King Herod heard of the miracles performed by Jesus and his disciples, at which “he said, ‘John the Baptizer is risen from the dead, and that’s why these powers work in him!’” While “others said it is Elijah” or “one of the prophets” of old (who certainly died and were buried, even if Elijah wasn’t), “Herod, when he heard these things, said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, he is risen’.” We even hear that “others” besides Herod also believed Jesus was the resurrected John [Mark 6:14-16; cf. Matthew 14:1-2 and Luke 9:7-8]. Does that sound like “there was no perception of the resurrection of an individual before the general resurrection”? To the contrary, it sounds like Jews were ready to believe in just such a thing.

Some Talmudic Rabbis may have believed something like this, too. But most believed in the recovery of our corpses, complete with scattered bones spookily rolling through secret undergrown caverns to be reunited in the Holy Land (The Empty Tomb, pp. 203, note 52). They debated whether God rebuilt our flesh first, and then inserted the bones; or assembled the bones first, and then poured flesh over them. Picture watching this. Both procedures sound ghastly. And yet even their ideas about this were phantasmic and creepy. The dead would rise with all their gory wounds and maimings intact and then be miraculously healed up. Then they’d grow wings.

As I wrote in The Empty Tomb (pp. 115-16):

In all cases the Rabbis envision the resurrected body as hardly any different than it ever was. What changes are what we might call the ‘laws of nature’: the raised live forever because death itself is abolished, not because our bodies are redesigned to escape it. The only clear example of the body actually being any different is the belief that we will be given “wings like eagles,” in order to reconcile the resurrection doctrine with the apocaylptic belief that the earth will be destroyed. But in general it is not the body that changes, but the rules. Thus … when asking whether we would suffer pain or fatigue (and by extension, injury) after the resurrection, [Rabbis answer] that “the Lord shall renew their strength.” In other words, our bodies won’t change in any fundamental sense (beyond the granting of wings, apparently), but God will act to preserve them, unlike now.

This is made clear by what follows: some Rabbis then ask how we can conclude this, when those resurrected by Ezekiel did not become immortal or free of pain, etc. The response? That never really happened, it was ‘just a parable’, a metaphor for the salvation of Israel. It is significant that the response is not that the resurrection is fundamentally different from ‘resuscitation’, it is not that ‘in the resurrection’ our bodies will be changed, in a way it was not for those Ezekiel raised. Rather, the response is to dismiss Ezekiel’s miracle as a myth, however meaningful. Some Rabbis then offer ‘proof’ that the story is actually true, debate who it was he raised, and then relate the legend itself. But at no point is it ever said that what he did was any different than what God will do at the end of the world.

To the contrary, when the Talmud then gets to a discussion of the resurrections performed by Elijah, they say God gave him the “key of resurrection,” one of the three great keys of God’s power (the others being of birth and rain), the very same key God will presumably use at the end of the world. So the variety of Pharisaism that survives in these texts apparently did not conceive of the general resurrection differently than any other raising of the dead. Instead, the way God will rule the new world will be different.

As I show throughout that same chapter of The Empty Tomb, the distinction modern Christian apologists always try to imagine between ‘resuscitation’ and ‘resurrection’ did not exist in antiquity. It’s a modern anachronism, something apologists just made up, to try and get out of a ton of pickles. In actuality, all returns from death were described with the same words. People could then talk about different kinds of resurrection. The Persians, Jews, and Mediterraneans believed in eternal superbodies; but also in returning to life in mortal bodies. And both were called the same thing. In fact, the New Testament almost only ever uses “waking from sleep” metaphors, not the more explicit words there were for actual resurrections. Anistêmi and its cognates, and egeiromai and its cognates, both just mean “get up” or “wake up.” They aren’t actually words specifically for rising from the dead. Only once is an actual such word used, palingenesia (“back to life,” “regeneration”), in Matthew 19:28; and never is the most explicit word used, anabiôsis (“return to life”). Yet both those words were used to describe the resurrection of Osiris (The Empty Tomb, pp. 154 and note 34 on p. 202 and notes 252 & 253 on pp. 217-18).

