Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Side 168

Jón Ma. Ásgeirsson
And if this was an age of classes, the Hellenistic Age brought out the
individual over against a nation and a social class. It culminates a process
going back to the early Sophists who challenged the hierarchical organization
of the state in which the elite alone had ideas about right and wrong and, thus,
the proper sense of the law—leaving more or less the rest of society and,
indeed, the rest of the world at a barbaric level. By separating nature and law,
the individual was on a road to freedom by virtue of its own ability to learning
and locating itself at one place or the other in life.12 Over against a state of
status quo, the individual emerges from out of the margins to claim the relative
nature of the world and urban law. Cynics, likewise, challenged the state by
exercising a way of life distant from the traditional propaganda. Their norm
became nature in contrast to the ideal law exemplified in the stellar body of
the athletes. Education of the individual became the challenge to the vanity
of physical exercise.13 Stoics applied the Hellenic concept of freedom to the
inner self so that any man of reason could claim to be free or, conversely, that
everybody was a “slave.”14 The polis had been privatized; nature deprived of
unchangeable laws; death became a common ground where all were to meet
at last. If but a deception, Alexander the Great was to meet a certain Celanus
again—and that in death.15 The humble and the hero on one ground in that
final resting place where distance no longer plays a part.
It is to this awakened sense of individuality that the ideas of (physical)
restoration beyond life and death are usually accredited. In the book of Daniel
(2nd century BCE) this restoration, finally, does justice to the righteous and
the wicked (see 12:2).16 An idea further attested in apocrypha literature of the
Old Testament.17 Various Jewish groups differed, however, on the idea of
resurrection as exemplified in the debates of Pharisees and Sadducees in the
12 On the Sophists, vide W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1971), praesertim 55-163.
13 On the Cynics, vide Donald R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism: From Diogenes to the 6th
Century A.D., repr. (Chicago,IL: Ares, 1980) [1937], passim.
14 On the Stoics, vide Andrew Erskine, The Hellenistic Stoa: Political Thought and Action
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), praesertim 43-74.
15 Cicero, De Div. 1.47, in William A. Falconer, transl., Cicero. De senectute, De amicitia,
De divinatione, LCL, T. E. Page et al. eds., 154 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1923); cf. G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian, Sather Classical
Lectures 85 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994) 102-103.
16 Cf. Ringgren, op. cit., 322-323, 331-341.
17 C/. George W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Inter-
testamental Judaism, HTS 26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
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