Judaism, Christianity, and Islam developed in the same region of the Middle East and have overlapping scriptural traditions.1 All three are monotheistic, positing a single all-powerful god, who transcends the natural world, which is his creation. All three portray God not only as the god of their particular group or region, but the god of everyone, everywhere. And all three spawned intellectuals who tried to integrate what was handed down in Scripture with pagan philosophy derived from Greece. Because the three religions had so much in common, their intellectuals faced common problems, such as the problem of evil. The theories that they developed to handle these problems were not just narrowly construed theologies but worldviews that incorporated what today we would call philosophy, science, and religion.
Yet, there were important differences between each of these emerging religions and the Greek philosophy on which their intellectuals drew. Chief among these was that Greek philosophy placed a higher premium on secular reason and tended to view its questions ahistorically. By contrast, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers tended to emphasize revelation as a preeminent source of knowledge and to view their questions within the context of what they took to be the histories of their respective peoples, as related in their holy scriptures.
Judaism
The “Tanakh” (or Hebrew Bible) is the basic Jewish Scripture. It includes the “Torah” (Hebrew for “Law”), the “Prophets,” and the “Hagiographa” (Greek for “sacred writings”). The Torah, which is also called the Pentateuch (Greek for “five books”), consists of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. Tradition has it that the Torah was written by Moses under divine inspiration. Parts of the Torah were in use by the Jews by 600 B.C.E., the whole by 400 B.C.E. It contains accounts of how the world and its creatures were created. It also includes a history of the flight of the Jewish people, under the leadership of Moses, from their bondage in Egypt to the Holy Land of Israel, where they settled. And it lays down many “laws,” including the Ten Commandments. These laws were intended to govern virtually every aspect of Jewish life.2
In addition to the Hebrew Bible, the Jews also wrote commentaries on the Torah, known as the Talmud (literally teachings) and commentaries on the Talmud, known as the Mishnah. These consist of biblical interpretation and practical applications of Scripture, as well as parables and stories that present Jewish ethics in more humanistic (less legal) ways. The Mishnah also includes discussion of some topics, such as the immortality of the soul and its superiority to the body, which receive scant treatment in the Hebrew Bible but were taken up later by Jewish philosophers.
The Talmud exists in more than one version. The one completed in Babylon at the end of the fifth century C.E. came to be accepted by subsequent Jews as the basic document fixing Jewish law and ritual. Explicit in this version of the Talmud is the belief both in the immortality of the soul and in the resurrection of the body. For instance, in the Birkhot Hashahar, or “Early Morning Benedictions,” the following plea occurs: “My God, the soul that You have given me is pure. You created it, You fashioned it, You breathed it into me, You safeguard it within me, and You will eventually take it from me and return it to me in time to come…. Praised are You Lord who restores souls to dead bodies.”3
Jewish philosophy, as opposed to the sort of scriptural commentary and elaboration found in the Talmud, began in the Diaspora community of the Hellenistic world, where beginning in the second century B.C.E. Jewish thinkers produced a philosophical literature in Greek. The point of departure for this philosophy was the attempt to understand the meaning of events related in the Hebrew Bible, especially what these events reveal about the ongoing relationship of the Jewish people and their God. Whereas Greek philosophers went out of their way to divorce their new philosophy from their old religion, Jewish philosophers went out of their way to integrate their old religion with their new philosophy. Christian and Islamic thinkers did the same. This task, then, became a prominent theme in European philosophy to the end of the eighteenth century.
Central to Judaism is the notion of a single God. The new Jewish philosophers were intent on explaining the nature of this God, his relationship to the created world, and his special relationship to the Hebrew people. These explanations begin in Genesis, the first book in the Hebrew Bible, which gives two accounts of the creation. One portrays God as an all-powerful being, who, first, created a “basic” world from nothing and then over a period of six consecutive “days” embellished it, adding the sun, the moon, and the different species of plants and animals. The creation of the world culminated in the creation of man in God’s “own image” (Gen. 1:26). The other account tells the familiar story of the first human couple, Adam and Eve, and their ultimate expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
Both of these stories profoundly influenced Western conceptions of human nature and personal identity. The first of them, by stressing the creation of man in the image of God, encouraged philosophers to think about humans as they thought about God, as well as the other way round. The second of them had even greater significance. The idea that humans fell from a previous state of grace in which they were destined for immortality encouraged the search for traces of good and evil in human nature. It also encouraged thinkers to assume that humans are destined to return to their original state.
