Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity (Religion in the First Christian Centuries) by Davies Jon

Author:Davies, Jon [Davies, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

It is the case, however, that the wars and massacres inflicted by the Romans on the Jews effected a substantial change in emphasis, if not a major reformulation of Jewish attitudes to the afterlife. John J.Collins and G.W.E.Nickelsburg, in Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism (1980), endeavour to construct for the period between Alexander and Hadrian, and from the literature originating in the Jewish homeland, a set of 'ideal' or exemplary Jewish figures. Inevitably, no general typology is advanced, but the authors and editors note the predominance of righteous men from the past such as Noah, Daniel and those in Pseud-Philo; of messiahs, that is to say men from the future, and of 'contemporaneous' carriers of the Jewish experience, such as the scribes Daniel and Aaron in Ben Sira. In all of this, the texts move back and forth between old and new tradition, recreating the ideal figures for the felt exigencies of the time as well as in terms of respect for the Jewish story. Military men are not a dominant type. The martyr does however make an emphatic appearance, in the shape of the mother and her seven sons in 2 and 4 Maccabees. In this story, the very real and graphic physical destruction of the bodies of the young men is explicitly compensated for by the promise of a physical reassembly and resurrection (2 Maccabees 7:14-30). In addition, writes Alan Segal, it is in this text that God is first described as having the capacity to create ex nihilo: Segal comments that

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