge, could transform weaker vessels into a form better fitted for spiritual resurrection. Females could become males, but not vice versa. This transformation, as noted, created a level of gender equality in Gnosticism that was absent from the emerging Christian mainstream..
Gnostics may have appeared to be reluctant to die for the faith, but the mainstream church promoted and defended martyrdom. William Frend’s 1945 book “Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church” cites the reputation of the endurance of Christian martyrs as a significant contribution to the growth of the church. Martyrs inspired succeeding generations of Christians to practice asceticism and to undertake perilous missionary journeys to distant lands. Their examples empowered lay persons and monks to strive to win the world for Christianity.
The Martyrdom of Perpetua is named after a woman who, along with several other aspiring Christians, were martyred in Carthage in 203 CE. Although the identity of whomever provided the narrative framework is unknown, sections 3-10 are believed to derive from Perpetua's prison diary, an early example of Christian writings produced by a female. Perpetua was a young, well-born married woman who was arrested with two other prisoners, her brother, her baby, and her pregnant slave Felicitas. They were condemned to be torn apart by wild beasts, but rather than being forced to confront a lion or a bear, Perpetua and Felicitas were to battle with a mad cow. In one of Perpetua’s three visions she had in prison, she is forced to battle against a human warrior. In the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 114, Jesus tells Mary that she must become a man to enter the kingdom of heaven:
Simon Peter says to them: "Let Mary go out from our midst, for women are not worthy of life!" Jesus says: "See, I will draw her so as to make her male so that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who has become male will enter the Kingdom of heaven."
Martyrdom of Perpetua 3:2 is analogous:
The day before that on which we were to fight, I saw in a vision that Pomponius the deacon came hither to the gate of the prison and knocked vehemently. I went out to him and opened the gate for him; and he was clothed in a richly ornamented white robe, and he had on manifold calliculæ. And he said to me, 'Perpetua, we are waiting for you; come!' And he held his hand to me, and we began to go through rough and winding places. Scarcely at length had we arrived breathless at the amphitheater, when he led me into the middle of the arena, and said to me, 'Do not fear, I am here with you, and I am laboring with you;' and he departed. And I gazed upon an immense assembly in astonishment. And because I knew that I was given to the wild beasts, I marveled that the wild beasts were not let loose upon me. Then there came forth against me a certain Egyptian, horrible in appearance, with his backers, to fight with me. And there came to me, as my helpers and encouragers, handsome youths; and I was stripped, and became a man.
After martyrdom was no longer common among Christians, the story of Perpetua and Felicitas continued to encourage the faithful, inspire conversions to Christianity, and motivate missionaries to evangelize dangerous peoples and places. Asceticism, including celibacy, supplanted violent death in a public setting and was regarded as similarly worthy of esteem. Monks, ideally no longer bound by family ties and unencumbered by wives or progeny, were free to wander the globe in search of new converts.
The Sethian school of Gnostic literature has been previously described. These writings reimagine the creation story, wildly mythological and dreamlike narratives that often reinterpret biblical heroes as villains and villains as heroes. The transmission of gnosis to contemporary readers revolves around Seth, son of Adam and Eve. The serpent in the garden of Eden is lauded for instigating Adam and Eve’s attainment of knowledge and the God of the Old Testament is demoted to an evil and ignorant demiurge who mistakenly believes that he is the only god, despite the existence of unknown higher deities. This view directly contradicts both the Hebrew and Christian traditions, a deliberate attempt to invert the cosmological order. Another Nag Hammadi text, the Hypothesis of the Archons (also known as the Reality of the Rulers), is representative of the Sethian genre. It describes a conflict between lesser authorities of the cosmos, primeval demiurges and their champions, the Fathers of the Church, and the true reigning spirit of “Incorruptibility” who is portrayed as a female. Salvation is granted to humanity in consequence of Eve’s consumption of fruit forbidden to her by God. The Female Spiritual Principle enters the serpent that successfully enticed Eve to break the only condition that God, called “Samael” in the text, placed upon the first couple. Hypothesis of the Archons 90:6-11 records an augmented (by the word “jealousy,” absent from, but possibly implied by the Genesis account of this encounter) statement by the spirit-possessed serpent to Eve:
"With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good."
Rather than being a world that a creator God described as being “very good,” Gnostics believed the world and the universe that contained it was dirty, debased, and irredeemable. Salvation is reserved only for those who are empowered to disassociate themselves from corrupt matter, which is the essence of Neoplatonic thought. In the Hypothesis of the Archons the lesser authorities create Adam as an attempt to trap “Incorruptibility,” the Female Spiritual Principle, then commence a series of rapes upon female characters to defile the spirit that they embody, starting with Eve. Hypothesis of the Archons 89:17-28 describes the initial attempt:
Then the authorities came up to their Adam. And when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great agitation; and they became enamored of her. They said to one another, "Come, let us sow our seed in her," and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches she became a tree and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully.
Eve’s transformation into not only a tree, but the Tree of Life reflects her position as the embodiment of the Female Spiritual Principle, which is Wisdom. The Book of Proverbs allegorically describes Wisdom as feminine. Here is Proverbs 8:1-5:
Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She standeth in the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths. She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in at the doors. Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of man. O ye simple, understand wisdom: and, ye fools, be ye of an understanding heart.
The passage from the Hypothesis of the Archons that describes Eve’s transformation into a tree is likely indebted to the Greek mythical tale of the god Apollo's pursuit of the nymph Daphne, who is transformed into a laurel tree to escape him. The Tree if Life is described in Genesis 2:9:
And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Proverbs 3:13-18 links Wisdom, again a woman, to the tree of life, and, less conclusively, the act of rape:
Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her. Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honour. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.
The blending of Hellenistic and Hebrew traditions to better promote the Gnostic agenda is common to the Sethian writings. The second woman that the Archons of the Hypothesis of the Archons attempts to rape is a figure not recorded in the Hebrew Bible, Norea, daughter of Eve and sister of Seth. Hypothesis of the Archons 91:34-92:2 describes the virginal purity of Norea:
Again Eve became pregnant, and she bore Norea. And she said, "He has begotten on me a virgin as an assistance for many generations of mankind." She is the virgin whom the forces did not defile. After a short and disagreeable encounter with Noah, now a villain, the remainder of the Hypothesis of the Archons describes further confrontations between chaste Norea and her subsequent revelation of a savior figure called Eleleth which confirms that she possess knowledge that will lead to salvation. The spiritual superiority of Seth and Norea qualifies them to become the progenitors of the Gnostic community. Although present in the flesh, Norea’s incorruptibility entitles her to serve as intermediary between the cosmic Female Spiritual Principle and the corporeal descendants of Eve. Eve served as the agent whereby Adam was saved. Norea facilitated not only the salvation of Seth, but of every subsequent generation of the elect. Eleleth, the savior, personally confronts Norea as she struggles to elude the Archons intent on raping her, teaches her the truth about the powers of this world, and promises salvation to her and her descendants. The text shifts from dialogue to a first-person eyewitness account by Norea, a psychological withdrawal of her inner self from the vicissitudes that beset her outward self, a disconnect common to victims of rape that is currently diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Below is an excerpt describing this encounter:
The (great) angel came down from the heavens and said to her, "Why are you crying up to God? Why do you act so boldly towards the holy spirit?" Norea said, "Who are you?" The rulers of unrighteousness had withdrawn from her. He said, "It is I who am Eleleth, sagacity, the great angel who stands in the presence of the holy spirit. I have been sent to speak with you and save you from the grasp of the lawless. And I shall teach you about your root." (Norea apparently now speaking) Now as for that angel, I cannot speak of his power: his appearance is like fine gold and his raiment is like snow. No, truly, my mouth cannot bear to speak of his power and the appearance of his face! Eleleth, the great angel, spoke to me. "It is I," he said, "who am understanding. I am one of the four light-givers, who stand in the presence of the great invisible spirit. Do you think these rulers have any power over you? None of them can prevail against the root of truth; for on its account he appeared in the final ages; and these authorities will be restrained. And these authorities cannot defile you and that generation; for your abode is in incorruptibility, where the virgin spirit dwells, who is superior to the authorities of chaos and to their universe."