In Genesis, what led to Adam and Eve’s demise was, on the one hand, their desire for heightened knowledge, particularly of good and evil, and, on the other, their disobedient, sinful natures. Prior to their expulsion from the Garden, they had been immortal. The wages of their sin were death, a debt handed down from generation to generation. What, though, is the ultimate significance of death? Is there any way that humans can recapture the immortality that they lost? These questions became central.
In most of the Hebrew Bible prior to the book of Daniel, there is an implicit assumption that bodily death is the end. Individual survival, let alone immortality, is not an option. The exceptions to this rule are intimations of personal survival of bodily death in Wisdom (2:23–24), Ezekiel (e.g., 37), and Isaiah. However, in Daniel (12:2), not only is there commitment to survival of bodily death, but a new idea is introduced: resurrection. For instance, it is written that “many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, others to reproaches, to everlasting abhorrence.” When Daniel asks for the meaning of these events, he is told, “But you, go on to the end; you shall rest, and arise to your destiny at the end of the days.” When ideas such as these appear in Daniel, they appear in an historical context in which the Jews are portrayed as suffering even though they have been good. Resurrection, thus, becomes the means by which God’s justice triumphs over injustice, thereby vindicating God and saving human life from being meaningless.
In Asian traditions (and even to some extent in the West), reincarnation, to which everyone was thought to be equally subject, had been used as a technique for achieving cosmic justice. However, in Daniel, only some are expected to survive bodily death, so reward and punishment applies only to them. Nevertheless, at issue is God’s justice, which is not fully realized in normal human lifetimes. To remedy this situation, and in sharp contrast to the prevailing message of previous biblical tradition, the earthly lives of some humans, and then eventually all, become just part of the story. The rest of the story concerns life beyond the grave, where God’s justice ultimately asserts itself.
Throughout the time that Daniel and earlier books of the Hebrew scriptures were composed, the Jews were materialists. So, when, in Daniel, the idea of resurrection is introduced, it means resurrection of the body, which is resurrection of the whole person. Eventually, in the Talmud, the idea of the resurrection of the body joins hands with the idea, borrowed ultimately from Plato, that humans have an immortal soul. Before this integration would be generally adopted, several sects espoused different views. The Sadducees held the traditional view that there was no afterlife and that reward and punishment occurred only in this life. Not surprisingly, this sect was more popular with the rich than the poor. The Pharisees held the newer and increasingly popular view among the masses that there was something immortal in the soul that, after death, could be eternally punished or rewarded by being resurrected with the body into a new life.
Although there were many previous Jewish commentators on their holy scripture, the first great Jewish philosopher was Philo (fl. 20–40 C.E.), a native of Alexandria. His main project was to harmonize the Hebrew Scriptures and Greek philosophy. However, in doing this he also tried to make the case that whatever good there is in Greek thought ultimately stemmed from Judaism. So far as the creation of the world is concerned, Philo found that the account most compatible with Hebrew Scripture was that of Plato in the Timaeus. In the views of both Plato and Philo, God existed from eternity as an immaterial being, without a world, then brought the world into existence. God, then, continued to exist as an immaterial being over and above a material world.
In Plato’s view, whereas God is eternal, other things also are eternal, in particular, ideal Forms, such as Beauty and Truth, and unformed matter, the basic stuff out of which the material world would be composed. In Philo’s view, by contrast, God alone is eternal. Philo, thus, modified the Platonic account by allowing Forms, which he called Logos (Greek, for word, reason, or plan), to exist from eternity only as ideas in the mind of God. In his modification of the Platonic view, Philo invented a story of a two-stage creation. First, God created both the Forms, as real beings external to his mind, and unformed matter. Then, God used the Forms and unformed matter to fashion the world as we know it, in the process locating Forms in the thinking part of the human soul, which the Greeks had called nous.
