Jewish hope in the resurrection of the body belonged to the larger framework of hope in an entire new order,87 the sort of kingdom of God Jesus preached. Jewish belief in “resurrection” meant not simply the appearance of a ghost from the afterlife; people believed they saw such ghosts after death, often in dreams,88 but this was a far cry from the end-time raising of the dead affirmed in Dan 12:2-3. Although Jewish views on the character of the resurrection varied (sometimes it involved an angelic or astral existence; see discussion below), it did not simply represent a disembodied afterlife of the soul, which (in some Jewish views) preceded the resurrection.
The Jewish doctrine of the resurrection was not simply an assertion of immortality. 89 Because much of Greek thought in general, like many cultures in the world throughout history,90 addressed the survival of the soul after death,91 it should not surprise us that the Eleusis cult promised a happy life in the underworld, 92 that Isis promised patronage and protection,93 and the Dionysiac mysteries may have indicated a happy afterlife.94 But there is little evidence for any future hopes in the cult of Cybele, and certainly not any linked with Attis.95 When the early Christian picture of bodily resurrection plainly derives directly from Jewish eschatological teaching, one casts the net rather widely to make all human hopes for afterlife parallel to it.96
Pagan afterlife notions and myths of risen deities did provide Gentiles a handle for apprehending aspects of early Christian teaching about the resurrection, 97 but the Christian teaching remains distinctly Jewish in its origin. The teaching can be recognized in some OT texts (probably Is 26:19; most explicitly Dan 12:2)98 and probably has early antecedents in Israel’s history, though personalized eschatology appears in texts only after the Exile.99
Not all streams of early Judaism clearly articulate a doctrine of bodily resurrection. The Sadducees denied it;100 rabbinic texts, which here probably represent the populist Pharisaic consensus, complain about the moral offensive-ness of this denial.101 The evidence we do have from Qumran may support the likelihood that those responsible for the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls accepted it,102 though the concrete evidence is scarce.103 Clearly the Pharisees and their probable successors in the rabbinic movement104 affirmed the doctrine of the bodily resurrection,105 almost equating belief in it with belief in the afterlife.106 The Pharisees were the most popular “sect,” according to Josephus, and popular views of the afterlife might be expected to follow an optimistic rather than pessimistic line of thought, though this was not always the case in paganism.
In any case, widepread attestation in a vast range of pre-Christian Jewish sources (2 Maccabees, Psalms of Solomon, 1 Enoch, and so forth) indicates that the doctrine was much more widely held than among the Pharisees, representing common Judaism,107 and as the widespread use of Daniel (especially in the LXX) would almost require (Dan 12:2).108 Sanders could be right that nearly all religious Palestinian Jews except the Sadducees affirmed the doctrine.109
The belief was probably less widely held initially in the Mediterranean Diaspora, though some evidence for it exists.110 Some hellenistic Jewish writers, while accommodating the idea to hellenistic notions of immortality and the language of deification, also allude to the doctrine of bodily resurrection.111 Perhaps after rabbinic Judaism consolidated its influence, the doctrine of a literal, bodily resurrection also became standard in much of the Diaspora.112 Paul’s contention with the Corinthian Christians might reflect not only pagan Greek but also first-century hellenistic Jewish aversion to discussion about the resurrection; while many Diaspora Jews would affirm the resurrection and most would know about the doctrine, in the first century it was probably most widespread in Palestine, to the East, and among the least hellenized communities. Such geographic indications simply reinforce other confirmations of our earliest sources’ claim that belief in Jesus’ resurrection originated in Jewish Palestine and nowhere else.
But Jesus’ early followers did not simply adopt the resurrection doctrine wholesale from Judaism without adaptation: traditional Jewish expectation was a collective, future resurrection.113 The notion of an individual’s bodily resurrection fulfilled in history would therefore not arise without additional factors (such as the experience of the disciples) to explain it.