In his dissertation, Lawerance P. Jones suggests that the reflects the sexual abuse that slaves encountered in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Slaves motivated by Jewish or Christian beliefs were more likely to resist the advances of their masters, a condition which could lead to their rape. Norea’s psychological withdrawal in reaction to her aggressors places her beyond their reach, at least in a spiritual sense. Her refuge was gnosis, knowledge of her identity rooted in a higher reality that is higher than that of the Archons who continually tormented her. Sethian texts appealed to a different social stratum than those produced by the Valentinians. Their incorporation of mythological elements, their rape scenes, their inverted views about biblical characters, and their demotion of Jesus to a lower grade of divinity provoked the wrath of the Fathers of the Church. What most incensed the Fathers, however, was the Gnostic spiritualization of the resurrection. Countermeasures began with Justin, who was both martyr and polemicist. His writings that condemned heresy are lost, but their essence is incorporated into the work of Irenaeus.
The next segment of Chapter 13 is subtitled “The Heresiologists” and consists of brief sketches of significant Church Fathers of the Apostolic Age who had begun to define Christian doctrine. These are, in roughly chronological order: Justin (Martyr), Irenaeus, Theophilus, Athenagoras, Tatian, Tertullian, The Alexandrian School (principally Clement of Alexandria and Origin), Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocians, and last, but far from least, Augustine of Hippo.
Most of the anti-heretical works of Justin are lost, but two apologies and a dialogue have survived. The First Apology, his most well-known text, passionately defends the moral values of Christian living and provides ethical and philosophical arguments intended to convince Roman emperor Antoninus Pius to stop persecuting Christians. Like Augustine afterwards, Justin wrote that the "seeds of Christianity" (manifestations of the Logos acting in history) predate Christ's incarnation, asserting that many historical Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Plato were unknowing proto-Christians. Justin developed the traditional association between bodily resurrection and a judgement that results in fitting rewards and punishments. He promoted the specificity of the Christian afterlife, in contrast to the relatively vague conceptions of previous religions (including Judaism). He believed that Hebrews who lived before the advent of Christ and honored the will of God would be saved. Justin believed that the resurrection would occur after Christ thousand-year reign, Postmillennialism is an interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation which sees Christ's second coming as occurring after the "Millennium", a Messianic Age in which Christian ethics prosper. Despite his familiarity with Greek philosophy, Justin opposed those who believed that the afterlife was populated with Platonic, disembodied immortal souls. Jews contemporary with Justin were condemned for their accusation that Christ’s body had been stolen from his tomb, an accusation that stimulated the development of the empty tomb tradition.
Irenaeus wrote two generations after Justin. Using Justin as a guide, he advocated that both a body and a soul were required compose a living human being. He used Gospel descriptions of the Eucharist as an example of the dual nature of Christ. Gnostics are condemned for their feeble assessment of the power of God when they assert that resurrection can only occur as an exclusively spiritual phenomenon. “Against Heresies,” Book 5, chapter 3, section 2 contains Irenaeus’s indictment of the limited perspective of the heretics:
Those men, therefore, set aside the power of God, and do not consider what the word declares, when they dwell upon the infirmity of the flesh, but do not take into consideration the power of Him who raises it up from the dead. For if He does not vivify what is mortal, and does not bring back the corruptible to incorruption, He is not a God of power. But that He is powerful in all these respects, we ought to perceive from our origin, inasmuch as God, taking dust from the earth, formed man. And surely it is much more difficult and incredible, from non-existent bones, and nerves, and veins, and the rest of man’s organization, to bring it about that all this should be, and to make man an animated and rational creature, than to reintegrate again that which had been created and then afterwards decomposed into earth (for the reasons already mentioned), having thus passed into those elements from which man, who had no previous existence, was formed. For He who in the beginning caused him to have being who as yet was not, just when He pleased, shall much more reinstate again those who had a former existence, when it is His will that they should inherit the life granted by Him. And that flesh shall also be found fit for and capable of receiving the power of God, which at the beginning received the skillful touches of God; so that one part became the eye for seeing; another, the ear for hearing; another, the hand for feeling and working; another, the sinews stretched out everywhere, and holding the limbs together; another, arteries and veins, passages for the blood and the air; another, the various internal organs; another, the blood, which is the bond of union between soul and body. But why go on in this strain? Numbers would fail to express the multiplicity of parts in the human frame, which was made in no other way than by the great wisdom of God. But those things which partake of the skill and wisdom of God, do also partake of His power.
Most Church Fathers, Justin excepted, wrote at the end of the Apostolic Age (180-220 CE). Theophilus was Patriarch of Antioch from 169 until 182 CE. His writings (the only remaining of which is his Apology to Autolycus) indicate that he was born a pagan and became a Christian after studying the holy scriptures, especially the prophetical books. Eusebius commended the zeal which he and other church leaders exhibited in driving off the heretics who were attacking the developing mainstream church, with a special mention of his work against Marcion. Theophilus explained resurrection using the scientific terminology of his era as the making and remaking of our earthly vessels, quoting Paul’s comparison of resurrection to that of a sprouting seed that seems to disappear (“die”) before the plant appears. Below is a passage extracted from chapter 13 of Apology to Autolycus:
God indeed exhibits to you many proofs that you may believe Him. For consider, if you please, the dying of seasons, and days, and nights, how these also die and rise again. And what? Is there not a resurrection going on of seeds and fruits, and this, too, for the use of men? A seed of wheat, for example, or of the other grains, when it is cast into the earth, first dies and rots away, then is raised, and becomes a stalk of grain.
Athenagorus’s treatise, On the Resurrection, is the earliest surviving literary treatment on this subject. The fact that the apologetics of Theophilus, Athenagoras, and Tatian regarding resurrection make no specific mention of Christ indicate that they were principally written to convince a pagan readership that physical resurrection was possible, and that it was not the disgusting revivification of a decomposing corpse. Like Theophilus, Athenagorus asserted that it lies within God’s power to raise the dead, and it is appropriate that God should do so. Simple as this may sound, this concept directly contradicted the teachings of Platonism and Aristotelianism which asserted that God despised all things that are grossly material. Matter is mutable, and changeable, an offense to an immutable and unchanging God. Diehard Platonists likely remained unconvinced by Theophilus, but ordinary people may have proved more susceptible to the inexorable, pragmatic logic of his argument. Bodily resurrection necessitated the reassembly of its constituent elements, but this would not be difficult for an omnipotent God. Common sense dictates that a God who knows everything is preferable to a God self-confined to a perfect, abstract ethereal domain.