Philo accepted Plato’s distinction between rational souls, which are created at the beginning of the world, prior to the creation of bodies, and irrational souls, which are created together with bodies, both of humans and animals. In this account, some rational souls remain bodiless. Philo identifies these with the angels of Scripture. Other rational souls are placed in human newborns, whose bodies are already endowed with irrational souls. When the people these newborns become eventually die, their irrational souls die with their bodies, but their rational souls go on. In Plato, the rational soul is indestructible because of the sort of thing it is, that is, “by nature.” In Philo, it is indestructible not by nature but by the grace of God.
Although the main influence on Philo’s philosophy was Plato, particularly his views in the Symposium and the Timaeus, Philo was also influenced by other Greek thinkers. From Aristotle, he drew ideas about cosmology and ethics, from neo-Pythagoreans, ideas about the mystic significance of numbers, especially the number seven, and about the importance of self-discipline in preparation for immortality. But Philo did not just borrow and modify. He was also an innovator. Importantly, he was the first to claim that while God’s existence can be known, his essence cannot. In contrast to the prevailing Greek philosophical view of a universal Providence subject to unchanging laws of nature, Philo insisted on God’s ability to suspend the laws of nature. He saw the world itself as a great chain of being, with Logos just below God and in the role of mediator between God and the world. Foreshadowing Christianity, he called the Logos the first-begotten son of God.
An important point of contrast between Philo and Greek thinkers is that the Greeks, especially the Stoics, tended to view human history as cyclical and pointless. Philo, by contrast, theorized that cyclical changes in human history are actually guided by Logos toward a preconceived goal, to be reached in the course of time. That goal is that “the whole world may become, as it were, one city,”4 and enjoy the best form of government, which is democracy. His account of this goal is in his interpretation of the messianic prophesies in Isaiah and Micah.
Philo was also innovative in the account that he gave of the human capacity for mystical union with God. In his view, the purpose of this ecstatic union, which he called “sober intoxication,” was to lead humans out of the material world and into the eternal world. Like Plato, he regarded the human body as the prison house of the soul. One could argue that it was predominantly Philo’s influence that turned what was to become orthodox Christianity toward Platonism.
Christianity
Around the age of thirty, Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 B.C.E. to 30 C.E.) was baptized by John the Baptist, just prior to John’s arrest and execution. Soon after, Jesus began his public career, possibly planning to continue John’s work as an apocalyptic prophet. John’s basic message was, “Repent, the end is coming.” Probably when Jesus was baptized by John, he accepted that message. However, by the time Jesus began his public teaching, he had developed his own distinctive message. Historians disagree about what that message was.5 According to traditionalists, Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, in the tradition of John the Baptist. However, traditionalists disagree about whether Jesus regarded himself as the Messiah promised in the Hebrew Scriptures. According to revisionists, Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet, but a this-worldly social and political reformer. In their view, his main message had to do with promoting social equality and with replacing the Jewish system that stressed holiness and purity with one that stressed compassion.
Aside from the extreme scarcity and ambiguity of the evidence on which historians have had to rely in constructing their accounts, there are two main reasons they have been unable to agree about Jesus’ message. First, they disagree about what the evidence should include. The main source of contention here has to do with whether to regard as authentic certain literary evidence that is outside of the New Testament. The most important potential evidence of this sort is the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings of Jesus apparently based in part on early sources other than the canonical Gospels. Second, virtually all academic historians, whether conservative or liberal, agree that many of the events depicted in the New Testament are fictitious and that most of the sayings attributed to Jesus are inauthentic. That is, in the views of most academic historians, many of the events that are said to have happened to Jesus, for instance, those depicted in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, many of the things that Jesus is said to have done, such as raising Lazarus from the dead and walking on water, and most of the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament are fictitious. In sum, in the views of most historians, the Gospels do not primarily represent historical accounts of Jesus, in the modern sense, but rather after-the-fact interpretations of the significance of his life and death by authors who never knew him personally.
