218 A History of Judaism
Wisdom of Solomon and Philo adopted the Platonic notion that the
soul is immortal, ‘weighed down by the perishable body’: ‘these mortals
who were made of earth a short time before and after a little while go
to the earth from where all mortals are taken, when the time comes to
return the souls that were borrowed.’^24
Jewish epitaphs from this period only occasionally refer to an after-
life, although some from Egypt mention ‘hopeful expectation’, and one
states that the soul of the dead has gone to join the holy ones. It seems
that most Jews, like many gentile contemporaries, were willing to
remain vague about their doctrine in this area. Josephus records the
very different notions about life after death to be found among Phari-
sees, Sadducees and Essenes, from a Jewish version of the Greek notion
of the Isles of the Blessed for the souls of the righteous (attributed to
Essenes) to resurrection or reincarnation (attributed to the Pharisees) to
a denial of any sort of life after death, attributed to the Sadducees. The
Gospels describe this Sadducee denial of an afterlife as a matter for pub-
lic disputations with Pharisees, in which the Sadducees confront the
Pharisees with the implication of resurrection for a widow of seven
brothers: ‘in the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven?’
According to Acts, Paul broke up a meeting of the High Priest’s Council
by crying out that, as a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees, ‘of the hope and
resurrection of the dead I am being judged’.^25
Attribution of such importance to this particular theological issue
was, so far as we know, rare, not least because the Sadducee denial of
life after death seems to have become a fringe view by the first century
ce. Apocalyptic texts imagine the souls of the righteous ascending to
heaven and speculate on the levels of the heavenly world, picking up on
Greek notions of the ascent of souls from the physical body to the high-
est part of the cosmos. That the garden of Eden, the primordial home of
humankind, is also the home of the deceased righteous is attested first
in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus reassures one of the robbers crucified
with him that ‘today you will be with me in the paradeisos.’ This pre-
sumably reflected an existing Jewish idea, since it is found also in the
targumim (paraphrastic Aramaic translations of the Bible which are
hard to date but contain many traditions of the first centuries ce), and
in the Testament of Abraham, in which God says, ‘Take my friend Abra-
ham to Paradise, where are the tents of the righteous ones ... There is
no toil there, no grief, no sighing, but peace and rejoicing, and endless
life.’^26
The ubiquity of such expectation is cited by Josephus in his summary