Athenagorus countered Platonic ideas about reincarnation by emphasizing the purified condition of flesh transformed during the process of resurrection. Below is a passage extracted from the 10th chapter of On the Resurrection:
Spiritual natures cannot be injured by the resurrection of men, for the resurrection of men is no hindrance to their existing, nor is any loss or violence inflicted on them by it; nor, again, would the nature of irrational or inanimate beings sustain wrong, for they will have no existence after the resurrection, and no wrong can be done to that which is not. But even if anyone should suppose them to exist for ever, they would not suffer wrong by the renewal of human bodies: for if now, in being subservient to the nature of men and their necessities while they require them, and subjected to the yoke and every kind of drudgery, they suffer no wrong, much more, when men have become immortal and free from want, and no longer need their service, and when they are themselves liberated from bondage, will they suffer no wrong.
Modern philosophers and anatomists would take exception to this analysis, but Athenagorus asserts that it is only a physical body in combination with a transformed, incorruptible soul that encompasses the “self” that can inherit eternal life. For the Platonists, the soul was the carrier of both life (sensation) and identity, or “self” (memory and intelligence). Reincarnation existed solely for the sake of remediation of a soul that had fallen short of the Platonic ideal in a previous life, or lives. The strongest argument Athenagorus makes for resurrection, like those of the other polemicists, would fail to persuade a dedicated Platonist but could be accepted and embraced by less philosophically minded individuals searching for clear cut answers to their difficult questions. Simply stated, resurrection is the will of an omnipotent God who is unwilling that anyone should perish, neither in body nor soul. A resurrection that lacks either a perfected body or its potentially immortal soul would not fulfill God’s plans for his created beings. A portion of the 15th chapter of On the Resurrection states:
But while the cause discoverable in the creation of men is of itself sufficient to prove that the resurrection follows by natural sequence on the dissolution of bodies, yet it is perhaps right not to shrink from adducing either of the proposed arguments, but, agreeably to what has been said, to point out to those who are not able of themselves to discern them, the arguments from each of the truths evolved from the primary; and first and foremost, the nature of the men created, which conducts us to the same notion, and has the same force as evidence of the resurrection. For if the whole nature of men in general is composed of an immortal soul and a body which was fitted to it in the creation, and if neither to the nature of the soul by itself, nor to the nature of the body separately, has God assigned such a creation or such a life and entire course of existence as this, but to men compounded of the two, in order that they may, when they have passed through their present existence, arrive at one common end, with the same elements of which they are composed at their birth and during life, it unavoidably follows, since one living-being is formed from the two, experiencing whatever the soul experiences and whatever the body experiences, doing and performing whatever requires the judgment of the senses or of the reason, that the whole series of these things must be referred to some one end, in order that they all, and by means of all,—namely, man’s creation, man’s nature, man’s life, man’s doings and sufferings, his course of existence, and the end suitable to his nature,—may concur in one harmony and the same common experience.
Athenagorus asserts that to become perfected as humans we must maintain our human form. Upon death, identity is suspended. An afterlife passed as a disembodied Platonic soul would deny the essence of our humanity which consists of both body and soul. This complete identity is lost when the body decomposes but survives when the same body inhabited in life becomes restored in a perfected form upon resurrection and is reunited with the soul.
Tatian of Adiabene, (circa 120-180 CE) was an Assyrian Christian writer and theologian of the 2nd century. Tatian's most influential work is the Diatessaron, a harmonized paraphrase of the four gospels that became the standard text for the Syriac-speaking churches until the 5th-century. All that remains of his writings are some fragments and his Oration for the Greeks, which serves a purpose like that of the works of Athenagorus. Tatian reaches the same conclusion without, however, incorporating immortality of the soul into his arguments. His approach is based on the biblical premise that the bodies of human beings are created by God out of nothing, and that the soul, separated from the body, is not immortal but rather dissolves upon the death of the body. Resurrection is the reconstitution of both body and soul, as Athenagorus also taught. Irenaeus contended that Tatian denied bodily resurrection, but this is a false accusation. Theophilus, Athenagorus, and Tatian all propounded not just the resurrection of the body, but of a body that is composed of flesh and blood and bones. Chapter 6 of Tatian’s Oration to the Greeks begins this way:
And on this account we believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies after the consummation of all things; not, as the Stoics affirm, according to the return of certain cycles, the same things being produced and destroyed for no useful purpose, but a resurrection once for all, when our periods of existence are completed, and in consequence solely of the constitution of things under which men alone live, for the purpose of passing judgment upon them. Nor is sentence upon us passed by Minos or Rhadamanthus, before whose decease not a single soul, according to the mythic tales, was judged; but the Creator, God Himself, becomes the arbiter.
Tertullian (circa 155 -220 CE) was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage. He was the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Christian literature written in Latin and a polemicist against heresy, including Gnosticism. He was particularly explicit regarding the subject of a fleshly resurrection. The 9th chapter of Tertullian’s On the Resurrection of the Flesh contains this statement:
Shall that very flesh, which the Divine Creator formed with His own hands in the image of God; which He animated with His own afflatus, after the likeness of His own vital vigor; which He set over all the works of His hand, to dwell among, to enjoy, and to rule them; which He clothed with His sacraments and His instructions; whose purity He loves, whose mortifications He approves; whose sufferings for Himself He deems precious - shall that flesh, I say, so often brought near to God, not rise again?
Late 2nd century debates between proponents of a literal or a spiritual resurrection were, in truth, debates about the nature of human beings shaped by the social standing and philosophical preferences of the opponents. Tertullian’s treatise was the first work of a Church Father that directly addressed this contentious subject. Like Theophilus, Athenagorus, and Tatian, Tertullian’s resurrection was the recreation and reassembly of body and soul, rather than a process of dynamic spiritual development as conceived by Paul. In the manner of the Stoics, Tertullian even regarded the soul itself as being comprised of fine particles of matter.
