Thus the Jewish writers of the centuries immediately preceding our era found ready to their hands a rich store of traditions relating to the lot of man in the Otherworld, formed by the combination of Oriental dogmas with the classical tradition in the forms in which this was preserved in the Hellenistic schools of Asia. Before, however, we proceed to trace the manner in which these blended traditions entered into subsequent versions of the legend, it may not be superfluous to ask what, if any, contributions were made by the remaining great centre of ancient religion and culture, Egypt.
To this question it is difficult to reply with certainty. While one of the great centres of the Neo-Judaic learning was the School of Babylon, set in the very focus of the ancient Oriental creeds, minor centres existed in every city of Syria and Asia Minor, in each one of which a thriving Jewish colony applied itself eagerly to the absorption of Hellenistic ideas and culture; but the centre, par excellence, of Jewish learning in the West was the flourishing and cultured Jewish community at Alexandria. However, the intellectual life of this school drew its nutriment from Greece, and the whole tone and character of its speculative philosophy, as of its literary culture, so far as it was not Hebraic, was Hellenistic, not Egyptian, and possibly more Hellenistic than Hebraic. At one time it was customary to refer the mystical speculations of the philosophic schools, Pagan, Jewish, and Christian alike, of the centuries in question, to the ‘wisdom of the Egyptians,’ and to regard Alexandria as the mart, so to speak, where ideas of Egyptian growth were exchanged for others of kindred nature imported from Greece and Asia. It has now long been recognised that this theory is true to a very limited extent only, and that Alexandria was, in the main, a Grecian city, and indebted to Greece for the origins of its learning and culture, whatever new developments these assumed in the fertile soil to which they had been transplanted. During the rule of the Ptolemies, and, afterwards, of the Romans, the prevailing attitude of the Greek colonists was not altogether unlike that of the English in India; they held themselves as a class apart, and intermixed but little with the native population, for whose religion and institutions they would seem to have often manifested a contempt, in which, doubtless, ignorance had its share. At the same time, we might err in the opposite direction by concluding that Egyptian ideas wholly failed to influence those who lived and wrote in such close proximity to the chief centres of Egyptian life. Even in our own day, the philosophy of the Upanishads, and the teaching of the Buddha, in however distorted a form, have crossed the pale which divides East from West, and the pale between Egypt and Hellas was far more pervious. Both nations professed a complex polytheism, with so great a resemblance between the two pantheons, that even before the time of Herodotus certain deities in the one had come to be regarded as identical with their counterparts in the other;[72] the traditions of the Greeks claimed an Egyptian origin for several of the national gods and heroes; a belief that the Hellenic religion was indebted for some of its more esoteric elements to the same source was expressed by Plato, and had been held by his successors, and we have seen that some of the most authoritative modern scholars accept this opinion as well founded, however much they may differ as to the amount of the debt. These circumstances would necessarily predispose the more inquiring minds among the Alexandrian Greeks and Hellenised Hebrews, in an age when speculation concerning the hidden things of life, and of the life after death, was a subject of paramount interest, to examine the theories which had been held on that subject by the nations, the orgiastic and magical side of whose religions was offering just then so powerful an attraction to the vulgar of the Hellenic world. Nor are we without direct evidence of contact between the two systems of thought. Ptolemy I. (abdicated 285 B.C.), acting partly under the inspiration of Timotheus, an authority on the Eleusinian mysteries, attempted to fuse the Greek and Egyptian cults into one eclectic system.[73] The poet Callimachus, who held the post of librarian (c. 260-240 B.C.) to Ptolemy Philadelphus and his son Euergetes, acquired for the Alexandrian library Egyptian as well as Greek and Hebrew books; and his successor in office, Eratosthenes, the astronomer and geometrician, was also addicted to Egyptian studies. Indeed, the Plutarchian treatise ‘On Isis and Osiris’ is one instance out of many of the interest felt by cultivated Greeks in Egyptian beliefs, which had long taken their place as parts of the popular cult in many places in Greece and Asia.[74] On the other hand, the initiation of even a few cultured Egyptians into Hellenic learning would suffice to further an interchange of ideas between the two races.
In any case, the Egyptian eschatology offers many points of resemblance to certain of the later Jewish beliefs, and to Christian doctrine. Among these is a belief in the judgment to be passed on every soul after death, whereby the wicked were condemned to be devoured by the ‘Eater of the Dead,’ while the righteous were led through a series of perilous adventures to a region of perpetual happiness, where, in a place surrounded by a wall of steel, they led an existence which is the reproduction of a happy life on earth, conceived in the usual terms of a pagan Elysium, with a due allowance of even the grosser pleasures.[75]
This resemblance extends to several points of detail. Among the trials through which the soul must pass are enumerated rivers and atmospheres of fire, and the assaults of demons and monsters; it is even affirmed, in agreement with the teaching of certain Jewish Rabbis, and of the early Christian divines, that all departed souls, good and bad alike, must undergo these trials, but the good passed through them speedily, and without pain. This, we have seen, is the teaching of the Fis Adamnáin, and occurs, as we shall see, in other of the Christian Visions.
