Resurrection

Resurrection or anastasis (Greek: ἀνάστασις, romanized: anástasis) is the concept of coming back to life after death. This differs from reincarnation, a process involving a person or deity returning to life in a different body. Some religions also include beliefs about the disappearance, or assumption, of the body, which is a related but distinct concept. The English word derives from the Latin resurrectio, from surgere, "to rise". With the advent of written records, the earliest known recurrent theme of resurrection was in Egyptian and Canaanite religions, which had cults of dying-and-rising gods such as Osiris and Baal. Ancient Greek religion generally emphasised immortality, but in the mythos, a number of individuals were made physically immortal as they were resurrected from the dead. Frazer treated these as a single dying-and-rising god pattern, a reading many later scholars have held to distort the sources. Figures such as Achilles, Alcmene and Heracles were held to have been raised to physical immortality, though Greek attitudes to returning from death were generally negative: Asclepius was killed by Zeus for reviving the dead. In the Hebrew Bible resurrection is rare and unsystematic, confined to a few prophetic miracles and to Daniel; the afterlife is more often framed in terms of Sheol. Beliefs diversified in the Second Temple period, with bodily resurrection affirmed in 2 Maccabees, accepted by the Pharisees and rejected by the Sadducees, and it was later fixed by Maimonides among the Thirteen Principles of Faith. The universal resurrection of the dead at the end of the world is a standard eschatological belief in the Abrahamic religions. The term is used in two distinct senses: the ongoing, individual resurrection of individual souls, as in Christian idealism and realized eschatology; and a general bodily resurrection of all the dead at the end of the world. Some...