Tertullian opposed the doctrines of the Gnostics and Valentinians, who believed that salvation and resurrection was assured upon baptism after the attainment of gnosis. These nascent heretics denied that Jesus lived as flesh, thereby denying that he was raised in the flesh. Certain Church Fathers, following Daniel 7:13 asserted that Christ ascended bodily into heaven. Paul’s declaration in First Corinthians that “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God” was interpreted by Tertullian as meaning that not only a spiritual nature was needed to enter this kingdom, but that death itself, corrupter of the flesh, would be excluded. Tertullian’s concluding argument are a biased reinterpretation of Paul’s spiritualized views of resurrection. He argues that if God could preserve the bodies and wardrobes of the Hebrews during their forty-year wandering in the wilderness, he could assuredly preserve the fragmented bodies of the faithful dead pending a future resurrection wherein every malady, infirmity, and handicap would be excluded. The nature of a revived and transformed flesh and spirit is discussed in the 63rd chapter of On the Resurrection of the Flesh:
And so the flesh shall rise again, wholly in every man, in its own identity, in its absolute integrity. Wherever it may be, it is in safe keeping in God's presence, through that most faithful Mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ, who shall reconcile both God to man, and man to God; the spirit to the flesh, and the flesh to the spirit. Both natures has He already united in His own self; He has fitted them together as bride and bridegroom in the reciprocal bond of wedded life. Now, if any should insist on making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the soul as her dowry. The soul shall never be an outcast, to be had home by the bridegroom bare and naked. She has her dower, her outfit, her fortune in the flesh, which shall accompany her with the love and fidelity of a foster-sister. But suppose the flesh to be the bride, then in Christ Jesus she has in the contract of His blood received His Spirit as her spouse. Now, what you take to be her extinction, you may be sure is only her temporary retirement. It is not the soul only which withdraws from view. The flesh, too, has her departures for a while - in waters, in fires, in birds, in beasts; she may seem to be dissolved into these, but she is only poured into them, as into vessels. And should the vessels themselves afterwards fail to hold her, escaping from even these, and returning to her mother earth, she is absorbed once more, as it were, by its secret embraces, ultimately to stand forth to view, like Adam when summoned to hear from his Lord and Creator the words, Behold, the man has become as one of us!
In Tertullian’s allegory, the bride is the flesh, and the bridegroom is the soul, joined in wedlock by the spirit. Resurrected bodies will be complete and perfect, including components such as teeth and genitalia whose purposes are not required in the resurrection body, mainly because the body would hardly be recognizable without them. Toward the end of his life Tertullian became a Montanist, an apocalyptic movement which anticipated the immediate end of the world, while maintaining his views about the resurrection of the flesh. His comparison of resurrected bodies to those of the angels should not be compared to literal angelic transformation, while yet living, that the Gnostics promoted as a safer alternative to physical martyrdom. It describes, in contrast, the perfected state of believers that qualifies them for immortality. Angels visited the earth in fleshly forms but maintained their solely spiritual nature. Similarly, perfected humanity ascends to the spiritual realm while preserving the semblance of flesh. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 62:
We shall not therefore cease to continue in the flesh, because we cease to be importuned by the usual wants of the flesh; just as the angels ceased not therefore to remain in their spiritual substance, because of the suspension of their spiritual incidents. Lastly, Christ said not, They shall be angels, in order not to repeal their existence as men; but He said, They shall be equal unto the angels, that He might preserve their humanity unimpaired. When He ascribed an angelic likeness to the flesh, He took not from it its proper substance.
The Alexandrian School, deeply influenced by Philo and Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, attempted to synthesize the concepts of bodily resurrection and the immortality of the soul. Clement of Alexandria (circa 150-215 CE) emphasized the perfection of knowledge, gnosis, over the resurrection of the body. Among his pupils were Origen and Alexander of Jerusalem. Clement, familiar with classical Greek philosophy and literature, was influenced by Hellenistic philosophy to a greater extent than any other Christian thinker of his time. Three of Clement's major works have survived and are collectively referred to as a trilogy: the Protrepticus (Exhortation), the Paedagogus (Tutor), and the Stromata (Miscellanies). The figure of Orpheus is prominent throughout the Protrepticus narrative, and Clement contrasts the song of Orpheus, representing pagan superstition, with the divine Logos of Christ. According to Clement, through conversion to Christianity alone can one fully participate in the Logos, which is universal truth. Following Plato’s Republic, the Paedagogus divides life into three elements: character, actions, and passions. Character having been addressed in the Protrepticus, he devotes the Paedagogus to reflections on Christ's role in teaching humans to act morally and to control their passions. Despite its explicitly Christian nature, Clement's work is grounded in Stoic philosophy and pagan literature. He counters Gnosticism by asserting that it is through faith in Christ, and not esoteric knowledge, that one is enlightened and comes to know God. The heterogenous Stromata discusses, among other subjects, asceticism. Clement rejects Gnostic opposition to marriage, arguing that sex is a positive good (if performed within marriage) for the purposes of procreation. The 10th chapter of the 7th book of the Stromata restates his views on the relationship between knowledge and faith:
For knowledge (gnosis), to speak generally, a perfecting of man as man, is consummated by acquaintance with divine things, in character, life, and word, accordant and conformable to itself and to the divine Word. For by it faith is perfected, inasmuch as it is solely by it that the believer becomes perfect. Faith is an internal good, and without searching for God, confesses His existence, and glorifies Him as existent. Whence by starting from this faith, and being developed by it, through the grace of God, the knowledge respecting Him is to be acquired as far as possible. Now we assert that knowledge (gnosis) differs from the wisdom (sofia), which is the result of teaching. For as far as anything is knowledge, so far is it certainly wisdom; but in as far as aught is wisdom, it is not certainly knowledge. For the term wisdom appears only in the knowledge of the uttered word.
Origen of Alexandria (circa 185 – 253 CE), was born and spent the first half of his career in Alexandria. He was one of the most influential and controversial figures in early Christian theology, apologetics, and asceticism. Origen erected a magnificent doctrinal edifice upon the foundation established by Clement. It lies somewhere between the extremes of Gnostic immateriality and Jewish/pagan views about resurrection and the afterlife. Just as Augustine was the most noted of the Church Fathers who wrote after the 325 CE Council of Nicaea (the first of many efforts to attain consensus in the church and resulted in the Nicene Creed), Origen was the most noteworthy of Fathers who wrote prior to this ecumenical council. He strenuously opposed the influence of Celsus, a 2nd century Roman philosopher, Platonist, and opponent of early Christianity. Origen’s counterargument incorporated so many of the views of Celsus, however, that they were not accepted by the more “orthodox” leaders of the early church.
Celsus’s attack on Christianity included a number of beliefs that he considered objectionable: (1) God will destroy the world with a great fire that only Christians will survive, (2) the dead will rise from the grave in the same bodies that were buried, (3) souls would willingly inhabit a decomposed body, (4) Christians seemed incapable of determining what kind of body they would pass eternity in, and, ((5) though God can confer immortality upon the soul, conferring immortality upon flesh would be contrary to divine reason.
For Celsus, Christian views about the resurrection were absurd. His writings issued forth from the seemingly impregnable fortress of Greek philosophy, but Christians, including Origen, understood the threat that their new religion posed for pagan philosophy. Origen undertook to systematically Hellenize the Christian viewpoint. But the immortality that Origen, like Philo, advocated was not universal. A soul could forfeit its immortal nature because of its sins.
Like the Platonists, Origen viewed consignment to the material world as a form of punishment. Life on earth is the descent of souls into human bodies from a preexisting condition of purity. Origen sidesteps the problematic issue of physical resurrection by adhering to Paul’s conception of a spiritualized resurrection. The 3rd section of the 10th chapter of the 2nd book of his work De Principiis describes a resurrected body that does not consist of ordinary flesh:
Because if they believe the apostle, that a body which arises in glory, and power, and incorruptibility, has already become spiritual, it appears absurd and contrary to his meaning to say that it can again be entangled with the passions of flesh and blood, seeing the apostle manifestly declares that flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God, nor shall corruption inherit incorruption. But how do they understand the declaration of the apostle, We shall all be changed? This transformation certainly is to be looked for, according to the order which we have taught above; and in it, undoubtedly, it becomes us to hope for something worthy of divine grace; and this we believe will take place in the order in which the apostle describes the sowing in the ground of a bare grain of grain, or of any other fruit, to which God gives a body as it pleases Him, as soon as the grain of grain is dead.
