Resurrection

Resurrection (Greek ἀνάστασις, infinitive ἀναστάναι; Latin resurrectio) is the raising of the dead to eternal life after or from death. A resurrection is hoped for and taught by various religions, especially the three monotheistic world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They follow the religious idea of a revival of all the dead to a final judgment of a god over evil and good (Persian Empire), but differ from ideas of a separation of the immortal soul from the dead body (Hellenism) and a reincarnation (rebirth, migration) of the soul into another mortal body (Hinduism, Egyptian mythology).

Depending on the context, the raising of the dead can refer either to a temporary resuscitation or to a resurrection to eternal life. The term is based on the metaphorical description of death as "(eternal) sleep" or the unconsciousness of a seemingly dead person.

Ancient Judaism developed its particular belief in resurrection from the idea of the righteousness of the Creator and Covenant God of the Israelites in two variants: Resurrection of only those Israelites who were righteous in earthly life to an eternal life with God, or resurrection of all people to the final judgment of God, which would then reward the righteous with eternal life and exclude and punish the unrighteous from it. Both variants are connected with the expectation of a comprehensive transformation of the created world in the Kingdom of God, which would overcome death at all. Judaism does not separate the fate of individuals in the hereafter from the salvation of God's people, humanity and the whole world.

Early Christianity related the world-oriented Jewish hope of resurrection to Jesus Christ: in him the God of Israel had already anticipated the final judgment in order to reconcile with the world and to reveal him as Son of God and Messiah. That is why for Christians the hope of the resurrection of the dead coincides with the expectation of the return of Jesus Christ as the judge of all living and dead.

The Qur'an, the Holy Scripture of Islam, contains numerous descriptions of the Resurrection, mostly in the context of warnings of the approach of Judgment Day and the divine retribution associated with it.

Zoroastrianism

Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion traced back to Zoroaster (630-553 B.C.), first teaches - similar to ancient Egyptian religion - a journey of the souls of the deceased to the Činvat Bridge. Here judgment is held on the good and the bad. For the righteous in earthly life, the bridge was wide as a path, for the others narrow as the point of a knife. The good reached the blessed realms of the paradise Garodemäna (later Garotman), the "place of praise" (cf. heaven); the soul of the wicked, however, went to the "worst place" (cf. hell).

(3) Three thousand years after the birth of Zarathustra, who taught men the way to salvation, the Saoshjant (Saviour) would appear. He would destroy the evil spirits and bring about a new, imperishable world; also the dead shall then rise.

Chronologically roughly parallel to exilic Judaism, the ideas of final judgment, redemption, resurrection, annihilation of the powers hostile to God were linked here. They may have influenced the similar teachings of the three monotheistic religions. It remains unclear whether the destruction of the evil spirits also includes the salvation of the damned and a new creation of the previous world subject to death.

Judaism

Tanakh

The belief in a resurrection of some or all of the dead is attested only rarely in the Tanakh and in relatively late writings. Much more widespread and older was the idea of the primeval and paternal stories in Genesis, according to which people who obeyed God's commandments were rewarded for this with a long earthly life and buried as dead with their ancestors (Gen 25:8 EU):

From the prophets Elijah (1 Kings 17:17-24 EU) and Elisha (2 Kings 4:17-37 EU) the Bible records the temporary revival of some who had already died, as a sign of their endowment with God's Spirit.

The idea of a resurrection of the Israelites is first hinted at in 8th century prophecy. So it says in Hos 6,1-3 EU:

The future action of God is presented here like a healing of the sick and as a certainty like the change of the day and seasons. The new restores the previous life of those struck by God's judgment in such a way that they henceforth fulfill God's will. This signifies an inner-historical turn for the good and was not related to a new life of the righteous after death until after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC.