All secular (and even most religious) scholars agree that the four New Testament Gospels were not written independently of one another. In their view, when at least two of the four Gospel authors, Matthew and Luke, wrote their accounts, they had before them one or more of the previously written Gospels. That, of course, poses an interesting difficulty, which is known as the Synoptic Problem. The difficulty is to figure out the relations of literary dependency among the Gospel of Mark, which is usually regarded as the earliest New Testament Gospel, and the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. According to the solution to this problem that is most widely accepted, Mark was written first, Matthew and Luke were written next and based in part on Mark, and John was written last, perhaps as late as 120 C.E.
The Gospel of John, which is radically different in style and content from the other three Gospels, is all but universally regarded by scholars as the most historically unreliable of the four canonical Gospels. In the other three Gospels, Jesus often teaches in short epigrams (or proverbs), such as, “For to him who has, will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Mark 4:25), and in parables, such as the stories of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the Sower and his Seed. In John, on the other hand, Jesus’ teaching style is different. Gone are most of the short, pithy epigrams and parables and in their place are long, abstract discourses:
Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.
(John 6:47–51)
And again:
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you.
(John 15:1–4)
And so on.
While some of the ideas in these passages from John parallel those in the earlier three Gospels, it is obvious that in John the ideas are developed more abstractly. A dramatic symptom of this tendency toward abstraction is that in John, Jesus is identified with the Logos. This identification may show the influence of Philo on John. Some of the early church fathers subsequently developed the idea that Jesus is the Logos. They may have done this in order to express Christian faith in terms that would be intelligible to the Hellenistic world or to impress their hearers with the idea that Christianity, while heir to what was best in pagan philosophy, embodied a higher truth. Be this as it may, there are other dramatic differences in content between the first three Gospels (the Synoptics) and John.
Among these differences are that in the Synoptics, Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God and hardly at all about himself. In John, Jesus talks a great deal about himself and hardly at all about the kingdom of God. For instance, Jesus uses the Greek word for “kingdom” (basilia) 18 times in Mark, 47 times in Matthew, 37 times in Luke, and 5 times in John; he uses the Greek word for “I” 9 times in Mark, 17 times in Matthew, 10 times in Luke, and 118 times in John. Such differences are not just statistical. When, in the Synoptics, Jesus uses the word “I,” almost all of his self-references are of a conventional kind. In John, by contrast, Jesus regularly makes staggering statements about himself, such as “I am the bread of life” (6:35), “I am the light of the world” (8:12), “I am the way, and the truth and the life” (14:6), and “Before Abraham was, I am” (8:58).6
There are possible ways to explain such differences between John and the Synoptics that would preserve for John an early date of origin. Most scholars agree that all such explanations are far-fetched. They conclude that John, who claimed to have been an eye-witness to the events he describes, wrote much later than Matthew and Luke, and elaborated for theological reasons what he claimed Jesus actually said. In other words, in their view, John used Jesus as a spokesperson for his own interpretation of who Jesus was.
For the purpose of recovering the actual words and deeds of the historical Jesus, such issues are crucial. Before historians can even begin to reconstruct Jesus’ life, they must separate the authentic wheat from the interpretational chaff. However, for present purposes, it is more important what various New Testament authors thought Jesus said and did than it is what Jesus actually said and did. For it is what New Testament authors attributed to Jesus, and their reflections on what they attributed to him, that have been historically influential. The New Testament authors that matter most in this respect are Paul and John, the earliest and perhaps the latest sources in the New Testament.
Although Paul (10?–67? C.E.) wrote just a few decades after Jesus’ death, he had never met Jesus. Based on what he wrote, he seems to have had almost no interest in what the historical (pre-Resurrection) Jesus said or did. John, on the other hand, who presumably wrote last among the authors of the New Testament Gospels, attributed more words and ideas to Jesus than any of the other authors of the Gospels. Moreover, John, partly because he allowed himself the luxury of being inventive but also because he was such a great writer, was able to put into the mouth of Jesus some of the deepest and most gripping teachings in all of the New Testament.