Indeed, the Rabbinical schools developed the Purgatorial theory to a considerable extent. Thus, we find mention of seven lodges of Hell, one below another, through which the soul had to pass successively, being tormented on its way by fire, scourging, showers of hail, exposure to alternate heat and cold, etc., until all its guilt was purged away. This process finds its exact counterpart in the Fis Adamnáin, save that the Rabbis called the seven stages or lodges Hells, instead of Heavens, with at least equal propriety. The fundamental conception, and also the nature of the sufferings endured by the dead in the course of their purgation, are capable of being referred either to an Egyptian or a Hellenic origin, though probably the latter assumption would be correct; the seven successive lodges are evidently the amplification of a Rabbinical tradition borrowed from the Chaldæan mythology.
As to the ultimate fate of the wicked, opinions were divided; some of the Rabbis taught the final redemption of all, after undergoing the necessary Purgatorial discipline; the school of Shammai held that at the Judgment mankind would be divided into three categories—the good, the bad, and those of mixed character, and that the last would be cleansed by Purgatorial sufferings.[76] The germs of this threefold division are contained both in the Avestan and the Platonic doctrines. The Kabbalists even had an inkling of the Treasury of Merits of the Saints, to whom they accorded the privilege of covering with their garments, and bringing up to Heaven with themselves, those sinners who had repented before death, but too late to make expiation. Here, too, we have a conception which recurs in the Fis Adamnáin and elsewhere, namely, the special provision for tardy penitents, though in the Christian Visions the mode of their redemption is different.
It is thus difficult to assign with certainty to the Egyptian religion any specific article of the eschatology of the later Jewish and early Christian writers; nevertheless, it does not follow that their contact with that religion was without effect in determining the shape which their eschatology actually assumed. It must be remembered that speculations of the kind which characterised the Orphic, Platonic, Pythagorean, and Neo-Platonic schools were not the only forms in which Greek thought entered into the intellectual evolution of that age. In the prevailing welter of Eastern creeds and Western philosophies, all the principal philosophic schools of Greece were represented, and, in particular, the Stoics and Epicureans exercised an influence both wide and deep.[77] If, then, the class of ideas to which it is convenient to give the general name, Neo-Platonic, obtained so complete an ascendency in the evolution of Judaic and Christian eschatology, the presumption is that this result was largely owing to the affinity of Neo-Platonism with the Oriental creeds with whose doctrines and mythology Neo-Judaic speculation was so deeply imbued; and if, moreover, this speculation differed from Neo-Platonism in certain fundamental points wherein it agreed with the Oriental doctrines, the presumption is no less strong that it owed its original trend in this direction to the forces by which it was moulded in pre-Hellenistic times, and that such trend would be confirmed by subsequent contact with any school of thought in which similar views were prevalent.[78] The most important point wherein the eschatology of the orthodox Rabbinical schools differed from that of the Greek mythical philosophies was the rejection by the former of the doctrine of rebirth, which predominated, though not to the absolute exclusion of the doctrine of finality, in the teaching of the mystical schools from the seventh century B.C. at latest.
In this respect, as we have seen, the philosophy no less than the religion of the Jews was mainly in accord with the views held by the Chaldæans, both Accadian and Semitic, and taught by the Avesta. In this view they would be further confirmed if, in the Alexandrian period, they fell under the influence of the native Egyptian religion, as distinguished from the later syncretism wherein that religion had become blended with allegories and orgiastic rites pertaining to Asiatic myths and Greek theosophy. Egypt, indeed, was formerly regarded as the very home of the doctrine of rebirth; it would appear, however, that the doctrine of the ancient Egyptian religion was of a directly contrary import. The idea of transformation, indeed, was familiar to it, but this is a different thing from transmigration, and Mr. Le Page Renouf states most emphatically that although the beatified spirit received powers which enabled him to visit any part of the universe in any form, the sentence pronounced at the judgment was final, and the soul was neither purged nor punished by a renewed life on earth.[79] This contradiction between the doctrine of rebirth which prevailed in the Greek mysteries, and the Egyptian dogma of the eternity of man’s lot after judgment, lends support to the contention, referred to in the previous section, that the ethical and eschatological sides of Greek religion were in great part of native development, however much the mystical schools may have been indebted to foreign influences in their origin.
Having thus got rid of a discussion which, however tedious, appeared necessary in order to make us understand whence and of what kind were the non-Hellenic and non-Scriptural elements which entered into subsequent developments of the Vision Legend, we now come to the concrete forms which that legend assumed in the Jewish and the early Christian Churches. In tracing the progress of the legend in these two Churches, it seems convenient to deal with the whole subject together in the following section, for not only do the principal Jewish examples which have reached us contain additions made to them in Christian times, but the versions belonging respectively to the two eras are practically homogeneous, alike in their fundamental doctrines, and, for the most part, in their method of treatment.