Despite his professed fidelity to the Pauline model, Origen’s conception of a resurrected spiritual body, like that of the Valentinians, was uncomfortably close to that of the Platonists. Souls are the stuff that stars are made of, and perfected souls are analogous to, if not identical to the heavenly bodies. He stopped short of proclaiming every soul to be immortal, qualifying his position as a Christian by asserting (like Philo) that immortality can be conferred by God alone. This Hellenizing approach, as noted, was dismissed by the mainstream, but was later taken up by the Gnostics, and, later, by the Manicheans. Origen steered Christian ideas about resurrection as far as they would ever go into the realms of Greek philosophy and was later branded a heretic because of this. The edifice that he artfully, and nearly perfectly designed was too radical for the orthodox Fathers to bear. Augustine, following the trail blazed by Tertullian, would soon represent, and extensively commit to paper the prevailing view.
Between the periods dominated by Origen and Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, the Cappadocian fathers also attempted to reconcile the differences between Greek natural philosophy and Christian revelatory explanations of life. They were a trio of Byzantine Christian prelates, theologians and monks who helped shape both early Christianity and the monastic tradition. Basil the Great (330 - 379 CE) was Bishop of Caesarea. Basil's younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa (circa 335 – 395 CE) was Bishop of Nyssa. a close friend, Gregory of Nazianzus (329 – 389 CE), became Patriarch of Constantinople. An older sister of Basil and Gregory, Macrina, was also a gifted theologian. She converted the family's estate into a monastic community.
These fathers (and sister Macrina) demonstrated that Christians could effectively oppose the Greek intellectuals. Christianity was antithetical to many of the ideas of Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. They made major contributions to the definition of the Trinity that became finalized at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 CE and to the final version of the Nicene Creed. Gregory of Nyssa overcame his initial reservations about physical resurrection to ultimately defend its reality. The miracles of Jesus, and his own resurrection, are offered as proof for a general resurrection to come. The 11th section of the 25th chapter of Gregory’s On the Creation of Man cites Christ’s reanimation of his friend Lazarus:
…and the disciples were led by the Lord to be initiated at Bethany in the preliminary mysteries of the general resurrection. Four days had already passed since the event; all due rites had been performed for the departed; the body was hidden in the tomb: it was probably already swollen and beginning to dissolve into corruption, as the body moldered in the dank earth and necessarily decayed: the thing was one to turn from, as the dissolved body under the constraint of nature changed to offensiveness. At this point the doubted fact of the general resurrection is brought to proof by a more manifest miracle; for one is not raised from severe sickness, nor brought back to life when at the last breath - nor is a child just dead brought to life, nor a young man about to be conveyed to the tomb released from his bier; but a man past the prime of life, a corpse, decaying, swollen, yea already in a state of dissolution, so that even his own kinsfolk could not suffer that the Lord should draw near the tomb by reason of the offensiveness of the decayed body there enclosed, brought into life by a single call, confirms the proclamation of the resurrection, that is to say, that expectation of it as universal, which we learn by a particular experience to entertain.
The 13th section of Chapter 25 concludes Gregory’s analysis:
Since, then, every prediction of the Lord is shown to be true by the testimony of events, while we not only have learned this by His words, but also received the proof of the promise indeed, from those very persons who returned to life by resurrection, what occasion is left to those who disbelieve? Shall we not bid farewell to those who pervert our simple faith by philosophy and vain deceit (Colossians 2:8), and hold fast to our confession in its purity, learning briefly through the prophet the mode of the grace, by his words, You shall take away their breath and they shall fail, and turn to their dust. You shall send forth Your Spirit and they shall be created, and You shall renew the face of the earth; at which time also he says that the Lord rejoices in His works, sinners having perished from the earth: for how shall anyone be called by the name of sin, when sin itself exists no longer?
Colossians 2:8, referenced above, encapsulates the work of many, if not most of the fathers of the early Christian church in their effort to supplant pagan Hellenistic beliefs with a much less nuanced and intellectually demanding faith in Jesus:
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
Gregory assures us, as do the pagan philosophers, that the seemingly illogical process of resurrection is demonstrated in nature. Seeds “die” only to be reborn. More primitively, the sun sets in the west every day only to rise again next morning in the east. The fields lie fallow in winter, but the arrival of every springtime reinfuses them with fecundity. Human resurrection, like the harvest cycle, is also a continual, dynamic natural process. Gregory, like Origen, coopts the Platonic concept of eidos (form, or idea) as the sole element of the earthly body to be preserved for resurrection. This is defined as the principle of identity which permits the scattered atoms of a human body to be reassembled. It is the eidos that imprints an individual’s identity upon matter. The 5th section of the 25th chapter of Gregory’s On the Creation of Man states:
Now to the element of our soul which is in the likeness of God it is not that which is subject to flux and change by way of alteration, but this stable and unalterable element in our composition that is allied: and since various differences of combination produce varieties of forms (and combination is nothing else than the mixture of the elements - by elements we mean those which furnish the substratum for the making of the universe, of which the human body also is composed), while the form necessarily remains in the soul as in the impression of a seal, those things which have received from the seal the impression of its stamp do not fail to be recognized by the soul, but at the time of the World Reformation, it receives back to itself all those things which correspond to the stamp of the form: and surely all those things would so correspond which in the beginning were stamped by the form; thus it is not beyond probability that what properly belongs to the individual should once more return to it from the common source.
The preceding excerpt is representative of Gregory’s sophisticated attempt to blend Platonic ideas about the immortality of the soul (our transcendent identity) with bodily resurrection (our bodies as the container of our personal identity). By attempting this synthesis, however, Gregory risked a failure to conclusively demonstrate that the human who was resurrected was identical to the human that had died. Consigning identity to the incorporate soul, rather than to a corporeal body, devalued the significance of bodily resurrection. As noted, the arguments of Gregory, like those of Origen before him, so resembled those of his opponents that a distinctive and persuasive defense of the unique Christian perspective on this controversial issue did not exist until Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 CE) entered the debate.
