woe or joy. He also believed at the same time in contrasted localities above and below, appointed as the residences of the disembodied souls of good and of wicked men. We will quote miscellaneously various passages from him in proof and illustration of these statements: 66 116 "Man's bodily form is made from the ground, the soul from no created thing, but from the Father of all; so that, although man was mortal as to his body, he was immortal as to his mind." "Complete virtue is the tree of immortal life."12 "Vices and crimes, rushing in through the gate of sensual pleasure, changed a happy and immortal life for a wretched and mortal one.' 9913 Referring to the allegory of the garden of Eden, he says, "The death threatened for eating the fruit was not natural, the separation of soul and body, but penal, the sinking of the soul in the body." "Death is twofold, one of man, one of the soul. The death of man is the separation of the soul from the body; the death of the soul is the corruption of virtue and the assumption of vice."15 "To me, death with the pious is preferable to life with the impious. For those so dying, deathless life delivers; but those so living, eternal death seizes." He writes of three kinds of life, 'one of which neither ascends nor cares to ascend, groping in the secret recesses of Hades and rejoicing in the most lifeless life."" Commenting on the promise of the Lord to Abram, that he should be buried in a good old age, Philo observes that “A polished, purified soul does not die, but emigrates: it is of an inextinguishable and deathless race, and goes to heaven, escaping the dissolution and corruption which death seems to introduce." "A vile life is the true Hades, despicable and obnoxious to every sort of execration." "19"Different regions are set apart for different things,-heaven for the good, the confines of the earth for the bad."20 He thinks the ladder seen by Jacob in his dream “is a figure of the air, which, reaching from earth to heaven, is the house of unembodied souls, the image of a populous city having for citizens immortal souls, some of whom descend into mortal bodies, but soon return aloft, calling the body a sepulchre from which they hasten, and, on light wings seeking the lofty ether, pass eternity in sublime contemplations." The wise inherit the Olympic and heavenly region to dwell in, always studying to go above; the bad, the innermost parts of Hades, always laboring to die." He literally accredits the account, in the sixteenth chapter of Numbers, of the swallowing of Korah and his company, saying, "The earth opened and took them alive into Hades."2 "Ignorant men regard death as the end of punishments, whereas in the Divine judgment it is scarcely the beginning of them."" He describes the meritorious man as 'fleeing to God and receiving the most intimate honor of a firm place in heaven; but the reprobate man is dragged below, down to the very lowest place, to Tartarus itself and pro 65. 9721 66 1 Mangey's edition of Philo's Works, vol. i. p. 32. Ibid. p. 643. 15 Ibid. p. 12 Ibid. p. 38. 20 Ibid. p. 555. 19 Ibid. p. 527. 9918 13 Ibid. p. 37. 17 Ibid. p. 479. 21 Ibid. pp. 641, 642. found darkness."25 "He who is not firmly held by evil may by repentance return to virtue, as to the native land from which he has wandered. But he who suffers from incurable vice must endure its dire penalties, banished into the place of the impious until the whole of eternity." 7726 Such, then, was the substance of Philo's opinions on the theme before us, as indeed many more passages, which we have omitted as superfluous, might be cited from him to show. Man was made originally a mortal body and an immortal soul. He should have been happy and pure while in the body, and on leaving it have soared up to the realm of light and bliss on high, to join the angels. "Abraham, leaving his mortal part, was added to the people of God, enjoying immortality and made similar to the angels. For the angels are the army of God, bodiless and happy souls."27 But, through the power of evil, all who yield to sin and vice lose that estate of bright and blessed immortality, and become discordant, wretched, despicable, and, after the dissolution of the body, are thrust down to gloom and manifold just retribution in Hades. He believed in the pre-existence, and in a limited transmigration, of souls. Here he leaves the subject, saying nothing of a resurrection or final restoration, and not speculating as to any other of the details.28 We pass on to speak of the Jewish sects at the time of Christ. There were three of these, cardinally differing from each other in their theories of the future fate of man. First, there were the skeptical, materialistic Sadducees, wealthy, proud, few. They openly denied the existence of any disembodied souls, avowing that men utterly perished in the grave. "The cloud faileth and passeth away: so he that goeth down to the grave doth not return."29 We read in the Acts of the Apostles, "The Sadducees