"He shall select the righteous and holy from among them, for the day of their salvation has approached." ... (Enoch l. 2.)
"I saw the habitations and couches of the saints. Then my eyes beheld their habitations with the angels and their couches with the holy ones. Thus shall it be with them for ever and ever." (Enoch xxxix. 4.)
"The former heaven shall depart and pass away, a new heaven shall appear." (Enoch xcii. 17.)
These texts show where the Jews got the idea of a Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven and summoning the dead from their graves for a great assize. They show where Christianity got its heaven and its hell. The author of the "Evolution of Christianity" gives in parallel columns a number of other passages which seem to have suggested corresponding passages in the Christian scriptures. The defenders of conventional orthodoxy urge that these passages and the passages I have quoted are post-Christian interpolations. In the way of this theory stands the fact that Enoch describes only one advent, that of a superhuman, triumphant Messiah. He knows nothing of a suffering, crucified mortal. That advent, according to the Jewish ideas of the time, seemed at first blush a failure. Surely the first object of an interpolator would have been to suit his prophecies to the double advent, and make the second explain the failure of the first. It is to be observed, too, that Enoch's Son of Man rules in heaven. There is no mention of Jerusalem. It seems very plain that the Apocalypse has attempted to fuse together the Messiah of Enoch and the Messiah of Micah, and the clumsy expedient of a thousand years preliminary rule in Jerusalem, entailing, as it does, two resurrections and two judgment days, is the result.
The Messiah of Enoch is plainly Craosha of the Persians, who will, one day, summon the dead to judgment in their old material bodies, sending the wicked to Douzakh, and the good to Behisht.
Let us see how this affects our present inquiry.
The Buddhists took over from the Brahmins:—
1. A heaven (Swarga) and a purgatory.
2. Ancestor worship (the S'raddha). The Buddhas of the Past had offerings given to them at stated periods at their topes, for which they were expected to perform miracles.
Nothing can be more explicit than the statements in the gospels about the fate of the dead. Souls and bodies are to remain in the festering grave until a trumpet shall sound. Then the body as well as the soul will arise for an universal judgment.