Augustine was one of the most prolific Latin authors. The list of his works consists of more than one hundred separate titles including apologetic works against the heresies of the Arians, Donatists, Manichaeans, and Pelagians, texts on Christian doctrine, exegetical works such as commentaries on Genesis, Psalms, and Paul's Letter to the Romans, many sermons and letters, and the Retractationes, a review of his earlier works which he wrote near the end of his life. Augustine vigorously defended the concept of a physical, material resurrection but like the Platonists and their Gnostic successors he believed that that the unregenerated material bodies of human beings were contemptible, particularly their insatiable appetite for sex. But because the “Original Sin” of Adam was committed in the flesh, then resurrection must necessarily also occur in the flesh. Augustine’s most extensive treatment of the resurrection before he wrote City of God is Sermon 362, “On the Resurrection of the Dead.” Section 14 attempts to explain Paul’s assertion that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God:”
What have we got in the gospel? That Christ rose again in the same body as was buried; that he was seen, that he was touched and handled, that to the disciples who thought he was a spirit he said, Feel and see, that a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you can see that I have (Luke 24:39). What does the apostle oppose to this? Flesh and blood, he says, shall not gain possession of the kingdom of God (1 Cor 15:50). I wholeheartedly embrace each statement, and I don’t say they clash with each other, or else I myself may be clashing with the goad. So how can I embrace them both? I could quickly, as I said, answer like this: The apostle said, Flesh and blood cannot gain possession of the kingdom of God by inheritance. He was speaking correctly; you see, it’s not the place of flesh to possess, but to be possessed. After all, it isn’t your body that possesses anything, but your soul that possesses things through the body, just as it also possesses the body itself. So if the flesh rises again in such a way as to be owned, not to own, to be possessed, not to possess, what's so surprising about flesh and blood not possessing the kingdom of God, because it will of course be possessed itself?
The flesh, you see, gains possession of those who are not the kingdom of God, but the devil’s kingdom; and that’s why they are enslaved to the pleasures of the flesh.
At the Second Coming all nature, including human beings, will be perfected. Glorified, incorruptible bodies meant for Augustine (as it did for Macrina) that no acts of the flesh such as eating, drinking, and procreation will exist in heaven. Section 21 of Sermon 362 describes this angelic transformation:
The body, though, which is no longer mortal, cannot properly be called flesh and blood, which are earthly bodies; but it is called body, because it can now be called a heavenly one. Just as when the same apostle was speaking of different kinds of flesh, Not every flesh, he said, is the same flesh. There is one kind in human beings, another in cattle, another in fish, another in birds, another in snakes. And there are heavenly bodies, he said, and earthly bodies (1 Cor 15:39-40). In no way, however, could he talk of heavenly flesh, though bodies could be called flesh, but only earthly ones. Every kind of flesh, after all, is a body, but not every kind of body is flesh; not only because heavenly bodies aren’t called flesh, but also some earthly ones, like wood and stones, anything of that sort. So even in this respect flesh and blood are unable to gain possession of the kingdom of God, because when the flesh rises again it will be changed into the kind of body in which there will no longer be any mortal tendency to decay, and which therefore will no longer be properly called flesh and blood.
This analysis is not particularly rational, but it is grounded in scripture. Augustine references the writings of Paul, rather than those of the Gospels, primarily because of Paul’s conception of a “spiritual body.” Rather than being a literal, physical body, it is, rather, an armature for the soul which possesses ornamental value and permits spiritualized bodies to recognize both themselves and others. The iterative and often open-ended prosses of comparing scripture with scripture keeps Augustine from arriving at a logical conclusion, but the accumulated weight of empirical evidence (including scriptural examples of ecstatic, out of body experiences) builds a convincing case not only for the immortality of the soul, but also for the encapsulation of the soul into an intelligible, of not a material body.
In the City of God, Augustine describes the ultimate good as the reincorporation of a body in the afterlife freed of the evils of corporeal existence, a future state that also permits the physical punishment of sinners. The felicity of passing eternity in a perfected body is described in the 29th chapter of the 22nd book of City of God:
The Lord Jesus also said, See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always see the face of my Father which is in heaven. Matthew 18:10 As, then, they see, so shall we also see; but not yet do we thus see. Wherefore the apostle uses the words cited a little ago, Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. This vision is reserved as the reward of our faith; and of it the Apostle John also says, When He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is (1 John 3:2). By the face of God we are to understand His manifestation, and not a part of the body similar to that which in our bodies we call by that name
Saints become subsumed into the body of Christ, the only person of the Trinity who assumed human form. Meditating on the Trinity is a way of anticipating the final consummation, which Augustine compares to the Sabbath at the conclusion of City of God in the 30th chapter of the 22nd book:
This Sabbath shall appear still more clearly if we count the ages as days, in accordance with the periods of time defined in Scripture, for that period will be found to be the seventh. The first age, as the first day, extends from Adam to the deluge; the second from the deluge to Abraham, equaling the first, not in length of time, but in the number of generations, there being ten in each. From Abraham to the advent of Christ there are, as the evangelist Matthew calculates, three periods, in each of which are fourteen generations - one period from Abraham to David, a second from David to the captivity, a third from the captivity to the birth of Christ in the flesh. There are thus five ages in all. The sixth is now passing, and cannot be measured by any number of generations, as it has been said, It is not for you to know the times, which the Father has put in His own power (Acts 1:7). After this period God shall rest as on the seventh day, when He shall give us (who shall be the seventh day) rest in Himself. But there is not now space to treat of these ages; suffice it to say that the seventh shall be our Sabbath, which shall be brought to a close, not by an evening, but by the Lord's day, as an eighth and eternal day, consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and prefiguring the eternal repose not only of the spirit, but also of the body. There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain to the kingdom of which there is no end?
The Nicene Creed concludes as follows:
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
The consensus was that Christians must await “the world to come.” The Cappadocians had adopted what became the standard formula, one which affirmed both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead. Augustine reconciled these contradictory states by describing them as occurring sequentially, rather than simultaneously. Upon death, a faithful Christian could attain an immortal soul analogous to the immortal soul as described by the Hellenistic Greeks. At the end of time, this soul would be returned to the body, a fulfillment of the prophecies of Daniel and the Jewish apocalypticists. Rather than becoming, like Gregory, immersed in philosophical speculation, Augustine distances himself from it so far as to establish a middle ground between body/soul dualism and millenarianism. In her essay “Beyond the body/soul dichotomy” Paula Fredriksen writes:
But Augustine’s anthropology took him even further beyond classical dualism. As he left man’s freedom, the soul’s integrity, and traditional education behind, he also left behind the cosmic architecture of the late Hellenistic universe, and the resonances that that culture had established between God’s relation to the physical universe and the soul’s relation to the body. No longer, for Augustine, was the human being a miniature map of the cosmos. That world, with its hairline fractures between orders of being and its twin major fault-lines dividing the universe just below the moon and man, neatly, between body and soul, could not speak to the infinitely more complicated man of Augustinian anthropology; the man through whose soul ran the ancient fault-line arising from the sin of Adam.
Augustine’s idea of embodiment at the end of time contrasted with Platonic cyclical immortality that involved metempsychosis and transmigration of the soul. The developing Christian doctrine incorporated the idea of immortal souls that will be punished at death, never to return to a corporeal body with its unwholesome appetite for worldly pleasures. Whereas Zoroastrians, Jews, and Muslims might consider an afterlife that lacks earthly delights as imperfect, Augustine believed that an angelic resurrection body, freed of the lusts of the flesh, would permit the faithful to more completely devote the afterlife fully to the contemplation of God. The soul is only immortal in its intermediate state, between the death of the body and the last judgement. Only the elect will be returned to a perfected body at the end of time. Souls denied this return are no longer complete individuals, A personality, a human individual is comprised of both body, soul, and the pneuma of God (the breath of life), a contrast to Gregory’s more intellectually satisfying synthesis, Augustine developed his doctrine in the setting of a forced alliance between the church and a state that sought the unification of the Roman Empire through the compulsory conversion of its inhabitants to Christianity.
