A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

particularly lavish reward? Some argued that God would grant back the martyrs bodily resurrection in this life, but inconveniently this failed to happen. Perhaps, then, the resurrection of the martyrs would be in a life to come, and the reward should be specific to individual suffering; this implied the prolonging of a recognizable personal existence.49 No doubt the era of the Maccabees was not the first time that this fairly obvious train of argument had occurred to thoughtful Jews, but now they could listen to voices in other religious or philosophical traditions which might give shape to the idea. The most readily available vocabulary and central concept was actually Greek and had been particularly developed by Plato: he talked of individual humans as having a soul, which might reflect a divine force beyond itself. The first Jewish texts to say much about the soul therefore appear in the Hellenistic period, in ‘Inter-Testamental literature’ dating after the closure of the Tanakh, like the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, probably written between the mid-second century BCE and the early first century BCE.50 The Book of Daniel (or at least most of its text) managed to