Shalom and welcome back to the fourth in our series of Resurrection Narratives which we're holding during the Spring Festival season. For those of you observing the divine moedim (appointments) now and not a month later as we will be, I wish you a blessed third day of Chag haMatzah or Feast of Unleavened Bread.

I apologise for being a little later than usual today which was occasioned by the material I had prepared yesterday vanishing without a trace which I'm hoping will turn up again later if it isn't permanently lost. It's one of those digital hazzards that seem to plague me with increasing regularity as I get older!

So what I thought I would do today is talk to you about the various resurrection beliefs held by the Yehudim (Judahites, 'Jews') of the first century AD, because it's interesting how many denominations and groups unknowingly have adopted variations of these frequently unbiblical beliefs into their theologies often without knowing where they have come from. As in every era, there is a range of divergent theological opinions based largely on a mixture of biblical teaching and speculation. As I tell you about these various positions, you may start recognising them as similar - or even identical - to the beliefs of modern church and messianic assemblies.

First of all, let's remind ourselves that not everything is immediately revealed in the Bible. Many revelations are progressively given, Yahweh revealing a little here, and a little there, building upon man's theological knowledge, particularly in the areas of what I like to call 'spiritual anatomy', the spiritual world beyond our physical sight, and the future worlds-to-come.

Many groups, for instance, base their beliefs about our spiritual anatomy - the way we are built inside - on earlier rather than later revelation. Thus you will find many denominations, from the Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adentists, and the Armstrongite cluster of the Churches of God, and the Christadelphians, to many messianic groups, believing in a very simplistic reality of life. For them, we consist of no more than a physical body plus an invisible, impersonal animating 'spirit' likened to electricity that returns to Elohim (God) when we die, leaving behind a body that disintegrates into a slew of molecules that break apart in the ground and get redistributed into the environment. To these people, because they often interpret the poetic language of the ancients literally, there is no consciousness after death because we don't exist at all after death in their scheme. We are but a memory in the brain of God until the day of the resurrection when He supernaturally reassembles us from scratch as immortal beings.

That's one point of view. At the other extreme is the essentially Western view that we 'have' an immortal, personal 'soul' that lives within us, which survives after physical death, that inhabits a spirit world - disembodied spirits. We talked about this yesterday. This idea represents a fusion of Greek pagan Platonic philosophy combined with Hebrew throught to give what is called Neoplatonism.

If you talk to various churches and denominations, they view the theological contest as essentially between these two truth issues - either you believe in soul-sleeping (like the Adventists, Witnesses and lots of Messianics) or you are a 'soulist' (for want of a better word, like the Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox). In the 19th century, when the Witnesses and Adventists were formed, one of the great theological battles was between these two positions. The soul-sleepers not only rejected - and still reject - a literal heaven and a literal hell, but many were, and remain, annihilationists - the belief that the wicked will be vapoursised and cease to exist altogether, leaving a tiny bunch of saved survivors out of the billions of original human beings who have been born on this world.

The Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox, by contrast, believe, as I said, not only in an immortal soul, but in an eternal heaven and an eternal hell. So while the annihilationists teach the wicked will become extinct at the end of the æon or age, the hellfire-and-damnation crowd believe the wicked will be mercilessly tortured for ever and ever, worlds without end. But what did the first Christians/Messianics believe and what was their doctrine of resurrection exactly? Let me say right off the bat that the first believers didn't accept either of these two positions, but that some of the groups in Judaism and paganism did (see Apocatastasis).

As I mentioned yesterday, the resurrection was the central belief of the first believers. It wasn't an 'add-on' doctrine, it lay at the very centre of everything. They believed everyone would be permanently resurrected, the good and the evil alike, thus giving the lie to the annihilationist teaching and the belief of the Calvinists that Christ only died for some people, not all, a doctrine first formulated by that famous Catholic theologian, St.Augustine. Resurrection was, is, and will always be for everyone. The final state of human beings is not as disembodied spirits.

But let's take a look at some of those first century sects, or at any rate the most important ones. If you had spoken to the Yehudim (Judahites) before Messiah started His mission, you would soon have learned that the Judaism of that day had a very definite understanding of what it thought 'resurrection' meant. First, as I said, there was a spectrum of views, as there always is when a revelation is incomplete. There were those who believed that the ultimate bliss of the redeemed was non-physical. If you know of, or belong to, a messianic group that has unwisely canonised the Book of Jubilees, then you would find the teaching that the physical bodies of the righteous dead will be restored to them but not for the reasons you and I look forward to. To the writer(s) of Jubilees, the hope was to get back one's body especially if you had been a martyr for the express purpose of meeting out justice to their torturers and executioners, and to celebrate their downfall. In other words, the main driving force for a physical resurrection for these fellows was revenge. Also understand that they did not understand a resurrected body to necessarily be immortal, or if immortal, then very much like the one we have now. They had no concept of a glorified resurrected body. Second Maccabees is a perfect example of this mindset.

