A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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 find a place in the Tanakh, but likewise it is almost certain to have been written as late as the second century. It is unprecedented in Jewish sacred literature in spelling out the idea of an individual resurrection of a soul in a transformed body in the afterlife – though still not for everyone!