What Jesus Believed about Life after Death and Why it Matters
The only time in the Gospels where Jesus talks about life after death is in a response to a question by the Sadducees. They did not believe in life after death, so the question posed to Jesus is a loaded question. A woman had married seven brothers successively in obedience to the law of levirate marriage. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? The Jews who believed in life after death, like the Pharisees, believed in resurrection, not immortality. Many of the Greeks believed in immortality. They believed in a sharp distinction between soul and body. Some Greeks called the body the prison house of the soul. They believed that in death the soul doesn’t die, it simply departs the body. In the Hebrew tradition, there is no separation of soul and body; soul and body are one. The immaterial is inseparably connected to the material in Hebrew thought. Therefore, they believed that when the body dies so does the soul, and then it takes an act of God to raise the total person....