Are any Christians on here adherents of mortalism or soul sleep?
I would like to engage in a friendly debate with any mortalists or soul-sleepers regarding my disagreement with your interpretations of the soul-body relationship in the Bible, especially in terms of the New Testament (but I'll also consider the Old Testament/Tanakh if you want).
A brief overview: until the early 20th century a pre-modern, classical interpretation of the Bible held sway over much of the relevant scholarship. It erred in applying alien notions of afterlife with a basis in Platonic dualism to its exegesis of the scriptures. This was supplanted in the 20th century by a fresh paradigm guided essentially by mortalism (or, in its softer articulation, lack of interest by the ancient Hebrews) as concerned the survival of the soul in the Tanakh and an emphasis (in the latter case rightly) upon bodily resurrection post-exile/Maccabean period and in the New Testament, allegedly derived from Persian or other influence. This "consensus" has in turn been widely critiqued by recent scholarship on ‘Israelite religion’, "which has sought to interpret Israelite understandings of death in terms of the religious patterns of neighboring cultures" while emphasizing the intermediate state for understanding elements of the afterlife alluded to in the New Testament corpus. This recent trend perhaps over-exaggerates the predominance of soul-related beliefs in the Hebrew Bible, just as the preceding 'consensus' strived too hard to avoid and/or outright dismiss them.
A number of the most up-to-date - and in my opinion intellectually robust scholarship - retrieves much that was true in the earlier accounts but also attempts to correct the errors, by locating both the belief in post-mortem soul survival and the resurrection of the dead far deeper and earlier in the Jewish tradition (prior to any alien influences from Greece, Persia and Babylon), to such an extent that "in the Second Temple period these ideas and ideals joined up and surfaced in Israel’s conscious faith" in the schema adhered to in the intertestamental literature, with influence at this latter stage from other cultures merely restoring and refining intuitions already known primordially to the Hebrews. For the resurrection side of this argument, see Jon Levenson's Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (2006).
Like Josephus in his Antiquities, Acts refers to the Pharisees' belief in disembodied spirits and angels, pared with the Sadducees rejection of these concepts. From Josephus, we learn that the Pharisees and their doctrines were "very influential among the body of the people", something that the New Testament and the later Talmudic authors both attest to as well.
The prevalence of this theological presumption regarding the existence of disembodied human souls after death was such that the American scholar and Emeritus Professor of the Hebrew Bible, Lester L. Grabbe, could write: "It was a view of the soul similar but different to that in Platonism which became widespread in Judaism in the last century or so BCE" (Wisdom of Solomon p.54).
Basically, populist first century Judaism had inherited notions of an intermediate disembodied state in Hades ("Abraham's Bosom" for the righteous and punishment for the wicked), immortality of the soul, disembodied spirits and the resurrection of the dead from influential earlier texts (i.e. the Book of Daniel, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra etc.) that had become very widespread among the Pharisees, Essenes and others such as Philo. This forms an important backdrop to the popular culture of the New Testament authors, with St. Paul having actually been a Pharisee and Jesus himself having had much in common with this school (certainly over against the Sadducees).
While I'd be happy to go over the Old Testament dimension of this discussion, I'm primarily interested in analysing the soul-body relationship at the time when the NT scriptures were written.
I would like to engage in a friendly debate with any mortalists or soul-sleepers regarding my disagreement with your interpretations of the soul-body relationship in the Bible, especially in terms of the New Testament (but I'll also consider the Old Testament/Tanakh if you want).
A brief overview: until the early 20th century a pre-modern, classical interpretation of the Bible held sway over much of the relevant scholarship. It erred in applying alien notions of afterlife with a basis in Platonic dualism to its exegesis of the scriptures. This was supplanted in the 20th century by a fresh paradigm guided essentially by mortalism (or, in its softer articulation, lack of interest by the ancient Hebrews) as concerned the survival of the soul in the Tanakh and an emphasis (in the latter case rightly) upon bodily resurrection post-exile/Maccabean period and in the New Testament, allegedly derived from Persian or other influence. This "consensus" has in turn been widely critiqued by recent scholarship on ‘Israelite religion’, "which has sought to interpret Israelite understandings of death in terms of the religious patterns of neighboring cultures" while emphasizing the intermediate state for understanding elements of the afterlife alluded to in the New Testament corpus. This recent trend perhaps over-exaggerates the predominance of soul-related beliefs in the Hebrew Bible, just as the preceding 'consensus' strived too hard to avoid and/or outright dismiss them.
A number of the most up-to-date - and in my opinion intellectually robust scholarship - retrieves much that was true in the earlier accounts but also attempts to correct the errors, by locating both the belief in post-mortem soul survival and the resurrection of the dead far deeper and earlier in the Jewish tradition (prior to any alien influences from Greece, Persia and Babylon), to such an extent that "in the Second Temple period these ideas and ideals joined up and surfaced in Israel’s conscious faith" in the schema adhered to in the intertestamental literature, with influence at this latter stage from other cultures merely restoring and refining intuitions already known primordially to the Hebrews. For the resurrection side of this argument, see Jon Levenson's Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (2006).
Like Josephus in his Antiquities, Acts refers to the Pharisees' belief in disembodied spirits and angels, pared with the Sadducees rejection of these concepts. From Josephus, we learn that the Pharisees and their doctrines were "very influential among the body of the people", something that the New Testament and the later Talmudic authors both attest to as well.
The prevalence of this theological presumption regarding the existence of disembodied human souls after death was such that the American scholar and Emeritus Professor of the Hebrew Bible, Lester L. Grabbe, could write: "It was a view of the soul similar but different to that in Platonism which became widespread in Judaism in the last century or so BCE" (Wisdom of Solomon p.54).
Basically, populist first century Judaism had inherited notions of an intermediate disembodied state in Hades ("Abraham's Bosom" for the righteous and punishment for the wicked), immortality of the soul, disembodied spirits and the resurrection of the dead from influential earlier texts (i.e. the Book of Daniel, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra etc.) that had become very widespread among the Pharisees, Essenes and others such as Philo. This forms an important backdrop to the popular culture of the New Testament authors, with St. Paul having actually been a Pharisee and Jesus himself having had much in common with this school (certainly over against the Sadducees).
While I'd be happy to go over the Old Testament dimension of this discussion, I'm primarily interested in analysing the soul-body relationship at the time when the NT scriptures were written.
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