ChristianReincarnation?
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From the book of Ecclesiastes, 3rd century BCE:
All are from the dust. And to the dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?
One of the most definitive Jewish responses to this question comes onto the scene about a century after the composition of Ecclesiastes in the Book of Daniel, composed over the span of the 2nd century BCE. After an extensive prophetic outline of events to come, Daniel‘s prophecy culminates in a bodily resurrection and transformation of man:
But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.
This tradition of resurrection and transformation is modified and championed throughout the Christian New Testament by the writings and posthumous traditions of St. Paul. For Paul, however, transformation is about becoming in the likeness not of a star or angel as in Daniel, but of the heavenly man, Jesus. As Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed– in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
This is fairly standard Christian narrative–those in Christ will be raised from the grave and changed, or sanctified, into perfection. But passages like these were not always read in antiquity as we read them today. Early Christians had many varying ideas about what exactly happened when we died as believers.
One of the more popular beliefs among early Christians is one that most modern westerners have historically ruled out–the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. Could it be that Christianity was initially characterized by a belief so foreign to modern Christians? If so, it would not be the only instance of a fundamental disconnect between ancient and modern Christian faith. Let’s look at another passage from 1 Corinthians 15 before making any conclusions.
But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” How foolish! What you sow does not come to life until it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. All flesh is not the same: Human beings have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another.
The first point worth noting from this passage is that people are concerned about their new bodies at the time of this resurrection; they want to know what kind of body they will have when and if it happens. But Paul rejects this worry as misguided inquiry that is ignorant of the nature of heavenly bodies. The second point, then, is that if Paul is promoting a faith of reincarnation, it concerns spiritual rather than earthly bodies.
So we see that some among Christian converts were concerned with the possibility of reincarnation after death at the onset of hearing Paul’s teachings. And while it seems that the idea of earthly reincarnation largely faded out of Christian thought by the third or fourth century, I’ve come across at least one witness to such a belief from the second century. This brief text is an arguably gnostic-Christian work sometimes called The Coptic Apocalypse of Paul.
In what is preserved of the manuscript, the narrator details Paul’s mystical ascension up to the tenth(!) heaven. From the introduction, which alludes to a road leading to Jerusalem, we are led to infer that this ascension occurred during Paul’s revelation of Christ on the road to Damascus.
The portion of the text concerning the doctrine of reincarnation is from Paul’s experience in the fourth heaven. Paul here witnesses a soul “out of the land of the dead” trying to make it past the gatekeeper into the fifth heaven. The soul produces three witnesses from his past life to vouch for him, but none of them have anything good to say on his behalf.
From the text:
When the soul heard these things, it gazed downward in sorrow. And then it gazed upward. It was cast down. The soul that had been cast down went to a body which had been prepared for it. And behold its witnesses were finished.
The soul, then, was only able to make it to level four of ten in his ascension. Thus, he was sent back down into his body for what we can assume is another shot at a holy life. We do not know what kind of body this soul went into, but we do know that he had come from the grave, whereas Paul’s ascension happened not after his life, but before his ministry of the gospel even began. Such an ascension is in line with Paul’s resurrection and transformation, which is not only available upon death, but at the moment of Christ’s coming, dead or alive.
In summary, Christian reincarnation is alluded to in early Christian writings, but cannot be said to have been a majority opinion by any means. When it does appear, however, it is built into a wider Judeo-Christian framework. Of course, speculation of reincarnated holy beings is common throughout the bible, but rarely to an extent that could be construed as a doctrine of soteriology for the common man. What we find in The Coptic Apocalypse of Paul is without a doubt a hybrid doctrine drawing upon Platonic ideas of the soul as much as Jewish apocalyptic literature and Pauline hagiography.