A number of non-canonical writings, such as the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon (and especially chapters 2 & 3), which you'll find in the Catholic canon, belong to quite a different category to Jubilees and 2 Maccabees (both Pharisee works). It's teaching very close indeed to the full revelation on resurrection truth in the Messianic Scriptures (New Testament). This book speaks of "the souls of the righteous" as being "in the hand of Elohim (God)" in a heavenly, non-coporeal reality. But, quite correctly, the book teaches that this is emphatically not their last resting place but a temporary safe haven before the time when they will "shine forth and run like sparks through the stubble" and be set by Yahweh over the nations and kingdoms to rule them (Wisdom 3:1-8). There's a slight hint of the revenge motif of Jubilees and 2 Maccabees to be sure but the idea that the state of the disembodied, conscious spirits is only temporary, prior to returning as physical beings, is definitely right on the mark. This is what Josephus believed too.

Finally - and this is well known to you all I am sure - there were those, like the Sadduccees, who didn't believe in any sort of life-after-death at all, though we have no definite proof that this is what they believed. They left us no writings of their own so all we know about them comes from their opponents. There may have been a range of beliefs amongst them too, as there so often is in any school of thought. At any rate, the Sadducees were a lot closer to the annihilationist position if what we understand about them is correct after all. Why did they believe in no afterlife? Because they only accepted the Pentateuch as scripture, like the modern Samaritans, and as you know these first five books of the Bible say almost nothing about life-after-death.

So this was the general spectrum of beliefs about life-after-death and the resurrection in the First Century. One thing you need to understand is that most of Yehudim (Judahites) believed in a 'resurrection' that was more like a re-embodiment and restoration of the physical body as we know it and in the kind of world we live in now, and not in a state of bliss. Paradise, to them, was 'more of the same' but under righteous government. The word 'resurrection' was not a general word, as it has become now to be, for 'life after death' or for 'going to be with Elohim (God)' (or with Yah'shua/Jesus) in some general sense. It was simply the word for what happened when Yahweh created newly embodied human beings after whatever intermediate state there might be.

The second thing you need to be aware of is this: when people envisaged the state of temporary disembodiment prior to eventual resurrection (to whatever end they thought they were being resurrected for), they used a variety of language for it, because they weren't too sure what a disembodied person looked like or consisted of. They used such words as 'souls', 'spirits' and even 'angels', but not 'resurrected bodies' as though they were something glorious and radiant. The modern 'Christian' New Age notion that a resurrected person is an incorporeal spirit brought back to life from nothing was never entertained by anyone back then that we know of.

Resurrection always meant re-embodiment to the early, pre-Christian Israelite. But from the time of about Ezekiel 37 the word 'resurrection' was also used as an image or picture to denote the great return from exile, the renewal of the covenant, and the idea that when these happened it would mean that Israel's sin and death sentence (i.e. exile) had been dealt with. You all know the valley of dry bones passage I have in mind, I'm sure. Thus 'resurrection' also carries with it the idea of covenant renewal.

Or to put it another way (because it's easy to get the wrong end of the stick here), the resurrection of the dead became both a metaphor (figure of speech) and metonymy [1] - both a symbol for the coming new age or æon and itself, taken literally, as one central element of the package. Or to put it even more plainly: when Yahweh restores the fortunes of His people, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, together with all Elohim's (God's) people down to, and including, the martyrs who have died in the cause of the Kingdom, from righteous Abel to the last Christian/Messianic martyr who is killed just before Messiah returns - all these will be re-embodied or raised to new life in Yahweh's new world.

To summarise, then: where first century, second-Temple Yehudim (Judahites) believed in resurrection, then that belief had to do with the re-embodiment of formerly dead human beings, on the one hand, and the inauguration of the New Æon or Age, i.e. the New Covenant, in which all the righteous dead would be raised simultaneously, on the other. That is why, when Yah'shua (Jesus) spoke of the Son of Man rising from the dead as an individual within the continuing flow of history (Mk.9:10), the talmidim (disciples) were puzzled as to what He could be talking about.

So, to make this absolutely clear: if a first century Yehudi (Judahite) said that someone had been 'raised from the dead', the one thing he absolutely did not mean was that such a person had gone to a state of disembodied bliss, to either rest in 'Paradise' or 'Heaven' forever to wait until the great day of re-embodiment. Understand I am not saying that the righteous dead don't go to a state of dismebodied bliss in Heaven or Paradise prior to the bodily resurrection - I'm simply saying that's what a first century Israelite hearing the word 'resurrection' preached would have understood it to have meant. Accordingly, we must understand that Yah'shua (Jesus) and the apostles would have tailored their language to, or phrased their preaching around, that contemporary understanding, because that's what 'resurrection' meant in the language of the day, just as it has a particular meaning in 2020, a meaning that has evolved over two millennia. Today the word 'resurrection' is far denser theological term and more pregnant with meaning than it was two millennia ago. Again, this is why history and linguistics (particularly etymology or the meaning of words) are essential to an accurate understanding of Scripture for the 21st century believer.