say there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit." At the same time they accepted the Pentateuch, only rejecting or explaining away those portions of it which relate to the separate existence of souls and to their subterranean abode. They strove to confound their opponents, the advocates of a future life, by such perplexing questions as the one they addressed to Jesus, asking, in the case of a woman who had had seven successive husbands, which one of them should be her husband in the resurrection. All that we can gather concerning the Sadducees from the New Testament is amply confirmed by Josephus, who explicitly declares, "Their doctrine is that souls die with the bodies." The second sect was the ascetical and philosophical Essenes, of whom the various information given by Philo in his celebrated paper on the Therapeutæ agrees with the account in Josephus and with the scattered gleams in other sources. The doctrine of the Essenes on the subject of our present inquiry was much like that of Philo himself; and in some par 25 Mangey's edition of Philo's Works, vol. ii. p. 433. 26 Ibid. vol. i. p. 139. 27 Ibid. p. 164. 28 See, in the Analekten of Keil and Tzschirner, band i. stück ii., an article by Dr. Schreiter, entitled Philo's Ideen über Unsterblichkeit, Auferstehung, und Vergeltung. 29 Lightfoot in Matt. xxii. 23. ticulars it remarkably resembles that of many Christians. They rejected the notion of the resurrection of the body, and maintained the inherent immortality of the soul. They said that "the souls of men, coming out of the most subtle and pure air, are bound up in their bodies as in so many prisons; but, being freed at death, they do rejoice, and are borne aloft where a state of happy life forever is decreed for the virtuous; but the vicious are assigned to eternal punishment in a dark, cold place.' Such sentiments appear to have inspired the heroic Eleazar, whose speech to his followers is reported by Josephus, when they were besieged at Masada, urging them to rush on the foe, "for death is better than life, is the only true life, leading the soul to infinite freedom and joy above." 1931 7730 But by far the most numerous and powerful of the Jewish sects at that time, and ever since, were the eclectic, traditional, formalist Pharisees: eclectic, inasmuch as their faith was formed by a partial combination of various systems; traditional, since they allowed a more imperative sway to the authority of the Fathers, and to oral legends and precepts, than to the plain letter of Scripture; formalist, for they neglected the weightier spiritual matters of the law in a scrupulous tithing of mint, cumin, and anise-seed, a pretentious wearing of broad phylacteries, an uttering of long prayers in the streets, and the various other hypocritical priestly paraphernalia of a severe mechanical ritual. From Josephus we learn that the Pharisees believed that the souls of the faithful—that is, of all who punctiliously observed the law of Moses and the traditions of the elders-would live again by transmigration into new bodies; but that the souls of all others, on leaving their bodies, were doomed to a place of confinement beneath, where they must abide forever. These are his words:-"The Pharisees believe that souls have an immortal strength in them, and that in the under-world they will experience rewards or punishments according as they have lived well or ill in this life. The righteous shall have power to live again, but sinners shall be detained in an everlasting prison."32 Again, he writes, "The Pharisees say that all souls are incorruptible, but that only the souls of good men are removed into other bodies."33 The fragment entitled Concerning Hades," formerly attributed to Josephus, is now acknowledged on all sides to be a gross forgery. The Greek culture and philosophical tincture with which he was imbued led him to reject the doctrine of a bodily resurrection; and this is probably the reason why he makes no allusion to that doctrine in his account of the Pharisees. That such a doctrine was held among them is plain from passages in the New Testament,-passages which also shed light upon the statement actually made by Josephus. Jesus says to Martha, "Thy brother shall rise again." She replies, "I know that he shall rise in the resurrection, at 66 30 Josephus, De Bell. lib. ii. cap. 8. 31 Ibid. lib. vii. cap. 8. 