In any case, although Christianity began as a sect of Judaism, only a small fraction of Jews eventually became Christians. The Jews had long awaited a Messiah, but in the first century C.E. most of them were expecting that their Messiah, if he appeared, would be a political leader, who would free Israel from Roman rule and establish Israel as a powerful kingdom in the world; if not that, then they were expecting a spiritual king who at the end of time would appear in glory from the heavens. One thing that they were not looking for was a messiah as apolitical as Jesus in the New Testament accounts seems to have been, especially not someone who would die in humiliation, like a common criminal, on a cross.
Jews believed that their special relation to God would eventually have important consequences for everyone. Nevertheless, they were intensely nationalistic and separatist, almost wholly centered on the people of Israel. Many early Christians who remained in Jerusalem saw Christianity as part of this nationalistic tradition. They continued to worship at the Temple, seeing no conflict between their new beliefs and Jewish ritual. These early Christians, led by Peter and James, continued to require the observance of traditional Jewish regulations, which tended to diminish the appeal of the new religion to non-Jews. Historians tend to think that Peter and James opposed bringing the new religion to gentiles at least until all of Israel had been awakened to its message.
In opposition to this early Christian faction, Paul, who spent most of his life outside of Jerusalem, asserted that the new Christian promise of salvation was available universally, both to gentiles, who were outside of the reach of Judaic Law, as well as to Jews, who lived within it. As we saw in the case of the Stoics especially, but even Philo, one of the ways in which thought in the early centuries of the Christian era differed from thought in classical Greece was in its greater tendency toward egalitarianism and inclusiveness. In Paul’s words, for those “baptized into Christ” there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one.7
This difference, in nationalistic instead of universalistic tendencies, was the first important doctrinal controversy within the emerging church. In the end, Paul’s universalism prevailed over James and Peter’s Judaic nationalism, thanks in part to the 70 C.E. destruction by the Romans of the Temple in Jerusalem. That event left the Jerusalem Christian community in disarray. Previously, the fledgling movement had been directed and controlled by the Jerusalem community, which was the unique source of authority in faith and discipline. Afterward, Christian life was organized and directed by churches in Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, and Alexandria. The consequences of this shift of power, not only for Christians at the time but for the rest of human history, were momentous.
Paul, a well-educated Hellenistic Jew, had in his early adulthood been an enthusiastic persecutor of Christians. He converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus, when he had a vision of the resurrected Christ. Subsequently he became an equally ardent defender of Christianity. In Paul’s view, Jesus was a preexistent divine being sent into the world to rescue humankind from its state of spiritual decay, which Paul thought was due to enslavement by demonic forces that ruled the lower universe. He claimed that it was primarily these demonic forces, rather than the Romans, who were responsible for the death of Jesus, who by his death and resurrection had saved humanity. In addition, Paul believed that Jesus as Christ might return at any moment: “We who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them [that is, the resurrected dead] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” so that “we shall always be with the Lord.”8 Although Paul speaks highly of the church as an institution, he thought that the world itself was fast approaching its end and, hence, did not expect the church to last for long.
