Views on Premortal Existence at the Time of Christ. ♦ Part One

I must begin today's blog by defining "the time of Christ." In this blog it refers to an era enveloping the years beginning with Gabriel's announcement to Mary that she was chosen to give birth to Jesus and extends through the time when first-person accounts of His life were being written. More loosely, it also includes literature that those alive then were likely to have read and been influenced by, even it if was written before Jesus' birth. For example, insofar as the writings of Moses would have influenced cultural beliefs of the first century, they are relevant even though written over 1200 years earlier.

But today, I want to post some English translations of hymns that were found as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You've probably heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in Judean desert caves near Dead Sea. They were written between the first and third centuries B.C., so they would have been the text books for some of Jesus' contemporaries. Some scrolls like the Book of Isaiah and others that are part of our Bible today have gotten the most media coverage. But with over 900 scrolls recovered, others have secular topics, even bookkeeping, that reveal what life in the community was like. One, known as the Hymn Scroll, offers some remarkable insight into how Jewish culture at the time of Christ (and consequently many in the early church), viewed the preexistence of souls. 

The Hymn Scroll is written as lyrical poetry.  An English translation of the first hymn says in part:

By Thy wisdom [all things exist from] eternity,
and before creating them Thou knew their works
for ever and ever.
[Nothing] is done [without Thee]
and nothing is known unless Thou desire it.

Thou hast created all the spirits
[edit - several stanzas about creation of wind, clouds, lightning, etc. omitted ]

Thou hast created the earth by Thy power
and the seas and deeps [by Thy might].
Thou hast' fashioned [all] their [inhabi]tants
according to Thy wisdom,
and hast appointed all that is in them
according to Thy will.

[And] to the spirit of man
which Thou hast formed in the world,
[Thou hast given dominion over the works of Thy hands]
for everlasting days and unending generations.
... in their ages
 For Thou hast established their ways
for ever and ever,
[and hast ordained from eternity]
their Visitation for reward and chastisements;

Thou hast allotted it to all their seed
for eternal generations and everlasting years ...

In the wisdom of Thy knowledge
Thou didst establish their destiny before ever they were.
All things [exist] according to [Thy will]
and without Thee nothing is done.

It is Thou who hast created breath for the tongue
and Thou knowest its words;
Thou didst establish the fruit of the lips
before ever they were.¹

As the poem continues, the writer acknowledges that he is "a shape of clay, kneaded in water, that houses a straying and perverted spirit of no understanding."¹ He marvels at God's righteousness and realizes that he must declare the mysteries, tell of God's glory, and recount His works of wonders in truth. The writer is saying that he had a purpose in the spirit before his body was formed.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/scrolls_deadsea/deadseascrolls_english/08.htm

≈ These lyrics give us a window into the views of one Jewish community that was active and vibrant around the time of Christ. They clearly believed that human life was well planned before the human body was created. They make a distinction between the spirit of man and the body he is housed in.

This is consistent with a summarizing paragraph about old rabbinic teachings that is found in History of Dogma:

According to the theory held by the ancient Jews and by the whole of the Semitic nations, everything of real value that from time to time appears on earth has its existence in heaven. In other words, it exists with God, that is God possesses a knowledge of it; and for that reason it has a real being. But it exists beforehand with God in the same way as it appears on earth, that is with all the material attributes belonging to its essence. Its manifestation on earth is merely a transition from concealment to publicity (φανεροῦσθαι). In becoming visible to the senses, the object in question assumes no attribute that it did not already possess with God. Hence its material nature is by no means an inadequate expression of it, nor is it a second nature added to the first. The truth rather is that what was in heaven before is now revealing itself upon earth, without any sort of alteration taking place in the process. There is no assumptio naturæ novæ, and no change or mixture. The old Jewish theory of pre-existence is founded on the religious idea of the omniscience and omnipotence of God, that God to whom the events of history do not come as a surprise, but who guides their course. As the whole history of the world and the destiny of each individual are recorded on his tablets or books, so also each thing is ever present before him. The decisive contrast is between God and the creature. In designating the latter as “foreknown” by God, the primary idea is not to ennoble the creature, but rather to bring to light the wisdom and power of God.²

But the Jewish community was not alone in their belief in premortal existence. Many Greek philosophers, Plato in particular, had reasoned their way to a similar conclusion, although using the Greeks' philosophical approach,  the label pre-temporal is more accurate; the soul existed before it entered this time dimension. Hellenistic beliefs recognized an eternal spirit and a perishable flesh. Philosophy was the "science" of the day, the explanation of how matter was constituted.  The Greek cosmology had a pure Upper World of the eternal spirit and a Lower World that was physical and finite. A spirit from the upper world would be invisible and immaterial in the lower world, so if it desired to be seen and wanted to move objects it would have to 'put on flesh.'  For those Greek philosophers, physical substance was ennobled by having spirit.