Summing up: RESURRECTION in first century Israel meant embodiment and the dawning of a new æon (age). Thus if you had gone around announcing that the resurrection had occurred, people would have been confused because clearly (in their minds) it hadn't. Why hadn't it? Because none of the dead patrirachs, nevi'im (prophets) and martyrs were walking around alive again plus, they would have pointed out, that the Restoration prophesied in Ezekiel 37 hadn't occurred since the Romans were still in charge. And that's exactly what a modern religious Jew would tell you today too - they're still thinking like their spiritual ancestors.

The problem with the first century Yehudi (Judahite), as with the modern Jew, is that their theology was, and still is, wrong. Just because the prophesied New Æon (Age) didn't happen the way they expected, and still expect, doesn't mean that the first talmidim (disciples) got it wrong. When they went around 2,000 years ago explaining that because of Yah'shua (Jesus) they now had a wonderful sense of divine healing and forgiveness of sins, and that the former leader of their movement was now alive in the presence of Elohim (God) following His shameful torture and execution, that would not have troubled their contemporaries nearly as much as the claim that Yah'shua (Jesus) was resurrected. That would have blown their theological fuses because they hadn't been taught to think that way on account of their religious leaders being ignorant of the Plan of Salvation. They shouldn't have been, but they were.

The fact that the nevi'im (prophets) and all of Yahweh's people hadn't been resurrected when, it was claimed, Yah'shua (Jesus) had been, would have therefore been a major stumbling block even though, Matthew claimed, in a very strange passage in his Gospel, that something by way of a foretaste of that generalø resurrection had happened. Listen to what he writes:

"Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones) who had fallen asleep (died) were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city [of Jerusalem] and appeared to many. So when the centurion and those with him, who were guarding Yah'shua (Jesus), saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, 'Truly this was the Son of Elohim (God)!'" (Matt.27:51-54, NKJV).

We need to discuss that incredible passage but not today as there isn't time. Let me also add something else - another 'strange' statement in Scripture given, as Matthew has just told us, the limited scope of the number of people "raised":

"Now as they spoke to the people, the cohenim (priests), the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees came upon them, being greatly disturbed that they taught the people and preached in Yah'shua (Jesus) the resurrection from the dead" (Acts 4:1-2, NKJV).

The way that's worded is a little odd because what it means is that the resurrection from the dead had in Yah'shua (Jesus) already occurred because He is the Resurrection. Thus in a very real sense the Son of Man's resurrection is the advance resurrection of the righteous, mysterious though that may sound.

Who were the people that arose from their graves and walked the city of Jerusalem, no doubt scaring the pants off some people, particularly if they were recognised by families and friends? Were they recently dead or had they died so long ago so as to have been unrecognisable? Did they appear any differently physically or in terms of glory - radiance? Were they 'raised' in the same way the widow of Nain and Lazarus had been thaumaturgised - or were they resurrected in the same way as Christ? And if resurrected in immortal bodies, where did they go afterwards? To be with Ezekiel and Enoch (though these were translated, never having tasted death)? Or somewhere else? Why did Yahweh even do that..raise a smalla dvance party from the dead? Was not Yah'shua (Jesus) enough? Who were they specifically? Ordinary folks, well known? And how many? A few dozen? Did anyone else apart from Matthew record this uniquely important event?

Well, that mystery, and all those questions stemming from Matthew narrative, and the enigmatic statement in Acts, must wait until tomorrow when hopefully we can look at them more fully. In the meantime, what I most want you to take away with you from this talk today is an understanding of what the people in first century AD Palestine would have understood 'resurrection' to have meant, how Yah'shua (Jesus) and the apostles would have had to shape their teachings around the common usage of the word at the time (with all its various interpretations), and to get some idea of the problem facing them in explaining the true interpretation of Scripture in place of the only party correct one of the Pharisees and Torah-Teachers (Scribes), never mind the Sadducees who didn't even believe in the resurrection!

Have a blessed day. Until tomorrow, Yahweh bless. Amen

End Notes

[1] The substitution of a word referring to an attribute for the thing that is meant, e.g. 'the crown' = the king or monarch

Acknowledgements

[1] N.T.Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (IVP Academic, Downers Grove, Illinois: 1999)
[2] N.T.Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (SPCK, London: 2003)
[3] N.T.Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (Harper One, NY: 1989)