Immortality
Page 11
Similarly, the youngest of the Abrahamic religions, Islam, is just as clear, as the Qur’an says: “It is God who gives you life, causes you to die, then gathers you together for the Day of Resurrection, of which there is no doubt” (sura 45, verse 26). There is also no doubt that Muhammad’s vivid descriptions of the very physical pleasures awaiting believers in paradise—especially for those who died in battle—helped to motivate them in spreading their faith. Indeed, one scholar of Islamic history, Nerina Rustomji, has described how this new religion was defined by its graphic images of the afterlife, which was as novel to the pagans of the Arabian Peninsula as it was to the Gentiles to whom Paul preached.
Thus half of the world’s population—some three and a half billion people—officially subscribe to the physical resurrection of the bodies they have known in this life. In reality, however, the figure is much smaller. One 2006 survey showed that, although 80 percent of Americans belong to one of the three Abrahamic religions, only just over 30 percent of Americans believe they will be resurrected. This means a majority of believers—totaling half of all Americans—do not believe one of the core dogmas of their faith. Responding to a survey, one Christian said that she associated the idea of resurrection with “bad horror movies,” while Jon Levenson, professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, recently wrote that the historical centrality of resurrection to their faiths “comes as a shock to most Jews and Christians alike.”
The reason for this astonishing gap between doctrine and actual belief is simple: despite its initial atractions, the idea of physical resurrection is a rather problematic one.
OF BOARS AND CANNIBALS
ANYONE believing that a Resurrection Narrative will satisfy his or her will to immortality must believe that it really is he or she, that selfsame person, who will rise again. Paul did not expect that someone merely like him in certain respects would rise from the grave on the Day of Judgment—he expected that he himself would. Indeed, only if the people who rise from the grave are really the selfsame people as those who once lived does the judging part of the Day of Judgment make sense: it would be grossly unfair to condemn anyone to hellfire unless that person really was the one who had committed the sins in question. This might sound obvious, but it in fact presents the resurrectionist with a problem.
If Paul believed that he would rise again, then he must have believed that he could somehow pull through the ordeal of being killed, buried and then revivified. This is, after all, what happened in the Jesus story: he is supposed to have pulled through being crucified, entombed and brought back to life. And many millions of people accept this story. Partly, they accept it because it seems not hard to imagine: we think it easy enough to picture a person dying and somehow a short time later reawakening to live again. But what we imagine is only the surface—someone becoming pale and cold, then magically warm and rosy-cheeked again. There is, however, much more to death than this.
Experts argue over the exact moment when we cross the boundary from life to death (or whether there is such a definite moment), but we can still sketch the outlines of what is usually involved. First, your heart stops beating, depriving other organs of life-giving oxygen. With no oxygen, your brain stops regulating your body’s functions and stops supporting consciousness, and individual cells throughout your body begin to die. Bacteria in your gut take advantage of the cessation of your immune system and start consuming you from the inside. Before long, although you may still be recognizable from the outside, on the inside, whole parts of your body, including the brain, have lost their complex, delicate structures and have begun to turn to mush. After a week, much of your insides will have putrefied; after a month or so, you are a liquefying, bloated, unrecognizable mass. It might seem easy to imagine a corpse once again becoming rosy-cheeked, but it is much more difficult to imagine how putrefied lungs can breathe again or how a liquefied heart can beat.
The details of Jesus’s resurrection are not described in the New Testament—only its effect, the risen Christ, and even that in contradictory terms. Diarmaid MacCulloch, the Oxford professor of church history, has described the failure to describe what really happened in Jesus’s tomb as “the blank” at the center of Christianity. It is a blank that is very hard to fill. The process of death and decay does not sound like one that any human being could possibly pull through—and even Jesus, the Son of God, died as a man. Yet if the story of Jesus and the hopes of millions are to make any sense, then this total dissolution of the body can be no more than a temporary setback on the journey to eternal life.
The ancient Egyptians were well aware of this problem and had a whole battery of answers to how someone could survive the shock of being killed. Of course, they did their utmost to preserve the physical body and believed that this was important for a satisfactory existence in the next world. But they also believed in the importance of numerous souls, a person’s works and the memories they left behind, their names and their families. All of these things provided ways of surviving even without a beating heart. So even before the mummification process was complete, although the deceased might be in a kind of limbo, they weren’t really dead and gone.
But resurrectionists such as the Pharisees and early Christians did not posit the existence of mysterious, nonphysical substances like souls—indeed, that was the view against which they defined themselves. So when people died, they really were dead. And what was death like? Well, a bit like sleep. The dead, according to the Old Testament, were “those that sleep in the dust of the earth” awaiting the resurrection (Daniel 12:2). But waking up from a long sleep is something we can all understand; waking up from death is a different matter.
