These Jews ultimately concluded that there is something to come after this life, but they did not believe, as the Greeks did, in an immortal soul that would live on, apart from the body. Why is it that so many people who follow God experience such pain and misery, but others who live godless lives prosper? Is there no justice? Death cannot be the end of the story. The shift in thinking arose largely because of the problem of suffering. It was only many, many years after the Old Testament, in the days of Jesus, that some Jews came to see things differently.
Once the breath/soul left the body, the person did not and would not exist anymore. That is why in the Old Testament we are told that at “death,” or in the “grave,” the “pit,” or “Sheol” - all used as synonyms - no one can worship God and God no longer remembers them. When God created Adam, he gathered “dust from the ground” and made it alive by breathing into it the “breath of life.” This “breath” did not exist as an independent entity (the “soul”) outside the body. The soul does not exist once the body dies. The Bible portrays the human as a creation of God that is one unified entity: an animated body. That is the view handed down to us not from the Bible but from ancient Greek thinking known best from the writings of Plato.
Most Christians today view the soul as an immaterial essence inside the physical frame of the body once the body dies, the soul lives on, intact, forever. As a Jew of the 1st century, Jesus did not think the soul went anywhere after death. Jesus did not think a person’s soul would live on after death, either to experience bliss in the presence of God above or to be tormented in the fires of hell below. The great irony is that this is not at all what Jesus himself believed. They also believe that when they die, their own souls will go to heaven. Billions of Christians around the world believe that on Easter, Jesus was raised from the dead and taken up to heaven to live with God.
0 kommentar(er)
