The earliest Christians inherited a rich tradition of beliefs about interactions between the living and the dead from the Greeks and the Romans, but the texts that comprised the New Testament added surprisingly little to this heritage. Many early Christian authors followed the apostle Paul in believing that the followers of Christ would join him immediately in paradise when they died. In the Gospel accounts of the Passion, Jesus likewise promised the repentant thief who was executed with him that “today you will be with me in paradise.” On the other hand, the souls of the sinful dead departed without delay to the dark realm of Hades. The Gospel of Luke contrasted the fates of Lazarus, a destitute man whose soul the angels carried to the bosom of Abraham, and an unnamed rich man, who proceeded directly to Hades where he was tormented for neglecting to give alms to the poor.
While the authors of the New Testament texts took for granted the existence of ghosts, they made no new claims about where they came from or how they behaved. In fact, the geography of the ancient otherworld remained largely unchanged in the imagination of the earliest Christians. The apostles employed the Greek term Hades alongside Hebrew words like Sheol and Gehenna to denote the abode of the dead, but they did not contribute to a new understanding of the meaning of these words. The behavior of the restless dead remained the same as well. In early Christian texts, the spirits of the deceased still visited their loved ones in dreams, crowded menacingly around visitors to their domain, and haunted the places where their bodies lay unburied or slain by violence, much like they did in Greek and Roman antiquity.
These similarities stem in part from a shared funerary culture throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. For several centuries after the death of Jesus Christ, early Christians did not have death rites or burial places separate and distinct from their pagan neighbors. In the Roman Empire, the interment and commemoration of a deceased person was largely a family affair. Many Christians attached a new significance to the day of a person’s death, believing it to be the day of their rebirth into a new life with Christ, and some of them sought burial in proximity to the tombs of the martyrs, but it was only in the early Middle Ages that Christian communities developed the preference for burial in the hallowed ground of churchyard cemeteries.
Unlike the Greeks and Romans, however, ancient Christians were strict monotheists who recognized the God of the Hebrews as their own. From the very beginning of the Christian movement, they appropriated the Hebrew scriptures as a foreshadowing of their claims about the meaning of the life and death of Jesus Christ. In doing so, they became the heirs to a long and ambivalent tradition about the practice of necromancy in the ancient Near East. Christian readers found in the Book of Deuteronomy an ancient prohibition against speaking with the dead, a practice outlawed by Moses as an affront to God. In contrast, they also read the story of King Saul’s consultation with the witch of Endor, who performed a necromantic ritual to summon the ghost of the prophet Samuel on the king’s behalf. Thus, the classical tradition and the Hebrew scriptures each played formative roles in shaping how the early Christians thought about the restless dead. Despite this inheritance, Christians abandoned commerce with professional diviners like Erictho. As these stories show, God granted the authority to communicate with the dead to martyrs and saints for purposes far removed from the unsavory activities of ancient necromancers.