When the later Gospels, Luke and John, go out of their way to invent specific tall tales of the risen Jesus being touched to disprove he was a mere phantom, they are not trying to argue against people who said “Jesus wasn’t raised, he was just a ghost.” No. They were arguing against fellow Christians—like Paul—who argued the resurrection body was not made of flesh but of a superior, supernatural ether, the same thing the Holy Spirit was made of: pneuma. Paul is explicit: the resurrection body will not be made of flesh (sarka), nor blood or bone, but pneumatikos, made of pneuma (1 Corinthians 15:44-50). Thus when Luke invents a scene where Jesus says “a spirit (pneuma) does not have flesh (sarka) and bones (ostea) as you see I have” (Luke 24:39) Luke is arguing with Paul. (Just as Luke repeatedly does: he often fakes history to rewrite what happened to undermine what Paul, an actual Christian, had said: cf. On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 362-63.)

Beware of Demons, Necromancers, and Jesus!

Some of the risen dead could be evil, too.

Satan has his own resurrections. His don’t have the full glorious power of God’s. Because Satan is Lord of Decay. But one way or another, the Evil One could bring people back from the dead. Hence it was widely believed even by pagans that sorcerers could raise the dead. And for hundreds of years the Christians were freaked out by a deathly fear Satan might raise the Emperor Nero from the dead and wreak havoc on earth.

These tales were distinct from ghost and spirit stories. The notion of ghosts who have no assertive form, who you couldn’t touch but just pass right through, was popularized by Homer. These ghosts, souls of the dead, still had shape and were still made of stuff—that mysterious astral pneuma again—and thus not literally incorporeal. It’s not clear anyone in antiquity ever had a literal belief in anything truly incorporeal: everything was made of stuff; even gods—even the body of the Jewish God, the body he used to touch and influence the world, was the Holy Spirit, made of pneuma, exactly what even the Stoics believed of God. One can find maybe some exceptions, of the genuinely incorporeal, but they are rare, and hard to pin down. Really, souls were always material entities, but only had “bodies” if they could grab and touch things.

I write all about what in antiquity was believed of ghosts, as the awoken souls of the dead, in Hitler Homer Bible Christ (Chapter 5). And several good books on the subject are available, from Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds to Haunted Greece and Rome—and even more specialized works from Greek and Roman Necromancy to Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. In Jewish lore, the souls of those who haven’t atoned for their sins before dying, will suffer in the grave, remaining conscious as their corpse burns with rot and devouring by worms—the ultimate Halloween nightmare—until the flesh has rotted away, which torment is enough to atone, and the soul then sleeps until the resurrection (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 47a-b).

This is the meaning of Jesus saying the damned will be left where “the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). He means, contrary to popular lore, this torment won’t last a short time, but forever. The soul also feels the pain of all this, without actually inhabiting its corpse. Instead it would hover over it for three days trying to go back in (upon which we must assume it could then wake up and walk around), but by the third day the corpse is so rotted the dead can’t recognize their own face anymore and mourns (The Empty Tomb, pp. 158-59). As is said in Scripture: when men die, God “changes their appearance and sends them away,” and they do not know what becomes of their children, but “they feel the pain of their own bodies and mourn” (Job 14:20-22).

That souls usually sleep, unconscious, is the point behind Paul constantly talking about the dead as those sleeping. And resurrection as waking up. But necromancers could wake the bodiless dead to speak with them. That’s even in Scripture: the witch of Endor wakes the soul of Samuel so Saul could speak with him. And the sorcerers who could have stolen the corpse of Jesus (thus unexpectedly leaving an empty tomb to inspire the Disciples) may have done so specifically to get his skull, as that we know was a necessary component of a common spirit summoning spell. As I wrote in The Empty Tomb (pp. 350-51):