23 De Bell. lib. ii. cap. 8. the last day." Some of the Pharisees, furthermore, did not confine the privilege or penalty of transmigration, and of the resurrection, to the righteous. They once asked Jesus, "Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Plainly, he could not have been born blind for his own sins unless he had known a previous life. Paul, too, says of them, in his speech at Cæsarea, " They themselves also allow that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust." This, however, is very probably an exception to their prevailing belief. Their religious intolerance, theocratic pride, hereditary national vanity, and sectarian formalism, often led them to despise and overlook the Gentile world, haughtily restricting the boon of a renewed life to the legal children of Abraham. But the grand source now open to us of knowledge concerning the prevailing opinions of the Jews on our present subject at and subsequent to the time of Christ is the Talmud. This is a collection of the traditions of the oral law, (Mischna,) with the copious precepts and comments (Gemara) of the most learned and authoritative Rabbins. It is a wonderful monument of myths and fancies, profound speculations and ridiculous puerilities, antique legends and cabalistic subtleties, crowned and loaded with the national peculiarities. The Jews reverence it extravagantly, saying, "The Bible is salt, the Mischna pepper, the Gemara balmy spice." Rabbi Solomon ben Joseph sings, in our poet's version, "The Kabbala and Talmud hoar Than all the Prophets prize I more; For water is all Bible lore, But Mischna is pure wine." The rambling character and barbarous dialect of this work have joined with various other causes to withhold from it far too much of the attention of Christian critics. Saving by old Lightfoot and Pocock, scarcely a contribution has ever been offered us in English from this important field. The Germans have done far better; and numerous huge volumes, the costly fruits of their toils, are standing on neglected shelves. The eschatological views derived from this source are authentically Jewish, however closely they may resemble some portion of the popular Christian conceptions upon the same subject. The correspondences between some Jewish and some Christian theological dogmas betoken the influx of an adulterated Judaism into a nascent Christianity, not the reflex of a pure Christianity upon a receptive Judaism. It is important to show this; and it appears from several considerations. In the first place, it is demonstrable, it is unquestioned, that at least the germs and outlines of the dogmas referred to were in actual existence among the Pharisees before the conflict between Christianity and Judaism arose. Secondly, in the Rabbinical writings these dogmas are most fundamental, vital, and pervading, in relation to the whole system; but in the Christian they seem subordinate and incidental, have every appearance of being ingrafts, not outgrowths. Thirdly, in the apostolic age Judaism was a consolidated, petrified system, defended from outward influence on all sides by an invulnerable bigotry, a haughty exclusiveness; while Christianity was in a young and vigorous, an assimilating and formative, state. Fourthly, the overweening sectarian vanity and scorn of the Jews, despising, hating, and fearing the Christians, would not permit them to adopt peculiarities of belief from the latter; but the Christians were undeniably Jews in almost every thing except in asserting the Messiahship of Jesus: they claimed to be the genuine Jews, children of the law and realizers of the promise. The Jewish dogmas, therefore, descended to them as a natural lineal inheritance. Finally, in the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul, and the progress of the Ebionites, (which sect included nearly all the Christians of the first century,) we can trace step by step the actual workings, in reliable history, of the process that we affirm,—namely, the assimilation of Jewish elements into the popular Christianity. CHAPTER IX. RABBINICAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. THE starting-point in the Talmud on this subject is with the effects of sin upon the human race. Man was made radiant, pure, immortal, in the image of God. By sin he was obscured, defiled, burdened with mortal decay and judgment. In this representation that misery and death were an after-doom brought into the world by sin, the Rabbinical authorities strikingly agree. The testimony is irresistible. We need not quote confirmations of this statement, as every scholar in this department will accept it at once. But as to what is meant precisely by the term "death,” as used in such a connection, there is no little obscurity and diversity of opinion. In all probability, some of the Pharisaical fathers—perhaps the majority of them-conceived that, if Adam had not sinned, he and his posterity would have been physically immortal, and would either have lived forever on the earth, or have been successively transferred to the home of Jehovah over the firmament. They call the devil, who is the chief accuser in the heavenly court of justice, the angel of death, by the name of "Sammael." Rabbi Reuben says, "When Sammael saw Adam sin, he immediately sought to slay him, and went to the heavenly council and clamored for justice against him, pleading thus:'God made this decree, "In the day thou eatest of the tree thou shalt surely die." Therefore give him to me, for he is mine, and I will kill him; to this end was I created; and give me power over all his descend |