Paul seems to have known a fair amount of Greek philosophy. Yet he went out of his way to disavow any use of it, declaring that he was not going to adorn his account with “persuasive words of wisdom.” He said that his purpose was to implant in his listeners a “faith” that is based not on “human philosophy,” but on the “power” and “wisdom of God.”9 A case can be made that the Corinthians to whom Paul was preaching this message were trying to understand his ideas about human survival of bodily death in terms of Plato’s ideas and that Paul resisted this Platonic interpretation.10
For the Corinthians, as for Plato, the “inward man” (esōanthrōpos) was a term used for “reason” (nous), the divine and immortal part of humans that should be nourished by education and learning.11 Paul rejected this idea.12 In Paul’s view, resurrection of the person and resurrection of the body are one and the same: “Before God there is no naked soul, only whole persons: thus the person is called upon to make himself pleasing to God, a task of the whole man.”13 Paul was interested in developing not reason but receptivity, that is, such faculties as conscience and passive understanding. In opposition to Plato, this is what he called the “inward man.” This orientation is related to Paul’s view that one does not justify oneself before God by deeds but by submission to God’s will. Paul’s interest in inwardness was not due to the soul’s being the seat of human reason but based on the potential of God’s word to change a person from the inside out. It is from the inside that a person is awakened to a new life and becomes whole. This transformation, Paul thought, is effected by the same spirit of God that awakened Jesus from the dead.
Yet despite Paul’s antipathy toward philosophy, his words, especially what he had to say about the resurrection, exercised a profound influence on subsequent Christian philosophy. In his account, just as death came through one man—Adam—so also “the resurrection of the dead has come through one man”—Jesus.14 As we have seen, the idea of bodily resurrection had already arisen within Judaism. At the time of Paul, whether people were resurrected and, if so, how had become a point of contention between Pharisees and Sadducees.15
According to the New Testament, some followers of Jesus were convinced that they had seen Jesus alive after his death on the cross and subsequent burial. Most historians of early Christianity believe that whatever the actual experience of these followers of Jesus had been, at least their thinking they had seen Jesus after he had died was instrumental in the initial formation of Christianity. When the early church fathers later tried to make sense of the idea that everyone would survive his or her bodily death, most of them felt that it was necessary to understand this doctrine of survival in the context of some more-or-less systematic worldview. Their scriptural point of departure in constructing such a view of the resurrection was invariably the words of Paul. Thus, one of Paul’s contributions was to elevate the doctrine of the resurrection to one of the central tenets of Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins”; “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’”16 Easy enough to say, but from the beginning the doctrine of the resurrection was extremely puzzling, as Paul’s pagan critics were quick to point out.
At Corinth, Paul had encountered people who doubted the possibility of resurrection, and wanted a detailed explanation of how it would come about: “But some one will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’”17 Probably Paul accepted from tradition that the resurrected Jesus was able to eat and that his body was solid to the touch. Yet, according to that same tradition, Jesus was able to appear and disappear at will, even passing through locked doors. There was a question, then, about the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body. By implication, there was the same question about the nature of anyone’s resurrected body.
Paul seems to have concluded that a resurrected body—anyone’s—is material but differs in significant ways from the bodies humans have during their earthly lifetimes. He compared the relation of one’s earthly body to one’s resurrected body, which for him was equivalent to the resurrected person, to a plant that in seeming to die leaves a seed, from which its life continues in another plant of the same sort: “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.”18
But if this is the model for resurrection, questions about identity quickly arise. Chief among these questions, for those who are sensitive to the distinction between exactly the same and exactly similar (that is, between numerical and qualitative identity), is whether the plant that produces a seed and then dies is numerically the same plant as the plant that subsequently grows from that seed or merely one of its ancestors. Ordinarily we suppose that a single plant remains the same plant throughout its life, in spite of changing in various ways, but that plants that grow from its seeds, even if exactly similar to the parent plant, are different plants. So, if the relationship of a person on earth who dies to his resurrection replica is like that of a present plant to future plants that grow from its seeds, then a resurrection replica is not numerically the same person who died but merely a qualitatively similar descendant. Not all of the early church fathers seem to have been sensitive to this distinction.
Another question has to do with whether the bodies people have on earth will be the same as the ones they acquire in the afterlife. Apparently, Paul’s answer was that they would not be the same: “There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another”; “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable”; “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body”; and, “I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”19 But if earthly and resurrected bodies are not the same, that further complicates the project of accounting for the numerical identity of the people on earth with their resurrected counterparts. This is especially true if, as Paul assumed, people are just their bodies.
