St. Paul and Thessaloniki

 We had a question on St. Paul's 1st letter to the Thessalonians on the Facebook group I moderate:
I found this group so helpful a few years back when I converted to the faith! I have a question that piggy backs off of another question recently asked about the second coming of Christ: I know we believe in the second coming of Christ and that, on the last day, the dead in Christ will rise first and then He will take the living. This might be silly, but the Bible refers to the dead in Christ as “those who have fallen asleep.” I believe in the communion of saints and that they intercede for us. They are obviously alive and conscious in Heaven with God after their Earthly death, right? Do we not have a physical body in Heaven? Why are the saints referred to as sleeping? It makes me think of Lazarus when Jesus says he is not dead, but sleeping. We are not really conscious while sleeping? Does the Catechism ever address what happens immediately after bodily death? This always confuses me. Thanks for the clarification.

My response was this:

 

There are two major ways of interpreting this passage concerning the “falling asleep” of believers, and interestingly they both work towards the same end really in terms of Catholic theology. One can interpret the “falling asleep” as a euphemism for death. We still do that in modern culture a lot. We use terms like someone “is no longer with us” or “passed away” or even more vague if flowery language. So, in one sense, this is not unique to Saint Paul and the first century.

One also has to take into account the cultures and philosophies of the 1^st Century that St. Paul is writing to, particularly as he is writing to the church in Thessaloniki. 1^st Thessalonians might very well be the first book in the New Testament that was written. If not the first, one of the very first, as Paul’s letters generally are believed to have been written before anything else, particularly the Gospels and other epistles. Galatians may have been first, but that is much debated. So, on one level, one has to be aware that this was about as early in distinctly Christian theology as you can get, probably written not more that 20 years or less after Christ’s death and Resurrection.

As such, the very Early Church was still sorting out what the Resurrection and Ascension meant. Most believed Jesus would return in their life times. They were probably thinking it was near the End of Days. So, the theology was very much immediate in what it was trying to convey. And so on one level, St. Paul is speaking to Christians in a community that seemed to have some communal anxiety about death and the end of time, as that is a major pastoral theme of Paul in this letter. What exactly the community was theologically worked up about is unclear, as St. Paul alluded to it but does not elaborate.

There was a large Jewish contingency in the city. Some strands of Judaism at that time did not believe in an afterlife per se. Once you died, that was it. The Breath of Life left you, and you ceased to exist either here or in the hereafter. Some did not necessarily believe in the concept of the soul. Perhaps that was playing on people’s minds if they were Jewish converts, if they believed that if you died before Jesus returned, you stopped existing and so your only hope of salvation was to be alive when Jesus returned. That is one possibility.

Thessaloniki was also a Greek city that had been Romanized. It was on a major trade route. So, there were also Roman converts presumably. The Greco-Roman view of the afterlife was pretty grim. Your soul descended into Hades if you could cross the River Styx, where you sort of became these zombie like spirits wandering around in darkness for all eternity, not really knowing who or what you were. So, the Greco-Roman converts may have had some ghastly leftover ideas that if someone died before Christ returned, they might descend into the shadowy realm of Roman Hades. That’s another cultural possibility at play in the Thessalonians community angst about death and the grave.

Again, we don’t really know precisely, but St Paul is pastorally trying to reassure the Thessalonians that because someone died, if they died in Christ, it was not some tragic end to their soul, just because they happened to died in between the time of Jesus’ Ascension and his, presumably, imminent return in few months or years.

One other thing to keep in mind is that the city was also on the trade route in between Athens and Byzantium. Athens was the home of several Greek philosophy schools, namely Platonism and its philosophical descendants (Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics). So all those Platonic ideas were probably all over the city in one form or another. St. Paul in particular had a rolling fixation with Stoicism. He never called them out by name, but a lot of what he writes is clearly geared toward both debating and making philosophical overtures to Stoics. But Plato in particular believed that physical matter was bad or at least suspect. That all things physical were shadowy reflections of the “really real” that exist on the ideal plain of the gods. As such, the funeral customs of many Greeks and Romans were to cremate dead bodies because the physical was of no real value.

St. Paul has a different take on that, coming from Judaism. He does believe in the soul and the body, but the body being a creation God called good. The body for Christians will one day resurrected and reunited with the soul at the end of time. Humans are not simply primarily spirit and the body is of no consequence. So, when St. Paul talks about the “falling asleep” of the believers, sometimes called dormition in Greek parlance, he’s talking about the physical body. The body has fallen asleep but must be respected because it is still part of God’s creation and will one day be resurrected with Christ, just as in Baptism we die with Christ so that we can rise with Christ.

Now, whether at this point St. Paul was envisioning the soul also falling asleep for the short period before he believed Christ would return in his own life time, we simply don’t know for sure. He is clearly talking about the physical body, but whether he was thinking that also applies to the soul falling asleep for that short interregnum, we don’t know. As time goes on and it is becoming more clear Christ would not necessarily return immediately, the writings in the New Testament, and particularly St. Paul’s later letters become more focused on the eternal soul in heaven until such time as Christ does return, whether now or in the distant future.