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people of the book
[ 51 ]
be worried about philosophical
questions of personal identity, particularly about
questions over which ways of a person’s (or thing’s) being continued suffice for
the before-and-after identity of the person (or thing). For instance, an oft-
repeated image these writers used is that of a statue that is melted down and
then recast in a form that is qualitatively exactly similar to the original. Most
philosophers today would say that the earlier and later statues, while qualita-
tively similar, are not identical, hence that they are different statues. But if this
were true, it would undermine the point of the imagery. Many early Christians
failed to see that it would undermine the point of the imagery.
20
Clement of Rome (c. 30?-100? c.e .), for instance, in a letter of about 90 c.e that
he sent to the Christians at Corinth, explained the resurrection primarily in terms
of two analogies: that of a seed, which he said dies and decays in the earth before
initiating new growth, and that of the phoenix, which he said first dies and then
rises as a worm from its own decaying flesh. In the views of many in our own time,
the new plant or bird would at best be a qualitatively similar descendent of the
original, not the very same plant or bird; hence, it would seem, there would be no
personal (or animal) survival, let alone immortality. Clement, it seems, and pre-
sumably also his audience, were not perturbed by such niceties.
21
But, then, in their
believing in personal survival of bodily death, what exactly were they believing?
Even after this question of identity, as opposed to mere replication, became a
matter of explicit philosophical concern, the old images continued to be used,
raising questions about how early Christian thinkers understood both bodily
identity and personal survival. Bizarre as it may seem, it is possible that many of
these early Christian thinkers did not even believe in what we today would
regard as personal survival of bodily death. That is, it is possible that to whatever
extent
personal survival of bodily death, in their
sense of this expression, depended
on the resurrection of the body and was not merely ensured by the persistence of
the soul, it is not what we today would call personal survival but, rather, what we
would call dying and being replaced by a qualitatively similar replica. When the
church fathers later tried to make sense of the idea of personal survival of bodily
death, increasingly over time they felt that personal identity does matter—that
the individual who rises must be the very same person as the one who died.
Even as Paul wrote, an alternative religious Platonism was spreading in the
Greco-Roman world, especially at Alexandria. Philo represented this trend. So
too did the Christians at Corinth, whose questions about the resurrection Paul
tried to answer. Although Paul, as a materialist, resisted their attempts to under-
stand survival partly in terms of an immaterial soul, their questions encouraged
him to adopt some of the language of Platonism, which opened the way for others
to reinterpret along dualistic lines what Paul was trying to express in his letters.
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