The church embraced Augustine because he uncompromisingly championed the orthodox viewpoint. The Roman state supported him because he demanded a higher degree of allegiance from its populace. Minority groups, such as the Jews, were forced into subservient societal roles, and many chose to emigrate from territories controlled by Roman Christendom. Those who remained were progressively stripped of their individual and communal rights. Augustine effectively robbed Christians themselves of the “freedom in Christ” that scripture had promised them. Elaine Pagels in a Harvard Theological Review article titled “The Politics of Paradise: Augustine's Exegesis of Genesis 1-3 versus That of John Chrysostom” summarizes the enduring influence of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin in its concluding statement:
The eventual triumph of Augustine's theology required, however, the capitulation of all who held to the classical proclamation concerning human freedom, once regarded by many as the heart and soul of the Christian gospel. By the beginning of the fifth century those who still held to such archaic traditions, notably including those the Catholics reviled as "Donatists" and "Pelagians,” themselves came to be condemned as heretics. Augustine's theory of Adam's Fall, once espoused in simpler forms only by marginal groups of Christians, now moved, with the aid of the imperially supported Catholic church, into the spotlight of western history.
When Augustine renounced not only his mistress of long standing with whom he had fathered several children, but his socially prominent Christian wife as well, he gained autonomy. Celibacy granted the ancients freedom to travel, or to write, or even to accept ecclesiastical authority (the bishopric of Hippo, for example). Augustine’s adoption of celibacy worked to exclude any positive or hopeful interpretations of the story of the Garden of Eden, but instead it came to represent the inability of humans to determine what is good or evil. This precipitous decline into bondage to sin could only be overcome by asceticism, self-control, and the holy sacraments of the established church. These lifesaving sacraments were only available to those who adhered to both civil and religious laws. Perceptions that Christ’s return was no longer imminent were reinforced and diluted by the newly instituted, but nonbiblical rite of infant baptism. The innate deficiencies of human beings justified imperial and ecclesiastical control.
Augustine was able to relate his inner spiritual experience to the doctrine of the soul in a manner that continues to influence Western culture. While his arguments that advanced the social standing of the church reflect his awareness of the world within which he wrote, his solutions to the problem of the “self” reflect his abilities as an accomplished and sensitive philosopher. Augustine was aware of the works of the Neoplatonists, particularly Plotinus, and was impressed by their focus on inward experience. Augustine’s own succession of inward experiences led to a series of conversions, from conventional Christian to pagan orator and philosopher, from philosopher to Manichaean, from Manichaean to Christian, from Christian to priest, and, lastly, from priest to Bishop of Hippo. Augustine documented each step of this spiritual journey and used his own experience as a model for the progress of the soul toward redemption. He is conscious of the relative value of each of these steps. Augustine transported and converted the inward spiritual consciousness of the Neoplatonists into a Christian context.
Philo had argued that the soul was immortal, but not indestructible. Augustine rejected this concept to emphasize the role of Christ as exclusive savior of humanity, and to explain the need for a physical resurrection. Real, palpable bodies, to be properly punished, required a real and palpable hell. The religious, yet pagan Neoplatonists believed that heavenly rewards could be obtained through meditation and the ascent of the soul to the realm of divinity. Augustine rejected the mechanical universe of the Neoplatonists, replacing it with a bond of love that draws a Christian upward in response to the grace of God, meaning Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Soul and divinity are separate and dissimilar, and this division can only be overcome by the mercy and grace of God in response to human will, a conscious and deliberate decision to be saved. A God who had become fully human in the form of Christ can engage in human relationships. This relationship takes place on an intellectual, rather than on an emotional level. The Neoplatonic identity of self with the universe was, to Augustine, impossible because of sin. It is this separation that first created private human consciousnesses but is also the inner self that enables as seeker to find God, and to reestablish their connection to God.
Memory played an important part in Plato’s proof of the immortality of the soul. In Augustine’s Confessions, it is memory that defines an individual. The 17th chapter of the 10th book of Confessions proclaims:
Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature am I? A life various and manifold and exceeding immense. Behold in the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things, either through images, as all bodies; or by actual presence, as the arts; or by certain notions or impressions, as the affections of the mind, which, even when the mind doth not feel, the memory retaineth, while yet whatsoever is in the memory is also in the mind: over all these do I run, I fly; I dive on this side and on that, as far as I can, and there is no end. So great is the force of memory, so great the force of life, even in the mortal life of man. What shall I do then, O Thou my true life, my God? I will pass even beyond this power of mine which is called memory: yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, O sweet Light.
Separated from God, our memories alone furnish our isolated chambers of selfhood. Augustine acknowledged the divine nature of our ability to remember past events but believed that unless an individual soul was newly created it would be incapable of living up to the ethical precepts stipulated in the Bible. Individuality is the battleground wherein the will consciously strives to transcend its limitations and ascend to a beatific vision of God. In contrast to Platonic conceptions that God could be discerned in the physical universe, Augustine believed that God could be discovered by looking within oneself. Christian life is formed based on an internal dialogue between God and the soul. This synthesis of philosophy and mystical inner experience triumphed, at lest for the next three centuries, because of Augustine’s prestige as a bishop of the church and the growing power of the church (handmaiden to the state) to enforce its dictates.
Chapter 13 concludes with a section titled “Universalism and Posthumous Baptism of the Dead.” Although salvation has traditionally been believed to be restricted to Christians, Unitarian scholar Jeffrey A. Trumbower describes three exceptions to this rule. (1) Among the Church Fathers, universalist proclivities can be detected in the writings of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. Much later, American Universalist clergyman and theologian Hosea Ballou (1771 - 1852) founded in 1774, with John Murray, the first Universalist church in America in Gloucester, Massachusetts. (2) Some individuals live so blamelessly that they are assumed to be “natural” Christians, worthy of salvation. (3) Baptism for the dead, common among the first generation of Christian, is an attempt to extend benefits earned by a living Christian to departed loved ones who had no opportunity to convert.
The last of these three categories, baptism for the dead, is relevant for two relatively contemporary American religious groups. The first of these is 19th century Shaker communities, wherein members were possessed by Native American spirits. After a successful evocation of these spirits, they could be converted, baptized, and saved. The second group, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism) has proved more enduring than that of the Shakers. In First Corinthians 15:29, Paul supplied a verse that has been subjected to a bewildering assortment of interpretations:
Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?
Mormons interpret this verse literally and strenuously endeavor to baptize the dead. A living person, serving as proxy, is baptized by immersion on behalf of a deceased person of the same sex. Baptism for the dead is an ordinance of the church, performed only in temples, and is based on the belief that baptism is required for entry into the Kingdom of God. The LDS church has built the world's largest genealogical database to help Mormons find names of ancestors to baptize.
In Trumbower’s 2001 “Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity” the principal focus is on baptisms of the dead that were performed in the early Christian church. The author discusses the implications of First Peter 3:19-20 and 4:6 which seem to indicate that a person could die as an unrepentant, unconverted sinner but still be saved by accepting the gospels in the afterlife. First Peter 4:5-7 states:
Who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead. For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit. But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.
