A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

summoned creation out of nothing.48 This was important for Christians later, as they struggled to find a convincing way of expressing their conviction that God could remain divine while entering the world which he had created. Greek discussion of nothingness helped to change Jewish views on beginnings; Jewish thinkers also borrowed ideas to help them understand the end of human life and its aftermath. On the whole, before the time of the Maccabees, Jewish discussion of God had shown little interest in the nature of the afterlife; Judaism was concerned with this life and with interpreting the many tragedies that happened to people on earth. Because of this, the Tanakh does not have all that much to say about death and what comes after. What it does say, particularly in texts written before the Babylonian exile, suggests that human life comes to an end and, for all but a few exceptional people, that is it. A new impulse to develop ideas about the afterlife seems to have been provoked by the terrible deaths of some of the heroes of the Maccabean war of independence, discussed in detail with pious horror in the histories of the wars. Surely such heroism deserved a