The whole system of views out of which it springs, and with which it is interwrought, is a fanciful mythology, based on gratuitous assumptions, or at most on a crude glance at mere appearances. The hypothesis that the creation is the scene of a drawn battle between two hostile beings, a Deity and a Devil, can face neither the scrutiny of science, nor the test of morals, nor the logic of reason; and it has long since been driven from the arena of earnest thought. On this theory it follows that death is a violent curse and discord, maliciously forced in afterwards to deform and spoil the beauty and melody of a perfect original creation. Now, as Bretschneider well says, "the belief that death is an evil, a punishment for sin, can arise only in a dualistic system." It is unreasonable to suppose that the Infinite God would deliberately lay a plan and allow it to be thwarted and ruined by a demon. And it is unscientific to imagine that death is an accident, or an after result foisted into the system of the world. Death that is, a succession of generations is surely an essential part of the very constitution of nature, plainly stamped on all those "medals of the creation" which bear the features of their respective ages and which are laid up in the archives of geological epochs. Successive growth and decay is a central part of God's original plan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and the whole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermore actually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence of man, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. And so the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as the restoration of God's broken plan to its completeness falls to the ground.
The Jews, in the course of their frequent and long continued intercourse with the Persians, did not fail to be much impressed with the vivid melodramatic outlines of the Zoroastrian doctrine of the resurrection. They finally adopted it themselves, and joined it, with such modifications as it naturally underwent from the union, with the great dogmas of their own faith. A few faint references to it are found in the Old Testament. Some explicit declarations and boasts of it are in the Apocrypha. In the Targums, the Talmud, and the associated sources, abundant statements of it in copious forms are preserved. The Jews rested their doctrine of the resurrection on the same general ground as the Persians did, from whom they borrowed it. Man was meant to be immortal, either on earth or in heaven; but Satan seduced him to sin, and thus wrested from him his privilege of immortality, made him die and descend into a dark nether realm which was to be filled with the disembodied souls of his descendants. The resurrection was to annul all this and restore men to their original footing.
We need not labor any disproof of the truth or authority of this doctrine as the Pharisees held it, because, admitting that they had the record of a revelation from God, this doctrine was not a part of it. It is only to be found in their canonic scriptures by way of vague and hasty allusion, and is historically traceable to its derivation from the pagan oracles of Persia.
5 Frazer, History of Persia, chap. iv. Baur, Symbolik und Mythologice thl. ii. absch. ii. cap. ss. 394-404.
Of course it is possible that the doctrine of the resurrection, as the Hebrews held it, was developed by themselves, from imaginative contemplations on the phenomena of burials and graves; spectres seen in dreams; conceptions of the dead as shadowy shapes in the under world; ideas of God as the deliverer of living men from the open gates of the under world when they experienced narrow escapes from destruction; vast and fanatical national hopes. Before advancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that some of the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising from the under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized, incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identical bodies they formerly wore would be literally restored.
Now, when Christianity, after the death of its Founder, arose and spread, it was in the guise of a new and progressive Jewish sect. Its apostles and its converts for the first hundred years were Christian Jews. Christianity ran its career through the apostolic age virtually as a more liberal Jewish sect. Most natural was it, then, that infant Christianity should retain all the salient dogmas of Judaism, except those of exclusive nationality and bigoted formalism in the throwing off of which the mission of Christianity partly consisted. Among these Jewish dogmas retained by early Christianity was that of the bodily resurrection. In the New Testament itself there are seeming references to this doctrine. We shall soon recur to these. The phrase "resurrection of the body" does not occur in the Scriptures. Neither is it found in any public creed whatever among Christians until the fourth century.6 But these admissions by no means prove that the doctrine was not believed from the earliest days of Christianity. The fact is, it was the same with this doctrine as with the doctrine of the descent of Christ into Hades: it was not for a long time called in question at all. It was not defined, discriminated, lifted up on the symbols of the Church, because that was not called for. As soon as the doctrine came into dispute, it was vehemently and all but unanimously affirmed, and found an emphatic place in every creed. Whenever the doctrine of a bodily resurrection has been denied, that denial has been instantly stigmatized as heresy and schism, even from the days of "Hymeneus and Philetas, who concerning the truth erred, saying that the resurrection was past already." The uniform orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church has always been that in the last day the identical fleshly bodies formerly inhabited by men shall be raised from the earth, sea, and air, and given to them again to be everlastingly assumed. The scattered exceptions to the believers in this doctrine have been few, and have ever been styled heretics by their contemporaries.
Any one who will glance over the writings of the Fathers with reference to this subject will find the foregoing statements amply confirmed.7 Justin Martyr wrote a treatise on the resurrection, a fragment of which is still extant. Athenagoras has left us an extremely elaborate and able discussion of the whole doctrine, in a separate work. Tertullian is author of a famous book on the subject, entitled "Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh," in which he says, "The teeth are providentially made eternal to serve as the seeds of the
6 Dr. Sykes, Inquiry when the Article of the Resurrection of the Body or Flesh was first introduced into the Public Creeds.
7 Mosheim, De Resurrectione Mortuorum.
resurrection." Chrysostom has written fully upon it in two of his eloquent homilies. All these, in company indeed with the common body of their contemporaries, unequivocally teach a carnal resurrection with the grossest details. Augustine says, "Every man's body, howsoever dispersed here, shall be restored perfect in the resurrection. Every body shall be complete in quantity and quality. As many hairs as have been shaved off, or nails cut, shall not return in such enormous quantities to deform their original places; but neither shall they perish: they shall return into the body into that substance from which they grew." 8 As if that would not cause any deformity! 9 Some of the later Origenists held that the resurrection bodies would be in the shape of a ball, the mere heads of cherubs! 10