Whatever the intended meaning of these verses, and similar verses contained in the preceding chapter of First Peter may be, later Christians interpreted them to mean that an opportunity for repentance and salvation was made available to those who had already died. In the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Perpetua records in her prison dairy a vision of her brother Dinocrates, who died at the age of seven due to a facial tumor. In the vision, he begs his sister for relief from physical discomfort that has followed him into the tomb. Perpetua’s sanctity as a martyr enables her to heal and restore her deceased brother. In the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a pagan noblewoman called Thecla miraculously survives three attempted martyrdoms after her conversion by Paul and vow of chastity offends her family and her suitor Thamyris. She is freed from these ordeals by Queen Tryphaena, who had experienced a vision of her deceased daughter Falconilla, who informed her that the prayers of righteous Thecla could assure Falconilla's posthumous salvation. A disturbing passage in the Acts of John, sections 73-78, records the resurrection of, and the subsequent salvation of Callimachus by John. Callimachus had perished in the act od defiling the corpse of Drusiana, a woman he had loved while she was living, but had never possessed. In the Ascension of Isaiah, a Christian work based on a Jewish source, Isaiah encounters Abel, Enoch, and other righteous deceased souls. All are clad in robes, but are not permitted to sit upon their thrones or wear their crowns until Christ’s return.
Other writings describe the general salvation of all who have died. The Gospel of Peter, sections 38-42, allude to what later came to be designated as the Harrowing of Hell:
Then those soldiers, seeing this, awakened the centurion and the elders, for they also were keeping watch. And whilst they were narrating to them what they had seen, they beheld again three men coming out of the tomb and the two were supporting the one, and a cross following them. And the heads of the two indeed reached up to the heavens, but that of him that was led by their hands rose above the heavens. And they heard a voice from the heavens, saying: “Hast thou preached to them that are sleeping?” And an answer was heard from the cross: “Yea.”
Chapters 17-27 of the Gospel of Nicodemus contain a more extended description of Christ's Harrowing of Hell. Chapter 17 begins with the following verses:
And Joseph arose and said unto Annas and Caiaphas: Truly and of right do ye marvel because ye have heard that Jesus hath been seen alive after death, and that he hath ascended into heaven. Nevertheless, it is more marvelous that he rose not alone from the dead, but did raise up alive many other dead out of their sepulchers, and they have been seen of many in Jerusalem. And now hearken unto me; for we all know the blessed Simeon, the high priest which received the child Jesus in his hands in the temple. And this Simeon had two sons, brothers in blood and we all were at their falling asleep and at their burial. Go therefore and look upon their sepulchers: for they are open, because they have risen, and behold they are in the city of Arimathea dwelling together in prayer. And indeed, men hear them crying out, yet they speak with no man but are silent as dead men. But come, let us go unto them and with all honor and gentleness bring them unto us, and if we adjure them, perchance they will tell us concerning the mystery of their rising again.
Chapter 24 continues the story:
And the Lord stretching forth his hand, said: Come unto me, all ye my saints which bear mine image and my likeness. Ye that by the tree and the devil and death were condemned, behold now the devil and death condemned by the tree. And forthwith all the saints were gathered in one under the hand of the Lord. And the Lord holding the right hand of Adam, said unto him: Peace be unto thee with all thy children that are my righteous ones. But Adam, casting himself at the knees of the Lord entreated him with tears and beseechings, and said with a loud voice: I will magnify thee, O Lord, for thou hast set me up and not made my foes to triumph over me: O Lord my God I cried unto thee and thou hast healed me; Lord, thou hast brought my soul out of hell, thou hast delivered me from them that go down to the pit.
Both Origen and Gregory of Nyssa admitted Platonic ideas about the transmigration od souls into their beliefs as a means of assuring that, eventually, every soul will be saved. Augustine’s mentor, Ambrose, embraced a broadened conception about who may be saved. In his 392 CE funeral oration for emperor Valentinian II, Ambrose proclaimed a “baptism of desire” for Valentinian, who had been preparing to be baptized prior to his untimely demise. The earliest of Christian writings indicate that only the most righteous of Old Testament figures were worthy of salvation. Up until the turn of the 3rd century CE, Christ ministry in hell was confined to the patriarchs and prophets.
Augustine codified the orthodox stance on this contentious issue by proclaiming that the salvation of the righteous prior to the advent of Christ was proportional to the opportunities afforded to them in their respective eras. As natural proto-Christians, they required no additional measures (the harrowing of hell) to secure their salvation. Augustine was less lenient with his contemporaries. To better combat the Pelasgian heresy, he declared that all infants who died unbaptized were condemned inheritors of Original Sin. Based on scripture, Christ undoubtedly rescued some from hell, but in chapters 109-110 of his theological handbook, the Enchiridion, Augustine declares that there are no further possibilities for posthumous salvation:
During the time, moreover, which intervenes between a man's death and the final resurrection, the soul dwells in a hidden retreat, where it enjoys rest or suffers affliction just in proportion to the merit it has earned by the life which it led on earth. Nor can it be denied that the souls of the dead are benefited by the piety of their living friends, who offer the sacrifice of the Mediator, or give alms in the church on their behalf. But these services are of advantage only to those who during their lives have earned such merit, that services of this kind can help them. For there is a manner of life which is neither so good as not to require these services after death, nor so bad that such services are of no avail after death; there is, on the other hand, a kind of life so good as not to require them; and again, one so bad that when life is over, they render no help. Therefore, it is in this life that all the merit or demerit is acquired, which can either relieve or aggravate a man's sufferings after this life. No one, then, need hope that after he is dead, he shall obtain merit with God which he has neglected to secure here.
In the East, Orthodox bishops rejected Augustine’s conclusions, relying instead on God’s mercy and grace to manage these affairs in conformity with his will. In the West, some adopted an intermediate position. 6th century pope Gregory (the Great) prayed for the soul of the emperor Trajan who had lived in the 2nd century. In Eastern Orthodoxy, this prayer is often combined with Thecla’s for Falconilla as demonstrating that God's mercy can be extended to dead pagans. In the West, because of Augustine's influence, the story is revised to include the resurrection of Trajan’s body, since without physical baptism, none who lived after Christ’s first advent can be saved. A description of this prayer is attributed to John of Damascus:
Gregory the Dialogist, the senior bishop of Rome, as everybody knows, was a man well known for his righteousness and knowledge. They even say that the divine angel assisted him when he was conducting the liturgy. One day this Gregory, while taking a walk among the stones, stood carefully still and uttered a mighty prayer directed toward the soul-loving Lord for the forgiveness of the sins of Trajan the king. Immediately after saying these things, he heard a voice borne to him from God: "I have heard your prayer, and I grant forgiveness to Trajan. But you should not again put forward prayers addressed to me on behalf of pagans."
In the Middle Ages, 13th century Dutch poet and mystic Hadewijch of Brabant claimed in her 5th vision that she had rescued four souls from hell. Catherine of Seina (1347-1380 CE) prayed that she would be condemned to hell if this would result in the release of everyone who had already been condemned. French mystic Marguerite Porete and Julian of Norwich (an English female hermit also known as Juliana of Norwich) both developed a theology that would lead to universal salvation. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church, Article 1261 expresses a hope that even unbaptized infants might be saved:
As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them," allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.
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