How the Stone was Rolled Away

What a tangled web the Web weaves!

I read an article in Dagbladet, a Norwegian newspaper, on how Christianity became a success in the Roman Empire. The author is Dag Øistein Endsjø. As it happens, his book, "Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity", is published in English (at a very high price! Religion is not cheap!).

His argument is that, although it took some military persuasion to convert the western part of the Roman Empire--the Italian part--the eastern end of the Empire, which was culturally Greek, was entranced with the idea of a physical resurrection.

Physical resurrection was not a Jewish idea. In Judaism, one's bones are gathered to his ancestors, and the person lives so long as a memory survives. St. Paul, our earliest reporter of New Testament events, was basically a Jew. He said the resurrection was not physical. The Gospels gradually move toward a physical resurrection: flesh and blood, bodily resurrection. It was a careful path from Semitic to Greek thought.

In Greek culture, it was the philosophers who thought that whatever might come after death would leave the physical world behind. Popular Greek religion was filled with flesh and blood resurrection ideas, but not for most people. When Christian missionaries said that all believers would be physically resurrected, the ordinary Greek said, "Yes, sir! Wow! Bingo!", and things like that.

And that is how the stone was rolled away.

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