Was the Resurrection a Greek Idea?

¶ Was the Resurrection a Greek Idea?

Short answer. No, and the reason is structural rather than statistical. Greek thought's great contribution to afterlife belief is the immortality of the soul, popularized by Plato: a deathless self that survives the body and is better off without it. Bodily resurrection is the opposite anthropology. Daniel 12:2, the first undisputed Jewish statement of it, says that “many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake”, which is a body coming back out of the ground. The two ideas were later fused in Christianity, and untangling that fusion is a standard piece of modern scholarship. So when Greek influence is offered as the explanation for the arrival of resurrection, it is being asked to supply the doctrine it is best known for ruling out. The loanword record does not help the case either: the entire Greek stratum of the Hebrew Bible is four words, and all four are musical instruments.

Tier note: that Greek thought centres on the immortal soul and that Daniel 12:2 describes a bodily rising is bedrock, and both are readable in the primary texts. The loanword counts are published data anyone can re-run. That the Greek explanation is therefore the weaker candidate is an argument, marked here as contested-but-grounded, and this page does not claim to have established where the doctrine did come from.

¶ The two doctrines are opposites, not variants

Begin with the distinction, because almost everything on this page follows from it and it is routinely collapsed in popular writing.

The Greek idea, in its influential Platonic form, is that a person is a soul that has a body. The soul is immortal by nature, the body is a temporary and somewhat regrettable container, and death is a release. On this view the best possible outcome is that the body stays in the ground and the soul goes free.

The Hebrew idea is that a person is a body, animated. Genesis has the human formed from dust and made living by breath, and the baseline is “dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). When hope for the dead finally appears, it is not a soul escaping. It is God putting the person back: “many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” (Daniel 12:2). The dust is the whole point of the sentence.

These are not two flavours of the same belief. They disagree about what a human being is, and they prescribe opposite outcomes for the body. Later Christianity holds both at once, which is why the average modern believer pictures a soul going to heaven and a resurrection at the end without noticing the seam. The seam is real and it is traced in Is the immortal soul a Greek idea, not a biblical one?.

So the question this page asks is narrow and answerable: can the tradition that gave the West the immortal soul also be the source of the doctrine that says the body comes back? It is the wrong donor for the job, and saying so costs nothing, because the immortal soul really is Greek and really did arrive later.

¶ The loanword record does not help the Greek case

Set the ideas aside and look at contact, which can be counted rather than compared.

The entire Greek stratum of the Hebrew Bible and Biblical Aramaic is four words, and all four are musical instruments: a lyre, a psaltery, pipes and a trigon. All four occur in one scene, the orchestra of Daniel 3. This is not a sample anyone assembled to make a point; the Greek stratum in Biblical Hebrew is famously confined to that instrument list, which is why it works as an exhaustive control.

In the same corpus the Old Iranian stratum runs 38 lexemes and concentrates in law and political office at 39.5 percent against an 8.3 percent chance expectation. And the two sit twelve verses apart in a single scene: the officials of Daniel 3:2 to 3:3 are satraps, prefects, governors, counselors, treasurers, judges and magistrates, while the instruments of 3:5 are the Greek ones. Same author, same chapter, same genre. Only the donor varies. The dataset, the method and the limits are in The Persian Passband.

Read carefully, this does not prove a Persian origin for anything, and this page is not claiming one. What it does is deny the Greek hypothesis the free pass it usually receives. If the standard of evidence for Persian influence is documentary, the same standard applied to Greek influence on the Hebrew and Aramaic of this period returns four musical instruments.

¶ And Daniel is the anti-Greek book

There is a third difficulty, and it is about occasion rather than vocabulary.

Daniel reached its final form around 165 BCE, during the Maccabean crisis, under the persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. It is resistance literature, produced by and for people who were refusing forced Hellenization at the cost of their lives. 2 Maccabees 7, the other early resurrection text, is a martyrdom narrative from the same conflict, in which the dying brothers expect their bodies back specifically because a Greek king is destroying them.

The Greek explanation therefore asks us to accept that the most anti-Hellenistic literature in the canon took its deepest theological innovation from the Hellenizers, at the exact moment it was being written against them.

That is not impossible. Cultures absorb from what they hate, and often, and sometimes precisely because the confrontation forces new thought. But it is a claim that needs an argument, and in practice it is usually offered as the obvious default.

¶ Why the Greek default gets reached for anyway

The pattern is worth naming, because it is about how comparative questions get settled rather than about any one scholar.

Dating and sourcing are different operations. When did this appear is a textual question with textual methods. Where did this come from is a comparative one, and it needs a control, a rival candidate and a standard of evidence applied evenly to both. The historical-critical method is superb at the first and has no machinery for the second, so the second tends to get settled by background plausibility instead.

Bart Ehrman's handling of the question is the clearest example precisely because he is careful elsewhere. Having once accepted Zoroastrian influence on Jewish resurrection, he wrote in 2019 that he is “not so sure. At all”, citing the difficulty of dating the Zoroastrian texts earlier than the Jewish material. Replying in his own comment thread he gave the alternative: “The issue is what evidence we have of Persian influence in Judea in the third century, apart from this. Nothing comes to mind! Though we see tons of Greek influence”. One hypothesis is asked for documentary evidence and dismissed for the lack of it. The other is admitted as common knowledge. No count is offered for either.

His caution about the Persian derivation is reasonable and this page shares a good deal of it. The objection is only to the asymmetry, and it is sharpened by his own work: Heaven and Hell (2020) argues at length that immortality of the soul is Greek and dualistic, that the ancient Hebrews were not dualists, that their hope was bodily resurrection, and that Christianity fused the two only later. That book is the best short statement of why Greece is the wrong donor for this particular doctrine.