Early Christian thinkers drew on a variety of images to speak of the transition from earthly life to the afterlife. Some were natural images, derived either from Paul or from their own imaginations: seed to plant, darkness to dawn, one season to another. Some were images that had to do with the making of artifacts: one piece of pottery to another, one statue to another. Some, such as the return of the phoenix, were derived from mythology. Curiously, Christian writers often used images such as these in ways that suggested that they had not yet begun to be worried about philosophical questions of personal identity, particularly about questions over which ways of a person’s (or thing’s) being continued suffice for the before-and-after identity of the person (or thing). For instance, an oft-repeated image these writers used is that of a statue that is melted down and then recast in a form that is qualitatively exactly similar to the original. Most philosophers today would say that the earlier and later statues, while qualitatively similar, are not identical, hence that they are different statues. But if this were true, it would undermine the point of the imagery. Many early Christians failed to see that it would undermine the point of the imagery.20
Clement of Rome (c. 30?–100? C.E.), for instance, in a letter of about 90 C.E that he sent to the Christians at Corinth, explained the resurrection primarily in terms of two analogies: that of a seed, which he said dies and decays in the earth before initiating new growth, and that of the phoenix, which he said first dies and then rises as a worm from its own decaying flesh. In the views of many in our own time, the new plant or bird would at best be a qualitatively similar descendent of the original, not the very same plant or bird; hence, it would seem, there would be no personal (or animal) survival, let alone immortality. Clement, it seems, and presumably also his audience, were not perturbed by such niceties.21 But, then, in their believing in personal survival of bodily death, what exactly were they believing?
Even after this question of identity, as opposed to mere replication, became a matter of explicit philosophical concern, the old images continued to be used, raising questions about how early Christian thinkers understood both bodily identity and personal survival. Bizarre as it may seem, it is possible that many of these early Christian thinkers did not even believe in what we today would regard as personal survival of bodily death. That is, it is possible that to whatever extent personal survival of bodily death, in their sense of this expression, depended on the resurrection of the body and was not merely ensured by the persistence of the soul, it is not what we today would call personal survival but, rather, what we would call dying and being replaced by a qualitatively similar replica. When the church fathers later tried to make sense of the idea of personal survival of bodily death, increasingly over time they felt that personal identity does matter—that the individual who rises must be the very same person as the one who died.
Even as Paul wrote, an alternative religious Platonism was spreading in the Greco-Roman world, especially at Alexandria. Philo represented this trend. So too did the Christians at Corinth, whose questions about the resurrection Paul tried to answer. Although Paul, as a materialist, resisted their attempts to understand survival partly in terms of an immaterial soul, their questions encouraged him to adopt some of the language of Platonism, which opened the way for others to reinterpret along dualistic lines what Paul was trying to express in his letters. As a result, later Christians increasingly interpreted personal survival dualistically. The resurrection, then, came to imply the resurrection of the body—not the resurrection of the person—and the soul, following Plato, was thought to be immaterial and independent of the body. In later developments of this view, Philo became a key source for reinterpreting the doctrine of the resurrection in the Old Testament. Inevitably, then, relying on him as a guide to the theology of the Old Testament encouraged a Platonic interpretation of the New Testament doctrine of the resurrection. In the end, Philo’s impact on early Christian beliefs became greater than it had been on Judaism, although Judaism would also move in the direction of distinguishing soul and body, with the soul being immaterial and immortal and the body requiring an independent resurrection.
Islam
The great political and religious unifier in Islamic civilization was Muhammad (570?–632 C.E.), who was born at Mecca into a family of modest means. At the age of twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow but retained his tendency to be critical of materialism and social injustice. At age thirty-five he began to make annual spiritual retreats alone in the desert. In 610, at age forty, he received his first revelation and began to preach. Subsequent revelations came at irregular intervals over a period of twenty years. Muhammad thought that these revelations, which he took to be delivered to him by the angel Gabriel, came directly from God and were perfect transcriptions of an eternal tablet preserved in Heaven. Between 650 and 651, the record of Muhammad’s revelations was compiled into the Qur’an, which consists of 114 chapters (surahs) of unequal length. Its basic message is a call to all Arabs to surrender to God’s will. The imperative to recognize no God but Allah is reiterated throughout these scriptures.