WITH cunning use of natron and linen stuffing, the Egyptians might have preserved mummies that looked a bit like human bodies, but these things no longer had brains, blood or many other features we ordinarily consider crucial to a real human body. Yet those who were mummified had it good compared to the Christian victims of Roman persecutions. The Romans were well aware of the Christians’ belief that they would one day rise bodily from the grave and did everything they could to mock and hinder those hopes. A report of a persecution in Gaul in 177 CE records that the martyrs were first executed, then their corpses left to rot unburied for six days before being burned and the ashes thrown into the river Rhône—“Now let us see whether they will rise again,” the Romans are reported to have said. Such barbarous acts did little to dampen the Christians’ missionary zeal—but they did pose something of a challenge to early theologians. Just how was a handful of ashes supposed to rise again?
Early Christians at first thought the answer simple: all God had to do was gather the bits that made you up before you died (atoms, elements or whatever) and put them back together just as they were. As he is omnipotent and omniscient, this should not be too big a job, they thought. It is no different from dropping a precious statue and so causing it to break into pieces, then putting the pieces back together with such skill as to make the statue as good as new. Seeing the fully repaired statue, would anyone doubt that it had survived the little accident? Surely not. So seeing the newly repaired you on the Day of Judgment, no one would doubt that you had survived your sojourn in the grave.
This way of describing resurrection was defended by the church fathers for many centuries after Jesus emerged from his tomb and still has advocates today. But also, even in Jesus’s time, this view had its critics, and subsequent developments in science and philosophy have only compounded its problems. As it involves a person being effectively dismantled by death and then put back together again, it is known as the Reassembly View of resurrection. It faces at least three major challenges.
The first of these is what I will call the Cannibal Problem. Imagine that before you had a chance to repair your broken statue, I grabbed a bit and used it for a statue that I was making. If you wanted to make your statue whole again, you could only do it by breaking mine and taking your bit back. We could not both at the same time complete our statues.
Similarly, if the same atoms were at different times part of two human beings when they died, we (or even God) would have a problem fully reassembling both of them. And this is by no means unlikely: during the Roman persecutions, many Christians were fed to wild beasts in the arenas. Some of those beasts—wild boars for example—might then have been served up for the post-circus feast. So people would have been eating animal flesh that was in part made of human flesh and that in turn became part of their flesh. Or simpler still is cannibalism. If a cannibal comes to be made up of bits that once belonged to another human, then even God could not re-create them both whole on the day of the resurrection.
We now know that we do not even need recourse to such dramatic examples to make this point: we are continually acquiring and losing atoms that are then recycled by nature—one estimate suggests that we replace 98 percent of our particles every year. Given the sheer number of atoms involved (approximately seven billion billion billion in an average human body), odds are—even if you are not tempted by cannibalism—that you are now in part composed of atoms that once were part of others as they breathed their last.
Theologians have thought hard about this problem and come up with many innovative solutions—but none that have yet found widespread acceptance. One early attempt was to flatly deny that a human being can actually digest and assimilate the flesh of another human being—of which the skinniness of cannibal tribes was allegedly evidence. Others have argued that the matter will belong to that person for whom it formed the most essential part, others still that it will belong to the person who had it first—and in both cases that God would simply fill in the gaps in the person left short. But these solutions rather undermine the idea that your claim to be identical to the resurrected you depends on your being made of exactly the same bits. Despite two thousand years of trying, the Cannibal Problem remains without solution.
The second problem with which the resurrectionists struggle is just what the resurrected body is supposed to be like. I will call this the Transformation Problem; like the Cannibal Problem, it is almost as old as Christianity itself. The argument runs like this: on the one hand, resurrectionists claim that your resurrected body is made of the same bits as you, put together in the same way. This, after all, is what makes the old you and the new you one and the same person. But on the other hand, when you die, you might be old, withered, arthritic, senile and riddled with cancer. Yet this is not how believers imagine the inhabitants of the resurrection paradise. On the contrary, St. Paul promised that our bodies would be made glorious and incorruptible, fit for immortality. Indeed, most Christian resurrectionists are convinced that there will be no sickness in paradise, nor any need for eating and drinking, and everyone will be beautiful and perfect.
But this is rather like my smashing my clay statue, then casting one in the same shape but made instead of gold. Would we really say that these were the same statues—that my original statue had survived being smashed and “rebuilt” out of gold? Or would we not be more inclined to think that I had destroyed my old clay statue and made a new gold one in its place? The early theologians suggested we might keep some of our bodily features that would strictly be obsolete, such as teeth (because we would look silly without them) or even redundant internal organs. But even these features that are supposed to link us to our original, this-worldly selves would be somehow transformed to be made incorruptible. The resurrectionists have therefore run into a contradiction: on the one hand, your survival depends upon exactly the same atoms being reassembled just as they were before you died; yet on the other hand, the postresurrection you is supposed to be a different creature altogether, made of invincible stuff and arranged so differently that you no longer require even a metabolism. Just as with the gold statue, this sounds more like replacement than resurrection.
