ABSTRACT
For the modern Occidental, more or less directly affected in his conceptions of the life to come by philosophic argument largely derived from Plato and the Greek thinkers, it is difficult to appreciate sympathetically the Jewish conceptions which underlie the teaching of our Synoptic Gospels. Resurrection Jewish-Christian thought may claim as its very own. No Greek thinker will dream of disputing it. The Greek’s belief is really a belief in immortality. It is an adjustment, or compromise, between the extremes of a Greek doctrine of bodiless immortality in heaven, and a Jewish doctrine of return to fleshly existence upon earth. It was more than a century before the two elements in the church came to even partial agreement on this question; and then they compromised on a doctrine more Jewish than Pauline. This represents Jewish-Christian incorporation of Pauline teaching, in the secondary strata of Synoptic tradition.