Muhammad was convinced that God had chosen him to be the final prophet. Abraham, Moses, and Jesus were prophets. But in Muhammad’s view, Jesus was not the son of God. Jews and Christians had strayed from the true faith, the one that had been revealed to him. An example of a way they had strayed is that by accepting the doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity had sullied its claim to being monotheistic. Muhammad’s task was to convert the Jews and Christians to the true word. In 622, he left Mecca for the northern city of Medina, where he created an Islamic community for which he laid down strict rules. Alcohol, gambling, and usury were prohibited, as was infanticide. His community grew in strength. In 624, he returned to Mecca and made it the center of the new religion. In 632, he died.
Throughout the Qur’an, the pursuit of knowledge is portrayed as an important virtue. Because Allah is all-knowing, humans, in acquiring knowledge, become more godlike. In the eighth and ninth centuries, at a time when learning in Europe had sunk to its lowest point, Muslim culture entered a golden age in which Arabic, Byzantine, Indian, and Persian perspectives and cultural traditions were successfully integrated into a remarkably robust and intellectually vital civilization. Muslim scholars preserved ancient Greek learning, which they had acquired from their contact with Byzantine scholars. They also wrote commentaries and glosses on Greek philosophy, thus augmenting what would become the Western intellectual tradition.
The Qur’an describes humans as God’s agents, albeit agents who are ignorant and morally weak. Although humans have the greatest potential of any created being, they alone are capable of evil. This tension is at the heart of the human situation. There is no original sin or redemption. Humans are responsible, both individually and collectively, for their behavior. Although Allah is said to control history, humans are free to accept or reject the Qur’anic teachings. When history ends, each human will face judgment and be held responsible for his or her behavior. The Qur’an provides detailed accounts of the joys of Heaven and the horrors of Hell.
The majority of believers interpret these accounts to mean that the afterlife is just like one’s normal life, except that it goes on forever. There is even sex in heaven. But according to some Muslims, one’s future existence differs from the earthly one either in being corporeal in a different way or in being spiritual. In any case, immortality is not guaranteed by humans having an indestructible soul but is due entirely to God’s mercy. Like the ancient Hebrews, Muslims tend to see humans as an animated body, not as an incarnated soul or an ensouled body. Hence, death is not separation of soul from body, but the dissolution of one’s whole being, which is later resurrected whole. Because Islamic scripture places few constraints on how the afterlife is understood philosophically, Arab theologians and philosophers were free to integrate their religious beliefs about the afterlife derived from Scripture with conceptions of the soul and human nature that they acquired from Greek philosophy. They did this within the context of three different sorts of Islamic philosophy: kalam, which consisted of scriptural apologetics, especially arguments in defense of monotheism (its opponents included polytheists, members of mystery cults, Neoplatonists, and Christians); falsafah, which was pursued relatively independently of scriptural apologetics; and sufism, a mystical tradition that originated toward the beginning of the eleventh century, primarily in Spain. In a later chapter, we shall return to consider Islamic philosophy.
Monotheism and Western Conceptions of Self
As we shall see, the three great Western monotheistic religions, with their common origin in the Hebrew Bible, have had an enormous influence on subsequent thinking about the self and personal identity. In each of them, God, the transcendent creator of the universe, is nevertheless personal, with humans created in God’s image, thus encouraging philosophical reflection on the personhood of humans. In each, God, though immensely powerful, is yet attentive to the smallest events that occur within the privacy of the human soul, thus encouraging philosophical reflection on human subjectivity. And, most fundamentally, in each, humans are thought not only to survive into an afterlife where what they have done prior to their bodily deaths can be rewarded or punished, but to resurrect, thus encouraging philosophical reflection not only on personal identity over time but on the identity of the body over time. Collectively, the three religions bequeathed to the philosophy of self and personal identity its most enduring preoccupations: personhood, subjectivity, and identity over time.