If this was not already enough, there is an even more serious problem with the idea that you could just be put back together again like Humpty Dumpty. I will call it the Duplication Problem, and it too has ancient versions, though it is still much discussed in the philosophical and theological literature. One modern rendition goes like this: we have just seen that we replace roughly 98 percent of our atoms every year. It is indeed entirely possible that, through this process of replacement and renewal, you now do not have a single atom in common with yourself as a five-year-old. But if that is so, then God could not only reassemble the current you, were you now to die, but he could also simultaneously reassemble the five-year-old you. And the reassembled five-year-old would have just as much claim to be you as the reassembled adult version: both would be made from atoms that composed you at a certain time and would be put back together just as you were.
This is a big problem for the Reassembly View of resurrection. As we will see in the next chapter, any theory that allows multiple versions of you to appear at the same time breaks the rules of logic—and even an omnipotent God cannot do what is logically impossible. One might argue that God would not attempt to pull off such a mean trick as to reassemble both the adult you and the child you—but that is not the point: the very fact that our criterion for survival allows for the appearance of multiple versions of you is enough to tell us that something is badly wrong.
These three problems show that even God would have great difficulty in physically putting you back together again on Judgment Day in a way that would mean it really was you rising from the grave. If we are just these fleshy bodies, then death and disintegration are high hurdles to overcome on the way to immortality. But we will see in the next chapter that there are other ways of seeing resurrection besides the Reassembly View, so the idea that we might rise again has life in it yet.
THE END IS (STILL) NIGH
“FIVE times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked” (2 Corinthians 11:24–27).
This is Paul’s own description of the tribulations he had endured on his mission—though when he wrote it they were far from over. Everywhere he went plots were hatched against him, mobs rose up and ambushes were laid. But his enemies were mostly not the Greeks and Romans whose ways he condemned as sinful—they were his fellow Jews and even fellow Christians.
St. Paul is famous today for his self-appointed title, “apostle to the Gentiles” (Romans 11:13), but he was not the only or even the first follower of Jesus to preach to non-Jews. What was unique about Paul’s mission was that he argued faith in the risen Christ was enough to be accepted into the new church. In contrast to the other apostles—those who had in fact known Jesus in his lifetime—Paul believed that converts did not have to be circumcised or follow all the (many and detailed) laws of Moses; in other words, he believed that you did not have to become a Jew to become a Christian. Salvation and eternal life awaited all who had faith in Jesus. This was a declaration of war on the special status and traditions of the people of Israel.
When Paul returned to Jerusalem after many years of missionary activity a trap lay in wait for him. He had previously argued bitterly with the other apostles—who still regarded themselves as pious Jews—and had even accused St. Peter of hypocrisy. Despite an official truce, these apostles continued to regard him as a troublemaker: when he arrived in Jerusalem, they told Paul that he must prove to the Jews that he was still one of them and was not really preaching that they should abandon the law of Moses. The book of Acts describes how they suggested he escort some pilgrims in a ceremony of cleansing in the temple—and how when he followed their suggestion an angry mob lay waiting to lynch him. Only the intervention of a large detachment of Roman soldiers saved Paul from being beaten to death on the s
pot.
He spent the rest of his life in Roman custody. But he had already sown the seed of a religion that could transcend the provincialism of the Old Testament. Judaism contained within it a contradiction: it claimed both that its god, Jehovah, was a tribal god, their god, but at the same time that he was the one true God, the God of all. Paul resolved this contradiction by declaring that the age when Jehovah revealed himself only to the Jews was over; through the death and resurrection of Jesus, he had sent his message to Jews and Gentiles alike, who were both now free from the old law. This was the last stroke needed to release Christianity from its Israelite moorings and allow it to become the world religion it is today.
IN one of the most extraordinary cliff-hangers in literary history, the Bible simply leaves Paul in Rome awaiting his trial—we are not given a heroic martyrdom, inspiring valediction or final revelation. A rich hagiographic tradition has sprung up to fill in this gap, according to which he was beheaded—as a Roman citizen he would have been spared the torture of crucifixion—during Emperor Nero’s persecution of the Christians following the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE. If he was disappointed that the kingdom of God had not already arrived, he would at least have died convinced that he would not have to wait long.
That was nearly two thousand years ago, and believers are still awaiting the End Times. The clues Jesus gave for how we should know the last days—when “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes” (Matthew 24:7)—are unfortunately rather vague; indeed some might say they are a generic description of the human condition. Thus people of all ages have believed the end was nigh. Some denominations, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, argue they are right now upon us—and have been doing so for some time.