It should also be said plainly that he is scrupulous about the other side. In a later reply he points a reader toward the influence camp by name and on purpose, recommending Anders Hultgard's essay on Persian eschatology to balance the sceptical case, and he is candid about his own limits, noting that he had not looked at the material in a couple of years. Nothing here accuses him of concealing anything.

¶ What this does not show

Greek influence on Second Temple Judaism was real and enormous. The Septuagint, 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, Josephus, the gymnasium in Jerusalem. None of that is in dispute, and the Wisdom of Solomon in particular shows Greek soul-language entering Jewish writing. The argument here is about one doctrine, not about Hellenization.

And most of that influence appears in Greek-language Jewish literature, largely in the diaspora and largely later than Daniel, which is exactly why the loanword count in Hebrew and Aramaic is a fair test of the Hebrew and Aramaic material and not of everything.

Ruling out one candidate does not establish another. The Persian derivation remains genuinely contested on dating grounds, our own instrument finds zero Iranian loanwords in the field of religion and belief, and the internal-development explanation advanced by Jon Levenson is strong and does not need a foreign donor at all. See Where Did the Idea of Bodily Resurrection Come From? for the three-way contest stated fairly.

Vocabulary is not theology. A loanword count shows which register of life the contact ran through. It cannot show what people believed, and a page that pretended otherwise would be making the same mistake it is complaining about.

¶ Common questions

¶ Was the resurrection a Greek idea?

No, and the clearest reason is that Greek thought is the source of the rival doctrine. Plato's influential account makes the soul immortal by nature and the body a container it is better off leaving. Bodily resurrection says the opposite: the person is a body, and God puts it back together. Daniel 12:2 is explicit that those who rise were sleeping in the dust of the earth. Greek philosophy is the wrong donor for a doctrine about dust.

¶ What is the difference between immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body?

They answer the same question with opposite anthropologies. Immortality of the soul holds that something in you never dies and is released at death; the body is not needed and is not recovered. Resurrection holds that you die completely and are raised whole at the end of the age, body included. Christianity ended up holding both at once, which is why most people picture a soul going to heaven and also a general resurrection without noticing that these are two different inheritances.

¶ How many Greek loanwords are in the Hebrew Bible?

Four, on the standard view, and all four are musical instruments listed in the orchestra of Daniel 3: a lyre, a psaltery, pipes and a trigon. The Greek stratum in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic is famously confined to that list, which makes it an unusually clean control for comparative work. For contrast, the Old Iranian stratum in the same corpus runs 38 lexemes and concentrates in law and political office.

¶ Did Greek thought influence Second Temple Judaism?

Enormously, and nobody disputes it. The Septuagint, 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, Philo and Josephus are all part of a thoroughly Hellenized Jewish world, and the Wisdom of Solomon shows Greek soul-language entering Jewish writing directly. The question on this page is narrower: whether that influence explains the arrival of bodily resurrection in Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the second century BCE, which is a different claim and a weaker one.

¶ Does Bart Ehrman think the resurrection came from Greek influence?

He has moved away from the Zoroastrian derivation he once accepted, writing in 2019 that he is not so sure at all, and when asked for the alternative he pointed to Greek influence as the better-attested contact. The difficulty is that his own Heaven and Hell (2020) argues that the Greek contribution is the immortal soul, that the Hebrews were not dualists, and that the two ideas were fused only later. On his own account Greece supplies the other doctrine.

¶ If not Greek and not proven Persian, where did resurrection come from?

The honest answer is that it is unsettled, and the strongest non-foreign explanation is internal. Jon Levenson argues that the doctrine grew out of Israel's own convictions about God's covenant fidelity and the restoration of the people, with Ezekiel's valley of dry bones as the imaginative bridge, and that it needed no donor at all. That explanation has the advantage of requiring nothing that cannot be shown, which is not nothing.

¶ Is Daniel a Hellenistic book?

It is a book written against Hellenization, in its final form around 165 BCE during the persecution under Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Its Aramaic chapters are saturated with Persian administrative vocabulary and its only Greek words are the instruments in chapter 3. That makes it an awkward candidate for a theological innovation borrowed from the Greeks at precisely the moment its community was dying rather than adopt Greek practice.

¶ Sources

Genesis 2:7; 3:19; Daniel 3:2-15; 12:2; Ezekiel 37; Psalm 88:10-12; Job 14:7-14; 2 Maccabees 7; Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-4. Plato, Phaedo. Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (2020), on the Greek soul, the non-dualist Hebrew anthropology and the later fusion; and the Bart Ehrman Blog, “Resurrection from the Dead: Were Jews Influenced by Zoroastrianism?” (19 August 2019), post preview and the author's own signed replies in the open comment thread. Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (2006); C. D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism (2017); Anders Hultgard, “Persian Apocalypticism” in John J. Collins, ed., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism vol. 1; Alan F. Segal, Life After Death (2004); Albert de Jong, Traditions of the Magi (1997). Benjamin J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible (2019). Loanword counts, method and limits: the Passband Corpus v0.2, CC BY 4.0, pre-registered at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21879071. CC BY 4.0.

The volume behind this page: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21879071

¶ Related

More from the sourced library:

• Is the immortal soul a Greek idea, not a biblical one?
• Where Did the Idea of Bodily Resurrection Come From?
• The Persian Passband
• Did Zoroastrianism Invent Satan?
• Did Zoroastrianism influence Judaism?
• Gehenna vs Sheol vs Hades