Since the Israelite faith regarded the body and soul of man as an inseparable mortal unity (Gen 2:7, 19 EU), biblical images of resurrection also encompass the whole person. Thus, in his vision of the bones of the dead, the prophet Ezekiel, who was active in the Babylonian exile (586-539 B.C.), experienced God's power over death as the restoration of all decayed Israelites to a new bodily life that includes the emptying of the graves (Ez 37:1-14 EU). Similarly, the post-exilic so-called Isaiah Apocalypse says in Isa 26:19 EU:

Again, this is about Israel, not mankind. The passage uses the verbs "resurrect" and "raise" in parallel, and in the passivum divinum points unspokenly to the author of the new life. In Isa 25:8 EU it was previously said of YHWH:

In the Tanakh, resurrection or raising from the dead means first of all God's exclusive act of salvation for his chosen people, which at the same time opens a perspective for all people. Here the overcoming of death is promised to them as a necessary component of salvation for Israel. Inner-temporal and other-worldly salvation go hand in hand.

It was not until the book of Daniel (from 170 B.C.) that this promise was extended to the expectation of a universal raising of the dead at the final judgment of God (Dan 12:2-3 EU):

Jewish apocalyptic connected this thought with the aeon turn, i.e. an abortion of world history brought about by God, which would completely transform creation. The fate of the individual human being was included in this collective expectation. Theological starting point is God's unbreakable self-commitment to the final liberation of Israel, expressed in the 1st commandment (Ex 20,2 EU), which aims at the salvation of all peoples from inhuman tyranny (Dan 7,13-14 EU). The faithful Jews held on to this hope even in the hopeless threat to their existence.

Deuterocanonical writings

The 2nd Book of Maccabees (100-50 B.C.), written after the Maccabean Wars, teaches in several chapters the resurrection of the righteous martyrs among the Jews killed for their fidelity to YHWH's Torah. For example, chapter 7, considered a legendary insertion, describes the torture death of seven brothers and their mother ordered by the foreign ruler Antiochos IV. They stand for all Jews who, in the face of certain cruel death, refused the required renunciation of their faith and held fast to YHWH's commandments. They are cited as witnesses to God's power over this unjust death to encourage later generations to faithfulness and martyrdom and to announce God's judgment to the foreign rulers:

Finally, the Mother relates the doctrine of the resurrection in summary to God's power to create:

The belief in the resurrection of the righteous, however, remained controversial in Judaism at that time. In many cases, defeats and deaths of Jewish freedom fighters were attributed to previously committed commandment transgressions that called into question their future justification by God. In contrast, the leader of a successful liberation battle also prayed and sacrificed for the resurrection of the Jews who had fallen because of idolatry, as an episode in the 12th chapter of the 2nd Book of Maccabees shows:

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, the resurrection is only hinted at in fragment 4Q521 as a statement about God:

This was a continuation of the prophetic tradition, according to which God would save and rehabilitate from death precisely those who had fallen short in this life, the poor, those who had been unjustly killed.

In the Ethiopic Book of Enoch the hope of resurrection is already found in early passages (c. 50 B.C.), which, however, are not yet clearly distinguished from the idea of an immortal soul (among others 20:8; 22; 90:33, 38; 91:10; 92:3). It is not until the imagery speeches added around 70-100 AD (chapters 37-71) that the future transformation of dead and decayed bodies into a new life on this earth is anticipated. "In those days the earth will return those who are gathered in it, and Sheol also will return what it has received, and hell will give out what it owes" (Enoch 51:1). Previously (46:6; 48:9-10) this promise is limited to the righteous, sinners are excluded from it.

The 4th Book of Ezra (7:32) and the Syriac Baruch Apocalypse (21:23f; 42:7; 50:2) also allude to these passages. In these, however, resurrection is thought of as the reunion of an immortal soul with a new mortal body in a transformed earth. Even younger Jewish writings such as the Pseudo-Philo tried to balance both complexes of ideas in different ways.