But while both cultures regarded premortal existence, they arrived at that agreement with a substantial divergence of world views. In Jewish thought, premortal existence glorifies the Creator. In the Greek cosmology, the creation is glorified by gaining a spirit.³  Indeed, in his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul warns that the two opposing world views apply to many things, not just premortal existence. In Romans 1:25-26, Paul pinpoints a world view where they 'worshiped and served the (temporal) creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever' as the reason that God 'gave them over to dishonorable passions.'

So what was Paul's view of premortal existence?  His surviving writings to the early Christian church are somewhat limited on the topic,  referring to the idea of preexistence in context to Jesus Christ. But both Paul and Jesus, even while speaking of himself as  the "son of man," clearly taught that Jesus had preexistence in the spiritual realm.

So how about other early church fathers; did they teach a premortal existence?  Yes, many did, but it gets messy fast!  Justin Martyr (AD 100–l65), St. Clement of Alexandria (AD 150–220), and Origen (AD 185–254) all had their own versions. At one end of the spectrum of thought, spirit is eternal and therefore one's spirit must be premortal, but that unique individual personhood and personality would begin and then continue to evolve only after it was attached to a body.  At the other end of the scale, a person's spirit already had personality, and that would determine which body it would get in the physical realm.⁴

As I said, the views of early church fathers on premortal existence get complicated rather quickly. I am writing a blog here, not a dissertation, so I focused mainly on Origen whose views seemed the most interesting, and—yes, he is also one of the easier ones to research.
   Origen used Romans 9:10-14 as his anchor text:

Now, this son was our ancestor, Isaac, who, with his wife, Rebekah, conceived twins. And before her twin sons were born, God spoke to Rebekah and said: "The oldest will serve the younger." God spoke these words before the sons had done anything good or bad, which proves that God calls people not on the basis of their good or bad works, but according to His divine purpose. For in the words of Scripture: "Jacob I have chosen, but Esau I have rejected."  So, what does all this mean? Are we saying that God is unfair? Of course not!  The Passion Translation

This passage is a conundrum for nearly everyone who reads it thoughtfully. How could God love one twin, hate the other, and proceed to tell their mom this before they were even born? Well, obviously not on the basis of their good or bad works. Origen's argument was that God's divine purpose was based on their conduct before this life and it was God's justice that determined the older one would serve the younger. 

I think it is important to point out that Origen did not believe in reincarnation⁵ where we recycle our lives in the same realm of existence. Neither did he believe in any species evolving or devolving into another kind.  He believed in transmigration of the spirit.  This is essentially the same concept as saying that when we die, our spirit "transmigrates" to either heaven or hell. Origen simply believed that Earth-existence was the result of a human spirit coming here from a previous realm.  He took the position that human souls incarnate only once into earthly bodies, as determined by God.


In Part One, I have shown that three categories of the Holy Land culture in the first century, Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian, believed in preexistence. Part Two looks into scripture from the Bible, the Book of Enoch, and Apocryphal writings. 



Footnotes
¹ http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/scrolls_deadsea/deadseascrolls_english/08.htm
² History of Dogma, Volume 1, on page 319.   http://www.ccel.org/ccel/harnack/dogma1.ii.iv.i.html
³ I am not 'going there' in this blog because it is off-topic, but the contrast of motivations behind the belief exposes the lure of Luciferian worship, glorifying man with dark empowerment.
⁴ Perhaps you noticed that from there, it would be only a short jump to a belief in reincarnation? That would come shortly. By ~400 AD, St Jerome, who translated Greek scripture into the Latin Vulgate, wrote of Christian sects that had adopted that heresy.
⁵ By 543 AD, nearly three centuries after Origen's death, he was renounced as a heretic for having views too close to Plato's belief of metempsychosis, a form of reincarnation. But it seems that the blatantly heretical ideas of Origenism were added by those who followed his writings after he died.