Rabbinic Theology

As the Sadducee question (Mk 12,18-27 EU) shows, the bodily resurrection was a controversial issue in 1st century Palestinian Judaism. The Sadducees rejected this belief because it did not occur directly anywhere in the Torah, which for them was the only valid document of revelation. The Pharisees on the other hand, following later Jewish writings, believed predominantly in the resurrection of the righteous (2nd Book of Maccabees), some also in a resurrection of all the dead at the final judgment (Book of Daniel).

Grave inscriptions of that time do not clearly show the belief in resurrection. A statement that the buried person (Greek psyche) was alive, for example, left open whether this meant a new body or a spiritual continuation of life. Accordingly, ideas about life after death in Jewish theology between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100 were neither uniform nor prioritized over other beliefs.

After the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD, the Pharisees or rabbis (Torah teachers) gained the leading role in Judaism. They gave priority to communal prayer in synagogue worship over the Temple sacrifice cult, which could no longer be practiced. The eighteen petition prayer summarizes the consensus of faith at that time on the resurrection in the 2nd Benediction:

The resurrection is here derived from God's saving omnipotence, grace, and faithfulness to all life.

A tractate of the Mishnah then declared it dogma and excluded from salvation those who did not believe it (San X:1b):

It remained controversial whether the Torah already taught resurrection and what the new life of the dead would be. Most rabbis limited the resurrection to eternal life to Jews recognized by God as righteous; some taught that only Jews buried in Israel would be resurrected. Beginning in the 4th century, it became common to bury the Diaspora dead with some soil from Israel; underground connections would allow their return to resurrection in Israel. In the Talmud, overly material conditions of salvation and descriptions of the life to come are averted (bBer 6 17a):

For this purpose Bible passages such as Isa 64,3 EU were referred to the world to come (bBer 34b):

Medieval

Only Jewish theologians of the Middle Ages attempted to reconcile the conflicting rabbinic doctrines on the resurrection. Saadiah Gaon wrote a separate chapter on this in his work Ha-Emunot we-ha-Deot, which came into circulation as a separate excerpt attributed to Rabbi Eliezer. He taught a temporary bodily resurrection of the righteous in the Messianic Last Days, to which he attributed traditional material propositions, and a completely unimaginable resurrection of all the dead after God's final judgment.

Maimonides put the resurrection as the last of his 13 articles of faith. In other places, however, he seemed to teach the immortal soul. Attacked for this, he explained his belief in Ma'amar Techiat Ha-Metim (1191): the bodily resurrection applies in the messianic time and ends with the death of all the resurrected; in the world to come in the hereafter, a purely spiritual state follows as an immortal soul life.

His main opponents in this dispute were Meir ha-Levi Abulafia (c. 1165-1244) and Moses ben Nachman (1194-1270). The latter declared in Torat ha-Adam that one could believe in God's rewarding and punishing justice according to the Torah even if one rejected bodily resurrection.

Modern Times

In modern times, three doctrines have emerged, each linking to different statements in the Tanakh:

• One assumes that all men die body and soul, but are resurrected bodily in the Messianic age (Sanhedrin 10:1 with reference to Dan 12:2 EU).
• The other assumes that the pure immortal soul, untainted by birth, life and death, returns pure to God. It assumes that this free soul lives on after death, independent of the body (Shabbat 152b with reference to Prov 12:28 EU).
• The third assumes that the soul of man lives on after the death of his body until the messianic time, finally unites with a newly created body and thus resurrects bodily.

In liberal Reform Judaism, under philosophical influence, belief in bodily resurrection is rejected in favor of belief in the immortal soul. Thus liberal rabbis declared after a conference in Pittsburgh in 1885:

The assembly leader Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900) already in 1857 deleted allusions to the bodily resurrection from his Jewish prayer books. He was followed by new editions in the USA, while European new editions of these prayer books transmit the traditional text, but interpret it in the sense of the immortal soul. How this soul lives on after death and what it is, Judaism has never exactly represented.